Pentecost 8: life in God is where we are wealthy.

Sermon by Anne East
Readings: Luke 12: 13-21, Colossians 3: 1-11

There’s a cartoon from the comic strip ‘Peanuts” that has been doing the rounds recently on social media. It shows Charlie Brown and Snoopy sitting by the side of a lake, with their backs to us, looking out over the water. Charlie Brown is saying, “Some day, we will all die, Snoopy.” And Snoopy says, “True, but on all the other days, we will not.” It all depends how you look at it! The parable Jesus tells of the  rich fool and his barns, is not about death, but about life: about the way to live, not about the need to die.

Jesus is talking to his disciples about his mission and his identity when someone interrupts him and asks him to arbitrate in a property dispute, to sort out a family squabble. He asks Jesus to tell his brother to divide an inheritance with him. According to Judaic inheritance practices, an older brother would receive two thirds of an estate while the younger would receive one third. The questioner in this case is asking Jesus to help him possess his rightful share.

Jesus doesn’t get drawn into the details of this case, but says, “Well, let’s look at this differently – life is about more than possessions.” So, as he often did, Jesus tells a story, but unlike the stories of the Good Samaritan, the Lost Sheep, the Prodigal Son, this one doesn’t involve a last minute rescue and a happy ending. A rich man harvests a bumper crop, more than he can deal with. He plans to tear down his old barns, build larger ones to store his crops in and then sit back and enjoy the excess. He stands as a negative example, this is how not to live as a follower of Jesus. In the end, the man’s days are numbered, and death separates him from his overflowing barns.

Note that the man in the story is not just a simple farmer with a small plot of land, but someone who controls much of the agricultural produce of the whole district. And he doesn’t see his plentiful harvest as a generous blessing from God, but as something of a dilemma, because he doesn’t have enough storage space.

Of course it is prudent to gather in the bountiful harvest and save it for the future, that is exactly what Joseph instructed Pharaoh to do when the dreams showed that seven years of plenty would be followed by seven years of famine. But this particular rich man is no Joseph acting wisely for the benefit of those in need. This is about Greed, the desire for more, where enough is not enough. This rich man had enough and to spare - he had so much that he couldn’t store it all. Did others around him have enough food? Did he bother to find out? Did he call to mind God’s frequent insistence that we should feed the hungry, clothe the naked, give to the poor? No, he didn’t. He was only thinking of himself, of having all the good things stored up for years to come. And in future times of scarcity, of course, he would become even richer, as others became dependent on him and the price he sets for food.

There is nothing wrong with prudent planning for the future – we have to do that here at St Margaret’s to look after and repair our building, pay our bills. But we know it is important that we do more than that – we need to make provision for supporting other poorer churches, our local communities and charities.

Greed applies to more than money, it can be a craving for the things that our culture sees as bestowing status and privilege: this house, this car, this latest gadget.

Greed can give rise to oppression and exploitation. For example - I want to wear nice clothes, to feel smart and be well-dressed, but what if those clothes are made, packed and despatched by people working in dreadful conditions? Clothes are among the items most at risk of being produced through modern slavery, it’s an industry where women make up a staggering 80% of the global workforce. Does my greed allow me to think of that when I’m looking at a pretty shirt I want to buy? This challenges me.

When is ‘enough”? The text doesn’t tell me that! It doesn’t give specific answers to our questions about possessions, it doesn’t provide rues that define how much is ‘enough’, what I should limit, where I should draw the line. But it prods me to think about these things.

Paul offers some suggestions to the people of Colossae. He lists the things that we should get rid of: anger, wrath, malice, slander, abusive language and lying. He offers the image of stripping off our old self and putting on a new self. Paul encourages us to see that God is so near to us it’s like being newly clothed. I am reminded of that wonderful image from the writings of Julian of Norwich, “He is our clothing”. For Julia, it is an image of the closeness of God: “He is our clothing, He wraps and holds us. He enfolds us for love and will not let us go.” Here is treasure, here are riches. Our life in God is where we are wealthy.

Our Gospel reading ends with Jesus commenting on those who ‘store up treasures for themselves’ but are not ‘rich towards God’. How can we as individuals, and as a community, live richly towards God? One answer might be that it means to live as if we are already in heaven, bringing the values and priorities of God into our thoughts, our activities, our way of being in this world.

A final word on riches: The Blackfoot tribe of North American indigenous people used to have a Blanket Ceremony each year. Blankets represented wealth. They saved all the year round to buy blankets, and when the ceremony came, they gave them away. The person who was able to give away the most blankets was counted the richest. The richest person is not the one who possesses most, but who has given most away.

Seek with all our heart, mind, soul and strength

Sermon by the Reverend Doctor Brutus Green
Readings: Exodus 34.29-end, Mattew 13:44-46

What does the kingdom of God cost?

Today’s Gospel makes it clear that it is in fact everything. The kingdom of God requires you to sell everything in order to purchase it – this field of treasure, this pearl of great price.

This is a tall order, a leap of faith – Should we stake everything on the Gospel? Can we let it dictate all our actions, become the defining force in our lives? If a friend, an acquaintance were to describe you, would they say first of all – oh, yes, she is a Christian? Is that dear purchase visible? Or is it visible in good works and care? Or is it like the treasure in the field, buried. Rooted deep down perhaps but not paraded to the world.

But not only this; the kingdom of God requires a lifetime of effort.  A beginner would not on seeing it, have understood the value of the pearl; that it is in fact worth such an investment. But furthermore they would not have built up the capital, the resources required to meet the cost of the field, the pearl.

So the kingdom of heaven is not presented to you on a plate. You will not comprehend it’s value if you suddenly have some experience, accept some doctrine. There is no fast way to gain the kingdom of God, and while certain preachers and church services may make it seem, feel, like it is the work of a moment, it takes a great deal longer to afford and perceive the pearl of great price.

Because what this parable is saying is that we should refuse to be satisfied with anything that isn’t wholly satisfying.

It’s like how when you’re young, it feels like alcohol and parties open up a whole new world. You can feel like you’re really getting to know people for the first time, and being known; that you’re finally getting what it means to be an adult; or when you fall in love, and think the only thing that matters in the whole world is winning and pleasing this one person.

But the morning after, the night seems less magical; the cold light of day, the fatigue, reveal the bright colours as dazzle and charm; you realise you were not as witty as you thought; the people were less interesting and at times unpleasant; you fall out of love and see the flaws in this seemingly perfect person; that it was all a trick of the hormones;

At this stage of life it’s fortunate you’ve not accrued a lifetime of wealth because to squander it all on such trifles would be a shame.

But even if our joys are spiritual, a sudden illumination, finding the perfect church, a good preacher, to know the pearl of great price takes time, investment, to think I have it, I will stop seeking, is to lose it altogether.

Christianity teaches that absolute value is demonstrated only in a man being crucified. A person giving everything to show people they are loved. In this sense the point of the parable, is less the pearl but in the loose handed way in which these merchants are prepared to relinquish everything; that when they’ve found what matters; what is of most value; they are willing to give everything up for its sake.

That in itself is the pearl of great price – the sacrificial act of love, of caring enough to make the purchase.

And here the parable turns on its head. Because we tend to read this assuming we are the merchant; we are seeking the kingdom of God.

But we’re told, the kingdom of heaven is like a merchant selling all he has to buy this pearl of great price.

It is God, who is the merchant. we are the pearl, purchased at great price. It is heaven that has sold all that it has to make this purchase. So, yes, the kingdom of God has cost everything – it’s just that the cost is not paid by us.

But we are called to be imitators of Christ, and as we grow in understanding of the kingdom of heaven, we might find that inspiration to seek it with all our heart, our mind, our soul, our strength.

It doesn’t take much to see that if Christianity is true, eternity is the one thing of great value, which we should pursue with everything we have. What Christianity teaches, however, in the grace of God, the love revealed in Christ, is that to God we are the thing of great value, made so by the love he has for us. Amen.

Pentecost 6: Stop and listen

6th Sunday after Pentecost
Sermon by the Reverend Doctor Brutus Green
Readings: Genesis 18:1-10a, Colossians 1:15-28, Luke 10:38-42

This week has made it very clear to me why Roman Catholic priests are not allowed to marry. Our boy, Oberon has had a tummy bug, which has caused him to be somewhat challenging. My current wife has been in the last week of rehearsals so gone long hours, and I’ve had friends staying from Chile, with their three children, who also proved susceptible to the tummy bug. And to cap it all my darling greyhound Zizi was savagely assaulted just yesterday by a marauding villainous cat, who took his gentle offer of friendship as an opportunity for a violent swipe across the nose. Martha, you are worried and distracted by many things; there is need of only one thing. 

This Gospel text was used in earlier times as the basis for prioritising the religious life – think nuns and monks – over the life of ordinary parish clergy. In Joachim of Fiore’s twelfth century representation, it’s monks and nuns, the Benedictines, Franciscans, the Carmelites, the Discalced Carmelites – who populate the eternal city, with so-called ‘secular clergy’ – even then a dirty word – like vicars outside the city walls. Distracted by building works, printing contracts, playgroups and fencing, we, with our congregations are the Marthas of this world. The laity, God help them, in this design, live about 3 miles out in the New Jerusalem’s equivalent of Croydon. There he notes, they will all have their own craft, and simple food and clothing. Sounds heavenly doesn’t it?

Rudyard Kipling, that energetic soul, wrote in our defence a poem called the Sons of Martha, which begins:

THE Sons of Mary seldom bother, for they have inherited that good part;
But the Sons of Martha favour their Mother of the careful soul and the troubled heart.
And because she lost her temper once, and because she was rude to the Lord her Guest,
Her Sons must wait upon Mary's Sons, world without end, reprieve, or rest.

You might notice Anne East is away in North Wales doing some creative writing. She is our Mary earning the gold stars ‘which will not be taken away from her.’ Have we then chosen the worse part? Do we put works before faith, action before thought? Should we refuse to work, to go on rotas, to make coffee, out of fear of becoming a Martha?

There is though another tradition in the Bible that sees any spirituality, without social concern, as heresy. So the prophet Micah tells us that the Lord requires us only ‘to do justice, to love kindness and to walk humbly with God’; Isaiah to ‘learn to do good, seek justice, rescue the oppressed, defend the orphan, plead for the widow’. St James’ epistle famously says: ‘Religion that is pure and undefiled before God, the Father, is this: to care for orphans and widows in their distress’ and Jesus says, ‘I desire mercy and not sacrifice.’ St Paul is a little more stark, reminding his new churches that he also works as a tent maker, and those who don’t work, shouldn’t eat. For those of you currently not in employment don’t worry; you’ll still get biscuits with your coffee after the service.  

So perhaps there’s an overstating of the case with this passage. After all it’s simply the case that Mary has sat down to listen, while Martha is fussily getting on with being the perfect hostess and making the house nice. But, again, this is no denigration of hospitality. In the ancient world there is no higher calling, nor any crime greater than betraying it. Many of the direst warnings, Sodom and Gomorrah being one, are related to it, and in our Old Testament reading today, Abraham entertains angels without knowing it, and by his actions brings about the first covenant of the Old Testament.

But to begin with, there may be some very human, very relatable issues going on in today’s Gospel. For a start we’re dealing with sisters, and all sibling relationships all have that whiff of competition; families are wonderful things but habits, learned early in life, are not easily shaken no matter how holy, how sophisticated you become. You can never truly become a priest to your parents, for example, you will always first of all be the darling curly haired cherub or the moody teenager; which may not perfectly encapsulate how you feel about yourself at 40.

So what sister would not feel a smidgeon resentful seeing her sibling with Jesus while she was doing what she felt was necessary? And perhaps to make the point Martha in her outrage had been a little extra zealous in her duties to prove herself and to make her sister’s laziness the more apparent. Mentioning ‘Zeal’ I like Bertrand Russel’s observation: ‘Zeal is a bad mark for a cause. Nobody has zeal about arithmentic. It is not the vaccinationists but the anti-vaccinationists who generate zeal. People are zealous for a cause when they are not quite positive that it’s true.’ Plus ça change.

But there’s also a bigger question about means and ends here. From time to time Rhiannon has cooked dinner for friends. Her usual protocol is for guests to arrive around 7 but not to eat till shortly after 11. Sometime around 10.30 Rhiannon will burst in complaining of not having talked to anyone all night and demanding, midway through a vital discussion of C Company’s flanking attack on Argentinian positions at Goose Green, that I immediately finish off the potato dauphinoise. The dinner is always delicious but we have to move house afterwards because the kitchen is uninhabitable.

Now if creating a culinary masterpiece was your primary objective, this would be fine.  But if actually you wanted to spend a relaxed evening with friends, then a rudimentary slow cooked coq-au-vin, prepared in the morning is a better option, or even a hearty beans-on-toast. The vicarage cook-book is out in the Fall.

I share this allegory, not to take advantage of my wife being away, but to highlight the significance of mistaking ends for means. If the end you want is to spend time with friends, don’t arrange matters so that you’re in a different room from them the entire evening. If you want to spend time with Jesus, don’t run around hoovering and preparing the perfect canapes in the hope of impressing him. And on this subject, it’s perfectly possible to spend an entire life getting yourself, the house, the children ready for a vague end that never happens: to spend your hours, days, weeks, months tidying, cleaning, laundering, getting the admin, the emails done. But for what? If there’s not also that time to be enjoyed, when you are not preparing for the next thing, but simply in the moment, then you’ve put the means before the end.

Equally this applies quite immediately to church. Whether you come for the hymns, the sermons, communion, a moment of quiet, if you’ve ruled yourself out of all those things because you’re on three rotas; something’s gone wrong. And if you’re not getting anything out of church except the feeling of being useful, it’s not enough. That’s not a primary reason for coming to church. There is more on offer! Because actually this story is not an allegory for how the vita contemplativa is a higher calling than the vita activa. But a reminder that we need to stop and listen; that in a world that looks scornfully on those who aren’t busy; that seeks to fill the unforgiving minute with a relentless barrage of notifications, you’ll lose yourself if you cannot sit for a moment with Jesus. That is the better part.

So perhaps Jesus here is just asking what’s really important? Isn’t it just spending time together? And as time is our most valuable commodity, it’s a good indication of how much we value an aspect of our life. Surely, 5 minutes spent in prayer is not 5 minutes wasted. So even if we can’t give our entire lives over to contemplation perhaps we can find time, good time, to commit to prayer. Time that goes beyond a 10 minute slot where 8 minutes are spent looking for matches to light an unnecessary candle. We may even be surprised by what a brief spell of meditation and reflection each day can bring to our lives. Things have been going quite well for the politician who likened prayer to Magic FM in the chilterns.

But neither is that the only important use of our time. Mary sat with Jesus as a friend, and as a teacher. It’s easy to be frivolous with our time, when like the parable of the talents, it’s a gift given to us. We can use it for work, for friendship, for families, to extend ourselves in a thousand ways. We can also waste it, hide in it, watch it pass by. Spend it on Netflix. How you spend your time shows what you really value. Sometimes we might ask ourselves then whether we haven’t been distracted by many things, and whether we have missed the one thing, the better part.

Are we distracted Marthas? Are we present - to our friends – to our God – like Mary?

Pentecost 5: What must I do?

5th Sunday after Pentecost

Sermon by the Reverend Doctor Brutus Green

Readings: Deuteronomy 30:9-14, Colossians 1:1-14, Luke 10:25-37

What do I have to do to be a good person?

It’s the wrong question.

What must I do to inherit eternal life?

Again, you lawyers, the wrong question.

They are reasonable questions. Excellent lawyer questions. Am I good? Am I good enough? What should I be doing?

Today’s Gospel’s very familiar. Every child knows and instinctively understands it. A few times during show-and-tell when children are asked what can they do to be better, we hear “helping people when they fall over, or when they’re hurt.” Second usually to the washing up.

