Sermon St. Peter's Birkdale - 16/10/22

 16/10/22               St Peter’s, Birkdale.              Trinity 18                      

Jeremiah 31:27-34      Holy Communion           Luke 18:1-8         

There are three parts to this sermon.

The first is a reading from St. Augustine who is realistic about what our life is, hopeful about what it will be and reminds us of our calling as the people of God. The second part is two linked stories about Russian composers that I found in the programme notes of a concert Hilary and I went to in Buxton - it exemplifies the human problem and then eventually in the third part we’ll look at the passage from Jeremiah and tenuously connect it to the 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.’

This was part of a sermon by St Augustine and it has a lovely balance between the life we live now and our future hope.

He is realistic about our life  - we are anxious, there may be enemies, we lose friends, in this world we are wayfarers rather than permanent residents.

He is reassuringly plain speaking about our hope in God - our hope is in heaven where there is security, no-one is an enemy, we will never lose a friend - there is eternal life - we are no longer wayfarers but those living in their own country.

He ends with a reminder that for now we have a task 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.’

Now the Russian composers.. The first is Borodin - who was a very gifted composer  but he was also a very gifted chemist and a doctor - and though now he is remembered for his music - what he was proudest of was establishing a school of medicine for women and this was the late 19th Century. Much to the irritation of his composer colleagues music was only part of his life. He began working on an opera Prince Igor - but the usual distractions meant progress was very slow.

Then catastrophe - eighteen years after he had started work on it  - Borodin died suddenly with Prince Igor nothing like finished. But his friends did not abandon him or his work and  Rimsky-Korsakov and Glazunov, began the hugely unenviable task of sifting through his belongings and dealing with the score of Prince Igor. As Rimsky-Korsakov later wrote ‘Glazunov ... was to fill in all the gaps in Act III and write down from memory the Overture played so often by the composer, while I was to orchestrate, finish composing, and systematise all the rest that had been left …’ The work was finished and is still performed.

Glazunov - was the hero of the hour - painstakingly assembling the bits of manuscript, then finishing it as truly as possible to Borodin’s intentions. What real friendship and selflessness that took. What Glazunov gave to Borodin was the best of himself.

The second composer is Rachmaninov and his 1st symphony. It was written early in his career -  when he was known as pianist and conductor rather than a composer. Its premiere was a a total disaster. Rachmaninov was very unlucky in his conductor. It was a difficult work anyway but it had been under-rehearsed and for the performance itself reports suggest the strong likelihood that the conductor was drunk. Unsurprisingly it had a wretched reception and it put Rachmaninov off symphonies for almost ten years  Poor man - his career blighted by a conductor.

As I said these are linked stories and the link is that Rachmaninov’s  conductor was the same Glazunov who so helped Borodin -for one he was the hero but for the other he was the villain.What he gave Rachmaninov was a long way short of his best.

How can this be?  How can the same person be a hero and a villain, a success and a failure , a saint and a sinner?

The better we know ourselves the less surprised we will be - because this is us too. This is what we are like  - we see it dramatically here but we are made of the same ingredients.

The good - the glorious, the made in the image of God - that’s in us but so too is the bad, the bit which gets things wrong sometimes accidentally, but sometimes quite deliberately and knowingly, the bit that  is selfish, mean and uncaring.

All of us have both these sides tugging at us the whole time - sometimes we’re more aware of the one than the other but they’re both there.

It’s how we deal with this tussle that shapes how we live. How do we make sure that the good - the made in God’s image predominates, and the bad, the fallen is subdued.

Of course this is not a new concern - Glazunov’s behaviour would have been no surprise to Jeremiah

In the reading he knows the mess that God’s people have made - their behaviour has exiled them from the promised land and brought them to slavery in Babylon - but he knows God is not washing his hands of them  he writes in effect ‘You get things wrong, You have a bias that pulls you away from what is good and towards what is bad. How can you make a better fist of living? God says ‘I’m going to do something different, to make a new deal with you, I will put my law within you, I will write on your hearts and I will be your God - I will forgive your iniquity and remember your sin no more.’  Here is hope in Jeremiah for Judah and for us. Forgiveness - because however much we try we still get things wrong - and a new heart alert to the things of God.

What does it mean that God will write his law on our hearts?

It can’t be just a more sensitive conscience to heighten our sense of guilt and failure when we get things wrong - that very rarely improves us. 

What are the laws that he wants us to have on our hearts - very simply the two great laws “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind. And , love your neighbour as yourself

God wants a people  who don’t just know his laws, he wants people who know him.  A heart with a greater responsiveness to God, a heart which naturally warms to him and his ways.  

