Ascension: Conceptualizing The Resurrection of Jesus Christ

There’s a section of the Jesus narrative that makes many people sceptical.

I mean, you might say quite a lot of it is hard for the very literally minded and the materialist.

But the section even Christians sometimes struggle with begins with the Ascension.

The physical language immediately raises our suspicion.

God is no more literally upward than any other direction.

This Clarke Kent ending sounds like an illustration, more than reportage.

Then there is Jesus return – when we’re told:

He ‘will come in the same way as you saw him go into heaven.’

Again this suggests something hard to imagine – mythic –

And while we long for a peaceful and just society, this kind of intervention is out of all experience.

It also raises the very difficult question:

Where is the risen and ascended body of Christ?

Is it somewhere in any meaningful sense?

Luke is trying to give expression to the change that occurs between the Easter resurrection appearances and the gift of the Spirit in the birth of the Church.

He takes the resurrection seriously:

‘he presented himself alive... by many convincing proofs’ –

and we shouldn’t overlook that it’s the concreteness of this resurrection experience that defines Christianity as something fundamentally new and unexpected.

But the ascension draws to a close Jesus’ humanly embodied presence in the world.

So where is Jesus’ body?

I think what Luke is saying is that now Jesus’ body is with God.

Where is that – I hear you ask!

Well that raises a very difficult question.

At once we think of God as outside –

That corresponds to the image of height –

God is so very far above us.

Not in actual distance – God is not among the stars.

Contrary to popular belief very few religions have ever understood God in this way.

But as that which is not our created order – the things of this world.

Metaphysics – that which is beyond the physical.

But also as Augustine writes God is more interior to us than we are to ourselves.

God is at the heart of everything.

It is he in whom ‘we live and breathe and have our being’.

It’s hard for us to get our minds around this because we’re so used to a materialistic view of the universe where the world of atoms, electrons, quarks and the rest push out God with their sheer weight of matter.

God is no more something infinitely small as something infinitely far away.

Both the upward and the inward and metaphors for how we can know God’s presence with us in a non-physical way.

Now I’m no scientist and dislike theologians trying to do science as much as I dislike scientists who think they can do theology;

but if science can talk these days about superstring theory and 11 dimensions then the idea of a multi-layered universe doesn’t seem so implausible.

Jesus’ body, then, like God, is somehow still with us.

What then are we to make of the return of this Ascended Lord?

As we say – Christ is risen. Christ will come again.

Well, in a sense, this is something that we already have experience of.

Jesus, as the Word made flesh, is a paradigmatic sacrament – a visible sign of an invisible presence.

Jesus is Immanuel – God with us.

In every Eucharist as God is made present in bread and wine, we have his return.

And that is a return we physically take into ourselves as we ask to be more loving, more Christ-like, closer to God, more a part of Jesus’ body.

And lest we get too intimidated by the requirement to be Jesus body, let’s remember it’s a broken body, just as the bread is broken at every service.

Jesus’ body reflects the brokenness of this world and the brittle nature of human hearts.

There is a sense then in which we can understand the Ascension and Return of Jesus as a metaphor for worship.

Our praise, our sacrifice, our prayers rise to God.

The movement of God, as he ‘came down to earth from heaven’ and returned, ascending to the right hand of the Father, is one which in worship we are carried along with.

In worship we celebrate Christ come among us in bread and wine, in the continual making of the Church, which is the body of Christ, lifting it up consecrating it before God.

And the Eucharist itself looks forward to when we will be fully present to God, though as our first reading in Acts tells us ‘it is not for [us] to know the times or periods that the Father has set’.

Something we are usually grateful for.

But actually just as our worship looks back to Creation, Incarnation, the life, death and resurrection of Christ – so it also looks forward to our redemption and the gathering up of creation;

the peaceful future of the kingdom of God.

If any of Christianity is true then our faith finally is that our home is with God;

that there is peace and reconciliation;

that an eternity awaits when the presence of God is more directly and abidingly known.

When war and disease and famine and death will cease.

Ultimately the Ascension and Return are indicators of this future, when we and all creation will be swept up into God.

For now our task is to inhabit Jesus’ body.

To ourselves be a sign of the redemption that is coming,

And to take that transforming love into our community.

Amen.

State of the Parish 2022

‘Go and do likewise’.

It’s tempting to read the Good Samaritan just as an ethical imperative.

Find the struggling people and give them a hand!

The question Jesus answers is not, though, how to be good –

But who is my neighbour?

The Good Samaritan is a story of an encounter between two strangers.

And the result is communion.

The result, on the road between Jericho and Jerusalem, is the church.

Today it’s our opportunity to reflect back on 2021.

Hopefully, you’ve already seen a copy of the Annual Report, which sets out the story.

I find it hard to have a clear sense of time at the moment.

The pandemic has had the effect of concertina-ing time – our experience of time drags through lockdowns but looking back seems short – as often little happened to remember!

2021 began very slowly in one of the longest periods of lockdown.

Most churches in the diocese shut their doors again.

We remained open and I know that for some who came that was very important;

And there is something about maintaining the worship of a space given to prayer – something our Archbishops neglected in 2020.

The community still gathered online in large numbers each Sunday, and also at our every day services, but the good weather and spirit that had held the nation together through 2020 was at low ebb in early 2021.

Financially, the pandemic has been disastrous for churches.

There is a movement at hand to close churches as the Church of England finds itself spread too thin, which the pandemic has accelerated.

Our generosity and resourcefulness got us through 2020, but we can perhaps be even more proud of 2021 finishing in the black.

With no collections and restricted hall rental in the first term, it was the congregation’s generosity that rebalanced our finances through our Lent appeal and relieved the pressure on our return to a new normality after Easter.

Easter was eventful.

Rhiannon likes to create little challenges at Easter, traditionally a busy time for vicars.

On Holy Saturday 2020 6 tonnes of top soil arrived on the road in front of the vicarage to create raised beds behind the house.

The morning and afternoon before the Easter Vigil were spent between a spade and a wheelbarrow.

As the Benedictines like to say ‘laborare est orare’

To work is to pray.

In 2021 the work was mostly done by her, but it does make it harder to plan Easter services when it’s also the due date for your baby.

Like Christ rising from the tomb, Apollo appeared very early in the morning on Easter Sunday, and it was our turn to watch the Easter service online, taken by Jono from St Mary’s in the garden.

But the 2021 Holy Week services were the best attended in the last ten years

(even without counting those streaming, which for the Easter 10am was over 100 devices).

– perhaps the Easter story and the message of hope particularly appealed to a people beleaguered by lockdowns.

The resonance seems to have stuck as our Easter service this year was again the best attended in my records;

and the first time since the pandemic it’s really felt to me like we’ve had a full church.

General attendance in church is higher than 2017 and 18, but has not yet returned to pre-pandemic levels.

Many people have left Putney in the last couple of years, and a number of friends have died.

The pandemic has lasted so long it’s not a matter of bouncing back but of starting again, especially in building connections with local young families.

Pastorally, things have moved back towards something like normal.

2021 saw the return of regular baptisms, which continues.

We also had an unusual number of weddings, including some at the heart of our community.

And funerals while still double pre-pandemic levels, were half the number of 2020.

It does, however, seem that Putney is a terribly healthy place to live.

Five of our congregation reached 90 in 2021, and have recently been celebrating 91.

Sadly Roger Power died early this year, shortly after his wife’s memorial service.

We will remember his life with his whole family returning in July.

In another area, 2021 continued to harm the arts.

We continued to support musicians through our recital series raising over £200 each week, while also putting on a free concert for our community.

Very much a win/win situation!

In an effort to rejuvenate and bolster our choir we also took on three choral scholars –

Not only do they provide a strong foundation for the choir, and solo voices, but they’ve also helped gather the choir with the confidence that there will be enough singers to perform an anthem in the service and that you won’t be singing on your own!

Under Nick’s leadership the choir has achieved a much stronger consistency, performing some challenging works, often supplemented by other musical instruments and with his own fine organ playing.

On Christian education, we were able to hold a preparation for Communion course in the second half of the year, and with the return to normal running, Bryony and Ben have re-established the Sunday School.

Small groups also returned to meeting and quiet days found record attendance.

In Lent and Advent I ran talks on the Gospels of Mark and Luke, which forced me to look at some recent Biblical scholarship and were hopefully helpful to others who attended online or in person.

I also co-ordinated the Lent talks for Churches Together in Putney and Roehampton which were online but some great talks including one from a professor involved in research on the pandemic and another by the poet who went on to win the biggest poetry competition in the UK in 2022.

Since the pandemic began pastoral care has been at the forefront of our operations.

Our Soup and cake run ran for over a year delivering to 80 people each week through the first half of 2021, finishing with a summer party at church.

At the time we wondered how we might retain the wonderful synergy of volunteering, cooking and baking, pastoral need and friendship that our operation had created.

Out of this in 2022 we began ‘lunch in the lane’ a free community lunch open to all.

It was immediately successful with over 40 people each week and a strong base of volunteering and donation.

There is every age group from newborns to 90s, and as someone told me escaping work on their lunchbreak and not a churchgoer – “it’s the highlight of my week”.

The playgroup returned and at times in 2021 was operating several times a week.

When restrictions lifted it reached over 100 people in church and continues to be very popular.

With the recitals, that means we have three distinct community events every week, drawing from our diverse community in our parish.

I wonder when was the last time so many people from our community have regularly passed through and come to our church.

The Mission of St Margaret’s is probably stronger today than it has been in a very long time.

It has, though, been difficult maintaining connections with other institutions.

In 2021 we streamed services with schools and Ashmead care home and have done visits where possible.

Falcon School returned for Christmas, as did the Beehive nursery, but Granard cancelled;

We hosted Paddock school for the first time in a long time this Easter and it’s hoped we will begin to restore all those relationships.

The pandemic has shaken every aspect of church and community life.

But I do think with our connections, our increased sense of responsibility and the capability and enthusiasm we’ve developed in the last years, St Margaret’s has not only weathered this storm but is well placed to do new and more exciting things in this new phase of our life.

2023 marks the centenary of St Margaret’s being a parish and having a vicar.

Since the first and greatest, Percy Wallis, who started here in 1918 and became vicar in 1923, I am now only the 10th, having started in 2018.

That speaks to the fact that this parish is a wonderful place to serve and we are delighted to be here.

In the last years we have been focussed on developing the worship space.

Mark Steward’s platform has enabled us to bring our worship forward creating a more communitarian space.

Jonathan Crane devised a new lighting system to supplement it which has enhanced both worship and performance.

Within the next few months we will be continuing this development by bringing in a custom designed nave altar to better suit this space, and also reordering the church with the replacement of pews for chairs.

This will create the flexibility we need for the different activities going on in church as well as creating more opportunities for how we use our worship space.

In the last few months, however, we have also received a legacy which creates a once-in-a-generation opportunity to make a lasting change to our parish.

Elizabeth Worth, on her death, left us a considerable sum from which we will build a new Worth Parish Centre – connecting the church and halls, refurbishing the facilities, and presenting a new front to our parish buildings.

This will be a major undertaking over the next two years, and kindly Jonathan Crane has agreed to manage it;

but on the centenary of our becoming a parish, this new moment in our community life presents an opportunity to increase our capability for all kinds of events, our financial independence, and our resources as a place of worship at the heart of a lively community.

The Good Samaritan has traditionally been read allegorically.

Jerusalem is the heavenly condition;

Jericho the worldly, sinful condition;

The wounded man is humanity

The Good Samaritan Christ;

The inn – the church

The innkeeper – the Holy Spirit

I think that can be helpful.
What I don’t think is true is the frequently held view that being a Christian is about going out and doing good to people.

Christianity is always about building communion;

Which is about developing connections and community and relationships.

Who is my neighbour – isn’t about who should I be good to? Who should I care for?

It’s who should I be involved with?

Who could I put my life, my salvation, in the hands of?

At St Margaret’s there’s a great deal of service, there’s worship, there’s fellowship.

I want this to be the place between Jericho and Jerusalem.

We might be the Samaritan, we might be in the ditch.

God is among us when we care for and are cared for by one another.

When we come together in Christ.

As we look forward to our centenary as a parish, let’s ask ourselves:

‘where can we find more opportunities to show love for one another?’

Amen.

Easter: The light shines in the darkness

One of the most famous lines in the Bible –

The apex of the Midnight Mass service:

The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.

It’s dramatic – it could have come from a novel, or the mouth of Yoda.
It gives the perfect visual image of hope.

But note.

It does not say the darkness was destroyed.

The darkness was no more.

The darkness remains.

This came to my mind because this week I have been compiling the Annual Report for 2021, which receives our full attention next week.

But having reviewed and remembered that year,

it was, you might say, a year of grind – all begun with that epoch long lockdown for the first three months.

There was certainly good that came from it –

But these years of pandemic will be remembered for a generation as a dark time.

I also remember two months into this year saying to you that somehow 2022 was conspiring to be an even more bleak year.

Fortunately, with a little bit of sunshine, a Cup Final penalty shoot-out – everyone loves those right?

And the Eurovision Song Contest it doesn’t seem so bad now.

Does it.

You’ll never walk alone.

Unless you’re a Spaceman.

Or Vladimir Putin.

We join the Gospel story today at a dark moment.

Judas has just in fact gone out into the night to accomplish his deeds of darkness, leaving Jesus with the remaining disciples on their last evening together, before it all goes wrong.

The other Gospels now tell the story of the Last Supper.

St John doesn’t.

In John’s Gospel, instead, Jesus essentially spends four whole chapters telling the disciples to love one another.

