Advent Hope

Sermon by Anne East

Readings: Isaiah 11.1-10, Romans 15.4-13, Matthew 3.1-12

“For whatever was written in former days was written for our instruction, so that by steadfastness and by the encouragement of the scriptures we might have hope.” 
Romans 15: 4 

Advent – the waiting time. Waiting is something of a forgotten skill these days. Our ancestors waited, for the days to lighten, for the crops to grow, for the fruit to ripen in its own time  . . in tune with the seasons, the ebb and flow of life. But today – we rush ahead of ourselves. Christmas decorations are in the shops in September, Easter eggs in January. Strawberries in winter, daffodils in November.  

In Advent we wait for the known, and for the unknown. There is a kind of ‘double vision’: we wait for something that’s in the past, the birth of Jesus has already happened. We also wait for a future coming, (Christ’s second coming) which theologians call the ‘end-times’. 

Past, Present, Future, a paradox of tenses! When I was working with deaf children, teaching English grammar, they struggled with the verb tenses – because sign language doesn’t express them in the same way as English. So the sign ‘GO’ is the same whether you are talking about a past action (yesterday I go) a future intention  (tomorrow I go) or a present activity (Now I go ). My students struggled with the different forms of English verbs but Sign Language places the action in a space that  offers me a model for a way of thinking in Advent, stepping outside a linear idea of Time and seeing past, present and future wrapped around us. 

The Old Testament prophet uses a future tense:

“A shoot shall come out from the stump of Jesse and a branch shall grow out of his roots”

The ‘root of Jesse’ is referring to the Messiah, the Christ, who would be a descendant of the great King David, the son of Jesse. That future occupies the prophet’s thoughts, a theme of hope and a coming prince of peace. 

When we get to the New Testament the future has become present:  John the Baptiser says, “The kingdom of heaven has come near.’ Andrew the fisherman says to his brother Simon – after a day spent with Jesus -  “We have found the Messiah. And Jesus himself, reading this passage from Isaiah in the synagogue, declares “The spirit of the Lord is upon me.” 

Isaiah offers the dawning of a new day. This promise of reconciliation and restoration is for all creation. “They will not hurt or destroy on all my holy mountain; for the earth will be full of the knowledge of the Lord.” 

A wolf living with a lamb? A leopard lying down with a goat? These don’t fit into our reality although the idea of a predator lying down with prey does have the power to thrill us. Social media pops up videos of a tiger nursing piglets or a lioness adopting an antelope calf. Perhaps our fascination with such oddities has to do with more than our love of the cute or bizarre? Perhaps we seek something profound in these reports? Animals overcoming a bloody instinct – might humans do the same? Is this a prophecy – or a fairy tale? Isaiah’s declaration stands in direct contrast to the terror and brutality that pervade our world. News of terrorism, war, economic collapse and climate catastrophe instil a deep sense of anxiety, we are fearful for the future. 

Sworn enemies sitting down together? It has happened. When white South Africans finally began to recognise black South Africans as their brothers and sisters; when Sinn Fein and DUP agreed to share power in Northern Ireland, when a father whose child was killed forgave the killers . . . these are all end-time moments, glimpses of God’s kingdom in our world now. 

“For whatever was written in former days was written for our instruction,  . . so that . . .we might have hope.” 

Can Isaiah’s word offer us any comfort in these unstable and frightening times? Notice how it begins – the transformation from a culture of fear to a world at peace – begins with a stump: “A shoot shall come out from the stump of Jesse..” out of something that appears finished, lifeless, left behind, comes the sign of new life, a green sprig. This is how hope gets its start, emerging as a tiny tendril in an unexpected place.  

For many of us, hope may be perceived as a last resort. It is what we do after all our planning and preparing is done. It is what we do if we cannot fix whatever the problem is. We’ve done everything we can - so now let’s hope for the best. Such a perspective puts us at the centre of the universe of course. 

For some, hope is buying a lottery ticket – imagining there is some force in the universe that will come to our rescue and give us what we think we want: luck / chance / fate. Fingers crossed. 

But that is not the meaning that fits with our Hope as Christians. Our ground for hope is neither last resort nor random chance. It’s not a pie-in-the-sky kind of optimism nor a cheery denial of the painful realities of life and death, injustice and suffering. . .For Paul (and us) hope is a core trust that relies on the steadfastness of God and allows us to be steadfast, no matter how dire the situation. Hope is not a human accomplishment, but the gift of our gracious God, drawing us beyond the darkness of today and towards the light of a new tomorrow. 

Here are some lines from the poet Rainer Maria Rilke, - he writes of being on a walk towards a sunny hill, we have only just started on the walk, but we are changed. 

My eyes already touch the sunny hill.going far ahead of the road I have begun.So we are grasped by what we cannot grasp;it has inner light, even from a distance-
and changes us, even if we do not reach it,into something else, which, hardly sensing it,we already are; a gesture waves us onanswering our own wave...but what we feel is the wind in our faces.

“For everything that was written in the past was written to teach us, so that through the endurance taught in the Scriptures and the encouragement they provide we might have hope” . Paul was writing to a community of believers in Rome made of both Jews and Gentiles. They are together because Paul and others have been preaching a gospel whose message is that the promises that God made long ago to the ‘children of Abraham’ are now open to all  - because of the life, death and resurrection of Jesus.  Hope is at the heart of the gospel. Every Advent we look again to Christ, not only for our own salvation, but for the redemption of the world. 

Paul’s prayer for the Romans is a benediction for us today: 

May the God of hope fill us with all joy and peace as we trust in him, so that we may overflow with hope by the power of the Holy Spirit.’ 

Amen

Advent Vision

Sermon by the Revd Dr Brutus Green
at Advent Carols, St Mary, Putney

You may have heard of a drag opera singer by the name of Keith Jurosko. He plays a 105 year-old Soprano, called Gabriella Tonnoziti-Casseruola. In his career he’s only once ventured into the outside world as Gabriella, when he had to fit in an interview with the BBC between acts in Edinburgh. During the taxi ride he became aware of the cabbie fixedly staring at him in the rear-view mirror and became increasingly uncomfortable. When they pulled in at the studio, a little anxious and embarrassed, he made to move off as quickly as possible but the driver pulled him back with his finger. ‘With your height’, he said, ‘and the weight of your chin, I’d recommend a hat with a broader brim’.

The temptation to judge people on first appearances is well known, but even with our own people, do we see them as they really are? Advent is the season of ‘watching’ and ‘waiting’'; the season of preparation for Christmas, for the coming of Christ. The challenge for disciples like us is to ‘stay awake’, to maintain our attention like the wise virgins. As our readings have led us this evening, it’s a season of darkness, almost of pre-creation, as we await the Light of the World, the divine spark present at that first moment of creation. 

We’re being asked, then, how attentive are we in our vision? How do we see the world in its true light, people for who they are?  We’re also mindful this year of an election, which has come like a thief in the night: how do we find the light at the end of the tunnel? And how do we see the future of Britain? In our present darkness, how do we see clearly, and in the light of Christ?

Well, imagine, for a moment, that you are about to get a new son-in-law. While he seems like his heart is in the right place, you notice that he is a little unpolished, not exactly common but a little lacking in manners and social graces. He is perhaps over-familiar, brusque, sometimes bordering on rude, always a bit juvenile. You don’t like his accent or the clothes he wears; you feel your daughter has married beneath her.  

But imagine you have a change of heart. Reflecting on your son you realise you’re being a little old-fashioned. Perhaps you feel for the sake of your daughter that you ought to try harder. Now you see him as straight-forward rather than vulgar, spontaneous not undignified, friendly rather than brash, youthful not juvenile. 

What has happened here? Perhaps you’re deluding yourself – he’s just obnoxious. But I’m trying to describe a situation here where someone might be trying to see more accurately, but also more justly and more lovingly. This may be a struggle.  Between the son’s actions, and our own temperaments, we may return to our prejudices, lazily resort to stereotyping or caricaturing him in our own mind. Pride and prejudice. The attempt to see him as fairly and as kindly as possible is an on-going task, which requires persistence and attention. It’s the basis for most nineteenth-century literature. But in the end it means us adjusting our own character. 

Of all our senses the one we are most likely to be duped by is our vision, precisely because it seems to be the most reliable. We think we see objectively. Our vision, though, is imperceptibly loaded with all kinds of presuppositions and judgements. When we see a taxi-driver we expect a certain sort of person. A tattoo, a hoodie, a haircut, a short skirt, an accent - all of these create tribal judgements in our minds. 

I’ve always enjoyed the 1950s U/Non-U distinction, popularised by Nancy Mitford in distinguishing upper and aspirant classes. So one would say “I left my glasses on the mantelpiece by the mirror, when I got up from the settee in your lounge”, while the other would say “I left my spectacles on the chimneypiece by the looking-glass, when I got up from the sofa in your drawing-room”.  I’m sure you know which is which. My point though is that even inconsequential words are social carriers of judgement and prejudice. Of course, the whole U/Non-U business is altogether Non-U.

How do we learn to see more clearly - to see more justly, more lovingly - when we’re seeing ‘through a glass darkly’ as St Paul says; or ‘through a dirty mirror’ if your translation is non-U. Iris Murdoch described this saying: ‘The difficulty is to keep the attention fixed upon the real situation and to prevent it from returning surreptitiously to the self with consolations of self-pity, resentment, fantasy and despair… It is a task to come to see the world as it is’.  

‘The people who have walked in darkness have seen a great light’. In the season of Advent we usually think about the people who point to that great light, the light of Christ. We begin with patriarchs and prophets and then turn to John the Baptist and finally Mary. I want to consider John the Baptist briefly, just because he gives us a method for seeing the world more clearly. Now you might think “Well, John the Baptist went around naked, eating locusts and honey.” I don’t take advice from immodestly dressed gentlemen with peculiar appetites. But John shows the sort of attentive vision we’ve been talking about in two ways.

 Firstly, he has taken himself out of the world in order to see it more clearly. He’s stepped back, retreated. And from this place he sees the politics, the hypocrisy and is not afraid to speak the truth. He calls the people to repentance and asks them to lead moral lives - he put himself in a place where he can think independently – and has the courage to speak out.

This is no less true for the church today. Simone Weil wote: ‘Christianity should contain all vocations without exception since it is catholic. In consequence the Church should also. But in my eyes Christianity is catholic by right but not in fact. So many things are outside it, so many things that I love and do not want to give up, so many things that God loves, otherwise they would not be in existence...  Christianity being catholic by right but not in fact, I regard it as legitimate on my part to be a member of the Church by right but not in fact, not only for a time, but for my whole life if need be…’

 It’s said that she received baptism on her death-bed but what more powerful sign of Christian redemption could there be than a refusal of the sacraments, to stand with the people who walk in darkness, in solidarity with those whom the Church has not recognised but are full of the grace of God?

The second lesson from John the Baptist is his self-effacement. John the Baptist points to Jesus. In every art work you see of him shows this with his bony finger stretched out away from himself.  John the Baptist is not mesmerised by his own light, but points out towards the true light that enlightens everyone. “He must increase, but I must decrease”. This is the fundamental Christian virtue of humility and as Iris Murdoch wrote, ‘The humble man, because he sees himself as nothing, can see other things as they are’. 

This Advent we’re called to attentive watching. This requires us to avoid prejudice and stereotypes, to not assume that a taxi-driver is unable to offer fashion advice. But also to question our own assumptions, to learn to look at our Son-in-law, our difficult acquaintance, with justice and love; to understand ourselves better so as to see others more clearly and kindly. The goal though is not merely self-improvement – the great religion of our age – the goal is directed towards the other. The point is to see the world and other people more clearly for their sake. 

This Advent we may need time to retreat from the world to seek truth; to find the courage to speak the truth in love;  And above all that supreme virtue of humility, of pointing away from ourselves and giving to God the glory; what we might understand as praise, which many of us, so keen to hold on to our own glory, find very difficult.  May we be found watching and waiting, sober and vigilant; give light to our eyes, O Lord; as we prepare for the coming of the Light of the world at Christmas.

The power and the sauna

Sermon by the Revd Dr Brutus Green
Readings: Jeremiah 23:1-6, Colossians 1:11-20, Luke 23:33-43

I was let out of St Margaret’s on Friday to join a friend at his club; to use the sauna and have some lunch. A rare break from work, you understand. I haven’t been to many saunas in the last few years, but a little while back I lived in Germany. Saunas are very inexpensive and much better there so I went quite regularly. The thing that struck me on Friday, sitting in the soupy heat, was how many men came in and read the newspaper. It’s something that would only happen in Britain. Sweating uncomfortably in 80 degree heat, low lighting, uncomfortable wooden seats; and someone pulls out, from who knows where, the Telegraph.

