Epiphany – The Reverend Deacon Abigail Davison (Curate)
The Reverend Deacon Abigail Davison (Curate)
Sunday 6 January 2019 – Evensong
Tonight we celebrate the feast of Epiphany, one of the church’s oldest feast days and the time when we recall the visit of the wise men to the child Jesus. I understand that current scholarly thinking puts Jesus (at the time of the Maji’s arrival) at a very similar age to my own toddler daughter and I have to say, after celebrating my third Christmas now as a mother, I have a new found empathy with Mary being made to receive these slightly bizarre, though I’m assured very symbolic and important gifts, politely and with a smile on her face. Someone gave my daughter a recorder last year. If you only take one thing away from this sermon, then please let it be this: if you truly love your neighbour, do not gift their toddler a recorder for Christmas.
But of course, it wasn’t about the gift, it was about the giving. I don’t necessarily understand the motives behind giving anything noisy to a small child, but the giver definitely felt it was the right thing to do. I wonder if we could think about this question tonight then: what prompts us to give? What motivated those wise men to get up, leave home, and travel all that way to bring those gifts of gold, frankincense and myrrh? It wasn’t demanded of them. It wasn’t expected of them: I don’t think social pressure compelled them to give. Was it charity or given out of pity? Gold, frankincense and myrrh were costly, but not necessarily the most helpful things to give a family if they were in need (and I’ve little doubt there were people closer to home and in greater need than the family of Mary, Joseph and Jesus). Perhaps they thought that there was something to be gained in return: a sort of payment made in advance?
The gospel account in Matthew tells us that they went because they saw a light. It was a light that they believed would lead them to a new King, the King of the Jews. So they went to pay him homage, which is something you do with kings, especially if you want to gain their favour for future years. I suspect that once they found this king they understood that it was not an earthly quid-pro-quo system they would be dealing with.
So why did they give to this child? It wasn’t because they had to: who was there that could compel these men to give anything? It wasn’t charity: what did He need? It wasn’t a payment: what could you pay Him?
I think it was a response. A poor, human response, perhaps as unnecessary as the gifting of a recorder to a toddler, but nonetheless (and much more) graciously welcomed, not because of what the gifts were but simply because of the act of giving them. It wasn’t about the gift, it was about the giving.
Or was it? Epiphany isn’t about the giving, it’s about The Gift. God’s gift, the gift of the Christ who is our light, the light which called those wise men from so far away. Epiphany is the revelation of this one true Gift. It’s a revelation that’s made to all, to Jew and to gentile, to those with much to give, and to those with seemingly little. And it’s a Gift that’s offered to all – like the wine at the wedding in Cana when Jesus revealed his glory, there’s more than enough for everyone.
I want to leave you with this though. In moment we will bring the traditional gifts of gold, frankincense and myrrh (or representations of them at least) to the crib scene in the Lady Chapel. Now this point sounds a bit negative but it’s not meant to be and it’s definitely theologically accurate, I promise: there is nothing you can give to God that will make you more worthy or appropriate to receive The Gift that he has offered. I have a friend who I trained with and who tells me she often says to herself “you’re not doing God any favours you know”. It’s not meant to be negative, it’s meant as a reminder. God doesn’t need you to give and what could you give Him anyway? There is only what He’s given you, to give. So give that. In accepting The Gift you can become a gift. And always and only give, because you have seen what was given.
The Divine Disruptor -The Reverend Canon Michael Smith (Pastor)
The Reverend Canon Michael Smith (Pastor)
Sunday 30 December 2018 11.30am Matins
Isaiah 41.21 – 42.1 & 1 John 1.1-7
One of the problems with making the events we celebrate at Christmas into a lovely, easily accessible story is that we tend to forget the profound nature of what we are celebrating, we tend to overlook the theology of what occurred and we tend to gloss over the deeply challenging nature of the message Jesus proclaimed. I heard a sermon recently that described Jesus as ‘the divine disrupter’. Despite the fact that the events we celebrate at Christmas can be made into a nice little story, they actually tell us a great deal about God, the way God is and the way God works, and it’s all very strange and disturbing and disrupting!
I have discovered a lovely prayer recently which helps to shake us out of the complacency of slipping into the lovely, old, comfortable Christmas story like we slip into a pair of lovely, old, comfortable slippers. Listen to this;
Lord Jesus Christ, you came to a stable when men looked in a palace; you were born in poverty when we might have anticipated riches; King of all the earth you were content to visit one nation; Creator of the universe you accepted the hills and plains of Galilee as the backcloth for your ministry. From the beginning to the end, your life held people in suspense, and its surprises force us to reconsider our values and priorities.
Come to us Lord Jesus, Do not let us take you for granted or pretend that we ever fully understand you. Continue to surprise us so that, kept alert, we are always ready to receive you as Lord and to do your will. Amen
This prayer reminds us that the Christmas story is peculiar and unusual, it reveals God in a way we would never have expected.
By focussing on the birth narratives of Matthew and Luke we tend to ignore the fact that Mark doesn’t make any allusion to the birth of Jesus in his gospel, so anxious is he to tell us of the significance and impact of Jesus’ ministry. And we tend to skim over what John says at the beginning of his gospel because it sounds fantastic, but it is a bit difficult,
‘In the beginning was the Word ……. and the Word became flesh and lived among us.’
What we celebrate at Christmas is not just a nice story. Yes, it centres on the birth of a child but it is not just good news for nice neat families who have the privilege of being able to gather together to enjoy and celebrate ‘family-ness’ at Christmas. The events we celebrate are all about God becoming one of us, the way it happened is almost incidental. The way it happened is certainly incidental to St Mark and St John!
Isaiah, in our first reading, speaks of a ‘herald of good tidings’ but goes on to say that no one actually listened, their response was a delusion, their response to the good tidings was to make images which were empty wind. That certainly resonates with the way the Christmas story is received by many of us. You know the aphorism, ‘don’t throw the baby out with the bath water’ which means that sometimes when we are trying to strip everything down to bare essentials we mistakenly get rid of the essence, the thing that is essential. With Christmas I think we could turn this aphorism around, we are in danger of throwing away the baby (the essence of Christmas) because we love wallowing in the lovely warm Christmassy bath water!
What is important about what we celebrate in this season is not angels and babies born to virgins and shepherds and wise men, what is important is that ‘the Word became flesh and dwelt among us’, God became one of us, one with us to share in our lives forever, to accompany us in our lives every step of the way. So Christmas is not just good news for children, it is not just good news for families, it is good news for those who are struggling, for those who are sick, for those who are bereaved, for those who are in prison or oppressed, for those whose faith is only a faint glimmer, for those who feel that God has abandoned them. The Good News of Christmas is that God is saying to all people, ‘I am with you’, ‘I walk with you’, ‘I suffer with you’, ‘I weep with you’, as well as ‘I rejoice with you’.
There are those who would say to this, ‘So what?’ ‘So what if God walks by my side as I suffer, what difference does that make, I am still suffering?’ Christmas does not stand alone, in a few months we will be celebrating Easter which shows us that by being one with us God leads us always to new ways of being, God leads us to new ways of living, God reveals that healing, resurrection, re-creation, new life is what God wants for all people.
Christmas is not just good news for those of us who can come to church, sing Away in a manger and then go home for Turkey and presents in front of a roaring fire. Christmas is good news for all people, and we as Christians, we as ‘the body of Christ’, are called to help make it so by our compassion, generosity, understanding and love towards all people.
