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

“I am now rejoicing in my sufferings for your sake”

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

Friends, when was the last time we were changed – not encouraged, not reassured, but utterly undone?

Not the kind of spiritual moment that leaves us quietly confirmed in the person we already believed ourselves to be, but the kind that leaves us exposed: stripped back and brought to the very edge of our own competence.

When did we last meet Christ in a way that did not simply strengthen our convictions, but convert them? Not just in what we think, but in how we relate; how we listen; how we depend; how we learn to receive.

We are so used to speaking of the conversion of St Paul as a moment of blinding light and thunderous revelation that we often miss where the conversion actually takes place. Not on the road. Not even in the light. But primarily in what follows: the slow, humiliating, disorientating walk into Damascus. Not the dramatic fall, but the difficult rising; not the voice from heaven, but in the silence that follows.

For the decisive theological moment is not when Paul falls to the ground, but when he is helped up again and discovers he is blind and cannot go on alone:

This is the sacred ground of Paul’s conversion: the beginning of the unmaking. The moment the old self is rendered powerless, and a new self begins – not through triumph, but through dependence.

The road to Damascus matters – but it is the being led by the hand into Damascus that Paul spends the rest of his ministry making sense of.

For up until this point, Saul of Tarsus has been the very image of religious independence. Authorised. Commissioned. Certain. A man saturated in Scripture, fluent in tradition, confident in his inheritance.

He knows who God is. He knows what God wants. And he knows who stands in God’s way. He is not wandering; he is certain. He is not searching; he is decisive. And that certainty is precisely the problem.

Our first reading from Ecclesiasticus offers a portrait of such a wise scribe: one who devotes himself to the study of the law of the Most High; who “seeks out the wisdom of all the ancients,” and “preserves the sayings of the famous.” It’s a beautiful portrait. But it’s also dangerous. For wisdom, unconverted, becomes control, learning becomes exclusion and scripture becomes weapon.

So, Paul is not converted away from Scripture. He is converted within Scripture. And what must be undone is the fantasy – the insidious lie – of independence: the belief that faithfulness means self-sufficiency; that holiness means being right; that truth is something we can carry alone.

The risen Christ does not argue Paul into the Kingdom. He dismantles him. And the dismantling is not complete until Paul accepts the hand that leads him into the city he intended to dominate.

So, the road to Damascus is not the end of Paul’s power. It is its unmasking. The walk into Damascus is its total surrender. To be led by the hand is to relinquish control of pace, direction, and dignity. It is to trust those we did not choose. It is to arrive not as a conqueror, but as someone carried. This is not incidental detail: it is theologically decisive.

And it speaks directly into the heart of the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity, which concludes today. Christian disunity is sustained by the very same fantasy that sustained Saul: the fantasy that we can journey alone. That my tradition has enough. That my theology is sufficient. That my church can see clearly without the hand of another guiding it.

And it also speaks painfully – even prophetically – into the heart of tomorrow, as we mark Holocaust Memorial Day.

Holocaust Memorial Day does not only ask us to remember the victims of Nazi hatred. It forces us to look, with honesty, at the long history in which Christians – through theology, preaching, and inherited contempt – helped to form the soil in which antisemitism could grow. It confronts us with the terrible truth that religious certainty, unconverted, can become religious violence.

We are not told whether Saul is an executioner; but we know he is a persecutor. Already convinced he is acting in the name of God. certain purity must be defended and threats removed. And that is why this conversion matters so much. The risen Christ refuses to let Saul keep calling violence righteousness. He is stopped in his tracks. Christ unmakes him and his sudden dependency forces him into humility – and then sends him back into the world with a gospel that can no longer be weaponised.

And this is why Paul can later write, as we heard tonight in Colossians:

“I am now rejoicing in my sufferings for your sake, and in my flesh I am completing what is lacking in Christ’s afflictions for the sake of his body, that is, the church.”

It is a startling statement – and a dangerous one, dangerous if misunderstood and dangerous if ignored.

Paul is not saying that the cross was insufficient. He is saying something far more unsettling: that Christ has chosen to bind himself to a body that suffers. A body that is unfinished. A body that is fallible. A body that requires community in order to become whole.

The mystery Paul proclaims is not Christ as private possession, but Christ among us. Not Christ as property, but Christ as communion. Not Christ as an idea to be defended, but Christ as a life to be shared – and sometimes carried.

Which means unity will not achieved by agreement alone. It will only be achieved by something far more costly: mutual dependence.

Paul, who once walked with authority, learns that the gospel advances not through domination but through vulnerability; not through purity but through participation; not through standing apart but through being bound together. And so when he speaks of being “rooted and built up in him” his words assume entanglement: shared soil, interwoven lives, a common life that cannot be lived alone.

Unity is not sameness. It is not the erasure of difference. It is the refusal of independence.

The Church will not become one by marching in step. It will become one by learning to travel at the pace of the slowest, the most wounded, the least seen — by discovering again and again that we cannot arrive where Christ calls us without the hands of others. And this is the conversion still demanded of us.

For we are very good at organising the Church. We are very good at defending convictions, histories, ecclesial identities. But we are less willing to be led. Less willing to be dependent. Less willing to receive the gospel from those we once presumed to correct.

Paul enters Damascus blind, silent, humbled. And there he receives the Church not as an enemy, but as his lifeline. Ananias must come to him. Hands must be laid. Sight must be given back – by another.

This is unity: not consensus, but conversion. Not agreement, but surrender.

So as this week draws to its close, the question before us is not whether we desire unity. Most Christians do. The deeper question is whether we are willing to be converted into it.

Are we willing to be led by the hand? Are we willing to let go of the fantasy of personal, theological, and ecclesial independence? Are we willing to discover that Christ meets us most fully when we arrive together – vulnerable, dependent, and unfinished?

Paul’s conversion did not make him strong. It made him faithful. And faithfulness, it turns out, looks like needing one another.

So may we, with Paul, learn to journey not as those who presume sufficiency on our own, but as those willing to be led – led by the hand into the life of Christ, led by the hand into the suffering of his body, and led by the hand into the costly, beautiful and unfinished work of unity.

Amen.

Sermon for The Conversion of Paul – Canon Peter Collier, Cathedral Reader

Acts 9: 1-22; Matt: 19:  27-30

Today we celebrate one of the most significant moments in the history of God’s church as we remember with thanks the conversion of Paul.

Before his conversion Saul was well known. He was known as someone who was well versed in the scriptures and the traditions of God’s people. He was regarded as a righteous man who himself observed that law fastidiously. And he was a man with a mission. That mission was to preserve that true and orthodox faith as it had been received and handed down to him. So he was intent on stamping out this new interpretation of that faith by the people who belonged to a group known as “the Way”. And he felt fully justified in that mission. After all this new-fangled interpretation of their historic faith was clearly fake news. How could he be sure of that? Well, Jesus had been publicly crucified by Roman soldiers, his body has been laid in a tomb, and his followers had scattered. But not long afterwards those followers began to assert that Jesus was alive. That was clearly a lie as everyone knows dead men don’t rise.

So Saul had in his hand, written authority from no less a person than the High Priest himself to go, on this occasion to Damascus, and there to seek out members of that group of troublemakers. When he found them, he was to arrest them and take them to Jerusalem, where they would be examined and punished if they would not recant this heretical development of the true faith.

But as he journeyed a remarkable thing happened. There was a brilliant flash of light that blinded him and caused him to fall to the ground. He and his entourage heard a voice. The voice addressed him by name and asked him “Saul why are you persecuting me?”