Now this is with good reason.

Already, five minutes before, Judas has left plotting murder against his friends;

There’s a reason Jesus waits till Judas has left to speak more intimately with his less-treacherous friends;

But Christians are no better today.

Fifteen years ago I was travelling in Ethiopia with the bishop’s office and we had to pull over and spend three nights in a hotel, because news had leaked out that a church we were going to visit had decided at a PCC meeting they were going to murder the Bishop’s administrator, who was travelling with us.

PCCs in this country are famous for dithering and spending long meetings drinking tea and disagreeing about who should be invited to judge the annual vegetable growing competition.

This PCC certainly seems decisive but perhaps not as Christian as you might hope.

If you would like to join the PCC do speak to me after church –

On the whole, we’ve found a rather healthy middle ground between minutiae and murder, which is striking in its absence from the Annual Report.

Even closer to home, this week Martyn Percy, the Dean of Christchurch, Oxford, has left the Church of England, after the University hounded him out, and the Church didn’t adequately support him.

He stated baldly on leaving: the Church is “an unsafe place to work”.

St John, we might surmise, should have talked more about the love we ought to have for one another.

His instruction in this Gospel passage is worth repeating, for the strength of their articulation.

Firstly, from Jesus: ‘as I have loved you, you also should love one another’.

The call to follow Jesus is to love as he has loved.

Loving one another has the character of the divine.

There is a level of equivalence between our ability to love and our identity and success as a Christian.

Secondly, ‘by this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another’.

Our mission, our evangelism, our reputation is all defined by the love that we have.

Between these two statements we might say that both our depth and integrity as a church, and also our success and public face, entirely depend on whether we are able to love one another.

But I think we can go a little farther than this.

The great medieval theologian Thomas Aquinas writes that ‘Love and love only is the fulfilment of everything that is [asked by Christ].

As all the boughs of a tree proceed from one root, so all the virtues are produced from one love…

The highest, the only proof of love, is to love our adversary, as did the Truth himself, who while he suffered on the cross showed his love for his persecutors.’

So we should love one another, even our enemies.

But, as Aquinas continues: ‘of which love the consummation is given in the next words: “Greater love has no one than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.”

Our Lord came to die for his enemies, but he says that he’s going to lay down his life for his friends, to show that

by loving we are able to gain over our enemies, so that they who persecute us are by anticipation our friends’.

I’ve often preached on the verse “Greater love hath no man this – to lay down his life for his friends” – it’s loved by the Army for obvious reasons.

But what an interpretation here by Aquinas:

That when Jesus says it – he doesn’t mean just his friends, the disciples in that anxious room.

He includes his enemies – but not as enemies – just as ‘anticipated friends’.

I wonder if we might be able to greet more people we meet, not just as

another face on the lane,

a person who probably doesn’t want to speak to us;

someone who is very different

someone who might delay us in where we’re going;

but as an ‘anticipated friend’.

And while a light shining in the darkness is a perfect visual image of hope,

what could be a more practical living out of hope than by treating everyone, even your grumpy neighbour, your mother-in-law, members of

St Margaret’s PCC, as an ‘anticipated friends’.

I hope you enjoy the Annual Report and perhaps even come next week to hear more of the detail.

The darkness remains.

But there is always a light shining in the darkness,

And the darkness has not overcome it.

Christian hope is based on friendship.

Friendship with one another, here and now.

Anticipated friendship with all those we have not had time to love yet!

If we can attain it, friendship with those who have done us harm.

Above all, friendship with God.

Who at an Easter some two thousand years ago anticipated our friendship, in demonstrating a love that is not bound by time or place;

That has survived 2021,

Numerous pandemics and wars;

68 years of Eurovision;

And anticipates an eternal ending in the heavenly city where there is no more death, or mourning or crying or pain.

But for now continues to draw people together here in Putney.

In love, in Christ, in friendship, longstanding and anticipated.

Amen.

Easter: Can you hear the tide – always falling and rising?

Sermon by the Revd Dr Brutus Green
Readings: Acts 9:36-end; Psalm 23; Revelation 7:9-end; John 10:22-30

I am the daughter of the village chief
We are descended from voyagers
Who found their way across the world
They call me
I've delivered us to where we are
I have journeyed farther
I am everything I've learned and more
Still, it calls me
And the call isn't out there at all,
it's inside me
It's like the tide
Always falling and rising

I’ll stop there just in case someone is tempted to burst into song. Fortunately, Oberon isn’t here or he would because Moanna’s his favourite Disney film. He has in fact been on a forced diet of Disney films because I can’t bear any more Paw Patrol or Peppa Pig.

But what we have with these Disney films – And I could have started with Hercules singing, “I Will Go the Distance”, or Simba in The Lion King, “I Just can’t Wait to be King”, Rapunzel in Tangled with a motley crew singing “I’ve Got a Dream”; Disney gives us the classic representation of the Bildungsroman – The novel of education. Move Over Little Women, James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and To Kill a Mockingbird; John Hughes’ 80s High School movies are a close second, but the dominant storyteller of Coming of Age is Disney. “Let it Go” I hear you cry. And there – the strange confluence of a song on the lips of a magical princess, every child in the country, and an anthem of LGBTQI+ freedom.

Back to Moana: ‘And the call isn’t out there at all, it’s inside me.’ When we think of what a religious calling might be, what it is to be called by God we tend to think of it as an external call: We think of the prohet Samuel hearing the voice of the Lord: “Speak Lord, for your servant is listening”

St Augustine puts it differently – in his Confessions – (a classical and Christian proto-Bildungsroman) He famously writes: ‘late have I loved thee! For behold thou were within me, and I outside’ Augustine recognised that we don’t find God out there – out in the world. That is largely where we are enjoying or not – the world of sense and desire. God, we find within, and in finding God we also find our true self. Our calling is discovered – or ignored – in prayer. A feeling of rightness, an inexorable sense of it must be this way – The returning, niggling voice that demands some action of us; that is sorry – despite our cynicism or fear – for something we’ve done. And it may not be classic bedside prayer – just a 3am 40 yard stare into the middle distance past a television tentatively asking ‘do you want to keep watching’, which you haven’t noticed. Or – ‘when an underground train, in the tube, stops too long between stations’ A moment when you ‘come to yourself’.

Mostly it’s easier to spend time with things or other people – ‘I sought thee outside and in my unloveliness fell upon those lovely things that thou hast made. Thou were with me and I was not with thee.’ We don’t give ourselves very much time to hear this call.

But in Augustine’s words the call is insistent; We feel it always – even if unacknowledged – Like Moana hears the tide ‘always falling and rising’ ‘Thou didst call and cry to me and break open my deafness: and thou didst send forth thy beams and shine upon me and chase away my blindness: thou didst breathe fragrance upon me, and I drew in my breath and do pant for thee: I tasted thee, and now hunger and thirst for thee: thou didst touch me, and I have burned for thy peace.’ Vocation has the character of moral compunction.

There’s a great similarity I think between the call of God and a midlife crisis. I think that’s why in the 1999 film Fight Club, before Brad Pitt starts a middle-aged men’s boxing ring, he’s attending daily self-help and support groups. Looking for intimacy, something real, a way out of the crushing solitariness and meaninglessness that modern life creates. Having watched the end of the film, I recommend Church over punching people in the face. But it’s about breaking out – of all that kills the soul. Finding the bright field, the pearl of great price – the thing that puts everything else into perspective.

And what we find in these Disney stories is youths leaving parents to find a transcendent parent:
Moana has to leave home, breaking her father’s commandment, to find her way at the end of which she discovers the great Earth Mother; Hercules has to leave his adopted father to discover his true father Zeus and heavenly home; Rapunzel has to realise her mother is in fact an abductress abusive witch to find her real parents, the king and queen; Just like James Joyce speaks of ‘the spell of arms and voices: the white arms of roads, their promise of close embraces and the black arms of tall ships that stand against the moon, their tale of distant nations… [and the voices] they call to me, their kinsman, making ready to go, shaking the wings of their exultant and terrible youth.

The call is always to leave – somewhere, something. There is a restlessness to the Christian vocation because this life is an ‘exile’. Our home is with our heavenly Father. Leaving is something that comes naturally in exultant and terrible youth, but it should also belong to age. TS Eliot reminds us ‘Old men ought to be explorers… We must be still and still moving/ Into another intensity/For a further union, a deeper communion.’

The spiritual journey; finding, following your calling, is both within and without. Both a wild adventure and the intensity of meeting the stillness that is inside of you. I suggest that the godparents divide this task. Some may be more suited to wild adventure, others to intense stillness. At 3, wild adventure is perhaps more natural, but I have also encountered that intense stillness – screaming along to ACDC’s Back in Black on full volume to try and wake a 3 year-old who’s decided to really commit to an after-lunch nap.

People find it hard to articulate what it means to be a Christian today. The British are especially reticent – somewhere between being on an electoral roll, knowing the main hymns and when to stand up, and ticking off your key life events in an ecclesial setting. There is that voice though – ‘My sheep hear my voice’. It is often – I think, a still small voice, – and there are so many things in this world that will drown it out. It may also be easier in the days of our ‘exultant and terrible youth’, when we are less choked by the cares of this world; And free enough to change direction to hear that call and follow it;

But we heard last week how Saul turned from murdering Christians to leading them. This week Peter takes centre stage – (well done Peter for orchestrating at your family’s baptism one of the few passages in the New Testament where Peter comes off well) Here he raises Tabitha from the dead. Tabitha, which in Greek is Dorcas. (I bet she kept that quiet.)

These great Christians hear their calling, like Augustine, only after a number of failures: ‘Late have I loved thee’ So we don’t have to be a princess or an adolescent to hear our calling; We don’t need an animal side-kick. But we do need to find time to listen. We need to have an openness of mind to believe there is a purpose to all this and we might have a place within it. And we need the help of people around us to understand what that calling might lead us to, to give us the strength to pursue our vocation and our dream. It matters that Moana discovers her ancestors were voyagers; It’s St Augustine’s mother, whose example of faith returns him to church; We appoint godparents specifically to be people who will help us discover and nurture our calling.

So why not take time today, tonight, this week. To listen. My sheep hear my voice. What is the disquiet in your heart? What is the thing you have not done? What is the thing you have done? Where is the relationship that needs repairing? What is the next adventure you are being called to? Are you in your exultant youth making ready to go? Old men ought to be explorers. Can you hear the tide – always falling and rising?

Easter: the Horror!

Sermon by the Revd Dr Brutus Green

‘Do not be afraid; I know that you are looking for Jesus who was crucified.’

Easter is a confrontation with fear. When I was 22 I went swimming on a hot day in a pool in remote Queensland. We’d hiked for a day to what is the tallest waterfall in Australia. It was beautiful – eirenic. The water refreshing. Natural curiosity and that irrepressible desire to flirt with disaster led me to swim close to the waterfall. At which point I looked up at that 200m of water that was falling with the force of concrete on the churning waters below; It was as if a mad axe-murderer had broken into my paradise. Being an average swimmer, I naturally reverted to the only stroke I can do to a textbook standard: the flailing windmill, also known as the drowning man; Only to find myself being sucked backwards into the waterfall. Reader I survived. But only by inching my way out with a furious energy that only terror creates.

Fear changes with age. When we are young fear is very often about what is overwhelming. There’s a book called “How Loud is a Lion” that I’m banned from reading. “Too scary, daddy” But children also play with fear. A little fear is delightful before it becomes too much and you’re plagued with parental regret and a child who won’t go to bed. Teenagers I think face fear at its most elemental. As adults we’re mostly so tethered by formalised relationships, property and possessions, a career history, debts and savings that there’s a sort of security. Putting the bins out, paying the mortgage, the school run. Even if one aspect of our lives falls apart there’s enough terra firma to prevent our lives dissolving too quickly. But, and you’ll know this if you’ve watched shows like Skins or Euphoria – or Sixteen Candles – Teenagers have fewer fixed points, less resilience, more vulnerability, more dependence; As a teenager, feelings of being overwhelmed, of being totally untethered to the world come quite naturally.

But adults are not immune. An accusation of crime, a fatal diagnosis, can plunge our lives from the gentle warmth of sitcoms and period drama to the ice-cold of Kafka and Dostoevsky – where our life is no longer our own; Where the pull of the waterfall dragging us back in and under has become inexorable. And even if, for now, the thrum of the waterfall is gentle, the scene idyllic, our stroke – elegant, the mood – period drama, The undertow is there. It is coming.

The Easter story is about fear. The disciples have gone through the stuff of nightmares – night arrests by the secret police. The torture and mock-trial of their leader. It’s all very twentieth-century. And after Jesus' grizzly execution he returns baring his wounds like a Hammer-horror zombie.

The resurrection is about the joy of a returned friend, butthe accounts are all peppered with fear and trembling at the return of the dead. Freud’s definition of the uncanny – a big influence on literature and film – was of something familiar that had been repressed, which has now come to light. There’s nothing more uncanny than a friend returning from the dead. You might say, the resurrection is the beginning of the modern genre of horror.

Horror villains in different ways embody what we reject. So vampires come from Transylvania (also, incidentally, where St Paul comes from), where Europe borders with the barbarous East. They bring with them fear of immigration, and otherness. “Send them back to Rwanda!” I hear you cry. Since Bram Stoker’s 1897 Dracula, male vampires are mostly camp, females sexually aggressive, when demure and submissive was all the rage. More generally, in villains of horror we find mental illness, physical deformity, foreigners and above all the dead. All those who are forced out of polite society, but return with violence.

