Peace be With You – The Reverend Daniel Jones
Peace be with you
Sunday 19th April 2020 – Easter 2 – York Minster
John 20: 19-31
“Jesus did many other signs in the presence of his disciples that are not written in this book.” John 20:30
Today, we meet Jesus in lockdown … just like those first disciples did. Little time has passed since the resurrection, the disciples haven’t had a week since celebrating Easter, just a few hours, and now they are terrified and locked together in a room. Some are beginning to believe that Jesus has risen but Thomas says” Unless I can see the holes that the nails made in his hands and can put my finger into the holes they made, and unless I can put my hand into his side, I refuse to believe.” And then Jesus appears to “doubting Thomas.”.
The title “doubting Thomas” sounds as though it has an air of criticism about it, but I’m not sure that that it is wholly justifiable to criticise Thomas. What Thomas does here is to recognise his own needs. He needs physical evidence in order to believe and, far from pouring scorn on Thomas for his doubt as many have later come to do, Jesus meets him in his need. He does not try to change him but appears to Thomas physically in an encounter that will shape the whole of his future.
Is Thomas wrong to have this need for a physical encounter? I don’t think so. Had the Gospel reading begun just a few verses earlier we would have seen Peter and the beloved disciple arriving at the tomb to look for Jesus. What makes them believe in the resurrection is apparently the way in which the cloths that had wrapped the body are lying on the floor, but the cloth that had covered his head was rolled up in a place by itself. Modern readers often miss the significance of this. Jesus was a tekton, often translated carpenter but probably more akin to a handiman. Those in his trade would have folded their work cloths in
a very particular way and so for these two disciples that little glimpse of their friend in the way that he did things left them in no doubt that he had left the tomb and returned to the world.
If we had started the Gospel reading just a few verses before that, we would have read of Mary Magdalene’s visit to the tomb. Later in her story we find her weeping in the garden and what brings her to believe that Jesus has risen is the sound of Jesus calling her name. Thomas, Peter, John, Mary … all of them have their lives changed by an encounter with the risen Christ. But all of them are called differently according to their needs not according to a set formula. Thomas’s story is a reminder that different things affect different people. God changes different lives in different ways. Today you and I are in lockdown too, but even here, we are called to look for encounters with the risen Christ. Even now, God’s voice is calling out to us both in what we see and in what we do and in what we hear. Just as we are, what you and I have to do is look out for the small ways in which God is
calling out to us, meeting us in our needs as Jesus comes among us and says, ‘Peace be with you.’ And today, as we gather in our own locked room, the lips that Jesus will speak those words with, are yours.
Today, just like every day, people around the world are desperately longing to encounter the risen Christ
just where they are, one who meets them in their needs and speaks peace to them. And in this locked room Jesus says to you and to me, “… 20 As the Father has sent me, so I send you.’ 22 When he had said this, he breathed on them and said to them, ‘Receive the Holy Spirit.’ In a few moments time, each of us will speak the words that Jesus did: “Peace be with you.” That’s because
we know that we are called to be people who look for encounters with the risen Christ in every person and in every moment. Today, in lockdown, perhaps that’s in medics, and delivery drivers, and our armed forces, and our politicians, and even in our own families. John wrote that, “Jesus did many other signs in the presence of his disciples that are not written in this book.” So as you continue to look for those signs of the risen Christ, meeting you in your needs and calling you to do the same for others, may peace be with you.
Amen.
Life Happens – The Reverend Canon Dr Christopher Collingwood (Chancellor)
Palm Sunday 5 April 2020 – Online Eucharist
Matthew 21:1-11
AUDIO:
By the time my Mum died, she’d managed to amass a wonderful array of fridge magnets, ranging from the humorous to the serious. Two always used to catch my eye. The first would invariably make me smile, ‘We plan; God laughs!’ The second never failed to bring me up short. It contained a line from a song by John Lennon, one of the 1960’s pop group, the Beatles. Beautiful Boy was written in 1980 for his young son Sean, and towards the end we hear these words: ‘Life is what happens when you’re busy making other plans.
We’re always busy making plans: for holidays, for what to buy at the supermarket, for how to celebrate a wedding. Right now, planning’s going on with a vengeance, from government downwards, across this country and throughout the world, in response to Covid19, and it’s absolutely vital and necessary; lives and livelihoods depend on it.
Behind all our plans lie certain expectations, not least that we’ll be able to bring our plans to completion and that things will go the way we anticipate. Many are fortunate to see plans come to fruition: for starting a family, for a building project, for establishing a new business. It’s not always like that, though: life happens, life takes over, life intervenes, and all our plans go out of the window.
Barely weeks ago, many of us might have expected to gather today outside the Mansion House in York to begin our Palm Sunday procession to the Cathedral. The Precentor would have made elaborate plans for the smooth running of the service: palm crosses would have been ordered, the brass band invited, rotas sent out, and the donkeys booked. Which of us could have predicted then that we’d be taking part in this service from the confines of our own homes, effectively under lockdown? It would have seemed unimaginable. But then life happened, upsetting all our plans and expectations.
On the surface, it appears very different from that first Palm Sunday, but I wonder. The gospel narrative itself suggests a degree of planning in advance. Jesus himself had arranged for donkeys to be available, two disciples were despatched to collect them, and a crowd seems to have assembled in anticipation of something historic taking place in the city of Jerusalem. What were the expectations of the crowd, though? What kind of a king did they think they were acclaiming? Perhaps the hopes and expectations of many were invested in and projected on to Jesus: that at last there’d be a king to overthrow the hated Romans, and that, after centuries of occupation and oppression, another golden age like that of King David would be inaugurated. It was so full of promise and hope.
But then life happened. Within days, this ‘King of the Jews’ was betrayed, arrested, subjected to a mock trial, tortured and executed, dying an ignominious death on a cross as a common criminal. All the pent-up hopes and aspirations of a forlorn people, all the mental planning for the day that was so longed for, all the expectations for the future, evaporated into thin air in moments. Above all, the people had longed for God and they’d dared to hope that God had come in the person of Jesus, but then life happened.
Good Friday, of course, is the supreme example of how we can’t plan life, of how things don’t always go the way we expect and, most of all, of how we can’t control God. God happens, so often in unexpected ways, and constantly breaks free of the limitations of our expectations and plans. Who in their right minds would have expected God to happen on a cross, in the midst of suffering and death? We could have planned God in a much better way, couldn’t we? And yet that wouldn’t have been God, not the God we see in Jesus.
So here we are with a global pandemic turning our lives upside down and inside out. Life has happened. Can we dare to see God in it, as we see God on the cross? It’s an unpalatable thought, isn’t it? It offends all our sensibilities, and it would be the height of insensitivity to dismiss in a cavalier fashion the suffering and deaths of so many. But what we see above all else on the cross is the immense love and compassion of God embodied in the one hanging and suffering there, containing, embracing, enfolding everything and everyone in it. The cross invites us to see in it more than just suffering and death, but also to find in it the love and compassion of God, present, paradoxically, in the most seemingly God-forsaken circumstances. Jesus shows this love and compassion to be not just who God is, but who we truly are, too. And we can see it, can’t we? Love and compassion are happening across the world in ways we could scarcely have expected, revealing who we really are. With this divinely-grounded love and compassion we can meet everything that occurs when life happens, including Covid19. For when life happens, God happens.
