Stewardship Sunday: I wouldn't start from here

Sermon by the Revd Dr Brutus Green
Readings: Ecclesiastes 5:8-20, 1 Timothy 6:17-19, Matthew 6:1-4, 19-21

There’s a joke that’s always confused me. It runs, something to the effect of, a lost tourist in Hammersmith asking someone how to get to, say, St Margaret’s, Putney, and the person replying, “Well, sir, if I were you, I wouldn’t start from here.”

I just don’t think it’s very funny. But it is helpful in analogical ways.

So if the Australian cricket captain were to ask you: how might we finish off the English and win the series: “Well, sir, if I were you, I wouldn’t start from here.”

Or, if a lady were to ask you, how can I achieve consensus to secure the orderly exit of the UK from the EU? “Well, madam, if I were you, I wouldn’t start from here.”

Or, more to my point today, how can I become a Christian? You might well say, “Well, madam, if I were you, I wouldn’t start from here.” ‘Here’ being twenty-first century Britain.

And it’s not the inexorable drive of secularism, which since 9/11 has shifted to a much greater interest in the place of public religion; and the renewed interest in holistic attitudes to health, especially mental health, that drive against scientific materialism.

But the trend that’s more damaging to Christianity is the seemingly endless march of individualism; that after 50 years has developed to be not simply hostile to religion but to all public life. So while relativism became fashionable in the second half of the twentieth century, with the sense that people became more tolerant of other cultures and religions, rather than seeking to push their own convictions; we’ve reached a stage where world leaders refuse to accept the consensus of evidence, doubling down on their own stories and dismissing the credibility of public institutions. 

Fake news, which in the past has been called propaganda and ideology, has never had such a riot in liberal democracies. never has politics been so dominated by individual personalities. And with that we face more social division than in generations. Next year will be no doubt another divisive American election, while we continue to slog through Brexit towards our third election in 5 years.

It’s interesting that technology, which has sought genuinely to provide greater and greater connection, and has done wonders for many in isolation, has also fuelled division; polarising opinion and destroying the balance that existed within old media. If once you could assume that people were getting their news from the papers and a couple of television and radio stations, the news people pick up on today is seemingly just as likely to come from the bedroom of a teenage fantasist.

One of the fascinating, albeit alarming, trends in the army I saw was the rise of flat-earthers. Not as a religious thing, but it’s what happens if you believe everything you see on Youtube. And it’s a demonstration of a total loss of faith in public life, from government to media and science. Soldiers, generally, are a superstitious lot and prone to conspiracy theories, so I thought it was just an odd army thing – but I’ve already heard of two people in Putney with the same views. In Putney.

And perhaps this is peak-individualism. Where children at school no longer want to be policemen, dancers, or vets. They want to be vloggers and have set themselves personal goals like being a micro-influencer by age 6. You are your profile. I post therefore I am.

But I’m not about to don my sandwich board and parade through West Putney hollering “the End is Nigh”. Where we build consensus, it’s possible to make a huge difference. Because we love David Attenborough, Britain has transformed how it sees plastic. We’ve cut carrier bag use by 90% in 5 years. I suspect it won’t be long till you’ll be pilloried in the street for carrying a single-use bottle of water. “Shame” people will cry and ring a bell behind you as you walk along, “Shame”. And there is in ecology a surprising and needed return of ethics to our society. Where people are prepared to say: ‘it’s not just my opinion – you genuinely shouldn’t do that.’ Which for British people is normally pretty much anathema (with the exception of jumping the queue).

But, this also ties in with the business of churches. The parish church is inextricably tied to the local community. So if you’re getting annoyed because we’re having a lot of baptisms you should know that we’re legally required to baptise all who seek it.  Or if you can’t get a seat at the carol service, or if you think it’s odd that you can only get married in your local church or the one you attend, and not the gorgeous bijou chapel in smartsville, with its beautiful celebrity bijou vicar, where you booked your delightful bijou reception and spa retreat,  it’s because parish and community are bound together and with the parish comes the cure, the care, of all souls within it.

And this means that the parish church is a place to gather not just like-minded people; we’re not an internet chat-room. And it’s entirely possible that in every conceivable way, in politics, interests, in age, career, sexuality, personal wealth, the person next to you is both different and disagrees with you. What draws people to St Margaret’s, then, is a shared commitment to the beliefs and values of Christianity, and our parish: this peculiar little patch between Putney, Barnes and Roehampton. 

And while the world is increasingly virtual, what matters here, despite Laura’s excellent website, is physically coming together. While the matters of the world spin and turn, what concerns us here is eternal, and is largely unchanged for 2000 years. While modern life has created the individual in an impersonal world, what defines the church is our coming together as one body.

