Interpreted by love - the Vicar

Interpreted by Love. It’s the final line of one of the verses of Dear Lord and Father of Mankind, which we sang at a wedding here yesterday:

O Sabbath rest by Galilee!
O calm of hills above,
where Jesus knelt to share with thee
the silence of eternity,
interpreted by love.

Some hymns are so familiar you don’t even register the words anymore. You think, sure, it’s familiar words, a pretty tune; Reminds me of school, or chapel, or my father; But read it again some time. It’s all words about noise and quiet. And more particularly the exchange of noise for quiet. Those who heard the call beside the Syrian sea: They rise up and follow thee, without a word. Our strivings, strain and stress are calmed by drops of quietness, Till we find the beauty of thy peace. The noise of the earthquake, wind and fire, are made dumb by the still small voice of calm.

Then in the middle verse, in rest and calm, Jesus shares the silence of eternity, interpreted by love. The great actor Kevin Cline was on Graham Norton this weekend, describing how acting Shakespeare outdoors in Central Park, he’d known moments in the middle of that great city where the intensity of the drama had created meaningful silence – the intensity of deliberate quiet, a pregnant silence, Concentrated in a moment of drama, shared by a large gathering.

Evensong may not contain a great deal of silence. But it’s intended to create a time of prayer, a time where words are not just words but ethereal, bourn on music; As St Augustine famously said, ‘the one who sings prays twice’. We are setting aside noise and desire, sense and the flesh, Our strivings, strain and stress, our anxiety, Our foolish ways; To find in the music of prayer, the prayer of music, the beauty of thy peace. But I’m more struck by the line I began with: Interpreted by love. I challenge anyone here to come up with a better summary of Christian faith than those three words: Interpreted by love.

What we call the theology of the Incarnation, the joy that remains ever popular in the anticipation of Christmas, the absolute veneration that abounds in Europe for Mary, Jesus’ mother, derives from our experience of the agony and hope and joy and fear and the wildness of physical birth: Interpreted by love. Our Christian hope, the terror or equanimity, our striving for peace, our grief, the experience of love and loss, our faith and uncertainty, derives from our experience of death, interpreted by love.

We celebrate weddings here, as we did yesterday (demonstrated by these gorgeous flowers), out of our experience of love and sex and our need for companionship and desire for a family, interpreted by love.

And actually the challenge of our faith is to keep looking at the world as interpreted by love. Because yes, we look at the great questions of physics, of conflict in the Middle East, of Le Fez nightclub, of the lonely grind of a day without joy, and we can interpret it as simply the laws of things hitting each other till they break or fall still – Newton and his apple.

Or we can interpret them by love. Which isn’t the empty platitude that everything happens for a reason. But it’s looking at the world and trying to make it better. It’s having hope that everything can be redeemed and made sense of. It’s trusting that it will end in neither a bang nor a whimper. It’s having the strength to start again and lay the first brick. It’s not giving in to fear, or apathy or despair. But trying to make music out of noise, To still the beating of our hearts and the noise of the guns. Visiting the sick – Encouraging a friend – Praying for peace. Life interpreted by love.

And isn’t our annual celebration of Harvest, a tale as old as time, also this: to give thanks for what we have received; To see the gifts of the land and those who work it, interpreted by love. Whether it’s a good harvest or a poor harvest, it is still celebrated. It’s an act of love to give thanks. It’s an act of love to share what we’ve received. Our Harvest celebration is our labour interpreted by love. And that is what it means to be rich towards God. Amen.

The Church: what it is and what it does - the Vicar

Who will rid me of this turbulent priest? Words sometimes heard in the parish office, in whispers at the back of church, stridently over coffee. (Hopefully not.) But certainly, an expletive of Henry II leading to the untimely death of Thomas Beckett 854 years ago. Today is 6 years since I was first invited to come to a service – it was a Harvest service – as the incoming vicar, shortly before I began ministry here. In the scope of St Margaret’s we are 151 years as a place of worship, 112 years as a Church of England, 101 years as a parish and this year we have completed a century of St Margaret’s vicars, of which there’ve only been 10, which is pretty modest. My intention this morning is to reflect back on the last six years to gain a fuller understanding of what a church is and what it does.

2019 was the year in which St Margaret’s opened its doors. We developed relationships with 7 schools and nurseries, rekindled our connection with Ashmead care home, started a playgroup in church and began hosting concerts. Attendance at services grew by 30%, parish income increased by £35,000 and the constant refrain I heard was how good it was that our doors were open. It was the year we hosted a Glass Door night shelter for people affected by homelessness and raised £5000 for other charities. We also finished a £100,000 project of ridding the sanctuary of dry and wet rot. We began new initiatives to prioritise the environment and gained a bronze eco-church award. We had discussions and sermons on our ethos and joined the Inclusive Church network, which affirms and challenges injustice in the church on its treatment of LGBTQIA+, as well as issues of race, neurodiversity and disability. Our worship was regularised to maintain the same shape each week with a printed order of service to make our worship more accessible, and we brought forward a nave altar to better connect the Eucharistic liturgy with the congregation. We gained a new crib, introduced informal worship for children and expanded our children’s ministry. Parish music developed under the excellent Mark Biggins, with more carol services. We brought in a new website, developed our social media and rebranded the Church. We hosted a wonderful Confirmation Service shortly followed by an epic Christmas Tree festival.

2020 started in the same vein. We bought new robes for the choir; we put in new signage across the churchyard; we installed a new sound system. And, as this was happening, at the break of the pandemic, we made a bold choice which has paid off 100-fold to install a streaming system in church that has been invaluable since. The pandemic rocked the world but worship continued and many will still remember fondly services streaming from houses as we developed to move between bedrooms and kitchen around Putney and kitchens in Yorkshire. Virtual playgroups and activities abounded, a group of up to 20 gathered to say daily prayers and support one another. The church gained a tabernacle for taking out the sacrament and a votive candle stand for passerby’s prayers. A cross was set up outside with a sign “We’ll Meet Again”.

Pastoral needs surged. Within days of the lockdown we had over 100 volunteers engaged in sometimes 25 deliveries of food and medicine a day to people across South West London, having referrals from Age UK, Wansdsworth hub and GPs. We were able to buy a weekly shop for a number of households out of local generosity, having quickly raised £10,000 with a steady stream of donations of food. Charitable fundraising became central and we raised in excess of £30,000 for other charities. Every Thursday we ran soup and cake out to 80 houses, a wonderful initiative that would become our Lunch on the Lane. Music recovered under Nick and we had silent movies with improvised organ, and the beginning of our recital programme, sometimes without audience, and then with a growing community returning to church. This is now a delightful pillar of our work here. Just this September we have hosted 5 excellent concerts including a concerto with full orchestra. They’ve raised £1200 for musicians and £1200 for the church and given the people of Putney access to the highest standard of live music for free.

2021 was a year of rebuilding and weathering the pandemic. It was also a year for turning 90 with Roger, Gordon, Marie, Ted and Humphrey. We began our choral scholarship programme which lifted the music. The playgroup got so large we split it to meet twice a week. We improved our lighting by making the current set up dimmable and bringing in spotlights for services and concerts. This got a good run through as we supported the first Putney Festival. We finally put in new fencing around the churchyard. Anne’s Quiet Days resumed, although throughout the pandemic we kept up regular talks, discussion groups, a book club and an excellent Churches Together Lent Course.

In 2022 we came out of the pandemic hiatus and grew past our pre-pandemic records. We took on more civic roles, becoming a polling station for the first time, celebrating the Platinum Jubilee and then gathering the communities response to the death of her majesty, the Queen. Our environmental agenda continued and we replaced our boiler with a condensing boiler and began climate cafes. And in a critical move we developed the crypt which now houses a music school, Pilates, classes, one to one teaching, coaching and yoga. In the September just gone the crypt brought in £1000 for the church. Our director of music position seemed to have taken on the curse of Harry Potter’s Defense Against the Dark Arts teacher, as Nick was replaced by Michael. In the Summer Rhiannon ran a second Putney Festival with four sold-out performances of La Boheme with professionals, a community chorus and a children’s chorus. The biggest change of the year was bringing in chairs for pews with a grand auction to see them off. Our three-fold pattern of community engagement in a very busy playgroup, community lunch and Sunday concert became set; flexible seating was pivotal. Charitable fundraising for other charities continues with an average of £15,000 raised each year.

2023 was a big year. Our services recorded the highest attendance this millennium, not counting up to 50 people who stream the service each week. Our children’s choir boomed into existence with a community choir now of over 50 and between 6 and 20 children singing in services each week. We’ve purchased a new piano from donations which pianists and audiences love. Musicians hiring the church has taken off – just this September church hire raised £2300. Concerts continue including this year a fundraiser for Sally’s Ukraine Ambulance Mission. raising over £13,000 each year since. Putney Arts Theatre came and performed in our garden for the first time; We gained a curate who was immediately taken to heart, And licensed a reader from a churchwarden. Rhiannon took over as the Defence Against the Dark Arts teacher, and our music immediately diversified to better represent our parish and its ethos, with an injection of great singers to aid the choir. Mark brought in our new beautiful Nave Altar which makes much better sense of our worship, As well as a choir wardrobe and toy cupboard to support our burgeoning activities. In this year the garden started to receive a wonderful make-over. Having created more light with the removal of trees our side garden has been transformed and is now also home to a forest nursery twice a day. The Worth project continued apace; the area around the halls cleared, a new shed built and the memorial garden transported to the West of the church, which has created a beautiful new area. The project concluded at the end of the year with refurbished halls, new toilets and kitchen, and the Worth Parish Centre. It was blessed at Epiphany by Bishop Christopher.

2024 has been a year of recovery for the parish funds but the gardens have improved dramatically under Sue, our fundraising and community activities are strong and our Sunday congregation continues to grow.

In 6 years church attendance and membership has increased by over 50%. We have driven up the church’s income by 50%. We’ve conducted, I think, 61 baptisms, 25 weddings, 117 funerals. More than 100 free lunches – proving the cynics wrong! A similar number of concerts making us probably the most notable live classical music venue in Wandsworth. We’ve contributed probably close to £100,000 to other charities – Glass Door, Rackets Cubed, Christian Aid, the British Legion, the DEC campaigns, and many others; Then there are the many contributions we make in the care and support of our community, And our hub that houses so many small businesses and community groups, creating space for faith, the arts, culture, community and the common good to flourish. If you were here yesterday lunchtime, in the sunshine, you would have seen a Putney-based children’s healthy food company filming in our halls and front garden, with children playing everywhere; You would have seen kickboxing in the lower hall. Music lessons in the crypt. Passersby investigating the church and saying a prayer, And a memorial service for a couple who were married here in 1959, taking place among the roses. That is church. What it is and what it does.

The Church we’re constantly told is in decline. riven with in-fighting. And yet the simple worship here, The careful stewardship of our inheritance, The hard work of building a community that is open, positive and engaged, Shows that the kingdom of God is there by the grace of God to be discovered.

And as we celebrate the dedication of our church today to an ordinary girl who stood up for her faith in a time of great darkness; We dedicate this service to those we remember from the last six years, and on whose work we build: Christopher Trott, Elizabeth Miller, Ralph Bonnett, Alan Fell, Ian Lechmere, Elizabeth Worth, Ann Fell, Jack Miller, Jean Brooker, John Tholstrup, Roger Power, Joyce Brooks, John Marston, Val Howdle, Juergen Simonson, John Driver, Les Farr, Joyce Brooks, Ernie Ordway, June Wakefield, Claire Fennell, Jean Bonnett and Ted Francis; To the glory of God. Amen.

The little door - the Revd Dr Brutus Green

Yesterday I went to Harry Potter world. One of the great things about having children is that you can indulge in things you might otherwise miss as a sophisticated bachelor about town. There are many more difficult things about children, as Helen and Martin already know! Having said that, I saw one man, who didn’t obviously have a partner or children who with great delight was riding a broomstick in a greenscreen room while the technology created scenes from the Harry Potter film around him. I didn’t judge. Though that may be why he doesn’t obviously have a partner or children. But what was charming, was the apparent joy everyone was taking in magic. There’s a very evident unsupernatural magic in the astounding and vast technical and imaginative efforts that go into creating the films, but by and large people were there principally to enjoy the imaginative world of witchcraft and wizardry.

What really struck me as peculiar though was the incredibly large gift-shop. Throughout there was a kind of Jack Wills vibe. Jack Wills is a clothing shop which opened around the millennium but basically traded off an inauthentic old-fashioned trad British look, a sort of fake Ryder and Ames, if you’ve ever been to Cambridge. Chariots of Fire but with more hoodies. The Hogswart’s vibe available-in-store is a similar pastiche of cathedrals, public schools, and Oxbridge, with a hint of London Blitz, and people were buying up scarves, robes and knitwear by the armful – All seeking a little magic through merch. If you’ve read Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited, or seen the excellent BBC adaptation – not the film (awful), – you’ll remember Charles Ryder speaking of the little door in the wall. He finds it at university, leading to a world of beauty, aristocracy, fine wines and big houses. There are no shortage of places in Britain that have this sense of age, power, meaning, beauty and possibility; Places that create an immediate sense of nostalgia for a hidden, exclusive world. Places where the feeling of old magic runs deep; That reignite our sense of possibility, meaning and specialness in the world. and when we turn away to the ordinary businesses of living, making money, bills, putting the rubbish out; we feel a sense of loss – a little bit like stacking chairs after choral evensong.

I should perhaps have warned you before starting off with Harry Potter. I’m told my predecessor took a dim view of girls dressing up as witches. JK Rowling herself, though, had a comprehensively Church of England schooling, and I’ve heard the series described as a Christian allegory, But, whatever you think, a grey world stripped of magic and wonder is a greater threat to the Christian faith than those whose interest in the dark arts is overly-enthusiastic. We live in a rather depressing era where the dullness of a Dursley-esque Dawkins is more harmful than the villany of Voldemort.

I bring this up because today we celebrate St Michael and All Angels, which I think matters for two reasons. The first is about how we look at the world around us – Our Weltanshauung, as the Germans call it (for short) – What is key for us as Christians is that there are more things in heaven and earth than in Richard Dawkins’ philosophy. And I think this is common even for atheists. I’ve met many who beat their chests, crying out science! Science! But are fascinated by ghosts, or read their horoscopes, avoid ladders or salute magpies. We are all Nathaniels: There are stranger things, but also greater things to be seen than these. The view of the world as a machine can be attractive – as it suggest we might see it, know it, control it, completely. But creation is not a machine, and remains full of secrets.

Angels, themselves, come in many forms: There’s the angel of the Lord, which is effectively how God communicates to the Hebrews in the Old Testament. There’s the archangels Gabriel, Raphael, Uriel and Raguel, named in the Bible and Apocrypha; There’s the angels of popular culture: of Robbie Williams, City of Angels, Highway to Heaven and Dogma. Throughout our tradition, epitomised by writers like Dante and Milton, there’s layers and ranks of angels ascending and descending, like on Jacob’s ladder – A cosmology in creation of dominions and powers above and below. It might be seen as mythic, but the contrast is with those who cannot think beyond a universe which is simply material, but does not matter.

