….. and the walls came tumbling down …… – The Reverend Canon Michael Smith (Pastor)

The Reverend Canon Michael Smith (Pastor)

….. and the walls came tumbling down ……

Sunday 14 October 2018 4pm Evensong

Joshua 5.13-6.20 & Matthew 11.20-end

The story of the walls of Jericho falling is one of the best known Old Testament stories. It has been told, retold and sung about over countless generations. Not surprisingly for the Old Testament, the miraculous breaching of the city walls was in the context of a war – God intervenes to ensure victory for the Israelites.

Rather than exploring the meaning and significance of the story as it appears in the book of Joshua, I want to explore walls, and the breaking down of walls, in broader terms.

Any mention of walls today quickly ends up with people talking about the promise made in the Presidential campaign in the USA a couple of years ago to build a wall along the border between the USA and Mexico. The argument for such a wall is that, among other things, it would keep drugs and illegal immigrants out of the USA. The proposed wall would be 2,000 miles long and would cost in the region of $18 billion. It seems ridiculous, but it is worth remembering that the Great Wall of China was built hundreds of years ago and is over 13,000 miles long and it is impossible to estimate how much that cost. Of course, it is not difficult to find people who think building a wall between the USA and Mexico is a terrible idea. Some politicians in the USA and beyond have fiercely criticised the idea and I suspect that if we took a vote here this afternoon the majority of us would be against the building of this wall or the building of any walls between nations – they never seem to help – look at Bethlehem today and remember the rejoicing when the Berlin wall came down.

It is very easy to be critical of the idea of building walls between nations and demonising those who suggest such plans, but the danger is that being critical of others for wanting to build walls between different peoples is a sure fire way of ignoring the way we all build walls to protect what we consider to be ours.

People of faith are great wall builders. We build walls of certainty – I know what God is saying to me, I understand the precise meaning of scripture. We build walls of tradition – we have always done things this way, it would be wrong to change. We build walls of denominations – my version of faith is better than yours, God is obviously Church of England.

Political people are also great wall builders. They build walls of ideology – my world view is more accurate than yours therefore whatever I think will make the world a better place is right. They build walls of fear – if we do not do things my way there will be catastrophe.

Ordinary people in ordinary situations can also be master wall builders. We all have a tendency to build walls of certainty – my version of what I think is true, or want to be true, is the only version, anyone who contradicts it is wrong. We also build walls by belittling or demonising those with whom we disagree – if someone I disagree with is stupid or evil then I do not need to engage with them at all, I can shut them out of my thinking.

Ironically some of the greatest wall builders I have met are people who consider themselves to be liberal. Some of the most disturbing conversations I have had in recent years have been about our relationship with Europe with good, liberal minded people who effectively close down conversations about Brexit by being so sure of their particular view. I am aware of families and relationships which have been put under terrific pressure because of the walls people build around their particular view of Brexit.

Pushing the metaphor to an extreme, I would say that the walls we construct in these ways are made firmer and more impenetrable because many of us reinforce them with the rock solid mortar of social media. With a few ill-considered clicks on a keypad we can fix our views and make our criticisms of others in ways that can cause lasting damage.

Having said all this we have to accept that some walls and boundaries are necessary and important. For there to be order instead of chaos and anarchy, there need to be some walls and borders.

So where do we go from here?

In the summer I went to see ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’ at the ‘pop-up’ Globe near Clifford’s Tower. One of the best and funniest sections of the play was the part where Shakespeare has one of the characters play the part of a wall. There was a huge amount of humour in the scene where two lovers seek to communicate through this human wall. This is, of course, a ridiculous premise, but it does, I believe, give us a clue about how we can establish and live with walls and boundaries creatively. The point is that there has to be humanity, humour and graciousness involved. All the walls we erect should have some flexibility and, like the wall in a Midsummer Night’s Dream, they should have ears, so that we can truly listen to the views of others and consider the possibility of changing our own views. We also have to accept that like the city walls around Jericho, the walls we invest so much time and energy in creating, may also be demolished by God. Yes, there is truth in faith. Yes, there is truth in politics. Yes, there is truth in ordinary situations of ordinary everyday life, but no one has a monopoly on that truth. While it is good and right to form and express opinions and views on what is true and right, we must always hold those views and opinions knowing that God has a habit of breaking down the walls we build to protect those views. We should also remember that Jesus developed an entire ministry largely based on breaking down barriers, trampling over social taboos and redefining many of the firmly drawn boundaries the religious and social elite had established in his day.

Let us be wary of walls and careful not to assume the walls we build to protect our views and beliefs are fixed for all time. Like the wall in a Midsummer Night’s Dream, our walls need ears to listen to others with different views in such a way that our understanding of what is true and right might change, develop, mature. We also need to be ready for the possibility that God may destroy the walls we build so that our understanding or our views become totally vulnerable to change. God made the walls of Jericho tumble down, maybe God will make the walls we build in our arrogance tumble down as well?

Let us pray

O God, grant that looking into the face of the Lord, as into a glass, we may be changed into his likeness, from glory to glory. Take out of us all pride and vanity, boasting and forwardness, arrogance and defensiveness; and give us the true courage which shows itself by gentleness and vulnerability; the true wisdom which shows itself by simplicity; and the true power which shows itself by modesty. We make our prayer through Jesus Christ, who is never confined and is the way, the truth and the life. Amen

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The Case of Brett Kavanaugh, Sexual Politics and the Mutuality of Love – Canon Dr Christopher Collingwood (Chancellor)

Canon Dr Christopher Collingwood (Chancellor)

Sunday 7 October 2018 – Sung Eucharist

Genesis 2:18-24 Mark 10:2-16

Who’d have thought that the presidential nomination of a circuit judge to replace a retiring Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States of America would become so contentious, that it would be among the top news stories for days, not only in the USA but in the UK and elsewhere around the world, too? The nomination by Donald Trump of Brett Kavanaugh has inadvertently or even deliberately served, amongst other things, to fan the flames of strong emotion around the issue of sexual politics.

In the middle of September this year, just a little over two months after the announcement of the nomination, Christine Blasey Ford made an allegation of sexual assault against Kavanaugh, which was followed shortly thereafter by two further allegations of sexual misconduct, made by Deborah Ramirez and Julie Swetnick. Prior to the confirmation of the nomination by the Senate, an FBI investigation of these allegations was commissioned by the President, and it became clear that this case was to expose the fault lines in American politics even further than they were already perceived to be. America’s deeply divided about many things, as is the UK, and matters to do with sexual politics lie, amongst other things, at the heart of that division.

Part of the backdrop for this is the #MeToo movement, which arose initially as a result of women in various walks of life coming forward with allegations of sexual impropriety on the part of men. Among the best known among the accused, perhaps, is the American film producer, Harvey Weinstein. There’s been an eruption of anger, frustration and resentment on the part of large numbers of women, who’re no longer willing to put up with the demeaning and abusive behaviour and attitudes of some men towards them. Only the other day, one of our own female staff here told me that when she worked for another organisation, it was made clear that if she wanted to get on, she’d have to sleep with various men to gain promotion. An offer was even made to her to set up such a liaison. Fortunately, she’s a person of great integrity, so she resigned rather than collude and conform. Despite huge advances in Western society in relation to women, misogynistic and patriarchal attitudes still lurk, and they’re deeply unpleasant.

Inevitably, though, there’s also something of a backlash against the progress made by women. At a recent press conference, Donald Trump said that it’s now very difficult to be a man in the face of allegations made by women, because it’s come to be assumed that you’re guilty until proven innocent. Now there may well be more than an element of truth in that. It’s just as much the case, though, that, as a matter of course, women have often been assumed to be making false allegations. Why didn’t the President say that as well? The suspicion lurks that there’s still something of a hidden agenda to reinforce male power and influence. In the end, all of us, men and women alike, lose out in such a climate.