How well people take it in is another matter. There was a famous study done on seminarians in America.  A situation was set up where the students were gathered in a hall and given certain tasks.  They were then told to move to another building where they would give a short talk on the parable of the Good Samaritan. On the way a man had been placed slumped in an alleyway. According to the research, only 40% of the students stopped to help. When the students were told they must hurry to their next event, only 10% stopped.  One student even stepped over the prone man, on his way to give a talk on the Good Samaritan, so urgent did he feel was the need to share his insight on this important parable. But we shouldn’t judge. Should we?

The context here is important. Notice that it’s a lawyer who asks the question, to test Jesus. The question he asks, is what must I do to inherit eternal life? And his second question makes his concern even clearer “wanting to justify himself”, he asked, ‘who is my neighbour?’ The motivation of the man is concern over himself. He wants to be good. He wants to inherit eternal life. He wants to justify himself. What must I do?

If Jesus was straightforwardly answering the lawyer’s question you’d expect a different set up. You’d expect the man in the ditch to be the Samaritan. The Jews didn’t like Samaritans. They’d intermarried with the Assyrians, so weren’t fully Jewish;  and their religious practices varied from the Jews.  They had different Scripture and didn’t worship at the Temple in Jerusalem as all Jews did. They were something like the Mormons of their day. So if the guy in the ditch was the Samaritan that would give us the basic set up of: “Who’s your neighbour?” Even a Samaritan is your neighbour. Be nice.

But Jesus doesn’t do that. The Samaritan is the hero, not the neighbour. Now parables on one level, are simply illustrations. You might ask, what does forgiveness look like? I’ll tell you the Prodigal Son. Does God love even lowly old me? I’ll tell you the shepherd who left his flock to seek out the one that got away. But Jesus’ parables are more than this. They have a very specific aim. To cut through self-deception. Parables should make you uncomfortable. They want to change you; to convert you. And to do this they come through a story. Because only a story has the subtlety, the ambiguity, the openness to interpretation to challenge the hearer not just on facts, on laws, on thou should, thou should not; but to challenge your presumptions. They have to surprise. The Word is very near you. But it’s not what you expect.

So our dear lawyer, wants to be good. He wants to inherit eternal life. He wants to be a good Jew. He knows he must love God and his neighbour. He keeps the commandments so he figures he’s ticked the God box. Now he’s asking how far, how many people, do I need to love in order to tick that neighbour box. A reasonable, lawyerly approach.

Like a fairy tale we have three characters. Our first on the highway is the priest. He’s in a compromising situation. On the one hand, he has official duties, which he cannot perform for a week if he touches a dead body. Although there’s equally an argument from Jewish law that preservation of life is a first principle and that despite becoming unclean his first duty is to help the man. You might think this is an ideal opportunity to take a justifiable week off work, but I’m not totally clear on whether the Temple had a policy for “unclean-pay” while people were off duty. Anyway, there’s an argument with the priest that he has a legal responsibility to walk on by. Of course, the very clear and present threat of bandits might be enough to hasten his steps. The Levite as a layman is free from public responsibilities, but will still wish to avoid becoming unclean and ruining his holiday. He is, after all, also on his way to Jerusalem, where unlike the Samaritan Jews go to worship. But both these figures are clearly Jews, who know the Law, and you should expect them to consider this left-for-dead man, their neighbour.

Now enter the Samaritan. And we’re told ‘he was moved with pity’. Not ‘he asked himself what does it mean to be good or how might I inherit eternal life?’ ‘Not he asked himself, “Who is my neighbour - is this man my neighbour.” He was moved with pity.

And look how he responds. He knows to use oil and wine on wounds — that is he has some basic first aid understanding, and the means with which to clean the wounds. He’s not just “trying to help, looking useful or trying to be nice” He has the skill to make a difference.  And then he spends time with him, makes sure he’s recovering and pays what would be several hundred pounds for someone to look after him. So he has the means to deal with this. He’s not trying to do something for which he’s ill-equipped or untrained, that might, despite intentions, make matters worse. And he’s not bothered to stick around to seek the reward, the thanks, the praise. He’s not sacrificing his entire life and so giving himself the chance to tell everyone how good he is, at what cost, or limiting the impact of other good he can achieve. He doesn’t need to be needed. He has not then troubled himself with the question of whether he should do this? Who is his neighbour? What will he receive for his actions? He was moved with pity. He recognised the human need and responded immediately with no desire, except to help the person in need. 

*** 

Jesus has shifted the conversation. The lawyer has asked, ‘What must I do’ ‘how can I be justified?’ The Samaritan has simply connected with the injured man. He was moved with pity. He’s not done it for the Law, to be good, justified, to inherit eternal life. He is not acting for himself, out of concern for himself, but for the other person.

The lawyer has asked ‘who is my neighbour’ to ascertain the loop holes. Like the priest and the Levite he wishes to be justified but doesn’t want to take unnecessary risk; get his hands unnecessarily dirty. What must I do to inherit eternal life. He is thinking of his virtue, his salvation as something he can achieve.

Jesus has told a story about a man who is not a Jew; who doesn’t follow the same law; doesn’t worship in the temple; is not socially acceptable to these people. And in the context of ‘what must I do to inherit eternal life? How may I be saved?’ It is this Samaritan, this man of another religion, this outcast, who is the paradigm. The law, the temple fall before the fact that this man was moved with pity, and responded spontaneously to human need. Jesus is asked ‘who is the neighbour I must love?’ He responds by pointing out ‘you haven’t yet worked out how to love.’ Loving begins with the other person.

So what does this mean for us? Well, firstly, it’s a warning against thinking that we’ve got it all sewn up; that you or St Margaret’s has nailed down what it means to be good, to follow Christ, to inherit eternal life. The parables are there to surprise us; to cut through our self-deception; they are a mirror to the laziness of our moral compass.

Secondly, it’s a reminder that we don’t inherit eternal life by racking up a list of good works, by ticking off our church and charity checklist. Jesus teaches us to pray for grace, and in that to find the love that enables us to connect with other people. And so be ready to respond when we meet that need on the road.

So what must I do? Connect - see that your salvation is bound up with your brothers and sisters. Salvation is like love, it begins when two or three are gathered. Try not to rush. People who are rushing are moving too fast to see the people in the road. And be ready. Ready to offer the crucial help, to have the skills and resources needed when the moment arises. Ready to be moved with pity; to see in the people you meet on the road, that need and vulnerability that is waiting for love. Go and do likewise.

Pentecost 4: Only Connect

4th Sunday after Pentecost

Sermon by the Reverend Doctor Brutus Green

Readings: Isaiah 66:10-14, Galatians 6:(1-6)7-16, Luke 10:1-11, 16-20

Perhaps the phrase brings to mind the eclectic and rather niche gameshow, hosted by Victoria Coren Mitchell, But it’s also the epigram to the EM Forster novel, Howard’s End, where we have the charming line:  "The more people one knows the easier it becomes to replace them," Margaret sighs. "It's one of the curses of London.” Don’t worry, though, we don’t replace people at StMargaret’s, we just add them to a new rota.

‘Only connect’ comes later in the key speech of the novel:

Only connect! That was her whole sermon. Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its height. Live in fragments no longer. Only connect

‘Live in fragments no longer. Only connect.’

‘Living in fragments’ is a bit of a theme for early twentieth-century literature, struggling with the collapse of the British Empire and the Great War. T.S. Eliot’s great poem The Wasteland includes more lines about the curses of London:

Under the brown fog of a winter dawn,

A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,

I had not thought death had undone so many.

Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled,

And each man fixed his eyes before his feet.

Eliot here is quoting Dante’s Inferno, likening the crowds that flow over London Bridge to the massed souls just past the gates of Hell. Here are the souls, in Dante’s poem, who are lukewarm, having done no good and no great evil, but who have stood for nothing.  Tellingly, Dante says they do not die for they were never alive. Eliot’s poem, which is a comment on the barrenness, the miscommunication and the fragmentation of modern life, is saying of the crowds, of the lack of meaning, the loss of connection in the daily trudge; that it has no life. That we have made of London an impersonal hell. All this at London Bridge in the shadow of our cathedral, but at the time there was no Borough Market so it may well have been impossible to get a decent lunch.

Now I’m sorry if this seems a very oblique way to begin a sermon.
Only Connect, as I said, is a bit of an obscure quiz and if I’ve taken in too much of the ethos of the show in using the line, let me draw it back together.  Because faith is about connection. It’s about knowing and living with yourself. Whether that’s doing a job that you feel is meaningful; that’s a good use of your time and abilities; building a life with a person you can love and respect, And this weekend we might celebrate that it’s somewhat easier than in E.M. Forster’s time to connect ourselves with our sexuality; connection is having time to pursue what makes you happy, and above all being at peace with the person you were created to be.

This may take a little reflection. Part of the difficulty of modern life is that we compartmentalise.  You wouldn’t believe how many people I see regularly, who walk past me utterly oblivious if I’m not wearing a dog collar. It’s more likely that they’ll recognise my oversize-greyhound. And shortly after I was ordained 10 years ago, I, a sensitive young curate, was walking through Soho only to be heckled by a middle aged woman with a large glass of Pinot Grigio, shouting, “You’re not a real priest”. At such a sensitive time it could have forced an existential crisis. We’re all prone to a bit of imposter-syndrome. But all of us might be one person during the week, and quite another at the weekend. One person at work; one person at home; who are you are with your parents, your children, your partner, your old friends, your putney friends, your vicar, your work colleagues, wherever it is that you find yourself late on a Saturday night, early on a Sunday morning? This is usually where we struggle to connect.

And it’s not just the old ‘Herbert’ line: ‘Seven whole days, not one in seven, I will praise thee’; It’s about the fact that it puts a great deal of strain on us acting out different roles; we can start to lose that sense of who we really are. Something more than just mummy. That is where the cracks start to appear. Only connect, and you can find that being a self-aware son makes you a better father; only connect to realise that being a parent, a partner, paying the bills and keeping the house together is the work of many people, and you’re not failing at everything, but performing wonders. Only connect, and owning in church that unpleasant thing you did in work, eases the burden, even if it sets the bar a little higher next time. Only connect and it will be the best You that starts making decisions, not the pragmatist, the pessimist or the person fitting in with the crowd. 

But our faith also asks us to connect with others.You shall love your crooked neighbour with your crooked heart, if you only connect! But our challenge is really thrown down in being asked to love our enemies. To connect with those we disagree with. Even cat-lovers. One of the great things about church is, where else would you spend an hour with children, people who are retired, people with all different jobs, or none, people from across the world. The idea of a community is built on bringing together identity and difference, but we’re becoming less able and willing to find difference and approach others with an open mind. Only connect!

And if St Margaret’s Day is about anything, it’s about maintaining and growing relationships. Bringing together old friends, and making new ones. And as some of you have returned year on year for over a century, 
well, nearly; St Margaret’s Day connects us to those we love and see no more, the growing list of friends who now worship on a further shore in a greater light, and equally back through the generations to those who first sang “Christ is Made the Sure Foundation” 1500 years ago (albeit in Latin), and all who have listened to these readings, sung these hymns and felt the pull of the divine on their lives.  And given that we’re remembering St Margaret, we cannot but remember all those who have given their lives for the faith, from Jesus, through the apostles, the persecutions of Rome, the staggering testimonies of men and women like Maximilian Kolbe and Dietrich Bonhoeffer in the Nazi death camps and everyone in between. Ten thousand times ten thousand sound thy praise; but who am I? I had not known so many had undone death. Only Connect.

So when Isaiah extols us to ‘Rejoice with Jerusalem’, we can receive it as a present command if we only connect. And by Jerusalem, we understand the city of God, if by our faith, by our living connections, we can make this Wasteland the eternal city. Only connect and ‘You shall see, and your heart shall rejoice.’

Paul began our New Testament reading in words which lay aside formality and position: ‘My friends’, as Jesus said: ‘I do not call you servants any longer… but I have called you friends’ These are the words of connection. ‘Bear one another’s burdens.’ We met some weeks ago discussing some of the difficult areas of faith and some of us spoke quite candidly about our experience of grief. What was especially moving was the way people had supported one another through these difficult times. Both that those grieving had felt able to reach out, and that their trust had been met in this community. That is what it means to ‘bear one another’s burdens’. Only connect. This is what it means that ‘the Kingdom of God has come near to you.’ Only connect. For as Jesus sent out the 70 to connect others with the Gospel, so we are sent out to connect with the world. And we too will return with joy if we’re able to take out a little St Margaret’s spirit with us into the world; not like greedy salesmen, but wanting to connect with the child of God that is in each of us.

 There aren’t many prayers that I really love.  It’s probably some terrible failing, but I prefer my own imperfect thoughts and words, not written down. But there is one prayer I return to. I think perhaps, because you can say it no matter how bad things are; whether I’m on a good day bustling about, or if my worst imaginings have come to pass, and like St Margaret, I’m in the dragon’s belly. It’s a prayer that acknowledges the value of every created thing, simply on the basis that we’re all points of connection, and God is present in every connection. It reads:

God has created me to do Him some definite service. He has committed some work to me which He has not committed to another. I have my mission. I may never know it in this life, but I shall be told it in the next. I am a link in a chain, a bond of connection between persons. He has not created me for naught… Therefore, I will trust Him, whatever I am, I can never be thrown away. 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. He does nothing in vain. He knows what He is about. He may take away my friends.  He may throw me among strangers. He may make me feel desolate, make my spirits sink, hide my future from me.  Still, He knows what He is about.

I am a link in a chain.  Only connect. Amen.

Pentecost 3: 100 years of the Dover House Estate

3rd Sunday after Pentecost

Sermon by the Reverend Doctor Brutus Green

Readings: 1 Kings 19. 15-16,19-21, Galatians 5.1,13-25, Luke 9.51-62

Foxes have holes, and birds of the air have nests; but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head.

There’s an expression well known in the army: there’re no atheists in foxholes. Meaning that in a tight spot people will always reach for the Bible. This is borne out in studies of war and religion, and, still today, services on operations, such as in Iraq and Afghanistan, are well attended even if this doesn’t translate to garrison churches on returning home. One bishop during the First World War reported from the trenches: ‘The soldier has got religion, I’m not sure that he has got Christianity’; without doubt, soldiers are a superstitious lot; and despite its peace and quiet, if South West London has a lot of anything, it’s foxholes.

Thinking ourselves back to 1919 (partying or not), the First World War had brought about an unprecedented upheaval across Europe and the world. The nineteenth-century had seen the coming together of Europe into blocks. In 1800 Europe contained 500 political powers. By 1900 there were just twenty. In that century the percentage of European ownership of the world rose from 35 to 85 percent. Britain claimed a quarter of the world’s land; Russia covered one sixth of it. Many of these great empires, the Romanov dynasty’s, the Hapsburgs’ Austria-Hungary, Kaiser’s Germany, and the Ottoman empire were in ruins by 1918. In 1914 there were three republics in Europe. By 1918 there were thirteen.

And by the end of the First World War, 65 million soldiers had fought. Nine million were killed, eight million held prisoner, twenty-one million were wounded — not counting the scores crushed by post-traumatic stress. Then Spanish Flu, in the year following the war, as the Dover House Estate was being planned, outdid the four years of violence, carrying off 30 million.

It’s often assumed that the War shattered confidence and belief in the British empire and humanity. In the same way people assume that the soldiers returned from the dreadful carnage atheists to a disillusioned secularized nation. The opposite is true.  Statistically, by reports and church attendance through the 20s, war returned soldiers with greater piety. It’s also striking how many, Christian or not, spoke of the presence of the ‘White Comrade’ on the battlefield, and the amount of poetry given to finding a common language for the soldiers’ experience and Christ’s passion; it seemed that in the trenches Christianity had ‘stooped from the sky… It had become incarnate’.

