Sermon for the Fifth Sunday of Lent – Passion Sunday – Canon Peter Collier, Cathedral Reader

Ezekiel 37.1-14; John 11.1-45

We began our Lenten journey going with Jesus into the wilderness, where he faced the temptations that we know only too well. In various ways, as we prepare for the Easter Feast, we are encouraged to use the season of Lent to deepen our discipleship in our own mini wildernesses.

The valley we read about in our OT lesson is very much wilderness territory. And there in that wilderness the prophet sees a lot of dried out human bones. They are not the recent dead, they are very dry – they have been like that for a long time.

The question he is faced with is whether theses bones can live. I’m sure it wouldn’t have been the first thing that came into his head when he saw them, such was their state. But the question is posed for him – Is there a future here? Is there any hope in this situation? Can anything be done to bring life-giving change after so long?

What are the dry bones that we so often find ourselves looking at?

As we contemplate the world around us – there is Iran; Gaza; Sudan; Ukraine; to name some of the places we hear about almost daily.

Or as we contemplate our own society here in the UK – we look at increasing poverty; family breakdown; and growing mental health issues.

Or as we contemplate our own lives – many of us are aware of our own ageing bodies; our fear of being able to make ends meet, and our anxieties about what lies ahead for our children and their children.

The question that is posed for us this morning is however dry these various bones may be, however long they’ve been like that – is there any possibility of change and any hope of new life?

The natural answer is the one that the prophet gave – “God only knows”.

And God responds to Ezekiel telling him he should speak to the problem. He isn’t to do any of things we are tempted to do when facing intractable problems, such as carry out some research, devise a plan, attempt to engineer a solution. He is just told to prophesy. He is to announce God’s promise. So he speaks God’s promise into the silence and something extraordinary happens – there is a rattling sound and the bones come together and form skeletons, and then he sees sinews and flesh and skin appear, and there are now bodies in front of him, but they are not alive, they are still dead.

And once again he is told to speak, to prophesy. This time he is to address the winds and to call upon the winds to breathe life into these bodies. And so he does that and that vast army of bodies comes to life.

The combination of word and spirit that had brought about life at the very beginning of all things, has again brought about new life where there was not even any hint of hope.

So, now come with me to Bethany and to another scene of death. Here the death is more recent. We face not dry bones but a decomposing body that has begun to smell. Lazarus is dead. He and his sisters Martha and Mary were friends of Jesus, and Jesus has come to visit the grieving sisters. And the response of each of them is “if only you had been here”. And how often do we respond to the anxieties, fears and problems we face in exactly that way? If only …. If only this or that had happened; if only I had done something a little bit different; if only they had kept their noses out … if only …

We know that when Jesus initially heard that Lazarus was ill he hadn’t dropped what he was doing and gone immediately to Bethany. But when he does arrive he finds the sisters in deep distress. The impact of their brother’s death has overwhelmed them.

And we read that Jesus enters into their pain and grief and shares it to the extent that he is greatly disturbed in his spirit and groans, and he is deeply moved. Deep, deep within himself he is profoundly affected to the extent that he himself begins to weep. Why? Why does he behave like this when he knows he is going to bring him back to life? This is not some affected grief but a genuine deep down visceral pain in the heart of God. Sin and death have impacted this world to its great hurt, but even more to God’s hurting heart. And that effect of sin and death cannot be denied, although it is to be overcome.

And so Jesus weeps. And nothing has changed in that respect. He continues to suffer this world’s pain. To know deep within himself the effect of sin and death.

This chapter is the turning point of John’s gospel. This is the last of the signs showing us what God is like, and what God is about. And in chapter 12 we move into the last week of Jesus’ life and his own death and resurrection.

And this last sign is to prepare us for all that will follow as he enters into suffering, abuse and death, and to prepare us for his resurrection which we will celebrate on Easter day.

When Jesus tells Martha that her brother will rise again, she responds with what she has been brought up to believe – “yes I know he will rise at the last day”. But Jesus’ response is to tell her “I am the resurrection and the life”. He is telling her that that new life is already here and is to be found in him. And that new life he can and will impart to her brother, and to all who believe in him.

And though like Lazarus, he will die and rise, unlike Lazarus who would die again, Jesus will rise to a life that changes everything. By his dying and rising he will have overcome death and all that goes with it once and for all. So he tells Martha that those who believe in him will never die. His rising will be a final and definitive act.

Unlike the other signs in John’s gospel where the event happens, and is followed by Jesus’ explanation, on this occasion we have the explanation first, and then the miracle where he calls upon Lazarus to come out and out he comes.

So as we face the last few days leading us to Easter, what are we facing in our lives? Are we looking at dried up bones with no hope that anything can be done to produce a positive outcome? Or are we facing some deeply distressing personal grief?

The message of Lent is that God knows all about it. God knows the hopelessness of our situation. God gets our brokenness and distress because he shares in it, and so God weeps at it all still. But then God says there is hope because in me is new life, a new type of life, a life that cannot be overcome and that will never die.

But there’s a post script. When Lazarus came out of his tomb, he was still bound with strips of cloth and his face was still wrapped in a cloth. So Jesus tells those who are there that they are to unbind him so that he can go on his way and enjoy his new life.

And there is a message for us that though we have God’s new life within us, we need to help each other to experience that life to the full. We need to unbind one another. We need to share our lives and build each other up in our faith. As we learn together what God’s word says and what his promises are and above all as we express to each other that unconditional love that God has poured into our hearts, so we will unbind one another.

In the week ahead you may want to reflect and recall times in your own life when you have been aware of God bringing you into fresh a experience of his life but you have needed others to help you to begin to work it out. And you may think of others even now who you might draw alongside and help discover more of God’s love.

Amen.

“Be patient, therefore, beloved, until the coming of the Lord” – The Reverend Canon Timothy Goode, Congregational Discipleship and Nurture

May I speak in the name of the living God, who is our creator, sustainer and redeemer. Amen

If you visit Belfast today, one of the most striking features of that city is the Peace Wall. For the uninitiated, this name sounds reassuring, almost hopeful, as though it represents a solution to conflict. But when you find yourself beside it, the reality feels more complicated.

The Peace Wall is a network of barriers running through neighbourhoods across Belfast, separating communities that have for generations been divided by violence and mistrust. They were first built during the Troubles to prevent conflict between Protestant and Catholic communities, and they have indeed saved lives, but they have also done something else: they have turned suspicion into architecture. They have made division visible in brick, steel, and concrete.

Today there are more than fifty of these walls stretching across more than twenty miles. What is striking is not simply that they still exist, but that their number has increased since the Good Friday Agreement of 1998.

This is not because peace has failed, but because reconciliation is so much harder than ending violence.

Violence can be halted by ceasefires, agreements and treaties. But rebuilding trust between communities wounded by history is a much slower and more costly endeavour. It unfolds quietly, often out of sight, through patience, conversation, and the courage to see one another again as neighbours.

Walls can be built quickly but rebuilding trust takes generations.

That reality would not have surprised the prophet Micah, from whom we have heard in our first reading. Micah looks out at the society of his own time and sees something painfully familiar: corruption, mistrust, and moral exhaustion. He describes the experience like someone walking through a vineyard after the harvest, searching for grapes and finding none. The faithful seem to have disappeared from the land. Justice itself has been distorted by power.

Then Micah says something deeply unsettling. He warns that trust itself is becoming fragile, even within their closest relationships. Suspicion is spreading through society. Communities are dividing into tribes that guard themselves against one another.

It sounds oh so familiar, doesn’t it? If we are honest with ourselves, Micah could also be describing our own age as well.

We live in a world where mistrust has become a powerful force in public life. Political discourse has grown brittle and polarised. Communities risk fracturing along ideological lines. And beyond our own disagreements we are witnessing conflicts across the world that seem endlessly capable of igniting and reigniting.

Yet Micah refuses to surrender to despair. After describing the brokenness around him, he says something quietly radical: “But as for me, I will look to the Lord.”

In other words, the instability of the world will not determine where I place my hope. This is not a denial of chaos. It is the recognition that the chaos of history is not the final word.

