“I received mercy… making me an example to those who would come to believe.” – Dean Dominic’s sermon from St George’s Cathedral, Cape Town

The question – I think – the question which stares us in the face from this morning’s gospel is, “Are you crazy? Are you crazy?”

But before we work out the answer, may I first thank Dean Terry for his very gracious invitation to share this pulpit with me, which is an honour and a privilege. I bring you greetings from York Minster – and from our own Archbishop, Stephen Cottrell, the Archbishop of York. As some of you may know, for the best part of twenty years, our two dioceses have had a companion relationship, and it is a joy that Canon Maggie and I are able to represent that relationship this morning.

But while it’s a joy and a blessing to share in this act of worship with you today, I’m still worried by the question – because I hear our readings shouting at me, “Are you crazy?”

Because today’s gospel is about utterly irrational behaviour. Today’s gospel is about doing things which make no sense at all. Doing things which are economically ridiculous, and which – to someone with a diary that is full to over-flowing with tasks that should have been done yesterday and meetings that must be attended tomorrow – things which are simply a waste of time. Today’s gospel is about being crazy.

This morning’s gospel is crazy, because the wilderness is a dangerous place. After all, it was in a wilderness that Jesus found himself spiritually wrestling no less a figure than the devil himself. And in a dangerous place like that you do not simply abandon 99% of your assets, whimsically to go off to find the one that has gone missing. I’m afraid the missing sheep – and, indeed, the missing coin – that’s just an asset you write off on the balance sheet of life. It is not something which – if you are sane, or rational, or efficient, or competent – if you are anything other than crazy – you just forget about.

After all, they tell us that time is money, and so many of us have far too little time to do the things that we even want to do. So not only would it be a crazy waste of time to go looking for that sheep, or that coin… it would be just as crazy to drop everything and run off when your neighbour summons you to an impromptu party they’ve decided to throw – something just to celebrate their craziness.

Let’s be honest. This is how real life works, isn’t it? This is the life that I find I have to I live if I’m going to survive the pressure of work, and family life, and all the rest of it. I don’t have time to be crazy, I don’t want to be crazy – at least, that’s what I find when I find myself looking in the mirror, let alone in my diary, or – when I dare to do so – in my conscience, or my heart.

Even today, some people look up to clergy, and I hope they find in me an example of someone who is rational, and ordered, and in control, somebody who is capable of running a very big cathedral with an awful lot of staff and worshippers and visitors and tourists… I hope they think I’m a good example.

And then that little voice pops the pin in the balloon of my smug, self-satisfied condition, and I hear that man saying to me again what he’s always said, when I quieten down enough to listen (which is not as often as it should be). And that voice says, “Are you crazy? Dominic – are you crazy?” Or, in the words of our gospel this morning, “Which of you does not go after the one that is lost…?”

And that is why I am so lucky – why we are so lucky – why we are so blessed to come to church this morning, and to discover we seem to be surrounded by some really crazy people.

Take St Paul. He’s a pretty frequent visitor to church most Sundays. Look how crazy he was. He knew all about the demands of what you and I probably call ‘real life’. Especially back in the day when he was more usually known as Saul – he knew all about that. He knew what tasks had to be done (mainly arresting these crazy followers of some jumped-up nobody of a rabbi from the north), and he knew just how to go about doing that. He was busy, he was capable, he argued really well. He had it all in hand. Until something crazy happened – something crazy which threw him off his horse, dazzled him with a light brighter than anything he’d ever known before, and gave him a new, crazy, outlook on life. And it was catching…

Paul’s new craziness was really catching. Because, if we are going to be honest, for many years Biblical scholars have been telling us that it is highly unlikely that the person who wrote One Timothy was actually Paul himself. Now, if you go to a university today and make false claims about authorship, and you’ll be out on your ear on a charge of plagiarism before you can snap your fingers.

But back in Biblical times, having your disciples attempt to echo your thoughts and what you stood for after your death – that was the highest praise. And so, someone – as I say probably not Paul, but one of those who had ‘come to believe’, because in Paul they found someone who was a really good example of how to live life – someone who had been touched by Paul’s craziness – someone else got it. And they used Paul’s name and identity to keep his ideas alive, and that someone else starts talking, in One Timothy, about how good it is – what a good example it is – to be crazy.

And so this morning, this shadowy author is speaking to us about how grateful he is that God strengthened him – strengthened him to be able, also, to live a crazy life, to be an example to others… To others who might find themselves needing to find a lost sheep or a lost coin when the rest of the world is saying, “No, no, no – be sensible. Don’t bother about that. It’s not the effort.”

And the story of Christianity, and the story of the Church of God – that story carries on like that, through the generations. And – on this particular morning – we get reminded that even in our own time, that craziness is a craziness which can change the world.

On this particular morning, we get reminded that there are too many people living for ideas that will die… but that if you are crazy, you learn – if that’s what it takes – to die for an idea that needs to live.

For this Friday was the 48th anniversary of the murder of Bantu Stephen Biko – a man touched with just the same kind of craziness that makes people search out what is lost sheep against all the odds. A man who was so certain that the evil ideas of the apartheid government were ideas that would die that, in the short life that he lived, he demonstrated with such clarity, that crazy idea of dying for the idea of a truly free South Africa that could, as he said, “be a community of brothers and sisters jointly involved in the quest for a composite answer to the varied problems of life.”

But, back in the bad days of the 1970s, certainly for those of us watching in anguish from around the world, that idea which, for Steve Biko, was worth dying for – that idea seemed little short of impossible. It seemed as elusive as the one lost sheep in the wilderness or the lost coin in the house. And I don’t know if I would ever have been crazy enough, or saintly enough, to put my energy into going to find it – I don’t know if I would have been crazy enough to drop everything to seek out such an unlikely excuse for a party.

It has been an honour, a joy and a privilege for Canon Maggie and myself to spend some time in this country. We have been looked after and cared for with a profound sense of welcome and with grace and kindness. We have tried to engage meaningfully with the history of the country and with some of the towering, visionary, crazy people who helped bring a transformation that for so long had seemed as improbable as finding one lost sheep.

And we’ve also had some fun while we have been here. We have learned much from your gracious Dean, Fr Terry, who is, let me tell you, a most excellent tour guide. And with him, we enjoyed a lovely visit to the farm and winery at Babylonstoren. For those who have the resources to enjoy its luxury goods, it clearly is a place that offers very high quality produce, and some very fine wines – wines which are marketed successfully around the country.

And thus, as we parked up, we saw the sign pointing people to the location to which they should go if they had ordered Babylonstoren wines in advance on a ‘click and collect’ basis. ‘There you are,’ said Fr Terry, ‘everything these days is click and collect’.

But in fact – if I may gently contradict you, Father – not quite everything is click and collect.

On 18th August, 1977, Steve Biko was arrested at a police road-block near what is now Makhanda – arrested, never to be seen again by his friends or family. Arrested, and subjected to repeated severe violence, denied medical care, and left alone, shackled, naked, in a police cell. For 25 days, until his death in Pretoria, he had, in effect, vanished, like a lost sheep. He was lost in the evil, inhuman, violent and murderous wilderness of Vorster’s apartheid regime.

But he was never lost to Jesus – to the utterly crazy Jesus of whom we read in this morning’s gospel – the utterly crazy Jesus who was determined that even when Steve Biko was apparently lost to human society, beaten and bleeding in a lonely prison cell – he was not lost to God. Not lost to the God – who in the person of Christ – calls us and reminds us, crazily, never to stop searching for what is lost and precious – whatever the cost.

Because, as we are reminded so strongly in our gospel today, Jesus was not a ‘click and collect’ God of convenience and comfort – Jesus was crazy enough to journey through the wilderness, through the wilderness of this life, himself bloody and beaten in Golgotha, and – abandoned by his friends – to death on the cross. Jesus was crazy enough to do all that to search out you and me, and every precious rainbow child of God.

And that craziness is infectious, my sisters and brothers. It infected Paul. It infected Paul’s disciple who, in all likeliness wrote that reading. It infected Steve Biko, it infected and beloved Archbishop Tutu, and so many crazy Christians down the centuries, who have been for us that good example.

And so, this morning, when Jesus says to us, once more, “Which one of you – which one of you is crazy enough to go and seek out that lost sheep, whom I happen to love very very much?” Let’s make sure we can be that good example for those who come after us, let’s hope that we can raise our hands, and say, “that’s me – I’m that crazy.” Amen.