To me, angels are a symbol of that hidden door: That in certain places we might find a holiness, or a greatness, or a beauty, a peace that is more than architecture and atmosphere; That there are those awesome places – where we might say: ‘this is the house of God’ or ‘the gate of heaven’. In certain ideas, in poetry, music and writing, we might be changed by a sense of truth or insight, a grasp of what is really important; In certain people we recognise something like a soul, there is a communion; those forms of love that help us transcend our mundane nature; In sacrament and worship, we are more than a small club of well meaning people in Putney, more than the sum of our parts, more than bread and wine; more than water declaring that this is not just a child, but a child of God. and a joined congregation of saints and angels meeting in the eternal praise of God.

The second reason why I think angels matter is because they point to a struggle between good and evil. St Michael defeating the dragon, that old serpent and fallen angel, Lucifer. As with Voldemort, evil is no longer the principle enemy of Christ. T.S Eliot wrote: “So far as we are human, what we do must be either evil or good; so far as we do evil or good, we are human; and it is better, in a paradoxical way, to do evil than to do nothing: at least, we exist. It is true to say that the glory of man is his capacity for salvation; it is also true to say that his glory is his capacity for damnation.” This isn’t about one of those cats – Mr Mistoffelees or the master of depravity, Andrew Lloyd Webber, sorry, no, MacCavity – Eliot is writing about the poet Baudelaire, Who he appreciates for his penchant for evil. Eliot’s point is about moral seriousness. He’s saying our decisions and actions matter.

If we were to consider some robot invested with AI: It will almost certainly be smarter than us. Better at maths. Able now to write a million books just like Harry Potter – as the million monkeys required to write Shakespeare are now hard at work in the internet – Our robot would be stronger – a better employee, without needing breaks and sick-leave. It’s entirely imaginable that before long we’ll have a robotic work force. But running algorithms isn’t the same as making moral choices. Robots are not good or evil, capable of salvation or damnation. Robots don’t and will never matter.

The materialist might be able to analyse your biology – map your genes, trace your family tree – gleaning your relationship with your mother from the couch; Might track social and national trends; In short run the data on your previous choices, your biological, psychological, sociological position; And across the nation they might predict elections, nudge behaviour, predict a housing boom, But they cannot make an individual choose, They cannot take away your freedom. They can’t in this moment take from you, your ability to choose good or evil. Humans are not machines, as much as this might make life easier. We have this ability to dream dreams – for good and ill. We are not expendable; to be human is to do evil or good. To rise with St Michael, or fall in with the devil.

Harry Potter is the classic Bildungsroman for our times – A novel of education. He chooses between Slytherin and Griffindor, He discovers himself through his family, his school, his friends, his enemies, by making mistakes and finding his courage. He knows Good and Evil. He discovers that little door that unlocks holiness, and vice, beauty and terror, magic and mystery, and a vault full of golin-gold. As today we give thanks for this non-human world, and all the magic of creation, let us leave space for those things which may exceed our understanding, but point to what is eternal. And we remember the eternal significance of our actions, praying that our choices would be of God and his goodness, and for little Jack and his family that they find in this world all the magic and meaning and goodness it has to offer. And we pray that our worship would lead us to that great choir that forever sings his praises. Amen.

All too well - the Revd Dr Brutus Green

There’s a Taylor Swift pop song which in Millennial self-indulgence drags out the break-up of a relationship over ten long minutes. There’s also a four-minute version for the masses; You might think the vicar should also keep his sermons to four minutes, But for die-hard Swifties like myself, only the ten minute version will do.

The song turns on the phrase “All too well.” I remember it all too well. So the song begins as she remembers him nearly running a red light because he was looking at her (Which doesn’t surprise me because whenever I watch American films I get uncomfortable at how drivers don’t look at the road); Then they’re dancing in the refrigerator light. And she remembers it all too well. And they make their promises to one another, She remembers it. All too well. But then there’s the break-up, she’s running scared, She remembers it all too well. He’s “casually cruel in the name of being honest” – Good line – the repetition is quicker now – And he can’t get rid of her scarf – Because the smell reminds him of innocence and her. All too well. The love remembered was real – She can’t let go. She knows he remembers it too. All too well. The heartbreak – she remembers it. Does he still remember it? All too well?

Running through these repeated memories – Down the stairs, A sacred prayer, Wind in her hair, The first fall of snow; It was rare, She remembers it. Does he remember it? All too well… The song turns on this line. The feeling is different each time: Reverential, nostalgic, bittersweet, just bitter, angry, forlorn, pleading, resigned, desperate. It’s this unequal repetition that gives the line resonance, power, meaning, something like a symbol, A liturgy of heartbreak.

And liturgy it is. Liturgy means “the work of the people”. It’s the steadiness of the repeated responses through all the situations of the world. Think of the intercessions; every time you’ve responded “Hear our prayer”, As we pray for the frustrations and joys of a church, in bad times and good, For peace, an end to poverty, at all times and in all places; For our community, in pandemics and in celebrations, In sickness, In grief.

Children experience repetition as boredom. I used to dread the long drone of the intercessions as a child, the most tedious part of the service. I remember it all too well. Now I experience them as the ritual of making a cup of tea (also boring for a child), But simple repeated actions bring calm, give purpose, create space, focus the mind. I love the Book of Common Prayer for this because the words are always the same, and for me that creates the freedom of letting my mind go where it needs to, because it can anticipate the movement of the liturgy. I know it all too well.

But what I hope is that our services together create that space and resonance. That when you have repeated the familiar words of the Eucharist in the magic darkness of Christmas Eve, with fifty children outside looking for Easter Eggs in sunshine, in memory of a friend at All Souls, Some of you will have heard them as a child in the Second World War, after a night jiving in the 50s, swinging in the 60s, Disco in the 70s, through Thatcher and Blair, after the shock of 9/11 and 7/7, the financial crash of 2008, remotely through Covid; Through school prayers, your first job, your wedding, bringing your children to Sunday School, through standing on the PCC, through retirement; On pews, on chairs, In the Hall when the heating broke, That you come to know these words, these hymns, all too well. And you can bring your joy and your pain, your hope, your regret into this place and find in these words a place for it.

Because the English do not do religion well. We’ve made religion a place for children. And so our children learn stories we do not believe in, and we falsely perpetuate them like the atheist who declares the baptismal promises. Like an unfaithful boyfriend;

We make religion an overly-feminine space – schmaltzy sentimental or twee –

We make religion a place for our Sunday best. respectable rather than honest. jolly hockey sticks and Victoria sponge.

And preachers will try: I can talk about filth and poverty and blood and fear at birth, before we turn to watch the enchanting Nativity Play. I can talk about grief and disbelief at Easter, before the Easter Egg hunt. I can talk about heartbreak in Ordinary Time, before coffee and biscuits and “how was your summer?” But the intensity is there for you to take hold of. One of you today is consumed with grief, one of you is angry at a world that has not given them what they want. One of you is so low they could barely get out of bed. One of you couldn’t and is watching online. One of you is afraid and sick of feeling afraid. One of you is just full of joy and captivated by the beauty of the world. All feelings all of us know all too well.

This is what we bring to church and this is what makes it real, and if we could all see all the myriad colours of our souls it would be easier to be more honest. If we’re British we probably can’t speak all these things to the people we’re sat next to. But we can bring them to God. God is not your friend – If you think that you won’t understand why you received this diagnosis. God is not your father; And your father is not God – he’s just a man who’s probably trying his best. Speaking as one who knows. God is your creator, closer than your skin; He may sustain the weary with a word. God is in this liturgy as the counterpoint to your soul. So find your soul, and be angry, scared, overwhelmed, at peace, joyful, bewildered; The work of faith is to not lose our hope and our purpose.

When the psalmist prayed he whispered: “out of the depths do I cry unto thee” He didn’t intone those words after putting on a tie and jacket, politely holding a cup of tea – Which doesn’t require a metal band to bring authenticity to the words – But it’s the work of our faith to meet our intensity with their intensity. I will walk before the Lord in the land of the living. To set our faces like flint, knowing that I shall not be ashamed.

You are here to remember who you are. Not who you pretend to be, or have to be, don’t want to be;And if you are anything like me you are overwhelmed with joy at the miracles in your life, and overwhelmed with frustration at the obstacles in your path, and overwhelmed with grief at the pain of others, and overwhelmed with anger at thoughtlessness and carelessness everywhere, and this is now our confession, our intercession, our praise.

It is the work of the people and our liturgy in these words that we know all too well – But speak all too quickly.

Jesus in today’s Gospel is asking his friends who do they think he is. They don’t know. And they don’t understand and Peter even has the gall to tell Jesus who he should be. You’ve probably also known that moment when a well-meaning person tries to tell you who you are or how you should be feeling. The desire to be kings and princesses, to have power and change the world, to receive praise and recognition, we learn as children, we never quite leave behind. Jesus knows who he is and what lies before him, Jesus chooses honesty over banality.

And if you think that Christians shouldn’t be angry or afraid or uncertain, then you’re another of these disciples telling Jesus how to feel, who he was. Something he knew all too well.And when life reaches those low notes – wearing your Sunday best and your plummy plainsong chant voice won’t help you – But the steady words of the liturgy that have carried up to three-thousand years of heart-ache are your best bet in being honest to God. And because I prayed them with my father, as I pray them with my children, and they speak from the Nativity to the Crucifixion, from baptism to the last rites, from cradle to grave, I know that when my mind and body are ravaged by dear old time, I will not forget them. When my heart is broken, or I am no longer at home in this world, Simply because I know them all too well. And like a love affair, running hot and cold, even if I forget myself, I am known – by the one who has created me, the one who redeems me, the one who has shown me what it is to love, despite my enthusiasm, my indifference, my forgetfulness, my distraction, my need, my desire, my suffering, The one who has known me all too well.

O Lord open thou our lips – And our mouth shall shew forth thy praise.

O Lord hear our prayer. And let our cry come unto thee.

Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us.

For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall understand fully, even as I have been fully understood. Understood, all too well. Amen.

The Good News of Liberation - the Vicar

‘The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,
   for he has anointed me
     to preach good news to the poor he has sent me,
to proclaim for the captives release
   and to the blind sight;
     to send forth the oppressed in release,
to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favour.’

This translation follows the greek ordering more closely, so you can see there is an emphasis on me and release. This is Jesus saying why he has come. And it’s a Gospel of liberation.

This moment is seen in Luke studies as pivotal to understanding the whole Gospel. Unlike the other Gospels, Luke has put this episode in Nazareth at the very beginning of Jesus’ public ministry. They are Jesus’ first words, and his first teaching. By referring to Isaiah he is claiming authority and legitimacy from Scripture; That ‘Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing’. It’s the only time in the New Testament that we have Jesus’ teaching in a synagogue. And it’s referred back to both later in the Gospel and in Acts as a summary of Jesus’ work.

But Jesus isn’t just quoting Isaiah. He’s interpreting him. So he finishes at “to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favour” Omitting the second half of the verse (Isaiah 61:2): “and the day of vengeance of our God”, And adding an additional line from a few chapters before in Isaiah: ‘to send forth the oppressed in release’, With the effect of emphasising the Gospel of liberation and minimising the theme of judgment.

Jubilee is an important theme in the Old Testament (though how often it was actually observed is anyone’s guess). The principle is that everything belongs to God so the year of jubilee is a year of release every 50 years, meaning that property reverts to is owners, and slavery and forms of bondage and debt are ended. The Student Loans Company adopted something similar. For Luke the words release and forgiveness are virtually synonymous, and, as is clear in his healings and exorcisms, also entail a release from the binding power of Satan. The healing in miracles in Luke are largely described as forms of bondage to the powers of darkness; And often understood metaphorically – sight to the blind concerns as much people’s spiritual vision in recognising Jesus and the activity of God, as literal blindness. It’s not a metaphor we would use today but for Luke it helps represent the totality of Jesus’ restoration of fractured humanity, body, mind and spirit. Because, as we saw last week, these various complaints also lead to social exclusion, for lepers, outsiders, tax collectors. So Jesus in Luke is someone who restores people completely. Release, forgiveness, healing, restoration all coincide as the mental, physical, spiritual and social are treated holistically. No wonder then, that in Luke almost every account of healing is followed by an act of praise.

Jesus is not treating symptoms, he is restoring the natural order of creation within creatures, between creatures, and with God. Syntactically, the force of the statement from Isaiah, is that Jesus is anointed to preach good news to the poor. The remaining infinitives, ‘to proclaim’ release for captives, sight for the blind, ‘to send forth the oppressed in release’, ‘to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favour’, all elaborate the preaching of good news to the poor. Poor requires a little elaboration of our own here. The modern reader will immediately think just in cash terms here. We have grown accustomed to thinking economically and any suggestion that someone is of less worth because of their gender, ethnicity, age, job, injury or defect, would get you cancelled pretty quickly. But this is a time when minor defects would have you removed from being a priest, a solider, or just entering the congregation. These were not inclusive times. Status and purity were hugely important and the cause of exclusion everywhere. So when Luke uses poor he is thinking of all causes of exclusion. We see the word poor associated with physical complaints: the blind, lame, deaf, maimed; leper; Economic: The hungry, captive and oppressed, Social: Mournful and persecuted. Theological: Sinners.

And even those who were comparatively wealthy, our tax collectors like Zacchaeus – because he is not respectable, a social outcast, qualify as poor; Someone in need of restoration.

By preaching good news to the poor, Jesus is effectively welcoming the excluded, the dishonourable, the sinner, restoring people and relationships; Bringing everyone inside the tent. It is: “status reversal” Outsiders becoming insiders; Unexpected grace.

The corollary of this, though, is that insiders become outsiders. Status reversal works both ways. It is undeniable that the life of Jesus was a crucifix of conflict which split the Jewish people. If we look at the fate of anyone in political history who stands against authoritarian rule, we can expect the worst. By championing the outsiders, ‘the poor’, Jesus is challenging those on the inside. And there’s a clear undercutting of the authority of those in power. At the beginning of the Gospel Luke states the secular authorities – Herod, Octavian; In contrast to Jesus. You’ll remember from the Magnificat:
‘he has scattered the proud’
‘brought down the powerful from their thrones’
‘sent the rich away empty’
And Simeon prophesied: ‘This child is destined for the falling and the rising of many in Israel, and to be a sign that will be opposed so that the inner thoughts of many will be revealed’. Jesus brings conflict. And others will align themselves with the forces that gather against him, The Jewish leadership, Herod, Pilate, Judas; As one biblical scholar put it: ‘the gracious visitation of God does not occur without resistance’ (66).

That this conflict will lead to suffering is no surprise. For Luke suffering is integral to Jesus identity as the Son of God. From Jesus opening speech in the synagogue, we saw the importance of Isaiah as a lens by which Luke understands Jesus. Isaiah’s famous articulation of the ‘Suffering Servant’ speaks directly to the passion:

Surely he has borne our infirmities
   and carried our diseases;
But he was wounded for our transgressions,
   crushed for our iniquities;
upon him was the punishment that made us whole,
   and by his bruises we are healed.
He was oppressed, and he was afflicted,
   yet he did not open his mouth;
Therefore I will allot him a portion with the great,
   and he shall divide the spoil with the strong;
because he poured out himself to death,
   and was numbered with the transgressors;
yet he bore the sin of many,
   and made intercession for the transgressors.

