“Jesus came bringing not peace but division” – Canon Peter Collier, Cathedral Reader

In the first chapter of Luke’s gospel Zechariah prophesies that when Jesus comes, he will guide our feet into the way of peace. When Jesus was born, the choir of angels sang about peace on earth. Jesus often said to people such things as – go in peace and sin no more; peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you. In a few minutes time we will do what we do week after week – we will share the peace with one another.

So what are we to make of our gospel reading this morning when Jesus said – do you think I have come to bring peace on earth? No, I tell you but rather division.  And if that is not enough, he also says I have come to bring fire to the earth.

The Message translation of these verses says this: “I’ve come to start a fire on this earth – how I wish it were blazing right now! I’ve come to change everything, turn everything right side up – how I long for it to be finished! Do you think I came to smooth things over and make everything nice? Not so. I’ve come to disrupt and confront!”

As we have reminded ourselves so often as we have been working our way through Luke’s gospel this year, Jesus had set his face to go to Jerusalem and Luke recorded that journey. As Jesus travelled, there was an increasing sense of an impending crisis, which would eventually centre on him and lead to his death. Conflict was very much in the air.

Of course, there were those who couldn’t get enough of him – his teaching, his miracles, his healings. At the beginning of this chapter we read “the crowd gathered in thousands, so that they trampled on one another”.

But there were others who were stirred by his words and actions to hostility. The reason for that is very clear – Jesus constantly challenged them and all that they stood for. They were the people in authority, they had real power. Anything that disturbed the status quo, and in particular their status quo, was a threat to them and their position. That group included the scribes, the priests and the Pharisees; and in due course the Roman civic authorities also turned against him.

What was it that caused this division? It was the coming of the kingdom of God. That kingdom, as proclaimed by Jesus, challenged their seemingly ordered way of life, and all that made for the status quo of how everyone lived. Jesus was saying that there was an alternative way – and that led to division.

Last Sunday we were asked to think about where we were laying up our treasure. Jesus had been saying that people should not worry about their life, what they would eat, what they would wear, because life was more than food and clothing. He said that the nations of the world strive after these things, but that they instead should strive for his kingdom. People were of course looking for security. Whether they were in authority or very much under authority – all were concerned to build for themselves a level of security now in this world.

But Jesus said that rather than focussing on this world and its received values, they should be getting ready for the coming of the King, and his kingdom.

And he told his listeners to read the signs of the times. “You all know how to read the signs that tell you what weather is coming” he said; “why can’t you read the bigger signs about what’s happening in the world?”

The reference to divided households is a quotation from Micah chapter 7. As Micah surveyed the world of his time, he saw that everything was falling apart. Everything that should give stability was failing. The rule of law, fundamental to fairness and justice, was corrupted because the judges were being bribed. Families, which should give social stability, had become completely dysfunctional with relationships turned upside down. Micah imagines himself walking in the field after harvest and he can find nothing left to eat or drink – no good thing has survived.

Jesus invited his listeners to look around at the signs in both their civic and religious worlds. Yes, there was a form of peace – the pax Romana – but at what cost? Nations and communities were oppressed to keep the peace, forced to abandon their own cultural practices, and to use a language which was not their own. And it was all made possible because of the slavery to which something like 5 million people across the empire, about 15% of the population, were subject. This could not and would not last. And in their religious world, people lived completely under the heel of the scribes and pharisees, who had built a whole set of detailed rules and regulations about how you must live. And woe betide you if you stepped outside those rules.

Jesus confronted all this, and as he proclaimed the Kingdom of God, he brought a judgement against those worlds and their requirements. Time and again he confronted the Jewish authorities and challenged their rule-based way of life, as he proclaimed and demonstrated the love of God that was unconditional, accepting, and inclusive.

That not only challenged the position of the authorities, but it liberated those who had struggled under those rules. Jesus always associated himself with those who were on the wrong side of the social divides of his day. Those who were unclean, he touched and restored to wholeness. He gave value and dignity to those who were despised – such as women, tax collectors and others generically described as sinners. He spoke of and demonstrated the eternal and inclusive love of God for all people. And that led to division. You accepted it or you rejected it; you could not sit on the fence.

So what does Jesus say today to the nations of the world? We spend our time building security for ourselves as we see it. Security is of course relative, depending on your circumstances, but for us it has much to do with possessions, net worth, and the protection of what we have managed to build up. For us it comes in all sorts of shapes and forms – a home, an income whether earned or otherwise to provide for our needs, savings for a rainy day or a holiday, a pension of some sort for future security, and health to maintain and even enjoy all of that. And of course we want our children and families to enjoy that kind of security too.

And so often that leads to a structured and tiered society in which, depending where sit, we enjoy different levels of security. Many of us here, but by no means all, will have a significant sense of security. And security is often associated with power and authority, in a chicken and egg sort of way.

For many people whatever security they did enjoy was shaken five years ago by the pandemic. And the levels of fear we experienced then have not gone away. And our world has become increasingly driven by fear, as the political rhetoric divides and polarises. You are always on one side or the other of so many issues. You only have to look back over this week – I expect most of you will have heard about Chris Kandiah, the Christian theologian who spoke on Thought for Today about attitudes to refugees and foreigners and it led to a huge row with the BBC withdrawing that part of the programme.

There are many issues today where Jesus and his gospel bring division, when he confronts those who are in power and who have authority. Archbishop Tutu once said that “when people say the bible and politics don’t mix, I wonder which Bible it is that they are reading”.

So still today Jesus come to us with his fire? Fire is not all destructive. It can refine, reveal, and renew. You will know that those who live or work in the forests sometimes start controlled fires in order to clear out the dead wood. You may have seen television programmes showing how remarkably quickly new life springs up where the fire has been.

As we follow Jesus, as we allow his word to penetrate our lives, we will inevitably find that he comes to disturb us in our established patterns of thinking and living which we think give us security.

He calls us to understand our times and to read the signs. And he calls us to belong to his kingdom and to live by the values of that kingdom where, as we walk with him day by day, we allow his unconditional love for all to shape how we think and live.

Amen.

“Another Lost Man” – The Very Reverend Dr Malcolm Young, Dean of Grace Cathedral, San Francisco

Another Lost Man

Gracious God give peace to all in this house, to travelers and hosts. In our hearts, speak of your kingdom, for the harvest is plentiful and we rejoice to be your laborers. Amen.

Walking along a Somerset path, in a glass case where one usually finds a map, we discovered beautiful calligraphy with these words from the poet William Butler Yeats (1865-1939).

“Had I the Heavens’ embroidered cloths, / Enwrought with golden and silver light, / The blue and the dim and the dark cloths / Of night and light and the half light, / I would spread the cloths under your feet: / But I, being poor, have only my dreams; / I have spread my dreams under your feet: / Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.”^[1]

My name is Malcolm Young and I am from Grace Cathedral in San Francisco, California. To share our dreams is to share the most vulnerable part of ourselves. This is hard to do with someone we have only just met. But let me tell you something that not many people know about me. I look and sound American, but inside I feel both American and English. My mother grew up in Yorkshire, and as a child our house felt like a little bit of Britain. So arriving here is like coming home for me, except that no one else sees this as my home.

Today in this ancient and holy cathedral I would like to share some dreams, dreams about the kingdom of God. Like the seventy disciples in today’s gospel, my wife Heidi and I came to England in June as a pair, sometimes with our adult daughter Melia, but always traveling light. We have visited dozens of cathedrals and churches, spent time with family and made many new friends. The people we met have been frank with us about the challenges faced both by the church and by society in general.

We will not be together for long so let me describe what it feels like when the kingdom of God comes near. This sermon comes in two chapters. The first concerns the challenges of living as if God’s kingdom is real. And the second is about the way that joy from God still manages to finds us.

1. How hard it is to live in God’s kingdom even though we were made for it. Everywhere we traveled the headlines scrolled silently under the BBC news television broadcasts. These messages reminded us how many people are being killed in Gaza and Ukraine each week, of bombing campaigns and an escalating war in Iran, terrible violence and punishment, rising housing costs and despair. Life feels hard for many people and our personal philosophy of life can make our suffering worse.^[2]

In 1938 C.S. Lewis published a science fiction book called Out of the Silent Planet. The technology seems hopelessly outdated but I was surprised how contemporary its critique of modern materialism still feels. A Cambridge University philologist named Elwin Ransom is drugged and kidnapped by an old school acquaintance, and a scientist named Dr. Weston. He awakes to find himself on a space ship and overhears their plans to trade him as a kind of human sacrifice to the inhabitants of another planet in exchange for gold.