In one sense, there’s nothing new here. Jesus was tested by a question to do with sexual politics, as we heard in the gospel reading. In this case, it had to do with when divorce was permissible. Some Pharisees asked Jesus, ‘Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife?’ On the surface, this looks like a fairly straightforward question, but notice the way it’s framed: ‘Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife?’ The question was put by men in a patriarchal society. Women had no rights in Jewish law. In this regard, Roman law was actually rather more enlightened, for female citizens of Rome were permitted to sue for divorce against their husbands. The way Jewish law was practised meant that women were little more than the property of their husbands. This legacy continued until fairly recently even in our own culture and, if you choose to be married according to the order prescribed in the Book of Common Prayer, that’s implicitly the view you’re accepting even today. That’s why the woman is given away by the father to her husband – to be his property. Fortunately, that assumption isn’t to be found in Common Worship.

When the Pharisees came to Jesus, he would have been well aware that there was a division of opinion among them as to the conditions for divorce. Some advocated very easy divorce, while others were more stringent. As far as Jesus was concerned, the debate was framed in entirely the wrong way, for its starting point was an assumption based on an imbalance of power between men and women. Instead, he took them back to the basic premise of all relationships as intended by God: that of mutuality.

When Jesus quotes from the book of Genesis, he clearly has in mind the second creation narrative in chapter two, where we read that a man and woman become one flesh in marriage. There’s an ambivalence there, though, because there’s a subliminal imbalance in the relationship, since the woman is created from the man. In other words, the man assumes priority over the woman.

At the same time, though, Jesus clearly has the first creation narrative in mind, too. When he says that ‘God made them male and female’, he’s referring to the first story, in which we read: ‘So God created humankind in his image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them.’ It’s quite clear from this that to be created in the image of God is to be created not only for relationship but as relationship, in which male and female are completely and unambiguously equal. Female isn’t created after male. Male and female are created together at one and the same time. The true dignity of every human being as created in the image and likeness of God lies not in asserting power over and against one another, but in a relationship in which neither can be without the other. As Christian experience and reflection unfolded, so it came to be seen that Jesus himself embodied a love grounded in the life of God as Trinity, the one whose very being is a mutuality and communion of love. To put it bluntly, God isn’t God without this essential relationality, and since we’re created in the image and likeness of this God, we can’t be human without a similar mutuality of relationship. Relationships aren’t or shouldn’t be about power, but about love.

All this is really important when we’re thinking about marriage and divorce. I wonder how many people here this morning have been through divorce themselves and felt not a little uncomfortable as the gospel was read. How many such people feel a sense of guilt and shame, of hurt and failure? The point Jesus was making is that marital relationships aren’t to be seen in isolation. All our relationships, of whatever kind, are grounded ultimately in the reciprocal exchange of love which is God the Trinity, and in that sense it’s not just marriages which fall short; all our relationships do. The real issue is how we deal with this fact.

To insist that there can never be divorce or remarriage runs the risk of preserving a marriage but killing the people. Jesus recalls us to the ideal of marriage not to weigh us down with yet another burden of guilt but to remind us all of our inherent dignity, residing not in power but in love. For some, it’s the very experience of marriage itself, particularly when based on an abuse of power, which whittles away that sense of God-given dignity and worth. In such circumstances, it would seem right to reject the very basis on which the relationship was made. And when things are difficult, as they are for all of us in all our relationships from time to time, marital or otherwise, what’s called for is wisdom and compassion, a gentle acceptance of ourselves as loved, as well as the affirmation, often from others, and the belief, that we’re more than the difficulties which temporarily seem to define us.

Jesus recalls us to who we truly are, whether married or not, and sets before us an aspiration, something to aim at: the perfect fulfilment of every human being in divine and human relationships of mutual love. The ultimate realisation of that aspiration is sometimes enabled, paradoxically, by our experience of failure. This is the mystery at the heart of Christian faith and experience. As is sung in the Exultet on Easter Eve, ‘O happy fault, O necessary sin.’ And if what’s going on in the public arena of sexual politics in the United States and elsewhere is an expression of deep dissatisfaction with asymmetrical relationships based on power, and of the desire for something different, then even the pain and trauma arising from all that can itself in the end contribute to the ultimate fulfilment of God’s purposes of mutual, transparent and power-less love.

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A Great Welcome – The Reverend Deacon Abigail Davison (Curate)

The Reverend Deacon Abigail Davison (Curate)

Sunday 23 September 2018 – 10am Sung Eucharist

James 3:13-4:3, 7-8a and Mark 9:30-37

If there’s anyone in my household who would argue that they’re the greatest, it’s my 2 year old daughter. She’s certain that she’s the greatest at finishing her cereal: she expects a round of applause when she does. Likewise, no one can jump from the bottom step of the stairs as well as she can. And I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to tell you, she might just be the greatest at finding biscuits I thought they were safely hidden. She has no qualms about asking for praise and acclaim for how great she believes she is. And of course, as her mum, I have no qualms giving it.

This probably isn’t the same standard of greatness the disciples had in mind but, from where Jesus is standing, I wonder if it’s not just as absurd.

In today’s gospel reading, Jesus warns his disciples for a second time that he is going to die. Their apparent response is to argue among themselves about their own greatness. In the Gospel reading last week (Mark 8:27-38) Jesus had also warned the disciples what was about to happen, and we heard Peter rebuke him for it. Jesus’ response to this seemed excessive: ‘Get behind me Satan! For you are setting your mind not on divine things, but on human things.’ Maybe it’s in this that we’ve found the route of the problem. The same issue came up in the first reading today, in the letter of James. He puts it just as strongly: ‘Do you not know that friendship with the world is enmity with God?’

I wonder if it was Jesus’ original outburst that made the disciples reluctant to ask him what he meant when he raised the issue of his death for a second time. Instead they seem to choose to overlook his predictions and start this argument about which of them was the greatest. I don’t want to seem too harsh on the disciples: I completely understand why they do, for two reasons. Firstly, the first thing you do when someone says something you don’t want to hear, is (if you possibly can) to pretend they didn’t say it at all (do ask my toddler about this technique, she’s very good at it).

The second reason is this: last week we heard the disciples establish just who Jesus is – he’s the Messiah, King of the Jews, the whole of Israel has been waiting for this! Jesus is now, for the second time, trying to teach them what this actually means. But they already know what it means, in the same way they know what it means to be great. They know this, because they have the likes of Caesar and other great rulers, to show them. When those Kings rode in to take possession of their kingdoms, the people nearest to them got a share in the accolade and the spoils and, often, became known as ‘great’ themselves. At least, for a short time.

The disciples had been promised that the good news was here, and good news looks a lot more like this, then like your king, your friend, dying on a cross.

Here we see most starkly the disparity between the divine and the human, between God and the world. Jesus wasn’t looking to emulate any kind of earthly ruler, and in hindsight we know that fleeting, earthly greatness wasn’t what awaited his disciples either. So what kind of greatness should we be looking to emulate? What does it look like when our standard of greatness is set by God: when it’s divine and not human? It looks, Jesus tells us, like the greatest acting as a servant: it looks like the welcome of a child.

As the mother of a little child, I have some things to say about welcoming little children…

I get a very twee image of this scene in my mind, and I don’t think it’s the whole truth. I picture a young child who is brought in just long enough for Jesus to make his point, then scurries out to play in the street again. That’s not welcome, that’s just saying hello. This is a much more powerful image then that: welcoming a little child is hard work. It means welcoming spaghetti handprints on your walls and grapes squished into the carpet and toys hidden in your dishwasher and all of your biscuits gone! And it can mean weeks without sleep, the long term loss of earnings, and a life that’s lived almost entirely around meeting the needs of someone else, supporting them to be great.

