(Preached at the 62^nd annual service of Thanksgiving for Liberation, Liberation Day, Wednesday May 9^th 2007, in the Town Church, St Peter Port, Guernsey by kind invitation of the Dean of Guernsey, Very Revd Paul Mellor)

Like everyone else, I had no choice over where, when or who I was born. Thinking about it now, as I can see the first signs of the beginning of the onset of early middle age on the far horizon, it seems to me that actually I had great good fortune in the when and the where of my birth. I was born at the end of the 40’s to a father who had survived being a navigator on bombers during the latter years of the war, and a mum who had spent the war welding landing craft and things in the heavy engineering factory at the top of the road where we lived in the Midlands.

As a child of the 50’s I was innocent and ignorant of everything that went on in the world - the Cold War, the continuing shortages, the huge adjustments after the War, the so-called ‘grey days’. As a teenager in the 60’s I was still pretty innocent and ignorant, and missed most if not all of the swinging 60s as, I suspect, most other teenagers did too. Only in my middle teens did the wider world begin to dawn on me: the Cuban missile crisis and the nuclear threat, the Biafran war, Vietnam, famines in India and world poverty. And then in the 20 or so years after that, both in England and in Africa, and despite everything, my world was still largely a good place in which to live, and living in it a good experience. And I think this was true, not just for me, but for many of my post-war generation. When we consider things now, taking everything together, our 50’s childhoods and our 60’s teenage years have something of the idyllic about them. We played where we wanted to play. We had a freedom unknown to children today. We lived in a world without hard drugs, AIDS or any of today’s frightening pressures on young people to consume and conform. We lived in a world which felt secure and safe; and we lived in growing prosperity.

That was not, of course, the world before I was born. The world before I was born had seen violence, terror and suffering on an unprecedented scale. It had seen the horrors of the trenches in the First World War, so horrible that my grandfather who survived gassing would never ever speak of his experiences. It had seen the horror of global conflict, of tyranny, oppression, occupation, and genocide in the Second. Those are the things that were part of my parents’ experience, and would have been even more so had they been Guernsey people instead of Shropshire people. Those are the things which will be very real in the minds and hearts of many of you in this church this morning and on this island today.

And then there are the last twenty years, two decades in which the world has changed dramatically again. Each of us will have our own opinions on what has been taking place and what is going on now – and I daresay arguments could get quite heated about politics, economics, religion, values and attitudes and so on – but I have a growing sense that for many the world is, and for many more the world feels, an increasingly uncertain, even frightened and frightening place in which to live. I hear people of my generation, 50-somethings where 50 is the new 35, beginning to speak of having seen the best of life in our world, and to voice their fears that things are going to get tougher from now on, whether that’s terrorism, or the economy or climate change. The cynics laughed at Macmillan’s ‘You’ve never had it so good’, but I’m beginning to hear people say that it now looks as if he might have been right, no matter how much better-off we are now than we were in his day. Today, many feel, it looks as if we are moving again into a darkening future.

Of course there are times and places when it doesn’t. A beautiful spring morning like this. Looking out to sea at views which are nearly as beautiful as those in Cornwall. When things are well with us, with our families or our friends over a glass of wine, a pint or a cup of coffee. Or for me, last Saturday lunchtime as I sat on Sittaford Tor in the middle of Dartmoor with my daughter on a beautiful day eating a cheese sandwich – the world looked and felt good. Then at home the tv news brought other realities into the living room, as did a pastoral phone call. At some times and in some places the world can still look and still be a good place, maybe as it did here and in many other places in the spring of 1939: but more often than not, I think, we are aware that this is a world of good and evil, of life and of death, of light and of darkness; and a world in which the second of each of those pairs is too often very real and very powerful. Whatever else we can say about the 20^th century it was a century in which we saw the power of evil, death and darkness, as you know only too well from your own experience here of occupation, and the 21^st century has begun no better. We now live in a world where light and dark, good and evil, life and death are at odds. You can guarantee every news programme will be plotted according to the conflict between those opposites. How then do we as human beings respond to this? That seems to me to be a very important question at this time. The easy way to respond is by building barriers, by stocking weapons, by making our fences more secure and our deterrents more powerful, and even by going to war on terror, but what does any of that achieve other than generating more fear and anxiety? What sort of life is it behind the fence, characterised by the fear that sees every stranger as a potential enemy and that withdraws from all human contact in the name of security? We see that happening in the UK at the moment. The stranger is the enemy. Different cultures or different religions are automatically suspect. Hence the Islamophobia that characterises much of the British press.

But we gather here this morning for worship in the glorious Christian season of Easter and on Liberation Day for this 62^nd annual service of Thanksgiving for Liberation. Our wonderful psalm from the OT reminds us that though human life is transient and frail – that we are about as stable as the dust and our lives as short as the blossoming of a spring flower - God’s eternal love is steadfast and sure, meeting our inevitable failures with forgiveness, offering us new beginnings, and showing us a better way. And then there is that glorious desert-island passage from Paul’s letter to the Romans. A man whose life had seen suffering, disappointment, ill-treatment, abuse and hatred, and who had himself dished out some of the same before he had seen the light, writes to the Christians in Rome and says that nothing, but nothing, can separate us from the love of God we have seen in Jesus Christ. He goes through a list - can hardship, distress, persecution, famine, poverty, danger, violence? - and answers ‘No’. Then he says that he is convinced, absolutely convinced, that nothing – death, life, angels, spiritual powers, the present, the future, any of the forces in the universe, height, depth – nothing at all in all creation, will ever be able to separate us from God’s love. Underlying everything he writes is his conviction that Easter, the resurrection of Jesus, has changed things just as it changed him. Because of Easter, he is convinced that the last word lies with God, that the last word does not lie with evil but with good, not with death but with life, not with darkness but with light. It might not look like it, he says, but it does. So go and live in that confidence, in that sure and certain hope, he tells the Romans. And so he tells us.

‘Those who cannot learn from history’, said a 20^th century philosopher, ‘are doomed to repeat it’ – and in our insecure and uncertain world there are many voices which still haven’t learned from history and so say that war and violence will solve some at least of our most pressing problems. St Paul reminds us of a different and a better way of being human and of living together, which is to look at Easter, to hear its message that the last word lies with good and not evil, life and not death, light and not darkness, and to learn to live individually and together in that confidence. That’s the only way to a better and safer world, the Psalm and St Paul both insist.

May God help us so to hear, and so to live in that true freedom for ourselves, for our communities and for the future of our planet.

Hymn NEH 86 - ‘My song is love unknown’

These famous and well-known words are a bit deceptive. Set to a gentle and easy tune they come easily to our lips. But if we stop for a moment and focus on them, they begin to look rather strange, for in them we are invited to sing a song, but a strange song, a song about a crucifixion, a song about a death, a song about a brutal, barbaric and tragic death. So in this first verse of what I think of as one of the most Anglican of hymns, we come up against the fundamental oddity of the Christian faith, although it’s much more than an oddity, it’s a scandal and an offence, the fundamental scandal of the cross. This first verse reminds us that Jesus, who we call ‘Lord’ and ‘Christ’ or ‘Messiah’ died by crucifixion; that the hero of the Christian story is one who died by brutal execution.

We’re so familiar with thinking of the cross as our symbol, I sometimes think, that it doesn’t shock us any more. We’re used to seeing crosses in our churches. We’re used to seeing crosses as items of jewellery. And how shocking and bizarre is that - that Christians wear and display in their churches the most cruel and barbaric execution device that the ancient Romans could refine to keep power in their vast empire. How strange is that, that we make of the cross, that ancient instrument of torture and execution, our song and our symbol. And yet we do, of course, and we do it without apology. We sing of a cross, we make the cross our song.

The song is about love unknown, my saviour’s love to me. Does this mean that we are going to sing of a love that was unknown before this living and dying of Christ, and therefore that our song is one which speaks of the new love of God seen so distinctively in Jesus Christ? Is it saying that in the cross of Christ, in the life and death of Christ, something new is seen of the love of God - a love which is eternal and yet ever new but somehow seen differently in the living and the dying of Christ? Or could it be that we are going to sing of a love which is just so amazingly, incalculably big? A ‘love so amazing, so divine’, or in the words of an old Methodist hymn, a love which ‘passes knowledge’ - a love that is unknown in the sense that it is beyond knowing, beyond describing, beyond measuring, a love which our words cannot properly express?

This love unknown is to the loveless shown. My students will tell you that I am for ever saying that Christianity is far too preoccupied with personal sin, and that it is not good or healthy for our human flourishing that the first thing we are supposed to say about ourselves every time we come to church is that we are ‘sinners’. In the Old Testament that word is used for those who consciously and deliberately set themselves against God and neighbour, and apart from odd moments on the A30, I don’t do that very often. This verse doesn’t call us ‘the sinful’ but ‘the loveless’, and I like this different, alternative word for me, and maybe for many of us. Loveless makes me think about who and what I am. And I have to admit to it. I have love for certain circles which are close to me, my family and my friends and those who think like me and agree with me, but I’m not actually sure that my love very naturally and very easily goes much wider than that, and to be honest I don’t think I’m alone in that, am I? So this is my hymn, my song, not least because it includes me, for I am one of the loveless to whom this love unknown has been shown.

Love to the loveless shown, that would be a good title for the Gospel stories about the life and work of Jesus. Love to the loveless shown, to those who were outside his own circle, including, as the story went on, those who would not be loving towards him. That’s what we see in the Gospel stories about his life and work: he leaves home and village, he goes out on a mission, he gives himself to the sick and needy, he touches the leper, he befriends the outcast, he accepts the unacceptable, and gets himself the unenviable reputation of ‘Friend of traitors and sinners’ for doing it. Here is love to the loveless shown all through Christ’s ministry. It is the very purpose of his ministry, to show this love to the loveless, and why? To what end? - that they might lovely be. Isn’t that quite an amazing little line? - that they might lovely be. Not that they or we might be good, or better, or ‘saved’ or anything like that, but that they and we might be lovely. What a beautiful picture that word paints, that we might be ‘lovely’, lovely like the loveliness of Christ, lovely with the loveliness of Christ. Lovely in character, in disposition, in actions; our lives characterised by loveliness, the loveliness seen in Jesus. One of my oldest friends in the Methodist ministry is a psychodynamic counsellor – I don’t hold it against him - and one of his favourite sayings is that you can’t love other people if you’ve never loved yourself or been loved as yourself. So Jesus loves us, Samuel Crossman wrote before psychotherapy was invented, that we might be lovely.

It was this love unknown which caused Jesus, our Saviour and Lord, for the sake of the loveless, for our sake, to take frail flesh and die. By take frail flesh the hymn reminds us of the Incarnation, that ‘the Word became flesh’, as our Christmas reading from John chapter 1 tells us, or as we might think of it, that the Energy behind the universe became human, human as we are, in all our frailty. And so we have here the picture of Christ’s total generous self-giving, taking upon himself the frailty of our human nature as in that early Church hymn that Paul quotes in his letter to the Philippians, that

Christ, though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness. And being found in human form, he humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross.

which Charles Wesley puts as ‘emptied himself of all but love, and bled for Adam’s helpless race’. So love unknown takes frail flesh and dies, as we remember on this Good Friday afternoon.

Lastly, notice what little words are used throughout this verse – my, me and I - my song, my Saviour’s love to me, O who am I, that for my sake, my Lord should take frail flesh and die. These little words make this is a very personal hymn. It reminds us that there is something very personal about the Christian faith, and that there is something very personal about Good Friday and Easter; that Holy Week is not just about something that happened to Jesus then and there, a long time ago and a long way away, which causes the Church to celebrate him as Lord and Saviour. This hymn invites a further step, it invites each of us to connect with that, to name Jesus as my Saviour and my Lord, and to see that it was, and is, for each one of us, each ‘me’ here, that Jesus was born, and lived and died.

My song is love unknown,

My Saviour’s love to me,

Love to the loveless shown,

That they might lovely be.

O who am I,

That for my sake,

My Lord should take

Frail flesh and die?

Who indeed?

Silence

Prayers (New Parish Prayers nos 112 and 113)

Hymn NEH 95 – ‘When I survey’

This third verse follows on from the second. Verse 2 has set the scene - men made strange and none the longed-for Christ would know. It talked about Jesus spending his life, and the overtone there is clearly that of giving his life. And now in this third verse we move towards the first Good Friday.

Sometimes they strew his way and his sweet praises sing. In many ways Jesus had been a very popular man, especially in his ministry in Galilee. He was a popular preacher, a popular teacher, a popular speaker. When he taught people gathered and people listened. They liked what he had to say. ‘He spoke with authority, not like the Scribes’ who were careful always to back up what they said with references to this authority and that teacher and so on. He spoke directly and he spoke plainly. He spoke clearly about the love of God. He could be sharp in his criticisms and of course when he was being sharp in his criticisms of the Scribes or of the rich or of the temple authorities, his ordinary hearers loved it. They liked it when he had a go at the rich because they were poor. They liked it when he had a go at the Jerusalem temple authorities because these Galileans resented having to pay their taxes to them up there in Jerusalem. They liked this outspoken preacher. He was one of them. They liked his style, they liked his parables, his parables were entertaining. He could tell a good story, with twists in the tail. This man was popular. They liked him. No doubt about it, Jesus was a bit of a popular hero around Galilee.

In our New Testament classes we have to look at the problem of working out what Jesus actually said and what he actually did. The four Gospels were written later on by people who believed passionately that Jesus was the Son of God and the Messiah. They were written by people who ‘believed in Christ’ and believed in him as ‘Lord’. ‘Jesus is Lord’ was their creed, and the Gospels were written out of belief in Jesus as ‘My Lord and my God’ as Thomas confesses at the end of John’s Gospel. So the question we have to look at in class is how far this later belief colours the way the story of Jesus is told in the Gospels - just how historically reliable are those Gospel stories? And when you add to this the fact that the Gospels differ in the way they tell the same story or when they recount the same teaching, you see there’s a real question here. Are we reading about the ‘Jesus of History’ when we read our Gospels, or about the ‘Christ of Faith’? - is one way of putting it. Just how reliable or accurate is the picture of Jesus that the Gospel-writers pen for us? - is another. New Testament scholars have spent a lot of time on those questions over the last century or so, trying to discover which of the sayings and which of the actions of Jesus in the Gospels are authentic. What did the real Jesus actually say? What did the real Jesus actually do? One of their conclusions is that Jesus was undoubtedly a popular teacher/preacher/prophet from and in Galilee.

Another of the things on which scholars are agreed is that the Jesus of History, the real Jesus, was a healer; that he had gifts of healing; that he was actually able to make poorly people better, some of them anyway. And that he was able to exorcise demons, which was their way of talking about healing some particular kinds of illness; that Jesus had healing gifts of various kinds. Now in one sense there is nothing particularly odd or unusual in this. Their community had healers just as ours does, and just as every human community in every culture worldwide always has had, people who have gifts of healing. Jesus was one of those, a gifted healer, there is no historical doubt about that either. Even his enemies accepted that, and then argued that his gifts weren’t good gifts from God but were demonic. He didn’t make healing his priority, and sometimes when they came in crowds wanting healing Jesus seems to have thought that this was getting in the way of what he was really about: but another one of the bedrock of history features of the life and work of Jesus, the scholars say, is that he was a healer.