After arriving on the distant planet Ransom escapes and learns the language shared by the three forms of intelligent life there. He finds out that each planet has a kind of spiritual ruler and that earth is called “the Silent Planet” because its ruler has become “bent” or evil and that this has resulted in earth being cut off from the other planets and at war with itself.

Near the end of the book the scientist/kidnapper Weston speaks to the ruler of the distant planet (Oyarsa) in words that sound like they could have been spoken by the SpaceX CEO Elon Musk.^[3] He says, “I bear on my shoulders the destiny of the human race… Life is greater than any system of morality; her claims are absolute… Life… has broken down all obstacles… and to-day in her highest form – civilized man – and in me as his representative, she presses forward to that interplanetary leap which will, perhaps, place her forever beyond the reach of death.”

The angel-like ruler of that distant world replies that life is meaningless without love and Weston does not love any actual person or even his own species. Weston just dedicates himself to an abstraction and that this arises out of a relentless fear of death among human beings.

This is what Christians mean by the word sin. Something in us is broken and leads to terrible and seemingly inescapable suffering. It is the reason for the BBC headlines, for the signs I see on bridges here that say “There is hope. Talk to someone,” or “Whatever you’re going through, you can talk to us.” There is an undercurrent of despair that cannot be denied.

In Bath we saw a new play by David Hare called “Grace Pervades” about two of the greatest actors of the Victorian era Ellen Terry and Henry Irving (played by Ralph Fiennes). Irving owned the Lyceum Theatre company on Charing Cross Road in London. We hear the story in part through the narratives of Ellen Terry’s daughter, who is an underappreciated but prolific theatre director producing 150 plays herself. And Terry’s son who is portrayed as a failed dramatist, a theorist, a self-proclaimed genius who imagines a future “theatre without actors… without words…” He cannot make do anything because any action will limit what he could do.

In short the two principal women in the play, Ellen and her daughter, are well-grounded, warm, empathetic, thoughtful, wise and secure. The two men are melodramatic, self-absorbed, with foolish ideas which cannot be easily corrected by the people around them. The difference between them seems to be that, although reluctant, Henry ultimately listens to Ellen. As Ellen approaches death in her Kent country home she remembers her tour to America. She says, “We went to America. They understood us. The people were so warm… warm but a little lost.”

After the play my wife Heidi was darting through the lobby so quickly and I foolishly asked her if she knew where she was going. Immediately behind me a woman said in clear loud German, “Ein andere verloren Mann.” “Another lost man.” She is right. I am lost in just the way those characters are. I’m wrapped up in my own fears and dramas, often cut off from the very sources of help that God is sending to me. I am that lost sheep that God continues to seek out.

I think this is the reason God sends us in pairs. It is so hard to hold onto the truth and we need another person to help remind us of it. Churches  are places where we meet these friends who show us how we are all part of God’s kingdom of love. 

2. At Southwark Cathedral we met a couple in their late eighties named John and Djemila Cope. Later they took us to lunch and we learned their stories. John had a distinguished career in parliament. Djemila’s great-grandfather was Horatio Spafford (1828-1888) a lawyer who had invested heavily in real estate which was destroyed by the Chicago fire in 1871. Although the family home was spared, nearly everything else they owned was lost. They had planned to tour Britain as a family, but Spafford was working on plans for re-building the city and the family went ahead without him. 

Then on November 22, 1873 the family’s steamship Ville du Havre was struck by another ship. It sank in just 12 minutes killing 226 people including all four of the Spafford’s daughters. Their mother miraculously survived floating on a piece of timber. Her telegram from Dublin said only two words, “Saved alone.”

Horatio took the next ship to go and comfort Anne. At a certain point the captain took him aside to tell him that they had reached the place where his daughters had lost their lives. Horatio immediately went into his cabin and wrote the words to one of the most famous American hymns.

“When peace, like a river, attendeth my way, / when sorrows like sea billows roll; / whatever my lot, Thou hast taught me to say, / It is well, it is well with my soul…”

The worst tragedy imaginable did not undermine the Spafford family’s faith. It only strengthened their sense of God’s love for them, that God would get them through anything. They wanted to be as close to Jesus as possible. In August 1881 they settled in Jerusalem as part of “the American Colony” a communal society of thirteen adults and 3 children. Djemila’s family stayed in Jerusalem for six generations.

Her story is one of so many that we have heard here in hours of evensongs and eucharists, receptions and teatimes. We have learned that despite signs of hopelessness all around us, the spirit of Jesus is very much alive in the UK. We have experienced hospitality inspired by the Holy Spirit. God has spoken to us through the beauty of choirs and musicians, through builders, wardens, guides, artists and poets, through the very landscape itself and all its creatures.

Practically what does it mean to proclaim the kingdom? It means showing with all our lives that we serve Jesus who teaches that every person has inherent dignity and is beloved by God.

It means that we do not need to make an interplanetary leap out of this world because of our fear that nothing matters but power. It means that there is someone to find us when we are lost. It means that we are not saved alone, than not matter what happens, it is well with our souls.

What we are is not always clear from what we look like on the outside. God has brought us together. We are spreading out our dreams for each other. And finding our way home.

“The angel said to him, ‘Fasten your belt and put on your sandals.’” – The Very Reverend Andrew Nunn, Dean Emeritus of Southwark

I don’t particularly like shopping for shoes and in fact, unlike the former First Lady of the Philippines, Imelda Marcos, I don’t own many.  It was different as a child.  We were always taken to a lovely shoe shop in Leicester, where I was born – the city not the shoe shop!  It was called Robothams and it sold Clarks and Startrites and so a kind lady would measure our feet as maybe they still do.  But the really exciting thing was that in the shop they had a beautiful, large, dappled grey rocking horse with a lovely soft mane that we could ride on as a treat.  Maybe that would get me in shoe shops more often now!

But apart from the shoes that were bought for us we did like wearing mum’s shoes for some reason, trying them on and clomping, staggering round the house, clip clopping in someone else’s shoes.

Just over ten years ago the stonemasons here completed a copy of the statue of St Peter that sits above one of the great windows on the exterior of the Minister.  I saw some lovely pictures of it online, the Canon Precentor at the time, hard hatted, on the scaffolding, smiling at the amazing work that’d been done in recreating the eroded medieval statue.

In the photos you could see all the details that viewing it from street level you could never do.  It was and is beautiful.  St Peter is sat, enthroned, in priestly vestments, wearing the pallium, wearing the mitre, sitting as a papal figure, majestic, powerful, a prince, a pillar of the church, holding in his hand a model of the first church on this site.

It’s a powerful statement – but there was something not quite right.  It wasn’t to do with the workmanship at all – that was exemplary – but I looked at what could be seen of his feet and he was clearly wearing shoes and not sandals.

Peter has been arrested, he’s in prison.  King Herod was, as ever with capricious hot-headed rulers, in a vengeful mood.  James, the leader of the fledgling church had been beheaded.  The church was being persecuted and as part of that Peter was arrested and thrown into prison.  He must have thought his days were numbered and that he was on a sure path to martyrdom.  But then, as we heard in our First Reading, an angel appears, the cell is filled with light and his chains fall off. As we’re then told in the reading from the Acts of the Apostles

The angel said to him, ‘Fasten your belt and put on your sandals.’ He did so.

In the sandals of the fisherman, in the shoes of fisherfolk, Peter walks, miraculously from the prison to the safe house where his friends are gathered.

It was a stroke of genius to call Simon, Peter, as Jesus did, with no little irony in his voice as he did so, one suspects. Eyebrows amongst the other disciples, must have been raised.  Yes, Simon, Peter, was a great guy, one of the best, a skilled fisherman, someone they’d happily go out on the water with, but he could also be impetuous, unreliable, even frightened.  He was a skilled but simple man, who’d never been far from home, never been far from the shores of the lake, never really been happy in the deep water and yet here he was picked out, nicknamed the rock, told by Jesus in front of them all that he’d be the rock on which the church would be built, on which the church would stand, the community established and that it would withstand, he would withstand, whatever powers were unleashed against him.