I think people often assume that the state pays churches to maintain their buildings, or that we receive support from the National Lottery or Libor. They might think Hilary is paid in her guard post at the back, or that church choirs are populated by those who have sung in choirs since they were children and are now duty bound to continue.

The truth is that churches are autonomous and depend at every moment on their congregation. Everything that happens, paying the vicar (the most important thing) the roof, the choir, the website, the silver, the garden, the magazine, cleaning the church, our social events, playgroups and Sunday school. Everything is written, bought, maintained by this group of people, who simply turn up each week, give, and pitch in, building this dais, decorating it, this altar frontal that was commissioned just before I arrived, fulfilling the last wishes of a parishioner. The pews, every one of which I’m told, has been repaired by Ted.

It is a huge collective work built on the love and sacrifice of generations of West Putney; which makes it a terribly exciting place. The chances are that most of the people who have lived in your house gave to this church, their time, their money: built the extension, the church hall, weeded the garden, read the lessons; left their mark, in visible and invisible ways.

Today’s readings all appear to be about money. They’re really about our attitude to life. In Ecclesiastes, the Eeyore of the Bible, there is an ambivalence about wealth that comes and goes, with the well-attested warning that ‘The lover of money will not be satisfied with money.’
‘Sweet is the sleep of labourers… but the surfeit of the rich will not let them sleep.’ His advice in the end is that ‘the gift of God is to find enjoyment in [your] toil.’ Which is to say that it is the manner of our life and how we find purpose in living that brings happiness.

Similarly, for Paul, the point is not to set your security, your hope, on your riches, recognising that all we are given comes from God, given for our enjoyment. ‘The life that really is life’ means using those resources to be generous and so to share that enjoyment with others. And this is echoed in the Gospel, which again is trying to take our eye off the pretty shiny things of the world, in order to use our riches, in whatever form we have them, to build up our common life; here the alms that would have been shared by the poor of that community.

With all these passages, then, the argument is that the pursuit of riches for their own sake, or the comfort and security of wealth, will not bring happiness, and will not last. Our treasure in heaven is what we are able to give, what we contribute with the work of our hands and how we serve others. 

The word community is one of the most abused today. Faith communities are one of the few places that gather people across demographics and generations. They are also themselves the sum of the work of generations, shaped by hands given in prayer and work. Today is a chance to reflect on our place in this community, where our treasure in heaven is, and how we can shape the future of St Margaret’s. How can webuild a community that celebrates all the good things we have here, that shares its pain and builds something extraordinary.

Well, sir, this is exactly where I would start.

Pentecost 13: leap of faith

Sermon by the Revd Dr Brutus Green
Readings: Deuteronomy 30:15-20, Philemon 1-21, Luke 14:25-33

People often assume that soldiers in the Parachute Regiment love to jump out of planes. Talking to them I’d say, for the main, the opposite is true. This is because the whole process is deeply boring and uncomfortable. In general, you’re waiting around usually for six or seven hours while the RAF decide whether it’s safe to fly. Then you have to stagger on to the plane carrying 75kg of equipment, more than your own body weight, before shuffling down the plane, while it does low flying manoeuvres, by which point you’re only too delighted to throw yourself out.

Only of course there’re risks. Just before I joined the regiment a boy had shattered his back during an air steal, where another parachute get too close, causing him to plummet to the ground. One soldier confessed to me that every time he jumped the whole way down the plane, he’d sing “Glory, glory what a helluva way to die” to the tune of the Battle Hymn of the Republic.

But of course there are also refusals. Usually boys who are overthinking, or perhaps whom life has taught not to trust others.

I can’t say I ever looked forward to it. Even after you land you’ve usually got weeks trudging about, sleeping in the open in Winter without a sleeping bag – and that’s if you’re lucky enough to have time to sleep. And every time I was told to jump – and it’s never a question – I’d think – is it worth it? The risk, death or permanent injury, and for what?

What does merit facing death? For what would you take up your cross?

The church likes to think it’s inclusive. We are a church of sinners. And Christianity has always spoken to the outsider; it’s the tax collectors, women, slaves who are its first followers.  

And the Church of England is the most forgiving. It’s as though Church is permanently on special offer. Perhaps it’s because we have some slightly embarrassing characters in our past: Old Henry number eight was not a model husband and perhaps more ready to put people on crosses than take up his own; but we are not inclined to judge those who join us: Elizabeth the first set the mantra that we will not ‘open windows into men’s souls’, and, as a church, we tend to be rather grateful that someone might come along. We’re the golden retriever of churches, friendly, tail-wagging, a little bit needy and over-enthusiastic; a strange cross between a social club, a support group, and an amateur dramatics society.