“Following Jesus might cost nothing less than everything” – The Reverend Canon Maggie McLean, Missioner

I imagine that most of us here today have a Bible.

But I don’t mean something we were given at confirmation; or bought in a shop; or found in a hotel bedroom. I mean the kind of patchwork collection of teachings, stories and parables that we carry within us. The parts of the Bible that have been especially significant to us, perhaps what we have chosen to have read at one of those special moments that mark our passage through life. We all have this Bible, and it is unique to each of us.

However, I doubt very much that many of us would include the Gospel reading we have heard this morning today. With all its references to hatred; cross-bearing; life-denial; warfare; renouncing all our possessions. These are tough, perhaps even questionable ‘asks’ for the disciples. Taken in isolation we find a Jesus who is harsh and unreasonably demanding.

There’s a great temptation for Christians to cherish the bits of the Bible we like and shuffle the uncomfortable parts to the margins. To allow our inner collection of teaching to put hard or uncomfortable words into the shade. Alternatively, we reinterpret these passages to lessen their demands – to translate away all that’s uncomfortable.  I’m not sure that’s being altogether faithful. It seems to me that Christians are called to live with the bits of Scripture we find difficult, as well as with those verses from which we take comfort.

One of the things I’ve learned from York Minster’s connection with South Africa, is just how dangerous a partial reading of the Bible can be. The whole theory of apartheid, of racial segregation and inequality, was created in the Faculty of Theology at Stellenbosch University. And it could only happen because many passages of the Bible were muted and ignored. We need, as best as we can, to allow the breadth of the Bible to speak to us, not only the bits that we feel suit our circumstances.

Which brings us back to today’s Gospel.

I wonder whether if in this this passage, Jesus is making it clear just how much discipleship might cost. Yes, it was easy to follow Jesus when he was the talk of the town; when crowds were pressing in wanting to be near him; when miracles sprang up wherever he went; and when religious leaders saw the disciples as gatekeepers to allow access to the popular young Rabbi.

But things change.

Jesus knew that profoundly dark and difficult days lay ahead – when even a faithful disciple like Peter would earnestly deny ever having known the man. All this was to come, not because Jesus was choosing this path, but because it was the inevitable consequence of refusing to compromise with the ways of the world. Jesus is telling the disciples – and telling us – that following him might cost nothing less than everything. And, looking down the centuries of Church history we can see that it does, in each and every generation. In this tough passage of Luke’s Gospel Jesus is asking his followers:

have you understood the cost, and are you prepared to pay the price?

Perhaps what this passage says more than anything, is that Christ knows us. Knows the flimsy stuff of which we are made. Knows that we fail so easily. Knows that we never seem to be prepared for what is to come. As the poet Grahame Davies has put it so beautifully:

‘what is best of us

dissolves like incense in a chancel’

The utterly remarkable thing is that despite all of this, God loves us.

If we took this passage from Luke on its own, as a key text in our personal Bible, it might well be a text to make us despair. The cost Jesus describes is simply so great, beyond anything we can calculate. But the great thing, the truly miraculous thing, is that God is also there, beyond our imagination. So that when things become impossibly difficult, we know that God is still with us – calling us and drawing us.

As one form of invitation to Holy Communion puts it:

‘Come to this table, not because you must but because you may,

not because you are strong, but because you are weak.

Come, not because any goodness of your own gives you a right to come, but because you need mercy and help.’

In the end all that really matters, is that we are invited.

Amen.

“My people have changed their glory for something that does not profit” – The Very Reverend Dominic Barrington, Dean of York

In the middle of next month, Donald Trump will return to this country for an unprecedented second state visit as the guest of the British sovereign. At the banquet that King Charles will hold in the President’s honour, the leader of the Liberal Democrats, Sir Ed Davey, will not be present. Writing in the Guardian on Wednesday https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/aug/27/ed-davey-trump-gaza-boycott-state-dinner-king-charles, Sir Ed explained that, while it goes against all his instincts to refuse an invitation from His Majesty,

“I fear we could have a situation where Trump comes to our country, is honoured with a lavish dinner at one of our finest palaces, and no one reminds him that he has the power to stop the horrifying starvation, death and captivities in Gaza. And no one uses this moment to demand that the US president picks up that phone to Netanyahu and the Qataris and does the right thing.”

Or, in the language of the prophet Jeremiah, from whom we have just heard, one might say that Sir Ed feels that the ‘glory’ of a state banquet at a royal castle hosted by the King himself is being used ‘for something that does not profit’. And thus – although it is likely that his absence may not be noticed by the US President – he will absent himself in protest, in the hope that ‘the people in Gaza are not forgotten during the pomp and ceremony’.

While I have utter sympathy with Sir Ed’s views about the awful situation in Gaza, and while I applaud the fact that he explained that he and his wife had ‘thought and prayed long and hard’ about the issue, this morning’s gospel reading forces me to observe that his strategy is a very different strategy to that taken by Jesus – at least the Jesus of whom we read in Luke’s gospel. For Jesus appeared to have no qualms about turning up to dinners hosted by people with whom he disagreed – and not just turning up, but stealing the limelight to seize an opportunity for some quite outspoken teaching.

If you dial back three chapters earlier in Luke, you’ll find Jesus at another meal hosted by a Pharisee. That episode is so shocking – at least to modern middle-class ears – that it is not included in the Church’s three-year lectionary, so the story is rarely heard on a Sunday morning. For, from the word go, this dinner party goes spectacularly wrong, with Jesus firing off insults to both host and guests – culminating in Luke’s rather understated remark that by the end of the meal the others present are feeling ‘very hostile’ towards Jesus.

And so, as the curtain rises for us this morning, a more senior figure – a leader of the Pharisees – is seeing if he can both tame this outrageous figure, and learn more clearly just how scandalous Jesus is. And while the mood around the table does not get as explosive as that in chapter eleven, Jesus is certainly not wasting another good teaching opportunity. And thus he tells what Luke refers to as a parable – but what an odd parable it is.

For parables usually speak to us in crystal clear terms about what Jesus calls the Kingdom. And usually they do so by simple and powerful similes:

Here’s a mustard seed – it’s very small but it becomes very big so that everyone could find shelter and shade – what does that tell us about God’s kingdom?

 Or 

A man got beaten up by bandits, and it took a despised nobody to treat him with compassion and dignity – what does that tell us about God’s kingdom?

 Or

 A loving father goes out of his way to care for both of his dysfunctional and badly – what does that tell us about God’s kingdom?

And so on and so on and so on….

But this morning, here in Luke chapter fourteen, we are told that this simple bit of common sense etiquette advice to help you avoid a socially awkward moment is not just a tip about how to behave in front of your elders or betters… It, too, is a parable.

It could be easy to ignore this, or regard it as a slip of the evangelist’s pen – but that would be a mistake, because Luke does not use language casually. Luke is a profound wordsmith, and if Luke is clear that Jesus intends the remarks we just heard to be understood as a parable, then that is emphatically what it is.

Because, of course, Jesus isn’t merely offering a first century equivalent of a Sunday newspaper advice column on how to avoid a social  faux pas. Yet again, Jesus is doing nothing less than teaching about how things work in God’s kingdom. Jesus is saying that humility and not ostentation is at the heart of the kingdom of God – something which, manifestly, he does not see exhibited by his fellow dinner guests.

And then this conversation-cum-parable turns, pointedly, to the host – to this senior religious figure. And to the face of this influential religious leader, Jesus makes clear how he believes people are called to live out the demands of generosity, of grace, and of love.

Just over ten years ago, in Cleveland, Ohio, ten Republican hopefuls who aspired to receive that party’s nomination to run for President, took part in the first televised debate of the primary campaign. Alongside Donald Trump were a number of well-established politicians, and – as you may recall – at that point Mr Trump was considered to be an outside candidate whose campaign was bound to fail alongside the political heavy-weights running against him.

