‘Generosity’ – The Reverend Canon James Walters

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Kindness’ – The Reverend Canon James Walters

Maundy Thursday in Holy Week – Kindness

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Patience’ – The Reverend Canon James Walters

Wednesday in Holy Week – Patience

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Peace’ – The Reverend Canon James Walters

Tuesday in Holy Week – Peace

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Joy’ – The Reverend Canon James Walters

Monday in Holy Week – Joy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Love’ – The Reverend Canon James Walters

Palm Sunday – Love

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Sabbath Time’ – The Revd Canon Maggie McLean, Canon Missioner

Title: ‘Sabbath Time’

Preacher: The Revd Canon Maggie McLean, Canon Missioner

Readings: Exodus 5:1–6:1; Philippians 3:4b–14

Date:  3 March 2024, the Third Sunday of Lent

‘Sabbath Time’

A few years ago, I caught a bit of one of the many reality TV programmes. It was called ‘Back to the Floor’. As you might guess from the title, this saw a CEO from a major company leave the office and spend some time on the shop floor. The episode I saw had the head of one of our rail companies working in one of his railway stations. There were complaints from the public about a lack of ticket machines; customers angry at a delayed train; and the time pressures on staff to simply get all their jobs done during the course of the day. In particular, there was a point in the programme where the timetable required a train to be de-coupled and then re-coupled to another service. This train was always, always late in leaving the station. Try as he might, with all the assistance he could muster, the CEO could never get this operation completed within the available time. He had to admit defeat and take back to the directors the news that the timetable needed to change.

Making bricks without straw might seem a remote image for the ways in which work can become a tool of oppression.

We heard in our first reading that denying the Israelites the straw they needed to make bricks became a form of punishment. Instead of providing the straw, as was the custom, the Israelites are told to find their own. As Pharoah says:

“let them go and gather straw for themselves. But you shall require of them the same quantity of bricks as they have made previously; do not diminish it, for they are lazy”

In this passage from Genesis the Israelites are called lazy because they wish to go and worship God in the wilderness, to mark one of their festivals. So the disagreement about this between Pharoah, Moses and Aaron isn’t about the people going to the promised land, but about them being able to make their religious obligation.

Very often the cry ‘let my people go’ is adopted by all sorts of people as a slogan for freedom – but in this account it’s about having a week off in order to worship God.

Many years ago I was in a department store in New York. It happened to be a Sunday and I was struck by a brief exchange between the man serving me and their supervisor. The young man was asking to have a Sunday off, as soon as possible, to go to church. As he put it to his boss: ‘Jesus goin’ to be angry with me if I don’t go soon’. Perhaps the supervisor, like Pharoah, might have thought this was a fancy way of dressing up laziness. Who knows. But for this shop worker, just as for the Israelites, finding ‘Sabbath time’ was important. Finding the space to be still for the presence of the Lord, to help maintain our faith and all that it means, matters.

Ultimately, Pharoah wasn’t denying the Israelites straw, he was denying them time. It also, created destructive relationships within the people themselves. When the quantity of bricks required weren’t delivered, the Jewish overseers of the people were beaten by the taskmasters of Pharoah. It must have felt that the days were numbered for the Israelites in Egypt. Moses pleads to the Lord, and God answers that things are about to change, saying: ‘Now you shall see what I will do’.

Giving people impossible tasks is a tool of oppression. Denying people the opportunity to worship, to celebrate the festivals that define them and shape them, is oppressive. Taking away the time to rest, and to be with your family, is also a way in which – down the centuries – leaders have sought to destroy the Jewish nation.

I’ve no doubt that the CEO I mentioned earlier was unaware that his organisation had set the staff at one station an impossible task. He experienced their frustration and I’ve no doubt that things were changed as a result.

People need Sabbath time – the space to reflect, to love and to live.

Perhaps, in the tragedy and turmoil of the Middle East, we need that space now more than ever. A pause in hostilities that allows people to recollect who they are, and where the God of peace is calling us to be. Setting people up for failure, be they Jewish of Palestinian, will never build a happy or just society.

