‘Blessed are the peacemakers’ – The Reverend Jonathan Chaffey, Archdeacon of Oxford

“We cannot hallow this ground”, said President Lincoln in his extraordinary address on the battlefield of Gettysburg in 1863.  “The brave men who struggled here have consecrated it…It is for us rather to be dedicated…that these dead shall not have died in vain.”  In our land the annual rhythm of Remembrance honours those who paid the ultimate sacrifice and compels us to reflect on our own call to be peace-makers today.  There are estimated to be over 100,000 war memorials in the UK to help us remember well.  York Minster has memorials dating back to the Crimea and Boer Wars.  Alongside plaques that commemorate those who gave their lives in battle or as POWs, you famously have the King’s Book of York Heroes for the First World War and the rather older ‘5 Sisters Window’ re-dedicated in the 1920s to commemorate women of the former British Empire who died in that same conflict.

Memorials capture the imagination down the generations, whether as the traditional village cross, or modern art installations or musical compositions.  Most are uncontroversial but some highlight the juxtaposition of sacrifice and moral complexity in war.  The Bomber Command Memorial in London recalls the loss of 55,000 bomber aircrew in the Second World War, some of them flying from airfields in Yorkshire yet was constructed only in 2012 due to the pain and confusion of what it represents.  It quietly includes the inscription, ‘alongside those of all nations who lost their lives’ in the aerial campaign.  It is appropriate then not just to recall the sheer scale of suffering caused by war but to do so with sober reflection concerning the motives, methods, ambiguities and consequences of war.  To rephrase the question posed by Lincoln: how do we remember in a way that honours the past, informs the present and inspires the future?

How we remember is as important as what we remember.  ‘There is a time to weep…a time to mourn…’  It is absolutely right that we should make our Act of Remembrance, just as the guns fell silent at the 11^th hour on 11^th day of the 11^th month in 1918.  I can tell you there is nothing more sobering than to stand on a parade square in a far off land, bidding farewell to departed friends and colleagues, listening to the Last Post, as a military chaplain saying prayers on behalf of sailors, soldiers and airmen and women – youngsters generally who may not always be able to articulate a faith but deep down are really grateful for spiritual succour.  Yet if we are to honour those who have courageously served and died, in war and in the fight to maintain civic society against terror and extremism, we need to do more, to remember with understanding – for ‘there is a time to speak, a time to gather stones together, a time to build up…’.

Yet it is difficult.  We have heard the abiding counsel of the Ecclesiastes reading, reminding us of the wisdom to know what activity is right, physically, morally, emotionally, at any given time: ‘For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven… a time to plant  and a time to pluck up, to kill and to heal…for war and for peace’.  If only it were easy to judge the right time…!  Yes, there comes a point when the choice is so stark, the cause so great, that there is no time left to ponder. You might think of the summer of 1940 when an existential threat to our nation demanded decisive action in the Battle of Britain.  But our moral choices are not usually so obvious. At ground level I recall a young Serviceman in Iraq who shot an insurgent and then switched roles to patch him up as the team medic. Control of such choices may become even more challenging with the development of increasingly autonomous weaponry. At a more strategic level how does one evaluate one country’s right to defend its homeland against the risk to wider security, or where military response to atrocity generates far-reaching suffering. As in our everyday experience when we sometimes don’t know whether to speak or be silent, to laugh or to cry, we should avoid a superficial, one-dimensional view of conflict for it bears a multitude of complexities.

Remembrance is made yet more challenging by the fickleness of our human condition: How do we fathom the right course of action when emotions and reason often jumbled together?  Leonard Cheshire, who won the Victoria Cross as a Pathfinder pilot and later founded the Cheshire Homes, highlighted the tension: ‘Ambition is a good thing; but not at the expense of others’.  The Russian dissident Solzhenitsyn astutely observed that ‘the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being’.  St Paul wrote honestly: ‘I have the desire to do what is good but I cannot carry it out!  For what I do is not the good I want to do…’ This battle for good and ill is writ large on the international stage and we should pray for those charged with responsibility for leadership.  No wonder Jesus looked over Jerusalem and cried: “If you had only known what would bring you peace …”  He cries today, whether over the legacy of failed military interventions, the drawn-out suffering in the conflicts of Ukraine and the Middle-East, of Africa and elsewhere, the fragility of international partnerships that hinders united action on climate change and migration; he cries over the weaponizing of gender, the power struggles over natural resources, even over water.  It is vitally important for future generations that we face up to battles that may exist in our own lives, communities and nations today.

Jesus, the Prince of Peace, offers a better way: “Blessed are the peacemakers; for they will be called the children of God.”  The series of Beatitudes in Matthew’s Gospel is a manifesto for the Kingdom of God.  It serves as a battle plan against self-interested agenda.  It is truly transformative, liberating as much the one who shows mercy as the one who receives it.  It is profoundly challenging, a call to sacrifice as well as to ultimate redemption.

Are you up for it?  Could you make it work in your family?  Could you be a bridge-builder in your community?  Can you adjust your sights, your ambitions and priorities in a call to service?  There is a wonderful verse in our first reading: ‘God put a sense of past and future into their minds’ – or as another translation puts it: God ‘has set eternity in the hearts of humanity’. It is possible.  Jesus himself has shown the way; he himself walked the talk.  He fought the battle and supremely embodied it on the cross.  He laid down his life, not just for his friends, but uniquely for his enemies also: “Do this as I have done for you”, he said, even as he washed his betrayer’s feet.

The remarkable thing, of course, is not so much that we remember before God but that he remembers us.  Jacob Astley got it right when praying at the Civil War Battle of Edgehill: “Lord you know how busy I must be this day; If I forget thee, do not thou forget me”.  He never forgets us nor leaves us.  He knows the deep waters of anger and pain in grief because he’s been there.  He understands the complexities that we face.  We will be blessed if we allow his peace to steady our disordered passions, if we allow him to walk alongside us in our lives.  So in return let us offer our lives in dedicated, compassionate service.  If we do that then we will truly honour the sacrifices of our forebears, gain lasting hope for the future and become peace-makers today.

‘The best is yet to be, and that will be remembering’ – Reverend Carl Turner, Rector of Saint Thomas Fifth Avenue, New York City

It is said that dogs do not have short-term memories, that they don’t have the same concept of time as we humans do. It certainly is true of my Cairn Terrier, Bertie. When I come back home after being away for a few hours, I get the exact same welcome as when I come back after being away just a few minutes having forgotten something. For humans, whose lives are dominated by time as well as space, memory is crucially important. I guess that is why it why dementia or Alzheimer’s is so distressing, for memories not only fade, they get jumbled and mixed up.

I had a parishioner in New York, her name was Jo Brans – she died a few years ago. A literary scholar, she wrote books, had a column in a big magazine in Texas, and was larger than life. But in her old age, dementia had made her a shadow of her former self. She wrote an article on aging, and recalled a poem by Philip Larkin, titled ‘The Old Fools’:

Perhaps being old is having lighted rooms
Inside your head, and people in them, acting.
People you know, yet can’t quite name. Each looms
Like a deep loss restored…That is where they live:
Not here and now, but where all happened once.

Poignantly, she said that there seemed to be more ‘lighted rooms’ now in her own head, then, turning to her beloved husband, she borrowed some words of Robert Browning but made them her own: “Grow old along with me. The best is yet to be, and that will be remembering.”

Remembering is not only what makes us human, it also forms bonds that create community; and communities use ritual and liturgy in order to connect with the remembrances of the past in a vivid and beautiful way. That is what we are doing tonight, my friends.

We live in an age when so many funeral customs have all but disappeared. Gone are the days of washing and preparing the body, bringing the body home, sharing stories, and even feasting around the body; many funerals, these days, do not even have the body present. As we heard in our first lesson, so many find death a discomfort even to talk about; “In the eyes of the foolish they seemed to have died, and their departure was thought to be a disaster.” But what does the writer go on to say?

“…they are at peace. For though in the sight of others they were punished, their hope is full of immortality.”