The war also brought about a great deal of Social change - the Archbishop of Canterbury declared field work on Sundays acceptable in 1917. Unsurprisingly for British culture, binge drinking, particularly from soldiers, became a problem. Before the war pubs were open from 5am - 12.30am on weekdays. These were shortened, particularly to prevent morning and afternoon drinking.  By 1918 illegitimacy rates had increased by 30% and divorce rates through the war tripled. While there was a set path for dealing with war widows and their children, what should be done with bereaved girls and illegitimate children? Victorian attitudes to unwed mothers now seemed heartless.

For the soldiers on the continent a different problem arose, as British chaplain Tom Pym remarked: ‘gonorrhoea is a minor discomfort compared to wounds or death cheerfully faced in battle, and is much more pleasurably obtained’. I suspect this is the Works of the Flesh St Paul talked about. Padre Geoffrey Studdert-Kennedy, also known as “Woodbine Willy”, (who won the military cross for bravery helping the wounded and whose son was vicar here through the 50s) noted the number of soldiers who brought up versions of the Problem of Evil: how do you reconcile Christianity with ‘the bayoneting of Germans and the shambles of the battlefield’? It seemed to many that Christianity and war were entirely at odds. At one point Kennedy found himself in the front line when a strafe started. ‘Who are you?’ asked a Sergeant, to which Kennedy replied “I’m the church.” The sergeant countered “Then what the ****** hell are you doing here?”

Here we can see a shift in emphasis in theology also reflected in the building of the Dover House Estate. The Dover House Estate was built over a decade from 1919. It arrived as part of the ‘Homes fit for heroes’ movement, that tried to improve living conditions for the those returning from the war. The attempt to clear slums and build decent housing was as much to do with the threat of Bolshevism as social concern, and it struggled through lack of funds and skilled builders, which is why it took a decade to build; but this estate is certainly one of the success stories.

It also plays an important role in the history of St Margaret’s as although we became a Church of England church in 1912, we only became a parish in 1923, undoubtedly because of the many new souls coming to West Putney. So while the Son of Man might have nowhere to lay his head, or as we shall shortly sing: ‘In life no house, no home my Lord on earth might have’; for the returning soldiers here was a place to lay your head, and a ready built church to bring the new community together. And here is the connection.

 At the heart of Christianity is a doctrine which for some seems very strange and contradictory, but which is the whole of Christianity. That God became Man. God became Man in order to share our suffering; to teach us how to live; to place eternity is within our grasp. The kingdom of heaven is here. That as we love, we encounter and grasp something of the reality of God. And actually the doctrine makes sense. How could we connect with God if he had not already connected with us? Why would God create a universe if he did not intend in some way to be part of the fabric of it and know it from the inside out? Where is God to be found if not in the most human of experiences: in rigid fear, in life and death moments, in loyalty and service to the point of death?

The incarnation that was grasped in the war was febrile, human, it was the blood, sweat and tears that made the Passion an everyday reality. These are those who knew what it meant for fire to come down from heaven and to leave the dead to bury the dead. But there is an incarnation in a community. There is the old foundation stone that reminds us of the faith we have inherited. There is a spire that points our hope to God, an altar that gathers the people as at a feast, in brotherly love.

St Margaret’s, which became a parish as the Estate was being built, is the incarnation of West Putney’s faithful. And for those people returning home with the experience of trauma, service and sacrifice, who stood firm for freedom, not for self-indulgence, but as servants of one another; this was their church that they shaped through their faith and experience. So the choir stalls behind me are the only ones I know which are themselves a war memorial, decorated with symbols of war and peace; while Humphrey has written a piece on the crucifix above the pulpit, given by an officer who had received comfort gazing on the large wayside crosses of Northern France. His speculation was that perhaps this was given by a soldier who was recuperating at Dover House, which was used as a hospital for amputees during the war. Whatever the story, the answer to the sergeant who questioned Studdert-Kennedy on what the hell he, the Church, was doing in the middle of a strafing attack, is that that is exactly where the church should be. Incarnate in the midst of people in difficulty. That is in fact the whole of the Gospel.

We are not so far from this generation. Very likely one person here has met someone who knew our first vicar. Our first hymn this morning, All my hope on God is founded, was sung at the consecration of St Margaret’s in 1912. So for us St Margaret’s is human and divine. It bears all the marks of the many hands that have shaped it over the years, the vicars, the churchwardens, the artists, the singers, the carpenters, the youth-workers, but it is here as a work of God. It is here to remind us that between the many offerings of time and talents, the imperfect lives of the faithful, there is a work of God to be discerned. Gently raising the prayers of the people, and shaping lives to follow Christ more nearly, day by day.

The church is the visible reminder of God’s presence in the life of our community. But it is we the faithful who are truly the church, sharing God’s love as the living reminders of the Incarnate God who came amongst us in hardship and tragedy, to share our pain and teach us to love. It is we who continue to sing ‘Great is thy faithfulness’ – written in 1923, just before St Margaret’s became a parish, as a tie to that generation and as a reminder that through all the changes of time, for strength for today and bright hope for tomorrow, God remains faithful and his mercies remain for evermore.

Pentecost 2: Freedom and order

2nd Sunday after Pentecost

Sermon by the Reverend Doctor Brutus Green

Readings: Isaiah 65.1-9, Galatians 3. 23-29, Luke 8.26-39

All of you are one in Christ Jesus.

I had an interesting chat with someone over coffee last week, considering the change that occurs between the Gospel and Acts.  In one sense there’s a very direct continuity. Both are written by Luke, and Acts deliberately runs parallel to the Gospel with Paul following a pattern of the life and ministry of Jesus. But what we’re dealing with in Acts is the setting up of an institution. Jesus is always personal – he’s always forgiving, he embodies the human, the compassionate side of teaching. He doesn’t lay down laws but looks to the spirit of them: ‘Man is not made for the Sabbath, but the Sabbath for Man.’

The early church is starting to put boundaries up. Different boundaries to the Jewish faith, but the reforming Spirit of Jesus is solidifying because of the need to hold the various churches together and establish common ground. It’s a tension between freedom and order.

Now this will bother some people. For some the revelation of God is Jesus. He’s what Christianity is about and in him can be found the real thing: spirituality and not religion. The Church for them is always just one step away from being the Pharisees, the bad guys. You too can have your own personal Jesus –  the spontaneous, intuitive, human feeling for the deep things.

But for others Jesus seems anarchic, dangerously liberal: Because without boundaries we don’t know where we are. Jesus lets off the adulterous woman, despite the evidence, he goes easy on the tax collectors who oppress the people, he obeys law only when it suits him: they don’t fast, they don’t keep sabbath, where will this end? Would Jesus forgive murderers, abusers, war criminals, NAZIs?

Even in this service it’s the contrast between the personal introspection of a hymn like “Be Still” and the creed that always follows the sermon, ensuring that despite the preacher we’re all still orthodox. Freedom and order.

This impulse runs throughout the Bible. Today’s Old Testament reading is bringing the people back to orthodox worship from ‘following their own devices’. There is the threat of punishment for iniquity, and the first five books of the Bible, known as the Law, set the parameters by which God’s people should live.

But at the wedding here yesterday we had a familiar reading from the Song of Songs; a book in which there’s no mention of God at all. But even more strikingly for an apparently religious love poem, there’s no mention of marriage. And in a world that is all about male desire, probably around 300 years before Christ, we have this voice:

I am dark but desirable, O daughters of Jerusalem,
like the tents of Kedar, like Solomon’s curtains.
Do not look on me for being dark, for the sun has glared on me…
Tell me, whom I love so, where you pasture your flock at noon,
lest I go straying after the flocks of your companions.

Her skin is tanned through working outside, like the tents of Kedar, a tribe who still to this day coat their tents in black goats skins, meaning she is a peasant. Like Britain till quite recently ladies of the court would not be getting a tan. You may have seen all the many hats this week at Ascot. So for all the moral conservativism of the Bible we have these poems, featuring a young peasant girl extolling the pleasures of love, seemingly without a thought for marriage or God. It’s frequently read allegorically, but on its own terms, in its freedom, spontaneity, its humanity, it’s a surprising addition to the Bible.  A reminder that for all the Law imposes order on our desire, passion will demand its freedom.

St Paul is the person in whom order and freedom meet. Some of Paul’s more conservative views still haunt the church. He’s fighting a battle of credibility for his new churches. They’re under existential threat and the worst of Christian persecutions is still to come. The last thing he needs is for his churches to be undermined by accusations of immorality and libertinism, or of being revolutionaries or anarchists – The danger of Christianity being swept into a political movement has been a reality since they tried to make Jesus king, or like the Gerasenes in today’s Gospel are terrified by this act of power and demand he leave. While Christianity might take a view, St Paul is more interested in the souls of men and women than their political liberty. So Paul wants his new Christians to be morally impeccable and socially acceptable in order to spread the Gospel.

But this message is radical. Our New Testament reading gave us one aspect: ‘Before faith came, we were imprisoned and guarded under the law… There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female – for all of you are one in Christ Jesus’. Imagine hearing that for the first time as a slave. As a woman who has hardly left her house and been passed without question from parents to husband.

There’s an empowerment here, a freedom that will drive Christian Europe to the values of liberty, equality and fraternity, of tolerance and democracy. But always held in tension with the need for order. So Paul is frequently dealing with churches which have heard his message of freedom, but are outdoing each other in proving how free they are. Famously the Corinthians prove what sophisticated Christians they are by blaspheming and sleeping with members of their family. You can imagine his despair!

St Augustine summarized it best with his aphorism: “Love, and do what you want.” It sounds simple and easy, but the trick is in the simple word ‘Love’. For Augustine is telling you to Love like God loves, like Jesus loves, in that way that serves others and is careless of the self, and then do what you like. Which is to say, order your desires to want what God wants. Love – and do what you want.

Perhaps the most significant shift that Paul is describing here is the shift from justice to mercy. ‘The law is our disciplinarian’, we are told so ‘before faith came, we were imprisoned and guarded under the law’. The law being the instrument of justice. I think even from the time we’re children we develop this really strong sense of justice. It’s all that stamping of feet, screaming “it’s not fair”.

St Paul is here saying that by the law, by justice, none of us would really pass muster. We are all too human. But God’s love has been revealed to us as mercy and freedom. So as Shakespeare’s Portia says to Shylock:

That, in the course of justice, none of us
Should see salvation: we do pray for mercy;
And that same prayer doth teach us all to render
The deeds of mercy.

And the same is true in our everyday relationships. If you’re getting worked up about whose turn it is to do the washing up, to get up early with the child, you’re going to end up in serious arguments. Keeping score in relationships leads to resentment. And if your partner’s thrown wine all over the sofa and got three parking tickets, the neighbours are complaining and the police have been called, you’re not going to resolve the situation by working out whose fault it is. It is mercy not justice that makes life possible: forgiveness, not fairness. Generosity not balance.

Our lives, our relationships require a certain order. Loss of order leads to self-indulgence or exploitation. But the Gospel is a message about the freedom of love. That as God has gone beyond order and the law, so should we find that freedom to love, to give and forgive. Amen.

Trinity Sunday: the joy of the present moment

Trinity Sunday

Sermon by the Reverend Doctor Brutus Green

Readings: Proverbs 8.1-4,22-31, Romans 5.1-5, John 16.12-15

I am an impatient person. When we’re eating our go-to meal of Fajitas, I will be busy licking my thumbs having demolished 3, whilst Rhiannon is still tucking the corners on her first. In my defence, though, she does overstuff hers.

And I was once recognised by a girl who hadn’t seen me for 3 years from 100 yards simply by the way that I walk. I can’t tell you in a church how my Company Sergeant Major at Sandhurst described my walking, very loudly on a daily basis, but I have a peculiar tendency to lean forwards and lurch rapidly ahead— especially if I’m thinking about something serious. I also have an almost neurotic drive to rush from one thing to the next, which has run into some difficulty in having a child.  But this weekend we started pram-running together and woe betide you if you get in our way, especially with our greyhound running behind picking up the road kill. 

Now there’s a part of all of us that just can’t wait for the satisfaction of reaching the end. Whether it’s the end of a romantic comedy when the happy couple swooshing off into the sunset; or Bond, washed up on a desert island with some scantily clad woman with a preposterous name; the end when Bruce Willis’ white vest is utterly filthy and everyone is dead; or a Peter Jackson hobbit epic when the end goes on interminably an hour past it should. But these are the moments when you think:  It’s all done. Complete.  Switch off.  You’ve got that tick in your life’s to do list checked.

And it would be very frustrating to not get to the end; to get killed in some freak accident and never find out who, if anyone, actually survives to be king or queen at the end of Game of Thrones. I still have about 3 episodes to go but annoyingly they’ve taken it off Now TV so I’ll probably never find out.

But then there are those difficult moments when you wish everything would just end because it’s all so awful. Like chicken-pox. Or Brexit. Or when you turn up to your exam and realise you revised for the wrong exam - which I did once. Or when you’re dry rot keeps spreading and suddenly in a week of bad weather you look up to see that there’s water coming through the roof.

But think how different is that willing for the moment to go on forever.  When the sound of the sea and the sun on your skin demand nothing of you, or when it’s gone midnight with friends feeling perfectly understood, free and invincible; it’s another desire to stop time but as different from the former as life is from death. The poet T.S. Eliot once wrote that ‘human beings cannot bear very much reality’. He meant by this that we’re not very good at living in the present. We’re often so consumed by anxiety over what’s coming next that we stop experiencing the moment.

As with fajitas, I habitually eat too quickly.  I might have been looking forward to some smart dinner all day but I’ll gobble through because hunger makes me eat like a maniac, or simply because I’m mindlessly chatting and not thinking about it, and before I know it it’s over and I can’t remember what I’ve eaten. Or, worse, you see people who are so busy Facebooking, tweeting, blogging, Pinteresting, Instagramming and Snapchatting that actually life has passed them by and they’re fifty with a massive web presence but no personal life or memories. They say that the mind is a wonderful servant but a terrible master. The same is true of social media. A wonderful servant. A terrible master.

But to go back to Bruce Willis and the romantic comedies - which incidentally would be a great name for a band - you will have noticed how the ending has a false bottom. There’s always a sequel - Bruce gets a new white vest, there’s a new bond girl as the previous one is conveniently forgotten; the awkward break up ‘it’s not you, it’s the Russians’, left to the imagination; or in the case of romantic comedies we’re just left with the speculation of happiness. Surely marriage, children, old age walks in kew gardens.

My point is though that we’re usually looking for an ending. And it’s true, life is a bit more manageable if there are markers where we can say with joy and relief “this is over”.  When the guests leave and you shut the door exclaiming, “Thank goodness they’re gone”. But actually there is no “over” — the kiss becomes a relationship, the engagement becomes a wedding, the marriage, kids. Suddenly you’re out the army, but now there’s a baby and already the churchwardens are clambering at the door. No one ever says stop, take a break, you’ve earned it. No matter how many seasons of Game of Thrones there’s been, life doesn’t get any easier for Jon Snow — Don’t tell me what happens. But just as we may be fervently wishing for the end — out of terror and horror or the joy of completion — life dances on.

So we can worry away focused on the future, or we can pay attention to the present moment. But if your mind is always set on the future you may miss the present.  Whereas if you’re truly and actively engaged with the present, then the future might just look after itself.

So, perhaps, instead of looking endlessly forwards, now is the time to start appreciating the moment — the weather, your work, cricket, your friends, a leadership election, the present moment in all it has to give.  Because the moment of peace in this life is not the stationary moment, the moment at rest at the end.  Retirement which for my generation will probably simply not happen, the moment of peace is not the moment at the end — It’s when you are still moving, but moving in harmony with the world and the people alongside you. When you’re in the present and it’s easy and right. Not a moment without responsibility, but a moment without distraction.

Now Trinity Sunday is traditionally hated by preachers who feel they have to explain the Christian God, usually by some bad metaphor relying on a dead plant, poor science, bizarre family dynamics or awkward third wheel relationships. For all the confusion the helpful aspect of the doctrine lies in shattering our childhood concept of God. God is not a thing out there or up above. God is not a great judge or king in the sky.  God is neither the immovable trigger that kicks it off nor the full stop at the end of the sentence.