What Then Will This Child Become? Growing in Love and Compassion – Canon Dr Christopher Collingwood (Chancellor)
Canon Dr Christopher Collingwood (Chancellor)
Sunday 30 December 2018 – Sung Eucharist
1 Samuel 2:18-20, 26 Luke 2:41-52
As some of you may be aware, Sue and I have a new granddaughter. We met her for the first time in August, when she was just three weeks old. To do that, we had to travel to Jordan, where she was born, and where she lives with Andrew, our second son, and Dania, his wife, who’s half-Jordanian and half-Egyptian. We’ve had the delight of having them with us for Christmas and we’re all agreed that our granddaughter is the perfect embodiment of her name: Farah – ‘Joy’ in Arabic.
A newly-born baby’s full of promise, potential and possibility, and I find myself pondering in relation to Farah the question posed by the family of John, later to be dubbed ‘the Baptist’, when his parents, Zechariah and Elizabeth, brought him to be circumcised: ‘What then will this child become?’ For them, as Luke recounts, the birth of their child was a sign of something new, mysterious and promising, a sign of God’s presence and activity among his people after what seemed like a long time of apparent absence. As I look at Farah, I marvel at her capacity to evoke feelings of sheer love by virtue of nothing more than the fact that she simply is, that she’s just there. Most mothers know what this is like. The love of a mother for her newly-born child isn’t wrenched out of her reluctantly, nor does the mother wait to love her child until the child somehow deserves it. A mother loves her child simply because she’s her child.
This is a love I, too, have for Farah, a love that doesn’t seem to be of my making or of hers. It’s simply there; it arises spontaneously and naturally from deep within. From within this love, though, I find myself wondering what she will become, how her life will unfold and what it will bring. I also recognise in myself a degree of sadness that I won’t live long enough to see her live her life to its end. I shan’t see the fulfilment of the promise, potential and possibility that she represents right now, but then that’s life isn’t it. We live our own lives and then make way for the next generations to live theirs.
And Farah’s arrival also makes me reflect on my own life and the course it’s taken thus far with all its twists and turns, joys and sorrows, ups and downs. There’s a temptation in all of us to live vicariously to some extent. Parents, especially, can project on to their own children their own unrealised hopes, longings and ambitions. That’s a danger, I guess, for grandparents, too. In truth, of course, what we’re all called to do, whether in family relationships, friendships or passing acquaintances, is to enable every single human being, as far as it lies within us, to be who they really have it in them to be. All of us both help and hinder that possibility in all sorts of ways.
It’s in Luke’s gospel, more than in any other, that we find the questions of promise, potential and possibility presented to us in relation to Jesus. Luke allows time for Jesus to grow and develop, to discover who he really is and, in so doing, to show us, too, who we, deep down, really are. And Mary and Joseph play a pivotal role in Jesus’ nurture and development.
Luke alone includes the story of Jesus visiting the temple on the threshold of adolescence, as we heard in today’s gospel reading. Mary, of all people, must have wondered what would become of her child from before his birth. Luke depicts the sense of anticipation and expectation she had when she visited her cousin Elizabeth, pregnant with her own son, John. Luke tells us that when the shepherds leave the manger, Mary ‘treasured all these words and pondered them in her heart’. Something similar is said of her after the visit to the temple when Jesus gets lost: ‘His mother treasured all these things in her heart’. It’s as if Mary gives Jesus everything a child could ask for, primarily love, but a love which includes, crucially, perhaps, allowing the child space to grow without imposing or projecting her own desires on him. Jesus was for Mary, and indeed for Joseph, so it would seem from Matthew’s gospel, something of an enigma, someone incapable of being manipulated or controlled, someone who always seemed to put them into question, rather than the other way round. So Mary ponders and watches as things unfold.
On the surface, the account of Jesus’ visit to the temple at the age of 12 appears to portray him as a stereotypical, stroppy, very-nearly teenager: thoughtless about his parents’ concerns and responsibilities, insensitive about their feelings, and wrapped up in his own world. This, though, would be to read into it our own 21st century sensibilities and thus rather to miss the point.
Practically every parent will know what it’s like, shall we say, to ‘mislay’ a child. It’s happened to us twice and the feeling of utter dread’s almost impossible to describe. This wasn’t quite how it was for Mary and Joseph. What appears to be carelessness on their part was probably nothing of the sort. In order to celebrate the Passover, families and friends usually travelled to and from Jerusalem with others in large groups. It would simply have been assumed that Jesus was somewhere in the party. Only at the end of the day would it have become clear that Jesus wasn’t with them. At that stage, no doubt, panic set in, but when they found Jesus safe and sound, deep in discussion with the teachers in the temple, there was almost certainly that mixture of relief and then anger: ‘Oh, Jesus, thank God you’re safe. If you ever do that again, we’ll kill you!’ Luke’s concern, though, isn’t really with psychological analysis; it’s with something else.
Luke’s Jesus is in one sense rather precocious: he can hold his own at the age of 12 with the best teachers of the day. But that’s rather the point. When he says, ‘Did you not know that I must be in my Father’s house?’ or in the more familiar but equally acceptable translation, ‘Did you not know that I must be about my Father’s business?’, Luke’s showing that the answer to the implicit question, ‘What then will this child become?’, lies in his total orientation to God. His very being, life and identity are found in God. At the same time, though, this doesn’t give him carte blanche to ignore human considerations, conventions and concerns; he submits himself in obedience to Mary and Joseph and, as a result, grows in wisdom and in divine and human favour. What his life shows, as it unfolds and develops, is that to be truly and fully human requires our being utterly grounded in God, just as to be divine means for Jesus to surrender himself in all humility to the needs and demands of humanity. And these two orientations meet supremely as the manifestation of love and compassion.
The answer to the question, ‘What then will this child become?’, is to be found in the way Luke presents Jesus in his teaching and in his life as the very embodiment of love and compassion. In his first sermon in the synagogue in Nazareth, Jesus reads from the scroll of the Prophecy of Isaiah, but stops reading at the point where vengeance is mentioned. He turns his back on violence, power and force in favour of compassionate understanding and self-giving love, something he’ll live out in his own passion and death. Only in Luke do we find the parable of the Good Samaritan, depicting as it does how the hated outsider is closer to the spirit of the Law of love than those who purport to live by it. Only in Luke do we find the parable of the so-called Prodigal Son, in which the father sees the world not through the eyes of success and failure but through the unchanging, unchanged and unchangeable love for his son. Only in Luke do we find Jesus on the cross praying with love and compassion for those who put him there: ‘Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing.’
This seems to run completely counter to the way things are in the world, where love, compassion and forgiveness are taken so often as signs of weakness. Yet the opposite’s actually the case. Real strength is to be seen in the willingness to let go of oneself in and through the apparent weakness of love and compassion. This is so because Jesus shows us that this is who God is and what God’s like. The whole purpose of Luke’s gospel is to show us that God’s love and compassion know no bounds. Jesus demonstrates that being about his Father’s business issues supremely in manifesting divine love and compassion for all. And his whole ministry is about living that out in whatever way it’s called for, but particularly in his concern for those who suffer, for the marginalised, the excluded, the disadvantaged, the poor, the powerless, the disreputable, the unloved and the unlovable.
I may not live long enough to see what will become of Farah. What I do know, though, is that the more she grows in love and compassion, the more she will become who she truly is, as, indeed, is the case for you and me as well, for we’re all created in the image and likeness of God, who is love and compassion. The rest is simply detail.
Christmas Eve Midnight Mass – The Reverend Canon Michael Smith (Pastor)
Grace, sweet grace.
Solemn Eucharist of Christmas Night 2018
Hebrews 1.1-4 & John 1.1-14
‘And the Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father’s only son, full of grace and truth.’
