St Nicholas

Sermon by the Revd Dr Brutus Green

St Nicholas is a good saint to celebrate at this time of year. He reminds us, and helps us instruct children, that there’s a Christian basis to Christmas; and helps us ground all the lights and chocolates in the more definite virtues of generosity, godliness and the protection of innocence.

There are two main stories about St Nicholas, neither of which are suitable for children. The first tells of when, as a rich young man, he stepped in to save three girls. The girls didn’t have the financial backing for dowries, which narrowed their options to the worst of futures. It’s a medieval situation which persists in the world. St Nicholas is said to have ridden by as each came of age tossing in – probably not down a chimney – a bag of coins. The plight of girls and women in this world remains heart-breaking; it’s sadly only in Disney films that Santa makes sure every child receives a gift.

And like many of the saints’ tales St Nicholas stories are not without some child-inappropriate gory details. A favourite medieval tale is his resurrection of three boys who had been chopped up with an axe by a wicked shopkeeper and pickled in brine. Such stories do not lend themselves naturally to a show and tell, and I avoid suggesting to children we go down to the crypt to inspect the parish axe – (The classic fairy tales by Grimm and Hans Christian Anderson are of course worse in this regard.) But because of such stories, which over time pass into folklore and charming customs, St Nicholas became the patron Saint of children, and identified with that chief Christian virtue of generosity.

I’ve always struggled with saints. I’ve never had many heroes of my own – I think David Gower is the only human I idolized as a child; Ian Botham’s a more natural hero and I saw him play a number of times; There was an effortlessness to Gower and just a bit more charm and grace. But after two disastrous tours to the West Indies against that formidable 1980s line up, I had no more heroes.

As a culture now we seem to delight in celebrities’ fall from grace, and even the great heroes of our recent past, Mother Teresa, Martin Luther King, Winston Churchill, Sir Cliff Richard — are quickly qualified with their various faults — Usually to the extent that public recognition given to anyone unleashes an outcry from some group of students.

The lives of saints, however, have been a traditional teaching tool, and despite our increased levels of literacy, I think this is still useful. Many of the stories of saints are quite obviously folklore and apocryphal, adding colour to some of the faded characters of history. We’re not the first to notice this and it’s important to remember that these stories were always also told for entertainment and taken with a pinch of salt. I will try to tell one of the stories to our children this morning in a PG format and I’m sure some new details will appear and others pass away, without losing the meaning. Because the stories do draw out Christian virtues and priorities, and act as illustrations of what we should take with utter seriousness. Today’s Gospel is nothing short of a command to include children in the work and ministry of the Church. For which St Nicholas should prove to us both a reminder and a helpful tool. There were about 70 children at playgroup last week and you can see that Christmas is getting people excited. We know that Christianity is becoming less embedded in our culture, which means we need to make the most of those parts of our culture that maintain a spark of Christian truth.

But even more, St Nicholas has become an embodiment of generosity that even the secular world understands, and through every Christmas movie, from A Christmas Carol to Miracle on 34th Street, an acknowledgement of the truth that godliness combines with contentment; that there is more happiness to be found in generosity than in the accumulation of wealth. In this way saints can be for us symbols of the priorities of the Christian life, and for us as a Christian community. `And happily St Nicholas is a rather jolly figure, not eaten by a dragon, or gruesomely tortured and murdered.

While many fear the pagan elements of our society, it’s the strength of disenchantment in our culture that presents the greatest threat to faith today. Children are naturally alive to wonder – They love stories – and have a certain resistance to the cynicism and materialism that later acts as an irresistible gravity to the imagination. One of the wonderful things about being a parent is seeing the return of that wonder through the eyes of your children.

So while St Nicholas will continue to remind us that it is to children that the kingdom of God belongs, and that the love of money is the root of all evil, he now also reminds us of that need for wonder. And that there’s more to life – more even to 2022 – than death and taxes.

Despite the lifting of lockdowns; The low-lying of trump; The fact that this year there’s been at least one prime minister you like, or you’ve got to say ‘so long’ to one you didn’t like; Despite that obsession of the British – the weather – being actually very good; I have not heard anyone say this has been a good year; And I think we are all hopeful for a better 2023. But perhaps in a return to a more normal Christmas, we can recall the joy of better times, and the hopes and dreams of all the years, in the stories that continue to keep children awake and full of wonder, and remind us that generosity is needed now more than ever.

St Nicholas should recall us to look on the world as children do, and believe that there is purpose and justice, to be not naughty but nice, And with the children, in this holy season of Advent, to again wait with expectation for the Holy night that is to come. Amen.

Advent

Sermon by the Revd Dr Brutus Green

In my early twenties I started a phd in theology and literature, which took the best part of four years. In that time I met with my supervisors usually once a month – except in the summer. I went to a couple of conferences to give papers; Taught an undergraduate class for two terms and did a bit of private teaching; Led a normal student life; Spending all day in a coffee shop nursing a cold cup of coffee, hoping someone would come along and buy me another one. Spending all evening in a pub nursing a warm pint of beer, hoping someone would come along and buy me another one. I still can’t afford coffee and beer out, but happily now I don’t have time to go to coffee shops and pubs. But then I did have the most enormous amount of time. The joy of an arts doctorate is that it’s just you, your thoughts and a library. It’s kind of hard looking back to imagine having that scale of time. Vast oceans of time not tidying up, picking up poo or looking for cash under the sofa to pay for childcare.

Time. I remember someone saying as we were awaiting Secundus (as I would have preferred to call him), and seeing me looking harried and worrying about the future demands awaiting delivery, that you shouldn’t worry about the increased demands of a second child: You have no more time, so you just do everything a bit more badly. Which I found helpful, and I think is largely true.

But Time. Advent is all about time. We look backwards to remind ourselves of the promises of God. We look forwards to the return of Christ and the restoration of all things. We try to attend to the present moment, in order to ask ourselves that question: Are we ready? Are we right with our God and neighbour?

Advent reminds me of a favourite expression in the army: “Hurry up and wait.” – Said because no one cares about private soldiers’ time so it’s easier to get them on to a parade ground an hour early – even in the dead of winter – than to risk any disturbance to decorum at the arrival of a colonel. And to be fair, God – at 2000 years – is a more careless commanding officer than most. O, come quickly; [They have been singing for centuries.] If you want a slightly baroque meditation, consider how on D-Day 330,000 soldiers, airmen and sailors – That’s an entire city’s worth of people – crossed the channel – in different ways on different schedules, but all exactly co-ordinated, between midnight and morning. The secrecy was so successful it was a total surprise. The logistics of making that happen, with no leaks, is kind of staggering. The reckoning of lives is also staggering. But you can just imagine the waiting involved. Stood next to your wooden glider: “is it today?” A metaphor for Advent, perhaps.

But in faith it’s all in the waiting: TS Eliot, in chapter five of my thesis which will only ever be read by 5 people, was quoted:

‘the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.
Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought:
So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.’

For Eliot the movement of God is only found only in stillness. The illumination of God is found only in darkness.

If you want to know the presence of God, it begins with waiting. So yes, this Advent, turn off your phone, close the door; take your hearing aid out. Find your stillness. Discover Time, as it’s passing, not in apprehension and anxiety ahead, or regret and nostalgia behind. And I say all this as a sinner – one of us all – who is not only busy but deeply attached to his busyness. Deeply attached and deeply wailing.

Rhiannon took a last-minute gig in Kidderminster yesterday, a town known for its museum of carpet, and a via dolorosa up the M40 if ever there was one; My purgatory was to take both children to a party in a leisure centre – abandon all hope ye who enter here – submerged for two hours in the angry hiss of a bouncy castle, having interrupted half conversations while a pack of wild boys hurled themselves at each other and sugary drinks, sometimes in combination. That is the worst possible kind of waiting – of constant distraction. The boys of course adore it even when they sustain life changing injuries, and scream like foxes when they’re told we’re going.

But let us assume – for a moment – that we have found time. We are in this Advent season of waiting. What is it, as Gwen Stefani asked, what is it you’re waiting for? Isaiah reminds us that we are waiting for peace. A peace, which we are constantly reminded under the conditions of humanity, is impossible; Not least the peace of Jerusalem for which the psalmist sings; The epistle and Gospel look for the return of Christ – the day of Salvation – And end to darkness and conflict. The emphasis of these passages is readiness.

For a while in the army I was with a high readiness unit – ostensibly on 4 hours notice to move. I remember the commanding officer bringing up at a staff meeting his concern over the number of dogs he was seeing around, which might strike you as odd. But his concern was, if 500 men suddenly had to get on a plane to South Sudan, what’s going to happen to all those dogs left behind. He had great attention to detail. And perhaps we need more attention to detail. What are the things we can’t leave behind? What is it that we cannot bring before God? These are things to be discovered in waiting.

Advent is the time to look yourself in the mirror. See the receding hairline, the grey, the marks of time. Not to lament the passing of youth, but to avoid getting caught up in the little things; our pride and vanity over small accomplishments, our fear and insecurity of what we don’t want taken away. Advent reminds us that at the last everything is taken away, every scrap of civilisation, all our illusions, however honourable, clever or impressive, dispersed — every medal, certificate, reference and cosmetic addition. We will stand simply as who we are and what we have done before God. And what is more, we pray for this. O Come, O Come, Emmanuel, Come Thou long expected Jesus. These are hymns, prayers for the final resolution. Be careful what you wish for.

How is our spiritual readiness? Looking at that human animal in the mirror, accepting it for what it is, and asking how it can be better, more alive to its own suffering and the suffering of others; more honest about what really matters. Now this might all sound like boot camp – But spiritual readiness is really equanimity. peace.

Our last hymn this morning is without doubt the most rousing expression of Christian hope, penned by the great Anglican Charles Wesley. I wonder as we hear day after day of horrors across our world in another bad year, if we can raise our voices a little more than usual; Find within our hearts a little more prayer and praise to sing out our “O come quickly”. There is so little peace in our world at the moment. It’s not easy to achieve in any form; For our own hearts it needs our attention; at the very least, a once a year Advent check-up. Above all it needs time. Time not spent in doing or distraction; And that time is always hard to find. So give yourself time. Give your partner time. Not just in Kidderminster or the joy of spending time with your beloved children; But time to rediscover yourself. Your hopes, your fears, your unrealised dreams, your faith.

 I said to my soul, be still, and let the dark come upon you
Which shall be the darkness of God.

Christ the King

Sermon preached by Anne East
Readings: Jeremiah 23: 1-6, Colossians 1: 11-20, Luke 23:33-43

I have been reading ‘Ghosts of Empire’, by Kwasi Karteng. Published in 2010, it is an interesting and informative book. I would say that the author has a future as a writer of political history.

There’s quite a lot about ‘kingship’ in it — for one of the ways the British managed their Empire was to cultivate local rulers, chieftans , maharajas, kings, and endow them with the trappings of monarchy on behalf of the Great White Queen, Victoria. So in Ghosts of Empire we read which rank of Indian princes were entitled to  a 9 gun, or 21 gun or 31 gun salute. (Victoria herself had 101).

Then there was King Mindon, the last king of Burma, who possessed a white elephant, and as long as he was Lord of the White Elephant, he was deemed to be a just ruler and the equal of any monarch in the world.

(The idea that being the Lord of the White Elephant conveys such status is intriguing, and I’m sure there must be a novel or at least a poem in that title somewhere)

Today we celebrate the Feast of Christ the King. We are at a transition point in the church calendar, next Sunday is the beginning of Advent and we start a new church year. So today, like New Year’s Eve, we can reflect. Christ’s reign takes on special meaning when understood within the context of the whole narrative of his birth, life, suffering, death and resurrection which we celebrate each year. The Christ who rules over all creation enters the world as a vulnerable baby. The Christ who is hailed as a king suffers a cruel death at the hands of the state.

Kings usually ascend to their thrones by genetic inheritance. They are normally descendants of a particular line of people. We have been very focussed in this country recently on the role of royalty and a royal family and a slimmed down monarchy. ‘Kings R Us’ we might say.

The early Israelites did not have a king, they were under the protection and patronage of The Lord, Yahweh. God was in control: “I myself will gather the remnant of my flock . . . I will bring them back to their fold . .” says the Lord, in our reading from Jeremiah. But the people wanted a man-king, God’s deputy if you like, who shall “reign as king and deal wisely, and shall execute justice and righteousness in the land.”

We are well aware, in the context of leadership, of the risk of the dynamics of power, people taking advantage of their positions and serving their own narrow interests, whether in ancient Israel or in the modern world.

But hear what the priest and theologian W H Vanstone wrote about the kingship of Christ:

Thou art God; no monarch Thou
Thron’d in easy state to reign;
Thou art God, Whose arms of love
Aching, spent, the world sustain.

Jesus is not the kind of king most people expect. He does not rule by threat or military domination or acquisition, his authority is not sustained by asking homage from others. He ‘hung out’ with the poor and marginalised, and then he hung on a cross. The majesty of this king is revealed not when we look up but when we look down, seeing someone who is deeply humiliated, tortured, mocked.

So here is the question: Why, on beholding this grim scene, organised by the Romans to deter insurrections, why did the thief ask, “Jesus remember me when you come into your kingdom?” What has this dying thief seen and recognised? Where. why, how does he see a ‘king’ nailed on the cross beside him?

This record of this conversation only occurs in Luke’s gospel. And it’s given rise to a number of theories from commentators who felt compelled to offer an explanation for the thief’s request — he’d met Jesus before, he’d heard him speak, he knew his reputation. Well, maybe.

Jesus had spent his life teaching about the kingdom of God, preaching liberation to captives, healing those who were sick. Jesus had challenged the unjust treatment of women, talked of the need for patience with children, accused the religious authorities of lacking good faith. His ministry had been controversial, powerful and world altering.

But at that place, Golgotha — ‘called The Skull’ — where is the evidence that such a kingdom exists, has ever existed, or ever will exist? The thief asks, nonetheless.  “.remember me when you come into your kingdom.”