During the debate https://rollcall.com/factbase/transcript/donald-trump-first-gop-debate-august-6-2015/, Trump was accused of having financially supported  – horror of horrors – liberal policies. Specifically, of liberal policies pursued by Hillary Clinton. Trump’s reply was fascinating:

“I gave to many people… I was a businessman. I give to everybody. When they call, I give. And do you know what? When I need something from them two years later, three years later, I call them, they are there for me…

…with Hillary Clinton, I said be at my wedding and she came to my wedding. You know why? She didn’t have a choice because I gave.”  [My emphasis]

So – if you should find yourself invited to dinner at the White House or at Mar a Lago – understand you are there for a purpose that is utterly transactional and reciprocal – you are there to be part of a quid pro quo. Which is – of course – as even the principled Sir Ed Davey admits, the reason that President Trump will be visiting this country next month: “I argued last January that we should use the offer of a state visit – something Trump so desperately craves – as leverage to persuade him to do the right thing.”

And, lest anyone think I am painting Mr Trump in an unfair or bad light, let me add that – having explained to his Republican rivals exactly why he sometimes supported ‘liberal policies’ and just what he gained by doing so – he said, with simple and perfect clarity: “that’s a broken system” – and, about that, I think he is totally correct.

Sir Ed Davey and President Trump are not the only people whose positions on Gaza have been in the news this week, however. On Tuesday the two most senior church leaders in the Holy Land – the Latin and Greek Patriarchs of Jerusalem – issued a joint statement about the worsening situation in Gaza City https://www.lpj.org/en/news/statement-by-the-latin-patriarchate-of-jerusalem, which is where the miniscule Christian community in the Gaza Strip is to be found – and, since the war began, to be found sheltering in the church compounds of their respective churches in that city.

As you will be aware, Israel has announced that it intends fully to occupy Gaza City, and is demanding its entire population of hundreds of thousands relocate to the south of the Strip – which, to offer context, is pretty much the equivalent of ordering the populations of Leeds or of San Francisco to up sticks and move.

In response to this, Cardinal Pierbattista Pizzaballa, the Latin Patriarch, explained that for many of the sick, weak and elderly sheltering in the church compounds, an enforced flight to the south would, quite simply, ‘be nothing less than a death sentence’…. and for that reason, his clergy and nuns would ignore the demands of the Israeli military, and stay put to feed and care for their flock. To offer what one English theologian called ‘the interruptive hospitality that says no to force’…. to host meals in which there is no leverage – no quid pro quo, but, quite simply, to offer the grace and love of Christ.

Jesus offers this parable-cum-lecture to the leader of the Pharisees, because he recognises that this man is a man of substance and influence; he is man who has capacity – a capacity with which, if he so chose, he could feed the poor, the crippled, the lame and the blind. He could host a meal motivated not by the quid pro quo mentality of reciprocity, but the pro bono motivation of grace and love. But – to Jesus’ dismay – that has not been his choice. It is not how he wishes to use either his influence or his resources.

In a few minutes time, you and I will gather to be fed at the ultimate pro bono meal. The meal where the ever disruptive figure of Christ is present not as guest but as host, offering, out of grace and love nothing less than his own self, in a body broken on the Cross, and in blood spilled for the world’s salvation.

As we feast on this uniquely holy and transformative food, it is incumbent on us to ensure that we do not change the glory which it confers on us into something that, as Jeremiah so forcefully put it, ‘does not profit’.

And as Christ sends us onwards, out of the doors of this great cathedral, into a world in which there is so much suffering, need and deprivation, I pray that, as members of Christ’s own body, we will use our capacity to share God’s love without stooping to the self-interest of that ‘broken system’ that ultimately will profit nobody – least of all ourselves.

Amen.

“Companionship Learning – being a disciple of Christ today” – The Reverend Canon Maggie McLean, Missioner

We hear a lot in the Church of England about discipleship. The idea of being a disciple, following Christ today, is seen as the key to transforming the church. We are told that it will energise mission and halt the decline seen in so many congregations. As the Archbishop of York wrote in 2020:

“God calls every one of us to be a missionary disciple”.

So, it makes sense for us to learn from Scripture what mattered about discipleship in the days when Jesus called the first disciples.

The former Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, has spent a lot of time thinking about those first disciples. As he has said, it’s a very different concept from our understanding of learning today.

Being a disciple wasn’t about turning up now and then to hear a teacher or attend a class. As Williams goes on to say:

 “in the ancient world… To be the student of a teacher was to commit yourself to living in the same atmosphere and breathing the same air; there was nothing intermittent about it”.

Discipleship in that sense is a state of being in which you’re looking and listening without interruption. This kind of discipleship still happens in some religions today. In Islam, for example, the seniority of a scholar can depend on who they spent time accompanying. This is especially the case in the Sufi tradition. More than going to classes or hearing a sermon, becoming a disciple involves time spent with the teacher.

I imagine that for any teacher here this afternoon, that might sound a horrifying thought! Apart from the safeguarding concerns, which of us would like a student to be with us 24/7, observing all our failings and frustrations? The times when we relax and the times when don’t live up to being our best selves. I can imagine that the teaching unions would have something to say about it as well.

But for Jesus, and figures such as John the Baptist, having disciples was the way to imprint teaching into the character of the follower.

It was important to see Jesus when he was angry; when he wept; and when he was exhausted. The Gospels aren’t a transcript of someone’s class; they are the eye-witness testimonies of people who were there all the time. Through thick and thin, all the way to the cross – and beyond.

When we think about a disciple, like Bartholomew, we are contemplating this kind of learning and transformation. Not a toe-in-the-water, but three years spent breathing the same air as Jesus. It must have been an intense and roller-coaster kind of experience. From being the valued gatekeepers who controlled access to Jesus, to sitting by a courtyard fire and denying having ever known him. This isn’t about sitting at the back of the class hoping no one will notice.

It isn’t asking AI to tell us what to think. This is visiting the body of your beloved and executed teacher and discovering something utterly beyond your imagination. It’s also promising never to desert the Son of Man and finding out that you’ve made a promise you can’t keep.

It’s humanity and divinity; amazing joy and profound despair.

And within all of this, what we might call companionship-learning, there are dazzling moments when we know that the full lesson has been learned:

When beyond anyone’s expectation someone suddenly sees what it’s all about. It’s Mary of Bethany, the sister of Lazarus, declaring: ‘Yes, Lord… I believe that you are the Messiah, the Son of God’. And this is what we’re called to do – and to be.

Today Christians do this in prayer, in worship and by being alert to God in daily life. Like Bartholomew and the other eleven disciples, we’re called to spend time with Jesus. To watch; to listen; to be alert for when God’s presence breaks into our lives.

Before I came to York Minster in 2019 some research had been done about people’s experiences when they visited this amazing building.

Over 80% said that they had experienced something spiritual while being in this space. And churches are places that can offer the atmosphere of being with Jesus. The thin places where space and artistry, music and light draw us into the company of Christ.

Being a disciple of Jesus isn’t cosy. It’s not a warm bath of affirmation and joy. It’s tough. But it’s also life-changing; transformative; and fulfilling. It led to disciples travelling all over the world to share the Good News, and to create more disciples in their wake.

In the Gospels we are invited to share in the intimacy of their time with Jesus and, through their words, to know the character and spirit of Jesus present with us. It is in this discipleship that we are changed – and it is within this discipleship that we are called to change the world in which we live.

Amen.

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

Acts 5.12–16; Luke 22.24–30

‘…they even carried out the sick into the streets and laid them on cots and mats, in order that Peter’s shadow might fall on some of them as he came by.’

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

Today we are keeping the Feast of St Bartholomew, one of the most elusive of the apostles. His name is always listed among the Twelve, but little else is said of him. There are no recorded words, no sermons, no miracles in his name. He slips through the pages of the New Testament like a figure at the edge of the stage.

Was he Nathanael, the sceptical but sincere Israelite whom Jesus praised in John’s Gospel? Tradition has often thought so, but Scripture does not confirm it. All we really know is his name – and yet for two thousand years the Church has remembered him, carved him in stone, honoured his feast, and prayed in his name.

Bartholomew is, in every sense, the apostle of shadows. Hidden, half-known, easily overlooked, and yet enduring. And perhaps that is his gift to us.

In our readings this morning the apostles appear in two very different lights. In the Book of Acts, Luke shows them radiant with charisma: the sick are laid out in the streets in the hope that even Peter’s shadow might fall upon them and bring healing. The atmosphere is charged with wonder, expectation, and spectacle.

But in today’s Gospel Luke paints a starkly different picture. Here we find those same apostles caught in dispute, arguing over which of them should be considered the greatest. And into their rivalry Jesus speaks a word that overturns their assumptions: ‘The greatest among you must become like the youngest, and the leader like one who serves.’