Society always has margins – the people who make us uncomfortable. And we are good at keeping them out of sight. So the very elderly, the mentally ill, the very sick and dying live at a slight remove, while vagrants and criminals mostly get locked up or moved on. Seeing the margins casts doubt about how good, how civilised we really are. In the margins it’s the rule of strength not the rule of law, and it’s this anxiety that horror plays upon. What if things fell apart and we fell into this world? What if this world rose-up and took us on? Probably something like what it feels to live in parts of Ukraine right now.

These questions are at the heart of the Gospel. Jesus associated with prostitutes and lepers. He was homeless and somewhat eccentric. He stood trial as a criminal. He was mutilated and killed.

But then resurrection. He returned bearing wounds that show the violence our anxiety is capable of.

BUT Jesus is not out for revenge. Figures of horror want their pound of flesh - they want Old Testament justice. But Jesus stands among his killers and says ‘peace be with you’. Jesus comes from the margins in order to bring to conflict a resolution – to raise up the poor; to show that love casts out fear.

Our faith asks us to refuse to make people feel excluded or rejected, whatever their misfortune or their choices – to try to heal suffering and anxiety; to not react with fear. The words Jesus says more than any other in the Gospels, “Do not be afraid”.

Following Christ to the cross means confronting this shadow, facing our fears. The resurrection is the promise that we will not be left in the shadow world to which society pushes the ill, the dying, the bereaved, the mentally unwell, the homeless; the fearful figures of horror; that madness, sickness and death are not the end of us all.

The resurrection is not the obliteration of what we fear. Christ keeps his wounds. He is part Zombie. God isn’t about perfection; redemption is for things that are broken. The body of Christ is a broken body. But fear will pass away. ‘Perfect love casts out fear.’

So as we face our own anxieties, Jesus says: “Do not be afraid”. Our life is hidden with Christ – and if God is on our side – of what can we be afraid?

The 2020s remain in the shadow of Good Friday. Caught in the undertow of sickness, war, death, and the cost of living. In the last two years, we have all had to confront a little horror – Do we still believe? Do we love enough to lead someone else out of the tomb?

Easter is about hope. When we say “Jesus is risen. Alleluia!” we are affirming Christ’s victory: of good over evil, of life over death and of hope over despair. Of society made whole – the margins returned to the centre, restored. At Easter, perfect love casts out fear. At Easter, love is stronger than death. Jesus is risen. Alleluia.

Easter Vigil: Honest to God

Sermon by the Revd Dr Brutus Green

‘In my end is my beginning’ The inscription at the place where the poet TS Eliot is buried. It’s the final line from one of his poems, which some might think is a bit ‘showy’ but it’s his funeral – so to speak – and so we might just let it lie. In my end is my beginning. It sounds poetic, a little obtuse; And he was both of those things.

But it’s a way in to start thinking about resurrection. Chronologically, it’s straightforward – in my end is my beginning. The end of this life takes us to the next. This is our hope: that following death our eternal life with God begins. Even Jesus spoke little about what this will mean in practice, and then with metaphors – but we will be with our Father and Jesus will lead us there.

But there is also a play on words here. End can mean the last point, but it can also mean the purpose, the reason. As when we ask ‘to what end’ or ‘the end justifies the means’. The end is not just chronology but the result, the point.

So in our purpose, in the principles by which we live, our sense of meaning, is our beginning, where we start from. This is as true now as it will be in eternity. We live today, hopefully, according to the things we think matter. These last years have shone a spotlight on what matters to us. We probably know now better than ever what we really care about. Many have left London or looked for more space, more outside space; Some will have moved into Putney with all its green spaces. If we reassess what really matters, that can be a new beginning. We are so far from 2019 now – there’s no sense of recovery any more. But whatever it is we have learned about ourselves, our family, our work, our environment. Hopefully, it’s something to make a new beginning.

In the same way, when we talk about the end of a person’s life, we might mean two things. 
 We might be talking about the last moments.
 We might be talking about the overall meaning on which the life hangs; 
 the ultimate end of our life being the point, the purpose.
 Coming through Good Friday is a reckoning with both of those questions. Have we identified with Christ and reckoned with our own mortality. Have we made a decision about what it all means, whether it’s true – Now is the time to decide in 2022 on this in-between night; Do we stand with the scoffers – Jesus is just a man in the wrong place at the wrong time. Or do we dare to believe. This might be the Son of God?

The first line of that same poem, and also inscribed at Eliot’s place of rest, is the reverse of the last: ‘In my beginning is my end’. The service tonight began with the creation from Genesis – a reminder that we begin from the Imago Dei: ‘Let us make humankind in our image’ just as we will pass from ashes to ashes and dust to dust; from dust you were made; to dust you will return – But from that beginning, when God created humanity with all creation and called it ‘good’ – we know that we are created for a purpose; by God and for God. Though if we believe that it’s all chance and chemistry – that we are the product of genes and hormones brought together by coincidence – Then our beginning is without meaning or purpose. In our beginning is our end.

This weekend we have been considering honesty. On Maundy Thursday – whether we are honest in our friendships? Do we deny or betray? Do we just look for friends who are like us? Who confirm our prejudices and ask little from us? Do we love? Do we serve?

On Good Friday – are we an honest society? Are we a just society? Do we condone leaders who lie to protect themselves? Who wash their hands of responsibility? Who commit or allow acts of violence against innocents? Where is it Good Friday today every day? Do we have the energy to keep caring about this world?

Tonight, Christ rises from the tomb; As tradition has it, he harrows hell, unlocking the spirits from captivity; Let me ask the question – are we honest to God? Do we emerge on this Easter night, after plague and war and death, Do we emerge with faith? Are we rising with Christ?

Some of us have been baptised more than 80 years. Formed in the promises of loved ones long dead. Are we faithful to those promises, to a lifetime’s effort to find meaning and a way to live in the light of faith?

The cynic’s answer that seems mature: ‘things just happen’ ‘make the best of it’, forecloses the struggle that makes life noble; That gives purpose, That can say through grief – even this short life is infinite in value and not without meaning and hope; That can point and say this is beautiful, this is true, this is good – And not because it serves our desire, but because it speaks of something beyond us. Something infinite, something inscribed on something more even than stone, something like the palms of God.

Mostly we don’t have time to consider how honest we are about our faith; What we really think about God – and the terrible things that happen down here – What we really think about Jesus – and the hope of resurrection – The hope for some sort of redemption.

But tonight is one of those moments, where we might just whisper alleluia and mean it. Where we might put down the myriad woes and troubles, and practical questions that occupy five quarters of our deteriorating brains. And say – yes, perhaps this is what it’s all about. And where else would I be except here on this night. What could be more important than celebrating this hope, this gift, this promise: And perhaps, yes, even I can receive grace, perhaps I too am loved by God. Have this hope set before me. Share somehow in resurrection.

Can we be honest to God? Can we say yes to God? Yes to eternity “I have not given up on God and I know that God will not give up on me.” That this is not an idle tale, But a story of faith which has touched the lives of billions; That has shaken the walls that surround us here with 150 years of hymns and Easters celebrated. That has seen book after book of births registered, of faithful lives remembered. Whose bell has called us to worship, as it rings out with joy on every Easter Sunday, as it will toll for our passing.

In my beginning is my end. In my end is my beginning.

Good Friday: Honesty in Society

Sermon by the Revd Dr Brutus Green

Imagine a Ukrainian soldier driving a tank to the outskirts of say Mariupol. She meets a Russian soldier coming in the opposite direction. Both are very likely Christian. Both may have attended a Maundy Thursday service led by their chaplain, (I have already read of the death of at least one Ukrainian chaplain) Both heard the commandment to love one another. Today they meet on Good Friday in the heat of battle.

On Maundy Thursday we considered how in washing the disciples’ feet, Jesus turns the normal pyramid of human society upside down. That as power, wealth, status narrow as we rise up through society to a single point, Jesus, at the pinnacle, Immanuel – God with us, chooses instead to take the form of a slave and perform the lowest function. Jesus therefore commands greater honesty in our relationships and asks that we become abseilers rather than social climbers. His is the business of turning pyramids around.

On Good Friday, this becomes a demonstration against our public life. Jesus refuses to engage in power struggle – to argue before Herod and Pilate. Jesus is turned into a public spectacle, but he remains with those at the very bottom of the pyramid. It is, if you like, a public demonstration, that God is not to be found in power, wealth and status, but in the absence of these things. God is found at the point of need and compassion, in the fragility of being human.

For St John, the account is very visual. The title of many works of art, “Ecce Homo” – behold – the man! And this is after Pilate has dressed him up to look ridiculous – a parody of a king. How did people react? Do the Jews think Pilate was mocking the idea of a Jewish king? They are forced into the awkward and embarrassing confession ‘we have no king but Caesar’. Was Pilate deliberately making Jesus look ridiculous in a last ditched effort to have him released? But Jesus is the king of the Jews, as the board on his cross will say in all languages – Hebrew and Latin and Greek.

So the situation is ironic. Half the people are pretending Jesus is a king, but not theirs; Half are claiming they have no king but Caesar. And there is the man – a king, but not as we know it. But it’s not ironic – true kingship is found here: in poverty, suffering and humility. The crown of thorns is the truest, most royal crown of all – Because divine majesty is the service of all – The highest point on the pyramid in the lowest place at the base.

With regard to friendship, Jesus, in washing feet, in giving the New Commandment to love one another, requires a new honesty. That friendship should not be about securing or advancing our place in the pyramid. And on Maundy Thursday we saw dishonest friendship fail: Judas puts money before friendship. Peter won’t risk anything for friendship. The disciples scatter when they come under threat. Only Jesus remains true.

On Good Friday we see how honesty fairs in public life. Herod, historically, was infamous as an opportunistic leader. He didn’t have the backing of the religious authorities, and wasn’t popular. Jesus is a threat to his insecure position; Herod uses him to make friends with Pilate. Herod has, of course, already had John the Baptist killed on the whim of his wife. We shouldn’t expect honesty or integrity here.

Pilate, I feel, has a sort of impotent tragic feel to him. He knows what the right thing to do is. He understands that the Jewish leaders are acting out of jealousy. But again he makes justice subservient to expedience. He puts the politics of keeping the people with power happy, before the truth of the case before him. ‘What is truth?’ he feebly asks. As for the Jewish authorities, they have no interest in truth. They will lie and kill to protect their position. And disappointingly the crowds are easily led and shift all too quickly from welcoming Christ to calling for his death.

Truth in public life has come a long way. But it’s not unheard of to see expedience come before truth; Both here and abroad we are not free of corruption, Or of decisions being made that end lives and create huge unhappiness for thousands. Just as Jesus calls us personally to develop honesty in our friendships, so he calls us to build a more honest and fair society. Or if that proves impossible, at least to pray for it; And to pray for the individuals who for the sake of honesty and justice fall foul of the power of crowds or politics. Perhaps today two Christian tank commanders will end up engaging in Ukraine. That is a tragedy. The cause remains the Herods, Pilates and authorities of our day. Until the reign of Christ, truth, and with it justice and mercy, will always be in the hands of corruptible, fallible people. The Passion reminds us of our need for transformation, prayer and vigilance. Amen.

Maundy Thursday: Honesty in Friendship

Sermon by the Revd Dr Brutus Green

Each year I try to impress upon us the benefit of moving through these services in Holy Week. It has been a practice since the early church to celebrate the Triduum, the Holy days of Maundy Thursday, Good Friday and Easter. They form a new Passover for Christians, as following Christ in the way of the Cross, we identify with him, hear – inwardly digest – the story, and make that movement from death into life, from the hill outside the city, to the empty garden tomb. In our imagination, in our prayer, it’s an entry point into this central narrative, without which, Christianity has nothing to say and no purpose. But we don’t enter it as Christ, or as a beloved disciple, following faithfully throughout. In hearing the story, we identify in our uncertainty, our impatience, our weakness with Judas – betraying with a kiss. In our fearfulness of exposure, of suffering, with Peter. And because our nature and our circumstances compromise us in all the good that we would like to do, we are as likely to be crying out ‘Crucify’ as ‘Why, what evil hath he done? And it’s important that, as on Palm Sunday, we say those words together, in order that in penitence, with an open heart, we may come back before him.

The disciples themselves argue who of them is the greatest and ask to sit at Jesus’ right and left. That honour is given to the thieves – and if we are able to make that journey through our own suffering, it is our hope to be able to whisper the words of the good thief at our end: ‘Jesus remember me, when you come into your kingdom.’ That we might hear the blessed return: ‘today, this day, you will be with me in paradise.’

For those of us with the stamina to take this journey through the cross, the theme for our reflections will be honesty. Tonight raises questions about honesty in friendship; in the promises made by the disciples to Jesus. Good Friday raises questions of honesty about our public life, which in both the great – or catastrophic events – and the petty – remain as they ever were. And Easter raises questions of honesty about our faith. How honest can we be about what we believe, what we hope for, what we feel for and expect from God. In every aspect of his life and teaching Jesus calls us to honesty. It’s honesty that gets him killed.

The first half of John’s Gospel is Jesus dealing with the world; the disciples are barely mentioned. From chapter 18 we have the passion and resurrection. It’s this section, beginning with today’s Gospel, known as the farewell discourses that Jesus addresses the disciples. And the central point that Jesus makes throughout is that being a Christian, following Jesus, means turning upside down normal human relationships.