And he addresses Christ simply as ‘Jesus’, no royal title, no ‘Master’ / Teacher / Rabboni / Lord’. Simply ‘Jesus’ in the way one person might address another. The name ‘Jesus’ means ‘God will save’. That is the name, that is the hope of the dying man. And in this absolutely hope-less moment, salvation breaks through: ‘Today you will be with me in Paradise’.

‘Today’ does not mean ‘the day after yesterday’ or the ‘day before tomorrow’, Luke is not referring to the current 24 hour period. Spiritual time is not linear time. The king on the cross. God’s salvation fractures time.

So here’s the next question: where do YOU see signs of the kingdom?

Where did you see the Kingdom of God last week?

If you’d dropped into church on Tuesday morning when the Toddler group was here? Or if you’d joined the Lunch on the Lane on Thursday? Seen the rows of high chairs for the babies, or our older guests  with their walking frames?

Or if you are walking in Putney Park Lane mid morning when the carers from Paddock School are taking their students for a walk  . . .is that the Kingdom of God?

Jesus talked more about the kingdom of God than any other topic: He describes it as having different rules and expectations from the rules and expectations of humanity. It’s like the love and forgiveness freely given to an errant son; it’s like a shepherd who cares so much for all his sheep that when one is lost goes and searches and does not give up until the sheep is found; it’s like a rich man who gives a party and when the invitees are too busy to attend opens his doors to the poor, the blind and the lame.

This is not a kingdom which needs to exhibit a white elephant to prove its justice and right-doing. This is a kingdom of Love — a place where God dwells. And it is in Jesus that the means and making of this kingdom are to be found. Paul tells the Colossians that to follow Jesus, to proclaim Christ as King, is to live one’s life in a new way, to take on the values and standards that reflect Christ’s character.

This is the Kingdom we are building, this is the king we serve. May it be so.  Amen

Remembrance Sunday

Sermon by the Revd Dr Brutus Green

As the world never ceases to spin, and technology runs our social lives, dating, churches (hi Dad), and basically everything;  there will always be those who cling to the past, and those who wish to leave it behind forever.

Wars are times of great innovation, necessity being mother to invention. The First World War which we remember today, takes credit for tanks, flamethrowers, poison gas and aircraft carriers, and also more generally helpful things like air traffic control and mobile X-ray machines.

The cost of not staying up to date in war bears an especially high price. Take Field Marshal Douglas Haig, commander during the infamous Battle of the Somme. Haig was very popular; his funeral in 1928 was a day of National Mourning. But from the 60s Britain turned on him, owing largely to the satirical musical “Oh What a Lovely War”. The musical might not have made it on to the West End but Princess Margaret went to see it and said afterwards that what’s been “said here tonight should have been said long ago” to the Lord Chamberlain. The family of Haig protested, but it was a hit. It’s been said that it tells you more about the 60s than the War, but its view was later set in stone by Blackadder Goes Forth.

Haig was a creature of habit, and the big push that started the battle of the Somme began predictably, as always, at 7.30am. There was no attempt at surprise and 66,000 men (mostly volunteers like you or I, not professional soldiers) walked forward steadily in a line, carrying up to 100lbs of kit towards the German line. Haig, who never visited the Western Front, overestimated his earlier bombardment, and underestimated the German machine gun. Within an hour there were 30,000 casualties. At the end of the first day there were 20,000 dead and 35000 injured with no significant objectives achieved.

The Daily Mail, ever the objective truth-teller, described how “The very attitudes of the dead fallen eagerly forwards, have a look of expectant hope. You would say that they died with the light of expectant victory in their eyes.” Other papers were no more truthful; the Times described the wounded as “extraordinarily cheery and brave” the Observer claimed we had “excelled our best hopes”. It’s not Haig alone that carries the blame for this, the greatest disaster in British military history, but his attitude is significant. In 1926 with a bewildered nation mourning nearly a million dead, Haig wrote: ‘I believe that the value of the horse and the opportunity of the horse in the future are likely to be as great as ever. Aeroplanes and tanks are only accessories to the men and the horse, and I feel as time goes on you will find just as much use for the horse – the well-bred horse – as you have ever done in the past.’

Our views of that war now often reflect more the poetry, than the history – But remembering is important – History can be cruel, can be kind. What and how are we remembering today?

Christianity is a faith of remembrance. The Hebrew Bible has a continual command to remember the Lord and his great works of salvation. Malachi today: “Remember the teaching of my servant Moses, the statutes and ordinances that I commanded him at Horeb.” It is by remembrance that the people of God know who they are.

But, even more than Scripture, Liturgy, our festivals are all acts of collective remembrance recalling great acts and sacrifices, and by their continual repetition bringing depth and meaning to human experience. Christmas and Easter layer memories, of Jesus and the church, our families and nations; Through sentimental adverts, seasonal chocolate and board games we recall our salvation and family arguments. But who would we be without these rituals – Imagine if it really was always winter and never Christmas; Someone’s going to get a shock tuning in this year for the Queen’s speech. Our family life, cultural and social life, and national life is all held together by rituals.

Rituals can become bad. Bad habits, ritual humiliations, the Two-minutes hates in George Orwell’s 1984, blood-rituals that swear revenge. Remembrance of violence and pain can swing both ways, seeking peace or perpetuating violence. In a previous parish, a German friend of mine was berated for wearing a poppy. (not by anyone in church I should add!) Is it forgiveable if the berator fought against the Germans? if they lost a loved one in the war? How are we remembering? There is remembrance that clings to the past, and there is remembrance that seeks peace.

We can remember war to hold on to enmity and mistrust; to never forgive a people; to remember our victory over another set of nations; as a basis for suspicion against foreigners. Or we remember lest we forget; remember the war which the science-fiction writer H.G. Wells too optimistically called “the war to end wars”, to remember the mindlessness of war; that two world wars killed more than a hundred million people; people like you and I, but on the whole people a lot younger than you and I.

And how we remember affects what sort of people we are. Does remembering give us a sense of superiority, justify our resentment of other nationalities, give us a misguided sense of strength, then we are a particular sort of people. Two world wars and one world cup – they used to sing. And presumably are still singing – at least until Christmas.

But we can remember to give honour to people we love, and values we cherish; We can remember the weakness of all flesh before weaponry, and the weakness of all minds before power, pride, envy, cruelty and above all fear; That is remembrance as confession – And if we remember with faith, in hope and love then we remember well.

The holiest part of the communion service is the words of institution. It’s called the Anamnesis – which means Remembrance – Or rather – as amnesis, from which we get amnesia means to forget, An-amnesis strictly means ‘to not forget’. Here we recall Christ’s words, even as he is remembering the great act of the Hebrew’s deliverance at the Passover of the angel of death.  And Christ’s words are a command: “Do this in remembrance of me.” Our first task as Christians is to not forget the death and resurrection of a man who gave his life for others.   Some have remembered these words with violence – as a basis for anti-semitism. But for the Jews who celebrated the meal with Jesus, and the Gentiles who continued this with them in the face of persecution and death, it was a meal of solidarity. Solidarity with all those who suffer, and especially those who have died, and were continuing to suffer for the faith.

This is the remembering that draws us here today. The re-membering of the body of Christ, which is one even as it is broken. The French and English have been at war most of their history, the Americans won their independence from us in battle, and the twentieth-century pitched friends and families across Europe on different unwanted sides of reckless wars. Nation rising against nation and kingdom against kingdom. The remembering we do here does not undo that history of suffering and tragedy; But it does not remain trapped in the past; it hopes for something better; for ‘the sun of righteousness [that] shall rise, with healing in its wings’; for a peace in Europe that extends to the East. It hopes that out of suffering and death, through love, can arise new life.

And for the tragedy that rocked Europe for thirty years and more, for the wasted youth and avoidable suffering, all we can do is give thanks and entrust them to God, knowing that nothing in all creation will be able to separate us from the love of God. If we have no faith then this remembrance is a bleak minute. A hundred million youths cut down before they’d begun, and a humanity that hardly deserves another chance and cannot believe in being better. But if we dare to believe, then by our endurance we will gain our souls, as they who have known even darker times than these surely did.

Today we remember the fallen and all who give their lives for their country, in faith, with hope, for greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends. Amen.

I know that my redeemer liveth

I know that my Redeemer lives, and that at the last he will stand upon the earth.

We are in the month of Remembrance: On All Saints and All Souls – Remembrance of the heroes of the church and those we miss personally, And, next week, those lost in war. Our readings from across the Bible today all reflect on resurrection and Christian hope. So we might ask ourselves this morning – What is our hope? Hope. It does not feel, presently, like a time of hope. And it’s a Sunday morning there may be a million incidental things our minds are occupied with – Shopping lists, Strictly Come Dancing, doctor’s appointments, the week ahead – But, in the last two years, we have all had time to reflect on our mortality; Even among those without religion a panoply of views on life after death circulate. What is your Christian hope? And what is it based in?

Tomorrow, I’m taking a service at Putney Vale. Not wholly unusually, there is no next of kin. It’s arranged by a solicitor who may not be present with a funeral director who will organise a number of services that day, taken by myself, who have, through a number of phone calls, managed to get only as many facts on his life as could be written on a post-it.

The saving grace is that he served as a corporal in the British Army, and worked for SSAFA and the Royal British Legion: army charities; and the British Army doesn’t abandon its own. Representatives, with little or no personal connection will attend and, astonishingly, a standard bearer, himself in his 80s, who never met the deceased, is travelling with his wife from Devon, to attend.

So a life, which like many, drifted into isolation in his last years, will have, I hope, the send-off that he might have hoped for. And, because I can’t let the standard bearer travel for 8 hours for a 20-minute service, we will toast him at a local hostelry after the service.

Next week is Remembrance Sunday, where we will promise, once again, that ‘at the going down of the sun, and in the morning, we will remember them.’ Primarily, we remember the fallen of the First World War, and this should not be forgotten. That generation earned an enduring national act for their sacrifice. But we also remember those of later conflicts. And memorials to many wars exist across our country. All Souls College, Oxford’s was founded to pray for those who had fallen in the 100 years war with France, A war that never officially ended – Brexit means Brexit. Right?

Remembrance is a form of human solidarity. We can’t imagine what it was like to be going over the top on the first day of the Somme, any more than a hail of longbow arrows silently descending on us, But in our connection as humans, as Britons, We count ourselves with them, and count them with us. Remembrance is a form of life after death.

This matters because it gives us the beginning of an understanding of what Christian hope might look like. The fact that even solid atheists believe in remembrance – and not just for our sake but as a duty to the fallen – suggests a universal human instinct for connection to past generations, which points to something that takes us past death.

In the Christian faith, our remembrance of the dead, is a participation in God’s remembrance of all the dead; A remembrance that is in complete knowledge of all people and their circumstances, that comprehends the whole person. So Job, in those words immortalized by Handel, proclaims that at the last in his flesh he shall see God; Just as the psalmist looks to when he will see the face of God in righteousness; That his heart will be weighed and examined by night; To have all your thoughts, words and deeds remembered is to face judgement, But, as Job says, with God on your side. But Christian hope is more than this – It looks to a time where we may be transformed in the image of Christ, just as we were made in the image of God.

What this will look like is not clear. So the Sadducees in today’s Gospel are making fun of Jesus. Rhiannon loves to tell people how you can remember the difference between Pharisees and Sadducess. The Sadducees don’t believe in life after death – they are sad you see? But the Pharisees do – far I see.

So it’s the Sadducees who are teasing Jesus about life after death by describing a ridiculous situation involving a woman being widowed seven times so having 7 dead husbands – I’ve often thought Rhiannon could do with at least one more husband – She is very good at delegating tasks – But Jesus’ answer is more enigmatic suggesting the next world will not be like the present. However, he affirms the resurrection on the basis of the character of God – That he is God of the living and not the dead. And if we are created – we might reasonably ask – Why would be made for so short a time – With so little justice but with so great a capacity for reflection, for virtue and for love?

The passionate conviction that this world is not all there can be; That the suffering of this life; That the tremendous sacrifice endured by various generations is not for nothing; Is so boldly stated by Job: I know that my redeemer lives; And I shall see my God.

That is the faith that God is asking of us today: That despite collapsing governments and bridges, and the Arts in this country; In a world of floods and famine and war; Where nothing is certain, nothing is sure; We can still pick ourselves up from scratching our open sores, like Job, And proclaim “I know that my redeemer lives.” Which is to say: This is not for nothing. I will see justice. I will see mercy. I will be remembered, if only by God.

The hope of resurrection is more than just optimism. It is the belief in the transformative justice of God. That in the tragedies stealing hope in countries like Ukraine, India, Pakistan, East Africa and many other places, When Wales lose once again to the All Blacks, life is not just a sad tale told by an idiot; But that God works in us and through us; and while we may not see it in our own time, There is a redemption, there is a resurrection, And we may not understand the present difficulties of our age; But there is a future in which those struggles are remembered and overcome.

I know that my Redeemer lives, and that at the last he will stand upon the earth; and after my skin has been thus destroyed, then in my flesh I shall see God, whom I shall see on my side, and my eyes shall behold, and not another. Amen.

All Souls

Sermon by the Revd Dr Brutus Green

There is a tension in the New Testament between two ideas of eternal life. It’s about verb tenses – which doesn’t sound very interesting, but bear with me. In the last clause of today’s Gospel, we have the verb: anasthsw. (from which we get the lovely name Anastasia) The Greek ending ‘sw’ tells you immediately it’s first-person future: ‘I will raise up’ And to be totally clear, we’re told ‘on the last day.’ The picture painted is of a final day when all will rise to meet Christ, which is why traditionally we are buried with our feet to the East, so, rising, we will face the direction from which he will appear. Incidentally, priests are buried with their feet to the West so they can gather their faithful. I’m sure you’re not all happy that I might be the first face you see after a thousand years, or at the current rate of bad events, maybe six months; But it’s not my current plan to stay here for the rest of my life so, very likely, you’ll have some more attractive face to welcome you on the day of judgement.