The theologian Miroslav Volf, in his seminal book ‘Exclusion and Embrace’, reflecting on reconciliation after the Balkan wars of the 1990s, writes that peace is never achieved simply by the absence of violence. True reconciliation requires what he calls ‘the courage of embrace’: the willingness to move toward the other even when history has taught us to fear them.

That kind of courage rarely appears dramatically. More often it grows through small and costly relationships.

And perhaps nowhere has this been more evident in our recent history, than in the relationship that developed between Ian Paisley and Martin McGuinness. who back in 2007 became respectively, First Minister and deputy First Minister of Northern Ireland.

For decades they had stood on opposite sides of Northern Ireland’s bitter sectarian conflict. Ian Paisley had been one of the fiercest voices of Protestant unionism. Martin McGuinness had been a senior figure in the Irish Republican movement. They utterly represented and embodied the profound division of their country.

And yet astonishingly, in the years that followed the Good Friday Agreement, they began to work together in government. What emerged was something few had expected: not merely cooperation, but a genuine and even warm relationship. Their partnership became so unexpectedly cordial that journalists began referring to them as the “Chuckle Brothers.”

That transformation did not erase the past. Nor did not pretend that decades of violence had never happened. But it did reveal something important: that reconciliation, however unlikely, is still possible.

Reconciliation is slow. Reconciliation is fragile. Reconciliation requires grace, generosity, humility and patience.

And it is precisely this virtue of patience the letter of James commends to the Christian community, that we have just heard in our second reading this evening.

James urges believers to be patient, and he uses the image of a farmer waiting for the harvest. A farmer does not simply sit and wait for crops to appear. The farmer continues cultivating the soil, caring for the field, trusting that the harvest will come, even when it cannot yet be seen.

Patience, then, is not passive waiting. Patience is active faithfulness. Patience is the decision to keep doing the work of goodness even when the results are not immediate, and our Christian faith tells us that God is actively engaged in precisely this kind of patient work within the world.

In Jesus Christ we encounter a God who does not remain distant from human conflict but enters directly into it. The New Testament speaks of Christ breaking down the dividing wall of hostility, not through domination, but through a love willing to absorb violence rather than perpetuate it.

Tonight’s psalm gives us a remarkable cry of trust: “Into thy hands I commend my spirit.” But the hands into which the psalmist entrusts their life are not distant or abstract. For us as Christians they are the wounded hands of Christ; hands that healed the sick, welcomed the outsider, bore the violence of the world and yet refused to return it. And it is those same scarred and faithful hands that hold our lives, and the life of the world itself, even now.

For in resurrection those wounds remain. Those scars remind us that resurrection does not erase the history of suffering, rather resurrection transforms it. And if our times truly rest in those wounded hands, then we are freed from the fear that so often leads us to build walls around ourselves. Instead, we are being invited to participate in the slow, patient, and costly work of reconciliation.

So, when Micah declares, “But as for me, I will look to the Lord.” it is not merely a private prayer for comfort. It is a confident declaration that the future of this wounded world is not ultimately determined by violence or fear. It is held by the wounded hands of God.

And because of that hope, even when the work of reconciliation feels unfinished – as it still does in Belfast, as it does in far too many places across the world – we do not turn away from the task. We continue it. Quietly. Patiently. Faithfully.

We continue it in the stubborn belief that walls are not the final architecture of human history; that suspicion will not have the last word; that fear will not write the ending of our story.

For the God in whom the psalmist places their hope, is the same God who, in Christ, has already begun the patient and costly work of breaking down every dividing wall of hostility. And that work is still unfolding among us – wherever courage overcomes suspicion, wherever enemies become neighbours, wherever trust is rebuilt one fragile conversation at a time.

So, as we leave the Minster tonight, we leave not as spectators of that work, but as participants in it: trusting that the God who has begun the work of reconciliation in this wounded world will, in God’s own time, bring it to completion. As we daily pray,

Thy Kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.

Amen.

“Ash, Silence and the voice of God” – The Reverend Canon Maggie McLean, Missioner

How did Jesus feel, going into the wilderness? 

Perhaps we imagine a holy, patient Messiah walking away from civilisation, happy to spend time apart from people, praying. The account we’ve just heard from Matthew’s Gospel seems to support that. Jesus ‘was led’ by the Spirit in order to be tempted. Mark’s Gospel is less coy. There, Jesus isn’t led by the Spirit but forced by the Spirit. The word in Greek is used more often in the gospels to describe exorcism. It has a force and compulsion that may sound surprising. Jesus – as it were – spat out by the Spirit, to face his demons alone in the desert.  

I have some sympathy with the idea of a reluctant Messiah. Would I want to spend week after week, hungry and cold, with no company other than my own thoughts? Perhaps not all of us, but maybe most of us, don’t rush into that kind of space. We might well need the Holy Spirit to give us a firm prod, to make us spend the time to ask of ourselves, and of God: ‘what’s really going on? What do you want me to do?’ 

Sometimes it can be lazy to be busy. To rush from one task to another with a diary brimming with appointments. Taking the time to make space, to find solitude, can be something we choose to avoid. Of course, it depends a lot on temperament. While some of us enjoy our own company, many people don’t. We need other people round us to know who we are. Being alone can be a void that is far from comfortable or easy. Our Gospel today seems to say, give it long enough, and the demons will come.  Create enough space and our worst doubts and temptations will come to the surface.  

As the word suggests, entering the wilderness can be…  bewildering. The place where we are led astray and become disorientated. Little wonder that the Spirit needs to catapult this saviour to face the demons that assault our certainties. 

We can all find lots of reasons to avoid Lent. It’s the season in the Church’s year when we are called most intensively to make space; take time; reflect; and open our hearts and minds to a God who might ask us difficult things. A season that couldn’t have a more basic and challenging start.  

Last Wednesday I was privileged to be part of services where hundreds of people in the Minster were told the most basic and inconvenient truth about themselves: “Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return”. Not only told but marked with the ash that represents our physical reality.  

The desert season of Lent reminds us of the truth of our being. But it doesn’t end there. In the desert, in the experience of sand and stars, God is also present. Love and grace continue to be with us. In the place where people are absent, God alone tells us our worth and value. Perhaps the thing that keeps most of us out of the desert is fear. Fear that we are only ash; only a failure; only a fleeting glimpse of who God wants us to be. We need an agent of God, perhaps the Holy Spirit, to push us into these uncomfortable places. To learn with patient faith that God is also there, even in our temptations. To name the whispers that speak to our weakness and, naming them, see them for what they are: shadows of our doubt and shades of our fear. 

One way in which many people might encounter this kind of space is in pilgrimage. While every pilgrimage has a purpose and a destination, there are times spent in remote locations, far from crowds or signs of civilisation. Days when we feel less confident that we can complete the journey. In places the world around us can seem a wilderness, and we might sometimes question whether we’re on the right path. 

Without doubt, there can be a bleakness in the season of Lent. So we might need to ask God to give us a nudge. To dare to be in the places where stillness allows us to hear the Spirit’s call. It is through Lent that we dare to arrive at Easter, knowing that we’ve faced our demons and kept on the right path. These 40 days are a microcosm of our pilgrimage through life. Beginning in dust and ashes, but placing our hope in the God for whom even death is not the final word. 

Amen.

“Here is my son; listen to him” – The Reverend Canon Timothy Goode, Congregational Discipleship and Nurture

This is my Son, the Beloved; with him I am well pleased; listen to him.

May I speak in the name of the living God, who is our creator, sustainer and redeemer. Amen

What would it take for us to truly listen to God?

Not to hear words we already agree with. Not to have our preferences baptised or our fears soothed. But to listen – deeply, dangerously, to the very core of our being, in a way that might truly unsettle us, change us. To listen in such a way that it might well cost us something.

This very question hangs over today, the Sunday before Lent, like the cloud on the mountain in today’s Gospel. It is the question that draws together both of our readings, and it is the question the Church must face before it dares to enter the wilderness of Lent.

Peter, writing later in his life, is at pains to insist that what he proclaims is not a clever construction, nor a persuasive story, nor a religious myth designed to inspire loyalty. “We did not follow cleverly devised myths,” he writes. “We were eyewitnesses.” In other words: this faith was not invented to be useful. This faith was encountered. It interrupted real lives. It left real marks.