Normal society, from the corridors of power to your local bookclub –has a pyramid structure. Wealth, entitlement, connection, resources, sometimes ability, all narrow to give certain individuals precedence. As we go down the pyramid the numbers increase, and the responsibility and power lessen. All organisations work like this: businesses, football clubs, the Church, most friendship groups. Human social life naturally organises itself as a pyramid.

At the bottom are the unremarkable guys who essentially just turn up. And buried under that first layer out of sight are the excluded, the marginalised, those who don’t fit. This is the layer, the rung below the bottom rung, that Jesus associates with. But this is also the place from which he says Christians must begin. The act of foot-washing is the act of a slave. It appals the disciples. Peter is deeply uncomfortable.

Jesus is the Messiah, the king, God incarnate. How can he show deference to the disciples? And who then will show deference to them? In the Synoptic Gospels there is a sort of inner-circle of disciples – Peter, James and John – who get special privileges, the explanations of parables, the transfiguration. They’re kind of the mean girls of the New Testament. Then there’s the Big 12. Then there’s everyone else. So even in this proto-church we see a nascent pyramid forming.

It’s this pyramid that Jesus turns upside down – By coming down from the pinnacle of the pyramid and taking the part of the slave. We see it also in the trials when he shows no deference to Pilate or Herod, where he had readily served not only his disciples but all who had come to him in weakness.  And to us it should be disarming. Think of the people you respect. The email address, or phone number, you read and are excited to hear from. The invitation you will immediately accept. Love isn’t just about being nice, the benefactor condescending. It’s about converting our social brain away from seeking out those people who have the things that we like and value; It’s about resisting that urge to accept the deference of those we feel ourselves superior to. The insidious pleasure we might feel when someone calls us ‘sir’.

The point is not to be perverse, or revolutionary; But to understand that our natural instinct to react to the signals given to us by power, wealth and status, is unhelpful; is not Gospel-driven. There are better ways of valuing people; of relating to people.

God does not see humanity as some kind of pyramid; A scramble to the top, where only the top 1%, or people who can properly pronounce quinoa, matter. But in every human situation we will have to realign our perception in order to exchange our worldly vision for Gospel vision. And ultimately this is about finding a new honesty of relationship. So that we’re not basing our friendships on finding people like us; Comfortable, non-challenging relationships; Relationships that make us feel more important, or valuable; That push us up the pyramid. Where are you right now in the Putney pyramid?

Honest friendships are built on mutual openness, a desire to know, understand and enjoy one another. The sort of love that seeks out difference in order to enlargen ourselves, our hearts; That seeks out weakness, in order to strengthen; That seeks our vulnerability, in order to stand with it.

Our challenge is to see the pyramid in which we operate, and then look the other way. To gird ourselves with a towel and start washing feet. Not because we’re better and have something to offer; But because those who have no one to wash their feet have most need of it. And because when the pyramid is turned upside down, suddenly everyone is lifted up.

There is great value in watching American high school movies. Always they are set up with very clear social hierarchies – from the jocks and cheerleaders, the Mean girls – through the wannabes and geeks – down to the outsiders and rejected – those regarded as weirdos and embarrassing. Teenagers in film are always presented as a sort of natural animal kingdom. And the point of these films usually from Breakfast Club to Mean Girls to High School Musical is almost always to overcome these cliques and raise up the lowly; To break down the hierarchy. Perhaps it’s highschool drama that most reveals the Christian backdrock to American culture and society.

Famously in John’s Gospel there are no sacraments. No description of baptism, no Last Supper. It may be that John thought charitable service was more important than liturgical services. I suspect it’s more that John presumed that his readers had contact with the Church and its practices, as well as the other Gospels. But in the commandment to love one another, in the physical demonstration Jesus performs in washing feet, can be seen a theology of the Sacraments. That in loving service we come to belong to one another – That in washing the feet of the poor we are baptized. In loving service we find the unity of the church – That in washing the feet of the weak we drink from the one cup of Christ. In loving service we know and become like Christ. That in washing the feet of our brothers and sisters we are made one body. In loving service we become friends – with one another, with God.

The Church is a funny place. I cannot really reconcile myself to the fact that there are bishops who live in palaces. The Gospel is a constant challenge to us. Do not let this community become a privileged members club. Don’t let us become a pyramid of power and status: Let us wash one another’s feet and embrace the humility that gives way to equality; The honesty that puts down the mighty from their seat And exalts the humble and meek; That fills the hungry with good things and send the rich empty away. To befriend the friendless; that is to follow Christ. Amen.

Palm Sunday - CONFLICT

The central theme of Luke’s account of Jesus is about conflict. From Simeon prophesying over the baby Jesus at the beginning of the Gospel: ‘this child is destined for the falling and rising of many in Israel, and to be a sign that will be opposed’. The Gospel is a sword that divides – it creates friends and enemies.

 The passion begins at the Last Supper, the celebration of the Passover – the formational festival of Israel and a time when the Jews are gathered in Jerusalem. But we see a series of alliances made and unmade, betrayals and denials. On Palm Sunday they celebrate Jesus’ entry. Days later they cry for his death. The disciples jostle for position, but Peter will deny him, Judas betray him. One thief on the cross will mock him, the other bears witness to him. Jesus is the force of division that reveals the true hearts of men and women. All believe they are serving God, but those of whom most is expected, fail most spectacularly. 

 And, typically of Luke’s Gospel the true disciples surprise us: Simon of Cyrene becomes a surrogate disciple. Women from the city mourn his suffering. A condemned, dying thief bears witness. A Gentile Centurion is led by the cross to worship. The previously unknown Joseph of Arimathea steps apart from the Jewish leadership to care for Jesus in death. 

We all have a different idea of God and who God’s people are. The passion answers these questions for Christians: God is love, and his people are not whom you expect. As we follow the Passion today, its story reads us as we read it. It is the judge of our hearts, but most especially a judgement on violence and the failure to love in our world today.

Passion Sunday: Unconventional Christianity

Christianity is unconventional. This is tricky because, on the face of it, the Church of England, seems about as conventional as you get. But it isn’t always. And perhaps it shouldn’t be.

If you want a mental image of the Church of England – think of an enormous tanker, laden down with 500 years of history and buildings. It’s moving forwards but its turning circle is about 100 nautical miles, so it takes time. Also, the bridge is facing the wrong direction so the captain is constantly looking backwards with only a little wing mirror by which they can see the way ahead. And the captain is actually a committee made up of 108 people, who have different destinations in mind, but all have one hand on the wheel. 

That is quite unconventional,  but being a Christian is unconventional in a different way.

St Paul has, as he says, confidence in the flesh. To talk in today’s terms: He’s from a good family. He has a sofa, not a settee. He went to the right school. Side note: Having grown up in Wales I find the English obsession with schools fascinating. Only 2 years ago I was asked which school I went to. The only place in the world two middle aged men would discuss which school they went to is England. But St Paul is one of us. He puts down his napkin after having pudding, places his spectacles on the chimneypiece and listens to the wireless. He doesn’t put down his serviette after having dessert, put his glasses on the mantelpiece and listen to the radio. Hell no. He wears a recognisable tie, His scarf is the right shade of blue; St Paul drives a Tesla. St Paul has confidence in the flesh.

And yet, whatever gains he had, these he has come to regard as loss because of Christ. In fact, he regards all of it as loss: the school, society, the car – because of Christ. And for Christ he has lost all of them – he regards them as trash – (If you’ll forgive the Americanism – but trash, garbage has more force than rubbish) In order that he may gain Christ, not trusting in those other things for who he is. But even more than this he wants to become like Christ – and not just like Christ, but Christ at the point of his death – In order that he may attain the resurrection. Here he draws back – he has not reached that place yet. He has not achieved the total self-giving love. But he presses on towards it.

So St Paul is quite a conventional figure – a pillar of society. And yet he regards what we might call ‘acceptance’, ‘standing’, ‘status’ as trash, as he seeks to become more like someone who became a pariah, a criminal, a dead man.

Now two things follow from this. The first is about our sense of identity. Olchfa Comprehensive may be one of the finest schools in West Glamorgan, but it should not define me, nor should any degrees, or jobs, or qualification. Another peculiar British habit is to fill your downstairs lavatory – (note my shrewd choice of words) – with family accolades, in a semi-ironic, non-ironic way. Having them in your lounge, sorry sitting room, would seem a bit brash.

That’s all fine of course. You’ve got to put those photos somewhere. Our downstairs loo is mostly hats and a beret from different army dress, alongside photos of Rhiannon on stage ranging from the trashy to the monstrous.  But the point is to sit light to all this stuff. You are not your CV. Your success and your value is not relative to your neighbour or your peer. (And not that sort of peer.) Our identity, our confidence, should be in Christ. We should probably have a picture of the electric chair, the lethal injection in our toilet. I’m not more important because of my school, my qualifications, my job;  We don’t earn our value. Our value lies in the fact that Christ loves us. You are loved.  That only makes you priceless.

The second thing is about how we use our resources. The New Testament has some pretty challenging things to say here. The short summary is that we should be directing all our resources – or as much as we can – to God’s kingdom. Our resources, our time, our money, our talents, are given to us to build the kingdom of heaven. 

You’ll notice I didn’t say the Church. The people of St Margaret’s have always been a generous community. This church is sustained and operates because of the congregation’s giving. We couldn’t do the things we do, playgroups, recitals, lunches, we couldn’t have the music we have at our services if it wasn’t for people giving money, time and their skill. Giving is at the centre of the life of any church. And from the current position of the Church of England, it’s clear that parishes will only keep their vicar, only maintain their building, only stay open, if they have the people and the finances to be self-sufficient. There is a rising pressure on clergy and churches to fund themselves, which makes some hard-pressed. Don’t take your church for granted! 

But our resources are needed more widely than that. Especially if your treasurer is Judas Iscariot. And it’s not just about some idealised version of ‘the poor’. In the letter to the Galatians, St Paul speaks of the fruit of the Spirit, which is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. This is how we build the kingdom of God. And our resources are well used when they are applied to these ends. When preparing our family budget perhaps we should write in: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. Don’t be like the local Whatsapp group bemoaning cleaners raising their price by £2 per hour. Think about your time, your money. How are you creating love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control?

Giles Fraser, not the most conventional of priests, commented this week on the Queen walking in to Prince Philip’s memorial service with Prince Andrew. No one was going to congratulate her on walking in with him. Any member of her family would have been a better choice. Prince Andrew is a pariah and will never recover. The Queen, in her usual understated way, in choosing him, has demonstrated to the nation the Christian virtue of forgiveness, Which has to start in the family. Very likely most people will think he is a poor choice –  They will judge, gossip and think less of her – and that is usually a commendation in the Christian life. And – do you know what –  We are an unforgiving people. Our cancel culture, our raking back over adolescent tweets, our fear of saying the wrong thing – All speak of a society that struggles with forgiveness. The symbol of an unimpeachable woman walking in to church with a disgraced son, is one which speaks volumes to me about Christianity.

Being a Christian calls us to an unconventional life. You may have confidence in the flesh. You may have a head start and already feel like you don’t really belong in this world; A feeling of dread as you walk down to the river. Our role model is an outcast, a criminal, a dead man. If you can bear it – let’s aim to be more like that. And maybe it doesn’t matter what you call the sofa, the loo, your evening meal; Maybe we can regard all that as trash. Maybe we too can be unconventional.

2022, for all our hopes, is laying a bigger trail of victims in its wake even than 2021. Now is the time to ask what exactly our faith requires of us. Now is the time to ask how are we using our resources to fund the kingdom of God. Now is the time to ask where are we planting fruit in love, In joy, in peace, in patience, in kindness, in generosity, in faithfulness, in gentleness, and in self-control. Amen.

Lent 3: Telling the Stories of God

Today’s readings are a catalogue of disasters. As Paul rather casually notes “God was not pleased with most of them, and they were struck down in the wilderness.” We have twenty-three thousand dying in a single day because of sexual immorality, which seems like a lot,  And then there are the deaths by serpents which is quite exotic; In the Gospel we had the Galileans murdered by the authorities and to add insult to injury, their blood mixed with their sacrifices, desecrating the Temple. Before those crushed by the falling tower of Siloam. All in all, that’s quite a range of carnage from arbitrary and accidental, to state-sanctioned violence, to the hazards of nature and divine judgement. Death comes in many forms to God’s people. Plus ce change – you might say.

There is, though, a totally different message at play about the cause of death. I’m not about to start twirling my moustache and prodding your little grey cells. The tower of Siloam didn’t have a butler as far as we know. And, anyway, you shouldn’t trust a Reverend Green who might at any time appear in the conservatory, with the lead piping. But in St Paul’s account which follows the Hebrew Scripture, the deaths in the wilderness are attributed to God. The wages of sin are death. Perhaps more disconcerting, the deaths were also for our instruction – to serve ‘as an example’.

This contrasts directly with the words of Christ.  The Galileans were not worse sinners, nor were those in Siloam. Nor, as we learn in John’s Gospel, was the man born blind because of sin, his or his parents. Jesus pooh poohs – actually rather aggressively if you can pooh pooh aggressively – any perceived connection between sin and suffering. And the parable of the fig tree, if one can take any general meaning from it, points towards mercy and second chances, and away from judgement and retribution. Our suffering is not planned.

It’s impossible not to take life personally. I’ve told the story before about when I was 15, falling asleep on a tram in Zagreb, two weeks before it was bombed by Serbs; Waking up with no phone and no details of where I was staying, but just by chance walking straight into the group of people I was travelling with. I feel like I’ve got lost in half the cities of the world but always had fortune smile on me to bring me home. Even the expression – and whether we say it’s God, or fate, or destiny – people of all faiths and none find meaning in the things that happen to them. More darkly, when tragedy strikes and things really do go wrong, health fails, family deaths, failure and disappointment, when a child is ill – we may recall our misdeeds, we blame ourselves, our pettiness and superficiality; we narrativize our suffering and find its cause in our failings. Jesus – to  be clear – explicitly warns us against this.