Bishop Richard Holloway suggests that Christian remembrance is not simply about memory but is an active engagement with the past and its effect on present realities; he suggests that Christians might use a better term for this kind of remembrance, making them actively remembrancers.

In his book with the most cheerful of titles – Anger, Sex, Doubt, and Death – He says this:

“We would be remembrancers even if we lived for ever, but it seems to be the presence of death that provokes the keenest remembrance. The living we can revisit, but the dead we can only remember. And we do: sometimes in little glimpses, like the credit flashbacks at the end of a film; sometimes in more elaborate sequences, in which we reconstitute as much about a person as we can. It is death that makes us look back in sorrow, makes us remembrancers. But it is also death that makes us look forward in dread.” (1).

In the prophecy of Isaiah there is a beautiful image of a person’s life journey described as a tapestry or carpet. When a carpet or tapestry is being woven, as it grows in size, it is impossible to carry on without rolling it up, and the roll becomes bigger and bigger and the pattern becomes obscured. It is only when the rug or tapestry is complete that the weaver cuts it off from the loom and unrolls it. Isaiah says: “like a weaver I have rolled up my life; he cuts me off from the loom.” (Isaiah 38:12)

Being cut off from the loom that was essential to the creation of the tapestry in the first place is a process of separation; it is an image of death, yet it is necessary in order for the tapestry or the rug to be of any use. But the most beautiful thing of all is that, it is only when it is cut off from the loom that the carpet can be unrolled, and the rich tapestry with its unique pattern can be revealed.

Jesus said “the hour is coming, and is now here, when the dead will hear the voice of the Son of God, and those who hear will live.”
Of course, we are taught that with death also comes judgment. Jesus also speaks about judgement in our Gospel reading:

“The Father … has given all judgment to the Son.”

Now that the beautiful tapestry with all its rich colors and pattern is spread out for all to see, it is also possible to see the flaws that were created during its making. We fear our flaws being revealed, but they are what makes the tapestry so unique and, therefore, precious. The process of coming to terms with the entirety of the pattern that is our life is what we call judgement – which, for the Christian, is not something to be feared, but a means of growth into the loving embrace of God – into accepting all that I was, all that I am, and what I shall be.

For some, that journey will be hard – meeting God who is pure love and forgiveness may be too much for some to accept all at once – perhaps some might even want to roll up the tapestry again, for they are not yet ready to see it in its entirety spread before them. Archbishop Michael Ramsey used to teach about this by using another uncomfortable word – purgatory – but not as a place of torment; rather, as he described it, a stage on the journey as we comes to terms with the reality of our lives and come closer and closer to God who, unlike us, is always pure love and ultimate forgiveness. As Professor Philip Sheldrake once said, “Holiness is a process, a continual movement towards God.

In the same vein, I love the story that Cardinal Basil Hume used to share about a priest preaching at a funeral. The priest started his homily, “I want to speak to you today about judgement.” And the congregation visibly shuddered. “Judgement,” the priest continued, “is whispering into the ear of a merciful and compassionate God the story of my life which I had never been able to tell.”

Judgement, is whispering into the ear of a merciful and compassionate God the story of my life which I had never been able to tell.

Let us pray.

A prayer by David Adams:
Light of the world, enter into the depths of our lives.
Come into the dark and hidden places.
Walk in the storehouse of our memories.
Hear the hidden secrets of the past.
Plumb the very depth of our being.
Be present through the silent hours,
and bring us safely to your glorious light. Amen

(1). From ‘Anger, Sex, Doubt, and Death’ pub. SPCK 1992

‘Three saints got into a boat’ – Canon Dr Paula Gooder, Chancellor of St Paul’s Cathedral

Three saints, Paulinus, Mellitus and Justus got into a boat…

If this were a joke, this would be one of the weirdest opening lines of a joke ever…but it isn’t.  According to the Venerable Bede, Pope Gregory I did send Paulinus, Mellitus and Justus to England on what we now call the Gregorian Mission.  He sent them to help Augustine of Canterbury who had arrived five years earlier with forty or so other monks to establish Roman Christianity in England.  Initially they were successful and so Pope Gregory sent a second mission five years later which included Paulinus, Mellitus and Justus.  Justus became the first bishop of Rochester in 604 and Mellitus the first bishop of London in the same year, founding a church in the city, which was probably on the site where St Paul’s Cathedral now stands.  Paulinus was consecrated as a bishop twenty or so years later and was made the first Bishop of York in 627, also founding a church in the city.

There is something profoundly satisfying about being invited here to preach on the day when we commemorate St Paulinus at the consecrations of three more bishops, Tricia, Barry and Flora, in the city where Paulinus was a made Bishop nearly 1400 years ago.  As I preach I bring best wishes and prayers from Mellitus’ Cathedral – St Paul’s, where I minister as Canon Chancellor.  All we need is someone from Rochester to rock up and we have a Gregorian Mission full house!

In the nearly 1400 years since Paulinus was made the first Bishop of York much has changed for the church in England, and yet, what inspires us, upholds us and draws us onwards remains the same.  Nearly 600 years before Paulinus, Mellitus and Justus set out from Rome to go to England, the risen Jesus met his disciples on a mountain top in Galilee.  What he said to them, then, echoes on down the centuries.  600 years later it inspired Paulinus, Mellitus and Justus to journey from Rome making disciples as they went, baptising and teaching everything that Jesus had passed on to his disciples.  1400 years on from them three more people are poised on the edge of a new venture with God.

So what was it about that encounter with the risen Jesus that has made such a great difference to so many people over so many years?  The answer has to begin with that they met Jesus, risen from the dead, and that meeting changed everything for them.  But there is more – of course there is more – and so many things that I will limit myself to my three favourites…

I love that the moment that the risen Jesus met his followers and sent them out was on a mountain in Matthew’s Gospel.  If you know Matthew’s Gospel at all you will know that he has a thing about mountains.  Each one of the Gospel writers has a thing – for Mark it’s boats, for Luke it’s journeys and for Matthew it’s mountains.  In Matthew’s Gospel as soon as Jesus goes up a mountain you know something important is about to happen.  Jesus is tempted, gave a Sermon, goes to pray, heals the sick, is transfigured, begins his final journey into Jerusalem to die and finally meets his disciples after his resurrection all on a mountain.  Not the same mountain but a mountain nevertheless.  Seven mountains, seven important moments in the life of Jesus and his disciples.  The last and final one being when he handed on the baton to his followers.

We all need our equivalent of Matthew’s mountains.  Places where we are alert that something important might happen, that we might hear God speaking, or know God’s presence in the sound of gossamer thin silence.  Places where our souls can rest and find healing.  Places where we can see afresh who God really is and hear afresh his command to go, gossiping good news to everyone we meet.

Tricia, Barry, Flora, you don’t need me to tell you that your lives are about to be turned upside down in a new way with the mad chaos that only ministry in the Church of God can bring.  In the midst of the storm may you, may we all, find our thing – a boat, a habit of journeying, a mountain top, anything or anywhere frankly – where we can practice the discipline of expectation of wondering whether this is moment, the time, the place when God will speak again and stir our souls.  As R.S. Thomas put it, ‘a moment of great calm, …waiting for the God to speak’. Sometimes God will speak, sometimes God won’t, sometimes God won’t speak  for months or years but, as it was for the first disciples, simply going to the mountain top and waiting is the start of it all.

This doesn’t mean, however, that this means we will glide along in haze of pure certainty every hour of every day.  One of the features of this passage, that utterly fascinates me, is that at that moment on the top of the mountain, when, after they had waited, they did eventually meet the risen Jesus and he sent them out on the biggest, most madcap mission imaginable.  Then, at that moment, Matthew talks to us of doubt.  We could, if we were so minded, talk for an exceedingly long time about what Matthew meant when he said ‘When the disciples saw him they worshipped but some doubted’.  There has been much debate not only about what they were doubting but about precisely who was doing the worshipping and who was doing the doubting.  I won’t bore you with the details but the consensus is that among the eleven on the top of that mountain there was more than one person who was both worshipping and doubting at the same time.  It might have been all of them; it might have been just a few of them but worshipping and doubting were going on together.