And this is what we’re asked to welcome?

There’s no quantifiable reward to be gained here: nothing that could be measure by the world’s standards. Nothing that will lead to us being regarded as ‘the greatest’. Can you imagine a world leader asserting their greatness by this standard, or promising to make their nation great by using its resources to make other nations greater than it?

Are you ready to give that welcome?

Are we, as a church, ready to give that welcome?

I can’t answer this for you, but what will the rest of your week look like if you offer that welcome? I don’t know either what this church will end up looking like if we offer this welcome, but I am desperate to find out.

Finally, I want to ask, are you in need of that welcome? (And I suspect at some point in our lives, we all are.)

I want to encourage you, if you haven’t received such a welcome, not to be afraid to demand it of us. Because it’s in you we have a chance to welcome Christ himself.

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Grace is not cheap – The Reverend Canon Michael Smith (Pastor)

The Reverend Canon Michael Smith (Pastor)

16 Sunday after Trinity – Evensong

Exodus 18. 13-26 & Matthew 7. 1-14

What do these things have in common – a rubber duck, a kebab skewer, a sock, a light bulb, 104 pennies, 9 sewing needles, and a penknife? No, they are not prizes on a rather disappointing edition of the Generation Game – they are in fact items that have been eaten and swallowed by dogs! I promise I was not just wasting time doing some random Googling when I should have been writing my sermon for evensong, I discovered this fascinating information in the course of writing this sermon! Hopefully, all will become clear…..

When I first looked at the bible readings we have just heard I thought that writing a sermon would not be too difficult. It seemed like the passage from Matthew is full of pithy sayings with plenty of scope for sermonising. To be honest, when I actually began to think harder about what I might explore I found it very difficult indeed. The first few verses of the passage from Matthew 7 begin with ‘Do not judge, so that you may not be judged.’ That is very clear and straightforward but is followed by, ‘Do not give what is holy to dogs; and do not throw your pearls before swine, or they will trample them under foot and turn and maul you.’ As I thought about this I couldn’t help thinking that some significant judgement is required to decide who are ‘dogs’ and who are ‘swine’!

Of course, as ever, I began to make some sense of all this when I remembered to try and read the passage in context. Jesus was speaking at a time when Judaism was exclusive and the language of ‘dogs’ and ‘swine’ was freely used to describe Gentiles. For example in Matthew 15 a Gentile woman approaches Jesus to ask him to heal her sick daughter and Jesus pointedly ignores her and then tells her that he has been sent to the ‘lost sheep of the house of Israel’, and then says, ‘It is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs.’ The woman is not deflected by this, perseveres with her request and eventually Jesus heals her daughter. So, on this occasion, you could say, he gives what is holy, healing, to the dogs, which is very interesting and very good, but doesn’t really help when trying to make sense of the passage from Matthew 7 when Jesus specifically says we should not give what is holy to the dogs.

Having made a little progress by reading the passage in the context of the time it was written, it is still important to make some sense of these verses today. Perhaps what this passage should be reminding us is that the things of God, what is holy, the pearls of truth we know through Jesus, are both precious and challenging. We talk a lot about the generosity of God’s grace but we have to remember that living in God’s generous grace, is hard. The life of faith is challenging. This is a difficult message when we are constantly trying to engage in mission and call people to join us in the life of faith. Churches are generally falling over themselves to find ways to make the Good News accessible, relevant and attractive – the danger is always that the profound challenges there are in living a life of faith and becoming a follower of Jesus are skated over. Faith can easily become primarily about the things you believe rather than the way you live, the way you relate to other people and the choices you make every day.

What we need, as we grow in faith, is discernment to see the profound beauty and the profound challenge of the gospel. And this is where I justify my Googling; dogs will eat almost anything, they show no discernment – some will eat a lightbulb with the same enthusiasm as a bowl of Pedigree Chum. We have to engage in mission in such a way that we do not make it seem that faith is simple, that following Jesus is easy, that grace is cheap, that faith is just another ‘lifestyle’ choice, something to be consumed with everything else there is on offer today.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the German pastor and theologian who was imprisoned by the Nazis and died in a concentration camp, wrote a book called ‘The Cost of Discipleship’ in which he warns against thinking that grace is cheap. He says, “Cheap grace is the grace we bestow on ourselves. Cheap grace is the preaching of forgiveness without requiring repentance, baptism without church discipline, Communion without confession…Cheap grace is grace without discipleship, grace without the cross, grace without Jesus Christ, living and incarnate.”

As we think about what Jesus said about not giving holy things to dogs and not throwing pearls to swine, Bonhoeffer makes us, first, look at ourselves. Do we treat the Good News as the truly precious and challenging gift that it is or do we treat it as something easy and cheap, something to make us feel comfortable, just something else for us to consume, taking the bits we like and ignoring the bits that are hard and challenging, the bits that involve sacrifice and vulnerability, the bits that lead us to the cross?

‘Do not give what is holy to dogs; and do not throw your pearls before swine, or they will trample them under foot and turn and maul you.’ It would have been easy and comfortable to spend our time worrying about the political incorrectness of this statement when what we should be doing is wondering whether we treat holy things with care and discernment accepting the challenges as well as the blessings they bring. Wondering whether we trample over the pearls we are given with our self-centred arrogance, taking what makes us feel good and safe and ignoring that which disturbs us or involves suffering. The teaching of Jesus in Matthew 7 is hard to read, hard to understand and it challenges us to examine our conscience – are we simply consumers of faith, along with everything else we consume, or do we make ourselves vulnerable to the life changing power of the ‘holy pearls’ of the Good News Jesus shares with us all? God’s grace is not cheap, as Bonhoeffer says, ‘It is the pearl of great price to buy which the merchant will sell all his goods. It is the kingly rule of Christ, for whose sake a man will pluck out the eye which causes him to stumble; it is the call of Jesus Christ at which the disciple leaves his nets and follows him.’

Responding to God’s grace means entering by the narrow gate, as Matthew 7.14 says, it is challenging and costly, but it is the entrance that leads to life.

Let us pray

Lord, your searing judgment penetrates the hidden places of our hearts and minds. Heal the injuries carried that would wound others, confront the prejudices held that would restrict vision, calm the fears that would strike those who would challenge. Transform us in your grace with humility and love, and may all our wrestling with matters of faith, ultimately end in blessing. We ask this for the sake of him who died to bring true peace and blessing to the world. Amen

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The Habit of Art and Being Ourselves – Canon Dr Christopher Collingwood (Chancellor)

Sunday 29 July 2018 – 10am Sung Eucharist

James 1:17-27 Mark 7:1-8, 14-15, 21-23

What, I wonder, are your earliest childhood memories? What’s the first thing you can remember in your life and how old were you?

I have quite vivid memories going back to about the age of three, but one that really sticks in my mind dates from a little later, when I must have been about seven or eight. Most of my early memories have to do with grandparents, and on this particular occasion we were staying with my paternal grandparents in Rugby. I remember going to church one Sunday, as we always did, the building being the sort that’s often referred to as a ‘tin tabernacle’, and I can recall quite clearly the vicar’s sermon. Sitting in the front row were three teenagers, dressed very casually in jeans and open-necked shirts or blouses. The vicar made a point of singling them out as he was preaching, saying that it really didn’t matter what they were wearing; the important thing was that they were there. I’ve very little recollection of anything else he said, but I guess he must have been making a point to those who might have thought that people dressed like that clearly shouldn’t have been allowed to attend a service. This was the sixties, and there was a social revolution, manifesting itself in all sorts of ways, not least in fashion and etiquette. Hitherto people would have worn their ‘Sunday best’ to church, but the vicar seemed to be stating that this wasn’t what really mattered. He didn’t say so in as many words, but what he was suggesting was that it wasn’t the external appearance that mattered, but the intention, the heart.