 While I was in Germany, I wrote a piece for a paper which argued that saunas are to be encouraged because they’re like little chapels. You can’t really do anything in the sauna. Can’t take in technology; no screens or headphones; it’s not really the done thing to start chatting, especially in Germany where clothing tends to be either optional or forbidden. So, generally, saunas are quite meditative places. And perhaps it’s the scrape of the pages, perhaps it’s the sheer ridiculousness of it, but my gentle meditative mindset does not survive the turning pages of a broadsheet.

 Now I bring this up because the feast of Christ the King is a bit marmite. It’s less than 100 years old, started by pope Pius XI, as the defensive gesture of a Church that was seeing its earthly kingdom and influence diminishing. It was also a response to anti-clericalism, which personally I’d say is a terrible, terrible crime against humanity. But at its worst Christ the King might be thought to encourage a sort of Christian triumphalism. The letter to the Colossians spoke of ‘the strength that comes from his glorious power’ and in our final hymn today, the great hymn of the resurrection, we hear ‘thine be the glory’ to an almost military march. We could be forgiven for assuming that with Christ comes terrific power. As if we could rule the world.

 It’s said that when Constantine the great Roman emperor converted to Christianity he saw a cross and the words “In this sign conquer.” The Royal Army Chaplaincy Department has taken it as their motto, Which is not unproblematic. The point the Gospels try to make, on the other hand, is that Christ’s kingship is ironic.

Now I’m on dangerous ground here. Anyone who grew up in the 90s may have had the misfortune of being misinformed as to what irony is by Alanis Morissette. So “rain on your wedding day”, infamously, is not ironic. It’s just disappointing. I’m not trying to say that Christ’s kingship is disappointing. Irony comments upon, makes us to reassess, what is being ironed/ or ironised. So rain on your wedding day is not ironic. The groom turning up grinning wearing a prison jump suit and a plastic ball and chain attached to his foot would be ironic. But ill-advised. 

The irony of Christ’s kingship is played out through his trial and crucifixion. We have this miracle worker, who’s fed thousands, healed, preached peace with divine authority, and raised the dead, under the control of a puppet jewish king and then a weak ruler who doesn’t even agree with the verdict he announces.

 It’s an interesting effect of power, even in the days of the Gospel, that it can make the powerful advocate causes they do not believe it. The need to hold on to power somehow trumps the reason to have that power. Thank goodness that would not happen today.

If you remember, Pilate asks, “What is truth?” The man of divine judgement has come under human judgement. So we see in human power, corruption, injustice and self-protection. We see in Jesus, forgiveness, even on the cross, and words of reassurance, of hope.

So when Jesus is crucified, the sign above him — which would usually describe the crime — says “Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews”. The irony is that it’s true, but not in the way his executioners understand it. But as a tortured, innocent man, it reveals the reality and brutality of human kingship. And against this, it reveals the humility and love of divine kingship.

The criticism of human power is unlikely to make you think twice. Power and corruption have and continue to walk hand in hand through all history. The more surprising suggestion comes with how we see divine power. We continue to desire the God who acts. If God loves then he will intervene, he will save. ‘Are you not the Messiah? Save yourself and us!’ We like to think of some superdad who is good, all knowing, all powerful who protects and will keep us from harm. 

But the crucifixion turns all that upside down. There is no magic trick. Anyone who believes that if they go to Church and lead a good life, nothing bad will happen to them #blessed needs to take a good look at the crucifixion. The life we’re called to is one that mirrors Christ. And fundamentally that did not end well. And if God values truth, courage and love over health and happiness then who knows what he’ll ask of you.

 What then is the power of God? The full quote from Colossians: ‘may you be made strong with all the strength that comes from his glorious power, and may you be prepared to endure everything with patience, giving thanks to the Father’. Power, strength, is being like Christ, who endured.

 So when do we know the power of God? It’s when we are weak. It’s when we’re unable to carry on; under the threat of death;in the depths of grief. When we have to throw our trust in him. 

Our offertory hymn is, I think, the greatest hymn in the English language.  In almost every line is the coincidence of opposites. We have glory and dying, riches and loss, contempt and pride, boasting and death, vanity and blood, sorrow and love, thorns and crowns. Each pair, each line, describes the transformation from human power to divine power; each line finds in the cross the unmaking of our normal standards and a new standard raised up. To sing it with faith, is to let go of ourselves and find in Christ the most incredible revelation of what life really is.  And that is love.

 For myself, I see in baptism, this same vision of divine kingship. The fragility and vulnerability of a child; no less than Christ on the cross; hovering over the water, which through the bible is a sign of both death and life; we don’t as in fairy tales promise youth, beauty, wealth. We simply mark this as a passage from death to life.

 Now Christmas as St Margaret’s starts this week with the arrival of the Christmas trees so I thought I’d share with you my favourite Christmas card poem called the Wicked Fairy at the Manger. It makes the point far better than I could:

My gift for the child: 

No wife, kids, home;
No money sense. Unemployable.
Friends, yes. But the wrong sort —
The workshy, women, wogs,
Petty infringers of the law, persons
With notifiable diseases,
Poll tax collectors, tarts;
The bottom rung.
His end?
I think we’ll make it
Public, prolonged, painful. 

 Right, said the baby. That was roughly
What we had in mind.

 Freddie, I hope will be saved this. But this is the man he is promised to follow. So Christ the King is not about the power and the glory, The Church triumphant, ‘In this sign conquer’ That sounds to my ears like the scraping of a newspaper page turning in an English sauna.

 Christ’s kingship is the power of sacrificial love; And the infinite worth of every human soul; that an anonymous criminal, a homeless vagrant, a charming toddler, a beloved brother, may be the most important person in the world. The person who is suffering, could be you, is no better nor worse than you; once was Christ. 

In St Ignatius’ Spiritual Exercises, the meditations that stretch over a silent retreat of 30 days, one of the key exercises is visualising a battlefield and choosing to take yourself to the banner of Christ. To choose to follow him. To place yourself under his kingship. It’s a costly decision. It is an ironic kingship. it probably won’t end well. But it will make you a better person.

 You have probably had the canvasses at your door, with their stories and their promises. There will be banners everywhere for the next few weeks. I know who I choose as my king. Amen.

Gathering Stones

Sermon by the Revd Dr Brutus Green
Readings: Malachi 4:1-2a, 2Thessalonians 3:6-13, Luke 21:5-19

Recently, there have been some appealing coincidences. This week marks a year since I began here at St Margaret’s. By coincidence, tomorrow the PCC will vote on whether to upgrade me from priest-in-charge to vicar, or whether to advertise for someone new. Please speak to a churchwarden if you have strong opinions. In another coincidence, our Old Testament lesson today is the basis for the collect of the Parachute Regiment, where I served shortly before arriving here. It’s one of those odd army/church connections that every regiment has a collect, a prayer, and it just so happens that the PARAs, who love all references to ‘wings’, chose that line: that the ‘sun of righteousness shall rise, with healing in its wings’ to build their prayer around.

And this week gone I was making preparations for a talk at the Wandsworth deanery meeting this Tuesday on the theology of mission. I wanted to use some quotations from my phd thesis only to find I’d lost it. I’ve lent all 3 hard copies to people and not had any of them back –I can’t remember who either – And with various computer shenanigans no longer have it electronically. Fortunately, I had an old hard drive from 2007; and here is a salutary lesson. Like many people I have a box of wires. Kept in the roof. I don’t know what they connect to, But they have been carefully accrued throughout the years. One member of our family is very keen that they be gotten rid of. It’s not Zz. But by the grace of God I still have them and was able to connect this antique hard drive to my computer and recover my thesis. So be careful when throwing out wires. But at the same time I found lots of old files including the first sermon I ever gave in 2005 in Exeter University chapel.

I know what you’re thinking. That’s 14 years ago. He must have been a mere slip of a boy, listening to S Club 7 and playing football in the street in short trousers – what was he doing giving a sermon? But God does call some very young. Just think of the prophet Samuel and Daniel Radcliffe.

 And again, in an odd coincidence, that first sermon was written for this Sunday, the 2nd before Advent. I remember feeling overwhelmed with nerves at the thought of expounding the Word of God for the first time. Taking up the apocalyptic theme, I talked about the Millennium and Twin Towers – Still in the early noughties a turning-point for reflection. On an aside, it’s shocking to me that someone celebrating their 18th birthday today was born after that event which had such a far-reaching impact on the world. I suppose that today’s children will feel about it the way my generation felt when people talked about ‘where were you when John Lennon or JFK was shot?’ But at the time it still came immediately to mind at a Gospel like today’s: ‘As for these things that you see, the days will come when not one stone will be left upon another; all will be thrown down.’

 Jesus is referring here to the Temple, newly finished, the pride of the Jewish people. Forty years later it would be thrown down and all that was left is the Western Wall, sometimes called the ‘Wailing Wall’. He is speaking also of all the works of our hands. And, as with any reference to the Temple, he is speaking of his own body. But the over-riding theme, prevalent throughout Jesus’ teaching, is that a time of destruction is at hand. A hard-rain is coming. The zombie-apocalypse is nearly upon us.

 Now, I had several reasons for leaving the army, the most insistent having the same voice as the one trying to throw out my boxes of wires. But vocationally I had an increasing sense of a call to build something.

 In chaplaincy you’re always doing patch work. 18 month postings. Your work is all personal with the men and women who cross your path, trying to help them on their way morally, spiritually and pastorally. Trying to curb the enthusiasm of soldiers a little. Sometimes I had to address the system or culture, where I found racism, neglect or over-efficiency. But moving so quickly, and with long periods away, there was no chance to build, to see a congregation develop, to gather a community. 

But here, we are building something. Churches measure time not in years but in decades and centuries. I’m not about to take down the board at the back on the left and pretend I’m the first incumbent. But I think in this last year we’ve begun an exciting new moment in the life of St Margaret’s.It certainly is for me and Oberon. It’s more than the building – though that has been consuming a lot of time and money; and it’s more than the gardens which now demand our attention. But the community, the events, the shelter and hospitality we offer, the music, children’s activities, getting more people passing through church and more people in church. 

We are not, as individuals, as families, as a community, just coming together each week. We are building something. Some of it may not seem immediately relevant to faith, to church. But it is. Because what we are building is the kingdom of God. And its borders are wider than at present we know.

There’s a lot of change at the moment. There has been in Putney, in the churches here. There is in the nation. This is a time to build.

 Our Gospel today, though, is concerned with the throwing down of stones. As Ecclesiastes says: There is a time to gather stones together; and a time to throw away stones. This should be a reminder of our limitations; our finitude; this mortal coil we have not yet shuffled off.

To begin with we must acknowledge that when we come together as a church, when we put things on, when we work together to get things done we are engaging in mission. But it’s not our mission. It’s not the church’s mission. It’s God’s mission. We come together as a church to participate in God’s mission. Mission comes from the word Missa – meaning ‘sent’. The church is sent by God. We will accomplish nothing if it’s not a participation in God.

And for all our power, our efforts of persuasion, our wealth, our energy; eventually we will be left with not one stone upon another. Yes now, our friends may be saying ‘what beautiful stones, and gifts dedicated to God’ But we will all face our own apocalypse. We will not know the time. And it will not be just.  In the end we will have to let go of the work of building, and see again the stones scattered. 

This may seem quite a dark message for today. But it’s also liberating. There are always hot-headed people who talk about crises and revivals. ‘Do not go after them’. The kingdom of God flows on like the ebb and flow of the sea. It will outlast us. But it’s our joy and pleasure to have this moment of participation. When the kingdom of God is at hand and we can be part of it. And when our day arrives burning like an oven and we are left with neither root nor branch, we will remember this work and our part in it, and see the sun of righteousness rise with healing in its wings. 

This week finishes with a chance for us on Saturday to look forward to the next phase in the life of St Margaret’s. It marks the end of my first year with you; last night’s Messiah, for those who came, was quite an inspirational moment. And tonight’s opening of our doors to guests for food and shelter creates a new opportunity of Christian service and connection with the wider community. And it has been overwhelming the generosity and compassion we have seen step forward for this project, from the church and the wider community. It is a time to gather stones together; a time to build. It’s a time to be excited about what we can achieve here together; as a Christian presence in Putney.

And while the future is full of uncertainty, and doubtless the prophets of doom will be haranguing us for some time about the various apocalypse that await our every decision; It’s a time to have faith; to gather stones, to see the arrogant and evil turn to stubble; and to believe that we will see the sun rise with healing in its wings. Amen.

The Sound of Silence

Sermon by the Revd Dr Brutus Green
Readings: Micah 4.1-5, Romans 8.31-end, John 15.9-17

"Fools, " said I, "you do not know
Silence, like a cancer, grows.
Hear my words that I might teach you
Take my arms that I might reach you."
But my words like silent raindrops fell
And echoed in the wells of silence.

