‘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.”

‘Love’ – The Reverend Canon James Walters

Palm Sunday – Love

Contrary to the expectations of many, Christianity is a significant force in the public life and global affairs of our times. But its meaning is contested, as it has always been. Earlier this year we saw an extraordinary argument about the nature of Christian love playing out on social media between the Vice President of the United States and the British podcaster and former politician Rory Stewart. A surprising array of people weighed in to share their views in this unlikely theological debate. Even Pope Francis, in his declining health, was prompted to intervene.

The Vice President, J D Vance, took up a theme from the writings of St Thomas Aquinas, the ordo amoris – Order of Love – to defend the American government’s isolationist and anti-immigrant policies. “We should love our family first,” he argued, “then our neighbours, then love our community, then our country, and only then consider the interests of the rest of the world.” In other words, there is a natural hierarchy of love, and that is affirmed in Christian teaching.

Rory Stewart, showing an unusual level of Christian education for British society today, responded by arguing that what was so radical about Christian love, as it entered the hierarchical and socially stratified world of the Roman Empire, was that it challenged and subverted all these natural instincts. Jesus commands us to love our enemies and to receive the hospitality of the despised Samaritan. He also says some decidedly unsettling things about letting go of immediate ties to family in order to be a disciple.

Pope Francis appeared to come down closer to Rory Stewart. He wrote:

“Christian love is not a concentric expansion of interests that little by little extend to other persons and groups. The true ordo amoris… is that which we discover by meditating constantly on the parable of the ‘Good Samaritan,’ that is, by meditating on the love that builds a fraternity open to all, without exception.”

It’s a temptation recurrent through Christian history to think of the Gospel as a system, a structure that we can impose on the world, and which will bring a reassuring tidiness to our lives. For years I studied an academic discipline called “systematic theology”, a potential Tower of Babel if ever there was one. The modern world loves to systematise and categorise into mental concepts, but the truths that radiate to us from the scriptures and that are encountered in the worship of the Church are not so easily pinned down.

Learning is certainly an important dimension of Christian life. But it’s not by mastering an intellectual system that we are changed from glory to glory, into the image of Christ.

Pope Francis is far wiser in speaking of Christian understanding as being gained through meditation. We become better Christians, not through firmer grasp of the ideas, but through allowing the truth to grow within us. And that prompts us to think much more about our patterns of prayer, silence, and worship. Christian love is not a system of any kind; it is a fruit that grows – so the First Epistle of John famously says – as we live in God and God lives in us.

Love is the first of the nine fruits of the Spirit that we find in the Letter to the Galatians. It is followed by joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control. We’re going to be reflecting on these fruits of the Spirit as we gather day by day in the Minster this Holy Week. They will help us think of Christianity less as a system and more as a formation in the ways of God and a growing into the fullness of humanity that has been revealed in this captivating but puzzling figure who rides into Jerusalem on a donkey on this Palm Sunday.

Love is the first of the fruits because love is the destination and the meaning of all that takes place in the gospels and culminates in the Passion story. It is love that comes to Jerusalem in the name of the Lord, love that is rejected and imprisoned, love that offers itself for our redemption on the cross, love that banishes the order of death to establish its ordo amoris as the self-giving energy by which we are to live in harmony with one another and with the earth.

So come to church as much as you can this week, not to learn more, not to have a better grasp of the Christian system, but to grow. Grow in all the fruits that the Spirit cultivates in the soil of a heart turned to God. But grow most of all in love, fruit of the seed that St John, in the twelfth chapter of his Gospel, tells us must die in order to bear much fruit.

This is the love that today’s fractured and frightening world needs, perhaps more than it has ever needed it. So let us stop seeing Christianity as a system, a set of ideas, and let us allow it to grow in us, that we may bear fruit from the seed that dies.

‘Rejoice, Jerusalem – Walking Together in Faith’ – The Reverend Dr Thomas Pott o.s.b., Sant’Anselmo, Rome

Rejoice, Jerusalem – Walking Together in Faith

On this Sunday, we are halfway through our Lenten journey toward the great feast of Easter. According to the ancient antiphon at the beginning of the Mass, Laetare, Jerusalem, this Sunday is called Laetare: “Rejoice, Jerusalem, and all who love her. Be joyful, all who were in mourning; exult and be satisfied at her consoling breast” (cf. Is 66:10-11).