And yet we might wonder why Peter feels the need to insist so strongly. Perhaps it is because even in the early Church there were doubts. Perhaps it is because the temptation to reshape God into something manageable was as present then as it is now. Perhaps it is because listening to God is never straightforward – even when God speaks plainly.

In Matthew’s Gospel, Peter appears again, this time on the mountain. Jesus is transfigured before him. Moses and Elijah appear. Heaven seems suddenly close. And Peter, understandably overwhelmed, does what so many of us would be tempted to do: he tries to fix the moment. “Let us make three dwellings.” It is the first century equivalent of a theological selfie. Let us capture this. Preserve it. Institutionalise it. Keep it safe.

There is something deeply human about that instinct. We pull towards clarity. We yearn for certainties. We prefer moments where God feels obvious, radiant, undeniable. We build churches, liturgies, doctrines, and habits around those moments. None of that is wrong. But it carries a risk: that we tempted to listen only for the God we already recognise.

Because the voice that comes from the cloud does not say, “This is what you must believe.” It does not say, “Stay here.” It does not say, “You’ve understood everything.” It says: “This is my Son, the Beloved; listen to him.”

And suddenly listening becomes the most demanding task of all.

Listening is so much harder than believing. So much harder than worshipping. So much harder than obeying. Because listening requires us to relinquish control over what we will hear. It opens us up to surprise. To challenge. To contradiction. To the possibility that God may speak in ways that disrupt our certainties rather than confirm them.

There is a version of faith – popular in every age – that treats God as a source of affirmation. God agrees with us. God validates us. God reinforces what we already think. That kind of faith is attractive, comforting, and ultimately shallow. It produces confidence without transformation.

But the God revealed in Jesus Christ is not a projection of our best ideas. The God of the Transfiguration is revealed precisely in the one who will shortly speak of suffering, rejection, and the cross. The dazzling light on the mountain cannot be separated from the hard road to Jerusalem. To listen to Jesus is to listen not only to words of glory, but to words that unsettle our fantasies of strength, success, and control.

Peter, writing years later, understands this in a way his younger self could not. He has learnt the hard way. He writes from costly lived experience. When he speaks of the “majestic glory” and the voice from heaven, he is not inviting the Church to chase spiritual experiences. He is grounding faith in a truth that has endured testing, failure, and fear. Peter knows now that listening to God did not spare him suffering – but it did sustain him through it.

So what does it mean for us, here and now, to listen?

In a culture saturated with noise – opinion, outrage, binary certainties – listening is countercultural. We curate what we hear. We choose the voices that reassure us. We mute that which makes us uncomfortable. Even in the Church, we can turn listening into a performance: nodding politely while already preparing our reply.

Yet the voice from the cloud is not inviting us into debate. It is not asking us to balance perspectives or manage tensions. It is commanding something far simpler and harder: listen to him. Not listen to our fears. Not listen to our prejudices. Not listen to the loudest voices or the most powerful interests. Listen to Christ.

And Christ speaks in ways that resist capture. He speaks through scripture, yes – but Christ speaks also through the poor, through the excluded, through the wounded. He speaks in the quiet persistence of prayer and in the discomfort of unanswered questions. He speaks not only in moments of radiance, but in the shadowed places where certainty fails.

That is why the Transfiguration is offered on this Sunday, on the threshold of Lent. Before the Church enters a season of repentance and self-examination, we are offered a vision of glory – not to escape the journey ahead, but to endure it. The disciples are not allowed to stay on the mountain. They must come down and we too must come down. Listening always leads us back into the world, not away from it.

And here is the hardest truth of all: listening to God does not guarantee clarity. It does not remove disagreement. It does not protect us from misunderstanding one another. What it does is reorient us. It places Christ, not our certainties, at the centre. It teaches us to live faithfully without complete resolution.

Which brings us back to the question we began with.

What would it take for us to truly listen to God?

Not more certainty.

Not better arguments.

Not stronger control.

What it takes is graceful, generous humility. The willingness to be addressed rather than affirmed. The courage to follow Christ down the mountain as well as up it and the patience to trust that God’s word is trustworthy even when it unsettles and disrupts us.

The answer, finally, is this:

To truly listen to God is to allow ourselves to be changed by Christ – not only in moments of light, but in the long obedience of the road that leads us through the valley of the shadow of death, towards resurrection.

And Lent begins by asking us, are we really, truly willing to listen that deeply. Well, are we?

Amen.

“The Throne Is Not Empty: Worship and Identity in an Age of Fear” – The Reverend Canon Timothy Goode, Congregational Discipleship and Nurture

There is something about Evensong that tells the truth about the human condition. We arrive towards the end of the day often carrying more than we can easily name. The noise of the news still echoes in our ears; conversations, worries, and unfinished business linger in our minds. We arrive with the atmosphere of our culture pressing in – relentless commentary, brittle outrage, cheap certainty, and the exhausting sense that everything is always at stake.

And yet Evensong is not simply a service of comfort. It is a service of reorientation. It meets the world as it is – with all its conflict, confusion, and cruelty – and places it within the greater reality of God. It retrains our attention and restores the centre.

And both our readings tonight also do precisely that. They do not invite us to escape the world, but to look upon it truthfully. They offer two arresting images that matter deeply for a culture like ours: Wisdom calling at the crossroads, and heaven gathered in worship around the throne.

We are living in a time marked by cynicism, distrust, and anger. Truth is now being treated not as a shared good but as a tool for leverage. Politics has become spectacle. Identity has hardened into tribe and those who feel unheard are being all too easily persuaded that their pain must have an enemy attached to it.

It is apt, therefore, that today is also the day the Church keeps Racial Justice Sunday. Racial injustice grows wherever fear hardens identity and difference becomes threat. But the gospel utterly refuses to collude with that logic. In Christ, human dignity is not earned or defended against others; it is given. The Church is called to be a community where difference is not feared but reconciled, where belonging is not secured by exclusion but received as grace.

Today’s Collect for the Second Sunday before Lent gives language to this truth:

Almighty God, you have created the heavens and the earth and made us in your own image: teach us to discern your hand in all your works and your likeness in all your children.

This Collect reminds us that identity begins not in anxiety or opposition but in gift. If we are made in God’s image, then our neighbour can never become a rival to our belonging but a vital part of the same divine intention. To discern God’s likeness in one another is already to resist the fear that fractures communities and corrodes common life.

In such a moment, Christian worship becomes more than devotion. It becomes discernment. It becomes resistance. It becomes the place where we remember what we are for, and to whom we belong.

St Augustine wrote, “You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our heart is restless until it rests in you.” That can become a holy restlessness when shaped by faith. But restlessness shaped by fear drives us toward slogans and scapegoats. When anxiety becomes the air we breathe, it becomes all too easy to trade wisdom for simple answers, truth for certainty, and justice for victory.

We see this in particular in the present rise of populism, not simply as a political movement but as a cultural malaise. Popularism draws strength from real pain: economic insecurity, cultural dislocation, communities that feel abandoned. That pain demands urgent attention and any Church that is not willing to bear the pain of its people has ceased to listen as Christ listens.

But populism does not bear pain; it corrupts it. Popularism reshapes pain into grievance and grievance into rage. It offers belonging through exclusion and identity without compassion and this dynamic has further seeped into families, workplaces, churches, and communities, training us in suspicion and condemnation.

Racial injustice flourishes in precisely this soil, when fear seeks somewhere to land and whole groups of people are made to carry anxieties that belong to us all. The Christian response is neither denial nor moral superiority, but repentance and reorientation: learning again to see one another as bearers of God’s image rather than as problems to be solved.

That is why tonight’s readings matter. Our readings from Proverbs and Revelation do not merely inspire; they reorient us. They call us back to what is real, what deserves our allegiance, and what leads to life.

Our first reading opens with a striking question: “Does not wisdom call, and does not understanding raise her voice?”

Wisdom is not hidden away. She is encountered at crossroads, at city gates, in public places – where decisions are made and power is exercised. Wisdom is not private spirituality but public truth. She refuses easy enemies and resists simplifications that allow injustice to flourish. Wisdom calls us to listen before judging and to discern before condemning.