Lyrics from Simon and Garfunkel’s ‘The Sound of Silence’. Silence here is a sinister silence; an inability to communicate leading to an inability to love. A silence you have known; when you want, you need to say something, but the words don’t come. You can’t communicate what you feel. There's a growing distance, a great abyss, between you and another, words falter before they’re able to bridge the gap between you. We experience this at the end of romantic entanglements, when friends or family let us down. in great suffering, bereavements and news of terrible sickness. It’s a noisy silence, like white noise, drowning out the sounds of everyday.

But there’s a very different silence. A silence that’s attentive, focussed, full of meaning, and if it’s shared, a silence that communicates; a silence of plenitude that goes further than words. The shared look on a perfect day when you want nothing more than to stay, soaking up this moment. The moment when joy or grief are total and beyond words, but you are with the person that understands, that shares and carries the burden or the ecstasy with you.

England no longer stops at 11 o’clock so you will hear tomorrow the traffic, engines, car horns, the noise of oblivious people. But till recently I’ve spent the two minutes of Armistice Day in a silent, unmoving congregation, on army camps or in the field, where every person will be thinking of people they have known, the wash of many memories, but with a common purpose; a rich silence, communicating solidarity and understanding across generations and between people, who might not otherwise share the most precious and guarded moments of their history. 

But of course, that was only my experience. Some there may have found the two minutes unbearable; full of unresolved memories, shared by, understood by, nobody.

This year I took a funeral at Sandhurst for a suicide the same age as me, who served in the same regiment. His rowing club, the regiment, family, friends, hundreds of people were there. The silence of death, the silence of a funeral; loneliness, grief, anger. Silence can be communication. It can be isolation. There is silence in both heaven and hell.

And if we return to the 11th November 1918, we discover something more and less than the silence of the guns. The Armistice was signed at 5.20am and agreed to come into force at 11 o’clock on that day.  In full knowledge of this both sides vented furious assaults across the trenches, perhaps out of final anger and resentment; or simply to lighten the load of ammunition that would have to be carried away. It’s said that the guns fell silent at 11 o’clock but, despite the French government’s backdating of deaths to the 10th November, even though the war was over, there were 11,000 casualties and 3000 killed on that short final day of war. That’s more than on D-Day. 

This year we remember the 75th anniversaries of D-Day and Arnhem.  I’m still in touch with some veterans of those great and terrible events and went to Normandy in June to commemorate D-Day. Corporal Hartigan of the Canadian PARA battalion recounted: ‘We stood to at 0600 hours in England on 5 June and did not stand down until the afternoon of 9 June – over 100 hours of continuous wakeful duty. We learned that lack of sleep was the worst of all deprivations.’ Brigadier James Hill remarked that these first days in Normandy were the hardest fought of the whole war.  In typical British understatement he wrote that ‘it was no picnic’. It’s a charming aspect of that generation that heroism could be taken so lightly. 

The Times recently wrote up a piece on Tommy Flowers who broke the Lorenz code used by Hitler to communicate with his senior commanders. He named his machine, the world’s first semi-programmable electronic computer, “Colossus”. According to historians it shortened the war by years, as well as making a huge advance in computer science. He recorded the achievement in his diary: ‘Colossus worked. Car broke down on way home.”  A mixed day then.

What we see here is a profound example of humility. It is perhaps the knowledge that so many of their friends, and countrymen had given their lives, that taught these men to take success so lightly, but we see in them the embodiment of service and a disregard of self that is very foreign to our world today. But neither is it an abstract idea of service to King and Country. When a veteran of Arnhem was asked what kept him going when the battalion had been largely destroyed, the cause lost, and defeat inevitable, he replied simply: ‘they were my friends’.

Christ in today’s Gospel summarises his central message:  ‘Greater love hath no man than this, that he lay down his life for his friends.’ It is central to the ethos of Christianity to see love, especially fraternal love forged through suffering, as redemptive: ‘Who will separate us from the love of Christ? Will hardship, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword?’ One Bishop in the First World War famously remarked: ‘The soldier has got religion, I am not sure that he has got Christianity’. But who could not forgive doctrinal error for the man, or woman, who laid down their life for their friends?

And as we remember the cost of so many lives lost we should not forget the difficulties endured, as ever, by army wives and families. The Commanding Officer of 8PARA on D-Day, Col Pearson, described what must have been a somewhat confusing experience of an engagement for his wife: ‘I then had a mental aberration and got engaged. My wife-to-be said that as it was wartime we should have a short engagement and get married on 8 June. This, of course, coincided with D-Day, but I couldn’t tell her that, so a lot of surprised officers of the 6th Airborne received invitations to our wedding. Joan had no idea what was happening and was not told until D-Day that she would not be getting married on the Tuesday.’ I’ll bet there was an awkward moment when he got home to the lucky Mrs Pearson.

I was caught off-guard earlier this year, hearing the familiar words: ‘At the going down of the sun, and in the morning, we will remember them.’ We have heard them so many times, but in the way that is often true of things heard many times, the meaning of them have brushed past me.  The words speak of the reality of grief. To lose someone so close is to be reminded of their absence at every waking hour, at the going down of the sun and in the morning. To endure that silence perpetually.

This was the reality for an entire generation following the two Wars. A people whose lives were dominated by loss, and the remembrance of profound sacrifice. A century on that loss is at a greater remove from us, but this is where the task of remembrance takes on a greater meaning and importance. People may feel that with 100 years gone by, Remembrance Sunday has had it’s day. We must not forget the sacrifice, the threat the world faced, and which these men overcame.

How then do we approach this coming two minutes silence? We can come at it with simple grief at the waste of human life and the horrendous suffering that the twentieth and twenty-first century have conceived. Or we can approach it with hope and meaning. That there remains a bond between that generation and ours. That nothing is wasted because all is gathered in by God. That there is an unspoken communication; that though we may not understand, still less be able to find the words, for some of the horrors of the last hundred years; the silence offers us space to share our grief, our thanksgiving, our memories and our hope; that brings them into the presence of God, of forgiveness and peace.

To remember only the chaos and suffering of war is to enter into a hopeless, abject silence: ‘The dead do not praise the Lord, nor those gone down into silence.’ But to remember those we love, our forebears and to recognise the sacrifice of those who have gone before us, is to enter the silence of prayer:

God's breath in man returning to his birth,
No noise, nor silence, but one equal music.

'death shall be no more; death, thou shalt die'

Sermon by the Revd Dr Brutus Green
Readings: Isaiah 25:6-10, 1Corinthians 15:50-58, John 5:24-27

There are two equally important and equally damaging approaches to the question of the individual and society that may offer wisdom or temptation in equal measure. I will refer to them here as Miss Liberal and Mr Social.  Which paradigm you instinctively prefer, in all probability, will entirely affect your politics, your attitude to others, and, most importantly, your theology.

Miss Liberal begins with the individual. She typically has a meritocratic instinct, believes in self-improvement and self-determination. She rails against the nanny state and regulation. She has pulled herself up by her bootstraps and she expects others to follow, though she is happy out of her largess to be philanthropic.  Freedom and fairness are her virtues.

Mr Social on the other hand begins with people. It is the state and society that forms us.  When people go wrong it’s because of poverty, neglect, difficult family situations or bad influences.  We are the product of our environment so we need strong institutions to form good citizens and lots of taxes to even up the woeful inequalities of economic distribution.  Compassion and justice are his virtues.

Salvation in Western Christianity is the product of a long line of Miss Liberals.  Salvation has largely been seen as a personal issue.  You have your freewill, you make your choices, and heaven and hell are the horizons of the judgements you make in this life.  

On the other hand, we have long known that ‘bad company ruins good morals’, and sought to build Christian societies, encourage education, reform the criminal and relieve the poor.  Society has a role to play in the work of salvation. St Ignatius, founder of the Jesuits, allegedly said: ‘give me the child until the age of seven and I will show you the man’. 

Depictions of hell also mirror these two ways of looking at the world. In Dante’s Inferno individual punishments are meted out for particular vices and the souls tell their individual crimes, their particular falls from grace. The epistle of Jude describes hell as a terrible solitary confinement; ‘wandering stars for whom it is reserved the blackness, the darkness, forever.’ 

But one of the most famous contemporary depictions of Hell is the socialist Jean-Paul Sartre’s play, In Camera.  Three characters find themselves trapped together in a room; their mutual animosity and flawed characters prevent any genuine friendship and each poisons the relationship between the other two, leading to the infamous line: “L’infer est les autres…”  Hell is other people.  

Such visions take up the most painful of human experiences and imagine them at their full extension.  Like Hieronymous Bosch’s nightmarish paintings of weird creatures and the most obvious forms of torment;  isolation and animosity point us to the darkest of human experiences and the horrors that each soul fears. But we are told today that we are inheritors of the kingdom of God, and our bodies will put on imperishability because we have victory over death through our Lord Jesus Christ. 

Why? though you must ask.  Why should Jesus dying and being resurrected make any difference to us?  

Typically Christians in the West have looked to Easter morning and seen in Christ the model of their own resurrection. Western depictions of the Easter scene show Christ alone, rising above the sleeping soldiers. This is Miss Liberal’s vision. Christ is her saviour, and she, like him, will rise on the day of resurrection to assume her glorious body. This is a good and reasonable faith. But there is another way of looking at it.

Before the day of resurrection is Holy Saturday. It is an odd day when you are following the church’s calendar because God is dead. You have dismantled the altar on Thursday, followed the Via Dolorosa to the cross on Good Friday. Christ has been buried but you have a whole day still until the resurrection.  

In the Apostle’s Creed we say of this day: ‘He descended into Hell’.  Jesus died. He shared solidarity with the dead. He experienced death. Those images of Hell I brought up earlier, the animosity of conflict, the physical torment, the isolation of the wandering star, whatever else you can imagine, he underwent in crucifixion, death and burial.  

Christ though was not merely a man and so he brought God to all those dark places. If Hell is, by definition, where God is not, Holy Saturday is the conquering of death and Hell. As Psalm 139 has it ‘whither shall I go then from thy presence? If I climb up into heaven, thou art there, if I go down to hell, thou art there also.’  Christ has brought God even into hell. Whither, then, shall I go from thy presence?

The Eastern Church produced many pictures and icons of Holy Saturday.  Here Christ is raised from the tomb, but below him you can see the gates of Hades opened and all the souls of the lost freed; as our Gospel put it, ‘anyone who hears my word and believes him who sent me has eternal life, and does not come under judgement, but has passed from death to life’.  This is the salvation of Mr Social as Christ’s resurrection brings about the rescue of all souls, because he has shone the light of God into the very depths of darkness and called us out. The connection of Christ to every creature is enough to bring God into all flesh; hallowing the darkest areas of our soul.  Christ has been there.

A former bishop of Europe once told me he was speaking to some children and he asked them where they thought Jesus was on Holy Saturday.  One of them replied: “in the very depths of hell, looking for his friend, Judas.”

My caricaturing of Miss Liberal and Mr Social is a little stark, but as I said they offer a little wisdom and a little temptation. Miss Liberal reminds us of the importance of the individual, that not one is lost, that the choices we make matter and that we take responsibility for our participation in God’s kingdom. But her temptation is to think that she is herself alone, that she is the ‘master of her fate/ [she is] the captain of her soul’.  that she ends in isolation, a wandering star in the darkness.

Mr Social can tempt us into believing that it’s all predetermined, that nothing can be done and that we are not responsible, that we cannot morally own our decisions. He may end up thrown about by the will of others, torn by conflict. But he reminds us that we are all connected; that we are God’s creature, formed in God’s image; that with all the souls who have formed us, the places, the characters, we are one body and that is the body of Christ, who has brought the human and divine together and taken it to the darkest place in order that there be light.

In one of John Donne’s Holy Sonnets he reduces death to punctuation. The final line is:  ‘And death shall be no more [semi-colon] death [comma] thou shalt die’; death is a mere shudder, between a semi-colon and a comma. Echoing St Paul: ‘Where, O death, is your sting?’

No full stop.  Just a comma.

And this is how we should think of All Souls.  We gather here with all the saints and angels to celebrate the eucharist, in communion with the 150 odd years this church has stood, the two thousand years that have gone before, and with all whom we have loved. They are a hair’s breadth away. And we declare at the breaking of the bread, the breaking of Christ’s body, that we who are many are one body because we all share in one bread. That is to reduce death to a comma. Not something to be afraid of, not an end but a pause, for the work of Holy Saturday has done away with all of that.  

I will finish with Donne’s poem:

DEATH be not proud, though some have called thee 
Mighty and dreadfull, for, thou art not so,
For, those, whom thou think'st, thou dost overthrow,
Die not, poore death, nor yet canst thou kill me. 
From rest and sleepe, which but thy pictures bee,
Much pleasure, then from thee, much more must flow,
And soonest our best men with thee doe goe, 
Rest of their bones, and soules deliverie.
Thou art slave to Fate, Chance, kings, and desperate men,
And dost with poyson, warre, and sicknesse dwell,
And poppie, or charmes can make us sleepe as well,
And better then thy stroake; why swell'st thou then;
One short sleepe past, wee wake eternally,
And death shall be no more; death, thou shalt die.