This suffering is proof of the obedience of the Son. It also aligns him even more closely with ‘the poor’. And of course it’s here that we see the paradigmatic status reversal. A righteous man, declared innocent even by Rome is executed as those of the lowest status: crucifixion. (Even execution is status-bound in this world.) But raised up by God. He has lifted up the lowly. He has given light to those who sit in darkness and in the shadow of death.

So Jesus brings conflict. Those who are self-seeking; Those who are high-status; Will push the righteous man out of the world. But will be brought low.

The peace Jesus comes for is to the low status, the outside, the sinner, the dishonoured; These are raised up. This is the good news Jesus preaches, as the fulfilment of Isaiah. And the resurrection is the assurance, the call to faithfulness and perseverance. This is Luke’s Gospel as status-reversal.

How does this Gospel sit with us? Are we among the poor? Do we side-with the poor? Are we among those to be lifted up? or with the proud who will be brought low? Where is that we are seeking release? Forgiveness? Healing? Restoration? Do we have the faith to take hold of this Good News, Are we ready to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favour? 

And thou most kind and gentle death - the Vicar

Creation is about more than fluffy animals and the climate crisis. We are celebrating creation this month to honour God for all God’s works. Our first hymn (at the 10am) is, All Creatures of our God and King, which is based on St Francis’ Canticle of the Sun, which is based on Psalm 148. It’s a bit like when U2 covered Jimmy Hendrix, who was covering Bob Dylan’s ‘All Along the Watchtower’. It’s Jimmy’s version you remember, but we’ll stick with the hymn here, which has the following verse:

And thou, most kind and gentle death,
waiting to hush our latest breath,
O praise him, alleluia!
Thou leadest home the child of God,
and Christ our Lord the way hath trod:
O praise him, O praise him,
Alleluia, alleluia, alleluia.

We aren’t singing that verse this morning, for no other reason than because it’s a very long hymn. I once put in six verses of ‘O Come All Ye Faithful’, because otherwise you never get to sing “Lo! Star-led chieftains”, which I would argue is one of the best lines in any carol, but the Director of Music was not happy and midnight mass ran a little late that year. ‘All Creatures’ has seven verses, that I know of, and something has to give – In this case ‘kind and gentle death’.

I bring it up because it’s highly unusual in Christian circles to put death in a positive light. Terry Pratchett famously had death as one of his heroes and as an amusing side character in many of his novels, but he was not so keen on the faith. Death features as the bass player in the Bill and Tedfilms, which were in the nineties among my favourite. But generally the Christian attitude to death has been defined by St Paul:

‘the last enemy to be destroyed is death…
Where, O death, is your victory?
   Where, O death, is your sting?’

It’s so well known it almost feels like Scripture, but John Donne’s Holy sonnet strikes the same attitude:

Death, be not proud, though some have called thee
Mighty and dreadful, for thou art not so;
For those whom thou think'st thou dost overthrow
Die not, poor Death, nor yet canst thou kill me.
From rest and sleep, which but thy pictures be,
Much pleasure; then from thee much more must flow,
And soonest our best men with thee do go,
Rest of their bones, and soul's delivery.
Thou art slave to fate, chance, kings, and desperate men,
And dost with poison, war, and sickness dwell,
And poppy or charms can make us sleep as well
And better than thy stroke; why swell'st thou then?
One short sleep past, we wake eternally
And death shall be no more, death thou shalt die.

If you’ve ever seen Margaret Edson’s heart-breaking play Wit, you will remember the attention paid to the final line: ‘And death shall be no more [comma] death thou shalt die’: ‘Nothing but a breath, a comma, separates life from life everlasting.’ Donne, who was familiar if not obsessed with death, finds in punctuation a way to utterly diminish the enemy death.

It’s intriguing then that St Francis makes of a death a friend; And better than a friend, a sister. Death in the above cases, in fiction, is always male so why does Francis choose death as sister? Is it because, under Christ, death is no longer constant – like sister moon earlier in the poem, more obviously feminine, as Juliet of Romeo and Juliet fame presses:

O, swear not by the moon, th'inconstant moon,
That monthly changes in her circled orb,
Lest that thy love prove likewise variable.

Or is it because Francis sees in death a nurturing aspect, a bringer of peace, a provider of food, as all food unless you’re Ozzy Osbourne, comes packaged in death. Is death than a nurturer, a protector of souls? Since arriving in Putney I’ve taken 115 funerals, more than our weddings and baptisms put together. It’s been a great help with the film script I’m working on: four funerals and a baptism. Tolstoy famously declared all happy families to be alike, and in many respects, all weddings and baptisms are largely the same, but funerals are strikingly different. I’ve taken a packed funeral here of a twenty-year old whose mother still maintains he was murdered; a beloved mother whose son was too vulnerable to attend so the funeral went ahead with only myself; a funeral of a man who ended his own life in the presence of his largely estranged family who were red hot with anger; of a teenage soldier where I was glad to have seventy women and men in uniform, some armed, as the locals were prickly; funerals here of good friends.

There are times when death seems like a friend and times when death is certainly the stalking enemy. But whether we see death as a part of life, or the abrupt absence, she is someone who plays an ever-increasing role in our lives and the touchstone of our faith, in whether we are able to keep rolling away that stone and believe in death’s defeat. And if you have sat at the bedside of someone as they lie dying; Known the strangeness and wonder of a life passing; Or equally known the unbelievable rush of a life coming into the world, in its Advent hiddenness or it’s Easter bursting forth – You will know that doubleness of our materiality in pulse and breath of the working time of our bodies; And the baffling mystery of life in its ex nihilo miracle, intelligence and vulnerable hunger for love; the absence and presence of life that is more than biological facts.

I wanted to begin this Creation Season by reflecting on death, as it’s a defining characteristic of our creation and so is at once something which is the antithesis of the divine, while also pointing us towards God. By definition creation is not God. It is everything apart from God. It is temporal, finite, partial, fallen, suffused with suffering. But everything is created by God and so must reflect the divine in some way. Even wasps. It’s difficult to look closely at a bumblebee or a passionflower, and not come away with a sense of awe; Death likewise can point us towards the eternal God, both as a counter-point, and in accentuating the miracle of life, the interwovenness of creation and the love that underwrites our relationships, a love which in Christ was exemplified in death:

Thou leadest home the child of God,
and Christ our Lord the way hath trod:

The implication is that, as Christ hallowed weddings by appearing at the wedding at Cana, so Christ has hallowed death in order to point beyond it. Or to put it another way, we might turn back to psalm 139:

If I climb up into heaven, thou art there 
 if I go down to hell, thou art there also.

The incarnation brought God into the world in order to show that creation may be redeemed. Creation, which has been made to praise God. So if we return to that opening hymn, we might sing:

And thou, most kind and gentle death,
waiting to hush our latest breath,
O praise him, alleluia!

It’s not just the refrain of the hymn, which itself points to the uninterrupted praise of God, but our latest, our last, breath, the work of our most kind and gentle death, is to praise him: alleluia. Death too finds its proper place in the praise of God.

So as we enter again into this season of thanksgiving for every generous act of giving, with every perfect gift, we thank our Father of lights, with whom there is no change; We thank God not without difficulty for sister death; We thank God for those we love and see no more, separated from us by that breath, that comma; And we ask that as we reflect and pray for our creation, we might find new ways of joining with it in praise of its maker: O praise him. Alleluia.

To be a conservative - the Vicar

To be a Christian is to be conservative. At least in some respects. Today I want to remind you of the ways in which you are conservative, in these times which are not propitious for conservatism. So I am wearing this beret, this helmet of salvation, to represent certain values which you hold, though at times they may be overshadowed by others, which are the values of conservatism. I was presented with this beret after completing an arduous physical course, on which every day – like an unpopular contestant on Big Brother – I expected to fail and be asked to leave; but after 5 weeks it was given to me as the qualifying badge to be trained to parachute with the best British infantry regiment. The values which I want to talk about today – the values which dare not call their name (in certain sections of South-West London) – are loyalty, authority and sanctity. Already some of you are mentally pulling on boxing gloves, saying Christ did not come for this. While others are offended because men should not wear hats in church. But – may I just say – that this is not a hat.

When I asked soldiers ‘what is the most important ethical value?’, the answer was usually loyalty. Soldiers will never go against loyalty – it is their strongest virtue. But loyalty is 95% to their friends. A British paratrooper at Arnhem at the end of the second world war, a bridge too far, was asked: what kept him going when his battalion had been largely destroyed, the cause lost, and defeat inevitable; he replied simply: ‘they were my friends’. Soldiers are not indoctrinated or brainwashed. I’ve taken a great number of funerals of men who fought in the Second World War or who did national service afterwards. So many of them, who had spent just a few years in their teens and twenties in service, later found their greatest friendships and purpose in life from those years, even when they’d lived 60 years after. Liberals today who don’t identify particularly with Putney or London or the United Kingdom, don’t understand this. They could live anywhere. Putney voted against Brexit – for progressive or libertarian reasons. But what the liberals, who didn’t see Brexit coming, often missed was loyalty. Our belief in the British, Our support for the British, Our love of country. Britain has a history of empire, of colonialism, of trading in slaves; Many people are ashamed of being British. But we’re also ‘the country of Shakespeare, Churchill, the Beatles, Sean Connery, Harry Potter, David Beckham’s right foot, David Beckham’s left foot come to that’. What conservatives get that liberals often don’t, is that we belong to a family, to a place, to a language, to a nation, without which we don’t entirely make sense. It’s Russell Crowe in the arena in Gladiator, shouting “as one” to keep his small crew together and pick off the enemy that come against them. We may have many loyalties, perhaps just a few, but they are what anchor us in this world, and without loyalty, we are alone. 

Everything in the army is about authority. Everyone goes to Sandhurst and intelligent people hate it there. Why should chaplains and surgeons in their forties listen to drones twenty years younger telling them to polish their waterbottles and dry their sinks before room inspections? And if we’re squeamish about loyalty and the thought of those who claim to be “only following orders”, the twentieth-century has given us a century-long horror of authority. What were the 60s for if not for breaking this evil? But curiously the British particularly love authority. We love the Royal Family. We’re the society most enmeshed in tradition and heritage – we love noblesse oblige, we throw money at the National Trust and without any reason I can fathom, we want Downton Abbey and Bridgerton to exist. We crave authority. We tap dance to social ritual. And authority gives us a place in the world. It creates a sense of order, and it is order that gives meaning. As the Eagles sang:

And freedom? Oh Freedom, well that’s just some people talkin’,
Your prison is walkin’ through this world all alone.

If loyalty connects us horizontally, authority connects us vertically: It’s the bond that fixes us in a family. It gives us our place within institutions, It connects our employment with our sense of purpose; It establishes behaviour and expectations in law and society, And anyone who’s visited a country where authority is totalitarian, or has collapsed alongside the rule of law, will know the anxiety and fear that result when authority is absent or morally repugnant. But, properly, authority helps you understand where you fit in.

Finally, there’s sanctity. Liberals don’t like the idea of sanctity because it seems superstitious or irrational, or because it’s less practical. But your sanctity instinct is triggered when you think “this shouldn’t happen in church”, When you see a man wearing a hat, Or when you see one of the vicar’s children making a den beneath the altar. And consider how you feel when people act out on war memorials, or if someone burned a union flag, or threw orange confetti on the court at Wimbledon; Some people feel that revulsion when they see someone writing in a book; If you ever watched the show Mad Men, set in 1960, the moment that burned into my mind was Don Draper’s family going for a picnic in a beautiful spot, and walking away leaving all their trash behind. Littering, especially in nature, is a practice that, even for the liberal, approaches what used to be called profane or unholy; And are there not some uses of the body which are simply degrading, as one conservative philosopher put it: “shallow are the souls that have forgotten how to shudder”. I mentioned the consensual cannibal Armin last week. Consent is the ultimate liberal ethic, but there are some things it simply doesn’t cover.

The social psychologist Jonathan Haidt has suggested that the reason Democrats and Republicans fail to understand each other is these ethical foundations of loyalty, authority and sanctity. All Americans believe in care and fairness, but conservatives feel like their most cherished values are ignored by progressive elites. Haidt has spent time trying to get democrats to speak this wider ethical vocabulary. He also makes the point that loyalty, authority and sanctity, something like an ethical social vision, create moral capital which helps bind communities together. Communities need some sort of flag to rally around, otherwise they really are just a collection of individuals. We’re certain to hear in the next few months how Harris does in speaking to the whole of America. These virtues populate the stories of God. In our Old Testament reading, Joshua consecrates the people before God, appealing to their loyalty and declaring them sacred. He gathers the authority figures and invokes the authority of God: Thus says the Lord. St Paul, likewise is consecrating the people by invoking the whole armour of God, and praying for their sanctity that they may withstand the world, the flesh and the devil. He establishes loyalty, demanding prayer for all the saints and he appeals to his authority as the ambassador of God and for the authority of God against the rulers, authorities and powers of this present darkness.

The central question of the Gospel is on whose authority does Jesus speak. Jesus is unequivocal: ‘No one can come to me unless it is granted by the Father.’ He, only, has authority – attested to by Peter ‘Lord to whom can we go? You have the words of eternal life.’ And as Jesus has brought the true disciples out into the wilderness, as we have heard over the last 5 weeks it’s for them to discover holiness and to be formed into the people of God, foremost by the Eucharist, the eating of the flesh and blood of Jesus’. Today we’re told that some of them walk away. It’s easier for liberals to walk away; Liberals generally have less attachment to geography and community. They live in cities; there’s another church, another religion around the corner. But if we find in Jesus authority and holiness, and if we value loyalty, we will say with Peter: ‘We have come to believe and know that you are the Holy One of God.’

We enjoy listening to people who think like us. We prefer to think that Republicans, Trump voters, perhaps even those who voted for Brexit, are idiots or corrupt, entitled or uneducated, racist or selfish. It’s easier to write people off than understand them. But that is a lot of people to write off. Instead, we might be better reflecting on whether in our own values we have any blind spots; If we’re overlooking moral capital that could invigorate our community; If we could not hear at St Margaret’s cultivate a greater sense of fellowship, respect or reverence. Our church and society remain enthralled by culture wars, and it goes without saying that in war everybody loses. So what are the values that will build this church? Is it all inclusivity, care and acceptance? Or is it also duty, commitment and holiness? Our church has people from all angles of the political spectrum. I hope we are taking the time to learn from each other so that we can be wearing not hats, but ‘the whole armour of God’. And make this Church great again. Amen.

We Who Do Not Walk Away

I wanted to begin today’s sermon with a joke about carpentry but I didn’t think it… would-work. The reason being that Jesus, coming from a family of carpenters, is asking today what it takes to become a joiner. Are you a joiner? A disciple? A follower of this carpenter?