Reflection for Passion Sunday – The Reverend Catriona Cumming
The Revd Catriona Cumming, Succentor
AUDIO:
Inevitably over the past week or so, my mind has been on people I love: some I talk to regularly, and others who are more remote. Each of us has no doubt been thinking about those whose presence in our lives we have taken for granted, and how we can support them.
The icon pictured sits on my piano. It’s known as the icon of friendship and was given to me by a friend. I’ve looked at it a fair bit over the past few days, as I have prayed for people, and I have been struck by the contact within it, in this world where that is no longer possible for many of us. I have also been struck by the cracks which run down the icon: cracks which seem to, but actually don’t quite, cut off the figures, one from the other.
Our relationship with God needs careful attention as much as our relationships with our families and friends. This Lent, perhaps more than in previous years, we need to tend to that relationship, and find new ways of keeping in touch, of speaking, and listening.
We also need to be kind to ourselves, allow ourselves to feel doubt and uncertainty, and share those things, as well as the silly stories, memes, and photos.
As we enter Passiontide we will glimpse once more, the depth of God’s love for us.
As is so often the case, we see this love in Jesus’ care for the people immediately around him, but also for those who come long after Lazarus, Mary, Martha and the others are laid in the ground.
Today we remember Jesus’ love for his friends, his compassion, and we see where he will go for us: down to the grave itself.
God does this for us. We don’t earn it by being especially good, or even especially good at being in touch.
Over the next few weeks and months our relationships will be tested, including with God. As we look for ways to support one another, it is worth keeping that icon in mind. Though we may feel ourselves cut off from God, those cracks will not divide us. God will reach out to us, again and again.
We are not alone.
Healing the blindness – The Reverend Canon Michael Smith (Pastor)
AUDIO:
Sunday 22 March 2020 – Lent 4 10am
1 Samuel 16.1-13 & John 9 DOWNLOAD HERE
If you were thinking of ways that blindness might be cured, probably the last thing you would think of would be to rub mud, made with saliva, onto the eyes of the blind person! In Monday’s lectionary readings we heard of the healing of the leper, Naaman, in the second book of Kings. He was told to wash seven times in the Jordan. This was still a remarkable miracle but it makes more sense to ’wash away’ a disease than to seemingly introduce the possibility of spreading a great deal more disease with spit and mud!
Today we cannot help viewing this miracle from the perspective of living with the impact of all the regulations in place because of Coronavirus. I expect that some of our more fundamentalist brothers and sisters will be suggesting that all this suffering has come because we have sinned. Of course I think this is nonsense, however, I do think that it is worth exploring this miracle with our imagination, as well as with our intellect, as we live with the impact of Coronavirus.
Accepting that at the time of this miracle there were all sorts of beliefs about the curative properties of saliva, to us in 21st century Britain, curing a blind man with mud and spit seems crazy. Part of the point is that with Jesus this peculiar, counterintuitive action, leads to healing – once he washed in the Pool of Siloam, the blind man could see.
We are living in strange days (I wonder how often I have said that over the past few days?) Seeking to live in isolation goes against everything our humanity and our faith says we should be doing. Certainly there are practical things we can do for each other, and for the most vulnerable, but essentially, we all have to live ‘at a distance’ from each other for the next few weeks, maybe months. As we are making these adjustments we can see how flimsy things are that we thought were solid and secure, from full supermarket shelves, to an economy where investments and pensions nearly always grew in value. There are seismic shifts occurring. Is it too dramatic to suggest that for the time being we are looking at the world, and at our lives, through a haze of mud and spit? I am not suggesting that God is administering this crazy anointing as he did to the blind man in the gospel today, but I am suggesting that, from the perspective of faith, maybe ….. maybe ….. as the weeks and months go by, the muddy haze will be washed away and we will begin to see the world with new eyes, we will see the world in a new light?
I often wonder what the blind man in this story did once he could see (yes, I have written a version of that story!) As ever, the gospel does not tell us …. but if you think about it, the blind man’s limited but predictable and sustainable life was turned upside down by this miracle. He had never seen, he had never worked, his only ‘skill’ was begging. Once he could see, where did he go? What did he do? Healing led to bigger challenges than he had ever faced.
Acknowledging the personal cost of what is happening to many, the sickness, the deaths, the worry and the pressure – I wonder if we will, in time, be able to see all of this, as something that helps to open our eyes and to see the world and others in a new light?
If the story of Jesus tells us anything, it tells us that there is always healing to be received, there is always new life to be seized. When we emerge, blinking, into a new day without the threat of an uncontrollable virus …. what are we going to do? How are we going to live? Like the healed blind man, maybe we will see the world and others in a ways we have never seen them before ……. there will be new challenges, new possibilities, new ways of living, and, with Jesus, as ever, new life.
The challenge of choosing the way of God – The Reverend Canon Michael Smith (Pastor)
The Reverend Canon Michael Smith (Pastor)
Sunday 1 March 2020 – Lent 1 – 10am Choral Eucharist
Genesis 2.15-17; 3.1-7 & Matthew 4.1-11
‘So what happened after you were baptised by John?’
Jesus was sitting with a few of his disciples talking about old times. As always they were asking him questions. Usually their questions were about things he had said or done that they did not understand but this evening they were asking him about the story of his life. He had told them what he knew of his birth from his mother and father. They had asked him about his earliest memories and he told them about the time he stayed in the Temple in Jerusalem when his parents had left to return to Nazareth. He had been talking to some interesting old men so intently that he forgot his family were leaving that day. He described the look on his mother’s face when they eventually found him, a mixture of fury, relief, confusion and exhaustion …. he said he still felt guilty about that incident. Then he told them about his baptism in the Jordan by John.
The disciples were enjoying having Jesus to themselves for once, usually there were crowds of people milling around.
Young Mark asked the question about what happened after his baptism. He had it at the back of his mind that one day someone would have to write some of these things down. Fortunately, Mark had a good memory and a good eye for detail.
‘Even as I climbed out of the Jordan’ Jesus said, ‘I was not sure what I was going to do next. I suppose I could have stayed with John and his disciples as I worked out what to do but in the end I felt I needed to be on my own so I wandered out into the wilderness. I should have been scared. I had not prepared and the wilderness is a dangerous place, but I wasn’t scared at all. I felt strangely calm. It felt like it was the right thing to do, the right place to be.’
‘To start with it was awful. I couldn’t sleep and as I wasn’t eating I was hungry all the time. But after a few days, none of that seemed to matter anymore, I got used to just dozing from time to time – in fact I began to feel closer to God than I had ever done before.’
