A bruising news week

 6/10/24                                 St Peter’s                         Trinity 19

Hebrews 1:1-4                                                      Mark 10:13-16

A bruising news week. - War spreading, floods, drought and famine underlining climate change, the anniversary tomorrow of the horrors of the Hamas attack on Israel. In the face of all this it might seem to some that our faith and worship are simple escapism. 

But it is not so. It is true that church is a place where we should be able to find consolation, but this consolation is not fraudulent, not wishful thinking; it is real because God walked this earth as one of us, human, incarnate and he came not as a sightseer but to offer us a different way of living - to give hope in the present and then to join beyond now to the kingdom of God. When we come to worship it is because our good God calls us to follow him and so help create his kingdom of peace and reconciliation.

It is an act of faith because a world that gives us such terrible headlines also asks us questions to which we cannot give a full answer.

In one of his sermons Austin Farrer - a philosopher friend of  C. S. Lewis - said ‘...we do not comprehend the world, and we are not going to. It is, and it remains for us, a confused mystery of bright and dark. God does not give us explanations; He gives us a Son.’ 

Which is a good place to start looking at our readings.

Part of clergy training is to be exposed to an argumentative hubbub of saints, theologians  and teachers - which of them can you trust? A couple of clergy friends developed a question to decide whether a particular approach rang true for them ‘Does St. Augustine, Martin Luther or the Venerable Bede - whoever they had been given to read - strike us as the sort of person we would we be happy to use as a baby sitter for the kids?’ Which has always struck me as a pretty insightful rule of thumb.

In our gospel Jesus passes the babysitter test with flying colours. Not only were parents actively bringing their children to him, but when the disciples spoke sternly to them order to discourage them Jesus was indignant - and scooped the nearest child up. The disciples must have thought that Jesus would have no time for women and children. They were wrong.

Lets add in the Hebrews reading. Here the writer says, ‘The Son is the radiance of God’s glory and the exact imprint of his very being.’  Which means at the very least that when we see Jesus we see what God is really like. And it turns out in the gospel that what our God is really like is someone who has more time for children than for standing on his dignity

If we think of God as distant from us, judgmental, trying to catch us out, we get him wrong. He has an open door. Jesus regularly objects when people set themselves up as God’s gatekeepers. The disciples were putting a barrier between Jesus and the parents and children trying to see him. He would have none of it. It was the same when they tried to shoo away the irritating man who was lame, or the crooked tax collector who wanted to change his life, or the crowd who had come out to hear him and were hungry, or the lepers or the lonely or the bereaved. Jesus went to places and spoke to people who were beyond the pale. He went to the places and people we might abandon - but God won’t.  

Jesus is the reflection of God’s glory and the exact imprint of God’s very being - do we want to know what God is like? Look at Jesus. Look at Jesus teaching, Look at him suffering, look at him with the young children, look at him indignant with the disciples - In all of these he is the exact imprint of the father. Approachable, loving, forgiving, merciful - when you look at Jesus you see the grace of God wearing a recognisably human face - grace, mercy, peace are not abstract qualities - they are what Jesus looks like.

Look at the cross we see Jesus, we see his suffering but we see the Father’s suffering too. If we think of a God who is far off, who is living cosseted in heaven, whilst Jesus decides to take us up as his own particular project - we are very wrong. The Father and the Son are one.

If we think that on the cross Jesus bought off an angry, grudging vengeful father we are quite mistaken. The father and the son are one. The way Jesus walked was the only way they could see to bring change to the world.

Our world does not look like the kingdom of God; indeed it looks antagonistic to it.  Jesus so loved us that he came to a world that would never by itself see things the way he does in order to show us a better way to live. Despite everything we do to each other, despite the way we treat his creation  he loved us enough to die for us.

He welcomes us and asks us to join him as people of the kingdom who will represent his way of living in a world predisposed to selfishness, greed and violence. This is why our worship is not escapism  - we can’t change everything but we can affect where we are - we can show something of the love of God to our neighbours. He doesn’t promise us that it will be plain sailing but he does promise to walk with us.

Austin Farrer said that God does not give us explanations of how the world is rather he sent us a son. St Anselm said ‘I believe in order that I understand’ that is if we believe the Son - which means following him - we will be lead into a greater understanding of how God’s world works best. 