Your Own Personal Jesus

Sermon by the Revd Dr Brutus Green
Readings: Daniel 7:1-3, 15-18, Ephesians 1:11-23, Luke 6:20-31

In 1989 Depeche Mode released a song which made it into the top thirty in the UK and US, two months and two weeks before the Berlin Wall politically ceased to exist. The record was the best selling twelve-inch single in Warner Bros. history, and each format, seven and twelve inch vinyl, tape, and later CD featured an unadorned woman with a different band member. The song was called “Personal Jesus”.  Its inspiration was Priscilla Presley’s book Elvis and Me, about how another person can become like a god to you, and how you can be a Jesus to someone, someone who’s there; someone to care.

Johnny Cash, on one of his later Rick Rubin albums, with the help of guitarists from the Red Hot Chilli Peppers and Tom Petty’s Heartbreakers re-recorded it. Cash, who in his last few months took communion with Rubin every day, sometimes on the telephone, related somewhat differently to the song. When you hear Cash’s old country voice you know he’s re-filling the hollow irony of electronica with some southern soul. The original is usually in top 100 song lists, but Cash, who knew both his dependency on others and on God, twisted it back to being both a love song and a song of faith.

The same song can convey quite different impressions. The year after Johnny Cash died Marilyn Mansun took the song back to naked girls and superficial catholic imagery. Easy come, easy go.

There’s something quite theological about this. We all have our own personal Jesus.  For many Christians a sense of personal relationship with Jesus is at the heart of their faith, as a friend alongside them. 

At a more biblical level part of the charm of the New Testament is that we have four different accounts of the life and teaching of Jesus, written through two generations after his death as the final people who had encountered him were dying. One is more Jewish, one noticed more his teaching about the poor, one is more concerned with giving an intellectual account of what he was about. And these records which we call gospels are based partly on other sources about which we can only conjecture. Just as we mean different things to different people, so Jesus appeared somewhat differently to his contemporaries, and is in each of our minds shaded in different colours.

Today’s Gospel gives us Jesus’ central teaching, known as the Sermon on the Mount, as it’s called in Matthew where Jesus is a second Moses; the Sermon on the Plain in Luke, where Jesus comes alongside ordinary people.  And it poses a question. Is Jesus in your mind a hard-line religious extremist, implacable in commandments which exceed the Jewish rules of his day - or is he the fuzzy live-and-let-live consumate liberal? Is he a Che Guevara revolutionary or a flakey hipster? Usually we think of Jesus as the easy-going reformer, the cuddly take-it-easy-on-yourself guy. The law is there to help you not to condemn you, don’t worry about the Sabbath, what matters is where your heart is.

 And yes. This is all in the gospels.

But then there’s the other Jesus.  The Jesus who says - be perfect as your Father in heaven is perfect; who in today’s Gospel places the most stringent demands on us. We might with a pinch of sanctimoniousness be able to love our enemies, but would we actually offer the other cheek to the one who slapped us? Would we give our shirt to someone who stole our coat? Is it even moral to give to everyone who begs? 

I’m reminded of Obi Wan Kanobe in Star Wars. Alec Guiness after a cursory slightly inept bit of fencing declares the immortal lines: “If you strike me down, I shall become more powerful than you can possibly imagine.”But does he? After this point he doesn’t really seem to do very much. There’s the occasional ghostly voice and whenever there’s a party he appears alongside a shimmering yoda to enjoy the merriment, but there’s no obvious display of great power. 

 When Jesus says to turn the other cheek is he engaging in defeatism? Is he ignoring the demands of justice? This Jesus seems too impractical, too demanding. We prefer to gloss over him - pass on its rigour to the monks or nuns; Or perhaps you spiritualize it, which is to say you ignore it in a particularly deep way, or claim it was a metaphor and he was really only talking about your middle brother, who never did the washing up and always had the messiest bedroom.

The Jesus of the Gospels presents us with both the liberal Jesus and the hard-line Jesus and if we’re honest we tend to select the bits of him that are easiest to live with. Like the Christmas Quality Streets, where by New Year’s Day, the one’s left are all the same colour. 

Theologians are certainly not immune to this. In Latin America in the 70s there emerged a generation of priests and theologians who read in Luke’s “Blessed are the poor”, “woe to you that are rich” a command to spread Marxism across the continent.  It also led some of these priests to a more liberal reading of ‘turning the other cheek’ - when they took up machine guns to bring about revolution. 

On the other hand, God’s blessing on the poor has been used by some for precisely the reverse ends. After all, if the poor are blessed are we not undermining them by improving their situation? Keep the poor poor and you keep them godly. I’m sure all of us here frequently rail against the curse of our capitalist prosperity, wealth and independence. If only I were poorer, I hear you cry, I would know God’s blessing more. 

Just as our interpretation gives us different Jesi so does it move us towards different interpretations of society. Do we leave the poor in their blessed state? Do we sell all our possessions and give them to the poor? Do we leave it to the individual to make their way in the world or demand the total global redistribution of wealth? 

Politics likes a broad-brush approach. Either the jobless are all scroungers, cheats and layabouts and we’ve developed an underclass that must be purged by austerity; or they’ve all been let down by society and must be supported at whatever cost and protected from the right-wing slash and burn of the welfare state. The first rule of politics: generalize! We should first of all remember though that Jesus is not doing social analysis here but teaching. 

To the rich he makes clear that the wealth of this world is a castle built on sand and can be taken from us, just as the constraints of our frail mortal bodies will always impinge on our happiness no matter who our health care is with. To the poor though, there is the encouragement but also the incentive - you are blessed. You are equally created and loved by God. And for all that you may feel you have little and are powerless, you have a gift from God, and the kingdom of heaven, which is learned and displayed in solidarity, generosity, kindness and love is equally close to you. Indeed, it may be closer. 

And in this the hallmark of Jesus’ teaching is its personal quality.  The woman caught in adultery is treated gently; the rich young man is asked to give up his possessions. The tax-collector is forgiven, the pharisee stands accused. The children are gathered in. In this sense Jesus is personal. Through him God meets us where we are. Not with a reductive political agenda, but a nudge or a push, if we but let him, to consider what more we can do and what more we can be.  If politics says generalize, Jesus says “personalize!”

Now we may be called by Depeche Mode to be Jesus to a friend, there, caring, perhaps unconsciously sharing the love of God with someone by just being nice to them. We may like Johnny Cash have ploughed through a torrent of sex, drugs and illness to find in our weak frames a dependence upon God, or the inspiration to live better. We may be being called to give something up, take something on, to ourselves bless the poor, or find in our own poverty the spark of blessing that returns us to vigour and joy. All of these are valid interpretations of the Gospel which has many things to say to us, whether we can or cannot yet bear it. 

Today is All Saints, where the Church remembers and give thanks for all Christians past and present. It’s a good day for a baptism to add one to its number; she may or may not prove more godly than her sister. She will almost certainly prove more godly than her cousin, who will like most clergy offspring probably come to terrorise the church, like one of the four great beasts come up from the sea.

But All Saints is a chance to celebrate difference; from the tragic Joan of Arc to the jolly Saint Nicholas; from Old St Peter and St Paul, to the very recent Saint John Henry Newman, to little Persephone joining us today. For us all to enjoy ‘the riches of his glorious inheritance among the saints’ and we can reflect that God calls people of every persuasion and that in the lives of millions of ordinary men and women like you and I God is at work. 

And in this, if we listen carefully – we can hear a polyphony of covers of a personal Jesus coming to life. Reach out and touch faith. Amen.

The Word of God is Not Chained

Sermon by the Revd Dr Brutus Green
Readings: Isaiah 45.22-25, Romans 15:1-6, Luke 4:16-24

In his second letter to Timothy, Paul, imprisoned, in chains, writes: ‘Remember Jesus Christ, raised from the dead, that is my gospel, for which I suffer hardship, even to the point of being chained like a criminal. But the word of God is not chained.’

Today is Bible Sunday. I haven’t looked up where this tradition came from but I suspect it’s because of the collect, our little faith poem for this week – as discussed last Sunday –  with those famous lines, that we should ‘read, mark, learn and inwardly digest’ all Scripture. I have spent some time with the Bible – in its original languages (of which there are 3 – answers on a postcard to win a prize).  But I want you to understand this morning, that the Word of God is not chained.

At the end of the readings, Roger and Sally dutiful said ‘This is the Word of the Lord’  to which we all smartly replied ‘thanks be to God’;  trapping it if you like with our little collaboration. This is the Word of the Lord, but ‘the Word of God is not chained’.

One of my present troubles is Putney Park Lane, also known as Putney Park Swamp. I was upset some weeks back when I met a couple who had been walking for 25 minutes from Hawkesbury Road. It’s not far but they were not terribly mobile and the signs on the gates at the bottom of the lane had put them off. We’ve spoken to the council but they’re not as interested as me in access. Our plan is to keep the gates open for services. There may be resistance. This is how the Word of God sometimes feels; like a jobsworth hanging around unnoticed and then closing the gate every time someone drives up, because the sign says to; but actually ‘the Word of God is not chained’.

This approach to the Bible is much older than Christianity. The Jewish practice of how to interpret Scripture is called Midrash - coming from the Hebrew word Darash, meaning ‘to seek out’ or ‘explore’.  Like our Old Testament reading put it: ‘from my mouth has gone forth in righteousness a word that shall not return.’ For millennia Rabbis have argued over texts, speculated and invented subtexts and stories that bridge and fill out the Scriptures, in a continuous attempt to get at what God is really saying. If you just imagine for a moment how much has been written on Scripture in the last three thousand years of Judaism and Christianity, the vast libraries of commentaries, sermons, stories and fables, the biblical scholarship and theological interpretations, and compare it to the relatively slim sixty-six books of the Bible, you cannot but fail to grasp that the Word of God is very far from chained.

And Midrash continues today in all media. Perhaps you have seen Cecille B. de Mille’s 1956 film The Ten Commandments. Being visual, film has to interpret, and dramatically. Who knew Moses, played by Charlton Heston, and the Hebrews all looked and sounded like White American Southern Protestants? Is it surprising that bad-man Pharaoh was played by Russian Yul Brynner as the Cold War stepped up? Or, given that the Exodus story was the template for the pilgrim fathers finding the Promised Land in the New World, that Pharaoh had an English accent? Or perhaps you have seen Dreamworks’ 1998 movie, The Prince of Egypt. Multiculturalism is now evident, feminism has given us some strong female characters, the boys are all a bit metro and there’s even a nod to the Arab-Israeli conflict. The Word of God is not chained.

When Nelson Mandela was in prison, the inmates passed around a copy of the Robben Island Bible —with the works of Shakespeare disguised in the covers of a Hindu religious text. It was the most excellent play Julius Caesarthat spoke to him, a 17th century Englishman telling a 2000 year old story, but he underlined and signed the lines:

         Cowards die many times before their deaths
         The valiant never taste of death but once.

Inspirational to him and his movement. And yet people still think that Scripture is written on stone.

So there are Christians who will tell you that the Word of God is chained in Scripture. Others will tell you that the Word of God is chained in unchangeable liturgy, others who will tell you the Word of God is chained in the edicts of popes, bishops or councils. 

The Word of God is free and yet in all the church it is in chains. Chains for St Paul are a humiliation.  Why then do we let the Word of God suffer this?

When I was at university there was a Christian Union which had a rabble-rousing campaign offering postcards with the single word “certainty” on it; trying to draw in insecure and uncertain teenagers with a reassuring faith that could define everything from how to live to who your friends should be. Nigel Lawson once said that the time to be most fearful in politics is when a consensus emerges. That is when the argument ceases to be tested and a fashionable cause pushes out rigour.  Not a problem we suffer at present.

Well, Christianity does not want you to have certainty. This is not because God is playing some will-you-won’t-you game in the celestial bookies. It’s because trying to understand who or what God is is a lifetime’s work. If your God still has a beard and a white robe; if your idea of Christianity has not progressed since Sunday school; if you think you cannot be gay and Christian; your God is chained. Working out how to be good and swapping your bad habits for good ones is a lifetime’s work. Finding God is an unfinished task. We are all works in progress, in thought and in deed.

So I don’t blame Dawkins for not believing in god, I don’t believe in his god either. Just as I don’t believe in the god that the Spanish Inquisition believed in. I have grave doubts about the god architect of the Church of England and Defender of the Faith Henry VIII believed in, because all of these gods seem terribly flawed.  Consider how the rationalist Dawkins and murderous Henry VIII would describe god and ask yourself, do you believe in that? Perhaps we can blame their imagination. Actually for the most part their gods are far too strongly outlined and coloured in, and like many gods often a cause of violence and guilt. The God we believe in is a little less bloodthirsty than that I hope, but don’t fall into the trap that you think you’ve got the right definition, that in spite of all odds you’ve finally got God nailed down. 

