“I received mercy… making me an example to those who would come to believe.” – Dean Dominic’s sermon from St George’s Cathedral, Cape Town

The question – I think – the question which stares us in the face from this morning’s gospel is, “Are you crazy? Are you crazy?”

But before we work out the answer, may I first thank Dean Terry for his very gracious invitation to share this pulpit with me, which is an honour and a privilege. I bring you greetings from York Minster – and from our own Archbishop, Stephen Cottrell, the Archbishop of York. As some of you may know, for the best part of twenty years, our two dioceses have had a companion relationship, and it is a joy that Canon Maggie and I are able to represent that relationship this morning.

But while it’s a joy and a blessing to share in this act of worship with you today, I’m still worried by the question – because I hear our readings shouting at me, “Are you crazy?”

Because today’s gospel is about utterly irrational behaviour. Today’s gospel is about doing things which make no sense at all. Doing things which are economically ridiculous, and which – to someone with a diary that is full to over-flowing with tasks that should have been done yesterday and meetings that must be attended tomorrow – things which are simply a waste of time. Today’s gospel is about being crazy.

This morning’s gospel is crazy, because the wilderness is a dangerous place. After all, it was in a wilderness that Jesus found himself spiritually wrestling no less a figure than the devil himself. And in a dangerous place like that you do not simply abandon 99% of your assets, whimsically to go off to find the one that has gone missing. I’m afraid the missing sheep – and, indeed, the missing coin – that’s just an asset you write off on the balance sheet of life. It is not something which – if you are sane, or rational, or efficient, or competent – if you are anything other than crazy – you just forget about.

After all, they tell us that time is money, and so many of us have far too little time to do the things that we even want to do. So not only would it be a crazy waste of time to go looking for that sheep, or that coin… it would be just as crazy to drop everything and run off when your neighbour summons you to an impromptu party they’ve decided to throw – something just to celebrate their craziness.

Let’s be honest. This is how real life works, isn’t it? This is the life that I find I have to I live if I’m going to survive the pressure of work, and family life, and all the rest of it. I don’t have time to be crazy, I don’t want to be crazy – at least, that’s what I find when I find myself looking in the mirror, let alone in my diary, or – when I dare to do so – in my conscience, or my heart.

Even today, some people look up to clergy, and I hope they find in me an example of someone who is rational, and ordered, and in control, somebody who is capable of running a very big cathedral with an awful lot of staff and worshippers and visitors and tourists… I hope they think I’m a good example.

And then that little voice pops the pin in the balloon of my smug, self-satisfied condition, and I hear that man saying to me again what he’s always said, when I quieten down enough to listen (which is not as often as it should be). And that voice says, “Are you crazy? Dominic – are you crazy?” Or, in the words of our gospel this morning, “Which of you does not go after the one that is lost…?”

And that is why I am so lucky – why we are so lucky – why we are so blessed to come to church this morning, and to discover we seem to be surrounded by some really crazy people.

Take St Paul. He’s a pretty frequent visitor to church most Sundays. Look how crazy he was. He knew all about the demands of what you and I probably call ‘real life’. Especially back in the day when he was more usually known as Saul – he knew all about that. He knew what tasks had to be done (mainly arresting these crazy followers of some jumped-up nobody of a rabbi from the north), and he knew just how to go about doing that. He was busy, he was capable, he argued really well. He had it all in hand. Until something crazy happened – something crazy which threw him off his horse, dazzled him with a light brighter than anything he’d ever known before, and gave him a new, crazy, outlook on life. And it was catching…

Paul’s new craziness was really catching. Because, if we are going to be honest, for many years Biblical scholars have been telling us that it is highly unlikely that the person who wrote One Timothy was actually Paul himself. Now, if you go to a university today and make false claims about authorship, and you’ll be out on your ear on a charge of plagiarism before you can snap your fingers.

But back in Biblical times, having your disciples attempt to echo your thoughts and what you stood for after your death – that was the highest praise. And so, someone – as I say probably not Paul, but one of those who had ‘come to believe’, because in Paul they found someone who was a really good example of how to live life – someone who had been touched by Paul’s craziness – someone else got it. And they used Paul’s name and identity to keep his ideas alive, and that someone else starts talking, in One Timothy, about how good it is – what a good example it is – to be crazy.

And so this morning, this shadowy author is speaking to us about how grateful he is that God strengthened him – strengthened him to be able, also, to live a crazy life, to be an example to others… To others who might find themselves needing to find a lost sheep or a lost coin when the rest of the world is saying, “No, no, no – be sensible. Don’t bother about that. It’s not the effort.”

And the story of Christianity, and the story of the Church of God – that story carries on like that, through the generations. And – on this particular morning – we get reminded that even in our own time, that craziness is a craziness which can change the world.

On this particular morning, we get reminded that there are too many people living for ideas that will die… but that if you are crazy, you learn – if that’s what it takes – to die for an idea that needs to live.

For this Friday was the 48th anniversary of the murder of Bantu Stephen Biko – a man touched with just the same kind of craziness that makes people search out what is lost sheep against all the odds. A man who was so certain that the evil ideas of the apartheid government were ideas that would die that, in the short life that he lived, he demonstrated with such clarity, that crazy idea of dying for the idea of a truly free South Africa that could, as he said, “be a community of brothers and sisters jointly involved in the quest for a composite answer to the varied problems of life.”

But, back in the bad days of the 1970s, certainly for those of us watching in anguish from around the world, that idea which, for Steve Biko, was worth dying for – that idea seemed little short of impossible. It seemed as elusive as the one lost sheep in the wilderness or the lost coin in the house. And I don’t know if I would ever have been crazy enough, or saintly enough, to put my energy into going to find it – I don’t know if I would have been crazy enough to drop everything to seek out such an unlikely excuse for a party.

It has been an honour, a joy and a privilege for Canon Maggie and myself to spend some time in this country. We have been looked after and cared for with a profound sense of welcome and with grace and kindness. We have tried to engage meaningfully with the history of the country and with some of the towering, visionary, crazy people who helped bring a transformation that for so long had seemed as improbable as finding one lost sheep.

And we’ve also had some fun while we have been here. We have learned much from your gracious Dean, Fr Terry, who is, let me tell you, a most excellent tour guide. And with him, we enjoyed a lovely visit to the farm and winery at Babylonstoren. For those who have the resources to enjoy its luxury goods, it clearly is a place that offers very high quality produce, and some very fine wines – wines which are marketed successfully around the country.

And thus, as we parked up, we saw the sign pointing people to the location to which they should go if they had ordered Babylonstoren wines in advance on a ‘click and collect’ basis. ‘There you are,’ said Fr Terry, ‘everything these days is click and collect’.

But in fact – if I may gently contradict you, Father – not quite everything is click and collect.

On 18th August, 1977, Steve Biko was arrested at a police road-block near what is now Makhanda – arrested, never to be seen again by his friends or family. Arrested, and subjected to repeated severe violence, denied medical care, and left alone, shackled, naked, in a police cell. For 25 days, until his death in Pretoria, he had, in effect, vanished, like a lost sheep. He was lost in the evil, inhuman, violent and murderous wilderness of Vorster’s apartheid regime.

But he was never lost to Jesus – to the utterly crazy Jesus of whom we read in this morning’s gospel – the utterly crazy Jesus who was determined that even when Steve Biko was apparently lost to human society, beaten and bleeding in a lonely prison cell – he was not lost to God. Not lost to the God – who in the person of Christ – calls us and reminds us, crazily, never to stop searching for what is lost and precious – whatever the cost.

Because, as we are reminded so strongly in our gospel today, Jesus was not a ‘click and collect’ God of convenience and comfort – Jesus was crazy enough to journey through the wilderness, through the wilderness of this life, himself bloody and beaten in Golgotha, and – abandoned by his friends – to death on the cross. Jesus was crazy enough to do all that to search out you and me, and every precious rainbow child of God.

And that craziness is infectious, my sisters and brothers. It infected Paul. It infected Paul’s disciple who, in all likeliness wrote that reading. It infected Steve Biko, it infected and beloved Archbishop Tutu, and so many crazy Christians down the centuries, who have been for us that good example.

And so, this morning, when Jesus says to us, once more, “Which one of you – which one of you is crazy enough to go and seek out that lost sheep, whom I happen to love very very much?” Let’s make sure we can be that good example for those who come after us, let’s hope that we can raise our hands, and say, “that’s me – I’m that crazy.” Amen.

“My people have changed their glory for something that does not profit” – The Very Reverend Dominic Barrington, Dean of York

In the middle of next month, Donald Trump will return to this country for an unprecedented second state visit as the guest of the British sovereign. At the banquet that King Charles will hold in the President’s honour, the leader of the Liberal Democrats, Sir Ed Davey, will not be present. Writing in the Guardian on Wednesday https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/aug/27/ed-davey-trump-gaza-boycott-state-dinner-king-charles, Sir Ed explained that, while it goes against all his instincts to refuse an invitation from His Majesty,

“I fear we could have a situation where Trump comes to our country, is honoured with a lavish dinner at one of our finest palaces, and no one reminds him that he has the power to stop the horrifying starvation, death and captivities in Gaza. And no one uses this moment to demand that the US president picks up that phone to Netanyahu and the Qataris and does the right thing.”

Or, in the language of the prophet Jeremiah, from whom we have just heard, one might say that Sir Ed feels that the ‘glory’ of a state banquet at a royal castle hosted by the King himself is being used ‘for something that does not profit’. And thus – although it is likely that his absence may not be noticed by the US President – he will absent himself in protest, in the hope that ‘the people in Gaza are not forgotten during the pomp and ceremony’.

While I have utter sympathy with Sir Ed’s views about the awful situation in Gaza, and while I applaud the fact that he explained that he and his wife had ‘thought and prayed long and hard’ about the issue, this morning’s gospel reading forces me to observe that his strategy is a very different strategy to that taken by Jesus – at least the Jesus of whom we read in Luke’s gospel. For Jesus appeared to have no qualms about turning up to dinners hosted by people with whom he disagreed – and not just turning up, but stealing the limelight to seize an opportunity for some quite outspoken teaching.

If you dial back three chapters earlier in Luke, you’ll find Jesus at another meal hosted by a Pharisee. That episode is so shocking – at least to modern middle-class ears – that it is not included in the Church’s three-year lectionary, so the story is rarely heard on a Sunday morning. For, from the word go, this dinner party goes spectacularly wrong, with Jesus firing off insults to both host and guests – culminating in Luke’s rather understated remark that by the end of the meal the others present are feeling ‘very hostile’ towards Jesus.

And so, as the curtain rises for us this morning, a more senior figure – a leader of the Pharisees – is seeing if he can both tame this outrageous figure, and learn more clearly just how scandalous Jesus is. And while the mood around the table does not get as explosive as that in chapter eleven, Jesus is certainly not wasting another good teaching opportunity. And thus he tells what Luke refers to as a parable – but what an odd parable it is.