Peter represents humanity, discipleship at its best and at its worst, strong yet weak, dependable whilst unreliable, brave yet fearful, present yet absent.  But we’re happy to represent him in our churches holding the keys, seated in majesty, showing nothing of that frailty, displaying nothing of the flakiness that in my mind makes him such an attractive and relatable figure.

Four years ago, General Synod was presented with a paper to consider that spoke of a new vision for the next season of our life as a church.  It was our own Archbishop who presented it.  It was easy to remember the central message of the paper because it boiled down to just three words ‘simpler, humbler, bolder’.  A simpler church, a humbler church, a bolder church.

Perhaps that’s what Jesus saw in Peter – a simple man, a man who’d jump in where angels fear to tread and name it, as he would name Jesus when he and the disciples were faced with that critical question of ‘Who do you say that I am?’  A humble man who’d prefer to wash his master’s feet than have his own washed and then recognise that it wasn’t just his feet that needed washing, but his whole self.  A bold man who’d step out of the boat to come across the water even though fear would then overwhelm him, a man who’d ultimately enter the lions’ den of Rome and receive the martyrdom that in the prison he feared would be his, at that moment.

Simpler, humbler, bolder – it’s a great vision and I happily signed up to it.  But how are we doing?  In all the turmoil that’s engulfed us in the last year have we been revealing any of this, simpler, humbler, bolder?

The angel said to him, ‘Fasten your belt and put on your sandals.’ He did so.

Peter sits there wearing the papal slippers but he should be wearing the shoes of the fisherman, the sandals that the angel directed him to.  We should have the humility to walk in his shoes, in his sandals, the sandals of the working man, the simple, humble yet bold sandals of the one who’ll leap from the boat as soon as he recognises the Lord standing and calling him.  The church needs to walk in the shoes of the fisherman.

And in walking in Peter’s shoes it walks also in Jesus’s.  As R S Thomas wrote in his poem ‘Via Negativa’

His are the echoes

We follow, the footprints he has just

Left.

For the calling to discipleship is the calling to walk where we’re led, on that humble journey that will lead us from the lakeside to the cross, from the locked room to the empty tomb, from the prisons we create to the freedom we find, where we can proclaim Jesus as the Christ, the Son of the Living God.

And that simpler, humbler, bolder journey begins here because we follow the call, the invitation this morning to walk, yes in our own shoes, to this altar where the Lord will feed us, not with the fisherman’s catch but with God’s own self, that sacramental food in which we recognise the Lord present, whose majesty is beyond imagining but who walks in the same dust as we do.  May we simply, humbly, boldly walk with Peter on the journey that leads to life and dare to step into his sandals.

‘The doctrine of Trinity Sunday’ – Canon Peter Collier, Cathedral Reader

Trinity Sunday

Our service began as it does week by week with the words “In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit”; it will end with the words “the blessing of God Almighty the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit …”.

So, Father, Son and Holy Spirit are clearly at the heart of our Christian worship. And as soon as I have finished speaking, we shall affirm together the Nicene Creed. During the summer months of the year 325 (that is 1700 years ago this year) a Council of around 200 bishops was summoned by the Emperor Constantine to meet at Nicaea in modern day Turkey to resolve various issues in the church of their day. One of those was two thirds of the doctrine of the Trinity, as they decided what it is the church believed about the relationship between the God the Father, and God the Son in Christian teaching, and they put together what we call the Nicene Creed.

Today is Trinity Sunday – it is the only feast day dedicated to a doctrine rather than a person, such as last Wednesday when it was Barnabas, or an event such as last Sunday when it was the coming of the Holy Spirit.  But Trinity Sunday is purely about doctrine.

No wonder it is a Sunday when no one wants to preach. Thank you, James!

The story is told of a Japanese man politely listening to a Christian trying to explain the idea of the Trinity. He was puzzled and responded – Honourable Father, very good; Honourable Son, very good; Honourable Bird I do not understand at all.

The word Trinity is not in the Bible. It was Tertullian, who lived just over a hundred years before that Council met, and who at the time when the Bible was being translated into Latin, was the first person to use the word trinitas when speaking about Father, Son & Holy Spirit. And he it was also who introduced the idea of ‘persona’ to distinguish between the three of them and who said that although there were three persons they were of one ‘susbstantia’ – substance. Now that is something that is difficult to understand, and it is not for nothing that we refer to it as a mystery.

Many people have come up with images to help us understand what is going on. Tertullian himself used the image of a plant: where the Father is the deep root, the Son is the shoot that breaks forth and the Spirit is the force which spreads its beauty and fragrance across the earth

St Patrick of Ireland, perhaps not surprisingly, said that it is like the shamrock where we have three individual leaves, but all part of one and the same plant

Now the point about Christian teaching – doctrine – is that it is not there to turn us into theologians, but rather to turn us into disciples.

The concept of the Trinity helps us to understand and experience God’s presence and activity in a very rich way. We see that there is a real depth to who God is. God is and always has been a community. God is a living relationship and so that immediately takes us into the realms of complexity and diversity. If complexity and diversity are there in God, they will also be there in God’s world and in God’s church – and so it is. And to that I will return.

Lest you think that this is all some clever middle eastern idea, dreamt up by some bishops in the desert, you will I am sure have already noted that our two scripture readings this morning link into that theme of the relationship within God. In Romans 5 Paul is coming to a high point in his letter. The chapter begins ‘therefore’, and whenever you see the word therefore in the Bible you should look to see what is there for. In the preceding four chapters Paul has been spelling out our human predicament of being separated from life with God and there being nothing we can do about it – religious ritual doesn’t help, trying to keep God’s law doesn’t work, and so God sent his Son to suffer and die so that we could receive as a gift God’s life. And now he summarises that in chapter 5. Simply put he says – we are now at peace with God the Father because of what Jesus the Son has done; and the way we experience that is because the Holy Spirit has taken God’s love and poured it into our hearts.

Each of Father, Son and Spirit playing their part in enabling us to receive that gift of new life.

And lest we think that three part drama is something Paul dreamt up, we see that in our gospel reading in John, Jesus himself speaks in a similar way. He is saying to his disciples that there is lots he would like to tell them, but they simply wouldn’t be able to cope with it yet. He is of course referring to his death on the cross and his resurrection. However, he says there will come a time when the Holy Spirit will guide them into all they need to know. The Spirit will do that by taking what the Father has given to the Son, and will make it known to Jesus’ followers. Truth here is not a matter of facts or accuracy. In John’s gospel truth is always to do with God and being like or consistent with who and what God is like.

We are still there, as we were throughout the Easter Season, with our gospel readings being taken from what Jesus did and said in that upper room where he washed his disciples’ feet and prepared to give up his life and die for them. This is the pattern of truth into which the Spirit was going to lead them as the Spirit made sense to them about the things that were to come – the things to come are not things such as the date of the second coming but about what is to happen to Jesus. Without the Spirit giving them an understanding of that it would all be utterly baffling for them. We know that whenever Jesus spoke about his death, about the cross, they either rejected it or were completely confused by it.

And when Jesus speaks as he does here about being glorified – in John’s gospel glory is always related to the cross.

So this is all about the Spirit giving them to understand the nature of God’s self-giving love – entering not only into our world in His Son, but in some way taking our sin and death and overcoming it so that we can receive and enjoy the life of God – and that life will lead us to a similar pattern of foot washing and suffering!

So just as the love of God is seen in the relationship between Father, Son and Holy Spirit, we now are drawn into that relationship – into community with God – to live with them and become like them

That is why back in Romans Paul speaking about this trinitarian work, speaks of the Spirit pouring that God style love into our hearts which will inevitably lead to suffering but suffering which we will be enabled to endure with hope.

And that is how we learn to live with all the complexity of the world and the church in which we live. If there is complexity and diversity in God, then you will expect it in the world God has made; and you will also expect it in the church he has redeemed.

Many of us like simplicity, and struggle with the complexity we find in the world around us.

Diversity too can be threatening – whether it is diversity of race, class, status, affluence, sexuality, or anything else. Such differences can be threatening. Why can’t everyone be like me, or like us?

So often we want our religious truths to be pure and simple too.

But in our own complex lives we can discover God in all our own diversity: in the highs and the lows, the good and the bad. God who is in the midst of our mistakes, our pain, our depressions, our illnesses, in the most fractured places of our lives, and even in our deaths. There we can find a God who is walking alongside us rather than one who is distant.

We find a God who loves us and saves us in the ways only a complex and diverse God can.