Populism, by contrast, thrives on speed – quick blame, quick anger, quick certainty – demanding that we decide who is at fault before understanding has begun. It tempts us to prefer the comfort of being right to the demanding work of being wise.

Then Proverbs says something astonishing. Wisdom speaks as present before creation itself, rejoicing before God always. Creation begins not in rivalry or fear, but in delight. The universe is not founded on resentment but on joy.

If creation begins in delight, then human difference – of culture, language, ability, identity and race – becomes not a problem to be solved but part of the abundance of God’s good creation. Reality belongs to God and is shaped by Wisdom, not grievance.

So discipleship in our age requires a spiritual refusal. A refusal to let resentment organise our lives. A refusal to let anger become our identity. A refusal to let tribalism teach us to see others primarily as threats. Hi We were created for something so much deeper: the joy of living in tune with Wisdom.

And if that were not enough, Revelation throws open for us a vision of the gates of heaven.

We are shown a throne – not because God is a tyrant, but because reality has a centre. The universe is not saved by the loudest voice or the strongest leader. There is a throne, and we are not on it.

Around that throne, living creatures cry, “Holy, holy, holy,” and elders cast down their crowns. This is not decorative worship but resistance. Revelation was written to communities living under empire, surrounded by the same pressure to conform. John’s vision says: look again. Worship belongs to God alone.

And that matters now. When politics becomes performance and ideology takes on religious intensity, Revelation reminds us that the throne is already occupied. It does not belong to nations, leaders, or crowds.

The throne is occupied by God.

Populism longs for a saviour who crushes enemies. Revelation calls us to worship the One who reigns in holiness. Around the throne are gathered people from every nation and language, not erased into sameness but united in worship. Heaven itself stands as a piercing rebuke to every hierarchy that measures human worth by race, power, or belonging.

But neither is the Church immune from these temptations. We too can trade depth for certainty, humility for rage, and discernment for belonging. But worship reforms us for we become like what we worship.

If we worship strength, we will become brutal. If we worship victory, we will become cruel. If we worship the nation, we will become tribal. But if we worship God, we will become free.

So, what are our readings calling us back to? Not neutrality or silence, but maturity. They call us to become communities of Wisdom: patient, discerning, compassionate, and truthful, people whose identities are rooted not in grievance but in grace; not in fear but in worship; not in nostalgia but in hope.

So let us hear Wisdom calling at the crossroads. Let us step away from the cheap thrill of outrage. Let us refuse the catechesis of contempt. Let us worship the One who alone is holy, and let that worship reorder our loves, our speech, our politics, and our compassion.

Because Wisdom is not silent and the throne is not empty. Thanks be to God.

Amen.

“Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life…” – The Very Reverend Dominic Barrington, Dean of York

On October 2^nd, 2023, Ezzideen Shehab, a 28-year old Palestinian man, returned to his home in Gaza City, after studying medicine abroad for almost a decade – returned to his home with the great achievement, the great honour, of having become a doctor. That Friday night, the night of October 6^th, 2023, his father prepared a feast. Writing about this joyous family gathering two years later, Dr Shehab remarked,

“We gathered as one family, laughing, speaking over one another, breaking bread with careless joy, pouring juice into glasses as though it were the wine of peace itself… My father’s hands moved as Christ’s once did, blessing the bread, dividing it among those he loved.”

In rapidly acquired hindsight, it was, of course, a fateful evening, and – precisely two years later, in October 2025, he recalled that “…somewhere, though no one could name it, there hung in the air that same fragile foreboding that filled the upper room in Jerusalem, when love spoke its last words before betrayal…”

For the very next morning, as we all know, the Middle East changed, as the world woke up to the horrific news of the Hamas attack on Israel that left over 1,100 people dead and some 250 more taken hostage. And that hideous betrayal of humanity was followed by nearly 700 days of military conflict – some two years of very unequal warfare during which another 1,700 Israelis and some 72,000 Gazans lost their lives, as the Gaza Strip was reduced to little more than rubble. Humans created in the image of God betrayed other humans created in the image of God, and love seemed to have been utterly vanquished from the stage.

It was not the context in which our young medical graduate had imagined that he would minister as a doctor. And over the next two years, his medical skills found themselves augmented by a spiritual – indeed, a theological – inner life, that led, three months ago, to the publication of the Diary of a Young Doctor – a record of his experiences and insights as he sought to live out his vocation in ever more desperate circumstances.

This profound reflection on living through what many have now termed a genocide contains many – too many – poignant encounters, such as the one he had on 27^th May, 2025:

This morning, they came, two sisters. The elder, a girl, the youngest still a child. Nineteen and fifteen. They stood before me like two broken icons, hollow-eyed, limbs too light to hold the soul in place. I listened to their lungs wheeze and watched their hearts labour against emptiness. I gave them what I had: medicine, supplements – a gesture that felt almost obscene. Then the youngest, with her cracked voice, asked, “Doctor, how can we take medicine without food?”

I say this with tears on the page: I did not answer. Because what answer is there? … What is this world where children must beg for bread to take with their antibiotics?

And yet, as we hear this morning’s gospel ring in our ears, it is not hard to imagine those two emaciated sisters saying to Jesus, “How can we not worry about what we are to eat and drink?”… We seem to hear Dr Shehab saying to Jesus, “Look at this genocidal death and destruction – we are not of more value than the birds of the air…”

But, therefore… says Jesus… therefore, do not worry about your life…

It sounds a tall order – an improbably, perhaps impossibly tall order. If you read the doctor’s diary, you will realize that not a day passed in which he did not face his own mortality and vulnerability, as around him friends, family members and colleagues were killed and wounded indiscriminately.

And if it sounds a tall order to tell the quietly heroic Dr Shehab that he shouldn’t worry about his life, it feels, I suspect, an even taller order for us to contemplate, in the safety and comfort of the city of York, where most of us take for granted so many aspects of a secure life, the sudden deprivation of which would probably leave us extremely worried. But unless or until that happens, we may find it hard to hear or to understand Jesus looking us in the eye, and saying, therefore… therefore, do not worry about your life.

And it’s not the only thing which Jesus has been saying. Since last Sunday, when we heard the start of the Sermon on the Mount, in the well-known text we call the Beatitudes, Jesus has been fleshing out some of the implications of what it might actually mean to live out the values of the kingdom of heaven in the midst of the broken kingdoms of this world. And if we bother to take his teaching seriously, we cannot fail to be shocked and discomforted by the counter-cultural call to love and to give unconditionally, to work out where your treasure really is to be found, to forgive those who wrong us, to pray and to work for God’s will (not human will) to be ‘done’  – done right here on earth, and not just in heaven on a ‘pie in the sky when you die’ basis.

And – this morning – these counter-cultural teachings come to head in the verse immediately preceding what we just heard read, when Jesus says bluntly and clearly:

“No one can serve two masters; for a slave will either hate the one and love the other, or be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and wealth.”

“It’s simple,” says Jesus: “you have a choice… and therefore… therefore, make the right choice… and don’t worry about your life…”

And only a few years later, Paul, known to his Jewish friends as Saul, made the right choice. Indeed, you might say that for him, the choice became blindingly obvious, as he journeyed to Damascus on an errand that would have been emphatically the wrong choice. But newly commissioned by his extraordinary encounter with the risen Christ, Paul sets off across much of what was then the ‘known world’, manifestly not worrying about his own life.

And boy if he had been the worrying type, he’d have given up pretty quickly. Go look at some of his letters, and you can get a vivid sense of what it means not to worry about your life if you are intent on building the kingdom. In one particularly noteworthy passage, he says:

I am talking like a madman…with far greater labours, far more imprisonments, with countless floggings, and often near death. Five times I have received from the Jews the forty lashes minus one. Three times I was beaten with rods. Once I received a stoning. Three times I was shipwrecked; for a night and a day I was adrift at sea; on frequent journeys, in danger from rivers, danger from bandits, danger from my own people, danger from Gentiles, danger in the city, danger in the wilderness, danger at sea, danger from false brothers and sisters; in toil and hardship, through many a sleepless night, hungry and thirsty, often without food, cold and naked.