At that moment he recognised that this could only be God speaking and so in line with a long standing Jewish tradition he asked God to reveal who he was. Moses, Jacob, Gideon had all met God in dramatic circumstances and as part of their encounters had asked God who he was? The reply Saul received could not have been more unexpected or dramatic. The voice revealed himself as Jesus and said that it was he Jesus whom Saul was persecuting – not this group, not the individuals whom he was to arrest, but it was Jesus himself whom Saul was attacking.

The one whom he believed was dead, discredited and dangerous was very much alive and confronting him and calling on him now to turn round.

So it came about that Saul who believed that he had a very clear vision of the faith was now blind – unable to see at all. He had to be led by the hand. Vulnerable and dependent. He was taken to the house of man called Judas. We have no reason to think Judas was a follower of Jesus, indeed from what happens next he would certainly appear not to have been.

For three days and nights Saul remains completely in the dark. He didn’t eat or drink. We can only begin to imagine what must have been going through his mind as everything he had been so sure about was turned upside down.

We read that he was praying, and my guess is that that prayer was him just holding his life before God as he recognised that he had got so much wrong. And all those certainties, all that he had been so sure about, was steadily dismantled as he prayed.

Now Saul’s experience was very dramatic, and although there are still some people who today have dramatic conversion experiences, I guess that if we think about our own experiences of turning round, for most of us it will have been a more gradual process. That may be so in relation to an initial decision to follow Jesus or in the development of our faith as we have followed Him. And many of us find that the longer we follow him the more we need to be open to change and to dismantling our previous certainties. Certainly in recent years I have had to let go of a number of my previous certainties.

It is also a common experience that spiritual change and development can take us into and through dark places where we can’t always see as clearly as we would like. The dismantling of old ways of thinking and acting can take time. And the more certain we have been about something the deeper the dismantling needs to go.

And certainty can be very dangerous. Dangerous in that it leads to blindness as to what is really true. And dangerous in that it can be very damaging to others.

In our own times there is a great deal of certainty being expressed by powerful people in our world and in our church. And let’s be clear many people like their leaders to be certain. We live in a world where everything is being reduced to binary choices, which you are for or against. But that kind of certainty so often leads to blindness and to damage.

But then comes Ananias. God spoke to Ananias in a vision and told him to go to the house where Saul was. There he was to lay his hands on Saul and enable him to recover his sight. Ananias’s reaction is so understandable – Lord I know who this is, and I know why he has come here; he’s come to arrest us and cart us off to Jerusalem. “Ananias”, says God, “just go”. And so Ananias went and did as God told him. He laid his hands on him and addressed him as “Brother Saul”.

I find that quite remarkable. I ask myself how I would have approached this situation. I think I might have wanted to ask some questions. Saul is it true you have had a change of mind and heart? Can you tell me what has happened? And so what do you believe now? But none of that – his first words are simply “Brother Saul!” or “Welcome to the family!”

And so we see that conversion to following Jesus leads immediately to belonging rather than to theological understanding. We join a family of people not a sect with a code.

Now human nature and the stuff of religion does not change.

On Wednesday of this coming week the Bishop of London will cross the road from where she currently lives to St Pauls Cathedral and there her election as the Archbishop of Canterbury will be confirmed and she will become the Archbishop from that point on. It was 500 years ago this year, 1526, when another Bishop of London made another trip to St Pauls. He was Cuthbert Tunstall, and he came from this part of the world, North Yorkshire. He took with him on his journey to St Pauls as many Bibles as he had been able to find or buy. There outside St Pauls, in order to maintain the orthodoxy of his day, he burned those bibles. Those bibles were William Tyndale’s translation, and the words used by Tyndale in his translation challenged much of the way the church was then being run. One simple example: he used the word repentance rather than penance, and thereby he challenged the orthodox faith of his day with its whole system of penances and indulgences.

Have things changed? Confidence and certainty in what we were brought up to believe is very much alive and well in our time. We hear a lot of talk within our own Church of England about revealed truth and about orthodoxy. And when it comes to issues about race and gender and money, those who are on the wrong side of such orthodoxy can suffer great pain. And Jesus has always said to those who cause pain to his followers: “why are you persecuting me?” Because as always he identifies with the little, the least and the lost.

And of course we still see the importance of the welcoming Christian family. A family that accepts all who have met with Jesus Christ and which knows that together we are undergoing change and transformation. No conditions, just a welcome.

There can be no doubt that our church needs to hear the call to be that kind of church. And by church I mean both our Church of England and also we here as a cathedral community. And to get there we are likely to need our own Damascus Road dismantling experiences whether they be dramatic or steady and continuing.

Amen.

“Hidden Hinges of Faith” – The Reverend Canon Maggie McLean, Missioner

Some years ago, I was on a retreat, when the retreat leader asked us all to imagine something. He asked us to imagine that, if we thought of ourselves as a part of the church building, what would we be. In a cathedral like York Minster there are plenty of things to imagine we might connect with. One person on the retreat, a church warden, said he felt like a pillar. Most of the time people saw him standing around and not doing a lot. But, as he went on to say, any engineer will tell you that every pillar is working – doing and fulfilling its purpose in keeping the building stable and supporting the roof to keep us dry. Perhaps he felt unappreciated in his role, but the group soon saw that what he did was essential, even if it wasn’t particularly glamorous.

One woman on the retreat took a long while to speak. But when she did, she spoke about not wanting the image that had come into her mind. She tried to think herself into being a window, full of colour – seen by everyone – and letting in the light. But however hard she tried, a less lovely image kept returning to her thoughts. The part of the church she identified with, was a hinge of the door. Something no one attending a church service sees, but essential in order for us to get in. Not usually a thing of beauty, but a practical necessity.

Sometimes a hinge might be connected to a beautifully wrought iron clasp – but the hinge itself is simply a fixture of hard metal, recessed into the door: Functional.  Necessary.  Hidden. As she said to the group, the only time anyone pays you any attention is when you begin to squeak. And then someone comes along with some oil to keep you quiet!

Of all the fabulous things in a beautiful church, this wasn’t the role she wanted. At least people pay attention to a pillar, if only to walk round it. But the hinge is the mechanism that helps people enter the building. It is the device that allows movement and openness – the pivot on which any of us being here relies. It’s a reminder that we all have a part to play in fulfilling the vocation we receive in baptism and discern as we begin to understand more and more what God is calling us to do – to be.  And sometimes, like Jonah (as in Jonah and the whale) we might well want to run away from whatever it is God is asking of us.

We don’t know whether John the Baptist ever a moment like that had, as he grew up and began to understand what God wanted for his life. It wouldn’t surprise me if he did, but for John going into the desert wasn’t a running away or an escape. It was the landscape in which his most important ministry would come to be fulfilled.

St Paul tells the Christians in Corinth that they are called to be saints. Being a Christian and following God’s call doesn’t always lead to glamour or popularity. Usually, it’s the opposite.

If we read about the life of any of the saints we find hardship and struggle. Finding our role in God’s purposes can be a humbling and a challenging task.

John the Baptist understood that he wasn’t the main focus of what God was doing. He knew that he was being called to prepare people for the arrival of someone else. He was the hinge, if you like, for people to turn to God and be ready for what was about to happen.

The poet RS Thomas has a lovely phrase in his poem ‘Gloria’, which points us to a God who is at work in these moments of transition:

He wrote:

Because you are not there when I turn,

But are in the turning, Gloria.

Perhaps our pride and desire for recognition would make us struggle if we found God calling us to be the hinge. But God is here too, in the hidden but essential work of drawing people into the Kingdom, whose coming we pray for at every service. Like John the Baptist we are often called to point away from ourselves, asking people to focus their attention on the ‘Lamb of God’. When John does that, the narrative leaves him behind. One moment we are standing with John and two of his disciples – the next, they have left him, followed Jesus, and the Gospel story goes with them.  And that is the sacrifice of love. To know what we are being called to do. To play our part and open the door for people to explore the wonder and beauty of God’s love.