Humility and service on the one hand; power and rivalry on the other. And there in the middle, we find Bartholomew, the apostle who’s always there but hidden, named but not noticed.

Luke’s image of Peter’s shadow is an arresting one for a shadow has no substance, it has no voice of its own, it holds no permanence. And yet Luke describes how people hoped Peter’s shadow might heal. What on earth was this power that he was describing?

At first, it does seem decidedly strange, even magical that Peter’s shadow might have the power to heal. But the power behind Peter’s shadow has nothing to do with Peter: shadows only exist when a stronger light is shining. They are not self-generated. Shadows are the evidence that light has fallen on something real. Peter’s shadow was cast not through his own power but was cast because the power of Christ’s light was shining through him.

Bartholomew’s life as an apostle mirrors that of Peter in that respect. Unlike Peter, he casts no great figure across the New Testament, and yet the light of Christ fell on him too, and his shadow has in been remembered for centuries.

But of course, not all shadows we see offer healing and hope. There are more sinister lights that cast shadows we know only too well. The brooding shadow of violence falling across war-torn streets. The shadow of displacement hanging over refugee camps. The shadow of poverty stretching across food banks and empty cupboards. The shadow of climate breakdown darkening fragile ecosystems. The shadows of loneliness in care homes, of despair in hospital corridors, of shame in places of addiction.

These shadows are heavy, oppressive, frightening. And yet even they remind us that shadows are never the whole story. For every shadow is cast by light. The question for us is whether we are positioning ourselves close enough to the true source of the everlasting and redemptive light – the light of Christ – so that that shadow may be cast as a sign of healing and hope.

The poetry of R. S. Thomas reflects so much on the shadows of this world and the shadow Christ’s light casts. In his poem The Coming, he imagines God showing the Son a broken shadowed world, scorched and scarred:

And God held in his hand

a small globe. Look, he said.

The Son looked. Far off,

as through water, he saw

a scorched land of fierce colour.

The light burned there; crusted buildings

cast their shadows; a bright serpent,

a river, uncoiled itself, radiant with slime.

On a bare hill a bare tree saddened the sky.

Many people held out their thin arms

to it, as though waiting for a vanished April to return to its crossed boughs.

The Son watched.

Let me go there, he said.”

Here, R.S. Thomas offers us a glimpse of the world as Christ saw it – blistered, fragile, full of longing and despair, full of brooding and oppressive shadows. And yet Christ’s response is not hesitation but resolve: “Let me go there.”

The Christ we follow does not seek earthly power or glory. He chooses the brooding shadows – the places of frailty, obscurity, pain and longing, to cast his light of healing and hope. And Bartholomew, the shadowy apostle, reflects for us that same light. His greatness is not found in fame but in faithfulness, not in being seen but in letting Christ’s light pass through him, quietly, without drawing attention to himself.

And that is the hope of this feast. For many of us, life can feel shadow-like too, ordinary, hidden, unseen. We may wonder what difference our small acts can make in a world so vast.

But Luke in his Book of Acts reveals that even a shadow can heal. What matters is not how brightly we shine, but whether we stand where Christ’s light falls. What matters is not recognition, but faithfulness. What matters is not the noise we make, but the shadow we cast in the light of Christ.

Bartholomew, whose feast we celebrate today – the apostle we hardly know – inhabits all that we learn within today’s readings. Luke in Acts reminds us that God works through shadows. Luke in his Gospel teaches us that greatness is found in service, not status. R.S. Thomas gives us a Christ who chooses the brooding shadows of the world.

So, us not shrink from the shadows, nor dismiss the hidden callings that go unnoticed. For it is in the shadowed places that the Church continually relearns its dependence on Christ’s light alone.

In Bartholomew’s witness we are being offered a pattern for our own discipleship: to choose faithfulness over fame, steadfastness over spectacle, so that Christ’s light may shine through us. And when Christ’s light casts its shadow – in the places where we work, where we rest, and where we have our very being – it will be where kthat shadow lands that the hope and healing of God will be revealed for all to see.

Amen.

“Jesus came bringing not peace but division” – Canon Peter Collier, Cathedral Reader

In the first chapter of Luke’s gospel Zechariah prophesies that when Jesus comes, he will guide our feet into the way of peace. When Jesus was born, the choir of angels sang about peace on earth. Jesus often said to people such things as – go in peace and sin no more; peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you. In a few minutes time we will do what we do week after week – we will share the peace with one another.

So what are we to make of our gospel reading this morning when Jesus said – do you think I have come to bring peace on earth? No, I tell you but rather division.  And if that is not enough, he also says I have come to bring fire to the earth.

The Message translation of these verses says this: “I’ve come to start a fire on this earth – how I wish it were blazing right now! I’ve come to change everything, turn everything right side up – how I long for it to be finished! Do you think I came to smooth things over and make everything nice? Not so. I’ve come to disrupt and confront!”

As we have reminded ourselves so often as we have been working our way through Luke’s gospel this year, Jesus had set his face to go to Jerusalem and Luke recorded that journey. As Jesus travelled, there was an increasing sense of an impending crisis, which would eventually centre on him and lead to his death. Conflict was very much in the air.

Of course, there were those who couldn’t get enough of him – his teaching, his miracles, his healings. At the beginning of this chapter we read “the crowd gathered in thousands, so that they trampled on one another”.

But there were others who were stirred by his words and actions to hostility. The reason for that is very clear – Jesus constantly challenged them and all that they stood for. They were the people in authority, they had real power. Anything that disturbed the status quo, and in particular their status quo, was a threat to them and their position. That group included the scribes, the priests and the Pharisees; and in due course the Roman civic authorities also turned against him.

What was it that caused this division? It was the coming of the kingdom of God. That kingdom, as proclaimed by Jesus, challenged their seemingly ordered way of life, and all that made for the status quo of how everyone lived. Jesus was saying that there was an alternative way – and that led to division.

Last Sunday we were asked to think about where we were laying up our treasure. Jesus had been saying that people should not worry about their life, what they would eat, what they would wear, because life was more than food and clothing. He said that the nations of the world strive after these things, but that they instead should strive for his kingdom. People were of course looking for security. Whether they were in authority or very much under authority – all were concerned to build for themselves a level of security now in this world.

But Jesus said that rather than focussing on this world and its received values, they should be getting ready for the coming of the King, and his kingdom.

And he told his listeners to read the signs of the times. “You all know how to read the signs that tell you what weather is coming” he said; “why can’t you read the bigger signs about what’s happening in the world?”

The reference to divided households is a quotation from Micah chapter 7. As Micah surveyed the world of his time, he saw that everything was falling apart. Everything that should give stability was failing. The rule of law, fundamental to fairness and justice, was corrupted because the judges were being bribed. Families, which should give social stability, had become completely dysfunctional with relationships turned upside down. Micah imagines himself walking in the field after harvest and he can find nothing left to eat or drink – no good thing has survived.

Jesus invited his listeners to look around at the signs in both their civic and religious worlds. Yes, there was a form of peace – the pax Romana – but at what cost? Nations and communities were oppressed to keep the peace, forced to abandon their own cultural practices, and to use a language which was not their own. And it was all made possible because of the slavery to which something like 5 million people across the empire, about 15% of the population, were subject. This could not and would not last. And in their religious world, people lived completely under the heel of the scribes and pharisees, who had built a whole set of detailed rules and regulations about how you must live. And woe betide you if you stepped outside those rules.

Jesus confronted all this, and as he proclaimed the Kingdom of God, he brought a judgement against those worlds and their requirements. Time and again he confronted the Jewish authorities and challenged their rule-based way of life, as he proclaimed and demonstrated the love of God that was unconditional, accepting, and inclusive.

That not only challenged the position of the authorities, but it liberated those who had struggled under those rules. Jesus always associated himself with those who were on the wrong side of the social divides of his day. Those who were unclean, he touched and restored to wholeness. He gave value and dignity to those who were despised – such as women, tax collectors and others generically described as sinners. He spoke of and demonstrated the eternal and inclusive love of God for all people. And that led to division. You accepted it or you rejected it; you could not sit on the fence.

So what does Jesus say today to the nations of the world? We spend our time building security for ourselves as we see it. Security is of course relative, depending on your circumstances, but for us it has much to do with possessions, net worth, and the protection of what we have managed to build up. For us it comes in all sorts of shapes and forms – a home, an income whether earned or otherwise to provide for our needs, savings for a rainy day or a holiday, a pension of some sort for future security, and health to maintain and even enjoy all of that. And of course we want our children and families to enjoy that kind of security too.