That is why, in our first reading, Paul speaks of creation being ‘subjected to futility’ – that is why he knows that the ‘glory of the children of God’ is a work in progress, yet to be fully realised, as we endure the groaning of the labour pains of a broken world that is only held together – that is only saved by hope… by the hope that in Christ (and only in Christ) can we be set free from ‘the bondage of decay’.

For Paul knew that the living out of such a hope can only be done in solidarity with the crucified one. Because one thing is utterly certain – there is no resurrection – there is no hope of resurrection – where there has been no crucifixion. And crucifixion is ubiquitous, as Dr Shehab realized when he encountered those two sisters in the ruins and rubble of Gaza:  I tell you this. This is not war. This is crucifixion.

But it is the encounter with crucifixion, as the young doctor discovered, that we fully and properly learn to make the right choice:

I tell you: our humanity is not in question. It is crucified. And I, a doctor in Gaza, am merely one of many still clinging to the faith. Not because I believe will save me, but because I believe that suffering beside the innocent is the last honest thing a man can do.

On that fateful evening before the horrors of Hamas’ evil attack on Israel and all that followed, on that fateful evening, Ezzideen Shehab experienced the profound joys of a celebratory meal, gathered ‘as one family’, breaking bread ‘with careless joy’, recalling Christ’s own actions sharing broken bread and the ‘wine of peace’ ‘among those he loved’.

As we share in Christ’s celebration around that altar in a few moments, we are called to do so with an equally careless joy… but a joy that connects us with a saviour whose scars tell us of the cost of making the kingdom come on earth as it is in heaven:

“…if God still watches, let Him bear witness. For if He is silent now, then one day He must speak. And when He does, He will whisper not in Hebrew, nor Arabic, nor English, but in suffering. The only language that was ever real.”

Which is why, if we truly seek first the kingdom of God and God’s righteousness, if we are serious about praying the prayer which Jesus taught us, then, in fellowship with that young doctor, in fellowship with Paul, and with all who have followed the Crucified One, it’s time to stop worrying about our life.

Amen.

Dr Shehab still runs the Al-Rahma Medical Clinic in northern Gaza, offering medical care without cost, treating the best part of 500 people each week. If you wish to support his work, you can do so at https://chuffed.org/project/117739-dr-ezzideen-shehab

“Pilgrims of Peace” – The Reverend Canon Maggie McLean, Missioner

In the past week it feels like there has been a welter of news connected to pilgrimage. And it’s been news from near and far, and across an extensive period of time.

Firstly, the excavations to build the HS2 railway in Warwickshire have unearthed a Medieval pilgrim badge. With a design of three lions this would have been a common sight in the 14^th and 15^th centuries. Tokens of making a journey to a site of special religious significance. Then there is the continuing media interest in pilgrimages, with a current BBC series presented by Simon Reeves.

Finally, and much closer to home, this weekend we are celebrating the exhibition here in the Minster of part of the shrine of St William. An important focus for pilgrimage here in the north of England, this is the first time in 500 years that these important artefacts connected with William have been brought together. But they are more than artefacts.

Pilgrimage is centred on a special person or place, usually associated with someone who has made God known in a particular way. The journey to get there, possibly with hazards and considerable effort, is part of the experience of connection we feel when we arrive. Since William was made a saint 800 years ago, people have travelled to York to find a physical link with someone who lived and died being faithful to Christ.

The Feast of the Presentation, also called Candlemas, recalls a journey which the family of Jesus made to the central structure of the Jewish faith – the Temple in Jerusalem. It would not have been an easy journey. Across 80 miles the family travelled with others for both company and safety. It is estimated that it would have taken 4 days. It was a purposeful journey, at the end of which Mary was purified and Jesus was presented.

Every Evensong, as we have this afternoon, includes one or more psalms. Today it was Psalm 122. The 15 psalms 120 to 134 are often called the Pilgrim Psalms. Psalm 120 says something like: ‘I have to get out of here’. Psalm 121 then describes the departure, and Psalm 122 leads to thoughts about the journey’s goal: Jerusalem. As one writer has put it, even as the pilgrimage begins, “Jerusalem’s silhouette” is captured in the beauty of verse:

‘Jerusalem, built up again as a city, firmly put together, a unity’

For any Israelite this was a thrilling vision. After the pain of Exile and poverty, the vision that the city can be built up again. As the same writer goes on to say: ‘it is like a promise that the work of people in community can change this world’s architecture towards peace’. Given the world of that time, and the world of today, it is a testimony to human faith in God that we can still image a place of peace. Having looked towards the wonderful vision of this city, the author of the Psalm turns towards the people with an invitation to pray for the peace of Jerusalem.

But here something else happens in the Psalm. The speaker recognises that they themselves must also turn towards peace, not simply tell others to do so: ‘For the sake of my siblings, for love of my companions on the way, I will after all speak for peace in you’.

And who is the author of this Psalm, and all the fifteen Pilgrim Psalms? Surprisingly, they are the most troubled people in society. In these psalms we find the voices of slaves; people in poverty working too many hours; farmers who weep because the grain they take to sow diminishes the family’s stock of food. As has been said about these psalms, the people who raise their voices here are ‘Exiles in their own land’. These are not naïve pilgrims.

The arc of the 15 psalms demonstrates a realism about the conflicts and cost of seeking peace. Jerusalem is a potent vision of God’s dwelling, a holy place of celebration and love and yet, as we know from the Gospels, a place which falls far short of what God desires for the people. In the second reading this afternoon Jesus points to the ultimate futility of a physical place, placing himself – the Son of God – as the enduring fulfilment of our hopes for peace and unity.

I long for the peace of Jerusalem, and for peace everywhere. Our true pilgrimage, the journey that can give us this peace, is the life we lead from day-to-day. As we seek to draw nearer to God let’s hear the voices of our companion pilgrims, especially those whose hearts and hopes for peace are born out of pain and suffering. Together – and only together – can we arrive with gladness at the heavenly Jerusalem: the living temple where God’s peace is within us.

Amen.

Quotes from: A Transforming Path – The Pilgrims’ Songs

Klara Butting

Sermon for the Feast of the Conversion of Paul – The Reverend Canon Timothy Goode, Congregational Discipleship and Nurture

“I am now rejoicing in my sufferings for your sake”

May I speak in the name of the living God, who is our creator, sustainer, and redeemer.

Friends, when was the last time we were changed – not encouraged, not reassured, but utterly undone?

Not the kind of spiritual moment that leaves us quietly confirmed in the person we already believed ourselves to be, but the kind that leaves us exposed: stripped back and brought to the very edge of our own competence.

When did we last meet Christ in a way that did not simply strengthen our convictions, but convert them? Not just in what we think, but in how we relate; how we listen; how we depend; how we learn to receive.

We are so used to speaking of the conversion of St Paul as a moment of blinding light and thunderous revelation that we often miss where the conversion actually takes place. Not on the road. Not even in the light. But primarily in what follows: the slow, humiliating, disorientating walk into Damascus. Not the dramatic fall, but the difficult rising; not the voice from heaven, but in the silence that follows.

For the decisive theological moment is not when Paul falls to the ground, but when he is helped up again and discovers he is blind and cannot go on alone:

This is the sacred ground of Paul’s conversion: the beginning of the unmaking. The moment the old self is rendered powerless, and a new self begins – not through triumph, but through dependence.

The road to Damascus matters – but it is the being led by the hand into Damascus that Paul spends the rest of his ministry making sense of.

For up until this point, Saul of Tarsus has been the very image of religious independence. Authorised. Commissioned. Certain. A man saturated in Scripture, fluent in tradition, confident in his inheritance.

He knows who God is. He knows what God wants. And he knows who stands in God’s way. He is not wandering; he is certain. He is not searching; he is decisive. And that certainty is precisely the problem.

Our first reading from Ecclesiasticus offers a portrait of such a wise scribe: one who devotes himself to the study of the law of the Most High; who “seeks out the wisdom of all the ancients,” and “preserves the sayings of the famous.” It’s a beautiful portrait. But it’s also dangerous. For wisdom, unconverted, becomes control, learning becomes exclusion and scripture becomes weapon.

So, Paul is not converted away from Scripture. He is converted within Scripture. And what must be undone is the fantasy – the insidious lie – of independence: the belief that faithfulness means self-sufficiency; that holiness means being right; that truth is something we can carry alone.

