I recently had an experience… – Revd Jane Speck (Chaplain at York St John University)

10.00am Sunday 8 September

Luke 14:25-33

May I speak in the name of the Living God,

Father, Son and Holy Spirit.  Amen.

I recently had an experience I’ve never had before: I bought a house.  And in order to do this, I put myself at the mercy of numerous estate agents.  What a charming bunch they are!  I really appreciated the ones who use brutal honesty as a sales tactic, they were my favourites.  But the ones who were capable of persuading us that a tiny box room could, with careful rearrangement of furniture, easily be used as a double bedroom – they took my breath away.

So now that we’ve moved into the house we eventually bought, and most of its ‘original features’ have turned out to be polystyrene – … – I have been reflecting on the tactics of sales people and how very skilled they are.

And it strikes me, on reading today’s Gospel passage, that Jesus was a terrible salesman.  Truly, awful.  For someone who was clearly gathering supporters to himself in their thousands, his sales pitch still needed work.

Take today’s Gospel passage.  Three times Jesus suggests something that’s really hard to do, a hugely unattractive prospect, then tells the people that unless they do this thing, they cannot be his disciples.

So, what is Jesus’s three-point sermon on how to be his disciple?  It’s quite simple really.  Hate your family, prepare to die, and give up everything you own.

Remind me why we’re doing this again?!

Perhaps we’d better have a closer look.  Hate your family, Jesus appears to say.  Well, tragically some of us might find that rather easier than others… but I don’t think Jesus is really telling us to break the fifth commandment!  Biblical scholars, commenting on this verse, assert that in Hebrew understanding the concept of hate was closer to a re-alignment of priorities: that which one loves comes first, with that which one hates coming second.  The word ‘hate’ has become stronger in meaning over time.  But does this different interpretation let us off the hook?  Jesus is calling on the people – calling on us – to realign our priorities, to reorder our relationships, to give precedence to him.  He’s asking us to rethink what ‘family’ and family relationships mean to us.  We live in divided times.  Times when we seem to be encouraged, by those in power, to give voice to our bias and feel justified in our prejudice.  I wonder whether we are here being invited, by Jesus, to think again about what we mean by ‘family’.  To cast the net wider than our little nuclear family and to start including our friends, our neighbours, and also – most challengingly – those we find difficult.  Those we find threatening.  Jesus was all about love, so perhaps when he says ‘hate your family’ what he means is change your priority, stop focussing exclusively on the people closest to you and start loving the people you find it most difficult to love.

It’s radical and challenging and uncomfortable.  It’s counter-cultural and goes against instinct.  Jesus is saying that in order to free ourselves to follow in his way; his way of love, we mustn’t let anything, even those people we love the most; even our love for ourselves and our lives, come between us and him.

I’m not sure what this looks like in our real lives.  I’m not sure because the thought of putting anything before my family feels uncomfortable to me.  But I also know that I’m a better, calmer mother when I pray more.  I’m a better, kinder wife when I have God at the centre of my life.  I’m a more open and generous neighbour when I put Jesus first.  I know that if I try to practice what Jesus says it turns out to be better for my family and those around me, not worse.

Jesus didn’t come to make things easier for us.  He came to make them better, in ways we can barely imagine.

The second of these hard sayings of Jesus tells us that unless we carry the cross we cannot be his disciples.  I don’t know about you, but I’ve grown up singing Anglican hymns exhorting me to ‘Take up my cross and follow him’, and attending Faith Walks where a slightly smaller than average cross is handed round for participants to carry for a while.  So there’s a bit of me that thinks I’ve got this bit covered.  I’m good with this.  For the people hearing Jesus say this ‘live’, it would have been horrifying because they saw, regularly, people put to death in this manner, and would do anything to avoid it.  No one knew, at this point, that this was how Jesus would die.  But crucifixion was used as a tool of terror to keep the people oppressed and compliant.

How can we understand this now?  Perhaps it’s a bit like Jesus saying, ‘just stare down the barrel of this loaded gun, while you follow me.’  He is inviting us to let go of the desire to preserve our own life, to stay safe.  He is inviting us to accept the inevitability of our death, in order that we might truly, richly live.  You know how people who have had a brush with death often say that it has taught them to live more fully now?  Perhaps this is your experience.  Jesus wants it to be the attitude we all have: let go of fear, of procrastination, of waiting for life to start, and live it as if you are about to die.

So to the third of Jesus’ hard sayings. ‘You cannot become my disciples,’ he says, ‘if you do not give up all your possessions.’  Well, speaking as someone who recently moved house there is certainly some temptation here.  We live in materialistic times, and we own a lot of stuff.  Really a lot.  It certainly focusses the mind to see how many boxes are needed to fit it all in once it’s off the shelves and out of the cupboards.  Do we need it?  Probably not.  Are we attached to it?  Yes.  Whether because it has an emotional value, or it confers a certain status, or it’s just easier to keep stuff than go through the process of getting rid of it, we do become attached to our possessions.  If we didn’t Maria Kondo wouldn’t be a best-selling author, and Ikea wouldn’t have a reputation for providing excellent storage solutions.

But at the end of the day it is just stuff, and as any refugee will tell us, when your lives are at stake you’ll be glad just to take your family and the means for survival with you.  Stuff can be replaced.

As ever, I suspect that Jesus is aiming for something even harder here.  What else do we possess that we might need to let go of?  Perhaps you hang on to an image of yourself that’s hard to let go – seeing yourself as professionally successful, or physically attractive, or a really great Christian; perhaps conversely you see yourself as a failure, someone who can’t be trusted with anything, and derive a certain comfort from feeling useless – and this self-image, positive or negative, has become more important to you than Jesus himself.  Perhaps you have a tendency to see your partner or children as possessions, and need to set them free to be themselves.  What is it that you are clinging to, that’s getting in the way of making following Jesus your priority?

Jesus’ sales pitch might be brutal, but at least it’s honest.  He recommends to his followers that they count the cost.  After all, who starts to build a house without working out first whether they’ll have the money to finish it?  Actually, if you watch Grand Designs you’ll know that a surprising number of people do just that!  Don’t be like them.

Or who starts a war without working out whether they have a reasonable chance of winning?  It really focusses the mind on peace.  I probably don’t need to draw the comparison with our own nation, and our ability – or not – to take the consequences of our actions into consideration.  I’ll leave that for you to ponder.

Jesus is not trying to hide the fact that following him is hard.  He’s not trying to persuade anyone that polystyrene features are the real thing.  Count the cost, he says, then make your choice.  Jesus ‘calls people to a kind of discipleship that is not cheap (akin to Bonhoeffer’s aversion toward “cheap grace”), not easy, and not to be entered into without deep consideration of the consequences and costs.’  (Jeannine K. Brown Professor of New Testament Bethel Seminary St. Paul, MN)

But what would we be choosing?  If we count the cost and pay the price, will it all be worth it?  Yes.  Yes, because what Jesus is offering is life, life in all its richness.  His are words and questions that offer life. Isn’t that why we showed up here today?  We want life.  We want to be fully alive.  We want to be real and authentic.  We want to be like Jesus.  Even with his terrible sales pitch, his brutal honesty, there’s something about Jesus that makes us trust him; that makes us believe:  We can do this.  He has made it possible.  So let’s not lose the power and gift of his words.  Let’s not lose this moment.  Let’s not leave here the same person we were when we came in.  What is one thing, just one thing, large or small, that you could do or give up that changes your priorities, that reorders your relationships, that gives precedence to Christ?  Choose that and you leave here today a different person.  Choose life.

Amen.

(Last paragraph adapted from a sermon by Revd Michael K. Marsh, US Episcopal Church)

Tribute to Lord Habgood – Bishop David Wilbourne

Tribute at Lord Habgood’s Thanksgiving Service on 27 June in York Minister
by Bishop David Wilbourne, – Chaplain to the Archbishop of York 1991-1997

‘Woe unto me if I preach not the Gospel.’
John lived those lines of St Paul.

No death has ever affected me as much as John’s.
Just one hour after he had died,
the Publisher from SPCK rang and said,
‘You’d better get on with his biography!’
Since then John has filled
my every waking and sleeping moment,
our home has been littered with towers of papers
bearing strange insignia such as
Westcott Compline 1957
– add milk and heat over stove;
House of Bishops Homosexuality, Adelphi Hotel, 1988
– that sounds like one great party;
and Cuddesdon Retreat 1966.
As well as being the year of that World Cup,
’66 was the year of theological college wars.
‘They think it’s all over, it is now!’

It wasn’t all over for Queen’s College, Birmingham:
ecumenical John created a veritable kingdom outpost there.
Before Queen’s, at Queen’s and after Queen’s
John had no truck whatsoever with bland bishops
who told him this couldn’t be done, that couldn’t be done:
John did it.
Our Lord’s Last Supper plea, ‘That they may be one,’
drove him, lock, stock and barrel.

The biography is complete, 75,000 words,
I guess too many for this morning.
Time fails me to tell of John phoning 10 Downing Street
brokering an offer from the Durham miners
which would have saved Ted Heath’s government
and spared us the Lib/Lab pact and Margaret Thatcher.

Time fails me to tell of John proposing to persuade
Saddam Hussein to draw back from the brink of war.
Hussein presumably got wind of John’s searing silences
and promptly invaded Kuwait instead.

Time fails me to tell of John secretly meeting
with both sides during the Troubles in Northern Ireland
persuading North and South to adopt
the European Convention on Human Rights
assuring fearful minorities
they had at least a basic respect and dignity.

This morning I want to dwell on just one thing.
Whilst Terry Waite languished in his Beirut cell,
for forty days each year for four years
I was incarcerated in a silent metal cage, six by eight feet
which I had to share with two other men,
one of them John, the other Gordon, our driver.
We travelled around twenty thousand miles each year,
silence in the car was the absolute rule,
which made for four hundred hours,
forty working days
if you work ten hours a day.
A Lent every year.