In Lent, as Christians, we are called to journey into the wilderness with Jesus, and make our Sabbath in the stories of betrayal, sacrifice, suffering and absence. To make the power of resurrection – of hope plucked out of despair – our own (to quote St Paul). Despite all that stands in our way, or seeks to oppress us, the season of Lent encourages us to ‘strain forward’ to that love and peace which Christ alone can bring.

Deference can be dangerous – The Revd Canon Maggie McLean, Canon Missioner

Title: Deference can be dangerous

Preacher: The Revd Canon Maggie McLean, Canon Missioner

Readings: Genesis 17:1–7, 15–16; Romans 4:13–25; Mark 8:31–38

Date:  25 February 2024, the Second Sunday of Lent

Deference can be dangerous.

Time and again in our church and across society, reports have highlighted that a culture of deference can become the landscape in which bad things happen. Deference is when people feel that even if they speak up, they won’t be heard.

Deference is when the invisible forces of respect mean that people don’t say what matters to them most. Deference is when people can collude with damaging behaviours that hurt themselves and others.

This isn’t by any means an issue unique to the church. Those who have watched ‘Mr Bates v The Post Office’, or read about these miscarriages of justice elsewhere, will know that an unquestioning respect can lead to calamity. That organisations beyond reproach become very dangerous organisations. Because they can never be in the wrong – even when they are.

In the past year the Church of England received the third report from the Archbishops’ Commission for Racial Justice. Among other things, this report addressed the patronage system that still operates in the Church. Among other things the authors of the report said:

“we want to ask whether an institution that still openly exercises the power of patronage in its affairs is capable of initiating and enabling a process of cultural change”

Last week you may have heard in the news that another major report was received by the Church – this time on safeguarding. The report makes clear that ‘a complete change of culture is needed’. On many occasions patronage and deference have been given as key reasons why the Church has failed to act on concerns about safeguarding.

When I think about the life of Jesus, I’m left wondering how on earth we ended up in this position. Why a church founded on the life, death and resurrection of Jesus gravitated so much towards unaccountable power. Why the mutuality of early Christians – argumentative as they were – somehow got lost in the structures of hierarchy and power. Perhaps it’s the fault of him out there – Constantine the Great with his broken sword – perhaps it’s his fault of making Christianity the state religion and embedding it in existing power structures.

However, if ever there was someone to defer to, and allow unaccountable command of his followers, surely that was Jesus? Yet in our Gospel this morning Peter takes Jesus to one side in order to rebuke him. Peter the fisherman having stern words with the Word made flesh; rebuking the one ‘who gives life to the dead and calls into existence the things that do not exist’ (to quote the Epistle).There is love and concern in what Peter says – but not deference. Peter is worried about the impact on the disciples of all this talk about suffering, rejection and death. It’s hardly the kind of pep talk designed to rally the troops.

While Peter appears to have no hesitation in taking Jesus to one side to have this conversation he finds himself being rebuked in return. Jesus addresses Peter in the harshest terms – ‘Get behind me, Satan!’ Time and again Jesus has to explain that his way isn’t the way of the world. Peter hears all the doom and gloom, but misses the promise of resurrection. Jesus is not to be deflected in his mission: he has a relationship with the disciples of open debate and honest speaking. There’s no place for fake deference, or unspoken truths, in this work of building God’s Kingdom.

Lent is traditionally a time when people new to the Christian faith prepare for baptism.

Perhaps one way of changing the culture in the Church is to remember that baptism is the most significant sacrament that we have to offer. That being baptised, and living out our faith each day, is the highest form of Christian discipleship. Consequently, being made a deacon, priest, or a bishop, or even and archbishop, is something that can only happen when that primary act of baptism has taken place.

In the Christian faith, if there is to be deference, it is surely first and foremost for the baptised in Christ – because everything else is simply commentary on that primary gift of grace. Perhaps, to paraphrase St Paul’s, we need to turn upside down our thoughts about the Church, so that in humility and love we can in turn, up-end and transform the world.