‘When I was little I remember watching my dad in his workshop.’ Jesus was enjoying this, he seemed to be wandering off the point of the question but his disciples didn’t want to stop him. ‘My dad was very strong and very clever. He never panicked – he always found a way to repair whatever people brought him whether it was a plough or a chair. It seemed to me he could do anything. And best of all, when he had finished work for the day he would pick me up and take me outside to play or to tell me stories or to teach me how to do some woodwork myself. He made me feel safe and he always made me feel loved. Once, when I was about 5 years old, he picked me up and it felt as though someone had poured a bucket of love over me. It’s a funny way to describe it, but that’s how it felt, I felt drenched in love. It didn’t happen that way again, but it didn’t need to, I understood something deep inside that could never be taken away from me. As I wandered or sat in the wilderness I had exactly the same feeling about God, I felt safe, secure and drenched in love. I knew deep inside that I wasn’t just the child of Mary and Joseph, I was also God’s child, God’s Son.’
‘When there are no people and there is no food and there is no pressure your thinking becomes very clear. I finally realised that my calling was to let others know that God is like a loving Father who holds each one of us and showers us all with his mercy, forgiveness and love. I began to wonder how I was going tell, or better still, show people something of God’s love and power.’
‘I thought about asking God to help me turn some stones into bread. That was very tempting, not only would doing something impossible show them the power of God, but I could practise while I was in the wilderness and have something to eat. I thought long and hard but every time I thought of doing it the words I heard as I walked out of the Jordan after my baptism echoed in my head. ‘You are my Son, the beloved, with you I am well pleased.’ I had never done any ‘tricks’ before in fact all I had done was to be the son of Mary and Joseph and God still loved me ….. God didn’t want me to do ‘tricks’.
‘One day I climbed to the top of a high rock. I could see for miles. It felt as though I could see the whole world. I thought about the powerful people in the world, the politicians, the merchants, the people with influence and I wondered whether I should seek fame and notoriety in one of those ways so that people would take notice of me and listen to things I have to say. A powerful wind blew as I looked down on the world, I felt confident that I could succeed in politics or in business, then, in my mind, I went back to the Jordan and heard those words again ‘You are my Son, the beloved, with you I am well pleased.’ I never sought success and power before, I just helped my dad mend ploughs and tables …. and God still loved me …… he didn’t want me to seek worldly success and power.
‘I can remember sometimes seeing people being crucified by the Romans. It was horrible to witness but strangely compelling, people like to see the drama of suffering and danger. I wondered about climbing to the top of the temple and throwing myself off. People would notice that, and I was certain that God would somehow protect me and keep me safe. People would come and listen to me then, the man who God saved. As I worked out how I might accomplish this remarkable feat the same words began to echo in my mind again. ‘You are my Son, the beloved, with you I am well pleased.’ The most dangerous and dramatic thing I had ever done was to dive in to the Sea of Galilee near where we lived from a high cliff with some of my friends. I was about 14 and a few of us were just messing about playing ‘dare’, that’s all I had done and God still loved me .….. he didn’t want me to play ‘dare’ anymore.’
The disciples shifted uneasily. Jesus could tell something was troubling them.
‘Thomas, have you got a question?’ Thomas was usually the one who asked the questions nobody else was brave enough to ask.
‘Errr …. ummmm….. I think I understand all that, but ….. but …..’
‘But what?’ Jesus challenged Thomas. He knew he’d spit his question out eventually.
‘Well, you know you said you decided not to do a ‘trick’ with the stones and the bread?’ Thomas was ok once he started. ‘Well, we all remember you feeding 5,000 people with five loaves and two fish, everyone had plenty to eat and there were twelve baskets of food left over …. wasn’t that a bit of a trick?’
‘Well,’ Jesus began to explain. Thomas interrupted.
‘And you said you didn’t want to get people to listen to you by being successful and powerful, well we can all remember you standing on the mountainside teaching and telling stories and there were thousands and thousands of people there, all listening, all hanging on your every word ….. you were pretty successful and powerful that day weren’t you?
‘Well,’ Jesus began to explain, Thomas interrupted again.
‘And you said you didn’t want to play ‘dare’ anymore. Well, we can all remember sailing across the Lake one night in a storm and you walked across the water to us and then you invited Peter to get out of the boat and walk on the waves with you. That looked a little bit like you were playing ‘dare’ then!
All the disciples looked at Thomas amazed at his candour and his courage … they turned to see how Jesus would respond. He was chuckling. He went over to Thomas and embraced him, still laughing.
Still smiling, Jesus sat down. It was late now and they were all getting tired. ‘I fed the five thousand because they were hungry. I taught and told stories to people on the mountainside because they were hungry for teaching, I didn’t ask them to come, they just followed. I came to you in the storm because you were frightened and I invited Peter to walk with me to show what he was capable of, not to show off what I can do. All these things that I have done and everything that I have ever done, every miracle, every healing, every bit of teaching, every story I have ever told has all come from love, a love of others, simple compassion, a desire to feed the hungry. If I had done things the way I thought about doing them in the wilderness I would have been doing them simply to show and to exert power – that’s the ‘way of the world’ and I won’t have anything to do with it. I go the way of God and the way of God is love.
Often, when Jesus spoke, the disciples didn’t really understand. But they understood this. They all began to settle down to sleep. The way of God is love. They slept well because at that time they had no idea what would happen to Jesus when the ‘way of the world’ collided with the ‘way of God’.
Being good disciples – The Reverend Canon Michael Smith (Pastor)
The Reverend Canon Michael Smith (Pastor)
Sunday 23 February – Next before Lent – Evensong
2 Kings 2.1-12 & Matthew 17.9-23
Discipleship seems to be a ‘buzz’ word in the Church at the moment. People like me preach sermons about how we are all disciples. We offer prayers, asking for guidance from God as we all seek to be better disciples of Jesus today. Many church’s run Discipleship Courses, designed to help members of the congregation grow and mature in their faith and to help them find ways to live their faith in worthwhile activity which helps to build God’s kingdom. All of this is excellent and valuable. As we think about discipleship, it is interesting to explore the story about the healing of the epileptic boy in this evening’s second reading. A man approaches Jesus asking him to cure his son, who is described as being epileptic. He says that he first approached the disciples for healing but says, ‘they could not cure him’. Jesus then, uncharacteristically, says something that suggests he is frustrated, if not despairing, ‘You faithless and perverse generation, how much longer must I be with you? How much longer must I put up with you?’ At first it looks as though these words are directed at the poor father of the epileptic boy, but, if you think about it, they must have been directed at the disciples, ‘You faithless and perverse generation, how much longer must I be with you? ……’
Earlier in the gospel story the disciples had been given authority by Jesus to heal the sick and to cast out demons but this story suggests that they just weren’t very good at it! When they ask Jesus why they had failed he tells them that it was because they did not have enough faith.
In essence, what we have here, is a man and his son in desperate need and the disciples trying and failing to help, the disciples had authority to help, but they did not have enough faith. So not a terribly encouraging story for those of us who are constantly being told that we are disciples of Jesus today!
