|
|
|
|
|
Sermons by the Revd Andrew Bain except where noted otherwise 2008 11 09 Remembrance and Hope Read Here Download PDF
9 November 2008 Remembrance and hope They shall beat their swords into ploughshares and their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they study war any more. Whatever your views on American politics, this has been an amazing week for the world, and most of all it’s been an amazing week for hope. The newspaper headlines just sounded so jubilant: “Change has come!” I was born in the same year Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on a segregated bus in Montgomery, Alabama, and set in motion a train of events culminating in Obama’s inspirational victory speech beamed round the world as if it was for all of us. And it is for all of us. Because this is the very victory of the human spirit, and the victory of hope, for which our honoured dead of two world wars and many conflicts since have fought and died. The possibility of this son of a Kenyan goatherd, rising to such a position is the harvest of sacrifices not only by the martyrs of American civil rights – but it’s also the harvest of Flanders fields, of sacrifices made to defeat monstrous powers of evil over the last century. In the Second World War the men and women whose memories we honour today set out to confront an ideology that saw Jews and gypsies, people with mental illness as fit only for the gas chambers. And the same hatred towards people of colour was infamously displayed when Jesse Owens won gold in the 1936 Berlin Olympics and Hitler left the stadium disgusted at the very thought of honouring of a black athlete’s triumph. So the victory of Obama seems to have put us all in touch with a kind of hoping about human freedom and possibility that’s been there all along, and which has earned any victories it has by sacrifice. And who isn’t hoping and praying that this new leader will remember nations longing for peace right now, and the young men and women from America and Britain and so many other places, making sacrifices now – laying down their lives so that any child can dream his dream, whatever that dream might be. This is the dream Micah is looking for: And they shall sit every man under his vine and under his fig tree, and none shall make them afraid. The name, Micah, means “Who is like the Lord?” – which is to say, what could be impossible for God? Obama will reach his desk to find what one newspaper this week described as the “intray from hell”, a mountain of problems and demands and human pain – justice for America’s uninsured poor, an ending to bloody and unpopular wars, the need to address infinitely complex environmental issues. The Israel and Judah Micah prophesied to had headaches at least as great in their own way, sandwiched between superpowers, never knowing which army was going to trample on them next. And yet, and yet, he never loses hope, for who is like the Lord? Because God is at work in our hoping and in the sacrifices we make for peace. It’s been my privilege to have known, sometimes taken funerals for, ex-servicemen who’ve given their all. Some have been men whose sheer nobility humbled me even to know them in their civilian life, like the ex-naval commander who nursed a sick wife for years and years and finally had to admit he couldn’t carry on, and having seen her at last into a care home, he himself died within days. One of his friends told me: it was almost as if he’d seen the last man off his ship before it went down, before leaving the bridge. He’d spent himself and duty was done. Another captain whose funeral again I was honoured to take, having had his ship sunk under him, he rescued a drowning sailor, swam, carrying him through heaving seas and blazing oil to put the sailor on the nearest ship (an enemy one), then jumped back into the sea and swam to the nearest British vessel. One soldier who served on our Vestry at Haddington (his last job had been in charge of the National War Memorial at the Castle) once really touched me with his soldier’s compassion because, when I complimented him on a very concise report he’d written for me, he said: Andrew, if you’re in the field that’s how you write, because what you’ve written probably has to be read by a very young soldier sitting in a water-filled ditch, in the dark, cold, shivering and scared. Encounters like these with people like that have made me over the years value this day and what we do here more and more. This is our opportunity to honour those who pay the price for failures of diplomacy or failures of mutual understanding, and for all our failures of vision. And in the doing of that often they show the very virtues on which our dreams for peace have to be built: selflessness, courage, loyalty, and increasingly today in the situations where our forces serve, the readiness to rebuild relationships and communities with people who hold us in the deepest suspicion and even hatred – and some times with reason. Greater love has no-one than this. So the joy of this week and the hoping and the dreaming are the fruits of all the sacrifices we honour today. Jesus says: Go and bear fruit that will last, don’t stop try to making a difference, don’t get cynical, never stop dreaming – we’re to work for a world where no-one can make you or anyone else afraid, whether for your race or your religion or the colour of your skin or anything else. One First World War poet wrote: “To you from failing hands we throw Today our Paschal Candle is lit, a torch passed to us by the young man of Nazareth who laid down his life for love, light for the world from the God who calls us not slaves, not servants, but friends. And who tells us that in his world there is no room for fear. Amen.