The risen Christ does not argue Paul into the Kingdom. He dismantles him. And the dismantling is not complete until Paul accepts the hand that leads him into the city he intended to dominate.

So, the road to Damascus is not the end of Paul’s power. It is its unmasking. The walk into Damascus is its total surrender. To be led by the hand is to relinquish control of pace, direction, and dignity. It is to trust those we did not choose. It is to arrive not as a conqueror, but as someone carried. This is not incidental detail: it is theologically decisive.

And it speaks directly into the heart of the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity, which concludes today. Christian disunity is sustained by the very same fantasy that sustained Saul: the fantasy that we can journey alone. That my tradition has enough. That my theology is sufficient. That my church can see clearly without the hand of another guiding it.

And it also speaks painfully – even prophetically – into the heart of tomorrow, as we mark Holocaust Memorial Day.

Holocaust Memorial Day does not only ask us to remember the victims of Nazi hatred. It forces us to look, with honesty, at the long history in which Christians – through theology, preaching, and inherited contempt – helped to form the soil in which antisemitism could grow. It confronts us with the terrible truth that religious certainty, unconverted, can become religious violence.

We are not told whether Saul is an executioner; but we know he is a persecutor. Already convinced he is acting in the name of God. certain purity must be defended and threats removed. And that is why this conversion matters so much. The risen Christ refuses to let Saul keep calling violence righteousness. He is stopped in his tracks. Christ unmakes him and his sudden dependency forces him into humility – and then sends him back into the world with a gospel that can no longer be weaponised.

And this is why Paul can later write, as we heard tonight in Colossians:

“I am now rejoicing in my sufferings for your sake, and in my flesh I am completing what is lacking in Christ’s afflictions for the sake of his body, that is, the church.”

It is a startling statement – and a dangerous one, dangerous if misunderstood and dangerous if ignored.

Paul is not saying that the cross was insufficient. He is saying something far more unsettling: that Christ has chosen to bind himself to a body that suffers. A body that is unfinished. A body that is fallible. A body that requires community in order to become whole.

The mystery Paul proclaims is not Christ as private possession, but Christ among us. Not Christ as property, but Christ as communion. Not Christ as an idea to be defended, but Christ as a life to be shared – and sometimes carried.

Which means unity will not achieved by agreement alone. It will only be achieved by something far more costly: mutual dependence.

Paul, who once walked with authority, learns that the gospel advances not through domination but through vulnerability; not through purity but through participation; not through standing apart but through being bound together. And so when he speaks of being “rooted and built up in him” his words assume entanglement: shared soil, interwoven lives, a common life that cannot be lived alone.

Unity is not sameness. It is not the erasure of difference. It is the refusal of independence.

The Church will not become one by marching in step. It will become one by learning to travel at the pace of the slowest, the most wounded, the least seen — by discovering again and again that we cannot arrive where Christ calls us without the hands of others. And this is the conversion still demanded of us.

For we are very good at organising the Church. We are very good at defending convictions, histories, ecclesial identities. But we are less willing to be led. Less willing to be dependent. Less willing to receive the gospel from those we once presumed to correct.

Paul enters Damascus blind, silent, humbled. And there he receives the Church not as an enemy, but as his lifeline. Ananias must come to him. Hands must be laid. Sight must be given back – by another.

This is unity: not consensus, but conversion. Not agreement, but surrender.

So as this week draws to its close, the question before us is not whether we desire unity. Most Christians do. The deeper question is whether we are willing to be converted into it.

Are we willing to be led by the hand? Are we willing to let go of the fantasy of personal, theological, and ecclesial independence? Are we willing to discover that Christ meets us most fully when we arrive together – vulnerable, dependent, and unfinished?

Paul’s conversion did not make him strong. It made him faithful. And faithfulness, it turns out, looks like needing one another.

So may we, with Paul, learn to journey not as those who presume sufficiency on our own, but as those willing to be led – led by the hand into the life of Christ, led by the hand into the suffering of his body, and led by the hand into the costly, beautiful and unfinished work of unity.

Amen.

Sermon for The Conversion of Paul – Canon Peter Collier, Cathedral Reader

Acts 9: 1-22; Matt: 19:  27-30

Today we celebrate one of the most significant moments in the history of God’s church as we remember with thanks the conversion of Paul.

Before his conversion Saul was well known. He was known as someone who was well versed in the scriptures and the traditions of God’s people. He was regarded as a righteous man who himself observed that law fastidiously. And he was a man with a mission. That mission was to preserve that true and orthodox faith as it had been received and handed down to him. So he was intent on stamping out this new interpretation of that faith by the people who belonged to a group known as “the Way”. And he felt fully justified in that mission. After all this new-fangled interpretation of their historic faith was clearly fake news. How could he be sure of that? Well, Jesus had been publicly crucified by Roman soldiers, his body has been laid in a tomb, and his followers had scattered. But not long afterwards those followers began to assert that Jesus was alive. That was clearly a lie as everyone knows dead men don’t rise.

So Saul had in his hand, written authority from no less a person than the High Priest himself to go, on this occasion to Damascus, and there to seek out members of that group of troublemakers. When he found them, he was to arrest them and take them to Jerusalem, where they would be examined and punished if they would not recant this heretical development of the true faith.

But as he journeyed a remarkable thing happened. There was a brilliant flash of light that blinded him and caused him to fall to the ground. He and his entourage heard a voice. The voice addressed him by name and asked him “Saul why are you persecuting me?”

At that moment he recognised that this could only be God speaking and so in line with a long standing Jewish tradition he asked God to reveal who he was. Moses, Jacob, Gideon had all met God in dramatic circumstances and as part of their encounters had asked God who he was? The reply Saul received could not have been more unexpected or dramatic. The voice revealed himself as Jesus and said that it was he Jesus whom Saul was persecuting – not this group, not the individuals whom he was to arrest, but it was Jesus himself whom Saul was attacking.

The one whom he believed was dead, discredited and dangerous was very much alive and confronting him and calling on him now to turn round.

So it came about that Saul who believed that he had a very clear vision of the faith was now blind – unable to see at all. He had to be led by the hand. Vulnerable and dependent. He was taken to the house of man called Judas. We have no reason to think Judas was a follower of Jesus, indeed from what happens next he would certainly appear not to have been.

For three days and nights Saul remains completely in the dark. He didn’t eat or drink. We can only begin to imagine what must have been going through his mind as everything he had been so sure about was turned upside down.

We read that he was praying, and my guess is that that prayer was him just holding his life before God as he recognised that he had got so much wrong. And all those certainties, all that he had been so sure about, was steadily dismantled as he prayed.

Now Saul’s experience was very dramatic, and although there are still some people who today have dramatic conversion experiences, I guess that if we think about our own experiences of turning round, for most of us it will have been a more gradual process. That may be so in relation to an initial decision to follow Jesus or in the development of our faith as we have followed Him. And many of us find that the longer we follow him the more we need to be open to change and to dismantling our previous certainties. Certainly in recent years I have had to let go of a number of my previous certainties.

It is also a common experience that spiritual change and development can take us into and through dark places where we can’t always see as clearly as we would like. The dismantling of old ways of thinking and acting can take time. And the more certain we have been about something the deeper the dismantling needs to go.

And certainty can be very dangerous. Dangerous in that it leads to blindness as to what is really true. And dangerous in that it can be very damaging to others.

In our own times there is a great deal of certainty being expressed by powerful people in our world and in our church. And let’s be clear many people like their leaders to be certain. We live in a world where everything is being reduced to binary choices, which you are for or against. But that kind of certainty so often leads to blindness and to damage.

But then comes Ananias. God spoke to Ananias in a vision and told him to go to the house where Saul was. There he was to lay his hands on Saul and enable him to recover his sight. Ananias’s reaction is so understandable – Lord I know who this is, and I know why he has come here; he’s come to arrest us and cart us off to Jerusalem. “Ananias”, says God, “just go”. And so Ananias went and did as God told him. He laid his hands on him and addressed him as “Brother Saul”.