I do wonder if what happened in this little encounter in Palestine over 2,000 years ago is actually happening today? We have a society that in many ways is civilised and advanced but is also highly dysfunctional. We know that some people live in abject poverty while others have more than enough. We are constantly being told that if we keep busy, if we buy more stuff and if we ‘look after number 1’ because ‘you are worth it’ – we will be happy. But we are not. We live with stress, dissatisfaction and anger. There is healing to be done. I would argue that most people today, one way or another, are in need of God’s healing touch, to know that they are loved and held by God. There is a hunger for meaning, connection, wholeness … and what do we, today’s disciples, do? ….. We fixate on trying to fill our churches with young people by developing ever more ‘relevant’ worship and more ‘accessible’ ways of being Church and we keep banging on about how the only loving relationships that are really acceptable to God are those between a man and a woman who are married. I am not sure any of this is helping. I think we are failing, just like those first disciples. Sometimes I can almost hear Jesus saying, ‘You faithless and perverse generation, how much longer must I be with you? ……’ We have authority, we are baptised and some of us have licences and others are ordained, but we do what we think is the right thing to do without spending much time wondering what people are actually looking for and we don’t spend enough time in prayer tuning in to what God is calling us to do.
While an entertaining and diverting hour or so on a Sunday, or on other days of the week for those in some new church communities, may attract some people, it seems not to be what most people are looking for. Interestingly the busiest and most popular service we have here at the Minster is Choral Evensong – I often wonder why so many people come. Perhaps it is because it isn’t trying to be relevant and it isn’t particularly accessible, but it is beautiful, it is awe inspiring, it does point to something beyond us. A well-known priest and theologian, Father Ken Leech said this about liturgy,
‘I see our major problem with modern liturgy as being the collapse of awe, wonder and the capacity for amazement. To stand in awe before God is basic to the human condition.’ ‘The Sky is Red’ I think it is beyond dispute that this building and choral evensong certainly help lots of people ‘to stand in awe before God’.
Perhaps what we 21st century disciples need is what those first disciples needed, a little more faith? Perhaps if we concentrate on inviting people to share in liturgy which is beautiful and awe inspiring, perhaps if we encouraged everyone to imbue their loving relationships (married or unmarried, of different genders or of the same genders) with commitment and faithfulness and to bless, joyfully, all such relationships, perhaps if we talked a little bit more about loving God and loving our neighbours …… we would help more people.
I was talking to someone this week who wants to be baptised and confirmed, partly because of the help and care he received when his mother died from an ordinary vicar in an ordinary little church in an ordinary rural parish. My friend found that the care he received and the funeral service that was taken spoke to him of love, care and stability at a time when his life had been turned upside down by grief. My friend paid tribute not only to the vicar but also the small worshipping community of the little parish church. Perhaps the Church, today’s disciples, just needs to do what we do as well as we can, with commitment, passion and love, with more faith that God’s Holy Spirit works through liturgy and through the grace mediated through generous and unconditional kindness?
There is nothing wrong with all the new initiatives there are around to grow churches and to grow disciples, they have my full support, but I think we underestimate the power of what we do already, and whether we are a breath-taking Cathedral with 28 public services every week and a world class choir, or a little parish church with a Sunday service once a month and the occasional baptism, wedding or funeral – we should do what we do the best we can, with prayerfulness and above all with faith, that God’s Holy Spirit works through good disciples, full of faith, conducting worship and welcoming all comers with confidence in what we say and celebrate in worship, and, above all, through our welcome, kindness and love.
Shared Anxiety, Essential Goodness and Basic Trust – The Reverend Canon Dr Christopher Collingwood (Chancellor)
Sunday 16 February 2020 – Sung Eucharist
Romans 8:18-25 Matthew 6:25-34
Not long before Christmas, I was having a casual chat with a ten year-old girl. At one point she slipped into the conversation an admission that she was having trouble sleeping. When I asked her what the problem was, she said she was having anxiety attacks. ‘About what?’ I asked. ‘Well, two things, really,’ she said: ‘Climate change and Brexit.’
I have to confess I wasn’t too surprised that climate change was a concern, but I was a little taken aback by Brexit. I hovered between feeling rather impressed, on the one hand, that she was so politically aware at such a young age, and angry, on the other, at what our politics were doing to the mental health of our younger generations.
When I asked her what it was in particular about climate change that concerned her, the reason given was fairly stark: she was worried there might not be a planet left for her to live on. As our discussion progressed, she said she wasn’t alone in being anxious. Many of her friends were also experiencing significant feelings of worry and anxiety about all sorts of things, but particularly about climate change. At the deepest level of all, I suppose, her worry was about life itself, about the threat of extinction, not only as an individual, but also as a species and as part of the whole wonderful living organism we call planet earth. I recalled that when I was in my early twenties, I was worried in a not dissimilar way – along with many others at the time – that the single push of a nuclear button might blow us all to smithereens.
At the beginning of today’s gospel reading, we heard Jesus saying, ‘Do not worry about your life…can any of you by worrying add a single hour to your span of life?’ At one level, this sounds like singularly unhelpful advice. It can be quite irritating to be told not to worry. We all know worry doesn’t get us anywhere; the problem is we don’t always know what to do about it. And this is where Jesus is a spiritual master. He does indeed know how to deal with worry; but I’ll come on to that in due course.
Anxiety and depression are the most prominent indicators of mental health difficulties in our society today and these things are now considered to be widespread. Some might be inclined to think it’s all a bit hyped up, as if we’ve gone rather soft. There’s no consensus as to whether there are more mental health problems today compared with previous generations, or whether there’s just a greater awareness of them and willingness to do something about them. Either way, addressing mental health issues is a sensible, mature and compassionate response to the difficulties we all experience at some time or other in life. According to mental health experts, the most common behavioural symptom of anxiety is actually avoidance: pretending there isn’t a problem in the first place or simply ignoring it. So, as we’ll see, Jesus’ wisdom actually turns out to have extraordinarily contemporary relevance.
In some situations, anxiety’s a perfectly normal and healthy response. If a lion were to come bounding into the Minster right now, our hearts would start racing and the adrenaline would start pumping. These bodily responses would alert us to real danger, something we’d need to be anxious about. We’d be imagining all the various possible outcomes. And while the advice of Dad’s Army’s Corporal Jones – ‘Don’t panic, don’t panic! – might be theoretically correct, it’d be misleading if we took it to mean just ignore the lion and pretend it isn’t there! The real question would be how to deal with it.
On the other hand, if we’d spent time in Africa in childhood, and had seen our father mauled by a lion, we might be excused if every time we saw a lion, we became more than just a little anxious. So, if a lion appeared on a film we were watching and we started screaming and ran out of the room, others might conclude we were over-reacting, and in many ways they’d be correct. But if the effects of that childhood trauma, absolutely real as they were, had never been properly addressed, they’d continue to influence our behaviour in ways which weren’t always in sync with reality as it is now. The issue wouldn’t so much be the anxiety itself, as the original trauma, and the failure, whatever its cause, to deal with it and come to terms with it.
The widespread incidence of anxiety in our society today seems largely to be the result on the part of all of us to be unsatisfactorily adjusted to the way things really are. I mean this not just in relation to our lives as individuals but corporately and socially, too. Is it any wonder, for example, that when someone on universal credit’s informed that their payments are to be stopped, pending further investigation or information being provided, that mental health issues arise? Money to live on doesn’t just appear from nowhere, so it’s not surprising that in such situations stress, anxiety and depression are common responses. These things can’t be resolved at an individual level alone, though: they relate to the kind of society we all want to live in together and how we bring that about.