Every three years we get this summer where for five Sundays in a row we go through the sixth chapter of John’s Gospel – largely the feeding of the crowd and Jesus’ teaching on it. By the end you’re running out of good hymns mentioning bread and wondering what more you can say about it, or more properly, whether people want to hear anything more about it. Happily, it’s worked out that we’ve split it this year between the readers and clergy so you haven’t had to just listen to me droning on. It also probably helps that most people are on away for at least one week, and it always feels like All of Putney disappears in August, so that few remain who are clinging to each Sunday, waiting for the next instalment.   But I hope if you are one of the faithful few you’ve enjoyed these different perspectives on what is a remarkable section of the Gospel.

This scene, as my learned colleagues have already suggested, is a replay of the foundational narrative of the Hebrews. Every culture has those stories by which it best understands itself. The French are forever storming the Bastille. The Americans are ganging up with the French to kick out our royalist antecedents on Independence Day; The Hebrews become who they are in the crossing of the Red Sea to forty years in the wilderness, before the entry into the Promised Land. It’s the story that throughout the Hebrew Bible in its prophecies and songs we are returned. And during this time the people receive the Law from Moses, and they’re fed by the Manna, the bread from heaven, in the wilderness, and they become the chosen people of God, the inheritors of God’s promises. The people encounter the God who saves, are fed and taught by God, and come to the promised land.

Jesus has taken the people into the wilderness. He has fed them, literally. He has taught them as Moses taught the Law. And he is now telling them how they are being reformed as the people of God, to receive God’s promise. So Jesus is replaying this foundational narrative and making it the beginning of something new.

When Jesus declares “I am the living bread”, as Anne said last week in declaring “I am the bread of life”, he is deliberately invoking the Divine name – the name which the Third Commandment tells us shall not be taken in vain. It’s the name given at the beginning of our foundational narrative, when Moses asks the burning bush who should he say has sent him, Who has sent him to Pharoah to release the Hebrews – And God answers “I am who I am”, An expression that is so holy that in Hebrew it is still translated throughout almost all Bibles as “The LORD” in capital letters. Think Samuel Lee Jackson quoting Ezekiel: “And you will know my name is the Lord when I lay my vengeance upon thee!”

So this is blasphemy or it’s revelation – High stakes preaching by Jesus. If I were to say to you now – By the way, I, who am now speaking to you, am God. I can well imagine some would be edging towards the door. But perhaps if from nowhere I’d produced a wonderful Putney brunch before saying it, you might be tempted to stay and find out a little more.

This is what Jesus has done. He is saying God is with you, the God who saves, (which is the literal meaning of Jesus, a derivation of Joshua – Ya – a shortened form of the Divine Name and Shua – ‘he saves’) The God who saves is with you. God is feeding and teaching his people, And Jesus tells them how to become truly God’s people.

In this Jesus takes the people into another taboo – that they must eat his flesh and drink his blood. Cannibalism is happily still a taboo in most cultures. Even when consensual in the disturbing case of German computer technician Armin Miewes. Blood, in particular, is taboo. Noah is commanded not to eat ‘flesh with its life, that is, its blood’. In Acts the early Church repeats the command not to eat blood, reiterated again by a seventh century council that Christians should not consume the blood of animals.

Jesus though is using the taboo to shock his hearers. He has to completely change how the Jews relate to God so he is deliberately walking freely on their sense of blasphemy and sanctity – So they must eat the flesh and drink the blood. He is preparing them, and us, for the Eucharist – for our participation in a new sacrifice. But he needs to shock them to realise that where they are is not enough. God is promising them something more. We are told the Hebrews, ‘your ancestors’, ate the bread God provided and died. But the one who eats this bread will live forever. Just as Jesus in his death will take the place of the entire religious function of Jerusalem, the Temple and Sacrifice, so in this new foundational story, he subsumes the role of Moses, the Bread from Heaven, the Law and the Promised Land. Jesus is the immediacy of God with us, meaning that he is our daily bread, our leader, our future.

We are being prepared in this Gospel, as the disciples are, to be in the upper room with Jesus. Prepared us for the moment of food washing and sharing of bread and wine that is the memorial of Jesus’ demonstration of incarnate love; Prepared to follow that example, in holding to truth and compassion in adversity.

We are told that after this many of the disciples turned away. Here, then, is the crucial moment in this Gospel. The people have learned who Jesus is. They have been fed by this miraculous meal. But will they join with him; Or will they walk away?

We don’t face quite this same question because we are not being asked to walk away from what we know. There is a sense in coming to church, though, in which we know we are doing something a little counter-cultural. Most people in this country don’t go to church. Most people feel ambivalently about religion. Perhaps we are even reaching a stage where belief in God will be seen as taboo, Or at least something that only poorly educated people, foreigners or eccentrics follow. A lot of people are also antipathetic to joining things. Institutions, we’re frequently told, are in decline. People no longer feel obligated to go to church each week, and find out what’s happening in the sixth chapter of John’s Gospel.

When we come to communion we are expressing a commitment: To God, to the Christian faith, to one another. Central to this commitment is the belief that our lives are meaningful, And that meaning is determined by their closeness to the life of Jesus, who is the revelation of God as love. Generations of Christians have thought this love worth giving their lives for, most recently by Maximilian Kolbe, Martin Luther King Jr., Oscar Romero, Esther John, all now adorning the front of Westminster Abbey as modern martyrs, with many, many more besides.

In a liberal, nominally Christian country like ours, belief and commitment to the faith is both easier and harder than at other times and places. But the question is the same? Have we found in Jesus someone we can follow? In our time in this Christian community have we become loyal? In this place of worship, have we discovered something sacred? And, ultimately, have we taken on this foundational story as central to our own. That we might become a person of the God who feeds and teaches his people.

So we now come to Evelyn and Eleanor’s baptism, which expresses this commitment of their family. That they are choosing to be people of God; to follow Jesus, find their place in this community and be taught and fed by him; that this story is their story as it is also our story. We who do not walk away, but follow the carpenter.

Live and Let Die

I moonlight as chaplain to a livery company in the city. The big livery companies used to be guilds that had monopolies on trade, a bit like trade unions, but somewhere in the last seven centuries they’ve morphed into large charities and today their charitable activities amount to around seventy-five million pounds a year. For me, like most things in the Church of England, it’s unpaid. But there are perks – You get some nice dinners and I got to see the King’s portrait before it was cool. The main duty is to preach at the annual company service, which was this week. It’s a tough gig because the congregation are often not church-goers, not necessarily Christian; In fact, you know that quite a few are there largely because there’s a very nice lunch in a very fancy hall, and, as the preacher, you’re stood between them and a glass of champagne. They are also largely the great and the good; His majesty the King is a member, so you really could get anyone turn up, and there’s quite a few clergy – and no one really wants to preach in front of other clergy. Except our young curate of course, Who knows to be kind to the poor old vicar.

What made preaching particularly difficult, this time, is that the church to which the company is attached, and patron of, is St Michael, Cornhill. Itself a beautiful Wren and Hawksmoor church embellished by Gilbert Scott (so basically all the church architects that most people have heard of), But it’s recently been taken over by St Helen’s, Bishopsgate. Famously conservative, St Helen’s opposes women in leadership and the current movement in the Church to bless same-sex relationships – to such an extent that the conservative churches in London have threatened to withhold money from the diocese, and are setting up their own enclave – a church within a church. It’s very much like the old joke of St Peter showing the newcomer round heaven, and him pointing out a walled off area – at which point, Peter shhses him, saying “that’s St Helen’s Bishopsgate – they think they’re the only ones in here.”

So taking a service with this vicar was not completely comfortable. He was of course very amiable because we are the Church of England, but it felt rather like preaching at an interfaith service. We both believe in God, but I’m not sure it’s the same God. It’s something that’s peculiar to religion and philosophy that you can say that. A great many words cover things we point at. And a whole lot of other words cover things we can do to the things we’re pointing at. But if you asked ten Christians from ten different churches what they meant by God you’d get ten quite different descriptions. Even at St Margaret’s, I expect we’d get some colourful ideas about God from the children, and probably a lot more confidence than some of our own hesitant and ill-defined attempts.

Difference, though, makes life and conversation interesting. I love that St Margaret’s has babies and nonagenarians. I reckon we’ve got all decades here up to 100. But equally, there are passionate supporters of all our major political parties; There are Chelsea, Tottenham and even Fulham supporters. Though I don’t think I’ve come across any Arsenal supporters, not that I’d mind. We’re an inclusive church. During the Six nations you’re very welcome to support any team that’s playing England. The difficulty that liberals have is that they’re advocating a live and let live approach. Usually, the words associated with liberals are things like “affirming”, “generous”, “open”. This is all very well. But they should be aware that their opposition is strictly live and let die. The Guns ‘n’ Roses version. (better) This makes for unpleasantly asymmetric warfare – Where one side is looking for inclusion and the other damnation.

Fortunately for both sides, this was at stake at the time the New Testament was written, so it’s a subject to which the Bible speaks directly. St Paul in our reading speaks for the ‘uncircumcision’, ‘aliens’ from Israel, ‘strangers to the covenants’, having no hope and without God in the world. We can lose sight of what’s being said here, especially if we’re cradle Anglicans. Imagine believing that you were beyond grace. That you were unacceptable to God. Just because of how you were born. Imagine hearing the words: ‘you, who were once far off have been brought near’
‘in his flesh he has made both groups unto one and has broken down the dividing wall, that is, the hostility between us.’
‘that he might create in himself one new humanity in place of the two,’
‘Thus making peace,’
‘and might reconcile both groups to God’
‘So he proclaimed peace to you who were far off and peace to those who were near’
‘So then you are no longer strangers and aliens’
‘but members of the household of God.’
‘built upon the foundation of the apostles… in him the whole structure is joined together’
‘you also are built together spiritually in to a dwelling place for God.’ How many times is St Paul saying the same thing here, with a whole host of different images? It’s like a chant, crescendoing throughout, “together, together, together, TOGETHER.”

At the service on Thursday I just preached about love. Love, interestingly, is just like God. If you get 10 Christians from 10 different churches to write down what they mean by love you’ll get 10 different answers. But, from St Paul, I can tell you that love is the instinct that says: I will not sacrifice our togetherness for the sake of my pride, my opinion, my position. I will not sacrifice our togetherness for anything. I will not sacrifice our togetherness, even for my life.

Because as every wedding couple knows, you can have faith, you can work miracles, you can prophecy the future, you can raise the dead, but if you don’t have love, God’s not in it. It’s not Christian. And there are some churches where you have to ask, as Justin Timberlake and the Black Eyed Peas once did: “Where is the love?”

Love is patient, Love is kind; Love does not insist on its own way. Love does not live and let die. One of the Desert Fathers around the third century had a pithy expression that ‘our life and death is with our neighbour; that if we win our neighbour we win God and if we cause her to stumble we have sinned against Christ’. To see in the welfare of our sister or brother, our own salvation – is something close to love. However mad you get, however frustrated, however sure you are that you’re right, don’t be the one to say: that’s it – I give up on you.

My sense in all this, is that it’s a lot about purity. And in my mind Christianity is radically opposed to purity. St Paul hitting out at circumcision, St Peter at Kosher, Jesus at hypocrisy, at Sabbath observation, at the exclusion of lepers, women, Samaritans and whoever else. Christianity does not believe in purity. And if you look closely at purity, you realise that it’s a tool to oppress women – we don’t think of purity for men and women in the same way – Or it’s racism – I can’t actually believe that the expression “ethnic cleansing” is still something people say – It’s a collusion with this idea of purity of blood, which remains everywhere a justification of horror. Even my 5 year old instinctively knows that in Harry Potter calling someone a ‘mudblood’ is abhorrent. But purity crops up in unlikely places – some of the woke obsessions with language and the cancel-culture that goes with it – is a form of purity. Anything that creates fear and shame is an agent of purity; And purity is hostile to togetherness, and so hostile to love. And so hostile to God.

The prevailing mood of the world today is division – In the aggression that continues to threaten our world, With Britain, France, Europe, America, all suffering from increasing divisions, Within political parties, within institutions, within the Harry Potter franchise, in the Church of England.

I’m saying that we must be the people who bring together. The introit that began our service will have reminded many of us of Ted. As someone who gently over decades built and maintained the house of God. Painted with trusting, Floored with faith, With walls of truth, A roof of peace, Building a house of love. This is the awesome place St Paul is asking us to build: To build ourselves together into a dwelling place for God, With our foundations in Christ, A house of the Lord, to dwell in, together, forever. Amen.

Now, this Louis, is baptism. It’s where we welcome you into the house of God, The house of faith. It’s where you’re surrounded by love in your parents, your family, their closest friends who will be your godparents. It’s where we all say “yes” we are in this together. Baptism makes this your house and we’re glad to share it with you. So would you now please join us at the font, with your parents and godparents.

John the Baptist

It gives you pause – When taking a service of baptism – that John the baptist, the OG baptiser – In the end gets beheaded for it. But those were hard times. And for Max, he should note that Jesus, whose ministry begins with his baptism by John – meets an even worse end. But, Max, what a ministry.

Baptism is a symbol of resistance. A sign of fierce loyalty to a power that isn’t the state; Even to St Keir, who curates around London worship and adore. And because of that, ever since, baptism attracts danger. Our very own St Margaret of Antioch – is counted among the many baptised martyrs of the fourth century emperor Diocletian. It surprises people, but Christians worldwide remain the most persecuted faith.

I like those little correctives to our understanding of history. Assumptions that people in the past were less happy, more stupid, and more conventional. There was a nice article this week by Cambridge University; apologies Sarah Cooper, once again, they got there first; an article correcting historical myths. The most surprising was that, while we often assume girls got married off as teenagers in the past, apart from a few decades in the early 1800s, (you’d need to ask Andrew Gairdner what was going on then) the only time since 1550 that the average age of first marriage for women fell below 24 was during the baby boom of the 1950s.

Going back a little further, you might be surprised to learn that the Romans weren’t very religious as a culture. They stole most of their gods from the greeks. And any culture that turns its emperors into gods is likely to attract a certain degree of scepticism. It’s bad enough when you elevate them into the house of Lords. That’s if they avoid getting stabbed in the back by backbenchers. (for which there’s an honourable precedent.)

But to the Romans conformity was everything. It didn’t really matter what you believed, but you had to obey. The Christians were unusual because they took religion seriously. It must have been perplexing for Romans to see the lengths Christians would go to for their faith. But eventually it led to the Holy Roman empire. Western Civilization is built on 300 years of the martyred baptized, beginning with John the Baptist and Jesus.

Today, things are a little different. The Church of England is the established religion. Baptisms are a way of celebrating a birth; Like a sequel to a big wedding; Hopefully without replacing the leading man. It may be seen as part of our cultural inheritance – following grandparents and great-grandparents; Baptism is also a step towards a church school, which is cheaper than a pre-prep school; And it may be seen as a sort of eternal life insurance. If you want to get past the pearly gates and avoid the overheated basement, joining the old club is a smart move.

As an outsider, having grown up in sunny Wales, it’s striking the continuity between Public Schools, Oxbridge combination rooms, Officers’ Messes, London Clubs, Livery Halls – I can well imagine the devil has designed the other place to look like a Gentleman’s Club. When a new member joins, someone will say – Oh Adam – how did he end up here? Same as the others. Entitlement.