Amen.

“He has spoken to us by a Son” – The Very Reverend Dominic Barrington, Dean of York

“Long ago God spoke to our ancestors in many and various ways by the prophets, but in these last days he has spoken to us by a Son”.

Those of you with memories able to stretch back to the winter of 1979 may recall that the darkness and gloom of that December was brightened by a chart-topping release from the legendary Swedish group Abba, then at the very height of its popularity. Echoing Martin Luther King’s famous rhetoric from the March on Washington of 1963, they claimed, “I have a dream…”

However, unlike Dr King’s dream, which was rooted in a vision of action taken by humanity – rooted in the vision of white and black children being brave enough to join hands and proclaim justice and liberty together – unlike Dr King’s dream of humanity in action, Abba’s dream focused on different beings: “I believe in angels / something good in everything I see / I believe in angels / When I know the time is ripe for me I’ll cross the stream / I have a dream.”

I was reflecting on the difference between angels and humans, as I pondered the opening of the letter to the Hebrews a few days ago, while being driven alongside the River Jordan, journeying south through Israel and the West Bank from the Sea of Galilee to Jericho, and thence to Jerusalem. In Biblical times, the Jordan was a substantial, fast-flowing river, but the demands of agricultural irrigation in modern times has reduced its grandeur, and it can sometimes look little more than a stream – albeit a stream which still serves as the eastern border of what Joshua would have regarded as being the ‘Promised Land’.

In our first reading, of course, the ‘stream’ was so abundant, it being ‘the time of harvest’, the Jordan is actually bursting its banks, making the idea of crossing into that Promised Land something of a challenge – at least, a challenge for those who cannot face getting wet. And so, just as he did at the very start of their journey, some forty years previously, God parts the waters. And Joshua, and the Ark, and the priests, and the entire nation ‘crossed over opposite Jericho’ – crossed over on dry ground – to start a new existence – a new life,  as the People of God… and, if they had lived out that vocation properly, that might have been the end of the story.

But as you turn the pages of the Hebrew Scriptures through the books of Samuel and of the kings, and as we read the words of the great prophets, we are reminded of the sinful nature of humanity, and of the failure of the Israelites to live up to their side of God’s covenant with them – a failure which, so the writers and the prophets make clear, ultimately leads to the destruction of the kingdom of Israel, a bitter exile, and a sense of alienation between God and God’s people.

Which – to cut a long story very short – which is why our second reading begins with the words, Long ago God spoke to our ancestors in many and various ways by the prophets, but in these last days he has spoken to us by a Son.

Because the dream had failed. The dream had been betrayed. The inherent sinfulness and self-centredness of humanity had destroyed the dream that had led to that crossing of the stream by Joshua Mark I. That is why it was time to dream again. But to dream a dream that forsook the ‘many and various ways’ of the past – a dream that no longer relied on angels or messengers. A dream in which, in effect, God said, “this time it’s personal…”

Which is why, of course, he was named Joshua. Because the Hebrew name Yeshua – which in English we say as Joshua and which simply means ‘the Lord saves’ – the Hebrew name Yeshua, when it was translated into Greek, became Iesous, and in English, of course, that becomes Jesus. But tonight, when we mark again the beginning of ‘these last days’ in which God has ‘spoken to us by a Son’, we recognise that this Son is none other than Joshua Mark II – the new Joshua, setting out to recreate a great dream, and this time, doing it properly.

Which is why Joshua Mark II makes just the same journey as Joshua Mark I. If you read the account of Jesus’ baptism in the Fourth Gospel we discover that the precise place John is baptizing is not actually in that fast-flowing river itself, but in a place called ‘Bethany beyond the Jordan’ – a tributary rather like a railway siding, connected and adjacent to the river, but just on the eastern side of it, from a Biblical perspective – just ‘beyond’ it, in what is now the Kingdom of Jordan – right across from Jericho, exactly where Joshua Mark I had come to the river so many centuries previously.

So Joshua Mark II follows the steps of Joshua Mark I to the river. But there the similarity ends. Because Joshua Mark II is not going to command the river to stop flowing in order  that he might pass through on dry land. The first people of Israel liked God to keep them dry, but Jesus founds the new Israel – the new people of God – by being plunged (the meaning of the word ‘baptize’) into the river at the hands of John. By being submerged as he crosses the stream, so that he might start afresh, and reconstitute a new Israel whose very foundational identity is tied up in a rebirth that confronts the depths, rather than avoiding them. A new Israel whose very mission – whose dream, if you like – is about a righting of the wrongs of human sinfulness and self-centredness, about proclaiming justice and reconciliation… about living out a love that is uniquely costly in its self-sacrifice.

The dream of the founder of the new Israel, the new People of God… the dream of Joshua Mark II goes beyond the ‘fairy-tale’ of Abba’s stream-crossing at the hands of angels or messengers. For in Jesus, as the author of Hebrews makes all too plain, God does this himself. And God doesn’t tip-toe around the dry edges of the stream – God wades right in, to inaugurate a new reign of justice, of mercy, of righteousness and love.

And if the body of the one we call the Christ could do that, then we, who, through our own baptism lay claim to being the Body of Christ – we, too, are called into the deep waters of God’s real purposes for God’s world – a fact that was most certainly not lost on Dr King, whose 97^th birthday would be this coming Thursday, and whose dream immersed him in the pursuit of a righteousness ‘like a mighty stream’.

Dr King knew that, while angels have their place in God’s universe, sometimes God’s mission and purpose needs the commitment of those who are not just messengers, and he entered the deep waters of that call, even at the almost inevitable cost of his life in a United States that was still deeply segregated in terms of its economics, its housing and its education policies.

Today, as we recall the baptism of the Anointed One we learn is none other than Yeshua Mark II, and therefore as we recall our own baptism, the only question is whether we can stop shillyshallying around the edges of the water and wade right in, whatever the cost.

Amen.

“The God Who Expands Our Imagination” – The Reverend Canon Timothy Goode, Congregational Discipleship and Nurture

“For we observed his star at its rising, and have come to pay him homage.”

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

The Feast of the Epiphany begins with people who notice what others ignore.

While kings are guarding power, priests are guarding tradition, and empires are guarding their borders, a small group of outsiders pay attention to the sky – and allow what they see to disturb them. They notice something that does not fit their settled explanations of how the world works. And instead of dismissing it, explaining it away, or domesticating it, they follow it. That decision – to notice, to attend, to follow – is the real drama of Epiphany.

This feast is not about God suddenly arriving on the scene. God has already come. Epiphany is about the slow, risky awakening of human attention. It is about learning to recognise what has been present all along but has not yet been received.

At the heart of Epiphany lies a gift without which faith itself withers: the gift of imagination.

Imagination is not fantasy or escapism. It is not wishful thinking or religious decoration. Imagination is the human capacity to hold open the possibility that reality is more spacious, more relational, and more surprising than our assumptions allow. It is the ability to resist shrinking the world to what feels manageable or safe. And it is this fragile, easily suppressed gift that sits at the centre of the Epiphany story.

The Magi are people shaped by imagination. They notice something that interrupts their usual patterns of meaning, and rather than closing it down, they allow it to call them into change – re-orienting their lives, re-shaping their journeys, and drawing them into a vocation they had not yet named. They imagine that the heavens might be speaking. They imagine that the birth of a child, far from palaces and power, could be bound up with the hopes of the world. They imagine themselves into a story that is not their own – and that imaginative leap sets them on a path marked by risk, generosity, and vulnerability.