So sometimes they strew his way and his sweet praises sing, especially in Galilee, for he was a popular teacher and a popular healer. And that’s what they did, literally, on Palm Sunday. Jesus entered Jerusalem in triumph on Palm Sunday, surrounded by a crowd of Galilean pilgrims, who strewed his way with palm branches and with their cloaks: celebrating him, welcoming him, praising him. The praise they sang was ‘Hosanna to the Son of David! Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord! Hosanna in the highest heaven!’ a shout of praise - although ‘Hosanna’ wasn’t originally a shout of praise at all, but a cry for help, but we won’t go into that. They acknowledged him, they cheered him, they welcomed him and so on - resounding all the day ‘hosannas’ to their king. That’s what the Triumphal Entry is - Jesus rides into Jerusalem on a donkey, in a gesture, a celebration, a stage-managed demonstration of his kingship. He is the king and Jerusalem welcomes its king – the Son of David – when they shout ‘Hosanna’ for ‘Hosanna’ had come to equal ‘Hallelujah’ by the time the Gospels were written and today we use the two words interchangeably.

So in the first half of this verse we see just how popular Jesus was - prophet, teacher, healer, charismatic figure. He had a following. But already there’s been a hint of something different. The very first word of the verse sounded a note of caution – sometimes – sometimes they strew his way. Then in the second half of the verse there is a change, as the hymn picks up the implication of that sometimes:

This is the climax of what happened when men made strange and none the longed-for Christ would know. And here is the stark contrast between the Palm Sunday shouts of ‘Hosanna!’ and the Good Friday shouts of ‘Crucify him! Crucify him!’ when the Roman governor Pilate asked them what he should do with Jesus. ‘Shall I release this man or another?’ Pilate asked. ‘The other’, the Friday crowd answered. ‘What shall I do with this man? Pilate asked. ‘Crucify him! Crucify him!’, they shouted. The way the Gospels tell the story it’s a fickle crowd, who shout ‘Hosanna!’ on the Sunday and ‘Crucify!’ on the Friday. Then ‘Crucify!’ is all their breath – all their breath - they shout ‘Crucify!’ with total enthusiasm; they want nothing whatsoever - at all - any more - to do with this one they had previously called the ‘Son of David’. ‘Crucify!’ is all their breath and for his death they thirst and cry. They are not content to shun him. They are not content to reject him. They are not content to walk away, give him the cold shoulder, dismiss him as another nutter. He must die. He must be crucified. He must be got rid of. Jesus goes from popularity to hate in six short days.

Sometimes they strew his way,

And his sweet praises sing;

Resounding all the day

Hosannas to their King.

Then ‘Crucify!’

Is all their breath,

And for his death

They thirst and cry.

Silence

Prayers (Contemporary Parish Prayers – nos 83 and 85)

Hymn NEH 511 – ‘Ride on’ 

Why, what hath my Lord done?

What makes this rage and spite?

He made the lame to run,

He gave the blind their sight!

Sweet injuries!

Yet they at these

Themselves displease,

And ’gainst him rise.

Why, what hath my Lord done?

What makes this rage and spite?

He made the lame to run,

He gave the blind their sight!

Sweet injuries!

Yet they at these

Themselves displease,

And ’gainst him rise.

Silence

Prayers (CtL4 pp88f – nos 1 and 3)

Hymn NEH 90 – ‘O Sacred head’ 

They rise, and needs will have

My dear Lord made away;

A murderer they save,

The Prince of Life they slay.

Yet cheerful he

To suffering goes,

That he his foes

From thence might free.

Hymn NEH 86 – ‘My song is love unknown’ 

Prayer (MWB pp538, collect no 1)

Lord’s Prayer

The Grace

12 James and John

(Sermon for 22^nd October 2000 – Proper 24 – published in Expository Times, September 2000, vol 111, no 12, pp412-413: Mark 10:35-45)

Some people blame their mother – Matthew does – but James and John weren’t the first to get things wrong about Jesus and his vision of the future. They are well on the way to Jerusalem, so Mark’s story goes, and three times now Jesus has warned his disciples what will happen to him when they get there. But some people only hear what they want to hear. James and John heard the half of what Jesus said which they wanted to hear and imagined the rest. They forget the bit about ‘suffering’, ‘rejection’ and ‘being killed’, and let their imaginations run away with them about ‘rise again’, ‘glory’ and ‘kingdom’. When the new age dawns, they pleaded with Jesus, please can we have the seats of honour? They would live up to their nickname – Boanerges – Sons of Thunder – they promised, and do their part to fight for the kingdom victory: but when that was done, could they please have the seats of honour at King Jesus’s side? They weren’t too ready to take Jesus’s ‘No’ for an answer, but the anger of the other ten cut short their wrangling. Anger, perhaps, because James and John had got their request in first?

This time Jesus addresses all twelve of the disciples. That is not our way, he insists, we do things differently here. Out there, he says, leadership is power, with all its trappings and privileges. With us, he says, leadership is service, with all its hard work and obligations. First – last; last – first. In John’s Gospel the point will be made in an upper room with a towel and basin and twelve pairs of dirty feet, on the night before this way of life is pursued to its end. In Mark’s Gospel the point is made here with words which speak of an example already in front of them and of another yet to come – ‘For the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life a ransom for many’. Have they not noticed already, Jesus suggests, how he has given himself time and again in service to the sick, the outcast and the needy? And that is the way it will continue to be, right to the end, Jesus suggests. He will lay down his life in love and service. Having loved them, he will love them to the end. Having given of himself, he will give to the point of giving his life away. That’s the lesson, Jesus says to the twelve, so learn it and live it.

So ends a powerful lesson in leadership for the future leaders of the infant church. The application of the message for today ought to be plain and simple. Church leaders should model their ministries on the Servant King. Church members should model their lives in exactly the same way. Amen. That, it seems to me, though blunt, is exactly the way this sermon should end; for that instruction captures the sense of Mark 10:45 precisely. To be a disciple is to give one’s life away in the service of others. As the old hymn put it, ‘It is the way the Master went, should not the servant tread it still?’

Sadly, however, few sermons on this text end here. Most don’t go along this route at all. Many get nowhere near to saying anything so down to earth and practical as this. Why not? Because they pick up one word out of Mark 10:45 and it takes the preacher’s mind right off such mundane matters as how church leaders or church members should behave. That word, of course, is ‘ransom’. Focusing on that one word preachers lift this verse straight out of its context and turn it into a theory about the death of Jesus. Sadly, this is nothing new. The Church Fathers did it when they talked about the death of Jesus as a ransom paid to the Devil to set us free from his clutches. To us that sounds quite bizarre, but at least it suggests that Jesus freely offered himself to his enemy and ours to get us out of an impossible position. The modern version is much worse. It uses this verse to talk of Jesus’s death as a ransom paid to God. This is not only bizarre but dangerous nonsense, for it suggests that God has the morals of a kidnapper or a hijacker who will not set us free until he has been bought off by the blood payment of the death of Jesus.

Of course Mark 10:45 talks of the death of Jesus, and there is no denying that it uses the word ‘ransom’, but it pictures that death as the final and ultimate act of Jesus’s life of self-giving service to others. He dies as he has lived, giving himself away in love. He lays down his very life, the ultimate in self-giving service. This powerful and challenging picture – of the Master acting as a slave and then giving his life away that others might benefit – is a sermon illustration, challenging and encouraging disciples to live in the same way. It was never intended to be hardened into a doctrine about the death of Christ, not least because if that is what you do with this verse you take the sting out of its blunt and very practical challenge.

Jesus spoke as he did (or Mark wrote as he did if you prefer to think of it in that way) because not only James and John but the other ten as well needed to learn the leadership mode of self-giving service. They needed to hear that ‘this is not how it is to be with you’, and to have that difference reinforced by Jesus’s reference to his own example. As it has turned out, leadership in the church down the centuries –international, national or local –has rarely listened to Jesus on this one. Neither has this different attitude and lifestyle been particularly common among church members. But there have always been exceptions, so what of us and what of the future? Like the disciples on the way up to Jerusalem, the church today is on a journey into a future yet unknown, with its hopes and its dreams, its visions and its fears. Decisions will need to be made about structures and leadership styles and many different models will be suggested. Each of us too, has a lifestyle to create or recreate and attitudes and values to choose and live by. Thank God, therefore, for James and John – or for their mother – for because of them we have these words of Jesus in our ears and his example before our eyes for just such a time as this. May we learn it and live it; learn from it and live from it.

13 Metaphor

(A sermon preached in the chapel of the Queen’s College, Birmingham, in 1990, and published for the 6^th Sunday after Pentecost 1991 in Expository Times, May 1991, vol 102, no 8, pp242-243)

I offer you two texts for today, first those well-known words from John 1:1 that we only hear at Christmas, ‘In the beginning was the Word’. It annoys me that this is never translated into ordinary English, and all that we do get is the English equivalent of one of the meanings of the main Greek word. The result is a fairly meaningless sentence, and I wonder how many of even our regular churchgoers have any idea what it all means, let alone the visitors and guests who only come to church at Christmas. I am not going to translate it here either, but to offer a paraphrase as my first text: ‘In the beginning was the metaphor’.

The second text is the well-known liturgical formula, in a slightly adapted form: ‘As it was in the beginning, so it is now, and is likely to go on being for some time yet’.

Remember where we are in the Christian calendar, just after Pentecost and Trinity Sunday. Part of that Pentecost experience in Acts which we remember and celebrate is the gift of the Spirit, an experience which both defied and defies words to express, and yet which gives new words and ways to the speechless disciples to share their faith. Part of the Trinity Sunday experience for many of us is having to preach about a doctrine which few understand, expressed in language which almost certainly fails to communicate. Both Sundays are about God, and both, in different ways, are about the failure or better, the limitations, of language. And not only limitations of language, but the shortcomings of all our symbols, acted as well as verbal.

Hence my text: ‘In the beginning was the metaphor; and as it was in the beginning, so it is now, and is likely to go on being for some time yet’.

I want to explore this theme from two sources: the Old Testament and the New.

From the Old Testament. Three Points. 

(a) The God with the impossible name (Ex 3:14). Moses is making excuses and it appears that he wants a handle by which to control or manipulate God, so God responds with an answer that says he can’t have an answer: ‘I AM WHO I AM’, then ‘I AM’, then the personal name we don’t know how to pronounce and out of respect to our Jewish brothers and sisters shouldn’t try to.

(b) The mysterious Creed. Deut 6:4 is familiar to all of us as the Shema‘, the nearest Israel ever got canonically to a creed. It consists of four words, one of them that hidden name used twice (The Lord / our God / the Lord / one). We can’t translate it, as the variety of suggestions offered in the RSV margin shows. God is not to be defined, mystery remains.

(c) A prohibition on symbols. That refusal to define is surely what lies behind the fanatic opposition to ‘graven images’ or any kind of ‘likeness’ to God seen in the Ten Commandments. The second commandment is the longest and most carefully expressed of the ten (Ex 20:4-6). So icons, visual aids, statues are all out; and in a modern synagogue all attention focuses on a cupboard, the Ark, containing the scrolls which repeat those mysterious words.

God must not be named, nor defined, neither must he be depicted by any symbol. He is who and what he is, he may be known in part by what he does, but all that we know of him is ‘but the outskirts of his ways’, to use the phrase from Job (26.14).

From the New Testament. Three Points.

(a) A Pauline warning. It is interesting that in the setting of a discussion about the Spirit and Pentecostal gifts we get some very pertinent words from Paul about our limitations. To the Corinthians he writes about seeing in a ‘glass darkly’ or a ‘mirror dimly’ (1 Cor 13:12), and about our knowledge being no more than partial. Pertinent words whether to those who claim that their experience of the Spirit gives them authority to talk definitively about God, or to those who attempt to do so in the name of theology.

(b) Incarnation or definition (Jn 1:18)? Secondly from the Prologue to John’s Gospel we look at Jesus. ‘No one has seen God at any time’ says John, the nearest we get is a living metaphor in the shape of Jesus of Nazareth. We get ‘incarnation’, a human person with all the ambiguity and hiddenness that that implies, and on top of that one who taught in parables, often refused to give straight answers, and instead of saying ‘Believe this!’ preferred ‘Follow me!’

(c) John’s seven metaphors plus one. Finally staying with the Fourth Gospel and Jesus, look at the way that gospel uses metaphors about Jesus throughout, metaphors which combine that evocatively transcendent ‘I AM’ and mundane things like ‘bread’, ‘light’, ‘shepherds’ and ‘doors of sheepfolds’. In the end came the metaphor in which we are sharing now, a meal with bread and wine with references back to God’s doings in Israel’s past and forward in hope to God’s future. Again it saddens me that such rich metaphors as bread and wine and such an obviously metaphorical statement as ‘This is my body’, should have given rise to so much controversy in the history of the church.

In the words of Hebrews 11, time forbids me to talk about the Wisdom literature and its love of proverbs, figures, and riddles to talk about God; of the Elijah experience where the old metaphors of earthquake, wind and fire no longer work and we have another almost untranslatable expression about a sound of silence; of the great metaphor of the kingdom in the parables of Jesus, and of apocalyptic where ‘metaphor rules okay?’

Let us rejoice in the metaphors we have, whether they be words or actions; let us play with them, agonize over them, reflect on them. And may the God who has given us the metaphors, one day lead us into all the truth, where faith is lost in sight, and metaphor gives way to the reality which at the moment it both reveals and conceals. Until then, my text: ‘In the beginning was the metaphor; and as it was in the beginning, so it is now, and is likely to go on being for some time yet’.

(Published for the 5^th Sunday before Christmas 1991 in Expository Times, October 1991, vol 103, no 1, pp20-21: 1 Kings 19:1-13 and 2 Kings 6:8-17)

Imagine yourself in Dothan . You wake up one morning and your little town is surrounded. There is the Syrian army: horses, chariots, siege equipment – the lot. All you have is your feeble town walls, your Dad’s Army of a militia, and no provisions of any kind for a siege. Such was the sight that met him, when Elisha’s servant looked out that morning. What would you do? You would surely panic, just as he did: he rushed back in to his master and cried out, ‘Alas, master, what shall we do?’

On the face of it Elisha’s reply was about as daft as it could possibly be. ‘Don’t be afraid’, he told the boy, ‘we have more on our side than they have on theirs’, or in the richer words of the older version, ‘More there are with us than they!’ You can imagine what the boy must have thought. Then Elisha spoke again, and he prayed, praying that the boy’s eyes would be opened. According to the story the prayer was answered, and the boy saw what Elisha had seen all the time, the ‘horses and chariots of fire all around Elisha’. The Syrian army was still there, but around and beyond and above them was the army of the living God, the horses and chariots of fire. Now the servant saw things differently, because he looked through the eyes of faith.

The obvious question is: which of them saw things as they really were, Elisha or the boy before the prayer? Was it that the boy had been seeing the situation as it really was, whereas Elisha had been dreaming and his vision was only wishful thinking? Or was it that the boy had only seen things as they seemed to be, whereas Elisha had seen things the way they really were?

There is no doubt that the story was told to answer that very question, and to answer it emphatically, that the real world is not the world as it appears to be. The story hinges on Elisha’s prayer, and demonstrates that faith sees the world differently, but sees it correctly. Before his eyes were opened the lad saw things only as they appeared to be, afterwards he saw them as they really were.