It has happened before. 

The Word of God is not written on a postcard. It is not chiselled in a creed.  It is not contained in all the shelves of the British Library.  The Word of God is not chained. 

But do you worry? If you can’t trust the formulas, the absolute truth of Scripture, the soul-saving affirmation of the creed, the definitive YES I’M IN of the sacraments, then how can you be sure you’ve got it right? That you’ve convinced God you’re good enough, Christian enough, to get wings and not horns? Perhaps there’s something in what the poet and priest John Keble said: ‘God never lets us know the result of our actions, and in one way that keeps us humble, and in another it keeps us hopeful.’

But there’s more to it than that. The separation of the in and the out, the strict boundaries of doctrine interrogated by the Inquisition, the anathemas of the creed, the winnowing of the good enough, are human inventions and not divine. Because the Word of God is not chained. 

My favourite verse in Scripture is from the psalms:

Whither shall I go then from thy presence? 
If I climb up into heaven, thou art there. 
If I go down to hell, thou art there also.

God is not impressed by our tribal boundaries. He is certainly not chained by them.

The Word of God is not chained and neither are the people of God.

A huge part of Jesus’ ministry in the Gospel is to show that the Word of God is not chained. In the Gospel we just heard Jesus starts his ministry, preaching Good News for the poor, for the captive, for the blind, for the oppressed. At our 8am we have the readings in the old words where, he comes ‘to heal the brokenhearted… and to set at liberty them that are bruised’. Sometimes the new translations fail to capture the beauty of the old. For Jesus, the people don’t want to hear that the Bible is speaking to them today. They felt perhaps that the Gospel is for them, not the poor, the bruised, the brokenhearted. And yes he speaks well, but he’s just Joseph’s boy. Later they’ll chase him out of town. Later he’ll be in chains.

But there is of course much more to Christianity than celebrating inclusion. My point with the Bible is that we need to read it freely. But with this we also need to get to know the Bible better. It’s still true that as our New Testament reading put it: ‘by steadfastness and by the encouragement of the scriptures we may have hope.’

But it’s when verses are taken out of context and when a little is known about the Bible that we hit the most troublesome waters. A little knowledge is a dangerous thing. There’s a reason why the pre-Reformation church didn’t allow people to read the Bible.

So the Bible will always be the primary textbook of the Christian faith, but you have to cross at least 2000 years to get to it and 2000 years back to speak it afresh. You have to inwardly digest it.

This can only be done if the Word of God is unchained. 

The Bible tries to explain the relationship of God to the world and how we should live. Both of these are enormous tasks with many answers for all times and places. Judaism was most remarkable because for the first time it asserted that there is only one God, that is to say that there is one God for all people. This core understanding of our faith reminds us that for all our claims on the knowledge of God and goodness, God is not chained. We cannot escape his presence but also we cannot claim to stake out his territory or define who are his people. 

We must not, as they did with St Paul, as they did with Jesus, as they still do today, we must not put the Word of God in chains. Amen.

‘Forsaking what lies behind and reaching out to that which is before’

Sermon by the Revd Dr Brutus Green
Readings: Genesis 32:22-31, 2 Timothy 3:14-4:5, Luke 18:1-8

‘forsaking what lies behind and reaching out to that which is before’

The Collect, I’m aware, is often a time when people switch off: that moment between the confession and the readings. And to be fair they often have more clauses than seems plausible for the English language:
a mere ten in today’s; you wouldn’t find them in an advertising campaign. Being mostly written originally by Cramner they often have a beauty which can be overlooked; they’re sort of like little faith-poems, and quite often they have phrases that are worth dwelling on, today’s stealing from the letter to the Philippians: ‘forsaking what lies behind and reaching out to that which is before’.

It reminds me of a cold December day two years ago when as a pre-Christmas treat my commanding officer told the whole battalion we were going to do a fifty mile march across Kent with full kit, but without rifles. He didn’t want to scare the locals and to be fair 500 men marching through your village at night is probably enough even without weapons.

It was broken down into 10 mile blocks, with twenty minute breaks between. As exercise it was a strange experience. Even carrying 35lbs you were never out of breath, never heart pounding, or muscles burning; it was just a long boring trudge, mostly through darkness. The CO was ex-special forces and had a reputation. His surname was Mann, and he was known respectfully if not affectionately as the Man-grenade. On our first exercise on the Scottish border I was told to expect 10% losses – which meant around 40 men going down with injuries. I spent more time doing hospital visits in those two weeks than in all my previous ministry. 

But it was the last ten miles that caught people out on the 50-miler. Just the weariness of it, some little rub at 2 miles which had become intolerable at 30.  (You should never go anywhere in the army without tape and Vaseline.) But it’s the psychology of it that matters – knowing you’ve gone 40 miles, feeling your almost there – but 10 miles is a very long way to hang in there for.

‘forsaking what lies behind and reaching out to that which is before’. You had to just forget the 40 miles done and focus on the task in hand – each one of those last ten miles. It’s the virtue of perseverance, which in so many things is easy for the first eighty percent, testing for the next ten, and the making and breaking of you for the last ten. That’s where you find out who you are. And it’s usually a surprise just how far you can push yourself.

England will doubtless find this as they prepare themselves for the All-blacks in the semi-final only, for the big challenge of Wales in the final. 

Perseverance is the undoubted theme for our readings today. In Genesis we heard of Jacob persisting in wrestling with the angel until he’d won the blessing.St Paul asks us to ‘continue in what you have learned and firmly believed’; to ‘be persistent whether the time is favourable or unfavourable’ to have ‘the utmost patience’. And finally in the Gospel there is the parable of the unjust judge who gives into the widow simply for her bruising persistence, told to the disciples to encourage them ‘to pray always and not to lose heart’.

Jo de Wardener, who has truly persisted in teaching in our Sunday School now from generation to generation, came to me in the week, claiming extraordinarily that she’d never had this Gospel before, alarmed I think, that the passage seemed to encourage children to nag their parents until they got what they wanted. We’ll see when the children come back in whether they’ve been encouraged in this.

But I think perhaps we all need a little encouragement in perseverance.  For while faith can be easy – and barely acknowledged for years of our life sometimes – there will also be those moments when the testing is severe. 

But even here we can jump to conclusions as to what we will find difficult. I was struck in researching the Great War some years ago that for all the mythology of the Siegfried Sassoon’s, Robert Graves and Wilfrid Owens, that most horrific war returned a more religious, more Christian nation. While the popular assumption is that the War was the beginning of the secular turn, the grim reality of the trenches overturning the Victorian certainties of Empire and Faith, church attendance rose during the decade following the War. Statistically, it’s decades of decadence and individualism that most hurt religion – the 60s being a great turning point in the life of the Church. War and disease, it would seem, are the friends of faith; its enemies are the bicycle, the television and the discotheque.

But what I think most accounts for our difficulty with perseverance is contained in that line from the collect: ‘forsaking what lies behind and reaching out to that which is before’. For faith to be real, and not just the comfortable nostalgia of years gone by, we must forsake what lies behind.

Church should not be a return to a world of the past, the familiar thump of Victorian hymns and dreams of running round the old oak tree; the glory days of St Margaret’s, before this dreadful new vicar, a time with less problems and less burdens. And we should not be afraid of the future, of a building without scaffolding, a transformed garden, with new people coming in and having a go, using new energy and skills to do things differently; that is not a dishonouring of the past but its recreation. T.S. Eliot said:

The Church must be forever building, for it is forever decaying within and attacked from without; 
For this is the law of life; and you must remember that while there is time of prosperity 
The people will neglect the Temple, and in time of adversity they will decry it. 

Last weekend, I was in the eternal city, witnessing with a few other vicars the canonisation of John Henry Newman, who wrote today’s final hymn. It was an interesting situation to be in as Newman was a Church of England priest for most of his life before he converted to Roman Catholicism. He had preached and written of the Pope as the anti-Christ which must be fairly unique on the CV of Roman Catholic saints. They were very hospitable to us, in any case, and we were seated just yards from the Pope while a crowd of more than a hundred thousand thronged St Peter’s square. It is encouraging to be reminded just occasionally that Christians number in the billions and are counted in every country on earth.

But Newman who spread a revolution in the Church of his day and then scandalised the nation by absconding to Rome, is famed for saying: ‘To live is to change, and to be perfect is to have changed often.’ It’s a rather extraordinary thing to say, especially for a conservative cleric: ‘To live is to change, and to be perfect is to have changed often.’ But behind it is the understanding that the nature of reality is change and if we are not changing then we are decaying. That is if you like the doctrine of the Holy Spirit.

On the Berlin Wall someone had scrawled in graffiti the words of a German poet: ‘whoever wishes that the world remain as it is, does not wish that it remains’ Which is a warning to Conservatives everywhere.

For Jacob, persevering in faith meant crossing the Jabok and putting out his hip in his struggle with God; Jesus himself commends us to pester God like a dog with a bone, as though we were battling against an unjust judge. A True faith is something that is battled over, worn smooth with years of ease, years of angst, hard fought nights of wrestling; the slow trudge and the irritant that is not eased by tape and Vaseline. We may look back at times and see the story of faith unfold; but we should be wary when that story is too easy; too comfortable; when St Margaret’s has become the comfortable slipper, unaffected by the river of mud flowing down Putney Park Lane.

Let us ‘forsake what lies behind and reach out to that which is before’. Let us discern what is needed for the kingdom of God now. Let us persevere in the faith; let us be perfect and embrace change. To quote the BT advert currently stealing from Dickens: ‘We have everything before us, we have nothing before us.’  Amen.

And now appropriately we have a baptism. Nothing brings home the perfection of embracing change like the first years of a baby and nothing forsakes what lies behind and reaches to that which is before like a child. So we ask Isobel to bring her family out to gather at the font, as we make the promises that begin another journey of faith,praying for her perseverance through the best of times and the worst of times.

Free to Serve

Sermon by Anne East
Readings: Jeremiah 29: 10-14,  Ephesians 2: 1-10, Matthew 25: 31-46 

 What does freedom mean to you? A group of people were asked this recently by a reporter out on the street with a roving mic. One woman, in a hurry to get to work, said, “Getting off the hamster wheel.” An older person said “Getting out and about.” A younger man said, “Opportunity. Freedom means opportunity.” Other replies were, “liberation, not being held back by anything, my own ability to choose, religious freedom”, and a young woman said, “It’s wonderful to be a mum – but I’ve just popped out for coffee with a friend, and that feels like freedom.” 

Then the programme cut to the inside of a prison and asked the same question of an inmate, ‘What does freedom mean to you?’ And he replied, “It used to be about getting out of this place, but now, for me, it’s about being free in here’” And he touched his heart. 

Are you free? I’m thinking of this because we are the beginning of Prisons Week, when we pray for those who are deprived of their liberty as a result of offences against the law. But there are other kinds of prison. Are you free? When that question was asked of the people in the street, the business woman waved her mobile phone and said, “Well I’m not free of this thing!” She’s not the only one. Me too. It sometimes seems that life has shrunk to the size of a screen and our peripheral vision is disappearing. 

Other kinds of ‘prison’ might be to do with patterns of behaviour, patterns of thought, habits, dependencies, addictions, coping with difficult memories, challenging relationships. There are many ways in which we might struggle to claim that we are truly ‘free’. 

Yet the man in prison told the reporter that he was ‘free.” His freedom came from God. We read today in Ephesians chapter 2: ‘You were dead through the trespasses and sins in which you once lived following the course of this world . . . but God who is rich in mercy, out of the great love with which he loved us . . made us alive together with Christ .. and raised us up with him.” 

God knows us better than we know ourselves, our hurt and harm, our brokenness, the truth about our past and present, all that traps and imprisons us. 

‘Come’, says the King, ‘inherit the kingdom prepared for you.’ That Judgement Scene in Matthew’s gospel is the only description in the New Testament of the great final assize, it comes in Jesus’ end discourse with his disciples. He is talking to them privately on the Mount of Olives just before he goes to Jerusalem for his trial and death and there is a sense of urgency about what he is saying: ‘The Passover is coming and I am going to be handed over and crucified. This is what you need to know..’ 

In this parable, people of all faiths and none are gathered before the throne of God and their past actions are recalled. They are shown how, some of them, in their thoughtful service to others they have unknowingly been serving the God of love. 

“…just as you did it to one of the least of these, you did it to me.”

They will get their reward: “Come, you that are blessed by my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you’” 

But the others “will go away into eternal punishment,” Of course they had not knowingly ignored the king “If we’d known it was you Lord, we would have helped!” But they are told, “Just as you did not do it to one of the least of these … you did not do it to me.”

