The journey of loss and grief – The Reverend Canon Victoria Johnson

Sermon by Victoria Johnson, Canon Precentor

Sunday 24^th May 2020

Readings: Isaiah 65:17-end, Revelation 21:1-8, John 17:1-11

In the name of the Father and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, Amen.

The last few months have been for all of us, quite a journey. That journey, we each have to acknowledge, has been a journey through loss and grief. We have lost freedoms, we have lost certainties; plans that we may have had for March, April and May of this year, have suddenly been ripped up and thrown into the fire and it looks like any plans we may have had for the rest of this year will be disrupted too. Weddings, celebrations, travel, projects, new jobs, ordinations, schooling, exams, the list of things which have been disrupted goes on and on. Our lives have literally been turned upside down by a microscopic virus which has trampled through the whole world. Though the virus shows no partiality we have seen that the partiality in our society and the inequality in our world, has made some people more vulnerable to it than others.

Whoever we are, and whatever our situation, we have experienced a profound loss, individually and corporately and for many in our communities that loss has been tragic and devastating and many have had to say the ultimate and final farewell to those they love, and some have been unable to say the farewells they would have wished. As a nation we carry the corporate grief of losing nearly 37,000 people, that number is still sadly rising. But these are not just numbers, these are names, and lives and loves. What effect will all this grief, and all these losses have on us, as individuals and as a society and as a church?

One of the most well-referenced books on loss and grief is by Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, On Death and Dying. She reflects that after the loss of a loved one, the reality is, you will grieve forever. You will not ‘get over’ the loss, you will learn to live with it. You will heal and you will rebuild yourself around the loss you have suffered. You will be whole again but you will never be the same. Nor should you be the same nor would you want to be the same. When we experience loss of any kind, we may heal, and rebuild, and become whole again, but we will never be the same. We will have been changed and there is no doubt we have all been changed by our experiences over the last few months.

This pandemic has also upturned our notions of what church is and how we do church. As we have experienced ourselves, creating church online is not without its issues. It remains an imperfect means of representing the gathered Christian community, and it has become clear that when we do return to our church buildings our gatherings will look very different. We cannot now rewind back to what we have always done. We need to imagine a new future. The church will have been changed by this experience too.

For us here in York, our excitement about welcoming a new Archbishop and our hopes of saying a fitting farewell to an Archbishop who has served the North so wonderfully have also been thrown up into the air. This is not what anyone of us was expecting.  We are all experiencing grief for what would have been. We have all said goodbye to long held hopes and dreams.

We have just heard in the Gospel of John (17:1-11), what is called the High Priestly Prayer of Jesus to his Father in heaven as he begins to face his future and say his farewells. He prays that what is yet to come, firstly his death and then glorification through the resurrection, will reveal the divine majesty of God to all people and help them build a new world in his name. He is the herald of change, the first born of a new creation.

The context of the farewell discourses as they are called, is important. We are with Jesus just after the last supper, the night before he was arrested, tortured and crucified. There is a kind of knowing in what Jesus says, he knows his end and the number of his days, but he also knows there is more to come. He is trusting his future to God, and the future of his disciples and the world he came to save.

Jesus understands loss and grief, remember he wept at the grave of Lazarus his friend. He understands the reality of a world being turned upside down because he is a sign of a new world which emerges from the old. He sees his future and beyond his future. He sees into eternity. This is his goodbye, his farewell to those he loves but he knows and understands that what is to come will ultimately glorify the Father and change the world. This is an ending which also marks a new beginning, a farewell which inaugurates a divine greeting. He is a sign of new life walking out of a stone cold tomb. He is the change.

Jesus prays for his disciples, those he is leaving behind, he prays that they may be one, that they are united and bound together through love, that they will be protected as children of God. He is praying for the embryonic church, that it may flourish and blossom and bear fruit, through and beyond a time of testing, a time of grief and a time of uncertainty.

The disciples are confused and upset about this coming and going of Jesus, they are distraught that Jesus speaks of leaving them, but they do not  yet realise that the limitations of their earthly imagination will soon be overwhelmed by the reality of God being with them for all eternity.