Without imagination, there is no Epiphany.

The Magi do not begin with certainty. They begin with attentiveness. Their faithfulness lies not in possessing the right answers, but in refusing to close the mystery too quickly. They are willing to follow a question rather than control a conclusion.

And this matters, because imagination is the gateway to empathy.

To imagine that another person’s story matters.

To imagine that God might be at work beyond the boundaries we have drawn.

To imagine that vulnerability, rather than dominance, might be the place where truth is disclosed.

This is precisely why Epiphany is so unsettling – and why it remains such a threat to systems built on fear and control.

Imagination destabilises the stories that tell us the world must remain exactly as it is. It loosens the grip of inevitability. It makes room for mercy. And it is here that Epiphany collides sharply with our contemporary culture wars.

Culture wars are not sustained primarily by argument. They are sustained by the deliberate narrowing of imagination. They train us to see the world in rigid binaries: us and them, pure and impure, deserving and undeserving. They reward certainty and punish curiosity. They teach us to stop imagining the interior lives of others – their histories, their wounds, their fears.

When imagination contracts, empathy soon suit. If I no longer imagine your fear, I can dismiss your need. If I no longer imagine your vulnerability, I can justify your exclusion. If I no longer imagine your humanity, cruelty becomes possible – even respectable.

The tragedy of culture wars is not only that they divide communities; it is that they diminish our shared humanity. They train us to protect our position rather than attend to one another. They make selfishness feel like strength and indifference feel like virtue. Epiphany stands as a refusal of that narrowing of the human spirit.

Notice what happens when the Magi finally arrive. They do not interrogate the child. They do not demand proof or explanation. They do not attempt to master what they encounter. Instead, they respond with reverence, generosity, and humility. They kneel – not because they understand everything, but because they recognise that they are in the presence of something that exceeds them. Here is imagination shaped by humility rather than control.

Their gifts are not a transaction. They are not payment for certainty or insurance against risk. They are acts of recognition – ways of honouring what they do not fully comprehend. This posture stands in stark contrast to the culture-war instinct to dominate, define, and defeat.

Epiphany reveals a God who refuses to be known through force.

The child at the centre of the story does not assert authority or prove worth. God entrusts the truth of the incarnation to the slow, vulnerable work of human attentiveness and love – to the willingness of strangers to recognise holiness without controlling it. And this has consequences for how we live.

If God chooses to be revealed in a body that is dependent, fragile, and exposed, then imagination becomes an ethical responsibility. To encounter such a God is to be invited into a way of attending others that resists fear and reduction: to imagine that the person we are tempted to dismiss carries a story we do not know; to imagine that the person we disagree with is more than the label we have given them; to imagine that the one rendered invisible by our systems bears the image of God.

When imagination is alive, empathy becomes possible. And when empathy is possible, cruelty becomes harder to justify.

Matthew tells us that the Magi return home by another road. This is not a sentimental detail; it is a spiritual truth. Once imagination has been expanded – once empathy has been awakened – the old routes no longer suffice.

Epiphany changes the map. It changes how we attend to others. It changes who we recognise as neighbour. And so Epiphany presses a question upon the Church today:

Are we a community that expands imagination – or one that polices it? Do our words make space for empathy – or do they shrink it? Do we help people imagine themselves into the lives of others – or do we reinforce the fears that make exclusion feel necessary?

God has already come among us – not as an idea to be defended, but as a life to be attended to.

The question Epiphany leaves with us is not whether God has been revealed, but whether we will allow our imagination to be stretched enough to become more fully human in response.

Amen.

Sermon for Midnight Mass 2025 – The Reverend Canon Timothy Goode, Congregational Discipleship and Nurture

‘You will find a child wrapped in bands of cloth and lying in a manger.’

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

Tonight, on this most holy night, we gather to celebrate the story of a birth. One birth, in one place, among countless births across the world. No headlines. No royal announcement. No social media countdown. Just a baby. And yet – somehow – the ground begins to shift. Old prophecies are dusted off. Power feels… uneasy.

This baby – this body – does nothing, says nothing, claims nothing. And still, this is what the Incarnation does: it shakes foundations and shows us where we’ve been building on shifting sand.

Because when God chooses to enter the world as a body, that body does not arrive politely, asking for a quiet corner of our lives. It arrives as a question: a sharp, searching, unsettling question, pressing on all our buried assumptions about power and worth, about whose body matters and which bodies count.

For all our crib scenes and carols, our Christmas trees and tinsel, Christmas is not sentimental theology. Christmas is disruptive theology. This baby does not come to us as an idea, a doctrine, or a religious symbol. This baby comes as a body: vulnerable, dependent, uncontrollable. And this is the scandal of Christmas: that God becomes skin and breath and bone; God becomes us.

We can cope with God as an idea. We’re good at arguing about God, defining God, writing essays about God. But God as a body? That is something else entirely. For a body can be targeted. A body can be rejected. A body can be labelled, excluded, controlled, made unsafe. And the moment God takes on a human body God chooses to reside inside all of that: all that danger, rejection, vulnerability, pain. From that moment on, our understanding of what it means to be human – our anthropology – is on trial.

The truth is, we’ve become rather skilled at sorting bodies. We divide them into good bodies and bad bodies, acceptable and unacceptable, worthy and disposable. We build our societies, our politics, even our laws, around these categories, these binaries, these acts of “othering”.

And into the middle of this anxious, divided world God becomes one body among many. Not powerful. Not idealised. Not safe and distant. But real flesh and blood: fragile, dependent, present, precarious, without privilege. And almost immediately, the conversations start. Not about love, but about control. Not about welcome, but about management. Because when some-body does not fit our neat groups and tidy tribes, we hurry to place it, define it, contain it – to make sure it doesn’t disturb or disrupt us.

This is the logic behind the binaries of our age: Who is in and who is out. Who is “us” and who is “them”. Who is deemed fully human and who is not.

These binaries offer us the comfort of simplicity – as if a human being could ever be neatly sorted – but that simplicity comes at a terrible cost: it hardens hearts, demands scapegoats, and makes the world ever more unstable and violent. It shrinks our image of God down to something we think we can control.

And as if that were not disturbing enough, the Incarnation does not come to do away with human violence. It comes to expose it. A defenceless body exposes our fear. A different body exposes our prejudice. A vulnerable body exposes our cruelty. A holy body exposes our hierarchies.

Before this body has spoken a single word, the sheer presence of this body begins to unveil who we really are. Because our culture wars are not, at heart, about abstract ideas. They are about bodies: Whose body is believed. Whose body is welcomed. Whose body is legislated against. Whose body is named “a problem”.

And in the middle of all of this stands this body – God incarnate, utterly powerless, a silent, forensic, unyielding question to every generation.

What if the very bodies we struggle to welcome, the very bodies we “other” – disabled bodies, LGBTI+ bodies, refugee and immigrant bodies – what if these are precisely the bodies in which God has chosen to dwell? Because that is the deeper revelation of the Incarnation: not only that God became a body, but that in becoming a body, God has changed forever how we speak of any body.

‘The grace of God has appeared’, writes Paul to Titus, ‘bringing salvation to all.’

Not to some of us. Not only to the respectable, the majority, the easily included. To all of us – to every-body, regardless of race, gender, sexuality, ability, nationality.

Jesus is born, not to feed our hunger for certainty, but to bring our false certainties crashing down. Not to build up our silos and tribes, but to tear down the walls of our prejudice. Not to reinforce our sense of righteous belonging, but to shine a fierce, piercing light on our privilege.

Until we finally dare to embrace every-body as wildly, gracefully stubbornly precious as the body God chose to wear, we will not have embraced the truth of Christmas.