And so often that leads to a structured and tiered society in which, depending where sit, we enjoy different levels of security. Many of us here, but by no means all, will have a significant sense of security. And security is often associated with power and authority, in a chicken and egg sort of way.

For many people whatever security they did enjoy was shaken five years ago by the pandemic. And the levels of fear we experienced then have not gone away. And our world has become increasingly driven by fear, as the political rhetoric divides and polarises. You are always on one side or the other of so many issues. You only have to look back over this week – I expect most of you will have heard about Chris Kandiah, the Christian theologian who spoke on Thought for Today about attitudes to refugees and foreigners and it led to a huge row with the BBC withdrawing that part of the programme.

There are many issues today where Jesus and his gospel bring division, when he confronts those who are in power and who have authority. Archbishop Tutu once said that “when people say the bible and politics don’t mix, I wonder which Bible it is that they are reading”.

So still today Jesus come to us with his fire? Fire is not all destructive. It can refine, reveal, and renew. You will know that those who live or work in the forests sometimes start controlled fires in order to clear out the dead wood. You may have seen television programmes showing how remarkably quickly new life springs up where the fire has been.

As we follow Jesus, as we allow his word to penetrate our lives, we will inevitably find that he comes to disturb us in our established patterns of thinking and living which we think give us security.

He calls us to understand our times and to read the signs. And he calls us to belong to his kingdom and to live by the values of that kingdom where, as we walk with him day by day, we allow his unconditional love for all to shape how we think and live.

Amen.

“What we treasure shapes our lives” – The Reverend Canon Maggie McLean, Missioner

In our Gospel Jesus couldn’t be clearer about one characteristic of human nature. That what we treasure shapes our lives. Last Sunday we heard about the rich man whose treasure – his wealth – was so great that it couldn’t be contained. He had to build new barns to house it all. This week Jesus continues this teaching with further reflection on treasure and what it means. Jesus could hardly speak more plainly: ‘where your treasure is, there your heart will be also’.

We seem to live in a culture that is fascinated by this kind of treasure. The TV schedules are full of programmes about what motivates people and their ambition to find the Holy Grail of whatever it is that motivates them. The perfect food; or house; or journey.  The question Jesus is asking us in today’s Gospel is about our desire. About what we value and set our hearts upon.

The poet RS Thomas captures this experience in his poem ‘The Bright Field’. According to Thomas what matters in our life’s journey is to be alert and ready for that moment when we encounter our true treasure. And we can only do that if we stop worrying about the past and give up our fantasies about the perfect future. What matters is ‘now’; and being ready to see the everyday miracles that God brings into our lives. Of course, for Jesus, this treasure is about more than the ambition to possess a ‘thing’, however perfect. Because all things ‘wear out’. Nothing we can possess or attain in this life lasts forever. Jesus wants us to seek what won’t wear out, or rust, or decay.

There’s a story told about a very wealthy man who dies and goes to heaven. When he arrives St Peter greets him and asks an angel to take the man to his heavenly dwelling. As they set out they pass many palatial homes, but the angel says that his home is further on.

The wealthy man thinks that his home must be even more magnificent than these houses, because on earth he was a very important person. However, as they go on the houses become less magnificent. He begins to get worried. From handsome large dwellings they move into an area with shacks and very basic accommodation. The angel then points to one of these and says: ‘there – that is your home for eternity’. The man is indignant. He shouts: ‘How on earth can this be right?’. The angel paused before replying, ‘but we aren’t on earth’.

The problem, as the angel went on to say, was that they could only build with the material the rich man had provided. And, in heaven, that material is the substance of our generosity on earth.

Unfortunately, despite his wealth, the rich man had given away very little.

Jesus reminds us that all our treasures on earth eventually wear out.  The things we try to possess rust and decay. Shrouds don’t have pockets. ‘We brought nothing into the world, and we take nothing out’.

Living with the reality of our humanity is the calling we each face, and we have choices. The question Jesus puts with complete clarity asks each of us to consider what constitutes our treasure. What stirs us to move mountains, or spend all our strength and determination?

These are big questions.

In fact, they are dangerous questions.

Writing some years ago Rowan Williams quoted the author Annie Dillard. Dillard compares the church to a cruise ship, but one where everyone is having a nice time and not worried too much about where the boat is heading. On this ship she finds that Christians are not ‘sufficiently aware of the conditions’.

And goes on to write:

Does anyone have the foggiest idea what sort of power we blindly invoke? … The churches are children playing on the floor with their chemistry sets, gently stirring elements they don’t fully understand.

It is madness to wear straw hats to church; we should all be wearing crash helmets. Ushers should issue life preservers and signal flares; they should lash us to our pews. For the sleeping god may awake someday and take offense, or the waking god may draw us to where we can never return.

‘Where is your treasure?’ is not a small question.

Being alert and ready is not a small calling.

We do not worship a small God.

Amen.

“Whom are we really following” – Canon Peter Collier, Cathedral Reader

The church at Corinth was a very divided community, it was full of different factions. And people were very conscious of which group they belonged to – some said they were following Paul, others said that they preferred to be identified with Apollos and yet others said their hero was Cephas (better known to us as the apostle Peter). We don’t know much about the details of the differences between the groups, but that doesn’t matter, because each generation has its own divisions, factions and camps. And the fact that we don’t know their detailed differences means that we cannot escape Paul’s point by saying “well our differences today are not what he was talking about”. Paul was spelling out a principle that remains good for all times and about all differences. Today our church, the Church of England, remains divided over a number of factors: issues about women in leadership of the church, issues of gender and sexuality, questions in relation to what we should be doing about reaching net zero, and big questions about money – where it should come from and what it should be spent on, and those are just four of the matters that divide our church today, as you can see clearly on social media.  

In the part of the letter that comes immediately before what was read to us in our second lesson Paul has been saying that no one has anything that they had not been given and if what they have is a gift what have they got to boast about? It is not anything they have achieved or earned – it is all gift.   

And from there he launches into a strong criticism of them and their attitudes. He says that each group keeps on about their own particular gift saying that because we’ve got this we’ve got everything. To which Paul says with a heavy dose of irony – you do indeed have everything! You are exceedingly rich! As rich as kings! And you can imagine them as they hear that being read out, revelling in it, puffing themselves up more and more, in what they see as their splendour and spiritual affluence.  

At which point Paul draws a contrast with himself and the other apostles, saying that they are at the other end of the line. 

The line he has in mind is one his readers would have been familiar with. What he says would bring to their minds images of the emperor returning from a military campaign. A great triumphal arch would have been erected at the entrance to the city and the emperor or king would then pass through the arch in triumph with his victorious army following behind. The soldiers would be carrying all the booty they had captured. Then at the end of the line would come the bedraggled and weary prisoners, awaiting execution or sale into slavery. This was of course before the age of any Geneva Conventions!

Paul says that just as you see yourselves and your group as kings at the front of the line, we apostles know that we are at the back. We are seen by all as foolish, as weak, and we are held in disrepute. He says his own daily experience is of being hungry, thirsty, poorly clothed, beaten and homeless. 

But he says that against that daily experience of being rejected and persecuted, his response and that of other true apostles is always to respond in ways that are truly countercultural. When they are reviled, he says they bless their revilers; when they are persecuted, he says they go on and on and do not give up; and when they are slandered, he says they speak back kindly. Although he knows that they themselves will always be seen and regarded as just rubbish. 

So what is this all about? What does it mean for us in our day when we don’t need such processions to know that our army has been triumphant; today we see the outcome of wars on our screens as it is happening. 

What this is all about is how we see ourselves, and how we relate to other people. And those two things are always connected to each other. 

Right at the heart of our reading Paul says about himself that he is a fool for the sake of Christ. In other words, his attitude to himself and others is dictated by his being a follower of Jesus Christ. And after all it is Jesus whom we follow not Apollos, Peter, Paul, or any of our twenty first century faction leaders. It was Jesus, who was himself reviled, beaten, spat upon, and crucified. And Paul had no expectation that in following Jesus he could expect anything different; he expected to be treated as Jesus had been treated. But the flip side was that when he Paul was abused, like Jesus, he would never give like for like, but would respond as Jesus had responded. 