Soon they will come to understand that from loss comes hope, from despair comes joy, from uncertainty comes faith, from death comes life. They will learn through Christ, how to see the world differently and how to carry the losses and the griefs that come with being fully human just as Jesus in his risen body also carried the wounds of the nails on his hands and his feet.

Jesus Farewell discourse with his Father actually begins to open up for his disciples a new future for the whole of humanity. Stephen Cottrell, our Archbishop designate, said this week ‘we’re all having to re-imagine how we live our lives and how we inhabit the world. What inspired me to follow Jesus is that vision of a new humanity that I see in him.’

That vision of a new humanity is laid out in the readings from the prophet Isaiah and the book of Revelation that we heard in morning prayer. In Christ we are promised a new heaven and a new earth, no more weeping, or cry of distress, houses will be built, vineyards planted, enemies will become friends. A new city will come down from heaven as a bride adorned for her husband, the former things will pass away and God is making all things new.

This is a vision of the Kingdom of God, a vision of what the resurrection means for the world, a vision for a people who will never be left alone, but always surrounded by the love of God.  It is a vision of hope and comfort, but it is, and let us not ignore the fact, also a vision of change.

This week the whole church makes a prayer to God ‘Thy Kingdom Come’. In our current situation, we might begin to reflect on what that invocation means in our world today and what it means for each one of us personally.  Despite the pain and the loss and the grief we are all experiencing in so many different ways, and the wounds that we will carry with us, perhaps we are being given the time to imagine a new future where the cities we are called to rebuild after this crisis reflect more closely the kingdom of God we pray for.  When we pray Thy Kingdom come, on earth as it is in heaven, we are praying for change, we are asking God to make all things new.

We hear very often these days, the phrase, ‘the new normal’- what will our new normal be like? We are told things will not be the same after COVID-19. And why should they be? We will not ‘get over’ the loss we have borne, we will learn to live with it. We will heal and we will rebuild our lives around the loss we have suffered. We will be whole again but we will never be the same. Nor should we be the same nor would we want to be the same.

Six weeks ago, we celebrated the resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ, and remembered once again that in him is life, in him is a new creation.  As we all grieve what we have lost in the last three months, and say our farewells to what might have been, we also look to what Jesus Christ promises us and begin to live into that promise. We continue to celebrate the resurrection each day of our lives knowing that from death comes life.

Jesus calls us to lift up our eyes and imagine a new future, a new humanity, and perhaps even a new beginning. He calls us to imagine a refashioning of creation itself, and look to a new dawn, a new day, a new heaven, and a new earth.

We pray, Thy Kingdom come, on earth as it is in heaven. Amen.

Commandment is to Love One Another – The Reverend Catriona Cummings

Thy Kingdom Come

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Jesus said: I give you a new commandment, that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another.

These are the commandments Jesus gives those who follow him.

These commandments are not given or received lightly.

They are given as Jesus is preparing for the cross, and received by men and women who knew that the cost of this life of love could be their own deaths.

The love that Jesus commands, and that Jesus shows, is selfless, and constant. It is life-enhancing, indeed it is life-giving, even as it leads Jesus to lay down his life for his friends.

These commandments are given so that God’s kingdom – a kingdom of justice and peace – may grow.

Jesus is going to the Father. But he says to his friends:

Very truly, I tell you, the one who believes in me will also do the works that I do and, in fact, will do greater works than these, because I am going to the Father.

How is that possible?

The disciples do not have a stellar record thus far, when Jesus is physically present with them.

They are confounded by what he does and what he says.

They are frightened, and flee when it comes to his moment of trial.

How then, are they to do greater works even than he?

And how are we, frightened and constrained in so many ways, to follow in their steps?

Well, through the advocate.

The Spirit of Truth.

The Paraclete.

I wonder how long it took the disciples to recall these promises of safety, and presence, after the events at Calvary.

I know that when I am frightened, or worried, I need time to remember God’s presence and promise.

Throughout this Easter season we have been following the stations of the resurrections – accounts of the appearance of the resurrected Jesus in the Gospels.