Be Strong and Courageous….Stand Firm – Canon Peter Collier QC, Cathedral Reader

Title: Be Strong and Courageous …. Stand Firm!

Preacher: Canon Peter Collier QC, Cathedral Reader 

Readings: Josh 1:1-9, Eph 6:10-20

Date: The Third Sunday of Lent, 12 March 2023 4.00pm

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

Mayday, Mayday, Mayday. Go, Go, Go. Three cheers for York Minster Evensong.

What is it about saying things three times? There are various theories about why the habit developed, but it is certainly very long standing now. I think the bottom line is that we do it to ensure that we are heard, that we are understood and that we get a response.

Today our OT and NT lessons each have something that is said three times.

In the OT lesson God said to Joshua three times “Be strong and courageous”

In his letter to the young church at Ephesus Paul told the young Christians to be strong, but three times he told them they were “to stand”

Joshua was about to lead the Israelites into the new and promised land – he had very little idea about what lay ahead of them, what opposition they would meet, what practical problems they would face, and what resistance he might even face from his own people. He very much needed to hear God saying to him that he must be strong and courageous.

For the young church at Ephesus those new followers of Jesus Christ now found they were living in an alien culture.  Right at the beginning when the church had come into being there, there had been terrific opposition to the Christian message from the trades guilds and the civic authorities. Now Paul writes to encourage them to keep going as Christians. And at the end of the letter he reminds them that they are engaged in a battle, not a physical one but a spiritual one, and they need to put on their spiritual armour for that battle. In verses 11, 13 and 14 he tells them they are under attack, so they must put on the armour that God has provided and stand, stand still, and stand firm.

For us the season of Lent is a time when we think about the struggle that Jesus had in the wilderness; the battles he fought with temptation and we begin to reflect on our own struggles as well.

If you have made part of your Lenten fast giving up something like chocolate or alcohol you may have your own struggles when you fancy just a tiny piece of chocolate, or the teeniest drink. But you may also during this period be aware of other things in your life that you recognise as temptation that must also be resisted. The temptation to pass on gossip, the temptation to try and get your own way about something, the temptation to tell another whitish lie. There are many things we struggle with where we know the right thing to do, but it is just hard doing it.

So this afternoon we are told to be strong and courageous; we are told to stand. And our two lessons give us the same clue as to what might help us to do that.

For Joshua – he was told to meditate on the book of the law and to act in accordance with what was written in it.

For the Ephesians it was about putting on all the armour that God provided; and there are 6 or 7 pieces of armour depending on whether you include that last injunction to pray. But I am only going to pick out one this afternoon. The one I want to take is the sword of the spirit which is the word of God. Or as Joshua knew it – the book of the law.

The word of God is perhaps especially relevant in Lent. Because in Lent we are never very far away from Jesus struggling with his temptations in the wilderness. As we know – for each temptation he faced his answer he always said what God’s word had to say. Again and again he brings to mind and recites sayings from the Hebrew Bible.

His temptations I’m sure you are familiar with – to turn stones into bread, to prove who he was by throwing himself from the top of the temple when God would step in and save him, and to get everything he could ever want by surrendering to Satan.

I always enjoy that game in “I’m Sorry I Haven’t a Clue” when the panellists are told “This is the answer, but what was the question?” And they often come up with quite bizarre and sometimes funny questions. This afternoon I want to start with the answers Jesus gave to the tempter, because that takes to the heart of each temptation.

These were all passages in the OT that Jesus knew from his life of studying the scriptures – hiding them in his heart. Joshua had been told to meditate on God’s words day and night. That’s what Jesus had been doing for 30 years and what we are called to do too.

Jesus’s first answer was that one does not live by bread alone. He says that we need to feed on God’s word.

After 40 days without food Jesus was famished and he suddenly gets an urge to turn the desert stones to bread, to satisfy those gnawing pangs of hunger and that physical pain that he was experiencing.