For on that day when every-body – disabled, displaced, queer, scarred, ageing, neurodivergent – is finally received as sacrament – as holy ground – this great feast of Christmas will no longer be our story about Christ, but Christ’s own revolution in our midst, and finally Christ will be at the centre of Christmas.

Amen.

“Love is proved in the letting go” – Canon Peter Collier, Cathedral Reader

Psalm 113| 1 Sam 1: 1-20 | Rev 22: 10-21

Are you ready? Are all the presents bought, wrapped, and labelled? I am very conscious that for some with family abroad, that will have been done weeks ago. But I am sure some of us are still working on it all.

But leaving aside the presents you will buy and give; what about the presents you hope to receive? Is there something you really want, something you really really want? Have you dropped hints, or even said directly to your nearest and dearest – “please … I would love …”

We still have the letters our children wrote to Father Christmas and left out for him on the fireplace with the mince pie and carrot for the reindeer. I should perhaps confess that they were still writing them when they were 19 years old – by when their requests were for world peace and the end of poverty.

I guess for all of us there are things we long for, way beyond Christmas presents – things to do with our lives, our families, our circumstances, leaving aside those issues of world peace and the end of poverty.

Our OT lesson introduces us to Hannah who had one of those long-standing longings. Hannah really longed for a child. Not having one was really difficult for her, as it is for many others in her position.

It wasn’t even just the emptiness. Or even her sense that others were looking at her and looking down on her. Hannah was Elkanah’s first wife. And when after some time she had not had any children, he took a second wife, Penninah, who did bear him children, and it would seem she had many of them. You may be aware that polygamy was quite common in the OT society.

But we read that Elkanah loved Hannah. So when they went to make their sacrifices they would provide an animal to the priest, which would be killed and roasted on the fire, and they would be given portions back to eat themselves. And Elkanah used to give Hannah a double portion as an indication of his deep love for her. That wound Peninnah up big time. And she would mock and provoke Hannah really badly about her barrenness in order to irritate her quite deliberately. This went on year after year.

Hannah became increasingly sad. But Elkanah didn’t really get it. He didn’t understand the reality of her emptiness and sadness.

So there she was – despised by Penninah, misunderstood by Elkanah – and it went on year after year after year.

And so we come to another of the annual trips to Shiloh, where the ark of the covenant was kept in the Tent of Meeting.  It was the place for an annual celebration when everyone came together; it was probably the equivalent of our harvest festival. But the intentional gathering together of the family around a religious festival is perhaps more reminiscent of our family gatherings at Christmas. We come together, which can be an occasion that accentuates the pain that some of our families carry.

So it was with Hannah that this annual event again caused her great pain. Aware of all the family noise and happiness around her she just felt empty. So what do we read she did? We read that Hannah went to pray. When she was distressed and weeping bitterly, she poured out her heart to God. In one sense that seems counterintuitive. If God was responsible for her condition, surely God would be the last person she would go to, but Hannah did take her troubles to God. And so often with us God uses our troubles and trials to draw us towards himself.

So how does she pray? Her prayer mirrors the prayer of her people when they were slaves in Egypt – we can read about it in Exodus chapter 3, and we read there that God heard their cry and looked on their misery and came to intervene.

And this was now another significant moment in the history of God’s people. At the end of the preceding book, the book of Judges, we read there was no king in Israel and everyone did what was right in their own eyes. In due course God would give them a king and Samuel was to play a big role in the anointing of first Saul and then David. So the outcome of her prayer and God’s answer was to be very significant, although she had no idea of that.

But even as she prayed, she was misunderstood. Eli the priest did not get the depths of her spirituality; and that’s perhaps not surprising as he seems to have been generally rather slow on the uptake of things to do with God. However he does quickly recognise his mistake and gives her a blessing – wishing for her prayer, whatever it was, to be answered as she longs for.

And having poured out her heart in prayer she was comforted and no longer sad.

So, what was the prayer that had this effect? It was a prayer based in God’s generosity, goodness and grace. She recognised that everything comes for God and so everything we have belongs to him. We don’t know if this was her prayer year by year, but it was the place she had ultimately reached in her prayer.

And she promises that her son will be dedicated to God for the whole of his life. The custom at that time was for people to be dedicated as “Nazirites” wholly to God for several weeks or perhaps months. You can read about in Numbers ch 6. But Hannah was promising that any son God gave her would be devoted to God for his entire life.

Through her praying she was changed. Because prayer ultimately is about change within us rather than in our circumstances.

She still has this longing, but she understands that if it is answered, its fulfilment will belong to God, as its origin is in God.

And so it turned out to be. She did get what she longed for and she did give him back to God and she got much more as she had 3 more sons and 2 daughters.

But that is not the point. There was no hint in her prayer, or in her sense of answer, that she wanted or would ever have more than the one son. The point is that if everything we have is gift as it comes from God, it is always God’s.

As followers of Jesus Christ we are continually learning to hold everything we are and have in an open hand before God rather than possess it or cling to it.

I remember many years ago, we were in our first home with all our new stuff. Quite a lot was not new but it was special for us. And my late brother in law was staying with us and he was rather clumsy and one day we were sitting at the dining table and he was rocking backwards and forwards on his chair when there was an ominous cracking sound. He looked at us and aware of our sense of proud ownership of all this stuff he asked rather defensively and quizzically: “Jesus chair?”

Cecil Day Lewis has a well-known poem called “Walking Away”, and it is about parting from his son.

It concludes in this way:

I have had worse partings, but none that so
Gnaws at my mind still. Perhaps it is roughly
Saying what God alone could perfectly show –
How selfhood begins with a walking away,
And love is proved in the letting go.

Amen.

“Faith, hope and endurance in adversity” – The Reverend Eleanor Launders-Brown, Succentor

2 Thessalonians 3.6-13; Luke 21.5-19

You will be hated by all because of my name. But not a hair of your head will perish. By your endurance you will gain your souls.

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

41 years ago, a devastating fire engulfed the South Transept. It was only through the skill of the fire crews bringing down the roof, that the whole building wasn’t destroyed.

Some have speculated about conspiracies and hidden meanings behind that tragic event, and it is an example of our need to seek understanding and meaning in chaos.

Some people naively said that the fire, started by a lightning bolt was a sign at God’s anger at the controversial consecration of David Jenkins as Bishop of Durham. But the God I know wouldn’t do that, they certainly wouldn’t wait three days to do it if that was their intention!

They said he denied the virgin birth and the resurrection of Jesus. Bishop David was misquoted and his words taken out of context. He actually said that “The resurrection was not just a conjuring trick with bones.” And he was right, its so much more than that, but that’s a sermon for another day.

He challenged traditional views and faced a backlash for it.

He called out lazy assumptions that we simply believe what we’re told instead of seeking a living faith, wrestling with difficult topics and coming to our own informed conclusions.

His journey reminds us that standing firm in our beliefs can lead to persecution and misunderstanding. Yet, like the promise of Jesus, he found strength in enduring the trials. Our faith calls us to be courageous amidst opposition.

The fire was a devastating loss, but the controversy around it ignited conversations about faith, resilience, and the enduring spirit of a community. It mirrored what Jesus was talking about in our gospel reading. The temple faced destruction, and we too encounter fires of our own.

Jesus was in the temple, a place of beauty and reverence. The disciples were marvelling at the grandeur, seeing its magnificent stones and offerings.

Then Jesus drops a bombshell. He states it will all be destroyed. You can just see the look of disbelief on their faces. It’s a reminder that even in places where we feel secure and safe, change is inevitable.