However. In the line before we’re told that it’s the will of the Father that all who see and believe in the Son may have eternal life. exh (subscript iota) – may have – zwhn aiwnion – eternal life – from which we get the lovely name Zoe. exh - The mood is subjunctive, the tense is present. Not will have or should have – at some point – But may have, may possess now – eternal life.

And in the most famous verse in that Gospel we have the same tense: God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life. Not ‘will have eternal life’; ‘have eternal life’: The one who takes hold of this love that made the world already holds eternity in the palm of their hand.

We have a sense of this in how we experience the death of those we love. On the one hand they have been transported to some future that we hope to share in. They are no longer in our present world, but we hope to see them again. Our reunion is a future event.

And, yet, we may also sense them with us. That celebrated sermon by Henry Scott Holland remains a favourite reading after a hundred years because it speaks to experience: ‘What is this death but a negligible accident? Why should I be out of mind because I am out of sight? I am but waiting for you, for an interval, somewhere very near, just round the corner.’ – Death is nothing at all.

This duality of time often filters in when people speak about loss: In a recent interview, Maurice Saatchi said he went to visit his wife’s tomb for breakfast every day for seven years and talks to her all the time. ‘I think about Josephine continuously, I don’t know if that’s rare or completely normal for scouples who are separated, but I live to see her again.” The article began: “We'll see you at 11.30am,” says Lord Saatchi. His wife, Josephine Hart, died 11 years ago and it is clear that I will be meeting them both. 

The novelist David Grossman, who lost a son to war, writes hauntingly:

… A man from far away
       once told me that in his language
       they say of one who dies in war,
       he ‘fell’.
       And that is you: fallen
       out of time,
       while the time
       in which I abide
       passes you by:
       a figure
       on a pier,
       alone,
       on a night
       whose blackness
       has seeped wholly out.
       I see you
       but I do not touch.
       I do not feel you
       with my probes of time (62-63).

But how do we make sense of this? I am quite often asked by the bereaved that most straight forward question: “but where is she now?” The answer is “she is with God” – but we might want to think about that a little more. The image that initially conjures up – of our beloved with a kind old man – is not the most helpful or convincing way to think about death.

The letters of St John describe God in a way that unsurprisingly is taken up more in the wedding service than the funeral: ‘God is love and those who live in love live in God and God lives in them.’ The essential point of Christianity is that our universe is created and shaped by love; And that even when it appears weak and overcome, the power of love – as Frankie Goes to Hollywood, Jennifer Rush, Huey Lewis and the News, 10CC and Luther Vandross all tell us – the power of love – will overcome all evil – even the vampires at your door (and it might just save your life).

We’re a little bit over-used to this concept. It’s sentimentalised in our culture, because of our Christian heritage. But it remains the unique selling point of Christianity – That the power and wisdom of God is revealed to us in the weakness and frailty of a person who has chosen to live by a rule of compassion, even at the cost of suffering and death, A life which chooses to give itself for others.

Now, what faith chooses to believe is that what is sewn in love is reaped in joy. That the love we give and receive is stronger than death. That because it shares in nature with the divinity that created the world, love is eternal.

Christianity is a metaphysic of love. The only thing that is real, the only thing that survives in the crucible of death that is this world, is love. Love created us; Love redeems us on the cross; And as that love lives in us so we are given immortality. We are really no more and no less than the love we give and receive.

So the act of faith that brings us here tonight; That requires us to remember those we love and see no more; Is the force of eternity within us, which is the power of resurrection, the power of love, a light that shines in the darkness and is not overcome.

We cannot help but be moved when we hear those stories from war – and they are not uncommon – of friends giving their life for one another. If we take time to really follow the passion in Holy Week, we cannot but be moved by the story of Christ. We may know ourselves stories of immense bravery, or of commonplace unselfishness in lives given, spent for children, partners, friends.

In the economy of the world this makes no sense. You have one life – get the most out of it. In the economy of faith this is everything. We are what we give.

But when we experience love, when we know love, we know this now. We have eternal life now, in the present. We have love that is more important than anything, that is stronger than death. So tonight we give thanks for that love whose object has fallen out of time. For the love that sustains us in memories, and the love that is not yet cold in our hearts, but endures eternally. For the light that shines in the darkness. Amen.

All Saints 2022

Woe to you who are rich, for you have received your consolation. Woe to you who are full now, for you will be hungry. Woe to you who are laughing now, for you will mourn and weep. Woe to you when all speak well of you, for that is what their ancestors did to the false prophets. INFSHSA

I am frequently in trouble with my wife. I believe the cause of this is a generation gap – she is 10 years younger than me but in the era of technology that makes a significant difference. I got my first mobile phone at the age of 23. She had one at around 13. If I don’t answer the phone she is furious. My feeling is that this is because her generation just cannot imagine life without a phone – Whereas at 22 I travelled across the entire world for a year without one. And no one died. We have a lodger in the vicarage who is 22. She was born with a phone inserted into her face so she can access Instagram just by twitching her neck. Ok perhaps not, but she has had a smart phone since she was a child, with all the social media, notifications and constant clamour for attention that brings with it.

And we don’t think about it anymore but on this phone you can email, message, whatsapp, facebook message, tweet, Instagram, snapchat – is that still a thing? – message me on linkedin – I think there are at least 12 ways in which you can make my phone vibrate. Incidentally, I read that there are 130 working mobiles for every 100 people in the UK, so some people clearly have at least two of these little brats.

Before I was ordained I went on retreat for just over a month. It was a silent retreat. I didn’t talk to anyone except a spiritual director for twenty minutes a day. I didn’t read the news, watch tv, read any books, turn on my phone or use the internet. The question I’ve been asked many times since is was it difficult to be silent for so long and to not hear from anyone for a month? Well, basically, no. It wasn’t difficult at all. 

What was difficult though was coming out of the retreat. After a month of letting go of all relationships and situations which were outside of my immediate bodily reach, suddenly being returned to the considerable pressures of time, money and energy required just to maintain friendships, let alone professional and social ties suddenly felt almost intolerable. And a month’s backlog of emails, messages and mail was enough to almost send me back on retreat. The fact is that whether we realise it or not, and mostly we don’t, we live under a hitherto unprecedented weight of demands, which are now, thanks to various technologies, almost impossible to escape.  Most of us actually have become so used to it that now we actually feel we need it. And let’s be honest, people revel in it. They draw confidence from the number of facebook friends, by how many messages they have, by how busy and important and liked they are. People have ceased to feel embarrassed when their phones go off in company – it’s a matter of pride that they are so necessary to the world. Some people even put their phone on the table at dinner, JUST IN CASE something happens that requires their immediate attention.

And in an odd sort of modern way - this is exactly what it means to be rich, to be full now, to be laughing, to be spoken well of. And Woe to that sort of thing. Now there is no blessing in poverty, or hunger, or weeping or being hated. To say otherwise is to make light of those whose sufferings we can little imagine. Jesus isn’t saying that.

These blessings are typical of Jesus though. There is something paradoxical about them and something revolutionary. Fundamentally, they are about reversals, and about how God’s kingdom, a kingdom which Jesus announces as already present, is about overturning our usual values and expectations. How saints are always counter-cultural. It’s about paying attention to what is actually true, as opposed to what everyone else thinks.

And our culture values busy-ness. Business is good! I have a friend, a solicitor at aptly named Slaughter and May who in one week worked 80 hours and slept only 12 hours. And technology, your smart tv, radio, laptop, ipad, ipod, iphone, means that we never need to do nothing. We are never silent. never truly alone. We are rich, we are full, we are laughing and if the only thing worse than being spoken about is not being spoken about, it’s now very difficult to avoid being spoken about – not that it is always necessarily being spoken well of. To give up these things, is to enjoy poverty. To turn off everything, and get lost on Wimbledon Common, is to enjoy poverty. Most of all to avoid the nagging insecurities that require us to be always available, the narcissistic thrill of the phone vibrating, is to enjoy poverty.

And whether it’s for a daily half hour, a quiet Sunday afternoon, a Saturday without distractions, or a blissful month in the country, it’s got to be a good thing. And even if it’s turning off your phone when your friend drops round so you can attend fully to them, it’s at least a move towards greater attentiveness. If our minds are constantly bombarded with people and information pawing at us, we never have the chance to think and reflect upon our experience. The human mind is such that it needs rest, it needs emptiness – not to be filled with all the good thoughts you think you should be thinking, or fluffy clouds and pretty things, or even close reading of the scriptures. But actually our minds sometimes need to be stripped away from the endless distractions, left to themselves in order to come to terms with who we are.

I thought I’d finish with part of one of T.S. Eliot’s late poems, which attempts to capture this: 

O dark dark dark. They all go into the dark,

The vacant interstellar spaces, the vacant into the vacant,

The captains, merchant bankers, eminent men of letters,
The generous patrons of art,
the statesmen and the rulers,
Distinguished civil servants, chairmen of many committees,

Industrial lords and petty contractors, all go into the dark,
…
I said to my soul, be still, and let the dark come upon you

Which shall be the darkness of God. As, in a theatre,

The lights are extinguished, for the scene to be changed

With a hollow rumble of wings, with a movement of darkness on darkness,

And we know that the hills and the trees, the distant panorama

And the bold imposing facade are all being rolled away—

Or as, when an underground train, in the tube, stops too long between stations

And the conversation rises and slowly fades into silence

And you see behind every face the mental emptiness deepen

Leaving only the growing terror of nothing to think about;

Or when, under ether, the mind is conscious but conscious of nothing—

I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope

For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love,

For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith

But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.

Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought:

So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.

Blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the kingdom of God. Amen.

Bible Sunday

Sermon by the Revd Dr Brutus Green

Particularly men, particularly when they’re younger, have a particular way of communicating. It may be to do with shyness or confidence, or an inability to express one’s emotions; Or just the enjoyment of the game and the chance to employ skills of memory and wit – But there are certain friendships, I still enjoy, where the majority of our conversation consists… in quoting from films.

When Nick, our former director of music, and I lived together we would quite often fall asleep together on the sofa watching the Lord of the Rings films – Not in a romantic way – (In our defence they are very long) And I think, much as teenage boys quite often prefer to revise in their sleep – So the archaic words of Tolkien would seep into our subconscious;

Which reminds me of a family, I heard of, who taught their child to say “behold!” instead of just “look” – “Behold, mummy” – which I think is rather nice. It was not the Rees-Moggs. Part of the beauty of quotations, is that films or books, can get engraved on our memories, and repeated. So a particular line that has emotional force becomes personal to us. I’ve recently been teaching Oberon to say “I’m sick [cough]”, which is a line from the celebrated film Mean Girls. He doesn’t get the joke but he plays along and it keeps his family amused.

But also when we return to the film – and hear those familiar lines – it can bring back memories of friendship in a powerful way. When Rhiannon proposed to me, rather than the quiet personal approach you might expect, she did it outside in the street with 30 opera singers, singing a Taylor Swift song, with some personal tweeks to the lyrics about choral scholars and vicars; There’s a video in the bowels of youtube if you’re curious. Whenever I hear that song, I not only think of that particular “turning point”, but am also surprised that Swift gets the lyrics to her own song wrong.

Back in ye olde biblical timesy they did not have films. But they did have stories, and songs and laws, and letters – which form what we now call Scripture. And what we find in the Bible – perhaps because it was probably mostly written by men – Is that there is a constant cross-referencing going on – Subtle or not so subtle quoting of other parts of Scripture.

So in our Old Testament we have Isaiah proclaiming: ‘To me every knee shall bow, every tongue shall swear’ That probably sounds familiar, but that may be because of the letter to the Romans:

For it is written, ‘As I live, says the Lord, every knee shall bow to me, and every tongue shall give praise to God.’ Or perhaps Philippians: at the name of Jesus every knee should bend, in heaven and on earth and under the earth,  and every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.  Or it may be familiar because of the jolly nineteenth century hymn, by Caroline Noel At the name of Jesus /ev'ry knee shall bow, /ev'ry tongue confess him /King of glory now;

Our New Testament reading directly quotes Psalm 69:  ‘The insults of those who insult you have fallen on me.’ That’s actually the second half of the verse. The first half also appears often: It is zeal for your house that has consumed me Famously referred to as Jesus throws the money-changers out of the temple. And this matters, because Paul here is not simply pulling lines out of Scripture for effect. He is rooting his teaching in the wisdom and prophecy of Scripture. He is calling on his readers, who know the psalms, to have zeal for the house – which is Christ and the church – And reminding them that Christ himself threw out the money-changers who preyed on the vulnerable and exploited religion.

That’s not there in black and white but when you read the Bible, it wants you to read the whole thing all at the same time, Which is quite demanding. But we can’t fully understand the Gospel and Paul, unless we have Isaiah and the Psalms running through our heads – Which is why when everyone comes to the carol service at Christmas we start with Isaiah: The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light… For a child has been born for us, a son given to us… and he is named Wonderful Counsellor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace. A shoot shall come out from the stock of Jesse, and a branch shall grow out of his roots. The spirit of the Lord shall rest on him, These are none of them the Gospel; They weren’t written by Handel; They are all from Isaiah, written over 700 years before Jesus.

Similarly on Good Friday it is Isaiah we read: He was despised and rejected by others; a man of suffering and acquainted with infirmity; Surely he has borne our infirmities and carried our diseases; But he was wounded for our transgressions, crushed for our iniquities; upon him was the punishment that made us whole, and by his bruises we are healed. It’s a prophecy written centuries before he was born that has done more to shape the theology of Jesus’ life, than either his witnesses or the Early Church.

Today’s Gospel is the centrepiece around which Luke forms his Gospel. It summarises his ministry and gives him the Scriptural basis for his ministry. It’s the first thing Jesus does publicly in this Gospel. And again he’s quoting Isaiah directly. Only he changes it.