Today’s station is also from John’s Gospel:

When he had said this, Jesus breathed on them and said to them, ‘Receive the Holy Spirit. If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained.’

As he has done throughout the Gospels, Jesus shows his love for his disciples, and for the world by action.

He does not expect the disciples to be perfect before he acts, but reaches out again and again, teaching them, providing for them, and loving them.

Each year at Easter, indeed each Sunday, we celebrate that active, expansive love, which Christ showed through the cross – and the promises kept to his disciples and to the church they built.

We do so with God present among us, because the promise of an advocate was kept too.

Jesus, ascending to the Father, did not leave his friends alone and frightened.

God’s spirit is given to the disciples, and to all who are baptised in Christ.

To this day we pray and worship in the power of the Spirit and in union with Christ.

I do not believe that the gift of the Holy Spirit turns the disciples into caped crusaders.

They are not superheroes, or demi-gods, and neither are we.

They, and we are human beings, subject to doubt, fear, jealousy, and any number of failings.

But they, and we, are not alone, and our humanity, which God cherishes, is transformed by the love of God, into the body of Christ.

Just as Jesus did not expect the disciples to be perfect before he invited them to be friends, to eat, and work together, so the Spirit does not wait for us to be perfect.

We need only ask, and God is there.

Jesus says to his disciples ‘I will not leave you orphaned.’

When we feel alone, and frightened, we need to remind ourselves of this promise, kept through centuries.

God is with us, indeed dwells within us, as close as our own breath.

That promise holds.

We are not alone.

Next week Thy Kingdom Come, an annual global commitment to prayer, begins once more.

Each day from Ascension to Pentecost, we will as a community pause and reflect on another station of the resurrection.

We will rejoice together, that God’s kingdom is near, and pray for the gift of the spirit, to comfort, equip, and inspire us he did the first disciples 2000 years ago.

Even in isolation, we can still witness to God’s kingdom, and pray for its fulfilment.

I was reminded of that powerfully this week, as I went into the Minster for the first time since lockdown began, to light the paschal candle, and pray for those who have been affected by the coronavirus.

It was one of the most powerful moments in my ministry.

Standing in front of the symbol of the light of Christ, I prayed the Lord’s prayer – a prayer which has been said in that place by countless people over the centuries.

That prayer, prayed through the Spirit, can be a space where we are reminded of God’s constancy, and where we meet God each day.

A life lived in love does not mean an easy life.

But love builds up hope and life as nothing else can, and enables us to live lives that build a kingdom, even in the midst of strange and fearful times.

In a little while the world will no longer see me, but you will see me; because I live, you also will live. On that day you will know that I am in my Father, and you in me, and I in you.

The God who longs to be ‘at home’ with us – The Revd Canon Maggie McLean

Since Holy Week rooms have featured many times in our readings.

The upper room;

the disciples behind locked doors;

and now the ‘many rooms’ of eternity.

Of course, alongside these reading we have seen services taking place in all kinds of different rooms as we each take part in worship from our own homes.

Place is important.

When I do a funerals visit I often ask where the person who has died liked to be.

Did they have a favourite room?

Was there a chair by a window where they sat and enjoyed the view?

Maybe a garden or allotment?

The places we choose to be can unravel a lot about us; about the things we value and the space where we feel safe; comfortable – ‘at home’.

Often we feel that in our homes we can ‘be ourselves’.

When the front door closes we can relax and stop worrying what anyone thinks about us.

Our appearance matters less; what we wear or if we’ve put our feet up.

Home can be the perfect place for us to unwind.

Of course this is not the case for everyone – but is the reality most would choose.

There’s a lot about rooms and home in John chapter 14.

It’s an account of the teaching Jesus gave his disciples after Judas leaves the last supper.  Night has come and Jesus is eager to speak with his followers during these last hours of his freedom.

Given what’s about to happen the teaching at first seems to be about the afterlife.  About a place where, after all the suffering that is to come, the disciples will be at home with him in eternity.

But I don’t think we can see it simply in these terms.