For parables usually speak to us in crystal clear terms about what Jesus calls the Kingdom. And usually they do so by simple and powerful similes:

Here’s a mustard seed – it’s very small but it becomes very big so that everyone could find shelter and shade – what does that tell us about God’s kingdom?

 Or 

A man got beaten up by bandits, and it took a despised nobody to treat him with compassion and dignity – what does that tell us about God’s kingdom?

 Or

 A loving father goes out of his way to care for both of his dysfunctional and badly – what does that tell us about God’s kingdom?

And so on and so on and so on….

But this morning, here in Luke chapter fourteen, we are told that this simple bit of common sense etiquette advice to help you avoid a socially awkward moment is not just a tip about how to behave in front of your elders or betters… It, too, is a parable.

It could be easy to ignore this, or regard it as a slip of the evangelist’s pen – but that would be a mistake, because Luke does not use language casually. Luke is a profound wordsmith, and if Luke is clear that Jesus intends the remarks we just heard to be understood as a parable, then that is emphatically what it is.

Because, of course, Jesus isn’t merely offering a first century equivalent of a Sunday newspaper advice column on how to avoid a social  faux pas. Yet again, Jesus is doing nothing less than teaching about how things work in God’s kingdom. Jesus is saying that humility and not ostentation is at the heart of the kingdom of God – something which, manifestly, he does not see exhibited by his fellow dinner guests.

And then this conversation-cum-parable turns, pointedly, to the host – to this senior religious figure. And to the face of this influential religious leader, Jesus makes clear how he believes people are called to live out the demands of generosity, of grace, and of love.

Just over ten years ago, in Cleveland, Ohio, ten Republican hopefuls who aspired to receive that party’s nomination to run for President, took part in the first televised debate of the primary campaign. Alongside Donald Trump were a number of well-established politicians, and – as you may recall – at that point Mr Trump was considered to be an outside candidate whose campaign was bound to fail alongside the political heavy-weights running against him.

During the debate https://rollcall.com/factbase/transcript/donald-trump-first-gop-debate-august-6-2015/, Trump was accused of having financially supported  – horror of horrors – liberal policies. Specifically, of liberal policies pursued by Hillary Clinton. Trump’s reply was fascinating:

“I gave to many people… I was a businessman. I give to everybody. When they call, I give. And do you know what? When I need something from them two years later, three years later, I call them, they are there for me…

…with Hillary Clinton, I said be at my wedding and she came to my wedding. You know why? She didn’t have a choice because I gave.”  [My emphasis]

So – if you should find yourself invited to dinner at the White House or at Mar a Lago – understand you are there for a purpose that is utterly transactional and reciprocal – you are there to be part of a quid pro quo. Which is – of course – as even the principled Sir Ed Davey admits, the reason that President Trump will be visiting this country next month: “I argued last January that we should use the offer of a state visit – something Trump so desperately craves – as leverage to persuade him to do the right thing.”

And, lest anyone think I am painting Mr Trump in an unfair or bad light, let me add that – having explained to his Republican rivals exactly why he sometimes supported ‘liberal policies’ and just what he gained by doing so – he said, with simple and perfect clarity: “that’s a broken system” – and, about that, I think he is totally correct.

Sir Ed Davey and President Trump are not the only people whose positions on Gaza have been in the news this week, however. On Tuesday the two most senior church leaders in the Holy Land – the Latin and Greek Patriarchs of Jerusalem – issued a joint statement about the worsening situation in Gaza City https://www.lpj.org/en/news/statement-by-the-latin-patriarchate-of-jerusalem, which is where the miniscule Christian community in the Gaza Strip is to be found – and, since the war began, to be found sheltering in the church compounds of their respective churches in that city.

As you will be aware, Israel has announced that it intends fully to occupy Gaza City, and is demanding its entire population of hundreds of thousands relocate to the south of the Strip – which, to offer context, is pretty much the equivalent of ordering the populations of Leeds or of San Francisco to up sticks and move.

In response to this, Cardinal Pierbattista Pizzaballa, the Latin Patriarch, explained that for many of the sick, weak and elderly sheltering in the church compounds, an enforced flight to the south would, quite simply, ‘be nothing less than a death sentence’…. and for that reason, his clergy and nuns would ignore the demands of the Israeli military, and stay put to feed and care for their flock. To offer what one English theologian called ‘the interruptive hospitality that says no to force’…. to host meals in which there is no leverage – no quid pro quo, but, quite simply, to offer the grace and love of Christ.

Jesus offers this parable-cum-lecture to the leader of the Pharisees, because he recognises that this man is a man of substance and influence; he is man who has capacity – a capacity with which, if he so chose, he could feed the poor, the crippled, the lame and the blind. He could host a meal motivated not by the quid pro quo mentality of reciprocity, but the pro bono motivation of grace and love. But – to Jesus’ dismay – that has not been his choice. It is not how he wishes to use either his influence or his resources.

In a few minutes time, you and I will gather to be fed at the ultimate pro bono meal. The meal where the ever disruptive figure of Christ is present not as guest but as host, offering, out of grace and love nothing less than his own self, in a body broken on the Cross, and in blood spilled for the world’s salvation.

As we feast on this uniquely holy and transformative food, it is incumbent on us to ensure that we do not change the glory which it confers on us into something that, as Jeremiah so forcefully put it, ‘does not profit’.

And as Christ sends us onwards, out of the doors of this great cathedral, into a world in which there is so much suffering, need and deprivation, I pray that, as members of Christ’s own body, we will use our capacity to share God’s love without stooping to the self-interest of that ‘broken system’ that ultimately will profit nobody – least of all ourselves.

Amen.

“making peace through the blood of his cross” – The Very Reverend Dominic Barrington, Dean of York

Through Christ God was pleased to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, by making peace through the blood of his cross.

Last Tuesday morning, on the last morning of the meeting of the General Synod of the Church of England here in York, Archbishop Hosam, the Anglican Archbishop in Jerusalem, addressed the General Synod and spoke about the mission and ministry of the diocese that he leads in a rather troubled part of the world.

He spoke of the 35 institutions his diocese runs – institutions principally concerned with healthcare, with education, and with hospitality. He spoke about the 28 congregations in his charge. “These,” he said, “our arms of ministry in which we show our faith in God through action and ministry. Healing the sick and teaching reconciliation with peace and justice,” he said, “is at the heart of our ministry.”

And do we know why?

Saul of Tarsus, who we also come to know as Paul, discovered in a blinding revelation, so the Acts of the Apostles relates, he discovered that in Christ all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, as we just heard read – and Saul-turned-Paul realized that this astonishing statement had implications – implications that fundamentally changed his life, changed his understanding of discipleship, of action, and of prayer.

Paul’s ministry was extraordinary and extensive and he gathered his own band of followers and disciples around him. And – probably – after his death, one of his own disciples wanted to pick up the baton, to carry on with the good work and share its mission with others. And thus this anonymous figure – in all probability – wrote to the church in Colossae, wrote the letter to the Colossians to remind them (and anyone else who might just be listening – like you and me here this morning) that Christ is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation… He himself is before all things, and in him all things hold together. He is the head of the body, the church… [and] in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell.

And if that isn’t remarkable enough, through him God was pleased to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, by making peace through the blood of his cross.

So, in other words, for Archbishop Hosam, and for the 35 institutions that he leads, working in those precious areas of ministry, in that troubled region. For them and for their staff, they must be Christ-like – whatever the cost – because, as the author of the letter to the Colossians makes so clear – Christ is and therefore must be at the centre of everything.

In an interview with the Church Times after his talk to the Synod, Archbishop Hosam developed the theme of what it must mean to be church in a difficult environment, what it must mean to be church in a time or war. How are we called to act as church? How do we proclaim God’s holy message? His answer was, “We are committed to reconciliation and peace-building… The ministry of presence and the ministry of resilience… We live and embody the gospel.” And he does that, and his team around him do that because, as we heard, we are now reconciled in Christ’s fleshly body through death.

And it isn’t, in a sense, just Christ’s death. It’s a call to set aside the values of human comfort and safety. We certainly know if we watch the news that the ministry of the diocese of Jerusalem comes at one hell of a cost. The Ahli Hospital – the Anglican hospital in Gaza City – that hospital has been attacked six times during the war between Hamas and Israel. Its emergency department was bombed on, of all days, Palm Sunday.

And just this past week, while Archbishop Hosam was in York, to wake us up to what is going on out there, just this past week while the Anglican archbishop was our guest, the one Roman Catholic church in Gaza City was bombed by Israel. Its priest was injured along with several others, and two people were killed – Saad Salameh, the church’s janitor, and an elderly lady called Fumayya Ayyad –whose younger brother, it just so happens, is the senior doctor, the medical director, of the Ahli Hospital in Gaza.

Years ago now, back in 2014, I visited Gaza. I was there after the last military campaign between Hamas and Israel, a campaign which at the time seemed horrifying, but really is like a children’s tea party when compared to what has happened since the terrible Hamas attacks on October 7th, 2023, and all that has followed. But I found myself, on this visit, in a war zone looking at the ruins of indiscriminate violence and bombing. It was, for somebody who has led a very innocent life in military terms, it was all very shocking. And on the last of my two nights there, having dinner with the staff of the Ahli Hospital, I found myself sitting next to this extraordinary doctor.

And Dr Maher asked me a very simple question. “Do you know,” he said, “the secret of a good life?” I didn’t dare answer, because I knew that my attempt to have a good life would sound comfortable, would sound selfish. I simply waited for him to offer me his wisdom. And he said, “It’s very simple: just make sure your neighbour has a good life.”

A remarkable statement even then from one of the tiny minority of Christians in the enclave that is Gaza – surrounded by so many Muslims, a small number of whom would actually gladly have eradicated the Christian presence. And all of them surrounded by Israel. “Make sure your neighbour has a good life,” said this doctor. And he said it, I am sure, because, In Christ God was pleased to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, by making peace through the blood of his cross.

And so to hospitality. And so to that well known and well misunderstood brief little story of the two sisters, Martha and Mary. They come in a very improbable place in the gospel if you look at the action that is going on. In Luke’s gospel, Jesus takes nine chapters, from chapter 9 to chapter 18, to get from the Galilee in the north of Israel down to Jerusalem. Luke traces a journey during which Jesus teaches and preaches and performs miracles – Luke paints this journey step by step, adding to the drama that will unfold when Jesus gets to Jerusalem on what we call Palm Sunday.

And yet, because Luke has a point he needs to make for us, Luke grabs Jesus’ arrival in Bethany, at this house – Luke grabs it and yanks it chronologically completely out of place. Because Bethany is a suburb of Jerusalem. Jesus is nowhere near there. But theologically, this story comes in a very important place.

