Boxing Day

Sermon by the Revd Dr Brutus Green
Readings: 2 Chronicles 24:20-22; Psalm 119:161-168; Acts 7:51-end; Matt 10:17-22

It goes without saying that St Stephen, often given the epiphet ‘first martyr’, is the archetype of Christian martyrs. We see something of the manner of this example Christian death in that he dies asking forgiveness for those who murder him. Our readings are so arranged to show that this isn’t the only possible exit from this world, though I think we can perhaps forgive Zechariah his cry for vengeance in the frustration of justice in his murder. And when we hear of the murder of innocent people, we probably also feel a tug towards ‘vengeance is mine – saith the Lord’, rather than forgive them what they do.

It’s intriguing to reflect that Luke, the writer of Acts, is the only Gospel that records Jesus also calling for the forgiveness of his executioners. Perhaps the magnanimity of St Stephen’s last words was so moving that St Luke did not want Jesus, in his Gospel, to be outshone by this unreasonable generosity of spirit, and so gave the same words to Jesus. Otherwise, Stephen is following Christ in deed and in word as the exemplar disciple.

It would be possible today to spend a great deal of time outlining just a few of the virtuous lives who have faced death in faith with equal courage.  The truth is that certainly every year since the death of Jesus, a Christian, and often thousands, has been murdered for her or his faith. And Christianity continues to be objectively the most persecuted world faith.

This is not our reality and as Christians in the UK it’s all too easy to be half-hearted, reluctant or occasional in our faith. The fact that boxing day follows on quite immediately from Christmas is actually rather helpful. Christmas is the celebration of grace. A reminder that there is nothing we do to merit God’s presence among us, or God’s salvation. It is a freely given gift, unlike those of that other saint, Nicholas, who has his naughty and nice list. He is more of a Zechariah figure.

But Boxing Day is a reminder of the cost of discipleship: That following Jesus demands everything from us, even our lives; We must take up our cross and follow him.

Discipleship is a freely given response to the free gift that has been received; ‘Who would not love thee, loving us so dearly’ But for all that Christianity deals only in what is freely given the cost has been terrible over the millenia. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the writing of the twentieth-century martyr Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Shortly before the Second World War he wrote of the Cost of Discipleship and railed against what he denounced as the ‘cheap grace’ offered by the church.

His essential point was that grace is free. It’s the gift of God, which we do nothing to earn. However, should we grasp the enormity of this gift our response should be total. In Isaac Watts famous words: “Were the whole realm of nature mine, that were a present far too small; love so amazing, so divine, demands my soul, my life, my all.”

What he disliked was the way the church treated grace as cheap. The suggestion that there are small acts by which we earn salvation. So both by demanding that people do something to be Christian – Going to church, giving money, volunteering; but also not demanding a total response:  a change of heart, repentance, truly taking up your cross and following Jesus. We cheapen grace. A Boxing Day sale. Placing conditions on grace, and actually very light conditions, Bonhoeffer saw as a total betrayal of the Gospel. As if the kingdom of God were to be sold on the same basis as we allow entry to Church schools.

 Grace is free but never cheap. And in his resistance to the Nazis Bonhoeffer’s faith demanded the ultimate sacrifice. This is hard for us because it’s so much easier to run churches if grace is cheap. You can suggest that people really ought to give more, they ought to volunteer on the tea and coffee rota. The idea that you buy in to faith is attractive, It makes people feel like they’ve earned their place, like they belong. And it makes sure certain things get done.

If I say God has done this nice thing for you, you really ought to give a little back; come along on a Sunday morning – and there’s coffee; It’s good for your family, for your mental health; that sounds reasonable. Instead we say that God has given everything for you. You owe God absolutely everything. Which is quite overwhelming. Just a little bit all or nothing. Christianity – at least technically – does not work very well as a hobby.

So for us who have just celebrated Christmas, Boxing Day is the fly in the soup. We celebrate the gift of God among us: Yea Lord we greet thee, born this happy morning. But it comes like the sowers seed, scattered on rocks, among weeds and on good soil. For our response to God’s love is only fully discovered on the road of discipleship – The proof of Christmas Day’s pudding is only served on Boxing Day. Amen.

Christmas Day: Surprises!

Sermon by the Revd Dr Brutus Green
Readings: Isaiah 62:6-end; Psalm 97; Titus 3:4-7; Luke 2:8-20

Christmas is about surprises. You’ve got to be careful here. Being whisked away on a romantic trip to Paris as a Christmas surprise. That’s a lot of brownie points. Though of course not this year. Camber Sands is a little less romantic but the English seaside is bracing at this time of year. “Bracing” is a particularly English word, which means “unpleasant but theoretically good for you in some unapparent and inexplicable way” I surprised my wife this week with a curry delivered to our house. She is vegetarian and she normally orders a chilli paneer curry. I thought I’d surprise her with a paneer masala with baby spinach.  It turned out to be a lumpy spinach slush with hidden cheese. She was surprised. Christmas is also often a time for proposals – and this may well be a good year for it with so many couples spending the holiday isolating or ruing failed travel plans. You can only watch Love Actually so many times.

The first Christmas was so surprising almost no one noticed it. You may have noticed how St Luke is keen to tell us who all the rulers of the day were. So we have Emperor Augustus, the great colonial emperor who took the Roman empire further in North Africa and Europe, but failing to keep hold of Germany, never managed to get those 5 extra armies for holding Europe. Then we have Quirinius – the name most stumbled over in carol services. He was very unpopular, not least for taking the census of Judea. Censuses tend to be followed by tax increases.

Luke gives us these details for historical context. But also as a comparison. The rulers of the day rarely thought the rules applied to them. But it’s here, in the manger, Luke is saying, that surprisingly, is the real king. born to peasants, his first guests shepherds, the poorest of the poor, Which reminds me a little of 3 years ago when Oberon was born, a week after we moved to Putney and on the day Rhiannon came home from hospital the churchwardens arrived to pay homage, but disappointingly did not bring gold, frankincense and myrrh.

All this is all a far shot from the palaces and Eton colleges of emperors and governors. There’s no royal fanfare, no cub lifting on pride rock; The surprise for Luke’s Gospel is that this great king, the most important person in history – whether you believe the hymn sheet or not – Is born in the most ordinary circumstances. And with no Christmas Card or photos in Hello.

There is much you could say about this. But now is not the time. But the so-called Pax Romana and the taxes and legislation are all ways of trying to organise and order people from the top down. The birth of Jesus starts something which is bottom up. A child, just as a creature to be loved, is something that turns a few people’s lives upside down. It’s deeply personal. Especially with some parents’ children. But Jesus will work this way, calling women and men, person by person to a different way of living. 

And while politicians try to have their way, telling us what to do, and sometimes even doing it themselves. This little boy shifted the course of the world by surprising us and showing us that it’s better to love than to rule. We still have the august Caesars and the grand Quiriniuses We still have the census and taxes. But we also have a king who operates not by power, but by love. And in the birth of a helpless child, we are surprised that God has come among us not wearing a suit at a work meeting, but naked in love.

So this Christmas render to Caesar what is Caesar’s. But render to God what is God’s. Amen.

Midnight Mass: Let there be light

Sermon by the Revd Dr Brutus Green
Readings: Isaiah 52:7-10; Hebrews 1:1-4; John 1:1-14

The mind is a strange thing. Take the peculiar case of Jedediah Buxton in the eighteenth century. In most respects he knew less than an average 10 year old but he had a prodigious head for numbers. So when he was asked how many times a coach wheel, six yards in circumference, would turn on the 204 mile journey from London to York he provided the correct answer of 59,840, in only 13 minutes. His greatest feat was squaring a thirty-nine figure number. It took him more than two months but he got the correct figure which ran to 78 digits. To encourage him in his feats of mathematical memory, friends and dignitaries would buy him pints of beer, a list of which he kept mentally, so that by 1753 he could say that the Duke of Kingston alone had treated him to 2130 pints.  Another treat was being taken to see a performance of Richard III.  When asked whether he enjoyed the play he replied that he hadn’t understood any of it but he could tell you how many words the lead actor had said!

Christmas is a large-scale act of remembering. The whole “Christmas magic” thing is about recapturing the giddiness you felt as a child, decorating the tree, waiting for Father Christmas, asking your parents difficult questions about the lyrics to ‘Fairytale of New York’.  And then there’s Christmas movies. You don’t even need the radio times any more to plan your viewing, and avoid missing your favourite ritual. But why do we watch them again and again? At 135 minutes anyone who happens to have watched Love Actually every year since its release in 2003 (and why wouldn’t you?), will have spent forty hours of their life watching what is by most standards a pretty mediocre movie.  And if you’ve watched ‘It’s a Wonderful Life’ every year since its release 75 years ago then you’ve lost nearly a week of your life.

So why do it? Why come to carol services each year? It’s not like you’re going to be surprised by the story; Or the rarely sung fourth verse of Hark the Herald where Mary and Joseph stay in on Boxing Day and order a curry.

But actually what makes life meaningful is repetition. Repetition gives order, shape. It allows experience to build; it makes connections; it gives resonance to our little rituals. I hate birthdays. Most of the bad things that have happened to me have happened on my birthday – heart-breaking break-ups, hospitalization, walking in on naked friends who really shouldn’t have been naked; but we get a bigger sense of our lives when we remember back through birthdays. Like Christmas and New Year we find layers, another year, laid on our lives, like a coastal shelf. And hopefully it helps us understand ourselves, and where we’re going. 

Or think about anniversaries. The one year since the first date that you forgot and he didn’t. Going out to dinner; reliving those memories of unpromising conversation. Looking at the photos. And this year’s platinum jubilee – a repetition that marks history and tells the story of a life of service through a large collection of commemorative crockery.

Repetition is a way of remembering and bringing order to your life, from your morning cup of tea with the Today programme, to your annual birthday walk, to sleeping through the queen’s speech. It marks time and glues the fragments of our lives together in some sort of shape.

And it does so much more than simply looking back. Normal remembering works backwards. And even if the memories were wonderful they are receding in the rear-view mirror. Repetition is memory working forward, re-lived. To look back to your wedding day is to think of what was. To repeat your anniversary is to inhabit that day and all that it meant, and to add to it, to create new memories, to deepen and enrich it. What happens but once, says the German proverb, might as well not have happened at all. To look back at past love affairs is always bittersweet, nostalgic; the repeated act of telling someone you love them, taking them out to dinner, builds a life together.

Repetition can also be hellish though. History repeats itself, first as tragedy, then as farce, according to Marx. The essence of trauma is being unable to escape horrific repetition. In that other great Christmas movie, In Bruges, the main character contemplates giving himself up, saying, - I have edited slightly here - “at least in prison and at least in death, you know, I wouldn't be in [] Bruges. But then, like a flash, it came to me. And I realized, [] man, maybe that's what hell is: the entire rest of eternity spent in [] Bruges. And I really really hoped I wouldn't die.”

But whether it’s positive or negative what’s repeated is meaningful. When we repeat what is good we see shades of heaven. When we repeat what is dreadful we find fifty shades of hell. What happens only once may as well not have happened. Even if this is our annual pilgrimage to church, to sing the familiar carols, to experience for one night again a lifetime’s repetition of words and music, year on year, it’s putting us in sight of heaven for a moment. Like an old remembered fairytale, coming to life.

Today’s Gospel was the reason I read theology at 18 and so inadvertently why I became a priest, not first for the theology, but for the poetry.  You’d be forgiven for thinking it was the first book in the Bible.  It deliberately starts the same, “In the beginning”, the repetition layering the story of Jesus onto the story of creation. In Genesis God speaks the first act of creation: in the beginning God said “Let there be light”. And in today’s Gospel we have ‘in the beginning’ was theWord, in which there was light, the light which is the life of all people  made flesh for the world.  Creation and redemption layered together as the repeating act of God’s love. 

But ‘Let there be light’ is now ‘the light shines in the darkness’. The first act of creation, incarnate in the Word made flesh, that’s Jesus, is still shining in darkness. So in this eucharist, near to the shortest day of the year, in the middle of the night, we are celebrating, we are repeating in the soft candlelight, the light that shines in the darkness, that is not ever overcome. 

Memory is not supposed to be perfect.  One can count, one can even say words with no meaning at all. When we remember forwards by repeating, the memory changes with us, grows with us. The important thing is the connections; being connected to the past;  building a connection with the future.  If we can dwell in the magic of tonight for a moment, we meet our precious childhood Christmases; the people who we’ve loved and who’ve loved us over the years.  And even if you’re just trying to get from the day before Thanksgiving to the day after New Years, that’s ok too. Because repetition can also ease our most painful memories.

So, dearly beloved, happy Christmas.  It’s Christmas Eve and you’re not in the drunk tank. Given the last two years, we will all ‘see a better time where perhaps some of our dreams come true’.  But the enduring hope of generations is in this birth of a child, the light of the world,  That we remember forwards, repeating the old words, repeating this gift of God’s love for the world in our gifts to others; repeating this hope that in all the darkness of the world,  there is meaning and purpose. And in this act of remembrance tonight we are brought close to the creative and redemptive love that still echoes through the world. 

God said let there be light. And the light shines in the darkness,  and the darkness has not overcome it. Amen.

Christmas Carols: On Repeat

Sermon by the Revd Dr Brutus Green

There’s a line in When Harry Met Sally: “Every year I just try to get from the day before Thanksgiving to the day after New Year’s”. If you added: ‘without having to self-isolate’ – it would probably capture the mood of the entire nation for the last two years.