Forty days of fast since we never ate in the car.
I once came armed with a pack of bacon sandwiches
and offered one to the Boss.
‘No thank you,’ he replied,
giving me the withering look Saul must have given
David when he asked for his daughter’s hand in marriage.
‘I’ve put tomato ketchup in them,’ I reassured him.
‘That makes me even more determined to resist.’

We broke our fast only once,
at a Little Chef outside Wrexham en route for Oswestry,
where St Oswald, King of York, had died horribly in battle.
It was Sunday lunchtime, the place was packed,
but within one minute of me and John striding in
in his gorgeous purple cassock – Rosalie’s phrase –
the cafe emptied.
I guess the punters feared it was a Fresh Expression
and John had a tambourine
hidden in his cassock’s ample folds,
little knowing that John wasn’t a tambourine sort of guy.

I used to sit in the front of the car and watch him
in the rear view mirror.
We were jumpy about being ambushed,
the IRA were active at that time,
so I had to keep an eye out
for what was hurtling towards us.
Gordon, an ex sergeant major looking for a skirmish,
even used to poke a stick under the car
with a mirror on the end checking for bombs.
Never mind the IRA,
John had said some cutting things about Evangelicals
and you do not want to mess with those guys.
Whatever,
I watched him for four silent Lents.
Could you not watch with me for four Lents?

Often he was pouring over the Bible
thinking of something arresting,
which would refresh the Gospel and refresh his audience:
Tell the truth, but tell it slant…
On the way home he poured over the New Scientist,
hallowing it like Scripture:
‘I will consider the heavens, even the works of thy fingers: the moon and the stars which thou hast ordained.’

Always he’d be either thinking or praying.
When he was fashioning the Act of Synod,
the trickiest of balancing acts between two integrities,
his eyes darted around, his eyebrows danced,
a veritable Einstein figuring out his theory of relativity.
In 1993 it was the Church of England’s version of Brexit,
and John fixed it.
If only you had been here, Lord (Habgood),
our nation would not have died.

When we returned from Wydale Hall
after giving his charge to York’s first 39 women priests,
– affectionately known as the 39 articles –
he had that look of an errant husband
concocting an excuse
to pull the wool over his wife’s eyes.
Wonderful Rosalie was fiercely against women priests:
‘This had better be good.’
At Eastertide 1989 Chris Armstrong was chaplain
for the heavy journey to Sheffield Cathedral
to mark the terrible Hillsborough Disaster.
They’d been held up by a major traffic jam on the A1,
and a voice came from the normally silent back seat,
commanding Gordon to break the speed limit.
God so loved Liverpool that gentle John did a ton.

Whenever we neared home, our journey almost complete,
John looked like a boy, anticipating Christmas day’s dawn.
All archbishops eventually have to return to base.
The 95^th Archbishop  of York coming home,
surrounded by his 94 predecessors,
portraits galore beaming down upon him.
Since we are surrounded
by so great a cloud of archbishops…
Late December 1953,
Cyril Garbett returns, looking piqued,
anticipating a ship’s biscuit with his acerbic sister,
the chaplain shivering, thinking,
‘Oh God, we’ve still got to say Evensong.’
Garbett piping up,
‘Thank God, we’ve still got to say Evensong!’

Donald Coggan once lectured his clergy:
‘When I return to a chilly Bishopthorpe,
there’s nothing I like better than rushing upstairs with Jean,
stripping off our outer garments
and having a stiff and vigorous game of table tennis.
That soon warms me up.’
How we laughed!  How Donald sadly didn’t.

John looked like Odysseus
sighing with relief, another long epic journey over,
yearning for Rosalie, Laura, Francis, Ruth, Adrian,
hoping his lovely family would remember him.
Sometimes Rosalie lost track of where in the world
the love of her life had got to now.
The Border terriers,
probably mere pups when he had left,
yapping down the corridors at his return:
To the Bishop: Are you going out again tonight?
Can Laura and I watch Top of the Pops, please?
I hope you are well!  See you soon!
All best wishes, Francis” 

He’d briefly greet the family,
and then straight up to the office
to answer mail and write the latest talk.
‘Oh, A cup of tea would be nice, Mary.’
‘Hail Archbishop’s PA, so full of grace,
the cup that cheers is with thee,’

He always had that same look,
like when he celebrated communion or confirmed a child.
A happy-in-his-skin look, a look of wonder.
I once spotted him over our garden wall,
looking at his pet tortoise.
For fifteen minutes, just wondering at it.
Where are the bishops who will be silent like John,
silent like Mark’s women at the tomb
rendered mute by the sheer stupendity of the Easter God?

Where are the bishops
who will be silent like Christ on Trial:
For Rowan Williams,
Christ’s silence is eloquent because otherwise
‘What is said
will take on the colour of the world’s insanity.
It will be another bid for the world’s power,
another identification with the unaccountable tyrannies
that decide how things shall be.
Jesus described in the ways of this world
would be a competitor for a space in it, part of its untruth.’
Poor talkative little Christianity!

On his 65^th birthday we were both travelling to London
and tried to get him a place in the driver’s cab.
British Rail declined.
I guess they didn’t think the driver could bear his silence
all the way down the East Coast.
Instead they treated us to a First Class breakfast
complete with a loquacious hostess called Karen
whom we’d picked up outside W H Smith’s kiosk
at seven in the morning.
Karen encouraged John to dunk his eggs
as we sped through Doncaster.
‘What’s that you’re reading, luv,’ she chirped.
‘Hansard,’ came the reply, like ice.
‘Not very chatty, your Boss, is he?’
she said when John had gone to the loo at Grantham.
He always went to the loo at Grantham.
I guess it was his way of paying the place back
for spawning Margaret Thatcher.
There was usually quite a queue.

It was a fearful and terrible thing
to fall into the hands of one of John’s silences.
You felt judged, you felt an idiot,
you filled the silence with babble.
But also you felt affirmed,
tremendously affirmed
with a love beyond words.
The word became flesh and was stunned into silence.

If I had to sum him up,
it would be a picture of a visit to Whitehaven.
A Sri Lankan priest there
had had major brain surgery,
and hadn’t got long.
He was mute, in a wheelchair,
with his dear wife tending him, looking so very sad.
John commissioned him for a ministry of prayer,
and then knelt down before him almost in homage,
held his hands in his and looked into his eyes,
beautiful dark pools of black,
saying nothing.
The silent before the silenced.

And that a higher gift than grace
should flesh and blood refine,
God’s presence and his very self
and essence all divine.

Praise to the holiest in the height,
and in the depth be praise,
in all his works most wonderful,
most sure in all his ways.

Good Friday Three Hours at the Cross

Good Friday addresses from Bishop Frank White

READINGS IN EACH HALF HOUR

1. Mathew 27 verses 1 – 10  – Accusers’ Story
2. Matthew 27 verses 11 – 23 – Pilate’s Story
3. Matthew 27 verses 24 – 26 – People’s Story
4. Matthew 27 verses 27 – 37 – Soldiers’ Story
5. Matthew 27 verses 38 – 44 – Observers’ Story
6. Matthew 27 verses 45 – 56 – JESUS’ STORY

Today we are looking at one big story, told here by Matthew; it is a story which, like a Russian doll, contains other stories, one of which will occupy us in each half hour.  The stories may be uncomfortable for us as we pay attention to their wider application, yet in each there is also a golden thread of hope, twisted together with the threads of human failure so evident in the people who meet at the Cross, the People of the Passion.

1. The Accusers’ Story

Matthew has been unflinching in documenting the decaying relations between the religious authorities and Jesus. The accusations they make against Him now are the last throw of the dice; their best chance to rid themselves of the disruptive influence He is having on their settled pattern. Minds closed to One lead to hardness of heart towards others. Consider their treatment of Judas for whom Matthew has some compassion. Those charged with helping the sinner to find relief and to restore the broken have no time for this lost soul.  They drive him away despite his terrible admission “I have sinned by betraying innocent blood”. Their adamant self-righteousness is a warning to all of us who are called to interpreting and communicating the work of God.

Their actions in “conferring together against Jesus in order to bring about His death” indicate not only how cheaply they viewed human life but how cavalier they were with the truth.  And surely this is the alarm bell we are to hear in this first of the Good Friday stories. Truth is the great casualty here.

And yet, buried deep within this sordid opportunism there is a sign that even they discern a glimpse of the future.  They make provision for the outsider, the Gentile, the foreigner who has come to the Temple in search of the Truth.  They buy the Potters’ Field; yes as a burial ground and outside the Temple Precincts.  The One they accuse would also end up outside the City of Peace where in His death He would take all our shame and transform it into beauty.

Matthew has set the scene with his characteristic clarity and we all know what the consequences of the actions of the accusers will be; or do we?

In this, “the greatest story ever told” the ending is still beyond our imagining.

2. Pilate’s Story

There are reckless people about in the world and Pilate is one of the most notorious examples.  While he is clearly discomforted by Jesus he doesn’t seem to stop to think what this might signify nor what his actions might be leading to.  He begins his interrogation with what he may have thought was a clever question “Are you the King of the Jews?” but Jesus saw immediately that this was a way of putting Him down and He makes no further reply to Pilate’s probing.  But Pilate’s question betrays an attitude to authority and the wielding of power which his wife knew would lead him disastrously down a blind alley.  She may have had a dream on this occasion but how many times before will she have seen her Pontius make the wrong call?