Regular listeners, as it were, might remember that last Sunday we heard the famous parable of the Good Samaritan read here in York Minster, and read in churches around the western world. That ultimate parable about action – about doing something, about being practical, about getting of your backside or getting off your horse and helping somebody. And if you come back next week, whether to the Minster or to any church in the western world, you will hear Jesus telling his disciples how to pray. Next week’s gospel begins with Jesus teaching the Lord’s Prayer. Jesus, in a sense, making sure that whatever else his followers do, they are fervent in prayer.

And in between these two so significant passages, comes, ripped out of geographical sense, comes the brief story of Jesus rolling up in the house of Martha and Mary. And this story has been subject of all sorts of interpretation, some of which have stopped us looking at what’s really going on. Martha, for instance, isn’t necessarily tied to the kitchen stove in a frantic way, because she is clearly a house-holder who has resources. Jesus didn’t rock up on his own – he had quite an entourage traveling with him.

But Martha clearly thinks that she is doing everything that counts as discipleship herself, and she has the nerve to criticize Jesus. It’s not directly Mary she’s criticizing – she’s criticizing Jesus. Because she wants to get Mary to see what is going on. It’s one of those moments when she can’t see the wood for the trees. She’s forgotten why she is busy.

But, as Colossians reminds us, you do need to be busy. We are ‘holy and blameless, says the author of Colossians, when you continue securely established and steadfast in the faith. Both of them are doing the right thing. But Martha is forgetting the right reason.

Saint Augustine, 1500 years ago, said “Martha was absorbed in the matter of how to feed the Lord; Mary was absorbed in the matter of how to be fed by the Lord. Martha was preparing a banquet for the Lord, Mary was already revelling in the banquet of the Lord.”

And it’s when we take those two sisters together – when we reconcile them – they serve as the example, together, of discipleship lived out in action and prayer. Because it’s through action and prayer together that we can be good disciples in a world where the ministry of reconciliation needs to be paramount.

At the end of his interview with the Church Times, Archbishop Hosam said, “I’m an Arab, but not Muslim . . . I am a Palestinian, but not a terrorist. And I am an Israeli, but not a Jew,”

“If,” he said, “if I can reconcile myself as both Palestinian and Israeli and Arab and Christian, surely that means that we can live together as Israelis and Palestinians?”

And that principle, that principle we see in our Scriptures this morning, applies to us and our attempts properly to be disciples. This morning we are being asked, asked by those two sisters, asked by Paul and whoever came after him that wrote to the Colossians, asked by Archbishop Hosam and Dr Maher, asked, really, by God, the very simple question: Is Christ central to us? Because, in Christ, God was pleased to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, by making peace through the blood of his cross.

And so the baton gets passed down. From Jesus himself to Martha and Mary, to Saul-turned-Paul and those who followed him, so very visibly to Archbishop Hosam and Dr Maher in Gaza. The only question now, this morning, is whether Christ is central to our lives. And if he is – what are we going to do about it? Amen.

‘Let me sing for my beloved my love-song’ – The Very Reverend Dominic Barrington, Dean of York

Let me sing for my beloved my love-song…

Smadar Elhanan was the youngest of four children – the only daughter, much adored by her three elder brothers, and her parents Nurit and Rami. Her name, in Hebrew, means ‘the grape of the vine’, and is a reference to the beautiful poetry found in the Song of Solomon. In the best possible way, she was the ‘princess’ of her family, and lived a happy life in Jerusalem, until just after her 14^th birthday, when two Palestinian suicide bombers detonated their bombs in West Jerusalem’s equivalent of Oxford Street, killing five people instantly, including Smadar and two of her friends of the same age.

Speaking of that terrible day, her father, Rami, says, “You find yourself running crazily through the streets, going from one police station to the next, one hospital to the next, until eventually, much later in that long accursed night, you find yourself in the morgue and [a] terrible finger is pointing right between your eyes and you see a sight that you will never, ever, be able to blot out.”

Let me sing for my beloved my love song…

In the year that Smadar was murdered, another beautiful baby girl was born in Jerusalem: Abir Aramin. Her parents, Salwa and Bassam felt the same delight that had been true once upon a time for Rami and Nurit. Fast forward ten years, and young Abir was standing with some friends outside the gates of her school in Anata, a troubled district of East Jerusalem, well known for clashes with soldiers of the IDF. And, on this most terrible of days, one such soldier deliberately shot her in the head with a rubber bullet. A day or so later, she died in hospital.

Let me sing for my beloved my love song…

It is easy, of course, to sing a love song when all is going well. But Nurit and Rami and Bassam and Salwa will not be the last parents, in the Middle East, in Ukraine and Russia, or across this broken planet, who will have to sing the heart-rending love song of grief – of a grief of separation so awful and profound that it surpasses decent imagination.

Grief of this kind is stark and ultimate. Forty years ago, 39 soccer fans were killed and hundreds more injured at Heysel stadium in Belgium. A monument erected to those who died then has inscribed upon it Auden’s poem Funeral Blues – the poem made famous from its use in Four Weddings and a Funeral, which laments so bitterly the death of a beloved:

He was my North, my South, my East and West,

My working week and my Sunday rest,

My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;

I thought that love would last for ever: I was wrong.

The stars are not wanted now: put out every one;

Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun;

Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood.

For nothing now can ever come to any good.

At the start of Holy Week, on the day when we have heard already in our morning worship the account of the Passion and death of Jesus, we might feel it is apt for us to be ‘in tune’ with such grief. But I want to suggest this evening, that it is not enough simply to acknowledge the pain of such grief – the pain that is inherent in the eternal story of the Passion of Christ.

For our readings tonight issue us a challenge – a challenge demanding of us that not merely do we enfold the grief of the Passion into our lives, but that we work out what God is calling us to do with it.

In other words, we must ask what it means to say that, in Auden’s terms, you should put out every star, that you should pack up the moon and dismantle the sun and pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood.  What does it really mean to say that nothing now can ever come to any good?

And the answer to that question sits in that most stark and pointed parable that was our second reading. A parable that infuriated its hearers and, despite their high calling, made them bent on revenge and murder. And what a strange parable to tell… a parable that is strange, and which is almost nonsensical…

The landowner leases his vineyard to some tenants, and they default on the rent, and abuse his servants. So, eventually, he sends his son, in the hope that he will be respected by the tenants in a way in which the servants were not. But what do the tenants say? Nothing about respect or honour – instead they say This is the heir; come, let us kill him and get his inheritance.

Let us kill him and get his inheritance….? Really?

While life in the 21^st Century has many differences to life in the First Century, the rules of inheritance were not that different. The tenants’ plan is nonsensical, as Jesus points out: the tenants will be put to death and the vineyard will be leased to other tenants. So what on earth are the tenants thinking? The idea would have been as ludicrous to the first audience of this parable as it is to us today. Why do the tenants think they have any chance of succeeding in this misguided, murderous scheme?

There is but one answer that can make sense of this parable – there is only one state of affairs that can underpin and account for the tenants’ seemingly bizarre behaviour – behaviour that is both murderous and suicidal. The tenants must believe that the landlord is dead.

The tenants believe the landlord is dead, and thus the inheritance is up for grabs if his son is killed as well. And given that this is a parable and not a news report, what Jesus is saying to the face of these religious leaders – who were already far from happy with his behaviour – Jesus is looking them in the eye, and saying to them, “You behave as if the God you claim to worship is dead.”

Because, if God is dead, then anything goes. And, if anything goes, then Auden is right, and nothing now can ever come to any good. Once you recognise that this underpins the logic of the tenants in the vineyard, you are hardly surprised that the scribes and the chief priests want to ‘lay hands’ on Jesus there and then.

And if we live in a world in which God is dead, then we live in a world in which the strongest and the richest and the loudest and the most bigoted will have the upper hand. And, if the world seems like that, what love song can you possibly sing then?

Isaiah’s prophecy of the vineyard is one of the most powerful passages of the Hebrew Scriptures. It is powerful in its condemnation of the behaviour of the people of Israel – the people who should have been God’s pleasant planting, but who produced bloodshed not justice. Isaiah is naming and shaming the people of God with a vision of the destruction of the city of Jerusalem and of the Temple – a prospect, symbolically, that could even be said to represent the death of God. And what love song do you dare sing then?

And by the time Jesus is telling his listeners this most powerful of parables, have no doubt that the game, as it were, is up. He knows that he is in the end game, and that the death which he has predicted not once but three times is looming. This is a man who knows that those who act as if God is dead will have no compunction whatsoever about killing him. And what love song can you dare sing then?

Those who grieve tend to make good footage for journalists. Those who grieve with real dignity make good examples for the world around them. But those who use and channel their grief, not to deny it, but to turn it into a power for good, do more than that – they change the world around them. Which is why Rami, the grieving Israeli father, and Bassam, the grieving Palestinian father, joined a remarkable organisation called The Parents’ Circle, to ensure that the tragic deaths of their daughters would not be in vain.

In this extraordinary organisation, alongside others, both Arab and Jew, who have suffered similar bereavements, they speak together as a double act, a double act of people who the world would expect to hate each other, but who, instead, claim each other as blood brothers moulded together in a love that surpasses the evil which killed their precious children. They speak together of a love-song that says that in the Holy Land and across the world, it does not have to be like this. They speak together in a way that counters those who act as if God is dead, and which demands the listener to recognise that reconciliation and peace must have the final say.

As Bassam says: ‘The year Smadar was murdered, Abir was born.  But what I didn’t know when Abir was killed is that she and Smadar would keep on living.  And we will not let other people steal their futures.  Try shutting us up, it won’t work.  [Our] grief, the power of it…is atomic.  To live on in the memory of others means that you do not die’.

That is the kind of love song we should sing for those who are beloved. That is a love song that sings of God, even in a world where we it can appear that God is dead.

For Auden – well Auden would have been right. It would have been fine to put out the stars, and the moon and the sun. If loves does not last for ever, then turn them all off.

But the love song of Passiontide, the love song of Holy Week, our love song this week is a song we will sing and sing and sing – even when God will die in front of our eyes. For the love song of the washed feet and the broken bread of a Thursday night, the love song of the scorching heat and the agonized death of a Friday afternoon – the love song that gets sung as darkness covers the whole land – that love song will get sung again as the first lights of the newest dawn the world has ever known breaks on a Sunday morning.

What song will you sing for your beloved this week?

‘I am about to do a new thing; now it springs forth’ – The Very Reverend Dominic Barrington, Dean of York

Do not remember the former things, or consider the things of old. I am about to do a new thing; now it springs forth, do you not perceive it?

I was pondering this morning whether the editor of the BBC Sunday programme had been disregarding that instruction from the prophecy of Isaiah – the instruction to disregard ‘the former things’. There was a fascinating account of an important local story, as you may well have heard yourselves, or you may have read in the local press. The Bar Convent has unearthed a quite remarkable treasure: an Arma Christi scroll, dating from around 1475. A scroll – one of only eleven now of its kind extant in the modern world – that is in essence a meditation on the ‘instruments of the Passion’ – Christ’s ‘arms’, if you like. A meditation on the instruments of the Passion and of the true image of Christ, associated with Saint Veronica mopping his face on the way to his crucifixion.