One of the things I like about saints is their sheer variety. There’s no sort of off-the-peg, one size fits all way of being a saint. At my last church I worked with a ministry team member one of whose duties was to compile a list of saints to be commemorated at our Wednesday service. This could result in my turning up of a morning to find that I was celebrating, for example, the feast of Sts Boris and Gleb. Who? This meant some fast research. Boris and Gleb were Ukrainian princes, both considered martyrs by the Orthodox church, having died by the command of one Sviatapolk the Accursed (not a nice man by all accounts) – Gleb we’re told, having his throat cut by his own cook. Now you may well ask, who needs to know that at half past ten on a Sunday morning a thousand years on, or at any time. But the commemoration of the saints, whether obscure Ukrainian martyrs or even the saints with unpronounceable Gaelic names in our own calendar – they’re an invitation to join in that weird and wonderful cavalcade that streams through those gates of pearl – all those whom Jesus calls blessed and invites us to be one of them. And it’s like they look back to us, calling over their shoulders: Come and join us. Join the pilgrimage. See what it feels like to put your feet in the footsteps of the Man of Galilee. A few years ago I saw a film of the art critic, Brian Sewell making the pilgrimage to the shrine of St James, Santiago de Compostela. He aimed to end up in that amazing cathedral famous for its huge hanging censer, the one that takes a whole team of beefy men to swing it from one side of the cathedral to the other and which Pope John Paul watched – in a great television moment - almost as if he was at Wimbledon. But Brian’s pilgrimage was extraordinary. Much of it done in a Mercedes, be it said, but nevertheless he made an amazing journey. Not just to the shrine of the saint, but meeting saints along the way, and indeed making a journey in his own heart. At Lourdes his aesthetic soul was appalled by all the tackiness and tat of the shops with their holy trinkets: Luminous blessed Virgins; holographic pictures of Jesus that show him crucified if you hold them one way and risen if you tilt them the other; or wind-up holy grottoes that play the Lourdes hymn. But still he could see beyond that to the faith of all the people with broken bodies or minds who find their way there and the compassion of all the helpers there to care for them (like the Duchess of Kent who after her conversion to become a Roman Catholic went to Lourdes as a helper and was happy to clean loos). Lourdes is a place of joy. It’s a place where one peasant girl, Bernadette, met another peasant girl, Our Lady, and had an encounter that literally opened up a well of healing and joy for millions. Beyond explanation, and both of them definitely among the ranks of the blessed. It’s a place of a love and a faith so alive it makes saints – you see the heroism of the sick and the heroism of those who care for them. It’s a place for going beyond yourself, which is what saints do. Saints see more than this world’s suffering – whether it’s their own or other people’s. They see hope and they see Jesus and they see a Way in which they can walk towards joy. By the time Brian Sewell reached Compostella he was beginning to see this. The pilgrim route is punctuated by amazing buildings and shrines, but far more moving than any architecture over which he cast his critical artist’s eye was the experience of meeting so many people travelling in hope and joy. At journey’s end, the last bit made very awkwardly on horseback (which is traditional apparently), you see him, his mind not much changed intellectually about Christianity, but his heart reached and touched to a depth that truly astonished him. The saints say to you: Get on the pilgrim way. What’s the journey of joy or sorrow Christ might be inviting you to make today? Will I trust Jesus to take that step beyond my comfort zone into a life which, even if it looks as ordinary or unremarkable as it could be, is extraordinary at its heart. You don’t have to physically go anywhere to follow the saints. Brother Laurence, author of The Practice of the Presence of God, worked in his monastery kitchen for 15 years and he says: "The time of business does not with me differ from the time of prayer; and in the noise and clutter of my kitchen, while several persons are at the same time calling for different things, I possess God in as great tranquillity as if I were upon my knees at the Blessed Sacrament." You can be a saint in the kitchen – and I don’t mean being Delia. And you can be a saint in the lion’s den of worldly power if that’s where God takes you. Like Martin Luther King who died forty years ago, a man who stood in the heart of Washington and said: “I have dream” and a million hearts rose and recognised his dream and shared it and thanked God for his voice and his vision and still do. Ukrainian princes and peasant girls, kitchen saints and political prophets, we need them all and they look strangely like us because they show us that any of us can shine like they have, shine like they do. They say, jump in, travel, even if the travelling’s in your heart; be open to being reshaped and turned upside down and emptied until you know what it is truly like to walk with God, on a journey where the signposts may be few and the map not always easy to read but where there are joys beyond describing. Amen.
C S Lewis was probably one of the greatest apologists for Christianity of the 20th century. He gave us the Chronicles of Narnia, the famous Screwtape Letters (from a senior to a junior devil) and books like Mere Christianity and The Problem of Pain that made Christianity real to people in their thousands as well as radio lectures broadcast from London literally as the bombs fell outside. But when his own wife died the faith of this eloquent insightful man of faith almost evaporated overnight. He’d only found love late in life, very late, only for it to be snatched away when his wife, Joy, died within just a few years of their meeting. In fact they were married in hospital as Joy lay dying. Lewis was left feeling angry, betrayed even and the experience resulted in a very short book that’s possibly helped more people than any of his others. In the depths of despair and depression he wrote: A Grief observed. No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear. I am not afraid, but the sensation is like being afraid. The same fluttering in the stomach, the same restlessness, the yawning. I keep on swallowing. There are moments, most unexpectedly, when something inside me tries to assure me that I don't really mind so much, not so very much, after all. Love is not the whole of a man's life. I was happy before I ever met her. I've plenty of what are called 'resources.' People get over these things. Come, I shan't do so badly. One is ashamed to listen to this voice but it seems for a little to be making out a good case. Then comes a sudden jab of red-hot memory — and all this 'commonsense' vanishes like an ant in the mouth of a furnace. Meanwhile, where is God? This is one of the most disquieting symptoms. When you are happy, so happy that you have no sense of needing Him, you will be — or so it feels — welcomed with open arms. But go to Him when your need is desperate, when all other help is vain, and what do you find? A door slammed in your face, and a sound of bolting and double bolting on the inside. After that, silence. You may as well turn away. The longer you wait, the more emphatic the silence will become. There are no lights in the windows. It might be an empty house. Was it ever inhabited? Not that I am (I think) in much danger of ceasing to believe in God. The real danger is of coming to believe such dreadful things about Him. The conclusion I dread is not 'So there's no God after all, ' but 'So this is what God's really like. Deceive yourself no longer.' Those words of Lewis’s speak to the experience of everyone who’s ever lost someone close to them, that sense of being rocked to your foundations, utterly bereft. But here, I want to say, is the place of faith. Not Lewis’s learned certainties of his early books, the intellectual arguments for the existence of God. It’s in the place of unknowing that God is really met. In the wilderness, in the silence. That’s where Abraham meets God, and Moses too; in exile the Jews find God in the very absence of everything they’ve lost; and for Jesus in Gethsemane and on the Cross what answer does he get other than the sound of what probably sounded like bolting and double bolting on the inside, and after that silence? Can we get our heads round the thought that in Jesus God takes loss and absence and silence and despair into his own being, that somehow our dereliction echoes in the heart of God? When Eric Clapton’s little boy, who was just four years old, died falling out of a skyscraper window in New York, he wrote a song for him called “tears in heaven”. And one of the hymns we often sing echoes that thought: And when human hearts are breaking under sorrow’s iron rod, then they find the self-same aching deep within the heart of God.” A little boy dies, God’s heart aches, there are tears in heaven. But faith looks beyond tears and heartache to those new beginnings you can’t see through your tears, when it’s the faith of other people that carryies you, when it’s the silent grieving God who carries you. So in those times when all we hear is silence the truth is that we are held, held in the love of those who keep faith with us and for us; held in the faith of the Church which keeps the flame of resurrection hope alive every time we light a candle, every time we walk through that door on a Sunday morning – the day of the resurrection; every time we come to the altar and receive the bread of heaven. We believe in the God who raised Christ from the dead. Slowly as it happened for the disciples, as it happened for Lewis in time, so for us it dawns on us that death isn’t the last word. Because yes, there are tears in heaven; but there’s rejoicing too. Love, we know, is stronger than death; love will come again like wheat that springeth green; on the third day whenever we awake to it, we know that love, quite simply, doesn’t die. Amen.