Pilate was the only person who could have saved Jesus, the One who his wife described as “that innocent man”.  Incredibly, one might even say, predictably, he chooses to incite the crowd so that they are invited to become Jesus’ judge and executioner.  His disdain for the people he governed threads its way through the whole of his story; his artful connecting of the first names of Barabbas and Jesus has him playing with the emotions of the crowd and his cynical hand-washing pushes the responsibility for his reckless actions on to the very people he is meant to govern and protect.  Pilate may serve as a reminder that people in power have choices to make about the way they govern and above all they need our prayers that they may govern wisely.  But in this desperately sad scenario there are some things to treasure.  The important place of the family even in the lives of those in prestigious places may be one to ponder but for me the treasure here is Jesus’ silence.  Not simply as a way – a well used technique -of exposing injustice.  Silence as a way of self-composure in the face of overwhelming adversity.  Commentators noted on Monday that the crowds who watched the horror unfolding in Paris were silent. In our days what a gift – a spiritual gift – is to be found in silence.  And here it is, right in the heart of the Passion.

3.   The People’s Story

I want to start this reflection with the golden thread which runs through it; it may seem to be tarnished here but it is an utterly vital feature for the wellbeing of any society.  Jesus’ story is largely played out in public, among the people, in the sight of those who are not the powerful or influential. It had been this way from the beginning on that in-vitero journey to the crowded Bethlehem and even in the stable, with the shepherds – the common people visiting and witnessing.  It was the chosen context for Jesus’ ministry; He was a Man for the People. But …and there is a big but…Jesus knew how to treat a crowd but the people on this Good Friday were shamelessly and scandalously exploited.

Pilate (the Governor, we remember) saw that a riot was beginning; so Matthew observes.  Into this unstable situation he releases a bloodthirsty villain.  Hardly a way to reduce tension.  The people have been wound up to such a frenzy by both civil and religious authorities that their terrible utterances can be seen as the over-reactions of people who are out of control.  We don’t need to go back 2000 years to see this – the angry mob seeking death for Asia Bibi in Pakistan is a chilling recent example.  The terrible words the people uttered, “His blood be on us and on our children” may be tragically prophetic but does the blame for them really rest on that pumped-up and manipulated crowd?

The fact that this great story was played out in public provides us with another assurance; no-one could then say that it didn’t happen. And for Matthew the story of the crucifixion and the resurrection would be meaningless without a welter of corroborating evidence.

4. The Soldiers’ Story

It is not just in our own time that soldiers have been held to account for their actions but here it is no public inquiry or media exposure that has done it.  As with any good story a thread has been woven in without the hearers being fully aware of its significance, and that is very much the case here. The facts of the story are plain;  the soldiers treated Jesus badly.  They used the tools of humiliation and mockery as well as the violence and coercion which are part and parcel of this story.  Ask Simon of Cyrene about that…and yet here too there is a seam of hope wending its way through the passion.  Last weekend I had the privilege of seeing a passion play acted out on the streets of two towns in the East Riding of Yorkshire, Withernsea and Hedon.  The story was aptly told and the scene was profoundly moving.  I noticed the narrator walking casually into the assembled crowd as the trial and sentence scenes drew to a close. He lighted upon a bystander – a large youth who had no part in the play – and asked him to carry the cross to the place of crucifixion. I spoke to the young man afterwards and he was clearly moved by the experience.  All along the way in this story are quiet moments of redemption, other stories where connections are made and hope instilled.

The soldiers have mocked and derided Jesus, they have used Pilate’s sloppy pantomime description, “The King of the Jews” to taunt Jesus and to wind up the crowd.  These “soldiers of the governor” – what we might call today the “Presidential Guard” are thoroughly compromised.  But fast forward for a moment and feel the redemptive wind that unexpectedly blows across their hardened faces.  They perhaps wonder at Jesus’ dignity in the face of their provocations but their defences are breached as Jesus dies on the cross and the order which they are commanded to keep is rocked violently.  Their response is to utter the truth that no-one else in this story has acknowledged “truly this man was God’s Son”.  Truth alights on them, and on us, unexpectedly and perhaps inconveniently but ultimately, gloriously.

5. The Observers’ Story

This short passage of scripture offers us the observations of people who watch what is going on; there are the criminals who share the execution site with Jesus, there are passers by who are not identified but who clearly have opinions.  Then the accusers who we encountered in the first reflection reappear and later the soldiers who watched will make their important contribution. In their different ways they are fitting what they observe into their own frames of reference; whether they are serious observers or casual commentators their role is crucial to Matthew’s telling of the big story.

They are watching and not seeing;  a spectacle is being played out before them but its deeper meaning remains obscure.  On Monday night I was struck how quickly the media reporters began to criticise the firefighters who were tackling the inferno at Notre Dame in Paris.  Why aren’t they using helicopters to dump water on the flames; why are there so few big hoses being deployed and so on.  The dawning of the day on Tuesday revealed the tactics of the Paris Fire Department – that if they had simply flooded the church much more would have been lost, even the possibility of the building itself. Their strategy as well as their undoubted heroism had been crucial as the drama unfolded.

The observers at the crucifixion help us to recognise how hard it is to see, so hard in fact that the real purpose in what is going on is hidden from nearly all those who were involved or who happened upon the scene; those whose stories we have reflected on this afternoon.  The Accusers, Pilate, The People, The Soldiers.

Surprisingly there is reassurance for us in this; most of us, (perhaps all) find it difficult to see clearly and assess accurately what is happening on the cross and the story will only begin to reveal its deeper meaning when we come to our consideration of the key player Himself, Jesus the Crucified.

But a final reflection from the scene at Notre Dame.  It came at first light on Tuesday and the opening of the west doors to reveal the blackened and burned interior.  As the camera explored further into the gloom there appeared in shining golden glory a simple large cross standing sentinel over the chaos.  In the light of what was there for me a stunning parable we can move on to the final, the great all encompassing story in a few moments time.

6. Jesus’ Story

All the stories we have been considering in these Good Friday reflections find their meaning and their resolution in this final, great story.  Here we see Jesus venturing unflinchingly and unerringly into the most difficult experience that can befall people of faith and perhaps too those with no faith.  Abandonment.  The  feeling of unimaginable loneliness;

“My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?” is the agonising cry uttered from the cross.  Jesus had searched out and found our darkest place and had occupied it as His own.  This was the place in which His loving Father could not look and turns His face away.  In this ultimate story all the darkness and bitterness of the other stories is soaked up and given to Jesus to drink.  The bible has a simple word for it, but one which we find hard to understand  – Sin.  Like Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, their instinct after eating the forbidden fruit was to hide when God came looking for them because they could not bear to look at Him; little did they know that God could barely look at them either.

Jesus drank this poisonous cup to the dregs so that the darkness could never again separate us from the God who comes to us in love.  Matthew hardly dwells on the agony of the cross because his instinct is that what really dealt the death blow to Jesus was the abandonment; He could not live without God’s seeing of Him.

“Then Jesus cried out again with a loud voice and breathed His last”. A great bellowing cry is followed by the quietist sound in the universe, Jesus’ final breath.

In that spine-tingling moment a new story begins; it is the story of our liberation and of our union with God as His new creation.  Consider Matthew’s words – “Jesus breathed His last” – the literal translation is  “Jesus released the spirit”.  On Sunday morning we will celebrate that the darkness has been vanquished and the light and energy of life has been released into our humanity.                  “Love to the loveless shown that they might lovely be.”

Whatever gain I had, I counted as loss for the sake of Christ – The Revd Professor Oliver O’Donovan

Sunday 7 April 2019 – 10.00

The Revd Professor Oliver O’Donovan, Canon Provincial of York

Whatever gain I had, I counted as loss for the sake of Christ (Philippians 3:7)

As we begin to read Paul’s memorable description of the total change of values that he underwent, it may seem to us that we can anticipate where it is going to end up.   Paul learned not to value external ritual, conformity, rigour, zealotry, a package of ideas which he wraps up in the name, “the flesh”, and he came to value something else.   That new thing he calls the knowledge of Christ, the power of Christ’s resurrection, the righteousness which God confers on faith.   Obviously enough, this change goes back to his encounter with the risen Christ on the Damascus road, and we hear it as a before-and-after story:  Paul proving himself by the standards of the Jewish law in which he had been trained;  Paul delivered from the need to prove himself, embracing an objective goal of life which set him free.   When we get to the words, “to know him and the power of his resurrection and the fellowship of his sufferings”, we reckon we have reached the end.

But then he goes on,  “Not as though I have already obtained this…but I am still in pursuit of it.”    All the time his goal was bring that transformation of twenty years before right up to the present day.    So on top of a Paul who arrived, back then, at his true spiritual orientation, we have to see a Paul who has not arrived, a Paul who is still not “mature”, not perfected in his Christian faith.    Both these Pauls are shown us, so that we can see the same Paul in both of them.   It is not, of course, that Paul could ever turn his back on what happened on the Damascus Road, as once he turned his back on his early training as a Pharisee.   He had been taken hold of by Jesus Christ, and that was a fait accompli.   But it still left him with the infinite task of taking hold of that for which he had been taken hold, the task he has pursued ever since.

Perhaps we have here a key to celebrating Holy Week and Easter.    The event that changed everything once and for all has to go on changing everything.    We shall recall the deeds that shaped the history of the world more than two thousand years ago, but each year we must come back to them, we must live through them again.   It is not something we can recall, and then put behind us.   Each year finds us needing to be “conformed to his death, that we may come to the resurrection of the dead”, and that experience takes on a new dimension each year and presents us with a new challenge.

And so Paul declares that he keeps looking forward.   If we take that idea seriously, and not as a familiar commonplace, it will present us with some difficult questions.   Is there no place for the moral virtues of consistency and stability of purpose?   Is there no place for memory in a life that “forgets what is behind and strains forward to what lies ahead?”