For some people this causes immense problems, you can’t, they claim do both at once.  To which my response is you may not but I can.  In my experience, it is precisely in the moment when I cannot comprehend who God is, when I’m wrestling to accept or to wrap my mind around the vastness of God and what that means in the world, when I’m railing against the impossibility of it all that then I fall into the fullest worship possible.  Yesterday my friend and fine scholar Judith Maltby sent me a poem ‘The Inescapable Day’ by the American poet Vassar Millar, whom she is currently studying, and a couple of lines from it have hooked into my heart:

here we fidget,
snuffling and straining
to work the Mystery over our heads and hearts like a child’s pyjamas.

The God we worship is a God far too great a mystery to comprehend in a single, simple moment.

Of course, the very heart of this passage, rests not in the thin places or in the wrestling with mystery, but in the journeying onwards.  Jesus sent the disciples down from mountain and out into the world bearing news that was deeply and profoundly good and remains as good today as it ever was 2000 years ago.  News that we are loved with a love beyond all measuring, that whether we understand that love or not it will never fail, or falter or change.

I mentioned earlier Matthew’s use of mountains as a motif, he has another that is equally striking.  Matthew bookends his Gospel with a theme.  Right at the start of the whole Gospel an angel appeared to Joseph and told him that Mary would bear a son and he would be Immanuel, God with us.  In the final phrases of the Gospel, Jesus sends the disciples onwards, down from the mountain, and reminds them of the very essence of who he is — God with us – saying I am with you to the end of the age.

Tricia, Barry, Flora you will be doing a lots of journeying over the next weeks, months and years, sometimes physically, sometimes deep in your souls, but as you go remember that you do not go alone.  Whatever happens, however it feels sometimes, we never journey alone.  We journey with the one who never has and never will leave us.

It is this that gave Paulinus, Mellitus and Justus the courage to leave Rome and travel to the cold wet lands of England.  It is this that calls you three – and us all – to journey to places beyond our wildest dreams.

Three saints, Paulinus, Mellitus and Justus got into a boat…1400 years later three more saints, Tricia, Flora and Barry, ready themselves to follow in their footsteps.

When you think about it…it is, after all, quite a good joke!

Amen.

‘And he sternly ordered them not to tell anyone about him’ – The Very Reverend Paul Kennington, Interim Dean of Chelmsford

And he sternly ordered them not to tell anyone about him.

Once when I was invited to the St Jean Baptiste Day reception in Montreal Town Hall  I was introduced to the Premier of Quebec, Pauline Marois.  Making polite conversation over the canapes she asked me ‘So what exactly is the Anglican Church of Canada?’

Being a provocative sort of chap I replied that the Anglican Church of Canada is like the Roman Catholic Church but with married clergy, women clergy and gay clergy – she laughed and we shifted the conversation to Edith Piaf and Celine Dion.

Jesus sternly ordered them not to tell anyone about him.

The Epistle reading from James warns us about the power of words.  At one level it is just good advice against gossip and about saying too much.  How many of us have pressed the ‘send’ button on an email only to regret it in the morning?

But on another level it is about more than just idle gossip and temper.  The words we use are also definitions and identity.  It is with words that we tell people about Jesus  –  or not.

And words are often not what they seem.  In predominantly francophone Montreal, I took a lot of care translating between English and French.  How do you say ‘atonement’ in French?   What is the best English translation of ‘recueillement’.  Translation is never quite as easy as looking it up in Google Translate.

To a Parisian the word ‘pain’ – the ordinary word for bread – conjures up a long thin crusty baguette freshly baked in the early hours.

To Jesus I imagine the word for bread would conjure up a round flat bread.

To my mother in Leeds ‘bread’ was always a white sliced loaf of Mother’s Pride.

Even such an everyday staple as ‘bread’ cannot always be translated so simply.

So God help us when we come to telling anyone about Jesus.  There is an argument that the Eastern and the Western Churches never got over the fact that the Greek word  ‘hypostasis’ looks so very much like the Latin word ‘substantia’ –  but that translation would lead us into heresy for God is three hypostases but only one substance.

So perhaps Jesus shows exceptional wisdom when he sternly ordered them not to tell anyone about him.  Words will never do him justice and may lead us into trouble.

Those of you who have studied the Bible may want to heckle me now and tell me that this is just the Messianic Secret.

And if you have never heard of the Messianic Secret, the theory goes that Jesus never said these words at all, but that Mark invented them as a literary device to explain why Jesus remained incognito, as it were, until after the Crucifixion and the Resurrection.

But biblical studies have changed. We’re less fussed these days about the actual words of the Historical Jesus and we’re more content simply to read the  Gospel, so whether or not Jesus ever sternly ordered his disciples not to tell anyone about him,  St. Mark thought it was important enough to say – and therefore important enough for a preacher to preach about!

So what do we make of this counterintuitive stern order not to tell anyone about Jesus when Church today is all about discipleship and evangelism?

At first Jesus merely asks the disciples,  who do other people say that he is –  they come up with the usual suspects:  – john the Baptist, Elijah, one of the prophets –  all of them wrong.

So Jesus asks them who they think he is – and it is Peter who answers : you are the Messiah.

All well and good.   It is tempting to sit back and think ‘ Yes, Peter has got it right’ –  Yes, Jesus is the Messiah –  but you see he hasn’t got it right – he has got it very wrong.

He has used the right word, of course  – Ha Mashiach – but what Peter means by Messiah and what Jesus means by Messiah are diametrically opposed – as far apart as a French baguette and a slice of Mothers’ Pride.

Jesus explains to Peter that Messiahship is about suffering, rejection and death – but Peter thinks the word Messiah means something very different indeed – and Jesus calls him Satan – a strong word to call one of your best and most loyal friends.   It starts to become clearer why Jesus sternly ordered them not to tell anyone about him.  Even if they used the right word they did not always understand what they were saying.

And perhaps that is the word of caution for us from the Gospel today.

There are about two and a half billion Christians in the world – and we all use the same words about Jesus in worship and prayer:

the only Son of God, begotten of the Father, true God from true God, 

and yet scratch us  –   scratch our understandings of the what the Good News is, and of what it means to live faithful and holy lives, and we are as far apart as chalk and cheese.

Between the Plymouth Brethren and the Metropolitan Community Church we are barely recognisably the same faith.

In our own Anglican way both St Michael le Belfry and the Minster may sometimes sing about the Church by schisms rent asunder, and by heresies distressed,  and yet I think we have very different views on what those schisms and heresies actually are.

And this subtle disagreement has always been one of the great strengths of the Church of England.

We have been traditional careful not to tell anyone too much about Jesus!

When I grew in Armley, I first attended Christ Church – a low evangelical church which taught me about my personal sin being like a rain cloud separating me from the love of God.  Only Jesus the atoning death of Jesus could take that cloud away.

That metaphor didn’t work for me and I defected to St Bartholomew’s Armley where I learned to make the sign of the cross, genuflect and say the Hail Mary.

And both churches happily got on with their own business of burying the dead, marrying and baptising the parishioners, feeding the hungry and preaching the word.  We didn’t interfere in what each other was doing.

No doubt the faithful at Christ Church thought we were all deeply misguided praying to the Virgin Mary up at St Bart’s – and I thought that the chorus  ‘Jesus how lovely you are, you are so gentle, so pure and so kind’  was – well how do I put it –  lacking a certain depth of theology and musical subtlety  – but Fr Owen happily went to Deanery Synod in his Cassock and Steve went in his open neck shirt and chinos.

And therein lies a change.  When I was much younger I was taught that there is no such thing as ‘The Anglican Church’,  – that there is no Anglican Confession of Faith – like the Westminster Confession or the Catholic Catechism, or dare I say it like The 2008 Jerusalem Declaration.   We don’t have a Constitution or a Supreme Court.  There is just the Anglican Communion – the Bible, the Book of Common Prayer, and the Creeds of the first Ecumenical Councils.