Life today has become a bit of a car crash. In previous generations the Church would have called for a time of repentance. Most of the things on are minds are really far out of our hands.  And we are not to blame. But this can leave us feeling powerless, and with it hopeless. We can pray; And for the cynics it’s worth remembering that the person who prays about a situation is more likely to give, more likely to give more, and more likely to volunteer. Part of prayer is recognising our inability to make things better – To give our burdens to God – And our unlikely hope.

But, as Christians, we’re storytellers. Each week we’re hearing together stories from up to three and a half thousand years ago: Stories of trials and wars and sickness; Stories of commitment and hope and courage; Stories of compassion, of death and resurrection. As a church we’re called to keep telling these stories in faith and hope; Seeing darkness and difficulty around us, encouraging one another; Praying for each other and for the world – for that unlikely hope. In doing so we’re keeping faith with former generations, who kept the faith even in the darkest hour; We’re keeping faith with our children, who will know whether we have hope and whether we pray; and will carry that with them; The story we have been given is a story of love sprung from hate; Of life sprung from death; Of a light shining in the darkness. Of unlikely hope and a merciful God.

This week I have been confronted with another tragedy I cannot account for; Cannot explain; Can barely speak about. It’s these personal moments, more than the ongoing clamour of war and disease, that put greater stress on the stories by which we make sense of life. It’s especially hard when we feel it has been left to us to speak a word of care into a situation that is crushed out of hope. Our ability to tell that story, though, in the dark places of the world – To speak of meaning, of kindness, of redemption; Is what may sustain us and those around us. Jesus has made it very clear that there is no connection between sin and suffering. It is our job to build in kindness a connection between suffering and hope. Jesus has taught us to pray –  And has shown us that it takes words and the actions, to tell the story of God’s love. Amen.

Lent 1: The Lord be with you.

The Lord be with you.

A friend, who I’ve since lost touch with, put a photo on Facebook a couple of weeks ago of myself with some university friends who’d travelled to Israel. [We had not been disrobed by passing trains as some in the parish managed on their travels.] The photo was taken at dawn on Mount Sinai, where Moses received the ten commandments, overlooking the desert. Seeing the places you’ve read and heard about a thousand times has a peculiar strong impact, like entering again into the story for the first time. The most striking place we visited, however, was Masada.  According to the Jewish historian Josephus, nearly a thousand Jews elected to kill themselves after being starved under siege by Romans at the end of the first Jewish-Roman war in 74AD. The place retains a chilling atmosphere, familiar to anyone who’s visited the various concentration camps or mass graves across Europe. Of which, we may expect more of soon.

Places retain memories. Hold atmosphere. We return again and again to certain places, not only because of our happy memories; But because we detect a sense of peace, or ease or joy there. Or a presence of a loved one. In medieval times this was referred to as the angel of a place. Gen Zs would call it the vibe or atmos’. [It’s a strange thing about young people today- the way they shorten words – When mandatory isolation ended we had a message from a young lady who was staying with us for a few months:  ‘Bozza is saying no isolashy for possy viddy come Thursday’ Understanding young people sometimes requires Google translate.

Neat segue – The liturgical greeting that has begun Christian services for over a thousand years: Dominus vobiscum. For Gen Z: Dommy vobby. Meaning: The Lord be with you. It might sound odd, as we generally describe God as everywhere – or nowhere – But it’s a form of prayer, of blessing; And it’s responsive The Lord be with you; ‘And with your spirit’ or ‘and also with you’. The Lord is here between us, among us. God meets us in personal and specific ways: The Lord be with you.

Now, it may have struck you one Christmas –  that Jesus has a second name. In Matthew’s Gospel, we hear: ‘Look, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and they shall name him Emmanuel’, which means, ‘God is with us.’ He does still get called Jesus, but Matthew’s is quoting Isaiah chapters 7 and 8: ‘Therefore the Lord himself will give you a sign. Look, the young woman is with child and shall bear a son, and shall name him Immanuel.’ Then later: 

Band together, you peoples, and be dismayed;
   listen, all you far countries;
gird yourselves and be dismayed;
   gird yourselves and be dismayed!
Take counsel together, but it shall be brought to naught;
   speak a word, but it will not stand,
   for God is with us.

The Lord be with you. God is with us. It’s a theme that carries through his Gospel till the very last words of Matthew’s Gospel: “And remember, I am with you always, to the end of the age.”

And this is a doctrine that runs throughout the Bible. God accompanies Israel throughout its wanderings in the desert – He is with the wandering Aramean - He is with the Ark when it goes into battle. There is a house built for God in Jerusalem. The presence of God in the Hebrew Scriptures is felt locally. How shall we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land? This isn’t the god of philosophy. It’s more the slogan ‘think global, act local’; But even more personal than HSBC as the world’s local bank, which for anyone who’s ever phoned them up is simply not true.

This is that primal energy that is known – In the moment of good and evil – where tyranny that seemed impossible once again enters the world and men and women rise-up to fight it; When the thrill of a voice or a violin sounds your pain or your joy; In the liberating moment of forgiveness; In the note of praise that takes you beyond yourself; In the unexpected kindness that lightens your misery; In the billion stars of the desert’s night sky. St Paul says: ‘the word is near you, on your lips and in your heart’. The Lord be with you.

Jesus steps out into the desert. He is led by the Spirit. He is, we are told, ‘full of the Holy Spirit’. This matters because I don’t think we should read this moment as a time of doubt or weakness. Entering the desert for Christ is a moment of armament – Of remembering who he is and what he is about. Which is why through the Gospel we see him retreat at times to the wilderness for rearmament. TE Lawrence wrote of the Arabs’ experience of the desert, that there was:  “just the heaven above and the unspotted earth beneath.   There unconsciously he came near God… [in] its open spaces and its emptiness [he was] inevitably thrust upon God as the only refuge and rhythm of being.”

Jesus enters the desert to find the nearness of God. And what we find in the temptations, is Jesus overcoming those ancestral, iconic failings of humanity. We are told ‘He ate nothing at all during those days’, undoing the first sin of Adam and Eve in nibbling the apple. Jesus answers the devil of the second temptation: ‘Worship the Lord your God and serve only him’ – reminding us of the Hebrews failure in the desert worshipping the golden calf, even as Moses brought down the ten commandments. Finally, Jesus quotes Deuteronomy in the third temptation: ‘you shall not put the Lord to the test’ Again, this relates to the experience of the Hebrews in the wilderness of Sinai –  when they lacked bread and water, they asked why had God led them out to die in the wilderness. They didn’t trust God. They asked – ‘is God really with us?’

In his 40 days in the wilderness Christ achieves what the Hebrews in Sinai could not achieve in their 40 years. He remains faithful. He trusts. He believes that God is with us, knowing in himself God is with us.

Now these are anxious times. Each year, it seems, is darker than the last. We are in a pandemic, a new cold war, a cost of living crisis. Each of us may have some personal struggle at this time. The 6 Nations is not going well for Wales. Where is our place for retreat and rearmament? Where will we find strength and purpose? What will remind us that God is with us?

God is with you. Not just in that generic God-is-everywhere way. But: The word is very near, on your lips and in your hearts. God is here where two, or three are gathered. Right now we may be on the mountain-top; We may be under siege. We may be in the desert, facing that question: Do you believe that God is with us?
”Listen, all you far countries; gird yourselves and be dismayed; Take counsel together, but it shall be brought to naught; speak a word, but it will not stand, for God is with us.”
“And remember, I am with you always, to the end of the age.”

Let this place be a place of strength to you. A house of God, built before the estates to our left and right. A place ‘where prayer has been valid.’ On your lips and in your hearts.

 The Lord be with you.

Ash Wednesday: Buried Treasure

Sermon by the Revd Dr Brutus Green
Readings: Joel 2:1-2, 12-17; Psalm 51:1-18'; 2 Corinthians 5:20b-6:10; John 8:1-11

‘Where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.’

Where is your treasure? What are your debts?

I love today’s epistle.  The prose drives us into the present moment through pattern and repetition: ‘See, now is the acceptable time;  see, now is the day of salvation!’

And then that great crescendo of bearing through every hardship, receiving grace and virtue and in the end a glorious rhapsody of triumph over the world: ‘We are treated as impostors, and yet are true;  as unknown, and yet are well known;  as dying, and see—we are alive;  as punished, and yet not killed;  as sorrowful, yet always rejoicing;  as poor, yet making many rich;  as having nothing, and yet possessing everything.’

It is the voice of a church that is misunderstood, persecuted. It is the voice of people who are victims of violence. The people of Ukraine are on our hearts today. We will hold some time in silence for them later in the service – They will not need ashes on this day to know their mortality, but this barbaric invasion is a reminder to the whole world of the precariousness and preciousness of life.

as having nothing and yet possessing everything.

‘where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.’ Where is your treasure?

Life is contradictory.  We tend to think that it is what we are and what we have that matters.  We look back and take security in the accomplishments of our lives, the places we have been, how we have looked, whatever awards, careers, responsibilities we have held –  our CV can become the measure of us.  Equally we can look around us and see the accumulation of furniture, a nice flat or house, of the books, some of which we have read, the cars, antiques, paintings, children;  all the things we own that go towards defining us as a person of a particular taste and personality, and let that be the measure of us.

As Christians we do not normally bury people with their possessions though, nor is our CV read at our funeral. Today we remember that we are dust.  Ashes and dust.

So we are challenged to imagine ourselves at our final moment and to reflect from that perspective;  to ask when the enzymes and bacteria have broken everything down,  what is it that endures? That will remain? Where is our buried treasure?

Paul’s reversals, of being treated as imposters but being true, of dying and yet being alive, as poor yet making many rich, are all about a different way of being and having;  a way that endures; a way of burying treasure if you like.

For Paul what endures, what remains, is not who we are but how we have loved  and not what we possess, but what we have given.  His model is Christ who, in the ancient hymn that he repeats in Philippians, ‘though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself... and became obedient to death.’ We are all guilty of grasping.  Our insecurity demands that we grasp at who we are, finding affirmation in status and the high opinion of others.  Our insecurity demands that we grasp at things of value to make us more secure, more comfortable and more respected.  These are our treasures. But our buried treasure lies in how we have loved and what we have given, and this is the treasure, the buried hidden treasure, that endures.

 Today’s Gospel tells us of a woman who has been publicly humiliated. She is weighed down by debt. There is an interesting corellation between sin and debt in the Bible. It is as accurate to translate the Lord’s prayer ‘forgive us our debts’ as it would be ‘forgive us our sins’. This woman is weighed down by debt. Her sense of shame, and the weight of condemnation. Publicly humiliated, she has no self-worth; The angry mob wishes to kill her. Here, we see Christ release her. We see the people who cause her shame walk away one by one. Where are our debts? Where are our hidden debts? We come to Ash Wednesday to acknowledge our sin, to repent, to recognise our frailty; But it’s not to wallow in it; Not to remember the misery of life. It’s to find release. To give it to Christ. Ash Wednesday should be for us a liberation. We step into the tomb with Lazarus, in order to walk out with Christ.

Where is your hidden treasure? Where is your hidden debt?

This focus on what is secret and hidden, the secrets of the heart, is a common theme and finds its way into the Book of Common Prayer Service for the Burial of the Dead: Thou knowest, Lord, the secrets of our hearts;  shut not thy merciful ears to our prayer; but spare us, Lord.  Suffer us not, at our last hour, for any pain of death to fall from thee.  Said at the graveside, this reminds us that at the last there is no distance between us and God and all is held in secret,  we are left with only our buried treasure, what we have loved and given in our time here.

Because it would equally be a mistake to think that it is simply by what we achieve for others, or how well liked we are, that we build up our buried treasure.  God has no preference for a packed funeral. As Paul says in the earlier letter to the Corinthians:  ‘If I give away all I have, and if I deliver my body to be burned, but have not love, I gain nothing.’

We are now beginning our journey to the cross, which is the perfect secret.  It is glory, truth, power, and love, in short divinity, contained in the kernel of rejection, humiliation, pain and death, that is to say ground-zero humanity.  Humanity under siege. It is our symbol, our reminder, of perfect love and the perfect gift of a person giving his life for those whom he loves. 

We are and will be how we have loved and what we have given. This is our buried treasure, buried with God.  In Christ this is perfected as a complete giving of all for all. Our hidden debts are paid, and we are released from them. This costly grace reminds us that the hidden God is a God of perfect love – a standard, an example, and a gift for us through all our days, because we are treasured by God. 

What then is our buried treasure?  Where is our hidden debt? What holds us back? Where is our love? What have we given?  Where your treasure is there your heart will be also. Amen.

Transfiguration

Sermon by the Revd Dr Brutus Green
Readings: Exodus 34:29-end; Psalm 99; 2 Corinthians 3:12-4:2; Luke 9:28-36

I bought a ceiling fan the other day.  Complete waste of money. He just stands there applauding and saying “Ooh, I love how smooth it is.”

What we have there is a transfiguration. You thought you knew what a ceiling fan was, And I surprised you. I didn’t add information, but changed the picture you had in your head. Changed the meaning. [At the 8am someone told me they were grateful I didn’t make a joke about the blind man, having been scarred by the Vicar of Dibley.]