Consistency must be consistency with something.   The question Paul asks is,  with what?   For himself, he does not want the consistency that would come from measuring himself by his own idealised version of himself.   He wants to measure himself against the “upward call” he has received.   And the question about memory is not whether to remember, but how to remember well.   Paul, who never stopped remembering, did not want to dwell in the past, but to look on the past as a window through which to see the working of God, so that he could dwell confidently in the present.   That is why he so often tells us to give thanks, for thankfulness is the memory that sets past experience in its proper frame, makes it a foundation on which we can build.

So we are to go on living in transition, crossing over from what the past has given to what the future will demand.    But if we need to have the right frame for viewing the past, we need a frame for viewing the future, too.   “Not as though I have already obtained…”   The future cannot be “obtained”.   We cannot grasp hold of it.   It is undetermined, unknown, unrealised, wholly God’s.   We have glimpses of it from time to time, through anticipations, projections, promises, hopes and fears, but they are always tentative, given at moments of heightened awareness and then left for us to wonder about.   The danger of trying to grasp the future is that the future we grasp will be imagined.    Imaginary futures are available in every different shape and size to suit our changing moods:  a future of cherished plans and ambitions, a future of speculation governed by a big idea, a future of extrapolated trends, safely predictable, a nightmare future that embodies our worst fears.   All of them are easier to grasp than the future God has planned, because for that we have to wait and watch out.

The strangest feature of the story told in this morning’s Gospel is that Mary was said to have exercised a kind of anticipation of the future in anointing Jesus “for his burial”.   She did not do this consciously.   It was left to Jesus to point out that the ointment she poured over him was used for anointing the dead.   But simply by attending to Jesus in his great crisis Mary rose to the challenge of the moment.   And to rise to the moment was to move forward into the future, for the only way we can confront the future effectively is on the horizon of the present moment, where the future is taking form as it approaches us.   If we are wholly intent on what lies before our face, we can receive the future as it is given.   From the ring of a doorbell to the latest headline in an impenetrable political chaos, we can pray each day to recognise, not to overlook, the point at which God is calling us – upwards, and therefore also forwards.

Paul closes with a word for those who, like myself, have the longer part of their lives behind them, whose broad lines of personality, habit and achievement are fixed.   To us he spells out the great paradox of maturity:  “It is not as though I had attained, or were mature….As many of you as are mature, have this in your mind.”   Real maturity inovlves a sense of continuing incompleteness.   Whatever stocks of memory, principle, accomplishment our memory holds, we shall have to add this further discovery:  we are incomplete as human beings, still attending to new tasks, still looking for the way God will lead.

When we were younger, our minds were set on getting there, on the next big opportunity.     Those opportunities are now past;  but we have still to reap the fruit of them, to make sure that they will add up to a life of service fit to offer God.   When we were younger, we had lots of ideas which we wore like new clothes, strutting around.   As the challenges of life took hold of us, some of them were put away, others became part of our familiar way of functioning.   Now we may think we are all of a piece with our ideas;  we are what we have become.    But not at all! Paul tells us.   Crucial decisions that will make us what we are still lie before us.   We have to reach forward in response to God, for whom anything is possible.   We may never settle back.

O God and Father, who hast set our face toward the future, to weigh its opportunities and its uncertainties, grant that our hope may so reach out to the promise of thy Kingdom, and our purpose so bent to the task lying near at hand, that at thy Son’s coming we may be found upon his service.  For his name’ sake.

Oliver O’Donovan

York Minster

Lent 5,  7 April 2019

What is that big picture? – Peter Collier

Luke 13: 1-9; Isaiah 55:1-9; Psalm 63:1-8
Sunday 24 March 10am Eucharist 

In the last 10 days we have learned of the massacre of 50 Muslims attending Friday prayers in Christchurch, and of the catastrophic Cyclone Idai in East Africa, and we inevitably find ourselves asking questions.

It was the same in Palestine 2000 years ago – Jewish worshippers had been murdered by Pilate, the tower at Siloam had collapsed killing 18 people – and people were asking questions. They asked the same questions we do. Who is to blame? Whose fault is it? Were the people who died at fault? Or does the blame lie elsewhere?

Jesus said: you are asking the wrong questions. When things like that happen you should not be looking at others and asking questions about them, you should be thinking about a much bigger picture and at your own place in that picture.

What is that big picture?  There are many evil things being done in the world, there is a great deal of pain and suffering. Many people’s experience of life is that it is nasty, brutish and short. Jesus said that the bottom line is that each of us will have to give an account of our own lives and that “unless you repent you will all likewise perish”.

Lent is when as Christians we take time to reflect on our own lives and our focus during this season is on penitence.

Having urged people to repent, Jesus then told them a parable. It is the story of a fig tree that had not borne any fruit in the three years since it had been planted. I do not know much about fig trees. However, a little online research tells me that it is not until some years after planting, that a fig tree begins to bear fruit. Different websites gave me different lengths of time, but there is a consistently clear pattern. So whatever type of fig tree Jesus’ audience was familiar with, people would have understood the idea that a tree had not produced fruit for a few years; equally they would have understood the idea that there was a time for it to have fruited but it had not done so. In the story, rather than cut it down straight away, the vinedresser was prepared to give it one more year and one more chance.

Clearly, Jesus was speaking about the patience of God, which is intended to lead to repentance

So bringing these two passages together Jesus is saying that when bad things happen out there and to others, it should be a reminder to look to ourselves and to make sure that we are right with God and the only way to be right is to repent.

But that leaves us with another big question hanging in the air – what does it means to repent?

For an answer to that question we can go back to the Old Testament reading from Isaiah.

We sometimes associate the idea of repentance with the phrase sackcloth and ashes. The marking of foreheads with ash on Ash Wednesday, as Canon Michael explained, is a reminder of our mortality, of our weakness and sin which is destructive and ultimately leads to death.

Another Lenten symbol or sign is that of giving things up for 40 days. Repentance is turning away from things. So we give up things, turning from them, whether chocolate or alcohol or social media. We do that as a sign that we are able to take ourselves in hand, whilst we attempt to impose a deeper discipline on our inner lives.

But our Old Testament passage which is also about repentance seems at first blush to strike a very different note.

Rather than fasting it speaks about feasting. Isaiah says: “Come buy and eat! Come buy wine and milk without money and without price”. The Psalm set for this morning is Ps 63. In it David says: “my soul is satisfied with a rich feast”

The starting point for each of them is that we are hungry and thirsty. Isaiah says “Ho, everyone who thirsts”. David says “My soul thirsts for you; my flesh faints for you.” Of course, there is a link here to giving things up. Giving something up can create a sense of desire and that can become a starting point for discovering a deeper hunger than just a physical craving.

But the starting point for David and Isaiah is that if you know you are hungry and thirsty then you are invited to gorge yourself – with food and wine – and it is all free.

What have they found which gives them that deep inner satisfaction?

David says that he has looked to God and found that God’s steadfast love is better than life.  Isaiah says that the rich and satisfying food is discovering God’s everlasting covenant – God’s steadfast sure love. And he brings us full circle back to David by saying it is the love God had for David. David was not only a king but also an adulterer and murderer who discovered that God offered him unconditional and for ever love whatever he had done.

In whatever way and to whatever extent we reflect upon our own lives during Lent we will undoubtedly find things there which we really do want to give up and turn away from. But so often, try as we might, we simply cannot do it. There are things that keep a hold on us, whether through their memories or their compulsions or even their attractiveness. It is at that point that discovering that God loves me, that God surrounds me with love, that God’s love will never let go of me is not only deeply satisfying but can be life transforming.

So David and Isaiah say to those who are thirsty – real satisfaction is on offer – the very best food and drink – a rich feast – and it is all free.

But how do I eat and drink to find that satisfaction? What does it mean?

Isaiah talks about listening to God. “Listen carefully” he says, “incline your ear”, listen so that “you may live”. David speaks about meditating on God. He is saying that he allows thoughts about God and what God has said to fill his mind when it is at rest. Again it is a careful listening.

And what do they listen to?  They listen to those promises of God’s steadfast covenant love with which the Bible is filled, from start to finish.

But we have more than words alone. Very shortly we will actually eat and drink together.  We will eat bread and drink wine. These also are symbols – symbols of God’s love for us evidenced and demonstrated by Jesus Christ. We are invited to eat and drink in remembrance that Christ died for us, and to feed on him in our hearts by faith with thanksgiving.

So through word and sacrament each of us can be shaped in our thinking and in our behaviour by that extraordinary fact that I am loved by God with an unconditional and forever love. It has been said that “nothing I do can make God love me more and nothing I do can make me God love me less”.

But coming back to our starting point, does this mean that as Christians we cannot address questions about evil and disaster? No, it does not. But it means that they are better addressed when we have begun to put ourselves in order. It is said that GK Chesterton once wrote to the Times newspaper in relation to an article entitled ‘What’s Wrong with the World’. His letter allegedly said “Dear Sir, Regarding your article ‘What’s wrong with the world’. I am. Yours sincerely G K Chesterton.” When we acknowledge that, we can begin to look outwards and to look at others. But we will do so differently.

My companion book for Lent has been the book recommended by the Archbishop of Canterbury. It is entitled Reconciliation and is by Dr Muthuraj Swamy. Like me, you may have an initial resistance to his use of the word ‘other’ as a verb. ‘To other’, or ‘othering’, may seem strange to our ears but I believe it can be a help to our thinking.

He shows how from the garden of Eden onwards, humankind’s pattern of relationships has so often been that both individually, and together in our groups and tribes, we distance ourselves from the other or others. That is followed by blaming those others. That inevitably leads to division and conflict.

In contrast God comes to those who have distanced themselves from him and each other. God came and dwelt among us or “pitched his tent among us” as one translation puts it. Ultimately on the cross he gave up his own life so that we might be reconciled to him and to one another.