On the report of this in the Sunday Programme, Sister Ann, the redoubtable Superior of the convent, remarked that, in today’s world, ‘the Passion is the last place people want to go, and yet,’ she said, ‘it is the place we need to go.’

Rather interestingly, in terms of a juxtaposition, this item on the programme was followed immediately by a report about a woman called Paula White-Cain, who is the Senior Adviser on Faith to the White House. We heard a report about a video that she has put out through her ‘Ministries’ (she’s a very successful evangelical preacher in the United States), which was talking (I thought, perhaps, rather strangely, to my ears as a Christian) about the fact that this is time for ‘God’s divine appointment with you’, because this is ‘Passover Season’.

And on offer to the faithful in Passover Season are seven ‘supernatural blessings’ that are available to us. Blessings including the assignation of a personal guardian angel, as well as also having an enemy to fight your own enemies; very predictably, giving you prosperity; taking away sickness; assurance of a long life of increase and plenty; and ensuring that it is going to be an all-round special year of blessing.

There was, of course, a slight catch to this. Quoting a verse from Exodus 23, she, and those who work with her, are very keen that you don’t appear, to use the Biblical term, ‘empty-handed’, and for donations of a minimum of at least $1,000, not only will you be in line for the seven supernatural blessings – you’ll also get a 10” Waterford Crystal cross!

I am about to do a new thing. Now it springs forth do you not perceive it?

Possibly those two extraordinary stories from the Sunday programme are old hat – medieval piety and Pentateuchal pre-Christian practice. But if we wanted to see something new ‘spring forth’ this past week, it has certainly been on offer in the world of global trade, in the big announcement of ‘Liberation Day’ by Mr Trump. He, at least in modern times, is up to something new with the introduction of tariffs, and I think it’s a pretty safe bet to say that the whole world has perceived what he’s up to.

We all saw the great scoreboard. China hits us 67% – we’re hitting back with 34%. The European Union hits us with 39% – we’re hitting back with 20%. Japan hits us with 46%, we’re hitting back with 24%. He is nothing if not confident of the rightness of his course of action. If he were to paraphrase that prophecy from Second Isaiah that we just heard read, I’m certain that he believes that he will be giving ‘drink to his chosen people’…and doing so, quite possibly, ‘so that they might declare his praise.’

I was wondering, as I watched this news unfold and I looked at that poignant reading from the gospel, what Judas might have made of the economic blessings of Mr Trump’s tariffs, let alone the supernatural blessings on offer from Paula White-Cain’s ministries. I think he might have felt that he was in good company, because Judas, of course, is the ultimate ‘transactionalist’ (if that’s a word) – the ultimate transaction-maker of the New Testament narrative: Why was this perfume not sold and the money given to the poor?

Judas’s choice, Judas’ outlook is a ‘tariff outlook’. It’s framed with the language of economic value: ‘we could have done something better with this fruit of the work of 300 days labour – we could have done something better than squander it like this.’

‘We could,’ so he claims, ‘have done something more effective with the poor’. And, of course, as the evangelist allows us to understand in a side note, the real thing that’s going on for Judas isn’t so much the economic waste of the product, as the self-interest – the question of how you personally exact the best outcome. And, just possibly, that is something we can see in more modern-day transactionalist approaches.

Certainly, Judas’ outlook is in sharp contrast to that of Mary. She is not remotely interested in economic value or in what can be obtained by a transaction. If we ought to think about ‘doing a new thing’ and making sure we ‘perceive’ it, it is, I believe, Mary who is offering us the role model that is important as we enter the season of Passiontide. For she is, quite simply, giving a gift – an extraordinary, outlandish gift, if, indeed, that perfume was worth 300 denarii. And she’s giving it without any sense of receiving anything back in return.

That’s a gift that as, we enter Passiontide, is iconic – because it is a gift iconic of God’s relationship with the world. And the challenge, as we enter these last two weeks before Easter, is absolutely to make sure that we perceive it. So how, indeed, are we going to do that? How, indeed, do we manage to do this when we are surrounded by the world of transaction in so many ways, from global economics, to the self interest that we recognize when we look honestly in the mirror at ourselves.

How will we perceive anew what God is doing? What God has always been doing, and which is, in its way, always new? Well, I have a suggestion that those of us who claim to be disciples might want to take seriously in Passiontide. Next Sunday is, of course, Palm Sunday, and we enter then into Holy Week. And Holy Week is the crowning glory of Lent. And if Lent is the time to spring-clean our discipleship – our Christian commitment – our lives – then Holy Week is the absolute nub and focus of that.

With us next Sunday morning will be Canon James Walters, the Director of the Faith Centre of the LSE, and, to my mind, one of the best thinkers, writers and preachers in the Church of England today. Jim is with us not just on Palm Sunday, but throughout Holy Week, preaching for us day by day by day.

If you’ve looked at the notice sheet you’ll see that he is preaching on the title Bearing Fruit from the Seed that Dies – a reference to Galatians 5, and the fruits of the Spirit that are showered on the disciples of Jesus. The fruits of the Spirit that are love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. Those fruits of the Spirit will be set in the context of the last days of Jesus’ life.

I want to suggest, and I hope that people won’t take this the wrong way, that it might be just a little bit transactionalist if we turn up on Palm Sunday and sing ‘Hosanna’, and then live out an ordinary, normal week, and the next time we set foot in church is Easter Sunday, when we sing ‘Alleluia’ and celebrate the Resurrection.

That feels to me sightly transactionalist, because it doesn’t give us the chance to take advantage of what the Church offers in Holy Week – it doesn’t give us the chance to walk alongside Jesus, to recognize what it really means to say God is doing something new, and give us the chance to perceive it. To perceive it in the little services on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday of Holy Week, and in the great dramas of the liturgies of Maundy Thursday and Good Friday, and when we strike the first light of Resurrection in the darkness not of Easter Sunday morning, but in the darkness of the Saturday night.

In the world in which we live today, when transactionalism is so much the guiding stuff of secular life, I want to suggest we need to get our eye in and refocus if we are indeed going to perceive what God is up to – what it means to focus again on God’s grace, and God’s generosity as we walk towards Easter.

Really, it is about choices – about the choices disciples make. Do we chose the Arma Christi and Sr Ann’s advice that, actually, the Passion is what we need – or do we choose the great supernatural blessings that can be ours, complete with the 10” Waterford cross, if you’ve got $1,000 to spare?

Judas and Mary, in the story we heard read just now, they both make their choice. The curious thing – the coincidental thing – is that both their choices lead to a death on Good Friday. And, in one case, that death is the final chapter in the book. Judas dies, having realised the emptiness of his transactional life; Judas dies despairing of that 300 denarii he could have got his hands on, and the lack of value of thirty pieces of silver.

Mary’s choice leads to someone else’s death, for she had, indeed, bought that precious ointment for the day of his burial – but in her act of grace, iconic of God’s act of grace, that story does not end on Good Friday. This Passiontide, as I look in the mirror, I urge myself and I urge each one of you to make the right choice and perceive anew all that God is doing. Amen.

Address for the Funeral of PC Rosie Prior – The Very Reverend Dominic Barrington, Dean of York

In an episode of University Challenge some years ago, Jeremy Paxman challenged eight hopeful students with a rather extraordinary ‘starter for ten’ by asking, “What text could be answered by the responses: No, no, no, no, get them yourself?” One bright young thing buzzed in almost immediately, correctly identifying that Paxman was, of course, talking about William Blake’s Jerusalem – one of this country’s most popular hymns, that we shall sing in just a few minutes’ time.  

University Challenge does not usually generate a lot of amusement, but this produced a brief burst of laughter from the competitors and the audience, before the quiz show returned to its regular diet of more serious and academic questions.  

Blake was writing, of course, before modern day policing had been established in England’s ‘green and pleasant land’ – the Metropolitan Police Act only coming into force more than twenty years later, in 1829. But, while Blake was in many ways an extreme radical (indeed, he was once arraigned for high treason, although acquitted of the charge), the sentiments of that famous poem and hymn set out values with which Sir Robert Peel would, I am certain, have agreed. For, as one major police historian has written, Peel’s vision of policing relied not on force or aggression or fear, but, by maintaining ‘the approval, respect and affection of the public’.  

Despite Blake’s famous reference to the ‘dark satanic mills’ of the early 19th Century, I think most of us would claim that the world has become a darker place than either Blake or Peel experienced. One consequence of this is that those who now serve as police officers not only face challenges of a kind that would, I think, have bemused and horrified Peel, but which place far greater strain on the fundamental value of ‘policing by consent’.

But it was into this service that Rosemary Jane Prior willingly stepped, and the outpouring of grief at her sudden, tragic death last month will, I deeply hope, remind and reassure not just her family and friends, but police across this county and country, that ‘the approval, respect and affection of the public’ continues to underpin the relationship between our police forces and the public.

But, while we are stirred by the curiously overlapping visions of the radical Blake and the conservative Peel there is something yet greater than either man articulated. There is something greater that, I believe, lies at the very heart of policing ‘England’s green and pleasant land’. And that, of course, was what was set out for us in the most famous passage ever penned by the apostle Paul, as he speaks to us about love.

About the real love that must underpin any attempt to create a new, heavenly, Jerusalem – about the real love that must guide and motivate the ‘mental fight’ and the use of the ‘sword’ that should not ‘sleep in my hand’.

Because, on a day like this, we recognize the imperfections of the world in which we live. We face the tragic reality that even highly trained professionals, following and upholding the wisest and most thoroughly rehearsed protocols will and can never be 100% safe. And we – the general public – recognise (and recognise with deep thanksgiving) that those who underpin the security of our society through their police service are, of course, never really off duty.

If we could have asked Rosie what made her pull into the side of the A19 on that fateful Saturday morning, I don’t know if she would have used the word ‘love’ in her answer to such a question. But – as a Christian, and just as someone who has lived into their sixties – I don’t really believe that it is possible  to live out the commitment that she espoused, and which she shared with so many gathered here today, without having some sense of and relationship to what St Paul describes for us in this most famous passage.

 For it is only love of which it can be truly said that it is patient, kind, not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice in wrongdoing, but rejoices in the truth. It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. 

It is our awful and tragic loss that, for Police Constable Rosemary Jane Prior, she endured a death so senseless and sudden. But, in dying as well as in living, it is clear to me, from all I have learned about this remarkable woman – and I am sure that for all of you who were blessed by knowing her, it is even clearer – her life pointed clearly to that selfless and enduring love of which Paul speaks so powerfully.