But over these past 40 years people have talked more freely about  – ‘The Anglican Church’

And I wonder what exactly they mean by that?

Do they mean a centralised body led by The Church of England?   My friends in Montreal would not think very highly of that bit of English colonialism.   Or are the words  ‘The Anglican Church’ just a verbal grenade to mean the global majority of Anglicans, especially for liberal Anglicans like myself who disagree with the global majority on a number of issues?

Jesus sternly ordered them not to tell anyone about him.

As I get older, I feel more and more that the Anglican Way of not over-defining, and of not making windows into people’s souls has a great deal to commend it.

I still want to preach the word of course, and to tell people about Jesus, but today’s Gospel gives wise advice to be very cautious when we attempt to over explain the mystery of the Word made Flesh.

In the end I am want less of other people telling me about Jesus and a little bit more of people showing me Jesus – not necessarily the right answers, but a bit more love, joy, peace, forbearance, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control in the Church and in the world.

You could say a little bit more ‘recueillement’ and a little less ‘atonement’.

Jesus sternly ordered them not to tell anyone about him.

But he did tell us to follow him.

‘In the days of King Herod of Judea’ – Canon Peter Collier KC, Cathedral Reader

Title: ‘In the days of King Herod of Judea’

Preacher: Canon Peter Collier KC, Cathedral Reader 

Readings: Judges 13:2 -7, 24-25; Luke 1:5-25

Psalm: Psalm 71

Date: Sunday 23 June 2024, The Eve of the Birth of St John the Baptist 

May I speak in the name of God who is Father, Son and Holy Spirit.

“In the days of King Herod of Judea”. One of the things about Luke’s writing, which is very often about miraculous and other worldly things, is that he always grounds what he is describing in its real, historical, and political context. So here in Ch 1, it is “in the days of King Herod of Judea”. Similarly, in chapter 3 it begins “in the 15th year of the reign of the Emperor Tiberius”. Luke knew that any work of God, any experience of God is, always rooted in a real place and time. So for us today, living Christ’s story is done here and now in the days of a conservative government, a labour controlled local council and whatever other political context you want to give, as well as your own family and other social contexts. Because our experiences of God as we follow Jesus Christ here and now can happen only in those real-life contexts.

“In the days of King Herod of Judea” there was a priest named Zechariah and his wife Elizabeth. Let’s look for a moment at their here and now. Zechariah was a priest from, as they would say, “up north”. He came to Jerusalem twice a year when it was the turn of his division of priests to do their Temple ministry for a week.

Zechariah was married to a priest’s daughter, so would be regarded as especially blessed. Their piety as a couple was well known. They kept the laws and followed all the relevant regulations. They were faithful people.

But they were childless, and they were now both getting on in age; their days were almost over. And that absence of children was a source of much pain and grief to them. Elizabeth in particular would have felt ashamed amongst other woman, as the law seemed to say that if you were faithful then you would be fruitful and have families. And she would have been very self-conscious of how others viewed her, and what she sensed they were saying about her behind her back.

But let’s be clear about this – suffering pain is not sin. And many today suffer pain in their families, or perhaps because of their families or maybe because of how other people look at them. Feeling different, feeling excluded is a common experience, especially in a religious environment. And it can be very painful. I expect there will be many here this evening, who feel real pain for some such reason. And if you take nothing else away tonight it should be that to be in pain is not to sin. Because like Zechariah and Elizabeth we can remain faithful and trusting in God whatever we are going through in or families, in our church, and whoever is running the country.

“In the days of King Herod of Judea”, Zechariah was about to have a remarkable spiritual experience. God who seemed to have been silent for 400 years, was about to speak prophetically to Zechariah through the angel Gabriel. It happened on what was a very significant day for Zechariah. Significant because he had drawn the lot that day to offer the incense at the altar. According to Jewish oral tradition, a priest could only do that once in his lifetime. So for Zechariah as a priest this would have been the most important moment in his whole life.

And as he came to offer the incense, there suddenly appeared an angel. And whatever else he might have expected at that great moment it was not that. And he was terrified. But the angel spoke, and said “Don’t be afraid; your prayer has been heard.”

I am confident that the prayer that was referred to by Gabriel was not a prayer for a son, but the prayer that he and the nation prayed day after day, longing for God to come as he had promised and once again redeem his people. In a couple of chapters’ time Luke will also tell us about Simeon, whose song – the Nunc Dimittis – the choir has sung again tonight, and of 84 year old Anna. He tells us that they both spent their time in the temple praying for God’s salvation to come. And the answer to Zechariah’s prayer is that God is about to come and redeem his people and that Zechariah and Elizabeth are to have the Elijah like child who will come and prepare the way and get people ready for the Messiah to come. And so, says Gabriel, they and many others will have a lot of joy because of what this child, their child to be, will do.

Now Zechariah cannot get his head round this, it is all too much for him. How can this happen he says. I am old. My wife is getting on in years. I just don’t get it! I can’t get it!

The angel responds by saying that he had come directly from God to tell him this and because he hadn’t believed it, he would now be mute until the child was born.

Now all this would have taken a little time and it meant that he was in the sanctuary longer than people expected and they began to wonder what was going on. And when he did come out, obviously he couldn’t tell them what had happened and it must have been a very weird sight as he tried to indicate in some sort of basic sign language what had happened. They realised he had had some sort of extraordinary spiritual experience, perhaps a vision. Of course later he would be able to write down what had happened, and no doubt when he got home at the end of the week that’s what he would do to break the news to Elizabeth.

And as we know in due course it all came to pass.

Spiritual experiences can have many different effects, sometimes quite dramatic as with Zechariah or you perhaps remember in the Old Testament, Jacob when he wrestled with God went away limping. Sometimes as here there is an impact that is visible to other people. Though more often that is not the case.

But when we do have an experience of God very often it takes time to work out what has happened, what it means and how we move forward from there. Zechariah needed time to do that processing – there were to be a lot of implications to what he’d just been told – a baby when it was really time for grandchildren, the boy would have to grow up with them, there were special instructions about the diet – no alcohol whatsoever. And what about all that lay ahead for the boy as the Elijah like prophet; how different their lives were going to be from now on. There was an awful lot for Zechariah to process.  And God gave him time, time when he couldn’t talk but could do a lot of that internal processing.

And when we have any experience of God in our lives we need to pause and reflect and process what it means.

So on the eve of the feast of the birth of John the Baptist what are we to make of all this? What impact might it have on our lives in the days not of King Herod of Judea but of King Charles of Windsor? What are our circumstances? Our here and now? Are we feeling excluded and consequently experiencing pain? Are we open to experience God in new ways? And are we making space to process what we do experience of God, day by day and week by week?

May it be so for his name’s sake. Amen.

Trinity at York Minster – The Rev Canon Dr Jennifer Smith

Title: Trinity at York Minster

Date: 26 May 2024, Trinity Sunday

Preacher: The Rev Canon Dr Jennifer Smith

Trinity at York Minster

Let us pray

Holy God, break your Word as bread for the feeding of our souls: and may the words of my lips and the meditations of all our hearts be acceptable in your sight, o Lord our strength, and our Redeemer.  Amen.

So friends, it is Trinity Sunday and we are here – this place where wars and plagues have been outlived, which has stood through how many elections, governments risen and fallen, this is a place where, when God has asked ‘whom shall I send,’ many generations have said ‘here am I send me.’

You heard about Nicodemus visiting Jesus under cover of darkness in our Gospel reading.  I hope you bring with you today as blunt a frustration, as much reality about the perils we face right now, as Nicodemus did when he came to Jesus.  He was living in the shadow of empire, well aware of the perilous future.

Yet unlike Nicodemus, you are here today in the light of day, for all to see.  It is an audacious thing to gather to praise God, still to bring our concerns to God, knowing what we do of the world.  Well done.