And I’m sure every vicar in the country has been thinking: “please God, can I just get to Boxing Day, without having to cancel everything or arrange another Zoom coffee morning.” Covid steals joy. It is the mosquito in your ear creating the anxiety that prevents sleep. I very much look forward to Boxing Day and sleeping in heavenly peace – Hopefully not in the way of all flesh.

Christmas is about repetition – we delight in the familiar. And sorry Tolstoy, but actually even happy families are happy in different ways – with different traditions; Our Silent Night didn’t actually sleep ‘in heavenly peace’ tonight but ‘in Mary’s arms’ – different translation and arrangement of what is most familiar. So we have our films we watch, our moments by the tree, with presents; A 45 year old unpronounceable highland scotch; However, you spend it, there’s a joy in connecting with Christmas past, A reawakening of a childhood memory; Or the memory of someone very precious no longer with us. It can be just a sensation, rumbling through our guts, hearing an overly enthusiastic soprano throw herself at a descant; The memories may blur together, But somehow all this is a part of us.

Last year the Covid grinch stole Christmas. I can almost feel him rubbing his hands as we speak.But as Ecclesiastes reminds us ‘there’s nothing new under the sun’. Plague, war, famine, all those merry horsemen have turned up in time for the Nativity play before. But they’ve not had the last word yet.

Christmas itself is summed up in a very simple image: A ‘light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it.’ It’s easy to picture – you hold it in your hands: it’s a picture of hope. The verse stands out in the prologue of John because it’s the only verse written in the present tense. It’s all has and was and then suddenly, out of nowhere, like an aside to the reader – speaking into our time – the light shines in the darkness. It’s not the historian saying what happened. It’s a promise. A promise that Christ is Emmanuel – God with us – Today, tomorrow, as before in that little town of Bethlehem.

So Christmas is about hope, even, especially, in dark times. There is little cause for carolings, but as that most miserable of novelists Thomas Hardy put it, even in the voice of an aged thrush, in the ‘growing gloom’ there may still be ‘Some blessed Hope, whereof he knew/ And I was unaware.’

So good luck to us all getting through ‘to the day after New Year’s’. I hope you don’t spend it this year in the covid tank. And in faith we can say that we will see another one. So ‘Happy Christmas to all and to all a good night.’ Or as the most famous Christmas Carol finishes: ‘God bless us, every one!’

Advent 4: The Underdog

Sermon by the Revd Dr Brutus Green
Readings: Micah 5:2-5a; Hebrews 10:5-10; Luke 1:39-45

It should be no surprise that Britain became a Christian nation in a relatively straightforward manner, largely in the seventh century.  Today’s readings bring out a central theme of Christianity which is also central to British identity: Favouring the underdog. Not because there was a corgi or greyhound at the birth of our Lord,  but in continuity with a great deal of the Hebrew Bible, God’s favour rests on the most unlikely of people in achieving the turn-around God desires.  God - like the English, especially, - prefers to cheer for the less likely candidate. This is also something of a trait in the Welsh and Scottish who will cheer for whoever is playing against England.

So it is in Bethlehem, one of the little clans of Judah, and it is Mary, a young girl - and no aristocat (she’s the underdog remember)  no fancy renaissance princess in a blue scarf, as we expect at our nativity plays - that is chosen for the task of bringing in God’s salvation.

When I was able to take assemblies in schools, I’d give the children a bit of a test to see whether they could tell Biblical Christmas from our post-Victorian Christmas. Usually they do correctly answer that Mary did not ride a reindeer down to Bethlehem.But the test comes in whether we can debunk the Waitrose Christmas myths - of the cosy manger, the silent night of picturesque snowy stables; the tired but satisfied parents, the jolly, apologetic innkeeper, the three kings. We would all like the Christmas story to be directed by Richard Curtis, but the Holy Family is much more like the worst-hit underdogs of today, refugees. Christ is born at Calais. Or this winter in Afghanistan.

This preference for the underdog is one of the most distinctive patterns of Christian theology. From the beginning it was vilified as the religion of slaves and women. Nietzsche described Christianity as “a European movement, [which] was from the start no more than a general uprising of all sorts of outcast and refuse elements”,  as St Paul agrees: “God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise; God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong; God chose what is low and despised in the world, things that are not, to reduce to nothing things that are.” Advent 4 in the last days before Christmas remembers Mary, a peasant girl of a conquered nation in an outlying region, with child;  the epitome of vulnerability and poverty.  Because God is with her.

But though she is the underdog it is the Magnificat she sings, the mainstay of Anglicanism in Evensong. And the Magnificat, echoing Hannah, Samuel’s mother’s song, after she gives birth to the Old Testament prophet, is the hymn of the great turn around:

he hath scattered the proud in the imagination of their hearts.
He hath put down the mighty from their seats, and exalted them of low degree.
He hath filled the hungry with good things; and the rich he hath sent empty away.

Mary, then, is the revolutionary of her day – bringing down the powerful from their thrones and lifting up the lowly; but leading the revolution in her own meek  “be it unto me according to thy word: way. So really, rather than blowing away the fat cats by crying havoc and letting loose the dogs of war, Mary’s revolution is internal. Internal in that she is carrying God within her. Internal in that it is a turn to reliance upon God. Not all revolutions can be accomplished by keeping quiet and having a baby. But any revolution begins from within oneself. 

Which brings me on to the subject of prayer. The main problem, I think, that people have in regard to prayer is not the struggle to get hold of God; that God’s not there. It’s where are you - and where has your mind gone. Because God can’t speak to you, if you’re not actually present. And if every time you pray your thoughts scatter in every direction, they settle off in the future with thoughts of Sunday lunch, or you settle down for a nap it’s going to be difficult for God to get through.

There are two common mistakes in approaching prayer. The first is to think it’s about saying everything you need to, making sure you remember all your sick relatives, getting it all on the table. The problem with this is if you’re the one speaking all the time, how are you going to hear what God’s saying. This, by the way, also goes for our day to day human relationships. A friend of mine once told me that you know you’re with a good friend when, to paraphrase, you can sit comfortably with them and not say anything. And it’s true, when we’re uncomfortable, feeling awkward, when we want to impress, we tend to talk a lot. You’re in the best sort of company when neither needs to speak.

The second common mistake is to think prayer is about emptying your mind. That you need not to think, or to think about nothing, in some Zen master wizard sort of way. The Christian tradition has never taught this and it’s also something you would not find in most mainstream religious practices - including Zen Buddhism.

Rather, and certainly for the Christian, the central occupation of prayer (at least of Christian meditation) should be focussing on something quite specific. So the Orthodox use the Jesus prayer: “Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner” repeated over and over in time with our breathing. Roman Catholics will often use the Rosary which moves between “Our Father”s, “Hail Mary”s and “Glory Be”s. It is entirely possible to pray focussing on nothing more than our own breathing. Alternatively, one could use Mary’s prayer: “Be it unto me according to thy word”. The point in all this is to be able to be open to what God might be wanting to say to you. After all, God already knows what’s in our hearts. It’s us who struggle to know what’s in his.

But prayer is not just about bringing us closer to God, it’s also about bringing us closer to each other. As we are commanded to love God and our neighbour, so as we love one more, we will in turn love the other.  Spending time in prayer should open us up more to the needs and desires of other people. And, in particular, the underdog.  Any revolution begins from within oneself. 

But it also reminds us that God is not necessarily to be found in or with the people and situations we expect. Not necessarily with the rich and famous, in the impressive cathedrals or the university divinity faculties, and we should check ourselves to make sure we haven’t become too grand, or too comfortable.

But at the moment, we are still in Advent. It is the season of hope and expectation. Which means it is still the season of prayer and looking within ourselves for the miracle of grace that is coming at Christmas. We’ve made it through the patriarchs - the great men of renown - Abraham, Isaac, Jacob;  then the second week’s prophets, foremost of whom is Moses, the law giver, but especially also the prophecy of Isaiah who looks to the restoration of Israel;  our third candle was for John the Baptist as the last prophet - pointing towards Christ: ‘Make straight the way of the Lord’.  Finally we have Mary, the culmination of these great figures, a poor peasant girl who is to be the Theotokos - the God bearer - who will announce and through her body present Christ to the world. Christ, the star to every wandering bark.

So as we come to the end of this Advent season, Let’s remember the underdogs of our world. Let’s pray for God’s presence with us. And let’s try and turn our hearts so that we will seek him more, and recognise him in the more unlikely places.

And, as we also pray for our enemies and those who persecute us, let us also remember cats. Amen.

Advent 3: Transformation

Sermon by the Revd Dr Brutus Green
Readings: Zephaniah 3:14-end, Isaiah 12:2-end, Philippians 4:4-7, Luke 3:7-18

There are moments in any life, which experience transformation. Sometimes you don’t realise it. So you have your first child, and perhaps a little later you look around, and realise that all your little preferences, hobbies, self-indulgences are now drowned by the impossible task of attempting to be an adequate husband, father and maintaining a job. I’ve heard it gets easier. Another moment of transformation: A mother told me this week of a lovely epiphany experienced one Christmas eve having a glass of champagne with her mother at 6 o’clock, knowing she could finally relax and enjoy the whole evening. The ghost of Christmas future.

Or it might be a moment like Kate Winslett telling Rufus Sewell to get lost in ‘the Holiday’, having finally discovered ‘gumption’. And don’t worry, sermon illustrations from Christmas movies are very shortly going to come to an end! But Christmas films so often have that Christmas, or Christian, miracle, where someone turns their life around; ever since the classic turnabout Scrooge McDuck in Mickey’s Christmas Carol.

There are times when the scales fall from our eyes, and we see ourselves, another person, the world, in a different, more truthful way. And we make a change. And Faith is about transformation.

I was struck by the anthem we will hear at communion today, on page 11 of your order of service. It’s based on a poem written by Richard Wilbur, a very successful 20th Century American poet. Each verse turns on the central repeated line: ‘and every stone shall cry’. The genius of the poem is how in each verse the line ends the initial thought of the verse, but begins the second. Bringing a thought to a close, but then, in the same words, opening a new thought in a different key. So he uses the ambiguity of the word ‘cry’ – to weep, to cry out in pain, but also to proclaim, to protest, to resist, to sing;

But it’s the image, the metaphor of the crying stones that gives the power to the change in key. Christ famously proclaimed of the temple that not one stone would be left upon another. But when Jesus is admonished to keep his disciples quiet as he enters Jerusalem on Palm Sunday he replies ‘I tell you, if these were silent, the stones would shout out.’ And surely, he is also thinking of Isaiah who prophesies that ‘the mountains and the hills shall burst into song’

Finally, we see this transformation directly in Jesus’ own words, as he quotes psalm 118: “The stone that the builders rejected has become the cornerstone” 

So we hear:

Yet he shall be forsaken,
and yielded up to die;
the sky shall groan and darken,
and every stone shall cry.

later:

And every stone shall cry
in praises of the child
by whose descent among us
the worlds are reconciled.

It is a peculiarity of grief that in it are contained the strongest elements of suffering, regret, shame, guilt, pain, anger, fear,  And hope, love, happiness, intimacy and many others. Grief transforms the soul, sometimes again and again and again. Christianity is a work written in grief. Which becomes the work of resurrection.

The first line of one of TS Eliot’s most famous poems reads: ‘In my beginning is my end.’ You might gloss: from dust we are made and to dust we return. The poem reflects on village life in East Coker, Somerset where Eliot’s seventeenth-century ancestors came from. It’s about time and mortality. But the poem finishes: ‘in my end is beginning’. That is a statement of faith:  That death is not the end.

It’s doing something similar to Richard Wilbur’s strategy, repeating a line but in changing the tone and context, making it the start of something rather than a gloomy conclusion. In me beginning is my end. In my end is my beginning. Eliot means something else alongside this. “end” means last moment, but it also means “the point of something”, as in: ‘To what end, do did you do that?’ Or ‘he went running to get fit, but enjoyed it so much that running became an end in itself’ His first line then becomes, to paraphrase: ‘in my beginning is the point of me And finishes: ‘in the meaning of my life is my beginning’, bringing the two meanings together. What has been made by God, for a reason, will find its home in God. East Coker, is also the village where Eliot’s ashes were buried on Easter Day in 1965. A plaque can be found in the church with the twin epitaph:  ‘in my beginning is my end… in my end is my beginning’. This may all seem a stretch from John the Baptist. Well he’s not a stone, but he is the voice of one crying out. And his purpose is a change of vision, and a change of life. In baptism one dies in the water and is reborn in faith. What is dead can never die.

What strikes me is the sudden changes of tone in this episode. He begins, by accusing the crowds of being vipers and declaring the axe is at the root of the trees, ready to cut down the wicked and toss them into the fire. But when he’s actually asked his demands are really moderate: Share your clothing, share your food. Don’t be corrupt, extort or intimidate. Essentially: be nice. He then speaks of the one to come, and again, it’s a little terrifying: ‘the chaff he will burn with unquenchable fire’. Before the episode ends: ‘with many other exhortations he proclaimed the good news to the people’.

John is preaching judgement and repentance; Which sounds like bad news. But actually it’s the beginning of very good news,  The coming of the Son of God and the kingdom of heaven. The presence of God brings about this turn around, this shift in meaning; It’s the sign of the kingdom of God.

There’s a shadow of this in the epistle. Rejoice in the Lord always, again I will say rejoice. Do not worry about anything. The early Christians had an exceptionally hard time. It takes a mastery of resilience to rejoice always. To always let your gentleness be know to all. To not worry. To believe in a peace that passes all understanding. After the last two years do we have the strength of character to continue rejoicing? In the face of hypocrisy, scandal and frustration to remain gentle? This winter to not worry? Through this Christmas to keep hold of the message of the angels peace on earth? Faith isn’t about believing that everything will turn out alright. But it is about believing God is with us in and through everything. That nothing can separate us from God.