But for all the established, cultural, niceness of the Church of England, the tea and biscuits; the baptismal liturgy is pretty direct. I always warn families to make sure the godparents have seen the liturgy. It’s not every day you get asked if you ‘reject the devil and rebellion against God’; or ‘the deceit and corruption of evil’. Some of you I’m sure might want to hedge your bets. And it’s just not very British to publicly assert such things. Only for nearly two thousand years it absolutely has been.

So for many now, inverting the martyrdom of the saints, the words trip out with crossed fingers and toes, echoing the pax romana; the pragmatic keeping the peace. But, for some, it is the opening of the soul to God.

It’s not for me, or the Church of England, to make windows into men’s souls (as Elizabeth I said), but godparents should beware they may be letting in a little chink of divinity into their lives; As the old vestry prayer puts it – what we speak with our lips, may we believe in our hearts and show forth in our lives.

Which takes us neatly to John the Baptist himself. He’s a figure who stands for honesty and judgement; Neither currently in Vogue. John removes himself to the desert and lives simply. It’s a bit like having a second home in Norfolk or Cornwall, but with worse food. Hearing of this holy figure the people leave the city to come out, repent and be baptized.

We tend to think of repentance as a reckoning with guilt. Raskolnikov confessing his great crime, or children stealing pears from a neighbour’s garden, We think of our conscience; What keeps us awake at night; What we’d be ashamed for our neighbour to know. And it may be that every time we come to the prayers of penitence, you think of the same thing. This can solidify in our mind into a heaviness we carry with us everywhere. Sin quite easily congeals into guilt or shame.

But repentance need not be so emotional. Repentance is about honesty. Guilt and shame makes us dishonest – with ourselves and others. They make us cover up to others; and lead to obsessing or sublimating. For this reason, I can say with some confidence that guilt and shame have little to do with God. You can tell this, because those feelings are rarely changed by hearing the words of absolution – The voices of guilt and shame will tell us that we are not yet absolved or free, which post te absolvo is not true.

And John the Baptist came for honesty. He’d want to baptise you of your fake news echo chamber, your Instagram filtered profile picture, your friends’ alarmingly cheerful holiday snaps. Your weak excuses. Your self-doubt. A friend once told me you can’t be fully employed, a good father and a good husband. At the point of confession I will normally be thinking about my failings in at least one of these areas, But sometimes we can do no more. Sometimes we might understand instead that we should be kinder to ourselves. The point is not to find something to wring our hands about, but to face the current reality of our life honestly. If we can adopt that, we might be thinking less about guilt or shame and more about acceptance and grace – What Paul speaks about in ‘the riches of his grace that he has lavished upon us.’

Baptism is an allegiance to a different standard. Not of conforming but of standing out: It serves a moral imperative. To honesty, to justice; A reminder that, though we belong to a state and society, we firstly belong to God. God consistently judges people throughout Scripture on their integrity and how they treat the most pressed in their society. Our baptism is a reminder of this. Do you renounce the deceit and corruption of evil? Do you come to Christ, the way, the truth and the life?

To be baptised means not conforming to the standards of the world; Which may, like John the Baptist mean a sticky end, but a glorious afterlife. So like the players at Wimbledon, and of course later tonight: It is to ‘meet with triumph and disaster/ and treat those two impostors just the same’ to not be conformed to the standards of the last 58 years; but ‘keep your head when all about you/Are losing theirs and blaming it on you’; John the Baptist may have met with disaster, he may like Gareth Southgate 28 years ago, have lost his head, but now John the Baptist is venerated throughout the world, while Salome is routinely confused with a cheap cured sausage.

So today, remembering the disaster and triumph of John the Baptist, we are reminded of our shared baptism. Of the call to be honest with ourselves and with God and find the riches of grace in that. To renounce the deceit and corruption of evil, And to turn to Christ. Amen.

St Margaret’s Day and Sarah Curl’s First Mass

One thing which you may, or may not, know about the Revd Sarah Curl is that she got married in Peppa Pig World. Mummy Pig, being ordained, took the service. Daddy Pig was verger and, like usual, bumbled about stupidly getting everything wrong. Peppa Pig did the intercessions, which as sometimes happens here, went on too long; (Peppa Pig being a bit of a chatter box). And George read “The Lovely Other Dinosaur”, which went down well. That’s not exactly true, except that she did get married in Peppa Pig world, but before it was cool – Now, of course, Sarah has been magnified by the Lord, He hast exalted the humble and meek. Living in the Palais de Manor Fields; She is usually referred to as “The Duchess” in the parish office. Sorry, that’s not entirely true either. She did, however, choose all of today’s hymns, most of which coincidentally only get scheduled when the vicar is on holiday.

But I say all this to remind you that Sarah is human, despite all evidence to the contrary, and not yet a saint, like our dear St Margaret. Having said that, her twin sister told me yesterday that when they were 14, she would be out with her boyfriend at record stores, While Sarah would be taking some “down-and-out” out for a cup of tea or a burger. I was impressed, when I was fourteen I definitely couldn’t get a girlfriend (or a boyfriend, for that matter).  Sarah has continued very much in this vein at St Margaret’s and blessed are you if you’ve been taken out for a “down-and-out” coffee.

I was struck in the ordination service yesterday by how grand and strange the language is. “Priests are called to be shepherds… to be messengers, watchmen (sic) and stewards of the Lord” ‘to watch for the signs of God’s new creation’; They are to preach the word “in season and out of season” – I wasn’t sure – is this a football reference? “They are to resist evil, support the weak, defend the poor, and intercede for all in need. (I wondered at this point if the Bishop had accidentally picked up Keir Starmer’s speech.) They are to minister to the sick and prepare the dying for their death.

And in all this, not one mention of stacking chairs, of organising lunches or running a tombola. Honestly, I wondered if I was in the right place. Still, having read Richard Coles’ recent novels, I’m glad he didn’t say anything about solving murders.

When I was a curate in one of the only training sessions I remember, a priest told us that our job was to work ourselves to death. Slowly. I think he meant it a good way. He seemed very positive about the word “slowly”. But I don’t remember coming away feeling especially encouraged.

But the reality is that the strangeness of the role of the priest is in its contrasts. To lead but to serve To teach, but to be humble, To manage people, but to be holy, To admonish, but to forgive, To be prayerful, to be an activist To be friends with everyone but to be set apart. To be wise as serpents, but innocent as doves.

It might seem that there’s little common ground in singing songs to toddlers, taking a service for a room of people who can no longer hold a conversation, figuring out where you put a handrail on a staircase, running a bible-study, helping at a lunch, going to a diocesan synod, fixing a bell in the tower that’s stopped ringing, writing a book review, taking a funeral, coaxing a pigeon out of church, or blessing a wedding ring or a new home, saying your prayers. There is no end to the range of things a priest is required to do. And all on one day a week. But in all these different things, 95% of which are utterly mundane, there is a common theme: The priest’s role is give meaning to people’s lives. I would use the word ‘sanctifying’ here but it sounds too much like sanctimonious. Crucially, the priest’s role is to help people see the meaning that is in their lives, that they really matter.

So at a baptism, you’re saying that this child isn’t just cute and special to mum and dad; This child is holy, loved by God, of infinite worth, with a share in eternal life. That the love in a family is an echo of the divine infinite love that has brought creation into being. Sometimes, like last week, there’ll be a challenge, perhaps the child will be in a headlock, But as long as the water hits the target it’s tea and medals for everyone afterwards.

At a wedding, you’re saying that this love you share, this community your family has brought together is something that goes beyond the two of you; That there is something meaningful, important – even if eventually it all goes to hell (and the priest is thinking, ‘it’s never gonna last’)– There is still something of enduring significance in these two people coming together, in their short lives. And most of us know how tough being married can be; But we also know from Genesis and from the Spice Girls, that despite the cracks, the two are still one flesh; and sometimes its through the cracks that grace seeps in, as Leonard Cohen sang: “There is a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in.”

At a funeral, you’re saying that this life that has ended mattered. That it had a purpose even if we don’t understand it. That the love that is now broken is not wasted; That this person and this love now lives in God, safe from the harm they have suffered.

But in all the little things, the playgroups, the lunches, the concerts, the visits, the general hanging around that is the day-job of all priests, as a representative of the church, in the priestly role of being Christ for the world, Sarah, as a priest, is saying you matter, you are loved, there is something meaningful happening here, even in the mess of life.

Because, as the ancient hymn says, where love and charity are, their God is. And God, in a way, is a kind of shorthand for saying “meaning” – divine purpose. And if it’s love and charity that create meaning, Divine purpose, or that lovely word ‘providence’, Then community gives meaning, Which is to say it’s our everyday relationships and being alongside each other, and above all the little kindnesses, that we really discover God. Being a priest isn’t about magically making that happen. But it’s about pointing it out to people and using words if you have to.

But the priest’s first duty is to lead the worship of the people. And, as a Christian, this is first of all in celebrating the Eucharist. That’s because the benchmark for everything we do as Christians is the revelation of God’s love in Christ, though his passion and resurrection. If the priest’s job in general is to point to where life has meaning; In the Eucharist it’s to regather us as the body of Christ.

The most poignant moment for me is when the priest breaks the bread. Because it’s not a whole, perfect, united bread in which we come together, But as broken bread in need of healing. And it’s at that moment holding the broken pieces of bread I see myself, my family, Especially when my children rise against me, Or when one’s children choose Hosier over you. In the broken bread I see the thrashing babies, the struggling couples, the missing friends and family, the bereaved, I see the mentally distressed, the Church of England, besieged Ukraine, the warming seas; It is the broken bread we offer to God in remembrance of Christ, in faith, hope and love. And that is the work of the priest.

We’re at a moment of change. Change in our country, perhaps change in the fortunes of English football, certainly change in our curate. When a woman celebrates the Eucharist I think all the angels sing, having been half-muted for nearly two thousand years of hurt. And I like to think St Margaret is cheering, somewhere very far upstairs. More change is needed for this broken church and broken world, but it begins with holding it together in prayer,

So when Sarah comes to break the bread today, let us pray for her, for Michael Curl, for Ted, and all the places we have experienced the brokenness of this world, And let us in faith hold to the meaningfulness of this life, to providence, and the hope that our broken bodies will find resurrection in the love of God. That even Peppa Pig World can become the place of the wedding feast.  Amen.

Easter 3, the Revd Dr Brutus Green

When I was twenty, I got a little cut on my thumb playing hockey in South Devon.

Two days later it had turned black and swollen.

I was a bit worried but it was a Friday and too late to get a doctor’s appointment.

I was going to wait till Monday but my then girlfriend convinced me to go down to A&E at the hospital to get it looked at.

The doctor took one look at it before getting me into immediate surgery.

When you have a blood infection you get a red line that travels from the infection towards your heart.

When the line reaches your heart the infection will kill you.

The red line in my case had reached my shoulder.

I spent the next four dull days languishing in hospital on an antibiotic drip clearing my body of septicaemia.

Shortly after joining the army, I had a similar incident where again a tiny cut brought on from ‘taking a knee’ a lot on exercise and degradation from lack of sleep led to a similar infection. 

It was Rhiannon this time who convinced me to seek help and more weeks on antibiotics to fix me.

I have a studied mixture of stubbornness and optimism that has often made those close to me despair.

When we have weaknesses, vulnerabilities; when we are afraid, when we’re suffering from bodily malfunction, there’s this human tendency to pretend they don't exist,

Even when it will lead to further and worse problems;

or to conceal our injury from the world;

to keep it to ourselves, to hide our fragile bodies.

You may have noticed before, the deliberate continuities between the Easter resurrection appearances and the liturgy of the Eucharist. 

In Luke’s account of the walk to Emmaus the disciples only realise it’s Jesus with them ‘when he was at the table with them, [and] he took bread, blessed and broke it, and gave it to them’. 

In today’s Gospel, Jesus greets the disciples by saying ‘Peace be with you’, just as the liturgy of the Sacrament traditionally begins with the Peace. 

He then displays his wounded body to them and eats with them. 

The Gospel writers are quick to note that Jesus is not a shade, a spirit —

this is not a haunting experience or a vision.

Luke emphasises that he eats a ‘broiled fish’ in their presence —

It doesn’t get much more real than that.

The fish doesn’t pass through him like some Harry Potter ghost.

But equally Jesus is not reappearing in his Sunday best as it were —

in some perfect photoshopped body.

He returns with his wounds;

He invites Thomas to place his hands inside them.

But while crucifixion is intended to display the broken criminal body in shame, Jesus now returns with no shame.

He openly displays his wounds.

In Christ, the weak human body becomes the sign of God’s victory.

Why does this matter?

The first thing is that bodies matter. 

People sometimes think that religion is a ‘spiritual’ thing. 

That it’s concerned with our souls not our bodies.

That what we do with our bodies is not important.

It’s about what we think, or how we pray.

As though you could cut away from your body and happily drift into some wacky astral plane.

The Christian faith though has a body at the centre of it. 

A body that is damaged, broken and resurrected.

There’s no distinction between body and soul.

And just as when your mind plays tricks when you don’t get any sleep;

or when you drink too much alcohol you might end up saying or doing things you would not otherwise;

we cannot distinguish between who we are as body and who we are as soul.

Our bodies matter.

The second thing is that the body which is most venerated, has most honour, is the wounded, broken body.

Today this does not seem such a strange idea.

In the last years, the work of Help for Heroes, the great success of the Paralympic Games since London 2012,

have helped change how we look at bodies.

But when we look at ourselves I wonder if we have the same attitude.

Are we happy about exposing the vulnerabilities and weaknesses we have?

Are we so forgiving of our own shortcomings?

Our husband’s shortcomings?

We may be more accepting of disability but we also spend more time and money than ever on ‘perfecting’ our physical appearance.

We will hopefully never find the weakness of our bodies so tortuously and degradingly exhibited as the crucifixion, but the Gospel is trying to suggest that all our weaknesses are redeemable, are forgivable and have their place in God’s world — when we bring them before him;

that the ideal human being is not some blonde 20-something gym-junky but a woman or man who has come to terms with themselves and is honest before God.

The third and final thing is that the body, in whatever state, will be perfected, brought into a state of grace before God.

Too many religions, too many theologies, suggest we can write over the experiences of this life with the whitewash of glory;

suggest heaven would be a race of six foot superwomen and men with chiselled abs and perfect jawlines;

that the drama of this life is forgotten in blissful perfection.

This has a superficial attractiveness.

We want to think that the most acute and unjust suffering of this world may be compensated by an afterlife of joy and ease.

But this is to return to our own standards of physical perfection.

To God the perfect body bears the wounds of suffering.

If this life has significance, our experiences, which write themselves upon our body, must find their place in eternity.

If Christianity stands for anything then it is the elevation of humanity’s suffering into God.

The experience of so many who suffer affliction is that they have to conform themselves to fit an unsympathetic world.

We have become a little better as a society in changing to fit the needs of all our members.

But it is so much more so with God.

The divine is more than capable of expanding its understanding of what it means to be perfectly human.