Jerusalem, the city of peace, symbolizing God’s intimacy with humanity on this earth, spiritually nourishes all who love her, just as a child is nourished by its mother. The exclamation “Rejoice” is addressed both to Jerusalem as an image of the Church, which gathers us into its womb, and to each of us personally and individually. Indeed, a mother’s love for her children is not merely a dynamic meant for a collective but a movement of the heart, a vital flow of blood to each son and daughter she has brought into the world.

The Tension Between the Individual and the Collective

In the readings we have just heard, we can perceive a certain tension between relationships of “one to one”—the heart of God speaking to the heart of each individual—and relationships of “one to many”—God’s love addressed to all together as a single body. It is not so much a matter of differentiating between these two manifestations of God’s, let’s say, motherhood, but rather of realizing that when God speaks to the whole, He includes each of its parts as specifically as possible—each one of us, every human being without exception.

Thus, in the reading from the prophet Isaiah, God addresses the one He calls His chosen one: Jacob, the father of the People of the Covenant. He exhorts him not to turn away from God—that is, not to build his own life project apart from God’s plan, relying on his own strength and doubting God’s faithfulness and power.

In the Bible, constructing one’s own project apart from God is symbolized by the making of idols. Isaiah presents a man and his companions who work together on a beautiful artistic and religious project: they build a false god. And when they finish, they look at it and say: “It is good!” (Is 41:7), echoing the words of God’s blessing at creation: “He saw that it was good.”

However, Jacob and, through him, all the members of the people of Israel, are called to devote themselves entirely to God’s project and to let Him give them wings like eagles, so they may run with God without growing weary, walk with Him without growing tired (Is 40:31).

In the same passage, God calls Abraham His friend. To him and to all his descendants, God pledges His faithfulness and His unwavering presence so that no fear, anxiety, or confusion may take hold of them: “Do not fear, for I am with you, do not be afraid, for I am your God; I will strengthen you, I will help you, I will uphold you with my victorious right hand” (Is 41:13).

The promise to Abraham, the word spoken to Jacob, is addressed to them and, through them, to each one of us, both collectively and individually: “Run with me without growing weary, walk with me without growing tired, be the companion who works with me in creation.”

In other words, God says to Jacob and Abraham and, through them, to us: “Give me your faithfulness, just as I give you mine.”

The Faithful Companionship of Paul and Timothy

In the Second Letter of Saint Paul to Timothy, we see two other faithful companions and friends. Like the idol-makers mentioned in Isaiah, they work together with diligence. However, their shared journey is not limited to a project restricted to the realm of their own human and fragile existence; it is entirely devoted to what Paul calls the Kingdom of Christ.

Indeed, it is “in the presence of God and of Christ Jesus, who is to judge the living and the dead, and in view of his appearing and his kingly power,” that Paul addresses Timothy in the same way God once spoke to Jacob, Abraham, and all their descendants: Keep the faith, remain faithful, advance and run with God, rise up with the wings He gives you.

It is with this fervor that Paul entrusts his mission and ministry dedicated to the truth to Timothy. This is not something to be taken lightly or merely according to Timothy’s own convenience. On the contrary, Paul adjures him to fulfill his ministry to perfection. To be a minister of God, as Paul himself was, means to devote oneself entirely and existentially to God, just as God devotes Himself to us: existentially.

Is it not beautiful that these exhortations—from one man to his friend, from an apostle to his spiritual son—are part of the divine revelation contained in the Bible?

This evening, Scripture unveils an important aspect of what it means to walk together in God’s footsteps: transmission. And is it not extraordinary that Paul’s solemn recommendation, spoken this evening in this sacred and historic place, is addressed to us—men and women of today—gathered here to pray together?

Yes, it is certainly wonderful! But also daunting. Because we must ask ourselves:

• What effect does Paul’s admonition have on us?
• Will we leave the church changed, at least a bit…, renewed in our faith, more deeply united to God’s plan for the world?
• Are we ready to become more inwardly aware of the fact that we are entrusted with a ministry and a mission in service of God and creation?

Living Out Our Baptism with Authenticity

Yet in itself, Paul’s words tonight are not extraordinary compared to what we receive every time we participate in worship, every time we enter the church to pray, or even every time God speaks to us directly through a human person in need of our help or love.