Trinity Sunday, today, is a day that clever priests traditionally get in a guest preacher to grapple with the tangle of metaphor and obscurity which is our usual talk, even our best talk, about the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

(Perhaps then, this is the moment to thank the Dean for his kind invitation to me, Methodist that I am.)

Friends, just because something is hard to speak of, does not excuse us from the responsibility.  To ask, and to speak, and in the full light of day.

It is particularly because it is hard to speak of Trinity that we must work at it today – never more urgently – unless we wish to let might make right again,  in this generation,  unchallenged.

The boundless, eternal self-giving love of God the Creator embodied in Jesus, and the breath of the Spirit which is God’s revelation – still today God brings order from chaos, still comes alongside us, still gives us the gifts of outrage, and compassion, and enlivens us.

This God in Trinity refuses to stop at what can fit on the slim page of an election manifesto, or what is fair, or practical, or affordable, or convenient when it comes to abundant life for every person.

Salvation is not a life boat for a lucky few, but the promise offered to all.

And salvation is intimately linked to, flows from who God is, in Trinity – this ‘three-one God’ as my predecessor John Wesley called it.

This week we commemorated John and Charles Wesley’s conversion experiences.  Anglican priests, both of them, they went on through the decades of the 18^th century to work for revival among the English, the Cornish, the Welsh – even the Scots.

And the missions spread in their name ‘Methodist’ went around our world, and have come back again to these shores, planting schools and hospitals and putting about the radical notion that people can make just society, drawn into the dance of God.

On Friday, several hundred of us walked in the streets of the City of London, ending at St Paul’s Cathedral.  These are the same streets where the Wesley’s worked and taught.  I am certain they would have thought by now, more than 250 years later, there would no longer be anyone sleeping rough.  Or elder folks forgotten, or anyone who couldn’t get medical care.  Their dream is not yet realised.

Some have said the most dangerous word in the Methodist vocabulary is ‘all’ – that is, ‘all may be saved.  All must be saved.  And its ethical corollary – ‘do all the good you can, at all the times you can, in all the ways you can, all as long as ever you can.’

That word ‘all,’ is dangerous only to those who would limit the reach of God’s call, or God’s promise: that ‘whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life.’ And make no mistake, eternal life is not some hazy relief or reward that begins after death.

It is a statement of God’s intention for right now, and the work in which we are already involved, we who dare to say ‘I believe’, let alone ‘here am I, send me.’

Friends, the doctrine of the Trinity was not arrived as an intellectual exercise, but was an attempt of the early church over generations to speak of our experience of the self giving love offered by God.

When Christians are asked ‘who is your God,’ then and now we answer by re-telling together the story of what God has done.

This we call the Creed.

Look at it – it is not a list of doctrinal abstractions, but a record of God’s three-one self poured out in love from the beginning.  First in creation, then in the events of the life, death, resurrection and ascension, and through both in the Spirit, which enlivens the Church and our fragile aging bodies.

When asked ‘who is God?’ we answer with a story.

May I say gently, let us not treat the Creed as if in saying it we are looking at faded holiday pictures from long ago of a time when God was active in our world.  It begins with the ending that puts us squarely as a part of God’s story: we believe.

And God in Trinity moves and draws us by our longing – into the story – and we are indeed born again, fragile, fearful children that we are – and sent in power.

There is no doctrine of the Trinity, no understanding God come among us in Jesus Christ, that can be separated from salvation, which is the ongoing work of justice.  Justice is not condemnation nor making one scapegoat and thinking we can wash our hands and go home, job done.  Jesus was specific – the salvation he speaks of is an implacable truth that whispers to us that it could be different, and not because of who we are, but because of who God is.

And so the seraph can call the prophet Isaiah in that extraordinary passage we heard read, and so any one of us can discover we too are already taken up in this story.

The Trinity, its power and love outpouring and eternal dance is an antidote to the bloodlust of our world.  Eternally drawing folk into the work of rebirth, creating, coming alongside, enlivening.

And you are still here, knowing all you do of the world.  All we do.  Again, it is an audacious thing you do to gather here, to offer praise and thanksgiving to God.

Today, I hope , if you have come with weariness, or with outrage, or despair at any of the things you have seen and heard this week in our news – any of the things you live with – I hope you will leave with the perspective that you are part of the story which reaches back and forwards, and in this place.  And it is not done yet, and the worst day is not the last day, and we are not alone.

For God still loves the world, still calls, still sends, still saves.

In the name of God, womb who bore us word who walked among us, breath that eases in us now, AMEN.

‘I am the good shepherd’ – The Rt Revd Paul Ferguson, Bishop of Whitby

‘It was the hardest Lent, I have ever had to endure’ – The Revd Canon Richard Sewell

Title: ‘It was the hardest Lent, I have ever had to endure’

Date: 14 April 2024, The Third Sunday of Easter

Preacher: The Revd Canon Richard Sewell, Dean of St George’s College, Jerusalem

Readings: Luke 16:19-31

‘It was the hardest Lent, I have ever had to endure’

It was the hardest Lent, I have ever had to endure. Not because of the suffering of my penitence and Lent disciplines although of course I did those. It was hard because of the unrelenting pain of those in Gaza, suffering real hunger not because of fasting but because  they were being starved to death. It was a hard Holy Week but at least the mood and the seriousness of final days of Jesus matched our own mood of the suffering and violence of all the people of Gaza, the West Bank and Israel. Good Friday’s Stations of the Cross on the Via Dolorosa in Jerusalem’s Old City was the perfect spiritual fit for our own sense of loss and near despair.

The day I was most wary of, most dreading, was Easter Day. How would we raise ourselves with Hallelujahs and Easter joy when on the ground in Gaza nothing had changed? Children, women and men were still dying in their hundreds from missiles, aid was still not getting through in sufficient quantities to prevent extreme hunger. Hostages were still held in underground tunnels. Our hearts were breaking and the celebrations of Easter seemed a far distant cry from that reality.

But when Easter Day dawned, we gained a glimpse of something to turn us around. At our service in St George’s Cathedral, we gathered, Palestinians and foreign nationals together and sang our hearts out. It changed nothing in Gaza, it did not release the hostages, it did not lift the crushing restrictions in the West Bank. It did not stop bombs falling and people dying. But for a couple of hours we proclaimed a truth which is written into nature: God has contended with the power of darkness and evil, and has won. We sang our hearts out because we heard again the story of an empty tomb and the declaration which the angels gave to the women: ‘He is not here. He is risen!’

Now we are two weeks into Easter, the joy is still there but it’s battling with the gathering darkness. Of course, it can be the same for any one of us. There are multiple reasons why the core and essence of our Christian faith is not always the dominant though and prevailing emotion in our hearts. If you are recently bereaved, if your marriage is in deep trouble, if you are living with depression and any number of other reasons, then Easter joy is not easily accessible.

But the gospels and the best teaching of our traditions remind us, over and over that our faith has to be able to endure many challenges of our circumstances; it will be tested by many of our life experiences. Faith must hold firm in the heat of the fire.

The mention of fire brings us to Jesus’s parable and the flames of Hades. It is a dire warning even if we do not take the parable literally, which we should not. Jesus tells the story as a graphic warning that this life is the time in which we are given the opportunity to decide how to live: which lights to follow, where to set our heart. Of course, we are going to keep hold of the truth of the Gospel, that we are saved by grace and not by works but we are also reminded by scripture that we are known by the fruit of our actions.

In the parable the rich man has lived to enjoy the good things of life without any concern for those who are denied such pleasures. Perhaps he has decided that compassion is for losers; that people make their own good fortune and what concern should that be to him? Lazarus positioned himself the gate of the man who lived the high life believing that sooner or later he would be moved to spare some of his excess to benefit a man with nothing. But it never happened. Jesus tells the parable to demonstrate that decisions which may make perfect good sense whilst enjoying the fine things in this life, may look different from the perspective of eternity.