 And, on a day like this, you do not need me to tell you that Paul was right when he said, at the end of that paragraph, ‘Love never ends’. For the love for Rosie that is in the hearts of the many hundred people gathered here today is a love that will not be extinguished, just as the love that God has for Rosie will never be extinguished in life or in death.

I suspect that, unlike William Blake, Sir Robert Peel would not have wished ever to be described as a radical. But in his enlightened gift to the world of modern-day policing, he voiced the principle that ‘the police are the public and the public are the police’ – which, in its way, is deeply radical – as radical as the power of love of which St Paul spoke so passionately.

And that is why we give thanks for those whose ‘mental fight’ and ‘sword’ continue to try and establish and uphold that new Jerusalem in this country and every country that shares Peel’s radical and enlightened vision that is the light and direction of all those who serve in our police forces. And that is why, even – and especially – on a day when we look tragedy head-on in the eye, not only do we give thanks for the selfless vocation and life of Rosemary Jane Prior, but we also dare to say that, in hand with God, our love for her truly never ends. Amen. 

‘Make us members of your blessed body’ – The Very Reverend Dominic Barrington, Dean of York

You who once deigned to take flesh for the sake of those who were lost:

make us members of your blessed body.

24 hours ago, the third most read home news story on the Guardian’s website rejoiced in the headline York Minster congregation outraged over ‘deeply inappropriate’ concert. Apparently, this cathedral is facing what the Guardian calls an ‘uprising’ from ‘members of its congregation’ – although, if I may say so, you look as placid as you usually do – because of a concert which will be held here in late April.

In what would appear to be complete ignorance of exactly what will be performed by the band known as ‘Plague of Angels’, if the Guardian’s story is to be believed, then one or more people who claim to be regular worshippers here believe that I and my team have exhibited ‘spiritual and moral failure’ for allowing to take place something that is not merely ‘shocking and deeply inappropriate’, but is, so it is claimed, an ‘outright insult to faith’.

Unless the person who contacted the Guardian has better information than do I and my staff, given that the music that will be performed is a rather unusual form of heavy metal composed to be played, in part, on a pipe organ, it is hard to believe that the real substance of this click-bait headline is about anything other than the undoubted fact that this concert will be very loud.

But, if you were paying close attention to our first reading, you may have realized that, as Jesus once famously remarked, the poor are always with us, and always have been, and that complaining about the state of the church – or, in this case, the Temple – is nothing new.

Who is left among you that saw this house in its former glory? How does it look to you now? Is it not in your sight as nothing? It sounds as if the ancestors of the ‘disgruntled of York’ who don’t like loud music were hanging around Jerusalem in the late sixth century before the birth of Jesus. Moaning and muttering – at first glance – about a lack of respect being shown for our historical and cultural religion. Has anything changed in over two and a half millennia?

But there is, of course, one vital difference. The voice of complaint, in the passage from the prophecy of Haggai, the voice of complaint, in this instance, is nothing less than ‘the word of the Lord’. The complainant about the state of things in and around the Temple in around 520 BCE is, in fact, the one God.

And God had good reason for complaining about the state of things, because Israelite religion, which, by now, was maturing into something we would recognize as Judaism, Israelite religion was not doing well. The point at which Haggai is prophesying is in the period of restoration, after the Persians – who were the reigning superpower of the era – had shown a much more enlightened approach to those whose lands they controlled than did the Babylonians before them. And, as a result, the Israelites, who some decades earlier had been forcibly led into exile in Babylon, having seen the destruction of Jerusalem and especially the destruction of the First Temple – the children of these Israelites were being allowed to return home and resume some kind of pre-exile life.

But – to the horror of the prophet Haggai, let alone to the horror of the Lord God – in so doing, all they seemed to want to do was to make themselves comfortable in their old stamping ground. They seemed to have had very little interest in the proper resumption of their old religion, especially when it came to rebuilding the Temple – the building which ought, truly, to have been at the heart of everything.

The people of God – so it would seem – had gone off the boil. The people of God were showing a marked preference for putting themselves first, and not the God whom they were called to serve.

And the hard truth is that there is nothing new in that phenomenon. For I would suggest that you and I simply need to look in the mirror with an element of honesty to be reminded how easy it is to put self first, and to edge God out of the picture. In small ways, we do this with alarming regularity, when we make choices about the use of our time, our energy, our commitment, and most certainly our money.

Much of the Bible, both in the Hebrew Scriptures and in the New Testament, contains calls from the prophets, from St Paul, and – most especially – from Jesus himself, that we should refocus our attention and priorities on the service of God and of God’s kingdom, rather than being seduced by the calls of sinful humanity that come either from within us, or from the lips of those around us.

But this is not just about the impact of personal sinfulness. Those who find loud music ungodly, according to the Guardian, feel that there is a duty ‘to protect the sacred’. That’s the kind of statement which – superficially – sounds so ‘right’ and ‘correct’. But it is a sentiment that can easily be misunderstood, and usually is misunderstood by those who attempt to seize the moral high ground and utter it in the first place.

Because God – you may be relieved to know – God does not need our protection. Indeed, it is a little hard to know how we might go about offering ‘protection’ to a God who will allow the temple of his body to be broken, violently and unjustly, for the sake of this world and its sinful inhabitants. But the challenge is that – in the light not just of crucifixion but of resurrection – in the light that, as the Choir sang in the very opening words of tonight’s service, ‘is born of light’ – in the glorious light in which we rejoice, we discover that, as Paul reminds us in a famous passage in one of his letters, we – the Church – have become Christ’s body. And that has implications.

Three days ago, the Bishop of Liverpool resigned in the wake of allegations concerning his behaviour with two different women. Allegations, which, the record should note, continue to be completely denied by him, despite his resignation.

And less than three months ago, the Archbishop of Canterbury resigned in the wake of the publication of a deeply damning report not merely about the appalling behaviour of the late barrister John Smyth, but about the way in which Smyth’s behaviour was known about and covered up by some people within the church.

The editorial staff of the Guardian – which is not known for being especially religious – must have raised their eyebrows at the outrage formulated about a concert of rather loud music due to take place here. I suspect they regarded this news story of congregational outrage as being an eccentric and trivial expression of what one commentator once called the ‘slap and tickle’ end of the Church of England.

For the part of the Body of Christ we call the Church of England has – tragically – seen better days than this – but not because of any concerts take might place in York Minster.

The horrors of safeguarding abuses are, quite simply, the most awful symptoms of what happens when, in some form or other, ego triumphs and we Edge God Out. But in plenty of lesser ways we all do this so consistently, and so very often not only do we sin against God and neighbour and cause hurt and distress, but we disfigure the very Body of Christ.

And this includes making fatuous, click-bait level complaints to the press about non-stories in the church. The Guardian claims that its curiously anonymous complainant is a regular worshipper here. I find that hard to believe, because I hope that anyone who is a regular worshipper here would, in the light of pretty express commands of Jesus about how the church should behave, have first of all talked to me or my colleagues about the concert they find so challenging, rather than talk in an uninformed and offensive manner about us to a third party. So, as I say, I doubt that the Guardian’s account of the horror of the impending concert by Plague of Angels is accurate.

But a hard truth remains. In the beautiful introit our Choir sang to start this service, it expressed the prayer: You who once deigned to take flesh for the sake of those who were lost: make us members of your blessed body.

But if we are happy to say ‘Amen’ to that prayer – indeed, if we dare to say such an ‘Amen’ – let us pray that the light of Christ – which, truly, is the light of the world – may so enlighten us that we learn to behave in a manner which builds up that blessed body, that it may honour and live out its call to serve the world for which Christ was content to die, rather than harm it. Amen.

‘He began to teach in their synagogues and was praised by everyone…’ – The Very Reverend Dominic Barrington, Dean of York

He began to teach in their synagogues and was praised by everyone…

In these ‘Sundays of Epiphany’ we are getting many revelations and beginnings. Those of you who are, shall we say, regular listeners, will have journeyed with Jesus and with the Church of God through the arrival of the Magi, complete with their extraordinary gifts and excessive homage, to that thin place at the river Jordan, when heaven and earth seemed to meet at Jesus’ baptism, to Cana, to witness the seemingly premature ‘first sign’ that produces a needless, extravagant amount of very fine wine, to this morning’s ‘curtain-raiser’ of the purpose, the very vocation of Jesus’ ministry, set in the synagogue of his hometown of Nazareth.

All of these moments, in their own ways, are new beginnings in which we see God’s desires and hopes for the world foreshadowed in a key episode at the start of Jesus’ ministry. All of these episodes speak to us in different but related ways of the beginning of something new and vital, that will help the world understand more fully the loving plan of the one God who creates, redeems and sanctifies. But – as we hear tell of these momentous beginnings – we should make sure that we do not lose sight of the bigger picture – the whole story of what is going on.

And, thought it pains me to say it, our readings this morning do not help us to do this. Indeed, the impact of this morning’s readings is quite the reverse – that they disguise or hide the bigger picture.

Take that passage from Nehemiah that was our first lesson. It sounded a seamless and straight-forward story – a story of the Jewish people being reacquainted with the Torah – the Jewish Law. The people weep – an acknowledgement that they may have strayed from keeping the Law – and Nehemiah and Ezra offer them words of encouragement for the future, telling them not to be grieved, ‘for the joy of the Lord is your strength’. All well and good – and indeed, it was all well and good.

But did you notice, if you were following the reading in your order of service, did you notice that two verses were cut? If you look at the attribution in the service sheet, you will see that verse four and verse seven were, for some reason, omitted.

Now, the reading cycle we use was set many decades ago, and it is used by almost every church in the western world, and I cannot claim any authority or certainty for predicting why verses four and seven were cut from that passage. But I can speculate, and I’m prepared to offer you generous odds that the reason these two verses were cut was simply to give the reader an easy ride. For verse four tells us that:

 The scribe Ezra stood on a wooden platform that had been made for the purpose; and beside him stood Mattithiah, Shema, Anaiah, Uriah, Hilkiah, and Maaseiah on his right hand; and Pedaiah, Mishael, Malchijah, Hashum, Hash-baddanah, Zechariah, and Meshullam on his left hand.

And if those thirteen names are not bad enough, verse seven compounds the challenge, telling us that:

Jeshua, Bani, Sherebiah, Jamin, Akkub, Shabbethai, Hodiah, Maaseiah, Kelita, Azariah, Jozabad, Hanan, [and] Pelaiah, the Levites, helped the people to understand the law, while the people remained in their places.

Many churches struggle to find volunteers to read lessons on a Sunday morning, and if you knew you might have to attempt 26 such awkward names as those, the situation would rapidly get worse, not better. And so, these 26 helpful Jews, supporting Ezra the priest in teaching the Law, they get cut from our lectionary, consigned to liturgical oblivion, despite their significant and supportive ministry on this critical morning in Jerusalem.