I am not sure that there is anywhere else that you would ever hear anyone talk about grace, but in church. We tend to talk about grace in church quite a lot. We expect to hear about it on occasions like this. It sounds good but, what does it mean? What is grace? What does grace look like?
Here are a few examples of what grace looks like in the life of Jesus. When a woman, caught in adultery, was brought to Jesus by a baying mob full of self-righteous hatred, everyone saw the woman as an evil, wanton, shameful woman who deserved the punishment of death. When Jesus saw the same woman he saw a sad, troubled and damaged lady who had given way to temptation, but who deserved forgiveness and another chance at life. That is what grace looks like.
When people saw Zacchaeus, a tax collector, they saw a greedy, intimidating, bullying crook. When Jesus saw Zacchaeus he saw a small man who was rich by his ill-gotten gains but lonely and isolated, so he invited himself to dinner with Zacchaeus and the tax collector changed completely. That is what grace looks like.
When Jesus was being crucified people saw the soldiers hammering the nails as evil, fearsome, unthinking brutes, servants of the Roman occupying force. When Jesus saw those soldiers he saw men, brutalised by violence, blindly following orders who deserved forgiveness and encouragement to live in a new way. That is what grace looks like.
In the life of Jesus grace is seen in his generosity of spirit, his willingness and desire to take a moment to look carefully at people and situations. Jesus did not order his world as we do, by labelling people. He did not order his world by only seeing things and people as being either good or bad. He did not order his world by counting people as either in or out of my tribe, my team, my social class, my religion or denomination, my political party. Jesus ordered his world by loving everyone and that only happens when you are full of grace, when you take time to see the glimmer of goodness, or even the glimmer of the possibility of goodness, in all people. Grace is taking time to look for that glimmer of goodness in everyone and it leads to love.
A famous song of the 1960’s said that ‘What the world needs now is love, sweet love’. We would all agree, but the world will only be full of love if we start filling it with grace sweet grace, a generosity of spirit which is not swept along by the tide of public opinion because public opinion is nearly always ill-informed as so much of it is manipulated by influential people to further their own ends.
I was watching a recording of a stand up show by Russel Brand recently, not everyone’s ‘cup of tea’ I know. Whether you think he is funny or not he is invariably thought provoking. As part of his routine he quoted Albert Maysles an American documentary film maker who said ‘Tyranny is the deliberate removal of nuance’. Unsurprisingly Russel Brand was bemoaning the fact that the things he says as a joke are often quoted by others (actually he singled out the Daily Mail!) completely out of context, to attack him and to inflame fear, mistrust and hatred – the nuance of what he says is deliberately removed. Maybe we could also say, Tyranny is the deliberate removal of grace? Grace can sometimes be about simply taking a moment, before responding to someone elses words or actions, to look for the context, the mood, the tone, the humour, the nuance around what is being said and done before we respond.
Part of our problem in the 21st century is that virtually all social media platforms do not do nuance! I know people try to communicate the mood, or indicate nuance by adding cute little emojis but they are a poor substitute for real communication.
What the world needs this Christmas, what the world needs at this point in our history, is what Jesus is full of, grace and truth. Think of politics, sport, celebrity culture, the Church – we all need more grace.
In the world of politics I am not just thinking about there being more grace on the floor of the House of Commons during Prime Minsters Question Time or in the Today studio when John Humphrey’s interviews people. I am thinking of the normal conversations you and I might have over a pint or round the dinner table or over a coffee at work, about politics. I know of several people who still do not feel able to say which way they voted in the referendum when in the presence of people they know voted the other way, for fear of falling out with them. Remainers imply Brexiteers are idiotic, jingoistic racists and Brexteers imply Remainers are privileged, liberal idealists who aren’t living in the real world. We need grace in all political discussions at every level.
Yes we need grace in elite sport which seems to be full of greed and aggression, but we also need to see a little more grace on the touchline from parents and grandparents watching their children and grandchildren playing sport – teachers tell of appalling, aggressive behaviour from many ‘grown ups’ at school fixtures.
Don’t get me started on reality TV – there may be some grace on ‘Strictly’ but there is never any to be seen on ‘The Apprentice’, ‘Love Island’ or ‘I’m a celebrity get me out of here’ – all we seem to see there are arrogant, self-obsessed, narcissists who then somehow become admired role models! Easy targets I know, but we all need to accept that we need to replace the arrogance, self-obsession and narcissism in ourselves with a little more humility and grace.
It would be nice to think that grace is blossoming from everything the Church says and does but sadly this is not the case. Quite often those who claim to speak on behalf of the Church adopt the same belligerent attitude to communicating their message as most politicians and others in the public eye – they are combative, aggressive, quick to speak, slow to listen – seemingly blind to context and nuance in scripture and in what others say.
What the world needs now is grace, sweet grace. When we sit down for our Christmas dinner tomorrow, whether we say grace or not before we eat, let us try and ensure that our conversations and the way we are with each other, especially those we find it difficult to love, are full of grace, generosity of spirit. Let’s be tuned into the nuances of what others say and the way they behave. And when Christmas is over and life returns to normal let us make sure that there is more grace in our lives, in our dealings with others at home, at school, at work, at the sports club and in our church. If Jesus can be so full of grace that he could forgive those hammering nails into his hands and feet, surely we can fill our lives with grace and to deal kindly, politely, respectfully and creatively with everyone with whom we share our lives?
‘And the Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father’s only son, full of grace and truth.’
The best way to celebrate Christmas is to seek to ensure that our lives are also full of grace and truth.
An ordinary miracle – The Reverend Catriona Cumming
Advent 4 2018 – An ordinary miracle.
23 December 2018
A young woman has received momentous news, which is by turns wonderful and terrifying: she’s pregnant.
It’s not a planned pregnancy, and the timing isn’t ideal, especially given the journey they have to make in the third trimester.
But she and her fiancé, after the shock has worn off, are excited.
The young woman feels compelled to go and see someone who will understand: a family member who is going through, if not exactly the same thing, something similar enough that there will be empathy, and support.
This impulse is something that is easy to understand.
Many of us will be familiar with the stories that are shared by women in particular, about the joys, challenges and indignities of pregnancy and childbirth.
Sharing funny, profound, or horrible stories tells us that the experience, whatever it is, is not one we have to go through alone, and that others have been where we are.
But for this young woman, something else is going to happen on this visit.
Because this young woman’s pregnancy is in one sense unique.
Mary is going to have to tell her cousin about the visit of an angel, and what she has agreed to do.
She is going to have to persuade her cousin that, remarkable as Elizabeth’s pregnancy might be, Mary has a story to top it.
She never has the chance to tell that story.
Because Elizabeth KNOWS.
This too may be familiar to a lot of people.
Whether it’s actually true or not, many mothers/sisters/aunts/friends will claim that they knew a woman was pregnant either before she did, or before she tells them.
Here too though, that trope is added to.
Not only Elizabeth, but Elizabeth’s unborn child, recognise that Mary is pregnant.
And there is also a recognition of who that child is.
Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb. 43And why has this happened to me, that the mother of my Lord comes to me? 44For as soon as I heard the sound of your greeting, the child in my womb leapt for joy. 45And blessed is she who believed that there would be a fulfilment of what was spoken to her by the Lord.’
Elizabeth is overjoyed, not simply at the fact of the pregnancy – but at who the child already is.
‘Lord’ has already been used repeatedly in the Gospel, in relation to God.
It occurs multiple times in the story of Zechariah, and his encounter with an angel in the Temple:
Then there appeared to him an angel of the Lord, standing at the right side of the altar of incense (Luke 1. 11).