Our gospel speaks directly into the heart of our life experience. It tells us that we will face challenges, trials, and tribulations. Jesus speaks of wars, insurrections, and natural disasters. But, in the midst of this ominous message, Jesus makes a promise. He tells the disciples that not a hair on their heads will perish and that by enduring, they will gain their souls. Telling us that, even in the face of adversity, there is always hope.

We live in a world where uncertainty seems to be the only constant. Just look around you at this beautiful building. I, like many of you are left at a loss for words to describe the wonder of this place, every time I look around, I see something new and it strengthens the closeness I feel to God when I’m in here.

Paul warns against idleness and encourages diligence in our work. This echoes the message from Luke where Jesus urges us to remain steadfast in our faith during difficult times. Both passages tell us that our faith should be active, not passive.

Jesus warns us that we will be questioned about our faith. But he also reassures us that we will not be alone. The Holy Spirit will empower us to speak boldly and truthfully in our defence. This promise is extended to each of us, inviting us to be witnesses to our faith every day even in the face of adversity, ridicule and rejection.

Think about the fires we are facing. It may be a personal struggle, a community issue, or the chaos which we see in the news every day.

Some of you are aware, I’ve had a personal battle with discrimination in the Navy and in the church.

Wrestling with faith and sexuality at a time when it was illegal in the forces prompted me to turn to a local church. It was a bold step to come forward at a time which could’ve cost me my career. Having built up the courage to seek guidance, I was banished from the building unless I considered some sort of therapy to “heal me” of my disease (his words, not mine!!)

I then went away to sea, and having no one to talk, my mental health plummeted, and things got as low as they possibly could.

But in all of that, God never left my side. God prevented me from doing something that I would regret. I was physically unable to move and when I accepted that hold, it became the warmest of embraces and I felt seen, acknowledged and valued by God for the first time.

It was people who abandoned me, not God. Things got a lot better after that. I had my happy ever after. God gave me someone to spend the rest of my life with, naval law changed, and I could finally begin to live as the person who I am, the person who God created.

I owe my life to God; it was given to me for a reason. That was when I decided to offer myself up for ordination and service to God.

We still live in a time when those who speak loudest are those who are opposed to and fearful of change. And unfortunately, by our silence, we become complicit in that voice. This is the image that is currently being presented to the wider world, but that’s not the church I know, it certainly isn’t true of our community here. But we are all guilty of apathy, just because an issue doesn’t affect us directly, we often can’t be that bothered to do anything about it.

Yes, we may be supportive of the issues raised, but our inaction and silence is the very thing that allows this prejudice and exclusion to continue.

I do get quite weary of banging my drum, here she goes again! Blah! Blah! Blah! When the abuse and derogatory comments come, and they will. To those people I say, I love you as God has called me to love you, but can you look inside yourself and by your words and actions, can you truly say the same to me?

The church is very divided. There is a lot of hurt and there is a lot of healing that needs to take place.

I can’t do this alone, and I know that the very Jesus who abides in me surrounds me and protects me, but it still hurts.

We at York Minster are in a privileged position. People look to us, as the Mother Church, for guidance. And when we speak, people hear.

As I put my head above the parapet, I would like to know that you have my back. That, together, we can be the catalyst for change. Together, we can make a difference.

Let’s make it clear to the world that York Minster is a place where everyone is welcomed, nurtured and accepted. That the beautiful building that we see reflecting God’s glory pales into the background of the beautiful people that are God’s people within it who are living as Christ did.

Speaking up, calling out the injustices around us, not just scrolling on or passing idly by. We should be more than simply witnesses of hope and resilience to a world that so desperately needs it. We can be agents of the change that the world needs to see.

Hold on to that promise of endurance. Face these trials with courage, trust in God and each other.

We are called to speak bold truths, to act justly, and to love unconditionally.

The fire in the South transported was extinguished 41 years ago, and the beautiful building we sit in is a testament to what can come from the destruction of the fires we face. but unfortunately, there will be other fires for us to face. Remember that every fire we endure, God is with us, holding us, guiding us, and empowering us. Giving us the strength to endure as Jesus has called us to do and giving us the spirit and resolution to change these injustices, one act at a time.

Amen.

“What then are we to say about these things?” – The Very Reverend Dominic Barrington, Dean of York

During half term, with my family, I visited the Anne Frank House in the centre of Amsterdam. Our visit was at the end of the day, pushing into the evening, but the crowds were still substantial, as we made our way slowly around this otherwise unremarkable house in which Anne, her parents and elder sister, and four other Dutch Jews hid out of sight of the Nazis for some two years, prior to their arrest in the early August of 1944.

In each of the rooms, the excellently curated information on display contains quotations from Anne’s now famous diary, creating an almost unbearable sense of poignancy as you immerse yourself in the story of those terrible times. Her youthful naivety and profound sense of hope is palpable, and all the more moving in the light of her eventual fate in the disease-ridden huts of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp.

My wife, my teenage sons and I were pretty silent by the end of our visit – and we were not alone. Despite the exit of the exhibition containing the inevitable café and gift shop, the atmosphere was muted and subdued. Being brought face to face with the horrors of the Holocaust made personal in such a very particular – and in some ways, very unremarkable – setting, it was as if we were all, inwardly, echoing the words which we just heard from Saint Paul: What then are we to say about these things?

Anne, of course, would not have been silent. Her answers to that rhetorical question fill her extraordinary diaries. “It’s really a wonder that I haven’t dropped all my ideals, because they seem so absurd and impossible to carry out,” she wrote, “Yet I keep them, because in spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart.”

And, of course, that goodness of heart is one of the things that, today, we gather to remember. The sacrifices of so many, especially in the two world wars, who rose up to fight against those who sought to dominate and subjugate others through acts of intimidation and violence and warfare. The thousands upon thousands who gave their lives to ensure freedom and peace for others. That sacrificial generosity should never be forgotten.

So it is, indeed, good that we should speak of ‘these things’ – that we should know what to say about them. For such sacrifices should inculcate in us, and in those who come after us, a similar desire to live out such radical generosity, and demonstrate that Anne Frank was not wrong about the fundamental goodness of humanity.

But that is no longer enough. When Paul demands of us to speak about ‘these things’, there is more to say. For if we talk for just a few more moments about the Holocaust, then we should note that, despite the 1.2 million visitors that come to the Anne Frank House each year, in Anne’s native Holland, a recent survey showed that 12% of Dutch adults believe the Holocaust to be a myth, or to be very greatly exaggerated. And if you focus on those under 40, that figure rises to 23%.

In Britain, the same percentage said they had never heard of the Holocaust, or – at best – knew very little about it, and over half were unaware that it resulted in the death of six million Jews. The figures for the United States are even more alarming.

More broadly, over 40% of British adults surveyed could not answer correctly which country was the principal enemy of the Allied forces, and over 50% did not know what the D Day Landings were. That, to my mind, suggests that our communal attempts to do some ‘remembering’ are not working as well as they should – and the consequences of this failure are alarming.

Writing in today’s Observer, the distinguished British historian Sir Anthony Seldon, powerfully recalls the optimism of the post-war government of Clement Atlee, who sought to deliver ‘a new Jerusalem’ for the people of Great Britain.  https://observer.co.uk/news/opinion-and-ideas/article/in-1945-we-said-never-again-yet-already-weve-forgotten

Seldon contrasts it painfully with the reality we experience today, writing:

Unemployment, ill health, homelessness and despair are reaching levels that would have shocked the architects of the new Jerusalem. Nigel Farage’s Reform party has a credible chance of winning the general election due in 2029. Abroad, we see Europe divided and at war. In Germany, [the far right populist party] Alternative für Deutschland achieved its best results, with 21% of the popular vote. Far-right parties are performing strongly in France, Italy, Austria and Belgium. Russia is intent on beating Ukraine, and is shamelessly destabilising Eastern European countries.