5 October 2008 Free like Francis I have to admit I smiled when I saw the readings set for today. Because couldn’t you just picture Francis standing somewhere in the Umbrian countryside under a clear blue sky? Think olive trees dotted along the skyline in the background, and a little group of brothers, farm labourers, children and animals gathered around him. And Francis spreads his arms towards the birds in the trees in a great expansive Italian gesture: Consider the ravens… how God feeds them – how much more value are you than the birds! This was Francis’s huge appeal. A completely free human being. In the film: “Brother Sun, Sister Moon” he sheds his clothes before the whole of Assisi including the Bishop and his parents, to stand there like a new Adam, and he says: I want to be like the birds are, to live in total dependence on God. I want to be free. For the witnesses what you see in their faces – and it’s a typical Zeferelli film with a lot of focussing on the character in people’s faces – is this mixture of horror but also a kind of wonder and attraction. How could someone walk away from everything – and this is the gilded son of a very prosperous man, one of Assisi’s most up and coming citizens – how could you just shed all that and say you don’t need it, don’t even want it? But in with that incomprehension there’s a wistfulness and a wondering, could I be as free as that? Is this what a really free human being looks like? So all kinds of folk were attracted to Francis, then as now. Knights put aside their armour and merchants gave away their gold until the town council of Assisi got really worried that Francis was going to undermine the whole established order. Meanwhile Francis went on collecting his growing band of completely oddball characters, like Brother Juniper who, in compassion for a sick brother who asked if he might have some leg of pork to eat, grabbed a knife, went off to find some pigs who were harmlessly minding their own business and fell on one of them to cut off a foot. This he cooked to the great consolation of the brother, but “enter owner”, full of indignation that he now owned a three-legged pig. According to the Little Flowers of St Francis, he “came unto the house of the brothers calling them hypocrites, thieves, false knaves and bad persons” but the end of the story sees Francis sending the simple Juniper to beg the man’s forgiveness and Juniper doing this with such transparent sincerity and overcoming the poor owner with such extravagant embraces and tears, that the man cooks what’s left of the unfortunate pig and presents it to the brothers. Juniper figures large in Francis’s story because he’s always getting it wrong, but his heart’s in the right place, and he shows how Francis, like Jesus, takes people just as they are. He starts with a kiss for a leper, something that terrified him to the core, but he knows that the widening of your heart is something that goes on for a lifetime. We never stop being challenged by people, by their behaviour, their wackiness, by the things they do that maybe hurt us or make us afraid. So this clown from Assisi, takes you to the brink of who you think you are and how you relate to other people – and he asks us, in all these things, in everything in fact, to let God be God. It’s in pardoning that we are pardoned. We’re the family of the forgiven. And it’s not as if Francis gets this without a struggle himself. He launches himself into his new life out of a place of brokenness and failure. As a young man he’d gone off to war decked out as a knight in the finest gear his proud Dad could provide, but ended up captured, ransomed home, a broken wreck with all his dreams in pieces. And even once he found himself on his new path he still had new discoveries to make about God and himself. Struggling with his natural sexual longings Francis on one occasion plunges naked into the snow, waving his arms to make a snow angel family in place of the natural family he’d never have – a wife and lots of little children. But years later, near to death, he apologised to his own body, which he used to call Brother Donkey, for all the harshness he’d subjected himself to. He needed to learn not just to kiss the leper and live with simple-minded Juniper, but to live with and love himself, to reverence his own being, body and spirit. And it is to that learning that he calls us, just as Jesus did. So don’t be anxious, consider the ravens, consider the lilies; seek God’s kingdom; fear not; buy treasure that lasts. What a Gospel. Spoken by Jesus when the Jews, taxed into the dust under the Romans, thought the world couldn’t get any worse; by Francis when the feudal world was ending and the merchant world was taking over – the dawn of the very capitalism that’s exercising everyone right now. But the question we’re left with is whether we want the kind of freedom Jesus offers. One Franciscan sister puts it like this: We fear being fully alive just as we fear anything else that we cannot imagine. Which is why God gives us a Francis so that we can see you can live this freedom. And you don’t have to do it as he did. No taking off your clothes in the middle of Stockbridge, or living with people who cut off pig’s feet. You do Gospel freedom as you, in the utterly singular, unique life that’s yours. And to do that you start with thankfulness and praise. Thanks be to thee O Lord, for Brother Sun, for Sister Moon. Thankfulness is the default position from which you get to joy. It’s the state we need to return to again and again every day so that it becomes the way in which we see the world. Not the negativity of the media as the markets crash, not that incipient Scottish negativity many of us know too well (we’re all doomed!), not the negativity we carry in our genes from old family wounds and memories; but thankfulness as our natural, creaturely state. That’s what a fully alive human being is like. Then truly the very trees of the field clap their hands, and we go out with joy. Amen.