This is where Jesus’ teaching about anxiety comes in full view. He neither ignores the reality of anxiety nor pretends it’s easily dealt with. After all, he says, tomorrow will still have worries of its own. Problems and challenges don’t disappear, they’re part of life. The question is how we respond to them.
At the heart of what Jesus says in this gospel passage today, and everywhere else, as far as I can see, is a recognition that God, creation and humanity are essentially good. The problem is that we’re misaligned in relation to this truth, which leads, amongst other things, to mental health problems, like anxiety. The response to this is to discover our correct alignment. In this, the Church hasn’t always been as helpful as it might be, for the way the gospel itself’s so often been presented hasn’t really been gospel – good news. The message, or at least the implied message, has often reinforced the sense that human beings are essentially bad, corrupt, lacking, deficient, unacceptable, even depraved, leading us to internalise attitudes of self-judgement and self-condemnation. But this isn’t who we really are. Jesus’ core message in this passage is that anxiety results from this misaligned perception, so the remedy lies in discovering how things really are. At the heart of Jesus’ teaching is the invitation to trust: to trust in the grace and goodness of God and in our essential goodness, too, as those created in the image and likeness of God. This is why he uses the analogy of the birds of the air or the lilies of the field. They are simply themselves, they are just as they are by nature, and because of that they have no cause to worry.
The anxiety which characterises our whole condition as human beings results from not trusting our basic goodness. It’s not enough to expect God to deal with this from the outside, as it were; it has to be dealt with from the inside, by the transformation of how we see ourselves, others, the world and God. This is why Jesus begins his preaching with the word ‘repent.’ This isn’t the message of a moralistic crusader. Rather, it’s an invitation to change our minds, to change the way we see things, to see that our essential nature is actually love, compassion, wisdom and goodness. The problem for all of us is that we find it difficult really to believe and trust this, so we live and act not from who we really are but from a diminished sense of self. It’s ultimately from this that all our mental health problems, the problems we share together as part of our common human condition, arise. Trust, says Jesus. In the final analysis everything really is all right, including you in your misalignment and anxiety, for everything’s grounded in the love and grace of God.
Disagreeing Well – The Reverend Canon Michael Smith (Pastor)
The Reverend Canon Michael Smith (Pastor)
Sunday 9 February 2020 – 3rd before Lent – Matins
Jeremiah 26.1-16 & Acts 3.1-10
How do you respond when someone says something to you that you do not like and do not agree with?
In today’s first reading, Jeremiah, following the guidance of God, goes to the people and tells them that God calls them to be obedient to God or else they will face punishment and their city will be laid waste. It is clear that the people did not want to hear this message so they seized Jeremiah with the intention of killing him.
This may seem like a reaction steeped in the way the world was several thousand years ago, but we will all have heard the story of Li Wenliang, the Chinese doctor who died a couple of days ago. He was the first to identify the new Coronavirus in December and when he spoke about it on social media he was detained by the Chinese authorities for spreading ‘false rumours’. In addition, threats of death and physical violence are a daily occurrence on social media. It is salutary to be reminded that these kinds of responses, when people hear things they do not want to hear, are not far below the surface, even in the enlightened and civilised 21st century.
So, how do you react when someone says something with which you disagree? It has to be said that our role models have not covered themselves in glory over recent months and years judging by the tenor of recent political debate in our own country!
The clergy of the Minster have been faced with a challenge in this area over the last week or so. On 22nd January the House of Bishop’s issued a pastoral statement relating to the change in the law allowing people of opposite sexes to enter into a civil partnership, a legal arrangement previously only open to couples of the same sex. The pastoral statement talked about the Church’s understanding of marriage, making the point clearly that a civil partnership is not a marriage, and restating the church’s teaching that marriage is a lifelong union between a man and a woman and that marriage remains the proper context for sexual activity. This pastoral statement was greeted warmly by those in the Church who are keen to uphold the Church’s present teaching on these issues, but for many in the Church, and for most people outside the Church, it was greeted with a mixture of anger, despair, dismay and confusion. Lots of people heard or read reports of the Bishop’s statement and did not like what they heard at all – what was the right way to respond? There was a furore in the press and the statement was quickly followed by some bishops distancing themselves from the statement and the archbishop’s publishing an apology, not for the statement itself, but for the ‘division and hurt’ it had caused.
The Minster clergy were lobbied by some to sign a letter of complaint to the House of Bishops. We discussed this possibility, as most of us thought the statement was, at the very least, unhelpful, but in the end decided to arrange an evening after evensong and invite anyone who wants to, to gather and discuss how the statement has affected them. We decided that the best thing to do was to listen to those who are feeling hurt, rejected and judged by the pastoral statement. Details about the evening, which is on Tuesday this week, are in the Notice Sheet today.
So, how should we respond when someone says something we do not like, something with which we strongly disagree? Our instinct is to go into combative mode, to challenge and belittle what we have heard. An instinct that social media platforms encourage and inflame.
We all know that Jesus taught us to love our neighbours and that he went even further and taught us to love our enemies. This is very hard indeed and not many people can do it – but surely, loving our enemies must start with listening to people with whom we disagree? We should listen carefully to what they have to say and examine what their motives might be for saying it? Is their point of view borne out of personal experience? Is their point of view borne out of careful and prayerful reading of scripture? As we listen carefully to others we should also constantly examine the basis for our own points of view, where do they come from? How justified are we in believing we are right? We are very quick to condemn religious and political fundamentalists but it seems to me that there are some in the liberal and academic elite these days who aren’t far off being fundamentalists themselves. Maybe even we have a tendency to express our views in ways which close debate rather than encouraging it?
As Christians we are disciples of Jesus and he taught us to love our enemies. One small step on the way to being obedient to this teaching is surely to listen carefully to those with whom we disagree and debate sensibly and respectfully with them. We are all led to believe that most issues in the world are about what is right or wrong, black or white, good or bad – but hardly anything is that simple. The world (and the bible) is complicated, there is ambiguity, there is nuance. Everybody’s world view is different and limited, everyone’s understanding of scripture is different and limited. It is only by listening together, discussing together and I would say, praying together, that we discover what is true. What we have to remember is that Jesus in not just in the truth we are reaching for, Jesus is also in the way we travel to the truth and Jesus should also be the driving force of the life we live, in relationship with others, as we travel towards the truth. Jesus said, I am the way, the truth and the life.
Birth, Death and the Ecstasy of Love – The Reverend Canon Dr Christopher Collingwood (Chancellor)
Sunday 2 February 2014 Candlemas Solemn Evensong
Haggai 2:1-9 John 2:18-22
When Sue and I were expecting our fourth child, we already had three boys. As we were driving to hospital for the birth, we were still undecided about names: we were fairly clear about the name should it be a boy, but we just couldn’t settle on a girl’s name, largely because we assumed it’d be another boy. At the moment of delivery, the midwife announced, ‘You’ve got a beautiful baby girl!’ So flummoxed by this was I that with the utmost inanity I asked, ‘Are you sure?!’