It has already done so in Jesus’ broken body.

And as today’s epistle tells us.

‘See what love the Father has given us, that we should be called children of God; and that is what we are.

The reason the world does not know us is that it did not know him.’

Jesus offers a new broader definition of humanity that the world does not necessarily recognise, not recognising him.

But: ‘Beloved, we are God's children now;

what we will be has not yet been revealed.

What we do know is this:

when he is revealed, we will be like him, for we will see him as he is.’

For us, our bodies do matter. 

We have our imperfections, our frailties, physical, mental, moral, spiritual, but we can hold these before God in trust that God has a big enough sense of what it means to be human.

And also we can trust that God holds the whole of us to him.

That when we find ourselves in eternity it will not be some sanitised version, but ourselves in all our broken, misshapen, irregularities.

At the eucharist we share in the body of Christ.

It is the ‘body of Christ that was broken for you’.

a moment of reconciliation, not only when we reconcile ourselves to the broken body of Christ, but also when we, in sickness and in health,

in tiredness and confusion, become part of that broken body.

And in this broken body we too are offered back to,

and accepted by God.

Amen.

Easter Sunday, the Revd Dr Brutus Green

Jesus said to her, ‘Mary!’  She turned and said to him in Hebrew, ‘Rabbouni!’  INFSHSA.

My mother used to point to an old man we saw in a park in Swansea, where I grew up, and say it was R.S. Thomas. This was not true. R.S. Thomas lived in North Wales. And he’d died by then. This is a poem by him. (R.S. Thomas, not the other man.) 

There have been times
When, after long on my knees
In a cold chancel, a stone has rolled
From my mind, and I have looked
in and seen the old questions lie
folded and in place
by themselves, like the piled
graveclothes of love’s risen body.

I went to university at 18, not believing in God. I know it sounds ridiculous, but I was a late bloomer. It just didn’t seem plausible to believe in God, with all the evil, suffering and science in the world. I had, though, oddly, elected to study theology. And I know in high falutin’ places like Oxford they don’t study theology, they read theology. But I didn’t go to Oxford, which is just as well, as I hear it’s pretty second rate anyway. At university I went to church – mainly because a pretty girl asked me – And in a moment that savagely undermined my earning potential and eviscerated my pension-prospects, I felt called by God. I’ve never looked back, (until having a second child).

But before that climactic moment, I’d spent my first year studying the philosophy of religion, largely things like, can you prove God’s existence, why does evil or suffering or Nigel Farage exist? what do you do about all the different religions? are moonies just characters on a surreal CBBC TV show, or is that moomins? The Big questions.

There aren’t concrete answers to those questions. (except Mr and Mrs Farage senior) But education, as it often does, exposed me to better arguments and alternate views, and made me realise my teenage atheist convictions were not as sophisticated or intelligent as I’d thought. Letting go of testosterone fuelled cynicism, and with a new girlfriend, I was able to fold-up those questions ‘like the piled graveclothes of love’s risen body.’

It’s not that the questions don’t matter, and having spent the next 10 years studying theology I didn’t become anti-intellectual, but I found there was more to God than justifying his existence. Sometimes our questions are not answered, but laid to one side. Sometimes the problem we thought most important has a death-like grip on our minds, and needs to be let go.

There’s an odd moment you might have noticed in today’s Gospel. We hear that the other disciple ‘also went in and he saw and believed; for as yet they did not understand the scripture, that he must rise from the dead’. It doesn’t obviously make sense. If he saw and believed then how did he not understand that Jesus must rise from the dead? What did he believe? Surely he doesn’t believe Mary, that Jesus’ body has been stolen. After all, he saw the graveclothes neatly folded and the head-cloth rolled by itself. Not the work of grave-robbers.

There’s something here about not understanding but trusting in God. Leaving aside the question of the body, to believe in who Jesus is; Perhaps, Jesus is with the Father. Perhaps, there is some sense, some meaning, some hope in this impossible, horrible world. He has not seen Jesus, he’s not expecting resurrection; He’s just seen an empty tomb. Technically he’s seen nothing. But he’s starting to believe that it’s not for nothing.

Mary is the more central character to this first resurrection experience. This isn’t Mary Jesus’s mother, who is traditionally depicted in blue; But if she was in blue, it would be light blue, because she got there first.

When she enters she sees two angels sitting at where had been Jesus’ head and feet. Through the Gospel and especially in the trial scene, Jesus by himself and his enemies has been described as a temple, not made with hands. When in the book of Exodus the ark of the covenant is made, before its discovery by Indiana Jones; At either end, are two angels with a space in the middle for the mercy seat, a space where the covenant, the ten commandments written on stone, are kept. The ark is the presence of God, kept in the Holy of Holies at the centre of the temple. And here we have two angels sitting either side of the empty space in which Jesus had been laid.

But Mary doesn’t recognise this. She is overwhelmed with grief. In fact, she doesn’t recognise Jesus. She’s been looking for a dead what. She’s not prepared to find a living whom. Once again, becoming stuck on the wrong question. But then Jesus calls her by name. And she turns to love’s risen body. She’s shaken out of her default thinking by something incredibly familiar and personal.

I was once leading a trip of American teenagers around Europe. We arrived in Swansea and took a walk by the sea to get ice-creams. I remember hearing my name called. I turned around and a friend I’d not seen since graduation perhaps 8 years before came running up. What was extraordinary was that she’d recognised me from behind, from 100m away, simply by the way that I walk, which I don’t think was really complimentary. When I was at Sandhurst a few years later a Sergeant Major was so uncomplimentary about the way that I walked on the parade ground that I actually nearly forgot how to walk. Sadly for him, he never got to see me dance.

But that is the experience, when a friend unexpectedly calls your name, and you turn, and suddenly you’re not in quite the same world, because you’ve been woken into this happier reality of friendship and recognition. That is when we can put to one side our preoccupation, our difficulty, our fear and become our truer more alive self. That is when we place by themselves the piled gravesclothes, and turn to love’s risen body.

And so, having mistaken him for the gardener, Mary and Jesus are reunited in the garden. It’s the first day of the week, a man and a woman, and Jesus calls her by name. It’s a picture of a new garden of Eden. It’s a new creation. And equally resonant with the lyric of the Song of Songs we hear so often at weddings, also set in a garden: Love is strong as death, passion as fierce as the grave. Many waters cannot quench love, neither can the floods drown it. The piled gravesclothes are placed to one side as she turns to love’s risen body.

This new creation, this new Adam and Eve, begins a new family as Jesus declares: “I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God.” The family that will become the church, as like Adam and Eve, Mary is sent out from the garden, But not as an exile from paradise but to take the kingdom of God to the world, as the apostle to the apostles, to be the first to spread the good news of the resurrection; to create this family that welcomes all, that gathers together after two thousand years, the 3 week old baby and the 93 year-old to celebrate in Putney at Easter.

But to find this Easter joy we must first put to one side the folded gravesclothes. The cynicism in which we have lost confidence, or courage, or heart in the coldness of our world. The grief in which, in feeling vulnerable, we shut out God and the world, and stop our hearing. Instead, we must listen for that voice: Perhaps the dimly remembered voice that spoke of our lives having meaning, of the infinite worth of each of us, the importance of belonging to a real community of neighbours, of our hope in life beyond death; Perhaps a voice we have not heard before, that in music and word and silence dares us to believe that we can love one another, we can make sense of the world and feel at home in it; That voice that calls our name, the voice of love’s risen body.

Ash Wednesday: The Woman Caught in Adultery

This is the Gospel of Christ, but it’s not the Gospel of John. 

No commentator defends it as original to John, no matter which century you turn to. 

The language is not Johanine, we hear of the Mount of Olives, and Jesus disputes with ‘the scribes and the pharisees’, unmentioned in John but common in the other Gospels.

It awkwardly interrupts the flow of the rest of the chapter, which seamlessly flows around it, and it’s missing from almost all the earliest manuscripts.

So, sorry to those who claim Biblical inerrancy, but this Gospel is in the wrong place.

So should we discard it as a cuckoo text –

erroneously or wickedly introduced to fool the unthinking Christian?

Well, no.

There are actually even better reasons for paying careful attention to it. 

Stylistically it feels like it belongs in Luke’s Gospel and in some manuscripts it’s placed as Luke’s twenty-first chapter. 

As an episodes of Jesus confronting religious authorities it’s among the most credible material of Jesus’ life, and the attention to detail suggests it may be from an eye-witness account. 

But what stands most in its favour is just how surprising it is. 

The radical claim that Christ’s mercy cuts through such an obvious case of caught-red-handed,

of its overturning of human justice,

is a threat to all authority. 

Backing a woman, at this time little more than property (with no legal voice), makes it even odder.

This story liberates the woman. 

It’s a dangerous text. 

In the emerging church, with its many disciplinary issues, regularly brought up in Paul’s letters, it’s a text that goes too far.

How will it be read? 

How will we maintain the reputation of our new faith if the hoi polloi get wind that the mercy of Christ exceeds all law, the teaching and authority of men?

So we have to thank the scribe who sneaks it in here, because in it we have a record of one of the most striking, comforting and challenging teachings of Jesus.

But what is going on here? 

And what have you assumed?

We’re told this woman is caught actually ‘in the act of adultery’ —

in flagrante delicto.

Presumably we can imagine then she is somewhat immodestly dressed (as in the art), caught off guard, and her public humiliation is only a foretaste of the hoped for violence.

I deliberately chose the story of Susanna three days ago for Safeguarding Sunday –

(Somehow her story translates seamlessly into a modern context –

Two established men bullying a woman into either sex or disgrace.)

Because here she is again a few centuries later, dragged before Jesus.

And when you heard this familiar story, did you assume she was guilty? 

Did the marvellous moral that Christ acquits even the most disgusting sin, obscure the fact that no evidence is given, that this is a lynching?

Did you also - without thought – pass judgement on the humiliated woman? 

Are you one of them?

Like in the plot against Susanna, with no offending man in sight, it's quite probably a set-up.

made even more evident as their actual goal is to trap Jesus:

Either he condones circumventing Roman law, and punishes her according to Jewish Law, in contrast to the mercy and healing with which he’s associated;

or in the very temple itself he denies what the Jewish Law demands.

How far will you go Jesus?

Does he care about this woman?

Jesus looks away, writing in the dust.

Is this an ironic parodying of man’s justice.

Is he mocking the Roman court in which the accusation would have been written impartially in the leger; 

We’re told he does this with his finger twice, perhaps suggesting the Law of Moses, written on the two tablets of the Ten Commandments.

Is he positioning himself as the new law giver?

Is he suggesting that human law is dust? 

Vanity blowing on the wind?

Is it simply time wasting, or an eyewitness report on one of Jesus’ tics?

Is he overcome with emotion, unable to look upon either the murdering crowd or the exposed humiliation of the woman?

We have in his riddling response — that the guiltless should throw the first stone — perhaps a suggestion of an answer,

for he immediately begins his writing in the sand again. 

He doesn’t look up. 

He doesn’t attempt confrontation. 

There’s something impartial in the action, which faces human judgement and says, yes, yes, but who are you, any of you, to demand punishment?

In the heat of conflict he holds up a mirror to the conscience of the would-be-murderers.

See this person who you are.

The episode is a criticism of all so-called human justice —

of every time we’ve been involved, personally, as a community, as a nation, where violence is committed in the name of justice. 

This isn’t to dismiss human justice, but it shows that it’s ugly, that everyone’s diminished by it, and that we must bear its sad weight every time it’s deployed.

At the end the woman and Jesus are left alone, the oldest — the wisest or the most burdened — having left first. 

Jesus and the woman. 

As St Augustine says ‘relicti sunt duo miseria et misericordia’—

Left, there are, the two — misery and mercy: 

“Woman, where are they? 

Has no one condemned you?”

This story has always moved me —  it’s an involving story. 

The question to ask though is — who are you identifying with here?

As you heard it, were you thinking of modern day parallels;

atrocities that happen to women today,

still, all the time. 

You may have seen in the angry mob an angry mob in Yemen or India. Perhaps you’re thinking of parliament, or the armed forces or the BBC.

You probably identified first of all then with the woman. 

Your own regrets may have come to mind, the residue of a secret shame.

But one of my most profound spiritual experiences occurred when I realised that although I did empathize with the woman I also strongly identified with the crowd of men. 

Because we all enjoy a bit of rough justice.

There’s a part of us not unhappy to see another suffer, lose, fall behind; the whisper of “justice” in your head as someone you don’t like trips up, the thrill of schadenfreude as an MP makes a fool of themself.

Executions have long been a mainstay of popular entertainment, and little has changed in the bullying morality of the press and social media.

But this was not my spiritual experience. 

What I noticed was that the rage of the crowd with which I identified was mostly directed at myself.

Because all of us are angry with ourselves — rock in hand angry with ourselves.

Many of us judge ourselves and find what we see wanting. 

Failed ambitions, disappointing relationships, not what we expected when we expected, not as good, clever, successful, pretty as a close friend;

“every time a friend of mine succeeds a little piece of me dies.”

Part pride, part vanity and envy; part frustration, part guilt, part unreasonable expectations. 

Hurl your rock on this disappointment of a man.

Jesus does not claim the woman hasn’t sinned. 

He tells her not to sin again. 

She isn’t left happy or even relieved. 

She's left in a state of repentance;

thankful for mercy.

Like the crowd, like us, not necessarily adultery, but she has sinned.

Like the men who excised this story from some of the early manuscripts because it was too threatening, too permissive, and in doing so continued the violence of the crowd to this woman. 

Like them, like the woman, we live in glass houses. 

But our aim for Lent is to be like her, to find ourselves alongside Jesus, and to one by one let the jeering crowd of clamouring anger depart from us, one by one, frustration, disappointment, guilt, vanity, pride.

Lent is a time for giving things up.

So this year perhaps you could:

Give up self-righteousness.

Give up self-judgement.

Give up self-hatred.

Give up anger.

Give up resentment.

Give up bitterness.

Watch them walk away, starting with the eldest. 

‘Relicti sunt duo miseria et misericordia:’

‘There were left, the two, misery and mercy’

Left with Jesus you will find no one left to condemn you.

‘Go, and do not sin again.’ 

Amen.

Safeguarding Sunday!

Vicars are not safe.

It’s one of those oddities of language that there is a double meaning in something being “not safe” –

Not safe can equally mean “dangerous” or “in danger”, which are two quite different things.

But it’s both sides of this double-edged sword that safeguarding is directed at.

Because it’s equally important that we protect children and vulnerable adults, and anyone who volunteers or works here.

However, it’s one of those career drawbacks that vicars are, on a more or less daily basis, in positions of safeguarding risk.

It’s just not possible to avoid one-to-one situations with vulnerable people.

Especially in situations around dying and death, but a wide range of other situations, relating to people seeking help or counselling, push ministry into a realm of unknowns and vulnerability you’d sometimes rather avoid.

The Church’s first priority is the vulnerable – and this is the frontline of what is safe.

While I was in the army I spent the afternoon of New Year’s Eve with a soldier who detailed to me the years of abuse he had suffered at the hands of his wife.