Does it matter what we wear to church? Do you dress up to come to church or do you come dressed casually? There are plenty of people who just like dressing up and think that church should be something special. Others hate dressing up for anything, and prefer coming to church simply in what they feel comfortable with. Whatever the case, I doubt very much whether any of us would challenge whether this person or that was dressed appropriately. We’d probably argue that this was to miss the point.

Missing the point was the challenge that Jesus made to the Scribes and Pharisees, as we heard in the gospel reading. In this case, it wasn’t about what the correct dress code was, but something of a not entirely dissimilar nature. It had to do with whether certain external ritual actions had to be performed in order to be acceptable to God. The Scribes and Pharisees were unnerved by the fact that Jesus’ disciples didn’t observe the regulations about ritual washing before eating. The charge, in other words, was that they were unclean. Ritual cleansing, however, lay at the heart of the tradition, because it was an outward sign of becoming acceptable to God. The original purpose of things like ritual cleansing was to impress on people the overriding importance of holiness. The problem arises when the sign is taken to replace the reality, when just going through the motions and little more is deemed to be what guarantees holiness. This is what lies at the heart of Jesus’ charge: that there’s more to spirituality than performing the right ritual actions. What matters is what motivates them. When they lose sight of what they’re really for, they just become mechanical and, for this very reason, counter-productive. What matters is the heart.

The problem with obsessing about ritual cleanliness and what’s acceptable to God in terms of the externals is that the attitude that lies behind this can be toxic. It leads to a whole host of binary judgments about who’s in and who’s out, who’s acceptable and who’s not. At the time of Jesus, simply to be sick put you beyond the bounds of social and religious acceptability. This is why Jesus’ behaviour was such an affront to the religious establishment, because he mixed readily with those who were diseased and deemed thereby to be outcast. Time and time again, Jesus recalled people beyond mere external observation to what truly lay at the heart of the tradition, particularly in relation to the prophets.

Nowhere does Jesus actually quote Amos or Micah as he does Isaiah, for example, but he would entirely agree with what they believed God to be saying through them. From Amos: ‘I hate, I despise your festivals, and I take no delight in your solemn festivals. Even though you [make] offerings [to me], I will not accept them. But let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream’ (Amos 5:21-22, 24). And Micah, ‘With what shall I come before the Lord, and bow myself before God on high? Shall I come before him with burnt offerings, with calves a year old?…He has told you what is good; and what does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?’ (Micah 6:6,8). Jesus and the prophets before him affirm that God isn’t concerned with the externals in and for themselves alone, but with what they reveal about who we truly are and what we’re really like. In other words, the externals point to something far more important and less visible: the heart, the very essence, if you like, of who we are. Justice, mercy, kindness, compassion and love, these are things that really matter, because these are what lie at the heart of God and, because we’re created in the image and likeness of God, at the heart of who we are, too. What matters is what comes out of the heart and Jesus suggests that in the end it boils down to love: love God and love your neighbour as yourself. Everything else is simply a gloss on that.

The uncomfortable thing for all of us, of course, is that there’s a disjunction between our outward behaviour and what we profess. To put it another way, our actions reveal our diseased hearts, and this so easily leads to charges of hypocrisy. The charge made by Jesus to the Scribes and Pharisees can be levelled at just about anyone who claims to follow him: ‘You hypocrites. “This people honours me with their lips, but their hearts are from me”’. The Church’s record on child sexual abuse, in particular, makes this charge especially irrefutable in our own day. Even the extraordinarily popular Pope Francis is coming in for a good deal of stick. Having tweeted, ‘Christians aren’t “selling a product” but communicating a lifestyle’, he’s had to change his tweet to ‘communicating life’, because some people were so affronted by what they took to be rank hypocrisy.

We’re all Scribes and Pharisees at heart. Well, that’s only partially true. We certainly don’t live in accordance with who we truly are, but our true nature isn’t corrupted and diseased, it’s actually pure and wholesome. As the great 20th century monk and mystic, Thomas Merton, affirmed, at our very core, we’re untouched by sin; there’s a part of us which is untouched by anything but God. The purpose of all our religious observance is simply to enable us to access this hidden ground of who we are, the heart, and discover it to be none other than love and compassion. As Jesus indicated to the Scribes and Pharisees, true religion is of the heart or it’s nothing. If there’s any real point to the whole paraphernalia of religion, it’s to enable God to facilitate the transformation of our hearts, so that renewed and restored, they finally beat in harmony with God’s own heart of love.

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Religion of the Heart – Canon Dr Christopher Collingwood (Chancellor)

Sunday 29 July 2018 – 10am Sung Eucharist

Canon Dr Christopher Collingwood (Chancellor)

James 1:17-27 Mark 7:1-8, 14-15, 21-23

What, I wonder, are your earliest childhood memories? What’s the first thing you can remember in your life and how old were you?

We’re all Scribes and Pharisees at heart. Well, that’s only partially true. We certainly don’t live in accordance with who we truly are, but our true nature isn’t corrupted and diseased, it’s actually pure and wholesome. As the great 20^th century monk and mystic, Thomas Merton, affirmed, at our very core, we’re untouched by sin; there’s a part of us which is untouched by anything but God. The purpose of all our religious observance is simply to enable us to access this hidden ground of who we are, the heart, and discover it to be none other than love and compassion. As Jesus indicated to the Scribes and Pharisees, true religion is of the heart or it’s nothing. If there’s any real point to the whole paraphernalia of religion, it’s to enable God to facilitate the transformation of our hearts, so that renewed and restored, they finally beat in harmony with God’s own heart of love.

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Size Matters! – Canon Dr Christopher Collingwood (Chancellor)

Sunday 26 August 2018 – 11.30am Matins

Canon Dr Christopher Collingwood (Chancellor)

Jonah 2 Revelation 1

Size matters. If you’ve heard that phrase before, you might well be quietly sniggering to yourself just a little, since those two words are likely to trigger visions of the male anatomy in your imagination – or, indeed, in your memory! Does size matter? Well, actually, I want to say yes, but not primarily with reference to the male sexual organs. The question of size arises in all sorts of contexts.

Take York Minster, for example. What effect does its size have on you? Those of us who live and work here often hear of the ‘wow factor’ people experience as they come through the West doors, and that’s partly the impact of the building’s size. The sheer scale impresses us with the ambition of its conception and execution. Built ostensibly to the glory of God, it conveys by its size something of the awesome immensity and transcendence of God. Its size is directly related to the experience of God it’s intended to evoke. At the same time, though, its size was also intended by those who conceived its design to speak not just of God but of political authority. With Church and state working hand-in-glove in the medieval period, the scale of the building was intended to send a subliminal message about political power and control. ‘We’re too big and strong for you to mess with us’, was the signal. The tiny little wooden shack built as the first Minster for the baptism of King Edwin in 627 wouldn’t have had quite the same force. So size does matter.

This isn’t to say that bigger is always better, though; it’s a question of proportion. It doesn’t follow, for example, that taller human beings are necessarily better than shorter ones, or that bees are less important than beetles in the natural world because they tend to be smaller. Bees might be relatively small in size but their role in terms of pollination is colossal. And while we’re about it, what about sermons? I’ve yet to find anyone who argues the longer the sermon the better. It’s usually the reverse – so I’ll keep that in mind!

The question of size arises directly in relation to something like the book of Jonah. I received notification two years ago that a collection of short stories entitled, That Glimpse of Truth: 100 of the Finest Short Stories Ever Written, was due to be published in 2017. It so happens that the book of Jonah appears as the first story in the collection. The stories were assembled by David Miller, who acknowledges that the very notion of the finest 100 short stories is simply outrageous. The finest says who? By what criteria? Miller explained that he wanted to choose stories that reflected as many genres, moods and voices as possible, readily acknowledging that his choices would inevitably be contested. What’s of note, though, is that the book of Jonah appears in such an anthology at all. Depending on precisely how you measure it, the only book in the Old Testament that’s shorter than Jonah is Obadiah, so Jonah undoubtedly qualifies as a short story in terms of size. In most editions of the Bible it’s less than two pages long. In terms of size, though, the significant thing about it is the sheer size of its spiritual and theological impact, which seems to be in inverse proportion to the number of words to be found in it.