In short, to summarize Sir Anthony’s words, the world feels as if it is an ever more dangerous place, despite the fact that we ought to know better. All of which says to me that we are not doing this ‘remembering’ thing properly. All of which says to me that we are not using our memories. Or, to put it in the language of St Paul, we have not come up with a proper answer to his blunt question that opened our second reading, when he demands of us What then are we to say about these things?

If you were to open your Bible and glance back at Romans Chapter Eight, from which we have just heard, you would find Paul explicitly addressing what he calls ‘the sufferings of this present time’. But he is clear that for God’s children, present-day sufferings do not diminish the hope of our calling – our calling to change the world, our calling to make the world a better place, our calling – like Atlee – to build ‘a new Jerusalem’ fit for a people committed to peace and justice. And Paul, as we heard, is clear that if we strive to do this, then nothing in all of creation ‘will be able to separate us from the love of God’.

But that’s only going to happen if we start remembering properly, and using our memories to fulfil that vision. Sir Athony reflected on the celebrations this year of the 80^th anniversary of the ending of the Second World War:

We have … forgotten the lessons of the second world war. This summer, on the 80th anniversary, the bunting came out, books were published and war films and documentaries were shown. It felt cheap and vulgar. We were remembering winning a war, not why the war had been fought.

And with that forgetfulness, we find ourselves incapable of knowing how to answer Paul’s demanding question: What then are we to say about these things?

When the young Alice of Lewis Carroll’s Victorian children’s novels steps through the Looking Glass, she encounters the White Queen – a confused and confusing individual who explains that she lives ‘backwards through time’, as a result of which, she has a memory which ‘works both ways’. And when the bewildered Alice explains that she is unable to remember things before they have happened, her new friend exclaims, “It’s a poor sort of memory that only works backward.”

Whether Anne Frank knew Lewis Carroll’s books, I have no idea, but she would, I am sure, have agreed with the White Queen. For Anne was clear that, in her own words, “I want to go on living even after my death” – a fate that has been amply fulfilled by her remarkable diaries. Fulfilled, because her diaries that chronicle her memories of this most awful period of human history have been shared across the globe in every generation since those darkest of days. Shared, in the hope that we are called to realise, the hope that such terrible times could nor arise again.

But we will only be able to do that if we can work out, as Saint Paul demands of us, What then are we to say about these things?

And if we are serious in sharing Paul’s belief that the ‘sufferings of these present times’ can make us ‘more than conquerors through him who loved us’, then we need to make our memories work forwards, and not just backwards. For to do anything less is to dishonour those whom we remember today. And then we might, just possibly, start to change the world to be more Christ-like – to achieve that vision of ‘a new Jerusalem’. For as young Anne said in one of her last recorded remarks, “How wonderful it is that no one has to wait even a minute to start gradually changing the world.”

Amen.

“Mortality, Memory and Meaning” – The Reverend Canon Maggie McLean, Missioner

In the past, people might have thought it strange that hooded figures bringing death would be the highlight of a popular TV show in October 2025. But for anyone watching Traitors the question of who will stay, and who will be visited by the grim reaper, is a tantalising spectacle. Perhaps our mortality is so serious, that we can only talk about it lightly.

Rather like the many euphemisms we have for death, entertainment is simply another way in which we speak indirectly about difficult or unanswerable questions.

This week the Minster will be surrounded by children looking for small effigies of ghosts.

Hidden among railings and masonry, these figures are at the centre of an annual treasure hunt. As we approach Halloween, each evening will see some of the largest ghost tours of the year too. People out in the dark and the cold, being told chilling tales, and thinking about a York where different people once occupied the same space. It’s not for everyone, but the numbers taking part suggest that we continue to have a fascination with a past that dares to intrude on our present.

Our first reading this afternoon, from Ecclesiastes, seems appropriate to this season, taking a bleak if accurate view of the human condition and its inevitable end: “because all must go to their eternal home, and the mourners will go about the streets”.  While the prospect of an eternal home may be welcome for those taking leave, the consequence of loss is inevitably mourning. In poetic language the author of Ecclesiastes reminds us of all that will be broken, and our return to dust.

A little while ago I was speaking to a member of the Minster congregation. Quoting words that come from a hymn we often sing, Immortal Invisible, she reflected that she was probably in the ‘withering’ stage, but not quite yet in the ‘perishing’ phase, of her life.

I think we can all recognise this reality, especially in autumn, when much of the natural world is shedding leaves and preparing for winter. We don’t find it easy to talk about ‘perishing’.

The author of Ecclesiastes similarly uses indirect language to speak about our mortality, when: the silver cord is snapped, and the golden bowl is broken, and the pitcher is broken at the fountain, and the wheel broken at the cistern, and the dust returns to the earth as it was…

The bowl in particular reminds us of one of the ancient understandings, in which our physical nature is simply a container for our spiritual identity. Like oil or incense, when the bowl is broken, our essence is released. People often question and criticise our indirect language for death. Yet, as the author of Ecclesiastes demonstrates, poetic words say more than plain speaking ever can. The same writer says that for ‘everything there is a season’, and maybe direct words serve one purpose, and poetry another. The skill – the wisdom – is to judge the occasion and find the words that fit.

Living healthily with an awareness of our mortality has always been seen as a critical aspect of Christianity. It’s something alluded to in the second reading, from the Letter to Timothy.

It is the seriousness of a soldier’s work, and the risk it carries, that distances them from everyday concerns. The awareness that death might descend suddenly reframes the soldier’s perspective on life. The author of the letter suggests that Christians are in the same boat – living a life alert to its risks, but also with the conviction that God is with us at all times, and for eternity. The key thing, the letter to Timothy says, is not to become ‘entangled’ with the earthly so much that we miss the Divine.

Having lived in what is believed to be one of the most haunted properties in York, the ‘Plague House’, I can’t tell you that I’ve seen any spirits. But living in a property that’s centuries old was a daily reminder that people have gone before us and will come after us.

To live with that sober reality, even if we take it lightly at times, is a healthy way to sift the wheat from the chaff. To focus on a faith that will last, and to be “strong in the grace that is in Christ Jesus “.

Amen.

Sermon for The Eighteenth Sunday after Trinity – The Reverend Canon Timothy Goode, Congregational Discipleship and Nurture

Nehemiah 8.9–end and John 16.1–11

‘Go your way, eat the fat and drink sweet wine and send portions to those for whom nothing is prepared’

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

The people of Israel weep.

Not the polite, restrained weeping we sometimes witness in our pews or on television tributes, but the full-bodied, gut-wrenching tears of those who have seen too much, known too much, lost too much.

In our first reading, they have just heard the law read aloud – Ezra’s voice spreading through the people like rain over cracked soil. And in response, they are utterly undone. For these are not tears of reverence or of devotion. These are the tears of recognition. The law convicts them – not just of individual failings, but of communal amnesia. They weep because they remember what they have forgotten.

And into that shared grief, Nehemiah issues a command they and we do not expect:

“Do not mourn or weep… Go your way, eat the fat and drink sweet wine and send portions to those for whom nothing is prepared… for the joy of the Lord is your strength.”

It is a surprising command. It is not “repent harder.” It is not “punish yourselves until you feel worthy again.” Rather, it is “celebrate – and make sure everyone has enough to do the same.”

There is something profoundly countercultural about this command. In our own day, we live not in the ruins of Jerusalem but surrounded by the wreckage of our shared discourse. Culture wars rage across our institutions, our churches, our communities. We watch as nuance is exiled, empathy dismissed as weakness, and truth manipulated in the name of tribal loyalty.