The same question confronts us: which is the real world, the one which we see in the same way that everyone sees, or the one that we see through the eyes of faith? When we see the Church, in this part of the world at least, surrounded by powerful forces of unbelief and indifference, the question cannot be avoided. Who is seeing things right, them or us? The Bible’s answer, here and elsewhere, is that the real world is the one that Elisha saw, the one which is visible to the eye of faith.

Our second story is a bit better known, and it is asking the same question, but from the other end. Elijah, Elisha’s greater predecessor, has fled for his life and ended up, dejected and disillusioned in a cave on God’s holy mountain, complaining to God that he is the only faithful Israelite left. God commands him to come outside and meet him, and then there is the famous ‘earthquake, wind and fire’, though the hymn has put them in the wrong order, before the ‘still, small voice of calm’. The point about that story is that God was not where Elijah had expected him to be, and had every right to expect him to be. Wind, earthquake and fire were some of the traditional ways in which God made himself known to his people, ways in which he had demonstrated his presence and his power. But this time God was not to be found in any of them: instead he came in a ‘soft whisper of a voice’.

The question here is which is the real spiritual world, the world of power, or the hidden world of the quiet and gentle? If the world of the Spirit, the unseen world of God, is the real world, as the story of Elisha at Dothan says, where is this world of God? Just where is it to be found? is the question that the Elijah on the mountain story asks. All of Elijah’s religious upbringing would have led him to look for God in the mighty and the spectacular: but he didn’t find him there on Mt Sinai this time. Instead he found him in the totally unexpected, in the whisper rather than the shout, and in the totally unspectacular. More than that, the story insists that God definitely was not in the spectacular and the marvellous. So which is the real world of God; the one of mighty miracle, of signs and wonders or the one of the undramatic, secret whispering? The story is clear enough. It seems to be a deliberate warning against making the mistake of listening for God in the wrong place.

This same question confronts us today in the Church. Where is God to be found? Is he in those signs and wonders which some are using today to advertise and publicize the Faith? Many would say that these great miracles and mighty works are indeed the real world of faith, living testimony to the reality of God, who is among his people as a God of power and might. But the Elijah story counsels caution, and rather suggests that that is not so. He was not in the earthquake, the wind, nor the fire. Instead he was there in the quietness of Elijah’s faith, whispering an assurance, listening to Elijah’s complaint, and sending him on the way with a task to do.

Two stories with one theme: which is the real world, who is seeing things as they really are today? The real world was the one which Elisha saw through the eyes of faith, the reality of the horses and chariots of fire all around, the living God in his world. The real world was the one Elijah heard in the still, small voice and not in the earthquake, wind or fire.

Both stories agree that things are not as they seem, neither the powerful forces of this world’s authorities and realities, nor the mighty spiritual powers which can be tapped and used, neither of these are the real world, they only appear to be so, even though they are very convincing at times. If we look with Elisha’s eyes of faith then we can see the God of power all around, that we live surrounded by the armies of the living God. If we listen with Elijah’s ears of faith, then that power comes to us as the ‘still, small voice’, which strengthens us and sends us onwards. Which is the real world? If in doubt, remember these two stories, Elisha at Dothan and Elijah at the entrance to his cave.

15 William Tyndale

(A sermon preached at Truro Diocese Chancellor’s Clergy School, held in a seafront hotel in Newquay, on the 450^th anniversary of the death of William Tyndale in 1986, and published for the 2^nd Sunday in Lent (‘King and Kingdom: Conflict’) 1989 in Expository Times, January 1989, vol 100, no 4, pp143-144)

My instructions were quite simple, a homily, eight to ten minutes, as a sort of ‘Thought for the Day’ on William Tyndale: Bible translator, preacher, evangelist, teacher, exile and finally, martyr.

It is interesting to see how the church comes much later to recognize as saints worthy of red-lettering those whom in their lifetime it recognized as nothing of the sort. For example John and Charles Wesley now get a reference in the new liturgical calendar. So with today’s remembered saint. I see in this process the truth of that hymn by James Russell Lowell, that ‘Time makes ancient good uncouth’. The whole verse is worth quoting,

By the light of burning martyrs,

Christ, thy bleeding feet we track

Toiling up new Calvaries ever

With the cross that turns not back.

Then I suppose come the rub,

New occasions teach new duties;

Time makes ancient good uncouth;

They must upward still and onward

Who would keep abreast of truth.

In 1536 Tyndale became one of those ‘burning martyrs’.

His life can easily be outlined. Born about 1494 in Gloucestershire, at Oxford from 1510 to 1515 then briefly at Cambridge. Back to Gloucestershire as a tutor to the local big house. At Oxford he earned the reputation of being a serious and hardworking student, but his desire to read and study theology and especially to master Latin, Greek and Hebrew for the purpose of reading the Bible earned him the label, ‘heretic upstart’. Around 1522 he felt the compulsion to translate the Bible into his own language, and after repeated attempts to gain ecclesiastical backing he was forced to flee to Germany, never to return. His various translations, especially of the New Testament, appeared over the next few years. Eventually the English ecclesiastical authorities succeeded in having him arrested, strangled and burned near Antwerp, probably on 6th October, certainly in 1536. We can only marvel at that zeal and dedication which we can all recognize as extraordinary, and exemplary. But apart from giving thanks for a life of such zeal in what we would all now see as a worthy cause, and apart from confessing in ourselves a sneaking sense of shame that faced with such opposition and persecution as he was we would probably choose a different course: apart from all that, what else can we say?

One interesting game that people play is to think where X, Y or Z would be if they were around today. Whose side, and it’s a sad fact that we do hear talk like that in the church, whose side would Paul, or Wesley or Newman be on today if they were here? They are of course not here, and I suspect that with Wesley at least all the sides who claim him as a member of their group would find his presence and opinions disconcerting to say the least if he was. Nevertheless there are lessons to be learned for today from these saints. So what can we learn from William Tyndale?

1. Tyndale the martyr

Thinking of that we ought, I suppose, to talk about commitment, dedication and sacrifice, remembering one who died for his faith and principles. But I wonder? It’s one thing to extol the martyrs of the early church, dying in loyalty to their Lord Jesus Christ and refusing to let the pagan state usurp his place in their lives, or to extol today’s martyrs who in the name of Christ are prepared to die in opposition to tyranny or atheism. But Tyndale’s position is not quite like that. He was legally executed by the church as a heretic. The irony of the situation being that the same church a year before had done the same thing to Thomas More, Tyndale’s chief antagonist.

Neither man was a Vicar of Bray. Each held that there are truths worth being a refugee for, worth sacrificing for, and worth dying for. Both, being men of their time, probably also held that there were truths worth exiling others for, and even worth killing for. So perhaps the events of 1535 and 1536, at the same time both glorious and sordid, ought to remind us of the dangerous ambiguity of our principles. When fallen human beings, whose knowledge and vision is at best partial, make absolute statements with total conviction, and especially when such people are in positions of power, then is it not so often the case that it is the  Kingdom of God which is the victim?

2 Tyndale the communicator

From early in his life he was driven by the conviction that people should hear and understand the Bible, ordinary people in their own tongue. His words in argument with a local clergyman have become famous:

If God spare my life, ere many years I will cause a boy that driveth the plough shall know more of the Scripture than thou dost.

No doubt there are cogent arguments for the beauty of the language of the AV and of the Book of Common Prayer, as there were no doubt for the sonority of the Vulgate and the services in Latin. But Tyndale was not in that business, and surely neither are we? Even our modern services, I fear, are at times suspect in this respect, demanding degrees of literacy and bookmanship increasingly not found. His was a vision for the ploughboy, and that vision was indeed realized in his version of the New Testament. Of Jesus it was said that, ‘The common people heard him gladly’, and that that could happen again was Tyndale’s aim.

3 Tyndale the biblical theologian

For him the Bible was central, and the whole edifice of scholasticism was to be swept aside so that the Bible could speak for itself. That of course was seen by the church authorities as a highly dangerous business. I’m sure that all of our lives as ministers would be much easier if Bibles were still chained to the pulpits, or only available in the original languages, well, easier in some respects shall we say? The proliferation of cults, the misunderstandings and the downright abuse of the Bible in so many quarters today clearly show that Tyndale’s opponents at least had a point.

For a few years after leaving Oxford and a brief spell in Cambridge, and before he embarked on his translation work, Tyndale’s life is hidden. It seems that he went back to rural Gloucestershire, taught as a tutor for a living, but spent his time and energy in his locality teaching the Bible. On the Continent he worked not only as a translator, but also as a teacher of the Bible. It is not enough to have readily available modern language Bibles if there’s nobody to open them up, teach them and guide people through what may be the world’s best book, but is also one of its most difficult, even dangerous.

William Tyndale, Bible translator, preacher, evangelist, exile and martyr. Foxe’s Book of Martyrs is, of course, a highly sectarian book, and I inherited my copy from my great-grandfather, who wasn’t just a Methodist but a sectarian Methodist. But I want to end this homily on William Tyndale, martyr, communicator and Biblical theologian, with Foxe’s concluding words,

To enumerate the virtues and actions of this blessed martyr would require much time and many pages. Suffice it so say, that he was one of those who, by his works, shone as a light amidst a dark world.

For that light, thanks be to God. And may we also walk in it.

(Sermon for 5^th August 2001 – Proper 13 – published in Expository Times, July 2001, vol 112, no 10, pp343-344: Luke 12:13-21 and Colossians 3:1-11)

He thought it was a simple request. And it definitely was a he! All he wanted was that the Teacher should tell his brother to divide the family property between them – properly, as the Law required. Yes, it was a family squabble over money and, yes, it wasn’t very dignified to air it in public: but he had had enough. But he certainly hadn’t anticipated this Rabbi’s reaction. First, that he had simply refused to say anything about it. What were Rabbis for if not to speak out clearly about right and wrong? Wasn’t it their job to give a firm moral lead, to tell people what was what? But this one, this Jesus of Nazareth, wouldn’t do it. Suggested it was up to them to sort it out for themselves. No wonder things are in a mess, he muttered to himself, if church leaders like him won’t give a lead! But what he said next had made it even worse. He had preached at him! Accusing him of greed when all he wanted was his legal rights.

Jesus had seen straight away what was really going on. And he knew that you couldn’t really blame that brother for making his request. He was a victim, a victim of a force way beyond his control or his understanding. It was in the air he breathed. He had taken it in with his mother’s milk. It was so natural and everyday that he wasn’t the least bit conscious of how it drove him, shaped him and made him the person he was. Or that it did the same to everyone else. Perhaps ‘force’ wasn’t the best word for it, though, for it was more powerful than most religion. For this man, his brother too, and the crowd looking on, Jesus saw, it was the dynamic of life, its highest value and its greatest good. It was the god they worshipped, albeit unknowingly, whose will they did day by day. What they were all actually doing was putting their trust, and their faith and hope and love, in a god very different from the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, from the God Jesus honoured and loved as Father. Later on Jesus would name this hostile and powerful god, he would call it ‘Mammon’, ‘Wealth’, but not yet.  Here he simply shows how these two brothers are true worshippers of this rival god. They are excellent examples of those who put their faith in him. Their creed is simple: one’s life consists in the abundance of one’s possessions. And the name for their religious zeal was simple too: greed.

It was at this point that the crowd began to thin out, though St Luke doesn’t mention that, because this wasn’t what they wanted to hear either. It was after all, completely over-the-top, too melodramatic by half, to say nothing of being naïve, unworldly and unrealistic. This wasn’t what they were looking for, neither those seeking a military messiah, those wanting an economic saviour, those looking for a new spirituality, nor those just wanting a good sermon. ‘Why doesn’t he talk about revolution, or justice, or prayer, or sex?’ they muttered. But he doesn’t and he didn’t, or at least not very much. The simple calculable fact is that this Teacher taught more about money and wealth than any other single subject, and this Gospel story and the parable of the Rich and Foolish Farmer which it leads into is just one snippet of it all. Here Jesus expects these brothers to work their practical moral responsibilities out for themselves, and having said that he takes this opportunity to look more deeply at what is happening all around him. His point is one of the most fundamental of all, the meaning of life, the universe and everything. And what he says was as radical for his day as it is for ours, that the Universal Religion of Consumerism with its Great God of Mammon is a false religion with a false god. Its creed, that life consists in the abundance of possessions, is wrong because it doesn’t! Its spirituality, greed, is pointless as well as dangerous, not least because you can’t take it with you! The crowds thinned at this. The disciples couldn’t follow it very easily either. That’s clear from what follows and what we’ll read in next week’s Gospel reading. Jesus has to spend much time and not a little patience talking all this through with the Twelve because it’s hard to follow, radical to believe and demanding to live out.

So let’s take a break from Jesus and the stark simplicities of his teaching to the crowds in Galilee and the disciples who were following him. Let’s turn to our other reading, the letter written to the Colossians in the name of St Paul, a sophisticated thinker who lived in the real world of the Roman Empire, the multi-ethnic, multi-cultural, global, high-tech society of its day. The passage we read is not an easy one. It speaks of discipleship. The writer spells out the lifestyle and values he expects of these Christians in Asia Minor. He talks of contrasts – before/after, buried/raised, below/above, old/new – because he believes that Christianity makes a difference. He expects that the Colossians themselves can see the difference in experience, lifestyle and world-view which they have already experienced since they became believers. But he knows and reminds them that they still have to work at it. They are already made new in Christ, but that work is not yet finished in them. In particular there are five things that they have to work at putting to death within themselves, and he identifies the last and the most powerful as ‘greed’. This is, he insists, not just another bad human trait to be overcome: it is religion, idolatry – bad, misplaced, wrongly-focused religion. He might put it differently, but the one who writes this letter in the name of St Paul for a very different audience is saying exactly what Jesus had said in very different circumstances to a very different audience.

Luke 12:15 is the text. Clear. Simple. To the point. ‘Take care! Be on your guard against all kinds of greed; for one’s life does not consist in the abundance of one’s possessions.’ There is no more counter-cultural text in the Bible! Because this saying is nonsense to the forces and values which shape modern life worldwide, drive the world economy, and reach into every home via the media. Life does consist in the abundance of possessions, they insist. It really, really does. And we see that all around us. Modern shopping malls with spires because they are the new churches. ‘I shop, therefore I am.’ And then there’s Christmas. I know Christmas feels a long way away at the beginning of August, but our children and grandchildren will very soon be evangelized with the good news of the must-have products and brands for Christmas. The biggest modern global religion is consumerism and it is militant, evangelistic and powerful. Is it possible for Christians to resist, to defy, to live by an alternative vision? That is the question.

17 Hosea chapters 13 and 14

(A sermon preached at Evensong at St Piran’s, Perranzabuloe, October 22nd 2006, to conclude a short series of sermons by various preachers on the Book of Hosea).

Well, you’ve arrived at the last week of your sermons on Hosea.  I don’t know what you think by this fourth week, but if it’s confession time I must say that I find most of the OT prophets pretty tedious and pretty nasty.  And I say that as somebody who is fascinated by the OT, and who has been an OT specialist for the last 30 years or so.  When I read the prophets I feel that most of them have only one tune and that they play that tune on a one-stringed fiddle, and even if it was a good tune that would get pretty monotonous pretty quickly.