And faith is about transformation. It’s about seeing the darkness of the world, and trying to shine a little light. It’s about believing that the end we see, which looks tragic,  is the start of something new and profoundly different. It is the low lifted high;

‘the sky shall groan and darken,
and every stone shall cry…
And every stone shall cry,
and straw like gold shall shine;
a barn shall harbour heaven,
a stall become a shrine.’

For the next two weeks, let’s hope for a Christmas miracle. And let’s keep faith with the Christmas miracle. Let us find that transformation, that rejoicing, Which begins with repentance and ends with praise. In my end is my beginning. Amen.

Memorial Carol Service

Sermon by the Revd Dr Brutus Green
Readings: Luke 2:1-7; Revelation 21:1-7

Welcome to St Margaret’s. As we’re used to hearing Christmas is ‘the most wonderful time of the year.’ But for many it’s a very difficult time. It’s a time that gathers constellations of our memories: We’re closest to our own childhoods here – And those of our children. As we come to the end of the year we naturally reflect on the passage of time; Another year past and the changes it has brought; Christmas present is wrapped with the memories of Christmas past – And the faces that we love and see no more. As we begin our service we call to mind the happy memories of those who now worship on a further shore, in a greater light.

***

The two readings we have had tonight, tell the stories of what’s known as the first and the second Coming; The first is ever familiar. You’ve probably heard it since you were an infant. Played the different parts in the Nativity Play. Perhaps seen your children take theirs. The story is very relatable. It’s an ordinary young family. The government is once again making them register. Though not vaccinating them at this point. They’re travelling at Christmas and there are the predictable difficulties. Donkey charges in the ULEZ and overbooked inns. What is unusual is the child. As the second reading describes it, second time around: ‘See, the home of God is among mortals. He will dwell with them; they will be his peoples, and God himself will be with them; Now it’s easy to write this off as a folk tale. To enjoy the story performed by children in a sanitised mock-stable; All charming, light the candles, sing the carols; Enjoy the memories of Christmas past; With a mulled wine beside a Christmas tree.

Our faith, or lack of it, is all different. Trying to figure out who is God, where is God. God may seem like a twentieth century despot, A terrifying power far away with a somewhat arbitrary use of his power over life and death. Who wants to believe in that? Others imagine a curious scientist who has wound up this complex experiment and sits observing with his clipboard the struggles of the tiny creatures. I don’t believe in this God either.

The Christmas story tells us that this creator is not remote at all; But that God came and dwelt among us, ‘with the poor, the mean, the lowly’. That he shared our difficulties, our frailty; In order to share with us his divinity. And he feeleth for our sadness/ And he shareth in our gladness.

And the reason for this is to reveal God as love. Love requires vulnerability And so yes, he abhors not the Virgin’s womb, He comes as infant, so tender and mild, Little weak and helpless; tears and smiles like us he knew. Any parent knows that vulnerability – Of both parent and child. And with it the strange, powerful strength of connection. And that child in life and death was to teach and act out of love, As our childhood pattern, With the greater love that no man has than this – to lay down his life for his friends.

Christmas is the beginning of the story that puts love at the centre of the universe. Now you may call it a fairy tale and claim instead that there is no meaning to life, That the universe exploded out and will finish with every atom spread out across time and space in ever cooling nothingness. That’s one way of looking at the world. That death has the victory; in ashes to ashes and dust to dust.

Or you may choose to believe this mystery of the incarnation. that ‘ubi caritas et amor deus ibi est’ that where there is love and charity, God is there. That in the vulnerability of this child, maybe God was there. The hidden meaning of the world. And that as God shared this life, its hazards, its suffering, As he, a young man, was killed by other men; he made a bridge that shows us the way to the Father. ‘And he leads his children on to the place where he is gone.’

The reality of death, we know. It may have caught us by surprise once, but the reality and finality of death once known changes us.

Christmas is about the reality of love. The enduring presence of our loved ones that doesn’t leave us. The hesitant knowledge that what loves and what is loved is never lost but endures eternally. Christmas is the bridge between these worlds. The promise that we have a friend who came to us with love, who is now with those whom we love and see no more. And that we too will thither, bend our joyful footsteps,

And that this child was born as our hope, not of something transient, like these Christmas tree that’ll be wilting by Boxing day – But born to show us the way of redeeming love; Born that man no more may die, Born to raise the sons of earth, Born to give them second birth. Amen.

St Nicholas

Sermon by the Revd Dr Brutus Green
Readings: Isaiah 61:1-3; Psalm 85:7-end'; 1Timothy 6:6-11; Mark 10:13-16

The stories concerning St Nicholas are difficult to tell to children. Like many of the stories of saints, and most folklore, they’re full of gory details. Most famously, as a rich young man, he stepped in to save three girls who couldn’t afford dowries. The detail we sometimes skip past in Sunday School is that the stated alternative those girls faced was a life of prostitution. Probably shared with all the scumbags and maggots you usually find in the drunktank at Christmas.

Another favourite medieval tale is his resurrection of three boys who had been chopped up with an axe by a wicked shopkeeper and pickled in brine. Such stories don’t lend themselves naturally to a show and tell suitable for 6-year-olds, (Though they are certainly no worse than many classic fairy tales by Grimm and Hans Christian Anderson.) And we haven’t even got to that very modern tale of adultery and deception involved when mummy is finally caught kissing Santa Claus. What a laugh it would have been if Daddy had only seen? Hardly. But because of these stories, which over time pass into folklore and charming customs, St Nicholas became the patron Saint of children, and identified with that chief Christian virtue of generosity. Signified to us by ‘a little round belly/ That shook when he laughed, like a bowl full of jelly.’

We live in an age that finds it hard to accept the possibility of sainthood. Movements in the last couple of years like metoo, BLM, together with an insistence on judging history by the morals of our own age, with an added pinch of cancel-culture, make us quicker to pull down heroes than to put them up. We delight in celebrities’ fall from grace, and even the great heroes of our recent past, Mother Teresa, Martin Luther King, Winston Churchill, Gandhi, Tiger Woods – are quickly qualified with their various faults — If it happened today, that whole team of reindeer would be sacked for bullying Rudolf, faster than Yorkshire Cricket Club coaching staff. Public recognition given to anyone today usually unleashes an outcry from some group of students; the toppling of statues, which is a very literal form of no platforming. The lives of saints, though, have been a traditional teaching tool, and despite our increased levels of literacy, I think this is still useful. Many of the stories of saints are quite obviously folklore and apocryphal, adding colour to some of the faded characters of history.  We’re not the first to notice this and it’s important to remember that these stories were always also told for entertainment and with a pinch of salt. Much like Hello Magazine.

But the stories draw out Christian virtues and priorities, and act as illustrations of what we should take with utter seriousness. Today’s Gospel is nothing short of a command to include children in the work and ministry of the Church. Something it all too frequently forgets, And for which St Nicholas, patron saint of children, should prove to us both a reminder and a helpful tool. Though he is also a patron saint of Russia, which is less useful to us.

Our playgroup has had over 50 toddlers and babies in recent weeks.  We’ve started singing Silent Night and Away in a Manger, so I think it counts as what the Church of England calls a “fresh expression of church”. Our Sunday School, on the other hand, has been rocked by illness and pandemic.  We’ve gone through three boy bishops in the last week! In all, the greatest damage done to churches in the last two years has been inflicted on Sunday Schools.  Mrs Clause was at our Christmas Fayre yesterday, checking on the naughty and nice list, but even with her august presence numbers in the grotto were down on 2 years ago.

But even more than reminding us of the spiritual life of our children, St Nicholas has become an embodiment of generosity that the whole world understands. Through every Christmas movie, from A Christmas Carol to Miracle on 34th Street,there’s an acknowledgement of the truth that there is more happiness to be found in generosity than in the accumulation of wealth. Although we might today lament his hefty carbon footprint.

So saints are symbols of the priorities of the Christian life and virtues. Even while the stories about St Margaret of Antioch are rather fantastic. It’s rather difficult, for example, to prove that she was swallowed or later spat out by a dragon. She can still remind us of the fortitude and courage of the early church, and that Christians today still suffer and die for their faith. And that girls are still forced to marry against their will.

Happily, St Nicholas is a rather more jolly figure that we can all get behind. That little round belly, right. But while many fear the pagan elements of our society, or lament the acquisitiveness and materialism;  It’s disenchantment in our culture that presents the greatest threat to faith.  Children are naturally alive to wonder and have a certain resistance to the cynicism and materialism that later acts as an irresistible gravity to the imagination. One of the wonderful things about being a parent is seeing the return of that wonder through the eyes of your children — This will be Oberon’s first true Christmas, and judging by his interaction with Mrs Santa, will be full of wide-eyed delight, and alive to the magic of the most wonderful time of the year. Like any normal child he asked her for a “toy church” for Christmas!  And snow.

So while St Nicholas will continue to remind us that it is to children that the kingdom of God belongs, and that the love of money is the root of all evil – I don’t want a lot for Christmas – But even more importantly he reminds us of that need for wonder. To look at this world and see adventure, and mystery, that divine spark of joy and peace, like some magic left over in an old felt hat; and with it all the meaning that bubbles over when we’re able to see and take each day as a gift.

St Nicholas should recall us to look on the world as children do, and believe that there is purpose and justice, to not be naughty but nice,  And with the children, in this holy season of Advent, to again wait with expectation for the Holy night that is to come. Amen.

Advent Sunday: Write your own Eulogy

Sermon by the Revd Dr Brutus Green
Readings: Jeremiah 33:14-16; Psalm 25:1-9;' 1Thessalonians 3:9-end; Luke 21:25-36

The merging of Advent and Christmas is lamented by the pious and the proud - especially grim, strident priests of a leftwing variety, who grimace at commercialisation – Black Friday is BLACK indeed – and decry the superficiality of a lost generation.  These tinsel-trashers insist on no Christmas trees before the 24th and nothing but plainsong chants for Advent hymns.

After the covid-carnage of last Advent, I wonder whether the children will remember the Patriarchs; Next week’s prophets might be easier – If there’s any children not isolating. Thankfully technology has now given us tablets and I can bring one in to illustrate Moses bringing down the Ten Commandments.  Obviously his were made of stone – probably by IBM – but a lot has changed since then. John the Baptist and Mary are easier. I think locusts and honey sticks in children’s minds, and everyone wants to be Mary.

Each Sunday is greeted in Advent, then, by the rather muted lighting of a candle for each of these sets of people, who have received the promises of God – leading up to the birth of Jesus, but the mince pies, traditionally, are put on hold.

My mum's way of preparing for Christmas, on the other hand, is to watch a different Christmas movie every day. The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree; I’ve already watched Home Alone 1, 2 and 3, the Family Stone, and of course the Holiday. But my mother is just as likely to slip on to Hallmark films, which always seem to revolve around an elf turning naughty with hilarious consequences before the family dog somehow saves the day.

So Advent used to be the austerity month of fasting and prayer before the joyful twelve days of Christmas. Today we have just six days of Christmas.  By New Year morning people have had enough and started a godless dry January; January, now, the month of austerity and huddling against the winter and sickness.

But Advent austerity and Christmas celebration cross over in the sense of waiting and expectancy. For a certain sensibility the appropriate thing is sackcloth and ashes, for others Christmas parties and shopping.  Fasting or frolicking - I’m not taking sides, but I’ve already had my first mulled wine – Not, I assure you, with dissipation and drunkenness.

There’s a similar splitting when you examine how people see the progress of history. For some – such as the writer Stephen Pinker – the world is slowly becoming a better, less violent place. Science, technology, civilisation are bringing about a more stable, enlightened world.  For others, the only real advances have been made in the field of dentistry.  The nuclear threat, terrorism, tsunamis and the rising temperature are all indicative that the end of the world is nigh.

Intriguingly, I’ve known more people that were not religious than religious who thought the end of the world was coming. This sort of thinking is not especially the province of religions now – apocalyptic and dystopian novels and films abound; The Hunger Games, the Walking Dead, the Handmaid’s Tale’ And it’s the Greta Thunbergs who have the real monopoly on predicting the End. The Bible of course has been quietly saying this for millennia: ‘There will be signs in the sun, the moon, and the stars, and on the earth distress among nations confused by the roaring of the sea and the waves.’ Perhaps we will finally be proved right. But for the most part the Christian tradition has seen speculation about the future as a distraction.  The point of Advent is to be in the present; to look at the world as it stands, ourselves and responsibilities, and to be ready – even now – to be able to give account for our lives before God.

In the last 18 months I’ve taken a great number of funerals. It’s a great privilege to hear people describing the lives of their loved ones – with pride, with honesty, with regret, with large gaps. It’s a complicated business; and often people are unsure how and what to include. For some it’s a bullet-point CV, for others a character sketch. I’ve met with a couple of people this year, in good health, to plan their funerals. People don’t often do it – perhaps it seems to some macabre. I’ve not heard yet of anyone writing their own eulogy. In a way, it might be quite helpful. What your brother, your husband, your daughter thinks about your life is one thing. But what do you value, that you’d want people to know?

And, crucially, of those things that you’d want mentioned, are any of them happening in your life today? Or are you too busy keeping the wheel spinning, maintaining the status quo, balancing income vs expenditure; Preventing infection; Are you pushing everything important back for when you’re retired? Are you – right now – living out your values?