We agreed that he would go home, pack a bag and I arranged for him to stay in a room in barracks for the time being.

While he was there he called me because his wife wanted to give her side of the story.

Despite it being 5pm on New Year’s Eve I felt I should go and while he packed and left, I listened to her and tried to be helpful, as she detailed and tried to defend the numerous ways she had abused her husband.

I got away eventually from one of the nastier human beings I’ve met, but within a few weeks then had to go through a ghastly 6 months as this person made up lies about me and the soldier in an official complaint, that happily through stressfully went nowhere.

It’s very difficult treading a line between compassionate sensitive ministry, and making yourself vulnerable to the fantastical whims of the distressed, the wicked, and the unwell.

It is impossible as a vicar to avoid risk.

A vicar is never safe.

What you learn, though, is how to mitigate against it.

Mitigation is really the art of safeguarding.

Life isn’t safe.

But we can take actions that protect people.

I’ve been struck this week that perhaps even the first response of our instinct to love, is the desire to protect.

How we protect one another is an indication of how we love one another.

Making our church, each other, safe, is a first-order Christian principle working out from the commandment to love one another.

[We have a rock of ages, cleft for us,

We must be that for one another.]

It sounds dull, but the mitigations of safeguarding are a proper response to the great commandment.

Now, St Margaret’s is a hive of activity.

The church is open most of the time, and there’s services, concerts, playgroups, lunches, meetings, rehearsals, so many things going on.

It was delightful yesterday to be helping with Jonathan’s team eating donuts, drinking coffee, and (when the cameras were out) helping with the decorating of the lower hall.

But what I loved was that Obie was in the upper hall at a reception birthday party;

Kids were kickboxing at the back of church.

Music lessons were underway by 9 in the crypt.

The place was a hive of activity.

It was exactly what we’d envisaged when we’d conceived of the Worth Project.

But that’s a lot of people in flow.

Until Sarah arrived the running of this church was done by 1.6 employed persons.

But alongside that, there is the great Team of St Margaret’s community, volunteering their time and skills.

But there are always vulnerabilities –

When people forget or just don’t up.

When a wave of bugs lays the community low.

At half term when people are away.

When you’re working alone, or you’re balancing a stepladder on a box to change a lightbulb.

Or there are just a lot of people passing through, being a community, and being children in a complicated environment.

There is always risk.

And I think here is one of most important rules of safeguarding.

Whatever your policies, your risk assessments, your carefulness,

There is always risk.

The Gospel, love, calls us to vigilance – which is, first of all, an acknowledgement that there is always risk.

[Lift thine eyes, O lift thine eyes – whence cometh help?]

keep alert. Like a roaring lion your adversary the devil prowls around, looking for someone to devour. 

There is always vulnerability.

We are vulnerable creatures.

But what is more, we often instinctively choose the non-safe option.

We stay in a situation, when we should leave.

We don’t want to leave our home, when we probably should.

We don’t easily sacrifice our independence.

Children will climb.

In churches the boundaries,

around what is voluntary or paid,

where professional, friendship and pastoral meet,

where family and work coincide;

create overlaps which are wonderful and pragmatic and harmful.

What is safe plays against a whole array of human desires, and of course the risks that one individual is content to entertain have an effect on all the people who love and care for that person.

So risk is something both individual and shared –

and it’s not always up to us to choose the risks that are entertained.

It’s like all those great movies where we’re cheering on some Jack Nicholson character, who’s living his best life, while his desperate relatives – looking ridiculous – are trying to look after him.

It doesn’t always work like that.

Rhiannon’s grandma recently cancelled her cruise after a bad diagnosis.

Rhiannon was like “what’s the worst that could happen?”

“but what about the insurance?”

“What’s the worst that could happen?”

She didn’t make the cruise, but I think she appreciated Rhiannon’s argument.

There’s always risk, but how we mitigate risk is an indication of how we love one another.

And then risk can be flattering;

it can be exciting.

A parishioner once wrote me a letter in which she told me that I was the Messiah.

A child once confused me with God.

It’s better not to get carried away with such assertions.

Being caught up in the fantasies of others is an occupational hazard,

and you don’t always get the help or support you require.

Equally, pointing out danger can be isolating, alarming, stressful;

When you discover some sort of worry or threat, the temptation to pretend you don’t know, to disbelieve, to ignore, to leave to someone else, to give it time, is very strong.

Safeguarding very often is about honesty and openness.

When we hear of the most terrible incidents, very often there are a number of people who knew, quite often several who tried to intervene;

It can be very difficult; go against our natural inclination to privacy, to live and let live;

It can be costly, sometimes to everyone.

But as we know, good safeguarding saves lives.

The transfiguration which is always the Gospel the week before Lent is the Revelation of who Jesus really is – before we enter the desert.
The disciples suddenly see the truth about Jesus, the reality of who he is.

There are many transfigurations – revelations of realities that might otherwise remain hidden.

Abuse usually happens in secret, as the disciples are commanded to keep secret.

We are no longer commanded to keep secrets.

But we are commanded to bear witness to the truth.

Vicars may not be safe, but St Margaret’s is a safe church, and we work hard as a church to keep it safe.

There is always risk, which is why we must remain vigilant.

This vigilance, especially for our children and vulnerable adults, is a mark of how we love one another,

And of our obedience to the Gospel.

It’s also a function of how we follow him who came as Truth to bear witness to the Truth;

that people and communities can do terrible things, and allow terrible things,

when they don’t speak the truth and protect the vulnerable.

So let’s keep St Margaret’s safe for everyone, but without foregoing the risk of being close and sharing our vulnerability, and trying, as we are able, to love one another. Amen.

Epiphany Carols

Sermon by the Revd Dr Brutus Green

An Epiphany.

Some sort of sudden realisation –

Internal – that’s where I left my phone –

Actually, that friend of mine, so-and-so, is just not a nice person –

My parents aren’t perfect – they’re just human and wow did they get that wrong –

(later) Actually parenting is really difficult, and they actually did this and this much better than I’m managing.

Or, sometimes, external –

Something in this moment – the view, the weather, the company, the situation, this piece of music, this book, the suffering of this person, the courage of this person –

the friend who pushes you out of your comfort –

Whatever it is that makes you think – I need to change –

I have changed –

I cannot forget this.

Every time you fall in love it’s an epiphany.

Every moment with a child can be an epiphany.

Every time you break something so hard it cannot be fixed;

Every time you confess something to God with your whole heart.

We can most of us imagine a different life, but the terror and freedom of change surprises us;

It takes an epiphany to smash through our patterns of behaviour.

This becomes more difficult as we get older.

If you ask people their favourite book, a book that changed them; inspired them,

most people will tell you books they read in their teens or twenties.

It’s a joke that you can tell the year a vicar left theological college by what’s on their bookshelf.

It’s not just that we stop being moved by what we read, a lot of us just stop reading.

But even when we do, we’re less likely to be inspired to change –

To stop eating meat, to become a protestor, to travel to India, to take a risk.

We set a limit on Epiphanies at 60% after 40.

The Church celebrates the season of Epiphany as the revelation of Christ to the world.

The moments in which people realise something has changed, something must change.

The wise men realise that this is no ordinary king.

But also no ordinary Jewish king;

Christianity brings a new religion to the Gentiles, opens the door to the Hebrew Scriptures for all;

But it also changes and splits the Jewish religion;

It’s the Hebrew Bible in a different light.

In Christ’s baptism, the heavens shake and his earthly ministry begins, emphatically with the miracle at Cana.

Christ appears on the scene.

And the first effects, the first fruit of this, is in the call of the disciples, as people give up everything to follow him.

Epiphany closes with Candlemas – returning us to the baby and the crib.

Here is the prophecy – to be a light for revelation to the Gentiles and for glory to your people Israel.

The change is fundamental.

Within three centuries – faith in this child will be the dominant force in Europe, and before long the world.

In the Christian understanding, the Gentiles and Israel will receive their reconciliation and unification in the Church.

Though for those who understand themselves to be the true continuation of Israel it will be catastrophe and the loss of the land for two millennia.

It’s really impossible to overstate the impact of Jesus on the world.

These events which reveal God to the world in the person of Jesus, have inspired billions;

Currently shape the identity of 2.4 billion Christians in the world today.

And this faith has been the force behind most educational and social programmes and reform in European history.

It could have been otherwise.

Zeus, with his lightning bolts, might have kept his place at the top of Mount Olympus,

Bearing in mind that the German for lightning is Blitz, we might well be fearful of a culture inspired by him and his reprobate crew.

Rewriting two thousand years of history is, in any case, difficult to imagine.

But in these grey January and February days,

in a time of political unrest,

with war and the weather biting at our borders,

we might ask where do we look for inspiration?
Where will we find that Epiphany?
How are we going to find the motivation to change?

To be better?

to uncover what it means to be human?

What the disciples took from these moments of epiphany is a sense of purpose.

A confidence that following Jesus is the right thing to do.

That here is the Son of God.

For an Epiphany to be real it must speak the truth.

A truth in us, a truth about the world.

That’s where it gets the power to change people.

It is curious that Christ is the dominant figure in Western civilisation.

A person without notable family or education, from a colonised non-white backward nation.

A person who gave up what power he had and died in his 30s by public execution.

A person who preached against power and against violence.

An Epiphany always comes as a surprise.

Is there perhaps more to this life –

who told us that God is love,

to be kind to one another,

that to give up everything for the sake of love is to be like God himself –

that God is waiting for you now, in your heart and in your neighbour,

If you will but seek him?

So let us look for that Epiphany, seek out that Epiphany, discover that Epiphany,

And in its truth find our purpose.

And in our purpose be changed to be more like him,

who brought light to the Gentiles and glory to his people. Amen.

The hidden life of Jacob

John’s Gospel is a mystery.

We don’t know who wrote it, when exactly or where it was written;

There are some baffling questions.

Who is ‘the beloved disciple’ who appears half-way through but is never named?

Why is there no Last Supper, which seems quite important in the other Gospels, and the church –

With that why are there actually no sacraments –

No description of baptism, or the baptism of Jesus –

But many allusions to sacraments – I am the bread of life, I am the true vine, I am the living water, the six stone jars for purification, the foot-washing.

Sacrament is a Latin word, sacramentum, whose Greek equivalent in Mysterion, and there’s no shortage of mysteries.

Why does the crucifixion happen before the Passover in John, rather than the Passover being celebrated as the Last Supper in the other Gospels?

And why are the list of disciples different?

Ironically, or not, there’s no mention of John in this Gospel, a central figure elsewhere, and today we heard about Nathaniel – unknown to Matthew, Mark and Luke.

John is just a very different Gospel.

It’s an insider Gospel.

He’s assuming you know certain things –

He’s perhaps protecting the church’s practices from being mocked or perverted by outsiders.

He’s always coding in connections, allusions, symbols to enrich the narrative and tell you more about Jesus, if you take the time to peel through the layers.

So you’d be forgiven – I forgive you – te absolvo –

If you hadn’t realised today’s passage is all about Jacob.

The first little clue comes in this strange introduction of Nathaniel –

Jesus describes him as an ‘Israelite in whom there is no deceit’.

Israelite here is an unusual term for John.

But Israel is the name which God gives Jacob, who becomes father of the twelve tribes –

But Jacob is famously the deceiver, he tricks his father by wearing animal skins to appear to be hairy like his brother and by getting his mother to cook Isaac a good lunch.

Nathaniel then is a true Israel – in whom there is no deceit – who will witness to the new promise of God.

But the explicit moment is the image we ended with:

you will see heaven opened and the angels of God ascending and descending upon the Son of Man.’

Updated in the New Zeppelin Version to a stairway, St John’s image replicates the seminal moment of Jacob’s dream in Genesis (not the band):

[Jacob] dreamed that there was a ladder set up on the earth, the top of it reaching to heaven; and the angels of God were ascending and descending on it.

This is the moment after Jacob has stolen Esau’s birthright – their father’s blessing –

where Jacob has this theophany of angels going up and down, and God renews his covenant with Jacob promising the land and offspring.

And Jacob declares: ‘‘Surely the Lord is in this place—and I did not know it!’ 

And he was afraid, and said, ‘How awesome is this place!

This is none other than the house of God, and this is the gate of heaven.’

But let’s get things lined up properly in these parallel texts.

Jesus is not Jacob here.

He’s not having a dream –

He’s saying this is what you, my disciples, you Nathaniel, Israel without deceit, will see.

No, Jesus is himself Beth-el, the House of God upon whom the angels ascend and descend;

He is the ladder that connects heaven and earth.

In that most unlikely place – between heaven and earth – towards which the Gospel inexorably moves;

Which finds in love and in suffering the central truth of creation.

And there’re no coincidences in John’s Gospel.

So when Jesus cleanses the temple in the next chapter, a totally different timing to the other Gospels, who put it at the end, he is saying the temple is not the house of God.

I am the house of God, the Word made flesh and dwelling amongst you.

The body which you will break.

And while Jacob exclaims: ‘Surely the Lord is in this place and I did not know it!’

only a few verses before today’s Gospel we read:

He was in the world, and the world came into being through him; yet the world did not know him.

As the centurion will cry at  the foot of the cross:

“Surely this was the Son of God!”

The Biblical stories are full of little parallels, mirroring and twists;

Jacob gets his comeuppance for stealing his brother Esau’s blessing a few years later.

He goes down to a well, sees a pretty girl called Rachel.

He agrees to serve her father for seven years in return for marriage.

But Laban tricks him and sends him in to Leah, and only gets Rachel in return for another seven years’ work.

No one really comes off well in the story but essentially Jacob gets a dose of his own medicine, his deceit.

Intriguingly, John deliberately plays off this Jacob story as well, a few chapters after today’s Gospel, when Jesus meets the Samaritan woman at Jacob’s well.

There are little details that match – Jacob and Jesus both arrive in the middle of the day;

And we have the odd unchaperoned flirting that shocks the disciples.

But as with Nathaniel, in whom there is no deceit, there’s no trickery here, and while Rachel was to fulfil the promises of God by giving Jacob his favourite children, Joseph and Benjamin, so we see the promises of God fulfilled in the encounter with the Samaritan woman, as she comes to faith and spreads the news of the Gospel to surrounding villages.

So – I’m sure you’re thinking – this is all very interesting, but why does it matter?

Well, the first thing is about the depth of the Biblical narrative.

The story of Jesus is only unlocked, only makes sense, in the context of Scripture.

The evangelist uses parallels with stories and characters – especially Adam and Moses, to bring out who Jesus is, to build the connections so you can see the larger story of what God’s doing with creation.

The promise Jacob receives at Bethel is owned by his children.

Jacob is Israel so the children of Israel have this promise that God has blessed them and given them the land.

We can see today how significant that is.

Here Jesus is saying I am Bethel – the house of God –

So the promise Jacob receives becomes incarnate in the person of Jesus.

And just as Jesus figuratively brings the people liberation and the new law – through parallels with Moses,

And is a universal figure of humanity, as Adam is,

So in Jacob he represents the promises of God, not achieved through deceit and trickery;

But by being this mediating figure between heaven and earth.