Dante, as he reaches the inner sanctum of heaven in Europe’s greatest poem, The Divine Comedy describes the Trinity like this: ‘In the profound and clear ground of the lofty light appeared to me three circles of three colours and of the same extent, and the one seemed reflected by the other as rainbow by rainbow, and the third seemed fire breathed forth equally from the one and the other.’ With circles Dante has found the perfect symbol that can convey both stillness and movement, for as a perfect circle spins you would not perceive its movement.  The image of God, then, is of being still and still moving. But even more memorable is the ending.  Dante writes: ‘now my desire and will, like a wheel that spins with even motion, were revolved by the Love that moves the sun and the other stars’. God is still and still moving and it’s this cosmic movement, not girls, that run the world.

It’s never at rest because Love is never at rest.  And if eternity is not one interminable ending; not one final full stop at the end of the world’s sentence, then perhaps we should stop looking for endings. Perhaps we should try living in the moment a little more, rather than recording what we’ve completed. After all, the truly interesting people are doing truly interesting things. They leave it to others to tweet about them.

Life is not a set of boxes to be ticked or a race to be finished, and even in the dreadful moment we can say, ‘this too will pass.’ But life is about discovering the joy, love and peace that suffuses and moves in every moment.  The love that moves the sun and other stars. This is the Trinity — and the God we should believe and trust in.  Amen.

Pentecost: A Christian nation before God

Pentecost

Sermon by the Reverend Doctor Brutus Green

Based on readings: Genesis 11:1-9, Acts 2. 1-21, John 14.8-17, 25-27 

The late eighteenth century philosopher Hegel wrote that “newspapers serve modern man as a substitute for morning prayers”.  The comment reflects the secularising of society, but at the heart of what he is saying is that the thing that binds the nation together, the people’s common interest and experience, is the daily practice of reading the paper.  Reading the paper, or however else we catch the news, forms us in our personal and social identities. The two, I might add, are not mutually exclusive. Justin Welby at the start of his reign repeated the theologian Karl Barth’s dictum that we should have a Bible in one hand and a newspaper in the other, if our faith is going to be relevant to the world.

Part of what is troubling about the rise of Social media is that we are no longer reading the same news, which leads to a confused and divided nation. But what I’d like to reflect on this morning how this little book gave us a new benchmark for the English nation, the English language and the modern individual.

The Prayer Book, obviously, holds God in high esteem, but the monarch comes a pretty close second. Not a service goes by without a prayer for her and usually for her family as well. Eddie Izzard was quite right in noting that, as people go, behind her big house and people with guns, she is one pretty saved queen.  This last week I have prayed and sung for her to be saved at least 20 times, so I’ve certainly done my bit, but it’s important to remember that praying for the queen is at the same time understood as praying for her government and people.

The gunpowder plot, used to provide one of the more colourful services of the 1662 Prayer Book, which was duly to be remembered each year, including the prayer to God, “who on this day, didst miraculously preserve our Church and State from the secret contrivance and hellish malice of Popish conspirators; and on this day also didst begin to give us a mighty deliverance from the open tyranny and oppression of the same cruel and blood-thirsty enemies”. The service was cut - presumably as Father Jack would have said - as an ecumenical matter.

Aside from the no doubt sincere piety of Anglican liturgists in wishing their monarchs well, the force of the Prayer book is deeply conservative, quietist and nationalistic, intended through lifelong repetition to uphold social structure that ‘we may be godly and quietly governed’.  And no surprise here. The 16th Century was still recovering from the bloody Wars of the Roses, and the Reformation and Counter-Reformation sparked political and religious wars and revolts across all of Europe. Rebellion was the great fear. 

But now for the first time, since the prior Latin rites were innumerable and diverse and incomprehensible to the ordinary folk, the people had services which would have been identical no matter where you were in the country, in a language you could understand. It was an end to parochial differences. Even the rubrics were written out so you would all be standing, kneeling or sitting at the appropriate time. It is the ideal form of ideology, even more than cricket and afternoon tea, the prayer book united the people in a common language and religion; thoroughly English.

It is particularly appropriate then that the prayer book was launched on Pentecost 1549.  The preface of the day celebrates ‘the gifte of diverse languages’ the tool of evangelism, suggesting that truth is to be pursued through the vernacular and understood by the people; against the tyrannous opacity of Latin. Being called Brutus that is a very difficult thing to say. It also brings to mind all those bad Latin jokes, like how you can decline Brutus but you can’t conjugate him. 

The point is that while in our Old Testament reading Zephaniah wants the undoing of the curse of Babel in a new ‘pure language’, the book of Acts, read through the Reformers, celebrates the gifts of different tongues praising God as the gift of the Holy Spirit, and so the hankering for a barely understood single holy language of Latin is read as the denial of the Spirit.  The use of Latin in liturgy was outlawed from Pentecost 1549. 

The nation state was not the only winner from the Prayerbook, however.  As part of the Reformation movement, a significant impetus in the new liturgy was to make the individual accountable before God. Under Catholic Latin it is the Church that is the guardian of Truth.  It is a matter beyond the competence of ordinary people. The inability of the majority to understand what is being said maintains a sense of transcendence and the radical difference of the divine. The Prayer Book, on the other hand, has a rubric that it must be “read distinctly with a loud voice”. It demands that it is understood and transparent before the people. No more secret prayers and cult practices.

And with the Prayer Book, services were laid open for the first time. The interpretation of Scripture and liturgy was suddenly open to everyone.  What had been sacred mystery and priestly power had become personal engagement and intellectual access.  This required the ordinary people to be involved in the service.  All of a sudden the service was actually about them. But all of a sudden they had to work a bit harder. 

The nation in worship moved from watching a transubstantiatory rite (try saying that after three gin and tonics) in a foreign language (1547), to a doctrinally ambiguous but inclusive and fully English service (1549), to forthright Protestantism in the second Book of Common Prayer (1552), back to Latin in the Catholic retrenchment of bloody Mary, before the compromise Prayer Book of the religious settlement of 1559.  A troubling couple of decades. The Prayer Book had two main purposes, to unite a nation in language, loyalty to the crown and uniformity of religion, and to legitimize the individual as a man or woman unmediated before God, able to work out their salvation in fear and trembling. 

The first Queen Elizabeth said “I would not open windows into men’s souls” and that has preserved a liturgy which might properly be called inclusive in its theology, and the good luck of the Church of England was to have for its liturgist a poet, Thomas Cranmer, who was able to lay the basis for a beautiful liturgy.  The same queen, however, was also to say, "I know I have the body of a weak and feeble woman, but I have the heart and stomach of a king, and of a king of England too; and think foul scorn that Parma or Spain, or any prince of Europe, should dare to invade the borders of my realm."

And this is the other side of the Prayer Book, a fierce nationalistic ideology, built on the humble origins of a the troubling and ambivalent character of Henry VII and a generation of religious persecution. It's an historical and cultural document which is worthy of celebration, but it also is in perpetuity, the official Prayer Book of this land, and for all its faults incredibly important in being a Book of Common Prayer, the first book of prayer for the common people of these isles.

We too can enjoy its beauty in prayer and music, reminded that we are still (just about) a Christian nation before God, but also an individual before God, called to learn his love and participate in building his kingdom.

Easter 7: Connection and belonging

7th Sunday of Easter

Sermon by the Reverend Doctor Brutus Green

Based on readings: Ezekiel 36.24-28, Acts 16.16-34, John 17.20-26

“May they be one, as we are one, I in them and you in me.”

Today’s Gospel reads strangely. It’s a prayer. But it’s written in very formal language. It’s almost like a philosophical treatise in its phrasing. As such it seems quite unemotional, withdrawn. Despite the fact that Jesus is praying that his disciples be one; that they love one another like he has loved them. The translation doesn’t necessarily convey that this is a heart-felt speech, made on the eve of execution, that his vision be carried on and his friends look after each other. 

Unless you have completely withdrawn from society; having heard the same news stories every day for the last three years and with the optimistic billing of the England cricket team, you may have decided you cannot bear the inevitable disappointment, and cut yourself off from the world; but not completely. After all you’ve still made it to church. So if you haven’t gone Crusoe, or retired to senility in the attic; you will be a member of certain groups.

At street level it might be a playgroup, a lunch club, or a poker night; a dysfunctional family; but you might still work or have ties to your old company. You might belong to a club on Pall Mall, or a book club, or the Society of Charles King and Martyr. You might, and perhaps contrary to your actions on your last trip to the polling booth, belong to a political party; or formerly belong to a political party; or be a patron or trustee of some charity or foundation. Your balloon is likely attached by several such strings. We are social animals. We belong. And belonging tells us who we are. 

But belonging seems less fashionable today, loyalty less a la mode. Institutions are in decline and in constant suspicion of abuse, corruption and being out of touch. Perhaps the French President will not go to the D-Day commemorations on Juno Beach.  How very French I hear you say. And even to say you’re English suggests colonial paternalism. Thus Elton John’s recent tweet: ‘I am a European — not a stupid, imperialist English idiot’. To be a “woman”, I’ve always said, is to participate in an outdated, binary, oppressive normativity.

And we could easily imagine Jesus walking into the Conservative party HQ right now and declaring: “Father, I wish that they might be one, even as we are one,” Or bringing together Jeremy Corbyn and Alastair Campbell and praying, “May the love with which you have loved me be in them, and I in them.” It seems more likely that he might offer some other just counsel like: “Father, forgive them for they know not what they do.” The desire to belong, to have a social mooring is as strong as ever, but in a culture, addicted to the heady cult of individualism, and a political situation which has abandoned collaboration, where is it that we come together?

I talked some weeks back about the Jewish philosopher Martin Buber and his book I and Thou. I’d like to bring it up again because it very neatly encapsulates two very different ways we inhabit the world, and the difference between worldly relationships and what Jesus calls us to.

So there are two sorts of relationship. I-it relationships: where we treat others as objects; an instrumental view of the world. And I-thou relationships: where we treat others as a relationship in which we’re involved; where I’m less sure where I finish and you begin.

So if you walk into a room and you’re thinking, what can I get out of this, how can these people help me, which people do I need to avoid, what is the most I can get from this. That is the I-it relationship. A room full of bumper-cars. 

If you walk into a room and you’re asking yourself, how can I connect with these people, how can we understand each other better, how can we grow together, how might we together benefit the world, then we’re somewhere closer to I-thou.

Now even the most generous minded person cannot be fully engaged all the time. The queues in Tried and True are long enough. And actually having a little professional distance from your dentist is usually a good idea. But to merely treat people as objects would lead to a very lonely and very cold life. But this is not just about dealing with other people.

So perhaps you run. A few years ago I had the delight of a 5 week running course in the Yorkshire hills. Every day was a somewhat uncomfortable test with every conceivable pressure to keep up. For the most part it was mind over matter. My body was an object. Fill it with fuel, give it ice baths, exert my will over it. But every runner will know — and there were moments in those 5 weeks — when mind and body are in harmony, and running is suddenly a joy. It’s actually thrilling and you feel the endorphins rushing about in your brain like performing dolphins. mind, body, spirit, the world all in sync.  That feeling of connection within yourself is I think like a religious experience.

Or if you’ve ever moved from that stilted experience of a first-date, where the boundaries of where each of you end are so clearly miles apart that you wonder how you will ever find anything to say to this person, to that seductive rapport where you could talk all night and you’re finishing each other sentences; that intoxicating infatuation is like a religious experience.

And even if it’s more measured there are those moments where you realise there is a matching curvature between your long term partner and yourself, where your faces fit together, such that to lose that person would be to lose yourself. It has become inconceivable that you would be truly separate objects again.

Or perhaps out on a mountain top, or in a summer rainstorm, in the absolute calm of an ocean or lake; or watching the dawn send a matrix of light through the dense canopy, you have felt within the animality, the createdness of your being an absolute connection and rootedness in this planet.

Or perhaps it’s just watching your first nature documentary after the birth of a child, seeing the polar bear with her cub and realising with uncontrollable sobbing that this is your battle. You are the polar bear. That connection has the nature of a religious experience. 

Or finally in church, it may be the collective act of singing, perhaps in today’s gradual remembering the Dunkirk scene in Atonement; perhaps singing in school or college, or through 40 years of vicars coming and going, or in speaking words a realisation of their weight, spoken over 2000 years, 160 years in this building where prayer has been valid. Perhaps it is simply in a quiet moment, a breaking down of the barriers we place around our souls to find that connection with God, with the person in the next pew, the birdsong, the Putney foxes asleep in the garden. That connection is the basis of all religious experience. That is the opening of the soul to the Thou of the world. This is what Ezekiel spoke of: “A new heart I will give you, and a new spirit I will put within you;”

The basis of almost all horror movies is to isolate each member of the group and pick them off one by one. Christianity is founded in reconciliation and this prayer that God’s people might be one, as God is one in unity, and that as one they might love each other. Britain, as a country, and as part of Europe has not looked so fractious and isolated in a long time. As Christians it is our vocation to be points of connection, and through prayer and action find ways of making our connection with nature, our neighbours and our God deeper and more numerous. It is that point of connection that fuels our charity and our impact upon world. It is that depth of connection that is the source of a living faith. 

We have for too long treated the world as an ‘it’, treated women, people of different lifestyles, foreigners, the poor as an it. Sometimes even with a general will to do good to them. To follow Christ is to realise that the animal one pew over, the taciturn man serving coffee, the stranger whose eye you would not meet walking here, the chorus of birds that woke you up, the bright garden outside all have that spark of the divine. All can be reached by thoughtfulness; all are a touching point to eternity. And in feeling that connection, to widen our hearts. In finding the Thou all around us, to love them. Amen.

The Ascension: The end from which we begin

The Ascension

Sermon by the Reverend Doctor Brutus Green

Based on readings: Ezekiel 37.1-14, Acts 16.9-15, John 5.1-9

 The first question, the question that all theologians hate is about the Ascension itself: where is Jesus’ body? In its typically pictorial language the New Testament has him going up and off like a sky rocket into the night.  Is he perhaps then to be discovered with the Father and Spirit hanging out on Mars like one evangelical I knew used to aver? Well no.

The Bible is trying to give expression to the change that occurs between the Easter resurrection appearances and the gift of the Spirit in the birth of the Church. It takes the resurrection seriously - note that ‘he presented himself alive... by many convincing proofs’ - and we should not overlook that it is the concreteness of this resurrection experience that defines Christianity as something fundamentally new and unexpected. But the ascension draws to a close Jesus’ humanly embodied presence in the world.        

As for where Jesus’ body is, it is with God.  The early church from the time of the Gospels had witnessed in the resurrection the divinity of Christ and so understood him to be not simply up in the stars - contrary to popular belief very few religions have understood God in this way - but present in the way that God is present. It’s hard for us to get our minds around this because we’re so used to a materialistic view of the universe where the world of atoms, electrons, quarks and the rest push out God with their sheer weight of matter.

Now I’m no scientist and generally hate theologians trying to do science as much as I hate scientists who think they can do theology, but if science can talk these days about superstring theory and 11 dimensions (we usually only experience 3 dimensional space and time) then the idea of a multi-layered universe doesn’t seem so implausible. Jesus’ body, then, like God, is somehow still with us.

What then are we to make of the return of this Ascended Lord? Well, in a sense, this is something that we already have experience of. Jesus, as the Word made flesh, is a paradigmatic sacrament - a visible sign of an invisible presence. So, in every Eucharist as God is made present in bread and wine, we have his return.  And that is a return we physically take into ourselves as we ask to be more loving, more Christ-like, closer to God, more a part of Jesus’ body.  And the Eucharist itself looks forward to when we will be fully present to God, though as our first reading in Acts tells us ‘it is not for [us] to know the times or periods that the Father has set’.