What is special of today’s scriptural message is that it depends on us to pass on to the people with whom we walk together the mission that flows from our baptism—the ministry that arises from our faith, hope, and love—the mission that stems from our calling as followers of Jesus. “Proclaim the message; be persistent, whether the time is favourable or unfavourable; convince, rebuke, and encourage, with the utmost patience in teaching.” This is the exhortation by which we are called to encourage one another “in the presence of God and of Christ Jesus.”

But Paul’s assurance in carrying out his ministry, as well as God’s command to Abraham and Jacob to place their trust in Him alone, also teaches us how to understand and live out our baptism with consistency—how to be truly followers of Jesus, walking together in His footsteps.

First and foremost, we must become aware that walking together toward unity in one body—the Church—is not for the sake of our own projects, nor to build a new Tower of Babel, a temple to our idols.

Rather, it is about serving the communion that life itself generates, building the spiritual Jerusalem, the City of Peace, or as Paul calls it, the Kingdom of Christ.

It is the Kingdom that welcomes us, that envelops us when we are gathered in worship. It is the society that exists within us and among us when our communion is truly in service of all our brothers and sisters in humanity.

Walking Together in Truth

Thus, each of us must define our priorities according to our life situation. No excuses—we are all responsible for the path our feet take!

Trusting in God alone and renouncing any project where He is kept at a distance means becoming bridge-builders and destroyers of walls of division, people who rejoice in encountering others with an open heart, without judgment, without contempt for what seems different from us.

At the level of our divided and deeply troubled churches, this calls for a conversion of ecclesial mentalities, focusing on Christ himself who leads us, walking together in spirit and in truth.

In contexts where Christians pray and celebrate their unity in the living and indivisible Body of Christ, like here and now, our true identity as followers of Jesus is to be communion.

Let us cast aside our false gods, let go of our divisive and exclusive identities. Let us walk together in the footsteps of Jesus Christ, without weariness, without fatigue; let us fly with the wings God gives us.

Amen.

‘Know where you stand, and then stand there’ – The Reverend Canon Dr Jennifer Cooper

[Mr Dean: thank you for your warm words of welcome.  I know I speak for each one of us of the Malines Conversation Group when I say that we are very moved by the use of the Mercier chalice and the Malines ciborium today as we share communion together. Such gifts exchanged between our two communions are powerful symbols of our desire for unity. They speak more powerfully than any words]

We Christians have turned a specific corner with this Sunday. We are now more than halfway through Lent. We are now turning in anticipation of celebrating Easter. We can see the light at the end of the Lenten fast.

Lent is a time of soul searching for Christians. It is a time of reflecting on our lives. A time to be honest with ourselves. It is a time to turn away from those things which do not bring life to ourselves and to others. But Lent is certainly not a time to be gloomy, even if we know we need to amend our lives. No matter how much I might be a work in progress, no matter how much each of us is a work in progress, God remains steadfast. God never breaks faith with us.

It is fitting then, at this midpoint in Lent, that our readings from scripture give us powerful images of God’s generosity, of the abundance of God’s provision for us. Our readings today are readings of promise and of consolation. They offer us some refreshment, they offer us hope. Indeed they give us images of feasting.

But our readings also offer us words of wisdom that speak very much to the challenges of our own day. They invite us to pause and to ask ourselves: where do I stand? What do I stand for? With whom will I stand? They are an invitation to search our hearts and to ask ourselves: what do I truly value.

Hope is certainly what our world needs now, as much as it ever has. The landscape all around us is shifting. Nothing seems too stable. There are so many places in our world where it is not safe to stand. There is political chaos. Borders between nations are up for grabs. We see this in every corner of our world. As a Canadian I ask myself: what will become of my homeland? And that is to say nothing of nations at war.

And the planet itself is in a state of churn: the devastating earthquake in Myanmar reminds us vividly that human life itself, human flourishing, is precarious. Our planet is in chaos.

And yet our scriptures invite us to trust that God wants none of these things for us. Not war, not the brokenness of this earth, not the displacement of peoples from their homes. God wants only that all people have life and have it in abundance. God’s longing is for our flourishing.

Our first reading tells us of the first time the ancient Israelites celebrate the Passover in their homeland. It is a tiny snippet of a much longer story. They have fled enslavement in Egypt and survived generations in the wilderness. Now, at last they have arrived at their own homeland. It is a good land.

The land itself is a symbol of God’s generosity and care for them. They no longer need the mana fed to them in the wilderness, now they are in a land of plenty.

Only a few verses on in this book, immediately beyond what we have read today, Joshua is commanded by the Lord to take off his sandals. He is told by the Lord that the land on which he stands is holy.