 

When people met Jesus they met God and they found him approachable, welcoming, true, compassionate joyful  and just - being utterly God meant that he could be utterly human - this is who we come to at communion. It is also the way of life of his kingdom that we are called to take on as we leave our worship and go outside. If we do we can help change the world - or at least our little bit of it.

Home is where the heart is - John 6:51-58

18/8/18                                 St Peter’s                         Trinity 12

Ephesians 5:15-20                                                   John 6:51-58

In the first verse of our gospel reading Jesus says, ‘I am the living bread that came down from heaven. Whoever eats of this bread will live for ever; and the bread that I will give for the life of the world is my flesh.’

This verse is about Holy Communion - or more accurately h/c is about this verse. What the service does is point us to truths about Jesus and why he came. Now - and I’m speaking for myself here - in something we do each week can become routine but however familiar the eucharist seems there are depths to it that we will never plumb. So this sermon, for me as much as anyone else is a reminder.   

But first a short excursion

30 odd years ago - Hilary and I went out for a meal to a restaurant in Selly Oak - Birmingham. It was South American, probably Chilean, perhaps called Los Andes - whatever - a friend who knew about these things said it had been set up by an emigre family because the regime had made  Chile unsafe for them, so they had come to make their home in this far country.

It felt like a family business - the staff and the other customers all knew each other, it was a focal point for the other exiles who had ended up in Birmingham - somewhere they could come to eat which reminded them of home. The grown ups talked and ate, the children messed around, had their own conversations, dived under the table to play round the legs of grown ups, somebody had a guitar and played and sang  - it was as close to home as they could get in a far country. A different culture from ours, but our meal was different because of what their meal meant to them.

Back from Selly Oak to the sermon. 700 years ago a German theologian wrote ‘God is at home. We are in the far country’  ie where God is is our true home and we are not there - we live in a far country 

What we have in common with those Chileans is that we too are in exile and our family meal to remind us of home is the eucharist.

So three nudges to our thinking  - past, present and future though not in that order.  

 

a) The past - The Chileans were remembering their homeland - the country that nourished them, that gave them life -  a place where people talked the same language, where they’d grown up, where there ideas of what really mattered were formed. The food the songs the atmosphere all revived those memories. 

How does this reminder of having been nourished work in our communion service?

Look at our gospel, Jesus reminds his hearers that God gave Manna in the wilderness, this chapter starts with the feeding of the 5000. 

  Jesus says ‘I am the living bread that came down from heaven.’ 

This is a long time ago, but God has nourished us too. We don’t have the same memories of our true homeland (the place where God is)  as the Chileans but we can sometimes get hints of it.

We bear the image of God so there are some things stamped into us that speak of him - we can ignore them, distort them but even so we have been created with a capacity for the eternal and sometimes we come into contact with it - it will be different for each of us  - God has infinite variety - but think of the times when we realise that more is going on in life than we can explain in purely human terms.

At a birth, at a death sometimes we feel the touch of the transcendent - and feel more fully human because of it - the same can be true at less obviously significant times - a piece of music, a landscape, a meal with friends - a sense of something being fitting, a sense of receiving a grace beyond our understanding. We may not be residents of heaven yet but we get enough of a glimpse of it to know that it’s our true homeland.

There is a bitter edge to this. The Chileans had to leave their home so they could be safe. For us the far country we find ourselves in is - to borrow a government phrase - a hostile environment for living in the way that God intended us to, we can’t blame others we have helped create it through negligence, through weakness through our own deliberate fault. 

It is because we needed rescue that Jesus the living bread left the place where he was at home to join us in the far country. He loved us enough, wanted our company enough to choose to share our exile. 

b) The next nudge to our thinking is about the future, about returning home. For the Chileans this would have been an ever present but uncertain hope. If the government changed then some of them  might have gone back home, for others even a change of regime wouldn’t have helped, and others again might have been too long away, might have made too many connections in this far country to think of leaving, might have ended up not quite at home wherever they were.

We have a better hope - the next phrase in the opening verse of our gospel reading is ‘Whoever eats of this bread will live for ever’.