Easy to say God writes his laws on our heart - how do we learn to respond

Having touched on Russian composers, we are finishing with a Russian bishop. Metropolitan Anthony Bloom suggested this - when you read scripture look out for those passages that suddenly strike you and you say ‘ How beautiful, how true’ - it may be something vast, or it may be something very small - take that beauty that struck you - turn it around in your head, reflect on it, live with it 

‘That will allow us to start on our struggle for integrity and wholeness, not by any ineffectual effort to reject or to heal what is wrong in us, but by watching over with joy, with tenderness, with a sense of reverence, something which is of God in us: visible, a light that pierces the darkness, and which is God himself’ (Encounter p.285)

Dwell on those things of God that gives you joy - love, truth, a parable, a saying -whatever it is - let them grow and bit by bit they can provide a touchstone of what is good - and the more attentive you are to them, to that which bears the stamp of God, the more natural it will be to live out of that part of you - so that you will be able to give the best of yourself to the people around you.

Love God, love our neighbour. These are the laws of God’s Kingdom. Learning to live by them is the labour that builds the kingdom of God. These are the laws God writes on our heart. This is what Augustine is talking about when he says 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.’

Sermon 18/9/22

 18/09/22                        1 Tim 2:1-7                                          Matthew 25:31-40

 I think we can be pretty certain that when Paul wrote to Timothy urging prayer for kings and all those in  authority he  was not thinking of the Queen marking her Platinum Jubilee by inviting Paddington Bear to tea. On the other hand it is just possible that the Queen was thinking of St Paul.

We will come back to this in a moment, but first a quick look at our readings.

It’s very easy to forget how unexpected the gospel was. We have so much history of faith around us, from much of which we have benefitted, that the Good News no longer startles us. We take for granted the change Jesus wrought in our standing before God, the way he transformed our relationship to each other.

But take what St Paul said ‘pray that kings and those in authority should behave so that ‘we may live peaceful and quiet lives in all godliness and holiness.’ What kind of sense would that have made to anyone?

The assumption for Rome dominant at the time, as it had been for the Greeks before them, and the Egyptians and whoever was before them was that might was right - if you were powerful you could do what you liked, you protected your own position and that of a favoured few - ruling for the benefit of the average citizen was simply not on the radar. Let alone the idea that leaders should be the servants of their people. Even now there are places where that is a subversive idea.  

Then take what Jesus says in the gospel ‘the King will say to those on his right, ‘Come, you who are blessed by my Father; take your inheritance, the kingdom prepared for you since the creation of the world. For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in, I needed clothes and you clothed me, I was sick and you looked after me, I was in prison and you came to visit me.’ The least that this means is that in God’s eyes every person is as valuable as every other person. Again this was not on the radar. 

And what did it mean to follow the risen Jesus when guided by his Spirit rather than his physical presence; and what did it mean when Gentiles began to follow him.    

It was all new and in his letters Paul is filling out the shape of our faith on the hoof - so they are a mixture of answers to queries, interventions in arguments, encouragement of the faithful and filling out the understanding of his readers about the shape of the Good News. 

Our passage from 1Timothy is no different. He roots the way of life of the church in its prayer and in what God has given us in Jesus. 

The queen will have known both of today’s passages well and we know that she took her faith very seriously. We know that she espoused the idea of servant leadership; we know that the Son of Man in our gospel reading was the King to whom our queen held herself accountable.

We are going to look at one thread from this new understanding of what it means to be human  - That each person is worth as much as any other person because all are made in the image of God - and using comments from three individuals try and shine a light on how the queen wove this thread into her life and how we can weave it into ours.

The first comment is from Paul Keating,  former Prime Minister of Australia, and a staunch republican

“In the 20th century, the self became privatised, while the public realm, the realm of the public good, was broadly neglected. Queen Elizabeth understood this and instinctively attached herself to the public good against what she recognised as a tidal wave of private interest and private reward. And she did this for a lifetime. Never deviating,” he said. 

What did he mean? Whenever she could the queen came down on the side of co-operation rather than competition, on the side of the common good rather than of self  or corporate interest. She was on the side of reconciliation and hope. In so far as it was in her power she worked to enable us, in St Paul’s words, to live peaceful and quiet lives in all godliness and holiness because this is good, and pleases God our Saviour.

How can we work for the common good? 

 The second person I’m going to quote is Frank Cottrell Boyce the writer who scripted both the Queen parachuting in to open the Olympics  and Paddington having tea with her at the Platinum Jubilee 

‘It used to be said that millions of people had dreams in which they had tea with the Queen. Now watching her have tea with Paddington will have to do instead. It’s easy to see why that was so powerful. In retrospect, it was valedictory. A woman waving a happy goodbye to her grandchildren and great grandchildren, an image of love and a happy death.

Apparently the idea for the Queen to meet up with Paddington during the Jubilee ceremony came from Buckingham Palace. “And what an astute idea it was to have her act with Paddington, because Paddington embodies so many of the values that she stood for. He is all about kindness, tolerance, being kind to strangers, politeness, these things that are about character.