And perhaps – perhaps that really doesn’t matter. After all, we get to hear about the governor, Nehemiah. We get to hear about Ezra, the priest and scribe. We get to hear about the important people. Is the story really helped by learning about the 26 folk who only had bit parts in the narrative?

And He began to teach in their synagogues and was praised by everyone…

But if the omission of the 26 minor characters from our first reading was not enough, you will – I very much hope – have realized that we really did only hear part of the story in the gospel which was read to us just now.

For Luke, this scene in Nazareth is the public declaration of Jesus’ own understanding of his vocation – a declaration, so the evangelist makes clear to us, is authenticated by the presence, no less, of the Holy Spirit (which, let us not forget, has put in an appearance at Jesus’ baptism, where – so Luke tells us – the Spirit comes down ‘in bodily form’, and which then also leads Jesus into the wilderness so that he might deal with Satan’s testing of this vocation).

And so, on a roll, on a high, filled with the Spirit, Jesus reaches for the scrolls of Scripture in his local synagogue, and sets out his agenda, in timeless words found near the end of the prophetic tradition of Isaiah. Jesus – making it quite plain that he is endorsed by the Holy Spirit – speaks of Good News. Of Good News aimed emphatically at various categories of people whom you might class as impoverished, or regard as ‘underdogs’.

But we were only allowed to hear eight verses of this vitally important scene, which – even if read in its entirety – is not particularly long. Had we been allowed but one more verse, we would have seen the immediate affirmation Jesus receives, and be told that ‘All spoke well of him and were amazed at the gracious words that came from his mouth.’

But had we been allowed to read to the end of the scene – only another eight verses – we would have heard the whole story. A story which moves with quite dramatic speed from affirmation to condemnation – partly caused by Jesus himself, it must be said – a story which ends with everyone in the synagogue being ‘filled with rage’, and attempting to take Jesus by force and murder him.

He began to teach in their synagogues and was praised by everyone…

But that is not the whole story.

And while, on these Sundays we label ‘of Epiphany’ we are focusing on the different ways that the Good News begins, even at this time of the church’s year, we must ensure we do not overlook the whole story – even when the lectionary attempts to stifle it – for to do so will not enable us (by which I mean you and me, here, in York, on this cold January Sunday) – it will not enable us to grow into being proper disciples.

Because the two readings we have heard this morning teach us as much by what was cut from them, as they do by what was included. And – even if it might have been a bit of a challenge for the unfortunate reader – it might have been helpful for us to have heard that when Ezra and Nehemiah wished to remind the people of Jerusalem of the importance and the power and the beauty of God’s Law, they needed the assistance of Mattithiah, Shema, Anaiah, Uriah, Hilkiah, and Maaseiah on Ezra’s right hand; and Pedaiah, Mishael, Malchijah, Hashum, Hash-baddanah, Zechariah, and Meshullam on his left hand – let alone the ministry of those supportive Levites: Jeshua, Bani, Sherebiah, Jamin, Akkub, Shabbethai, Hodiah, Maaseiah, Kelita, Azariah, Jozabad, Hanan and Pelaiah.

Because – of course – they are us. They stand for us – those people whose names are on lists, in baptism registers, or perhaps even inscribed on the west wall of the Minster, but who really are not the famous names in the story of the Good News.

But people, nevertheless, without whose ministries, the spread of the Good News of God’s love would be greatly lessened. The 26 ‘assistants’ of Nehemiah 8, had they not been expurgated from our first reading, might just have given us a hint that, in our own obscure lives, we still have an important role to play in the economy of God’s Good News.

And what we might have learned, had we been allowed to read to the end of our gospel story this morning, what we might have learned is that proclaiming to the world the nature of God’s Good News will not always make us popular, as Bishop Mariann Budde has most certainly found out, after her sermon at the National Cathedral in Washington DC on the day of President Trump’s second inauguration.

In the wake of the President’s reaction to Bishop Budde, if you are a social media type, you might have seen the meme depicting bystanders in the crowd at the crucifixion.

“What was it he said that got everyone so upset?” says one onlooker to another.

“Be kind to each other.”

“Oh, yeah. That’ll do it.”

Today, on these Sunday of Epiphany, we find ourselves focusing on the start of the Good News, as we learn that Jesus began to teach in their synagogues and was praised by everyone…

But now – whether or not it makes us popular, or quite the reverse – insignificant though we might feel that we are in the so-called ‘grand scheme of things’, let’s make sure we play our part in the next chapters of God’s unfolding story of Good News. Amen.

‘This will be a sign for you’ – The Very Revd Dominic Barrington, Dean of York

This will be a sign for you: you will find a child wrapped in bands of cloth and lying in a manger.

Getting on for thirty years ago, many thousands of people watched wide-eyed with horror as a crisis loomed. At a remote but sensitive location on the Russian border, a nuclear explosion was within minutes, if not seconds, of occurring – an explosion that would destabilize world order, and precipitate a sequence of greater disasters.

The only hope of avoiding such a fate lay on the shoulders of one man – a man who could easily have fled to save his own skin – as many of us would, I am sure, have felt tempted to do. But not, of course, James Bond – personified back in 1997 in Tomorrow Never Dies by a relatively youthful Pierce Brosnan.

As senior military and MI6 operatives watch anxiously from afar by live video relay, an arrogant rear admiral played by the late, great Geoffrey Palmer cannot believe that Bond is staying put, attempting to avert the impending catastrophe. Incredulous, he barks at Judi Dench’s ever-unflappable M, “What on earth is he doing there?” To which the simple, two-word reply comes straight back: “His job!”

Whether they are terrorists or tyrannical government regimes, Bond’s job, across 27 films, has been to save us, and often the whole world, from the bad guys. And ever since 1962, we have enjoyed 007’s brand of excessive indulgence, fast-living, and deftly executed violence, that has kept him popping up in places both unlikely and downright dangerous.

But the incredulous question of Palmer’s self-serving admiral fits more scenarios than just the world of James Bond, as we might realize on this night  – the night when we are offered, once again, that familiar sign of a child wrapped in bands of cloth and lying in a manger. For if we look past the tinsel and sentimentality that has come to be part of the backdrop of Christmas, if we look at the reality of the story crafted for us with such care by Saint Luke, we might well be tempted to echo the admiral’s incredulity, and ask  “What on earth is he doing there?”

Even the setting of tonight’s narrative should startle us, for, as Luke has already gone to pains to make clear in his gospel, Mary and Joseph are Nazarenes, who live nowhere near the ‘little town’ of Bethlehem. Their presence in the ‘city of David’ is a necessary response to an exploitative census on the part of the Romans – a census inflicted on the population simply to ensure the occupiers can grab as much ‘taxation’ as possible from the people they are subjugating. This is not taxation levied to ensure any kind of common good, but merely to line the pockets of those who rule by fear and force.

And the displacement that Mary and Joseph must endure – and endure just as Mary reaches the full term of her pregnancy – only underscores for us how the Holy Family exist on the very margins of society. Hence not only the paucity of their temporary accommodation, but the improvised clothing for the new-born baby, and the announcement of his birth to a bunch of shepherds – shepherds generally perceived as outcasts on account of both dirt and dishonesty in the eyes of the society of that era.

And the irony, of course, is that this extraordinary narrative is written by Luke, so we learn in the very opening verses of his gospel, to offer a Roman nobleman he calls ‘the most excellent Theophilus’ an ‘orderly account’ that explains that God is interacting with humanity to bring it glory, exaltation and even salvation. An account which must surely have caused this elevated member of society to cry out, “What on earth is he doing there?”

And if the beginning of the story Luke recounts makes us ask such a question, it has got no better by the end. For not just in birth, but also in death, this Jesus will rest, once again, in a space far from his real home – a space once again provided by a stranger, and will once again have his body wrapped, this time in a linen cloth. At what appears to be the end of the story, just as at its beginning, Luke leaves us thinking, “What on earth is he doing there?”

For the sign of a child wrapped in bands of cloth and lying in a manger  – this sign is a sign that confounds a world that has, across the centuries, reveled in the familiar, James Bond-like stories – the stories in which victory is achieved by the strong at the expense of the weak.

Instead, we are offered the story of love incarnate – incarnate and active, in birth and in death – active in the unlikely places of the world, standing the established way of doing things on its head, and making a difference… making the difference to those, who whether weak or strong, have come to believe that the world can only work on the ‘might is right’ principle.

Some years ago, I was privileged to hear a talk by the inspirational Baptist minister Steve Chalke, founder of the Oasis Trust. He spoke of having visited the 16^th Century Pinkas Synagogue in the great city of Prague, inside which are inscribed the names and dates of the 77,297 Czech Jews murdered by the Third Reich.

Chalke explained that on these poignant walls, not merely do you find the names of thousand upon thousand adult Jews slaughtered in the death camps, but that the names contain many small children – some aged five, or four, or three, or even two years and under – Jewish children of the same age as those slaughtered when King Herod tried to kill the baby Jesus.

“What made them do it?” Steve Chalke demanded of us, his audience. “What made them do it?” Mistakenly, I thought this rhetorical question demanded that we try and explain the genocidal motives of the Nazis… but I had missed the point of his question.

“What made them do it?” he demanded …. “Why did they still have babies by then?”

For, as he pointed out, even by the mid 1930s, let alone the end of that decade, the Jews of Europe could see what was coming.

“There is only one reason”, he said, “why you can possibly carry on having babies in such awful circumstances” – and that is that you know – that you know – that you have something in your life that is stronger, that is bigger, that is more important, and that will – ultimately – be more triumphant, than anything that the forces of this world can muster.

“You can only”, he said, “carry on having babies at that point, because you know you have something that makes a difference.”

And that is what we are gathered to celebrate tonight. The God who makes a difference in a manner that, even for God, is personal and costly. For tonight, we celebrate a God who makes that difference by choosing to stand with humanity not in the places of power and strength, but in the margins occupied by the weakest and most vulnerable members of society.

Which is why God gives us this precious sign of the child wrapped in bands of cloth and lying in a manger.  For it is this extraordinary, counter-cultural sign that tells us that, in the words of the prophet, we will, indeed, be ‘redeemed, we will be ‘sought out’, and we will be called ‘a City not Forsaken’.

For this is the nature of the God who is born right into the midst of human sinfulness and violence, born there, and not in a royal palace, to undertake a job which only God could undertake – the job, as we just sung, of being ‘born to save us all’.

So do not be surprised by the sign of the child wrapped in bands of cloth and lying in a manger, for, in birth and in death, this is the sign of the God who, in the words of Steve Chalke, makes a difference. And if, on your way home tonight, or at any point in the coming year, if they should turn to you and ask “What on earth is he doing there?”, I hope that you will remember that he is there to make that ultimate difference, and I hope that you will look them in the eye, channel your inner M, and reply “His job.” Amen.

‘Seek him that maketh the seven stars’ – The Very Revd Dominic Barrington, Dean of York

Seek him that maketh the seven stars and Orion and turneth the shadow of death into the morning.