In some cases it takes longer for people to get the joke. A priest called Copernicus famously worked out the earth was orbiting the sun in 1515. He didn’t publish till just before his death in 1543 expecting a hostile crowd.  It was a smart move.  The next guy who made that claim got burned at the stake. But switching from the earth to the sun as centre of the universe is a kind of transfiguration. Makes you see the world in a different light. Still, importantly, the sun though.

I’m a terrible packer. When we go on holiday I find it impossible to imagine being in a warm climate. I always pack too many socks. I really just need to close my eyes and remember that feeling when you step off a plane into humidity. But it usually takes a more immediate transfiguration – Like moving to a different continent – for me to remember what being warm is.

There’s a common misapprehension. That we’re like computers. We receive more information and we grow in knowledge and adapt. The truth is that knowledge and experience change us. It’s not more;  It’s different.

Receiving a bad diagnosis, Winning the lottery, A friend dying, Moving to the West Indies, Suffering from depression; Living through a pandemic Becoming a Christian, Discovering a war has broken out in a nearby country; Having a significant birthday; These don’t just add information; They change our frame of reference. They are a transfiguration.

The imagination is a cunning little vixen –  We think we can prepare. I can mentally picture what it would be like to be at war with Russia, to be terminally ill; To finally turn 30 years old; I can imagine adding this information to my current knowledge. The reality might be quite different.

In the last couple of years – like most of us – I’ve had to isolate three or four times. Even now – if someone said right you have to spend the next two weeks at home, I’d think – rationally – it would be fine.  I can work here.  I can look after children. I have a garden. But based on previous experience, I know now I don’t cope well. don’t remain calm. That part of me that is animal biology will be pacing the cage growling at passersby. This matters because we always assume we are straightforward rational creatures, gathering information and making objective decisions based on facts. We look on anti-vaxxers, fans of Michael Buble, or people who support absurd world leaders, as stupid, or ignorant, or brainwashed.

In the army I met a surprising number of flat earthers. It’s hard to believe that people would hold such views today but these were perfectly normal, functional people, employed by the British state, and with access to weapons.  It wasn’t religious or political. It was the internet. But speaking to some of these people it was really a part of a much wider and ingrained sense of distrust –  Of politicians, of scientists, of the wealthy and powerful.

And here’s the thing – you can’t convince such people by the detail, the science of why the world really is probably round. You have to change the worldview. You need to help them trust the reliability of all those sources of information that public life depends on; and are fact-checked and accountable. Do the Russians believe Putin? It’s not just the worldview that needs to change there.

In the sixteenth and seventeenth-centuries, there were incredibly complicated mathematical models to explain the movements of the planets and sun, based on the earth being at the centre of the universe. It was naturally simpler to model it with the sun at the centre, but no one wanted to change the paradigm – The whole earth-centre of the universe thing was, I should say, Aristotle’s fault before it was the Church’s, and as I said Copernicus was a priest as well as an astronomer. An insider.

But the point is that for centuries astronomers were trying to fiddle different elliptical patterns of movements of the planets to make sense of the discrepancies. It needed a complete overhaul of system and a total new start to have a chance of getting something right.

Otherwise you end up in an argument with a man as to why the room isn’t getting cooler;  when he just wants to explain to you the beauty of Artex.

So St Paul in our second reading speaks of minds hardening, of a veil being over their sight; These are those who have been unable to receive the transfiguration. Who are still working on the old defunct system. And if you’ve spoken to Antivaxxers, or flat earthers or Jehovah’s witnesses, you’ll know how hard it is to change the system. Because it’s not one thing – it’s everything. And to change everything is undermining, frightening, overwhelming. It’s shifting your harbour – your trusted place – from one set of people, one radio station, newspaper to what?What can you trust? Because it’s exhausting going through the world not knowing who to believe.

The transfiguration that is today’s Gospel, tries to communicate what it means to let the Gospel change your world. It matters that it starts with prayer. They go up to the mountain to pray. Do we? If we’re facing something difficult? Struggling to understand what’s going on? Do we take the time to pray? Or just obsessively listen to the news. They went up on the mountain to pray. They took themselves away; They sought out God. They took the time to pray. Because if you want to think clearly, you’re going to need both time and space.

And then we have this moment – the shekinah (not to be confused with Shakira) – the glory of the Lord. An epiphany – and the disciples see Moses and Elijah. Moses – the bringer of the ten commandments – of the Law. And Elijah – the prophet par excellence. And now Jesus – shown by this transfiguration to be the true continuity with the law and the prophets.

It lasts just a moment. Peter wants to start building houses – as we all want to give permanence to the moments that change us; But in a second it has passed; And the disciples are left – with this experience that changes everything.

After this Jesus goes back to his teaching and healing and we hear how quickly the lack of faith and vision returns – the hearts harden, the veil descends on a perverse and faithless generation. This moment matters though because it’s here in this epiphany, this revelation, that the light slices through opening space for the new paradigm, the new system – that everything has changed

We only get the voice from the heavens at key moments in the Gospel – at Jesus’ baptism, here the transfiguration – we hear the same words from the centurion at the crucifixion – That Jesus is the Son of God. These are the moments that people witnessed and realised this is different – that everything has changed.

And like Copernicus, the new system is simpler. Because you’re not devising endless contortions to make the data fit – figuring weird patterns of orbit so that we can maintain ourselves as the central point of the universe. Jesus simplifies all the law and the prophets to love: Love your God. Love your neighbour. Anyone can grasp that. The new system is simple.

And perhaps we also need shaking out of our complacency, our easy systems of thinking. It’s so often only the worst aspects of life that make us think honestly. Mortality, war, tragedy, grief. We have moved on to the second horseman of the apocalypse – I think everyone is a little jittery. It’s a good time to consider if we’re really living out our beliefs.

And there’s also something in the wonder of birth and the everyday miracles of childhood development that can also retrain our lazy materialism. Children naturally make us see the world differently, and force us back on our priorities. And in baptism, in making and hearing those promises, there is that same sense of conversion, transformation, transfiguration.

So what will shift our paradigm of thinking? What will transfigure our hearts? What will help us understand, or empathise, or reach out, at least in prayer, to the Eastern borders of Europe? What will make us love God and our neighbours? We don’t need a ceiling fan of any kind. But maybe we do need to get out to the mountain, and find a fresh perspective on the world. Amen.

Faith's Sticking Points

Sermon by the Revd Dr Brutus Green
Readings: Jeremiah 17:5-10, Psalm 1; 1 Corinthians 15:12-20; Luke 6:17-26

Ten years ago I had a DVD player – it wasn’t even a blue-ray player. It was connected to my parent’s old television, which had a depth of about a metre. I think I was probably the last person in the UK – certainly in London – to get a flat screen TV.  Anyway, this DVD player would freeze halfway through films with the message coming up “Reading”. By a quirk of fate it so happens that Reading has the most obnoxious train station in the world. If, like the Village People and the Pet Shop Boys, you’re used to ‘going West’ you will well understand the frustration of Reading train station and especially of having to change between platform 3 and platform 584  (or God help us the three most feared words in the English language “Rail Replacement Bus”) –  usually involving a sprint over 3 minutes, which would be fine in any other train station but in Reading feels like you’ve got to run all the way to Swindon. And let’s not get started on Swindon, where dreams go to die. Anyway, the joke in the vicarage, watching a film, at the time, seeing that message come up, was ‘oh no, we’re stuck in Reading’.

I bring this up because Christians – and churches – frequently get stuck on a particular idea of faith, which the Gospel, and especially today’s Gospel, is trying to smash apart with the kind of mallet I eventually took to my DVD player (metaphorically). This idea of faith is in the Bible. It’s the simple and attractive idea that if you’re good, good things will happen to you. The child’s idea of justice – that the world is fair. I find it quite educative watching our three-year-old Oberon, who quite often has his little tantrums. And I get it: Last time he did x, he got a sticker.  Why doesn’t he get one now? Yesterday morning he could watch paw patrol. Today he has to go to nursery. You can see why it’s infuriating. We make sense of the world on the basis of consistency – and even the best parent in the world can’t manage those expectations.  And in our faith, this is concentrated by the commandment to pray. We’re even told “ask and it shall be given unto you”; and: “if you ask anything of the Father in my name, he will give it to you.” That’s a big promise.

I think we can get stuck on this idea of God rescuing us in times of danger, much like a parent once did. Only it’s our faith that gets stuck, and can’t move on, when that danger, difficulty, sickness, death arrives and we don’t get rescued. And if our faith is stuck on those passages where prayer is always answered, where the wicked are punished, where the righteous die old and fat and sated with life, it will not cope with this world.

In my early 20s I went to a free church in Exeter with a huge congregation of probably 1000 people over a weekend. There were donuts. The pastor and his wife were killed in a Road Traffic Accident. When I visited a couple of years later the church had collapsed.  Students were warned not to go there. It was a terrible tragedy, but from what I hear people were unable to understand theologically how this could happen. There was such a strong message of the reward of faithfulness, of the blessings of righteousness, that the faith of the community could not accommodate an arbitrary tragedy.

And if Russia invades Ukraine this week it will be a thing of evil, of horror, which we have here been praying won’t happen. Senseless, unnecessary violence which will destroy lives. Should we blame God for not stopping this one man? But what then are we to say? That God doesn’t care? That God can’t act?

What we find if the DVD has not stuck is that Scripture has a broader range of voices, especially when it speaks of suffering and the presence of God. And it’s not all reassuring, at least in the short term; but it connects with our experience;  and may prevent us stamping our feet, shouting ‘this is not the God I wanted’, and walking out of church.

One description of prayer I like, is that – prayer is ‘the distance between ourselves and eternity’ Prayer is the distance between ourselves and eternity. It’s not our shopping list to God. But it’s the voicing of our desires, of our lack, of how we ourselves and our world have fallen short of perfection. Our recognition of our need for God and for justice and peace and resolution. When we pray truthfully we know our desires. The very act of prayer, even if we’re praying for something morally dubious, tells us how far we are from God. It is, as George Herbert says, ‘the heart in pilgrimage’. When we pray truthfully we find out what we’re really about. Rather than magically changing the world, prayer is first of all about being honest with ourselves, changing ourselves, and learning to be closer to God; Finding God in adversity.

If we were a ship in a storm, our prayers are our bearing –  our sense of direction to the harbour of God, somewhere beyond the horizon. Our Christian discipleship is trying to close that distance – but it’s not always achieved just by getting what we want. There’s a lovely line in Hamlet where he says:
There’s a divinity that shapes our ends,
Rough-hew them how we will. 
We need to get beyond this sticking point and have a faith that can accommodate suffering in its many difficult forms.

Today’s Gospel is considered the core of Jesus’ teaching. Matthew’s Gospel places it on the mount, associating Jesus’s new teaching with that of Moses who brought the law down from Mount Sinai. In Luke’s Gospel the sermon is on the plain, where we’re on a level. He’s talking to his brothers and sisters as one of us. And he tells us what a blessed life looks like. He tells us where to find God. From the beginning: Blessed are the poor. Blessed are the hungry. Blessed are those who weep. Hearing this, does it make sense to ask “where is God” when life is dreadful? He’s telling you: Blessed are you when you’re hated. Excluded. Reviled. Defamed. Hearing this, do we still expect God to make life easy? Where is your blessing? Where is your God?

Somewhere in our heads we have muddled up God and Father Christmas and it seems to take forever to disentangle them.

When St Paul is raging at the Corinthians in the second reading – it’s because none of Christianity makes sense without resurrection. The faith is not just some self-help book to make things a little more zen.  It isn’t all #blessed. Jeremiah curses those who trust in mortals, in the flesh. If Jesus wasn’t raised from the dead then the Gospel ends with terrible suffering and death, without hope. And if he’s not raised then we will not be raised and our faith is futile; in vain; we are of all people most to be pitied (most miserable).

Our God is a crucified God. We follow a man of sorrows. If we let the DVD play out the story as we move through Lent, the passion and crucifixion, is a difficult story – But it tells us that God is closest to us in suffering and death. There is no miracle in the crucifixion.

Here, again, then is a sticking point. How do we move from suffering to hope? And the worse our experience of suffering, the more difficult it will be to find that hope of resurrection. Those little devil voices of materialism, of “the science”, of “supposedly grown-up” scepticism, of childhood disappointments in things we have wanted to believe in, but have been disappointed by; All say – “resurrection? It just seems so unlikely.”

It is unlikely, impossible. But for God all things are possible. And the Church has proclaimed Christ crucified for 2000 years because Christ has been raised from the dead. And because of that we can find in our suffering, hope. We can find blessing when we’re poor, and suffering; When we mourn, and are weeping. When we are hated or excluded. But we have to let the story play to the end. We have to stay clear of Reading, and follow Christ through hardship, through the way of the cross, to arrive at the last at the Easter morning.

Accession Day: Love the Brethren. Fear God. Honour the King

Sermon by the Revd Dr Brutus Green
Readings: 1 Peter 2:11-17, Matthew 22:16-22

Before coming to St Margaret’s, as most of you know, I was a servant of the Crown, had taken the Queen’s shilling, and wore the insignia of the Royal Army Chaplains’ Department. The crest of the department shows a Maltese cross with a laurel around it and a crown at the top. At the centre is the department’s motto “In this sign conquer”. ‘In This Sign Conquer’ refers to a vision of the fourth century Roman emperor Constantine – who in a dream saw an image of the cross and those words. The words – especially serving in the military, create a sense of unease. They sit awkwardly with the teaching of Jesus; it feels uncomfortable.