This is a king who identifies with the weak and the vulnerable, and in ignoring them, they had ignored the king. Profound, radical words. Hard-hitting. 

This powerful parable is a statement about God. That God is not a remote supreme being somewhere ‘out there’ in the mysterious reaches of the universe. Jesus is saying that God is here – in the messiness and ambiguity of human life. God is in your neighbourhood, you want to see the face of God? Look into the face of your neighbour. 

In the judgement scene the righteous are surprised to learn that they had cared for the King, they had simply given of themselves to help others, without calculation or expectation of reward. The others are shocked that they had missed those opportunities. But the king was looking for a natural overflowing of love, the kind of Love that Jesus (whom we call the Servant King) demonstrated and shared in his life on earth. Compassion, dignity, the respect we owe to our fellow men and women. 

On the micro-level – you and me in the street - it’s about how we treat others, how we show God’s love to the people we meet everyday. Matthew 25 makes me very uncomfortable when every week I walk past people asking for money. I cannot help everyone. I do have either the money or the time. Besides, how do I tell who is really needy and who simply wants a bottle of cheap wine? What I can do and am called to do is to remember what Jesus says, “When you did it to one of the least of these, you did it to me.” 

The hungry, the thirsty, the stranger, the naked, the sick, the prisoners. Note that phrase “the least of these” – not just the certifiably hungry, the truly deserving – the only criterion Jesus set was ‘the least of these’, which means those who are weak and vulnerable. 

So what you and I are called to do is not to ignore and over-look, but to look into a human face and to see there the face of Jesus Christ, because that is what he said 

We are talking here about Glass Doors, an initiative we can support to give shelter to the homeless, and we heard last week about the Food Bank, supplying basics to those in need. 

Christ tells us to look for him in the faces of prisoners – those in detention centres, immigration hostels, refugee camps. Jesus’ words lead us to seek a social structure based on the dignity and value of every human being. They are not to be abused and tortured, because Jesus said that ‘what you do to them you do to me.’ So in His name we must expect and demand more from our leaders and politicians, those in positions of power and authority. We must demand accountability and responsibility, careful supervision and high standards of conduct. 

Today we heard a reading from Paul’s letter to the church at Ephesus. I like to think about those very early followers, how they might have put their faith into practice. In Lebanon, the excavation of the cemetery at Tyre has revealed the burials of early Christians. The inscriptions read: “Adelphos, tapestry-maker and sub-deacon”, “Anthony, deacon and goldsmith”, and “Theodorus, presbyter, silversmith, the friend to all..” 

Their Christian identity and their work identity came together to make those people who they were. We can imagine the passers-by dropping in at Theodorus’ work-shop, watching him shape the precious metal and telling him about their mother’s illness, their worries about their daughter’s marriage, their son’s military service. “Theodorus, friend to all” Well we can be that, can’t we? Hearing and responding to those around us.

St Benedict had two simple questions he asked after people visited his community: “Did we see Christ in them? Did they see Christ in us?”

That is the criteria: whether or not you saw Jesus in the face of the needy and whether or not you gave yourself away in love, in his name. 

 “Come,” says Jesus, “You that are blessed by my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you”. We are welcomed into the life of God. As we share in the Eucharist today, and we pray ‘Your kingdom come’ let us ask God to show each one of us what we can do to make the difference, how we may play our part – in Christ’s kingdom of love and justice in the world.                                                            

Amen.

YOU WILL BE GRATEFUL.

Sermon by the Revd Dr Brutus Green
Readings: Genesis 1:9-13, 2 Corinthians 9.6-15, Luke 12.22-30

Thankfulness is something we ingrain into children.  Saying “thank you”, writing thank-you letters, forced phone calls to Grandma on Christmas day, YOU WILL BE GRATEFUL.

For adults, though, some of those practices seem to be on the way out. The rather chivalric practice of sending physical notes after dinner, parties and presents are more clearly a habit of a particular generation; and while a hasty email might have the same wording, I suspect that it’s immaterial nature, makes it a practice that isn’t sustainable. For one or two years I know people who would send electronic Christmas cards – my parents actually did it for at least a decade – but it never really took off.

I think it has mixed results with children.  A lot of children epically resent writing all those letters; the queuing to speak to an ancient relation when all you want is to be left alone with your lego and transformers; but those hard-wired habits can also flourish, once in a while, into good manners and thoughtfulness. 

We might worry then as adults we’re becoming less mindful of thankfulness. And this is probably also true at a national level. You may well feel that there is little to be thankful for at present, but consider Remembrance Sunday – Thanksgiving for our national survival, for what was not destroyed, and for those who came back, 100 years on it remains a national milestone. 

But for centuries, thanksgiving would be a foremost theme at harvest. I suspect few would know today, year on year, the good and bad harvests. The blackberries being poor this year, is my only indication that it may have been disappointing. but I spent my holiday on a farm and it was a little bleak to watch them gathering the hay in the rain. We teach it at school, then, but most people have no sense any longer of thankfulness at harvest.

And to my mind it is the great lie of our time, that the modern world tells, that is mostly to blame for our lack of thankfulness. This lie is that we are each of us independent human beings.

The lie that we need rely on no one and nothing but a full bank account to live the life we choose. Because, of course, now you can go down to the shop and get everything you need without any human interaction – though if you can process your shopping with one of those machines without it complaining about some ‘unrecognised item in the bagging area’, you’re a better man than I. Or you could do your shopping online and have it left on your doorstep.

We have eliminated the need for human contact, but we are still completely dependent on our connection to a whole range of species, not least other humans, to make things happen. So it might seem like all we need is the pounds in our account, but our connectedness is greater than ever.

I suspect if we do have a no-deal Brexit that will become immediately clear very quickly.

And I wonder, again, if children grasp this more intuitively. I took an assembly at Granard last week and they did get that our food comes from animals and plants. That we need farmers and factory-workers and delivery-people, and store-managers and till-attendants. And that our food is all dependent on the seasons and the sun, the wind and the rain, in our fragile environment. Because children are dependent, and know it, I think they’re always aware of the importance of connection, and at least until they’re teenagers children don’t have that same desire to be independent.

Now when Jesus in today’s Gospel is pointing our attention towards the simplicity of the flowers and the birds, it is I would suggest a reminder to re-engage with the world as fellow-animals. We have all our sophistication, our buildings, our fashion, our internet, but ultimately we need feeding and clothing like everything else. That means using what’s at hand in God’s creation to serve our needs. Which means being reminded of our connection to all creation through the complex inter-relations of the environment. And it means being thankful for what we have received and taking a moment to consider its path. From the parts of creation that we receive in unrecognisable forms and for the hundreds of invisible hands that have joined to bring this produce to our door.

The first service we were invited to at St Margaret’s was Harvest. It was also the first time Rhiannon and Oberon had left the house since hospital when he was a mere 11 days old. He turned up in an enormous fluffy suit and was passed round, much as he still is today. Harvest here, then, which seems so appropriate to be made the most of in this green and pleasant parish, will always stick in my mind – with these themes of connection and thankfulness. And when the gifts are brought up in the next service and the children sing their songs, and we hear about those who do not have enough from the food bank and we join together for a simple lunch, I think we’ll have moved for a short while beyond that sense of humans as independent beings.

And it will be seen that we have a lot for which to be thankful.  Amen.

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

Sermon by the Revd Dr Brutus Green
Readings: Genesis 28:10-17, Revelation 12.7-12, John 1:47-51

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 21st 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.

ChrBut, 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/apron, 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 we build 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.

The Blessing of the Dogs: "Be the person your dog thinks you are"

Sermon by the Revd Dr Brutus Green
Readings: Psalm 104

My first thought on visiting this church at interview just over a year ago, was “wouldn’t this be a perfect spot for a dog blessing. My previous parish in Paddington had an annual horse blessing as, despite its central location, there were still 2 working stables, plus the cavalry up the road in St John’s Wood. Here, however, it is dogs that predominate the lane and every dog must have his day.

Dogs and horses have always been man’s first companion, created as the Bible tells us, before woman, and while cats are more like people in knowing good and evil, it is dogs of all the animal world that most embody virtue.

The Dickin medal, which is the Victoria Cross equivalent for animals, has been won 34 times by dogs, more than any other animal. The rest have mainly gone to pidgeons with a few for horses. Only one for a cat, and he was in the Navy. I had two years with the PARAs and the exhibits I always most liked at their museums were the PARA dogs who were trained not only to parachute but when they hit the ground to run round in circles until their silk shutes were neatly gathered. At least one I know of landed on D-Day 75 years ago.

Dogs, though not all dogs, have courage and loyalty in abundance.  Mark Twain’s famous quote: ‘It’s not the size of the dog in the fight, it’s the size of the fight in the dog.’ very much summarises the confidence of the little dog. Our greyhound is a lover and not a fighter. And if I’m honest, of late, not really a lover either. But he is loyal and has his own courage. A dog psychologist wrote that ‘the greatest fear dogs know is the fear that you will not come back. This is certainly true of Zz and while making it impossible to leave at home on his own, makes him adorable and ensures us of a very warm welcome whenever we get home.

But dogs also bring out the best in us. They give us time out doors, time to think; to wonder and wander out under the skies. And dogs show us how to enjoy life. W.H. Auden wrote: In times of joy, all of us wished we possessed a tail we could wag. But a dog will also believe in you like no one else. Once a dog has chosen you he or she will never look back and unless you’re a monster you’ll never lose that trust that actually you are the best person in the world.

So for our dog’s sake I leave you with an instruction that has more depth than all the poets and philosophers:

‘Be the person your dog thinks you are.’

Amen.

Creation Sunday: Master, Steward, Friend

Sermon by the Revd Dr Brutus Green
Readings: Isaiah 55:10-13, Romans 8:18-25, Matthew 6:25-end

If you google “evil vicar” you will likely find a sketch by comedians Mitchell and Webb, which is uncomfortably amusing. A ‘not particularly religious’ but ‘spiritual’ Olivia Coleman drops into a church, which she’s heard has become much more inclusive and open minded, hoping to talk about “stuff” with the nice friendly lady vicar who wears a colourful jumper. The vicar she meets tells her he cares nothing for her internet assembled philosophy and the friendly lady vicar has been banished to Daventry. He then tells her that he’s back with all the incredibly twisted people who are still unaccountably vicars, standing with 2000 years of darkness, bafflement and hunger behind them, diligently harvesting the souls of a million peasants. As is evident in the comments left below the video, it’s hard to know whose side you should be on.

I’m reminded of this because Services of Thanksgiving for creation, pet blessings and the like all seem a little Vicar of Dibley. Though I should confess, that I myself have only seen 2 episodes – at the insistence of my wife. One of which was because she’s convinced we should do a Nativity Play involving taking a donkey up Putney Park Lane. 

But there’s a new scent in the air.  A little touch of sulphur to the traditional English thatched delight of the pet blessing. The more apocalyptic side of climate change – though a little way from the sleepy hamlet of Putney– makes creationtide more like Advent than Harvest. And if we are not to write off the international protest this weekend as eccentrics, students and hippies, then we face some troubling questions as Christians.

Like many areas of Christian theology, attitude to creation have shifted dramatically in the last century. For most of history, there has been the understandable view that we are to dominate nature. It is our God given resource, bequeathed in the first chapter of the Bible to Adam: ‘‘Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth’ And in the second account of creation man names all the animals, which must have been very useful for Noah as he checked them all into the ark.

Dominate and control.

In early civilisation, nature is the enemy. Physically there are enough threats, from disease through poison to the charging hippo. And nature is always threatening to encroach back on agriculture, and of course until fairly recently all of Britain was a forest, and we all know from the fairy tales what happens when you go into the forest.

I had such a moment in Australia. I’d chosen to climb a mountain in Queensland in the bush on my own, as I couldn’t afford the SCUBA course my friend went on.  Only it took me a while to drive out and I didn’t start hiking till the afternoon. I was moving quickly though and thought I’d get to the top before dark. Shortly after starting, though, I also had the slightly uncomfortable experience of leeches. They were dropping from the trees alongside the constant rain. Because it was hot I was just wearing shorts and boots so I was soon covered in the little critters. Not knowing better I tore off the leeches and continued merrily on my way. Only leeches have this anticoagulant thing – which stops your blood clotting, and when you rip off a leech you leave part of the leech in you, and a steady trail of blood.

In short, by dusk I was halfway up a mountain, wet through, covered in blood and leeches and by this time the path had disappeared and I was following a splash of paint left every 30m up a steep slope. Frustrated, I put up my tent on a ridiculous slope across tree-roots and definitely not water-tight. Leaving everything behind, I decided to run up a couple of 100m to at least get to the top. A truly ghastly mistake. 10 minutes later I found myself above the tree line in a howling gale in darkness without a torch or any clothing. I did panic a bit, and slid down the slope back the way I came.