But he knows that for the moment his focus in that desert place was to deal with his spiritual hunger, to be in real communication with God his Father.

For us we may not have gone 40 days without food, but I expect we all know the constant urges to satisfy our material needs or desires. Whether it is food and drink, or the other things that we use and that entertain us and occupy us. Jesus reminds us that in all our muddling along in the business of this world it is that God shaped hole in the middle of us that needs satisfying more than anything else.

It was that which Jesus had gone into the wilderness to grapple with, and it is that which we need to address this Lent – getting to know God and what it means to be his sons and daughters.

The answer to the second temptation is that we must not put God to the test. Jesus had answered the first temptation with the Bible and so the tempter comes to him – Ah the Bible – two can play at that game – listen says the tempter – the Bible says God will send his angels to save you, so throw yourself down from the top of this temple pinnacle and if you are who you think you are, the Son of God, then God will step in and save you from harm. You will float down from heaven on the wings of angels and everyone will know that you are God’s Son. So, if you are God’s Son, put on a show. Show them some magic! Jesus’s answer says is that the Bible says you mustn’t put God to the test. Because, he knew that the only route by which people would come to know who he truly was, would be by his going to the cross.

When we recognise that God is to be the focus of our living, the next step is to understand that that relationship is not about us and what God will do for us, but about our following him, accepting that our lives must follow the way of the cross. And it can be a real temptation for us to want to use God to establish our own importance and position rather than recognising that if we follow Jesus we are on the path to the cross. So there is a second thing for us to grapple with this Lent.

Finally, the third temptation – the answer to it was you must worship and serve the one true God. This temptation is to get it all – all the wealth, comfort, recognition, power, and glory that is out there. Satan offered all that to Jesus if he would take the easy way – his way. How often do we say we follow Jesus but in reality we live our lives working and straining for all those other things because we have in fact exchanged the service of God for the service of Satan.

So as we work our way through Lent – another 26 days or so to go – let’s focus on getting to know God, on walking the way of the cross, and on truly worshipping and serving God rather than stuff.

Let’s keep God’s word at the centre of our lives – meditate on it, allow it to shape our lives, use it in our dialogue with those often subtle urges that come to us day by day. So that in all these things we may be strong and courageous and stand our ground.

Water for all, for life, and for unity – Canon Victoria Johnson, Precentor

Title: Water for all, for life, and for unity.

Preacher: Canon Victoria Johnson, Precentor 

Readings: Exodus 17:1-7, Romans 5:1-11, John 4:5-42

Date: Third Sunday of Lent, 12 March 2023, 11.00am

Isn’t it great when we all come together? When we gather, and congregate around something we have in common. There are many things that bring us together and unify us, like, I suppose, football: big matches on the big screens with best commentators; remember the olden days when we all huddled round the TV watching Match of the Day on the BBC? Of course, Football isn’t the only thing that unites us. From our Gospel this morning, people are brought together around a well, a watering-hole if you like. Water always brings us together.

Water, brings us together because it is the source of life. Human beings are made up of around sixty per cent water and the earth is almost completely covered with water, we cannot survive without it. Water is able to calm, and heal, to salve, cleanse, to restore and to reconcile. We are creatures made of water and creatures who need water. Wherever there is water, there we gather, bound together as one, we build cities alongside rivers, we irrigate our land to grow our crops, every creature of this earth comes to the water to drink.

Spiritually, the Christian person is born again through the waters of our baptism, and Jesus alludes to himself as the living water, in whom all our thirst will be quenched. The water that I will give, he says, will become a spring of water gushing up to eternal life. It is this water that brings about new life and new possibilities, it is this water that can make miracles happen.

In the book of Exodus, we find the Israelites grumbling; they are in the desert and have had nothing to drink for days. Without water the people are fractious and divided. What brings them together in the end? Water bubbles up from the side of a rock like a crystal fountain- and through that water, the people are reconciled to God and to one another.