28 September 2008 Seeing angels Just the other day I came across a quote from a man who said: I’ve been reading a book called “The Power of Positive Thinking”, but I gave up – because after all, what’s the point? And there’s a little of that in Nathaniel, at least to start with. Can anything good come from Nazareth? Some translations say: From that place? There’s that negativity and cynicism that says, been there, done that, got the T-shirt, what else have you got to show me? A kind of world weariness in which any sense of expectation is so dulled that you no longer expect to see anything new, least of all angels. So Nathaniel needs a bit of working on by God, by Jesus, to get him from that almost adolescent shrug which is his response to Philip, to the very different place where the story leaves him. We don’t know if he responds to Philip’s: “Come and see” with “Do I have to?” but it doesn’t matter, because move he does. He leaves the place where he is, and in a sense maybe leaves also his cynical certainties, and starts the journey towards the encounter of his life. And here we get another of those great New Testament dialogues. You can see Jesus smiling as he greets Nathaniel: Here’s an Israelite worthy of the name. There’s humour and affection and recognition – and recognising Nathaniel as someone who isn’t just going to swallow anything. Just like the comedian, Robin Williams, says of being an Episcopalian, that you don’t have to leave your brains at the door on the way in, so Jesus knows Nathaniel is just like that. Nathaniel’s seen all those tuppeny-hapenny prophets who made great claims about themselves (Here I am, I’m the Messiah) – bit like Oasis saying they were going to be bigger than the Beatles – but who’s going to believe that? Certainly not Nathaniel, and Jesus knows that. And to Jesus’s greeting, Nathaniel is straight back with a question: How do you know me? And this is what takes his breath away. This is something new. That he’s known and somehow with every sinew of his being he knows he’s known, and it feels wonderful to be known in that way. No explanations needed. The Samaritan woman at the well had the identical experience. And on that occasion too Jesus almost plays a game with her, and again with respect and humour and a deep, non-judgemental knowing. I know how many husbands you’ve had and the guy you’re with now isn’t your husband. But I can give you a spiritual nourishment to last for always. And the woman’s reaction is just like Nathaniel’s (and she’s a tough cookie too): Come and see someone who told me everything I ever did! So now Nathaniel is eating out of Jesus’s hand. Rabbi, you’re the Son of God! But Jesus wants Nathaniel to know that there’s much more here than mind-reading. Jesus wants Nathaniel to be able to see things that other people may never see. Which is what angels are about. Angels represent a dynamic intervention of God to initiate something new. They tell you to prepare for a new thing; they’re heralds of action, they tell you that the tectonic plates of your life are shifting and the Spirit is blowing through your life in a new way, so get ready. There’s a lovely fable in the Old Testament about Tobias who’s heading off on a mission, but God sends an angel to prevent him. Which allows for the only real Disney moment in the Bible because Tobias (with his head full of his own plans and worries no doubt) can’t see the angel. But the ass he’s riding does. The angel stands before the ass time after time, pushing it to the side, stopping it in its tracks and time after time Tobias gets off to beat the poor ass, until in the end God opens the ass’s mouth and he speaks, and after threatening him with a phone call to the RSPCA and telling him to quit with the beating, he gets Tobias to turn around and head in a new direction. So to see angels requires a certain simplicity of spirit, maybe something easier for children certainly or even animals. And whether Nathaniel had that kind of spirit at the beginning or not, we don’t know. But what we do know is that by the end of that journey towards Jesus, possibly reluctantly begun, he knows that he’s known and loved and loveable. Christ loves him. He can see it and feel it. And therefore when his time comes he will indeed see his angels. He knows that good things come even from the place you least expect, even from Nazareth, and maybe Philip was actually the first of all the angels Jesus promised he’d see. All he had to do was start the journey. Which is a journey we symbolise every time we come up to the altar rail, or even if you don’t physically do that, you’re doing it in your heart. We hear the invitation to come and see. We put out empty hands, admitting we don’t have all the answers. And we receive the bread of heaven, the food of angels. When I started at the Cathedral years ago it used to bemuse me that frequently when there might only be two of us for morning prayer sitting in the dark Resurrection Chapel, when we got into the Vestry the then Vice-Provost would write in the service register an attendance of three. The extra one is for the angels, he explained. The whole Christian life is about having our eyes opened to see good things in unexpected places, and living with what our liturgy calls the whole company of heaven, including angels. Amen.