It may have been a miracle or blind luck but 5 minutes down I happened to look to the side and there 20m away was my tent. Predictably in the dark I’d come off the trail and not noticed and it was only a shaft of light glancing off the top of the tent which prevented me getting entirely lost in the bush. I passed a terrifying night, soaking, covered in leeches, huddled, waiting for morning.

But there’s nothing quite like waking up in a rainforest. The light made the most stunning patchwork of beams as it was filtered through the canopy. I was so inspired I decided to climb back up and realised I wasn’t even nearly at the top, which took the better part of the next day. But apart from the itching of the leeches – it turns out you need to burn off leeches – it was a glorious day.

I indulge in that story because we have mostly seen nature as dangerous and chaotic – needing to be controlled, like the queue of people ascending Everest, and so sought divine approval to dominate it. And, psychologically, nature can present us with great fear. The fear of anarchy and meaninglessness, and of vulnerability. Life without reason or control, where our stories, our thoughts, everything that civilisation has made stands for nothing; opera, even a Gesamtkunstwerk – it turns out – means nothing to greyhounds and houseplants.

More recently, Genesis has been re-read as a command for us to be good stewards of nature. We have these resources but also the responsibility to look after and manage them. Now that theology is read as colonial, and inadequate to describe the history of our exploitation or to rectify the gathering crisis.

But there has also long been within Christianity a significant thread which sought to approach creation with greater humility and saw in it a good, entirely independent of the uses and enjoyment humanity made of it. Famously the Franciscans for the last thousand years have seen all nature as our brothers and sisters, and our last hymn today uses his words to describe all nature praising God. 

And as each of the readings today show, and even from Genesis where God declares his creation good before man is even on the scene, the natural world is also concerned with glorifying God. Isaiah envisaging the mountains, the hills the trees praising God; Paul describing ‘the whole creation’ as longing for God – and you might note, it’s the whole of creation that will be ‘set free from decay’ and ‘obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God’. While in the Gospel Jesus points to how God feeds the birds and clothes the flowers – that his concern is not only with man.

Unfortunately, the Middle East was very hostile to dogs and there is only one passage in the whole bible that speaks well of them: as one of the three things that ‘go well, are comely in going’ the lion, the he-goat and, you’ll be pleased to hear, the noble greyhound. But in any case, as Scripture makes clear, it is the purpose and future of all creation to worship its creation, and dogs, who embody the virtues of loyalty, discipline and fidelity will be far to the front of God’s more independently-minded animals. (Mentioning no names.)

I suppose the issue that should most concern us today is nature’s attitude to us. For we might well have moved from a theology of dominance, to stewardship, to friendship, but it seems to me that nature may well be moving in the other direction. Certainly, it is to nature that we have evolved as sentient life, able to understand and reflect on our place in the world. Creation has welcomed us as part of its family to this esteemed high place. And yet it seems more and more that nature has had to manage, to steward, this species that has got out of hand.

And it may just be that the scientists and theologians are speaking with one voice when they look to the time where creation is groaning, as it looks to set itself free; that the sufferings of the present time are only to increase and that we are yet in the time of the thorn and the brier;  as nature reasserts itself, and restores its dominance over us, as the son whose vaulting ambition has overleaped itself. But, as Jesus insists, we should not be anxious about tomorrow for today’s trouble is enough for today. Only for our world, and for the poor who are most at risk, it is today that we must act if we are not to imperil forever the world of tomorrow. 

But today we are also celebrating a baptism. Nothing draws us back to our animality like children. And nothing reminds us of our responsibility to the future like children. So as we give thanks for creation and welcome these children into the church, we work for and pray that the world they are growing into will continue to welcome us; and that we discover more and more the friendship that should exist between God and all his creatures.

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 12: give me the lowest place

Sermon by the Revd Dr Brutus Green
Readings: Proverbs 25:6-7, Hebrews 13:1-8, 15-16, Luke 14:1,7-14

Give me the lowest place: not that I dare
Ask for that lowest place, but Thou hast died
That I might live and share
Thy glory by Thy side

Give me the lowest place: or if for me
That lowest place too high, make one more low
Where I may sit and see 
My God and love Thee so.

Christina Rosetti, being ever-so-humble, captures the message of today’s Gospel. The principle behind it accords very nicely with British social anxiety. For British people, who love to demur and hate the idea of being one of those pushy so-and-sos who think they’re better than they are, we’re naturally inclined to underplay ourselves and avoid confrontation. And who wouldn’t enjoy being told, “Oh no, you are much more important than that, come and sit on this table.” The English, of course, get around the problem by wherever possible having seating plans.

In this, the armed forces always struggle with where to put clergy. They don’t quite fit into the rank structure so they don’t follow the recognised order. And you couldn’t have someone saying grace so far away that the commanding officer couldn’t hear. I usually found I was placed on or near the top table but usually at an awkward corner seat, slightly out of the way where it was very difficult to talk to anyone. Like an ostentatious pet.

But avoiding confrontation and politeness is not the same as humility; although, while people often dismiss the Church of England for caring more about politeness than ethics, and more about good taste than piety, manners may be seeded in a richer soil, and politeness is at least a first step to putting others before yourself.

But all virtues also have their back-door vices. So good manners may conceal not humility but a priggish and judgemental character, or the hypocritical show of concern. So too service is the bedrock of Christian discipleship, ‘The Son of Man came not to be served but to serve’'; but many is the volunteer who finds in their service the opportunity to create their own little fiefdom of power; who discovers in helping others a place to puff up themselves.

Humility goes beyond manners. But it’s not neurotic self-disgust or low self-esteem. Humility is the practice of self-forgetting. It’s the person who’s not concerned with themselves at all, for better or for worse, but for whom others have become larger than life. Humility is putting to one side your discomfort, your hunger, tiredness, your success and failure, to attend to the person in front of you. Of course, we do have such people at St Margaret’s, but I can’t tell you who they are as it would likely go to their heads.

Now I was struck in a conversation with a parishioner recently when she complained how unlikely the Christian story is. Consider this: According to a well know internet search engine, a calculation was done estimating that up to 1995 the total number of human beings who have ever lived was 105 billion. I’m not sure why 1995. Probably that’s when the research was done, but it may also have been that scientists having listened repeatedly to “Rednex” singing – I use the term loosely – “Cotton Eyed Joe” decided that this was probably it for the human race, and started coming up with a final score. The same sources tell me very definitely that the earth is about 4.5 billion years old and the universe 13.8 billion years. In this context, how likely is it that one human life spanning just over 30 years, should have the not just global but universal impact Christians claim? It seems unlikely. And yet.

If we accept that our world is created such that every creature is of infinite value, and that the creator wished those creatures to understand that, is not the most reasonable way to demonstrate this that the creator would enter into it as one of them? Show them this love in word and deed, not as a wealthy or powerful person but as the most ordinary person imaginable, except for this incredible revelation they would unfold? And how would you inspire your followers not to seek power and prestige but to protect the weak and seek out the lost but by living with those ordinary people and doing it yourself? And is it not frankly a little bizarre that this philosophy which favours the poor and ordinary, that emerged from a remote occupied state and saw all its early leaders killed, should now carry the belief of over two billion people today?

It is perhaps the difference between an objective and a subjective view; but don’t think that the objective is more true. That’s a little bit like admonishing your daughter for not getting better GCSEs when the national average has risen by 0.5%. Or explaining to your wife exactly what childbirth will feel like, having watched a documentary on a well know streaming service, or trying to cheer her up by telling her that statistically a huge number of women, many of whom were terribly frail or fearful, have already managed it. Sometimes the subjective approach contains more truth.

With Jesus’ parables there is always an ambiguity. Here he is on the surface, teaching the importance of humility, of the discipline of learning to put others ahead of us. But like so many of the parables it also is a picture of Jesus. Jesus is the wedding guest who ought to be at the head of the table, as God amongst us. And yet he chose to place himself at the lowest point; to ask God to make a place more low that he might also sit with the least of us as we measure it. And by doing so God has raised him to the place that is exalted above all. So while in St Paul’s letter he instructs us to be hospitable to all, as in doing so we might also entertain angels; by putting ourselves, wherever we are, in the lowest place, once there, we may also find that we share that place with Christ. Amen.

Pentecost 11: a Kingdom that cannot be shaken

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

The secular world has been struggling in the last few weeks with the desire of the church – and Norwich Cathedral in particular – to reach out to the great world outside it: some of you may even have visited Norwich Cathedral’s Helterskelter by this time: it has been part of their campaign called ‘Seeing it Differently’. It has been meant to give visitors a chance to start conversations about the architecture,  and then possibly to lead on to a conversation about belief.  The Telegraph headlined: ‘Norwich Cathedral accused of treating God like a tourist attraction ’. The BBC – more middle-of-the road - gave us:  ‘Norwich Cathedral helter skelter offers new experience’. Metro told us it ‘gives a better view of the roof’ and Premier told us that ‘choristers and canons get first rides on cathedral helter-skelter.’

And then the Bishop of Lynn, Jonathan Mey, was invited to preach by the Dean of Norwich.  The Mail on line reported that, instead of using the pulpit,  he climbed to the summit of the helter skelter, delivered his sermon and slid down the helter-skelter to the ground.

It’s a great story. As far as I know – but what do I know – Brutus has no such proposals for us. But his aim with the Tuesday playgroup,  and with the open door of the church whenever possible, has been to encourage people to step inside: to become comfortable with the building and to begin to enjoy what’s on offer – from a decent cup of coffee to a well-planned service – to be able to hear the good news. Baptisms and weddings and funerals, concerts and carol services and Sunday school are all ways that we are drawn in. Many of us may well be here because something like that drew us in - even if not always with a helter skelter.

Because, how is God to reach out to her world and offer the hope and healing, the vision and energy for the future that is always so desperately needed? Our three amazing readings today show a reaching out through prophecy, and in discussion, and in action: three visions of a new world.

Isaiah was prophesying more than 700 years before Jesus and Jesus knew his words well. He describes how to live generously: ‘if you remove the yoke from among you, the pointing of the finger, the speaking of evil, if you offer your food to the hungry and satisfy the needs of the afflicted, then your light shall rise in the darkness… The Lord will guide you continually… you shall be like a watered garden, like a spring of water.’

In words that so many must long to hear today, he goes on: ‘Your ancient ruins shall be rebuilt’ and he says this will happen ‘if you call the Sabbath a delight…if you honour it, not going your own ways, serving your own interests.’ Not to point the finger, not to lay burdens on others, not to serve our own interests – this is a demanding code to live by, but it makes for reconciliation and justice – living at peace.

The writer of the letter to the Hebrews is contrasting the experience of the Lord God that Moses had, and all the Israelites, long before Isaiah,  as they struggled through the wilderness,  with the revelation of God’s kingdom brought by Jesus: ‘You have not come to something that can be touched, a blazing fire and darkness, and gloom, and a tempest, and the sound of a trumpet, and a voice whose words made the hearers beg that not another word be spoken to them…but you have come to Mount Zion, and to the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem….’ He is building on the same understanding of God as Isaiah.  Here the city has been built and is eternal – a kingdom that cannot be shaken.

Luke’s story puts us in the everyday world: Jesus is teaching in a synagogue one Sabbath.  A woman appears who has suffered for 18 years from a crippling ‘spirit’ in her back. Jesus spots her and calls her over. Perhaps he knew her. ‘Woman you are set free from your ailment,’  he says, and then lays his hands on her.

This reading  has a special poignancy for me. Some of you will remember Phyl Cameron Johnson. Phyl was an active good neighbour and an adventurous traveller around the world, in Christian work. She was American and she and I shared a home here in Putney for many years.  I was the closest thing she had to family here. After her English husband died, she was firm that her home was in the UK and not back in the States. 

In December 2006, she was massively disabled by a stroke and she died in November 2010. In the four years in between, she had made an extraordinarily generous life out of her time at Ashmead Care Home: she took a great interest in all the staff; she had a wide correspondence and visits from friends. When she finally became fully reconciled to the fact that she would not walk again, she said to me, ‘if God wanted to heal me, he could – so he wants me to be here.’ Then, one night, I had a call from Ashmead at 1 in the morning. Phyl had been rushed to Charing Cross Hospital. 

As I left the house I grabbed a copy of Luke – Luke the doctor, the gentlest of the gospel writers – I wanted something with me in case she wanted to be read to. She was conscious when I arrived, and, while we waited, we chatted and I reached for the book. This was the passage where it opened –  it seemed so appropriate to her. A woman who has been so disabled for so long, meets Jesus – and she is healed. ‘Immediately she stood up and began praising God.’ I read it to Phyl. Soon after she was taken to a ward. When I saw her later that morning, she was unconscious and she died the following morning. I was sure she was praising God, freed from all disability.