Constantine was the first emperor not to persecute Christianity and legalise the faith. He brought Christianity into the mainstream. From this point, the Church had a foothold in politics, in states and kings. Taking Constantine’s motto the Church expanded, lead armies, conquered continents, built empires, managed colonies. This made it a global faith, converted millions, sometimes by force, but created some distance from its foundations.

In the short term, for the first time, the church could own property. Constantine built basilicas. Sunday became an international day of rest. He called the first Council of Nicea in 325, from which comes the Nicene Creed, the main creed we say each week. And he removed pagan gods from Roman coinage.

Coins are the subject of today’s Gospel. And it’s this passage of the emperor’s coin that the Church chose to mark the accession, which is curious.

You can see what they were thinking. Render to Caesar and Render to God. Give the Queen your loyalty and your taxes; For God, your prayers and praise. A neat division; Only it’s not what Jesus meant at all.

The context of this is the Pharisees and Herodians conspiring to trap Jesus. They ask whether it’s lawful to pay taxes because it puts Jesus in a bind. If he says no to taxes then he’s inciting rebellion against Rome. But if he says yes to paying taxes, then he puts himself with the Herodians, the puppet regime of the Roman occupation. A yes to foreign gods is a no to being a credible prophet. It’s like trying to keep everyone on your side in a Brexit debate.

Rome required taxes to be paid in Roman currency; with Roman coins. The cleverness of Jesus response begins with him asking for a coin. To everyone around, they immediately see that, Jesus doesn’t carry the coin of the emperor. If we remember that Roman emperors were frequently associated with divinity, onlookers would see that Jesus doesn’t carry round any graven image, while the Herodians do.

Jesus 1, Herodians 0. Then Jesus takes the coin and asks ‘whose head is on it, and whose title’. The question is designed to remind them of that second commandment, not to make any graven image and not to bow down to them. Jesus 2, Herodians 0.

So when Jesus says give to the emperor what is the emperor’s, he’s not suggesting we live with divided loyalties. He’s saying – send the money back to Rome. [It’s a bit like if you were living in Crimea and someone said what should we do with these Russian Rubles. In 2017, unsurprisingly, Ukraine forbade its banks from using Russian currency with Crimean imagery on it. That hasn’t changed… yet.] As Jesus later says – ‘no one can serve two masters… you cannot serve God and wealth’ so you cannot serve God and the emperor. But in the meantime, he’s neatly sidestepped the Jewish leaders’ trap.

The Church, on the other hand, has largely preferred to sidestep the wit of Jesus’ reply, taking it instead at face value. “When you’re good to Mama, Mama is good to you.” Which means that the Church has largely sided with the Herodians. Such are the compromises of an established Church!

The point for us is that as Christians we should always sit awkwardly with wealth and power. The best we can do is to dedicate them to the service of God and our neighbour; or as some have done, give them all up altogether.

The passage from 1Peter is similar. Yes – we are being told to accept every authority but that’s not because they’re right or authorised by God. It’s really just because St Peter thinks there are more important things to be getting on with.  The kingdom of God takes us well beyond the kingdoms of men. For St Peter, following Christ means becoming the servant of all, as Jesus was the servant of all. So we should have no problem submitting ourselves before emperors and rulers, because we should be ready to serve everyone.

Now the Church of England liturgy has since its inception been tied to a certain social conservatism. It’s always prayed for the monarch and the peace of the realm – unsurprising given its origins in social and political turmoil; But it’s fair to say that, unlike the emperor in Jesus’ time, the British monarchs have usually understood themselves as under the obligation of God.

For all Henry VIII’s flaws he was intently religious;  He earned himself, from the pope – perhaps a little ironically, the title ‘Defender of the Faith’, still held by British monarchs. It is hard to imagine anyone maintaining the sense of duty and quiet but explicit faith as our Queen does.

In 1947 she declared: ‘before you all that my whole life whether it be long or short shall be devoted to your service...  But I shall not have strength to carry out this resolution alone unless you join in it with me, as I now invite you to do:  I know that your support will be unfailingly given.  God help me to make good my vow, and God bless all of you who are willing to share in it.

On her coronation, likewise, she said; When I spoke to you last... I asked you all, whatever your religion, to pray for me on the day of my Coronation – to pray that God would give me wisdom and strength to carry out the promises that I should then be making...  I have been uplifted and sustained by the knowledge that your thoughts and prayers were with me.

Those are words of vocation – of dedicating one’s wealth and power to God. And there is a characteristic straightforwardness to how the Queen expresses her faith. Last Christmas she closed her speech, which was especially moving in respect to her openness in the loss of her husband, by saying: “It is [the] simplicity of the Christmas story that makes it so universally appealing:  simple happenings that formed the starting point of the life of Jesus —  a man whose teachings have been handed down from generation to generation, and have been the bedrock of my faith.  His birth marked a new beginning.  As the carol says, “The hopes and fears of all the years are met in thee tonight”.

There are few among us who remember a time when she was not our queen. And she’s been exemplary in giving her life in public service and in Christian witness. The Queen is not the head of the Church but its “supreme governor”;  but she’s also made a ‘deacon’, meaning a ‘servant’ in the Church. And no one has a greater claim to having served her people.

So, we are perhaps not so torn between serving God and the Queen. Though we might feel the contradictions more with her representatives, and as Christians should always feel the tension of carrying wealth and power.

And when we make and hear those baptismal promises, we are aware we are putting ourselves under a higher authority. It is a dedication to follow a man who gave up everything and took the form of a servant for the love of others. They are promises to maintain an awkwardness to the things of this world, directing what we have always towards service rather than self-indulgence.

These 70 years the Queen has led her nation in its service of God, and as much as she appears on our coinage it is to the glory of God and the service of her people. It’s a shilling a Christian can accept. And I think in this year of Jubilee there is nothing more than she would want than for us to: Love the family of believers. Fear God. Honour the Emperor. But perhaps more than this in just observing the Great Commandment. as she has maintained throughout her life and reign: to love God and serve our neighbour. That is all the law and the prophets. Amen.

Epiphany Carols: Gifts and Anxiety

Sermon by the Revd Dr Brutus Green

We had a total fail this Christmas. Didn’t send Christmas cards, except to the PCC. Didn’t send gifts, except to the Churchwardens. Somewhere, between absences at work, more pandemic drama, Rhiannon setting up a business, services, talks and sermons, the bells chimed for Christmas and the few things we had organised were gathering dust in a sad ghost-of-Christmas-past pile in the bedroom. So well done PCC, you got more of a Christmas greeting than my parents. I did get a pair of candlesticks for Nick that look like trees. Sadly they arrived broken. Probably because of Brexit. They’re still sitting in our dining room, where actually they look rather nice.

Gifts is the one aspect of Christmas I dread. I’m not very good at giving or receiving them. I’m just awkward with gifts. Epiphany is all about gifts. The main event is the wisemen with their mixed bag of Gold, Frankincense and Myrrh. There’s no vowels in the word Myrrh – either in how you spell it or say it, and it’s almost impossible to remember whether it has two rs or two hs. It’s very difficult to say it without sounding like you’re from Northern Ireland. Myrhh.

One wonders how the holy family felt at this intrusion. One of the difficulties I have with gifts is knowing how much to spend.  Do you spend £10 or £100? Are you valuing your friendship? What if you spend ten and they a hundred? How do you respond to the stranger who turns up on Boxing Day with a box of gold? There’s an old Scandanavian proverb that ‘It is better not to bring an offering than to spend too much on it’  But also that ‘The miser always fears presents’. I fear presents but it’s just part of a horror of mine over social anxiety. Will I be appropriately enthusiastic? Should I have done better myself? The answer – usually yes. Time to take myself off to hide in my Father’s house.

In all cultures gifts demand reciprocation – often to the level of honour – in some cases as taboo. Anthropologists tell stories of families and villages bankrupting themselves to return hospitality or match gifts in order to exceed what has been given. Like a giant game of poker meets keeping up with the Joneses.

The wisemen offer gifts appropriate to a king. Gold, frankincense, myrrh. Jesus reciprocates with his own gifts of kingship, priesthood and sacrifice. The hints begin immediately with the prophetic words of Simeon at the Temple. But we see this also at the baptism. Christ is proclaimed a king by the wisemen, but is himself baptized by John, showing the humility proper to a king.  And as the Christmas Gospel proclaims him Emmanuel, ‘God with us’, we see the value of his gift as, to quote St Paul, Christ took the form of a slave, humbling himself even to the point of death’.  Truly bankrupting himself with this gift.

So the question for us is how we respond to the gift? Each of us will feel this as a different sort of gift. The gift of creation;  The gift of art and music and all that makes life meaningful and beautiful; The gift of knowing you are loved; The gift of eternity, waiting for you.

The gift of everything is a hard gift to emulate; We can look forward to Lent for an opportunity to reflect on what it means to give more in discipline and charity. But in the last few years we have perhaps also learned that most of the gifts we receive are only loaned to us anyway, except for the one surpassing gift we receive from God; So it may well be that it is as well for us to bankrupt ourselves in giving, if we are to follow in the footsteps of Christ. If we look within ourselves, we will discover we have already received more than all we have to give. Amen.

Candlemas: Step onto the Bridge

Sermon by the Revd Dr Brutus Green
Readings: Malachi 3:1-5, Psalm 24:7-end, Hebrews 2:14-end, Luke 2:22-40

Who is a funeral for? If you asked 10 people that question today, I think nine of them would say “for the bereaved”, “the family and friends”. The thought is that the person who has died is no longer really there, and I often hear this said.  Funerals, then, are to comfort, to bring around support, to give thanks for the life, to express grief. And I agree with all of this. I have spoken recently about the difficulties of the past two years when this hasn’t happened.

But, as a Christian, I don’t think that’s the primary purpose of funerals, or all that is going on. That’s not to say that Christians are different to others in how they treat funerals; It’s fair to say the mourner has replaced the deceased as the main focus at services. And even in Christian and church-going contexts, the funeral aspect – involving the body – is sometimes done in private, with public memorial services. There’s also I’ve been told an arrangement that can be made where the body is destroyed without any notice or involvement, just as though an old hat were being thrown away.

This might seem spiritual. A very popular poem at funeral is ‘Do not Stand at my Grave and Weep’ –  I’m a little wary of it –

I am a thousand winds that blow.
I am the diamond glint on snow…

And most of all – ‘

(Do not stand at my grave and cry.
I am not there, I did not die!)’

It’s a poem and so for interpretation, but death is at least in one sense very real. And the body and its resting place matter.

A funeral is sacramental. The definition of a sacrament is ‘a visible sign of an invisible presence’. If we stand by what we say we believe, there is nowhere this is more the case than at a funeral –  Where it is grace at work on the person who has died – through prayer, commendation and blessing. At a funeral we come to witness in faith an encounter between God and the dead.

When we come together to celebrate a baptism or a wedding we come as witnesses, supporters, cheerleaders - We would never ignore the baby, or the bride; The dead should not be the elephant in the room. They should be the focus of prayer and attention.

Some of the most inspirational moments I have known have been with those who were approaching death. That journey can be made with the grace of one approaching baptism; I have witnessed people organising their death with the attention to detail and care of others, as if it were their wedding. It’s an intensely personal experience and there are many who would not go gentle into that good night. But, if, as Christians we believe that death is conquered; If – and it’s a big if – we have faith that Christ is risen, and is for us – Then death is a sacrament and as in baptism, ordination and marriage, the service celebrates and enacts the truth of grace working within us.

We are not spirits. We are flesh. Bodies matter. But we don’t respect the coffin that passes as a symbol of death; A solemn nod to the grim reaper; But, rather, for us it’s the hidden activity of God; for us it’s a sign, a sacrament, of resurrection.

This probably seems a little heavy for a Sunday morning. I try not to think about death before brunch – you’ll tell me. But today’s festival is all about bodies. And the fact that bodies matter.

The letter to the Hebrews makes the point forcefully. Jesus shared flesh and blood. He experienced bodily death. He wasn’t an angel.

The Gospel is all about bodies. Mary’s body – changed as it has been by the birth of a child. The bodies of animals brought in as sacrifice. Simeon and Anna’s bodies, at the end of their lives. And the body of a child, as he grows up. Christ lived and died as one of us; He shared in our humanity. And with that, one of the most troubling images we have in the Bible, so thoroughly represented in art, is the pieta, The image of Jesus, taken down from the cross, being held in death by his mother, as should never happen. Of all images it captures most Christ’s humanity and divinity. The suffering all life inherits; a love so amazing, so divine.

The early church fought its way through rumblings of heresy – mostly over who Jesus was. There were those who said Jesus couldn’t be human – as the revelation of God, he only appeared as one of us, like avatars or demigods in other religions. Then there were those who said Jesus couldn’t be divine – he was just a perfect example of humanity, adopted as a Son of God.

 What the Church understood and what is vital to understand for us about Jesus is that he must be able to complete the bridge between us and God. If he’s not quite human – not like us – then he can’t meet us in our need. If he’s not quite God, an angel or a superhuman, then God remains remote and unknowable. Christ is a bridge. And even if God is to us inscrutable, difficult, dark – Christ has made him known. And as our bridge Christ has reconciled us to God.

So when the disciples ask how they may know the way to the Father, how they may follow Jesus; His response is: “I am the way, and the truth, and the life”. I am the bridge between you and God, but you will only know it in the resurrection, where the wounds of torture and the death of an execution, are raised up in anticipation of the restoration of all creation. This is the invisible presence we are privileged to see in faith at the funeral of a friend. And though it is hard; our faith wills us to send them on with joy. Perhaps it’s living in the glorious paradise of Putney that makes us sad with the things they will miss, that obscure from our eyes also the unsearchable riches that await us.