If you’re at all familiar with the story, you’ll probably be aware of the role of the whale, the big fish, about which we heard in the first lesson. Despite the brevity of the story, its impact was sufficient to cause Jesus himself to refer to it in the gospels, and indeed the image of Jonah inside the whale, and his eventual emergence from it, is often seen as a type of death and resurrection, which itself is so central to the whole Christian story.

The story of Jonah’s primarily about human small-mindedness compared to the vast and limitless nature of God’s love and compassion. Jonah’s called by God to go to the people of Nineveh to draw attention to the wickedness in that city, not to rub the people’s noses in it, but to convey to them the compassion and concern of God for them, who wants to give them a chance to change. Jonah resents the fact that God’s care is broader than he himself feels comfortable with, so he sets off in the opposite direction. While on board ship, though, a storm arises and the sailors assume that Jonah’s jinxed them. He tells them that they’ll just have to throw him overboard but, pagan, though they are, they try to get him ashore first, thus showing more concern for Jonah’s welfare than Jonah did for the people of Nineveh. Seeing that they’re unable to achieve their objective, Jonah’s thrown into the sea and gets swallowed by the fish, not as a punishment but as a mark of God’s desire to save him. After three days he’s spewed out of the fish’s belly onto dry land.

Reluctantly, Jonah proceeds to Nineveh, bitterly resentful of God’s desire to save them. When Jonah sees that the Ninevites heed his message, Jonah’s angry, and with heavy irony denounces God for God’s compassion and mercy to those whom Jonah deems to be undeserving of it. Jonah’s almost a prototype of the Prodigal Son’s elder brother, who just can’t bring himself to rejoice in his younger brother’s return home to be reconciled with his father after messing up his life. Both stories are at pains to communicate something of the magnitude of God’s love, and in so doing convict us of our small-mindedness. The message of the story of Jonah is quite simply: your God is too small – the title of a book by the 20^th century New Testament scholar J.B. Phillips.

The story of Jonah’s really a comedy, because Jonah’s just so ridiculous. In Jonah, though, we see ourselves and the ways in which we seek to cut God down to size. By the end of the story, it becomes clear, to quote the words of Frederick Faber, that ‘the love of God is broader than the measure of man’s mind; and the heart of the Eternal is most wonderfully kind,’ compared with the ways ‘we make his love too narrow by false limits of our own.’

We’re called to live with a largeness of heart, not as something alien to us, imposed from the outside, but as who we truly are as created in the image and likeness of God, the God who’s bigger than we can ever conceive and whose love and compassion is so great that it blows our minds wide open.

So, you see, as I told you: size does matter!

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Do you believe and trust in God?- the Reverend Canon Michael Smith (Pastor)

The Reverend Canon Michael Smith (Pastor)

Sunday 19 August 2018 – Trinity 12 – Matins

Jonah 1 & 2 Peter 3.14-end

There are many great prophets in the Old Testament. There is Isaiah with his writing about holiness, righteousness and judgment. There is Jeremiah who speaks of judgement and hope. Then there is Hosea who uses his own marriage as an illustration, calling the people to be faithful to God. Then there is Amos who speaks about social justice and warns against hypocrisy. There are many other prophets who speak the word of God with courage and clarity. Their lives are often hard but they are faithful in their calling to guide God’s people and to share in God’s work of salvation. There are all these great prophets in the Old Testament …… and then there is Jonah …… as a prophet Jonah could be described today as , ‘a bit rubbish’!

God told Jonah to go to Nineveh and Jonah went to Tarshish, in the opposite direction. On the ship to Tarshish a huge storm blew up and all the sailors were praying hard to their gods. Where is Jonah, the prophet of the one true God? Is he helping the sailors control the boat in the midst of the appalling storm? Is he saying his prayers? No, he is fast asleep in the hold! The sailors work out that the person to blame for the storm is Jonah who has been disobedient to his God. Jonah, showing some remorse, suggests that the way to end the storm is for the sailors to throw him in to the sea. They show compassion and do not immediately do that, they keep rowing hard and battling the storm. So the foreign sailors did what they could to avoid throwing Jonah overboard, but in the end they had to, the storm was so fierce, and immediately the storm ceased and Jonah, who should have drowned, was swallowed by a large fish.

The whole story of Jonah is like this. He is portrayed as a self-centred, disobedient and ineffective prophet while all those around him, mainly foreigners, are seen to be good, compassionate and obedient.

The question screaming from the pages of the story of Jonah is; why is this book, about a prophet who is ‘a bit rubbish’, in the bible at all?

There are many ways of thinking about this. What is important is that almost despite Jonah, good things happen. The sailors encounter the power of the one true God and as a result they offer sacrifices and make vows to the one true God. Because of the great fish Jonah gets a second chance and goes go to the massive city of Nineveh, walks into its centre and preaches the shortest ever sermon, ‘Forty days more and Nineveh will be overthrown’. As a result of this the king of Nineveh orders everyone to repent, which they do, obediently and God does not destroy them all, God’s mind is changed!

Wow, what a great story of redemption – in the end Jonah does the right thing and they all lived happily ever after. But there is another chapter …. Jonah is very displeased that Nineveh is not subject to God’s wrath and so he is very angry with God. Jonah says to God that he fled to Tarshish because he knew what God was like and that the bad people of Nineveh, if he didn’t go to them, would get their just deserts. This is what Jonah says

‘I knew that you are a gracious God and merciful, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love, and ready to relent from punishing.’ Jonah 4.2

This is true. We believe it is true and Jonah believed it to be true. The problem is that God is gracious and merciful, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love, but Jonah isn’t! He is a self-righteous, arrogant man who thinks he knows best.

In the service of baptism one of the questions the parents and godparents are asked is, ‘Do you believe and trust in God the Father, source of all being and life, the one for whom we exist?’ When I am talking with candidates or parents before a baptism I always talk about this question. What is important is that the question is not simply, ‘Do you believe in God the Father’, but ‘Do you believe and trust in God the Father’. Believing in God is one thing, for many it is a philosophical decision. Many people say that they believe in God but it makes no difference to the way they live their lives. The challenege comes when you say that you trust in God. Trusting in God is much more difficult. It is easy to trust in God when looking at a beautiful, healthy new born baby sleeping soundly in a cot, it is more difficult when you turn on the news and hear of some terrible tragedy or a friend rings you up with awful news about a loved one being seriously ill – then, trusting God is much more challenging.

The problem for Jonah was that he believed in God, he even believed in God as being gracious and merciful, abounding in love, but he did not trust that the world would be a better place if God was able to manifest God’s love and mercy to the people of Nineveh. Jonah believed they should suffer for their sins, he didn’t trust that God’s forgiveness and mercy was the right and best course of action for that wayward people.

It is easy for us to condemn Jonah for his lack of trust in God, but, could you walk into a prison and visit a convicted terrorist or a convicted paedophile and tell them that God is gracious and merciful, ‘slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love, and ready to relent from punishing’, thus opening the door for them to repent and receive God’s mercy and love? Maybe if we felt God calling us to go to speak the good news of God’s love to a notorious criminal, in a prison in Nineveh, we would get on the bus and go shopping or to the cinema in Tarshish instead!

Jonah believed in God, he believed in God’s goodness, but he did not trust in God. The question is, do we believe and trust in God?