Now, as those who have been reconciled to God we are called to live in communities that reflect God’s ways rather than our ways. As God said through Isaiah “my ways and my thoughts are not your ways and your thoughts”.

So we are called, once we have discovered that reconciling and forever love of God, to begin to live out God’s ways in community. We begin within our Christian communities, our cathedrals and churches. We practice ways of relating to one another that are reconciling rather than othering. We do that in our own families, in our community gatherings and in our social life together. It is not easy. And we demonstrate that to the world that looks on. Wherever and whenever we can, we help the wider community to live that way also, constantly challenging its othering and blaming.

Whether we look at the world arena, the national stage this coming week, our local community, or our life together as a congregation – that is the call to us this Lent. The call is to ask the right questions, to seek the reconciliation that God offers, and having found that new way of living, we are to live it out day by day and hour by hour.

Amen

First Sunday of Lent – Tom McLeish

First Sunday of Lent 2019
Tom McLeish
Deuteronomy 26:1-11
Luke 4:1-13

What has a passage from Deuteronomy outlining the proper liturgical way to present first fruits in ancient Israel got to do with Luke’s account of Jesus’ temptations in the wilderness?  And what might either of those have to do with us in York today, at the start of Lent, but also at the start of the week ahead?

That’s our homework for this morning, but before we think about that I would like to say how very grateful I am for this kind invitation, and for very much besides, that Julie and I and our family have received from the Minster, this congregation and especially its choir. The notion of the ‘visiting preacher’ this morning stretches the meaning of ‘visiting’ almost to breaking point – as Michael said, when I am in a pulpit rather than a university lecture room it is in the church right next door.  But that allows me to bring greetings from the congregation at St Michael le Belfrey, and to say that we value both our proximity and our partnership very greatly indeed.

It also gives me the chance to thank Robert Sharpe and the choir both for their continuous gift to all who come here of the very best musical road to worship and mission I know of, but also for the years that our daughter Rosie thrived as a chorister.

Music runs in our offspring rather more than in this parent – some of you know that Rosie’s elder sister is learning to be a Baroque oboe player in London, and for that reason this time last week we were at the Royal Academy of Music listening to a concert of Bach chorales. BWV 19 There was a war in Heaven contains a particularly striking aria for tenor singing words from the Book of Revelation. And in the background Bach writes answering phrases for the trumpet – which after a while the listener realizes are not simple echoes of the singer’s lines (though they are musically related to them) but are also the lines of another chorale – one about finally resting after a life of labour in peace with Abraham – that Bach’s Leipzig listeners could not fail to recognize. In a brilliant stroke of musical suggestion, Bach makes his listeners think of a second theological story while the singer relates the first. And the music does the job of holding them together, and joining them in a moment – when the sermon on it would have taken an hour.

Then I realized – this is exactly what Luke is doing in chapter 4. The tenor of the evangelist wants us to hear the first theme of Jesus meeting temptation and overcoming it, and of being prepared for his ministry of teaching, healing and ultimately sacrifice. But he is playing a trumpet as well – and that tune is the choral of Deuteronomy.

Think about Jesus’ replies to Satan: when invited to satisfy his 40-day hunger by turning stones to bread, Jesus quotes, ‘Man does not live be bread alone…’ , when invited to worship the deceiver, he recalls, ‘Worship the Lord only’; when offered the easy route to kingdom, he quotes ‘Do not put the Lord your God to the test as you did at Marah…’

All Jesus’ text are from – from Deuteronomy chapter 8. And there is more, for the story of the Jew’s wanderings in Sinai after the exodus from Egypt, which is the context for the Deuteronomy teachings, is echoed not only explicitly in Jesus words but in the very actions he is invited to perform.

Not just once in the 40 years of wandering between Egypt and Canaan did the people of Israel grumble that there was no bread. Nor did they resist the temptation to flirt with idolatry in that lonely and desiccated place. And they continually put God to the test.

Jesus 40 days in the wilderness become a sort of reenactment of the Exodus events, and the Deuteronomy teaching. Luke has written two trumpets playing that familiar tune against his song.

There is yet another consonance between the temptation scene and Deuteronomy – and to see that we need to pan out from the little vignette about bringing first-fruits as a gift, to almost the entire book. It’s part of an extended commentary on the 10 commandments that Moses is giving to the second generation of wandering Israelites. 40 years on from the Exodus, and just before they are to enter the Promised Land, he is recalling the events at Sinai that their parents witnessed. It all starts back in chapter 10 where he begins, ‘Now I had stayed on the mountain 40 days and nights …’ Where have we heard that before?

You see the rich and layered teaching for life in Deuteronomy that covers Passover, and eating, and looking after the poor, and what to do about Kings, and freeing servants, and how to celebrate festivals and what to do about war and murder, and giving tithes and welcoming the alien and the stranger … all that comes, as a gift, after Moses has spent 40 days fasting on the mountain.

This might help us to know how to use it in our own season of Lent.  For although these Biblical periods of 40 days – of Moses and of Jesus – were, for sure, times of privation, they were more importantly times of preparation.  And the discipline of those few weeks launches itself into the creation of fruitfulness along much longer and much bigger stories. Moses 40 days are clearly representative of the 40 years in Sinai. “My father was a wandering Aramean’ says the giver of the basket of first-fruits as he sets it down at the feet of the priest, recalling the story (of Jacob) that was already ancient history by Moses’ time.

And that great story of the Exodus, and the desert wanderings in hope of a new home – a land of milk and honey – was always itself a picture of a larger story still: the story of creation, fall, incarnation, resurrection itself and the pathways of human beings in it – the wilderness in which we wander now, learning obedience and enabled by God to make a world that too often seems like a desert without love or compassion of justice bloom in little oases into places of welcome and forgiveness and healing. Like, we hope, this place.

Lent recalls all these tunes, all these stories from the inside out so that by now the expanding wave of 40 days has caught up us within it. And the point about discipline, that of Moses on the mountain, of Jesus in the wilderness, of a whole generation of God’s people in Sinai, that of our 40 days of Lent – is not about some form of self-hatred, or a rejection of the physical, but quite the opposite. That is the point of the stress on first-fruitfulness. It is much more like learning to play an instrument, so that others might be delighted, or tending a garden, so that others may be welcomed and eat. It might be returning the gift of doing science in the increasing knowledge and understanding of the world that it takes to care for it properly. It is certainly becoming more deeply familiar with the Bible – but again so that we may point others to Jesus. It’s also not principally a time of turning inwards, but of welcome to newcomers and strangers.

So let our Lenten discipline be in every way one of learning a deeper familiarity with scripture, that it may be on our tongues as readily as it was on Christ’s, and one of prayer, so that like Moses we develop a clear and detailed understanding of what it means to be in our places of vocation, yet in the Kingdom of God at the same time. But let’s also make it a season of welcome so that, as our  Old Testament reading concludes:

“And you and the priests and the aliens among you shall rejoice in all the good things the Lord your God has given you and your household.”

Advent Ordination sermon- The Right Reverend David Wilbourne

Given 10am Sunday 2 December 2018

‘Be alert at all times, praying that you
may have the strength to stand before the Son of Man.’

One year during Advent I kidnapped the Christchild
from Helmsley church’s crib,
put him into the basket of my bicycle and took him on tour:
Each night Jesus came to visit a different place in great humility,
to coin the Advent Collect.
I love cycling,
but I remember those journeys were so hard, so tiring,
almost as if I was carrying
the woes of the world on my bike.
I love visiting too,
no technology can even approach
the face-to-face personal touch,
the spoken word, the faith stories you chance upon
which write your sermons, and indeed books for you.
But mostly I’m like an ecclesiastical version
of David Attenbrough,
simply delighting in such wonderful human creatures,
but mercifully spared the mating rituals.

Some of the homes teemed with life and excited children,
Christ, also brimming with life in all its fullness
came into their midst.
Some of the homes were lonely places,
a widow or widower;
that night Christ stayed with them,
as he always stays with them.
Some of the homes were places where death was close,
and Christ came close.

Helmsley was a bit of a Downton Abbey,
with our own Lord Grantham.
One night I huffed and puffed
up the 1:3 hill to the Big House
in a fierce snow storm,
and knocked on the back door.
A housekeeper eventually answered
‘I’ll see if his Lordship is free,’ she said.

‘Don’t worry,’ I thought, shivering on the doorstep,
‘I’m only bringing Jesus to stay!’
Eventually his Lordship descended,
but he didn’t seem very chuffed to receive his Lord.
Lord Feversham always read the part of Herod
in the Christmas Carol Service,
so on reflection perhaps not the best choice for child-care.
I returned, 24 fretful hours later,
but thankfully retrieved Jesus, safe and sound.
After all, if Christ can survive the cross,
he could survive a cross Lord Feversham.

Next I took him to a cottage even higher up the moors,
a chilly place with such thin walls,
but such a warm welcome.
The estate worker’s wife was pregnant with their first child, and as I left the baby Jesus with them,
I prayed that their baby would be born safe and well.
Which she was.

Baby Jesus went to stay with Norman,
who like his father before him had worked on the railways,
his little bungalow a shrine to steam
festooned with model trains
and well-thumbed copies of Bradshaws.
Norman’s friend Martin often stayed over
and they received communion together.
I guess they were an item.
I once chanced upon Martin stooping down before Norman
tenderly bathing his heavily ulcerated legs and feet.
Such love. In sickness and in health…
I placed baby Jesus on Norman’s male-only mantelpiece
cheek to cheek with Sir Nigel Gresley and the Flying Scotsman,
hallowing the heart of their home.

Some weren’t homes at all.
Christ stayed with our Dentists,
Messrs Hacket and Angel, for 24 hours,
I plonked him on the counter and made a swift exit:
wherever there is pain, there is Christ.