Whether it’s actual war, a cold war, nuclear terror, environmental armagaddeon, the threat of endtimes is always present:  There is ‘distress among nations’ with ‘People fainting from fear and foreboding of what is coming upon the world’.  Being at peace with ourselves is the first step to sharing that peace with the world. What Scripture does not tell us, though, is to turn in upon ourselves; to defensively barricade ourselves against the world; to mistrust our neighbour. St Paul’s prayer in our second reading is ‘may the Lord make you increase and abound in love for one another and for all’. We are more inclined to close borders today, against variants, migrants and refugees than ever before.  As Christians we can’t live our lives like that.

These days of Advent are days of preparation for Christmas. Preparation for the miracle of God being with us. As the Collect for Advent says, then, we are praying for protection against the present darkness, both from within and without: ‘Almighty God, give us grace to cast away the works of darkness and to put on the armour of light’ But also we are look forward with hope to God being with us, working in the hearts of men and women, We are asked to keep our faith in God and people.

There is always light and darkness, but just as Christmas takes us back to our childhood and simpler times  so it should remind us, as I think children naturally do, to look for the best in people and to hope and work for a brighter future. So whether we’re throwing ourselves at full Christmas already, or staving off Mariah Carey a couple more weeks; whether the world is teetering on the edge of the abyss or slowly inching towards better times,  Advent is a time to remember the promises of God – that God is with us to the end –  and to look at ourselves in the mirror and ask ourselves whether right now we’re heading in the right direction and living the life we’d choose? Are we on guard with our hearts not weighed down? Are we ready to receive the Lord when he comes? Amen.

Christ the King of the Universe

Sermon by the Revd Dr Brutus Green
Readings: Daniel 7:9-10, 13-14; Psalm 93; Revelation 1:4b-8; John 18:33-37

The image of Christ the King seems like an obvious one.  You see it in art, churches, readings,  Today’s hymns are resplendent with royalty: ‘Christ is the King, Crown him with many crowns, crown him Lord of all’ God as king, Christ as king, is one of those primal Sunday School images. The full name of today’s festival is the Feast of Our Lord Jesus Christ, King of the Universe. Which is quite big. It’s a relative newbie, as Christian festivals, begun in 1925 by pope Pius XI, infamous for signing the controversial Reichskonkordat with Nazi Germany.  On the whole, it was the defensive gesture of a Church that was seeing its earthly kingdom and influence diminishing; and a response to anti-clericalism, which is obviously up there with the most terrible crimes against humanity. But at its worst Christ the King might be thought to encourage a sort of Christian triumphalism. The British Army Chaplaincy department’s motto is from a vision the emperor Constantine had of the cross, with the words spoken: "In this Sign Conquer”.  That should sound a little uncomfortable.

The point the Gospels try to make, on the other hand, especially St John, is that Christ’s kingship is ironic. We’ve talked about irony before. Irony doesn’t mean disappointing or funny.  Irony makes us to rethink what is being ironised, usually by surprising us by describing things a little differently.

So rain on your wedding day isn’t ironic. Nor is testing positive for Covid at your godson’s baptism. Turning up to your wedding wearing a ball and chain attached to your ankle would be ironic. But ill-advised.

The irony of Christ’s kingship is played out through his trial and execution. A miracle worker, who has fed thousands, healed, preached peace with divine authority, and raised the dead,  Falls under the judgement of a puppet Jewish king and a weak ruler who doesn’t even agree with the verdict he announces.

Strangely, the king of the Universe is condemned by corrupt officials. The kingship we know is always touched by sleaze, injustice and self-protection. Divine kingship is humility, love and suffering.

So when Jesus is crucified, the sign above him — which normally describes the crime — says “Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews”. Supposedly ironic, the real irony is that it’s true, but not in the way its authors understand it. But as a tortured, innocent man it shows the reality and brutality of human kingship. And as self-sacrifice it reveals the humility of divine kingship. A kingship that doesn’t control; But serves.

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 the criticism of how we see divine power. We want the God who acts. If God loves then nothing bad will happen. 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 that upside down. There’s no magic trick. Anyone who believes that if they go to Church and lead a good life, nothing bad will happen to them needs to take a good look at the crucifixion. As Christians we’re called to imitate Christ. And if God values truth, courage and love over health and happiness then who knows what he’ll ask of you.

***

So why irony in the Gospels? Why is the crucifixion portrayed as a parody of human kingship? The answer is contained in this exchange between Pilate and Christ. Christ’s pronounces:  ‘You say that I am a king. For this I was born, and for this I came into the world, to testify to the truth. Everyone who belongs to the truth listens to my voice.’

Pilate responds to this in the next verse: ‘What is truth?’ I think you have to imagine for a moment what it would feel like to be standing before a judge condemned to death and to hear that casual attitude to the truth: ‘What is truth?’ Pilate’s words betray his powerlessness. He is the authority. He has power here. He even wants to do the right thing; But Pilate is controlled by the crowd; unable to follow his instincts or, even, most criminally, the suggestions of his wife! He is weakness dressed up as power.

Again, the irony is that Jesus, bound and condemned, has the power to be himself, express his freedom in taking the path he has chosen. He is power dressed down in weakness. But the point is the truth to which Christ testifies. Pilate’s rhetorical “what is truth?” is the politician’s question. It’s the attitude that puts winning an election before National Health, that puts a national economy before the survival of the planet. Anyone who is more concerned with what is easiest, what will leave me most liked and well thought of, what will most people agree with.

Christ stands for an openness with the world. He embodies honesty and integrity, even under violence. He speaks the truth to power, despite the cost.And this is part of the Christian vocation. So St Paul: ‘We must no longer be children, tossed to and fro and blown about by every wind of doctrine, by people’s trickery, by their craftiness in deceitful scheming. But speaking the truth in love, we must grow up in every way into him who is the head, into Christ’ (Eph 4:14-15).

I find it amazing sometimes. You can hear words spoken thousands of years ago and realise that there is more substance in them than anything on Radio 4 or LBC today: ‘speak the truth in love’. If only more people did that.

So when we hear kingship, as Christians we must think service. When we hear power, we must think love. When we hear people speaking in ways that look after themselves and people like them; We speak the truth in love. Find the strength to be honest.

Christ’s kingship isn’t about the hierarchies of the church. It isn’t about wrestling with power in government, Though it does recognise the weakness of human government; that human kingship is always tainted by preserving its own interests. Christ’s kingship, is a raising up of the lowly, the criminal, the weak, the condemned.  Christ’s kingship asks – who does not currently have a voice? Who is being pushed out of the world. It is honest, it is humble, it serves. It’s a truth worthy of the king of the universe.

And the challenge is for us: In what we aspire to, in what we look up to, in what we seek to imitate, in what we show our children: Is it the Pilates and Herods of this world? Are we seeking small-town power and influence and recognition? Our own little kingdom? Or are we here as one who serves?

In baptism we are making some explicit promises. We are renouncing the kingship of this world. In all its forms. And we are turning to Christ. For these boys we are promising to lead them in the kingship of Christ.

This feast of Christ the King serves to distinguish between the values of the world and the values of the kingdom of heaven. In Gospel terms the choice is stark; uncomfortable. Do we follow Pilate?  Or do we follow Christ. Amen.

Remembrance Sunday 2021

Sermon by the Revd Dr Brutus Green
Readings: Daniel 12:1-3; Psalm 16; Heb 10:11-14, 19-25; Mark 13:1-8

“The lamps are going out all over Europe; we shall not see them lit again in our lifetime.”  British foreign secretary Edward Grey’s most famous words,  as the lights on Whitehall were extinguished on 3rd August 1914,  after Britain declared war on Germany. Just a year before George V, Nicholas II of Russia and Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany met in Berlin at the wedding of the Kaiser’s daughter.  It was the last time the three cousins met. 

The nineteenth century had seen Europe coming together. In 1800 Europe contained 500 political powers; by 1900 it was just twenty. Britain owned a quarter of the world’s land, Russia covered one sixth of it.   Great empires, the Romanov dynasty’s Russia, the Hapsburgs’ Austria-Hungary, Kaiser’s Germany, and the Ottoman empire were in ruins by 1918.  In 1914 there were three republics in Europe.  By 1918 there were thirteen. It’s hard to comprehend the devastation felt by the end of the war. 65 million combattants. Nine million were killed, eight million held prisoner, twenty-one million people wounded.

***

Seismic historic change; but what are we remembering for? I once asked a primary school assembly,  “How many of you remember the First World War?” You’d be surprised how many chubby little hands rose in the air.  Children will put up their hands for anything.  But actually here they’re right.  They do remember the War; because every year, as a nation, on Remembrance Sunday we all remember it.  And very visibly by wearing poppies.

We are one of the few countries that has a non complicated relationship with it.
Most of Europe got overrun; then there are those who were defeated, and many have difficult moral questions to ask themselves; Russia pulled out halfway through, and of course Italy is forever changing sides. 

We don’t remember it, though, because we were on the winning side;  We remember it because of the worldwide grief that followed. We remember because, as they say, ‘Those who forget the past are doomed to repeat it’. Today’s readings, which touch that frequent biblical subject of the apocalypse capture something of what 1918 Europe would have felt when examining its broken and bankrupt reflection in the mirror.  ‘what large stones and what large buildings!…Not one stone will be left here upon another; all will be thrown down.’ ‘There shall be a time of anguish, such as has never occurred since nations first came into existence.’ ‘nation will rise against nation and kingdom against kingdom.’ And all the images of brokenness that follow must have spoken to countries full of young widows, Vienna where there were no cats left because of a starving population, levelled cities;  and where a grieving, miserable and worn out generation was then overrun by thirty million deaths in 1919 from Spanish flu. Something we can now relate to.

The apocalyptic is also notable for coming by surprise. But, all the same, it’s somewhat surprising that in August 1914 Dean Inge of St Paul’s wrote in his diary of how people had three things on their minds:  ‘their summer holiday, the danger of civil war in Ireland and the abominable outrages of the suffragettes.’ We have become used to the idea that war was inevitable —  but it didn’t seem so at the time. We also remember, then, because peace in Europe cannot be taken for granted. Aside from the political changes, it can hardly be surprising that this confrontation with poverty, mortality and human evil and suffering, forced social change. Our own brushes with mortality usually have the most profound influence on our direction. The public experience of death upturned the staid morals of Edwardian England.

But it’s often assumed that soldiers returned from the dreadful carnage atheists to a disillusioned nation.  In fact, the opposite is true.  Studies of the war and religion show that if anything war returned soldiers with greater piety.  Church attendance steadily increased after the war and through the 1920s. It’s striking how many, Christian or not, spoke of the presence of the ‘White Comrade’ on the battlefield, and the amount of poetry given to finding a common language for the soldiers’ experience and Christ’s passion;  One soldier wrote that in the trenches Christianity had ‘stooped from the sky… It had become incarnate’.  You still hear repeated today the First World War aphorism:  ‘there are no atheists in the trenches’.

For the most part, though, the lasting impact of the war was the relaxing of ‘respectability’.  Binge-drinking soldiers became a problem so drinking hours were shortened and tax on beer increased.  By 1918 illegitimacy rates had also increased by 30%, as Padre Tom Pym remarked at the time: ‘gonorrhoea is a minor discomfort compared to wounds or death cheerfully faced in battle, and is much more pleasurably obtained’.  And the war changed people. One soldier alarmingly remarked: “We’re trained up as murderers — I don’t dislike it, mind you —and after the war we shan’t get out of the habit of it.’

Women also were called in to work to replace all the men from factories and farms who had gone out to fight. Afterwards, to everyone’s surprise, they continued to want to work, and even to vote. The war also, of course, brought socialism to Russia. It could easily have had more of an impact in Britain but, as Oscar Wilde said, ‘the trouble with socialism is that it takes up too many evenings’.

But war increased solidarity; it brought communities together; And on our doorstep here we have a great example of homes being built for heroes; We remember today that war sometimes, personally and nationally, can bring out the good.

It’s a dangerous thing to live in a time when wars are only fought far away, and death is kept in hospices and hospitals largely out of sight. This has not recently been our reality — we have become used to daily death tolls, and anyone who went up to Putney Vale last year will not forget the sight of temporary morgues. Remembrance Sunday this year reminds us again of the fragility of life.

But what is most incredible about the British Army of 1914-1918 is that for the first two years they were all volunteers.  Two and a half million, half the total who fought, the second largest volunteer army in history. They were not professional soldiers; But quickly trained and poorly equipped. They fought because they believed in the cause and because they felt it was their duty. In 1916 it was reported that more Church of Scotland ministers were serving as combatants than as chaplains. The Bishop of London claimed that ‘khaki is the garment of the faithful’. It would not happen today, even with a much larger population —  Can you imagine our country agreeing to go to war for the sake of Brussels?

But this day is one way in which we can remember and be inspired by the sense of duty, along with the courage of that generation. We can empathise with all those ordinary people who suffered and witnessed horror. It should remind us to work and pray for a more stable Europe. It’s a time to remember the dire cost of political greed and foolishness; And of the sacrifice of the coming generation by those who should know better.

At the least it should serve to keep those chubby little hands raised in our primary schools in knowledge of what has been done for them and to keep them from the same. Amen.

What is the 'Good News'?

Sermon by the Revd Dr Brutus Green
Readings: Jonah 3:1-5, 10; Psalm 62:5-12; Heb 9:24-end; Mark 1:14-20

What is the good news? It’s an important question. Christianity rests on four accounts of Jesus, entitled Gospels. Which is just Old English for ‘good news’. Practically the first words of Mark, the earliest Gospel written,  Are the good news of Jesus Christ – Here, still in chapter one, enter Jesus. His first words: The time is come; The kingdom of God is near; Repent and believe in the good news.