Currently we get by on hints of what our true homeland is like - we see through a glass darkly - but it will not always be so - the eucharist is the foreshadowing of the great heavenly feast - when we try and imagine something utterly beyond our ken we have to rely on familiar images - like feast - knowing that they can’t be utterly  accurate but trusting that God’s reality is better than our imagining - just as we know that the love we celebrate at the Communion table is more than we can properly understand. There’s a passage from St Augustine that I’ve almost certainly quoted before that I find helps to put flesh on the bones of my hope. 

‘Let us sing alleluia here on earth, while we still live in anxiety , so that we may sing it one day in heaven in full security... We shall have no enemies in heaven, we shall never lose a friend. God’s praises are sung both here and there, but here they are sung in anxiety there in security; here they are sung by those destined to die; there by those destined to live forever; here they are sung in hope , there in hope’s fulfillment; here, they are sung by wayfarers; there, by those living in their own country. So then let us sing now, not in order to enjoy a life of leisure, but in order to lighten our labours. You should sing as wayfarers do - sing, but continue your journey ...sing then, but keep going.’

c) how do we live now in the light of our communion service? At the end of their meal those Chileans went out better able to be their Chilean selves in because they had had a true taste of home. For them Los Andes had become a place where Chile happened - and to a lesser extent for us too - so that more than 30 years I’ve forgotten the food, even how many of us were in our party but I still remember the atmosphere. 

The Eucharist should be a place where God happens - it should give us a taste of our true homeland so we will go out into the hostile environment  accompanied by Jesus better equipped to live well.

But how? God is not at our beck and call to give us a religious experience as and when we want. What can we do so that the eucharist will have the true flavour of our heavenly home?

This far country created through negligence, weakness and our own deliberate fault, is a hostile environment for the kingdom of God - is a place where different values obtain - welcome is weakness, mercy is folly - the attributes held up as virtues - charity begins at home, you have to look after number one, you can measure the value of someone’s life by the money they’ve made - are not those of the kingdom of God. 

In sending his son the Father makes it clear that he is not content to leave our world as the far country, he wants it to bear the stamp of his presence  And Jesus calls us to help in his work. How should we live?

 Sam quoted Paul’s list of the fruit of the Spirit last week - it does no harm to hear it again  the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. There is no law against such things.

So we have a pattern, we have resources - the eucharist comes to us like a food parcel from home - reminding us of what matters and equipping us to take part in his work. We have the Spirit of God to accompany us

Someone once said ‘Man is broken , He lives by mending, The grace of God is the glue.’ The way we live, the way we meet others can be 

part of the mending

What was going on in the restaurant was in its way God’s mending. A homesick people were given a true taste of their home country so that at the end of the evening they would go home that little bit more their proper selves - and this is what the eucharist should do. This should be a place where God happens.

For Christians, to share in the Eucharist, the Holy Communion, means to live as people who know that they are always guests - that they have been welcomed, and that they are wanted. It is, perhaps, the most simple thing we can say about Holy Communion, yet it is still supremely worth saying. In Holy Communion, Jesus Christ tells us that He wants our company.

One final thought - the overwhelming thing I took from that meal at Los Andes was that, in spite of the difficulties of living in a far country,  there was an exuberance to their living - and that’s very attractive.

After the Emmaus road

 14/4/24                                St Peter’s                             Easter 3

Acts 3:12-19                                                         Luke 24:36-48

    

When I looked at the gospel passage what struck me most was how determined Jesus was to make it crystal clear that the resurrection is a physical, bodily event,  Look at my hands and my feet. It is I myself! Touch me and see; a ghost does not have flesh and bones, as you see I have.” 

But why- there he is with them - they can see him - what’s the problem? 

But put yourself in their place

About a week ago they had followed Jesus  as he rode into Jerusalem on a donkey. They hadn’t been sure what to expect  but they had been met by a cheering crowd - it had been a triumph. 

But just few days later everything fell apart in the worst possible way-Jesus - the focus of their life for the last two or three years was betrayed by a friend then brutally executed after  a mockery of a trial. 

The disciples were left with grief, shame, and despair for the loss of what might have been.

Our reading takes place three days after the crucifixion. When they woke that morning they hadn’t begun to come to terms with what the death of Jesus might mean for them. How could they remake their world? What was left for them.