Let us pray

Spirit of God, breathe into our hearts peace that is content in your love. Spirit of God, unite us in honouring the gift we are to each other. Spirit of God, give nations common cause to strive for justice and the welfare of all people. Spirit of God, fill us with your grace to trust in your promises and accept your forgiveness for ourselves and others. Spirit of God, breathe into the whole of your creation the peace that comes from you alone through Jesus Christ. Amen

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Living in the Now. – the Reverend Canon Michael Smith (Pastor)

The Reverend Canon Michael Smith (Pastor)

Sunday 12 August – 11^th Sunday after Trinity – Matins

Song of Solomon 8.5-7 & 2 Peter 3.8-13

‘But do not ignore this one fact, beloved, that with the Lord one day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years are like one day.’ 2 Peter 3.8

Tom Hazard is a history teacher in a tough London secondary school. He is teaching a lesson, to a class full of disinterested and surly teenagers, about the witch trials of 16^th century and struggling, not just with the surly teenagers, but with flashbacks. Tom Hazard looks middle aged but is over 400 years old and he saw his mother executed as a witch because she had a son who was not aging normally. This scenario is taken from a novel I am reading at the moment called ‘How to stop time’ by Matt Haig. The basic premise of the story is that Tom Hazard, the hero, has a physical condition which means that after relatively normal ageing in the first years of life he begins to age very slowly, he ages 1 year for a normal person’s 13 or 14 years.

I thought of this story when I read the opening verse of chapter 3 of Peter’s second letter, ‘But do not ignore this one fact, beloved, that with the Lord one day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years are like one day’, because the most interesting thing about the novel I am reading is that living for over 400 hundred years rather than the usual human life span, gives a very different perspective on life and on human problems. I began to wonder if that is the point that Peter is making in his letter. Is what he says about a thousand years being like a day to God, really challenging us to think again and to think in new ways about the problems and challenges we face in life.

There is a strange contradiction running through chapter 3 of Peter’s second letter, at times he seems to be saying that one day is like a thousand years to God and later he says that the day of the Lord will come like a thief, and the end of the age as we know it is imminent.

Perhaps what this passage is telling us is that we should not allow our lives, and our sense of what is significant and important, be dominated by our perception of time. The things that are really important are those things that are not bound by or dependent upon time – love, grace, generosity, compassion – these are things that are truly important.

I wonder if what Peter had in the back of his mind as he wrote this letter was what Jesus said in the Sermon on the Mount. In Matthew 6 Jesus calls on those listening to him on the mountainside, not to worry about food and drink and clothing, pointing to the birds of the air and the lilies of the field who do not worry but survive, thrive and are beautiful. At the end of Chapter 6 Jesus says, ‘strive first for the kingdom of God and his righteousness’. The things of the Kingdom, love, peace, justice, joy are not bound by or dependent upon time, they are not things for which we can or should set a timetable, but we do …. ‘I will start being more loving to my family and friends when I have built my career’. ‘We will build a kind of peace built on fear and get round to building peace based on mutual respect and trust later’. ‘When we get rid of this tyrannical leader by any means, then we will start working for justice’. ‘I am looking forward to finding some real joy in my life, when I retire’. Individuals and nations have a tendency to put things off, to dodge doing hard things – I know some of the things I have just said resonate alarmingly with me.

I am a little uncomfortable with all the language we have in our liturgy about eternity and eternal life. People sometimes tell me that the idea of anything being eternal, even playing a beautiful harp on a nice fluffy cloud, is not particularly attractive. I think we have to sit a little more lightly to time, linear time and the things of time. God is above and beyond time – with God there is just now – God’s now. What Peter seems to be saying in his letter and what Jesus seems to be saying in the Sermon on the Mount is, live for the day, leave the thousand years to God – live for now, not for some imagined future and make sure that you fill now, God’s now, with the things of God; love, peace, justice, joy …… do not put these things off until later ….. one day, today, tomorrow or in a thousand years there will not be a later …. there will only be God, so let us strive for the things of God today …. now.

Let us pray

(The hallowing of time – a prayer by Eric Milner-White, a past Dean of York Minster)

O my God all times are thy times, and every day thy day, made lovely only with thy light. Bring us, O Lord, to that blessed eternal day which thy Son, our saviour hath won for us and to the perfect light.

Blessed be the hour, O Christ, in which thou wast born, and the hour in which thou didst die; Blessed be the dawn of thy rising again, and the high day of thy ascending: O most merciful and mighty redeemer Christ, let all times be the time of our presence with thee, and of thy dwelling with us. In your name. Amen

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Feed the World – the Reverend Canon Michael Smith (Pastor)

The Reverend Canon Michael Smith (Pastor)
12 August 2018 – 11th Sunday of Trinity – 10am Choral Eucharist
Ephesians 4.25 – 5.2 & John 6.35,41-51

“I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me will never be hungry” John 6.35

Whenever I read these words I always think of the poem called ‘Horace’ which begins

Much to his Mum and Dad’s dismay
Horace ate himself one day.
He didn’t stop to say his grace,
He just sat down and ate his face.
The poem continues, cataloguing how Horace slowly consumes himself and it ends ….
And there he lay: a boy no more,
Just a stomach, on the floor…

I have always liked this poem – it is by one of the Monty Python team – not sure which one. In 1 Corinthians 12 Paul identifies the followers of Jesus as “the body of Christ” and there are occasions in services we have when we say “we are the body of Christ”. So, if Jesus is the bread of life, there is a sense in which we should also be, at the least, a crumb, or even a slice, of the bread of life! Thinking of ourselves as food is a very strange idea indeed – but let’s do that and let’s do it in relation to the food we share each week, the Eucharist.

There are four main actions in the Eucharist – Taking, Blessing, Breaking and Sharing. Bread is taken at the Altar, we give thanks for it and bless it, we break the bread and share it. But what is happening at the Eucharist is many layered. On one level we are simply sharing food with people we love. On another level we are entering into and sharing the very life of God. When we come to the Eucharist we do not only bring bread and wine, we bring ourselves and so we can also say that at the Eucharist we offer ourselves to God and God accepts us and takes us, he rejoices in us and blesses us, because we offer our whole selves in vulnerable love, our selfish, self-centred instinct is broken and we leave ready to be offered in vulnerable love to those with whom we share our lives.

Horace’s big mistake is the same mistake that most of us make all the time – he thinks ‘It’s all about me’ – without wishing to get too prosaic and arty about what is essentially a silly little ditty – this poem can be said to reveal something that is essentially true – selfishness is ultimately destructive, selfishness is not only destructive of communities it is also destructive of individuals – people who only think about themselves, who work only to satisfy their own desires can appear to be successful by the world’s standards but ultimately selfishness leads nowhere – ‘just a stomach on the floor’!

I think that many of us come to the Eucharist thinking, subconsciously, that this is all about me – it’s about me being fed by God. It’s about me being sustained. It’s about me, at that moment of communion, connecting with God and feeling loved and held, safe and secure. This is all true, but it is only a part of the story, coming to the Eucharist is not only about receiving, it is also about giving. Giving ourselves to God to be blessed and broken to be given back to the world.

One of my sons as a teenager had a T shirt and it has emblazoned across the front with the words ‘God’s gift’. He wore it with irony (I hope) and with the arrogance of youth. I would like to buy a job lot of those T shirts and give them out as people walk away from the communion rail – sustained by God in the Eucharist we actually do become ‘God’s gift’ to the world. As we have been fed, sustained and blessed around the altar we go out to offer ourselves in unconditional love to the world around us. Not because we are better than anyyone else but simply because we know that we are accepted and loved by God and we are called to share that with everyone we meet.