21 September 2008 Ninian tells it Ah, Lord God, I am only a boy! Ninian’s chronicler, Aelred, tells the story of how one of the boys in Ninian’s monastery at Whithorn gets into trouble and is about to receive the then conventional punishment of being beaten with rods. St Benedict in his rule about a hundred years later gives this as a punishment for people who sing out of tune in choir, so maybe that’s what he’d done. But anyway, he decides to make a sharp exit and pinching a coracle from the beach he sets off for Ireland to make his escape, taking with him, like a kind of lucky rabbit’s foot, Ninian’s staff. St Ninian was still alive at the time so he kind of needed it. So this young monk isn’t having a great day. He’s got into trouble at the monastery, he’s run away, he’s pinched a boat, and he’s pinched the holy man’s staff, so things can only get better, you’d think. Only suddenly he’s aware that his sandaled feet are getting wet, that he’s paddling in fact. There’s a hole in this coracle. So serves him right, you might say. Only the boy actually has a good heart and he reveres St Ninian so he calls upon God and in a flash of inspiration he plants the staff in the hole, and behold the hole is sealed, and a favourable wind catches against the staff and blows the coracle back to shore where the boy plants the staff in the ground and as he prays his thanksgivings the staff blossoms and a fountain springs from its roots and the waters it turns out can even heal the sick. All in a day’s work for your average Celtic saint. As they say, ye couldnae make it up. But this is the God of surprises who takes no excuses and who won’t let us run away from anything. Jeremiah certainly has his “I’m only a boy” moments; his running away moments. At one point he ends up stuck down a cistern. And the Bible records: “And there was no water in the cistern”, (which was lucky) but goes on to say, “but only mire (that’s probably the polite word) and Jeremiah sank in the mire”. But again and again he recognises that even when he’s sinking in every conceivable way, still there’s a claim of God on his life that he just can’t shake off: “If I say, I will not speak any more in his name, there is as it were a burning fire shut up in my bones and I weary from holding it in”. I think we tell these stories because we see in them moments where an ordinary human being like us just gets knocked off their feet by an encounter with the Living God and they’re hooked (joyfully, crazily, absurdly hooked) for the rest of their lives. And you can’t explain it or explain it away. The nearest thing to that for me was going into the Cathedral at age sixteen to tell the God I no longer believed in just exactly what I thought of him for not saving my Dad who’d just died. Only something happened and fifteen years later I found myself kneeling only yards from the same spot making ordination vows. God, it seems, has a sense of humour. You couldn’t make it up. One of the five men who spent five weeks at Worth Abbey as part of the BBC series “The Monastery” got a similar surprise. 30 year old Tony had been working as an executive in the soft porn industry, and joined in the project almost saying, “Well come on then, convince me”. Only, to his own total amazement he was convinced. In the silence of the abbey, in the love of the monks, something happened: “And that was it,” he says. “That was my call. It wasn’t just grown-ups dressing up. Or something to do on a Sunday before the pubs opened. I wasn’t willing it to happen, nor expecting it to happen, but it did”. So here’s the thing, this is the God who lifts you out of yourself and sends you where you never thought you’d go. And we remember our saints like Ninian, because they’re people who take God at his word, who go to the edge, take huge risks of faith and they fly. I love that story of the boy who, when filling in a careers questionnaire, wrote down that he wanted to be an astronaut, but in response to the question: Are you willing to work away from home?, answered, “No”. And sure we won’t be asked to confront kings as Ninian did. But that we’ll be asked to leave our comfort zones and go beyond what we think we can do, there is no doubt. To venture into the terra incognita of your own life, and to trust God beyond what you can see - that’s faith. But not blind faith, because the saints have done it before us, and millions are doing it with us now. So in whatever place we find ourselves now, can you or I speak God’s word? To speak a word of hope in your family situation, or with someone who’s sick, or in a conflict at work, to speak that word we’re bound to speak, because there’s a fire that burns in the heart and even if you feel that it’s no more than an ember, speaking God’s word of hope for yourself or for someone else will fan it into a flame even in spite of yourself. Because this is what you were born for. God says: Before I formed you in the womb I appointed you. And the Risen Jesus joyfully affirms that: Go and tell them. Go and tell the world that there’s hope. So Ninian runs to the very edge of the world to tell the story before kings and warriors and peasants and anyone who’ll listen, and even people who won’t. And today it’s almost as if, from his little white church on the Solway, that centre of LIGHT, he asks us a question – who will you tell the story to? Who do you know that needs a word of love? To whom is Jesus sending you? Because what Ninian would tell us, from his own experience, is that Christ’s promise is true: He is with us always. Amen.
14 September 2008 Holy Cross A few years ago there was a great stushie about Mel Gibson’s film, “The Passion of the Christ”, which majored on the horror of the Cross, the crucifixion itself and the anguish and pain of it all. I have to confess I deliberately didn’t go to see it. Partly because I haven’t forgiven Mel Gibson for “Braveheart”, but more seriously because his approach seemed both way too much and not remotely enough. I say “too much” because showing us all that horror down to every gory detail misses the point, and because the meaning of the Cross in fact transcends all that – it belongs to everyone. If the Cross is only about the three hour anguish of the Man of Galilee, then frankly in the scales of human suffering – in a week where there was a service of remembrance for all the soldiers who served in Northern Ireland (bringing back memories of all those terrible bombings and killings and people left scarred for life), and 9/11 again commemorated just this week, and on and on – just add to the list for yourself, well how much can we say about three hours? I once saw the Mum of a boy struggling with leukemia interviewed between the hymns on Songs of Praise and she just told it like it was and said, “Don’t talk to me about the Cross, I’ve been watching my son suffer for years.” So being overfocused on those three hours both insults people’s pain and it sells them desperately short. Because the fact is, and it is the folly of the Cross (as Paul calls it) that for centuries people have claimed the Cross and clung to it as a sign of hope, an absurd contradiction right at the very heart of whatever might be happening for them. There’s a famous Passion scene in Germany, a painting called the Eisenheim altarpiece, it’s by Grunewald and it does depict a broken, crucified Christ, in all its horror with the flesh literally hanging off. It stood originally at the end of a long room, a ward if you like, in a hospice for lepers, and the idea was that the sufferers would see this painting and know – not so much that Jesus had suffered with them once long ago – but that all suffering is known to God and he shares in everything that happens to us. But this was a painting which could be reversed, and what the lepers could contemplate on the other side was a Risen Christ, a glorified, beautiful human being, perfected and whole – the way that God saw them already, no matter how the world might see them. So the Cross pointed away from itself, away from present anguish to the Christian hope. For God so loved the world… And loves the world so much that he can even take our anger. Christopher Nolan, the Irish author who lives with cerebral palsy, describes a moment where the young disabled boy, Joseph, through who he tells his own life story, has