God’s generosity is the very ground on which Joshua stands. It is as if the Lord has said to him: ‘stand here, stand still here stand still for a moment. Can you understand what I have given you?’ Only if you understand what I have given you, will you understand how much I value you – you will understand your worth in my eyes. This place is the symbol of my faithfulness to you.

And then our second reading. The parable Jesus tells his followers is also a story of wandering, of hunger, of coming home and of feasting.

There are two brothers, both of whom have a lot to learn. The older brother stays at home. He believes he has acted justly and responsibly. And on the surface of it, he has. Any of us here today who have slightly reckless younger siblings might feel rather sorry for this brother. Here he is, doing what he believes to be the right thing. But he just does not understand the deeper value – that underlying his father’s generosity there is a deeper truth. The recognition of the immeasurable value of each person, including this rather wayward younger brother.

And the younger brother simply does not understand his own worth. That might sound ironic – he has just squandered his father’s money recklessly. He has been utterly humiliated. He has the good sense to turn around and head home, to ask for forgiveness. But even then he misses the point. His father does not want him to become his hired hand, he simply wants him to be who he is: a much loved son.

Neither son has really understood the true meaning of their worth. The older brother in his own insecurity is so blinded by resentment and jealousy that he cannot welcome his brother home. And the younger son believes that in order to return home he must become a servant – he cannot believe that his father will welcome him for who he truly is.

Two brothers not really sure where they stand or why – with a lot to learn.

At some point last week a quotation popped up on my Facebook feed. It was a quotation taken from Daniel Berrigan – an American catholic priest and peace activist. Berrigan first became well known at the time of the Vietnam war. The quotation that popped up was short: ‘know where you stand, and then stand there’. It seems very apt for our time. It has been running through my mind since.

It is one thing to think we know where we stand. It is quite another thing to stand there when this becomes costly, when the ground seems to be shifting under our feet. We can only stand still in a place, stand fast, if we truly know why we are there – if we are committed to the ground on which we stand. – what are the values upon which we stand. What is the ground.

On this fourth Sunday of Lent we have had two readings that touch on the themes of place, of belonging, of God’s generosity and the immeasurable worth of each and every person.

If we – each one of us – stand fast in the place of God’s generosity we might just bring about a world in which everyone has a place, not just of safety but of feasting.

May it be so.

“What Are You Expecting?” – The Right Reverend Mark Edington

[Text: Luke 21:28: “Now when these things begin to take place,
stand up and raise your heads, because your redemption is drawing near.”]

On this Advent Sunday, the first day of a new church year, the Dean has chosen to set before you in this pulpit an American bishop, which may just be all the proof you need that the end times spoken of by Jesus in Luke’s gospel are now well and truly upon us.
We have a reputation here, I know. We are too enthusiastic, too animated, too emotive, and too long. So if by mere chance you happened to know before you arrived in church this morning just what it was you would be faced with, all the more credit to you for your courage and forbearance in coming.

My English grandparents, who came to America a hundred years ago from Bath and from Berkshire, would never in a thousand years have expected that this grandchild would ever end up preaching in York Minister. Their expectations for all of us were considerably more modest.

But you will perhaps permit me to wonder—what was it you were expecting?

Maybe you have long since passed the point at which you expect anything at all from the preacher on Sunday morning. Perhaps you are among those who come faithfully to church not expecting anything new or insightful to be said, no more teaching with authority. Over the course of two thousand years it has all been said, and we come instead for the beauty, and the music, and the sacrament, and the community.

I find that in many of the churches I visit, that’s often the case. People have no more expectation of the preacher than to provide a warm bath of words between the gospel and the Creed. My own preaching professor, who once stood in this same pulpit, would not infrequently say to us beginning students—“Well, I came expecting nothing, and I got what I expected.” Is that what you expected?

I wonder what you are expecting of this year of grace that lies ahead of us, uncharted, today. What are you expecting for your family? What are you expecting for your work—or perhaps your search for work?

What are you expecting for health, and the health of those nearest to you?

What are you expecting for those whom you may know and love who are contending with a life-ending illness, in the wake of the vote in Parliament on Friday?

What you are expecting for your country in the year ahead, or for the new government in mine? What you are expecting about the miserable, grinding, depraved war over Ukraine’s future, or for the violence tearing apart the Holy Land, or for the one hundred and twenty million displaced people in the world desperately seeking refuge from the war and weather driving them from their homes?