By now you know the tune - and let’s leave the question of whether or not it’s a good tune on one side for a minute - the tune is: ‘You have failed to do what you should have done, and you are about to reap the evil you have sown!’.  There’s a simple observation here, that acts have consequences; and there’s a moral here, albeit a bit oversimplified, that wrong acts have bad consequences.  So Hosea points to the invading Assyrians and says to the people of Israel – ‘You can’t blame God for this.  You have brought this on yourselves by generations of wickedness.  It's your own fault.  You have brought it on yourselves.  You can’t go on ignoring the maker’s instructions with impunity.  If you ignore the instructions for long enough the car will break down.  And you people, you people of Ephraim, have ignored the maker’s instructions.  You have lived for yourselves.  You have created a country, a society and a culture which is deeply, deeply flawed.  You have lived by wrong values and now you are reaping what you and your kings have sown for two centuries at least’.

That’s Hosea’s simple tune, repeated and repeated and repeated throughout the 14 chapters of the book.  Amos had played it 20 years before, and Jeremiah would play it again 150 years later when it was the Babylonians who were doing the invading.  That’s the common tune of the prophets.  If you live for yourselves in denial of God then that has a way of working itself out and its working out is painful.  That’s what Hosea says throughout his ministry and that’s the simple message of his book.  It sometimes gets told in ways that to us seem very complicated, sometimes very convoluted, but the message is plain and pretty straight-forward.

Each prophet, though, has a particular tone to their playing; and Hosea’s is to say that the people of Israel have got their God wrong.  His base line is that they have adopted wrong ways of living.  Amos’s tune on that was that they had practised injustice rather than justice, oppression of the poor instead of equality.  Hosea’s is that they have got their God wrong, that they have played fast and loose with the true God and have worshipped Baal instead of the true God.  That’s Hosea’s particular twist.  Worship the wrong god, or worship God wrongly, and other things go wrong in consequence.  That’s Hosea’s distinctive note, and he plays it because he is convinced that religion matters.  That it actually matters that you get your theology right.  That it actually matters that you get your worship right.  That it actually matters that you get your religious allegiance right.  It is not a matter of indifference which god you worship, says Hosea.

It’s time for an illustration, so let me give you one from the Books of Kings.  In your first sermon Bishop Roy said that if you wanted to know the background to Hosea you needed to read the Books of Kings.  But before the illustration you can have an advert, I just happen to have with me this excellent little commentary on 1 & 2 Kings in the People’s Bible Commentary series published by the Bible Reading Fellowship, and I pass on my author’s discount so you can have it for a fiver at the church door.  End of advert, so on to the illustration.  Once upon a time there was a weak king, a wicked queen and a poor peasant.  The peasant, Naboth, had a vineyard.  It wasn’t much but it was the family vineyard and it had been in Naboth’s family for generations.  That’s how the inheritance system worked.  Naboth couldn’t sell it because you can’t sell the family property like that.  So Naboth looked after his vineyard and wanted nothing more than to pass it on to Naboth junior when his days of treading grapes were over.  But Naboth’s vineyard backed on to the king’s garden, and the king wanted to enlarge his garden.  The king, Ahab, was depressed.  He was a very keen gardener, and he really fancied adding Naboth’s vineyard to the garden and putting in a new pool and a pergola, but he couldn’t.  One morning as he was moping around the palace his wife, the wicked queen Jezebel, says - What’s up with you then?  You don’t look very sparkly this morning, was there something wrong with the porridge?  So Ahab says it’s just that he’d really like to get Naboth’s vineyard.   His wife looks at him, ‘Well, go and take it man, go and take it’.  ‘I can’t take it’, he says.  ‘Why-ever not?’  she says.  ‘Because it’s Naboth’s family inheritance’ he says.  ‘O come on man, get real’, she says, ‘you’re the king and you can take whatever you like’.  ‘I can’t’, he says’ ‘we don’t do that sort of thing here’.  ‘Well, we’re going to do it now’, she says, and lo and behold Naboth ends up dead and the king’s bulldozers move in to his vineyard.

Now why does the Book of Kings tell this story?  It tells it because its authors believed that this is what happens in Israel when you start getting involved with foreign gods.  Jezebel was a foreigner.  She had come from Tyre and she had brought with her the god of Tyre, Baal by name, and in the religion of Baal kings could do what they liked.  So for Jezebel it was perfectly right, proper and okay to get rid of Naboth and appropriate his vineyard because he was only a peasant and kings were more important than peasants.  Her god and her religion told her that.  On the other hand, the God of Israel thought differently, and said that that kind of thing is most definitely not okay.  It certainly wasn’t okay for Naboth.  He lost his life because Jezebel worshipped Baal who promoted a different set of values, a different set of standards.  So they told that story in Kings as a warning against foreign gods and their different standards.  How you worship and who you worship are not unimportant matters.  Worship the wrong God, says the Book of Kings, and you find yourself living by a value system different than the one you ought to be living by.

Not convinced?  Well here’s another illustration.  The Gospel reading last Sunday morning was about the Rich Young Ruler.  A very difficult passage.  Jesus says a person’s life does not consist in the abundance of his possessions.  Rich Young Ruler doesn’t want to hear that.  The great god of contemporary Britain is the ancient god named in the Bible as Mammon, the god of militant consumerism, and Mammon says that your life does consist in the abundance of your possessions, and his worship takes place 7 days a week in shopping malls.  Have you noticed how many shopping malls now have spires and clock towers which traditionally go with places of worship?  The great god Mammon says your life consists in the abundance of your possessions; Jesus, speaking in the name of God the Father says, it doesn’t.  Which god we worship will have practical consequences in terms of how we live.  Religion matters, get it wrong and all sorts of things will go wrong.

And that’s what Hosea believed.  It matters which God you worship.  So he condemns his contemporaries because they have worshipped too often at the shrine of the Baal of Tyre and so imported into Israelite life and culture a whole set of alien and destructive attitudes and values.  And now they are reaping what they have sown.  One of the sad things about the way many of the prophets said this, though I’m not sure if this is fair to Hosea, is that many of them seemed to enjoy saying this kind of thing – announcing bad news and threatening people in the name of God.  That gives the OT a bad name which it doesn’t really deserve – which brings me to my second advert for this little book – Let us bless the Lord – rediscovering the OT through Ps 103, same price.  Most of Hosea is negative, but that’s not its last word.  Its last words are these (read 14.4-9), which pick up glimpses already seen, snatches already heard as you’ve read through it.

What do we make of this?  This is a happy ending.  It’s not a happy ending that takes away the difficulty.  Israel has been invaded, Samaria its capital city has been ransacked and destroyed, Israelites are being exiled all over the place.   But Hosea says that that is not the last word.  The last word does not lie with death, or destruction or exile because God is faithful and God offers new beginnings.  There will be a new beginning, he says, after this destruction.  Admittedly, he says, many of you will not live to see it, many of you will not take part in it but there will be a new Israel because God is faithful.  There will be life after death, light after darkness, good after evil, because the ways of the true God are stronger than the ways of men and women.  The power of our God is greater than the power of the most powerful men and women, even invading Assyrians.  The love of our God is greater, stronger, more beautiful and more reliable than the love of men and of women, and he’d learned that from reflecting hard on his own difficult relationship with his wife.  And so this strange and difficult and often tedious book ends on a note of hope, of optimism, of life - that there will be a new beginning.  In reality it took time.  But the ways of God always take time.  That’s why Jesus taught us to pray ‘your kingdom come and your will be done on earth as it is in heaven’ and then to live in long-term hope and prepare for the long-haul.  Our conviction, as Hosea’s, is that the last word doesn’t lie with death but with life, doesn’t lie with darkness but with light, doesn’t lie with evil but with good because the God about whom Hosea speaks and the God who speaks to us in Jesus is God, and he will have the last word in love and grace and peace just as Hosea and Jesus both promised he would.

(A sermon preached at Trethosa Methodist Church a couple of weeks after the dramatic flooding at Boscastle in August 2004)

1.  Boscastle.

We were sitting on holiday in the caravan in the far end of Torridon, surrounded by beautiful Scottish scenery, and the wireless was muttering away in the background.  The reception was poor and it was probably Radio Ireland that we were listening to, but it was muttering away in the background.  We were reading and drinking coffee, and something made us prick up our ears and as we listened it was the word ‘Boscastle’, for we found ourselves listening to a news bulletin which was talking about the dreadful storm that had deluged Boscastle.  That evening when we rang Truro to make our daily check up on my mother, though I’m never quite sure who is really checking up on whom in that phone call, mum told us about the pictures she had seen on the television of that disaster.  Next day we bought a paper in the village shop and looked amazed at those absolutely incredible photographs of Boscastle car park and the village street and the bridge, and saw where we had ourselves parked and walked many times, as I’m sure many of you have done as well.  Then, we read in the paper and listened on the wireless to discussions about this disaster at Boscastle - why it had happened and all that.  There was talk about freak weather, talk about global warming and all that sort of thing.  There was even talk about acts of God.

So let me quote something that I did quite a few years ago now in the days when I was Chair of the District.  It was a Thought for the Day on Pirate FM in the week before the Royal Cornwall Show one year:

“Good morning everyone, this is Stephen Dawes with today’s Pause for Thought, two days before the start of the Royal Cornwall Show.  I go every year and, as usual, people have been saying to me “Pray for good weather for the Show, Stephen.”

Sorry folks, can’t do that.  It’s just like praying for a safe journey home from the studio.  Can’t do that either.  The weather for the show’s going to happen like it’s going to happen, no matter what you want, I want or God wants.  And whether I get home safely today depends on how I drive and how everybody else on the road drives.  What God wants - which is for all of us to be safe on the roads - doesn’t come into it.

I can, of course, pray for patience and consideration in my driving and for the gumption to watch my speed and drive carefully, but any other sort of prayer is just silly.  Life’s not like that and neither is religious faith.  So if you’re coming to the Show – and I hope you are - bring your mac, just in case.  Bye for now.”

I actually got into trouble with that a little bit because I had phone calls and people stopping me at the Show the next week saying they didn’t quite like what I had said.  Surely, they said, God controls the weather.  Surely it’s right, they said, to pray for journeying mercies and that kind of thing.  They didn’t like it when I replied, ‘No’, it wasn’t right to pray for such things because God could do nothing about the weather at all.  And that applies to Boscastle too, and we simply have to say that wherever God is in all of that tragedy at Boscastle, he is not there controlling the weather.  He did not make that flood happen, and there was nothing he could have done to stop it either.  As far as the weather is concerned it is nothing at all to do with God.

2.  Blame.

Well, if it isn’t to do with God, then what is Boscastle to do with?  You couldn’t listen to the media talk about Boscastle for very long before you heard the phrase ‘global warming’.  One of the things about the world in which we live today is that there is a widespread belief around that there has to be an explanation for everything, a reason for everything.  Everything has to be explained.  Sometimes it’s because people want to point the finger of blame, and then get their hands on some compensation.  So something happens and you hear the question asked time and time again on the radio about whose fault it is, because we are very much getting into that blame culture and that culture of litigation and compensation that comes from America.  But behind all that is the idea that there has to be a reason for everything.  So what’s the reason for Boscastle?  Apparently, according to many, it’s ‘global warming’.

When we saw the pictures of Boscastle, many of us probably thought about Lynmouth, for Lynmouth in the 1950s was a very similar sort of thing except on a far bigger and a far more tragic scale because of the loss of life.  But there was no mention of global warming in the talk after Lynmouth in the 1950s, for global warming had not begun then, or at least was not sufficiently far advanced to be noticed; and the phrase didn’t come into use until this last 10 or 15 years or so.  So global warming was not an explanation for Lynmouth.  It was simply just one of those things.  It was freak weather and freak weather happens.  It happened, of course, in Boscastle too.  Freak things happen from time to time and from place to place.  Freak things just do.  Sailors talk, for example, about freak waves.  There is no reason for some of these things - they just are.  They just happen.  Boscastle is another example.  There is no reason for it.  It is just one of those freak things.  We might indeed do well in our present world to take the threat of global warming seriously, but global warming is too important to be brought out and used as an example as the cause of the tragedy in Boscastle.  It was just one of those things, a freak weather event.  It just happened and you can’t blame anything or anyone.

3.  But we mustn’t forget Geordie Wetherspoon.

Geordie Wetherspoon was the steward in one of my churches in our first circuit, a church in the little village of Slaley in Northumberland.  Geordie was a retired road sweeper and he spoke in the broadest Geordie accent imaginable, and when I was around he used to delight in putting it on even thicker because I couldn’t understand a word he was saying.  Geordie had been the village roadsweeper for 30 years.  He had his little pushalong cart, his brushes and shovels and his red flag on a broom handle and it was his job to sweep the lanes and to keep the ditches clean.  We don’t have any Geordie Weatherspoons any more, do we?  They don’t exist today.  Occasionally you will see a council lorry clearing out drains with a big vacuum cleaner thing and that is the nearest we get.  Obviously no amount of silt-free drains would have made any difference in Boscastle and the surrounding area, but can you remember thirty years ago or so driving around ordinary lanes and ordinary roads in ordinary rain storms and coming across great pools of standing water all over the road and council workmen scurrying along with their red triangles putting out flood warning signs?  Because I can’t; and I can’t because I don’t think they did.  I don’t think they did because of what Geordie Weatherspoon and all the Geordie Weatherspoons of every place used to do.  Because day after day they swept the roads and cleaned out the gutters, when it rained the water had got somewhere to go, down drains that weren’t silted up and along ditches that weren’t full of rubbish.  As far as ordinary weather was concerned, ordinary people doing ordinary things was the way life worked.  So when ordinary people stop doing ordinary things, things start to go wrong.  Obviously ordinary people doing ordinary little things won’t stop a Boscastle - nothing will stop a Boscastle - but it will keep normal life being normal for most of the time.

There are all sorts of lessons to learn from Boscastle.  One is that we live in a world where freak things happen, like the Boscastle flood.  Another is that we live in a world in which there is not an explanation for everything, and so you can’t blame anyone or anything for Boscastle 2004.  Another is that we live in a world where if, for any reason, ordinary people like Geordie Wetherspoon stop doing a lot of ordinary things then normal life gets more and more difficult.  Where does God come into all this?  Geordie Wetherspoon would have said that he helped him to keep the drains clear.  Amen.

(A sermon preached at Evensong on Feast Sunday at Mullion Parish Church, November 6^th 2005.  Bible readings: Esther 9.18-28 and Mark 14.3-9)

Most human beings, it seems, love to party.  They love celebrations.  A few, miserable souls like me, are not quite so keen, but generally speaking, it seems, we are and always have been, a partying people, needing little excuse for a celebration or a feast.  Jesus too was a partying person, who grew up among a people who loved their celebrations: the big Festival Celebrations at the Feasts of Tabernacles in the autumn, Passover in the spring and Weeks (or Pentecost) in the early summer, and smaller ones like Purim scattered through the year, to say nothing of family and village celebrations.  So Jesus would have been a big supporter of Mullion Feast.  But he went in for much more partying than that, so much so that his enemies called him a glutton and a drunkard, and sneered at him for partying with the wrong sort of people, ‘a friend of sinners’ they jeered.  Feasting is an old and great human treat, and one blessed by God in the OT and the New.

So we read part of the legend of Esther and the origins of the December Feast of Purim.  The story has all the right characters, a wicked villain (Haman the Agagite), a wise old man (Mordecai), a terrible threat (the extermination of the Jews), an exotic location (the harem of the Persian emperor), a beautiful heroine who risked her life to save her people (Queen Esther), and a happy ending (they all lived happily ever after, well, for a few years anyway).  So it was decreed that ‘these days should be remembered’ and to do that an annual date was fixed and a new Festival created, the Feast of Purim, the Feast of Lots, because Haman the villain had cast lots to decide which day the extermination should take place and had ended up hanged on that very day.  O yes, there’s plenty of violence in the story too.  So every year, to this day, on the Feast of Purim, our Jewish brothers and sisters remember and they party.