I find that quite remarkable. I ask myself how I would have approached this situation. I think I might have wanted to ask some questions. Saul is it true you have had a change of mind and heart? Can you tell me what has happened? And so what do you believe now? But none of that – his first words are simply “Brother Saul!” or “Welcome to the family!”

And so we see that conversion to following Jesus leads immediately to belonging rather than to theological understanding. We join a family of people not a sect with a code.

Now human nature and the stuff of religion does not change.

On Wednesday of this coming week the Bishop of London will cross the road from where she currently lives to St Pauls Cathedral and there her election as the Archbishop of Canterbury will be confirmed and she will become the Archbishop from that point on. It was 500 years ago this year, 1526, when another Bishop of London made another trip to St Pauls. He was Cuthbert Tunstall, and he came from this part of the world, North Yorkshire. He took with him on his journey to St Pauls as many Bibles as he had been able to find or buy. There outside St Pauls, in order to maintain the orthodoxy of his day, he burned those bibles. Those bibles were William Tyndale’s translation, and the words used by Tyndale in his translation challenged much of the way the church was then being run. One simple example: he used the word repentance rather than penance, and thereby he challenged the orthodox faith of his day with its whole system of penances and indulgences.

Have things changed? Confidence and certainty in what we were brought up to believe is very much alive and well in our time. We hear a lot of talk within our own Church of England about revealed truth and about orthodoxy. And when it comes to issues about race and gender and money, those who are on the wrong side of such orthodoxy can suffer great pain. And Jesus has always said to those who cause pain to his followers: “why are you persecuting me?” Because as always he identifies with the little, the least and the lost.

And of course we still see the importance of the welcoming Christian family. A family that accepts all who have met with Jesus Christ and which knows that together we are undergoing change and transformation. No conditions, just a welcome.

There can be no doubt that our church needs to hear the call to be that kind of church. And by church I mean both our Church of England and also we here as a cathedral community. And to get there we are likely to need our own Damascus Road dismantling experiences whether they be dramatic or steady and continuing.

Amen.

“Hidden Hinges of Faith” – The Reverend Canon Maggie McLean, Missioner

Some years ago, I was on a retreat, when the retreat leader asked us all to imagine something. He asked us to imagine that, if we thought of ourselves as a part of the church building, what would we be. In a cathedral like York Minster there are plenty of things to imagine we might connect with. One person on the retreat, a church warden, said he felt like a pillar. Most of the time people saw him standing around and not doing a lot. But, as he went on to say, any engineer will tell you that every pillar is working – doing and fulfilling its purpose in keeping the building stable and supporting the roof to keep us dry. Perhaps he felt unappreciated in his role, but the group soon saw that what he did was essential, even if it wasn’t particularly glamorous.

One woman on the retreat took a long while to speak. But when she did, she spoke about not wanting the image that had come into her mind. She tried to think herself into being a window, full of colour – seen by everyone – and letting in the light. But however hard she tried, a less lovely image kept returning to her thoughts. The part of the church she identified with, was a hinge of the door. Something no one attending a church service sees, but essential in order for us to get in. Not usually a thing of beauty, but a practical necessity.

Sometimes a hinge might be connected to a beautifully wrought iron clasp – but the hinge itself is simply a fixture of hard metal, recessed into the door: Functional.  Necessary.  Hidden. As she said to the group, the only time anyone pays you any attention is when you begin to squeak. And then someone comes along with some oil to keep you quiet!

Of all the fabulous things in a beautiful church, this wasn’t the role she wanted. At least people pay attention to a pillar, if only to walk round it. But the hinge is the mechanism that helps people enter the building. It is the device that allows movement and openness – the pivot on which any of us being here relies. It’s a reminder that we all have a part to play in fulfilling the vocation we receive in baptism and discern as we begin to understand more and more what God is calling us to do – to be.  And sometimes, like Jonah (as in Jonah and the whale) we might well want to run away from whatever it is God is asking of us.

We don’t know whether John the Baptist ever a moment like that had, as he grew up and began to understand what God wanted for his life. It wouldn’t surprise me if he did, but for John going into the desert wasn’t a running away or an escape. It was the landscape in which his most important ministry would come to be fulfilled.

St Paul tells the Christians in Corinth that they are called to be saints. Being a Christian and following God’s call doesn’t always lead to glamour or popularity. Usually, it’s the opposite.

If we read about the life of any of the saints we find hardship and struggle. Finding our role in God’s purposes can be a humbling and a challenging task.

John the Baptist understood that he wasn’t the main focus of what God was doing. He knew that he was being called to prepare people for the arrival of someone else. He was the hinge, if you like, for people to turn to God and be ready for what was about to happen.

The poet RS Thomas has a lovely phrase in his poem ‘Gloria’, which points us to a God who is at work in these moments of transition:

He wrote:

Because you are not there when I turn,

But are in the turning, Gloria.

Perhaps our pride and desire for recognition would make us struggle if we found God calling us to be the hinge. But God is here too, in the hidden but essential work of drawing people into the Kingdom, whose coming we pray for at every service. Like John the Baptist we are often called to point away from ourselves, asking people to focus their attention on the ‘Lamb of God’. When John does that, the narrative leaves him behind. One moment we are standing with John and two of his disciples – the next, they have left him, followed Jesus, and the Gospel story goes with them.  And that is the sacrifice of love. To know what we are being called to do. To play our part and open the door for people to explore the wonder and beauty of God’s love.

Amen.

“He has spoken to us by a Son” – The Very Reverend Dominic Barrington, Dean of York

“Long ago God spoke to our ancestors in many and various ways by the prophets, but in these last days he has spoken to us by a Son”.

Those of you with memories able to stretch back to the winter of 1979 may recall that the darkness and gloom of that December was brightened by a chart-topping release from the legendary Swedish group Abba, then at the very height of its popularity. Echoing Martin Luther King’s famous rhetoric from the March on Washington of 1963, they claimed, “I have a dream…”

However, unlike Dr King’s dream, which was rooted in a vision of action taken by humanity – rooted in the vision of white and black children being brave enough to join hands and proclaim justice and liberty together – unlike Dr King’s dream of humanity in action, Abba’s dream focused on different beings: “I believe in angels / something good in everything I see / I believe in angels / When I know the time is ripe for me I’ll cross the stream / I have a dream.”

I was reflecting on the difference between angels and humans, as I pondered the opening of the letter to the Hebrews a few days ago, while being driven alongside the River Jordan, journeying south through Israel and the West Bank from the Sea of Galilee to Jericho, and thence to Jerusalem. In Biblical times, the Jordan was a substantial, fast-flowing river, but the demands of agricultural irrigation in modern times has reduced its grandeur, and it can sometimes look little more than a stream – albeit a stream which still serves as the eastern border of what Joshua would have regarded as being the ‘Promised Land’.

In our first reading, of course, the ‘stream’ was so abundant, it being ‘the time of harvest’, the Jordan is actually bursting its banks, making the idea of crossing into that Promised Land something of a challenge – at least, a challenge for those who cannot face getting wet. And so, just as he did at the very start of their journey, some forty years previously, God parts the waters. And Joshua, and the Ark, and the priests, and the entire nation ‘crossed over opposite Jericho’ – crossed over on dry ground – to start a new existence – a new life,  as the People of God… and, if they had lived out that vocation properly, that might have been the end of the story.

But as you turn the pages of the Hebrew Scriptures through the books of Samuel and of the kings, and as we read the words of the great prophets, we are reminded of the sinful nature of humanity, and of the failure of the Israelites to live up to their side of God’s covenant with them – a failure which, so the writers and the prophets make clear, ultimately leads to the destruction of the kingdom of Israel, a bitter exile, and a sense of alienation between God and God’s people.

Which – to cut a long story very short – which is why our second reading begins with the words, Long ago God spoke to our ancestors in many and various ways by the prophets, but in these last days he has spoken to us by a Son.