And so for us – we are unlikely to experience the sort of opposition and persecution that Paul did as he travelled round the Mediterranean. We know that he was shipwrecked, beaten with rods three times, flogged five times with thirty nine stripes, in and out prison, and more.  

We may not get anywhere near that, but we do and will have people who tease us, criticise us, or put us down. And our natural response is to want to hit back in some shape or form. But if we are primarily following Jesus then we are learning a different way of responding – namely by being kind, saying good things about other people, and hanging on in there through all that we are on the receiving end of. 

Is that weakness? It may sound like it. Far from it! It takes determination and courage to live like that. And we cannot do it in our own strength, but only by the grace of God and in the power of the Holy Spirit. 

And that kind of living is to be applied in all our relationships with other people – those closest to us in our families, our neighbours, those we work with and socialise with, as well as those we worship alongside and those from whom we differ on any particular issue. 

In all those situations we will be tempted, I imagine on almost a daily basis, to retaliate in some way in response to what others say or do to us. But as those who are now living our lives walking alongside Jesus Christ, we will be modelling our walk and our talk on the pattern of His life. 

 And when you begin to live like that it plays right into our divisions and factions. They are of course real and sometimes there are real issues of truth and error. However, when we recognise that as followers of Jesus everything we have has been given to us, we have nothing that enables us to say we are better than anyone else. And so we should always speak well of one another and to one another. That is what shows we are truly following Jesus Christ. And that pattern of relating builds the kind of communities that our world so desperately needs and that leads to peace and justice. 

Amen 

“making peace through the blood of his cross” – The Very Reverend Dominic Barrington, Dean of York

Through Christ God was pleased to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, by making peace through the blood of his cross.

Last Tuesday morning, on the last morning of the meeting of the General Synod of the Church of England here in York, Archbishop Hosam, the Anglican Archbishop in Jerusalem, addressed the General Synod and spoke about the mission and ministry of the diocese that he leads in a rather troubled part of the world.

He spoke of the 35 institutions his diocese runs – institutions principally concerned with healthcare, with education, and with hospitality. He spoke about the 28 congregations in his charge. “These,” he said, “our arms of ministry in which we show our faith in God through action and ministry. Healing the sick and teaching reconciliation with peace and justice,” he said, “is at the heart of our ministry.”

And do we know why?

Saul of Tarsus, who we also come to know as Paul, discovered in a blinding revelation, so the Acts of the Apostles relates, he discovered that in Christ all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, as we just heard read – and Saul-turned-Paul realized that this astonishing statement had implications – implications that fundamentally changed his life, changed his understanding of discipleship, of action, and of prayer.

Paul’s ministry was extraordinary and extensive and he gathered his own band of followers and disciples around him. And – probably – after his death, one of his own disciples wanted to pick up the baton, to carry on with the good work and share its mission with others. And thus this anonymous figure – in all probability – wrote to the church in Colossae, wrote the letter to the Colossians to remind them (and anyone else who might just be listening – like you and me here this morning) that Christ is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation… He himself is before all things, and in him all things hold together. He is the head of the body, the church… [and] in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell.

And if that isn’t remarkable enough, through him God was pleased to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, by making peace through the blood of his cross.

So, in other words, for Archbishop Hosam, and for the 35 institutions that he leads, working in those precious areas of ministry, in that troubled region. For them and for their staff, they must be Christ-like – whatever the cost – because, as the author of the letter to the Colossians makes so clear – Christ is and therefore must be at the centre of everything.

In an interview with the Church Times after his talk to the Synod, Archbishop Hosam developed the theme of what it must mean to be church in a difficult environment, what it must mean to be church in a time or war. How are we called to act as church? How do we proclaim God’s holy message? His answer was, “We are committed to reconciliation and peace-building… The ministry of presence and the ministry of resilience… We live and embody the gospel.” And he does that, and his team around him do that because, as we heard, we are now reconciled in Christ’s fleshly body through death.

And it isn’t, in a sense, just Christ’s death. It’s a call to set aside the values of human comfort and safety. We certainly know if we watch the news that the ministry of the diocese of Jerusalem comes at one hell of a cost. The Ahli Hospital – the Anglican hospital in Gaza City – that hospital has been attacked six times during the war between Hamas and Israel. Its emergency department was bombed on, of all days, Palm Sunday.

And just this past week, while Archbishop Hosam was in York, to wake us up to what is going on out there, just this past week while the Anglican archbishop was our guest, the one Roman Catholic church in Gaza City was bombed by Israel. Its priest was injured along with several others, and two people were killed – Saad Salameh, the church’s janitor, and an elderly lady called Fumayya Ayyad –whose younger brother, it just so happens, is the senior doctor, the medical director, of the Ahli Hospital in Gaza.

Years ago now, back in 2014, I visited Gaza. I was there after the last military campaign between Hamas and Israel, a campaign which at the time seemed horrifying, but really is like a children’s tea party when compared to what has happened since the terrible Hamas attacks on October 7th, 2023, and all that has followed. But I found myself, on this visit, in a war zone looking at the ruins of indiscriminate violence and bombing. It was, for somebody who has led a very innocent life in military terms, it was all very shocking. And on the last of my two nights there, having dinner with the staff of the Ahli Hospital, I found myself sitting next to this extraordinary doctor.

And Dr Maher asked me a very simple question. “Do you know,” he said, “the secret of a good life?” I didn’t dare answer, because I knew that my attempt to have a good life would sound comfortable, would sound selfish. I simply waited for him to offer me his wisdom. And he said, “It’s very simple: just make sure your neighbour has a good life.”

A remarkable statement even then from one of the tiny minority of Christians in the enclave that is Gaza – surrounded by so many Muslims, a small number of whom would actually gladly have eradicated the Christian presence. And all of them surrounded by Israel. “Make sure your neighbour has a good life,” said this doctor. And he said it, I am sure, because, In Christ God was pleased to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, by making peace through the blood of his cross.

And so to hospitality. And so to that well known and well misunderstood brief little story of the two sisters, Martha and Mary. They come in a very improbable place in the gospel if you look at the action that is going on. In Luke’s gospel, Jesus takes nine chapters, from chapter 9 to chapter 18, to get from the Galilee in the north of Israel down to Jerusalem. Luke traces a journey during which Jesus teaches and preaches and performs miracles – Luke paints this journey step by step, adding to the drama that will unfold when Jesus gets to Jerusalem on what we call Palm Sunday.

And yet, because Luke has a point he needs to make for us, Luke grabs Jesus’ arrival in Bethany, at this house – Luke grabs it and yanks it chronologically completely out of place. Because Bethany is a suburb of Jerusalem. Jesus is nowhere near there. But theologically, this story comes in a very important place.

Regular listeners, as it were, might remember that last Sunday we heard the famous parable of the Good Samaritan read here in York Minster, and read in churches around the western world. That ultimate parable about action – about doing something, about being practical, about getting of your backside or getting off your horse and helping somebody. And if you come back next week, whether to the Minster or to any church in the western world, you will hear Jesus telling his disciples how to pray. Next week’s gospel begins with Jesus teaching the Lord’s Prayer. Jesus, in a sense, making sure that whatever else his followers do, they are fervent in prayer.

And in between these two so significant passages, comes, ripped out of geographical sense, comes the brief story of Jesus rolling up in the house of Martha and Mary. And this story has been subject of all sorts of interpretation, some of which have stopped us looking at what’s really going on. Martha, for instance, isn’t necessarily tied to the kitchen stove in a frantic way, because she is clearly a house-holder who has resources. Jesus didn’t rock up on his own – he had quite an entourage traveling with him.

But Martha clearly thinks that she is doing everything that counts as discipleship herself, and she has the nerve to criticize Jesus. It’s not directly Mary she’s criticizing – she’s criticizing Jesus. Because she wants to get Mary to see what is going on. It’s one of those moments when she can’t see the wood for the trees. She’s forgotten why she is busy.

But, as Colossians reminds us, you do need to be busy. We are ‘holy and blameless, says the author of Colossians, when you continue securely established and steadfast in the faith. Both of them are doing the right thing. But Martha is forgetting the right reason.

Saint Augustine, 1500 years ago, said “Martha was absorbed in the matter of how to feed the Lord; Mary was absorbed in the matter of how to be fed by the Lord. Martha was preparing a banquet for the Lord, Mary was already revelling in the banquet of the Lord.”