And this matters because with all this layering of Scripture it’s not just saying the same thing over and again. So this famous start to Jesus’ ministry: ‘The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favour.’  But Jesus omits from Isaiah’s proclamation of ‘the day of vengeance of our God’, and instead includes from an earlier chapter of Isaiah ‘to proclaim release to the captives’. So we get immediately from this mis-quoting of Isaiah a clear sense of what Jesus is about and where he is taking Scripture in a new direction.

Now why does all this matter? It matters because Scripture is a living, breathing thing. As Isaiah says, the Word goes out; it does not return. It exists in layers like the structure of the Earth: with the crust, the mantle, the core; or as the layers you can see in a cliff face holding secrets of thousands of years. Each layer informs, interprets and builds on layers beneath. To quote out of turn: ‘It deepens like a coastal shelf’.

But the essential point, before we all get too interested in history, is that the Word of God is still alive today; Still speaks today: With Jesus, we can say: ‘Today, this Scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.’

Wouldn’t it be amazing if our next Prime Minister stood up and said: ‘The Spirit of the Lord is upon me and I’ve been anointed to bring good news to the poor, release to the captive, to let the oppressed go free. Today this scripture is fulfilled in your hearing.

You’re right, it would probably be terrifying. And there’s probably enough ego going round without MPs believing they’re sent by God. Although it might make sense of the line that ‘no prophet is accepted in the prophet’s home town.’

But the Church can say it. In the last week raising £5000 for a homeless charity and a car full of food to a foodbank; In visiting Wandsworth prison, in checking in on neighbours; We, in our little ways can fulfil this Scripture today. Which is what it means to follow Christ.

And as we come shortly to baptize Scarlett and Bjorn – Listen out for how many stories we are immersing them in – And I’m not thinking of Gone With the Wind. In the prayer over the water we will hear of Jesus’ baptism (30AD), the crossing of the Red Sea (maybe 1400BC), the resurrection (back to 33 AD), and we might think of Noah being saved through the flood (perhaps 5000 BC), and the baptism of Constantine (337AD), which created the Holy Roman empire and the beginning of Christendom.

In our actions today we are remembering and reading these stories alongside our own stories; Rooting ourselves in Scripture, in order to discover and live out the promises and commandments of God. So as today we celebrate and give thanks for the Bible, let us not regard it as some dead thing to keep in a drawer or keep our holiday money in; But as a living tradition in which our own stories are written; Let us hear in Scripture and liturgy those quotations that have been spoken for thousands of years, speaking into our lives now; declaring: ‘Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.’  Amen.

Jumping out of Planes

Sermon by the Revd Dr Brutus Green

This time 5 years ago, I spent a day-and-a-half at the US and NATO air base at Ramstein in Germany. It wasn’t supposed to be that long, but I was waiting to parachute into a large multi-national exercise in South Germany, and conditions, apparently, have to be just right in order to throw a couple of hundred men out of a plane. The waiting is excruciating. Obviously, jumping out of plane makes everyone nervous (I never met anyone in the army who liked doing it; Although there is someone on the PCC who does it as a hobby – what a parish we are); On this jump I was with a soldier who told me he liked to sing “Glory, glory what a helluva way to die” all the way down to the tune of the Battle hymn of the Republic, Which was good, I thought. At least, if anything happened, he was singing a hymn tune. But after the intolerable wait, we were loaded-on like cattle, bent double, as, between the weight of 2 parachutes and kit, we all carried more than our own body weight. Being a padre, my burden was fairly light, but I’d been hanging out with the mortar platoon and felt sorry for them because their weapons and ammunition are so heavy they didn’t have space for water and food. Here I made a definite mistake as I offered to help, and got loaded with 20kg of machine gun ammunition. Soldiers are nothing if not opportunists. I was carrying that ammunition for the next 3 days. My yoke wasn’t easy, or my burden light.

Anyway, at dusk, we took off and screamed along for a while as the pilots practised low flying drills and everyone was sick, before gratefully exiting the plane, with 45 seconds in the air hanging between God and earth; Just enough time to get organised in order to hit the ground without breaking your legs.

At that point, we gathered and then spent the next 9 hours marching in the dark. I assume someone knew where we were going but everyone else was just following the man in front of them. It felt like the blind leading the blind, but eventually we stopped and just lay down where we were to sleep. No sleeping bags. I didn’t get my sleeping bag until day 6. I can’t remember of what I dreamt, but I started recording my dreams this summer and realised, perhaps not surprisingly, that all my anxiety dreams now feature life in 2PARA.

Something similar’s happening to Jacob in today’s Old Testament reading. His family are the other side of the river, a figure has dropped from the sky, and Jacob suffers this night of endurance, struggling enough to dislocate his hip. That image gives us an iconic picture of the life of faith, a night-long wrestling with God. As today’s epistle tells us: ‘Be persistent whether the time is favourable or unfavourable’; have ‘the utmost patience’. At the end Jacob is renamed Israel – head of the great family that will take on new adventures as the people of God; that will resume this wrestling match as they fall in and out of faith and favour.

We hear of expressions like ‘the Dark Night of the Soul’ and we often think it is the night of agony, of grief, that is the greatest threat to our faith. Historically this is not true. Church attendance during the major European wars grew, as it did in the 1920s. National duress traditionally improves church-attendance. Covid may be the exception. But it’s the comfortable years of the Baby Boomers that have seen the church in decline. Faith’s greatest enemy isn’t suffering but leisure. For the Victorians, the bicycle was the enemy of faith, more recently, television. Today, I imagine it’s Pinterest or TicToc that tempts everyone to stay in bed on a Sunday morning.

The same is true for individuals. If you’re wrestling with ‘why’ questions – Why did this happen, why me, why is the world like this, why did I get fired when it was her idea? You’re in the business of faith – wrestling with an angel. It’s largely indifference that kills faith – The thought that nothing really matters. To not engage in the difficult questions of life, but just flick between Netflix and Amazon Prime.

And when you read the Bible it’s not about saints, the psalms are not respectable prayers – It’s about the struggle to stay true, to keep the faith; While the psalms contain all the anger, bitterness, fear and fervour of men and women trying desperately to work out how to hold on to that faith when everyone else is losing their heads and worse.

In today’s Gospel, we have this peculiar story. The characters are morally ambiguous. For the sake of the parable, Jesus does not define them as a just judge, or a widow with a deserving case; The justice of God does not always meet our understanding, and we are frequently far from deserving. The story is told simply to labour the point of persistence. It’s not always about being good. Doing the right thing. Sometimes faith is just about keeping on. Having the resilience to keep praying even when it seems the lights have gone off and no one is home; In dire circumstances, to not lose heart.

We will have to wait and see whether the children come back from Sunday School, having learned that Jesus is telling them to keep nagging and pestering until they get their way. But this is the message of the Gospel. Churchill’s KBO – Be persistent whether the time is favourable or unfavourable.

Rhiannon’s mother has been with us this weekend. She flew here from Lourdes, which is close to where they live, and, when we spoke about it, she remarked that the most moving thing at the famous shrine was where the step had been worn away, worn smooth by the number of feet that passed through a certain point. You see this on the steps of medieval churches where the stone, polish smooth, dips at the threshold by the everyday friction of generations. A True faith is something that is battled over, worn smooth with favourable times, unfavourable times and hard fought nights of wrestling. Patiently coming to church even if you’re not sure why.

It’s important to ask difficult questions, to wrestle with God. Human beings have been doing this for millenia and the basic structure of these questions hasn’t changed. It may not feel like we’re wrestling with an angel, but simply the darkness within our own minds; But that is exactly where we will confront the darkness of God; And whether it’s intolerable waiting, A sudden rush of air around our head, A difficult landing, Or most often hours of trudging through the night weighed down by useless ammunition, In our persistence we will ultimately know the justice of the Son of Man, and find in that struggle our formation as the people of God. Amen.

Harvest 2022

Sermon by the Revd Dr Brutus Green

Is there anything more wrought with contradiction than the Church of England? There can be no doubt that the God revealed in the New Testament sits awkwardly with the State. Paul directly contrasts the power of the cross with human power; The wisdom of the cross, with human understanding; For God’s foolishness is wiser than human wisdom, and God’s weakness is stronger than human strength. 1Cor 1.25 Moreover, Jesus is the victim of capital punishment – he is executed by the state. And all the demands of the Gospel are extreme – Jesus’ and the Apostles’ teaching on wealth, ownership, violence – all uncompromising – politics, as we know, is always about compromise.

But the Book of Common Prayer has one foot in politics and one in religion. One certainly couldn’t be a prayer book republican; Until recently a service was required to be held annually every 5th November giving thanks for our deliverance from the: ‘ſecret contrivance and helliſh malice of Popiſh conſpirators’. The prayerbook is not a great advertisement for ecumenism or interfaith relationships;  it knows little of multiculturalism.

And in every place that the Church tries to marry the business of State, nation and worldly concern, there’s a clang of awkwardness. So in recent weeks we’ve confronted Scripture’s discomfort with monarchs. Mr Johnson, then Prime Minister, was booed entering St Paul’s for the Jubilee service and eyebrows were raised mid-scandal as he proclaimed from the lectern today’s epistle: “whatsoever things are true, whatsoever things are honest, whatsoever things are just, whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever things are lovely, whatsoever things are of good report; if there be any virtue, and if there be any praise, think on these things.”

Today one might wonder what was on the mind of those compiling the lectionary in choosing today’s Gospel for Harvest. ‘Labour not for the meat which perisheth, but for that meat which endureth unto everlasting life’; he that cometh to me shall never hunger; Jesus is directly contrasting the meat – the food – of the harvest, with the spiritual food of himself. I am the bread of life. But one thinks of all those farmers come in for their harvest festival to hear: ‘Labour not for that which perishes’.

So, again, the Church seems to be gathering us to give thanks for food and drink – while the Gospel is telling us that we should not worry about such things, but strive for the food (metaphorically) which endureth to eternal life.

At the heart of the issue, is a question about the relationship of grace to the world. We may disagree about this. Elements within the New Testament – perhaps most strongly heard in the Gospel of John – draw a very strong line between the church and the world; The spiritual and the profane; There is within this reading, a sense that the Christian is called to retreat from the world. There are churches which discourage forming friendships with people who aren’t Christian. There are theologians who disparage those who draw on other fields – the sciences and social sciences perhaps especially – to help us understand better how to live and understand life. There are those who mortify the flesh in order to advance spiritually. Heaven is to be found at the expense of the body.

But the Church has also advanced a doctrine that bears reflecting on: Gratia non tollit naturam, sed perficit. Grace does not destroy nature, but perfects it. Those were the words of Thomas Aquinas, but they resound down the ages and chime strongly with the ethos of the Church of England. So in this view the ordering of this world may reflect something of the divine order, and grace operates alongside us elevating those parts of nature which direct us towards eternal truths and virtues. Harvest – the seasons of life, and death, and renewal, may itself be shaped by grace.

It is, I fear, complicated. Christianity has been quite forceful in denigrating the physical. It has censured our culture with a doctrine of Original Sin – that has at times tried to convince of the absolute separation of creator and created.

And yet. Unlike some Platonic escape from the cave, Christianity holds to a creation made good. The central doctrine of Christianity remains the Incarnation. We believe that God is with us – God is a body among us – God is bread and wine, ingested, incorporated. God does not destroy nature, but perfects it.

These movements have a sense of fashion about them – In times of great anger and great pain I can see that the Kingdom of God must require a total transformation. It must wipe clear – like the rain of Noah, the crackling sin of nuclear terror, of environmental abuse, of slavery and murder; When our world turns very dark – we may feel the same – What is there to redeem here – Who are those 10 souls for whom we might forego the destruction of the city? What is there within my failing mind and body that might be carried through – might be retained as worthy to praise God in eternity? What here might be redeemed, rather than recreated?

Every year – from our first few months, we have as a family – and Oberon was born just as we moved in – We have taken a photo in front of the Virginia Creeper as it burns red in the Autumn. It’s how we mark our time in this parish. And isn’t it strange that this season – in which everything changes – The colours, the light, the weather, the landscape, the emotional adjustment to a new year, endings and beginnings – That perhaps eternity feels closer? Not because it has all stayed the same – But the repetition of years pointing to something greater. There is a difference between eternity as permanence – as sameness – Which seems naïve – And eternity as an evenness of movement – as in the circling of seasons The crescendos and diminuendos of nature as its praises its creator in the instant, brief, elongated shapes that form the pattern of this world.

There is to me something in that Virginia Creeper – which isn’t ours – it creeps over the fence from next door – But something in its seasonal changes that speaks of eternity – especially when it blushes like Pentecost in Autumn. I cannot think that a creator would not sow in his work the seeds of eternity. At Harvest we bring ‘the first fruits of the land, which thou, O Lord, hast given me.’ We bring the good things of the world to the Lord to bless and fulfil their purpose in praise, thanksgiving and service. I cannot look on this world – for all the grim reality that is the Today programme – I cannot look on this world and not see much I would hold tight forever – That has given me glimpses of eternity – Not in permanence but fleeting beauty. Nature is not something to be destroyed – As much as men have tried. Nature is to be perfected, and in the movement of seasons, in the work of the harvest – we may still see the colours and fruits of the Spirit at play. Amen.

Dedication Evensong

Evensong, I’ve always felt, is the last refuge of the spiritual. Everyone who goes to church has the things about church that drive them bonkers. I got to a point in my 20s when I couldn’t bear sermons. It was the sheer tediousness of them. I could have lived with heresy. I’d at least have had something to think, or write to the bishop about. But, no, it was the sheer irrelevance and dullness of them. You may have heard me mention this morning that sermons were struck from services here because of Air raids during the war. It’s worth remembering that at that time sermons may well have been 45 minutes long. A blessed relief I imagine to crawl into an air raid shelter. Anyway, I found the most creative solution to the problem of putting up with sermons, which is of course to give them myself. Few people, I find, are bored by the sound of their own voice.