Christ stayed in our comprehensive school.
Secondary Schools can be frightening places
– leading assemblies there
is as close as you get to a near-death experience!
But this school welcomed Christ:
the D & T class
– known as the woodwork class before we joined the EU –
they made him a little wooden crib.

Christ stayed for the night in my good friend,
the butcher’s shop.
The Lamb of God alongside lamb galore.
In the middle of his shop window
with all the hams and pork pies and turkeys
the butcher put the Christchild
in the little crib the school had made
with the following message:
‘Jesus, born in a stable, be the guest at our table.’
I’ve preached for 39 Advents,
but I couldn’t put it better than that.
Jesus, born in a stable, come,
be the guest at all our dinner tables today.

But some dinner tables are sad tables,
with an empty chair and a heartfelt absence:
Jesus, born in a stable, be the guest at that table.
Tables in the Yemen.
Not much food there,
25 million of God’s children set to starve this Christmas.
More likely that the tables will be used to hide under,
makeshift shelters from the bombs we have sold the Saudis.
Jesus, born in a stable, be the guest at that table.
If it disturbs you, Jesus being there, do something about it.

Tables in hospitals, operating tables.
I guess this moment outside the city wall
in York District Hospital
a life hangs in the balance,
and skilled surgeons and our wonderful NHS
try their hardest to save someone and bring healing:
Jesus, born in a stable, be the guest at that table.

Tables in mighty cabinet rooms across the world,
in London, Moscow, Washington and Ottawa,
where the flick of a pen
can bring peace or war,
prosperity or famine.
‘We must honour the people’s vote,’
Teresa May lectures baby Jesus,
as he sits on her cabinet table in 10 Downing Street.
‘Mm,’ Jesus replies,
‘Last time we honoured a people’s vote
they freed Barabbas and crucified me!
Now, about those bombs you’re selling the Saudis…’
Jesus, our Righteousness,
born in a stable,
come be the disturbing guest at those tables.

But most of all come, be the guest at our table here
at this Eucharist and every holy and unholy table
where our two new priests
will celebrate for the rest of their lives.
I’m a Maths geek
and I once calculated that I had consecrated
about 250 gallons of wine
at all the masses I had celebrated.
As every Tony Hancock fan knows,
each body contains about a gallon of blood,
so that is 250 Christs you will unleash upon the world
because of your ministry,
all those communicants going out
with the taste of Christ on their lips.

Bike or no bike,
pot Christchild or no pot Christchild,
Tina and Jake,
You will spend the rest of your ministry taking Christ out,
carrying Christ, being met by Christ,
and cheering the world and his church.
In those words of St Paul
‘May he so strengthen all your hearts in holiness that,
having brought Christ so close to so many,
you may be blameless before our God and Father
at the final coming of our Lord Jesus Christ
with all his saints.’

Because one day,
when life on earth draws to its close
our prayer will change into,
‘Jesus, born in a stable,
may we be the guest at your table’

And our gracious Lord will reply,
‘Come, blessed child of my Father,
receive the kingdom prepared for you
from the beginning of the world.
Come to the feast.’

One PS.
I took him to Lillian’s for 24 hours,
her home a medieval hovel.
Breathless,
she couldn’t receive Jesus before she’d had her ‘beer’,
a tot of Dandelion and Burdock
which I decanted into a drinking bottle for her,
the viscous liquid bubbling over
and making my hands sticky: a strange communion.

In the pocket of her painfully worn cardigan
was an individual Mr Kipling’s apple pie,
which she removed and put on the sofa arm.
‘If I lie down, I might squash it,’ she explained.
Then from the very same pocket
she produced some scraps of raw meat,
which she pressed into my hands to feed her mangy dog.
‘Is there much sickness in the parish, Vicar?’
she asked, with genuine concern.
‘There will be,’ I thought,
‘if we keep carrying on like this.’

I stole into the kitchen to wash my hands,
only to be appalled that it was so primitive.
One cold tap above a chipped Belfast sink,
a battered cabinet or two,
piled high with chipped unwashed crockery,
food dried on it from goodness knows when.
I returned to Lillian, scanning the severely cluttered room.
On the dampest of distempered walls hung an MBE.
‘Goodness, Lillian, is that yours?’ I asked in surprise.
‘Oh yes, Vicar,
King George VI presented it to me, for nothing really.
All I’d done was run a Church Army refreshment caravan
for the troops in the last war.’

I realised the immensity of
all this Church Army sister had done,
hawking her caravan all over Britain and Europe,
chasing the action.
Lillian was there to comfort the troops
dragging bodies of their comrades
out of the English Channel at Start Bay,
following some doomed rehearsal for D Day.
Even there at the relief of Belsen,
which proved the most harrowing sights of all,
the emaciated victims
too late to be cheered by Lillian’s tea and buns.
She told me how
she had held a glass of water to the parched lips
of a tiny Jewish girl.
Hail, little one, full of grace, the Lord is with thee…

I began to understand why,
having witnessed such deprivation and desolation, possessions and home comforts meant nothing to her.
I cleared the cluttered sideboard
and placed baby Jesus there,
the Son of Man who had nowhere to lay his head
finding shelter that night with Sister Lillian.
I then held her hand as I gave her my blessing.
Or did she, the best priest we never had,
give a blessing to me?’

He comes
the broken heart to bind,
the bleeding soul to cure,
and with the treasures of his grace
enrich the humble poor.

Enrich us humble poor: even so, come Lord Jesus.

Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary – The Reverend Dr. Rowan Williams

Revelation 11:19- 12:6, 10  Luke 1: 46-55

Solemn Eucharist – Wednesday 15 August

At my primary school, we had weekly hymn practice. Our favourite hymn, which we requested week after week, was one which you probably have to be a certain age to remember: When a knight won his spurs in the stories of old. It goes on to describe some of the clichés of chivalry. Knights are gallant and bold- and they kill dragons. Now, as a Welsh person I’ve always rather enjoyed the fact that our first reading from Revelation contains dragons- and red dragons at that. In the great East Window of the Minster above my head, the same red dragon appears alongside a monster with seven heads. Neither of them look particularly scary; but even as a Welsh person, I have to admit that the dragon of Revelation is meant to be a symbol of evil, waiting to destroy the woman with the crown of stars and her child.

The woman and her child are never named in Revelation: but their significance is obviously intended as a reference to Jesus and his mother Mary. There is so much about Revelation which makes it as easy to dismiss as fairytales and legends. If we no longer believe in knights, dragons and monsters, why on earth should we still believe in the rest of it- angels, heaven, God? Jan Struther’s hymn, which I learnt when I was seven, spells out why. The knights are all gone and the dragons are dead- but the dragons of anger and the ogres of greed  still exist and still need to be destroyed: in our Church, in our world, in our own lives.

We can no longer afford to believe in romantic visions of the past, but there is still a role for faith in the battle between good and evil. And Mary, the mother of Jesus whom we celebrate today, helps us to root that battle- and our faith- firmly in the real world instead of a world of fantasy. Her song, the Magnificat- which was our Gospel reading and which we sing here every day at Evensong- is a rallying cry for the transformation of the world. A young woman, whose whole place in society is already marginal because of her gender and made even more vulnerable by unexpected pregnancy, sings with absolute confidence of a God who confounds expectation. Mary names the dragons of her own day, and of ours: poverty, power imbalance, injustice, hunger- and speaks of God’s utter commitment to their destruction. So Mary’s song is not a wistful ‘if only the Kingdom were like this’. It’s a profound and radical call to put our faith into action, to build the Kingdom.

A great deal of nonsense has attached itself to the figure of Mary over the centuries. She sums up the ambivalence of a Church which took six centuries to declare officially that women had souls, and another six centuries after that to begin to take seriously the theological implications of Jesus’ humanity. That debate lies at the heart of the confusion about what exactly it is that we celebrate today. If Mary is an ordinary human being like the rest of us, her human death is not a matter for shame, to be explained away by theology. But if Elijah the prophet can be taken away into heaven at the end of his ministry, why not Mary at the end of hers? The very point of Mary is that she is indeed human; for if Mary isn’t human then nor is Jesus, and if Jesus is not human then we are not saved. But Mary’s existence as a human physical woman has been problematic too. Mary’s virginity and her motherhood have been used down the centuries to limit options for women: there’s still a kind of silence about those of us who are neither of those things, as if we didn’t or shouldn’t exist. When I was seven and singing When a knight won his spurs in assembly, my brother could join the church choir but I couldn’t. So it’s been a delight to sing services in the Minster this week with the girls’ choir from St Peter’s Wolverhampton, to show them that there are no reasons why one of them, can’t go on to preach, or to direct music in a cathedral- or anything else that they are called to do.

But not all the dragons are dead yet. We still live in a world where senior politicians can belittle women who choose to dress a certain way- let’s not forget that Mary wore a headscarf. We still live in a culture which thinks it can tell women (and men too, for that matter) what to eat, how to look, how to behave, who to go out with. We still live in a world where #MeToo needed to happen. The radical vision of the Magnificat is not a song for women. It’s a song by  a woman, which has become the song of every Christian who shares that vision of a better world- where the hungry are fed and the powerless enabled, where wealth and influence are equally distributed, and nobody is made more perfectly in the image of God than anyone else. Mary’s song is not a fantasy or a fairytale. The dragons of anger and ogres of greed are as much of a threat now as they ever were. But, as the hymn points out, it cannot be left to some mythical knight in shining armour to defeat them.

Mary’s story, Mary’s song, is ours too: an ordinary human being, called into relationship with God, called to work with God to bring about the Kingdom on earth. It won’t just happen. Except that we know that it is already happening. The dragon did not win. The woman and her child survive. And Mary’s song echoes down the generations, and outside all time: My soul magnifies the Lord, and my spirit rejoices in God my Saviour. From henceforth, all generations will call me blessed.