So some of the more fierce readings can come as a bit of a surprise. Old Deuteronomy, a cat who’s lived a long time, tells us today: See, I have set before you today life and prosperity, death and adversity. It’s a strong message and I look forward to seeing what Sunday School have done with it; but because of this ambivalence, this fear of being thought judgemental, of being intrusive, we don’t ask questions. I’ll bet there’s dozens of people you’ve met here for years and have never once spoken to about faith. Which when you think about it, in a church, is kind of extraordinary.

But, as all the reports show, the most important thing is that churches are welcoming and friendly, and this will lead to growth. Only then we have a Gospel like today – where we’re told that to be Christian we must take up our cross; put our families, our own lives even, after Jesus.

You can imagine Dominic Cummings writing it off as dreamed up on the back of a cigarette packet: ‘Take Back our Congregation’, he insists: Do talk about tea and coffee, Do talk about church schools Do talk about culture and community. Don’t talk about taking up your cross.

And it also stands completely at odds with Deuteronomy. That has a much better selling line:
obey the commandments and you shall live and be blessed in the land. go astray and perish.Promise and reward. That could get anyone to church. In the line made famous by Trainspotting: Choose Life.

But Jesus did not choose life. He chose something else.

And to be a disciple is to follow. So, if Jesus obeyed and faced death and adversity, so should we. 

Now the history of Christianity is littered with examples of self-sacrifice. Jesus was immediately followed by most of the disciples, Paul in today’s epistle ‘a prisoner of Christ’, in discovering the most gruesome forms of execution. Right up to the Second World War when to name just two, Maximilian Kolbe in Auschwitz and Dietrich Bonhoeffer in Flossenberg, give two examples of extraordinary men dying horribly for their faith. And today it’s still estimated that thousands of Christians are killed each year, very often with their faith being a primary issue.

That is not at least an immediate threat for us, though I sometimes wonder if the impulse within Christianity to immoderate positions: refusing to allow gay couples in your B&B or bake them a wedding cake, resisting female priests, is partly fuelled by a desire to stand against the current, even to feel a righteous sense of persecution. It would be very British to be martyred on the grounds of refusing to bake a cake.

And it’s interesting that around the time Christians stopped getting persecuted, they started taking themselves off to live in the desert. It’s as if with the lack of challenge a spiritual vacuum appears that has to be filled. So the Desert Fathers, as they’re known, found their cross in the unforgiving hardship of the wild places.

You can see this switch even within the Gospels. So today’s Gospel reads: ‘Whoever does not carry the cross and follow me cannot be my disciple’ echoed in Matthew 16 and Mark 8, but in Luke 9, we have a slightly different wording where Jesus says: ‘If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross daily and follow me.’ So while Jesus and the early church may have been describing the brutality of the life of faith that awaits many disciples, in this wording, we are also concerned not with a grisly end, but with a life of renunciation.

Renunciation I know about. My current wife has deemed September a waste free month so we’re trying to fit all our household rubbish within a large jam jar. We’ve just switched to toothpaste that comes in a pill that you chew, but tastes of chalk, and went yesterday to an over-priced farmers’ market. But we’ve also been trying to be a little more frugal and to give more to charity. And then there’s the daily running, which meant we had to run to a gin party last night. Some heavy sacrifices.

As I said, there’s a spirituality that comes in seeking martyrdom, seeking crucifixion; a desire to find challenges in life that stretch us personally. For some it’s bound up with financial or enivornmental concerns. For some it’s the person they chose to marry.

But being a disciple means being ready to change your life, to take up the challenges, that God calls us to. Being a disciple means offering to God the unknown and unpredictable future. We can all here make the commitment to give up a morning to be here together. But will our faith stretch to when we get a bad prognosis. Or a friend does? Will our commitment see us through the worst of days – And will we stand by it when our cross is standing before us. 

Bonhoeffer, one of those martyrs, wrote: ‘When Christ calls a man, he bids him come and die.’ That isn’t the easy grace that trades on God’s kindness; that presumes if God is God, then I can expect him to do everything, meet my every need; the God that is grateful that I’ve come to church, and makes it as easy as possible to join. The promise of God that we see in Jesus’s crucifixion is that he will be faithful even to death. The question today’s Gospel asks of us is will we? And will we find the strength in the hour of difficulty to turn to him and ask for forgiveness and grace. When we’re stood, loaded down, in the plane door is our commitment strong enough to believe it’s worth jumping out?

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.