Cottrell Boyce is a practising Catholic and he too is familiar with our gospel, and goes on to say ‘And Paddington is an evacuee, a refugee, one-time prisoner, pretty much every category of need that is mentioned in Matthew 25. Here, he is being welcomed with tea and good manners. This is a strong statement of a set of values that are not uncontested in the corridors of power. To have them exemplified so joyfully at such a moment meant something.’

 Every contact mattered to her, since she died probably what we have heard most frequently from those who met her was that she met them properly - person to person.  

Each person we meet is as valuable to God as we are - do we think of them like that, do we treat them like that, do we meet them with tea and good manners, are we hospitable?

The third quote is from the former MP and now newspaper columnist Matthew Parris

Speaking about the queen’s political influence, ‘Did she win an argument? I doubt it. Did she make monarchists out of republicans? A few, perhaps; not many. What she did was different. By winning personal respect, and by making monarchy work, she gently put the argument aside.’ 

This sounds a lesser comment than the other two but may be what we need to hear most.

How did the Queen win personal respect? She was steadfast in what she did -- she had influence rather than power, but she was steadfast in doing good.

Jesus never treated people casually; to treat others with a proper concern is one of the areas where we can bear witness to his presence with us.  

Three questions the passages ask of us:

How can we work for the common good?

Are we hospitable?

Are we steadfast in doing good?  

An Indian Christian Pandita Ramabai Saraswati wrote ‘People must not only hear about the kingdom of God, but must see it in actual operation, on a small scale perhaps and in imperfect form, but a real demonstration nevertheless.’ 

We won’t be perfect but working for the common good, hospitality and steadfastness of care will show the reality of the kingdom of God more than words alone ever will 

The queen knew herself accountable before God and like us she may not have found that a comfortable thought, bur she would also have known, ‘there is one God and one mediator between God and mankind, the man Christ Jesus’,

The trouble is that mediator can easily be impersonal theological  legal word not at first glance a comfort  so close with a passage by Donagh O’Shea an Irish catholic priest  which fleshes out what it means that Christ is our mediator.

'The passion and death of Christ belong to us as fully as if we had suffered them ourselves.' I must have read this in St. Thomas (Aquinas) years ago as I crammed for exams in theology, but it failed to strike root in the mind's weed patch. Having rediscovered it, I think of little else at Mass. Christ is our brother: the Father cannot see us apart from him. So we stand before our Father with pride and joy, not in tortured anxiety.’

Dorothy L Sayers - women first at the Cradle and last at the Cross

 

“Perhaps it is no wonder that the women were first at the Cradle and last at the Cross. They had never known a man like this Man - there never has been such another. A prophet and teacher who never nagged at them, never flattered or coaxed or patronised; who never made arch jokes about them, never treated them either as "The women, God help us!" or "The ladies, God bless them!"; who rebuked without querulousness and praised without condescension; who took their questions and arguments seriously; who never mapped out their sphere for them, never urged them to be feminine or jeered at them for being female; who had no axe to grind and no uneasy male dignity to defend; who took them as he found them and was completely unself-conscious. There is no act, no sermon, no parable in the whole Gospel that borrows its pungency from female perversity; nobody could possibly guess from the words and deeds of Jesus that there was anything "funny" about woman's nature.”

The quotation is from ‘Are Women Human?’ by DLS

Christmas 2 2022. All Saints Southport

   02/01/22       All Saints Southport        Christmas 2  

Ephesians 1:3-14                                                  John 1:10-18

If there’s one thing that living in a pandemic has made pretty clear it’s that all our plans are provisional. For example, in February we hope to go down to Surrey to look after two of our grandchildren allowing our son and daughter in law to have a week end away. Will it happen - we hope so and think so but have learned to keep a little way this side of complete confidence. 

The reason I mention this is that in this sermon I am going to make a very modest proposal which should see us through this year and beyond - I have every hope it’s Covid proof and government proof, but I can offer you no guarantees.

Further, my proposal is manageable whatever our starting point and will improve the quality of our life whether we are great saints, great sinners or somewhere in-between. At this point you’re probably wondering when will I bring out the bottles of snake oil and what the catch is, but in fact we are going to look at the passages. 

Our readings are very different from each other - Paul is exuberant, he is overwhelmed by what God has done for us and can scarcely pause for breath, the gospel is comparatively dour it has a greater sense of buckling down to a difficult but necessary task - nevertheless they have at least two things in common. 