What is the good news?

When Oscar Wilde was taking his entrance exam for what was, at the time, one of Britain’s top universities, he was asked to read and translate from one of the Gospels. After a while the examiner said ‘enough’ – to which he allegedly replied, ‘But wait! I want to see how it ends!’ Intriguingly, there are three different versions of this anecdote. In one, it’s alleged this episode took place at lights-out in Reading gaol, where Wilde did hard labour. The meaning and inflection are very different from impertinent youth in a privileged college to middle-age in the dystopia of a Victorian prison. either pretended ignorance /or the soul seeking refuge.

But in either case, the gospel is not very obviously good news for its protagonist, except perhaps at the very end. The reader might feel a certain sense of false advertisement from the title.

So we might also ask – who is it good news for?

Today’s Gospel moves immediately from this proclamation of ‘good news’ to the call of the disciples. – aha! – you say – Good news for the followers of Jesus! Only at the end of this Gospel – every disciple has betrayed and failed Jesus.  It’s not just Judas, unfairly singled out; It’s all of them. Denied, fled, sold out. In what is probably the original ending of the Gospel, we hear no more about the disciples after that. In the “shorter ending”, only that they are sent out with ‘the sacred and imperishable proclamation of eternal salvation.’ In the “longer ending”, the disciples don’t believe Mary, they then don’t believe two unnamed disciples who claim to have seen the resurrected Jesus; Finally, Jesus appears and upbraids them for their lack of faith before sending them out. To cut to their ends: Peter – crucified. Andrew – crucified. James – killed by the sword. John, died in old age in Turkey. Well done John. But not on the whole ‘good news’.

You’re probably thinking by now – “this must be about heaven right?” Life wasn’t great 2000 years ago and these guys all died violent bloody deaths – Christianity’s great selling point is the eternal life thing. The good news is “do your best now, and next time things are going to be way better”.

But this isn’t what Jesus preached. ‘The time is fulfilled and the kingdom of God has come near’ The Good News is not a future, next time thing; The Good News is about now.

 So let’s think about some good news stories.

It’s hard to think of anyone who would not celebrate the abolition of slavery. And yet Wilberforce formed the abolitionists in 1787, bringing forward the 1792 Slave Trade Bill, only to be eviscerated by government;  it was not until 1833 that the effective Slavery Abolition Act was passed, extended to the British empire in 1838.  So something as morally indefensible as slavery took 50 years of exhausting campaigning to convince the British government. Because, of course, the abolition of slavery was not perceived as good news by everyone. Or for everyone. 

It is lucky we live in a time when politicians are less swayed by personal interests.

And this case is hardly even unusual. Emiline Pankhurst declared: ‘I am here as a person who, according to the law courts of my country, it has been decided, is of no value to the community at all; and I am adjudged because of my life to be a dangerous person, under sentence of penal servitude in a convict prison.’ We may note that it was ordinary people (and politicians), but not gangsters, refusing Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Nelson Mandela. Supporting Hitler, Franco, Mussolini, Stalin. In the 1980s AIDS crisis – how many ordinary people vilified and disowned young gay men in this country? In a climate crisis, where some countries do not turn up, and leaders jump on and off private flights; 

What is the good news? and whom is it good news for?

I bring this up, not because the Gospel is politically good news – Though it is: Jesus proclaims in Luke chapter 4 ‘good news to the poor… release to the captives… recovery of sight to the blind… let[ting] the oppressed go free,’ (not written in 1833 but nearly 2000 years ago) But these events in our recent past show that even what would today be unthinkable to defend, has not been recognised as good news in its day. And realistically, why would we be any better? we too are doubtless skirting unknowingly around the things our great grandchildren – and history – will despise us for.

So if I unrolled a scroll today and said to you all: The time is come; The kingdom of God is near; Repent and believe in the good news. How would you understand ‘good news’? Well let’s take Jesus proclamation as a whole. ‘The time is come’. Clearly what’s being said here is that THIS MOMENT matters. These very minutes. If you feel moved to step outside now to start a liberation movement or at least start peeling potatoes for lunch I’ll understand. 

In some respects 2021AD makes this year sound more impressive than it is. According to physicists we are in cosmic terms something closer to star date 13,835,467,653;  which makes this year seem less important.

But if we are to believe in good news, this year matters. The year 33 mattered. 1833 also mattered. 1964 mattered for the US Civil Rights Act 1928 mattered for women in this country. These are markers but the point is that for justice, mercy, peace, every moment is an opportunity and somewhere in the world the kingdom of God, good news, is happening. For many each year is life and death; a meeting point of time and eternity. At this point, as at every point, you and every other creature God has made, matters; their suffering and their justice matters; And is known by God.

What then does Jesus mean when he says, ‘the kingdom of God has come near’? Well again, while the year can seem arbitrary,  Or can seem like a date written in bold in the history books; We may or may not perceive the nearness of the kingdom of God.

Jesus has announced the reign of God as a present reality; But it’s been denied by the world in every moment since. To follow Christ is to realise and pursue the grace present in this moment; to seek to make it known; To proclaim that peace, justice, freedom, forgiveness, reconciliation, joy – Can be taken hold of today. That there is grace enough today for today. Whatever it may seem like.

Which is not to deny our pain; But in that wonderful phrase of St Paul’s, to acknowledge that ‘my grace is sufficient for you’. Because you matter to God, the complete riches of his grace are open to each one of us. Despite the individual difficulty each of us faces – known only to ourselves and God – God loves us fully, unreservedly, unconditionally.

This is the good news we’re called to celebrate. Neither a final future overturning that will make up for our pain; Nor the obviously false claim that life is without problems. But the claim that the grace of God is sufficient for us. That whatever our difficulty, God is with us and will not abandon us. And that in ways we don’t know, the good news is already happening and will one day be made clear to us; Whether we’re enjoying our privileges, or serving hard labour.

And who is this good news for? Well because it’s good news, it’s for everyone, without discrimination. We don’t earn this good news – it’s simply a gift for us to receive. And we may fight it, refuse it, not acknowledge it; We may not perceive it in this moment, in this life time, as good news. In which case repent and believe!

But to the one watching with faith:  it remains the good news. a vision of hope in every age. Amen.

All Souls': Grief like fear

Sermon by the Revd Dr Brutus Green
Readings: Lamentations 3:17-26, 31-33; 1Peter 1:3-9; John 6:37-40

C.S. Lewis likened grief to fear. Not that we’re afraid – But that grief hangs over us, like suspense; It’s a cloud; a pre-occupation; It drains the world of colour; It’s the dementor standing behind you.

The thing he says that’s most striking in his famous little book on grief, though, is that: ‘You never know how much you really believe anything until its truth or falsehood becomes a matter of life and death to you’ (20-21).

Grief, then, both hides and reveals the truth. On the one hand, from the start, we’ve lost any sense of objectivity. Death unlocks all manner of hidden forces within us,  and the loss of love is like the foundations of a tower being stolen in the night. The bricks come loose. The turret wobbles.

But like the sea washing over a beach, what remains, through and after grief, has greater substance than the pretty ideas and lifestyle choices we accumulate in the good times. It is truth proven through fire, (to thoroughly mix metaphors).

So he dismisses the claim that faith is consolation.Faith doesn’t make us miss someone less; Feel less of an injustice; Feel less loss; Faith may well become the focus of our anger, our bargaining, our tears; But it won’t make the loss less. Rather, grief sifts our theology, our ethics, all our ideas: If our idea of God cannot cope with death, it’s not real. It is washed away, burnt off with other impurities.

Equally, our own suffering, highlights our lack of compassion for others: ‘If I had really cared, as I thought I did, about the sorrows of the world, I should not have been so overwhelmed when my own sorrows came’ (33). We’re never as empathetic as we’d like to believe.

But the test involved in grief is not about God, it’s not exactly about our faith; It’s about our idea of God and how robust that is. ‘God has not been trying an experiment on my faith or love in order to find out their quality.  He knew it already.  It was I who didn’t’ (45).

Once, in a previous church, a child got confused, pointing at me and saying “it’s God!” This God confused with priests and parents, is formed in Sunday School. The foundations of faith laid in simple stories and songs and prayers –  a sense of a father, an authority. This god is usually destroyed by adolescent angst and disappointment. But even as adults there are idols, false gods, that must be smashed along the way. Grief is the heaviest, but most effective tool in the theology shed.

All Souls’ is one of the most important moments in the Christian calendar. Not because it makes us think about heaven. Christianity is vague on heaven. There is little to help us. Some pictures. An assurance that there is more and it will be different.

But no answer to the frequently asked question: “Where is John?” As Lewis puts it with acid humour: ‘kind people have said to me ‘she is with God.’ In one sense that is most certain. She is, like God, incomprehensible and unimaginable (22).

But as he also reminds us, if our beloved is no more, then they never were. If what seemed a person was just a collection of atoms, then loosely held together, now apart; then they were actually just the appearance of a person; and our love hormones and enzymes. And I do not believe that. I believe in a thing called love.

The faith we bring here tonight, in the vulnerability of loss that is undiminished, in the memory of our most difficult days, in suffering, in thanksgiving, in reverence, in memory, is our actual faith. Buttressed, as it is, by fear and anger and pain and sorrow.

Grief is the voice of lamentation: My soul is bereft of peace; I have forgotten what happiness is; Gone is my glory, and all that I had hoped for from the Lord.’  My soul continually thinks of it and is bowed down within me.

AND YET.
AND YET.

This I call to mind, and therefore I have hope: The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases, his mercies never come to an end; they are new every morning;  great is your faithfulness.

This is not consolation. It doesn’t bring my beloved back. If anything, it seems to say: take your eyes off your beloved and return them to God, the author and creator of all.

And yet: The line CS Lewis finishes his little book with is in Italian:

Poi si tornò all’ eterna fontana.
Then she turned to the eternal source.

It’s a line from Dante’s Paradiso –  Where Dante’s dearly departed Beatrice, who has been his guide through heaven,  Finally turns away from him to God, as he finishes his ascent to divinity. This act for Dante’s lost love and CS Lewis’ lost wife, reminds us that our love after death is more than a love between two. Our love points us now to God.

St John’s epistle has told us that God is love and those who live in love live in God and God lives in them. Unfortunately, we’re usually so fixed on our idea of God as a big white guy (cishet) that we miss the central point of faith that God is revealed as love itself.  When we’re most consciously and presently in the act of love, in all its vulnerability and suffering, we’re closest to God. So grief, which is intransitive love; Love in separation – Is the anguish of Good Friday that God promises to heal.

There’s even a moment in this service, which anticipates this. It’s not Faure’s ‘in Paradisum’, which with its church-bell-like tinkling conveys a sense of distance of the souls in paradise. But the grand opening of Faure’s Sanctus, is, I think, his attempt to bring the saints and angels; the living and departed, together before the throne of God – in communion. Communion is what we long for. With the living, with the dead, with God. Musically and liturgically, it’s the effort of this service to bring us together in the eucharist, the thanksgiving, the remembrance of his broken body, which is also ours.

Grief is at the heart of our faith. Grief is love in separation. Grief is our separation from God and one another. The narrative of Christianity is one which passes from grief to joy From Good Friday to Easter Sunday. If we can keep that love alive with hope.

We are not there yet. We are still lighting candles in hope and remembrance. We are sharing bread and wine in faith and remembrance. And we are gathered together on this side and on a further shore, in love and remembrance, fulfilling the last wish of one who embodied the love and grief of God: Do this in remembrance of me.

All Saints: The Gospel turned on its head

Sermon by the Revd Dr Brutus Green
Readings: Wisdom 3:1-9; Psalm 24:1-6; Rev 21:1-6a; John 11:32-44

Where have ye laid him?  They said unto him, Lord, come and see. Jesus wept.

I would dare to say that in this Gospel are most of the themes of John’s Gospel. But it is a world made strange. It is the Gospel turned on its head.

In John’s Gospel there is a preoccupation with where Jesus is from. John 1 – spoiler alert –  The Word was with God. The correct answer to where is Jesus from. But then Philip announces the Messiah as Jesus of Nazareth; to which Nathaniel replies ‘Can anything good come out of Nazareth?’ Philip: ‘Come and see’.

After the feeding of the 5000 many reject Jesus for saying “I am the bread of heaven” because they say they know his father and mother. They know where he is from. Nazareth. And later they will say: ‘Search and you will see that no prophet is to arise from Galilee.’

Finally, at the end of the trial sequence, Pilate asks Jesus ‘where are you from?’ Jesus gives no answer.

This is mirrored when Jesus speaks of returning to the Father. The crowds and then the disciples, famously Thomas: ‘Lord, we do not know where you are going.  How can we know the way?’

The Gospel consistently separates the worldly from the spiritual, like goats from sheep.

Where is Jesus coming from and going to? From Galilee to the Cross? Or from the Father to the Father.

Then a second motif:  Come and see. At the Call of the Disciples in chapter one it occurs twice: the invitation to follow Jesus. Then in chapter 4, the Samaritan woman, now a disciple, calls others to Come and See. Curious? Come and see.

A third motif. The Gospels have different Christologies, different inflections on who Jesus is. The fourth Gospel is written for one reason, which its author helpfully tells us: That ‘ye might believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God; and that believing ye might have life through his name.’ But the Gospel says more: We have all those ‘I am’ statements I’ve spoken about before, hidden declarations of the divine name; And that prologue: ‘the Word was with God, and the Word was God’ Finally, Thomas faced with the resurrected Christ declares without ambiguity:  ‘My Lord and my God!’