People like me in pulpits like this say things like ‘You are to be a Eucharistic people’ and generally people like you think, ‘That sounds good, I like that’ ……. but we are not quite sure what it means. Well it doesn’t mean that we are simply a people who choose to worship in a particular way with a ritual based around sharing bread and wine. Let me explain what I mean by saying ‘You are a Eucharistic people.’ When I was training to be a priest I can remember having a long and heated debate (as only students can) about genuflecting. Genuflecting is when you bow on one knee, a sign of respect and honour. The argument was essentially this – when you are in church and you go up for communion you should genuflect because you are approaching the altar and more importantly you are approaching the consecrated bread and wine, the focus of God’s presence, the body and blood of Christ. We all agreed (because I went to that sort of Theological College) that genuflecting on your way to receive communion was the right thing to do. The question was, when you have received communion, should you also genuflect towards the consecrated bread and wine before you walk away? Some said you should while others argued vehemently that you shouldn’t because as you walk away from communion you are carrying the focus of God’s presence within you, you become what you eat – you have received the sustaining food of heaven, you are then ready to go out to be the sustaining food of heaven to everyone you meet, you are a walking tabernacle, you are God’s gift! What I mean by saying that you are a Eucharistic people is that you leave church to feed everyone you meet with God’s love, to develop relationships that are creative and sustaining based on the Kingdom values of justice, compassion, peace and love.

The Eucharist is our central act of worship. It is important that we remember two things;
1. The Eucharist is not just about the bread and wine and the Jesus of history it is also about you and me offering ourselves in vulnerable love to God, to each other and to the world
2. It is not just about you and me as private individuals coming to feel close to God so that we can feel better as private individuals, it is about you and me coming together in community to be fed and sustained so that we can give ourselves to each other and to those we meet – so that we can become God’s gift of love to the world.

In the past I have preached sermons about what is the most important part of the service on a Sunday. Everyone thinks it’s the reading of the gospel, or the Eucharistic Prayer or the Breaking of Bread, Some people even think it is the sermon! All of these things are important but they are all essentially a means to an end. The most important part of the service is the dismissal – ‘Go in peace to love and serve to Lord’ – Go in peace to give yourselves away as God’s gift to bring healing, wholeness, justice, peace, compassion, love to the world or at least to the little bit of the world in which you live.

Don’t be a Horace, just feeding yourself – be God’s gift to others to be his real presence to them, sustaining them with God’s love.

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The Presence of God – Canon Dr Christopher Collingwood (Chancellor)

Canon Dr Christopher Collingwood (Chancellor)

Sunday 29 July 2018 – 10am Sung Eucharist

Ephesians 3:14-21 John 6:1-21

I wonder if you can pinpoint times in your life when you’ve been most vividly aware of the presence of God. If you’re able to do so, I suspect you may struggle to articulate exactly what it was you were aware of. Words might seem inadequate. You might even be a little diffident in speaking about it, lest some people think you a bit weird, the kind of person prone to ‘that sort of thing’. The plain fact of the matter, though, is that since time immemorial, people of all kinds of background, culture and belief have experienced something that seems almost to compel them to speak of their experience, should they be inclined to do so, by naming God as the mystery in which such experience is grounded.

The difficulty in speaking about this kind of experience is that God isn’t simply one object among many in the universe. God’s the very reality in, through and from which the universe comes to be in the first place. In this sense, God’s a very different kind of ‘thing’ from anything else we know or can conceive. The very act of speaking about God necessarily limits or diminishes the reality and the mystery of God. And yet all sorts of people resort to language about God in order to speak of something profound and irreducible in their experience. It’s only by using language about God that they feel they can do justice to the sheer mystery of what underlies their experience, and yet at the same time God forever escapes being confined and restricted by the language we use about God.

So what kind of experiences might encourage people to speak of them as giving rise to a sense of the presence of God? More often than not, they have to do with a sense of our individual, limited, separate selves either being dissolved or expanded. It’s as if everything becomes whole. Fragmentation, disorder and disunity give way to a sense of unity and oneness. Underlying all this is an awareness of an all-embracing love or compassion pervading everyone and everything.

Such experiences typically come upon us unexpectedly and unannounced. It’s as if we’re taken out of ourselves by something we think of as being utterly beyond us and yet with which we’re more intimate than anything else in all our experience. We might, for example, be overwhelmed by the beauty of a sunset, or a landscape, or a painting or a piece of music or a liturgy or a person. It’s as if we see everything in a new way and we have a sense of the deep-down all-rightness of things, whatever else might seem to be happening on the surface. And while such experiences themselves may be fleeting and transient, the effect on us is long-lasting and even permanent. We wake up to the fact that the reality disclosed to us in these experiences is actually a permanent presence, whether we’re permanently conscious of that presence or not.

This sense of presence is what lies behind the whole Biblical revelation and which comes to be fully focussed and realised in the person of Christ. And it’s what lies behind the account we heard at the end of today’s gospel reading of Jesus coming across the water to his disciples in the boat and saying, ‘It is I; do not be afraid’. In the midst of the chaos of the sea and the storm, God is there, present and embodied in Christ right there, exactly where they are.

The real significance of what the evangelist intends to convey by the words, ‘It is I’, can actually be hidden by the very words themselves, for as is so often the case in John’s Gospel, there’s a double meaning. At one level it sounds like a perfectly correct use of English grammar. You ring someone on the phone and when you get through you say, ‘Hello, it’s me.’ Technically we should say, ‘It is I’, but that would sound horribly stilted, even if strictly correct. So when Jesus comes alongside the disciples in the boat and says, ‘It is I’, he’s really saying, ‘It’s all right guys, it’s me.’

‘It is I’ in this context has a much deeper resonance, though, one that will resound time and time again throughout the gospel, for the words could simply be translated as ‘I AM’. The Greek words ‘ego eimi’, which are translated as ‘It is I’, are the same words on Jesus’ lips when he says, ‘I am – ego eimi – the bread of life’, as we’ll hear next week, or ‘I am – ego eimi – the resurrection and the life’, or ‘I am – ego eimi – the true vine’, and so on. So when Jesus comes across the water and says, ‘It is I; do not be afraid’, he’s also saying, ‘I AM; do not be afraid’. When Jesus says ‘ego eimi’ here and elsewhere in the gospel, he’s deliberately evoking the unnameable name of God as given to Moses in the book Exodus. When Moses encountered the presence of God in the burning bush and asked for God’s name, Moses was simply given the name, ‘I AM’, and it’s exactly this with which Jesus identifies. To be make it abundantly clear, Jesus might just as well have said to the disciples, ‘It’s me, I AM, do not be afraid’. He was saying that the God whose presence was disclosed in the burning bush, and in the exodus from slavery out of Egypt, and in the return of the exiles after the destruction of Jerusalem, was the same God now embodied in him. He was saying that he was the very presence of God in human form. Most importantly, he was also saying that this presence was to be discerned in the chaos of the raging sea and, by extension, in the chaos of our lives. Suddenly being aware of the presence of God doesn’t happen upon us only in the beautiful things like a sunset or a landscape; it can occur in the midst of suffering, disaster and chaos. What else, after all, is the message of all the gospels, when they reach their climax in the accounts of the crucifixion, other than that precisely there, where God seems to be decidedly absent, God is most present and known as self-giving, all-embracing, limitless love and compassion.

This truth has profound consequences for our lives and for the way we live them. The times in which we live seem to be times of considerable chaos and uncertainty. Very little, if anything, can be taken for granted anymore. Not even what were once considered to be indisputable facts are universally respected as such by some any longer. Fake news and misinformation are becoming the order of the day for some. It’s as if everything’s threatened and up for grabs. So often our own personal lives can seem like that, too. The sudden and unexpected diagnosis of a serious, life-limiting illness can throw us into disarray, the breakdown of a relationship can seem like the end of the world, changes in the way things are done in the country, at work or even in church can make us feel very unsettled. Indeed, we can feel not unlike how the disciples felt in the boat as the storm blew up on the lake.