And it’s when we take those two sisters together – when we reconcile them – they serve as the example, together, of discipleship lived out in action and prayer. Because it’s through action and prayer together that we can be good disciples in a world where the ministry of reconciliation needs to be paramount.

At the end of his interview with the Church Times, Archbishop Hosam said, “I’m an Arab, but not Muslim . . . I am a Palestinian, but not a terrorist. And I am an Israeli, but not a Jew,”

“If,” he said, “if I can reconcile myself as both Palestinian and Israeli and Arab and Christian, surely that means that we can live together as Israelis and Palestinians?”

And that principle, that principle we see in our Scriptures this morning, applies to us and our attempts properly to be disciples. This morning we are being asked, asked by those two sisters, asked by Paul and whoever came after him that wrote to the Colossians, asked by Archbishop Hosam and Dr Maher, asked, really, by God, the very simple question: Is Christ central to us? Because, in Christ, God was pleased to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, by making peace through the blood of his cross.

And so the baton gets passed down. From Jesus himself to Martha and Mary, to Saul-turned-Paul and those who followed him, so very visibly to Archbishop Hosam and Dr Maher in Gaza. The only question now, this morning, is whether Christ is central to our lives. And if he is – what are we going to do about it? Amen.

“Echoes of that endless light” – The Reverend Canon Maggie McLean, Missioner

May I speak in the name of the Blessed and Holy Trinity One God in three persons.

Recently I was in the city of Tromso, in Norway. During our stay we decided to go to a concert we’d seen advertised.

It wasn’t surprising that the concert was to be performed in Tromso’s cathedral – but it was a little unusual that it didn’t start until 11 pm. As I did, you might wonder why the starting time was quite so late. Well, it seemed to me that it was kind of the opposite of a midnight mass. Once a year we have a service in the Minster that starts very late in the evening, which whilst inside is full of light, outside we’re in the depths of winter.

In Tromso, at this time of year, the sun never sets, because Tromso is well inside the Arctic Circle, which means that for several months, the sun never goes down. It seems that the citizens like to celebrate this special time of endless light by holding some events late into the night and so when you emerge from the cathedral, after midnight, the sun is still shinning.

Of course, the opposite is also true.

For months of the year the sun never rises. I can’t quite imagine what it must be like living with that experience. When the first sunrise of the new year is weeks and weeks away, and only a brief twilight marks the place where the sun should be.

All this reminded me that the Bible, based in the experiences of a particular place, draws a lot on the imagery of light and darkness; the sun at noon; dusk and dawn. Scripture takes the experiences people have of the natural world and uses these in different ways to communicate divine truths. So, for example, when Jesus dies on the cross on Good Friday, an unexpected darkness appears at noon and lasts for three hours.

In our first reading, when Jacob was at a crucial juncture in his life, and wrestled with a stranger all night, the conflict endured “until daybreak”. It is as the sun rises that Jacob becomes Israel and is blessed by God. A new day; a new name; and a new purpose.

We’ve just heard our fabulous choir sing Parry’s setting of Milton’s ‘Blest Pair of Sirens’. It ends with that vision of heaven which draws on so many Biblical references about the life to come, where one day we will all: “sing in endless morn of light”. If “endless morn” is heaven, then we can all probably guess what the Bible associates with perpetual darkness. It’s not good. Either it is an image for hell, or a state that arrives in advance of the apocalypse.

In the book of Revelation, depicted in the centre of our Great East Window, the darkness of human folly and failure is contrasted with the Son of Man whose “face was like the sun shining with full force”.

The text of the hymn we are going to sing in a few moments was written by a vicar who was very preoccupied by the “end times”. John Mason was alive in the 17th century and might seem an unusual source for a hymn we sing at this Evensong each year. He was a Calvanistic Anglican, suggesting he was both very earnest and rather severe. Mason suffered pains in the head and became so sensitive to sound that even the noise of his own footsteps caused him pain. He experienced terrifying dreams and hallucinations and became convinced that the personal reign of God on earth was about to begin.

And yet, despite this, throughout all his suffering and unusual religious beliefs, Mason has left us a poem of profound verse and theological depth. Perhaps it’s a good reminder that when God chooses an instrument, no matter how humble the vessel, words and music of sublime quality can be the result. In his poem Mason reflects on the brightness of heaven and the human longing for just one glimpse of celestial light. Whatever Mason had to give, he feels it is ‘cold and dark’ compared with the brilliance of God’s presence. Nevertheless, he offers what he has, and that’s all any of us are asked to do.

In his own way, like Jacob, Mason wrestled with God in his prayers; in his preaching; and in his writing. He certainly wasn’t perfect, and neither are we. But when we let God into our lives there’s no telling what God will do. In Jesus Christ we see the pattern and character of God’s fulness – at once surprising and improbable. All because, as Mason puts it, this is a Being beyond the limit of our imagination. This is a God who is like “a sea without a shore”. A brilliance of sunlight that never sets; and cannot be contained.

I want to end by giving thanks for the voices and dedication of our choir. Their music has carried us through seasons of celebration and contemplation, offering a foretaste of that “endless morn of light” which, in faith, we anticipate.

Each anthem, psalm, and hymn they have shared has enriched our worship, lifting our thoughts beyond the everyday and reminding us of the beauty and hope at the heart of our faith.

As some move on and others remain, may all who have sung here know the deep gratitude of this community. Wherever you go, may you each find the same glimpses of divine brilliance that their singing has brought to us. For it is through such gifts, humbly and joyfully offered, that we experience echoes of that endless light which no darkness can overcome.

Amen.

“Touching the Wounds of God” – The Reverend Canon Timothy Goode, Congregational Discipleship and Nurture

She had endured much under many physicians and had spent all that she had; and she was no better but rather grew worse.

May I speak in the name of the Wounded and Risen Christ, who breaks every boundary and makes holiness dwell in breaking flesh. Amen.

Tonight, in our readings we have heard two stories unfold slowly in the shadows of suffering and hope. In Genesis, a servant waits beside a well. In Mark, a haemorrhaging woman reaches out after twelve long years of pain. Both are stories of seeking, of navigating vulnerability in a world where power hides behind certainty.

But what if we read the woman’s story not as a miracle proving Jesus’ divinity, but as a direct confrontation with every theology and practice that has ever named some bodies unworthy or unclean?

For through this lens this woman is already whole before she is healed. Her bleeding body is not a problem for Jesus to fix but a body made sacred by its endurance, holy by its reaching and powerful by its protest. Mark tells us she had suffered under many physicians, spent everything, and only grew worse. This then is more than a medical issue, it is structural. This woman’s body has been managed but not honoured, treated but not healed, consumed but not understood.

Under Jewish purity law, she is deemed unclean. Not just ritually but symbolically. Not only is she barred from the temple, but she also dares to press through the crowd as an unclean woman and touch the hem of Jesus’ garment, from below, in trepidation. In that moment, the story turns everything that we think we know about holiness and the body upside down.

Nancy Eiesland, in The Disabled God, writes that in the resurrected Christ, disability is neither cured nor erased; it becomes part of God’s own embodied reality. ¹ The risen Christ still bears wounds, not as flaws but as testimony. Christ is recognised, not despite the wounds, but because of them and that changes everything.

The Church still reads stories like this one through the lens of restoration, as if divine love is about returning people to a so-called normal. But Jesus, in his resurrection, is not restored to Greco-Roman perfection. He is risen, wounded, scarred. Our Christian anthropology is not the imperial perfect body of Rome; it is the risen body of Christ.

Thus, Jesus’s recognition of the woman is the high point of her healing. Her healing is that Jesus sees her. But the healing does not end there. The crowd is also healed of their prejudice through witnessing Jesus’s recognition of her.

For Jesus stops and Jesus sees. “Who touched me?” is not asked from ignorance but from invitation. He wants the crowd to turn. He wants the invisible to become visible. He wants to dismantle a culture of purity and perform a moment of profound mutual recognition.

And he calls her “Daughter.” Not sentimentally but politically. That word places her right back where she belongs, back within the covenant community. It declares that her body, with all its history of bleeding, belongs fully within the Body of Christ.

The theologian Deborah Beth Creamer calls for us to resist the “limits-as-problems” paradigm, the view that limitations are deficits to overcome. ² In this encounter, Jesus doesn’t solve her life. He interrupts the world that deems her unworthy. Her healing comes through the delay, through the fragile pause, through the risk of being seen.