But here it’s: Jesus wept. In one of those moments when you need the King James Bible for its poetic understanding that this verse is deliberately a short punch: Ἐδάκρυσεν ὁ Ἰησοῦς Jesus wept. This is supposed to be the big miracle – the final sign; the revelation of divinity… but we encounter Jesus’ humanity –  he grieves, he weeps he knows pain like us.

So what on earth is going on with the single line I began with: Jesus asks: Where have ye laid him?  They said unto him, Lord, come and see. Jesus wept. Everything is reversed. It is Jesus asking where. It is the crowds, calling disciples. It’s Jesus as a man.

Why is this? My instinctive sense is that it’s because at this point we’re dealing with the News of the World. i.e. Not the Good News. We are going to the known place. The place of this world. The place which those who are of the world call others to. It is the place of death. It is godless.

This moment, then, is a microcosm of the Gospel. From the prologue we know that in him was life and that life was the light of the world. He has declared himself ‘the bread of life’ and he will declare ‘I am the resurrection and the life’.

This is the moment that Jesus takes the Good News into the News of the World and overturns it.  Lazarus, come forth! Life out of death –  The revelation of God.

For the Gospel of John, then, there are two paths. There are those who will say, Jesus came from Nazareth and went to the cross. They will invite you to follow them and they will lead you to the tomb of a man.

Then there is the way of Jesus Christ. Who has told us that he came from the Father and returned to the Father. He invites us to follow him, the way, the truth and the light. Where he is revealed as God, being one with the Father.

But this passage does more. It prepares us for the final revelation of God on the cross.

The raising of Lazarus is a sort of mythological event. High drama. It is the act of a powerful god. Lazarus, come forth! Loose him, and let him go. Jesus as played by Charlton Heston. We understand it as revelation of divinity by power. Life from death. But instead John foregrounds Jesus’ humanity. He weeps.

It’s placed almost by way of contrast, next to the cross. Superficially, we have comparable miracles. Days later a person is raised from the dead. But everything in John’s Gospel points us to the cross, and not the resurrection. It is the hour for which he has come. On the cross his words are not, ‘my God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me’ but: ‘it is accomplished’. He is in control. He’s not weeping – Here is Jesus in his divinity: The cross, not the resurrection, is the revelation of God as love.

And it’s this strange compounding of humanity in omnipotence; And in control in extremis and death; That John conveys his identification of love with God.

Since the book of Acts, Christians have never been a magical cult who went around raising corpses from the dead. But they have been a people prepared to die for one another and for the good news they received that God is love and we ought to love one another.

They are then a people who found divinity in the most human of realities. A reality which has never been far from Christians.

When we read Jesus asking: Where have ye laid him?  They said unto him, Lord, come and see. Jesus wept. We are perhaps also hearing the imagination of the church in faith that Jesus has gone to their brothers and sisters; In the knowledge that Jesus would weep also for them and for all who die in the faith; And that we too might looking forward to that moment when the voice calls out: ‘Lazarus, come forth!’

So on this All Saints’ day, we pray for the church, past, present and future; We listen again for that voice calling “Come and See” on his journey from the Father to the Father; And we wait for that moment on the edge of eternity, when God shall call out our names, crying: ‘Loose him, and let him go.’ Amen.

Why come to church?

Sermon by the Revd Dr Brutus Green
Readings: Isaiah 53:4-end; Psalm 91:9-16; Hebrews 5:1-10; Mark 10:35-45

Why do you come to church? Why are you here? What’s the point of… all this?

Marx called religion the opiate of the masses. By which I think he meant that religion numbed the realities of life. Some of the popular forms of Christianity today sell faith as a fix – The guide to a hashtag blessed life; Happiness, contentment, even wealth can be yours, with sufficient prayer. You will be healed. Your life will be better. Church can solve your problems. Does faith, Christianity, make your life better? Is that why you go to church?

Aristotle thought happiness was the goal of life and philosophy. Here’s a secret: God does not want you to be happy. But God does want you to find joy. Today, you often hear about people talking about contentment as a goal. To be content sounds admirable. Moderate. Mature. Another secret: God does not want you to be content. But God does want you to have peace.

In our Old Testament reading we have a familiar reading – a reading from the Passion – Good Friday. In the old words one of the best lines in the Bible: ‘he was bruised for our iniquities… and with his stripes we are healed.’ It’s visual, visceral; It is not hashtag blessed. The suffering servant of Isaiah speaks of a different kind of vocation.

It’s been interpreted in different ways. Some have thought he’s speaking of Israel – of the suffering of the people, which will be redemptive for the Gentiles or future generations. Some have thought it was the suffering of the remnant – a small portion of faithful Jews suffering for the nation. Others have identified it with a particular figure, and for Christians, even though Jesus was born centuries later, it’s been called a fifth Gospel; so neatly does the suffering servant coincide with the theology of the cross.

There is a sort of mythic background to the suffering servant in the figure of the scapegoat. In Leviticus, among various offerings and sacrifices, Aaron is to take a goat, lay his hands on it and confess all the iniquities, transgressions and sins of the nations, before releasing it into the desert.  You couldn’t do it today – it would be an act of animal cruelty and we’d need to bring in a goat psychologist to help it through the spiritual abuse – but times were different then. Scapegoating and sacrifice provide a psycho-social release to the conflict and violence of society; The figure of the innocent man who is stricken for the people is a figure as old as humanity, encapsulated here in Isaiah’s suffering servant and, even more definitively, in the passage from Hebrews as Jesus becomes both high priest and sacrifice in the Day of Atonement. This figure persists in literature and in life. In tragedy, especially Romeo and Juliet; or Obi Wan Kanobe, Gandalf, Harry Potter’s mother, there is a heroic sense of the healing, redemptive power of sacrifice. While in the dark history of the twentieth-century many such figures emerge who for their nation, for fellow prisoners, for humanity, for justice –  made of themselves a sacrifice for the world. It’s a martyrology of saints that continues to inspire, and has more to say about God than any blessings you can count.

Which gives us the context for today’s Gospel. This is a classic portrayal of irony. [Unlike Alanis Morisette’s rain on your wedding day – which is actually just something that’s a bit disappointing.] James and John are committed to Jesus. And they sense there is power and meaning – even majesty – in him and in his faith. They want to share this glory, this sense of history. It comes, I think, from a good place. Just like me, they long to be close to you.

You can imagine Jesus looking on them with love – as he did the rich young man in last week’s Gospel. But thinking, you don’t really want what you’re asking for. And of course they don’t. They could have stayed with Jesus through the arrest. But all like sheep went astray. At Jesus’ right and left hand are ordinary criminals. Also victims – no one deserves crucifixon – But the point is, that to be at Christ’s right and left is to find the very lowest place imaginable. It is open to anyone – Christianity is nothing if not democratic.

And it’s precisely that conflictual desire to be the greatest, the will to power, the libido domandi, that Christ has come to heal: ‘for the Son of Man came not be served but to serve’. Even when James and John get shot down, the rest begin to bicker as they jostle for position. We don’t hear of the disciples asking for the lowest place; though we do get glimpses of that in some of the women who follow him  (which is presumably why it’s women who first see the resurrection). But despite the disciples’ failure, (and ultimately the deaths of the disciples are just as grisly as their master) the call to follow Jesus is the call to take up your cross; To be the last, not the first; To serve and not be served.

So the question we return to is why are you here? Why come to church? What’s the point? What will you get from coming here?

If you are the rich young man, Jesus has asked you to find ways of distributing your wealth to the poor. If you desire prestige or power, Jesus is asking you to take the lowest place, to become like a slave. If you rest easy in the comfort of good health and wellbeing, Jesus is pointing you to a path of suffering.

The Gospel doesn’t want you to be happy. It doesn’t want you to be content.

This doesn’t sound like good news. But the example of the perfect life we are given in the Gospel only lasted 33 years, which is not much longer than your vicar’s.

It’s not about age though; which measured in minutes, hours and years, is in all cases all-too-brief.

As TS Eliot said: ‘Old men ought to be explorers’. It’s about our attitude to vulnerability, to risk. And here is where the biggest difference between Christianity and the modern world lies. One of the central impulses of modern life is to insulate us from risk. Insurance, health and safety, the law, gated communities, safeguarding, zoos, modern transport, covid regulations are all directed at preventing risk. Now none of these things are in themselves bad. But the safer we are the more our mortality ceases to be a pressing concern. And the more detached we are from the risk and mortality of those who do not share our resources, whether close by or in far-flung places. The terror of lack of shelter, or the inability to put food on the table, vulnerability to a deadly disease, is usually unimaginable for most of us. But it’s estimated that nearly 2% of adults in London are affected by homelessness, and as we heard 2 weeks ago, here in Wandsworth 1 in 3 children don’t have enough to eat. We have all known vulnerability to disease now; But has it made us more compassionate? And if we are commanded to love our neighbour,  how can we be happy or content while such conditions persist? Can we really rest easy in West Putney, knowing the insecurity of our neighbours, far and near?

Jesus preached that the kingdom of God had come near. It is near. But we choose how we participate in it. Love requires vulnerability – and that is the hard saying of the Gospel. How vulnerable will we let ourselves be? Ultimately, we are all that vulnerable – no matter how safe, how well insured; But we are better prepared for that moment if we’ve known vulnerability in our lives. If we have trusted in God. The prayer that Jesus taught is thy kingdom come, on earth as it is in heaven. To pray that is to refuse to be happy or content, until there is justice and freedom for all. But if we’re doing what we can, if we’re seeing our love and our community make a difference, we will find joy and we will know peace. Helping someone to a place to stay, sending a family a box of food, Sitting down to talk to a grieving widow,  what is closer to the kingdom of God than that?

And when we are ones suffering, and it’s our bruises and our stripes, if we have trusted him we will know that we share this path with God; That our tears and our prayers are seen by one who knows our suffering; And that as Christ was made perfect, so we shall be made perfect with him.

And this is why you come to church, I hope. To find Christ, in his Word and Sacrament and in our love for one another. And in finding Christ, who has borne our infirmities and carried our diseases, to become more like him. Amen.

Harvest: Transformation & Growth

Sermon by the Revd Dr Brutus Green
Readings: Ezekiel 47:6-12; Psalm 65:8-13; 2Cor 9:6-11; Mark 4:26-32

Harvest is a strange sort of thing. It’s not a religious festival. It’s quite solidly earthy – there’s no scriptural story, no ritual practice. There were Harvests and thanksgivings before Christianity; There are secular versions now. Just about every culture that’s every existed has celebrated and given thanks for the Harvest.

But Harvest does fit very well with our faith. The defining worship of the Church is known usually by three names: The Lord’s Supper – the celebration of a meal, centred on bread and wine, and dependent on the Harvest; Communion – which translates “as one” – the coming together of the community, the church and God, as the act of Harvest traditionally brings the whole village together to one end. And, of course, the Eucharist – which simply means “thanksgiving”. And it’s not insignificant that the last word you hear before receiving bread and wine in this service, and at the invitation in the modern service is: ‘thanksgiving’ and ‘thankful’.

So in rural Christian communities, it’s not surprising that this service, which brings together the liturgy, the community, and the basics for life, has become a keystone in the Church’s year. But, stepping beyond that, generosity is an attribute abundantly given to God. Most of the promises of the Hebrew Bible concern the goodness of the promised land – flowing with milk and honey. Ezekiel’s vision, we heard, – is of plenitude. And in 2Corinthians – Paul takes up the familiar theme of grace, and we hear that sense of the distribution of wealth and blessing, of ‘all bountifulness’ through the natural world.

That generosity is something we are expected to echo:  So that well-loved verse “God loveth a cheerful giver.” Or in the letter of James: ‘Every generous act of giving, with every perfect gift, is from above, coming down from the Father of lights, with whom there is no variation or shadow due to change.’ As we are generous, so we find in ourselves the image of God.

So, as Harvest is about thanksgiving and the generosity of the natural world;  In Christian worship this becomes both a concrete example of grace, and a metaphor for the goodness of God we believe we receive in Christ’s saving work. But even more than this, agricultural language is everywhere. The Hebrew Bible consistently uses imagery such as the vineyard for Israel. Most of Jesus’ teaching and parables comes through agricultural vignettes. 2Corinthians has just spoken of ‘the increase of the fruits of your righteousness’ – and we are familiar with ‘the fruits of the Spirit’; in John’s Gospel Jesus is the vine with the church as the branches bearing fruit;  in the other Gospels we have the sower whose harvest comes from the seed fallen on good ground.

The choice of metaphor matters. It conveys a hidden, perhaps interior transformation. From seed to flower is unexpected, mysterious but also within the created order. It requires external action – the seed does not just grow itself. It is common, but beautiful and life giving. It also speaks of the coming of life from death. The seed must first of all die: ‘What is sown is perishable, what is raised is imperishable.’ And everything the Christian believes is centred on resurrection: The resurrection of Jesus and our future hope.

But as well as transformation, the kingdom of God is also about growth. Most of the parables are about growth – and Jesus uses natural, agrarian examples. The mustard seed, the sower, the wheat and tares. Growth – an organic, productive, progressive metaphor. The kingdom of God growing within us; The church as the living, growing body of Christ.