When our third son was born, the delivery wasn’t quite so comical. Towards the end of the labour, we sensed that something was seriously wrong because there was a sudden flurry of activity. The umbilical cord was being cut before the birth was complete. It became clear that it had become entwined around his neck. When he was fully delivered, he was blue and lifeless. My immediate thought was that he was dead. For about a minute there was nothing and then, all of a sudden, there was an involuntary inhalation of breath, followed by the first sound of crying. It was a moment of sheer relief and joy, but in those few moments I became acutely aware of how life and death are profoundly connected.
Those who’ve ever had the experience of being present with someone as they breathed not their first but their last breath might also know that dying can also evoke awe, wonder and mystery, just like birth. It was my privilege to be present with my wife and daughter when my mother-in-law died ten years ago. Even though she was ill and in a degree of pain, it was clear that she didn’t really want to die, not so much because she seemed to be afraid – I don’t think she was – but rather because she simply wanted to hang on to life. She was used to being in control of things and almost to the end she resisted the inevitable like mad.
Not long after eight o’clock in the morning, after a restless night, the nurses came in to make her feel more comfortable. Afterwards there was a difference. Her breathing was calmer and she seemed more peaceful and at ease. The next two hours before she died were some of the most beautiful I’d ever experienced with her. It was as if the relinquishing of life was the most natural thing in the world, as if it were a letting go not into vacancy but into something much bigger and fuller, something characterised – like birth – by a sense of the sheer miraculousness of it all, something graced with all-embracing love and compassion.
On this Feast of the Presentation of Christ in the Temple – Candlemas – we’re presented with the profound interconnectedness of life and death. As we heard in the introduction to the service, today we’re given the opportunity, so it would seem, for one final glance back towards the birth of Christ, before turning our sights in the direction of his passion and death. There is, of course, for all of us, the sense of a journey to be made between our births and our deaths, but it would be misleading to think that birth and death are separated from each other by what comes in between, as if there were little connection between any of them. The truth of the matter is they’re all of apiece, and sometimes it’s impossible to distinguish which is which.
This is a point made well in the poem, Journey of the Magi, by TS Eliot. The journey the wise men make to the infant Christ at Epiphany is an arduous and demanding one, which unsettles and disturbs them, causing them to reconsider their frame of reference. The poem ends like this:
…were we led all that way for
Birth or Death? There was a birth, certainly,
We had evidence and no doubt. I had seen birth and death,
But had thought they were different; this Birth was
Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death.
We returned to our places, these Kingdoms,
But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation,
With an alien people clutching their gods.
I should be glad of another death.
For Eliot’s Magi, the distinction between birth and death is ambiguous, and this is an important truth to ponder as we prepare to make our way in procession not, on this occasion, to the crib, but to the font, the place of baptism, the place where Christians are baptised into the death and resurrection of Christ, the place also of birth.
Journey of the Magi implies that birth and death are connected because they both seem to be a ‘hard and bitter agony.’ The question arises, though, as to whether this is actually the last word on either. Certainly Jesus’ dying on the cross was a ‘hard and bitter agony,’ and as we process towards the font in a few moments, we’re invited to identify with Jesus in his journey towards suffering and death, and to find in that journey the path to life. Beyond the ‘hard and bitter agony,’ though, there’s something else that links birth and death, what might be called the ecstasy of love. Let me explain.
You and I are created to know, enjoy and live in communion with one another and all creation in the abundant, overflowing, boundless love of God. We also know that life doesn’t always feel like that. Life itself can indeed be a ‘hard and bitter agony,’ but as we reflect on why that’s the case, we become more and more aware that it has to do with our resistance, our selfishness, our self-centredness. We want things to be the way we want them to be, and when they’re not we find ourselves in conflict with ourselves, with others and with God. This causes us to suffer, to experience the ‘hard and bitter agony’ of life.
Having our egocentricity laid bare is painful. There comes a time, though, when the realisation dawns that it’s actually less destructive and painful to go on asserting our own self-centred desires and ambitions and let go into something much more expansive instead. In and through our very suffering we discover, in fact, that we’re being invited to surrender into love.
Now those of us who’re fortunate enough to know the intimacy of love in family life, among friends or with lovers, know that this kind of love isn’t a ‘hard and bitter agony;’ it’s genuinely ecstatic, in the sense that we’re taken out of ourselves by the other into a communion of love in which there aren’t any barriers. There’s just an endless, uninhibited, free flow of love, in which there’s no resistance because the sense of a separate, isolated, egocentric self is surrendered and disappears.
And it’s here that what Christians experience of God as Trinity – in whose image and likeness we’re created – is important. Fancy technical words are used to describe this, words like perichoresis – mutual indwelling – but what they’re struggling to convey is a sense that in the fullness of love there’s no struggle, no ‘hard or bitter agony,’ because there’s nothing to resist or to be resisted. Love’s experienced as a joyous pouring of itself into the other, a dying into the other, which gives birth to an overflowing abundance of love.
This is what Jesus is all about and what he comes to reveal. The fact that his death is a ‘hard and bitter agony’ is because it’s the price of overcoming our resistance with love. Through Jesus’ death, though, something new is born for the whole creation. As St Paul says, ‘If anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation.’
As we make our way in procession to the font, we may well be aware of the struggle that life sometimes brings. If we thought life were only ever a ‘hard and bitter agony,’ we might conclude it’s scarcely worth it. Underlying all this, though, from beginning to end, is the invitation from God to die to ourselves, to let go of ourselves, into each other and into God, so that we might be born into the love of God and give birth to the love of God in us. The promise isn’t so much of a ‘hard and bitter agony’ forever, but of the sheer ecstasy of love.
Seeing and Touching God – The Reverend Canon Dr Christopher Collingwood (Chancellor)
Sunday 26 January 2020 – 11.30am Matins
Amos 3:1-8 1 John 1:1-4
I’m holding in my hand a small clay model. Most of you won’t be able to see it, so let me briefly describe it for you. Standing just a little over six inches tall, the figure’s of a woman bending forward slightly. She’s wearing a dark blue blouse and a floor-length turquoise skirt. Positioned at her left foot is a cat, nibbling at her skirt. The features of her face are painted rather than moulded, although her hair has a vaguely realistic shape.
This model’s of little artistic merit at all but it’s of considerable sentimental and emotional value to me personally, because I made it. It’s the only thing I’ve ever modelled in clay and I produced this at school when I was 11 years old. I spent the whole of my first term at senior school making it in art lessons. My intention all along had been to make something to give my Mum as a Christmas present. It’s in my possession now because my Mum returned it to me much later in life. I can remember thinking at the time that it was a little disconcerting to be given it back. Did this mean that it didn’t mean anything to her after all? I’d never had cause to question the matter but when my Mum died just over six years ago, I wondered whether she hadn’t thought all along that it would give me time to value what it represented. My Mum had vascular dementia and so the time came when it was very hard to engage with her in any meaningful way at all. This figure, though, was a tangible reminder of a loving relationship in which there was a genuine exchange of love. It was as if my Mum was giving back to me something in which I’d invested so much of myself as a sign of her love for me.