a moment of terrible despair and he rails against God in the crucified Christ. A friend has taken him into Church. “What,” said Matthew, “Do you want to see the crucifix, Joseph?” He wheeled him over and there hanging up on the wall was a lifesize Christ crucified to a huge black cross. His pallid limp body sagged windswept and dead. Crowned with thorns, his grey face was streaked by caked blood, his wonderful eyes were turned vacantly upwards, his head fell backwards and his veins were taut in his throat. But Joseph was not seeing the sadness of the spectacle that day, his boy’s heart was broken and he knew who to blame. The bright angry eyes of the rebellious boy looked up at the great crucifix and swinging his left arm in a grand arc he made the two-finger sign at the dead Christ. He told God what he thought of him. He was furious still. For Joseph this self-assertion before God is part of his spiritual journey, part of his growing up in faith, as it needs to be for all of us. Joseph loves the God he sometimes hates and that’s ok, and in the Eucharist he meets the crucified God in a special way, just as he is. One of Joseph’s problems is opening his mouth to receive the host when his uncontrolled reflexes keep his jaws jammed shut. “Once, when Joseph was in difficulty, the priest came up with a bold idea of his own – Hi Joseph, what were you doing in the Church yesterday? Were you riflin’ the poor box? Joseph was so surprised by the accusation that his mouth fell open in astonishment. The priest immediately returned to prayer as he placed communion on the boy’s tongue. Such were Fr Flynn’s schemes, such his empathy that the boy became more and more relaxed over the years. And so you see Joseph, no matter all the challenges he faces relaxing more and more into who he is and who he is with God. Nolan writes: “Communion served to join the silent boy with silent God, and into his masked ear Joseph poured his mental whisperings, begging blessings to be showered on his faithful friends.” The crucified Jesus reveals to us, the silent God who hears our cries, who stands beside us inviting us to let go into a great fathomless love: Into thy hands, I commit my spirit. Paul writes to the Colossians in a phrase of almost startling boldness that we “make up what is lacking in the sufferings of Christ”, so whatever the mystery of the Cross is about, I’m part of it and so are you – and the sufferings of the whole world. So that when we offer the bread and the wine to God at the altar, that’s what we’re offering – merged into the bread, mixed into the wine – everything you are, and everything you’re going through and the anguish and hope and wonder and joy of the whole world. But like that Cross held before the eyes of the lepers, we see beyond it to hope. Because the deepest meaning of the Cross is: the Risen Jesus for whom the Cross becomes a royal throne – and the one phrase a Christian needs to know by heart: God so loved the world. Amen.
7 September 2008 It’s now that matters Owe no-one anything, says St Paul. It’s an interesting idea in a time when according to the financial pundits your average Briton has more credit card debt, more debt of all kinds in fact, than anyone else in the western world. And it’s easy to see how it happens, because we’ve been seduced with easy credit for years – at least until now and the credit crunch. Even vicars like me get letters through the post offering me an American Express gold card, leaving me wondering if they have any idea what vicars earn, or even if they care. But of course, in the ancient world debt was an even more serious business. Because if you couldn’t pay they didn’t just send in the bailiffs and take your stuff – your flat-screen TV, your laptop or even your house, they took you. Debt led to literal enslavement. That’s why Paul’s language of redemption really hit home, because if you found yourself in the slave market being inspected by potential owners like you were a horse or a piece of furniture, you prayed to every god you knew that some kind friend would come and literally redeem you. Buy you out of the market and give you your freedom back. So Paul says again and again: don’t be enslaved to anything. Don’t owe anyone anything, except – and here his argument takes a really clever twist – the debt of love. And this is a debt with a difference because, unlike your monthly visa bill (hopefully) you don’t ever pay it off. Paul says love fulfils the Law, but there’s never any sense of job done, that’s it. This is a debt that isn’t paid off with the mortgage, or stops when the kids leave home, or over when we can’t work in the ways we used to or do the things that we did. Our liturgy says: our life and yours are bound together in a wonderful exchange, in a way that suggests almost a continual commerce between God and us. And I’m invited to really enter into that exchange, not just as a passive recipient of love and forgiveness, but as a channel through which those things will flow into the world. So I don’t just bank up all this love and forgiveness for me. Freely you have received, so freely give. But no-one, neither Paul nor Jesus, pretends this is easy. What if people don’t want my love? What if I try to offer forgiveness or to be reconciled to someone and they don’t want to know? How much does that hurt when it happens to us? But Paul and Jesus both say, this is how it is. In a world of fragile people where for so many our wounds lie painfully close to the surface, we will hurt and be hurt. Nothing in the Bible tells us to expect anything else. Paul falls out with the Corinthians. Paul falls out with lots of people, but with the Corinthians especially. A challenge to his conflict management skills comes early on when it turns out that at the Eucharist the Barnton Corinthians are bringing Waitrose hampers which they scoff themselves, whilst the less fortunate turn up with a pot noodle and a packet of crisps. So Paul has to sort them out, and remind them whose feast this is and what it means. This is the feast for the poor, this is the feast for all, this is the feast where love of neighbour is acted out by sharing. But conflict doesn’t seem to worry Paul or Jesus. On the contrary conflict again and again provides a spark that lets something new burst into life. If Paul hadn’t gone into a head to head with Peter and the other apostles, demanding the right to set the Gospel free for everyone, we would none of us be here. If Jesus hadn’t got himself into trouble in the synagogue in his home town, and into trouble again and again and again until he’s standing before Pontius Pilate and Herod for the final confrontation, the liberating news that love is the only debt a human being really owes wouldn’t be ours. So Jesus says, when conflict arises, don’t avoid issues with people, but bring things into the light and try your best to be reconciled, and do it now. Because for Paul and Jesus it’s now that matters. You know what time it is, Paul tells the Romans, meaning the reign of God has already begun and the clock is ticking, so live like this is so. And maybe so should we, even if we don’t look for literal end times. Whatever lies to hand in the loving and forgiving business, do it now. Don’t just pay the debt of love and forgiveness in a kind of reluctant way, but do what God does and overflow. Just like the Bishop in Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables who provides shelter for the fugitive Jean Valjean on the run from the merciless judgement of the officer of the law, Javerre, who’s sworn on his life to make sure Jean pays the full price in years for the loaf of bread he stole. By night the desperate Jean steals some of the Bishop’s silver and makes off under cover of darkness, only to be caught by local gendarmes and dragged before the Bishop next morning. But the Bishop knows what the Gospel means and, going over to his sideboard and taking out two silver candlesticks, he says to Jean before his captors: But my dear friend, the silver was my gift. Here, you forgot these. Why did you leave the best behind? For Jean this is the gift of his freedom, a literal redemption, a gift he can never repay except by a changed life – a loving life, a forgiving life. This is the wonderful exchange of our liturgy and it is the only debt we owe. Amen.