But our reading isn’t about the morning but the evening, and it’s  the evening of the day of resurrection and into that terror and confusion an impossible hope is beginning to insinuate itself. 

Stories are beginning to accumulate - Mary and the other women who went to the tomb at dawn say Jesus met them there, Simon and John hurried after them and they met him too- the disciples are still digesting this when the Cleopasses arrive back from Emmaus.

and they found the eleven and their companions gathered together. They were saying, ‘The Lord has risen indeed, and he has appeared to Simon!’ Then they told what had happened on the road, and how he had been made known to them in the breaking of the bread.

Jesus is making himself known to people and then disappearing

Still frightening, still confusing but somehow, hope has begun to intrude. 

While they were still talking about this, Jesus himself stood among them and said to them, “Peace be with you.” They were startled and frightened, thinking they saw a ghost

But Jesus is not a ghost. A ghost is a dead person and Jesus is not a dead person, and that is what he spends this time demonstrating to them. Death has not tamed, has not captured the God of life. God does not give death the last word. Jesus is not an apparition, he is flesh and blood, recognisably the person with whom they shared the last three years; whatever has happened to Jesus he is still the same Jesus they knew.

Jesus shows them the nature of resurrection life and then opens their minds to understand the scriptures - to show that what they see is not an aberration - it isn’t God making the best of  an awful mistake - instead this is how God’s forgiveness is opened to us. The resurrected Jesus is both the guarantee and demonstration of God’s reconciling plan.

But first he has to deal with infinite human capacity to try and domesticate God, we feel more secure with  laws than grace, with guarantees than trust, and so try to fit him into a framework we can understand ‘they thought that they were seeing a ghost’ - they had heard stories about ghosts -perhaps they were true after all -

Jesus won’t have any of it -‘look at the scars, touch me, give me some fish’  

Whatever they’d heard about ghosts didn’t include being invited to prod them or seeing them deal with that bit of fish that Andrew had caught and Matthew had cooked but that nobody in the end had felt like eating. 

None of this was what they expected ghosts to do, on the other hand they had seen Jesus eat fish lots of times. The Jesus who has joined them is solid enough to have tweaked James’s nose if he’d wanted to.

Jesus standing among them in the fulness of resurrection does not  conform to our understanding of death - somehow he is much more playful than we expect.

In a few minutes we’ll say  ‘On the third day Jesus rose again in accordance with the Scriptures;’ and at the very end of the creed when we talk about our future ‘We look for the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come.’ 

This resurrection, which is our our hope because this is our resurrection too,  is not tame - it’s inconvenient because it doesn’t sit well with the Spirit of the age - which often tries to deny death’s realities - it’s monstrous, because it goes beyond our understanding, taking us into areas where we proceed by faith and not by sight -  it’s unnerving because we know the strength of our faith wobbles, we continually fall short of our aspirations let alone Jesus’s but our resurrection hope has been demonstrated by the most trustworthy pioneer that we could have, who knows us and our frailties better than we know ourselves.

People have produced flimsy alternatives to resurrection hope but they don’t ring true.. 

A few years ago Disney made a film - Coco - based around the Mexican Day of the Dead. The film’s central conceit is that the dead have a kind of limbo life so long as they are remembered by those who love them. 

Some try ignoring death Woody Allen said ‘“I don't want to achieve immortality through my work; I want to achieve immortality through not dying. I don't want to live on in the hearts of my countrymen; I want to live on in my apartment.” 

Both these ideas fall well short of what Jesus did for us by his life, death, resurrection and ascension.

The resurrection hope - it isn’t comfortable, and it doesn’t feel safe because just as for Jesus there was no way to his resurrection  except through dying,  so too that is true for us. 

What we are offered in Christ isn’t an escape from death - bad luck Woody Allen - rather it is the denial that death has the last word. And after all that is how Jesus came to his resurrection - through the death he genuinely died.

In “The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe’ Mr Beaver talks about Aslan  - Safe?” said Mr Beaver ..."Who said anything about safe? 'Course he isn't safe. But he's good.’We are being asked to put our trust not on a safe bet but in the son of God, who is good and true. 