Candlemas is really the bridge festival of the Christian year.  We have one foot still in Christmas and the Epiphany season, with the mysterious kings, our crib, the winter chill and fading memories of magical Christmas; And Simeon heralds Jesus as the light of the world, that shines in the darkness. But he also looks forward to the cost of that gift and sword that will pierce Mary’s heart. So that by the end of this service are eyes have moved from the crib to the font; And from Christmas to Holy Week, And the red ribbon that surrounds the delicious sweet filled Christingle. Equally between Simeon and Anna, and Jesus we see the bridge between Old and New Testaments, Old and New Covenants, between generations; between life and death.

Church means many things; All of us are drawn here – or watching at home – with different things on our hearts. But faith is stepping out onto that bridge. Believing in that connection between what is human and what is divine. And trusting in a resurrection, begun two thousand years ago, but still working in us today. Amen.

Woe to you, hypocrites!

Sermon by the Revd Dr Brutus Green
Readings: Isaiah 43:1-7; Psalm 29; Acts 8:14-17; Luke 3:15-17, 21-22

There are certain parts of the world which are not claimed by any state. Bir Tawil – a remote bit of land between Egypt and Sudan. Antartica, except, of course, by the king penguins; And the high seas. And there are times when you’d be forgiven for thinking it might be better to live in a land without kings.

So what were you doing in May 2020? Social media has been a-buzz with stories:  amusing, emotional, self-righteous, traumatic; It was in many ways peak-pandemic, but also glorious weather. Worth making the most of. I haven’t kept a journal for some time but it’s easy for me to recover where I was between pew sheets, sermons and orders of service, I can pretty accurately work out what was going on here.

We had a zoom quiz that month. We put up the cross outside church with the Easter garden, as a meeting point and focus of prayer; on 8th May, VE day, I put up a sign saying “we’ll meet again”. The local foodbanks had shut so the vicarage became a collection point,  and I took a dozen calls a day asking for food, medicine or other necessaries, which I pinged out to a list of a hundred local volunteers who mostly took up tasks in minutes. The cake and soup run started that month, lasting for nearly a year, delivering to up to 80 people. The Archbishops had closed all churches, so alongside every service the pew sheet reads “live on Facebook” Even playgroup song-time! By May we had multi-screen online services so we’d zip from the vicarage to Yorkshire for music to other houses for readings and intercessions.

The week before May I’d taken three funerals, including one for a woman, where no one attended because the only mourners, her brother and son, were both also vulnerable. I dropped round to their flat beforehand to give them an order of service.  They didn’t have internet so couldn’t watch the service. There wasn’t really much I could say. Strangely, they both died within a week of each other just a year later.

On the first of May I took the funeral of a complicated man who took his own life. Even now we underestimate the cost of the pandemic on our mental health and especially those already distressed. Then two more funerals for Maureen and Geoffrey on the fourth and sixth of May. In the week following the fourteenth of May I took five funerals, The last one, on the twentieth May, was Theophilus Morris, which was all conducted at the graveside, in competition with the A3.

The rules on funerals have changed frequently. I think in May numbers attending rose from 6 to 15. No wakes of course. I do remember someone pouring themself a glass of wine from the boot of their car outside the crematorium at Putney Vale; Mostly I remember families coming together, not physically touching and then drifting away again. I always tried to meet the next of kin in person – in gardens or at least outside. Even that was at times something of a grey area, but the coldness of the situation, arriving at Mortlake to see a full list of services, a funeral every half hour from nine till six, or the thankfully little used temporary morgues in Putney Vale, required whatever humanity was left to us.

In the four weeks leading up to May 20th I took 11 funerals, more than I took in the whole of 2019, at all of which were people who had not said goodbye, could not attend, could not sing, could not touch, could not go for a drink or gather afterwards. This is not my suffering. But I was a witness to great suffering.

Prophets arise as a response to moral outrage. To injustice; To suffering. Moses is called to lead the people of God out of slavery. After him, the prophets often come to bring warnings of foreign invasion, when the people have lost their way. Some of the later prophets speak of the restoration of the people from exile. Their ire and recriminations are usually targeted at the temporal and moral leadership of the day –  the king, the priesthood, the ruling class.

So John the Baptist describes the religious leaders as a ‘brood of vipers’.  He’s accepted by the people as a prophet but the leadership don’t like it. He’s particularly critical of Herod, the ruler, and his wife Herodias. Herodias had also been married to Herod’s half-brother, confusingly also called Herod. That is a lot of Herods David. Questioning the integrity of the leadership lands John in prison and then summarily executed.

And Jesus is equally critical of the leadership of the day, particularly the religious leadership: “Do whatever [the scribes and pharisees] teach you and follow it; but do not do as they do, for they do not practise what they teach. They tie up heavy burdens, hard to bear, and lay them on the shoulders of others; but they themselves are unwilling to lift a finger to move them.” [pause] And then we have a phrase repeated seven times: ‘But woe to you, scribes and pharisees, hypocrites!’:
‘Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites!  For you are like whitewashed tombs, which on the outside look beautiful, but inside they are full of the bones of the dead and of all kinds of filth.  So you also on the outside look righteous to others, but inside you are full of hypocrisy and lawlessness.’ It’s this verse, of course, from which we get the phrase ‘whitewash’.

After this in Matthew’s Gospel Jesus predicts the fall of Jerusalem and the coming judgement of God, causing the plot, passion, and execution of the prophet. It rarely ends well for prophets, though equally, when they have divine backing, it rarely ends well for those of whom they prophesy.

But what’s different about the prophetic role of John the Baptist and Jesus, is that they’re calling people out to something different. Having seen the exploitation of the people John calls them out to the wilderness, a place without kings,and through baptism offers an independent form of moral authority.

Jesus in predicting the destruction of the temple, in clearing out the money changers, is changing religion; From culture and custom, to a change of heart. From a system devised by men that exploited people, To the simplicity of the desert and asking God to give you another chance, a second beginning. He is calling people out – in both senses of the phrase.

John and Jesus are levelling up. These leaders are corrupt. They don’t have your interests at heart. Turn again and find God among you. Your king sits as one of you. He suffers as you suffer. Do not look for authority above, where there is only hypocrisy, but within and alongside.

Today we give thanks for the sacrament of baptism. In it we are adopted as children of God; As beloved sons and daughters in whom God is pleased. We are taken out to the wilderness, to no man’s land, to repent and to know and receive the authority of God.

On the 10th May 2020 I said in a sermon: “In our present darkness, there are a great many hells which are coming to light.” There were others that were yet to come to light. Among other things, these last years have seen a democratic twist in accountability. Even now, we have a number of very wealthy, well-connected people in different spheres testing that accountability. Our baptism reminds us that we are called out into the wilderness, where there are no kings, no law, and the soul is naked before God. And that the one who we bow down to came not to be served but to serve.

We cannot escape society for long, and we shouldn’t lose hope in people. Our leaders represent us, and we all share a responsibility for our nation’s actions – we too have a foot in Iraq and Afghanistan. There are few in any form of leadership who escape hypocrisy; I am always aware of the logs in my eyes when noticing the motes in others. We return to our baptism again and again, in knowledge of our weakness and failure, seeking out that wilderness where there is only God; And perhaps others too will soon find themselves in the wilderness, whether they like it or not. It is a God of forgiveness we find there.

Next week, you’ll be pleased to hear, we have a more upbeat Gospel, the wedding at Cana with the turning of water into wine. And no one could deny that, at least for Jesus, that’s gotta be a work meeting.  Amen.

Epiphany: The Unexpected Guest

Sermon by the Revd Dr Brutus Green
Readings: Isaiah 60:1-6; Psalm 72:10-15'; Ephesians 3:1-12; Matthew 2:1-12

I recently read a book where an unexpected guest arrived at a house in the afternoon. It runs in a great tradition of novels and plays – Agathe Christie’s great play of that name, JB Priestly’s An Inspector Calls. The guest is polite but behaves somewhat erratically, taking advantage of the hospitality of his hosts – generally eating and drinking them out of house and home, while they uncomplainingly stand by in a very awkward English manner. He then leaves. The protagonist, Sophie, is placated only when her father arrives and takes the family out for Sausage and Chips, and ice cream. Despite their preparations, we are told,  the Tiger never returned.

It’s one of those stories that feels like an analogy of something dark and disturbing. Michael Rosen, of Bear Hunt fame – you can’t accuse this vicar of not keeping up his reading – suggested that the tiger might consciously or unconsciously reflect the experience of living with threat in her childhood in Nazi Germany, from which her family fled in 1933, her aged 9; The author herself disagreed, having written the book after visiting a zoo with her daughter;  the tiger, she said, is a tiger.

It’s a very different sort of unexpected guest we recall at Epiphany, these magi, or wise men, or kings, with their eclectic gifts. (Personally I prefer magi – wise men or kings is quite exclusively male – where magi – the Greek magoi – is a masculine plural but could include women – New Testament Greek is more woke like that – There is also, it should be said, no reference to how many arrive, but only that there are only three gifts.

[Speaking of eclectic, I was at an Epiphany service last week in Cornwall, where instead of the intercessions, the churchwarden opted to read TS Eliot’s ‘The Journey of the Magi’.  They also sang ‘In the Bleak Midwinter’ to the tune written by Harold Darke, which is normally only sung by choirs. Church seems to be very high brow in Cornwall.]) But, yes, these guests seem very unexpected, not from these parts; Though equally their host is unexpected. We might say that here is the first Christian encounter: Where the unexpected God meets the unexpected guests.

TS Eliot, speaking for the magi, says: “we returned to our places, these kingdoms/ but no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation” While goodness knows what the peasant girl Mary made of gifts for kingship, priesthood and embalming. (Of course it doesn’t really matter what you get toddlers – they’re just as pleased to play with the packaging – but it still hardly counts as child-friendly. [It’s hard to see any context where myrrh could be viewed as ‘friendly’. It’s a little bit like giving someone for Christmas the hit single by Glasvegas “You’re gonna get stabbed”])

The feast of Epiphany is also known in the old English prayerbook as “the Manifestation to the Gentiles”. The magi being gentiles, and the first sign of the universality of Christ, who comes for all people. Jesus in his ministry to sinners, publicans, lepers, children, women – even, and gentiles – reveals that God has come for the unexpected guest.

Now, there are three ways in which our faith demands we take unexpected guests very seriously. The first thing to say is that You are the unexpected guest. Even if you’ve been coming to this church for 80 years. If you have lived an upright life; We must never lose sight that we are an unexpected guest. Not as a cause of guilt or shame. But simply because there is no reason why we should be invited to be friends with God. But we are all invited.

The rub comes because we have all internalised a way of thinking that we need to earn our place. Children quickly recognise that if they succeed, if they do something right, they win affection and praise. That is how we parent. And if our children are better than other children – like my children – We praise them all the more, and tell anyone who’ll listen about it. That’s called reflected glory, and it’s another way of us earning our place. So we are conditioned and condition others to believe that value comes from praise, from the regard of others. Which leads us to believe that the guests whom God invites, are the expected ones: the good people you see to your left and right today.

Only this is a cause of anxiety. I’m not as good as Steve; And I don’t volunteer as much as Gladys; I have not joined the pyramid scheme which leads to the PCC and churchwardens. So do I really deserve to be here; Do I still feel like a visitor here after 80 years? Did I peak in my 50s and now am sort of just clinging on a little, slightly ashamed thinking I’m not a very useful engine.

Let it go. God is not here for the usual suspects. They are rewarded with their own self-assurance. God is here for you. The unexpected guest.

So yes, you can eat all the sandwiches, and all the cakes, and drink all the tea and all daddy’s beer; The unexpected guest will get away with it.

That’s the theology, but the ethics are the same. So, secondly, while God treats us the unexpected guest – as the returned beloved son. So we ought to treat unexpected guests with the same love. This can be very difficult. Especially if they eat you out of house and home. At Christmas we remember again the truth of the aphorism – ‘Guests, like fish, begin to smell after three days.’ But we cannot escape the command that wherever we are, and however we are pressed for time or patience, we are required to look after the unexpected guest. And as the Gospel makes painfully clear, this is especially true of all the people who struggle to fit in; The people we would be happier avoiding.

What makes this especially graphic in the Gospels is that time and again, Jesus says that in caring for these people – the outsiders, the unsavouries, the people who don’t fit in, the unexpected guests – We are caring for Christ. And when we avoid, neglect, don’t care for them, we are neglecting Christ.

Which leads us to the third and final aspect of the unexpected guest. The unexpected guest is Christ. Just as Abraham entertained angels; As Christ said ‘just as you did it to one of the least of these who are members of my family, you did it to me’ As the letter to the Hebrews warns: ‘Do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers, for by doing that some have entertained angels without knowing it.’ As the risen Christ appeared on the road to Emmaus, unrecognised: God is with us as the unexpected guest. And it is in unexpected grace, and unexpected joy that we are most likely to recognise him; And rediscover him, if we can but widen our hearts.

So as we celebrate the coming of the magi, let us welcome the unexpected guests amongst us, let us welcome God who has come among us, and let ourselves be welcomed in love and acceptance by the one who is revealed among us as the unexpected guest inviting all to the heavenly banquet. And as so many unexpected guests still today are pushed away and out of this world, let us invite Christ today into our homes – to use the old words – by whose stripes we are healed.  Amen.