And it has just been used in the encounter between Mary and Gabriel, when Gabriel says to Mary:
‘Greetings, favoured one! The Lord is with you.’ (Luke 1. 28)
There are not many occasions in the Bible where we see a scene between two women, where they have all the dialogue.
They do exist. Naomi and Ruth spring to mind, but there are not many of them.
This scene shows two women engaged, on the surface, in a conversation common to millions of women, sharing in the joy and anxiety of pregnancy.
Within that conversation though, we clearly see God at work.
The incarnation – Jesus’ birth, and life, and death – is about God transforming the ordinary stuff of human life and death.
The everyday, boring, uncomfortable, painful or ridiculous stuff of human life.
God’s presence in Jesus Christ tells us that all of this, and all of us, are precious to God – that it, and we, are priceless.
There are layers and layers to this scene.
I’ve said that this scene – featuring two women – is remarkable in the Bible.
What adds to this, is that these women have each of them, have faced disgrace in their community – Elizabeth because of her inability to conceive, and Mary because of her unplanned pregnancy.
God has chosen these women, not only to bear children who will themselves change the world, but to be prophets themselves.
Both Mary and Elizabeth articulate powerfully who God is, and what God does.
They too, are powerful voices.
And they are blessed by God. Not simply in the sense that they have been given good things.
Elizabeth says:
And blessed is she who believed that there would be a fulfilment of what was spoken to her by the Lord’.
The word that Elizabeth uses is akin to that of the beatitudes – a sense of divine joy. Righteous, and joyful before God is Mary, because she has believed God has done as God promised: to lift up the lowly, and save God’s people.
Mary’s own Spirit-filled response has become one of the great songs of the Church, sung or said daily here in the words of the Magnificat.
We will sing the words ourselves in this service, in our final hymn, Tell out my soul.
Within that song is a sense of primal exultation that God is good, God is faithful, and God is present.
Countless women through the ages have rejoiced at the news that they will have a child, and countless others have shared in that joy, and supported them.
God, whose Spirit hovered over the face of the deep at the beginning of the world, and in whom we all live, and move, and have our being, has been present with each of those women.
For God has always loved, and cared for his creation.
But with this story, and with this pregnancy, we glimpse more clearly than ever, the richness of that love.
Here our Lord enters our human nature, and so experiences the joys and sorrows of human life.
Over the next couple of days we will hear the story of how Jesus was born, not in a royal house or hall, but in a stable dark and dim, the word made flesh a light for all.
But for now, this morning, let us rejoice with the women of Jesus’ family.
These women whose humanity and faithfulness was honoured by a faithful and loving God, and whose ordinary human experience was transformed by God’s spirit.
Ordinary women whose courage, compassion, and faithfulness mean that we too can rejoice, in God’s presence with us, and can join in the song.
Tell out, my soul, the glories of his word!
Firm is his promise, and his mercy sure.
Tell out, my soul, the greatness of the Lord
to children’s children and for evermore!
Is Judgement Good News? – The Reverend Canon Michael Smith (Pastor)
The Reverend Canon Michael Smith (Pastor)
Sunday 16 December 2018 10am
Philippians 4.4-7 & Luke 3.7-18
In the gospel reading today John the Baptist calls the crowds who were following him a ‘brood of vipers’. He talks about the ‘wrath to come’ and trees that don’t bear good fruit being chopped down and burned in the fire. He calls the people to live generously and compassionately and then again warns them that the wheat and the chaff will be separated on the threshing floor and the chaff will be burned with unquenchable fire. All of this fearsome rhetoric takes us from chapter 3.7 to chapter 3.17 and then we are told in verse 18, ‘So, with many other exhortations, he proclaimed the good news to the people’. Good news? Vipers, wrath, unquenchable fire ….. John seems to have an interesting view on what might be considered Good News!
We talk a lot about The Good News as if we know what it means! I suppose that if we took a survey of what we all thought it meant today we’d say things like;
The Good News is that God loves us.
The Good News is that Jesus takes away our sins.
The Good News is that Jesus gives us eternal life.
As ever with our beautiful and mysterious bible there is no one answer. There are many ways of talking about The Good News. The chopping down of unfruitful trees and the burning of chaff – thinly veiled images of Judgement – is this really Good News? This has got me thinking this week. After pondering these words I have concluded that, yes indeed, Judgement is good news and yes, of course, it is good news that we are called to live in a morally upright way.
You are all sitting there now thinking that I am about to launch it a good old fashioned Hell Fire and Brimstone sermon. The kind of sermon we need more of – we are constantly told by people who used to go to church! Well I am not going to preach a ‘Hell Fire and Brimstone Sermon’, but I am going to muse about the idea that Judgement is actually Good News.
Imagine spending a great deal of time and energy writing a report at work, you deliver it, on time, to your boss ……. and then you hear nothing more.
Imagine doing your homework (I know that is difficult for some!) a difficult essay or some hard sums and your teacher forgets to mark it and then loses it.
Imagine you arranged for a friend’s house to be decorated while they were on holiday and they come home and don’t even notice!
If any of these things happened you would feel pretty peeved, to say the least. You would feel that all your hard work was not valued and had been wasted.
Maybe we should stop seeing Judgement exclusively in terms of the chopping down of unfruitful trees or the burning of useless chaff and start seeing it in a more positive light. Judgement is God’s way of saying that you, and what you do, matters. It makes a difference. Judgement also a reinforces the fact that we have freewill – we have choices in life and God values each one of us so much that God is interested in the choices we make.
Ah, so Judgement is a kind of divine system of appraisal is it? If that’s the kind of language you like – then yes – why not?
The problem with the church and the subject of Judgment is that we only ever think of it in terms of the metaphors used in the bible, sheep and goats being separated, eternal sulphurous flames, the chopping down of unfruitful trees, the burning of chaff, vicious images of divine retribution unleashed when people get things wrong. The world likes things to be binary, good or bad, acceptable or unacceptable, people have to be saints or sinners. Because the bible has so much frightening imagery surrounding the idea of judgement and because there is also talk of ‘Judgement Day’ – one day in the future when the good will go to heaven and the bad will go to Hell, we all get very edgy about Judgement and people like me often try not to talk about it too much because it is uncomfortable. Imagine having your only appraisal session on the day you retire – imagine waiting until then to learn whether you were any good at your job or not! Ridiculous! Maybe we should think of everyday as Judgement Day? Every day we should assess how our life is going and reflect on our behaviour and our activity prayerfully in the presence of God. Maybe part of our prayers should be about asking ourselves, am I living in the way I should? Am I sharing my possessions? Am I taking more than my fair share? Am I bullying people? We should be aiming for the very highest standards of moral behaviour, not because we are afraid of burning in hellfire but because it’s the best, most fulfilling and sustainable way of life for us and for everyone – because it brings us closer to God. We have been given freewill as a gift from God. Imagine you give an expensive present to someone this Christmas, a brand new, expensive and shiny mobile phone, and then you watch all Christmas afternoon as the person you gave it to fiddles with it, loses the charger, spills a drink on it, scratches the screen and then drops it on the drive as they leave because they were carrying too much. That must be how God feels as he watches us misuse the great gift to of freewill. Freewill is a precious gift we should value and the giver of the gift is interested to see that we use it well.
So St Luke was right when he describes St John the Baptists exhortations about judgement as Good News. Judgement is good news because it means you matter. We are not just nameless, insignificant people. We are people loved and valued by God. The choices we make in life are important to God. The choices we make in life make a difference. If we only ever think about Judgement in terms of biblical imagery we will not get very far – we’ll stop thinking about it all – think of Judgment as a sign that you are important to God – it is another expression of God’s love.