Then there’s ‘Please to remember the 5^th of November – gunpowder, treason and plot; I know of no reason, why gunpowder, treason, should ever be forgot’.  Bonfire Night has brought its usual bonfires and fireworks, of course, but this year on the 400^th anniversary of the Plot we have had all kinds of extra things going on, especially plays on the telly and on the wireless, reminding us of what it is all about.  Whether in these ecumenical days we should be investing quite so much in remembering a Catholic plot against a Protestant king and parliament, is another question, but my point here is that we can have a celebration with no idea, really, of what it is we are celebrating and why.

Our Gospel reading was about another feast, a Feast in Passover week, hosted by an outcast, Simon the Leper, and Jesus, friend of outcasts, was Guest of Honour.  A woman appears, no name, and pours top-of-the-range perfume on his head.  Some of the guests are angry, and object to the waste of money which could have been better spent helping the poor.  ‘Leave her alone’, Jesus says, ‘it’s as if she has anointed my body for burial – and when they tell the story of this last week of my life, she’ll be remembered, because she’s worth it’.  And as Christianity spread and stories were told, that story grew in the telling: the woman was identified with Mary Magdalene, she was given a colourful past, and even appears in films today.  But what Jesus said should be remembered – her extravagant generosity and kindness – is still remembered, even though we don’t know her name, remembered and celebrated when we read that gospel story.

And it’s just like that with your saint, isn’t it – Melaine, Melanius, Mellion – or however you pronounce it, Breton bishop of the 6^th century or Celtic missionary of an earlier one – we don’t know really do we?  And I’m sure you know, because he’s your man and not mine, and you’ve heard lots of sermons about him and I haven’t, all there is to know about him, even if it’s not a lot.  But his feast has become a Cornish village Feast, and at the heart of the Feast is the church, because we are celebrating a Christian man, and because we are remembering – though its origins are lost deep within the mists of the past – someone whose extravagant love and living made an impression in these parts 1500 years ago.  So we tell stories of the Cornish saints, slaying dragons, or at least killing snakes, healing the sick, raising the dead, praying in the winter sea for hours on end or standing all day in prayer with arms extended sideways in the shape of the cross, fasting, living on the minimum, travelling around endlessly, crossing seas on millstones or leaves, living in caves or little beehive huts, but always marked by their love for God and their commitment to Christ.  No doubt some thought they were odd, or mad, and sneered – and no doubt some of them were – but this county is dotted with the memories of such holy eccentrics and we continue to celebrate their feasts.

For many this Feast Week will be just like Bonfire Night, something we do and enjoy without any longer knowing why we do it.  It’s a feature of village life, important for that reason alone, a celebration of community and village heritage and values.  And there’s nothing wrong with any of that.  For us, however, it’s more than that: for it’s a celebration of a particular ancestor, not a blood relation of course, the saints rather frowned on sex, but one of our spiritual forebears, one of that great company of the faithful who have gone before us and in whose steps we tread, whose memory inspires us or challenges us or nerves us, for our pilgrimage in these very different days.  Just as it’s also a celebration of his heritage, the Christian community in this place over 1500 years.  And it’s also, if we really do believe in the communion of saints, a reminder and a reassurance that he and they are praying for us even as we worship here tonight.

And so, here and now, doing what people do, and doing what people of Faith do, we remember and we celebrate: cherishing the past so that we might live better in the present and confidently for the future.  That’s why, God says, it’s good to feast.

Amen.

20 Mission - where from?

(A sermon preached in the chapel of the Queen’s College, Birmingham, in 1991, and published for the 4^th Sunday after Pentecost 1992 in Expository Times, June 1992, vol 103, no 9, pp277-278)

‘Mission’:

- one of the in-words of the age, the theme of great conferences in exotic places.

- a word that is a must for church agendas today, when we are told that ministry must be geared for mission and not just maintenance.

- a word used with particular force in the context of the 1990s, the Decade of Evangelism.

- also a secular word these days, companies, institutions and organizations produce their ‘Mission Statements’, of what they are about and why.

This sermon has a title and a question: ‘Mission’ is the title, and ‘Where from?’ is the question. And the sermon does not end with an answer.

(a) The traditional answer is that Mission begins from the Cross of Calvary. As Paul said, ‘We proclaim Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles, but to those who are the called … Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God’ (1 Cor 1:23f. NRSV). This is seen as the good news message which the church is commissioned in the Great Commission of Mt 28 to take into all the world.

To put the traditional answer another way, Mission begins from the human condition of sin and our desperate need for forgiveness, or ‘justification’.  As Charles Wesley’s hymn says,

To save what was lost, from heaven he came;

Come, sinners, and trust in Jesus’s name;

He offers you pardon, he bids you be free:

‘If sin by your burden, then come unto me!’   (Hymns and Psalms 805:3)

Such Mission begins from the premise that without the death of Jesus appropriated through faith, then we are dead, in this life and for eternity. That simple viewpoint has provided both the motive and the message for Mission for centuries.

We need to be humbly grateful for this, and for the terrific history of missionary sacrifice without which we would not be here. Nor must we allow our awareness of the excesses and the failings of the enterprise to blind us to its achievements.

(b) But (and I hope you were waiting for a ‘But’), but what if we cannot believe in a God who is happy to condemn millions to an eternity in oblivion  or worse simply because they do not conform to his expectations? Would not any parent behaving like that soon be labelled neurotic or psychopathic?

What if, to get back to where we started, Mission does not begin from the Cross of Calvary at all?

What if Mission begins instead from Gen 1:26-31 and Gen 12:1-3? Reading these we see that in Gen 1 Mission is about being made in God’s image and so continuing his ongoing work in creation as his stewards and agents. In Gen 12 Mission is about travelling to a new land and a new community in which those who know God are a blessing to those who don’t.

If we start from there, does not a different journey of Mission unfold?

(c) If we start from Creation rather than Calvary, from a doctrine of creation rather than one of redemption, in that case the parameters of Mission are widened considerably. It is not necessary to disparage the traditional dimensions, but certainly it is necessary to go beyond them.

In one sense this is not new. It is simply stressing the catholic emphasis of beginning from creation rather than the evangelical one of beginning from redemption (if the two positions can be summed up in such a sweeping generalization). In another it is actually a very radical programme. If evangelicalism can be said in practice to lead to the individual, so Catholicism can in practice be said to lead to the church. Mission that begins from creation will involve the church and have a place for the individual, but it will not end with either, but will aim for a renewed humanity in a renewed creation.

This raises other interesting questions about who such Mission is with or alongside. Given our traditional starting point for Mission, then Mission is with our fellow Christians, easy enough to say, not always to achieve.

But if we are starting from somewhere else, from Gen 1 rather than Mt 28, does this not change the companions as well as the route of the Mission journey? Might it not mean that we should think of Mission with our fellow religious people of whatever faith, or simply Mission with our fellow human beings? That would be one consequence, and a profound one, of beginning somewhere else.

If we do that we are immediately faced with another question: where does Jesus fit into Mission which begins from Gen 1 and Gen 12? This is not a new question either. It is raised in the New Testament itself, as to whether Jesus is the messenger or the message? The Gospels appear to present Jesus as the messenger, in word and action, of the kingdom, even as the one who inaugurates the kingdom. Jesus is the speaker, announcer, messenger; he is not the message. The content of the message is God and God’s kingdom. In the rest of the New Testament the whole thing is changed: Jesus becomes the content of the message, the message is the message about Christ. Where does that leave us?

If Mission begins from Gen 1 there is ample place for Jesus as the messenger, as the one who provides impetus, renewal, challenge and encouragement in the Mission; even for Jesus as the example or fulfilment of mission in personal terms, or in terms of a new humanity: but is that enough, should we say more, need we say more?

Let me end with the picture of the patron saint of Mission – Andrew. What did he do? He introduced his brother to Jesus as the messenger, the Messiah, and got them both caught up with Jesus in God’s Mission, the gospel Mission about the kingdom of God. I think Andrew was sharing in God’s Mission which began from Genesis 1 and Genesis 12.

So: Mission: where from? What about if it is from Genesis 1 and Genesis 12?

21 Damaging your health?

(Sermon at Choral Evensong at the opening of the St Endellion 47^th Festival of Music, Tuesday July 26^th 2005, nb three weeks after the London bombings)

I have a friend who has a superb collection of fridge magnets, and I didn’t know just what an art form or social commentary a fridge magnet could be until I saw that family fridge for the first time.  ‘I love to cook with wine … sometimes I even put it in the food’; ‘For a woman to succeed she has to do everything twice as well as a man … fortunately that’s not difficult’.  You’ve already worked out that my friend is a woman and a cook: but she’s also a vicar, and her teenage daughter presented her with a more sombre one last week, ‘Religion can seriously damage your health’. 

The events of the last three weeks have probably made most of us think along those lines at times, when we have seen again and much nearer at hand how terror has been used in the name of religion to such devastating effect.  Most of the commentators on the London bombings began by trying to draw a distinction between Islam, as one of the great and classic world Faiths, and the misguided or misled bombers who were being used by fanatics with an agenda.  More recently that rather neat, easy and politically correct distinction has begun to be questioned – that there is something about Islam itself and not just certain strange and off-centre interpretations of it, which is dangerous.  And I think that is true, as long as you add immediately that it’s also true of Christianity, Buddhism, Sikhism, Hinduism and any other smaller Faith which is big enough to have any kind of power.  Suicide bombers might be a recent phenomenon, but they have their equivalents in previous centuries and in Christianity and the other Faiths too.  So yes, religion, as religion, can seriously damage your health.  And it’s just too easy to explain the bad effects away – they must be addressed, currently and urgently in and by Islam itself, but also by all of us, for religion – all religion - is public truth, open to outsider assessment and accountable to the whole community, not simply a private or insider business.

Which brings me to the wonderful legend of Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego, three young men singing praises to God in the middle of a Babylonian burning, fiery furnace.  They had not been thrown in there for terrorist activities, for the Jews in exile in Babylon had not chosen that tactic.  Even when new and draconian laws had been passed outlawing their faith, the legend goes, they did not resist: but some, including these three, just continued to practice their religion in the privacy of their own homes and their own prayers.  But they were arrested nonetheless, and again they refused to resist, or to recant - their religion was too important to them to do that - and so found themselves thrown into that burning, fiery furnace.  Where they sang.

We have also, of course, to be hard nosed and unromantic about singing, and about music itself.  It too has a downside.  It too can fall victim to that thing in human nature which turns a proper interest into a fanaticism, where you are so committed to Beethoven that your very humanity is distorted, as distorted as any religious fundamentalist or born-again potholer.  Just as it can be used to abuse the other team and their supporters, to sell dubious bread or as an opiate for the people in Relaxing Classics at Seven.  Music too can damage your health.

But it can also do the opposite, and so the legend says that the three young men sang.  It tells us the words of the psalm the three young men sang, but not unfortunately the setting – and despite much research and even more speculation we haven’t a clue about what the original music of the psalms sounded like.  But the legend does tell us that they sang, and that, for me, as a Methodist, is saying something very important.  Anglicans, I observe – and I’m a friendly observer of the Church of England, most of the time anyway – Anglicans traditionally, express their faith by saying the Creed: Methodists sit light to creeds, and express their faith by singing it.  And I must say here, usually by singing with verve, enthusiasm and zest, and at the right speed – but singing one’s faith can be dangerous, for singing goes deep and does things to us, and some of the things Methodists used to sing were neither good theology nor good music – even so I remain convinced that it was much better than the stuff sung these days in much of today’s supposedly alternative worship, but I musn’t go there.  No.  Singing, and music more generally, reminds us that theology is much more like poetry than prose, that all our talk about God is metaphor and image and symbol, not definition.  Singing in Church, and music more generally, helps us to keep our thinking about God open and imaginative, and to prevent it hardening into doctrine and dogma.  It reminds us that when it comes to talking about God, then words alone are not very good.  It reminds us that our souls are bigger than our brains.  That in approaching the mystery of God then words alone just will not do.  So Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego sang.

So did the Samaritan leper in our Gospel reading.  He came back to Jesus, thanked him for healing him, and sang a psalm of praise to God.  He called God by a different name than Jesus used, and no doubt sang his psalm to a different tune.  But neither of those things mattered to Jesus at all.  And he went on his way, whole, restored, human.  Religion can do that to us, or it can do the opposite; and that’s the test, the public test, does religion make us more sane and humane than we would otherwise be or not.  If it does then it is good religion, if it doesn’t it isn’t.  And either way, music matters.

So may God, by whatever name we know and use, bless this 47^th Festival of Music, and through it enrich our faith, our lives and our humanity.  Amen

22 Offering for Ministry

(A sermon preached at the Eucharist at the first South West Ministry Training Course weekend 2008-9, 29^th September 2008, 26^th Sunday in Ordinary Time: Exodus 17.1-7, Philippians 21-13, Mt 21.23-32)

You folks amaze me.  I look around at this first weekend - when we started with the Inaugural Service in which we welcomed or welcomed back 11 members of the Course, and when I’ve spent the rest of the weekend with Years 2 and 3 looking at Ordination and the Year 1s just starting out - I look around and I see 35 ordinands, bright, fresh, alert and keen; and you amaze me.  It was different for me, when I entered Handsworth College to train for the Methodist ministry this week 41 years ago.  I was bright, fresh, alert and keen too, but I was 19.  You amazing lot are not 19.  I am indeed bright, fresh, alert and keen now: but that’s because I retired as a Methodist minister on 31^st August and the university made me redundant at the end of July and now all I’ve got is SWMTC, my Canon Theologian work, as much freelance teaching and preaching as I want, my train set, my bike and my bus pass – great reasons for being bright, fresh, alert and keen.  But you folk, especially you folk my age about to start ordained ministry, you amaze me.  When I went to college I was full of the idealism of youth, the future was bright, the challenge of ministry was there to be grasped, the world and the church were there for the changing.  I had not, of course, been to many Church Councils or Synods, I did not read the Methodist Recorder, I had not sat on committees trying desperately to find money for a new heating system, I had not heard church members giving the minister grief or each other aggro.  I was idealistic, and innocent.  All I’d had to struggle with was God at my own burning bush, and that voice which wouldn’t let me go: calling, calling, calling.  And so I’d said yes, and I was now walking up the drive of Handsworth College, the waters of the candidating Red Sea safely behind me, to start the next stage of my journey with God.  But, you amazing people, you are not there.  You, all of you, are older, wiser and much longer travelled.  You’ve been to those places I’d never yet been.  You’ve heard the Israelites of St Ives mutter against their Moses, you’ve seen the almost murderous struggles between the factious tribes, you’ve heard the complaints in the wilderness of Liturgy, you’ve seen the anxiety over the desert dryness of rot in the church floorboards, you’ve heard them looking back to the Egypt days when everything was better than it is now, and you’ve seen the doubts about anybody knowing where we’re really going.  And yet, you’re here, despite the Massah of Methodism and the Meribah of the Church of England!  You, with the same shortcomings, frailties and motliness as Moses have been called by God.  You, like Moses, have said ‘Yes’ to God, even if he’d tried a bit of the ‘Here am I, send Aaron’ first.  And now you, like Moses, have to learn how to lead, minister to and serve God’s equally motley, frail and difficult people.  You really are amazing, and I thank God for you.