And now that I’ve invited you on a tour d’horizon of all the things you’re expecting in the year ahead, I wonder whether I might just gently ask you: Where, in any of those—much less in each of them—are you expecting Christ?

God created us to be planners. We are blessed with memory, reason, and skill, as the prayer teaches us, but the purpose of the first is chiefly to refine and strengthen the second and the third to help us navigate our future. We are, by the grace of God, plan-making creatures—and by the mercy of God, able to change our plans when they turn out to have been poorly formed.

But for the most part, when we look toward the future, our expectations tend to fall into one of two camps—hopes, for our own ambitions or our own desires; and dreads, for the things we see on the horizon that might defeat or disappoint.

And for most of us, I’d wager, the balance between those is definitely leaning in the direction of dreads.

The thing is, in all of that there’s very little room for Christ in between our hopes and dreads—to say nothing of the Christ who is coming, Christ in glory, robed in dreadful majesty. We don’t lift our expectations much higher than the ground beneath our feet, let alone to the horizon in the East where the dangerous power of God’s love to change everything breaks like the dawn.

And that is a problem. Because it turns out that what we expect—the discipline we bring toward living toward the plans our expectations shape—has profound importance for our spiritual lives.

From the evidence in Luke’s gospel, it’s a little hard to make out just who it is Jesus is addressing in the teaching we heard this morning. We get two clues, one just at the end of the previous chapter, and one at the very end of this chapter, after what we heard this morning.

The first clue says that Jesus was saying these things to the disciples, but “in the hearing of all the people” (Luke 20:45). And the second clue says that “Every day he was teaching in the temple…. and all the people would get up early in the morning to listen to him in the temple” (Luke 21:37-38).

So Jesus is speaking to a mixed crowd. He is speaking to those who have walked with him for three long, dusty years now, and to those who have just caught wind of his message. To say it differently, he is speaking to a wide variety of expectations about God. Which is to say, he is speaking directly to our condition here, in this moment, in this place, at the gate of this year.

The disciples are in that crowd; and if you look from here there is nothing to distinguish them. They are not more educated and not more wealthy. We don’t even have any reason to believe they are more religiously observant; we never see them spending a great deal of time in the synagogue, or Jesus, for that matter.

What sets them apart from most of the rest is something not about class or education or piety, but about their hearts. For reasons we’ll never fully know, they have each of them lived in the fervent, abiding expectation that God is going to enter their lives in some way. Their planning for the future has involved the constant lookout for God’s transforming love to show up.

God knows this, and that is why God calls them. And that is why what appears to us with the eyes of this world as the height of irresponsibility—leaving jobs and families and communities and the expectations of others behind to follow a wandering preacher—is for them merely the enacting of the expectation with which they have approached their future.

Mary has lived in the fervent, abiding expectation that God will enter her life in some way. Her planning for the future, young though she is, has involved the constant lookout for God’s transforming love to show up. And that is why, one fine day, Gabriel shows up on her doorstep.

And when the angel’s message comes in a way not just unexpected but questionably appropriate, when it comes with what appears to us with the eyes of this world as the height of irresponsibility, it is for her merely the enacting of the expectation with which she approaches her future.

So dear people of God, what about you? Can you make space somewhere between the hopes and the dreads in your heart to make a place for expecting Christ to enter into your life anew?

I am not your bishop, but I feel obliged to offer you this solemn word of warning: If there is any one thing we can learn from the Gospels that is incontrovertible, any one thing that is always and everywhere true, it is that no one— who encounters Christ—no one—leaves that moment
unchanged. No one.

And that is why so many people make every possible, desperate effort to avoid the meeting. Whether for good or ill, the presence of Christ, when it comes, will transform us. No one leaves unscathed. Some of our deepest convictions will be questioned; some of our most treasured institutions will be shaken; some of our most certain prejudices will be laid to ruin.

And in the midst of all that, as much today as in those first encounters, some will follow in faith; some will reject in outrage; and some, like the rich young ruler, will walk away, grieving.

I don’t know what it will be for you this Advent. I only know that if you look for it, if you expect it, it will surely come; and if you are ready for it, if you will risk it, it will change you, too.

So come with me out into the world, this world so cast over by what feels like the encroaching darkness. Come with me out to the hillside, and let us sit together, facing the east, waiting in expectation for the dawn to break.

Amen.