Cardinal Basil Hume, who was the Roman Catholic Archbishop of Westminster some time ago described Judgement like this;
’Judgement is whispering into the ear of a merciful and compassionate God the story of my life which I had never been able to tell’. To be a Pilgrim’ p.228
So let us think positively about Judgement, let us give thanks for Judgement and let us ensure that we use our freewill wisely and carefully – we are accountable for the choices we make in life. Above all let us give thanks that our judge is merciful and compassionate and that our judge loves us.
It’s been a bit of week! – The Reverend Catriona Cumming
Advent 3 2018 -December 16 2018
10am Matins
It’s been a bit of a week in British Public life.
The latest in a long line of bonkers weeks stretching back for quite a while.
In this febrile atmosphere, cool calm certainty seems unimaginable, perhaps even somewhat naïve.
Wake up and smell the chaos!
At times like this, what do, or what should people of faith, who believe in some kind of order, have to say, or shout into the void?
There is an assurance running through many of the readings in Advent that God has a plan, and that plan is coming to fruition at just the right time. But this seems out of step with what is happening in our world.
In the Old Testament reading, the chapter begins with a hymn of praise to a victorious God, who has done wonderful things,
plans formed of old, faithful and sure.
Delightful, you might think.
But has God noticed what is going?
Is God not paying attention?
The world is going to hell in a handcart!
The promise of the feast of rich food, a feast of well-matured wines,
of rich food filled with marrow, of well-matured wines strained clear is lovely. But while we’re feasting, look at what is going on around us!
Global warming is ramping up.
War and famine still large parts of the world, there are riots in Europe, and political discourse in the United States remains perplexing.
But this is nothing new.
10 years ago if I were preaching this sermon, I would be doing so as the world economy spasmed, and shrank, with dire results for millions of people. 100 years ago it’s less likely that I would be preaching this sermon for a variety of reasons, but if I were, this sermon would come in the context not only of the aftermath of an horrific conflict, but in the midst of a flu pandemic even more lethal.
The struggles human beings have faced down the centuries may have recurring themes.
What we people of faith believe is that God has does something different in mind.
God steps into this human world, and offers something new, something other, something that says that there is another way.
The hope offered to the people of Israel through the Prophet Isaiah, and to all of us in Jesus Christ, is a hope that does not rely on human beings to break the cycle of struggle we seem to be trapped in.
This hope has also endured through the centuries.
It is incredibly powerful.
But it must not be taken for granted, and we must resist the urge to characterise it as, or relate it to, a political cause of outcome.
God is bigger than the mess in which we currently find ourselves.
And because God is bigger than this, we can look to God for rest: respite from the craziness around us.
But more than that.
God offers something new, something different.
Justice. True justice, rather than human justice, which, even with the benefit of hindsight, is inevitably shaped by context, and bias.
There is however a twist to this tale.
Because God uses us, engages us, with our consent, in building God’s kingdom: a kingdom which may share some of the political values we believe our important, but is ultimately richer, and more solid and lasting than any human political institution, nation, or church building.
Throughout history, God has worked through the lives of ordinary human beings, through worship, and scripture, and reason, to bring to light those things hidden in darkness.
God’s timing and God’s plans may infuriate us.
The hope is that amidst whatever chaos we find ourselves in, God remains unchanging: a refuge no matter how crazy the world gets. But God also intervenes, challenges and provokes us to look for better things, and to build God’s Kingdom.
Bold Hope – The Reverend Deacon Abigail Davison (Curate)
The Reverend Deacon Abigail Davison (Curate)
Sunday 18 November 2018 – 10am Sung Eucharist
Hebrews 10: 11-14, 19-25 and Mark 13:1-8
I’m sure you all keep up to date with the Anglican Communion News Service blog page, but in case you missed it, there was a piece this week from Rev’d Canon Dr Stephen Spencer, who was one of my tutors and vice principal of the college where I trained (he’s now Director for Theological Education in the Anglican Communion). Stephen has a real passion for the Church in Africa and in the article he wrote about being invited to preach in an Anglican Church in Uganda. The Church was made up of South Sudanese Christians, who had been forced to flee the violence in their home and were now living in exile, in a refugee camp. The shelter that housed the Church they had built themselves out of wooden planks and tarpaulin that they’d persuaded some of the UN staff to give them. And yet, in all this, Stephen wrote of the joy the Church had in gathering for worship, a joy that he described as ‘triumphant’.
Here was a triumphant Church, a Church that witnesses powerfully and movingly to the triumph of Christ, gathered in a makeshift shelter, built of bits of wood and borrowed tarpaulin…
It was another Deacon that sent me a link to the article, and I read it while I was trying to work out what I was going to say today. I read the part about the Church building their own shelter and thought to myself “this’ll make a great sermon illustration”! In the gospel reading we’ve just heard, Jesus foretells the destruction of the great temple, and here we have a group of people who have seen everything destroyed, and yet are in themselves an indestructible, joyful, Church. There’s a sermon somewhere in that.
I could have asked of us, are we ready to be the same: could we be that joyful? If, perhaps when, these large stones are thrown down, will people still be able to point to us and go, “ah yes, there’s the Church”?
That could have been a perfectly fine sermon.
But then I read Stephen’s article again, and it wasn’t the joy the Church had that most stood out, it was the hope.
It was a hope so bold that even in the midst of a refugee camp, they would gather and build themselves a church and be joyful, when according to the world, they should have been crying.
I’m sure tears have been shed. I’m sure they still are being shed: hope isn’t about never being sad or about not recognising when things are truly dire, but it is about knowing they will not always be that way.
Joy like that Church had, I think, can only be the result of knowing how sure and how firmly grounded our hope is.
In the gospel reading, it seemed that the disciples were disturbed by the idea of something so seemingly permanent as the great stone temple being destroyed. It was the centre of religious practise for them. But ultimately it was not where their hope, or ours, was grounded.
It was our first reading, the letter to the Hebrews, that made clear where our hope is grounded: it’s grounded in knowing that the Christ saw things through to the end, and beyond. He finished the job. Because of that, we’re told to ‘have confidence’, to ‘approach’ the most holy in ‘full assurance’, to ‘hold fast’ to the confession of our hope. These are bold statements, bold actions. We are called to be surer then we can be even in stone. There’s very little humility there I think. And that’s not a bad thing here: I don’t know that either hope or joy are terribly humble things. They are very very bold things.
Towards the end of the reading we’re told to do one more thing, we’re told to consider how we might ‘provoke’ one another to love and good deeds. Provocation is never an act of humility: our provocation needs to be grounded in our bold hope though. I suspect there are lots of ways we could be provoking each other to love and good needs, but I wonder if the best of them isn’t by example. Are our brothers and sisters meeting today in that makeshift shelter in a Ugandan refugee camp a provocation to us? If they can be that bold in witnessing to the hope they have, then how could we, how should we be responding to that same hope?
To be clear, I am not suggesting that we should be happier because there are people in the world that have it much worse. Maybe there are times when we need to have a sense of perspective, but actually if you’re facing something difficult then you can’t and shouldn’t try to just dismiss it because there are other difficulties in the world: you still need to deal with it prayerfully and practically, whatever that means to your situation. What I’m asking is, can we, as another part of that same Church, be drawn into what they have. Can we be provoked and encouraged into that same joy?
Here is a place to start, here is my challenge, my provocation to you. I know that some of you will just not be in a place where you can do this – please don’t force yourself to.
But can you smile?