But the thing I found hardest was other Christians. The demon Screwtape advises a young demon that when his victim goes to church ‘he will see just that selection of his neighbours whom he has hitherto avoided’ and urges him to draw his attention to when they sing out of tune, or their boots squeak, their double chins or odd clothes. There is a heroic element to the life of faith – buoyed up by stories of saints and the exploits of Jesus and the apostles – which is brought down to the ground sharply by other Christians. And faith may carry a sense of the sublime, of transcendence, which is sharply disconnected when the person next to you develops a sharp cough, intermittent snoring, or, worst of all… a baby.

Evensong takes us back to a monastic beauty, There is very little room for the congregation to do anything. It is a meditative swirl and in Exeter cathedral at tea time I did quite often fall asleep, or that semi-sleep which is very pleasant and restful, provided you have adequate neck support.

So Evensong creates a sense of peace in its beauty and through resonance in its timelessness – what one hymn calls the beauty of holiness – Or perhaps the holiness of beauty. And there is something highly personal in it as a service because very little is forced on you, so you actually have time to yourself, free from distraction. There are the words that resonate with the weight of 4 to 5 hundred years, in the knowledge they have been said and sung across this land throughout that time, And before in its antecedents in the Latin monastic offices of Vespers and Compline. It’s a form of worship that leaves you largely to your own thoughts – But immersed in Scripture and the music of previous generations. That is unless you’re in the choir, in which case the wholes service is usually a desperate scramble through your folder to find the right piece of music at the right time.

It is especially resonant on a Sunday like today when we are remembering 110 years of this service being read or sung most days in this parish, and with music and hymns from the nineteenth and twentieth-centuries; all of what we have heard today will very likely have been heard by our former generations.

With so much change and decay in all around – With the passing away of earth’s proud empires, which was largely accomplished in the last century, but even those shifts in gravity these last years have seen – Stepping out of the European Union, the death of our Queen, a high turnover of Prime Ministers, And a world seemingly staggering from one disaster to another – There is something very stilling about evensong, And reassuring that as we shall shortly sing – ‘As o’er each continent and island/ the dawn leads on another day,/ the voice of prayer is never silent/ nor dies the strain of praise away.’

And the truth is that through wars, famines, crises, the hot grief of individuals seeking solace, the joy of new parents proclaiming thanksgiving, the parish church continues in its cycles of morning and evening prayer, Of births, marriages and deaths; And if we can find in that a beauty, a harmony and a peace amid the noise and gloom of the world, then perhaps we can still hear the still small voice of our creator.

So apologies for the sermon. I’ve kept it short at least. I won’t apologise for your fellow Christians; We are none of us without fault, but given time we are all loveable. And if some are more difficult than others, or if the vicar’s not to your taste, that’s what the sherry’s for. But I hope that in this service, in this place where prayer has been valid for 150 years and evensong sung for 110, you know the reassurance of eternity, in a form that will outlast even tonight’s prayers and ring forever in the everlasting halls of our God and saviour. Amen.

Dedication Sunday

What does it mean to be St Margaret’s, Putney?

This is the first time in recent years – to my knowledge – we have celebrated a dedication Sunday. In a sense, it’s what we’re doing on St Margaret’s Day, but I wanted this year to particularly celebrate some milestones we’re achieving, as a building, as a community, as a church. If you’ve noticed the board at the back, you’ll know we’ve an unusual pedigree in being presbyterian and Baptist before we joined the Church of England. The board says 1859 – I’ve seen that date elsewhere, but The Building News and Engineering Journal records an architect – W. Allen Dixon being taken on by Colonel Croll to construct a new church, completed in 1873. So – ding! – we have a first significant date in that next year will mark our 150th anniversary as a place of worship.

The second half of the nineteenth-century was the time for church building – When Britannia truly did rule the waves – And around a quarter of the world. And so our neighbours: Holy Trinity Roehampton was built in 1842, St John’s, now the Polish church in 1859, and baby All Saint’s, the junior Putney church, built a year after us in 1874. But we were built as a private chapel and it’s not until 1912 that we became dedicated to St Margaret as a new Church of England church on 5th October 1912. So our second ding! This week marks our 110th anniversary in the Church of England.

It took a little while for us to get going, though. When Percy Wallis took my job in 1918 (exactly 100 years before me), he had no vicarage, no organ, no hall, no choir stalls, no license to carry out weddings. His church was also still in the middle of a field, with no school, and no Dover House Estate. All this changed in the first years of the 20s – and as they started building the Dover House Estate next door, St Margaret’s in 1923 became a church with its own parish. So our final ding – next year, 2023 will mark 100 years of us being an independent parish church. Our centenary of freedom from the so-called ‘parish-of-Putney’. The vicarage was also bought in this year – she shows her age – and Percy Wallis was installed as the first vicar in 1924.

So we are 110 years in the Church of England and approaching 150 years as a place of worship, and 100 years as a parish.

Change is a constant, though; Even then the church finished where the congregation now ends. Everything my side was built in 1925 and 1926. And the work continued – The glass in the windows behind is from 1929; Our first church hall 1930, the current one next door 1962. The lower hall and house in 1972 – 50 years of bouncy castle parties. The font to your right was bought in 1965, in which thousands have now been baptised. A charming annotation in the Service Register on 3 September 1939, crosses out the word “sermon” after matins – replacing it with “Air Raid Warning”. Drastically, the sermon at evensong was also cut and evensong thereafter moved to 3pm. If you’ve noticed different colours of glass, that’s because a flying bomb landed in Woodborough road.

There’s a lot more that could be said – The point is that churches are living buildings, adapting, stretching, modifying to meet the needs of their time. I’m told that in living memory, you sat on the side of church that you lived on. Dover House Estate here, West Putney – rattle your jewelry. Which is a little surprising. There is continuity, there is change. In all this the generations have passed through and on. Our duty as Christians is to tell the Gospel afresh in each generation. Our building, our resources, are there to aid us in this task.

During lockdown it was very popular to say that the church is the people not the building – Which was convenient when we weren’t allowed in them. But the temptation then is to think in terms of the people you see each week – or recognise from the Zoom chat – To see church as a support network for Christians. Churches are more than membership clubs. One of my favourite lines about the Church of England, is that it’s the one institution which exists for those who aren’t members. And this is true both in mission and service.

I took a funeral on Friday, and was asked as I often am – do you work at the crematorium. I say no – I’m just a vicar in Putney. And then they ask: why you, and did you know her – And almost always some realises, well she lived there – in your parish. And that’s the reason. It doesn’t matter whether you go to church, the church still has a pastoral responsibility for you. I’ve taken 97 funerals since arriving here – mostly for people I have not knowingly met but to whom I have a simple duty to bury. Those people – or their families – all asked for a Christian service.

We all like to sketch our boundaries of what it means to be Christian – Doctrinal assent, baptism, attendance, sherry consumption, lifestyle – At this funeral – one of the family confessed to me afterwards that he wasn’t religious. His first complaint was that the Christians he’d met were not better people than those without faith. To which the obvious answer is – Well just imagine what they’d be like if they weren’t Christians. I think if we can treat everyone as if they’re one place ahead of us in the queue to salvation, we’re probably starting in the right place.

In today’s Old Testament reading, David is preparing to build the Lord the first temple. But just as Moses – the favourite prophet of God – doesn’t enter the promised land but leads the people up to it – So David – the favourite king of God – doesn’t build the temple but prepares the ground for Solomon to build it.

But to achieve that we see that first the people have to come bringing their free will offering. Historically we are a generous church. Many give regularly. Recently we have had donations which have paid for our sound system, our streaming equipment – which enabled us to deliver services through the pandemic; Our choir robes, now with more bodies to adorn them – the new fencing around the church; And more recently a legacy which will enable us to take a new step in the life of the parish, in building a parish centre.

At the same time we have been sustained by the work, time, gifts and energy of many. The pews only lasted as long as they did because of our resident carpenters; Building works in the spire and the roof, Refashioning our pews, the cupboard to house the sound system, the platform for the altar, the decoration on the front; the radiator covers – But also the tireless hours of preparing for services, welcoming, serving, making coffee, cakes and sandwiches, running bars, fayres, barbecues and quizzes; Assembling a magazine, packing food parcels, making dinners for those without homes, shopping, fundraising, counselling, being a friend; The countless tasks that are necessary to build and sustain a community and place of worship.

This has happened here for 150 years; in our parish for 100 years. To be at St Margaret’s is to be part of something which is bigger than ourselves, to be citizens and saints and members of the household of God. Not in a grand way, but an every-day way.

And I think we can see here the grace of God. Jesus throws out the money-changers to stop the temple becoming a market-place. Our services are free to attend. Our Sunday recital is free to attend. Our playgroup – unlike almost all others – is free. There genuinely is such a thing as a free lunch here on Thursday. What could possibly speak more about a God of grace than a free lunch? After the service we’ll have a presentation about a new stage in the life of St Margaret’s, in which we may be resourced to extend our vocation to serve our community.

Saint Margaret herself was an ordinary young woman who stood up for her faith in dark times. She may or may not have been spat out by a dragon, but like many she was a victim of persecution. Our calling in our dedication as a church to her is to remain true to the Gospel and to live out our faith in worship, service and generosity, In whatever time is given to us, Building on the good work of the generations that have gone before us. Amen.

The Rich Man and Lazarus

If we were to have heard this morning an announcement of a new global pandemic, what would your reaction have been? “Ugh – not again! Another Christmas ruined!” Better visit the grandparents now; Should we slip in a rousing rendition of ‘we’ll meet again’ at the end of church; then get ready for some more ‘me-time’.

After a couple of years of panic, disruption, boredom and death we’re now mentally quite well prepared. To have suggested in the hey-day of the noughties – that we’d shortly be facing public lock-downs, missing essentials in supermarkets – Remember when you couldn’t buy flour – Daily death tolls, Would have seemed eccentric. Frightening. Change when it comes is usually unimaginable. So it’s easy in early September to say –Right – we have to be frugal – no heating till November. In Summer you simply forget how cold feels. The pinch comes in mid-October – oh yes. A cold house at 6am is unpleasant. 

The death of the Queen, despite her age, caught everyone by surprise – It was, it seems, impossible to imagine singing God Save the King, until you’d got through it a couple of times. Human beings are ever resistant to change. I’m running out of lightbulb jokes but this one I liked: How many Anglicans does it take to change a light bulb? 7. One to phone an electrician. 6 to tell you how much they liked the old light bulb better. Ah, the perils of being a vicar.

Today’s parable is not what it seems. It’s often taken for a colourful picture of the afterlife, with the rich man suffering for his cheerful but thoughtless worldliness and the poor man finally getting the good things he deserves. That sort of divine balancing out that we learnt at Sunday School.

But Jesus’ parables are stories. Not truths. I’ll shock you here. There was no good Samaritan. No prodigal son – They were figments of the Almighty Imagination. The parables are there to change how people think and act; not to give them new facts.

 And, actually, we’re not told that the rich man was especially bad, or that the poor man was good. They are both Jews – both seem friendly with Abraham – and we have no reason to suppose one was more pious than the other. This parable is not about salvation.  We’re told, though, “Jesus told this parable to those among the Pharisees who loved money.” Jesus is trying to change the way people see and use wealth. So he goes straight in for shock tactics. His audience is well off. They have their dinner parties. There’s certainly no shortage of poor, hopeless people in the first century. Nothing, they said, that a Roman mini-budget and some trickle down-denarii couldn’t fix.

So the line is: WHAT IF. What If your positions were reversed. And let’s take the worst case scenario. Eternally reversed. All the want you see in that person you walked by each day was yours. Forever. As a sermon that’s pretty punchy.

Now the rich man sees the error of his ways. He’s asking – and this matters – He’s asking Lazarus to come down and help him. Abraham’s response is given kindly – he calls him teknon – child or even ‘my child’. And then this strange sentiment – ‘between you and us a great chasm has been fixed, so that those who might want to pass from here to you cannot do so and no one can cross from there to us.’

As I said, this isn’t a description of the afterlife. It’s a parable. Just a story. All Jesus has done is to say to his rich audience: ‘imagine in eternity your place is swapped with someone very poor’. And here is the key point of the story: Between the you and us – Between the rich man and the poor man Lazarus, a great chasm has been fixed so that no one might cross between.

Jesus is really saying: You have not, cannot cross that chasm to meet the poor man who lives at your gate. You are simply unable to see the needs of your neighbour. To love your neighbour. To grasp that your neighbour is a person of equal value to you, Who no more deserves his state than you do yours. That is your failure in life. Do not presume that this present situation will remain in the next.

We actually have a similar parable told in our own context. Freaky Friday first hit the big screen in the 70s and some of you will remember a young Jodie Foster earning her stripes, but actually it’s universally agreed that the Lindsay Lohan/Jamie Lee Curtis noughties version is better. Essentially – sorry spoiler alert – the teenager finally understands the horror of parenthood and adulthood, and vice versa and everyone walks away a little bit kinder. If you saw the Jim Belushi movie Filofax, you’d get an even closer parallel. So – to me – the question of the parable –Back to Lazarus and the rich man – The question Jesus is provoking –Is can you cross that great chasm? Can you understand your teenager? Can you love your neighbour? And he’s framed it really in a sort – “bet you can’t” way. Because people struggle to change. They struggle to see the world in any way that is not the way it is now. Most of our ethical failures begin with a failure of imagination.

Essentially, it’s a question of empathy. As our favourite lawyer – tickets still available at the Gielgud – As our favourite lawyer said: ‘you never really know a man until you stand in his shoes and walk around in them.’ It’s a play on the idiom: ‘Before you judge a man, walk a mile in his shoes’ Which keen observers will note puts you a mile away from the scene of the crime in a new pair of shoes. But empathy is really very difficult, very uncomfortable and very costly. It’s unsurprising Jesus calls it ‘a great chasm’.