Let me end on a different note. If you are troubled that all this imagery is rather masculine – Father and Son – in the book of Proverbs we have the idea of Wisdom (and as my wife always reminds me wisdom is feminine!). As you may know many commentators have linked the idea of wisdom in Proverbs to that of the Logos in John chapter 1. The Word that was with God and the Word that was God. In Proverbs chapter 8 we read about wisdom also being there when the world was made – and a more literal translation of vv 30 and 31 would be “I was having fun, smiling before him all the time, frolicking with his inhabited earth and delighting in the human race”. That was wisdom’s experience of being there with and in God when the world was made, bringing us an image of God in relationship – secure, joyful, creative, dancing and gambolling or frolicking.

That same God has taken our pain into the midst of that relationship and has experienced separation within the family of God because of our sin. But the Holy Spirit now leads us to see that the truth is that ultimately love has triumphed and that love of God is now being poured into our hearts by the Holy Spirit, so that in all our diverse situations and circumstances we find a God who draws us into God’s very family.

Amen

‘Self Control’ – The Reverend Canon James Walters

This week we have been working through and meditating on the Fruits of the Spirit set out in the Letter to the Galatians. And we have arrived finally, at this great celebration of Easter, to consider the last of these fruits, self-control. And, frankly, that feels like a rather disappointing place to arrive at. Self-control feels very, well… Lenten. Shouldn’t we be throwing off the self-denial of the last forty days to celebrate the Easter feast?!  

Well, I don’t think the self-control that’s talked about here is quite as dreary and austere as it might sound. Consider the opposite, indeed we see the opposite everywhere: lives that are out of control. Lives out of control through addiction and unhealthy dependency. Lives out of control through submission to technology and the duplicitous manipulation of corporate and political interests. Lives out of control through debt and economic pressures. 

Christian life doesn’t inoculate you from these things. Christians suffer from addictions and distractions and the pressures of the world just like everyone else. The Gospel isn’t a uniquely effective wellbeing strategy. 

But the framework of Christian life, which includes both discipline and liberation (or even discipline as liberation), gives us a rhythm and a story that provides us with the crucial aspect of self-control, which is knowing who we are and what we are for. 

The world in which we live is full of confused and confusing information. Most of it is superficial and inconsequential, playing on our basic desires for stimulation and connection, but offering very little in the way of meaning and truth. Think of how our culture understands Easter itself. The shops are full of chocolate eggs, and bunnies, and pastel-coloured spring-themed merchandise designed to evoke warm feelings, consumer contentment and vague culturally resonant ideas of new life. But none of it really means anything at all. 

You, however, who are presenting yourselves for baptism and confirmation tonight, you who have come to church to worship Almighty God, have heard the truth through the idle tales of the world. You have heard and believe that Jesus has risen from the dead. 

That’s what the women going to the tomb at dawn on the first day of the week heard from the two men in dazzling clothes. Then they remembered that they had heard it from Jesus himself who told them that he would be handed over to sinners and be crucified, and on the third day rise again. The male disciples then hear it from the women, but they are slow to recognise that it is not just more of the world’s idle tales. They get there in the end. 

This revelation of the truth is for all these people a turning point. From the confusion and chaos they have been living since Jesus’ arrest, in some ways the confusion and chaos that has characterised their journey with Jesus, they start to take control. They take control of their fear, coming out from hiding to proclaim this truth through the world. They take control of their community, expanding it with men and women, Jews and Gentiles, slaves and free. They take control of their future, knowing that whatever persecution they suffer, their future is for God’s glory. 

And what is this truth? What has God done in raising Jesus from the dead? He has brought control to the world. It is not out-of-control to the meaningless forces of death and nihilism. It is not out of control amid the cacophony of idle tales that convey no meaning. It is under the control of God, for God’s loving purposes of glory, delight and life in all its fullness. 

If you are a gardener, the task of this Easter bank holiday may well be getting the garden under control. Another way of thinking about control is the imposition of order over chaos. That’s what spring gardening is about: putting your borders and your trellising and your soil composition in good order to allow for a fruitful growth season. This is what God has been doing since the beginning of creation, as we heard in the readings at the start of this service, imposing order on the chaos such that by Genesis 2 his creation is described as a garden. And so it’s not for nothing that the resurrection of Jesus takes place in a garden. It is where order is restored, where God (to use a somewhat tainted phrase) takes back control. 

Self-control, as a fruit of the Spirit, is about receiving this gift of meaning and hope and purpose that flows from the truth of the Gospel, and allowing it to shape our lives through prayer and worship, study of the Bible and participation in the life of the Christian community. It is about allowing God to impose some order on our lives, not to oppress and restrict us, but in order that our lives might bear the fruit of the Spirit and be a blessing to the world. So as we renew our baptismal vows tonight, own them in confirmation, or joyfully make them for the first time, let us rejoice that, despite the chaos we see around us, the world is not out of control. And that control is a gift to us, the life-giving truth in which we share. 

‘Gentleness’ – The Reverend Canon James Walters

For a long time, the primary religious question in the Western world has been whether or not you believe in God. Are you a believer, or are you an atheist? Yet the late American novelist David Foster Wallace argued that: “in the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship.” 

Foster Wallace is right. People worship money, or power, or bodily beauty, or celebrity and popularity. All these things become substitutes for God – idols – and in our age of advanced communications technology they are magnified as we are bombarded on social media with commodities we must own, bodies we must attain, and celebrities we must revere (until they’re cancelled, and then new ones take their place).  

More conventional powers, like nationalist movements, extremist religions and ultra-Right groups have also harnessed these platforms so that people may be snared into worshipping them too. We are all worshipping, and the screens on our phones and our laptops have become the new medieval rood screens onto which we project our deities and before which we bow. 

But while they are amplified by new technologies these idols are as old as humanity itself. In the Fifth Century, St Augustine of Hippo saw all these false gods as objects of what he called the libido dominandi, the lust for power or the will to dominate. And it’s that will to dominate that characterises, for Augustine, the Earthly City, the sinful state in which fallen humanity finds itself. 

So in this world of domination, intensified by the screens that demand our attention, the question for Christians on Good Friday is ‘who is the god that you worship?’ Who is the Christian God? He is the antithesis of the will to dominate. He is the god on a cross. Arrested, tortured, executed. Our god does not compete in the Earthly City, he becomes its victim.  

And he does so to lead us to what Augustine calls the Heavenly City, or what’s referred to by Jesus in St John’s passion story as “a kingdom not of this world”. He stands in front of Pilate, a man who knew the will to dominate as well as anyone. Perhaps he knew it so well that he realised he might as well release Jesus because Jesus was not competing with him in that game. But the logic of the fallen world demanded that you compete for domination, or you perish, and so the crowd cried for him to be crucified. And we are told that this was within the purposes of God the Father for the redemption of creation. 

To refuse the will to dominate is to be gentle. To us the term gentleness may evoke something soft and unremarkable. To describe someone as gentle barely even seems a compliment in our culture. But our god chose gentleness. He chose it, not just as the passive rejection of violence; he chose it as the power by which he would redeem the world. The gentleness of submitting to death, the gentleness of giving his mother and his friend into each other’s care as he dies. The gentleness of bowing his head and giving up the ghost. 

So gentleness was the means of our redemption, and it is also the means by which we overcome the will to dominate in our lives today. The late philosopher Anne Dufourmantelle was one of the few intellectuals to take gentleness seriously in her work. In her 2013 book, The Power of Gentleness: Meditations on the Risk of Living, she describes gentleness as “a force of secret life-giving transformation… Without it there is no possibility for life to advance in its becoming.” And she points to the power of gentleness in the moments of life where we allow ourselves to tap into its potential: in parenting and caring for the vulnerable, in welcoming, in forgiving, in listening, in affirming, in resisting. These are all expressions of the fruit of gentleness that heal us from the will to dominate. And this fruit grows in us as we learn to give our attention and our devotion less and less to the idols of this world and more and more to the Kingdom of the god who was crucified. 

Dufourmantelle herself died at the age of 53 in 2017 while rescuing two children caught in dangerous waters in the Mediterranean off a beach near St Tropez. The risk of living is indeed the risk of dying. Gentleness is not passive; it is our liberation from the will to dominate so we may participate in the life of God, giving ourselves to others in love and service, in small ways and, by God’s grace, in our totality. St Augustine described this as the service that is perfect freedom, the liberation from the idols of the Earthly City that brings us home to the City of God, in this world and in the next. 