The first is that neither is satisfied to simply say that Jesus came that we might be forgiven in the sense of having been given a get out of jail free card, an ‘off you go and don’t do it again’ approach they go further, we are not just forgiven we are reconciled to the Father ‘God and sinners reconciled’ - the relationship has been healed, made good, Jesus came so we might be welcomed into the family of God ‘Mild he lays his glory by, born that we no more may die, born to raise us from the earth, born to give us second birth.’  - if I’d been thinking we could have sung Hark the Herald Angels. Forgiveness is only the starting point of what God has done for us, what he wants, intends, looks forward to - is our adoption into his family.

Now before telling you the second thing they have in common I’ll give you my modest proposal.

I am going to introduce it with a paragraph by Rowan Williams which I very often use during a eucharist. 

 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.

My proposal is simply that we should take this last phrase seriously - ‘Jesus Christ wants our company’ and so over this next year we should aim to keep him company, walk where he is walking, enjoy being with him..

If this is the proposal what is the catch?

One reason is that often - and I speak personally - we’d rather have a get out of jail free card than family membership. We suspect - often rightly  that if we stick too close to Jesus we may be taken ever so slightly outside our comfort zone.

However there is another reason - we find it hard to believe that God might enjoy time with us ‘Jesus Christ wants our company? That must be nonsense.’

Writing about Christmas Rowan Williams puts it rather more elegantly , ‘We are dealing…with a God who doesn’t have to be persuaded to be interested in us….what relics are there in our mind and hearts of an approach to God which still believes that God is essentially rather bored with us, rather removed from us and always in need of being kept sweet.

However long you’ve been a Christian, or however long you’ve been looking wistfully at Christianity from outside, that’s something that obstinately keeps coming back. That something is deeply etched in our mind, the mythology of a God who somehow has to be persuaded to be on our side.’ 

We expect that God is bored with us or that we’re just not his kind of people. Rowan Williams gives this idea short shrift

 ‘Persuade God to be on our side? You might as well try and persuade a waterfall to be wet.’

We can have a blind spot about God’s love for us - the idea is so odd we can distance ourselves from it. Yet he could hardly have done more to try and get us to take it seriously. And this is the second thing that our epistle and gospel have in common. Listen to what Paul wrote Read extracts from Ephesians to emphasise God's agency , God sent his son so that we would be brought into his family Similarly read from the gospel. Preparing this sermon reminded me that the incarnation wasn’t inevitable; it happened because of God’s active choice, it is his idea, our relationship with him is not one of the byproducts  of his Creation, the word being made flesh is not an afterthought, it’s the focal point of his intentions. Adopting us as his children/ giving us the power to become the children God wasn’t a business decision - ‘how can I make the very most of this universe’, or a reluctant rescue ‘they’ve made a complete pig’s ear of things, I’d better hit the plan B button’ - he did it because us in his family is what he had wanted all along. 

My proposal is about accepting we don’t need to be defensive with God - he enjoys our company - but it will change us, if we have his ear he has ours - and he is different from us, our understanding will not be perfect.

We will have questions about faith, the world, the way people are  for which we have no answer   Life comes to us, not always straight forwardly or comfortably and we have to find our way through it - part of our keeping company with Jesus will involve asking the awkward questions - we may not get a full answer but we can still be left with hope.

C. S. Lewis’s friend  Austin Farrer wrote this

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. Such is the spirit of the angel’s message to the shepherds: ‘Peace upon earth, goodwill to all..... You shall find a baby wrapped in swaddling clothes, and lying in a manger.’

The Saviour the angels sing of is not an abstract idea, He has been born to us

... flesh and blood, fully human - and he is going to live in the world we live in and provide God’s response to our questions in that flesh and blood.

‘A Son is better than an explanation.

From the gospel ‘No one has ever seen God. It is God the only Son, who is close to the Father’s heart, who has made him known.’ Sometimes alived example or an image is worth a thousand words 

Desmond Tutu’s funeral was yesterday so one example and one image from him. The example wasn’t his but touched him The first time he met Trevor Huddleston, an Anglican missionary he doffed his hat to Tutu's mother, a gesture almost unheard of in apartheid South Africa. When Tutu spent 18 months in hospital with TB  Huddleston regularly visited him and later supported him as went forward to ordination. Huddleston knew all people have the dignity of being made in the image of God so he did the simple things that changed a life and eventually a nation.

An image Desmond Tutu at a sitting of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, his head is bowed While listening to the testimony of victims, Tutu was sometimes overwhelmed by emotion and cried during the hearings. Firmly believing that that the conclusion of forgiveness is reconciliation meant he didn’t try to armour himself against the pain of those who had suffered, but this was a very hard road to walk. 

Trevor Huddleston and Desmond Tutu - immensely different characters - both Godly people who gave time to keeping God company - following Jesus led them along difficult paths but they were more fully themselves as his companions than ever could have been otherwise.

A modest proposal for the new year  ‘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.’

Day by day, spend a little more time with him in the give and take of companionship and it will change your life.