St Paul, of course, wasn’t all that saintly.  He was dedicated, committed, driven, enthusiastic, spirit-filled.  He was argumentative, short-tempered and not above swearing at those who disagreed with him.  He was caring, compassionate, pastorally-minded and missionary.  He was obsessive, authoritarian and demanding.  He was human.  He was another member of God’s motley crew: he served God warts and all.  And he didn’t have it easy – making converts was easy enough – it was what happened next that gave him the headaches.  Converts become church-members, prayer, fellowship and nurture groups become churches, gifted leaders become Deacons, Elders, Episcopoi, Evangelists, Teachers (all with capital letters), and eventually, much later than NT times, Priests and Ordained Ministers with titles, job descriptions and ranks in the hierarchy and authority structure.  And it’s all starting around Paul, and he doesn’t like all of what he sees.  He sees it happening at Philippi - he sees ‘selfish ambition’, ‘conceit’, people ‘looking to their own interests’.  He sees the beginnings of what Charles Wesley called ‘names and sects and parties’.  He sees the beginnings of power struggles, divisions, and issues of status; and he doesn’t like what he sees.  So he quotes a worship song they used to try to correct it all.  It’s one about Jesus and his leadership style – about servant ministry, about not exploiting power, about emptying oneself, about taking the cross seriously in the Church.  It’s about taking Christ as the model for ministry, the servant Christ, Christ the Servant King.  And I have to say, folks, that it seems a long way away from what I see as I look around today’s Church and churches.  We might read Philippians 2 and we might sing Graham Kendrick’s magnificent version of it, as we will in a minute, but I see a huge gap between them and the reality of today’s Church.  If Paul saw a gap beginning between the way of Jesus and the practice of the Church, as he clearly did and tried to close it; for me it looks like an unbridgeable chasm.  I hope you guys will stand on its left bank.

All of you will be told in one way or another, at your various Ordinations, to ‘take Jesus Christ’ as the model for your ministry.  You will be told that by a chap in a mitre or someone in equally scary Methodist garb, and you will be forgiven for wondering how we got to Episcopal Palaces and Gowns and Hoods from a chap who wore sandals and had nowhere to lay his head.  This was, of course, the same chap who the Chief Priests and Elders of the Synagogue challenged precisely because he didn’t have a Rabbinic BTh(Rab) from a validated top-ten institution and wasn’t wearing the right kit.  And when they challenged him about his ‘authority’ and his right to do what he had been doing, he just wouldn’t play their game.  He wouldn’t answer their question.  And they couldn’t do anything about it, because they didn’t control his funding and he had no licence for them to withdraw.  And we’ve just called his refusal ‘the Gospel, good news, of Christ’, and praised him for it.  And we can summarise Jesus’s take on this whole authority, leadership, ordination and ministry business by one of his common sayings which floats around the Gospels – ‘the first will be last and the last first’, or his devastating counter-cultural approach to Messiahship and any form of hierarchical structure when he says to the disciples: ‘that is not how it is to be with you’, ‘I am among you as one who serves’, ‘the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve’ - words we hear, approve and all too often ignore.

You are amazing people.  You have been called to be public representatives of an amazing figure, Jesus of Nazareth who was crucified.  You have been called to service in his Community, his Body, which ought to be amazing but often isn’t.  You have been called to share in nothing less than the Mission of an amazing God to God’s world in the amazing Jesus way.  So just do it, get on with it, for that was the message of the parable in the Gospel reading.  Go to it, in the power of the Spirit, and in the assurance of knowing that those he calls, he also equips.

In the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, Amen. 

23 Easter Facts - a very short sermon

Easter Facts – a very short sermon

(‘Sermon’ preached at the morning Communion Service at the South West Ministry Training Course Easter School at Trinity College, Bristol, on Tuesday, April 14^th, 2009.  Bible reading: 1 Corinthians 15:1-8, 12-14, 20, 35-38, 42-44a, 51-54, 58)

Easter Facts are beyond recovery – if the Exodus was a couple of dozen escaping slaves struggling through a windy marsh on a spring Thursday afternoon – Easter is a blur of confused stories, and doubtful disciples.

But like the exodus, when they thought about it the only thing they could say was, ‘God’!  ‘Why are we here?’, the Israelites asked when they emerged as an ethnic group in Canaan in the twelfth century BCE.  ‘Why are we here?’, the early Christians asked as they huddled among the competing faiths of the  Roman Empire .  ‘God!’ they all answered – not us, not our bravery in slipping past border guards and heading into a desert, not our faith and spirituality and vision and organisation: not us, but God.

There is one undeniable early Christian fact – Jesus, rabbi and healer was crucified in AD 30/33/36 and by AD 50 his followers were calling him ‘Lord’, ‘Saviour’, ‘Son of God’ and ‘Icon’ of the invisible God.  When pressed to explain they mumbled about an empty tomb and a 3^rd day corpse.

That’ll do for me - a God of sweaty, frightened but liberated slaves; a God of confused, confusing but transformed Galileans.  The marsh becomes a sea, crossed.  The corpse becomes a Risen Lord.

We live and walk by Faith.  One day we shall see and know.

24 Being and Doing in Mission and Ministry

(A sermon preached at the South West Ministry Training Course Eucharist on October 18^th, 2009.  Readings for the Feast of Luke the Evangelist: Isaiah 35.3-6 and Luke 10.1-9.  For background, the Anglican Bishop of Plymouth had delivered the annual Course Lecture the previous day, which had been on ‘ministry and mission as being’ with a definite disapproval of ‘ministry and mission as doing’.  It had featured, as trendy lectures do, several video clips including one from a film I had never heard of about someone trapped in a US airport as his own state had disappeared in a coup and the US would not let him in.  The film was, apparently, about the life he developed in the airport which was a life of simply ‘being’ as there was nothing he could ‘do’ – or something like that.  My frustration at the lecture led to the first paragraph below being added to the sermon I had prepared)

Grant, O Lord, that the words of my mouth and the meditations of all our hearts be now and always acceptable in your sight, O Lord, our rock and our redeemer. Amen

It is perhaps a good job that Bishop John is not here this morning, because this sermon is about ‘doing’.  It’s about doing because today’s Gospel reading is about doing, just as so much more in the New Testament is about doing, and about doing in mission, because the New Testament is a mission book, full of ‘mission’ words about the mission of the Church – a mission commissioned by God and endorsed by our Lord Jesus Christ – to the world in which it is set, a mission of proclaiming and telling and acting and doing, by the people of God whose words and deeds must obviously be one with their being and character.  This sermon is therefore Synoptic rather than Johannine – we had the Johannine theology in the lecture yesterday, together with its Greek metaphysics – here we read Luke and listen to what it says we must do in the mission on which our Lord Jesus sends us.  If later theologians used the word ‘mission’ in relation to the inner dynamics of the Godhead, well bully for them and those who like that sort of thing.  In this sermon I shall use it in its plain, literal and biblical sense, about what God in Christ sends his church out into his world to do.  Following the command and the example of our Lord Jesus Christ, because our Lord Jesus Christ was a doer  - who came into Galilee ‘proclaiming the good news of the Kingdom of God’ and who ‘went about doing good’, preaching, teaching and healing, not Mr Sbrinkski-style, simply being and then responding to whatever came.  Divorcing ‘Being’ and ‘Doing’ is dangerous, just as is prioritizing either one over the other – ‘Being and Doing’ is a both/and, not an either/or.

There are some wonderful, absolutely wonderful, images in that ancient anthology of varied and anonymous writings gathered together in the Book of Isaiah, and today’s Old Testament snippet contains some of them: ‘strengthen the weak hands’, ‘make firm the feeble knees’ and reassure those ‘of a fearful heart’.  Stand up please, those of you who are facing the prospect of your new lives as authorized and public representatives of your churches and of the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, as Readers, Distinctive Deacons or Ordained Ministers, with ‘weak hands’, ‘feeble knees’ and ‘fearful hearts’ …  I thought as much, there is hardly anyone still sitting down.  You have stood up, I imagine, because no matter how convinced you might be about your vocation, or how clear the Church, this course, or your friends have been in their affirmation of that vocation, you face the prospect of your new lives and your new ministries with more than a touch of those awake-at-3am nerves, when the way ahead just looks so, so daunting.  And rightly so, because it is – and if anyone tells you it isn’t then they’re telling fibs.  Ple4ase sit down.  You are called to minister in a ‘dwindling church’, to use a phrase from the title of one of my third year’s Reflective Essay title, a ‘dwindling church’ in an increasingly hostile western world.  There is, let’s be frank, real cause for those nerves, those ‘weak hands’, ‘feeble knees’ and ‘fearful hearts’.

Our Gospel reading follows a crucial incident when Jesus had ‘set his face to go to Jerusalem’, that is, after he had faced up to his nerves for that final journey, and begun the tough process of trying to get the disciples to understand that the way ahead was the way of the cross, not of the crown.  There has just been a mini-selection conference where three new recruits had had their interviews with Jesus, and then Jesus sends out 70 successful candidates in pairs on their first mission placement.  They are nervous and vulnerable, and it can’t have been much of an encouragement when Jesus told them that he was sending them out ‘as lambs in the midst of wolves’ and we can imagine their ‘weak hands’, ‘feeble knees’ and ‘fearful hearts’ being much like ours.  And that’s one of the points about all these Gospel stories.  They weren’t written by Luke or the others as a historical record of the Life and Ministry of Jesus of Nazareth, but as a programme for the Mission of the Lord Jesus Christ, and therefore for us as we look forwards to ministry.  So what’s there for us as we do that, ‘weak hands’, ‘feeble knees’ and ‘fearful hearts’ and all?

Of the various points in that mission-programme I want to focus on two.  The first is the sense of urgency and the need to fix priorities, there in the story in those terse ‘no purse, no bag, no spare shoes, no greeting on the road’ instructions.  There is a huge amount of baggage around ministry in the Church today, just as there was baggage around what disciples of rabbis were to do and how they were to behave then.  Jesus says, ‘Dump it’, ‘No time for that now’, ‘Not your business’.  You shall not go to finance committees, leave them for those volunteers who know about finance.  The church roof is no concern of yours either, leave the money-raising to fix it to those who can do money-raising.  Charity fundraising is not your business either, leave that to others.  Is that committee, fellowship, group, course, meeting, synod, gathering or event just another talking shop?  If so, don’t go.  If not, go.  This will make you immediately unpopular with members of the Finance Committee, the Church Roof Appeal Committee, the members of every charity support group in your church, all those who think you should go to their particular ‘talking shop’ as well as with your Rural Dean, Superintendent Minister, Bishop and District Chair.  In which case you can remind them, in your last words as an Anglican or a Methodist when they are showing you the door, that Jesus told the 70 that it was a matter of some urgency to fix priorities so that their limited time, energy and gifts could be used to maximum effect.  And you could add, when you’re telling them to blame him and not you, that both the Church of England and the Methodist Church have after all repeatedly emphasized their commitment to a mission-shaped church, with the priority of mission over maintenance, and that what you’re doing is only taking that commitment seriously.

And so to the second point in that story.  What are you going to be doing instead of worrying about the finances, fretting over the right liturgical kit, or drinking coffee and being nicely sociable?  If you’re just doing your own thing, in a pick-and-mix, making the most of ‘my’ ministry in ways that suit me kind of ministry, then you’ll deserve exactly the sort of short shrift that you will get.  Which any of the 70 who were doing that would have got of Jesus.  What he insists they, ie us, should be doing instead of bothering with the baggage is ‘harvesting’.  Now isn’t that an interesting image?  Not sowing the seed of the word; not preparing the ground for the sowing of the seed of the word; not nurturing the little plants; not weeding out the wrong stuff; not tidying up the dead and lifeless plants which have blossomed, flourished and died; nor keeping the garden shipshape with the hedges cut and the shed roof well-maintained – but harvesting.  It’s all ready, says Jesus.  Get out there and ‘harvest’ it.  The harvest is ‘plentiful’, all it needs is harvesters.  What ‘harvesting’ means in your context, for you and your ministry, I don’t know and can’t say – so all I can do is leave Jesus’ word with you and leave you to reflect on it.  I don’t know whether it’s an image that features much in mission-shaped church thinking, but at least according to Jesus, that’s the priority task.  And really, I think that’s rather encouraging: all the hard work of ploughing, sowing and weeding has been done, by others before us and by God’s Spirit, so ours is just the last bit of the process, and the process itself is God’s because he is ‘the Lord of the Harvest’.

Maybe, just maybe, there’s enough in that ‘harvest’ image to calm us down, strengthen our ‘weak hands’, ‘feeble knees’ and ‘fearful hearts’, help us to see God’s priorities and set ours accordingly, and then to do as we’re told and get on with it?

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.  Amen.

25 Three in One on John 14

(A sermon preached at Trethosa Methodist Church on 20^th April 2008 on John 14.1-11, 15-19)

Today it’s three short sermons from this one Gospel passage.

Sermon number 1.  We’ve read one of the most reassuring and comforting of all the Bible passages used at funerals this morning.  Jesus is, in the story, in the Upper Room with his disciples on the night before his own death.  He knows what is likely to happen and he is trying to prepare his disciples for what is to come.  So he says those marvellous words,

‘Let not your hearts be troubled.  Believe in God.  Believe also in me.  In my Father’s house are many rooms - or mansions, or dwelling places – and I go to prepare a place for you.  My peace I give to you, my peace I leave with you.  Let not your hearts be troubled.  Neither let them be afraid’.  

Each of those phrases is worth a sermon in itself.

Jesus knows what they are feeling: upset, frightened, confused.  He knows that ‘their hearts are troubled’, and just how troubled they are.  He faces up to it and gets them to face up to it, for there’s no way of dealing with things like that if you won’t face up to them.

‘Believe in God’, he says, because that helps: because believing that ‘underneath and round about are the everlasting arms’ helps; because believing that ‘there is nothing in death or life, in the world above or the world below, in height, or depth or anywhere else in all creation that can ever separate us from the love of God’ helps; because believing that ‘God is love, so Love for ever o’er the universe must reign’ helps.

‘Believe also in me’, he says.  Why?  Because sometimes it’s hard to believe in God, who you can’t see, and who doesn’t always seem to be there when you need him, and who sometimes doesn’t seem to be able actually to do very much to help.  Whereas Jesus is there, with them, in the room.  Trust me, he says, if you can’t trust God.  You’ve seen me, you’ve heard me.  Jesus isn’t here for us, of course, in that same way, but he tells us, his Body, to be here for each other; to bear each other’s burdens, to be his hands, his feet, his voice, his presence for each other. 

And remember that this life isn’t all there is, he adds.  There are ‘mansions in the sky’, many rooms in God’s great house, rooms enough for all, and rooms in which to live and rest, not just temporary lodgings that he and the disciples had to use.  Forget that, he suggests, and then things will get on top of you, get you down and make you despair.  Some people pour scorn on this sort of thing as ‘pie in the sky when we die’, but Jesus did promise us a ‘heavenly banquet prepared for all mankind’ and that’s good news for those who are hungry and thirsty no matter how much food and drink they have here and now.  