‘Faithfulness’ – The Reverend Canon James Walters

A woman was staring at me on the bus. It was a bit disconcerting. She didn’t seem to blink. But I could tell she wasn’t really looking at me. I was a representation. That’s what you are when you wear a clerical collar in public. 

Finally, she opened her mouth: “Well, I wish I had your faith.” 

I find it helpful in these situations to respond with a question. “What is it that you think I have that you would like to have?” I asked her. “Certainty,” she replied. “You’re wrong,” I said, “I don’t have certainty. Certainty is the opposite of faith. If you’re certain about something, you don’t need to have faith in it.” 

She sat down next to me, and for the next dozen or so stops we had an anonymous conversation about the nature of the seventh fruit of the Spirit, faithfulness. 

Whatever it is that I have (and presumably most of you have), it’s clearly not something the majority of people in British society have today. If you go to church regularly you are in a minority of 5%. A cultural identification with Christianity persists more widely. But the 2021 census found that the proportion of the population who claim any kind of affiliation to Christianity has fallen below 50% for the first time. Western European society can’t even be compared to the unfaithful slave in the parable we have just heard who says, “My master is delayed in coming”. Our culture believes that there is no master, or rather that we are the masters, and the house is ours to use as we please. 

The Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor describes modern Western society as operating within what he calls the “immanent frame”. That is to say that we explain our reality and answer all the questions we believe to be important without reference to the transcendent or the supernatural. We no longer believe that extreme weather is caused by the wrath of God or illness by evil spirits. Most people seem to lead a contented life without praying or coming to church or opening the Bible. 

Scientific rationalists hubristically claim that they have taken away the need for such superstition and provided answers to all the meaningful questions. But I wonder, is it that modern society can now answer all the questions without faith, or is it that there are some questions we have just stopped asking? 

We never got round to discussing what prompted the desire for faith in the woman on the bus. But I suspect she had started asking questions to which she had not found ready answers. Why have I experienced this terrible loss? What is the point of my life? What truths can I live my life by? Where can I find peace? 

And, as I told her, she was wrong to think that I have neat comprehensive answers to these questions that provide me with spiritual certainty. But what I do have is a vocabulary and a grammar that can begin to construct some answers that resonate with my experience, my feelings, and my understanding of the world. 

To be a faithful person in late modern Western society is not to possess some piece of knowledge or insight that other people do not have. Much less is it to supplement or replace a scientific certainty with a spiritual certainty that eradicates doubt and ambiguity. 

Rather, to come to faith is to reach a point of rational frustration, a dissatisfaction with the norms of the immanent frame. And at that moment, faith does not flood in with its creeds and doctrines to give us comfortable and certain answers. At least, it shouldn’t. Faith is staying in that place of unknowing, while coming to believe that, at the limits of our understanding, we are met by truths that surpass full comprehension. But we are not left blind. The Bible, the Christian tradition, Christian teachers and friends all give a language to help us make sense of the work God is doing within us. In the words of Thomas Aquinas’s great hymn which we sang here last night, faith befriends our outward sense as we grow in understanding of God and God’s purposes for our lives. 

Good Friday is, for me, the ultimate point of rational frustration. It seems to go against everything we would imagine God to be if God were simply our projection. How can this be the God we need? A God who submits to human violence. A God who dies.  

And if this day is true and meaningful, then it brings us to multiple points of rational frustration about the shape of our lives. Why do we strive for security and affluence when God becomes so undefended and vulnerable? Why do we work so hard to justify ourselves and compete with others when God gives himself so utterly to redeem us? Why do we crave power when God is supremely manifest in total humility?  

The Czech philosopher and civil rights activist Jan Patočka used similar terms to rational frustration when he spoke of people who have been “shaken”. Patočka, who had an enduring interest in Christianity as he resisted Communist oppression, described the shaken as “those who are capable of understanding what life and death are all about, and so what history is about.”  

Good Friday is the day when the earth shakes, literally. We read in Matthew’s Gospel that as Jesus breathed his last, “the earth shook and the rocks were split.” All our certainties fall apart, all our neat answers prove inadequate. The immanent frame is no longer satisfactory. And Patočka spoke of a “solidarity of the shaken.” We are not alone in our rational frustration. There is a coming together, like Mary and John at the cross, of those who are on a new journey of understanding beyond their old comfortable answers.  

I think we are living in times when more and more people are becoming shaken – shaken by the turbulence of the global economy, shaken by the threat of war, shaken by the terrifying reality of dramatic ecological change. And the challenge for the Church is whether we can overcome our own institutional crises to draw these shaken people into a meaningful solidarity, communities that work for sustainability, for peace, and for compassionate interdependence. Because what meets us in our rational frustration is not a set of ideas, what meets us is the Kingdom of God. Faithfulness is not faithfulness to doctrine or beliefs, it is faithfulness to God’s ways with the world, the kingdom that is revealed by this king whose throne is the cross and whose crown is a crown of thorns. 

The parable of the faithful and unfaithful slaves is about openness to receiving that Kingdom and a willingness to play our part in bringing it about. The returning master is obviously the Second Coming of Jesus Christ. But the moral of the parable is not to live in a state of apocalyptic fervour. That’s a mistake made by many people in our times. The Pew Research Center found in 2022 that 39% of Americans believe that we are living in the End Times. 10% believe that Jesus will return within their lifetime. This causes many people to interpret the horrifying events of our age as welcome signs of Jesus’s return, and so fatalistically accept, even celebrate them. 

Living like this is to misinterpret the parable. The Venerable Bede observed that, “It is not numbered among the virtues of a good servant that he hoped the Lord would come quickly, but only that he ministered faithfully.” We are not called to believe the world will end tomorrow; we are called to be faithful to God’s Kingdom today. And that is a source of immense hope and resilience and as the future of our world looks less and less secure. There is a saying attributed to Martin Luther: “If I knew the world would end tomorrow, today I would plant a tree.” Keeping the faith in these faithless times is about staying true to the ways of the kingdom that has been revealed, regardless of whether cultural norms draw us towards complacency, or whether geopolitical and ecological events draw us towards despair. 

I didn’t have the time to say all of this to the woman on the bus as we sat together for those dozen or so stops. But I wanted her to understand that God hasn’t privileged me with some secret knowledge that makes my life easier than hers. I don’t have certainty, about God or about much else that’s going on in the world. But I live in a place of unknowing where God meets me in prayer and worship, in silence and in scripture, in the solidarity of the shaken and in the shakenness of creation. Attending to that, submitting to that, wrestling with it, delighting in it – this is what I believe faithfulness to be. 

‘Generosity’ – The Reverend Canon James Walters

The sixth fruit of the Spirit listed in the Letter to the Galatians is sometimes translated as “goodness”. So that seems a fitting place for us to arrive at on this day in the Church calendar that has been known as ‘Good’ Friday since the early Middle Ages. 

And the strange paradoxes of this day remind us that goodness is not an easy or sentimental thing in the Christian tradition. The use of the term ‘good’ for the day on which Jesus was executed seems to imply not a pleasing day but rather a day infused with holiness, a day when God is intensely present. German sources suggest that “Good Friday” may have come to us from Gottes Freitag, God’s Friday. 

So what is the nature of this goodness that is grounded in the divine being? More recent translations of the fruits of the Spirit help us here in naming the sixth fruit as “generosity”. God’s goodness is not a niceness or a mere resistance to corruption. God’s goodness is giving. It is the self-giving we call generosity. 

In the modern world where human beings have become radically atomised and where meaning has become structured around accumulation and competition, expressions of godlike generosity are rare. It is much more than the safe and sometimes self-congratulatory generosity of the philanthropist, more than the generosity of occasionally letting a car cut in front of you when sat in traffic, more than buying the odd copy of the Big Issue – though all of these may be smaller fruits. True generosity, true self-giving is a difficult fruit to cultivate in a world that trains us to see ourselves as more deserving than others and that prizes self-responsibility above mutuality. 

That is the spirit represented by the figure of the elder brother in the famous parable of the prodigal son. Like most of us in today’s society, he is working hard and feels underappreciated. He doesn’t see why his irresponsible and disgraced younger sibling should receive benefits denied to him. But the father isn’t seeking to punish him for his steadfastness. As he says, day by day he shares all he has with this loyal son. But his generosity to the wayward son reflects an abundance of joy at a relationship restored. The generosity of God is not a calculation, it is a disposition of love. 