It is certainly a story which resonates strongly for me living in Palestine and Israel in a time of war. I’m fairly certain that it’s a story which resonates here in York today because a war in the Middle East is never only a concern to the people who live in the Middle East. However, I must say that there have been times in these past six months that Palestinian Christians have felt that even their Christian brothers and sisters in the wealthy and comfortable parts of the world have not noticed the suffering of poor Lazarus at their gate. The feeling of neglect and the sense of rejection felt by Palestinians by the words and deeds or the lack of words and the lack of deeds even by Christian leaders has left them feeling utterly abandoned. Balancing the need to condemn Hamas with the desire to support Israel along with the desire to protect innocent victims has usually resulted in the innocent victims feeling as if they are the ones who have been left begging without reward at the Rich Man’s gate.

But I am here to tell you, Palestinians, Christians and Muslims alike are not sitting passively waiting for the world to come to its senses. Inevitably people are taking many different courses of action in the face of dangers they face, some of them not so wise. But my experience in many different contexts across the Land is that they will not let fear and hatred rule their actions. I clearly see a determination to pull together, to strengthen the bonds of community so that none are left to suffer alone. I am continually impressed and moved by those who are literally binding up the wounded, comforting the bereaved, feeding the hungry and visiting those imprisoned. They are not just siting around waiting for the rich countries of the world to come to their senses. They are They are using the forces of light to contend with the darkness which threatens to engulf them. I believe with all my heart and soul that we are all called to play our part too.

On Easter Day, the Anglican Christians of Jerusalem gathered together in the Cathedral Church of St George the Martyr for the high point of the whole Christian year. We may not have been all that many but it felt as if being together we amounted to a great deal.

I am pretty sure that I was not alone in wondering if Easter could be made to feel anything like Easter when our hearts were breaking and we were grieving and also angry. I need not have worried: The Holy Spirit moved among us. Two of our teenagers sang and encouraged us:

When I am down and, oh my soul, so weary
When troubles come and my heart burdened be
Then, I am still and wait here in the silence
Until You come and sit awhile with me. You raise me up.

We received the Eucharist as a sacrament of the presence of Christ with us. And in the final hymn we sang together in Arabic and English simultaneously:

Up from the grave He arose
With a mighty triumph o’er His foes
He arose a Victor from the dark domain
And He lives forever with His saints to reign
He arose! He arose! Hallelujah! Christ arose!

In singing it, for a while at least, we knew that victory over the dark domain and Easter joy lifted our hearts. We walked blinking, out into the bright sunshine and the world still had not changed. But we were changed, as I hope you were too in your own Easter celebrations. As we continue through this season of Easter may we live in that resurrection light and commit to doing the deeds of the light, in the power of the Holy Spirit.

Amen.

Eighth Sunday of Trinity – The Rt. Rev. Gregory H. Rickel Assisting Bishop of SE Florida, TEC

Preacher: The Rt. Rev. Gregory H. Rickel Assisting Bishop of SE Florida, TEC

Date: 30 July 2023,  Eighth Sunday after Trinity

Good morning I bring you all greetings from the Episcopal Church which comprises
the United States, as well as many countries and places outside of it. We rejoice in our
connections in this, our Anglican family. I bring you particular greetings from the Diocese of Southeast Florida where I serve as Assisting Bishop and from our Bishop Diocesan Bishop Peter Eaton.
Now, I realize, many of you have already picked up that I am not from around here, I have a rather peculiar and funny way of speaking, and indeed it might have been helpful to have an interpreter this morning, to interpret my Southern USA drawl, but alas we do not have that so I promise I will try to do my very best. As I do that I also wish to thank Dean Barrington, a true mentor and friend, for the invitation and blessing of standing here in this amazingly beautiful and
sacred place.
Today I would like to focus on “heart.” Both the word, but mostly the concept. The heart
is of course a real thing and yet also a theme well beyond that reality. This is what our
collect for the day points to so well when we prayed.
We beseech you to direct, sanctify and govern both our hearts and bodies in the ways of your laws
and the works of your commandments;

Paul points to it in his letter to the Romans today when he speaks of our God, who
searches our heart.
Most of us understand body, it is pretty clear, and we can see it and know it. Heart, however, is both physical and real, and yet far more than that. Here, when heart is used, it is, of course, not suggesting our actual beating heart, that organ we all have right about here. Of course, that organ is real, and also real important to each of us, but that is not what heart here means.

No, in these words, from Jesus, “heart,” refers to those things we cannot, for the most part, see at all.
If you think about it, none of us absolutely know we have a heart right here, except that we can feel it beating, we can feel it when it is hurting, but in the end it is a matter of faith to a degree, that one is right here, and is working to keep us alive. Most of us intellectually know that we cannot live without it working, day in, day out, minute to minute, literally as they say, and
hopefully for each us, not missing a beat.
Most often, if we are truly fortunate, we don’t think about it at all, but it keeps always, doing its work. It’s consistency, its persistence, is absolutely crucial to our continued survival. We can live without many other things, but not without a heart.
So we can say it is absolutely central, crucial, primary to life.
With that idea, and understanding, Jesus and so many others use this image, heart, meaning everything that makes you you, me me, anybody anybody.
That is what makes this image so mysterious and yet so powerful. It is one reason Jesus,
and so many others, use the image so often.
In fact, in Scripture we find the word “heart” used in just this manner, over 1000 times,
making it therefore, one of, if not the most common anthropological theme in Scripture.

Love God with all thy heart, with all thy soul, with all thy strength, and with all thy mind…
Luke 10:27

Where your treasure is, there your heart will
be also. Matthew 6:21

Heart as it is used here, means all those things that fall outside our physical reality. It
is, you might say, the air that we breath, the feelings that we have, the love that we share,
or that we don’t. You might even say it is how we navigate the world, and interact with our community, and our planet. We hear sayings every day that pick up on this.

His or her heart is just not in it. Home is where the heart is. The heart of the story. Getting to the heart of the matter.

And it is far from just Jesus or religion that believes this. Carl Jung once said, Your vision will become clear only when you can look into your own heart. Who looks outside it, dreams; who looks inside it, awakens. Jesus is saying much the same. In a sense, he is telling a truth, we all know, and also asking us a question and that is a simple and yet
deeply challenging one: What is primary in your life? What is central to your being?
What is the heart of your life? What is it in your life, that like our physical real heart,
beating inside us, drives you, motivates you, moves you, causes you to act.
It is summed up for me in a much paraphrased comment by GK Chesterton, who basically said “it’s not that Christianity is all that bad, its just that no one has ever really tried it yet!”
Because it is not always easy, and Jesus didn’t promise it would be, but he did promise a God of Love, that would be with us in every beat of our heart, in every step we ever take, and God, in turn, asks us to essentially love others, just as God Loved us, which I would say is to love completely,
recklessly, wastefully, not something this world encourages of us, and not something our mind tells us is reasonable, and that is why heart is so important. That is why heart is what Jesus asks us to give completely. Because heart is everything, mind, soul, body.
What is primary in your life? What is your heart?

I don’t believe following Christ means you must live an oppressive life, or somehow live removed from this world. I don’t believe that following Christ means you have to leave everything you own on the street corner and walk away. I do believe it means realigning how you see all of those things, what the priority of all those things are in your life. I do believe we have to let go of them, in the sense that they are no longer things we own, be it money, or possessions, or even those we
love, to let go of them, in the sense that they are not our heart, they are not the central reason for our being, or for our actions in this world, and instead care and love all those
things for God, and as God loves us, fully, completely, abundantly, recklessly, wastefully. When Jesus spoke of freedom, that is what he was talking about. When he spoke of heart, I believe this was what he was speaking of.
For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.

That is God’s wish for this world, and for each and every one of us. That is the heart of this faith. That is the heart of Jesus’s way, and it is a free gift, available to each and every one of us. We
must only accept it, follow it, and live it, from our heart.
My beloved I have said these words to you in the name of the Father and of the Son and of
the Holy Spirit.

Amen.