The point is, though, that looking towards the end will help us see and so bring to being that peace and goodness that is the kingdom of God. By seeing our end we can orient our lives. The importance of this cannot be overstated. Celebrated life coach Martha Beck offers the following exercise: ‘Think of someone whose approval you covet.  It might be your lover, someone else’s lover, your boss, a celebrity who may never even meet you, [your favourite vicar, or even Jesus,…] Get all those needy feelings front and center.  Let them fill your whole mind.  Now imagine that you get to spend an hour with the person whose approval you seek. Can you feel the desperation, the grasping, the sick sense that this hour isn’t nearly enough? Excellent.

Now begin at the end.  Imagine that you already have this person’s approval, that they adore you, that nothing on God’s green earth could ever diminish their total approval.  You are awash in approval... Letting this mental position fill your mind, picture interacting with your hero again. Can you feel the freedom, the ease, the humour that’s suddenly available to you? Can you feel yourself start to smile without trying?  Can you tell this version of you is way more likely to get approval than the version who’s always desperately seeking it?’

It kind of works doesn’t it? Really it’s a confidence trick in which you help yourself to a place in which you really believe in yourself.  It requires, though, that you can picture and believe in a positive end.  And this is important.  Because if at any point we stop believing in positive outcomes to our lives and actions we will soon find ourselves in quick sand.  When our confidence really leaves us or when the narratives we have in mind for ourselves, for society, history, the world are bleak any motivation to keep going, to seek justice, love, peace will soon evaporate. Martha Beck is right in knowing that our faith in positive outcomes is essential to our success as a person.

Which brings us back to the return of the Ascended Lord.  History, it seems continues to turn and turn in the widening gyre.  We have moved from an Age of Optimism to an Age of Anxiety, a narrative which is also replayed in cycles through different times of our own lives.  But the Christian narrative promises a happy ending: that in Jesus’ return we will lay hold of the peaceful kingdom of God for ourselves.

This is the end from which we begin.  This is the hope and confidence that our faith should give us in seeking to build a world of love and justice. Even through the anxiety of Brexit, the seven last plagues and the four horsemen, by beginning at the end, which is the glory of the risen and ascended Lord, we can move forward with hope and confidence - not anxious about oddballs claiming the end of the world is nigh - or cynics with their Jesus is coming, look busy!  But in the sure and certain hope of the resurrection.

Easter 6: Do the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few?

6th Sunday of Easter

Sermon by the Reverend Doctor Brutus Green
Based on readings: Ezekiel 37.1-14, Acts 16.9-15, John 5.1-9 

If you happened to be at church last week, you’ll be delighted to know that I’m sticking with the classic movie references. Only this week moving from Taxi Driver to the superb 1954 film On the Waterfront. The film is less famous than one particular line in it, spoken by Marlon Brando, a boxer who is convinced by his brother under pressure from the Mob to lose fights for money. You may have never heard of the film but you’ll know the line: [I think it works better with an English accent, but this is not an accurate repetition of Brando’s working American man:] “I coulda had class. I coulda been a contender. I coulda been somebody.” Not ‘I coulda been a champion’, but just ‘I coulda been a contender’. Against his conscience, against his pride, with no support, Brando has become a bum, a nobody. It’s not that he failed — he never even got a chance.

I bring this up because there’s a tension throughout history, but most clearly in the twentieth century between — paraphrasing Mr Spock — ‘the needs of the many’ and ‘the needs of the few’. That conflict is at the heart of most human tragedy. For when ‘as logic clearly dictates… the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few’, we are in to the language of ‘collateral damage’, of ‘necessary evils’. The evil of having to get up early every morning because the need of your partner to have half an hour more in bed, and your baby for his milk, outweigh your need to sleep. Necessary evils.

The great unsentimental wickednesses of Fascism and Socialism made no excuses here, but it also becomes the embarrassment of our own politics. Economic or ‘tough’ decisions are made regularly that even with every effort to be fair, require politicians, commanders, anyone making large-scale decisions, to set the needs of the few to one side. Decisions called ‘brave’, ‘statesmanlike’, ‘justified’. I’m sure, like me, most of you are very much looking forward to seeing which of the ‘statesmanlike’ figures, vying to be contenders, becomes our next Prime Minister.  

The novelist Arthur Koestler puts it concisely in Darkness at Noon, the book that signed him off from Communism.  He writes:

‘There are only two conceptions of human ethics, and they are at opposite poles. One of them is Christian and humane, declares the individual to be sacrosanct, and asserts that the rules of arithmetic are not to be applied to human units. The other starts from the basic principle that a collective aim justifies all means, and not only allows, but demands, that the individual should in every way be subordinated and sacrificed to the community — which may dispose of it as an experimentation rabbit or a sacrificial lamb.’

It’s not that having collective aims pursued at the cost of individuals is evil. That’s a principle inherent in all politics. But it is true that when this is pursued most rationally and ruthlessly, it’s led to some of the worst human catastrophes. Think of Javert in Les Miserables, of whom Victor Hugo says:

‘Probity, sincerity, candour, conviction, and the idea of duty, are things which, by deceiving themselves, may become hideous, but which even if hideous remain grand… they are virtues which have but one vice, error… Nothing could be more painful and terrible than this face, which revealed what we may call all the evil of good.’ 

This may be true even of politicians who have good intentions. But so much more when they do not. I hope you all voted last week.

When the mob who control the Waterfront in the Marlon Brando film start getting rid of those who threaten their control, Father Barry tells them: ‘Some people think the Crucifixion only took place on Calvary. They better wise up! Taking Joey Doyle's life to stop him from testifying is a crucifixion…  And every time the Mob puts the pressure on a good man, tries to stop him from doing his duty as a citizen, it's a crucifixion. And anybody who sits around and lets it happen, keeps silent about something he knows that happened, shares the guilt of it just as much as the Roman soldier who pierced the flesh of our Lord to see if he was dead. ‘

When the individual is crushed beneath the collective will, the powers that be, it is a crucifixion.

I was intrigued watching a 3 year old playing with some older children in the house yesterday. You could see this was very new to the 3 year old, but it was also exciting being with these older children. Despite being very unsure about the game he went along with it.  We are just naturally very sociable animals. Submitting to a group is something we do a little too easily. And a vicarage is an excellent place to play hide and seek.

It’s a theme that’s very clearly at work in the Gospel.  Power – that is – not hide and seek. As John’s Gospel moves to a close, it’s revealed to the High Priest that ‘it is expedient that one man die for the people’. He doesn’t understand why this has been revealed or what it means, but goes along with it because it seems to him a political truth. The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few.

And we see it in certain miracles.  We’re told that the man is born blind in order that God’s power may be seen and Jesus revealed as the light of the world. Lazarus is allowed to die and Jesus delays his journey to this end, so that he may be raised from the dead and Jesus known as the resurrection and the life. Jesus’ divinity then appears to look past the plight of the individual to the higher goal of the revelation of God’s purposes.

And yet in today’s Gospel, we see Jesus, as he does so often, responding to individual need. Seeing someone struggling and not abstracting to the wider social or theological  issues, lamenting the NHS, or making a speech about social justice, but simply acting on the basis of the need in front of him. We see him breaking the Jewish interpretation of the Law, which is no respecter of the man or woman in crisis. And as with his compassion for outcasts, the vilified and unclean, and his emphasis on forgiveness, Jesus in his humanity puts the individual first.  He’s kind. So in the two natures of Christ, we see mercy seasoning justice, of the needs of the few held with the needs of the many.

This person-based ethics is infused in Christianity. In our reading from Acts we heard about the women of Macedonia and Lydia, hearing the Gospel and being baptised. And this is how Christianity went from a handful of people to a world religion. The simple sharing of stories and interpersonal relationships. The few caring for the few, despite the persecution of the many. As Lydia was baptised with her whole family, like last week, we baptise into the faith our children, as we promise to pass on the stories and bring them up with love and prayer. And as a parent loves a child, as the humanity of Christ speaks of God’s love for each of us despite our weakness and failure — so in baptism we’re reminded that nothing can separate a child from the love of God, and that we have this duty to try and replicate this love for one another, for our neighbours and those we share our lives with; despite early mornings, diva moments and an overabundance of bodily fluids. 

So yes we have collective goals, and we should pursue justice. But we also have to protect one another from the justice and indifference of the world. We have to encourage one another to become the persons we are meant to be. We can all be contenders, but not alone. We can all become collateral damage, we can all face crucifixion, if we don’t watch out for the person who has fallen the wrong side of the tracks. And as the Bible continually exhorts, we must do what we can for the widow, the orphan, the refugee, the sick and the dying. And as Spock learns, where there is love, there is no counting of costs.  Love will move time and space to meet the needs of the few, that one sheep gone astray, the prodigal and profligate, the outcast on the hill, whatever the purposes of the many.  Amen.

Easter 5: Attention and Humility

5th Sunday of Easter

Sermon by the Reverend Doctor Brutus Green

Based on readings: Genesis 22.1-18, Acts 11.1-18, John 13.31-35

This week I had the pleasure of going on a safeguarding course. Understandably, the Church is very keen on these, such that vicars end up attending one most years. They’re a sort of health and safety brief but for people. But like all courses, they easily become too generic and so full of “necessary information” that the only way to get through it all is to have someone talk solidly for 5 hours at a glazed airless room. Please understand that my first priority is for St Margaret’s is to be a safe church, especially for children and vulnerable adults. The church’s C3 Safeguarding course, however, seemed suspiciously similar to its C1 course, we did here a month ago, only with less discussion and fewer breaks. I’ve always felt that if Microsoft had placed an inbuilt limit of twenty slides per presentation, teaching across all institutions would be greatly improved. The army, for example, loves Powerpoint like it’s 1997, but it’s telling that there’s an unwritten rule amongst soldiers that you never ask questions. Nothing to prolong the agony.

Now astute listeners will have noticed something of a safeguarding issue in our Old Testament reading, in some respects ill-suited to a baptism.  But don’t worry, I know you can’t see the lamb in church for the burnt offering, but the Lord will provide. Of course, the story is so familiar, you may have missed its strangeness, or you might think, the Bible is just full of odd stories, it’s better not to think too much about it. But Abraham throughout history is held up as the model of faith, despite this troubling attempted filicide. So should we be concerned? Does this story advocate child sacrifice? fundamentalism? Is he the paradigm of faith or the harbinger of terrorism?

At the root of Western civilisation, are two sets of stories: the Bible and Homer. Homer, whose Iliad and Odyssey, like the Bible, are the work of multiple authors, is very different to the biblical writers. With Homer, everything is stated.If a minor character appears in a scene there’s always a great rambling tangent, and, like someone you may know, you’re frequently asking, “Will this story ever end?”So a god will appear in a scene and suddenly the story breaks and we are told this gods parentage and origin, and a brief account of their activity to this point. Achilles and Hector, fully enraged, are about to do battle, but they will chat first expressing fluently their motivation. Even as Odysseus is slaughtering Penelope’s suitors he’s also telling you why he’s doing it. It’s like the beginning of a Game of Thrones episode, which starts with someone awkwardly recounting the events of the last two days to someone with no clothes on in order to bring you up to speed with who is now dead.

Also in Homer, there is absolute continuity of character. We know Agamemnon, Paris, Helen, and they do not change.  Any more than the gods. Just as the characters have epithets — swift-footed Achilles, lovely-haired Ariadne, horse-taming Hector, cunning Odysseus, their personalities are fixed like the stars. There’s no character development, no hidden interiors, and Homer works hard to make the entire narrative clear. You never ask: ‘I wonder why that happened?’

This is not so with Abraham. God speaks to Abraham. We’re not told where or how. Abraham responds simply with a paired back ‘Here I am.’ Then God almost goads him: sacrifice ‘your son, your only son, Isaac, whom you love.’ No answering back. We don’t hear the desperate wrangling in Abraham. He lives for the promise of God —  that he will become Father of nations. Now in his and Sarah’s old age they’ve finally become parents, but despite God’s promise, he’s demanding this child be sacrificed. We do not hear — distress, disbelief, frustration, conflict, anger. From this, his only Son, whom he loves.We hear nothing from Sarah at all. It’s not really a very “woke” story, apologies to all intersectional feminists. The narrative simply progresses on.  Emotions and intentions are undisclosed. 

So then there’s this journey. “On the third day.” But what happened on those three days? These black three days walking with your son to his execution. How many times does Abraham nearly turn around? How does he wrestle and plead with God?

And here’s the difference between the Greek and Hebrew texts. Even were I a Greek of ancient times I’m not involved in the stories of Homer. They’re entertainment; the stories of gods and heroes. I’m not required to put myself in Achilles sandals. There’re virtues and vice aplenty but the stories are written for pleasure.

But Abraham is given to us as a model of faith. The story needs interpretation. What does this tell us about God, faith, and how to live? Where am I in this story — on the three day march to Moriah — those three opaque, hidden days — carrying both the promise of God and this dire command. Attempting to believe in what has been given to me, what I have held onto trustfully through these years,  and yet seeing the inevitable approach of death. And how often have we tried to believe in the promises of a God who will protect and love us, and yet seen disaster around us, felt personal loss, all the evidence of a God who does not keep his promise; but the Bible interprets itself. And when you hear ‘and on the third day’; the crucifixion and resurrection are heard in its echo. And once again we’re dealing with this promise of God and its difficult resolution. Of Christ put to death, of descending into hell; but ‘on the third day’ the restoration of life. The child is returned and the Father’s love is made known.

Now this isn’t neat. Or easy. It’s so familiar we can enjoy it — like a Beatles song that we like because we’ve heard it a thousand times but have no real idea what the words are or mean. ‘I am the Walrus, coo coo key choo’? But these stories are asking more of us. Christ asks us to believe in the possibility of resurrection, when what we see is a world of crucifixion. Abraham on his three day journey must wrestle between the promise he knows in faith and the uncertain command he has been given. He is our model in his honesty, his openness and his availability. Look at how he responds. God calls him: ‘Abraham!’ And he said ‘Here I am.’ Isaac says to him, ‘Father!’ and he says ‘Here I am.’ The angels calls preventing the murder, ‘Abraham! Abraham!’ And he says, ‘Here I am.’ He doesn’t shy away from God, or his son, and to the last moment is present to the possibility that God will interrupt.

Most of us think of faith as something fixed, a sort of certainty. Something that cannot be tested, put to the proof. Abraham shows this is not the case. The constantly moving nature of the world and ourselves, means that faith is not some stationary mast to which we lash ourselves. Nor is it great tablets of stone upon which we write ‘thou shalt’ and ‘thou shalt not’.

Faith is a three day journey to Moriah to wrestle with God over the contradictions between his promises and our experience of a broken and troubling world, a compromised church and our confusion over who this hidden God really is. A faith at all times open to the surprising grace of God. It is not unthinking or dogmatic. It is a profound attention and humility; to be ready at any point to say ‘Here I am’; and to admit at any point — in this I am wrong.

For all the strangeness of politics recently, it has helped in showing us how nearsighted we are, and how unable to see the world from the positions of others. We can blame social media, or a divided society, but an inability to see the financial crisis coming, to see the resistable rise of Trump, of Brexit, of Jeremy Corbyn, of a failure to care for the residents of tower blocks, a late win for the Netherlands in Eurovision, all belies a fixity of opinion that won’t see an approaching storm, and won’t notice the suffering of those not in our social circle. 

Faith demands attention and humility. We are all on this three day journey. Faith is there to be wrestled with. Otherwise it will wither or drift into wishful thinking. So if God is calling — are you willing to say ‘Here I am’? Are you open to the possibility of change?

And as we’re concerned today with a baptism, we might ask how we are doing at walking alongside our children. Are we striking the right balance between the simple truths and allowing their questions, and the deeper meanderings of faith? If faith is too simple, it will be rejected along with the other pleasantries of childhood. This is where we need to be alongside our children on the journey. I’ve had a couple of conversations with Dads in the last week about the transition to not being cool, not being your child’s hero. As Oberon approaches being 8 months old I’m only too aware how little time I have left. 