It falls to Thomas to ask the blunt question which takes the teaching further.

There’s no Sat Nav; there’s no road map; how on earth are the disciples supposed to get to their heavenly future?

Jesus presses home the teaching he’s tried to give his followers so often.  He seems to tell them to stop thinking in a limited way.

Forget the map – you need a person.  Jesus: the route; the reality; the resurrection.  Jesus is the co-ordinates and the vehicle; the bridge and the destination.

This time, Thomas isn’t alone in his forthright speaking.  Philip hears what Jesus says but wants a bit more – or a lot more.

‘Just show us the Father – just a peak, and we’ll be right with you!’  I don’t know who to feel more sorry for – Jesus or the disciples.

Jesus presses on.  See me – see the Father.  See the Father – witness the Son.

I find this conversation so reassuringly normal!

We are so like these disciples – well, at least I feel I am.  We always want just a little bit more.  More evidence, more proof.  Because then it’s not our choice – it becomes a given.

But Jesus says it isn’t like that.  There is a leap of faith, a step we are all called to take to find what our heart truly desires.

We need to prise our fingers from the side of the boat and step onto the waves.  It’s never easy.

When we take that step we are promised that God will keep faith with us.  It’s not just about the rooms to come – the home we will make with God in the far future.

What we learn from this Gospel is that we can be at home with God now.

We can ask our deepest questions and be answered with love.  God doesn’t want a show of faith or a performance of belief.

God wants to love us as our ‘at home’ self.  The honest self that makes no effort to play a part for the world.

These first 14 verses of John’s Gospel only ever make sense to me if we hold them in mind with verse 23.

Jesus has spoken about the future rooms, already prepared, in his Father’s house.  But in his discussion with the disciples we learn that God isn’t just there in the distance, he’s here now, in front of us.

Those who love me will keep my word, and my Father will love them, and we will come to them and make our home with them.

So in verse 23 we aren’t given the image of a God we’re moving towards but instead Jesus tells his followers about a God who reaches into us.

When we love God, Jesus and the Father come to us.  Not just come to us, but promising to make their home with us.

Those many rooms are already in the lives of those who have welcomed God and embraced the Son.

I want to finish with a few words by the poet RS Thomas that capture this sense that our movement towards God is always met by an even speedier movement towards us.  In his poem “Gloria” Thomas says this:

Because you are not there

When I turn, but are in the turning, Gloria

Many of us are having to learn in a new way what it means to be at home.

Perhaps we can use some of this time, and this experience, to reflect on the God who longs to be ‘at home’ with us.

Who, even as we make the most modest move towards that truth, is already at our side – loving our at-home-self more than any other version of our lives.

Life in Abundance – Dr Christopher Collingwood (Chancellor)

Sunday 3^rd May 2020 – Online Eucharist

John 10:1-10

Two or three weeks ago there was a news item on BBC Look North which made a considerable impression on me. It concerned a man – in his early- to mid-seventies, I should think – whose name I can’t quite remember, except that it was unusual. His first name sounded rather more like a surname – something like Lyle – although I don’t think that was it. Anyway, whatever his name actually was, Lyle’s what I’m going to call him.

The news report began with pictures of what has now become a rather familiar ritual of a restored Covid-19 patient being discharged from hospital through a line of applauding NHS staff. Nothing was mentioned as being of particular note about Lyle, compared with anyone else who’d survived, but perhaps the staff had glimpsed something in him of what came across in the interview that followed.

Lyle lived, as I recall, somewhere near Middlesbrough and he seemed to be fairly well-off. Interviewed in his garden, the house in the background looked rather like a country house or a modest stately home. He described something of what he’d been through: the struggle to breathe, the wonderful medical and nursing staff, and his weight loss, about a third of his body weight. What made such a lasting impression on me, though, was his characterisation of what his life was like having come through the illness. It was utterly different. In the first place, he was just so grateful to be alive. Secondly, having been through his ordeal, he was now experiencing life in a completely new way. It was as if he was encountering everything for the first time, and it was all full of joy, wonder and delight. Previously, he’d taken life for granted, perhaps, but now he understandably treasured every single breath. Birdsong was exquisite, the beauty of flowers overwhelmed him, and he said he could happily live on NHS food every day of his life, so fantastic did it taste! He seemed to me like someone who’d been released after a long spell in captivity. Now he was totally liberated and utterly exuberant as a result. So heightened was his newly-acquired appreciation of the sheer wonder and gift of life, it was as if he’d been born again. And this new birth had about it a quality of abundance.