Because the dream had failed. The dream had been betrayed. The inherent sinfulness and self-centredness of humanity had destroyed the dream that had led to that crossing of the stream by Joshua Mark I. That is why it was time to dream again. But to dream a dream that forsook the ‘many and various ways’ of the past – a dream that no longer relied on angels or messengers. A dream in which, in effect, God said, “this time it’s personal…”

Which is why, of course, he was named Joshua. Because the Hebrew name Yeshua – which in English we say as Joshua and which simply means ‘the Lord saves’ – the Hebrew name Yeshua, when it was translated into Greek, became Iesous, and in English, of course, that becomes Jesus. But tonight, when we mark again the beginning of ‘these last days’ in which God has ‘spoken to us by a Son’, we recognise that this Son is none other than Joshua Mark II – the new Joshua, setting out to recreate a great dream, and this time, doing it properly.

Which is why Joshua Mark II makes just the same journey as Joshua Mark I. If you read the account of Jesus’ baptism in the Fourth Gospel we discover that the precise place John is baptizing is not actually in that fast-flowing river itself, but in a place called ‘Bethany beyond the Jordan’ – a tributary rather like a railway siding, connected and adjacent to the river, but just on the eastern side of it, from a Biblical perspective – just ‘beyond’ it, in what is now the Kingdom of Jordan – right across from Jericho, exactly where Joshua Mark I had come to the river so many centuries previously.

So Joshua Mark II follows the steps of Joshua Mark I to the river. But there the similarity ends. Because Joshua Mark II is not going to command the river to stop flowing in order  that he might pass through on dry land. The first people of Israel liked God to keep them dry, but Jesus founds the new Israel – the new people of God – by being plunged (the meaning of the word ‘baptize’) into the river at the hands of John. By being submerged as he crosses the stream, so that he might start afresh, and reconstitute a new Israel whose very foundational identity is tied up in a rebirth that confronts the depths, rather than avoiding them. A new Israel whose very mission – whose dream, if you like – is about a righting of the wrongs of human sinfulness and self-centredness, about proclaiming justice and reconciliation… about living out a love that is uniquely costly in its self-sacrifice.

The dream of the founder of the new Israel, the new People of God… the dream of Joshua Mark II goes beyond the ‘fairy-tale’ of Abba’s stream-crossing at the hands of angels or messengers. For in Jesus, as the author of Hebrews makes all too plain, God does this himself. And God doesn’t tip-toe around the dry edges of the stream – God wades right in, to inaugurate a new reign of justice, of mercy, of righteousness and love.

And if the body of the one we call the Christ could do that, then we, who, through our own baptism lay claim to being the Body of Christ – we, too, are called into the deep waters of God’s real purposes for God’s world – a fact that was most certainly not lost on Dr King, whose 97^th birthday would be this coming Thursday, and whose dream immersed him in the pursuit of a righteousness ‘like a mighty stream’.

Dr King knew that, while angels have their place in God’s universe, sometimes God’s mission and purpose needs the commitment of those who are not just messengers, and he entered the deep waters of that call, even at the almost inevitable cost of his life in a United States that was still deeply segregated in terms of its economics, its housing and its education policies.

Today, as we recall the baptism of the Anointed One we learn is none other than Yeshua Mark II, and therefore as we recall our own baptism, the only question is whether we can stop shillyshallying around the edges of the water and wade right in, whatever the cost.

Amen.

“The God Who Expands Our Imagination” – The Reverend Canon Timothy Goode, Congregational Discipleship and Nurture

“For we observed his star at its rising, and have come to pay him homage.”

May I speak in the name of the living God, who is our creator, sustainer, and redeemer. Amen.

The Feast of the Epiphany begins with people who notice what others ignore.

While kings are guarding power, priests are guarding tradition, and empires are guarding their borders, a small group of outsiders pay attention to the sky – and allow what they see to disturb them. They notice something that does not fit their settled explanations of how the world works. And instead of dismissing it, explaining it away, or domesticating it, they follow it. That decision – to notice, to attend, to follow – is the real drama of Epiphany.

This feast is not about God suddenly arriving on the scene. God has already come. Epiphany is about the slow, risky awakening of human attention. It is about learning to recognise what has been present all along but has not yet been received.

At the heart of Epiphany lies a gift without which faith itself withers: the gift of imagination.

Imagination is not fantasy or escapism. It is not wishful thinking or religious decoration. Imagination is the human capacity to hold open the possibility that reality is more spacious, more relational, and more surprising than our assumptions allow. It is the ability to resist shrinking the world to what feels manageable or safe. And it is this fragile, easily suppressed gift that sits at the centre of the Epiphany story.

The Magi are people shaped by imagination. They notice something that interrupts their usual patterns of meaning, and rather than closing it down, they allow it to call them into change – re-orienting their lives, re-shaping their journeys, and drawing them into a vocation they had not yet named. They imagine that the heavens might be speaking. They imagine that the birth of a child, far from palaces and power, could be bound up with the hopes of the world. They imagine themselves into a story that is not their own – and that imaginative leap sets them on a path marked by risk, generosity, and vulnerability.

Without imagination, there is no Epiphany.

The Magi do not begin with certainty. They begin with attentiveness. Their faithfulness lies not in possessing the right answers, but in refusing to close the mystery too quickly. They are willing to follow a question rather than control a conclusion.

And this matters, because imagination is the gateway to empathy.

To imagine that another person’s story matters.

To imagine that God might be at work beyond the boundaries we have drawn.

To imagine that vulnerability, rather than dominance, might be the place where truth is disclosed.

This is precisely why Epiphany is so unsettling – and why it remains such a threat to systems built on fear and control.

Imagination destabilises the stories that tell us the world must remain exactly as it is. It loosens the grip of inevitability. It makes room for mercy. And it is here that Epiphany collides sharply with our contemporary culture wars.

Culture wars are not sustained primarily by argument. They are sustained by the deliberate narrowing of imagination. They train us to see the world in rigid binaries: us and them, pure and impure, deserving and undeserving. They reward certainty and punish curiosity. They teach us to stop imagining the interior lives of others – their histories, their wounds, their fears.

When imagination contracts, empathy soon suit. If I no longer imagine your fear, I can dismiss your need. If I no longer imagine your vulnerability, I can justify your exclusion. If I no longer imagine your humanity, cruelty becomes possible – even respectable.

The tragedy of culture wars is not only that they divide communities; it is that they diminish our shared humanity. They train us to protect our position rather than attend to one another. They make selfishness feel like strength and indifference feel like virtue. Epiphany stands as a refusal of that narrowing of the human spirit.

Notice what happens when the Magi finally arrive. They do not interrogate the child. They do not demand proof or explanation. They do not attempt to master what they encounter. Instead, they respond with reverence, generosity, and humility. They kneel – not because they understand everything, but because they recognise that they are in the presence of something that exceeds them. Here is imagination shaped by humility rather than control.

Their gifts are not a transaction. They are not payment for certainty or insurance against risk. They are acts of recognition – ways of honouring what they do not fully comprehend. This posture stands in stark contrast to the culture-war instinct to dominate, define, and defeat.

Epiphany reveals a God who refuses to be known through force.

The child at the centre of the story does not assert authority or prove worth. God entrusts the truth of the incarnation to the slow, vulnerable work of human attentiveness and love – to the willingness of strangers to recognise holiness without controlling it. And this has consequences for how we live.

If God chooses to be revealed in a body that is dependent, fragile, and exposed, then imagination becomes an ethical responsibility. To encounter such a God is to be invited into a way of attending others that resists fear and reduction: to imagine that the person we are tempted to dismiss carries a story we do not know; to imagine that the person we disagree with is more than the label we have given them; to imagine that the one rendered invisible by our systems bears the image of God.

When imagination is alive, empathy becomes possible. And when empathy is possible, cruelty becomes harder to justify.

Matthew tells us that the Magi return home by another road. This is not a sentimental detail; it is a spiritual truth. Once imagination has been expanded – once empathy has been awakened – the old routes no longer suffice.

Epiphany changes the map. It changes how we attend to others. It changes who we recognise as neighbour. And so Epiphany presses a question upon the Church today:

Are we a community that expands imagination – or one that polices it? Do our words make space for empathy – or do they shrink it? Do we help people imagine themselves into the lives of others – or do we reinforce the fears that make exclusion feel necessary?

God has already come among us – not as an idea to be defended, but as a life to be attended to.

The question Epiphany leaves with us is not whether God has been revealed, but whether we will allow our imagination to be stretched enough to become more fully human in response.

Amen.