We could well imagine that the older brother views himself as a generous sort of person, maybe self-consciously so. For there is also a caricatured form of self-giving that can be an equally dangerous kind of egotism. The seductions of believing we can justify ourselves through manic charitable activity is a sin we are warned against in debates going right back to the early church. And still today we can recognise a kind of generosity that just feels paradoxically ungenerous, somewhat controlling. As C. S. Lewis mockingly caricatures in the Screwtape Letters: “She’s the sort of woman who lives for others – you can tell the others by their hunted expression.” 

So the kind of generosity we are talking about is profound, but unselfconscious. It is sacrificial, but it’s not a self-sought-out martyrdom. The hymn in the letter to the Philippians speaks about Christ in precisely these terms. 

Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus, 

who, though he was in the form of God,
    did not regard equality with God
    as something to be exploited,
but emptied himself,
    taking the form of a slave,
    being born in human likeness.
And being found in human form,
    he humbled himself
    and became obedient to the point of death—
    even death on a cross. 

This is the ultimate expression of the generosity of God, the God who, while his wayward children were still far off, saw us and was filled with compassion. This is the God who runs to us, puts his arms around us and kisses us. This is the abundantly generous God we see hanging on the cross on Good Friday.  

But as we consider how we grow in this fruit of generosity, the Philippians language of self-emptying might also have some pitfalls. A generosity that leaves us empty, either materially or emotionally, doesn’t seem to capture the abundant character of the father in this parable. This makes me think of some of my students who, typical of so many young people today, are drawn into a highly commendable self-giving activism about the causes they care about – climate change, racial justice, the appalling conflict in the Middle East. They are passionate and committed, but often they come to a point of crisis and disillusionment. They burn with righteous anger until they find themselves burned out – exhausted, physically and mentally, while feeling demoralised by how little they have achieved.  

I encourage such students to focus not on fighting activist campaigns but on the longer-term business of cultivating lives of witness. To be a sustainable activist you can’t just be motivated by a burning anger but rather by the generosity of living for others. It needs to spring out of love and not rage. It needs to emulate what is presented to us as one of the first images of God in the Bible: the Burning Bush that Moses encounters while tending his sheep at Horeb. We are told that “the angel of the Lord appeared to him in a flame of fire out of a bush; he looked, and the bush was blazing, yet it was not consumed.” 

God gives of Godself abundantly, yet is not exhausted. God burns in the fire of Horeb and is poured out in tongues of fire on the Day of Pentecost, yet is not consumed. To bear the fruit of generosity is to live out of that loving generativity. And as we translate that to our own lives, perhaps all these limited forms of generosity we’ve explored have something in common. They lack a more fundamental surrender of our own will, our own ego. Comfortable or occasional acts of generosity clearly do little to decentre ourselves as agents of power. A manic performative generosity is its own form of control, continuing to assert our will through an exaggerated and false humility. The burnt-out activist, while clearly self-less in their commitment to a cause, can’t deal with their own inability to assert the changes on the world that they wish to see. 

What’s often overlooked in the parable of the prodigal son is that the father’s generosity is not just shown to the returning son who he treats, not as a hired hand as requested, but with royal dignity and feasting. And it’s not just shown in the generosity extended to the elder son to whom he also goes out and persuades to come into the party, mirroring the going out to the younger son while he is still far off. What is most extraordinary is the generosity at the start of the story when the father grants the foolish son’s wish to take his share of the inheritance, to go and make his mistakes. 

God has granted us free will, which means that God has relinquished something of his own will. He does not force us to worship or to show gratitude for the blessings of creation or indeed for our very existence. He lets us be. He lets us make our mistakes. And there is in true generosity a willingness to let others be who they will be, a willingness to give to others for their own sake, to love them for their own sake. Apparent generosity can so often be a transaction to assert our will, to bring about a change we want to see or a reaction we want to provoke. But God just gives. He loves us as we are. How hard we find it to replicate that kind of pure generosity.  

The abundance of God’s grace, the fire that does not consume, is first noticed by the elder son in this parable in the form of music. “As he came and approached the house, he heard music and dancing.” The Greek word is symphonia, a symphony. It probably didn’t sound like Beethoven’s Ode to Joy or Rachmaninov’s Second. It was probably a bit more raucous. But I find it fascinating and delightful that music is found at the heart of this parable as a sign of the generosity that it illustrates. Making music, with others and for others, is a great act of generosity, a gift that creates a connection without imposing the will. So as we meditate on this great parable that encapsulates the heart of the Gospel, and as we meditate on the mystery of the Cross, the greatest manifestation of the generosity of God, let us allow music to help cultivate in us the fruit of generosity – an abundant self-giving to others for their own sake. 

‘Kindness’ – The Reverend Canon James Walters

Maundy Thursday in Holy Week – Kindness

On Sunday we began this sermon series on the Fruits of the Spirit with the theme of love. But now that we come to the fifth fruit, kindness, we must return to love, because to speak of kindness is to speak of a form of love. And that is fitting because at the heart of Jesus’s words on Maundy Thursday is the mandatum novum, the new commandment: 

I give you a new commandment, that you love one another. 

Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another. By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another. 

The opposite of love is, of course, hate. Perhaps we can say that the opposite of kindness is anger. And I think that’s why kindness is increasingly invoked these days. Hashtag ‘be kind’. ‘Practice kindness’. ‘Be kind to our staff’. All these are responses to an age of anger. 

It feels that, in our times, anger is out of control. It is stoked by tech companies who have learnt that our rage returns profits higher than our kindness, and they have constructed their algorithms accordingly. Anger is manipulated by populist politicians who exploit and magnify our resentment towards minorities and outsiders. Even progressives argue that anger is good, that it is a motivator against injustice. A popular slogan, emblazoned on t-shirts, has become, “If you’re not angry then you’re not paying attention.” 

Certainly, there is much to provoke anger in today’s world. But I’m not so convinced it is helpful to us. Perhaps how we feel about anger depends on whether or not we see anger in God. Many people do, even understanding the death and resurrection of Jesus as a sacrifice to placate God’s wrath at humanity since the disobedience of the Fall. 

The Fourteenth Century mystic Blessed Julian of Norwich takes a different view. In her Revelations of Divine Love she concludes that God cannot be angry; for if God were to be angry even for a moment, we could not live, so grounded is our very being in God’s love. 

The Cambridge theologian Janet Soskice has noted how, in Middle English, the words ‘kind’ and ‘kin’ are the same. To say that Christ is ‘our kinde Lord’ is not merely to say that Jesus is tender and gentle towards us (though this is implied), but that he is our kin, our kind. In the writings of Blessed Julian, this kinship with Jesus is not merely nice words, it is the basis of our salvation. To be redeemed is to know Jesus as a familial relation. Here she is drawing on the metaphor of adoption used by St Paul, particularly in his letters to the Romans and the Ephesians. But the kindness that Julian sees in God requires her to identify in God not just male kinship but female kinship. So we have this famous passage from Chapter 59: 

Our great Father, almighty God, who is being, knows us and loved us before time began. Out of this knowledge, in his most wonderful deep love, by the prescient eternal counsel of all the blessed Trinity, he wanted the second person to become our Mother, our brother and our saviour. From this it follows that as truly as God is our Father, so truly is God our Mother. 

The role of footwashing was performed by slaves, and Jesus was demonstrating profound humility in this action at the last supper. But it also feels like it has the qualities of kinship, something a mother would do, something a brother would do. In washing the disciples’ feet, Jesus is building a circle of kinship, a circle of kindness. Earlier in his ministry he has asked, “Who is my mother, and who are my brothers?… whoever does the will of my Father in heaven is my brother and sister and mother.”  

I find this unsettling. If Jesus’ command to love one another was just a call to service, that would be much less threatening. We can dish out food at a soup kitchen or volunteer our time to some charity and still feel quite distant (even superior to?) those whom we’re serving. But Jesus’s command is more demanding: it is to be kind, which means recognising all people as our kin. 

We know that in our age of anger this has become an unfashionable idea. On the Right we are told that it’s fine to see people of other nationalities and cultures as different and less deserving than ourselves. On the Left we are told that to imagine we could be kin to people of different identities is appropriation of their experience; we can’t be kin we can only be allies. 