And this is a place that godparents have a real opportunity. To talk through the difficult things in life, relationships, uncertainty, decisions and bring their experience and, if the child is lucky, wisdom. If not then experience. But as Lizzie symbolically begins this journey today, we know at least that for these first steps she is in a safe place surrounded by the prayers of Putney, and that she has room to grow and change. That beginning the journey of faith sets us in a family, which will have it testing times, but in which we journey alongside one another, in discovering for ourselves the promises of God.

Easter 4: Bringing the world into our ark

4th Sunday of Easter

Sermon by the Reverend Doctor Brutus Green

Based on readings: Genesis 7.1-5,11-18; 8.6-18; 9.8-13, Acts 9.36-43, John 10.22-30

Is it time to build an ark?

This morning notwithstanding, it’s been a disappointing May. Especially after last Summer, we might have expected better, and the eternal British optimism about the weather is currently being tested. But I’m not necessarily talking about the climate. The flood is one of our foundational stories that helps us understand the world, and so we should always be asking, “Does God want us to build an ark?” Now I don’t want you to think I’m turning St Margaret’s into a cult. I have not like Travis from Taxi Driver, started muttering to myself: “Thank God for the rain which has helped wash away the garbage and trash off the sidewalks. All the animals come out at night… Someday a real rain will come and wash all this scum off the streets.”

It’s funny how the human mind works. I was absolutely convinced that the quote was that ‘a hard rain will come’ but I think I’d conflated the line with the Bob Dylan song ‘A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall’, which Dylan wrote after spending too long reading newspapers in New York library around the time of the Cuban-missile crisis. About the song he wrote: "After a while you become aware of nothing but a culture of feeling, of black days, of schism, evil for evil, the common destiny of the human being getting thrown off course.  It’s all one long funeral song.” And perhaps the flood as a story had a hold on Dylan’s mind. My favourite song of his is “Shelter from the Storm”, which has a very diluvian feel.

For me the Flood is not a story about the end of the world. Rhiannon and I do have a plan for if the zombie apocalypse hits, but the flood speaks more of finding and creating safe spaces in the ordinary world. As churches were designed to reflect the shape of boats, we are asked where we can offer, to those who need it, shelter from the storm.

You may have heard that this week a great hero of the church, Jean Vanier died. After serving in the British and Canadian navies, Vanier had trained as a philosopher, but then devoted his life to setting up a network of communities for people with developmental disabilities. There are now 146, 11 in Britain. His guiding ethos was that we should be living with the poor, not just doing good to them. And before it was cool, he was setting up ecumenical and interfaith communities, which put shared humanity before creed. At a time when our care for people with mental disabilities was particularly abject, he recognised a need and an opportunity. So visiting asylums he noticed that despite appalling conditions no one was crying, and he wrote: “When they realise that nobody cares, that nobody will answer them, children no longer cry. It takes too much energy. We cry out only when there is hope that someone may hear us.”

But while many great reformers see poverty and work to alleviate it, Vanier understood that we when live with weakness, we can learn from it. In his communities, those with perceivable disabilities live alongside those without. And speaking of growing old, he stated that he wished to use his age as a sign of the Gospel he had proclaimed: that God is present at the heart of weakness; that despite loss of mobility, memory and ‘even speech’ he might continue to proclaim God’s presence. In this vein he had said earlier: “I am struck by how sharing our weakness and difficulties is more nourishing to others than sharing our qualities and successes.” 

The network of communities is named after the first house Vanier set up in France, “L’Arche”: which means The Ark. A space to gather those who ought to be loved more, against the indifferent waters of the world. 

Probably the most important moral philosopher of the twentieth-century, Alasdair MacIntyre, wrote: ‘I can only answer the question “What am I to do?” if I can answer the prior question “Of what story or stories do I find myself a part?”’ The story of Noah and the ark is significant because it shapes our imagination in how we think of and respond to overwhelming and surrounding danger and difficulty. How can we create a safe space for ourselves and those in our care in the midst of difficulty?

The question for us at St Margaret’s is how we bring more of the world into our ark. How within our resources and capability we extend our friendship and hospitality to widen our umbrella. Not least to our natural world, which whether two by two, or for astute listeners fourteen by fourteen has a rightful place in the ark. Rhiannon, attempting to read the Bible in one year, was outraged when she heard that the clean animals went in, not two by two, as the songs tells us, but 7 pairs at a time; with all the disillusionment of a child having been told that the tooth fairy was…  switching to euros. And if those unicorns have taught us anything, it’s that we should be especially mindful of the young at heart among us. 

But this story of the flood should challenge us further. It’s a story first and foremost about the judgement of the world. But the strange thing is that it immediately undermines itself. Ostensibly, we feel and identify with the wrath of God against a perverse and foolish generation. And like the old crowds at public executions we’re secretly pleased at the idea of judgement and retribution, not least because any judgement that falls not against us is a relief. Schadenfreude, the enjoyment of the pain of others, is first of all, the quiet joy that this did not happen to me.

But the gamechanger moment is the end. The promise, the covenant, that this will never happen again. As a myth, it’s the oddest thing. Myths for the most part are old ways of explaining how the world works. But the flood does the opposite. It takes the universal myth of the great flood – found across all cultures – that explains the judgement of sin and evil, but then says, Never. Never again will this happen. So any time a Hebrew might have been tempted to say “Look, here comes the end of the world!” Her friends would have to say – NO. God has promised that will never happen. And this is not least important because of who the perceived judgement is usually against.

So to return to Taxi Driver, Robert de Niro helpfully enumerates the various low lifes that inhabit the night: the drunkards, gamblers, fornicators, and he doesn’t get quite as far as the clergy in the diocese of Southwark – but there’s a very real socio-economic element to the judgement he speaks as he drives through a grotty part of New York. It is those at the fringe of society that are most liable to our judgement, and yet, as we know, those are whom Jesus chose to spend time with.

And as the rainbow shows the covenant by which promises he will never again cut off all flesh and destroy the earth, so Jesus promises he will not lose one of his sheep, and no one can snatch from his hand. So in reality, we’re all now living in the ark, and it’s time we learned better to live alongside one another, as we’re really in for the long haul.  So for us, today, let us think of how we can better connect with those who fall outside the net of our society. Let us look to how we can bring more safely into our ark. And let’s also think what more we can do to stave off the flood, and keep creation ticking along, two by two and fourteen by fourteen.

Easter 3: Transforming failure

3rd Sunday of Easter

Sermon by the Reverend Doctor Brutus Green

Based on readings: Zephaniah 3.14-20, Acts 9.1-6, John 21.1-19

There’s a moment around 8 o’clock, when hosting a party, that I get a chill deep in my bones. No one’s coming. Perhaps it’s a legacy of being a socially awkward teenager, when for me really no one would have come; but I think it may stem back to my 21st birthday as a student, when I threw a party.  Everyone in the house we shared was very excited and, expecting great numbers, started taking drastic actions like taking doors of walls to prepare for the great crowds. But then I’d been quite non-committal, haphazard and last minute in my invites. A little too cool.This was also I should say before these heady days of social media which make this sort of thing terribly easy, but also of an age and culture where people didn’t send out pour memoirescards, which give a good physical reminder. So the party was a rather dismal affair where people tried to be jolly but on the whole everyone felt slightly embarrassed, trying to think of excuses to leave but aware that their planned exit couldn’t fail to attract attention.

This would have also been the case at our wedding, where as I was at Sandhurst I entrusted a friend to make the invitations and on the first print run Rhiannon noticed that he’d got the place and the date wrong, and spelled my name incorrectly. My involvement in the wedding planning after this was quite limited. On the whole, I think my friend really did me a favour. But you can imagine that this failure of mine, does get brought up from time to time; and in general I think, especially when errors are very public, our failures settle in our mind; sometimes becoming a helpful reminder to avoid repetition of disaster, sometimes as a paralysing fear which prevents us from taking risks. And this can be institutional; there are certainly churches that fight shy of social events, or ambitious fundraising, often because there’s a nay-sayer who tried something back in 1983 to an underwhelming response, and now dutifully attends every meeting just to remind everyone of this.

So failure can be a whetstone – sharpening us to be better organised, better prepared; making us more realistic, more honest, more determined; but it can also be the harbinger of fear, that prevents us from taking risks; the humiliation that says “this is not for you”; that confuses realism with lack of ambition.

The resurrection; the joy of Easter; is about the transformation of failure, and reconciliation.

So today’s Gospel is all about Simon Peter. There’s no more compelling evidence of the destruction of failure than when people take a step back to an earlier mode of life. Peter had given up fishing; he was to be a fisher of men, you remember. Now Jesus is gone and Peter let him down, the “gone fishing” sign is back up.

John’s Gospel loves its symbolism so keen readers will note that if anything happens in the Gospel at night, it’s bad, it’s the devil’s time, because Jesus is the light of the world. So famously when Judas leaves the Last Supper to go and betray Jesus, we’re told: he went out. And it was night. Spiritual darkness. Equally here, we’re told ‘that night they caught nothing.’ The weight of failure has left Peter incapable and in spiritual darkness.

Jesus appears ‘just after daybreak’. And suddenly there are fish everywhere, as Jesus turns this failure, this empty handed spiritual night, into something new and exciting. Here – breakfast – the most important meal of the day,  a sort of impromptu party – (there’s no record of pour memoires) sharing bread and fish in words entirely reminiscent of the last supper and the eucharist. But for Peter it’s what comes after that is his resurrection. 

I think we’re usually quite easy on Peter. Mostly when we read the Passion, the arrest and crucifixion, we’re focused on Jesus; but Peter is worth considering. He is the last disciple who is trying to keep up with what’s going on. He’s Jesus BFF, he’s promised never to leave him; and then at night, in the spiritual darkness, before the cock crows; he denies Jesus 3 times, which in that culture is enough to be granted a divorce. While understandable, at the time when it really matters, for Peter this is total moral failure.

Peter has been living with this: failure to live up to his promises: failure to stick by his friend: and the last time he saw Jesus, he pretended not to know him. How can he go on? So in fact he hasn’t gone on. He’s gone back. He’s gone fishing. But this is resurrection. And since Peter denied Christ three times, the risen Christ now asks him three times, do you love me?

So there is here a sense of a great undoing. You might see it in terms of lifting a curse; as in a fairy tale in order to release the enchantment brought on by the three denials; we need a triple release. You might see it as a psychological truth: that the weight of guilt and shame caused by his failure, requires a ritual cleansing; and we can hear the desperation in Peter’s voice: ‘you know that I love you’ he is hurt by being asked the third time; but it’s necessary to fully confront this psychic poison, bringing about this reconciliation and turning this failure into wisdom. He needs to confront his failure. Then he can receive absolution and the commission. Feed my sheep. So finally this whole sequence can end with the words that take us back to the beginning of the Gospel, when we first meet Jesus gathering the disciples: “follow me”.

Now you may well be thinking, this is all very well, but I’m not so terrible. I have not denied Christ. I have not held the coats of those who murder Christians like St Paul, whose conversion we heard earlier. I’m not such a terrible person. You may like Mr Barnaby Lenon, former headmaster of Harrow, feel that you’ve been castigated wrongly, and that it’s not the terrible sin, those left-wing virtue-signallers claim it is, to be middle class.

But it’s central to the Church’s self-understanding that we gather as sinners. That even vicars, for all their good intentions, get it wrong. That we gather in confession, share again each week the peace, and come together as the broken body of Christ. So it’s helpful that in the Gospels the disciples are slightly farcical in their misunderstandings and errors; that Simon Peter, the rock on whom the Church is built, at the crucial moment found himself in spiritual darkness denying Christ; that Christian leadership begins in failure, and so begins in humility. Not so that we can be always beating ourselves up, still less that our faith is based in shame and guilt. But really we just need an awareness of the reality of the human condition; that we are dependent creatures, that it takes time to master ourselves that our quickest learning comes through mistakes and set backs. And we need honesty in seeing our faults and weaknesses because patience, humility and faith, hope and love, are not won easily but over time by renewed discipline and will entail some hard fought struggles on the way. For this reason, I think, my training vicar would always take me out once in Lent to eat or drink whatever we had given up so as to protect us from the sin of spiritual pride. That and a love of gin and cup cakes.

These first Easter encounters are really the beginning of the Church as authority passes from Christ to the disciples. This story reminds us that the spiritual journey begins properly with us confronting ourselves warts and all with relentless honesty; to bring our deaths in fear and failure, perhaps especially our social deaths, into the presence of Christ for resurrection. And if there is something that’s holding you back; a weight that you carry with you, a fear or a regret, perhaps now is the time to confront it and discover some Easter joy. And if you’re planning a summer party, perhaps now is a good time to be ordering the pour memoires.

Easter 2: God's deliverance; an invitation to us all

2nd Sunday of Easter

Sermon by Hilary Belden

Based on readings: Acts 5:27-32, Revelation 1:4-8, John 20:19-31

May the risen Lord Jesus bless us. May he watch over us and renew us as he renews the whole of creation. May our hearts and lives echo his love.  Amen

( Evening prayer for this Easter period.)

A famous play includes a speech that starts ‘Friends, Romans, Countrymen…’ the second line is: ‘I am no orator as Brutus is….’                                

Three escape stories for Low Sunday.  The Israelites escape from the pursuing Egyptians; the friends of Jesus are beginning to believe he has escaped in some extraordinary way from death; in Acts, there is a literal escape from prison by the group who have been hauled up in front of the authorities. 

Our gospel reading is following on from last Sunday in real time – it begins on the evening of Easter Day - the Resurrection and moves on to a week later - Thomas’s story. This Sunday is sometimes called Low Sunday. So how do you feel?  Low, maybe. It’s all done - Lent, through to Good Friday and then the pleasure of family meetings, roast lamb, Easter eggs, Easter Sunday - all over for another year…the school term has begun again and we’re back in work routines.  

We may even feel a sneaking sympathy for those moaning Israelites faced with the Red Sea in front and the Egyptian military behind. They protest to Moses, ‘ Is this not the very thing we told you in Egypt, ‘Let us alone and let us serve the Egyptians’?

I have a watch with these words on the face: Dreams don’t work unless you do. Moses would have understood that. Because, in our first escape story, 

Moses said to the people, “Do not be afraid, stand firm, and see the  deliverance that the Lordwill accomplish for you today; 

And that is exactly what happened. 

When Israel was in Egypt’s land
Let my people go
Oppressed so hard they could not stand
Let my people go

Go down, Moses
Way down in Egypt's land
Tell old Pharaoh
Let my people go

In fact, these worried, unhappy people created the founding story of Israel as they followed Moses towards the Promised Land. Thousands of years later, their story inspired that great Spiritual, first recorded in the 1850s shortly before the American Civil War, as a spiritual song, yes and also as a code, an anthem, for enslaved African Americans. ‘Let my people go.’  

Remember Martin Luther King’s great last speech, in 1968 ‘I just want to do God's will. And He's allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I've looked over. And I've seen the Promised Land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the Promised Land.

If we go back from now 2000 years, still centuries after the Exodus, that escape from Egypt was commemorated by Jesus and his friends, at Passover.  Jesus radically altered the ritual.  By the time they began building Notre Dame in around 1163, Jesus’ way of celebrating with bread and wine was already 1100 years old and it lives today, as Brutus has reminded us through Holy Week, all over the world : the old story of deliverance and freedom transformed into the new: the sacrifice of a lamb in the old ritual  becoming Jesus’  sacrifice made once for all upon the Cross.

So we are in real time in this second escape story: on the evening of the Resurrection day – Easter Day -  the friends of Jesus are together, behind locked doors – not unlike the fearful Israelites before the exodus from Egypt - but beginning to glimpse a greater hope. And Jesus appears. Locked doors are no barrier to him. In Acts, when Peter and John are imprisoned – and later Paul – an angel is needed to free them – perhaps a sympathiser among the guards? But Jesus, (with a new kind of physics operating?), needs no angel or friendly guard.