It’s the most un-British, un-Anglican thing, I know! But I want you to leave here absolutely assured of our hope. As you come forward to acknowledge and celebrate the sure foundation of that hope [in the Eucharist], then will you join those Brothers and Sisters and be joyful in it: will you smile?
Link to Rev’d Canon Dr Stephen Spenser’s article here
Remembering Properly – The Reverend Canon Michael Smith (Pastor)
The Reverend Canon Michael Smith (Pastor)
Remembrance Sunday Choral Eucharist 11 November 2018
Hebrews 9.24-end & Mark 1.14-20
Memory can play tricks on us and sometimes it is good that is does. Something very interesting happens around childbirth for example – at the time of the birth of a child most women cannot countenance the idea of going through the same experience again, it is so painful and exhausting. After a few weeks or months, however, the joy of having a baby begins to cloud the memories of childbirth and, for most, the idea of having another baby becomes something to look forward to. It is, of course, very good that our memories sometimes work like this, but we have to be wary of the way memory can be selective.
Today is Remembrance Sunday – we remember those in the armed forces who have died in war. On this Remembrance Sunday in particular we are remembering those who died in the First World War as this is the 100th anniversary of the end of that conflict. In York we have the great Kings Book of Fallen Heroes to help us with our remembering. In this great book, we have the names of 1,477 people from York who died in the First World War. This book and the names in it have rightly been the centrepiece of our city’s acts of remembrance on this important anniversary.
Part of the challenge we have with our remembering on this day, is that we won! This means that we have a tendency towards concentrating on the victory. We rejoice in the freedoms we have today which are due, in part, to the sacrifice made by those whose names are in our Book of Heroes and hundreds of thousands of others who also fought. Those who died in another war speak to us words that could be said by everyone named in our book, ‘For your tomorrow, we gave our today’. All of this means that we are able to stand upright and proud, we can march about with military bands, members of the armed forces and local dignitaries dressed in their finest and rightly remember and honour all those who died. But if that is all we do, then we are not remembering properly.
To explain what I mean I am going to say something I rarely say, let’s do some maths! Let’s suppose that, on average, each of the 1,477 people named in our Book of Heroes came from a family of 4 and that, on average, each of the 1,477 had 4 close friends, those they went to school with, mates from work. These are, I think, conservative estimates, but if they are even roughly right that means that the deaths of our 1,477 heroes broke the hearts and shattered the lives of around 12,000 other people.
If we are going to remember properly, we have to remember and honour the glorious sacrifice of so many and also remember the pain, devastation, broken hearts and sheer human misery that accompanied those sacrifices.
Of course, another major challenge with remembering properly is perspective. I can remember walking around a German war cemetery in Normandy with one of my young sons and him surveying the sea of dark grey granite crosses marking the graves of thousands of dead German soldiers and asking, ‘Daddy, were all these people baddies?’ That made me think – of course they were not all baddies, they were ordinary people doing their patriotic duty, like our own soldiers, sailors and airman. It’s all a question of perspective.
A while ago I read a book called The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas. It is about an 8 year old boy whose father was a high ranking soldier. The family moved a long way from home to the countryside to live beside what the boy assumed to be a huge farm. There were lots of wooden buildings behind a seemingly endless high, barbed wire fence. The little boy, disobeying his mother, went to explore and began to walk around the perimeter of the fence. As he did he saw a boy, about his age, on the other side of the fence, wearing what he thought were striped pyjamas. They sat, and began to communicate, without words, through the fence which separated them. They met often in the same place, without anyone else knowing and a friendship developed.
That’s the beginning of a beautiful and tragic story which has now been made into a film. Those of you who have read the book or seen the film will know, and others may well have worked out, that the first little boy is German and his family move because his father is put in charge of a Concentration Camp. The boy behind the fence is a prisoner in the camp. This story illustrates the importance of perspective – the father of the German boy, looked at the Jews and other ethnic groups in his Concentration Camp and, like most of his contemporaries at the time, believed that they were the cause of a great deal of wrong in the world and so needed to be destroyed. The man’s son, the young German boy, knowing nothing of the politics and propaganda of the time, looked at the same Concentration Camp and saw only another young boy, very different from himself, but someone with whom he could be friends.
We can’t allow ourselves to remember only the winning and the brave sacrifices and we cannot allow ourselves to be so lazy as to remember only in terms of the goodies beating the baddies.
Jesus, who is the way the truth and the life, calls us to remember properly and fully on days like today, we have to remember and honour the bravery and the sacrifices and we have to remember and mourn the devastation and the agony. Jesus also shows us the importance of perspective, of never demonising those who are different from ourselves. Jesus sat and ate with tax collectors and sinners. He befriended a prostitute. He embraced lepers and mad people. He sat and drank water at a well with a Samaritan woman. He healed the servant of a Roman soldier. He talked late into the night with a Pharisee. All the people he should have hated, all the people he should have steered clear of, all the people who were thought to be unclean, dangerous and cause trouble, all the people categorised by many in his day as ‘baddies’, he sought out, befriended and loved.
The way to ensure that we do not get caught up in conflict or war again is to make sure that we remember past conflicts and wars properly and to take the trouble to see all people as essentially people like us, people with whom we could potentially be friends. The reason why the officers put a stop to that football match that started in no-mans-land one Christmas in the First World War is because they knew that if the soldiers got to know each other and see each other as essentially the same, they wouldn’t be able to kill each other.
Today it is important to remember the past properly, not just the 1,477 people who died, many of them heroically, but the 12,000, whose hearts were broken and lives shattered by their deaths and never to generalise about anyone, even potential enemies, but always be prepared, like Jesus, to make relationships of friendship with anyone, even the most unlikely people. This is the best way to honour the memory of the 1,477 people named in York’s Book of Heroes is to be people, a city and a nation of peace.
Revealing the ‘hidden saint’ within – The Reverend Canon Michael Smith (Pastor)
The Reverend Canon Michael Smith (Pastor)
Sunday – Ss Simon & Jude – Matins – 28 October 2018
Isaiah 45.18-end & Luke 6.12-16
Today we celebrate the feast day of Ss Simon & Jude. No one is quite sure why they are teamed up for a feast day, it’s possible they were related in some way. They were both members of Jesus’ inner circle of twelve disciples but other than that they seem to have little in common. In the lists of disciples Simon is described as ‘the Zealot’ probably because he was a member of a nationalist resistance movement which opposed the Roman occupation of Palestine. One assumes, therefore, that Simon was passionate and confident, a political activist working for freedom and justice for his people.
There is some confusion about Jude, who may also be the disciple named Judas in the passage from Luke we have just heard, he may also, sometimes, have been referred to as Thaddaeus. He wrote a short epistle which is in the New Testament, the Epistle of Jude. Even though we have some of his writing we know little about him. The letter is all about how what we believe must be manifested in the way we live, we must not fall into hypocrisy, saying one thing and doing another. Despite the fact that we have some of his writing we know very little about Jude, it would seem, reasonable therefore, to conclude that he may well have been a gentle, unassuming and humble person.
So Simon and Jude seem to be two very different people, one probably a fiery, political activist whose faith led him to want to change the world and one a quiet, gentle man whose faith led him to want to ensure that individuals were truly changed by their faith in God.
I think it’s a good thing that we honour two saints who were probably so different on the same day. It is good to be reminded that there is no template for saints. Even a cursory look at the saints, our church’s heroes, reveals that they are all dramatically different. There is impetuous, blundering St Peter, aesthetic, pious, St Francis of Assisi, who gave away everything he owned, courageous and generous St Maximillian Kolbe who volunteered to die in place of another man in Auschwitz, tough and practical Mother Theresa who spent her life caring for the poor and dying in India. It is good to be reminded that every saint is different.