But I fear that for Jesus neither position will do. They say that blood is thicker than water but, hard as it is to accept, the waters of baptism are thicker than blood. The water of the footwashing is like the wine that at this Last Supper becomes the blood of the body, our body, the Body of Christ. This is the mandatum novum: a new kinship, a new human family. The Eucharist that is inaugurated on this night does not remember a sacrifice to appease an angry God; it is the ultimate sign of the kindness of God, the God who is our kin and who calls us to expand that kinship to all of humanity. 

‘Patience’ – The Reverend Canon James Walters

Wednesday in Holy Week – Patience

“Good things may come to those who wait, but only what’s left by those who hustle.” That’s a remark attributed to Abraham Lincoln, and it articulates a commonplace scepticism about the value of the fourth fruit of the Spirit, patience. Patience is something we tell children to have when they’re badgering us for their dinner or asking if the car journey is nearly over. But in the adult world, it’s not highly prized. We are more likely to respect people who don’t hang about, people who deliver results fast and get what they want quickly.

In former times, patience was given a central importance. Pope Gregory the Great in the sixth century held that “patience is the root and guardian of all virtues”. The absence of patience is not, therefore, one aspect of what’s wrong with the world. It’s at the heart of that wrongness. The Czech novelist Franz Kafka wrote that Adam and Eve’s fall from the Garden of Eden arose principally from a lack of patience: “Impatience got them expelled; impatience keeps them from returning.”

So what might it mean to see patience as something much more foundational to human flourishing and the common good? Fundamentally, what we’re talking about is living well in time. Humans are temporal creatures. We grow over time, physically, emotionally, intellectually, psychologically. We are affected by the rhythm of the seasons. We have to pace ourselves and plan. We have to remember that Rome was not built in a day. Modernity has increasingly played this down, making us believe that we are more like the machines we have created, able to process data faster and faster, immune to the temporal rhythms of nature.

Losing the ability to live well in time makes us frustrated. We become frustrated by the limitations of our bodies, frustrated by our inability to accomplish the goals we have set ourselves, frustrated that the change we want to see continues to evade us. And this frustration is impatience.

Judas wanted the world to change. We don’t know exactly the change he wanted but it seems likely that he longed for the messiah to return to lead the Jewish people in revolt against the occupying Roman Empire. Judas wanted a revolution. Jesus had never said that he would fulfil that role, but the crowds of Palm Sunday suggest that Judas wasn’t alone in thinking that Jesus might be one God had sent to bring about this dramatic change.

So Judas committed to Jesus, followed him, and stuck with him. But now his patience has run out, because Jesus is not doing what he wants. Jesus does not understand his vocation in that way. And Judas can no longer live well in time.

Back at the start of Lent we recalled the temptations which the devil put to Jesus at the beginning of his ministry, and these were temptations to do exactly what Judas now wants. They were temptations to impatience.

The first was to turn stones into bread. But God willed that Jesus give his own body as bread for the life of the world at Calvary. All in good time.

The second temptation was to throw himself from the pinnacle of the temple to force God’s hand and save his life. God will resurrect the life of Jesus, but not before his work is done. All in good time.

The third temptation was to claim the kingdoms of the earth by bowing down to Satan. Jesus will establish his kingdom on earth, but only through his ministry of teaching, healing and self-giving on the cross. All in good time.

So the temptations in the wilderness all express the desire to fast forward, to imagine there is a quick, easy route, rather than living well in time. They are temptations to impatience. Jesus resisted them. Judas cannot.

It is possible that Judas thought that his betrayal would force Jesus’s hand, or perhaps force God’s hand, by precipitating some cosmic crisis. This is a pervasive religious temptation. God has created us to live in time and to work for his purposes within time. But religious fanatics get impatient and want to hasten the End Times. Much of the Christian Zionism that has influenced American foreign policy in the Middle East over the last few years is rooted in a belief that we are in fact living at the end of the world. It holds that there is no point working patiently in time to build peace and justice for Israelis and Palestinians because the violence and chaos engulfing them are signs of Jesus’s imminent return. Islamist terrorists are not dissimilar in their impatience with living in the temporal world God has created.

And, of course, there are secular forms of this temporal impatience everywhere. It is increasingly present in our conception of what it means to be an activist. There are times when righteousness compels us to protest and speak up for the changes we believe the world needs to see. But increasingly in our society that protest is done on social media accounts by frustrated keyboard warriors. Even in the real world, protest has become decoupled from realism. And so often the protest is a sign that we have just gotten frustrated with the hard work of bringing these changes about.

I am not unsympathetic to the impatience. It is indeed hard to be patient in times when the crises we face are so urgent. I too feel the anxiety that we don’t have time to waste in addressing climate change, in demanding an end to war, in addressing the outrageous inequalities that persist in our world. But there are no magic wands, and the revolutions we’ve seen (at least in my lifetime) have brought as many new problems as they have solved.

Effective social change – building a peaceful, just and sustainable world – is a collective project of living well in time. And if we’re going to contribute to that project meaningfully, we will need the fruit of patience.

You may have heard of Jadav Payeng. He is better known as the Forest Man of India. Since 1979 he has been planting trees on Majuli Island in North India. Over nearly four decades he has planted an entire forest in an area at high environmental risk. The forest is now home to tigers, rhinos, elephants, deer and rabbits. He has single handedly renewed a significant part of the global ecosystem by the simple act of planting trees.

I can’t think of anything that better illustrates the art of living well in time. He has accomplished more than thousands of other environmental activists. He has borne the fruit of patience, and that patience has borne the fruit of meaningful change.

And that’s a reminder that growing in the fruits of the Spirit is also a temporal process. The rhythms of our worship and our prayers cultivate in us the capacities to live well in time. Just as Jesus resisted the devil and waited and worked patiently for the moment when he would be glorified, so good things do indeed come to us who wait on God.

‘Peace’ – The Reverend Canon James Walters

Tuesday in Holy Week – Peace

I associate the service of compline with the word peace. The candlelight, the calm, the stillness at the end of a busy day. It feels like a glimpse of the peace that so commonly evades our world.

Yet the liturgical language of compline is not devoid of threat. We pray that we may be defended from fears and terrors, even from deadly foes. The peace we encounter in compline – the peace in which we will lie down and sleep – is not the absence of danger and risk.

The idea that peace is simply the absence of war is quite a modern humanistic one. It presumes that conflict is an aberration, and once removed, humans will revert to their natural state of harmony. But that is no one’s experience of everyday life. Conflict and tension occur in relationships, in families, among colleagues and in communities. Geopolitical conflicts too have continued to rumble on, even while we in the Western world were cocooned in a bubble of security that made us believe that war was a barbarism soon to be eliminated.

So part and parcel of the peace we encounter at compline is a naming of the reality of our fallen predicament. It’s not a spiritual escapism nor a state of denial. It can even come with a warning. We often read the verse from 1 Peter: “Be sober, be vigilant, because your adversary the devil is prowling round like a roaring lion, seeking for someone to devour.”

The story of Holy Week too is shot through threat, risk, violence and conflict. The colonial rulers of Jerusalem fear an insurrection brought about by religious fervour during the Jewish festival of Passover. Conflict penetrates Jesus’s own circle as Judas betrays him to a brutal death. Jesus’s prophecies about his resurrection (“Destroy this temple and in three days I will raise it up”) allude to the violent sacking of Jerusalem and the tearing down of its temple that the Romans will carry out within the lifetime of many present. So if we’re looking for peace as the absence of war and violence, we won’t find it in Holy Week either.

Peace in the Christian understanding is not just an absence, it’s a presence. It’s something positive and powerful. In the face of chaos and disorder, it is coherence, a meaningfulness that holds all things together, the good and the bad. In a world of fragmentation, it is an energy for connection and healing.

That energy is manifest in Jesus’s actions throughout the passion story. We see it when he heals of the ear of the High Priest’s slave when soldiers come to arrest him. We see it in the washing of his disciples’ feet at the Last Supper. These are all signs of the judgment of this world that Jesus refers to in John’s Gospel, the driving out of its ruler the devil.

But most of all peace is simply what Jesus embodies. In his prayer in the Garden of Gethsemane. As his beloved disciple reclines on his chest at the Last Supper. In his silence at his trials. John’s language for the passion story is the “lifting up” of Jesus, and it is in this that Jesus draws all people to himself, draws them into coherence and peace.