By revealing God on the cross –

By identifying with our suffering and conquering with love;

A God not universally recognised, but awesome to those who see it, the house of God and the gate of heaven.

There is something in the call of faith that is about the ability to connect.

If the Gospel is just a story about someone called Jesus who lived along time ago, then we have not been able to make that step.

Just as if you can read CS Lewis or Tolkien without hearing the Christian underpinning of their stories, you’d have missed something important.

To really read the Gospel is to hear the tremors of so many more stories beneath, of Kings and prostitutes and lepers and conquests and slavery and trickery and children and snakes.

And all those stories – like we hear at Carol services and on Easter night are built into the pivotal story we hear each Sunday.

And this isn’t about the evangelist who may or may not have been called John.

It’s about a drumbeat, an ancient story built up like geological strata over millennia.

A story about what it means to be human;

And carried forward through the lives of Saints, the mystery plays, Chaucer, Shakespeare, King Arthur and Dickens;

And in every generation it’s asking can you hear that beat?
Can you hear the story?

Hear the call of God, enough to respond –

Speak, Lord, your servant is listening.

Because just as John is riffing on the story of Jacob to give sense and meaning to the story of Jesus, so we can play out the story of our lives by connecting it with this well of stories we have inherited.

As a Christian, our suffering is cruciform;

Our depression is Gethsemane

Our grief is Good Friday;

Our recovery is resurrection;

Our love is our purpose.

This is a work of imagination, to connect us to the deeper story that God is telling about the world.

A story of layers and layers,

Where a great deal is hidden and there is no shortage of mystery.

but also buried in those layers is the Word made flesh, and a stairway to heaven.

Amen.

Sermon for St Cecilia's Day

Sermon preached by Anne East at St Margaret’s for St Cecilia 26 / 11 / 23

Azariah 28-34, 52-59, 68.  Psalm 150. Revelation 15: 1-4. Luke 10: 38-42

One of my earliest childhood memories is of standing next to my father in chapel (in the pew that had our name on, because we paid ‘pew rent’ – but that’s another story!) on a Sunday morning, dad’s voice ringing out above me:

O Lord my God
When I in awesome wonder
Consider all the worlds thy hands have made –
I see the stars, I hear the rolling thunder
Thy power throughout the universe displayed
Then sings my soul, my Saviour God to thee,
How great thou art. How great thou art.

Methodism was born in song. (I promised Brutus I’d tell you that . .  it’s a quote from the 1933 Methodist Hymn Book, which is probably the one my father was singing from).

Later I experienced a different kind of worship song. The girls of Truro High School filed into Morning Assembly clutching not only their hymn books but also their Psalters. (Books of Psalms). We were an Anglican foundation and we sang a Psalm every morning. Very clever stuff, singing all on one note and then moving at the pointy bits. In the sixth form they made me leader of the Hymn Choir, so I was destined to be Church of England after all.

Today we celebrate Saint Cecilia, patron of music and musicians. Cecilia was a Roman virgin martyr and it is written that as the musicians played at her wedding Cecilia ‘sang in her heart to the Lord’. She came to symbolise the central role of music in liturgy. And we acknowledge, with gratitude, the gifts that our choir (directed by Rhiannon, supported by Emily) bring to our worship here at St Margaret’s.

There are hundreds of references to singing in the Bible.

Matthew and Mark record that on the eve of the crucifixion, after the Passover meal, (the Last Supper)  the disciples and Jesus sang together “ . . . after they had sung a hymn, they went out to the Mount of Olives.” (Matthew 26:30). While Scripture doesn’t explicitly state which hymn was sung, Jewish tradition has it that the Passover meal was concluded by singing the last portion of the ‘Hallel’ – a joyous celebration of praise and thanksgiving comprised of psalms 113 to 118.

The Psalms, the longest book in the Bible, are the prayers, reflections, laments, complaints and praise declarations of God’s people. Jesus knew them and frequently quoted from them. All human emotions are there: celebration, despair, grief, anger, joy, sorrow, thanksgiving. . .

One important use for the psalms was for instruction: reminding people of the fundamental truths of their faith:

·      How God has saved / is saving his people

·      The attributes of God – what God is like (just, merciful, compassionate, forgiving)

·      the nature of creation

·      humankind’s strengths and weaknesses

Psalm 96: ‘Oh sing to the Lord a new song, sing to the Lord all the earth. Sing to the Lord, bless his name, tell of his salvation from day to day.’

The ‘Salvation Story’ – that’s what it’s about. That’s why Charles Wesley wrote 6,500 hymns (yes, I know, I couldn’t believe that number either) – but he and his brother John produced 56 hymnals that covered every area of Christian doctrine. Those Cornish tin miners, Yorkshire coal miners, learnt the gospel (the Good News of Jesus Christ) from those songs.

Martin Luther, 200 years before the Wesley brothers, loved congregational music. In a foreword to a collection of songs, he wrote the following: “When man’s natural ability is whetted and polished to the extent that it becomes an art, then do we note with great surprise the great and perfect wisdom of God in music, which is, after all, His product and His gift”.

So music is a way of teaching us our theology.

But by far the greater number of hymns and psalms are about simply PRAISING God. That reminds me of something else I used to sing with my father – the ‘Te Deum’- WE PRAISE THEE O GOD, WE ACKNOWLEDGE THEE TO BE THE LORD’  . . .

The glorious company of the Apostles praise Thee. 
The noble fellowship of the Prophets praise Thee. 
The white-robed army of Martyrs praise Thee. 
The holy Church throughout all the world . .

This is a Christian text going back to the 4th century and earlier, and the point about praise is that it’s not about us. It’s about God – Creator, Comforter, Saviour.

That exuberance of praise is summed up for me in the figure of Margaret Newman, whom many of the older worshippers here will remember – organist, pianist, church warden, guide leader – playing us out with a final hymn : ‘And the trees of the fields shall clap their hands / clap their hands . . and you’ll go out with joy!’

The whole creation is called upon to worship God. In our reading from Azariah: ‘Let the earth bless the Lord . . . mountains and hills, . . .all that grows in the ground . . seas and rivers . . whales and all that swim in the waters . . all the birds of the air . .

Music is about harmony. It is a powerful gift that complements, supports, and deepens our relationship with God and with each other.

My mother-in-law had Alzheimer’s and lost the ability to communicate meaningfully in speech towards the end of her life. But when I visited her I used to sing hymns, and she joined in. The music was so embedded that the music hung on to the words she had lost in every other aspect of her life.

There are times when hymns express things that I do not have the words for:

Father I place into your hands / My friends and family
Father I place into your hands  / The things that trouble me . . .
For I know I always can trust you.

Our curate Sarah, in her sermon on Wednesday a couple of weeks ago, reminded us of the importance of gratitude to God - an awareness of the Grace that we receive.  Our response to that must be adoration – like Mary, sitting at the feet of Jesus in today’s Gospel. The repetition of music like the songs from Taize also help us to express our deepest prayers.

As we celebrate - and appreciate – what music brings to our worship here at St Margaret’s, let Paul have the last word; (this from Colossians chapter 3 v 16):

“Let the message of Christ dwell among you richly as you teach and admonish one another with all wisdom through psalms, hymns, and songs from the Spirit, singing to God with gratitude in your hearts.”

Amen

Harvest!

In all times and all places; for all faiths and all peoples, harvest is a time of thanksgiving: for corn, wheat and barley, for rice, for watermelons, humans have given thanks for the weather, for the soil, for the crops, that have given them the security of food through the winter.

The beginning of farming, around 10,000 years ago, changed human culture. The land itself became sacred as human communities became resident, rather than following the migrations of food sources. Storable food made trade and wealth possible. Being resident, and not having to constantly chase food meant leisure, which gave time for reflection, for the development of art, music and language. And, of course, recorded religion. Adam is told on leaving the garden of Eden that he will toil the land, and his children, Cain and Able, are the archetypes of the arable and dairy farmer respectively. And so begins civilisation.

But farming also puts us at the mercy of the elements, rain and drought, ice and wind; no culture is without its gods of harvest because all who are involved with agriculture understand that we are dependent creatures; that fickle nature can fructify our crops or reduce them to nothing. I don’t know if it’s true but someone told me yesterday they saw crocuses on Putney Common – With this weather, anything is possible.

And it’s necessary to realise every now and again how dependent we are as creatures — Despite our supermarkets, our weather forecasts, out of season vegetables and tinned goods — humankind is always at the mercy of the elements. And when they turn elemental, as in recent storms, fires and earthquakes, the fragility of human life, our dependency, is all too apparent.

But the thankfulness of Harvest doesn’t take the simple attitude of human thanksgiving. Harvest is celebrated every year in good and bad harvests — with great joy, hard toil, or meagre offerings. It’s not thanks that our harvest is better than theirs — or better than last year. We still celebrate harvest despite the hellish wreaking of devastation in other countries. Despite floods here, droughts there. We simply give thanks for what we have, share a little, and pray for the needs of others.

At present the climate is throwing harvest and the idea of seeing divine purpose in it, into disrepute. When I went to Auschwitz a few years ago I saw Eucharistic vessels that had been smuggled in for priests to take forbidden services. Eucharist means ‘thanksgiving’. You might well ask — how do you give thanks in a place like that? Thanksgiving is an attitude.

You can list things your thankful for; you can weigh up and measure whether you’re lucky; compare yourself to the Beckhams, the king, a Libyan widow — This might make you grateful, or bitter — but thankfulness is an attitude that looks at everything in life through the prism of ‘gift’. That we have nothing, hold on to nothing, but we who are alive are daily given inestimable gifts with which to do our best.

My mother calls me Pollyanna — based on some literary figure I have never read. Apparently, she is always optimistic. Years ago, when I was in the army, I was doing a particularly unpleasant training trial called P Company. Less than half those who started finished, many dropping out with broken limbs. Being the only chaplain, I was also fifteen years older than the next man (and they were all men). Halfway through the course, as part of my duties, I went to a 2PARA Reunion Club dinner and I remember talking to a wife who asked me if I thought I’d pass. I genuinely didn’t expect to finish let alone pass it, and said as much. She didn't like my answer and kept pushing me — She took a PMA — positive mental attitude angle — (Perhaps you remember Mr Motivator?) where people think that to achieve things you have to be positive. If I didn’t believe I could pass I never would.
 And I’m certain she went away thinking I’d never do it.

I don’t believe in PMA; optimism is shallow; I’d rather expect the worst than be surprised by it. But I do believe in looking for the good, for the opportunity in every moment and every person. For giving thanks for any victory however small. For trusting that whatever the situation, somewhere there is grace working. Which in the army often took a lot of imagination.

Our epistle reminded us of the need to be patient. That the work of Harvest tells us that the things for which we long are often long hidden from us. That we should not begrudge one another. “Stablish your hearts”! When it comes to faith, there is a great deal hidden from us. The ways of the world are often confusing and hard to reconcile with the loving God we follow. But the way in which we see the world is determined by the attitude we bring to it; And we are much more likely to discover grace, if we begin with an attitude of thanksgiving. As I said, Eucharist means thanksgiving, and it’s no coincidence that in this service the last words before the bread and wine are given to you are thanksgiving and thankful. Your list of thankfulness maybe very long, it may just have one very special thing, but it pays to always remember we are dependent. On nature; on the people around us. And to remember that there are always things to give thanks for and grace to be found. So let us give thanks for what we have, share a little, and pray for the needs of others. Amen.

Original Thinking

I was walking through Battersea with the Archdeacon when a man accosted me. He seemed not to have noticed that the archdeacon was also a man of the cloth, but set himself to testing me and whether I knew some basic things such as the Ten Commandments. He was a very angry man and, as a priest, you learn a certain wariness, when people start shouting at you aross the street. At one point he made as if to punch me in the face to see if I would turn the other cheek, At which point the Archdeacon and I began to inch away. But as his diatribe took shape, it emerged that he considered himself to be an entirely original thinker, whereas I only thought ideas I’d been taught to think. I did try to explain, as we backed away, that originality is a peculiar thing to aim for in the realm of ideas, especially as he insisted on being extremely well read. Christianity is a tradition that goes back thousands of years; one individual is probably better advised to try and understand and make sense of that deep well of thought, than gaze into his own mirrored shallows.

Now we might think that Jesus would be an exception here, as the Incarnate Word, he might express himself in an original way; As, some would say, the founder of a new religion we’d expect something a bit different. But what we see time and again, here, is a typical rabbinic approach, and, it might seem odd to say, but in many respects it is St Paul who has the better claim for founding Christianity. Jesus’ teaching is not something new and radical, but a recalling of the people to essential truths and a reformer’s criticism of abuses of power. So in today’s Gospel the teachers wonder at his learning, but his reply is ‘my doctrine is not mine, but his that sent me.’ The Jews do not have him killed because of his originality but because he threatens their authority by presenting the faith authentically. Even in the epistle, by which time, Christianity has taken some steps away from the accepted Jewish practices, the abiding message is ‘hold fast that which is good.’ And those theologians who tried to draw a line between the Old and New Testaments, were defined as heretics. The teaching of Jesus and St Paul can only be understood within the context of Hebrew Scriptures and must be regarded as a continuation and interpretation of it.

When I did catechesis for Confirmation in Swansea, I remember learning the Ten Commandments. They are often printed in the sanctuaries of churches. The Gospel is not the end of the Law but its fulfilment.

So yes, Jesus’ central teaching to love God and neighbour is there in the Old Testament, The concept of the Messiah as a suffering servant who suffers for his people, the scapegoat who becomes the nation’s sacrifice, the revelation of God as love – love for the created world, love for God’s people; it’s all there in the Old Testament. The Gospel gives us a more direct account and demonstration of God’s nature and teaching, and a refined emphasis and prioritising, but God’s self-description is unchanged.

However, here we must pause, as what I’m not so sure about, is that our idea of God is derived from the Bible at all. It’s from philosophy and eighteenth century rationalists that we have an abstract conception of a god as the embodiment of power and knowledge, of omnipresence and abstract goodness, a remote and dispassionate god of law and perfect justice, a god above and beyond. A god who marries with the authoritarian figures of the kings and emperors of ancient civilisations, a god of coronations.

It is a wrench to turn back to Scripture and see that God is revealed only in figures of weakness and poverty; That God is found not in conquest but in reconciliation; Not in power but in sacrifice; That we need not think of God as far away or high above, But in the love we sense in creation, that we read in Scripture and that we come to know in the friendship of the Christian community.

The God revealed in Scripture is not an object – however distant, however different. St Augustine famously described God as closer than I am to myself. And God is not abstract or indifferent. You exist because God wills it.

Today is Back to School Sunday where we’ll be blessing the little darlings as they head off to new adventures, full of wonder and open minds. The teaching of the faith, our attempt to approach those timeless truths that matter more than anything, is better if it’s not new or original, But it’s a work to allow ourselves to be drawn back to what is revealed in Scripture – Even in its most fundamental categories. It asks us to keep our minds open and our capacity to wonder alert. The eyes of humans are always drawn to power, to knowledge, to control; But the faith teaches us to look to what is small, what is little in this world, but especially to those people and places that exist for the sake of others. To find God not in what is grand and great and good, But in humility, compassion and service. Amen.