Over the years here, I’ve convened groups of a dozen or so people over a period of four successive weeks to share their stories with one another. In each case, I’ve invited the participants to bring an object that means something to them and explain its meaning and significance. I’ve used this very model. I speak of my relationship with my Mum and what that meant to me.
The figure also shows an accident of history, which you can’t see, but which is highly significant. Her right arm has been broken. Whereas I might have been inclined to think that this spoilt the model, I explain that it actually enhances it. Brokenness is part of all our lives and I’ve shared with groups something of the brokenness my Mum experienced in childhood and which affected our family. The broken arm draws forth from me not just love for my Mum but also compassion for her and for others.
Without knowing any of that, there’s no way you’d look at this little statue and conclude that it’s a figure of my Mum herself, but I know that was what I wanted to create to give her that Christmas. I invested the whole of myself in making a model in as close a likeness as I could of the one I loved most in my life as a small boy, to show her how much I loved her. I could have told her in words, and that would have meant something and been sincere, but they wouldn’t have conveyed that message as much as my artistically flawed little clay model did. Something tangible, something more than words, more often than not speaks so much more loudly than words. I’d warrant my Mum treasured this naive little present as much as I do myself now, because she could almost touch and feel and hold my love for her in her hand.
In trying to communicate the significance of who Jesus is, the author of the first Letter of John begins the letter – as we heard in the first lesson today – by saying, ‘We declare to you what was from the beginning, what we have heard, what we have seen with our eyes, what we have looked at and touched with our hands, concerning the word of life.’ In other words, it’s the author’s conviction and experience that God’s made known supremely not simply in words but in a person, a flesh and blood human being, who experiences and knows life in the same way that you and I do. The life and love of God are revealed in one who’s embodied and immersed from the inside in the joy and delight, the glory and mystery, the suffering and pain of life, just as you and I are. It’s as if God went through the same sort of process I did in making that model for my Mum. ‘How can I convey my love?’, God seems to have asked. ‘How can I show human beings how I see them?’ And the best and only truly authentic answer available to God was this: don’t just tell them in words, show them in something tangible, handle-able.
So when we wonder who and what God is and what God is like, the simplest we can do is to point to Jesus and say: God is as God is in him. But there’s a next step we so often resist, and it’s this: to accept that God is just as much as God truly desires to be in us, and to acknowledge that we are truly who we are as we see and know ourselves to be created in God’s image and likeness in Christ. We, too, embody the life and love of God in ourselves, albeit in the same flawed way that the model of my Mum is flawed, but if God is to be real for us and for others, it can only be as we allow God to be truly embodied in us, so that God can be heard, seen, looked at, touched and handled in us.
On this Generous Giving Sunday, we’re invited to demonstrate our response of love to God not just in words, not even just in the giving of our money, but in the offering of ourselves to be completely and utterly indwelled by God, to be totally transparent to God in all that we are, to be a living embodiment of God as God is in Christ – heard, seen, looked at, touched and handled.
‘We are all missionaries’ – The Reverend Canon Michael Smith (Pastor)
The Reverend Canon Michael Smith (Pastor)
Sunday 19 January 2020 – Epiphany 2 10am Choral Eucharist
1 Corinthians 1.1-9 & John 1.29-42
Apparently for many years, at the beginning of the 20th century, it was common practise for soldiers in the army to tie their newly issued motorised vehicles to trees or other static objects when they parked them. This practise was enshrined in their orders and so of course they just kept on doing it. After many years someone had the courage to ask why this was being done and when the practise was examined it transpired that it stemmed from a time when soldiers rode horses and ponies which had to be tethered when not being used – what had happened was that when the animals were replaced by vehicles, no one had updated the orders of what to do when they weren’t being used!
This is an example of how we can get so used to things that are odd or strange that we simply take them for granted. The same thing happens with scripture. Those of us who know our bibles fairly well know passages that we simply take for granted, but, if you think about them, or look at them with fresh eyes, are seriously odd. Today’s gospel is one such passage. We have got so used to its strangeness that most of us we no longer notice it.
The first odd thing about our gospel this morning is the way John the Baptist is portrayed. Mostly when we see him depicted in the gospels, he is a wild firebrand, preaching repentance and calling out the rich, the powerful and almost everybody else for their hypocrisy and sin. In the first part of today’s gospel passage, however, he quietly and succinctly identifies Jesus as the ‘Lamb of God’ and proceeds to describe what happened around the baptism of Jesus.
That is the first odd thing about this passage – we meet a quiet and reflective John the Baptist. Odder still, the next day John is again simply and quietly standing around with two of his disciples, when he sees Jesus walking by and he identifies him again as the ‘Lamb of God’. When John the Baptist’s two disciples heard this they followed Jesus. When Jesus noticed that they were following him he turned and asked them, ‘What are you looking for?’ A direct, challenging and powerful question. They begin their response by addressing him as ‘Rabbi’, or ‘Teacher’, a clear sign of respect, then they continue ….. now, what question would you expect them to ask? They have been with John the Baptist a long time and he has been talking endlessly about repentance and judgement and has also been prophesying the coming of the Kingdom of God and the coming of the messiah. Presumably they were there when Jesus was baptised and they have just heard John identify Jesus as the ‘Lamb of God’. I would expect them to ask, ‘are you the Lamb of God?’ or ‘are you the messiah?’ or maybe ‘we are looking for meaning’ or ‘can you help us get close to God?’ The two disciples don’t respond in the way I would expect at all. ‘Rabbi’ they say ….. ‘where are you staying?’ ‘Where are you staying?’ ….. what has that got to do with anything? They have left their homes and jobs to follow John the Baptist and they have been living with him in the wilderness for some time ……. homes and possessions meant nothing to John ……. they have been hearing John talk about the coming of the Kingdom of God when the world will be turned upside down …… and when they meet Jesus and they are directly asked by the person John has identified as the ‘Lamb of God’ ‘what are you looking for?’ the best they can come up with is ‘Where are you staying?’!
Knowing Jesus from the rest of the gospels one might expect him to respond to this very human and dull question by saying something like, ‘foxes have holes and birds have nests but the son of man has nowhere to lay his head’. But Jesus saves that up for another occasion and simply responds to them, without missing a step, ‘Come and see’ and that is what they do. They stay with him, wherever he was staying, the rest of the day and they are clearly drawn to him. One of them, Andrew, goes off to find his brother, Simon Peter and they become some of Jesus’ first disciples and the rest is history.
So what can we learn from these strange events? I think that they give us a wonderful insight into the haphazard nature of mission. We are big into mission in the Church – we are here to share the good news of God’s love which we see most clearly expressed in the life and teaching of Jesus of Nazareth. The Church, rightly, puts a huge amount of effort and resource into mission and we, here, in this Cathedral church, have recently appointed Canon Maggie as our Missioner to help lead us in working out the best way for us to live and share the good news of God’s love in Jesus Christ. We are soon to be part of a huge Mission across our diocese led by the Archbishop and many other northern bishops and the Mission is called ‘Come and See’. We regularly run courses for people enquiring about faith. We want to have more housegroups to nurture more people in faith and we want to ensure that everything we do is geared up to deliver our mission to invite everyone to experience God’s love in our community, in our city, in our diocese, in our province, across the Anglican communion and across the world.