But there is, of course, more in this story even than a wonderful healing. The healing is an act of compassion and love, and it fulfils what Isaiah says: if you call the Sabbath a delight and the holy day of the Lord honourable, if you honour it, not going your own ways, serving your own  interests…. then you shall take delight in the Lord… It gives us a glimpse of the kingdom of God. Jesus – a young man of just 30 - notices and calls to this older woman: the fear of many older people –and certainly of older women – is of being overlooked, not cared about, being alone. Jesus calls her with complete respect, a daughter of Abraham  – and he heals her.

We have just sung ‘amazing grace’ – the hymn written by that battered old slave ship captain, John Newton. Newton’s life was changed in a different but equally startling way during a terrifying storm when he was a young man, crew on a slave ship. He had an experience of God’s presence and grace in those first moments. His beliefs and behaviour immediately changed.  He gave up swearing and drunkenness and exploiting women for sex. Like the person in the Isaiah prophecy, he stopped serving his own interests and going his own way.  But it was years before that worked into the rest of his life;  eventually  he gave up slaving altogether. Then he became ordained, and, then, as an older man and a priest with both the experience of the slave trade and the vision to end it, he played a key part in inspiring his friend, the young, rich and successful William Wilberforce,  MP for Hull,  to stay in Parliament and fight to end the slave trade. 

Our three readings bring together visions of the new world, the kingdom of heaven which is here and within us, which Jesus lived and died to bring. No longer is it like the ancient world of the Exodus from Egypt, and Moses’ encounters with God, where we need to be terrified of God.  No longer a God of terror and fear. But one who loves us and wants to heal us. The writer of Hebrews warns us that to refuse him is to place ourselves in danger of being ‘shaken’ and destroyed – but, he says, ‘since we are receiving a kingdom that cannot be shaken, let us give thanks, by which we offer to God an acceptable worship with reverence and awe.’ 

Jesus shows us in action that kingdom that cannot be shaken: ‘Ought not this woman, a daughter of Abraham whom Satan bound for eighteen long years, be set free from this bondage on the Sabbath day?’ he asks the worshippers in the synagogue. The leader of the synagogue is indignant with him but the people round him are ‘rejoicing at all the wonderful things that he was doing.’

Words of hope, stories and prophecies of inspiration – that can stand beside us in difficult times. Our God, as the Hebrews writer says, ‘is a consuming fire’ – a fire that will burn up hypocrisy and treachery, selfishness, all kinds of sin – yes  – but a God who offers us – all of us – healing, hope, love, respect, and the certainty of ‘a kingdom that cannot be shaken.’ We can be like a spring of water. We can restore streets to live in. We can rejoice. 

Thanks be to God.

Pentecost 10: Living with Division

Sermon by Hilary Belden
Readings: Jeremiah 23:23-29, Hebrews 11:29-12:2, Luke 12:49-56

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

 ‘From now on, five in one household will be divided, three against two and two against three.’

We are living in deeply divisive times. As it happens, my household was not at all divided by the famous outcome of the Referendum: like many Londoners, we were shocked and dismayed.  I found this mug – with the words, ‘Keep calm and play football’,  in a charity shop on that ‘day after’ which, for a football-loving household (them, not me of course) said it all. But a great many people disagreed with us so deeply that we are now in the current apparently insoluble impasse.

Deep division is what we are openly living with. Some of us here will remember the divisions of the Miners’ strike. Or the struggles over the ordination of women. The troubles in Northern Ireland are surfacing again as the Good Friday agreement comes under pressure. Long- standing divisions which are by no means all behind us. And all of us will have lived with deep disagreements in our own lives and families. One of my honorary nephews is researching and even writing some of the pro-third runway material being produced by Heathrow. You can imagine that’s not a frequent subject of relaxed chat for us. We tend to stick to cricket – he’s a talented MCC player member.

So Jesus is – you could say – making a statement of the (supply your own expletive) obvious about times like ours and, indeed, any times.   But the compilers of the Lectionary have placed his words in a context of prophecy and faith.  Jeremiah, who knew a thing or two about violent opposition and division, and whose writing Jesus would, of course, have known well, writes that the Lord says, ‘Let the prophet who has a dream tell the dream, but let the one who has my word, speak my word faithfully…is not my word like fire, says the Lord, and like a hammer that breaks a rock in pieces.’  There are times when we must speak the truth and trust it to hammer to pieces the untruths around us.

And the writer of Hebrews, writing not long after Jesus’ life, reminds us of the extraordinary acts of God through the faith of his people – starting with the crossing of the Red Sea, going on to the fall of Jericho and the actions of Rahab –a prostitute but, in the crisis, obedient to God, on to Gideon and David  and so many – some who ‘won strength out of weakness’ and some who ‘suffered mocking and flogging’ or who were ‘stoned to death.’ These were people who met opposition and who ‘were commended for their faith.’ Yet, he says, in extraordinary words, ‘they did not receive what was promised, since God had provided something better, so that they would not, without us, be made perfect.’ 

Jesus recognises starkly the division and opposition that he represents: ‘I came to bring fire to the earth.’  Two millennia later, in June 2019, the introduction to Bishop Mounstephen’s report for the Foreign Office – commissioned by Jeremy Hunt - on persecuted Christians  gives this ‘final’ reason of six for the Review: 

 ….To look at this both historically and theologically the Christian faith has always been subversive:' Jesus is Lord' is the earliest Christian Creed. Those were not empty words. Rather, they explain why from the earliest days the Christian faith attracted persecution. To say that Jesus is Lord was to say that Caesar was not Lord, as he claimed to be. So from its earliest days the Christian faith presented a radical challenge to any power that made absolute claims for itself.

Christian faith should make no absolutist political claims for itself - but it will always challenge those who do, which is precisely why the persecution of Christians is a global phenomenon and not a local or regional one. … And I suggest that confronting absolute power is certainly a legitimate concern and policy objective of any democratic government. Indeed the Christian faith’s inherent challenge to absolutist claims explains why it has been such a key foundation stone of Western democratic government – and explains too why we should continue to support it vigorously wherever it is under threat.

Nonetheless the focus of the Review’s recommendations is clearly on guaranteeing freedom of religion or belief for all…

For those who believe in Jesus, and believe that in him we are able to make perfect all those faithful people who came before him, the writer of Hebrews says:  ’let us lay aside every weight, and the sin that clings so closely, and let us run with perseverance the race that is set before us, looking to Jesus, the pioneer and perfecter of our faith.’  

There are always prophets with dangerous dreams and leaders we distrust and disbelieve, but there are also voices of compassion and courage:  we can see the continual struggle to recognise the demands of climate change, or to invest in youth services, prison rehabilitation,  schools and hospitals. Our foodbanks and charities for the homeless are a massive reproof to the current structure of our society. We are supporting both here at St Margaret’s but we need to pursue that vision of a society that is structured to value everyone  and we need to  do whatever we can to support it. Our prayer has to be to know how to interpret the present time – as Jesus says, how to speak God’s word faithfully, as Jeremiah says, so that it can spread like fire.

Pentecost 9: Espoused Theology vs Lived Theology

Sermon by the Revd Dr Brutus Green
Readings: Genesis 15:1-6, Hebrews 11:1-3,8-16, Luke 12:32-40

The first words in the funeral service after the greeting are these: ‘We look not to the things that are seen but to the things that are unseen; for the things that are seen are transient but the things that are unseen are eternal.’  Which is the echo of the letter to the Hebrews we just heard: ‘Faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.’ At funerals, I think, more than anywhere, we’re aware of the tensions between our espoused theology and our lived theology. Let me explain that. Our espoused theology is the theology we learn. If someone asked you what do Christians believe? You’d perhaps tell them what you recall from Sunday School, if you remember a creed, some personal flourishes perhaps.Our lived theologyis what you’re really left with when you’re cut to the quick; the parts your espoused theology cannot reach. If a terminal friend asks you, do you really believe in an afterlife? If someone who’s been terribly harmed asks you if he should forgive the perpetrator.

Our espoused theology is shared. It’s in our services each week and through the year. The creeds –  essentially a list of things the Early Church decided were essential for people to believe, in order to be Christian. And a major source of our theology is our hymns. We sang earlier that we are ‘ransomed, healed, restored, forgiven’; the basis of our praising the King of heaven. And just a minute ago that we come to Jesus in prayer as a place of rest for our souls.

But how much of those hymns translates to what you really personally believe if asked directly? The final verse of ‘Praise my soul’ asks ‘angels [to] help us to adore him’. The first verse of our last hymn will list all the angels, traditionally held, to occupy heaven already in praise; but if some godless sceptic cornered you, would you feel confident defending the existence of angels?

Now you’d not be alone if you were a little agnostic about aspects of our faith; but what about something more personal? Each week we confess together where we have sinned against God and our neighbours in thought, word and deed. In the silence you perhaps reflect on some of your less good decisions, the things you wished you’d had time to get to which would have helped others; if you’re a churchwarden probably the string of people you’ve recently defrauded, slept with or murdered. 

It’s helpful to get these things off your chest.

We then hear the words of absolution. Our sins are forgiven. In our espoused theology, the faith of the church, the work of grace means that we’re released from the judgement of everything in our past. But do we return to these sins? In your lived theology are there things for which you’re not forgiven; where you do not yet feel or know forgiveness? Is your lived theology demanding that you must do something to atone? Sometimes we’re unaware of the heresies of the theology that lurks beneath our good espoused theology; our inability to accept the grace that’s offered to us. And it’s our lived theology that actually shapes who we are and how we pray.

So at funerals we’re confronted with our lived theology. When the reality of life and death is before us, we will find ourselves truly praying or spiritually shutting down. Faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen. 

I heard on the radio recently that ‘living funerals’ have become a thing. You may already be planning your own or your partners, especially if you’re a churchwarden. The idea is based on that sentiment sometimes expressed at funerals that ‘she would have loved this’, and the rather peculiar truth that it’s often only after a person’s death that family and friends come to visit. Essentially, it’s a sort of goodbye party, though with a formal element, perhaps your favourite reading and a couple of songs. The woman on the radio was very clear that she didn’t think much of hymns. I suppose the thing I struggle with most is how would you leave that event? A firm handshake and an ‘all the best’? ‘Have a good death’? I spend a lot of energy trying to avoid social awkwardness and, speaking personally, for me this would be a bit of a nightmare.

But actually the more alarming aspect of this trend is that having been to the living funeral you would surely not go to an actual funeral. You’ve said goodbye. So while a body is at a distance, processed out of existence, there’s nowhere to express the actual and unpredictable aspects of grief. There’s no place to comfort one another. And, there’s nowhere to register hope.

We look not to the things that are seen but to the things that are unseen; 
for the things that are seen are transient but the things that are unseen are eternal.  

Funerals are liminal places. There is absence and presence. They are a kind of place in-between worlds.Like the most primal experience of life, the birth of children, war, these near-death experiences cut through the comfortable platitudes, whether we’re Christian or a materialist atheist, and call us out on what we really think.

That’s when you know your lived theology.

Over the last seventy years death has been quietly, step by step, removed from society to sterilised professionals and institutions. The intention is to focus on the positive, to make it easy for people, to shield us from the nastiness, the messiness of it all. 

It’s strange that for most of human history religion has focused on where humanity is most rational, most educated, most reflective. Now I think one of the things that most threatens our natural sense of the divine is that in Britain we are losing our connection with ourselves as animals. The experience of death helps us understand what it is to be alive, 

And there’s nothing more likely to produce the instinct to praise God as our first hymn led us, than to see our child born, to find that person who seems to meet our every need, to find ourselves in desperate peril or to drag ourselves to the funeral of a loved one. Because in all these instances, when we see our createdness, our natural finitude – both our tiny insignificance and the incredible wonder of self-conscious life – we are also looking towards the things that are hoped for, the conviction of things not seen. And it’s not the well-worn creeds and favourite hymns of our espoused theology; it’s in the blood, sweat and tears of our lived theology.

I know that I’m not alone when I tell you that whenever I come to worship, I am as mindful and as much in the presence of those who are no longer with us, than of those whom I can currently see. Faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen. 

So Abraham, counting stars in the assured hope of children, the unseen conviction of God’s promise; the Hebrews who are newly come to the promises of God in Jesus, who are strangers and foreigner in this world, hoping for, convicted by the reality of the unseen city of which they are members; the disciples who eschew the goods of this world, for the unseen, hoped for goods of the world to come; whose hearts desire the treasures of an unseen reality. These are those whose lived theology is built on faith. Faith which hopes. Faith which looks on death and is not afraid. 

Our time of trial may come at any point. And that is when we will know our lived theology,how honest we have been with our faith; and whether we have taken the time to build up the reserves of faith and hope needed to help us endure; our unfailing treasure in heaven. Amen.