Resurrection is fulfilled on the other side of the grave but it begins now. It is the good news at the heart of the kingdom of God - though things may be bleak now they will be set right. How do we live in that hope? It sounds very simple, but takes every part of us - Love God, with all your heart mind and strength, love your neighbour as yourself, do unto others as you would have them do to you - but we are accompanied by the risen Jesus.

Listen to St Augustine

‘Let us sing alleluia here on earth, while we still live in anxiety , so that we may sing it one day in heaven in full security... We shall have no enemies in heaven, we shall never lose a friend. 

God’s praises are sung both here and there, but here they are sung in anxiety there in security; here they are sung by those destined to die; there by those destined to live forever; here they are sung in hope , there in hope’s fulfilment; 

here, they are sung by wayfarers; there, by those living in their own country. 

So then let us sing now, not in order to enjoy a life of leisure, but in order to lighten our labours. You should sing as wayfarers do - sing, but continue your journey ...sing then, but keep going.’

Passion Sunday sermon

 17/3/24.   (Passion Sunday)          St Peter’s Birkdale                Holy Communion

Jeremiah 31:31-34                                                John 12:20-33

Imagine yourself in Jerusalem at the time of the gospel. You are one of Jesus followers - not one of the inner circle, you don’t know Jesus especially well - not like the twelve who were always with him - you might only have talked to him a few times - one to one - but those times you’ve had his full attention have changed you, he’d seen the truth of who you are now, but that was OK because he also saw the truth of who you could become and in company with him that change no longer seemed impossible.

Something you heard Peter say once, ‘Who else could we follow, Lord? You are the one who has the words of life.’ And you can say yes to that - it’s what talking to him felt like. And you’ve seen his words of life in action,  you were there when he raised Lazarus from the dead - you still find it hard to believe your eyes. Not that it made Jesus popular with the religious authorities - he’d never been flavour of the month, but raising Lazarus turned  the heat up a notch.   

some went to the Pharisees and told them what Jesus had done. Then the chief priests and the Pharisees called a meeting of the Sanhedrin. “What are we accomplishing?” they asked. “Here is this man performing many signs. If we let him go on like this, everyone will believe in him, and then the Romans will come and take away both our temple and our nation.”

Caiaphas, who was high priest that year, spoke up, “You know nothing at all!  You do not realise that it is better for you that one man die for the people than that the whole nation perish.” So from that day on they plotted to take his life.

Therefore Jesus no longer moved about publicly among the people of Judea. Instead he withdrew to a region near the wilderness, to a village called Ephraim, where he stayed with his disciples.

The chief priests and the Pharisees had given orders that anyone who found out where Jesus was should report it so that they might arrest him.

Jesus was in danger - and he was dangerous to know - the closer he and his followers came to Jerusalem the tenser the atmosphere. If the disciples had said to Jesus, ‘When we celebrate Passover this year could you try and blend in’ - it would have been hard to blame them 

But that was never his way, even so when he started to make arrangements to ride in on a donkey  as publicly as possible in a way that unmistakably fulfilled prophecy,  their hearts must have sunk. As his follower your heart sinks too. There is danger and there is dancing in the dragon’s jaws. Is he going to drag you down with him. 

But … Jesus rides in, the crowds roar for him and then …. nothing happens.

The disciples must have been on a high ‘Coming in to Jerusalem like that wasn’t so crazy after all, He must have known this would get the people on his side, the temple authorities have had the wind taken out of their sails.’ Relief.

We know things that they didn’t know. We know Jesus has set his face on the path that will lead him to the cross, the disciples don’t. 

Inevitably we see everything from Palm Sunday onwards as Jesus’ end game- they didn’t. 

So when Philip and Andrew go to Jesus about some Greeks who want to see him it feels like getting back to normal. Until what Jesus says points in exactly the direction they had hoped to avoid.

First he says, “The hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified.’ In John’s gospel  talk of glory is talk about the utterly human Jesus displaying the utter fullness of God’s presence - Look at him, this is God in the flesh  - But then Jesus says , unless a kernel of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains only a single seed. But if it dies, it produces many seeds. 

 It’s an image that’s easy to map Jesus’s future onto. Jesus, God the Son, is here to work the possibility of mercy into the fabric of human life and the only way that can happen is through his death. In purely human terms what did it cost him to walk this path for our reconciliation? At least as much as it would cost anyone else. The coldblooded courage he shows required just as much from him as it would from us. He had no exemption from fear and pain.