First Sunday after Trinity – The Reverend Dr. Rowan Williams

The Reverend Dr. Rowan Williams

First Sunday after Trinity – June 3, 2018

2 Corinthians 4: 5-12    Mark 2: 23- 3:6

Do you remember, during the last election, someone asked Theresa May in an interview what was the naughtiest thing she’d ever done ? (I gather this question is now also put to those who are about to become bishops…) After a slightly surprised pause, Mrs May said that she’d got into trouble as a child for running through fields of wheat near her home. She didn’t say whether she had compounded her crime by doing it on the Sabbath, but I do wonder whether perhaps today’s Gospel was at the back of her mind.

Of course it’s not walking through cornfields on the Sabbath that so upsets the religious authorities about Jesus. It’s not even the fact that he and his good Jewish disciples break the Sabbath by picking corn to eat- technically, that counts as work, so it’s forbidden; but it’s a minor infraction compared with reinterpreting the entire purpose of the law. And that’s what Jesus does here. The Sabbath was made for human beings, he points out: not the other way round. Everyone should have one day of rest per week, to remind us that God is the centre of life rather than ourselves, that we aren’t actually indispensable, and that workaholism isn’t the same as holiness- and yes, I’m preaching to myself here, too. The journalist A.J. Jacobs, in his book A Year of Living Biblically, tries to keep the Sabbath law literally and finds it really hard- not least because you spend so much time worrying about what you can and can’t do that you don’t have much concentration left for God.

But Jesus doesn’t leave it there. He heals a man with a withered arm. What better day than the Sabbath, you might think, to restore someone on the outside edge of society to a full relationship with his community and with God? What better witness could there be to the loving power of God? If the Pharisees object, they will look like monsters: not just inflexible in their interpretation of the law, but actively prolonging suffering for the sake of principle. And they know that. But they can’t be seen to back down. So they say nothing- but they begin to look for an opportunity to accuse Jesus of more than mere words. And sure enough, he gives it to them.

‘Is it lawful to do good or to do harm on the Sabbath, to save life or to kill?’

This is no longer mere rule-breaking. This is a massive ethical and moral escalation. And by posing this particular challenge, Jesus is using his own life as the stake, to force into the open the logical absurdity of a moral absolute. If the things you cannot do on the Sabbath become more central to our understanding of God than the things that demonstrate our freedom and wholeness in God, something has gone seriously wrong with our moral compass; just as it had with the Pharisees. For their response to Jesus was not to confront the logical flaws in a rule-based interpretation of religion which prevent you from healing in the name of God on the wrong day; it was to destroy the person who pointed out their mistaken priorities. The law of God is made to be a framework for our lives, not a straitjacket. We do need structures: we need an agreed ethical and moral code. But the point of it is not the law itself: it is the life which the law makes possible. I have come that you may have life, and have it in abundance, promises Jesus in the Gospel of John.

And have it in abundance. For life itself, in the sense of mere existence, isn’t the point either. For much of the last two weeks, much of my pastoral and theological conversation has been taken up with the recent Irish referendum on abortion. A couple of days ago I celebrated Communion at a church in York on the feast of the Visitation. And as we heard the Gospel for that day, two things struck me with equal force. The meeting of Mary and Elizabeth, both of them unexpectedly pregnant, is the only example I can think of, of a Bible story in which the protagonists are two women, equal in standing, with no male characters making decisions for them or telling them what to do. It is the women’s own voices we hear, with no men narrating events from a male perspective. Theirs is a mutual recognition, a mutual empowering. Women’s ability to make decisions about their own bodies and control what happens to them is at the heart of the story. But… so too is the fact that it is the unborn John the Baptist who, moving in his mother’s womb, becomes the first witness to Jesus; and the unborn Jesus whose potential is made tangible in this moment. How to hold these insights together? How to rejoice at what I do, personally, believe to be a good and right decision on the part of the Irish people; and simultaeously recognise the pain of those who profoundly disagree?

This is, as the Roman Catholic theologian Tina Beattie acknlowdged, a moment of extraordinary moral complexity, which deserves to be met not with posturing but with maturity and seriousness. Life and death are huge matters. The fact that we can reflect on their meaning and their purpose is itself a gift. For life is not, in the end, a right. And mere existence is not always to be celebrated, never mind equated with having life in abundance. As Tina Beattie points out, we do nobody any favours if we reduce debates about the beginning of life- or the end, for that matter- to emotive language about murder and killing. Instead, we have the opportunity to ask ourselves what we want life to mean, what we hope it can mean- and to face the fact that quality of life is as important as existence itself.

Choices are not an end in themselves. They have consequences, and moral maturity means learning to live with them. Laws, whether secular or religious in inspiration, can and do change as our understanding of the human condition changes. God’s will for us, is, unmistakeably, pro-life; but in its fullest, most abundant sense, not in a legalistic one. Male, female, or transgendered, we each of us ‘carry in our bodies the death of Christ’, as the second letter to the Corinthians reminded us this morning. In other words, we are preganant with that death, impronted with it in our very being. But out of that death, let us never forget, came forth life- resurrected, glorious and joyful. The one makes no sense without the other. ‘Death is at work in us, but life in you’.

We were not made for legalistic wrangling, but for the loving purposes of God. Living up to that is difficult, because it requires us to think and act with real moral maturity, and respect the consequences of our choices. No rulebook yet devised has enough nuance to cover ever possible situation: which is why it is so important that we do not treat the Bible, or the Church, as if that’s what they are. Instead they are mirrors, held up to us, to show what life in abundance might look like, and how it might feel to live it.

And if we run through a few cornfields on the way, I really don’t think God’s going to mind too much.

The Great East Window Returns – Very Revd Keith Jones (Dean Emeritus)

Very Revd Keith Jones (Dean Emeritus)

Thursday 17 May 2018 – Evensong 5.15pm

For York Minster

Learning and skill, and each to a high degree, have made a right royal marriage in this restoration of the east front of the Minster. Like the whole Minster, this is a handmade masterpiece. Human hands have been cherishing the magnesian limestone and the glass and lead. Especially in these last years, men and women have been learning their craft on it and seasoned carvers have spent many hours getting intricate details perfect.  Read the book! They have been as imaginative and accomplished as ever they were.  Huge pinnacles have been set out and raised anew.  Bowing walls have been made straight. Cracked and sometimes jumbled glass has been rendered lucid and firm. Well-meant botches in the past have been patiently corrected. The most careful balance has been made to capture the original achievement of John Thornton’s great work of 1408, but using the technology of today so that the trained eye can see how new work enhances the old.   In making difficult decisions the Advisory Group for the window has weighed evidence, pondered history, and been profoundly glad of the quality of the experts at hand.  And there it is.  From the work of 1408 we know of hardly anyone’s name except John Thornton, our Michelangelo of glass.  Today though we can name a host of people of whom we are proud.  For they remind us that skills have not died, that here tradition is creative and living, and that here human handiwork has done such things as John Ruskin would rejoice in.

The programme of work on the Minster has to go on. There is always a next phase. Scaffolding is a sign that the Dean and Chapter are vigilant still in the care of this miraculous place.  All the same, the completion of the east window is a special moment.  For this window draws together the whole accomplishment of the Minster. York Minster is literally the most imperial of English cathedrals.  For centuries its magnificence showed that the Christian Gospel was in no way diminished at the limits of the known world.  This place proclaimed its meaning straight out, Yorkshire fashion.  This, says the Minster, is how the truth is, even to the ends of the earth.  This is the meaning of it all.  Hear, and see.  Shyness is not one of York Minster’s virtues.

See what they hoisted into the air here!  They took as their theme the beginning and the end of all things: nothing less.  To do it, they turned to the most reliable history of time that they could trust: the Old and New Testaments, the history of the works of God from the first utterance of the meaningful Word, the Logos. So at the summit of the window is the benign but majestic utterer of that Word, depicted as a bearded man, all-Wise.  And the creation streams in solidifying light through the angelic hosts to the panels where we see light and darkness being divided and the world being made.  Then the panels trace the earliest legends of humanity in scene after scene.  Nearer to us, with startling simplicity the story moves into the painful chaos of human history.  Then it breaks off abruptly, as history keeps on doing, in the miserable upset of Absalom’s rebellion.  And then the window shows us the visions of finality, when the children of time and the things of time are confronted by the shattering justice and unexpected mercy of that same God as portrayed for us in that charter for dreamers and imaginers, the book of Revelation.

All this ultimate narrative our ancestors lifted to catch the light and the winds of Yorkshire.  Of course, in terms of sheer information about the world the people of the 15^th century suffered from a huge information deficit.  But they held this right conviction: that it is God who makes sense of this life and this world.  That for all our human chaos, the beginning and the end of this creation are God’s.  And when you come into York Minster, and most of all when you are part of its worship, you are surrounded by a world made gracious and ordered by these perfect arcades.  We are drawn into the drama of it as we walk through its spaces. And as we ascend to the heart of the building, we bring our lives into the place where God is most clearly shown to us, and the music and the incense surround us, and the bread and the wine convey God’s very self to us, in the light of that translucent wall that closes the horizon ahead.  We feel ourselves transfigured.

When we are showing the Minster to others, we should not speak of the builders of the Minster as them:  think of them as us, rather, even though of another time.  The Minster belongs to our national civilisation, expresses the beliefs of many centuries and is sustained by the living chain of human life.  The stonemasons and glaziers of today, yes and the fundraisers and interpreters and administrators of today, and all who wish to identify as the people of today’s Minster are in unbroken continuation across the years. Apart from a regrettable but short disruption in the 17^th century and the odd fire or plague, no long hiatus has occurred in the Minster’s life;  chapters – even deans – come and go. The skilled craftsmen work generation on generation. Human beings, forming the One Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church have gone on drawing inspiration from such places as this Minster and keeping it standing.  As we affirm the creed day by day we of our generation turn towards that easterly wall of stone and glass; towards the rising sun, the resurrection source, from which God comes to meet us whether it’s 1408 or 2018.