And here the parable takes us a step further. The end of the parable – we notice – won’t mean anything to its hearers. It’s a message for us reading Luke’s Gospel after all these events have occurred.

The rich man – thinking of his brothers – see he’s not such a bad guy– Begs Abraham to let him return to warn them. Abrahams’s response is: “If they do not listen to Moses and the prophets, neither will they be convinced even if someone rises from the dead.” There’s an acknowledgment – it doesn’t matter what you do what you say – people are largely fixed in their views. It takes a sledgehammer to change someone’s mind. And even the resurrection was not enough to convince all Jesus’ contemporaries.

But there’s more. That clang of the word ‘resurrection’ should wake us to the echoes of the Gospel itself in this story. Jesus as a rich man – as God – makes himself poor – crosses that great chasm. In doing so as the poor man made rich – he can cross that great chasm that separates us from wholeness and God, and, unlike Lazarus, bring relief to the dead. In doing all this he has warned his brothers. And yes, some are not convinced even when someone rises from the dead. But that is what he has done. And that is what Luke here is testifying to in his Gospel. It is the example of Christian service and humility, and the revelation of God’s love.

Now Luke’s is a Gospel of reversals. From the start Jesus is proclaiming good news to the poor, release to captives, liberty to the oppressed. Even before he’s born Mary is proclaiming that God has scattered the proud, put down the mighty, and exalted the humble and filled the hungry.

Jesus said ‘let the little children come to me’ Children are very quick to change, to adapt; They do not believe themselves better than others. From the moment they start squawking ‘it’s not fair’ they have a keen eye for justice. Sometimes we do need to become more like children to see the kingdom of heaven. And as we come to this baptism in a moment we should be reminded that it is when we are become like Henry that we are most ready to meet Christ.

For us, to hear and believe the Gospel is to be changed. To see the world differently. In some respects then – faith is about imagination. Can we imagine a world where people are treated equally? Where the distribution of resources, education and opportunities is fair? Where the values that Jesus taught – summarised adequately in ‘love your neighbour’ – take precedence over self-protection and excess.

It’s usually the case that under greater hardship, the divide between rich and poor increases. It is well established that social inequality breaks society. There will be more Lazaruses this winter. We will be challenged to walk in other people’s shoes, and allow ourselves to be affected by them; however poorly, to love them. We – in our situation – may find ourselves doubting whether anyone will come to drop crumbs for us.

The one whom we follow crossed that great chasm. He exchanged riches for poverty. And he crossed from death to life. Let us be prepared to change; Prepared to see the world differently; Ready to love our neighbour. Amen.

Creation Sunday

Sermon by the Revd Dr Brutus Green

There are two facts, two doctrines if you like, on which Christianity, as a philosophy, a religion, a world-view, depends. The second is the birth of Christ, the Incarnation, But despite our eager anticipation of this year’s John Lewis advert, we’ll leave that one a couple more months. The first and most definitive fact is the Creation, or more precisely, creatio ex nihilo, creation from nothing. This separates Christians from two other sets of belief. On one hand, we have the pantheists and pagans. The modern religions have managed to root out most Zeuses and Aphrodites along the way but a few pagans still persist and every now and then there’s a revival. So Spinoza brought back pantheism briefly in the 17thcentury and today environmentalists like James Lovelock usually toy with the idea that the earth or the universe is some sort of goddess, or Gaia, of which we’re all a part.

The main problem with this philosophy is that nature is so mindlessly cruel –as the world so vividly experiences –  it is nature ‘red in tooth and claw’ as Tennyson put it. If Voltaire couldn’t stomach that a good God would allow the earthquake of Lisbon, how much more awful would it be to worship the creature that made it happen. It is the villain Edmund in King Lear who proclaims ‘Thou, nature, art my goddess’, who invert morality, ‘Who, in the lusty stealth of nature, take/ More composition and fierce quality/ Than doth, within a dull, stale, tired bed,/ Go to the creating a whole tribe of fops.’ There is resonance here with Milton’s Satan who cries: ‘all good to me is lost;/ Evil, be thou my good; by thee at least/ Divided empire with Heaven's King I hold’. More prosaically, the ‘selfish gene’ hardly sounds like an edifying morality and it is only the most terrifying regimes which have indulged in promoting ‘natural selection’.

The other set of belief is that of atheists in agreement with Bertrand Russell who famously said, ‘I should say that the universe is just there, and that's all.’ The problem atheists suffer is one of plausibility. They are forced either to acknowledge that the universe had a beginning and to be left in the uncomfortable position of having to explain why a universe would suddenly spring into being – which without God will always sound peculiar; or they have to hold that the universe has always existed. This is implausible for two reasons. Firstly, it makes time very hard to conceive of. If there was an infinite amount of time behind us, how would we ever have reached this moment? The second reason is that absolutely everything we know that exists has a beginning and an end. Starting from that point, it seems more likely that everything does have a beginning, which would mean that the universe cannot have always existed.

Now there are - no doubt - more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in my philosophy, but such thoughts lead to three important conclusions. Firstly, that God exists as a necessary being that creates and sustains creation. Secondly, that God is entirely different to everything that is created. He is not a superman or ET out in space; God must be entirely different to creation, being uncreated. But thirdly, since all creation is created by God and nothing else, the natural world must in some way be like God, since it was created by nothing other than God.  

The creation narratives all try and get this across. The Bible actually gives us three narratives. These accounts are intended as pictures. The first chapter of Genesis, describes how God created in the beginning. God’s first act is to make light which brings order out of chaos. The Hebrews are not idiots and they understand that the light by which we see comes from the sun, the moon and the stars, which are created only on day four (and obviously that days and nights are somewhat dependent on these same heavenly movements).

The point is that God doesn’t just create matter; he forms matter. Creation is at once embedded with meaning. The author of St John’s Gospel is also very keen to get this across: ‘In the beginning was the Word [the logos, the meaning]... and all things were made through him’. God doesn’t just make stuff; God forms creatures with meaning; he calls everything into being with purpose.

In opposition, Milton gave the capital of Hell the name Pandemonium, defined as a great deal of noise and confusion – or chaos, or the name of a Pet Shop Boysalbum. It is said that when Milton was describing the conclave of Hell at the beginning of Paradise Lost he had in mind the House of Commons. How it must have changed.

And so, the world and all creation must have been created by an uncreated, necessary being. This being, which we shall call God, is no earthly tyrant, superman or Martian but of an entirely different order of being. And yet creation, being God’s, must bear some likeness, some reflection of its creator, shown by its sense of order, that its creatures have meaning and can find purpose in their world.

There is one final conclusion to be derived from this fact, this doctrine of creation for which we are today giving thanks. It is a gift. What is created only exists for a time and it need not exist at all. Along with this, everything comes from God; there is nothing we can give back to God which is not also from God. Since God in eternity must be self-sufficient, it can only be that creation is a mark of the divine desire to extend itself, to create another with whom to be in relationship with, to love and be loved. From which it’s reasonable to say that to not believe in God is nothing more and nothing less than being ungrateful.

Genesis is consistent throughout in describing creation as good, just as Haydn’s creation extols the ‘marv’llous work’, ‘delightful to the ravish’d sense’, the ‘sweet and gay’ flowers, the ‘charming sight[s]’, the ‘splendour bright’ of the ‘wonder of his works’, with ‘th’immense Leviathan sport[ing] on the foaming wave’. ‘The World is charged with the grandeur of God’. What’s not to like? In these troubled times nature is so often described as something dying, or as the enemy, or as a time-bomb ready to go off. Well, maybe. But as Christians we should first see it as a gift, and in receiving this gift we may come to learn something of its creator, who has formed us in God’s image, as meaningful gifts to one another. Amen.

Sermon on the Death of her Late Majesty Queen Elizabeth II

‘For this slight momentary affliction is preparing us for an eternal weight of glory beyond all measure’.

Kings seem a little improbable. A little fairy-tale or Arthurian. I’m kind of bracing myself for the National Anthem. I’m not there yet. I enjoyed a complaint on Twitter that this whole woke-culture has got totally out of hand if they’re now letting a man become Queen. The real thing is a Queen.

Sometime, when I was maybe 11 years old, the Queen came to watch me play hockey at Morfa stadium in Swansea. I’m sure she did a number of other things that day which supplemented her watching me play hockey, but she definitely did do that. I didn’t meet her and would certainly have been much more interested in playing hockey at the time, but I remember it; And isn’t it strange: Normally with the famous, the celebrity, you go to see them, watch them perform; The Queen is the one person who comes to watch ordinary things done by ordinary people.

I don’t bring this up as my “I met the Queen story” which everyone has been sharing over the last few days, but just because almost everyone seems to have had that brush with the monarch; and, while they remember it because she’s the Queen; she’s there because of them. There can be no one else in the country who has had that proximity to so many people; Who just by showing up in her bright colours adds a little bit of glory to a new supermarket, or school or to a parade or church service.

75 years ago on her 21st birthday she said these words which you can’t have escaped in the past few days:

‘I can make my solemn act of dedication with a whole Empire listening. I should like to make that dedication now. It is very simple. I declare before you all that my whole life, whether it be long or short, shall be devoted to your service and the service of our great Imperial family to which we all belong, but I shall not have the strength to carry out this resolution alone unless you join in with me, as I now invite you to do. I know that your support will be unfailingly given. God help me to make good my vow and God bless all of you who are willing to share in it.’

Empires have since gone out of fashion, largely, I think, because of Star Wars, but what is striking is that she’s probably the only 21-year-old to have made a promise on a lifetime scale, and kept it.

And the monarchy depends on that dedication. Having sworn 6 oaths of loyalty to Her Majesty, and her successors, I’m aware that the weight of the symbol depends on the integrity of the monarch. And if you need a reminder of how important that is you have only to recall the last radio transmission of 2PARA as the battalion was destroyed at Arnhem: ‘Out of ammunition. God save the King.’ King Charles will know that, of course, as Colonel in Chief of the Parachute Regiment.

I’m not here to give a eulogy for our Queen; we have Huw Edwards for that, who despite coming from Brigend, I’ve never met. But really there has been a worldwide eulogy rolling out without ceasing since she died. And we are shaken. Perhaps less so for younger people, but I’m struck by how many, and especially men, have told me they have been thrown by the depth of grief they now feel. She is the nation’s mum – the head of that ‘family to which we all belong’. And time and again people say that it feels like they have lost a member of their family. A landmark, a point of orientation has been washed away. And in this annus horribilis, that is felt all the more keenly.

In her death we also have the strongest possible reminder of our own mortality. Never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee Even the most famous woman in the world, Elizabeth the Great, is mortal. You are mortal. So our Queen in her last act of service to us, helps prepare us for that final hour of reckoning, Even as in her Christmas messages she always struck a universal but distinctly Christian note of hope. Our defender of the faith last Christmas: “We continue to be inspired by the kindness of strangers and draw comfort that—even on the darkest nights—there is hope in the new dawn. Jesus touched on this with the parable of the Good Samaritan. The man who is robbed and left at the roadside is saved by someone who did not share his religion or culture. This wonderful story of kindness is still as relevant today. Good Samaritans have emerged across society showing care and respect for all, regardless of gender, race, or background, reminding us that each one of us is special and equal in the eyes of God.”

The phrase that struck me from the appointed readings for today was this: ‘For this slight momentary affliction is preparing us for an eternal weight of glory beyond all measure’. The Queen, of course, was used to the weight of glory. The 1661 St Edward Crown, used only at coronations is made up of 2.2kg of gold and jewels. That is a headache of glory.

But it reminded me of a famous sermon by C.S. Lewis, where he thinks about glory first in human terms – the sense of fame, being thought well of – as the Queen certainly was. And at first he rubbishes the idea as worldly, superficial. But then he thinks how a schoolboy seeks the approval of his teacher, a child of her parent, a dog of his master; and finds in our seeking the approval of God, of finding good report, a proper kind of glory, such that when we finally meet our God, God might say: ‘well done, thou good and faithful servant.’ And, of course, glory does mean acceptance by God, good report by God, as Jesus is transfigured and the voice booms out: This is my Son, the Beloved; with him I am well pleased. But why is this ‘an eternal weight of glory?’ Well surely that is in contrast to the unbearable lightness of the things of this world. Our queen no longer lives in palaces, the jewels have passed down; The responsibility has gone to another, and the slagging match of twitter is faded from her ears. What remains is the eternal weight of glory; The care, the affection, the good report of God. It is only now she has inherited the imperishable crown.

The shocking thing is that this weight lies with all of us. The faith our Queen boldly proclaimed tells us that we are immortals, heirs of glory – That there are no ordinary people. And while we may not all in this life wear crowns, we are being prepared for glory, Even Welsh school boys are holy. The person sitting next to you is holy; Not because of their income, their car, the school their children go to, the fact that they met the driver of the Queen herself and had their photo taken by a charming old lady – But because we all carry within us this hidden weight of glory.

And as an imperishable crown now stretches over her – like a rainbow above the royal palaces – we know that she is welcomed home as an old friend: ‘well done thou good and faithful servant’. She has run the race, she has kept the faith, She has her imperishable crown.

And the bell that tolls for her, will at 4 o’clock toll to ring in a new time. So we might finish with the words of Queen Victoria’s favourite poem; Praying that as church bells across the land ring out the old and in the new, this would not be the final nail in Christian Britain, or another step towards the end of all things, but the beginning of a new hope and a better time:

Ring out the grief that saps the mind
   For those that here we see no more;
   Ring out the feud of rich and poor,
Ring in redress to all mankind.

Ring in the valiant man and free,
   The larger heart, the kindlier hand;
   Ring out the darkness of the land,
Ring in the Christ that is to be.

Amen.