‘I came that they may have life, and have it abundantly,’ said Jesus. Whenever I visualise abundance, the image that comes immediately to mind is that of the Victoria Falls in Zimbabwe, which I visited when I was 18, where gallons and gallons and gallons of water endlessly cascade over a sheer drop. Something of this kind of abundance is conveyed in the story of the Wedding at Cana, where Jesus transforms gallons of water into wine. So, too, in the miraculous transformation of just five barley loaves and two fish into enough food to feed 5000 people, after which there are still 12 baskets-full left over. All this is a symbol, of course, of the unending, limitless nature of God’s life.

This life, though, isn’t marked primarily by quantity but quality. When Jesus also speaks in John’s Gospel of the gift of eternal life, the instinctive way we conceive of this is in terms of quantity of life, of life that doesn’t come to an end as a result of death. Eternal life, literally meaning ‘the life of the age to come,’ isn’t so much to do with longevity, though, as with the divine life-charged quality of every moment, to which we’re invited to wake up. I’ve no idea what Lyle’s religious beliefs are and, in one sense, they’re of little consequence, because Lyle’s transformed perspective demonstrates that he now experiences precisely this quality of eternal life at first hand; he savours every moment, cherishes the tiniest things, and seemingly vibrates in harmony with every aspect of life as it unfolds for him, as if life itself were a completely new discovery.

Lyle’s brush with death, though, also brings to light, a paradox that lies at the heart of life and which the gospel itself illuminates, which is that in order truly to wake up, to know and live this quality of life in abundance, we have to be prepared to let go of it, to die. Real life can only ever be lived in an open-handed way. This is what Jesus tries to tell Nicodemus, that we have to undergo a death of sorts in order to experience another birth, one which requires us to open our hands and let go of what we cling to – life as we think we know it – in order to receive life as we can scarcely imagine it, and yet which is our birthright. We have to be born from above, from the Spirit, the Lord the Giver of Life, and live every moment in freedom, trust and abandonment, for the wind blows where it chooses.

In order to enter through the gate of the sheepfold of which Jesus speaks, we have to let go of our ego, to die to our small, limited, narrow self, and awaken to a larger, unlimited self, which embraces all things and all people, and whose nature is love. This is the self which Jesus reveals, and this is why he himself is the gate to the sheepfold, because he lives not from the ego but from the expansive, inclusive, unlimited spaciousness of love. This is the shepherd-voice of real life and love, which knows that its truth sounds only in the letting go of self. By contrast, it’s the ego that’s the thief or bandit trying to climb in by another way for its own narrow, self-centred motives. It’s only by dying that we discover the real quality of life, one which is indestructible, and which is God’s gift to all, whether they know it or not.

In one sense, we can be grateful, perhaps, if we haven’t had to endure what Lyle’s been through. Covid-19 is having devastating consequences for many. What price would we be prepared to pay, though, I wonder, to experience life as Lyle experiences it now in the wake of Covid-19? And how might we begin to experience life as he does without having to undergo a similar brush with physical death? In small and simple ways, perhaps, like taking time to appreciate the sheer gift of life in all its many aspects, in the delicate and intricate beauty of a flower, in the kaleidoscopic taste of food, in the smallest of everyday acts of kindness, love and compassion that sustain us. Even just being aware of the miracle of the breath and being grateful for this breath that we’re breathing right now, as if it were our first – or our last. Then, with time and patience and practice, we might begin to experience every moment as filled with life in abundance.

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

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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

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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 21^st 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 21^st 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 – 3^rd 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 21^st 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 22^nd 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.