And he’s going to prepare a place for us, get the room ready, clean sheets on the bed, stock up the coffee sachets and put in the clean towels.  Of course it’s not like that, but Jesus wants the disciples to know that each of them matters to God, and that God has their eternal interest at heart. Just as he has ours.

So Jesus speaks his peace to them, offers his assurance that in the end all will be well.  He speaks to quieten their troubled minds, reassure them, and give them inner peace to cope with all that will happen, or if not to cope then to survive it, and come out the other side.  So he ends with those marvellous words, ‘Let not your hearts be troubled.  Neither let them be afraid’.  They were anxious, troubled, fearful, and they had good reason to be.  We live in an age of anxiety, where stress is the number one illness and there is much to be fearful about.  Those words, therefore, apply no less to us – ‘Let not your hearts be troubled.  Neither let them be afraid’ – and the same Jesus still speaks them if we have ears to hear.

Sermon number 2.  A shorter one.  Text: John 14.6

Jesus said, ‘I am the way, the truth and the life; no one comes to the Father except by me’.  

This is a favourite text of those Christians who believe that Christians are the only people God loves, and who believe that only Christians go to heaven; that all the rest, from our good Cornish neighbours to every Moslem, Buddhist and Hindu are going straight to Hell.  You’ve only got to put it like that to see that a God who would do that sort of thing isn’t exactly very nice or friendly.  You’ve all heard the joke about the group of people who arrived at the Pearly Gates and St Peter was showing them around.  At one point he stops, puts his fingers to his lips, and tells them to tiptoe quietly past the next block.  When they’ve gone past someone asks him what that was all about.  He points back to the block and he says, ‘That’s where the Fundamentalists live; they think they’re the only ones here’.

Jesus has already talked about ‘many mansions’, not just one; just as in John’s Gospel he also says that he’s got other sheep in other flocks, and that’s always worth remembering when you meet anyone who says there’s only one way to be a Christian, one way to worship, or one way of believing.  Jesus seemed happy enough with a bit more variety than that, but that’s not the real point here.

The real point of this text is to read what it actually says.  It doesn’t say that no one comes to God, except through Jesus.  If it did, the Fundamentalists might just have the beginning of a case.  But it doesn’t.  It says that no one comes to the Father, except through Jesus and that is significantly different.  People come to God through all sorts of things, through all the different religions, through beautiful places, through music, through private and silent meditation, through loving friendships - people meet God in all kinds of ways and in all kinds of experiences.  What Jesus offers, this text says, and uniquely offers, is to meet God as ‘Father’, as a loving parent.  That’s why the Lord’s Prayer begins like it does with ‘Our Father’; and why the first Christians used Jesus’ own word to speak of God even though they didn’t speak his language, the word ‘Abba’.  That’s the way Jesus leads us – to the Father; that’s the truth Jesus gives us – that God is Father; and that’s the life Jesus offers us, as children of a Father.  That’s Jesus’, and Christianity’s unique contribution to the great religious traditions of the world.  People get to God in many ways, and discover many truths about him, and live many varieties of religious life: the distinctive one that Jesus offers, is to know God as ‘Father’.  That’s what this text is about.

Sermon number 3.  Even shorter.

The disciples easily got confused.  Thomas was usually the one most ready to admit it, and to ask for clarification.  He does it here.  But this time Philip joins in as well.  ‘Just show us the Father, please, and then we’ll understand’, he says.  Jesus comes close to losing his temper.  He controls himself, and has one last try to make his point clear.  Philip, he says, if you’ve seen me, you’ve seen the Father.  If you’ve heard me, you’ve heard the Father.  If you’ve watched what I do, and how I do it; you’ve seen the Father.  

This is very simple.  It’s shockingly simple.  But that’s how Jesus meant it to be.  He didn’t mean us to start dreaming up complicated theological formulas like the Doctrine of the Trinity, and Creeds which talked about him as the ‘only begotten Son of God, begotten of his Father before all worlds, very God of very God’ and so on and on a bit more.  He meant that he was the human face of God.  That he was the best clue there was to what God was really like.  That God was like him: kind, understanding, loving, generous, forgiving and all that; or if you want to put it the other way round, that when was being kind, understanding, loving, generous, forgiving he was being most like God.  It doesn’t matter which way round you put it really, Jesus said to Philip, just look at me and you’ll see what God is like.

And then, for there was a sting in the tail, he tells them just ‘go and do thou likewise’.  Live like that yourselves, he tells them.  God will help you, and so will I, even though I won’t be around any more.   Amen  

26 The God who Acts?

(Sermon preached at a Circuit United Service for the Truro Methodist Circuit at Truro Methodist Church on Advent Sunday in 2005.  Readings: Philippians 4:4-9 and Matthew 6:7-13 + 7:7-11.  The background to this is that the Circuit had been using my little red book – Thinking Things Through – Prayer – as a study book in groups and fellowships over the previous three months and this United Service was to mark the end of the study sessions) 

You’ve given me an awesome task tonight – to round off your studies on prayer by preaching on Advent Sunday on ‘the God who acts – question mark’, the title of the last chapter of the little red book. 

I’ve split this awesome task into two parts, in the first I want to explore the problems which lurk in this question, and in the second, I want to suggest that two of Jesus’ shortest parables may give us the best way forward there is in living with those problems.

1. And so, first, why the question mark when we talk about God acting, working or doing things?  It is there because as Christians we live in two worlds.

One world we live in is the world of the Bible.  We are ‘people of the book’.  We listen to the ‘old, old story’ and we say that it is ‘our story, our song’.  It is the story which gives meaning to our lives, the story we live by.  We identify with its characters, share its vision, cherish its values and dream its dreams.  We find some of it difficult, even offensive, certainly complicated: but we take it seriously.  And in that Bible world God acts, he works, he does things: in fact he is its chief character, its chief actor, its biggest doer; and the Bible is the ‘Book of God’ and has been called the ‘Book of the Acts of God’.  In this Bible world, God acts in history in all kinds of ways, he does things.  The Bible is full of ‘the mighty acts of God’.  That’s the one world we live in.

The other world we live in is this one, the world of Truro, the world of 2001, our much more mundane and ordinary and day to day world.  And apart from in insurance policies, ‘acts of God’ seem thin on the ground in this world.  In this world there are no obvious signs of God acting anywhere.  He does not feature in our newspapers or on the television as having just done this or that, and it is very hard to say how God acts in this real and everyday world.  Some believe he intervenes to find them car parking spaces, no mean feat in this city at times, and others see no evidence of any such interventions anywhere, even in matters of life and death where people have prayed earnestly for them.  Some will say, yes, it’s true: when we ask we receive, when we seek we find and when we knock the door is opened; equally sincere and faithful Christians will say that they have not seen it working like that at all.  This is the other world in which we live, a world where God does not appear to be much of an actor in our story, where he doesn’t appear to do very much at all.

These are two worlds and as Christians we live in both of them and that is our problem.  If we were able to live as Christians just in that one world where God acts as he did in the Bible, that might be wonderful; we would seek and find, ask and be given and doors would be open when we knocked.  But my gran had a saying about that - ‘If cats were always kittens, and rats were always mice, and elderberries were youngerberries, wouldn’t that be nice?’  It might indeed be nice, but life’s not like that.  If on the other hand, we just lived in the everyday world where things happen as they happen, well at least we wouldn’t give ourselves theological brain-ache when our prayers weren’t answered because we wouldn’t have prayed that way in the first place.  But our problem is that we can’t do that either of those things, because we live in both of those worlds: one world in which God acts and one world where there is very little sign of that action.  

How does God act? is the big theological question, in fact the biggest theological question of them all, at least for Jews and Christians.  Atheists have a simple answer.  They ignore the first world altogether.  Muslims have a simple answer, God works in the second world just as he does in the first.  But we can’t say that.  The simple Muslim answer that God is in total control, that he can do anything he wants to do, and that everything that happens is the will of Allah, is not our view.  When bad things happen to good people in the Old Testament, for example, God’s people were not prepared to accept them submissively as ‘the will of God’, as we see in the powerful psalms of lament which argue, complain and challenge what is going wrong.  And the acid test for Christians who do want to talk about a God who acts is what we are to make of a God who can act but doesn’t, when the result of his inaction is the continuation of untold and indescribable human suffering?  

So as Christians we live in these two worlds and it is not easy, intellectually or pastorally.  We want to say, ‘Yes - God acts in creation, in redemption, in the life and ministry, the death and resurrection of Jesus’.  But we also have to recognise that very often when it comes to our prayers about the deep needs of our world, God does not act, that we see no sign that he acts to heal the sick, to restore the church, to solve the AIDS pandemic, to bring peace to the world, or to make poverty history, or at least of course no sign that he acts directly.

That’s our dilemma, that’s why there is a question mark when we try to talk about a ‘God who acts.’

2. And so to my second task, which is to suggest that two of Jesus’ shortest parables may give us a way forward to think about this huge dilemma.  We usually call them the Parable of the Mustard Seed and the Parable of the Leaven, and we find them side by side in Luke 13:18-21 but I’d like to suggest two different titles, the Parable of the Gardener and the Parable of the Baker.

Jesus said, ‘What is the Kingdom of God like – which incidentally we could translate as ‘How does God rule? How does he work? – and to what shall I compare it?

It is like a mustard seed which someone took and sowed in the garden; it grew and became a tree…

It is like yeast which a woman took and mixed with three measures of flour until all of it was leavened’

Notice what is going on here: a gardener takes a mustard seed and sows it and something happens, a baker takes yeast and kneads it into the dough and something happens, and that’s the way God works, says Jesus.  

This is my illustration of that: the Parable of the Tomato …(Include the verse from ‘We plough the fields and scatter’)  

There is no agreed or simple answer to this question and there never has been in the two thousand plus years of theological reflection on it in the synagogue or the church, so beware therefore of those who will answer this question simply, for they will tend to do it by denying one or other of those two worlds in which we live.  Jesus’ parables here, on the other hand, offer a way of thinking on this which manages to hold the two together.

Which brings me, in conclusion, to Advent Sunday.  This is the Sunday when, traditionally, we look forward to the End, when God’s kingdom will come and his will be done on earth as it is in heaven, the last and final Act of God to make all things new.  St Paul encouraged the Philippians to hang in there, as we read, because in the End God will be God, and in the meantime they should both pray and work.  And Advent Sunday encourages us to do the same, to go on living in our two worlds until, in God’s End, the two become one when God’s kingdom comes.  Until that time we live by faith and not by sight.  We live with questions rather than answers: but we do so in the faith that comes from the life and death and resurrection of Jesus, the faith which says that the last word does not lie with death but with life, not with darkness but with light, and not with evil but with good.  We live in an Advent Hope, that the ultimate act of God will be to fulfil his creation, and in the meantime, in the here and now, in our two worlds, we are promised by St Paul, and promised twice, that in our praying and in our doing the peace of God will sustain us.

How God acts in our world is a huge theological problem with which we wrestle.  That God’s peace, which passes understanding, acts in our hearts and minds to sustain us in our discipleship in the meantime in which we live is, for St Paul, an absolute certainty.  His prayer for the Philippians is that they may know that peace as they both pray to God and work for him.  That is not a bad Advent prayer for us all.  Amen

27 Gwithian Chapel 200^th Anniversary

(I presided at the celebration of the 200^th Anniversary of Gwithian Chapel (formerly Methodist but now an independent trust) on Sunday August 15^th 2010.  There were two short sermons in the service, mine was the second. Readings: Psalm 5 and John 4.7-24)  

1          Charles Wesley wrote many splendid hymns which have given us many memorable phrases and expressions, though the amount of his hymns which are sung nowadays is sadly decreasing rapidly.  One of those memorable phrases from one of his hymns, the one we’ll be singing in 9½ minute’s time, is this, summing up his and his brother’s vision for the Methodist movement – ‘To serve the present age’. 

            And that’s what the two of them tried to do in the 18^th century – to serve their present age, first by reforming their church (the Church of England) and when that failed by preaching the Gospel outside it; and the result, not intended by either of them, and bitterly opposed by Charles, was eventually a separate Methodist Church.  

And this church is here because (so Charles Thomas’s booklet tells us – available in the porch for £1) during their lifetime a Methodist Society was formed here and was certainly official and functioning by 1782.  The building they used is no more, but this one soon replaced it in 1810, no doubt with the same aim – to serve the present age.

2          If I turn to this booklet – Graham Pearce’s portrayal of the time in which those early Gwithian chapel-goers lived (available in the porch for £2) - one thing is abundantly clear – they lived in a very different world from the one we live in.   Their world of sailing ships, genteel society contrasted with industrial squalor, the infancy of the steam engine, large families and huge mortality rates, and so on is almost impossible for us to re-enter – though that doesn’t stop the costume dramas on the telly trying.  

            And Wesley was very successful in serving that age.  In those days most people believed in God, they experienced death all around them often, and they believed in Hell – and Wesley offered them a message of future hope and a way of avoiding Hell that was relevant and convincing.  It was good news.  

3          Today we live in a quite different world.  Less and less British people believe in God, they experience death only rarely, and very few of them believe in Hell – so they have no need of the kind of message Wesley preached because if they believe in Life After Death at all, it is that we go to the Great Big Golf Course in the sky, or whatever our particular thing might be; that’s the message we hear so often at the Life Celebrations which are what so many modern funerals have become.  And personally, I think that’s a lot healthier and more biblical idea than it looks but there’s no time to go there now.  So less and less people today are taking the Ps 5.7 line – the text of the sermon preached at the opening of this church – ‘As for me, I will come into thy house, in the multitude of thy mercy; and in thy fear will I worship toward thy holy temple’.  That sort of thing is just not happening any more, and that is why almost all the churches are struggling with seriously declining numbers, and why Methodist ones at least are closing so frequently.

            But, and there is a ‘but’ – there are signs that we are living in a time when people are still interested in spirituality – not religion but spirituality - and so we sometimes hear the expression ‘ Spirituality Good, Religion Bad’.  Organised religion is in decline; there’s the fervent atheism of Richard Dawkins. Eminent biologist and very amateur theologian, who keeps telling us that God and religion is bad for us - ‘religion is bad for your health - and all that; and, of course, he’s quite right when he says something of that.  But despite decline in and opposition to ‘religion’, ‘spirituality’ is ok.

We can see a bit of what I mean in our New Testament reading – Jesus and the Woman at the Well – he is talking about spirituality (where to find meaning in life – where to find life-giving water – where to discover the resources to fulfil your potential and be really alive) but she wants to talk about religion – why her church is right and his wrong – ‘my chapel is better than your chapel’ - but in the end she comes to see that those things don’t matter that much, what matters is Jn 4.24 – ‘God is spirit; and those who worship him must worship in spirit and in truth’. 

4          And that brings me to here and now, and here and tomorrow.  The old Anglican/Methodist feuds are over, as Martin and I can share this pulpit as friends and colleagues (though from Charles’ book I sense that there has been less church/chapel feuding in Gwithian than in many other places, and I think I’m right to say that there has been no chapel/chapel feuding in Gwithian at all because there has only ever been this one chapel in the village – which is another thing that makes Gwithian distinctive among Cornish villages.  None of that two or three chapels opposite each other, built in what a former supernumerary in this District, Tom Darlington, used to call ‘a combined spirit of zeal (for God) and malice (against the other chapel)’. 