God yearns for humanity to be bound together as one, and gives them water, to make it happen. Because of this water, the people of Israel are drawn back together and are carried through their wilderness into the promised land.  St Paul later refers to Jesus as the rock from which this living water comes.

Our Gospel reading today, is about water from a deep, life-giving well, which reveals the true identity of the woman who came to fetch it in the heat of the day. This is the water that reconciles Samaritan and Jew, male and female, the excluded and the included. This water washes away any idea of us and them, the well becomes a place of meeting, water brings people together.  Jesus is crossing every social boundary by talking to this woman- but through this conversation he speaks of the hope that one day, all will worship together in spirit and in truth….and he of course, is the living water which will make this happen. This is the ultimate reconciliation of all things in Christ, the living water that brings all things together.

St Paul in his letter to the Romans, reflects further on what this reconciliation might mean.  Reconciliation is in essence is a very simple thing, it is to be made one, and through Christ the whole of humanity has the potential to be made one with God and with one another. Jacobs’ well at Sychar, is the place, where for a moment in time, all things are drawn together under God, above and beyond all the petty divisions that separate us.

As the water from the rock brought the Israelites together- so Jesus, the living water, seeks to restore and reconcile all things to himself, bringing the whole of humanity through the wilderness of doubt and division into the promised land of joy and gladness and complete unification before God. This kind of unity is something we are thirsty for today, not only in our world but also in our church.

Jesus had a vision of all people reconciled with one another. The tribes and nations of the world re-created as one family, worshipping God together in unity and recognizing one another as children made in the image of God.  For us, that hard work of reconciliation begins with our baptism, but also with something as simple as our prayer of confession at the beginning of every eucharist- we have not loved God with our whole heart, we have not loved our neighbour as ourselves…there our reconciliation begins, as we gather at the well and drink of the living water.

This is the work we are called to undertake in lent, reflecting on how we give ourselves to this task of being made one when there is so much pulling us apart and when we experience a world which is divided and unjust. We do so need that living water to renew us and bring us together until justice rolls down like a river, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.

This week we hear again of the most vulnerable and most excluded in our world, our most needy neighbours, brought to our shores across the waters of the English channel, seeking safety and asylum after terrible loss and grief, and yet, as a society how are we proposing to welcome them? Will we even give them something to drink? The direction of some current policies seem to be taking us further towards division, this morning the Archbishop of York has called the government’s new asylum and migration law  ‘cruel and without purpose’, it seems as if we are being scattered, rather than drawn together through our common humanity, we are being turned against one another, and encouraged to turn away those we should be loving.

The Gospel is always very clear on these matters: Jesus constantly challenges us to consider, who is ‘included’ and who is ‘excluded’? What does being reconciled in and through Christ mean for us today? We are called to gather around the living water, we are called to generosity in our response to those who are thirsty. True reconciliation, of which St Paul speaks, means seeing Christ in one another and loving as he loves us. It means recognising that we are all equal under God.

If we waited at Jacob’s well for a little longer, who else would be drawn to the water at an unsociable hour, who else would be seeking to quench their thirst? To all those who come, Jesus offers living water, and desires that we his children do the same.  Whoever turns up at the well is given the water of life.

The story of the woman at the well, shows us that Christ, the living water, shows no partiality. Though the disciples were clearly uncomfortable about Jesus talking to a Samaritan woman and urged him to turn away, Jesus recognizes her as a child of God and she becomes a prophet, a messenger, an evangelist, for the good news, there at the well, where water is shared. God turns no-one away, and sends no-one away without offering them a drink of that living water.

It is to the woman at the well, that Jesus reveals that one day we will all be together, made one in him.

We are all called to drink of the water, offered to us by a loving and generous God, freely given for renewal, restoration, and reconciliation, given to bring us to life, and given to bring us back together.

Amen

Turned towards Christ and turned for Prayer – Ash Wednesday – Canon Victoria Johnson, Precentor

Title: Turned towards Christ and turned for Prayer

Preacher: Canon Victoria Johnson, Precentor.