Trinity Sunday – Revd Matthew Porter, Vicar of St Michael le Belfrey and Bishop Designate of Bolton

Title: A Sermon for Trinity Sunday

Preacher: The Reverend Matthew Porter, Vicar of St Michael le Belfrey and Bishop Designate of Bolton

Date: 4 June 2023  Trinity Sunday 11.00am

Readings: Is. 40:12-17, 27-end; 2 Cor. 13:11-end; Mt. 28:16-end

Last words. Last words are important, especially when you’re dying. It’s said that famed musician Billie Holiday’s were: ‘Don’t be in such a hurry.’ The last words of footballer George Best, who struggled with alcohol, were: ‘don’t die like I did.’ And Bob Marley the celebrated singer, said to his son as he died, ‘Money can’t buy life.’ So often it’s the final words that people remember.

When Jesus gives his last speech to his disciples, his Great Commission, what (according to Matthew) does he say? ‘Go’ – don’t keep the good news to yourself; go and make more disciples. ‘Teach’- pass on what I told you. ‘Baptise’ – immerse people. In what? In God. What kind of God?

‘In the Father, Son and Holy Spirit’ Immerse them in the God who is three and yet One. That’s what I was doing last Sunday, next door in St Michael le Belfrey Church. I got wet, immersing five young adults in water in our baptistery, declaring: ‘I baptise you, in the name of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit.’ It marked the end of their old life, as they now chose to follow Jesus for the rest of their days.

While we need to take seriously the rise of atheism, especially in the contemporary West, most people in the world today, and across human history, believe and have believed, in God. The question is: what kind of God is he? Let me highlight three things we can confidently say about the nature of God from our readings.

First God is Trinity. We’ve been seeing this already, for today is Trinity Sunday.

This three-in-one way of understanding God has sometimes been seen as an embarrassing problem which the ancient church has passed down to us. Passed like a hospital pass in rugby, that’s difficult to receive! Or passed on like inheriting an old house, that comes with a lingering fusty smell that’s annoying and we just can’t get rid of it! Over the last two to three hundred years, ultra-rational people have often thought like this about the Trinity, finding it awkward: how can God be three and yet one? They find it goes against their neat categories, being untidy and even contradictory. But, think about it, we live in a world that rightly celebrates both unity and diversity; they don’t have to contradict. Also most of us can live holding two things in tension; it doesn’t phase us. We call this paradox – living with apparent contradiction. For example: throw things in the sky and they normally fall. And yet people travel daily on planes in the sky, trusting they’re not going to fall to the ground. Also, people normally do all they can to avoid pain, yet across our planet every day women are giving birth, knowing full well it’s going to hurt! Those are just two examples showing that we humans can live with a bit of paradox in our lives! So, observing that’s there’s paradox in the Trinity doesn’t mean it’s not true. In fact for some, it makes things more reasonable, with Oxford theologian and scientist Alastair McGrath describing our faith as ‘shaped by a rich and coherent Trinitarian logic of faith.’

And of course the testimony of our Scriptures, from Genesis to Revelation, is that God is Trinity. Even in our first reading today, from Isaiah, it’s possible to see the interconnected and beautiful work of God the Creator, God the Lord and God the Spirit. So rather than being something to apologise for, I want us to celebrate the Trinity today! We gladly worship this wonderful, relational God, who’s revealed himself as Father, Son and Holy Spirit.

I hope you know this trinitarian God. We know him through Jesus Christ, who through his cross and resurrection has opened the way to the Father, and to the experience of the Spirit. It’s all through Jesus Christ. If you don’t know this God, come in prayer to Jesus Christ today, and enter into the joy and wonder of worshipping our Trinitarian God.

Here’s a second thing we see in our readings: he is a giving God. All three persons of the Trinity are like this: giving and giving and giving. They give love to each other. And to us. They just can’t help it! It’s in their nature. The close of 2 Corinthians (in our New Testament reading) speaks so simply, but profoundly of this, of the gracious work of Jesus: self-giving of himself with great love. Forgiving and freeing us. So unconditional, undeserved and unending! All overflowing to us. The deep love of God the Father: so strong, protective and creative, which he wants us to experience. The rich loving fellowship of the Holy Spirit: life-giving and empowering; pulling together and bringing unity, that he wants us to enjoy.

Notice that Jesus says: ‘All authority in heaven on earth has been given me,’ and then he passes it on. He gives it away, for our God is a giving God. This is why Isaiah, having told us that God doesn’t get tired or weary, then says that if we hope in him, expectantly putting our trust in him, we can have our strength renewed. Some of us here today, are tired and weary: worn out with life, with work, with politics, with our relationships, even sometimes with church. If that’s you, again come to our giving God and ask for him to give you his strength. For he loves to give to us all we need for life.

Ann Voskamp, a mother with young children, one day felt dared. She dared to write a list of a thousand things for which she was thankful. Not of gifts she wanted, but of gifts she already had. So she made a start:

• Morning shadows across the old floors
• Jam piled high on toast
• Cry of the blue jay bird from on high in the spruce

As she thought about these things, they made her smile, so she wrote them down in a journal. They were common things she was grateful for.  Here’s what she said about it: ‘I didn’t even know they were gifts really, until I wrote them down, and that is really what they look like: Gifts which God bestows. This writing it down – it is sort of like … unwrapping love.’ And that was the start of a joyful journey into thankfulness, eventually written up in her best-selling book One Thousand Gifts, a book which has helped many not only journal their thanksgivings, but more importantly live lives of gratitude to the trinitarian God who keeps on giving. This is our trinitarian God. He gives.

A third and final thing we discover about our God, is that he gives to us, not just for own benefit, but for others. He’s a going God – who sends us out to serve. That’s why Jesus said, in the Great Commission of Mt 28: ‘Go and make disciples.’ He wants us to give away our faith: pointing others to Jesus Christ, so they too follow him. To give away our money: generously giving to church, and to the poor and those who are struggling. To give away our time: investing in people and projects in our locality and beyond that make a difference. To give away our love: trusting that God will give more, so we can give again. This is our mission, with the Father being the sender, Jesus being the One sent, and the Spirit being the sending power.

The purpose is transformation. Starting in us. And then spilling out, well beyond ourselves. John, one of those baptised last week in St Michael le Belfrey Church, gets this. Although he’s only been a believer a few weeks, here’s what he said in a short interview before his baptism last week: “I moved to York but didn’t expect to find Jesus or church. But Jesus found me. That’s how it feels. I want to be baptised to start a new life with Jesus. I want to live better. And I also want to make a difference in the world.” How right he was! As disciples, we are baptised people: immersed into the Trinity, to live a new life. Yes, to live better. But also to make a difference in the world. Eighteenth century pioneering missionary Henry Venn grasped this. On arriving in India, knowing that was the place he was called to serve, he famously said: ‘Until now I have not been very useful. Let me now burn for God.’

So on this Trinity Sunday, may you experience the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit, as he gives his love to you, and sends you out, with heart on fire, to transform the world.

Grown men don’t cry – Revd Dr Ian McIntosh

Preacher: Revd Dr Ian McIntosh

Title of sermon: Grown men don’t cry

Date/time/service: Sunday 13 March, 11am, Choral Eucharist

“Grown men don’t cry”.  This popular proverb has shaped many a male upbringing speaking as it does of an expectation of a masculinity which displays no emotion or weakness.  When the Tsunami hit Indonesia on Boxing Day 2004, the BBC reporter, Ben Brown, broadcast a live interview with a lady who had lost everything.  They stood amongst the rubble of a former home, surrounded by debris as she told the world of her pain.  It was heart rending.  And his response was to offer her an arm around the shoulder, with tears in his eyes.  A rare public display of compassion seen on live TV.

“Grown men don’t cry”.  Yes they do.  And they do at the moment in the Ukraine where a broadcast last week showed a distraught man able to do nothing but weep uncontrollably as his home burnt.  Tears stream down the faces of those husbands and fathers who have to say what they hope is a temporary farewell to their wives and children fleeing from railway stations in Kyiv to become refugees.