Much of the gospel of Matthew depicts the growing tension between Jesus and the Jewish religious leadership of his time, especially in the person of the Pharisees. While this theme is not absent from any of the four gospels, it has a particular resonance in Matthew, the tone of which suggests that the context of this particular gospel may well have been set in a community of Jewish Christians which had separated very painfully from the synagogue, given how much opprobrium is directed at the ‘scribes and Pharisees’ nearer the end of the gospel.

The section of the gospel read as our second reading depicts the split with a painful and clear dichotomy – one that might have felt all the more poignant if we had heard the verses immediately preceding. For the very last verses of chapter eleven present us with Jesus at his most consoling, inviting all those who are ‘weary and carrying heavy burdens’ to come to him for rest. And then, so Matthew tells us, ‘At that time’  – at that very time – Jesus finds himself going through the cornfields, needing to satisfy the weary burden of human hunger – only to have the Pharisees accuse him of breaking God’s law.

And that’s not an accusation which plays well with Jesus, who has left behind the ‘gentle and humble’ persona depicted only a few verses earlier. As is often the case, when Jesus has an argument about the Law thrust at him, he gives back as good as he gets – indeed, he gives back rather better, throwing a line from Hosea at those who would condemn him, to top off a legal counter-argument in which he emerges as the victor.

Seek him that maketh the seven stars…

And that’s not enough. With a very clear sense of the growing division and enmity, Matthew tells us that Jesus then enters their synagogue (that possessive pronoun telling us all we need to know about the level of tension and division now in the air). And here the stakes are raised – raised from hunger to sickness and deformity. “Is it lawful to cure on the sabbath?”, they demand…. and, again, Jesus gives those who love to uphold the Law a lesson on what it might mean, properly, to do just that.

A lecture, and an action, that leave them conspiring ‘how to destroy him’. An attitude that simply encourages Jesus to cure ‘all’ of the ‘crowds’ that have begun to follow him, in the context of which Matthew aligns Jesus for us with that famous but shadowy figure from second Isaiah – the Suffering Servant – whose service and compassion for all people will enlighten the nations and bring justice to all.

Seek him that maketh the seven stars…

It is good – very good – this evening, to welcome members of York Medical Society to join us at this service, worshipping here at the Minster, as is their custom, on the Sunday following the feast day of St Luke, labeled in the New Testament as being the ‘beloved physician’.

Founded in 1832, the Society, so its website explains, exists to offer medical professionals ‘an environment removed from the workplace, and a rare opportunity to socialize across specialities in relaxed surroundings’. For those of us not privileged to belong to this wonderful body, I can reveal that in the coming weeks, they will be having a talk about the history of the universe; a talk on the state of nature in North Yorkshire; a Christmas wreath-making workshop; and – I am most envious to report – both a wine-tasting for the imminent festive season, and also (most dear to my heart) a whisky tasting.

One would have to be living with one’s head in the clouds not to be aware of the many pressures that the medical profession faces in the current climate. The extraordinary years of the pandemic (in which, so appropriately, we stood on the streets to applaud the NHS), and the challenging economic reality this nation faces does not, I suspect, make the working life of our guests this evening always feel a bundle of laughs. So it is good that they model for themselves and the rest of us, the need to find that bigger picture in which they can relax, they can form friendships beyond their immediate work environment, in which they can grow, and in which, perhaps, they can even Seek him that maketh the seven stars.

Our medics are not the only group gathered here this evening who meet together regularly for reasons that blend vocational activity with relaxation, and – at least in some cases – the chance to sample the odd alcoholic beverage. Some of you may be aware that our visiting choir this weekend is the choir which formed me both as a musician and as a Christian. In my school days the director of this choir was also the Director of Music at a nearby grammar school, and it was his rather heavy-handed suggestion that persuaded me to darken the doors of a church for the first time in my life, and I guess you could say that it ‘took’, and after a mere 18 years of singing in Kingston I found myself moving onwards to theological college, to do my own seeking of the one that maketh the seven stars, and here I am today.

Of course, when I joined All Saints choir back in 1975, Jonathan Dove’s uplifting anthem that we have just heard was still some twenty years in the future, for he is a mere three years older than I am. So it is not a work I have ever had the pleasure of singing myself, but I am deeply grateful that it was chosen to round off this weekend of choral excellence by my old friends. For, in Mr Dove’s choice of text, we have the challenge that is at the heart of our second reading, and – indeed – I think we have the challenge of how we live out our entire lives encapsulated in just two well-chosen verses of scripture – verses that tell us to Seek him that maketh the seven stars.

Conflict dogs and divides the communities of the world, and even those communities that strive to be religious, explicitly following God’s command and God’s call, are far from immune, as that portion of Matthew shows us so clearly. In about a month’s time, our politicians will be debating Kim Leadbeater’s private member’s bill to legalise assisted dying. In addition to the debate and division I imagine we will see on the floor of the House of Commons, I am quite certain that the rooms of the York Medical Society, and many other spaces occupied by healthcare professionals will be divided by this debate – as, most certainly, will be many parts of the church of God (only yesterday, the deans of England’s cathedrals, were being asked to sign a letter on this subject). People will not agree, and it is possible heated words will be exchanged as law, vocation and ethics mix together in a complex fashion.

And that is just one topical and clear instance of why it is important to hear the call of that glorious anthem to which we have just listened, which encourages us to emulate Jesus in working out properly and fully (by which I mean doing so much more than just quoting a particular legal formula) that God would have us do in the living out of our lives and the challenges we will face.

That is why it is, truly, so important to seek the maker of the seven stars and Orion, for it is only God who possesses the gift that ‘turneth the shadow of death into the morning’. That’s not always easy to do – far from it – for in truth, despite Matthew’s bitter depiction of them, I am sure the Pharisees were keen to obey and follow God, even though they disagreed so violently with Jesus. But it is only when, in fellowship with those around us, whether in societies, in choirs, or in any other walk of life into which God calls us – it is only when we respond to that call to seek the maker of those seven stars that we will find ourselves able to say (and perhaps even to sing) yea, the darkness shineth as the day, the night is light about me. Amen.

‘When he was in the house, he asked them, “What were you arguing about on the way?”’ – The Very Revd Dominic Barrington, Dean

When he was in the house, he asked them, “What were you arguing about on the way?”

When I was interviewed for the position that I now hold as Dean of York, I was asked a question which rather surprised me. It was about misogyny – specifically, about what I would do if I were at a meeting or social event as the Dean of York, and someone were to make a manifestly misogynistic remark in front of me.

I think I must have raised my eyebrows when this was put to me (coming from a city like Chicago, it did feel a little surprising), because one of the panel, looking at me, added, “this is Yorkshire, you know…”

Well – I leave you to make up your own mind about whether or not the question identified a valid concern, but I will say that both Alison and I have occasionally been surprised by remarks that have been uttered either to us or in front of us that have reminded me of this moment in the interview. And it is particularly sad to note that sometimes such remarks have been about Dean Viv, who was, of course, the first woman to be the Dean of York, holding the post from 2012 to 2018.

All of which is to say that I realize that there may be some people around this great cathedral whose views on what roles are appropriate for women and what roles are appropriate for men might feel – shall we say – traditional. People, perhaps, who believe they understand exactly what the author of the Book of Proverbs was on about, when describing that figure that he calls a capable wife – the sort of wife who will be supportive of her (evidently more important and capable) husband – her husband who is busy being a mover and shaker at the city gates, taking his seat among the elders of the land.

But there will be others, I suspect, for whom this passage can feel a particularly blunt reminder of the patriarchal culture in which the books of the Bible were brought to birth, and who will be wondering why on earth, in today’s world, it can be a good or appropriate thing to legitimize these seemingly outdated words by reading them out loud and calling them ‘the Word of the Lord’?

Of course, we should take note that the words we heard translated as a ‘capable wife’ – the Hebrew phrase eshet Chayil – are also often rendered as ‘woman of valor’. And perhaps that helps a little – perhaps that enables us to give thanks that in today’s world most professions have seen women reach the very top ranks, even if society is still male-dominated.

Perhaps that enables us to give thanks that there are now 35 female bishops in the Church of England – even though I still regularly hear conversations in which people – well, men – mutter worriedly about whether we are ‘ready’ for a female archbishop, at the point when either of the current postholders might retire.

Perhaps it is good, though, to champion the idea of the ‘woman of valour’ and rejoice that we can, at least, uncouple such a notion from the distinctly ‘wifely’ feel of the translation which we heard read just now.

But actually even saying that is to miss the point, and, in my opinion, to fail to understand what the author of Proverbs is really pointing us to.

During the time we were living in Chicago, Alison and I were privileged to be invited to dinner one Friday evening at the home of a very distinguished orthodox rabbi. When we took our place at the table, I was surprised to discover that the weekly liturgy that heralds the arrival of the Jewish sabbath includes the recitation of those verses about the capable wife that we just heard from Proverbs.

Curious to know the relevance of this passage to the celebration of the arrival of the sabbath, I asked the rabbi why these particular words were read. And I suppose that – to my shame – I was anticipating a trite reply about the role of a good Jewish wife, and how she is there to support her husband and family. After all, my not very well-informed perception of orthodox Jews made me think that in a setting which seemed to traditional and conservative, it might be very natural to hear a remark or two along the lines of ‘a woman’s place is in the home’.

However, I was gently put in my place when the rabbi explained that this famous passage was read each sabbath in order to help Jews welcome the feminine presence of God into their home. For, as the rabbi reminded me, the attributes of the one God are both masculine and feminine, and neither should be ignored or prioritized at the expense of the other – rather, both should be welcomed into one’s home and one’s life.

Furthermore, he reminded me that this passage about the eshet Chayil is the last word – the climax of the book of Proverbs, and more than that, in the original Hebrew it is an acrostic, with each verse beginning with the next letter of the alphabet. A fact that suggests it might well have functioned as a liturgical or catechetical text – something which everyone in the community was encouraged to learn, to recite, to live by – women and men alike.

Certainly, in this early example of what we call Wisdom literature, after some thirty chapters of wise advice about how to live life – advice with something of a masculine feel to it – when, by way of climax, the author wants us to understand values and attributes that are exceptional, he presents us with a woman of such remarkable abilities and graces that we see in her nothing less than a feminine personification of the divine. A feminine personification of the divine to encourage us, to inspire us, and to challenge us.

And when we read today’s gospel passage, we are reminded, all too clearly, how much we need to be challenged – just as we need to be challenged when we find ourselves witnessing or hearing language or behaviour that is sexist, or racist, or ableist, or homophobic, of which in any other way disparages and denigrates some of God’s beloved children who are our siblings in Christ.

For throughout Mark, the depiction of the disciples cannot be said to be complimentary. Their almost constant failure to grasp even the most basic essentials of Jesus’ teaching permeates the entire gospel narrative, and this morning’s passage shows the Twelve as little more than grumpy and embarrassed teenagers caught out after an utterly inappropriate argument about greatness and importance.