17 August 2008 Mary gets bovvered One of the most well-known comic catch-phrases of the last few years has been this: “Am I bovvered?” or “Do I look bovvered?” And in a sense it holds up a mirror to an attitude that’s almost characterised by a shrug. Nothing really matters enough for me to get bovvered that much – you know, it’s not worth voting, because you can’t change anything, and everybody’s just out for themselves anyway. So there really is no point bovvering with anything. And I guess in Mary’s time lots of people generally weren’t bovvered either. The Romans were here to stay, prophets were ten a penny, the promised reign of God showed no signs of showing up so you might just as well make the most of it and let the rest of it slip past you. But Mary’s having none of this. She doesn’t have any of that apathy. Her heart is ready; she’s on the tiptoe of expectation that maybe God will do something; she’s fertile for what God wants to accomplish in her and through her. So here she is, like Paul says, a child of the Law, just like everyone else. She has to be like everyone else so that Jesus will be like everyone else, or else the Incarnation will just be a cheap trick. So we keep coming back to Mary to remind ourselves of that. Early heresies must have found Mary a bit of an embarrassment because there were lots of people who found Jesus being like everyone else too much to cope with. Jesus couldn’t possibly be human like us because God can’t possibly suffer or die (that was an idea most ancient people just couldn’t get their minds round). But here God enters the human realm in a unique way, starting with a slip of a girl who is bovvered enough to say “yes”. And Mary stands in a place where she invites us to join her. She wants us to be expectant. Which might mean changing the world. It might equally mean changing me. So I can change, and so much biblical imagery is about yielding ourselves to God so that we can allow him to shape his will in us. We’re the clay; he’s the potter who’ll shape and reshape us if we let him. We’re the vineyard and he’s the vinedresser who lovingly tends and nurtures and prunes us. God never gives up on the possibility that we can change and grow. Biblical people change – big time. Peter and Paul those two pillars of the Church are people who change. They fail, they get up again. They’re broken pillars if you like. But they give us hope, because like Mary they’re just like us and they allow God – and I say allow because you have to give your “Yes” like Mary (God coerces no-one) – to bovver them, change and disturb them and turn their lives upside down. And Paul just exults in this: If anyone is a new creation, behold the old is gone; behold the new is come. Then he checks himself with a kind of humility check as it were: Not that I have already achieved perfection, but I strain forward to capture the prize for which Christ Jesus captured me. When I was a child there used to be tins of old-fashioned sweeties and on the lid it used to say: Beware spurious imitations. And the whole thrust of Paul’s letter to the Galatians is about that. People are going around after Paul’s moved on saying: Yes, this Gospel thing’s great but you still need the Law, you still need the rules. But Paul shakes them by the scruff of the neck: Oh foolish Galatians who has bewitched you? Don’t be a slave again, to anything ever. The Gospel is meant to free us up so we can change and grow and respond to what God wants to do in us next. Galatians is, we think, the oldest text in the New Testament. Maybe as early as AD40 which means it predates Mark’s Gospel by possibly as much as twenty years. So this isn’t Paul just having a lawyerly rant about the law; this is the core of the Good News being clearly articulated by someone who, like no-one else, has grasped it right down to its essentials. So he’s saying: don’t settle for less than God wants to give you. There was a pop song years ago that went: God is watching us, God is watching us, God is watching us, from a distance. It’s a lovely song about how the world and all its anguish and war and pain looks to God; but the only thing wrong with the song is that refrain of: From a distance. Because what erupts into Mary’s life is the God who takes flesh. There is no distance between us and God. So when the mothers of Georgia or Iraq cry for lost homes and lost children, it’s almost as if the next step for God is to look for someone to care, someone who, like Mary, will go on believing that the world can change. That the way things are isn’t good enough. It’s worth being bovvered. Because we’re not slaves to a destiny we can’t change, but God’s children each and every one of whom contains almost a universe of possibilities. Another woman, a real stirrer, a trouble-maker and early feminist, a suspected heretic who only just escaped the hands of the Inquisition, was Teresa of Avila. Teresa knew that God does not watch the world from a distance. Just like Rabbi Lionel Blue says that God invented Jews in order to fix the world and make it work, so Teresa had no doubt that making the Incarnation a reality now, is down to us: Christ has no body but yours, Mary and Paul and Teresa – and a world that needs us, and our own hearts and their needs and God and his love for the world, challenge us to be bovvered enough to be a blessing. Amen.