Imagine an Onion

Sermon by Sarah Cooper
Imagine an onion. That onion is you. The outer layer, the skin, is your outer layer. It is a first impression if you like. The you we see every day. Peel off a layer and then another and we start to discover another you, in no particular order: What you do, your age, your experience, your family, where you grew up, your ethnicity trauma or tragedy, your mother tongue, your sexuality, your beliefs and values. The real you, which may be hidden or unrecognised.

The story we heard from Matthew’s Gospel is a story of recognition, of mutual recognition. And it is a story of persistence and faith and therefore hope. This short story of the Canaanite woman, only 8 verses long, is sandwiched between some major events in Matthew’s Gospel: the feeding of the 5 thousand, the walking on water, a major challenge by Jesus to the Pharisees and then, after it, the feeding of the 4 thousand. The tide is turning for Jesus, he is making his authority visible. But soon after this, he gives the first indication of his death.

His mission is short, it is focused, as he will explain, and his time is limited. And yet he withdraws from familiar territory, not for the first time, and travels far away from home putting himself right in the heart of enemy territory. To modern day Lebanon.

Now this really was ancient enemy territory. The Canaanites were the old enemy of the Hebrew Scriptures, the ones who had to be defeated to give the nation of Israel the land they had been promised. In Deuteronomy Israel was urged to “show them no mercy”.

So why on earth did Jesus go there? He must have had a purpose, but it appears to contradict his stated mission, in verse 24 “to save only the lost sheep of Israel”, I.E the Jews.

Jesus is in the midst of Gentiles, in Gentile territory but is immediately recognised, by a Gentile woman, as the Jewish Messiah. She calls him Lord, as do his followers, and Son of David. She is in no doubt who he is. This is extraordinary, and in stark contrast to his home ground, where he is frequently not recognised for who he truly is, by the Jews and sometimes by his own disciples. His reaction is to fob her off, encouraged by the disciples. She is not their priority, no matter how desperate she is. This is not what we expect to hear from Jesus. Where is his compassion, where is his mercy?

But this woman does not give up, she simply asks, “Lord, help me” she is asking for God’s mercy and she believes in Jesus’ authority to grant this. What a risk she was taking.

Again he says she is not his problem. He is focused on the children (The Jews) not on the dogs (The Gentiles). And still, she argues, she would be happy with a crumb, she doesn’t expect more. She acknowledges her position of inferiority and at the same time acknowledges his power.

And then, it is his turn to recognise her. The layers peel away and he sees her for who she truly is, underneath the layers of despair, ethnicity, background, gender she has faith. “O woman, great is your faith” he says. The use of the expression “O” indicating great emotion on his part. He is blind to all else. I don’t think he sees her foreignness, her different background, any of it. I think he simply does not see it, he sees beneath the layers and that is all that matters.

A circle of recognition. She of him and he of her.

Was this a transformative stage in Jesus’ understanding of his mission? That God’s grace was available to all if they sought it in faith? Some might say so. Or did he know all along what God wanted of him? Either way, this pivotal story highlights the future direction of Jesus’ ministry, that of his disciples and ultimately the church, to take God’s grace to all who believe.

Do we recognise people for who they truly are? Do we peel away the layers and recognise what is important? Do we hide under layers for fear of revealing who we really are?

In this story, we learn that the categories or restrictions society puts on us do not and need not affect our relationship with God. God of course can see into our hearts as the writer of Psalm 139 puts it so beautifully:

“O Lord thou hast searched me and known me”

We are an inclusive church. We share our love of Christ, our worship and praise with all who walk through our door, inclusive. There are times I feel a little uncomfortable with the word. Why? It has connotations, maybe not to all, but ironically, of exclusivity. Welcome into our club! You are different, but we welcome you and want you to join. We see your difference, but it doesn’t matter! All are welcome here.

It feels very one way. You come to us. 

But that is not what Jesus did, he went out, he went into alien land and found somebody who simply needed God’s mercy. He was blind to all the layers

Do we still see difference rather than commonality sometimes? Do we not look deeply enough beneath the layers of the onion? Underneath the layers we share our love of Christ, and our belief that through him we will be forgiven and be redeemed. Nothing else matters.

But even in the Church of England division persists: at the Lambeth Conference yesterday our Archbishop acknowledged that continuing division between Bishops on the subject of same-sex marriage, an open and bleeding sore in the Anglican Communion, where difference is standing in the way of commonality.

Sometimes we just have to ask ourselves a simple question

What would Jesus say?

What would Jesus do?

Our love of Christ unites us and we want to share that love. We can take that out as Jesus did, to where it is needed. We can live our lives blind to the layers and see that simple truth of faith in others, and celebrate it. Somewhere out there is someone who persists in faith just as the Canaanite woman did, and who needs God’s mercy and we can help them find that hope.   

Amen

Prayer II

In the summer of 2008 I went on a 36 day silent retreat in North Wales. I wrote 95 pages of notes from that time; reflections on prayer, rather than the quality of the canteen, which was actually rather good. At the end, to my surprise, I felt I could just as easily have stayed for another 36 days, as return. Giving up busy-ness, the constant distractions, the throng of people – is a relief that challenges the pile-up of activity that takes over our lives. Looking back, I’d also say being 29 and child-free again presents certain attractions.

I was asked last week, how we hear from God. The answer will be different for different people. What I would say is that there’s no compensation for time. Today’s Gospel calls us to dogged persistence in prayer. On this retreat I spent 5 hours a day kneeling, unmoving in silence, but also prayed while running and going about the day. Now there’s always a little hand pulling me away. ‘can I show you something…’ But the truth is that if you don’t make time for God, you won’t find the stillness to hear God.

I’d also say that after prayer it’s always worth making notes. When you read back through them, you can see patterns and arcs emerging which speak of the journey of the soul. I quite often go back to my notes from these days. When prayer is difficult, reconnecting and revisiting a formative time can help recover our ability to listen.

But today our Gospel gives us the Lord’s Prayer. the definitive form of Christian prayer, the example of how we should pray in the words of Christ himself. The first thing to note, which is easily overlooked, is that Jesus calling God “father” is a new move. God is referred to as Father only eleven times in the Old Testament. And what is more, never in prayer. Jesus, on the other hand refers to God as Father 170 times and when he prays, he always prays to the Father. In this condensed new testament there is a 12500% God-as-Father-inflation. Not only this but Jesus goes so far as to call God “Abba!”, the Aramaic word for “Daddy!” – a word never before used of God.

For the Jewish people the name of God was a serious business. So serious that it was never spoken and even in the most solemn worship God’s name was never used. In the Hebrew Bible it was always written without vowels, which is why all through the Old Testament we have the LORD as in: ‘And you will know that my name is the LORD when I lay my vengeance upon you’.

The point is that the Hebrew God was almighty, transcendent, unapproachable, deadly to meet, “no man shall look upon thy face and live”. He is a warrior to be feared, the judge of all things; the Arnold Swartzenegger of the ancient near East. And Jesus calls him Daddy. In one fell swoop Jesus redefined Jewish theology, replacing the Terminator with Kindergarden Cop. Gone is the machismo, the jealous Lord of Hosts and suddenly we are seeing God’s sensitive side. So what is it that makes Jesus redefine the Jewish idea of God and bring him so close to us as to call him ‘Our Father’, even ‘Daddy’?

Well, the key to it lies in the Lord’s prayer – that in that first line, we move from greeting God as our Father to praying for his kingdom to arrive on earth. Jesus’ message from the very beginning is that the kingdom of heaven is at hand and this prayer is an invoking of God here with us.

And that’s the tone of the whole prayer. Even the most earthly sounding request – give us our daily bread – is about something else. “Daily” here is a longstanding poor translation. The greek word is epiousios - a very rare word that does not mean daily but something like “supersubstantial”, or perhaps “of tomorrow”. Epi – is a prefix meaning ‘upon’ or ‘over’, ousia – means ‘substance’. Epi, of course you’ll have come across before – Epi-demic is from epi and demos (as in democracy) – ‘Upon the people’ This over-substantial bread is not about material sustenance but it is the bread of the kingdom. Spiritual food for the new age. The bread of heaven.

Jesus in this prophetic role is ushering in the new kingdom, defined by its proximity to God. The Word has come near. God is suddenly familiar, a closeness that is capable of transforming God’s people and the world – As the Christian faith in the first centuries did exactly that converting and transforming the Middle East, Europe and North Africa.

People often think of God mainly as a distant, disapproving father. Doling out rewards and punishments or simply an absentee landlord of a wayward allotment. Perhaps a benevolent old pensioner but equally an impassive hard-faced judge. All these images make God far off, removed, hovering above.

The Lord’s prayer puts it differently. It describes God as being very near and very personal. It describes the immediacy of a new age, calling for a new sustenance, peaceable relationships, and a God who nurtures, comforts and protects rather than judging and going to war.

Christian prayer should be an effort to move through that far-off God, to discover a kindness and a meaning that is closer to us than we are to ourselves. It’s a kind of therapy to find love within ourselves. But even if God is very near he is still discovered in time. So prayer can also be thought of as a bridge between time and eternity: The attempt through stillness to reach beyond the slow moving seconds: To perceive the discontinuity between the world as it is and the world as it should be, and to find in that hope.

That’s why we shouldn’t get too worried about praying for the right thing – Thinking up worthy prayers. It’s better to pray for what we truly desire, whether it’s an hour more with the baby asleep, a little more cash to come in by the end of the week, that John will not forget our birthday and Susan will call; for James to get well; However self-motivated, this prayer is useful: Useful because it can often lead us to action in being part of God’s work. Useful in understanding ourselves in our limitations; And Godly in perceiving that gap between time and eternity. Sometimes as we are praying we will be able to let go of a foolish desire because we understand that it’s not God’s will. Sometimes as our Old Testament tells us, by our persistent bargaining with God we are let to perceive the mercy of God in a new way, Sometimes, the prayer will be answered in ways we might not expect.

But even when it seems futile and we’re praying for something far away and terrible, like famine in East Africa, peace in Ukraine, or even an honest prime minister, we are in our small ways finding a path to align our will with the will of God, which is the first steps on the path to the beatific vision.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                    In finishing, I thought we might hear George Herbert’s famous poem. It’s more condense than 95 pages of notes and in a litany of pithy phrases brings up different aspects of prayer – some which are quite surprising, but point to that meeting of time and eternity: or in Herbert’s phrase: ‘Heaven in ordinary’:

Prayer the church's banquet, angel's age, 
God's breath in man returning to his birth, 
The soul in paraphrase, heart in pilgrimage, 
The Christian plummet sounding heav'n and earth 
Engine against th' Almighty, sinner's tow'r, 
Reversed thunder, Christ-side-piercing spear, 
The six-days world transposing in an hour, 
A kind of tune, which all things hear and fear; 
Softness, and peace, and joy, and love, and bliss, 
Exalted manna, gladness of the best, 
Heaven in ordinary, man well drest, 
The milky way, the bird of Paradise, 
Church-bells beyond the stars heard, the soul's blood, 
The land of spices; something understood.

Amen.

Prayer I

Just imagine how annoyed you’d be if at a dinner party, after you’d cooked, cleared everything away, brought out the coffee and the after-8s, Jesus, to your sister who hasn’t moved all night, pipes up with, thank you Mary, for listening. Livid.

And that of course was also the Church’s official position. Contemplation over action. Joachim of Fiore famously drew a map of the New Jerusalem – entirely populated by monks. Secular clergy – parish priests – like your humble vicar – all domiciled beyond the walls. You lot – miles off. Thank goodness for Martin Luther.

Although when I’m old, and my family have abandoned me, I like the thought of retiring to a religious community. And when I say ‘religious community’ it would be silent and there would be a large library and central heating. And I would live out my days choosing the font of my unwritten magnum opus and sleeping in a comfortable chair. In the church it’s good to have ambition.

Mary is lauded over Martha – so symbolically prayer – sitting at the feet of Jesus – Is considered better than good works – activity. So I thought in the next couple of weeks, with Gospel stories considering the subject of prayer, we might think about how we pray. Something, traditionally, the British, even in churches, hate talking about. But – And I know this because people tell me – There are frequently asked questions – “what should I hope for?” “how should I go about it?” “when can I stop?” “do I need to close my eyes?”

You say prayer – and most people think of asking God for things. This is wrong really – intercession is only one form of prayer and not the most important, unless you’re falling out of a plane or a Tory leadership candidate, but let’s start there. I think the question most people have is ‘does it work?’ And if it works, ‘why doesn’t it work all the time?’

Now I have personally witnessed some very surprising turns of events, which I cannot account for except by exceedingly unlikely probability, or acts of grace. I have been told of countless more examples, many more striking. But equally I can think of countless situations where prayer has not been effective, and tragedy, suffering, death, calamity have advanced uncontested, where the God we strive to understand as good, powerful and active – has seemed shockingly absent. It’s too glib to come up with the speculative answers: “In suffering he knew how loved he was and was able to live with a courage no one would have suspected.”
“In death she brought back the family together, and the fundraising campaign will prevent others suffering as she did.”

One cannot tap, tap, tap the calculator to ascertain whether the good that has come from a time of trial is sufficient to justify it. Good does come from evil, often surprising, often later, often insufficient, but it’s fruitless and heartless to offer comfort with the claim that any suffering is for the greater good. “You don’t realise now, but actually…” On the other hand, for myself, I do try to continual keep in mind Cardinal Newman’s prayer: ‘If I am in sickness, my sickness may serve Him, in perplexity, my perplexity may serve Him. If I am in sorrow, my sorrow may serve Him.’

But prayer is about more than changing God’s mind. There’s a sense in which it’s an attempt to say at every moment, however haltingly, ‘thy will be done’. It is a gathering of our desire – our own and our community; It’s an attempt to reach out: In faith – that trust, which is so wanting in this world, but which we seek in God; In hope – that there is a reason – even if we cannot understand – that things may improve or at least find resolution; And ultimate hope: that injustice and horror will find meaning and resolution in eternity; In love – when we can do nothing else, we can pray. Prayer is always the final act of love for anyone, and an act which extends even beyond death in faith and hope.