 But Jesus is talking about more than what is going to happen to him He is speaking of the pattern of life for his people ‘Whoever serves me must follow me, and where I am, there will my servant be also. Whoever serves me, the Father will honour’  What do these words mean for us?

As followers of Christ this is a pattern we attach ourselves to - the seed must die. We know where that took Jesus but for the vast majority of us following him doesn’t mean martyrdom, it doesn’t even mean as I rather expected when I was younger that God’s will for me would be to force me to do the thing I least want to do. It’s hard to look at Jesus and his friendships, the way he dealt with people and believe he valued misery for it’s own sake.

What following Jesus should do is shift our priorities, our ultimate loyalty. At the very least the seed going into the ground so it can bear fruit means my recognising that my life is not all about me.

We are all called to follow Jesus - but  our call does not come in a vacuum. 

It is in the middle of our own actual not theoretical lives, in the midst of its real possibilities, responsibilities and challenges that we each have to work out how to best play the cards we have been dealt in the service of his kingdom of justice and reconciliation.

We are not called to be self denying for the sake of it, not called to a one size fits all pattern, however onerous or virtuous. We are called to bring all that we know of who we are to all that we know of God, which will not always be easy. If we do it with integrity sometimes it will feel like a wrestling match.

And so we wrestle...In the preface to ‘The Splash of Words’ Mark Oakley writes about scripture in a way that can be expanded to include our whole relationship with God. ‘To take the bible seriously does not mean shrinking it into your own particular system of thinking about God, others and yourself. To take the bible really seriously means engaging with the variety of its texts, its history, the cultural, interpretative and ethical questions that need addressing, as well as the similar questions they ask of us. It is to invite the comfort and the unease of their inspiration, artistry, open-endedness and teasing of human pride. We mustn’t close down the conversation with texts. We spend a lot of time asking whether the bible is ‘true’ and miss the fact that the biblical texts are often asking us ‘Are you true?’ This is the real question that readers of the bible should face - others are a distraction -’

The trouble with a question like ‘Am I true?’ is that whilst it’s obviously important it’s hard to be quite sure what it means 

On Friday’s Thought for the Day Richard Harries gave a hint of an answer. He talked of being being shaped by the assumptions and prejudices that were part and parcel of the culture he was born into, some of which he now sees as clearly wrong and he wondered how many of those prejudices were still swirling around in society, indeed how many of them were still lodged in his own understandings. 

Being true means learning to recognise and confront some of the evasions and self-deceits by which we usually live our lives. It’s part of the work of Lent but not a work we do alone Jeremiah speaks of God’s help

“I will put my law in their minds

    and write it on their hearts.

I will be their God,

    and they will be my people.

The reward is that the more we can lose of the baggage that skews our understanding of ourselves and the world around us the closer companionship we can have with Jesus as we walk in his way.

Books to be read during Lent

 A Lenten Interlude - which will largely be about the books I’m reading as a discipline - though discipline is not quite the right word.

The books I have read have always been a piecemeal selection and there are many glaring omissions. Since 2004 I’ve been using Lent to fill some of those gaps.

Some books are obviously christian, but the majority are there because I felt I should have read them, or need to read them again. Some have been hard work, others a complete delight e.g. To Kill a Mockingbird, which was in the first clutch of books chosen and one of the reasons it seemed a good practise to continue.

I’ve decided to put this interlude into a blog for two reasons a) one of this year’s books -  a reread of Bird by Bird - suggests writing regularly and this seems a good way to enforce it, and b) I hope it will encourage attentiveness to what I’m reading  

This year’s books are:

Demon Copperhead - Barbara Kingsolver√

Small Island - Andrea Levy√

Tesserae - Denise Levertov√

Bird by bird - Anne Lamott

Magisteria - Nicholas Spencer√

With a subs bench of

Light Perpetual - Francis Spufford

The Underground Railway - Colson Whitehead

Christian Wiman - The Long Home√

Getting Better - Michael Rosen

A memoir of my former self - Hilary Mantel

This is the story of a happy marriage - Anne Patchett

Killing the Black Dog - Les Murray√