And when she steps forward, she becomes prophetic, not because she is fixed, but because she testifies.

So too with Christ. The risen body of Jesus is not idealised but made prophetic, scarred, resistant to sanitising.

And in response we must ask: how often does the Church sanitise the gospel by demanding conformity? How often is inclusion reduced to physical access, rather than a reformation of theology?

The risen Christ haunts our churches not as perfection, but as a scandal of grace. Not idealised flesh, but the wounded body of God.

To live as Christ’s Body therefore is to be seen, re-membered, not as a uniform whole, but a gathered, storied, scarred community. Each body, each story, each wound becomes part of the testimony.

The theologian Thomas Reynolds puts it this way: the Church must be a place where “belonging precedes conformity.”³ That reverses the purity logic that exiled this woman. She belongs not because she is cured, she belongs because she is seen.

And in a world obsessed with perfection, being seen in one’s difference is holy ground.

So, who are the bleeding ones in our midst? Who dares to reach from below, in trepidation, only to be met with silence?

What would it mean for the Church to be interruptible like Jesus, to pause its liturgies and agendas for the voices long unheard?

Would we recognise the touch of the one who presses through our ableist theology, our sanitised icons, our inaccessible pews?

Would we recognise Christ when he bleeds?

Would we recognise resurrection, not as restoration to an idealised normal, but as a public display of scars, as the holiness of a life interrupted?

Because resurrection doesn’t return us to what was. It does not erase our woundedness. Resurrection re-members us into something new.

Not perfect. Not polished. But risen. And the wounds remain. Amen.

‘The doctrine of Trinity Sunday’ – Canon Peter Collier, Cathedral Reader

Trinity Sunday

Our service began as it does week by week with the words “In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit”; it will end with the words “the blessing of God Almighty the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit …”.

So, Father, Son and Holy Spirit are clearly at the heart of our Christian worship. And as soon as I have finished speaking, we shall affirm together the Nicene Creed. During the summer months of the year 325 (that is 1700 years ago this year) a Council of around 200 bishops was summoned by the Emperor Constantine to meet at Nicaea in modern day Turkey to resolve various issues in the church of their day. One of those was two thirds of the doctrine of the Trinity, as they decided what it is the church believed about the relationship between the God the Father, and God the Son in Christian teaching, and they put together what we call the Nicene Creed.

Today is Trinity Sunday – it is the only feast day dedicated to a doctrine rather than a person, such as last Wednesday when it was Barnabas, or an event such as last Sunday when it was the coming of the Holy Spirit.  But Trinity Sunday is purely about doctrine.

No wonder it is a Sunday when no one wants to preach. Thank you, James!

The story is told of a Japanese man politely listening to a Christian trying to explain the idea of the Trinity. He was puzzled and responded – Honourable Father, very good; Honourable Son, very good; Honourable Bird I do not understand at all.

The word Trinity is not in the Bible. It was Tertullian, who lived just over a hundred years before that Council met, and who at the time when the Bible was being translated into Latin, was the first person to use the word trinitas when speaking about Father, Son & Holy Spirit. And he it was also who introduced the idea of ‘persona’ to distinguish between the three of them and who said that although there were three persons they were of one ‘susbstantia’ – substance. Now that is something that is difficult to understand, and it is not for nothing that we refer to it as a mystery.

Many people have come up with images to help us understand what is going on. Tertullian himself used the image of a plant: where the Father is the deep root, the Son is the shoot that breaks forth and the Spirit is the force which spreads its beauty and fragrance across the earth

St Patrick of Ireland, perhaps not surprisingly, said that it is like the shamrock where we have three individual leaves, but all part of one and the same plant

Now the point about Christian teaching – doctrine – is that it is not there to turn us into theologians, but rather to turn us into disciples.

The concept of the Trinity helps us to understand and experience God’s presence and activity in a very rich way. We see that there is a real depth to who God is. God is and always has been a community. God is a living relationship and so that immediately takes us into the realms of complexity and diversity. If complexity and diversity are there in God, they will also be there in God’s world and in God’s church – and so it is. And to that I will return.

Lest you think that this is all some clever middle eastern idea, dreamt up by some bishops in the desert, you will I am sure have already noted that our two scripture readings this morning link into that theme of the relationship within God. In Romans 5 Paul is coming to a high point in his letter. The chapter begins ‘therefore’, and whenever you see the word therefore in the Bible you should look to see what is there for. In the preceding four chapters Paul has been spelling out our human predicament of being separated from life with God and there being nothing we can do about it – religious ritual doesn’t help, trying to keep God’s law doesn’t work, and so God sent his Son to suffer and die so that we could receive as a gift God’s life. And now he summarises that in chapter 5. Simply put he says – we are now at peace with God the Father because of what Jesus the Son has done; and the way we experience that is because the Holy Spirit has taken God’s love and poured it into our hearts.

Each of Father, Son and Spirit playing their part in enabling us to receive that gift of new life.

And lest we think that three part drama is something Paul dreamt up, we see that in our gospel reading in John, Jesus himself speaks in a similar way. He is saying to his disciples that there is lots he would like to tell them, but they simply wouldn’t be able to cope with it yet. He is of course referring to his death on the cross and his resurrection. However, he says there will come a time when the Holy Spirit will guide them into all they need to know. The Spirit will do that by taking what the Father has given to the Son, and will make it known to Jesus’ followers. Truth here is not a matter of facts or accuracy. In John’s gospel truth is always to do with God and being like or consistent with who and what God is like.

We are still there, as we were throughout the Easter Season, with our gospel readings being taken from what Jesus did and said in that upper room where he washed his disciples’ feet and prepared to give up his life and die for them. This is the pattern of truth into which the Spirit was going to lead them as the Spirit made sense to them about the things that were to come – the things to come are not things such as the date of the second coming but about what is to happen to Jesus. Without the Spirit giving them an understanding of that it would all be utterly baffling for them. We know that whenever Jesus spoke about his death, about the cross, they either rejected it or were completely confused by it.

And when Jesus speaks as he does here about being glorified – in John’s gospel glory is always related to the cross.

So this is all about the Spirit giving them to understand the nature of God’s self-giving love – entering not only into our world in His Son, but in some way taking our sin and death and overcoming it so that we can receive and enjoy the life of God – and that life will lead us to a similar pattern of foot washing and suffering!

So just as the love of God is seen in the relationship between Father, Son and Holy Spirit, we now are drawn into that relationship – into community with God – to live with them and become like them

That is why back in Romans Paul speaking about this trinitarian work, speaks of the Spirit pouring that God style love into our hearts which will inevitably lead to suffering but suffering which we will be enabled to endure with hope.

And that is how we learn to live with all the complexity of the world and the church in which we live. If there is complexity and diversity in God, then you will expect it in the world God has made; and you will also expect it in the church he has redeemed.

Many of us like simplicity, and struggle with the complexity we find in the world around us.

Diversity too can be threatening – whether it is diversity of race, class, status, affluence, sexuality, or anything else. Such differences can be threatening. Why can’t everyone be like me, or like us?

So often we want our religious truths to be pure and simple too.

But in our own complex lives we can discover God in all our own diversity: in the highs and the lows, the good and the bad. God who is in the midst of our mistakes, our pain, our depressions, our illnesses, in the most fractured places of our lives, and even in our deaths. There we can find a God who is walking alongside us rather than one who is distant.

We find a God who loves us and saves us in the ways only a complex and diverse God can.

Let me end on a different note. If you are troubled that all this imagery is rather masculine – Father and Son – in the book of Proverbs we have the idea of Wisdom (and as my wife always reminds me wisdom is feminine!). As you may know many commentators have linked the idea of wisdom in Proverbs to that of the Logos in John chapter 1. The Word that was with God and the Word that was God. In Proverbs chapter 8 we read about wisdom also being there when the world was made – and a more literal translation of vv 30 and 31 would be “I was having fun, smiling before him all the time, frolicking with his inhabited earth and delighting in the human race”. That was wisdom’s experience of being there with and in God when the world was made, bringing us an image of God in relationship – secure, joyful, creative, dancing and gambolling or frolicking.

That same God has taken our pain into the midst of that relationship and has experienced separation within the family of God because of our sin. But the Holy Spirit now leads us to see that the truth is that ultimately love has triumphed and that love of God is now being poured into our hearts by the Holy Spirit, so that in all our diverse situations and circumstances we find a God who draws us into God’s very family.

Amen