Yes, the Minster says to us, be reassured.  Your lives are meaningful, because here is God.  York Minster will not have it that life is random, and creation accidental as is the widespread fashion these days.  Believe that if you like, but put up with the fact that we won’t have it.  Our world may be in all kinds of mess, and the threats to it seem never to end.  But here we declare our hope.  The great east window tells us we are not to waste time unduly entertaining the thought that we may be deluded. When things are bad, Jesus said “look up, and lift up your heads; for your redemption draweth nigh.” (Luke 21, verse 28)

These days I find myself very often with the people of the l’Arche community which has a house only yards away from my home in Ipswich.  We are people with and without learning disabilities, of various nationalities and Christian traditions.  Some among us are unable to speak.  David, for example, makes many unfamiliar noises while we sing and pray together.  It is perhaps the opposite in splendour from York Minster, our simple holding hands and singing choruses; Rowland’s guitar rather than the Minster organ.  The noise we make together is pretty fearful if you stop singing to listen.  But In God’s sight we are every bit as prized and glorious, and one of David’s sounds as we pray is unmistakeably “Amen”.  Amen he says.  Amen.

And that is York Minster’s great word, which this window declares. In David’s Amen, that So be it, the simple daily acts of love and service by the hands of people who need one another is at one with the eastern climax of York Minster.  “Amen!”  say David and the east window of York. To all that has been, to all that is to come, the Alpha and the Omega: Amen.

Keith Jones

Dean emeritus of York

I am sending upon you what my Father promised – Reverend Dr. Rowan Williams

Reverend Dr. Rowan Williams

Ascension Day 10 May 2018 – 5.15pm Eucharist 

Daniel 7:9-14       Acts 1: 4-11      Luke 24: 44-end

‘See, I am sending upon you what my Father promised; so stay here in the city, until you are clothed with power from on high’ (Luke 24:49)

Some of the Minster community are spending this week on the Scottish island of Iona, whose abbey has been a site of Christian prayer and pilgrimage for fifteen centuries. It was the 20^th-century founder of the modern Iona Community, a Church of Scotland minister named George MacLeod, who said of the Ascension: ‘There is a human being in heaven; one of us has made it’.

One of us. Not one like us: not ‘one like a human being’, as the prophet Daniel put it, but a real  human being: a real human being who is also God. We’ve been trying to get our heads round the mysterious truth of Jesus’ identity since even before St Columba first arrived on Iona, in the middle of the 6^th century. And the Ascension marks a key moment in our understanding of that identity. Early this morning, as we do every Ascension Day, members of the chaplaincies of both York’s universities climbed the Minster tower, and my colleague Kevin said to the assembled students that Ascension is Jesus’ graduation: the fulfilment of both his humanity and his divinity.

We use the language of ascending and descending- up  to heaven, down  to earth- as a way of trying to make sense of our feeling that there is a distance (maybe even a separation) between us and God: as if we belong here, and God there. Jesus forces us to rethink that idea. For he is both here and there; both with God and with us; both then and now.

All the ways we have of understanding how time and space work are simply too small to comprehend how God can be both human and divine. We’re confronted with the same problem at the other end of the liturgical year: Ascension and Advent are opposite sides of the same coin. At Advent, we experience a similar knot in our linear understanding of time: we await the arrival of a baby who is simultaneously timeless, present in creation from the beginning of all time; and  fixed in human history in first-century Palestine; and eternally present as we await the fulfilment of all time. At Ascension, we see that just as God transcends our understanding of time- past, present and future- so too God transcends our understanding of space- up and down, here and there. There is no division between heaven and earth. God is, was, and ever shall be here. God is, was, and ever shall be one of us: from the beginning of time to its end.

Jesus tells his disciples to ‘stay here in the city until you are clothed with power on high’. There’s that spatial language again. For it is here in the city- this city and every city, the here and now where we live, work, study and rest, among other human beings like ourselves- that we are to work out what it means to be made in the image of God, for our humanity to be transformed by sharing in divinity. It is here, and now, that we are to build the Kingdom and live out the truth of God, until we discover for ourselves what is beyond this life, beyond our current capacity to imagine or comprehend.

The disciples of Jesus do not know how they will manage without him. They do not yet know what they can do; and they do not yet realise what it will cost them to do it. But their task is not to wait for Jesus to return at the end of time before they act. It is to begin the work now of transforming the world we live in into the kingdom of heaven. It is not that God belongs there and we belong here. Quite the opposite. There is a human being in heaven: and because there is one, wherever human beings are is also, already, touched with the divine.

‘Why do you stand looking up into heaven?’ It is all around you. There is a human being in heaven. The whole world belongs to God, across every boundary of time or space: and it is here in the city that we are to find him.

See that you love one another – Reverend Dr. Rowan Williams

Reverend Dr. Rowan Williams

6 May 2018 – 4.00pm Evensong

Song of Solomon 4:16- 5:2, 8: 6-7        Revelation 3: 14-end

When my grandmother died, we found her diary. She began it just after the Second World War; so that my dad, who was six when his father’s ship was torpedoed by a German U-boat, would have something to remember him by. She wrote it all down: how they met in a Baptist youth group when she was seventeen, married against the wishes of her father, and were separated by war when my dad was still only a toddler. She obviously began it wanting him to know the whole story: but as she revisited it all, somehow it became too personal to share. She described in terrible detail the arrival of the telegram, the disbelief, the grief and numbness- and then, for decades, there was only silence.

My grandmother lived for another 57 years, but she never married again, and she never did bring herself to talk to my dad about his father; and a great emotional rift opened up between them as a result. She hoped he would one day read the diary and understand- but it was too late. My grandfather’s body was never found, but my grandmother’s grave is marked with both their names, and a quote from the Song of Songs: Many waters cannot quench love, neither can the floods drown it. It was believing that, for 57 years, which kept her going.

What the Song of Songs, or Song of Solomon, is doing in the Bible at all is open to question. It’s the only book in the ordinary canon of Scripture which never mentions God. Scholars have tried to explain it away by understanding it as an allegory; God’s love for his people, or Christ’s love for his church. In mediaeval times it was hugely popular among preachers, and also among female religious and mystics, who perhaps saw themselves reflected in it as nowhere else in Scripture. The woman in the Song of Songs is neither a virgin, nor a mother, nor a prostitute, so she escapes all the usual stereotypes attached to her gender: she is allowed to express her desire in unambiguously erotic language, as indeed is the man. ‘Love one another fervently’- yes, certainly; but ‘with a pure heart’? Not so much. For this isn’t an allegory of desire: it’s the real thing. Passion fierce as the grave, love strong as death, raging flames: if this just sounds like a collection of Mills and Boon clichés, well, read the rest of the book and it doesn’t leave much to the imagination.

There is no doubt that the Song of Songs  does work as an allegory if you want it to, because this is precisely what desire feels like. There is no other book in Scripture which so graphically describes what it feels like to want-  whether what you want is another person, or God; or for that matter a career, a vocation, or music, or safety, or death. But the Song isn’t just about the wanting; it is equally graphic about the end of the search. Satisfaction. Consummation. No wonder it had to be explained away as theological allegory; for the Christians who decided this book did belong in the canon of Scripture had also inherited a terrible ambivalence about anything to do with bodies or sexuality. Love is OK as long as it is kept pure and spiritual: agape  or philadelphia  are permissible, but eros becomes steadily more and more suspect. We still know what it is to want, but we are taught that we shouldn’t want certain things- or certain people. Sex itself becomes theologised into something shameful, something less than pure; until we reach the point where God is supposed to satisfy all our needs, so how dare we still want?

Of course that’s not the whole picture. There have been brave theologians down the centuries who have let the Song  speak on its own terms. The experience of desire, including sexual desire, is enormously powerful in helping us to understand different ways in which it might be true that God loves us; different ways in which we might feel empty or incomplete without God. If we are lucky enough to know human love in our own lives, we may well find in it a window on to the love of God; for those of us who do not, perhaps it is the image of the wanting and searching that speaks most powerfully not just of what it is to want, but also to be wanted.

‘If one offered all the wealth of one’s house for love, it would be utterly scorned’ (Song of Songs 8:7) What is there for which you would give everything you had? Another person? A job? An idea, a principle? This vision of love, potently physical and embodied as it is, is not all about us and our own feelings: it is also about the separate reality of the objects  of our love and desire. If we turn the people we love into mere extensions of ourselves, projections of our own feelings, that is not reality. For they too have feelings, experiences and desires which are just as powerful as ours- and when the two don’t match up, the result can be extraordinarily painful.

When my grandmother died, her brother said to me that he’d often wondered over the years what would have happened if my grandfather had survived the war and come home. We’ll never know. The vision of him in her diaries is so clearly idealised that it’s impossible to get a sense of who he really was. But the sense of s passion fierce as the grave remains. The waters in which he died did not quench love, but they ended up costing my dad more in emotional terms than he could afford.

Love is not for the faint-hearted. That’s the charge laid against the church in Laodicea, in our second reading. They are too lukewarm, too dispassionate. There may be purity in their hearts, but there is no fervour. God’s love demands more. It is uncompromising, bringing with it ‘reproof and discipline’ for those who do not give everything. But it is not self-indulgent. For God’s love treats us as absolutely real. God wants our fulfilment, our satisfaction and completion. God wants us to be who we are, who we are called to be; complete with our unruly bodies and our messy desires. Whether it is a person or a principle we want most, to love them- with a pure heart, fervently- is the most Godlike thing we could ever do.