He is the man they know and love. But he has not been magically healed: his wounds are there. There is no escaping the pain or the suffering. The Easterhope is not based on a neat, fairy tale ending, where all the mess and horror is tidied up and we’re back, whole and unaffected, in some previous world. The Israelites could not go back to their old lives – and neither could Jesus or his followers – and nor can we.

We all have friends – or it may be ourselves – for whom there is a strongand lasting sense of  Good Friday, even in the hope and joy of Easter Day. The families and friends of those who died in the Sri Lanka bombings, and those who died in the mosque in Christchurch.  One of my honorary nephews turned up last night, ostensibly to say hello,  but actually to share a little of his grief: the young couple killed in Greece in that buggy accident had been special friends of him and their group of Christian friends in Durham. The pain does not easily clear away for them or us or for the countless refugees and victims of disaster.  Nor does it here. 

John tells us: ‘But Thomas… was not with them when Jesus came. So the other disciples told him, ‘We have seen the Lord.’ But he said to them, ‘Unless I see the mark of the nails in his hands, and put my finger in the mark of the nails and my hand in his side, I will not believe.’

Thomas is often labelled ‘Doubting’ but we can hear he is overwhelmed and distraught with pain and loss. Someone we can readily identify with.

The poet John Clare wrote in the 18C  how he felt his life had tipped him

Into the nothingness of scorn and noise, 
Into the living sea of waking dreams,
Where there is neither hope of love or joys 
but the vast shipwreck of my life’s esteems

He could have been writing Thomas’ thoughts. Why should Thomas believe – he had seen Jesus die.  And what should he believe – some unlikely tale of reappearances?  Thomas is easily held up as not quite as insightful as we like to think we might have been. It’s quite easy to sound patronising about these friends of Jesus – they fall asleep, they deny him, they run away. But of course, they are us – we can do all these things at crucial moments - sometimes just to avoid trouble, sometimes because we are almost destroyed by pain of heart and body. 

And then, this Sunday,  without opening any doors, Jesus appears among his friends in front of Thomas, and says, ‘Peace be with you.’

Thomas is completely overwhelmed. It doesn’t seem that he actually does what he said he wanted to do – put his hands on the wounds. What he does is to say, ‘My Lord and my God!’He is the first person to give Jesus that name, to identify him with God himself. And Jesus – I think we have to recognise that he’s smiling – ‘said to him, ‘Have you believed because you have seen me? Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe.’  

And, of course, those people are the generations that follow, and they are us.

This is an extraordinary story – an escape into an entirely new world, a new life with the power of death broken.

The Exodus story is a powerful image for times of immense, terrible difficulty and suffering. The sea was parted, the Israelites were saved, their enemies were utterly destroyed.

There’s a literal way of seeing this which should horrify us. There are plenty of stories in the Old Testament which are bloodthirsty and cruel. They tell us uncomfortable truths about what human beings can be like: wars and slavery, murder, adultery and treachery. And stories about the absolutely undeserved tragedies – famine, war, deportations into captivity - that befall ordinary people. It’s all there. And it is important to know that. Because through the centuries whose stories and meditations make up the Old Testament, we also see how such a different understanding of the ways and will – the love and mercy - of God developed and led to the moment when God sent his son Jesus. Jesus and his friends knew the writings which form what we call the Old Testament – they often refer to the prophets and psalms.

Think back to that violent Old Testament story which literally frees the Israelites and starts them on the journey to the promised land. And then see Jesus – who said, ‘Ask and it will be given to you’ – he’s the man who feeds people with actual fishes and bread at the end of a long day.  Who welcomes children…. who stops the stoning of a woman taken in adultery. He asks Zacchaeus, the despised servant of the Roman authorities, to have him to dinner, rather than giving him a moral lecture or avoiding him. Jesus says ‘Forgive your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.’ 

This Jesus recognises Thomas’ longing – and promises us who come after that we too will believe. We are a long way from the Red Sea. God has kept his promises and his children have come to understand his power, his mercy and forgiveness in a very different way.

And what happened to Thomas?  Well – the story goes that he went to India – in fact to Chennai in South India and brought Jesus’ message there. Chennai where the Kunnam church is that we have a link with in this present day. He brought the message of Jesus to another country and continent. And he may well have been martyred. 

Martyrdoms and losses happen as we saw so hideously last Sunday. Justin Welby preached on Easter Sunday just after he had spoken to the Anglican Bishop of Columbo.  The whole sermon is well worth reading but here are a few sentences:

The will to power leads to the murder of innocents in Sri Lanka, the utterly despicable destruction that, on this holiest of days, seeks to challenge the reality of the risen Christ, to say that darkness will conquer, that our choice is surrender or death.

Jesus chose to defy this darkness and he is risen indeed, so that death and evil know that their end is marked, promised and assured. Yet still evil rises in these times between the resurrection and the judgement….

And today, we say the Easter acclamation, Christ is risen, with bittersweet joy, knowing that our sisters and brothers, and many others of other faiths, suffer and mourn.

In another part of the world – Louisiana in the American Deep South – in the last few weeks, three historic, mainly Black, Baptist churches have been torched in one small parish. The Episcopalian Bishop of Western Louisiana wrote a pastoral letter to all his churches about two weeks ago in which he said,….

This is the way that Jesus taught –  meeting violence with forgiveness and love – completely foreign to so much of any culture. His followers did not and do not call down curses on their enemies’ heads. We find the strength in Jesus to pray for them and forgive them. 

Since the fire at Notre Dame, on Tuesday, the fundraising effort for these three churches has jumped from $100,000 to nearly $2 million.

After that Sunday meeting with Thomas, there is a huge change. Acts is the third escape story:  read Acts this week and find out what happened – an amazing story.

These stories of God’s deliverance are an invitation to us all. We are in touch with a very great mystery when we look at the crucifixion and the resurrection of Jesus and share the bread and wine.  It is an extraordinary outpouring of forgiving love. How we live in response to that is our journey in faith and in our lives.

For Thomas it was enough to see Jesus face to face, risen and recognisably himself: he knew him then - ‘my Lord and my God’. 

Easter Sunday: If it's not ok, it's not the end

Sermon by the Revd Dr Brutus Green

Based on readings: Isaiah 65:17-25, Acts 10:34-43, John 20:1-18

It’s a story every child knows from the age of Sunday school.  The lead character is forced out into the wilderness, gathers a troop of odd followers, before being betrayed by someone they should have been able to trust, and left for dead. Then when all seems lost and the body is laid out for death - the miracle of love brings resurrection.

The handsome prince kisses Snow White back to life, the twelve, sorry seven dwarves rejoice, the wicked step-mother, whose serpent-like apple betrayed Disney’s first princess, falls off a cliff, and she marries the handsome prince.

The story of Jesus’ death and resurrection has stood at the heart of Western culture for two thousand years.  That’s two thousand years of stories growing up like vines around it, repeating its shape, twisting the plot a little, shaping the imagination of children and adults alike, from the medieval mystery plays to The Matrix, from Mallory’s Morte D’Arthur through the Lord of the Rings and Narnia to Christopher Nolan’s epic Batman conclusion, The Dark Knight Rises.

On that note - my favourite joke of a couple of years ago - What do you call it when Batman doesn’t turn up to church at Easter? Christian Bale.

All of which is not to say that Warner Brothers are secret evangelists trying to convert the world to Christianity with hidden Christian messages; if anything it’s the opposite - the deeper resonance of the resurrection story gives these films a sense of authenticity and a wider cultural reference - like this poetic turn of phrase from the Brothers Grimm:

‘it seemed as if a stone had been rolled from [the huntsman’s] heart since it was no longer needful for him to kill [Snow White]’.

More and more these days we hear of the fading impact of Christianity on culture.  In 2014 Oxford City Council shut down a theological college’s Passion Play because they thought it was a sex show.  The Daily Mail attacked Health and Safety culture quoting anonymously,  "You can’t hold a crucifixion these days without a licence.”  The organisers apologised that the crucifixion would not take place this year due to ‘an intractable situation’.  The local vicar said, “it’s very upsetting because so many people were looking forward to it.” I’m not sure if he was talking about Christians or those coming along for the sex show.

Perhaps this suggests that the lasting impact of two thousand years of Christianity will be the enduring shape of romantic comedies: a romance building slowly over time - think When Harry met Sally - culminating in a triumphant Palm Sunday moment - probably when they first kiss - followed by the total crucifixion crash of misunderstanding and falling out - resolved in the joyful resurrection of an engagement.

But despite Oxford, the Passion and Resurrection are not really about sex.  Nor are they really about Batman being thrown down into a hellish prison, then getting super-buff and saving the people of Gotham in a self-sacrificial act. They are not even about Aslan getting shorn or Gandalf overcoming the Balrog.

The resurrection is not even really about Good overcoming Evil. The Bible is less mythic — it knows that the bad things that happen in the world are about justifiable choices.  The resurrection is not about the judgement of evil, but the judgement of politics.

So in all those superhero stories, all full of echoes of the Messiah — Superman, Batman, She-Ra whoever — you have clearly identified forces of evil, just like the orc hordes who as ugly, stupid creatures must be evil — right?

But in the Gospel, as in life, it’s not so clear — if anything, everyone’s a little bit evil. So even the wicked High Priest - a textbook villain — Disney would have him overweight with purple trousers and narrow yellow eyes — the High Priest only says that Jesus must die because he has heard from God that it’s ‘expedient that one man die for the people’.  And who are we to fault him on this?

I used to do a moral experiment with soldiers in their training.  I’d tell them that there’s a train coming down a track and about to plough through six people. If they pull a lever though, the train will deviate to another track and just kill one person. Most pull the lever.

Interestingly, If I change the scenario and say there’s only one track but they can stop the train by pushing a large man off a bridge onto the track to slow it down, the majority wouldn’t do it. Same consequences but most don’t have the stomach for it.

This is the nature of all politics.  If you’re making decisions that affect hundreds, thousands or millions of people, there will be those who suffer grievously as a result.  Those who slip through the net.  And they’ll probably be others who’ll profit enormously at very little effort.

And this is also true of our decisions.  The ever fragile balance of human relationships means that saying yes to one means saying no to others. You only get to marry one person.  And even then that means two mothers to try and keep happy.  And in all the mess of work, friendship and family we make mistakes, get our priorities wrong, end up living in different countries from our wives, and end up letting people down.

The resurrection doesn’t really make this any easier. It is in its own way a happily ever after.  But it’s deferred — it’s only a foretaste, a promise of what’s to come.  It’s a sign of hope that for all the chaos of life there will be a restitution in the end.   Peace at last.  Like Fernando Sabino wrote, quoted in the charming film, Best Marigold Hotel: “Everything will be okay in the end. If it’s not okay it’s not the end.” This isn’t necessarily an easy thing to live with. But it is the business of faith — So when the beloved disciple runs to the tomb in today’s Gospel, we’re told “he saw, and he believed”. But what did he see? Just some wrapped up linen. He saw nothing, and he believed.

And when in the next sequence doubting Thomas finally believes only when he sees the marks of Jesus’ wounds and places his fingers inside them, Jesus says, “Blessed are those who have not seen, and yet believe”. But not seeing and believing isn’t always easy.  As one anxious royalist wrote to the Times: “Wednesday’s paper did not have a photograph of the Duchess of Cambridge.  I do hope she’s alright.”

For some faith comes easily, almost as a kind of vision. So Blake famously wrote:

To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower,
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour.

It’s about seeing the world as more than just stuff — material; seeing creation as something which has a purpose and so will not be forgotten or lost; seeing what is eternal in what is ephemeral.

The resurrection does not do away with the injustices of life;  it doesn’t diminish the ills of politics on a large or a small scale. Christ has still been crucified and bears the wounds to eternity.  We take our scars and our experiences — for better and worse they make us who we are.  But the resurrection means that all these things are held before God.  They are understood, forgiven, and we will be given the wisdom to forgive and move from a world of compromises, of politics and imperfections to a world of love — as we move from seeing in a glass darkly to seeing face to face.

So, while fairy tales are a bit like Easter; Easter is not like a fairy tale. It doesn’t have real fairy tale justice. The resurrection doesn't make the crucifixion worthwhile, like some Herculean endurance test.

The resurrection does away with justice and replaces it with love.  And unlike fairy tales it asks that we truly believe. That we rise above the people of Oxford and the more dull and ignorant servants of secularism.  We may not escape the politics of this world for now, the squabbles over the lamb at the family Easter table, who to send out to buy the missing mint sauce. Nor will issues in the Sudan or Brexit be resolved over a lovely Easter Sunday, the Notre Dame will not be rebuilt in three days.

But Easter is about hope, and the belief that love is stronger than death. It is the reminder that if it’s not okay, then it’s not the end. And in Jesus coming back to share the peace with the disciples, it is the ancient promise that despite our troubles, despite our griefs, there is a happily ever after.

This morning we awoke to the terrible news in Sri Lanka, where the people of God have been thrown violently back into Good Friday on this day of celebration of Christ’s victory.  I’m not even going to guess at current numbers. Even one, deliberately murdered in church, is a horror to contemplate on this day. We cannot hope to explain such acts, but we can pray for them and with them.  And in solidarity with all who have suffered through acts of terror, in faith and love, we still dare to hope in the promises of Easter resurrection.

Easter Dawn: Free to love and be loved

Sermon by the Revd Dr Brutus Green

Based on readings: Isaiah 65:17-25, Acts 10:34-43, John 20:1-18

"Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains.  Those who think themselves the masters of others are indeed greater slaves than they"; the striking first line of Rousseau’s most famous work The Social Contract.  Looking at Brexit, you can perhaps immediately see his point.  All our social relationships make pulls on us, controlling and conforming us in various ways.  Actually it is the man or woman who has nothing left to lose who has the most freedom;  once you have renounced the world, its people and judgements, you have only yourself to satisfy.

When I think of Christmas, I think of it as a reminder that the universe has meaning;  it’s beautiful and has a secret Love at its centre.  ‘In the beginning was the Word’ - that great cosmological vision of our St John that says with the first stroke of creation, the heart of the singularity that lit the big bang, was 50 billion shades of Love exploding out into the world.  In all the magic of midnight mass, in the candles, the liturgy and music, pulses this affirmation of hidden, structural love making the world go round.  We might not be remembering Christ’s humble birth but there is something of this magic at 6am on a Sunday morning on the blasted heath. The divine love here revealed and hidden, not in a child and a stable, but on a cross and in an empty tomb.

But when I think of Easter though I think of freedom.  Now I’m sure you’re thinking that Easter is really about eggs and bunnies and some sort of bargaining done by God and the devil in order to buy our souls;
or even salvation and the afterlife; but all these are just distractions or abstractions. Easter is really about a fundamental, tangible expression of freedom.

But what does it mean to say that because of Easter we are free?  Well, if we have gone through Maundy Thursday and Good Friday, we have passed through death.  The church is dismantled, we have walked to the cross with Jesus and ended up at the tomb.  At this moment we are dead men (and women) walking.  ‘Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains.’  And yet the person at the point of death has no chains except death itself. This is why Easter is the story of perfect freedom.  We are about to pass from death back into life.  We’re at this strange cuckoo hour when apart from a dog somewhere nonchalantly barking, a couple of kebab shops in Putney, the world is asleep, awaiting its recreation alarm bells. I love this in-between time because it’s a time — if you’re awake — when actually anything feels possible. It’s the time of freedom to be the person you choose. It’s added time.

So what we might consider this pre-morning is what are those chains which we have burdened ourselves with? Right now you are dead people, free people.  When you walk into Holy Trinity to collect your champagne and bacon butties (or whatever passes for breakfast in Roehampton) you will emerge back into life. But the chains that you walk in with are of your own choosing and God wants you to be free.