As chaos and darkness engulfs, Jesus is what the poet T. S. Eliot calls “the still point in the turning world”:

Neither flesh nor fleshless; Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is, But neither arrest nor movement. And do not call it fixity, Where past and future are gathered. Neither movement from nor towards,

Neither ascent nor decline. Except for the point, the still point, There would be no dance, and there is only the dance.

Like peace itself, this still point is a paradoxical place. It is where time and motion appear to cease, yet this stillness is the source of movement and dance. As the committed pacificist Sidney Carter captures in his famous hymn, the journey of Jesus to the cross is not a passive submission, it is the greatest manifestation of the Lord of the Dance. “They cut me down and I leapt up high. I am the life that will never, never die.”

So to grow in the spiritual fruit of peace, to be a peacemaker, is to stand where Jesus stands. It is to find and inhabit the still point in the turning world, the point where the world is gathered up. And when we find that place, we find that it is not an escape from the world, an otherworldly nirvana. It is the place from which we engage in the connecting, and reconciling, and healing that makes us bearers of peace to the world.

It might feel privileged and naïve to talk about peace in such terms when we think of what is happening tonight in Gaza. But it’s from my encounters and friendships with Palestinian Christians that I have perhaps learnt most about the meaning of peace. I think of Sami Awad who founded the Holy Land Trust in Bethlehem. He has pioneered what he calls non-linear leadership training, working with both Palestinians and Israelis to put an end to the working out of each side’s self-defeating response to trauma. He helps people find that still point where past and future are gathered and where we find the imagination and creativity to believe that coexistence is possible.

If Sami can find the still point in the brutality of the occupied West Bank, then we can find peace and share peace in the conflicts of the culture wars and the harshness we encounter in our lives. When Jesus said on the night before he died, “My peace I give you, my peace I leave with you”, he wasn’t wishing his disciples a quiet life. He knew they wouldn’t have that. He warned them about the persecution that was to come. But he was giving them a peace they could believe in and encounter come what may.

This isn’t simply to say that peace is a state of mind. That would indeed seem glib. Rather, peace is realised in the world by those who attune themselves to the coherence and connectedness that is often hidden, the energy of reconciliation and healing, the gathering up of all things in Christ.

This is why I associate compline with peace. It brings us to the still point of the turning world. It calms the monkey-mind of our busy days, it shuts out all the distractions that compete for our attention, and it allows us to encounter God, the God of peace who brought again from the dead our Lord Jesus, in the greatest opening up of the still point in our temporal world, the resurrection that is at the heart of our faith. So as the fruit of God’s peace grows in you, may God make you perfect in every good work to do his will, working in you that which is well-pleasing in his sight. May you know peace, and may you be a peacemaker.

‘Joy’ – The Reverend Canon James Walters

Monday in Holy Week – Joy

Happiness has become a big industry. Books and podcasts on happiness abound and wellness gurus on social media are all telling us how we can find it. In our society, people are trying to measure happiness, promote happiness, and commodify happiness. And this is not a trivial matter in a country where 1 in 6 people report mental health problems such as depression or anxiety. Happiness is elusive for many and the impact on society is immense. And so making people happy is the preoccupation of corporations, of the health service, of governments, and of academics.

I have two colleagues at the LSE who have made their name in the field of happiness. Richard Layard has for years made the economic case for cognitive behavioural therapy and mindfulness as mechanisms of managing our negative emotions. Paul Dolan is a behavioural psychologist who argues that we should reject popular ideas about what success and fulfilment look like to define our own paths to happiness.

There is wisdom in both their contributions. But I have to say I am nervous about any attempt to improve our lives by avoiding or supressing what is difficult and painful. There is a danger that happiness today is built on various forms of denial. Suppressing negative emotions doesn’t make them go away. Ignoring the things that bring us sorrow and pain does not make those things any less real. This is true individually as we assess our own wellbeing, and it’s true for us as a human species. In so many areas we seem to prefer to drift towards denial of our problems rather than confront them. I’m thinking of course of the climate emergency, but also of global inequality or of the dangers posed by AI. None of these things, taken seriously, should make us entirely happy.

One of the things I find quite distinctive about Christianity as a worldview is its rigorous impatience with fantasies that deny difficulty. The rich man who comes to Jesus would prefer to stay in denial about the obstacles his wealth poses rather than give them up. In a shocking passage in the gospels, Jesus associates Peter with Satan when he tries to deny the path of suffering that Jesus must walk. Even some of the people whom Jesus heals like blind Bartimaeus and the paraplegic at the Pool of Bethesda are challenged to think about whether they truly want to be made well, perhaps so they are not in denial about the difficulty that comes with losing these identities of dependence and the livelihoods they have built on them. Jesus won’t let us run away from what is difficult, just as he knew that he could not run away in denial from his own cup of suffering as he prayed in the Garden of Gethsemane.

It is no wonder Christianity has been criticised throughout history as promoting misery and denying people happiness. In the first century the followers of Epicurius rejected the Christian focus on self-control and moral judgment in favour of the pursuit of sensual pleasure. In the 19th Century, Friedrich Nietzsche argued that Christianity was “against health, beauty, well-being, intellect, kindness of soul—against life itself.”

Christianity does not make you happy they all argue. And if happiness is built on denial of the difficult and the negative, then they are right. But Christianity believes in something much bigger than happiness and this is called joy.

Joy is what we encounter when we don’t turn away from the difficulties of life, but when we’re able to place them within a bigger frame of meaning and transformation. Joy is not the avoidance of suffering, but the knowledge that suffering is not a dead end, that there is always hope because God is an abundant source of life and healing. Joy is knowing that we can make sense of what is difficult and that we are given the moral resources to confront it.

The great mystics always knew this. For John of the Cross there is no attaining the joy of union with God before first going through the dark night of the soul. Happiness is not running away from what we fear; paradoxically “light is at the heart of the darkness.” For fellow Carmelite Teresa of Avila, there is also no joy without first passing through pain. In her great work The Way of Perfection, only in the final stages of the mystical life does joy overcome pain, and even then it does not fully annihilate it. Pain and difficulty are not destroyed but are engulfed by the vision of transformative grace that the Lord has placed into the contemplative’s hands (36.9).

In understanding the meaning of a joy that is greater than happiness, we are given a wonderful image in the story of Jesus’ anointing at Bethany. The pouring of the costly ointment on Jesus’s feet is a beautiful action and I love the detail that the fragrance filled the whole house. It is so cheering, so delightful; it brings a smile to my lips. We can’t deny there is also an unsettlingly erotic dimension to the story as Mary uses her hair to wipe his feet instead of a towel.

And yet this extravagant gesture was not an act of happiness. We are told that she had saved the perfume for his burial. It was a response to the presence of death, an act of impending sadness.

This is a household that has known great sorrow. In the previous chapter of the gospel, Mary’s brother Lazarus had been dead for four days. It was a house of mourning, and we are told that even Jesus himself wept. But miraculously Lazarus was raised as Jesus proclaimed himself to be the Resurrection and the Life. Mary has learnt that with Jesus, death is not the end. Darkness and struggle are not eradicated, but can be made sense of and confronted with the powerful love and hope that permeate this household just like the fragrance of the nard.

So I believe this anointing is not motivated by happiness, but it is an act of joy. It is a celebration of Mary’s love and gratitude for Jesus, even as she anticipates and fears his death. And it is, therefore, a prefiguring of the joy of the resurrection, which will not bring Jesus fully back to her in the same way – he will bear his wounds as he ascends to the Father. But it will overcome the pain of the cross that she has journeyed through and allow her and the other disciples to see a new world infused with possibility and hope.

Mental health and negative feelings are a complicated matter that can’t be generalised about and can’t be comprehensively dealt with in a sermon. But as we search after this elusive happiness as a society, I can’t help feeling we would do much better if we stopped trying to exclude the dark and the difficult from our view. Instead we need to attend to our pain and our fears, and interpret them within a larger framework of meaning and hope. Whether or not we are able to find happiness within our personal lives, it seems to me impossible to look at so much of what is going on in the world today and respond with happiness.

But I do believe we can have a disposition of joy, because whatever happens – with our economy, with our international relations, with our fragile climate – we can find hope in the pursuit of God’s purposes, we can find hope in the knowledge of God’s transforming presence among us, and above all we can find hope in the knowledge that God is God and as Julian of Norwich wrote so famously, “all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well.”