            So what does it mean to ‘serve the present age’ here in this place and now at this time?  And here too you have something special – most Methodist chapels are not old enough to have attracted any patina of ancient holiness, but this one is.  It is old, different, cherished and visited.  It doesn’t have a weekly service of worship any more – but that way of doing spirituality is declining anyway – but it is an open holy place; and surveys seem to show that while many people no longer belong to chapels and churches they still believe, and still use holy Christian places to nurture their inner lives.  That is one ongoing ministry here. 

On top of that you have somewhere to celebrate the Festivals – Christmas, Easter, Harvest – and to do those special moments like Baptisms – and all that in a spirit of full ecumenical and village co-operation – together, of course, with a freedom from Methodist church bureaucracy.  Add all that up, and that means there’s a lot going for this old and holy place.  And may God bless you all in the doing of it.  Amen

28 St Phillip and St James

This sermon was preached at a Solemn Evensong in Truro Cathedral on the Feast of St Phillip and St James on Wednesday May 4th 2011 when Truro hosted the annual Conference of Deans.  The mikes failed during the service but came on after the sermon as the Canon Precentor prayed to the Virgin Mary.  I draw no theological conclusions from the coincidence ...  Readings Ephesians 1.3-10 John 14.1-14

Grant, O Lord, that the words of my mouth and the meditations of all our hearts be now and always acceptable in your sight, O Lord, our rock and our redeemer.  Amen

There are times, admittedly not very often, when I feel a bit sorry for those who job it is to create lectionaries and produce liturgies.  They get a brief from headquarters – we need some Saints Days for the Church Calendar.  Well, ok, there’s the obvious New Testament ones, Peter and Paul; then you can add in a few good recent ones like Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Oscar Romero; then we can always ask the Church Historians for a list – a few great teachers of the faith, some notable martyrs, a missionary or two, a social activist to leaven things a bit, the odd sundry hero.  Then you can always leave a space for a few local notables, and no shortage of them in these parts of course – more than in Devon, of course.  Fine, so you send in your list: but the brief comes back, we need more.  So after much head-scratching in go the likes of Philip and James, second order apostles - very relevant of course for a service to which we welcome the Deans of all the English Cathedrals - but a bit of a headache really because there’s not a lot to say about these lesser bods.  Anyway, the names go in the list and the problem passes down to the poor minions who actually have to preach on these relative obscurities.

But when I actually sat down to think about Philip and James for this sermon - never having given either of them a moment’s thought in my ministry up to now, of course – for we Methodists don’t do saints days of even the big ones, let alone the minnows – I found it wasn’t so bad.

Philip appears as a kind of sidekick to Thomas asking a supplementary question, as in tonight’s Gospel, and anyone who asks questions about their faith gets brownie points from me.  He’s a fisherman disciple from Bethsaida.  He recruits Nathanael.  He gets put on the spot by Jesus with a test question about where to buy bread to feed that 5000 crowd.  He acts as an intermediary when some Greeks want to talk to Jesus, presumably because he can speak the language a bit.  Otherwise he’s one of the lads: he’s called, he becomes a disciple, he listens and learns, he’s sent out on a mission placement, he sometimes gets it wrong, he’s caught up in the apostolic jostling for position and resents John and the other James who got their bid in first, he’s in the triumphal Palm Sunday demo in Jerusalem, he has his feet washed and shares the Passover Meal in the Upper Room, he runs away from Gethsemane and he stays away from the cross, as did all the men, he’s there at Easter, he takes part in the election of Judas’ replacement and he shares in the joy of Pentecost.  Then he disappears.  Legend has it that he went to Asia Minor as an apostle and is buried at Hierapolis near Colossae, where he was possibly martyred.

Of James, the Son of Alphaeus, we know nothing personal at all, so no wonder the poor bloke gets called ‘James the Less’.  He suffers the added indignity of being confused with every other James who was around at the time.  He too shared in all that ‘being a disciple’ experience and then disappears into legend: this time, staying in Judah only to be martyred by being beaten to death with a fuller’s club on the orders of the Sanhedrin in AD 62.

Looking at those brief bios I remembered that you Anglicans have a lovely phrase about ‘those whose faith is known to God alone’ – lovely - and thinking about that I want to end this sermon with two short comments:

First, look at the challenge that emerges from Philip’s question in tonight’s Gospel.  ‘Jesus, please’, he says, ‘show us the Father and we’ll be satisfied’.  ‘Sorry, Philip’, Jesus answers, ‘you’ve seen all there is to see, heard all there is to hear; just trust me, and live it out’.  If we want to know what ‘faith’ means then we see it here: ‘faith’ in its Biblical sense is life commitment, living out Christian discipleship on the basis of trusting that it’s the right thing to do.

Second, think about the reassurance and encouragement we get from these two characters.  Philip and James the Less are two of the multitudes of Christian people who live out their discipleship in ways really known only to God.  As we do.  So maybe giving a special day to minor characters like these two is really saying that, in the sight of God, anonymous ordinaries like us do actually matter.

So thanks to Philip and James the Less for being a text and an illustration – of the challenge and the encouragement or reassurance that anonymous ordinaries like us are called to life commitment, to live out our Christian discipleship in ways that are mostly known only to God and that, whatever we make of it, we do actually matter to the God we see in Jesus.

In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.  Amen

29 St Petroc’s Society 25^th Anniversary Service

A sermon preached at the 25th Anniversary of the St Petroc's Society (Cornwall's homelessness project) in Truro Cathedral on 9th July 2011.

Grant, O Lord, that the words of my mouth and the meditation of all our hearts, be now and always acceptable in your sight, O Lord, our Rock and our Redeemer.  Amen.

The words ‘Cathy Come Home’ probably mean nothing to anyone under 50, and the name of Rev Michael Palmer probably rings very few bells in Truro now.  Life moves on.  And life has moved on a long way from 1986 for St Petroc’s, as we have just seen in that superb presentation.  In 1966 the television play Cathy Come Home woke us up to the existence of homelessness.  In 1986 Bishop Richard, the then Bishop of St Germans, made us realise that homelessness wasn’t just something that happened in London, Birmingham and Manchester.  So St Petroc’s has grown from a small beginning with Michael Palmer and the Diocese of Truro’s social responsibility committee to the busy, complex and professional organisation it now is and this afternoon we are celebrating its 25^th Anniversary.

In one respect, of course, it is very sad indeed that we are celebrating the 25^th anniversary at all of an organisation designed to help those who are homeless.  Like world poverty and hunger, the vision was that homelessness would be sorted.  But it hasn’t been, and there’s every indication that it won’t be either.  So St Petroc’s is still here, and is likely to continue to be here for some time yet, an example of the Big Society, from the days when we just thought that doing good, being helpful and trying to make a difference was what you did or tried to do, without governmental sloganizing about it.

Anniversaries look two ways; ‘We’ll praise Him for all that is past, and trust Him for all that’s to come’, as an old hymn puts it.  Anniversaries look backwards, usually with gratitude and appreciation, and sometimes with amazement or relief.  And they look forwards, sometimes in hope and anticipation, though sometimes with anxiety because the future is not always bright.  So we gather here this afternoon to look back and recognise achievement and to express gratitude to professionals and volunteers alike, but also to look forward and to encourage one another and to be encouraged for the next phase.

And I’m glad that St Petroc’s has chosen to celebrate its 25^th Anniversary here, in this cathedral.  Many organisations quickly forget their religious roots* and there are loud voices these days telling us that religion is dangerous nonsense, a danger to your health and the health of society**.  And sometimes they’re right, of course.  In my nine years as Methodist Bishop of Cornwall, though that isn’t the official job title, I saw quite a bit that embarrassed me and brought the Church into disrepute.  But at the same time I saw quite a bit that impressed me, and both thrilled and humbled me by the sheer quality of its work and the commitment of those involved.  One such organisation was St Petroc’s and so I never said no when I got the phone call each autumn about supporting a Christmas Appeal around the chapels.  Good religion is about loving God and loving our neighbour and most religions share that simple bottom line.  Christianity didn’t invent it, but at its best it promotes it, as we read in our Bible reading (Hebrews 13.1-3, 8, 15-16, 20-21).

So here this afternoon, on behalf of my Methodist successor and of Bishop Tim and all the other Church Leaders, of which thankfully I am no longer one, I say thanks to you all at St Petroc’s for all that is past, and God bless you in all that’s to come.

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.  Amen.

*eg 12 of the 39 football clubs which have played in the Premier League, inc Aston Villa, Birmingham City, Blackpool, Bolton, Everton, Liverpool, Wolves (www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/Fhistory.htm)

**The loudest being Richard Dawkins, of course

30 The 400^th Anniversary of the Authorised Version (KJV)

A celebration sermon preached at Evensong in Veryan Parish Church on 10.7.11, at the Eucharist at Bolton Priory on 28.8.11 and at Christchurch URC/Methodist, Barnstaple on 11.9.11

Grant, O Lord, that the words of my mouth and the meditation of all our hearts, be now and always acceptable in your sight, O Lord, our Rock and our Redeemer.  Amen.

2011 is the 400^th Anniversary of the publication of the Authorised Version or, as the Americans call it, the ‘King James Bible’.  The Church has done lots on this, nationally at least, and this Anniversary has hit the media in quite a big way with some excellent features on both the wireless and the telly.  The programme by Melvyn Bragg was particularly good.  There have also been books, one from Oxford University Press that is particularly good (Gordon Campbell Bible: The Story of the King James Version 1611-2011) and one that is particularly bad (David Crystal Begat: The King James Bible and the English Language).  And that’s what we’re doing now, celebrating this rather special 400^th Anniversary, but I want to start a bit further back.

On 6^th October 1536 William Tyndale - Oxford scholar and the ‘Father of the English Bible’ - was burned at the stake in Brussels on the orders of Henry VIII.  In London in 1537 John Rogers published the first authorised English Bible with the words ‘set forth with the king’s most gracious licence’ on its title page.  That ‘most gracious king’ was, of course, Henry VIII.  The translation of the four Gospels and of Genesis to Deuteronomy in it was almost word for word Tyndale, just as they are to this day in the Authorised Version.

Originally there’d never been a problem with translating the Bible into your local language.  At the time of Jesus the Jews translated their Hebrew Bible into the language that Jesus and his companions actually spoke, Aramaic, and St Paul and his churches always read the Hebrew Bible in its Greek translation.  After the conversion of Constantine when they wanted a Latin Bible for the western part of the Roman Empire, Jerome got the job of producing a better Latin translation than the ones they already had.  In England, Alfred the Great, king and scholar, after burning the cakes went on to produce an English translation of the Jerome’s Latin Gospels, and the famous Latin Lindisfarne Gospels have an English translation between the lines in places, presumably so that the reader didn’t have to translate it himself for the congregation to hear it in their own language.  So there wasn’t anything wrong with reading the Bible in your own language.  Well, not until 1380 anyway.  In 1380 John Wyclif produced a new and complete English Bible, but the problem was that he had an agenda, because he was ‘the first English Protestant’- 150 years ahead of the Reformation.  And it was his agenda which led to anger at his translation.  Here’s a quote from an angry contemporary - ‘Wyclif translated from the Latin into the language not of angels but of Angles, so that he made the Bible common and open to the laity, and to women who were able to read, which used to be reserved for literate and intelligent clergy’ (Campbell p9).  Unlike Tyndale, Wyclif died in his sleep, but one of his legacies was that the government introduced the death penalty for heresy in 1397.

So here we have some real ironies:

Irony no 1 – having translated the Bible into the language that folk used to understand, and done it gladly, the Church later refused to do it again when folk spoke something different.  William Tyndale is burned at the stake by Henry VIII for doing what Jerome had done for the Emperor and got called a saint for. 

           Irony no 2 – the year after killing Tyndale, Henry authorises an English Bible which turns out to be mostly Tyndale’s translation and 70 years later the revised edition of that is published at the instigation of King James. 

And there’s irony all the way through this anniversary:

      Irony no 3 – in 2011 we are celebrating the Authorised Version as a treasure of English religion and the English language, but in 1611 this new translation was not at all popular.  The Establishment much preferred their Bishops’ Bible of 1568, while ordinary people, the Puritans and William Shakespeare carried on using their Geneva Bibles of 1557.  In fact it took 50 years before the Authorised Version was really accepted. 

      Irony no 4 – by 1720 people were saying that it was time to ditch this out of date language – ‘we don’t talk like this anymore’ – and they said that too about Shakespeare’s plays (Campbell p143)!  It wasn’t really until the 19th century that people began to talk in earnest about its splendid and beautiful language, and call it a treasure or gem of English prose.

      Irony no 5 - those who first formed the Authorised Version Appreciation Society were in fact Victorian cultured despisers of religion like Thomas Huxley, just as today’s great militant atheist, Richard Dawkins (eminent biologist and very amateur theologian) says how much he loves the Authorised Version - it’s just that he doesn’t believe a word of what it actually says.

      Irony no 6 - is that the Authorised Version we actually read is not the Authorised Version of 1611 at all, but the revision of it made by Benjamin Blayney in 1769 when the University of Oxford’s authorised printers took it in hand to update it properly (Campbell p136). 

And then there’s perhaps the two biggest ironies of all.

James I intended his Bible to be a people’s Bible, which all could read and which would promote unity in his English Church.  But it didn’t work out like that.  80 years before, arguing with his Gloucestershire vicar, William Tyndale had boasted, ‘Ere long, the boy that driveth the plough shall know more of the Bible than thou dost’ and the Authorised Version made that vision come true. But then those ploughboys started arguing with their vicars and with each other about what it all meant, and instead of church unity there came diversity, denominations and dissenting voices as people read their Bibles for themselves.  Even Wyclif and Tyndale, I suspect, might have had second thoughts, and King James certainly would have done, if they could have seen ploughboy killing ploughboy in the Civil War with Bible texts on their banners or if they could read the nonsense about the Bible on today’s American fundamentalist websites.  Religion and the Bible can indeed be dangerous, as Richard Dawkins and his friends keep rightly telling us, and there’s a lot of bad religion and bad Bible around.

And so finally to irony no 8.  The Authorised Version was published to ‘serve the present age’ (to use a phrase from a Wesley hymn) so that people could access the Bible for themselves, read it in worship in their daily words, and find it God’s word like a lamp to their feet and a light to their path (Ps 119.105).  And the Authorised Version did that.  It has been a book which has changed lives, generated visions of peace and justice, given comfort and hope in distress and despair, challenged tyrannies, blessed worship and enriched our language and culture.  But, of course, after 400 years of changing language and culture, the Authorised Version no longer ‘serves the present age’ because no matter how precious it is as a literary and religious classic, it’s subject to the truth of that powerful Victorian American hymn, 

New occasions teach new duties / Time makes ancient good uncouth;

They must upward still and onward / Who would keep abreast of truth

(James Russell Lowell, Once to every man and nation, v3b).

So on this 400^th Anniversary of the Authorised Version we rightly say thanks be to God for that Bible: but that can’t be all that we do.  If we are truly to honour the Authorised Version, its translators and its patron King James, as on this anniversary we should, and to honour the God of whom it speaks, we need to do two things.  First we must ask ourselves how we can fulfil our responsibility to serve our present age in the huge task of communicating the Bible, as they asked themselves 400 years ago in theirs.  And second, we must commit ourselves so to ‘read, mark, learn and inwardly digest’ the treasure which is the Bible, not simply as heritage and literary and religious classic, but as indeed a lamp to our feet and a light to our path. 

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.  Amen. 

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