I find very often I’m not praying for things to get better, but for peace; And that’s not asking God to draw alongside people. God is already there. It’s really asking for people to know that presence, and find comfort. In John’s Gospel the question is raised about why has Jesus healed the blind man. It’s not because Jesus has compassion, or that this man deserves it, But that the glory of God may be revealed. In prayer we are always seeking the glory of God.

St Paul tells us we should pray without ceasing. From this I take it that prayer is an attitude: It’s a bubbling over of our faith, hope and love in conversation with God; If anything is going to train us in faith, hope and love it is prayer. Prayer is the work of faithful, hopeful love, And whether some situation is actively transformed by prayer or not, we cannot cease from prayer while our faith, hope and love remains.

But we have to believe it matters. Christianity is either the most important thing in the world or a strange hobby – Then we of all people are most to be pitied. And with us all the apostles, martyrs and early church who died with prayers on their lips, not praying for themselves but for those who would follow them. Because prayer is an act of witness.

The second frequently asked question concerns how to pray. There are ever so many set prayers, written by the Church. In Covid the diocese issued at least one prayer every week, which I thought was indescribably annoying when there were so many things to do. That’s no doubt the Martha in me. Then there are those who hold that prayer should emerge spontaneously by the Spirit. Jesus himself teaches us to pray in a set way in the pattern of the Lord’s Prayer. He also commends the simple prayer of the publican – “God be merciful to me, a sinner” over the wordy prayers of the pharisee. The Lord’s Prayer – the Our Father – is the subject of next week’s Gospel but in it are all aspects of prayer. The Jesus prayer – adapted from the publican: “Lord Jesus, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner”, has been adopted in all churches. It’s frequently used as a sort of spiritual warm up, as a breathing exercise, as a focus of meditation for long periods of prayer. Some people prefer just a straight-forward conversation with God. Something to check periodically in prayer, though, is ‘are we talking when we should be listening?’.

But the other thing I’d say is that practicalities matter. Every now and then Rhiannon will come down and sit with the kids and tell me to go off for a run – knowing that running helps me. But this always throws me. Running is not something I can just start doing – It takes a degree of mental preparation – what to eat and when to eat, deciding a route, thinking about what I’m doing straight afterwards, do I know where my running watch is, will I have music? This sort of planning is very helpful in prayer. Decide how long you’re going to pray for and set an alarm – even if it’s 5 minutes. Then you won’t be distracted glancing at your watch. Stick to the time – like therapy it’s usually in the last few minutes God will pull your arm. Decide how you’re going to pray before you start and make sure you have everything you need. Go somewhere you won’t be disturbed or feel awkward. Prayer must be surrendered to. I remember my tutor at university encouraging me to let go, by reminding me that you submit a thesis. You have to submit to prayer.

I think Jesus praises Mary, because sitting at his feet is usually the more difficult thing to do. How many of you are writing shopping lists during the intercessions, Planning your diary during the sermon; We default to business, to filling the unforgiving minute with 60 seconds of distance run; When sometimes what is required is just to be still. So try it, And every time that distracting thought comes, that feeling this is a waste of time, the practical thought of something else to be done, remember Mary, and that the better part is to be at Jesus’ feet; to be still, and to listen. Amen.

Freedom

“Do not submit again to a yoke of slavery, for you were called to freedom”

About 10 years ago, now, I went to an unusual wedding of a friend. The bride at the tender age of 23 was marrying for the second time, while the groom, only a few years older, had just served two years in her majesty’s penitentiary. The highlight of the reception was the happy couple, who were both good singers, duetting Stephen Sondheim’s “The Madam Song”, also known by its frequent refrain “I never do anything twice”. Without wishing to offend any of our esteemed espoused, there is a popular sense in which both marriage and prison are seen as imposing limits on our natural God-given freedom. The “old ball and chain”, // we would be ill-advised to say.

And if you have had the curiosity to peruse the enormous volume of literature on finding and keeping a man: notable tomes such as The Rules, and He’s just not that into you, you will have come to realize that freedom is something that you need to convince your partner that he has, in order to maintain his interest, while you slowly, subtly steal it away. You may have also read The Game, which tells a man how to play a woman who is playing The Rules, that is to say how to keep his freedom and still achieve his goal. [If my reading on dating seems – well dated – that’s because my freedom was stolen a long time ago and now I find myself at the bottom of the food chain, somewhere between the dog and the hydrangeas.]

So for some freedom is the independence to pursue one’s own ends outside the burden of social ties.  Live and let live – It is FREEDOM FROM. Freedom from constraint. Jesus in today’s Gospel is almost like a beat poet out on the road: ‘Foxes have holes, and birds of the air have nests; but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head.’ As Paul Young sang – Wherever I lay my hat – that’s my home.

So is this Christian freedom? Leaving behind employment (Elisha’s plough, which Jesus mentions in the Gospel), family and material possessions; taking up the boho lifestyle, like a Gen-Z child, travelling to India with nothing but a pair of Ray-bans, a mobile phone and your credit card. This aversion to social ties chimes with freedom today. Fewer people belong to political parties, churches, social clubs; rates of marriage have been in rapid decline since 1973, we do have an increasing obsession with individual self-promotion, from reality television to the obsessive twitter of social media. Freedom has become a by-word for self-assertion.

But Jesus was not a beatnik in search of experience, Still less looking for his 15 minutes of fame – although the miracles should at least have gotten him through the preliminaries of Britain’s Got Talent.

But in today’s Gospel we heard that expression that Jesus’ “face was set towards Jerusalem.” This is Jesus’ freedom. Not in shrugging off relationships, All those gossipy myths about Mary Mags – Or Challenging the Law and Jewish authorities. It’s not a freedom from. Nor is it having 2.4 billion followers – as he does today – Or wealth to do as he pleases, for experiences or self-gratification. It’s not a freedom to.

It’s the freedom in being himself. Jesus is not free from anything. At no point does he cut himself off. He doesn’t say to hell with you. [He won’t let you down, he will not give you up. He just really loves to stick around Sorry, that’s George Michael, not the Gospel.]

But nor is he free to do anything. He doesn’t take up Satan with those temptations – Actually, quite specifically, he says not my will but thine. His freedom is simply in being the person he is meant to be; In following his call; In staying truthful to himself no matter what the world places on him. His face is always set towards Jerusalem.

So throughout his career he is kind, he teaches and works tirelessly, he lives for others but is undistracted from the person he knows himself to be, he bypasses the Samaritans because Jerusalem is his destiny; he is true to himself. He has freedom in himself.

So what does this say about our freedom? I read a story the other day about a policeman – he was American so he was in fact a “law-enforcer” – who was describing his work in confronting drug runners and people-traffickers. When he first began he had a principle that the shotgun always goes in first. You’re dealing with violent unpredictable people so you need to be armed and show them you mean business. At some point in his career, though, he changed his mindset, and instead of entering with guns blazing, he went in with the mindset of ‘going to a funeral’, with perfect calm. What he discovered was that when he entered people would remain calm and fully co-operate with him.

This follows the same principle as Jesus. There’s no element of compromise in the personality or job of the officer but he enters the situation of conflict with the mindset that the goal is already achieved – “in my mind”, he says, “the fight’s already won. You begin where you want it to end. That’s most of the battle.”

Still I’m sure it would help if there were fewer guns in America. Some rights, it seems, are inalienable.

Jesus begins at the end. His face is set towards Jerusalem. He knows what he is about. So if we begin at the end, with where we want to be, we may find the strength to transform our lives as we choose – rather than simply reacting to the world as it is forced upon us.

Or to look at it another way – Think about where you are now – whether you’re 29, 50 or 91. If you had to explain to your 8-year-old self what their life is going to look like, would it inspire them? Would you be proud to tell them? Or if you had to meet your 92-year-old self would they tell you now to change your ways, to stop wasting your precious time?

Or let’s take an even greater challenge. if we can have a little faith – And imagine our ultimate end is with God, Then are we acting as if that’s the case? Does our belief that God is love, produce in us the work of love? Do we act as though we and our neighbours are made in the image of God? Is our face set to Jerusalem? Or are we just bobbing about, washed this way and that, by the changing patterns of this world and the people around us? There is probably nothing more difficult in this world than being yourself. It takes courage – [and good Godparents.]

But [Bertie,] I just want you to believe that there’s a little bit more glory in this world, than viruses, slippery politicians, and the fickle temerity of the England batting line-up.

So freedom. I recently rewatched an episode of Ally McBeal. You might remember the male lead Billy, who spent most of the show staring into mirrors, the television method for demonstrating a character being introspective. I often find myself staring into mirrors – particular when I have major decisions – but the trick is to be able to look beyond the mirror and see not the person you are; but the person you want to become.

That is freedom and freedom is a Christian virtue. It’s not confined by the people around us, even by marriage or prison! That freedom can be much more limited by our unencumbered ‘freedoms from’; And our entitled ‘freedoms to’.

Freedom lies in being ourselves, which means seeing ourselves as we are and imagining who we might be, who we want to be – It means starting from the end, “setting our face towards Jerusalem”, in not being overwhelmed by circumstance, pushed and pulled by the pressures of modern life; but taking the time to choose who we are and who we will be. So let’s hope the England team is currently visualising themselves as victors, and let us pursue our own victories, with Christ, setting our faces towards Jerusalem. Amen.

St Margaret's Day 2022

St Margaret’s – This Place. And today – St Margaret’s Day. What’s it all about? St Margaret? Let’s be honest – we have very little information about her. She is practically mythical. It’s quite unlikely she was actually eaten by a dragon. And actually there’s quite a lot of prejudice against dragons in the third and fourth centuries, and little evidence of their wrong-doing. We can blame incendiary writers of the twentieth century, like JRR Tolkien for the negative press they’ve received and the hate-speech directed at them by so-called virgins.

Also, no one’s quite sure why this church is dedicated to St Margaret. The best guess is that she’s named after the daughter of the Lord of the Manor, which seems shaky ground for a dedication – Perhaps we should have been named after the dragon but sadly he was martyred by Margaret’s contemporary St George. History after all is written by the victors.

But – do you know – I do like to remember Margaret. Because she was an ordinary girl and even if we know next to nothing about her, Like most great religious persecutions and genocides, we know nothing of the individual lives of the victims, just as we know nothing about the tens of thousands killed this year in Ukraine. History focuses on big figures – prime ministers, presidents, And numbers with at least four zeros after them.

The church, on the other hand, very often remembers people with little consequence and little influence. Margaret is an every-women. Her reward was in heaven not earth. We remember with Margaret, all those lives that matter a great deal to us in this place. John Marston, John Tholstrup, Roger Power and Joyce Brooks, Ann Fell, Jack Miller and Jean Brooker, Delphine Power, Christopher Trott, Elizabeth Miller, Alan Fell, Ralph Bonnett and Elizabeth Worth. These are all familiar names, bright lives seen each week that have fallen since my arrival. There may be many more on your minds.

Although I’ve been ordained 13 years now, I had not before realised what worry you carry as a vicar for those in your care; I promised Humphrey I would repair the railings before he died – That is achieved and I’m very glad he looks as well now as when I arrived. Andrew has always said he advocated my appointment with the person in mind that he would want to take his funeral; I would much rather depart to my next and a third post before such an event could occur. But the business of a parish church is to witness and remember these shifts in the lives of a community.

On Friday I took a funeral, the ninth this year, yesterday we said prayers for the mother of a member of our church on her anniversary of death, then celebrated a lovely wedding, where the mother of the groom had collected photos from 5 weddings of her family here, including one in the early 50s where she had been a bridesmaid at St Margaret’s, in the snow, with a great tree to the right of the church as the halls had not yet been built. There will be two more baptisms and a thanksgiving for baptism in this church in the next month, another joyful wedding, and a memorial service. It’s strange to think on these movements, the inevitable circling of time through seasons, The times and movements of dancing and love, of birth and recreation, of loss and grief.

The anthem to be sung at the beginning of the 10am service is one of my favourites: Locus Iste by Bruckner. Locus Iste – this place. This place, St Margaret’s, where lives pass through and have this enchantment. Where sacraments are celebrated – The Word made flesh, our spiritual food and drink, Marriages, baptisms, Celebrations of live and love, of hope and faithfulness, And of life passing on. And in that moment seeking that which we believe endures: Faith, hope and love.

This place that has seen these movement over nearly 150 years. In the shadow of the growing trees, The walking of dogs along the lane, The playing of children in the garden. It’s a vanity to think you’re doing anything new in a church; Because time in churches is measured with the steady patience of the grandfather clock. This place has seen all this before. It will ride out the joy and excitement; It will wait out the fear and trembling.

In the pandemic it was very a la mode to say that the church is the people. This was quite convenient when no one’s allowed in the building. And it’s true – it’s the people here that matter. But actually in this shifting landscape of births, marriages, deaths, this building, this place, matters and connects us with former generations and generations to come. We will come and go but this place will endure.

The temptation, then, is that we make this place as unchanging as possible. Because it’s nice when it feels like everything’s changing to have something solid. But this place has changed with its people. In the 20s the building doubled in size. In the 40s we caught a little of a nearby bomb and had to replace the glass in the windows. In the 60s they built the halls. In the 90s when John Marston was churchwarden they got rid of one organ and brought in this one. 10 years ago this kitchen was built. 

On the Berlin Wall was written: Whoever wishes the world remain as it is, does not wish it remains. Change is an inevitable facet of our world, and our business is to make the changes that meet the needs of our time. But a building is there to serve the people, and we are blessed to have wonderful people with great hearts, a lively faith and soul. So as the shifting generations carry us through the seasons of life, let us come together in this place; Let us remember those who have passed on with St Margaret; And in this place, which has blessed us and continues to bless us with its quiet holiness, in faith, hope and love, we worship the God who is still and still moving, Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Amen.