The law we have forgotten is not the code of Moses, but the law of love, of neighbourliness, of communal obligation. And when that law is read again – whether by prophets, poets, or protesters – some weep, but others rage. We are a people not at peace with our past, and we are a people who are deeply suspicious of our future.

Into this context, our second reading offers another startling word.

Jesus says to his disciples, “I have said these things to you to keep you from stumbling. They will put you out of the synagogues… Indeed, the hour is coming when whoever kills you will think he is offering service to God.”

We are left in no doubt: the tearing apart of community is nothing new. Religious violence, righteous exclusion, doctrinal purging – these are not modern inventions. And Jesus’ words are not just warnings – they are diagnoses.

They remind us that some of the greatest harms are done by those who believe themselves to be guardians of truth. Those who exile others for the sake of “purity” do so believing they honour God.

In our own fractured landscape, we have seen how people on every side of every issue claim the moral high ground while digging trenches that make communion impossible.

But Jesus does not leave us there.

He goes on to say, “When the Spirit comes, he will prove the world wrong about sin and righteousness and judgment.”

The Spirit unmasks the falsity of our certainties. The Spirit shows us that sin is not what we thought it was; that righteousness is not owned by any one tribe; that judgment belongs not to us, but to the crucified and risen Christ.

This is forensic theology. The Spirit does not float above the fray but enters into it. Not to vindicate one faction over another, but to diagnose the deeper illness: the ways in which our violence, our divisions, our exclusions are built on false understandings of holiness and truth.

Our readings this evening call us to something braver than the culture wars permit.

They invite us to imagine a community not built on winning the argument, but on shared joy. Not on expelling the unclean, but on making sure all have enough to celebrate. Not on moral certainty, but on Spirit-led humility.

The people in Nehemiah’s day are told to feast, to eat the fat and drink sweet wine and to send portions to those for whom nothing is prepared. This is not just a command to rejoice – it is a command to remember the poor and the vulnerable in every single act of rejoicing.

Now imagine a church that measures its faith not by doctrinal alignment, but by whether the most vulnerable among them have enough to feast.

Now imagine a community that refuses the binary of winner and loser and instead lives out the messy, costly reality of shared life.

This is not weakness. This is not moral compromise. This, my friends, is resurrection strength.

The culture wars thrive on a scarcity mindset: if your truth is affirmed, mine is erased; if my experience is centred, yours is diminished. But the Spirit reveals the opposite: that when one part of the body is honoured, the whole body is strengthened. That joy, like manna, multiplies when shared.

The church has too often traded the Spirit for strategy, and joy for judgment. But joy is not an optional emotion – it is the theological act of resistance.

To feast in a wounded world is not to deny its pain – it is to insist that pain will not have the final word.

To weep when the law is read is not a failure – it is the first sign of awakening.

To send portions to those with nothing is to declare that no one will be left behind in the kingdom of God.

And so we are faced with a stark choice.

We can participate in the patterns of the world: misinformation, gatekeeping, scapegoating, polarising, proving ourselves right, regardless of the cost to others.

Or we can take the harder path: of Spirit-disruption, of wounded joy, of communities that listen, make space for difference and diversity and dwell together in the tension of not always agreeing – but always, always loving.

Jesus says, “I tell you the truth: it is to your advantage that I go away.” These are, on the surface, strange words. But the presence of Christ withdraws, so the Spirit of Christ can come. This is theological decentralisation. The Incarnate One who once walked among us in one body now calls us, you and me, to be his body – many members, one wounded-and-risen whole.

This is the antidote to our present culture wars: not the erasure of difference, but the bearing of it together in joy. Not uniformity, but cruciform unity.

So let us read the law again, with tears in our eyes and bread in our hands. Let us welcome the Spirit who will prove the world wrong – and us, too. Let us feast, share, and build a community that is less concerned with being right and utterly focuses on being reconciled. For when we do, we will find that Nehemiah is absolutely right, the joy of the Lord is our strength.

Amen.

“Weak pleading or courageous insistence” – The Reverend Canon Maggie McLean, Missioner

There is a lot packed into this parable recorded in Luke and It’s worth spending a moment or two unpacking what it says. I guess that many of us might have an image of the widow even though we know almost nothing about her. We might imagine loneliness; powerlessness; marginality. Yet none of the text tells us this. All we know is her loss, but not whether it was long ago or recently. Maybe she is wealthy; relatively independent and well educated. We simply don’t know. But we do know that she believes she has suffered an injustice. Perhaps something connected with her bereavement – a matter of inheritance? Who knows. What we do know is that she was persistent.

The judge, on the other hand, is high and mighty. Like the labour party of Tony Blair, he doesn’t ’do God’. Equally, he seems aloof from what people think about him. But the key issue, it seems to me, is that he doesn’t do his job. The widow keeps coming because he’s failed to attend to her cause or make a decision. Only her persistence compels him to do what he’s supposed to do: To pronounce judgement.

So, is this weak pleading or courageous insistence?

It is for us to decide.

Down the centuries women who have suffered injustice have risked much by appealing for an outcome. The mothers of the Plaza de Mayo in Buenos Aires are just one example. In Gaza and elsewhere women will turn their despair and outrage into a demand for restitution to be made.

Last week I was fortunate enough to see Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure performed by the RSC in Stratford. Despite various reconciliations at the end (and forced marriages) it’s not a play that is comforting or amusing. The production team clearly knew that and they began, before the first word was spoken, to show images of all the men whose conduct has been questioned in recent years. Men who have used their place and their power to satisfy their own desires and obstruct justice.

Perhaps what was most depressing for me was to think that, across an arch of 500 years – half a millennium – nothing has changed. And of course, going back to our parable today, that story stretched much, much further back into history. Think of the woman caught in adultery in John’s Gospel. Thrown down before Jesus with men standing by telling him to judge her. But where was the man?

In Measure for Measure the full horror of so many women’s experience is expressed in painstaking detail when Isabella threatens to expose her unjust judge. Alone together, Angelo simply laughs in her face, asking: “Who will believe thee Isabel?” His speech makes it abundantly clear that say what she will, no one will take her word over his. As he put it at the end of his address to her: “my false o’erweighs your true”.

Seeking justice implies vulnerability. The courage of the widow in Luke’s Gospel is to refuse to be swept aside by denial; or to be hushed by the stare of authority. She will not be silent; will not be biddable; will not simply walk away. She demands justice.

It might seem a minor detail, but it’s interesting that Jesus is telling this parable to his disciples to encourage them not to lose heart. He chooses the actions of a woman to model the behaviour they will need to adopt. They aren’t to be like the judge, in his authority and power. It’s probably not how many preachers address this parable, but I have to ask, isn’t Jesus saying to his male apostles – you need to model your faith on the example of a powerless woman?

As the parable concludes we are told that God isn’t like the judge in this story. Eventually, simply for a quiet life, the earthly judge gives the woman the justice she demands. As Jesus says, God is utterly and completely different from this judge. God brings justice – God is justice – it’s in the essence of what we understand about the God we worship. Our God is attentive to the cry of the widow, and to every petition that we make. Rather than waiting to be ground into submission, the God we love and worship wants to work with us to bring justice to the world today. And how desperately needed that justice is, in so many places and among so many people.

This parable calls to us, each of us, to model our lives on the courageous outsider; the second-class citizen; the one whose voice isn’t likely to be believed. It is part of the radical message of the Gospel, as when Jesus put a child into their midst, that confounds the values and expectations of the world. This is different; Jesus is different; the Gospel is different. Unless we learn that, we can never enter the Kingdom of God.

Amen.