Growth is currently a hot topic in the Church of England. Parts of the church are very keen on monitoring the numbers: How many people in church? Regular attendance? Baptisms, weddings, funerals, All this information is churned through the bureaucracy to give indications of growth and decline –  What works and doesn’t. As a vicar I think there’s a strong sense that you are assessed on the basis of your Sunday attendance and parish giving. At a time when big questions are being asked, are enough people going to church and can you afford the vicar your diocese is paying for, becomes the bottom line for every parish.

But can the kingdom of God be measured? Many in the church look down on this culture of numbers and measurability. Are we about getting numbers in church or deepening faith? How transformative is the church in the local community? What are the signs and indicators of a healthy church? What fruit are we really looking for?

When we look at St Margaret’s: is it a growing church? Is it a church that is faithful in following Christ and extending the boundaries of the kingdom of God? Part of the complexity of the metaphor is captured in today’s Gospel. It begins in straightforwardly. The Gospel is sewn. It grows – the sower knows not how – But when it is ripe, the sickle comes out and the grain is harvested. The process isn’t just about growth and increase. The metaphor contains within it destruction and death, both of the seed and the grain. It’s the gathering of the fruit that is the goal, but that is only achieved after the harvest. There is a time to be born, a time to die. a time to plant, and a time to pluck up what is planted.

When Jesus announced the arrival of the kingdom of God, everyone thought they knew what he meant. But the kingdom of God is both present and hidden. So too, spiritually, we see the fruits of God’s work, the fruit of the spirit – joy, peace, love, kindness, goodness, gentleness – But the final harvest may be known only to God. In this world it remains hidden – It is the seed that is buried awaiting the flowering of resurrection.

So at the Harvest – we give thanks for the goodness of creation and its gifts that we depend upon. But we also recognise a metaphor here that speaks of goodness and generosity of God in the grace of Christ’s great work – received by us in eucharist.

Our prayer, in thankfulness and praise, is for the growth of this gift in the fruits of the Spirit; and that at the last we may flower in resurrection with him who has given everything and is the giver of all good gifts around us. Amen.

The Birth of Apollo

Sermon by the Revd Dr Brutus Green
Readings: Psalm 139:1-18, 1Corinthians 1:9-13, 26-29, John 17:21-24

I promise to be quite brief. I have to these days or I get heckled. Stop talking daddy. Stop talking.

Dearly beloved, we are gathered here together to cleanse this little goblin of his original sin. I always admired theologian Eddie Izzard’s doctrine of original sin – Where you have to commit an act that no one has ever committed before. It’s more challenging. ‘Poking a badger… with a spoon’ was Mr Izzard’s example. Oberon, who, as of tomorrow, we have successfully kept alive for 3 years, has already committed several original sins: In just the last month he has pulled a loo-roll holder out of the wall and pulled the dining room light fitting out of the ceiling. He should really have been called Samson. As everyone tells us: “he’s a very confident child.” At five months Apollo has not really had time to develop originality.

A colleague said to me earlier this week that every time you say promises in church you emerge as a different person. A changed state of being. I think we have to be careful here. Many’s the person who’s married someone thinking that marriage will change their partner, resolve their infidelities, only to be disappointed, and discover their real age. I can reveal that the promises made on ordination don’t resolve the petty and not-so-petty foibles of the clergy. Neither the promises of matrimony nor ordination suddenly transform us into something better; Sometimes wives don’t even take their husbands’ names, and the poor bloke looks like an add on who’s been transplanted into the family after the event. And priests are not visibly held in the Holy Spirit tractor beam conferring their new powers to bless, consecrate and absolve.

But neither is it nothing.  I remember when Sally and I were ordained someone told us that a sacrament is just the public recognition of what is already the case. They were trying to be kind and stop people panicking and running out the church like Julia Roberts in the Runaway Bride.

But sacraments are more than this –  It’s not just God - we’re all participating. This moment matters.  It is a change in relation. In baptism we are joining in with the yes that God speaks to all creation to one of our own. It’s a calling.

It’s not magic though. It’s like the marriage toasts when traditionally the groom deliberately first says “My wife and I…” It’s funny because it’s this awkward stepping into something different that at the same time is just as it was.

Or we might think of naming the baby. Oberon’s name was always definite but even as Rhiannon was heading off to register Apollo at 6 weeks, we were a little undecided. With that uncertainty, or if it’s just “baby” there’s a slight vagueness of identity. Once a child has its name – it takes on a little more definition. It’s a little bit more like a person, less like an accessory. I’m still a little sad we didn’t call him Anastasius – which is Greek for resurrection; He was born on Easter night – traditionally the time of the harrowing of hell. Rhiannon thought that was just a bit pretentious.

Apollo is good though. Dante appeals to Apollo, god of poets, singers and music, at the beginning of Paradiso, the happier part of the greatest work of Christian literature. But Apollo is more – one of his Homeric epiphets is “killer of mice”; And the vicarage does usually have mice. It also gives him something in common with Zz who loves chasing small furry animals and occasionally murders them, mostly by accident. We think.

I was very tempted to use the Tyndale translation for today’s 1Corinthians passage – His is the first English translation so the spelling is all squiffy (Kitty would have coped)–  But he does call Apollos, Apollo, which is better. After all, we don’t call Paul, Paulos do we?

Apollo unfortunately comes off very much as second fiddle to Paul. Despite being mentioned a number of times in the New Testament, and quite possibly being the author of the letter to the Hebrews, he does not have his own feast day and has fallen into shadow.

We should take account of the wisdom of the 2004 arthouse film Mean Girls,though, when Gretchen, who is always number 2 to Regina, reminds us: Brutus is just as cute as Caesar, right? Brutus is just as smart as Caesar, people totally like Brutus just as much as they like Caesar,  We should totally just STAB CAESAR!” (who am I to disagree?)

As an apostle Apollo may be the underdog but as Paul himself admits: God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise;  God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong.

In this, Christianity is a little bit like carnival night. It’s about reversals: The birth of God in poverty and jeopardy. The transformation of death to life on Easter night; The last shall be first; Jesus gathering the children and declaring in the face of the learned teachers – ‘the kingdom of God belongs to such as these.’

So perhaps it is a higher honour to be named after a dubious apostle, an uncertain saint, and a killer of mice.

At Oberon’s baptism the choir sang Mascagni’s Easter Hymn, which would have been more appropriate for a baby born on Easter morning. It’s sung by the ‘fallen woman’, the soprano out on the square, who feels she can’t go to church because of an affair. But it’s her song that rises in parallel with the resurrection, drawing in the villagers and taking the worship from the church into the open air. The song gives us an image of grace. Surprising; Out of focus, in the background of where the action is supposed to be. Born in humility.  But glorious.

Two of my favourite writers of the twentieth-century were women who both probablyhad death-bed baptisms, one catholic, the other Church of England. There is something deeply Christian about hanging around on the edge of the Church. Not out of a lack of faith; but from a suspicion of institutions, of power, of concern over who else is left outside, 

The last-minute Catholic, Simone Weil, wrote: ‘In the old baptism by immersion the man disappeared under the water;  this means to deny one’s self, to acknowledge that one is only a fragment of the inert matter which is the fabric of creation.  He only reappeared because he was lifted up by an ascending movement stronger than gravity;  this is the image of the divine love in man. ‘

That to me is the description of the fallen soprano singing outside the church in the town square. The people who go to church usually believe that they have earned love. It’s a prize they’re entitled to because of their good – or at least not terrible lives. It’s a transaction: Dear God, I have been good, therefore I deserve to be let in the good place. God dressed up as Santa Claus.

It’s more likely the people on the margins, hovering outside the church, who do not feel entitled. Who may love without expecting a return; Who regarding themselves as nothing will be lifted up by an ascending movement stronger than gravity. Love defying gravity – maybe even witches can be saved.

So perhaps original sin might be thought of as self-justification; Where the more we justify and commend ourselves, the more we belong easily, the further we have fallen from grace. Infants – who know only dependence, are perfectly and wholly available to love. Which is why, to find grace, we must become more like Apollo. Perhaps this sacrament is as much for us, as for him. Apollo. Uncertain saint. Destroyer of mice.  Amen.

Apollo, of you even the swan sings with clear voice to the beating of his wings, as he alights upon the bank by the eddying river Peneus; and of you the sweet-tongued minstrel, holding his high-pitched lyre, always sings both first and last. And so hail to you, lord! I seek your favour with my song.

From Homeric Hymns to Apollo 

The glory of the One who moves all things
permeates the universe and glows
in one part more and in another less.

I was within the heaven that receives
more of His light; and I saw things that he
who from that height descends, forgets or can

not speak; for nearing its desired end,
our intellect sinks into an abyss
so deep that memory fails to follow it.

Nevertheless, as much as I, within
my mind, could treasure of the holy kingdom
shall now become the matter of my song.

O good Apollo, for this final task
make me the vessel of your excellence,
what you, to merit your loved laurel, ask.

The opening of Dante’s Paradiso

Apprehend
Nothing but jollity. The gods themselves,
Humbling their deities to love, have taken
The shapes of beasts upon them: Jupiter
Became a bull, and bellow'd; the green Neptune
A ram, and bleated; and the fire-robed god,
Golden Apollo, a poor humble swain,
As I seem now. Their transformations
Were never for a piece of beauty rarer,
Nor in a way so chaste, since my desires
Run not before mine honour, nor my lusts
Burn hotter than my faith.

A Winter’s Tale IV.iv

A young Apollo, golden-haired,
Stands dreaming on the verge of strife,
Magnificently unprepared
For the long littleness of life.

Frances Cornford on Rupert Brooke

Damnatio Memoriae

Sermon by the Revd Dr Brutus Green
Readings: Numbers 11:4-6, 10-16, 24-29; Psalm 19:7-end, James: 5:13-end, Mark 9:38-end

Today’s readings are not easy. The Old Testament was very long. And it’s hard to identify with people longing to return to slavery because they miss cucumbers and melons. We hear it today presumably because of the two men, Eldad and Medad, who Moses approves of in their unauthorised prophesying. It finds an echo in the beginning of the Gospel with Jesus’ famous words: ‘Whoever is not against us is for us.’ This is an inclusive and practical message that we shouldn’t always insist on recognised procedure, if good things are happening. Though that’s not a concept the Church of England is very comfortable with.

The Gospel after this takes a very sharp turn though. Suddenly we are being threatened with dismemberment. And we have some of the most striking imagery associated with divine punishment in the Bible. The millstone carrying us down into the sea. The unquenchable fire, where the worm never dies. But the passage is confused. Mark has collected these sayings of Jesus together, but they’re anything but clear.

And the epistle is not much more comfortable. There’s a very direct connection between prayer in faith and healing. I’ve heard many stories of unexplained healings and seen some surprising things. I have known prayer answered. But equally I’ve known prayer unanswered. For better or for worse I have more faith in doctors than miracles. We’re rightly a bit sceptical about tele-evangelists –  Touch the screen! And if the Bible is clear about anything, it’s that suffering is part of life and discipleship. Following Christ is taking up your cross, not being saved through ‘blessings’. We have all also witnessed infuriating injustice in the outrageous suffering of people who deserved better.  So there will be some who’ll hear this reading and tell you that the prayer of faith did not save the sick. What will you say to them?

The first thing to say is that we must remember that we’re reading in context. Jesus is speaking to a beleaguered nation. There’s a fight going on for the soul of the people of God. Not between the Jews and the Romans so much as between Jesus’ teaching, which is people-centred and announcing the the kingdom of God,  and the hypocrisy and self-serving teachers of the day. Here Jesus is drawing a clear battle line. Either you’re with us or you’re against us. And yes his language is strong but his goal is to wake people up where they’re drifting on the wrong course.And these warnings do not speak to some personal sin we might feel judged by,  but simply are we with Jesus, or against him. And – again context! – although Jesus speaks of being cast into hell, the Greek is Gehenna – which refers to the great rubbish tip outside Jerusalem which was constantly being burned down. It’s a real place – much like Wandsworth tip and the awful smell there. Be careful! You too may end up in Smugglers Way! The Household waste and recycling centre. Although some people love a trip to the tip.

James, meanwhile, is writing out of the intensity of the early church. Again, there’s a spiritual battle as the Jewish community is splitting and the Church is having to define itself. James is writing to strengthen the solidarity of the Christian community in the face of great hardship. They know suffering and death first hand – many of their faithful brothers and sisters have suffered an unjust and untimely death. James is not saying that prayer will always solve all your problems. He begins this letter encouraging his readers rather to face trials with joy as the testing times produce endurance and maturity of faith.

Prayer is foremost about submitting ourselves to God’s will. Which is neither demanding healing, nor being fatalistic; But accepting that in health or sickness we may serve God. But importantly, by praying together as we do this morning, by sharing in joy and in pain, as we hear about each other’s week, we can encourage one another, and most of all we can do better at loving one another. And as the Gospel reminds us, it’s in our failure to love one another, especially as Christians, that we let ourselves down: It is the definition of sin.

I was discussing with some colleagues this week the strange disappearance of sin from our vocabulary. Some will be glad because they equate sin with shame. They might argue we live in a more enlightened world where we understand people’s action with more empathy and compassion. We understand mental illness better, the impact of our parenting and upbringing; We have these sociological and psychological tools that explain anti-social behaviour.

What strikes me in recent reporting, however, is that a more judgemental attitude has crept in – possibly than ever before. So in the debate on statues – and I’m not defending all those with the wealth to buy themselves public immortality – But there is a movement to remove from public history all those whose values don’t accord with this current moment. A city might reasonably decide it no longer wants in its public space a man who built his wealth on the slave trade; But what about when statues of Churchill need protecting?  There are elements of anti-semitism and racism in the works of our best writers like TS Eliot and Shakespeare. Are their memorials at risk? And JK Rowling took some heat for allegedly transphobic comments.