All of this is fantastic and we should put all our energy behind it, but what we have to remember, every single one of us, is that people who are searching for meaning or direction, people who are searching for God don’t all come knocking on our door with a clear and concise question about what they want or what they are looking for. We can and should have strategies for mission and mission action plans and courses for enquirers and big missions led by bishops so that we can respond to those who will be attracted by such things and can articulate questions about life and faith we can respond to. But all of us, every single baptised Christian, should always be open to the have conversations with and respond positively to anyone who asks weird and unexpected questions because we do not know where they will lead. It would have been quite understandable if Jesus had responded to the ‘Where are you staying?’ question by saying, ‘who cares where I am staying, it doesn’t matter, come back when you want to ask questions about truth, meaning or God.’ But, of course, Jesus did not respond in this way, he responded positively and warmly to the question that was asked and then John’s disciples were drawn into deeper faith as a result.
The point is that we must never forget that we are all involved in mission. We all have a calling to share the Good News of God’s love. Matthew’s gospel ends with a commission to the disciples and, therefore, to every baptised Christian ‘Go and make disciples of all nations …..’ Not everyone looking for faith comes to a place like this with a neat, cogent question. Many will approach someone they know who goes to church and talk about all sorts of things and ask all sorts of weird and wonderful questions because they don’t really know what question to ask ….. we have to be ready to respond as Jesus did in a friendly and warm way to whatever questions that are asked, however weird or discordant they are, however disconnected they seem to be from matters of faith …. and to trust that glowing from our faces, from our actions and from our words will be something of God’s glory and grace which others will sense as special and then be drawn into God’s love, just as those disciples of John were in today’s peculiar gospel reading ……… With our generosity and gentleness and the power of the Holy Spirit, even the most peculiar questions can lead to faith …. we are all missionaries …….
‘What difference does our worship make?’ – The Reverend Canon Michael Smith (Pastor)
Preacher: The Reverend Canon Michael Smith (Pastor)
Sunday 12 January 2020 – Evensong
Passage of scripture: Joshua 3.1-8 & Hebrews 1.1-12
Attending the pantomime at the London Palladium, visiting 11 cathedrals, driving round the Isle of Harries in the outer Hebrides, watching the England v New Zealand Rugby World Cup game in a bar in Athens, growing a beard, swimming in the sea off the Pembrokeshire coast on Christmas Day, reading half a dozen books, playing a round of golf, cycling over 600 miles …. this is not a fairly unambitious Bucket List (I don’t like Bucket Lists, I think they make life into something to consume rather than something to live, but that is another sermon). No, this is a list of some of the things I have been able to do during my recent 3 month sabbatical. I have had a great time!
In addition to all of this I have been doing some writing. I have written 6 short stories which will form the basis of our Three Hour devotions here at the Minster on Good Friday this year. The stories are based on scripture but are essentially works of my imagination which have helped me, and hopefully will help others, view the events of Good Friday from different perspectives.
One of the hymns we sing every year on Good Friday is ‘When I survey the wondrous cross’. I always find the singing of that hymn particularly moving but we have to remember that even though we sing it in the midst of the darkness of what we are remembering on Good Friday, we sing it in the light of the resurrection. My stories are written from the perspective of 6 people who might have surveyed the wondrous cross as Jesus died on it and would have had little or no idea that resurrection would follow.
I had five characters I knew I was going to explore in stories, but I hadn’t settled on the sixth. The days of my sabbatical began ticking by and I pondered about who my last character would be …. and then I had an odd thought. We always assume that the Magi who visited the manger in Bethlehem, were old. (I think we make an erroneous connection in our minds between age and wisdom.) Anyway, perhaps the Magi were young? Maybe they were due to inherit responsibility for their families and their lands and were searching for wisdom about how to be good leaders? Maybe they had heard that the God of Israel was not a God of emperors, kings, the rich and the powerful, but a God who chose a slave nation to be his people? A most unusual turn of events in those days. If they were young when they visited Bethlehem then it is conceivable that one of them might have returned to Jerusalem 30 years later. What would Balthazar be thinking if he witnessed the crucifixion? Legend has it he gave the infant Jesus the most unusual gift of Myrrh, something used for embalming the dead, a gift we must assume that was a prediction that the child would suffer. Imagine Balthazar watching the crucifixion – what must he have been thinking?
As I wrote a story about Balthazar surveying the wondrous cross I realised that the most important aspect of the story of the Magi is not told in the gospels. Matthew tells us that when they saw the infant Jesus they ‘knelt down and paid him homage’ …….. and that’s all we know! The interesting and important question is, how did paying homage to the infant Jesus change them? Were they different, better people when they went home? If they had been young did they fulfil their responsibilities as adults to their families, and to whatever they inherited from their fathers, in a better, kinder more ‘Christian’ way than if they hadn’t seen and paid homage to Jesus?
I don’t want to pre-empt the story for any of you who might come on Good Friday but I think that coming from a sophisticated, privileged background of wealth and education the magi may well have been moved to kneel in homage by the simplicity of what they encountered in the stable. Perhaps Joseph welcomed them by sharing his little family’s meagre provisions with them? Perhaps seeing the infant Jesus made them think that being a king or a leader of any kind, may not be about wealth and power, may not be about instilling fear and subjugating those being led, but about being humble and vulnerable, identifying with, living alongside and loving those being led? Maybe they were very different people when they returned from the stable in Bethlehem to their homes and responsibilities in the East?
The stories I have written are for Good Friday, but the one about Balthazar relates to the season of Epiphany. After this service we should all go around into the Lady Chapel to our crib and take a look at the magi, who, legend dictates, are nearly always depicted as three kings, and wonder how paying homage to Jesus changed them and then to think hard about how paying homage to Jesus, which is essentially what we are doing in this choral evensong and in every act of Christian worship, how does paying homage to Jesus change us?
Having spent all of my adult life working in the Church I know that regularly paying homage to Jesus in worship, for some, sustains them in living lives of near saintliness. In all the churches I have been part of, including this one, there are people who live good, kind, sacrificial, loving lives, a great deal of which has flows from regularly paying homage, like the magi, to Jesus. For most of us the homage we pay to Jesus in worship at least makes us try to be better than we would be otherwise. We fall well short of saintliness but we do keep trying through confession, thanksgiving, prayer and having our minds fed and our hearts uplifted in worship, to be better, kinder people, a little less selfish, a little more loving, a little bit more like Jesus, the one we follow as disciples.
In this season of Epiphany we look back to Christmas and forward to Lent – as we remember the story of Jesus and, in this and every act of worship, pay homage to him, as the magi did, we have to keep asking ourselves the question – what difference is this all making to me and the way I live my everyday life as a disciple of Jesus?