People like me get into pulpits like this on days like today, or later this week, when we will be celebrating All Saints, and say that we should all be striving to be saints. We hear this and immediately begin to think that we have to become something we are not, because clearly we are not saints now. To a greater or lesser extent we are all selfish, jealous, greedy, and inconsiderate to different degrees – we all have many flaws to our characters which result in sin, and we assume this means we are disqualified from being saints. But listen to this, a few words from St Paul’s letter to the Ephesians, ‘may the Father give you the power through his Spirit for your hidden self to grow strong ….’ Ephesians 3v15. Maybe all these flaws we have in our characters are simply covering up our ‘hidden self’ the self we truly are? Maybe saintliness is all about the Spirit of God giving us confidence to let go of all that we cling to that covers up who we truly are? Maybe what we all truly are, is saints? Maybe our ‘hidden self’ is actually our ‘hidden saint’? The more I have thought about this over the past few days the more I think its right. The Spirit of God should give us confidence to be who we truly are, God made who we truly are and therefore that must be good. All we need to be saints is for the Spirit of God to make our ‘hidden self’ grow strong.
So, striving to be saints is not about us trying to become something or someone we are not. It’s not about trying to attain, learn, or understand something we haven’t yet grasped. No! Striving to be a saint is all about trying to uncover who we truly are, trying to uncover the ‘hidden self’ we constantly obliterate either with an image we think we want to project to the world or with sin.
As Archbishop Rowan Williams said in his book ‘Silence and Honeycakes’ ‘At the Day of Judgement …. the question will not be about why we failed to be someone else: I shall not be asked why I wasn’t Martin Luther King or Mother Theresa, but why I wasn’t Rowan Williams.’ P. 95
Today let us rejoice in fiery, idealistic Simon and quiet unassuming Jude. They remind us that saintliness is not one thing. May the Spirit of God give us the courage to reject sin and the image of ourselves we project and allow our ‘hidden self’ to emerge. That ‘hidden self’ is made in the image of God and is unique to each one. It is not just our ‘hidden self’ it is our ‘hidden saint’. May that saint grow stronger and stronger in us week by week and shine God’s light of love into the world.
Let us pray
God of holiness, you send your Spirit into our hearts and by your grace we participate in your love. Like all the saints, make our lives shine with the radiance of your glory that we may choose life over death, hope over despair, freedom over bondage and rejoice in your blessing for all creation, through Jesus Christ. Amen
The Habit of Art and Being Ourselves – Canon Dr Christopher Collingwood (Chancellor)
Sunday 28 October 2018 – Evensong
Jeremiah 3:11-18 Jude 1-4, 17-end
We live is disturbing and worrying times. It’s as if the global tectonic plates are shifting and opening up vast fissures in all sorts of areas of life. For example, we’re seeing mass migration on an almost unprecedented scale, at least in modern times. Then there’s climate change and global warming, inclining some to suggest that we’ve little more than 10 years to put a strategy in place before it’s too late. The situation in the Middle East, which never seems to be stable at the best of times, is becoming increasingly unstable, with horror stories reaching us daily of brutal oppression in Syria, famine in Yemen, and things like the torture and butchery of a journalist in the Saudi embassy in Turkey. Russia’s flexing its muscles and, some say, deliberately attempting to destabilise the West. Far-Right political movements are on the rise in European countries such as Italy, Austria and Germany, from which the UK’s certainly not immune. Oh, and there’s Brexit! And, of course, there’s Donald Trump!
Americans must be feeling ill-at-ease today. Within the last 24 hours, 11 people have been gunned down at a synagogue in Pittsburgh. Anti-Semitism’s gaining ground in all sorts of places. The parcel bombs, too, sent a few days ago to leading Democrats in the USA have no doubt ratcheted up the tension and fear in that country just a little more. Cesar Sayoc, an ardent Trump supporter with a criminal record as it happens, is alleged to have sent 13 explosive devices to the homes – amongst others – of the former President, Barak Obama, the former Presidential candidate, Hillary Clinton, and the former Vice-President, Joe Biden. Thankfully, they were all intercepted by the intelligence services, so no physical injuries or deaths were caused.
Many have suggested that the sending of parcel bombs is a direct result of a toxic political climate fomented by the President himself. While it has to be remembered that the President wasn’t responsible for sending the bombs, it would be hard to deny that the President’s political rhetoric hasn’t on occasion been inflammatory.
The former CIA Director, John Brennan, remarked that the President had previously subjected the intended victims of the bombs to verbal attacks, and accused the President of hurling insults, telling lies and encouraging physical violence. It’s been remarked that news stories the President disagrees with are immediately labelled ‘fake news’, and many have commented on the invective used to demonise political opponents and others. From the beginning of his Presidential campaign, for example, Donald Trump referred to Mexicans crossing the border as ‘criminals’ and ‘rapists’, before hastily adding, ‘some of them might be good, though’. And it’s the media, above all, which comes in for stick. The President’s referred to the media as the ‘enemy of the people’, as ‘absolute scum’, ‘disgusting’ and ‘very dishonest’. It’s for these reasons that his appeal in the wake of the parcel bombs to ‘all sides to come together in peace and harmony’ might ring just a little hollow.
It’s not only in the USA, though, where a toxic political climate can be found. Here in the UK the rhetoric around Brexit has meant that there’s been little real opportunity for a serious, sensible and intelligent debate about the issues. Such toxicity is to be seen most of all in the Prime Minister’s own party. Tim Shipman, the political editor of a Sunday newspaper reported last week that one Tory MP had declared that Theresa May should ‘bring her own noose’ to a forthcoming meeting of backbenchers, saying that she would be ‘knifed in the front’ by critics of the so-called Chequers proposal. This led one of her backbenchers to claim that the story had been concocted by Downing Street itself in an attempt to gain sympathy for the Prime Minister, something Shipman strenuously denied.
In the context of such toxicity, words heard from the Letter of Jude in today’s second lesson seem like balm to the soul. In contrast to ‘worldly people, devoid of the Spirit, who are causing divisions’, the recipients of the letter are to keep themselves in the love of God and to ‘have mercy on some who are wavering’. Love and mercy seem like good virtues to practise in any circumstances, even and especially, perhaps, in politics.
It would be too easy and not a little complacent to leave it there, though, for toxic climates exist in the Church, just as much as anywhere else. Those who are accused of causing division in the Letter of Jude, those who are described in verses not included in the lesson as ‘grumblers and malcontents, [who] indulge their own lusts [and] are bombastic in speech, flattering people to their own advantage’ aren’t some outside group; they are themselves Christians, members of the church. The Letter of Jude was clearly written in the context of bitter disputes within the Church, disputes between those who would later come to be referred to as orthodox believers on the one hand and heretics on the other. As we heard at the beginning of the lesson, the issue was, as the author states, that ‘certain intruders have stolen in among you, people who…pervert the grace of God into licentiousness and deny our only Master and Lord, Jesus Christ’. It was clearly felt that matters of crucial importance were at stake here, but it’s to the eternal credit of the author that invective, insult and abuse is discouraged. Instead he urges, ‘Build yourselves up on your most holy faith…and have mercy on some who are wavering’.
‘Have mercy on those who are wavering’. We might paraphrase that along the following lines: ‘Be courteous, respectful, gentle, sensitive and generous to those you disagree with. Listen to them carefully. Seek to learn from them where you can, but persuade them otherwise where you think they can learn from you. Above all, have compassion and humility, knowing that none of us is in possession of the whole truth. So have mercy not only on others, but also on yourself. Where you have to part company, do so with kindness and civility, for stridency and rigidity only separate and divide, whereas love builds up and unites, and leaves the door open.