For the dead we seem to be reinvoking the Roman practice of Damnatio Memoriae. Meaning condemnation of memory. If an emperor really didn’t like someone he could erase them from history. Not only would their house and possessions be taken but all official mention of them would be scored out and any statues disfigured or destroyed. Several ancient cultures followed this practice as well as the USSR. It would seem a strange evolution for this country but these are strange times.

For the living there is “No Platforming”, where individuals out of sync with the times are kept out of the public sight.  Controversially, it’s been feminists of a more old-fashioned sort, like Germaine Greer and Rowling who have found themselves in the same sin-bin as the BNP and EDL.

It’s also evident in the pillorying of just about any public figure over tweets stretching back into their teens. A racist or sexist joke at school can now get you suspended from the England Cricket Team. Part of what’s troubling about all this is that mistakes and errors, sometimes even difference of opinion or misrepresentation, have the power to lead to erasure.

Sin was considered to be endemic – everywhere among people. It was also something that could be repented of with immediate absolution. To follow Jesus’ language we can remove sin and avoid the fire, the rubbish tip. In contemporary morality the approach seems to be to immediately throw the perpetrator onto the fire. Harry Potter and the Transgender Inferno The statues will be toppled and those who do not conform will be silenced; where we heard from the letter of James that ‘anyone who has committed sins will be forgiven’ and that actually we should be encouraged to bring back a sinner for everyone’s sake.

Because although Jesus and the Early Church had to define a battle line very clearly. Either you’re for us or against us. The possibility of stepping back into the Church is always there, and a simple act of kindness to a follower of Jesus is enough to receive reward.

It’s a shame really that baptism doesn’t automatically delete all past tweets or we could just call up the English Cricket Board and arrange a visit. Perhaps the Church of England should develop an app – Repent of your Social Media – and be made clean! For Elodie and Miles – their tweeting days are ahead of them. It is perhaps part of our task as a church to teach them that their sins are not as permanent as their presence on social media. Nor can they be erased from the love of God.

And let us be careful of any movement that seeks to erase or silence and try to support and encourage one another. Not from fear of fire or household waste, Or that all God’s blessings are just one fervent prayer away; but in knowing that by our love for one another, we are sharing in the love of God. And that love endures eternally. Amen.

Creation Sunday: Random!

Sermon by the Revd Dr Brutus Green
Readings: Isaiah 6:6-9, Psalm 19:1-6, Romans 8:18-25, Matthew 6:25-33

When I was at first at university in Exeter the word everywhere was “random”: “oh that’s so random”. I was never sure whether it was a good thing or a bad thing. I think it was just something people said. Like: “I just saw Sophia and Harry crossing the road” “That’s so random.”

There are, at a very basic level, two ways of looking at the world. We can see it as chance: random!  Neither good nor bad. – or we can see it as creation. ‘And God saw that it was good’.  Made with purpose and value. Which of these two paths we adopt will lead us to faith or not,  but also gives some sense to how we treat our natural world.

The first obvious problem with looking at the world as chance, is just that it seems so unlikely. The chance that anything is there – how would you even calculate that? And every time you say that the universe started with this – There is the childish voice that asks “and what made that happen?” Then: what’s the chance that this coherent synchronised expansion happened to hit an appropriate rate that created uniform conditions that could sustain? How likely is it that rational coherent ordered universe would emerge totally by chance? What’s the chance that those things move constructively together, not fall or drift apart. The chance of life emerging is probably the big one. A twentieth-century biologist put the odds of the random formation of a single protein molecule (which is necessary for any organism) at 1 in 2 billion, billion billion, where I keep saying the word ‘billion’ 37 times. So a long shot.  More recently another two scientists put the odds of life forming at 1 in ten to the power of forty thousand.  And we haven’t even come to the odds of sentient life being able to reflect back on these odds and head to the bookies. At some point you have to ask yourself, isn’t it maybe more likely that all this was not random. 

But there’s also a darker tyranny in living in a random world. A random world operates on the law of the jungle. It is just ‘nature red in tooth and claw’ and survival of the fittest as an ethic is not terribly kind or terribly ethical. Or I suppose one might concede it is terribly ethical: Or ethically terrible. In a random world why would we not just use the natural world to our advantage. Is that not what nature herself teaches? We would still fight against climate change and support biodiversity – but in order to better sustain human life and to keep our zoos interesting. For the proponent of the random world, man is the measure of all things.

The doctrine of creation has not unfortunately led Christian nations to an improved relationship with nature. We have certainly fulfilled one of God’s first commands to:  ‘Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it’. We have always taken God’s last act of creation as the pinnacle –  by which I mean the limit and the point of creation. But that assumes that what was created first – and most of that first week – is not more important –  and misses the fact that creation ends with the rest of the Sabbath. Perhaps the point of creation is not humanity – but peace. This is Isaiah’s vision: Where the wolf shall live with the lamb. The leopard and the kid, the calf and the fatling. The cow and the bear. A vision of harmony, not dominance.

But just because humanity has been selective in its interpretation of Scripture, does not mean that Christianity is the problem. There is a meditation in considering the works of God’s hands. Thinking through the infinitely low probability of there being anything – To the vastness of the cosmos; And the panoply of creatures we see in our world today. And as we reflect in wonder upon just that which we understand in nature, in the cosmos, how can we not but see our smallness? Our finitude?

Contemplating creation is perhaps the best starting point to thinking through the divine. On the one hand we have systems – our weather, eco-systems, solar systems, circulatory systems and more that point to the inter-connectedness of creation. The migration of birds is a meditation on glory. But, equally, the detail. To see the perfection of the tiny hand of a new child,  or a sea-shell washed up on the beach. The head of a sunflower; The fragile beauty of all things points to the value of each divine work.  And within each thing a new complex interconnectedness of systems. And within each system, the glorious works of God – from the excretory system of the stick insect to the rings of Saturn. The heavens are telling the glory of God. If we have but eyes to see them.

Now there is much in our world that does seem random. And worse than that – indifferent. It’s all very well Jesus telling us not to worry, but faith is stretched in the difficult tension between the random vicissitudes of nature and the assurance of the ordered framing of the universe which gives rise to our hope in a loving God. That famous line of ‘nature red in tooth and claw’ comes from Tennyson’s reflection on grief:

Man, her last work, who seem'd so fair,
Such splendid purpose in his eyes,
Who roll'd the psalm to wintry skies,
Who built him fanes of fruitless prayer,

Who trusted God was love indeed
And love Creation's final law --
Tho' Nature, red in tooth and claw
With ravine, shriek'd against his creed --

Who loved, who suffer'd countless ills,
Who battled for the True, the Just,
Be blown about the desert dust,
Or seal'd within the iron hills?

It’s only by taking in our littleness within this creation that we will grasp the humility required of us. But in grasping our part within the greater systems of this world,  the craftsmanship of our body, mind and spirit,  we can know ourselves sacraments – the handwork of God. A visible sign of an inward grace.

So, yes, God is intimated in picking blackberries, staring through a telescope, or in a grain of sand. And the nature of God is hinted at in the complexity of systems within systems within systems that speak of the divine interconnectivity of the Trinity.

To describe anything as random neglects its place in the larger scheme of things. Nothing is random. But we may not perceive its place, just as we might neglect our own significance as a unique, infinitely complex  (some more complex than others) creature serving its purpose and creator within the vast horizons of time and space. To describe this world as a creation implies its value, and the significance of each piece. So as we gaze out into the garden, on our non-human animals, these stones, this congregation, we might remember our duty to the wellbeing of all our environment. But also that all this has been made by God, perfect in his image; And that the hope of resurrection is for all creation; Nothing is unwanted. Nothing is wasted. All creation exists to the glory of God. Alleluia.  Amen.

20 years on from 9/11

Sermon by the Revd Dr Brutus Green
Readings: Isaiah 50:4-9, Psalm 116:1-8, James 3:1-12, Mark 8:27-end

When I lived in Germany I regularly went to the same hairdresser. She didn’t speak more than a dozen words of English. And I didn’t speak German but learned in my ponderous way through my two years there. But we had great fun attempting to communicate, Each of us trying out words and guessing and gesticulating our way through, And we did get more successful as we went along.  Rhiannon would get irritated in Germany when she’d speak German – which she picked up way faster than me –because Germans would reply back in English –  defeating her attempts to learn and respect another tongue. The French, of course, give you the opposite problem, ignoring you entirely if you don’t speak perfect French.

It’s very hard to understand the language of violence in terrorism. Most of us can’t imagine what might drive someone to kill, let alone indiscriminately. And even more what could push someone to trade in their own life for the death of others. The philosopher Terry Eagleton called the suicide bomber ‘the last word in passive aggression’; Vengeance and humiliation –  Tearing yourself apart for a symbol of outrage. Typically, the reaction is to speak the same language back. 9/11 was followed by wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, both of which have now come to an end without any sense of resolution or progress, but greater instability and an increased humanitarian crisis.

Human nature naturally resorts to Newton’s third law:  ‘For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.’ Conversational violence. It’s 182 years since the beginning of the first British Afghan War. And it’s unlikely we’ve heard the last from that country.

But what is the answer to violence? In today’s passage from Isaiah we have a sentiment familiar to us from the Gospel: ‘turn the other cheek’ As Isaiah puts it: ‘I gave my back to those who struck me and my cheeks to those who pulled out the beard; I did not hide my face from insult and spitting…  therefore I have set my face like flint and I know that I shall not be put to shame’. Turning the other cheek can seem very passive. Or stoic – we must bear the violence inflicted upon us. We, perhaps, admire those who bear the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune and faint not.

But it’s more than that. When you’re struck it’s not just an act of violence, it’s about power. The striker is expecting you go down, or to fall in line.  The slave will obey its master. You will walk away with your tail between your legs. They are not expecting you to stand your ground and turn the cheek. It’s a bit like Jaws in James Bond – when he takes the punch and smiles. It’s a challenge to power; frightening to the one who threw the blow. It says – you can hurt me, you can pull out my whiskers, but you have not beaten me – you have not put me to shame. So it isn’t passive. It is non-violent protest.And from Gandhi and Martin Luther King jr we know how powerful that can be. This is what it means to change the language from that which we’re spoken to. To end conversational violence. Against our nature, to break Newton’s third law. To respond to violence with something else. To an action, don’t re-act, be neither equal nor opposite.

Today we’ve also heard the central question of the Gospel: “Who do you say that I am?” And the misunderstanding that is at its heart. Everyone thinks that Jesus is here to bring a revolution against the imperial Roman occupation. Those in power fear it. The Jewish leaders are jealous of it. His friends desire it.

But that is not the language of Jesus. He doesn’t speak power to power Violence to violence. Instead, he tells his friends, he must suffer, be rejected and killed. He is speaking a different language. Others will continue the conversation of violence and Jerusalem will be destroyed and Rome will be sacked. But Jesus has set something else in motion. Something that is not violent, but will win over much of the synagogue, and before long the entire Roman empire. That is to set your mind on divine things and not human things. And to follow is to deny yourself, take up your cross and follow him.

Richard Curtis, included in the opening monologue of his 2003 film, Love Actually, the line: “When the planes hit the Twin Towers, as far as I know, none of the phone calls from the people on board were messages of hate or revenge—they were all messages of love.” It’s a theme also taken up by Archbishop Rowan Williams, who was on Wall Street when the planes struck. What struck him was the contrast between the violence apparently inspired by religion, and the many well documented phone calls to loved ones from ordinary people. And specifically how at the most awful time of danger, difficulty and certain death – So many people put themselves to one side in order to let someone know that they loved them.  At a moment when we’re biologically primed to self-interest, adrenaline-panic and survival – so many of those three thousand victims thought first to alleviate the grief of someone else. And then there were the firefighters who placed themselves at the heart of the inferno. One firefighting unit lost all its members. I heard a US fire chief on the radio last week who ordered his own brother’s team into the tower, never to see him again; and then went day after day to recover his body. The first official victim of 9/11 was the Roman Catholic fire brigade chaplain Mychal Judge, who had rushed to the scene and was killed in the tower lobby by flying debris.

I have set my face like flint and I know that I shall not be put to shame.
For those who want to save their life will lose it and those who lose their life for my sake, and for the sake of the Gospel, will save it.

We cannot explain these events, or justify or blame God; we are lost for words in the face of such suffering; And we look with wonder when violence and suffering is met with love. As the ancient Christian hymn puts it:  Ubi caritas et amor, Deus ibi est. ‘Where there is love, there is God also.’

Like this pandemic, this day 20 years ago was a point of change in the world. A point of ‘where were you when’ And a discussion about how taking a plane used to be like getting the bus. 9/11’s legacy has been the war on terror. The attack on the axis of evil. The conversation of violence has continued.  Rowan Williams remarked that ‘in the global village, the one who becomes rich will be seen as the thief of his neighbour’s goods.’ At a time when the wealth of nations may be measured in its rate of vaccinations, this becomes painfully clear. Man hands on misery to man.

But when suffering is shared we build solidarity. And when we are confronted with fear and aggression, if we can speak another language, we are following Christ. Twenty years on, the results of violence on violence are at best ambiguous. The world is not a safer place. The threat of violence is undiminished. Turning and turning on the widening gyre, there is neither better understanding nor more compassion. But perhaps the examples left to us, of quiet heroism in the service of firefighters and the last words of love, may at least inspire us to more Christian responses to the pain we find in the world. Where there is love, there is God also. Amen.