An argument, moreover, set in the context of an even more awkward moment around a similar theme, which we heard one week ago as last Sunday’s gospel reading. For last Sunday, our gospel found Jesus and the disciples in Caesarea Philippi, where Jesus demands that his closest friends tell him who they think he really is. A moment which starts well – with Peter acknowledging that Jesus is the Messiah – but a moment which then ends badly, as Peter reacts negatively to Jesus predicting his Passion and death – which then ends so badly that Peter is addressed – and addressed very publicly – as Satan.

Well today, we are a little bit further on in Mark’s narrative, and we come to Jesus’ second prediction of his Passion and death… a prediction which proves to be a curtain-raiser for this egotistical dispute among the disciples. A dispute about – of all fatuous, ridiculous, and offensively irrelevant topics – a dispute about which of them was the greatest.

Jesus is attempting to show them that, despite being the Messiah, the Christ, his sense of ego is of such little relevance to him that he is prepared – that he is expecting to suffer and die to demonstrate the truth about God’s love to the wider world. But his closest friends and followers – they can only talk about their own egos – unaware (that at least for those of us who speak English), the word EGO should really be understood as an acronym for Edging God Out. And, of course, when Jesus demands to know what has been going on, they lapse into the sullen and embarrassed silence that is a particular gift of young men.

And the tragedy is that this was not what Jesus wanted of them. It was not what Jesus wanted of them and it was not what Jesus wanted for them. For Jesus wanted them and needed them to be the best versions of themselves that they possibly could be, for – strange to say – he needed them, truly, to become nothing less than what the author of Proverbs referred to as being a ‘capable wife’. For these men in whom Jesus – incredibly – believed so much, these men were to become the foundations of what you and I now call ‘the church’, that body which is also known as the bride of Christ.

Because, for the Christian, it is the Church of God that must, surely, be the real woman of valour. And that means, quite simply, that the virtues and attributes of which we heard read just now, those hallmarks of valour that are the very climax of this great book of Wisdom, they should be the aspiration of all God’s children that claim to be the church.

Because the capable wife is called to do her husband good and not harm, which is – or ought to be – the vocation of the Church. That capable wife is called to let her works praise her in the city gates. That is, or should, be the call of the Church of God – and therefore the call of each and every one of its members. It should not be worked out in the kind of petty arguments like the one where Jesus says to the embarrassed disciples, “What were you arguing about just now?”

Because whether male or female, young or old, gay or straight, our aspiration corporately and individually, needs to take us beyond the petty squabbles we just witnessed of Peter, James and John and all the rest of them. Jesus believed in them, nevertheless, and loved them, just as he believes in and loves each one of us, despite our own failings. And that is why Jesus calls us, as he called them, to be the best version of ourselves that we possibly can be. Because when we don’t then we end up – like the disciples in this morning’s gospel – we end up ‘arguing on the way’, and there is already, surely, too much argument in the world without us adding to it.

Just before the final blessing, as we are getting ready to be sent back out into that argumentative world, having been fed on the Body of Christ, and having been confirmed anew in the reality that our call is to be the Body of Christ, we’re going to sing the well-known words of the Victorian priest John Ernest Bode. Words he wrote to celebrate his three children being confirmed in 1869, when – doubtless – he hoped and prayed that his children would grow in the Christ-like vocation of being the best version of themselves that they could be.

I hope and pray that we, too, can lay aside the things over which we indulge in arguing about ‘on the way’, that we can hear again the call that we should all emulate the divine ‘woman of valour’, so that we can genuinely sing and pray:

O let me see thy footmarks,

and in them plant mine own;

my hope to follow duly

is in thy strength alone;

O guide me, call me, draw me,

uphold me to the end;

and then in heaven receive me,

my Saviour and my Friend. Amen.

‘If anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation’ – The Very Revd Dominic Barrington, Dean

Title: ‘If anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation’

Preacher: The Very Revd Dominic Barrington, Dean

Date: Sunday 16 June 2024, The Third Sunday after Trinity

If anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation.

Hector Pieterson died 48 years ago today. Had he lived, he would now be sixty, and, one hopes, beginning to contemplate plans for retirement. He might have had a successful career, a loving spouse, children and possibly grandchildren, in whom he might have found joy and pride. But it was not to be. And the reason it was not to be – the real reason – was quite simply that he was black.

The apartheid government of South Africa had implemented the compulsory use of Afrikaans in schools across the country, refusing to heed the desire of the majority of black schools that tuition should be in local languages, and not the language felt to be ‘the language of the oppressor’. Across Soweto, students from many schools protested, and into the midst of peaceful demonstrations, came fierce police brutality resulting in at least 176 student deaths.

Of this tragedy, Hector became the icon, captured in a famous photograph as he was carried, dying, in the arms of a friend, with his elder sister running alongside. A tragedy fuelled, at least in part, by the strongly propagated teaching of the Dutch Reformed Church that apartheid was divinely ordained and set out in the Bible – a teaching that encouraged and emboldened the South African government in this abhorrent era.

And yet, If anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation. And that means we need a new way of thinking about things…

For the sixty-six books of the Bible, of course, can be understood and interpreted in so many ways, and are redolent of images, not all of which seem to make a great deal of sense. You will find ample proof of this in the Great East Window, most of which is devoted to recounting the narrative of the Revelation to John in 81 remarkable panels of glass that are one of the greatest highlights of this magnificent cathedral.

But, remarkable and exquisite though John Thornton’s breathtaking window is, the bizarre and complex imagery of Revelation has ensured that its message of encouragement to a community of persecuted Christians in the very late first century has been consistently misinterpreted in all sorts of weird and not very wonderful ways – some of which have been downright dangerous, especially when the religious fundamentalism they create gets mixed with political fundamentalism.

Interpretation, of course, is at the heart of our gospel reading this morning, which also contains some less flamboyant but nevertheless rather challenging assertions. For while the science of agriculture is understood in a far more complex manner in the modern age than in first century Palestine, to depict a farmer watching plants ‘sprout and grow’, and to say, ‘he does not know how’ would have done a great disservice to those who tended the land in Jesus’ own day. For you may be assured that two thousand years ago, they understood the importance of ploughing, of weeding, and most certainly of watering.

If we should wonder, therefore, what is going on, the answer is at least hinted at in the curious paragraph that ends almost an entire chapter of agricultural parables in Mark chapter four. In this editorial note, picking up a similar text inserted into the longer Parable of the Sower which immediately precedes this morning’s section of this chapter, we learn that only Jesus’ disciples are privileged, at this point, to get a clear explanation of what he is talking about.

And, if it were the case in Sunday School, that you were simply told that a parable is a story based around one easy-to-grasp, straight-forward image, we need to accept that this is an over-simplification that simply does not work all the time. For if it was a straight-forward truth that parables use one easy to understand illustration to make one simple point, then the confusion and lack of understanding that pervades this part of Mark’s gospel would simply not be the case.

Indeed, if you scroll back a few verses in this chapter you will find Jesus explaining that he speaks in parables precisely to cause mis-understanding, quoting the prophet Isaiah, and saying, “everything comes in parables; in order that ‘they may indeed look, but not perceive, and may indeed listen, but not understand; so that they may not turn again and be forgiven.’”

And, in the passage we just heard read, Mark’s editorial remark clarifies that the word – and even outside the Fourth Gospel our ears should prick up at the use of this term – Mark clarifies that the word is spoken to people ‘as they were able to hear it’.

So what is going on?

How could people not understand the basic point Jesus is making about the universal mission of the kingdom of God offering shade, shelter and protection to all who seek it?

Or, perhaps more worryingly, how could almost fifty years of the offensively vile apartheid regime in South Africa be propped up by theological arguments propounded by a major Christian denomination justifying its evil and often murderous behaviour?

What – to get to the root of what is going on – what does it take ‘to be able to hear’ Jesus’ teachings in a manner that elicits an appropriate response? A response that – in the context of South Africa of fifty years ago produces a Tutu-like condemnation of apartheid, rather than the faux-theological justification for it that so stained the Dutch Reformed Church of that time.

Of – if we were to borrow the language of the better known Parable of the Sower which immediately precedes this morning’s gospel – why is it that only some seed falls on fertile ground, while other seed lands, unproductively, on the path, or amongst thorns, or on rocky ground?

A clue to the answer, I would suggest, is to be found in the words we have just heard from Saint Paul. Words penned by him at a very low point in his life, castigated and criticized by his beloved Corinthians who, now that he no longer is living and teaching among them, have come to regard him in a very harsh light that clearly has stung Paul very deeply.

And thus, from a section of this letter which speaks of the pain and risk of human vulnerability, Paul is, as it were, getting back to basics, and speaking of the call and of the demands of love – of divine, selfless love. Of the love of Christ which, so he passionately believes, is what urges on both him, and others who truly know they are called by God. For, as Paul has come to know in the very depths of his being, the love of Christ has consequences, because, as he says so powerfully:

We are convinced that one has died for all… so that those who live might live no longer for themselves, but for him who died and was raised for them. From now on, therefore, we regard no one from a human point of view.

The issue at the heart of the call of today’s readings from Scripture – the issue at the heart of our response to the Good News of the gospel – is about God’s love, and our response to it. It is about whether we have the great-heartedness to open our lives to God in the manner in which Paul did in such a remarkable and surprising manner.

For when we first get to know Paul or Saul, he has a very rigid view of who is ‘in’ and who is ‘not in’. At least in a religious sense, the Saul we first meet in Acts has an apartheid-like view of those who are acceptable to God. An apartheid-like view that saw him approve of a murder even more violent than the murder of young Hector Pieterson in South Africa, as he stood by and watched the stoning of Stephen – something which, at first, propelled this zealous Pharisee into active and harsh persecution of the first Christians.

But then, on the road to Damascus, Paul loses his sight as he encounters the risen Christ, but perhaps – to pick up the language we are using this morning – perhaps he gains his hearing, as he encounters the true breadth, depth and height of God’s love

And thus, as he writes so profoundly to his erstwhile friends in Corinth, he has learned that if we hear the words of Jesus properly and take them into our lives, From now on, therefore, we regard no one from a human point of view…

Young Hector Pieterson died an evil and tragic death because those in power in his native land did not regard him, and all those whose skin colour was different to theirs, as God regarded him. Their actions were actions urged not by the love of Christ, but by the worst sinful instincts of human greed and hatred – sinful instincts that, in other parts of the globe lead to similar suffering and death right now.

As we gather today to feed on the Body of Christ and to be transformed anew into being the Body of Christ, let us never forget that Christ died for all, precisely to ensure that we who live might, indeed, ‘live no longer for ourselves’, but strive to look at the world and its children as God looks at us, so that, truly, in Christ there might yet be a precious new creation. Amen.