Sadly, the Church hasn’t always adopted such an approach. Even the gospels themselves show evidence of the use of invective against opponents. The Gospels of Matthew and John, for example, both demonise opponents. In the case of Matthew, it’s the Scribes and Pharisees who are the target of harsh language, and in John it’s those referred to simply as ‘the Jews’. This designation in the Gospel of John has been particularly uncomfortable for the Church, because it’s been used as an excuse for anti-Semitism throughout its history. How, in any case, could such invective be attributed to Jesus himself, the one who certainly spoke the truth at great cost to himself, and yet who embodied the virtues of love, compassion and forgiveness?
One possibility is that these two gospels, in particular, reflect the bitter controversies in the latter part of the first century, when it’s thought that Christians began to be excluded from synagogues. The hurt that Christians felt is perfectly understandable, but the language used in Matthew about the Scribes and Pharisees is directly at odds with Jesus’ own teaching in the same gospel, ‘You have heard it said, “You shall love your neighbour and hate your enemy.” But I say to you, Love our enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be children of your Father in heaven’.
Such loving is about more than just the words we use, it’s also about actions, the way we behave. And yet words are hugely important. As the Letter of James puts it:
‘Look at ships: though they are so large that it takes strong winds to drive them, yet they are guided by a very small rudder wherever the will of the pilot directs. So also the tongue is a small member, yet it boasts of great exploits.
How great a forest is set ablaze by a small fire! And the tongue is a fire’.
We don’t know for sure who the Jude was who wrote the letter which bears his name in the Bible. We can be extraordinarily grateful, though, that in this 25-verse letter, matters of significant disagreement are addressed with conviction, yes, but above all with love, mercy and compassion. It’s a model which all of us, both inside and outside the Church, have much to learn from. After all, the words we use and the way we speak can be used either to spread poison, or to be one of the antidotes to deal with the toxicity which affects us all. As the author implies, the most powerful antidote of all is to keep ourselves in the love of God, to let it shape and transform us, so that in our words and actions it is really Christ speaking and acting.
What happens next…? – The Reverend Canon Michael Smith (Pastor)
The Reverend Canon Michael Smith (Pastor)
Sunday 21 October 2018 10am Choral Eucharist
Ecclus 38.1-15 & John 9.1-12
(York Medical Society in attendance at this service)
It is virtually impossible for me to describe what it is like to suddenly see after being blind since birth. My first sensation, as I washed the mud from my eyes, was a kind of pain. It hurt. My eyes hurt. I immediately shut them again. I felt dizzy and disorientated. When I opened my eyes again all I can say is that it was like someone blowing a horn right in your ear after you had been sitting in silence for a long time – only it was someone shining light in to my eyes.
It had been just an ordinary day. My parents had put me in my prime begging spot early in the morning. I chatted to a few of the locals about this and that and sat the rest of the time just thinking and occasionally I hummed a tune quietly.
Suddenly I became aware of quite a large group of people coming towards me. They stood near me and soon I realised that they were talking about me. I supposed they were a group of students or Pharisees because they were talking about why I was blind – for whose sin was this man’s blindness a punishment, his parents or his own – they mused. For them I was an interesting subject for discussion, not a person. This did not unduly worry me because it happened all the time, I was used to it. And then one of them came close to me. He touched me on my arm very gently and introduced himself. He asked me if I would mind him touching my eyes. He said he was going to give me my sight back. I thought for a moment. Was this some kind of sick joke? Was this someone taunting me – like the children who would laugh at me, hide my stick and kick my begging bowl down the street? But I could sense only gentleness in his touch and sincerity in his quiet voice and so I said that I did not mind. I had nothing to lose. He let go of my arm, there was a slight pause, and then I felt this warm, slightly gritty substance being smoothed over my eyes. He told me to go and wash my face in the nearby pool of Siloam. I slowly made my way there and did as he had asked and it was as I stood to dry my face that my eyes were hit with a thousand tons of brightness.
It took me ages to be able to open my eyes just a little bit and begin to adjust to this new world I had been given – by the time I had begun to get used to it he had gone. I could not understand why he had chosen me. I was not particularly good, I could be short tempered and selfish like everyone else. I was not particularly religious either, certainly I was Jewish, but like my blindness I had no choice about that, it was mine by birth.
I used to think that life was hard and full of problems when I was blind, but on the day I received my sight things got really difficult and complicated. For a start my friends and neighbours, whose voices I knew well, seemed not to know who I was. They were confused. We were all disorientated. They asked me what had happened and I simply explained about the man who had touched my eyes with what I now know was just mud and that I could see ……..
I find it helpful, sometimes, to play with bible stories like this. To put them in context of ordinary people experiencing extraordinary things. One of the most interesting things about healing miracles, like the one we heard in the gospel this morning, is that we rarely hear what happened after the healing. In the passage we heard today we hear of the man regaining his sight, and that’s it. If it was an episode of EastEnders the drums would sound and we’d all wait to tune in to the next episode to see what happened next. Of course the whole of chapter 9 of John’s gospel is about the same miracle, but all we hear about in the subsequent verses are the arguments between different factions relating, mainly, to the fact that the miracle had happened on the Sabbath. That is all very interesting and significant, but for me, the most interesting and challenging aspect of this story is simply never told – what did the healed man do with the rest of his life? Apart from regaining his sight, how did his encounter with Jesus change him?
My version of the story ended with this sentence ‘I used to think that life was hard and full of problems when I was blind, but on the day I received my sight things got really difficult and complicated.’ The healed man had survived into adulthood as a blind man presumably because he had parents who cared for him and because he could make some money begging. All of that would have to change. He could now live independently of his parents if he wanted to. He would have to go out and get a job as well because begging was no longer an option – but what could he do? He had been blind since birth!
If you reflect on nearly all the healing miracles in the gospels and try to imagine, what happened next, it does not take long to conclude that being lame, blind, having leprosy or being possessed was undoubtedly horrendous, but life as someone who could suddenly walk or see, or as someone who used to have leprosy or who used to be possessed, is not without its challenges!
It is very fashionable these days to be dismissive of people of faith. We are talked about by some as people who are living in a fantasy, people who are essentially frightened of dying so believe all sorts of ridiculous things about resurrection and eternal life. What our critics never consider is that being a person of faith is actually quite hard! Encountering God in Jesus, responding to the invitation ‘follow me’, living a new life as someone who has been healed or forgiven is actually very challenging and involves a total re-orientation of your life and a lot of hard work. I believe life is much more challenging for those who live by faith than it is for those who live lives based on their own, often quite self-centred, belief systems. Jesus understood this. Once he met a man who had been lame for 38 years who lived by a pool of water which was thought to have healing properties, presumably in the hopes that one day he would be healed. When Jesus met him he asked him this question, ‘Do you want to be made well?’ In context this, at first, seems like an incredibly crass question to ask someone who had been lame for 38 years, but it was an excellent question. I expect that there are some here in the medical profession who regularly see people who appear to want to be made well, but have actually got so used to their illness or condition that they cannot really imagine living life in a different way so they never really get better.
The point of the gospel story today, and the point of all the stories of people who genuinely encounter Jesus, is that it is a life changing event. After encountering Jesus nothing can ever be the same again. Living as an invited, healed or forgiven follower of Jesus is extremely challenging, but in the end it enables us to live life more fully, enables us to live lives which are enriched and more fruitful because we cease to find our identity in our status, or our abilities, or our disabilities, or our qualifications, or our possessions and discover our true identity as beloved, healed and forgiven, children of God.