That’s not to say that you should relax into thoughtless selfishness, filling your handbag with treats and telling the vicar what you really think of him. There’s a freedom from here, a freedom from constraint;  but also a freedom to — a freedom to be yourself in the image of God, as you were created.  The most serious constraints to which we’re tied are those that pull us into ourselves.  The chains of anxiety and insecurity, which chain our eyes to our problems, the chains of acquisitiveness and vanity which chain us to objects and appearances, the chains of selfishness and pride which chain us to the relentless drive of our own ego.  Discovering who we are entails learning to be free with ourselves, to look beyond ourselves and be free-handed with what we have and are.  That’s the freedom of the resurrection.

When we talk about the end of a person’s life we might mean two things. We might be talking about the last moments.  We might be talking about the overall meaning upon which the life hangs; the ultimate end of our life being the point, the reason. Coming through Good Friday is a reckoning with both of those questions, and the celebration of Easter is the affirmation that the end of all things is God, and God is reconciling, forgiving, sacrificial love; a love, that if we can take hold of it, is perfect freedom.

So now we are here at the empty tomb, like Mary Magdalene, arriving while it was still dark.  We may be like the male disciples, returning to our homes in confusion, or like Mary we can remain a little longer. For Mary the Easter experience was first of all a liberation from grief — grief that prevents her from seeing what God is doing, from recognising Jesus, and grief that makes her cling to Jesus. Being set free, she is released to be sent to the other disciples as the first person to proclaim the risen Lord.

There are many things we may wish to be set free from this Easter.  It may be grief, it may be fear of death for ourselves or another.  It may be a false god — an authoritarian disciplinarian who keeps us as spiritual infants; we may need to be set free from self-indulgence in any of its many forms; I am quietly aware of my failure to really give up anything this Lent. Perhaps we need to take a moment to consider our relationships with others and our own sense of self-perception and self-worth. Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains.  But tonight you have died with Christ and are risen again, a new creation. You are free to love and be loved should you choose to cast off these chains.

‘But now is Christ risen from the dead, and become the first fruits of them that slept.’ (1Cor. 15:20)

‘Therefore if any man be in Christ, he is a new creature: old things are passed away; behold, all things are become new.’ (2Cor 5.17)

‘I was buried yesterday with thee, O Christ; but today I rise, resurrected with thee.  Yesterday I crucified myself with thee, O Savior. Now glorify me with thee in thy kingdom.’

Good Friday: By his stripes we are healed

Sermon by the Revd Dr Brutus Green

Based on readings: Isaiah 52:13-53:12, John 18:1-19:42

What are you doing here in church again on Good Friday? It is not in all likelihood your first Good Friday. This service you have sat through before, perhaps dozens of time. You have sung the hymns. You know the story. You know how it will end. Unlike Oscar Wilde, who famously in his university entrance exam, was asked to translate St Mark’s Gospel from the Greek. After a chapter of fluent translation they told him he could stop; to which he replied, ‘but I want to see how it ends.’ But presuming you do know; what is it that brings you back here?

Madness, as they say, is doing the same thing again and expecting different results. You’ve doubtless seen the classic 1993 film, Groundhog Day, where Bill Murray is forced to relive the same day again and again. No matter what he does, at 6am the radio comes on playing the same song and he’s back in the hotel waiting to report on this local event he has no belief in. If you’re like my mother and spend the whole of December watching Christmas movies you may also have seen the Twelve Dates of Christmas. A variation on a theme; probably not destined to be a classic.

But here we are on Good Friday telling again this old story. Like a broken record. Only it’s not exactly the same. This may be your first Holy Week at St Margaret’s. The clergy are somewhat new. But more importantly — to you — you are not the same.

There’s a line in Larkin’s most famous poem, where he’s talking in the vernacular about the faults of our parents and grandparents, and he says: ‘Man hands on misery to man/ it deepens like a coastal shelf’. potentially a good metaphor for original sin — but also a great metaphor for understanding the way human experience builds through time and repetition. ‘it deepens like a coastal shelf’. The experience is not simply repeated. But under the weight of time and repetition it deepens. And with this pressure can come great energy — like in the build up of layers of coal. And great beauty, as diamonds are formed from heavily, heavily condensed carbon.

So this year is another iteration of the Easter story. A story that you hear differently as a child than an adult. That you hear differently when you’re under a great deal of stress, that you hear differently when you’re ill, when you’re unemployed, when you’re grieving. That this year under false accusations at work you hear as Jesus, that this year struggling with guilt you hear as Judas, that this year as a new mother you hear as Mary;

When you first step into the story, the narrative is like a stream sweeping you along with its terse, fateful narrative. Through a lifetime this is a river, where the story is embellished with memories, with our own spiritual journey and the slings and arrows of our own outrageous fortune. But that river is only a tributary in the vast tide of Christian experience that has walked the world round in palm sunday procession, that has taken parts in centuries of passion plays, celebrated Communion in every context, kissed a million rugged crosses, and year after year found joy in the empty tomb and proclaimed the resurrection and the hope of the humanity.

Repetition can be slavery; it can be freedom. When people suffer from post traumatic stress disorder, it’s a form of repetition: the inability to stop repeating past events. It may manifest as nightmares, hallucinations, adrenaline and stress levels appropriate to a combat environment, now unable to be switched off. Again and again the sufferer is drawn back to the traumatic event. Again and again reliving the moment.  A deep personal hell. And humans get caught in these mental traps quite frequently. Any neurosis, or even just those things you stress about which you end up turning over and over in your mind, conscious you can do nothing about it, but you can’t stop thinking it through; when you become trapped by the past.

But of course therapy is designed to do the same thing. To turn back to the traumatic events but by bringing them out wholly into the open, by facing them full on, to achieve healing. Which is to allow the past to resolve in the present.

Today the point is not to relive the tragic and traumatic events of Christ’s life. The Church is not stuck in that moment. But there is a therapeutic element. As the Old Bible translates Isaiah: By his stripes we are healed. And hopefully it may be that in these days when we take time to examine ourselves in the light of the crucifixion and resurrection that we may find some healing. Not to relive but to relieve.

But this won’t happen simply by our reading the Gospel. We need to allow the Gospel to read us. As C.S. Lewis said – Faith is less a subject to be studied, than a pair of spectacles with which to understand life and the world. What Christianity wants is for you to see the world through the lens of faith. So, not to read the crucifixion and say, what terrible suffering! But when you have that blinding headache, to see the cross; when you see a homeless person out in the snow, to see the cross. When someone forgives you, even if it’s for something silly, to feel something of the joy of resurrection. When you feel inspired to see the rush of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost. Which is not to say don’t take painkillers for that headache. But look and find the resonance of the Gospel in your life. And understand that every experience of human suffering is cruciform; that it matters; to God, to all of us. And until every human suffering is eradicated we still live in a world in the shadow of Good Friday.

What we have in the actions of Good Friday is the full disclosure of what it means to love someone as a Christian. And that is sacrifice. But what is most radical about the Christian concept of love is that it strains to be universal. Family and friends are good enough for almost every culture and religion. Christianity has never taught that we should treat everyone the same. But it challenges us to push further our boundaries of love. It’s great that you love your wife, your parents, your friends. But is there another person you could fit in there.  Could you try and love some of your colleagues. Could you attempt to love a couple more people at church? Can you just open that circle a little wider? Perhaps dislike the people at the edge of your world a little less. Be a little less caustic about Donald Trump. Despite being called the passion, Jesus is entirely free of hatred in the narrative. What you do see is forgiveness, and the practical carrying out of the earnest desire to love even one’s enemies.

That is the challenge. Sacrificial love. That is our calling.

This is not our first holy week. But each year we are invited to enter a little more deeply into the river. To bring the experiences of this year, our lifetime, to connect with the Gospel story. To allow the Passion to read our lives. And find the strength to love. Remembering that much of the world stands with us at the foot of the cross today, from Christians persecuted across the Middle East, to those grieving at the Notre Dame, to the small faithful village churches of the shires, looking back through time from the pomp and power of the medieval church, to our humble origins in a quiet upper room. 

Today we come to the cross once again. Not in a repetition that simply repeats the story again, trapped neurotically in a world of the past, but in taking the story into this present world, in all our mistakes, and crooked relationships. Seeking by his stripes to be healed, and to tell a new story of Easter hope.

Maundy Thursday: Do this in remembrance of me

Sermon by the Revd Dr Brutus Green

Based on readings: Exodus 12:1-14, 1 Corinthians 11:23-26, John 13:1-17, 31b-35

People don’t like ambiguity. Some time ago Rhiannon decided to become a vegan. As a loyal husband I was supportive. I made the hard decision to become bi-vegan. With a heavy heart I resorted to eating food with no animal products in at all;  but I also ate meat and fish and dairy. Bi-veganism, which I’m hoping will become a major trend, is about saying “yes” to things. Including lamb. But generally people have expressed surprise and confusion on me coming out as bi-vegan, which I maintain even though Rhiannon is now merely vegetarian. People know what a vegan is, and a vegetarian, and when one treats all God’s creation with love and appetite. It’s a simpler world when you’re either one thing or the other. A lot of the issues over gender and sexuality I think can be attributed to this. Facebook famously offered you 58 possibilities including “Agender, “Androgyne” or “Androgynous”, “Gender Nonconforming”, “Pangender”, and “Bigender”. A lot of people, especially the gender anxious, would rather that men be men and women be women as near to stereotypes as possible. Then you know where you are. And everyone is headed to the right cubicle.

This sort of anxiety is equally strong in religion. Jesus’ beef with the authorities is, more often than not, about their scrupulousness to the letter of the law, over the spirit behind it. Unsurprisingly these same issues get replicated within the Church. On the one hand you’ll always get the purists who want black and white boundaries, the ins and the outs, the sheep and the goats. Then you get all these difficult cases that don’t fit, the situations where compassion and common sense ask for a more liberal interpretation.

The New Testament clearly presents two sacraments that we can be sure are efficacious — baptism and eucharist. For the purist you only get one chance at baptism — the one-time-only soul-airbrush. So the purist, the anxious Christian, might expect that any sin post-baptism suggests an unregenerate — and so unredeemable — soul. Hence, for a time, believing Christians put off baptism till close to death. You want to be sure about something like the fate of your eternal soul. But time of death is a difficult call to make and does not make for a long and glittering career of discipleship. So the Church decided upon an extra sacrament of penance and reconciliation to ensure that that deathbed confession holds water. And although the Anglican Church went back to just 2 sacraments at the Reformation; many still hold to this third sacrament and in every Eucharist you’ll find near the beginning a penitential rite and the words of absolution. 

There are, however, no sacraments in John’s Gospel. This is often a great surprise to people. But no, there’s no last supper as recorded in the other Gospels. No “This is my body”; no “do this is remembrance of me”. In fact curiously John places all the events of Holy Week slightly earlier. While the others have Jesus arrested after he’s celebrated the Passover meal with the disciples as the last supper, John places the crucifixion just before the Passover; the symbolism being that Jesus is now the new paschal lamb, able to ward off the angel of death in perpetuity. Likewise Jesus is not baptised by John the baptist in this Gospel and only passing references are made to baptism. This is not to suggest though that John was somehow unaware of the two sacraments evidently practised since the beginning of the Christian church. The reading from 1Corinthians, one of the earliest Christian documents, gives St Paul’s account of the Last Supper as it was passed to him and in un-Pauline words gives an impression of an early Christian liturgy. In fact the words of institution that have been used since, except in translation, are unchanged to this day.

It has been suggested that St John was aware of and wary of pagans who were usurping and perverting Christian rituals. Christianity was by necessity secretive in its origins so it may be that he wished to disguise the Church’s practices within the text of the Gospel. “Let the reader understand…” So instead in the Gospel we have events with sacramental overtones. In tonight’s Gospel we have the scene of the last supper. But instead of describing the last supper John describes Jesus washing the disciples’ feet. And in this act of ritual washing he says: ‘Unless I wash you, you have no share with me.’ And earlier at the feeding of the 5000, Jesus’ famous line “I am the bread of life” with the explanation: “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… Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood have eternal life, and I will raise them up on the last day” followed later by his claim “I am the True Vine.”

What emerges from this Gospel then is not liturgical, as actions to be repeated: ‘Do this is memory of me’ but rather sacramental. We don’t have descriptions of the actions of baptism and eucharist, but we have the theology: that Jesus is identifying himself with the bread and the wine; and that it’s by being washed and by eating and drinking that the Christian and Jesus are brought together. For John’s community which would likely never have met Jesus while he was alive this is key. For people who have not met Jesus John is explaining how they too can share in the risen life. For the anxious this identification is necessarily literal. Roman Catholic teaching on the Eucharist insisted that the bread and wine was quite genuinely changed into flesh and blood.

I’m reminded a little of the story of Oedipus and Thebes. Here, Thebes was losing a Theban a day to the Sphinx because they couldn’t answer the Sphinx’s riddle. The riddle was: What has four legs in the morning, two at midday and three in the evening? Oedipus finally solves it and destroys the sphinx. The answer is a man, crawling first as a baby, then standing, then walking with a stick in old age. It’s not that the riddle was especially hard, but just that the Thebans had no understanding of what a metaphor is. Oedipus did, but then Oedipus had other faults which come to light a few years down the track.

Now a lot of blood has been shed on the question of whether Jesus intended these words literally or metaphorically, and the anxious will always insist that it’s literal, for the surety that it definitely works. For my own mind I am not so anxious to think it matters, as long as you consider that God is present in the taking of communion and understand that its intention is to join you to the spiritual life of Christ. I am though always shocked and appalled by churches that do just pour blessed wine down the sink. For a start, what a waste of good port!

But the Church is right to insist on the importance and maintenance of the sacraments. At times in the Church of England, the Eucharist has been occasional and when we have these promises of the assurance of God’s presence with us, it seems strange to limit our participation. And the Eucharist has the advantage of being non-verbal and non-intellectual. There may be consolation in meditating on the presence of Christ in the sacraments but there is also a simple grace in the physical acts of eating, drinking and washing; they are acts in which even the simplest of us can participate.

And part of the joy of each Eucharist is, as the Eucharistic prayer says, that we join our voices with all the saints and angels; that these words have been said for 2000 years repeating Jesus’ words that he spoke on this night. And, if you’ll allow me, I’ll finish with a passage from Dom Gregory Dix’s majestic work on the history of the Eucharist. It was the favourite passage of a friend of mine, also a priest, and captures the weight of tradition as he reflects on Jesus’ command: “Do this in remembrance of me”:

Was ever another command so obeyed? For century after century, spreading slowly to every continent and country and among every race on earth, this action has been done, in every conceivable human circumstance, for every conceivable human need from infancy and before it to extreme old age and after it, from the pinnacle of earthly greatness to the refuge of fugitives in the caves and dens of the earth. Men have found no better thing than this to do for kings at their crowning and for criminals going to the scaffold; for armies in triumph or for a bride and bridegroom in a little country church; for the proclamation of a dogma or for a good crop of wheat; for the wisdom of the Parliament of a mighty nation or for a sick old woman afraid to die; for a schoolboy sitting an examination or for Columbus setting out to discover America; for the famine of whole provinces or for the soul of a dead lover; in thankfulness because my father did not die of pneumonia; for a village headman much tempted to return to fetich because the yams had failed; because the Turk was at the gates of Vienna; for the repentance of Margaret; for the settlement of a strike; for a son for a barren woman; for Captain so-and-so wounded and prisoner of war; while the lions roared in the nearby amphitheatre; on the beach at Dunkirk; while the hiss of scythes in the thick June grass came faintly through the windows of the church; tremulously, by an old monk on the fiftieth anniversary of his vows; furtively, by an exiled bishop who had hewn timber all day in a prison camp near Murmansk; gorgeously, for the canonisation of S. Joan of Arc—one could fill many pages with the reasons why men have done this, and not tell a hundredth part of them. And best of all, week by week and month by month, on a hundred thousand successive Sundays, faithfully, unfailingly, across all the parishes of Christendom, the pastors have done this just to make the plebs sancta Dei—the holy common people of God.