“Grown men don’t cry”.  This one does when I see the suffering of others and can do little to help.  When those I love are upset and I can do nothing about it.  When I feel overwhelmed with expectations. And in a world where the rates of males taking their own lives is alarmingly high, it is important that we all debunk these popular myths which can be so damaging.

The shortest verse in the Bible is in John’s gospel – Jesus wept.  Grown men do cry.  Jesus cried.  He cried at the tomb of his friend Lazarus who had died before Jesus could reach him.  Jesus also cried as he approached Jerusalem in the days before he was crucified distressed at how that city would turn down the offer of peace and settle instead for an option of war and conflict.  And in our gospel reading this morning we read of what is essentially part one of that visit to Jerusalem.  Here Jesus laments over Jerusalem.

Lament is a very powerful expression of emotion.  It is a deep being moved over the plight of others, in this case of Jesus knowing that his life, his values, his care and compassion of others will not be recognised in Jerusalem.  In the very place where they most needed it, those who he loves will refuse it.   At the very centre of the faith which nourished Jesus, his love would be spurned.

Jesus’ lament is also a raging.  A raging at the despotic family of Herod whose forebears had already caused Jesus’ family to flee as refugees to Egypt when he was young. And now a new Herod who Jesus names openly as a fox seeks to do him more harm. And yet in the midst of rage, Jesus is determined that his mission of love to the world, to the Herod’s of this world, will not be curtailed, even if it will end up in his own death.

Jesus’ lament comes from the depths of his compassion – that deep place of being moved in the bowels that leads to wanting to gather up others into safety but can’t.  That is where his compassion always comes from.  It is expressed here by a Jesus who is deeply in touch with his femininity as he employs a beautiful image from wider creation of a mother hen gathering her chicks.  Laments allow this man Jesus to describe his longing in an image drawn from the world of mothering and women.

Laments are part of a language of compassion.  In the Bible and especially in the psalms, they allow impossible questions to be posed without answers.  They are vehicles to express feelings that need to be expressed.  They cry out to a God who often feels a long way off and who seems powerless. Laments enable a language of tears, a primal language without words, one that is greater than words.

So grow men do cry and they do rage.  And today as we worship this morning in the midst of war in the Ukraine, we too cry and rage.  We cry with the women, men and children of the Ukraine who are battered, scarred and so fearful.  We long with the many people in Russia and around the world for an end to this outrageous war.  We name that fox Putin and pray that he will have the decency to seek a withdrawal of his troops and to ensure ceasefires that truly allow people to be safe. We weep and God weeps too as God does in Jesus Christ.  God weeps to show the depths of compassion and solidarity with a broken and fractured world.  God rages against injustice and calls us to rage too – to be angry and to channel that into acts of mercy and compassion. God calls us to work for a healed world where such tyranny will no longer be.

It is very hard to be powerless, to have little to say in the face of such trauma. However, we have a God who is as God is in Jesus – a loving, merciful, compassionate God who weeps and rages and laments and loves.  And if that is what God does when life gets unbearably tough, then that is what we are called to do this morning and this Lent – to weep, to rage, to lament and to love.

Returning to meet with Jesus – Revd Daniel Jones, Honorary Minor Canon

May the words of my lips and the meditations of all our hearts, be acceptable to you, O Lord, our strength and our Redeemer. Amen.

They appeared in glory and were speaking of his departure. Luke 9.31

When living in exile just before the 1917 revolution, Lenin is said to have written that, “There are decades where nothing happens, and there are weeks when decades happen.” What I think he was referring to, was the tendency for a society to remain apparently stable for long periods of time, during which time ideas and beliefs bubble under the surface and eventually, for good or ill, pour out in the events that we then read about and see in the news.

Both on a societal and on an individual level, what we see going on on the surface is an indication of what’s happening underneath. Our actions betray our thoughts. Every time I sit and listen to a sermon preached, every time I read a Christian book of any kind and, dare I say it,
every time I stand in a pulpit, I’m aware of how we are called to live out our beliefs. The whole point of preaching is that you and I are invited to read our lives and our Bibles together in the hope that each might help us to make sense of the other. And yet, there are weeks when so much darkness happens in our world that it feels difficult to see the promise of peace which is reflected in the pages of our Bibles being equally obvious in the text of our newspapers. That’s a rather longwinded way of saying, how might you and I hold onto the stories about Moses, Jesus and the transfiguration that we have heard this morning and use them to reflect on the unsettling realities of what’s happening in Ukraine.

To try to do so risks seeming to trivialise the current political situation and yet to shy away from doing so would be to fail in our responsibility as Christians to see the world and its history as belonging wholly to God. I don’t have any easy answers to that, actually I’m not sure I have any answers at all, and so, as much for my own benefit as for anyone else’s, and just in case you are feeling a little lost or sad or frightened by it all, I hope you’ll permit me to share some thoughts in the hope that God and the safety of all God’s people might be for a few moments in the meditations of all our hearts.

Writing about a hundred years before Jesus, Marcus Varro wrote “Antiquities of Human and Divine Things.” The work is long since lost but Augustine preserved Varro’s thinking for us in one of his books. Augustine seems to have liked Varro’s distinction between three different versions of theology: mythical; political and natural. Mythical theology is the accounts of the actions of God told by the storytellers and written in the pages of the Bible. Natural theology is the works of God glimpsed in the beauty and order of our world. And political theology is how human beings make their own, let’s be honest often faltering attempt, to reflect divine beauty and order in our own social structures – including this one. The distinction between these three things is, I think, a good one but only if you remember that they can’t actually be separated. The job of every human being, as God’s pilgrim people, is to live out the story of God: that means looking for God’s truth in our world and living out God’s values in our relationships.

And that’s why, even when the news is difficult, we begin by returning to the Galilean countryside to meet with Jesus. And this morning, you’ve just heard Jesus and his disciples having what can only be referred to as the greatest of all mountaintop experiences. Just for a moment, Jesus disciples are surrounded by “light inaccessible, hid from our eyes” as we will sing in a few minutes time. They are lost in very presence of God. Is it any wonder that they ask to make dwellings for Moses and Elijah and one for Jesus himself. In other words, let’s stay here forever. Let’s just get lost in our beliefs. Let’s just tell the stories of our faith. Let’s just look for God in God’s divine light. Let’s be mystical and natural theologians without having to do the uncomfortable job of being political ones too. You can’t do that, says Jesus, and he sends them back out again. What follows the transfiguration is a story of how they come down from the mountain, and into a crowd where Jesus heals a sick child. Is Jesus making the point, I wonder, that mountaintop experiences are great but the more open we are to the presence of God, the more willing we have to be to return to really engaging with the sufferings of our world.

NT Wright puts it like this: we have to remember that “it was that the glory which they had glimpsed on the mountain, the glory of God’s chosen son, the Servant who was carrying in himself the promise of redemption, would finally be unveiled on a very different hill, an ugly little hill outside Jerusalem.” Jesus’ hope for a better future always means engaging with the lived reality of his world, even if it hurts to do so. I wonder whether that’s what he meant to teach those disciples that day: that it’s good to be lost in worship but it’s only truly worship if God’s redemption promises somehow play out in their lives, and ours. Being people who live out the story of crucifixion and resurrection means that we are at the same time willing to stand alongside others in the sufferings of our world and also alive to the hope that God will bring and end to suffering. We are called to be people who are changed by the divine promise of a future hope. This week, I wonder what that means for you? For me, it means that Jesus reminds me that violence is never an answer, that the suffering of the innocent is never right and that injustice has to be faced down even if to do so is costly. Our lives too must be transformed by our beliefs. It also means that, while the peoples of Russia and Ukraine may feel a long way away, you are I are called to somehow come down from the mountain, to somehow engage with issue, even in the midst of our confusion and sadness, even not knowing what we might actually do. If nothing else, we are called to pray for those who suffer and for those who work for their freedom, as we continue to tell the story of God’s future hope to a world that longs to hear it.

Amen.