What reassures and steadies us, as it did them, is the sense of God’s presence, the sense that God is with us, not just as a one-off experience but in every circumstance of life, whether we consider it to be good or bad, desirable or undesirable. The one-off experiences certainly occur, but their purpose often is simply to encourage us to trust that what’s disclosed in and through them is true not just at that moment but always and everywhere, that God is the hidden mystery, present in all things. And this very awareness begins to restore a sense of balance and perspective. The knowledge that God is with us doesn’t remove the difficulties and challenges of life. Rather, it enables us to face them, knowing that we aren’t alone, and this makes all the difference. As Jesus says at the very end of Matthew’s Gospel, ‘I am with you always, to the end of the age’. Had he been John, he could just as easily have said, ‘I, I AM, am with you to the very end’.

The church’s vocation amongst other things is to discern, embody, live and proclaim the universal, reassuring, liberating presence of the God who loves us and who remains committed to us, come what may. This is partly the significance of the story of the feeding of the 5000, heard in the first part of the gospel reading. Jesus is aware that the crowds are hungry and on the verge of descending into unrest perhaps. He doesn’t abandon them, though. He stays with them and it’s his very presence and commitment to them which makes possible a transformation not really of bread and fish, but symbolically of our small, limited, anxious, grasping, narrow selves into the generous, giving, abundant, loving, compassionate, expansive selves we truly are and long to be. But that’s another sermon for another day.

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Mary Magdalene – Canon Dr Christopher Collingwood (Chancellor)

Sunday 22ⁿJuly 2018 – Solemn Evensong

Feast of Mary Magdalene

Zephaniah 3:14-end Mark 15:40-16:7

On 10^th July 2011, our third son, Dominic, sang his final service as a choral scholar at St John’s College, Cambridge. The atmosphere in the chapel at Evensong was emotionally charged for everyone. Not only did it mark for Dominic the end of three wonderfully happy and fulfilling years in Cambridge, it also brought to a close the period of his formal education.

Sitting in front of us during the service were a couple of youngish parents with two children. The mother had been steadily snivelling all through the service, but by the time we got to the end she was a crumpled wreck. She’d clearly exhausted her supply of tissues, so as the congregation began to leave, Sue, assuming she was the mother of a leaving chorister, leant over and pressed a handkerchief into her hand, saying, ‘It’s hard, isn’t it. We’ve been through this three times. Have a good cry; we know just what it’s like.’ Whereupon the mother looked at Sue and said, ‘Oh no, our son’s not leaving. He’s not even starting until next term! I’m not sure I can bear it!’

I suspect that cathedral and college Evensongs all over the country are similarly emotional at this time of year. And the Minster’s no exception. For all of us it marks something of a transition, because some are leaving the choir – though not necessarily the Minster – and moving on to other things, and their departure affects us all. We’re part of one another, and although we know full well that circumstances change and that people and things move on, we still feel a certain loss. So today we bid farewell to Charlie, one of our bass songmen, as he returns to teach in his beloved Cornwall; to Jeremy, our Assisting Organist, whom we congratulate warmly on his appointment as Assistant Director of Music at Rochester Cathedral; to Jack, George and Chris, three of our four choral scholars, who embark on their professional careers; and to our year eight choristers, Ivor, Grace, Sophie, Orlando, Sarah, Catherine, Louis and Kit, as they move to senior schools in York and elsewhere.

With all this in mind, the question arises as to how Mary Magdalene’s story can speak to us today? I want to suggest two things, both arising out of the second lesson. The first has to do with the central events of the Christian story concerning suffering, death and resurrection, and the second has to do with how we live in relation to these things.

Exactly what Mary Magdalene’s story was is difficult to pin down. At the very least, what seems likely is that she was in some distress, and her life in disarray, when she first met Jesus, hence the reference in today’s collect to her being restored to health of body and mind. We don’t know the back story, although many have speculated. Luke’s Gospel suggests she’d been possessed by demons. The significant thing is that Jesus enabled her to recover a sense of order and balance in her life.

We heard in Mark’s Gospel that she was among a number of women who provided for Jesus when he was in Galilee. Perhaps she came from a wealthy background and had some independent means, which she used to support Jesus’ ministry in thankfulness for her own healing. Whatever the case, she appears also to have been strong. As we heard earlier, it was she and other women who kept company with Jesus as he hung on the cross, when others had run away. Mary and the other women stayed to the bitter end, quietly supporting him by their presence.

Despite this instinctive response of enduring love, it seems hard to believe that Mary and the other women weren’t also in complete emotional turmoil. In a sense, perhaps, life had only really begun for her when she encountered Jesus. But the cross wasn’t how it had been supposed to end. Before her very eyes she saw everything falling apart. Her own life was descending into chaos, the whole thing an utter disaster.

So Mary and the other women went to the tomb to anoint Jesus’ body and complete what they hadn’t been able to do on the day he’d died, so hurried had it all been. On arriving at the tomb, they found the stone mysteriously to have been rolled away, only then to be greeted by a stranger, who told them that Jesus wasn’t there because he’d been raised. The reaction of the women? Sheer terror! It must have seemed like some kind of sick joke. In any case, they had no frame of reference for what they were met with. As far as they were concerned, they were in completely unknown and uncharted territory. They’d totally lost their bearings and simply didn’t know what to make of what was going on, hence they said nothing to anyone.

John’s Gospel tells a slightly different story. Mary Magdalene meets the Risen Christ in the garden and, although she’s grieving and perplexed, once she’s recognised him, her heart bubbles up with joy. So excited is she that she runs to tell everyone all about it.

There’s actually no discrepancy between these two accounts. Together they ring true in terms of how we adjust to things that are initially beyond our comprehension. Mark captures that sense of shock and bewilderment we all feel in the face of the unexpected, particularly when life doesn’t go the way we think it should, and we’re rendered mute. John characterises what it’s like when the truth dawns, and we realise that despite how it might seem, life’s never actually at a dead end, but always full of surprises, possibilities and opportunities. The important thing is how we respond to what comes our way. For those moving on to new schools or work, the future’s probably tinged with both hope and anxiety. There’ll be a mixture of joy and success as well as frustration and disappointment all through life. We all delude ourselves into thinking that one day everything will be just as we want and expect things to be. Mary Magdalene shows us that life is never what we expect it to be. The important thing is to embrace the whole of it, with all its ups and downs, with open arms, as the very place where we encounter God. How we respond is what matters.

The second and final point arises out of the fact that Mark’s Gospel ends surprisingly and abruptly, it leaves everything hanging in the air. It’s as if it ends mid-sentence. One scholar has suggested that the last line could be rendered something along the lines of, ‘They were afraid, you see’, without then going on to explain why. A great deal of scholarly ink has been spilled in an attempt to explain the significance of why Mark ends as it does. One possibility is quite simply that the story doesn’t end there, it ends with the reader, with you and me. It’s we who complete the story by how we respond to it. In this sense, the story’s never-ending, because each individual and each succeeding generation continues the story and adds to it. So the question for all of us is what do we contribute to the continuing gospel story?

And that’s how the Minster itself symbolises the very character of the gospel story. All of us are part of the story of the Minster and will be forever. Those who’re moving on to other things today don’t cease to be part of the story, it’s just that their relationship to it changes somewhat. The story for all of us continues in the places we move on to, in the communities of which we become a part, and in the relationships we make. So today is really neither an ending nor a beginning but just a stage on the amazing adventure we call life. Mary Magdalene, with her experience of how her life was changed through her relationship with Christ, would surely encourage us to see that our stories aren’t ours alone but part of a larger one – God’s story – and perhaps with confidence in her experience of resurrection, she’d paraphrase Jesus’ own words by saying, ‘Live your life, whatever it brings, in all its fullness, for this is God’s gift to you and to the whole creation’.

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