Readings: Isaiah 58. 1–12, Matthew 6. 1–6, 16–21

Date: Sermon preached on Ash Wednesday on the theme of ‘Prayer’, one of the Diocese of York ‘Habits of Christlikeness’ in the Diocesan Rhythm of Life

George Herbert in his first poem on Prayer, describes what prayer is, or rather, he ends up telling us, rather beautifully, that there is no singular definition. Prayer is many things, The Church’s banquet, he begins, angel’s age, God’s breath in man returning to his birth, the soul in paraphrase, heart in pilgrimage.

It seems that Prayer is a thing which is almost undefinable, it is the other country of our souls, whilst also being as Herbert would say, Heaven in ordinary, or the milky way, the bird of paradise, church bells beyond the stars. In more prosaic language, prayer is a habit of Christlikeness, for it through prayer that we become more and more like Christ.

We are today entering into a season when we are commanded to pray as a means of seeking forgiveness, and of orientating our lives anew in the right direction. But what is the right direction? And how shall we pray?  How can our praying help us navigate not only this lent but our whole lives as beloved children of God?

Another take on prayer is and what prayer isn’t, is offered in our readings this evening. God does not desire, God is not interested in, the kind of prayer and fasting that is orientated to the self. The people of Israel complain that they are ‘not seen’ by God when they make ostentatious prayers and offer fasting for their own good- their fasting does not recognise the needy in their midst and their prayers are neither honouring God nor their neighbour, they are primarily honouring themselves. The direction is all wrong.

The Philosopher Soren Kierkegard reminds us that the function of prayer is not to influence God, but rather change the nature of the one who prays. To become more Christ-like, we might say.  The change God wants to see through prayer: is the bonds of injustice being loosened, the hungry fed, the naked clothed, the oppressed set free, the words of Isaiah, taken up by Christ himself when he defined his own mission in the world.

Through the prophet Isaiah, God calls the people to humility in their praying, which means to be properly brought down to the dust of the earth. For it is stood in the dust with our eyes looking to the stars that we know who we really are- creatures made in the image of God our creator, and creatures seeking transformation and change in our lives, and from there seeking transformation and change, and healing and renewal in the life of a broken world.

When prayer is rightly directed, other joys and blessings will emerge like a spring of water- the praying will direct the living.

Prayer does not need trumpets, prayer does not need to be seen. Prayer is ultimately an activity of the human heart in response to God alone, the turning and tuning of the heart to sing, as Herbert would again say a kind of tune, which all things hear and fear. Prayer is you and me, each one of us, stood before our maker-

In a sense, it is that kind of personal reflection and prayer that we are all called towards this lent, this is an inward journey of the heart and soul, the journey we all must face as we stand before God who sees us even in secret. This is a journey which plumbs the awful depths of our humanity and lifts us up from the dust of the earth to rise in glory.

The Litany of Penitence which follows this sermon sets us off on that journey by naming out loud and helping us each recall our propensity to turn away from God.  It’s a list of things we know we all do and this is followed by a symbolic gesture of penitence which marks our foreheads with an ashen cross.

We remember that we are of the dust, and to the dust we will return, we are reminded that in the meantime, we are daily being tuned to sing the song which glorifies no-thing and no-one but God, and through that prayer we are turned away from sin to be faithful to Christ.

And there is perhaps the key, the secret, the only way of praying- For however we pray, whether on our knees, or in silence, or with others, or indeed on street corners or noisily with trumpets, the key to prayer, the secret to prayer, is that it is orientated always and only towards Christ, we are to be humble in the dust with our eyes fixed on Jesus. O God, turn us and tune us to sing your song.

If our prayers and our hearts are so directed, then our lives will be directed in the same way, turned and tuned to be faithful to Christ, open to being changed and transformed in his name, and ready to serve Christ in one another, in the world he loved and came to save.  To his name be glory forever.