10 August 2008 If you want to walk on the water The Ship is one of the classic symbols for Christians. It’s the logo for the World Council of Churches, it’s often depicted in Christian art, with its mast shown as a Cross, a sign of hope above the tempestuous waves below. Medieval iconography went even further, often showing the Ship of Faith with the saved sitting smugly aboard whilst the heretics drowned. A sort of spectator sport for the redeemed. So you’ve got to get on board this ship of faith, only better make sure it’s the right ship, or so the thinking went. Theologically the Church developed the ship idea in all sorts of ways. Mary was seen as the Ark of Salvation carrying the Christchild in her womb and you’ve only got to look up at some of the buildings in Leith to see the Leith coat of arms with Our Lady sat on board cradling the infant Jesus. And last week’s baptism service echoed the Ark theme only differently: The Ark and the rainbow and the waters of the Red Sea are all about the promise of an amazing destination for the ship of faith, namely the love and freedom which are our birthright. Now for the Jews there was actually a bit of a contradiction here. Because for them the sea and anything to do with it was a place of absolute fear and terror. You read psalm 107, the sailors’ psalm, and although the sailors make it safely to their haven, you can almost feel the seasickness as the boat lurches up and down, one moment perched on the crest of a mountainous wave, the next plunged into the depths. You feel yourself turning green just thinking about it. So the sea is a place where we’re not in control and the elements are untamed and capricious and monsters lurk beneath the surface. All of which made it something of a challenge when years ago, a young man, a keen sailor, who I was helping to prepare his wedding service, asked me if I could suggest any nice psalms about yachts. To his disappointment I had to tell him that there aren’t any. And I didn’t really feel “For those in peril on the sea” was the best wedding hymn either. But Jesus faces the Jewish fear of the sea head on. “Who is this? Even the wind and waves obey him.” This is the Lord who stills the tempest. And if you visit the Sea of Galilee you always sail out onto the lake, and your boat stops half way across so you can sing: O Sabbath rest by Galilee, who calm of hills above. And you think of Peter stepping out onto those waters not on a calm sunny day, but in the very heart of a storm. Peter’s life is of course, stormy by nature. Always he opens his mouth before he’s put his brain into gear. He’s a crazy choice you’d think for the rock on which to build the Church. And yet I rejoice that Christ picked Peter. Because God is permanently challenging the Church, and every one of us, to get out of the boat. Because if we’re any kind of ship then we’re certainly not a luxury liner for the lucky few. And it’s almost as if Jesus is always walking towards us across scary uncharted waters and saying: Come and join me, come to me across the choppy waters of your fears. To the Church that’s an invitation not to succumb to that institutional hardening of the arteries that says we know what the Church is and who it’s for. And all the fears and angst of the Lambeth Conference for me are about the Church trembling on the brink of Christ’s latest invitation to change and grow. But it also applies to us to in our own lives. When you’ve got one foot on the edge of some scary situation and you look down at the waters and say: I’m afraid, Lord. I feel like I’m drowning already just by thinking about what might lie ahead for me – this change in my life that I probably haven’t chosen but here it is to be faced. But there are some helpful Old Testament echoes here. The children of Israel can see the Red Sea up ahead of them and they’ve got Pharaoh’s army thundering up behind. They don’t know the waters will part and they must have looked at Moses as if to say: OK, genius, what now? But this will be their first lesson in stepping out in faith. Years on they finally they reach the Jordan, and again they stand at the water’s edge, and yes there’s a Land flowing with milk and honey on the other side, but it’s also a land full of folk who are not going to lay out the welcome mat. And this time the Bible tells us the waters do not part until the people actually get their feet wet. Those first steps they take are taken in fear and faith. Anyway back on a choppy Sea of Galilee, out steps wonderful, impetuous Peter, takes a few steps, then like a cartoon character who races off a cliff and keeps on running mid-air until he looks down, he sinks like a stone, just like we do when we get scared, until a strong hand grasps him and sees him safely into the boat. Over these last few weeks I’ve had some moments for looking down at the waves. I’m involved, as you know, in a pretty crazy kind of faith project, renovating a huge dilapidated house as a centre for a small Christian community at the heart of the city, a project in which there have definitely been sinking moments. Like the moment we put the key in the door and walked in to find that not a single item of the previous owners’ contents had been removed – everything from unmade beds left just as their last occupants had got out of them, to walls fouled with graffiti and worse. And it took thirty friends two whole days just to clear a mountain of extremely unpleasant debris. Definitely one point, and not the last, at which we looked down at the waves and asked ourselves: What have we done? But the strong hand of Christ, in the shape of our friends and their labours and their prayers – and the fact that already a community is forming round this broken down old house – all this has confirmed to us that it wasn’t that crazy to get out of the boat. It’s in fact a favourite maxim of inspirational speakers, management gurus and the like: if you want to walk on water, you’ve got to get out of the boat - whatever that means for you in the life you’re living right now, this week. But the witness of this story and of all those water-walking saints who have gone before us, is that the Living Christ is there as your strength and your companion and your guide – not just to bring you to safety but to bring you to joy. Amen.
3 August 2008 Transfiguration… What’s in a name? I’m always fascinated by the names people choose for their babies. Some parents pick names for their children either to live up to or even to live down: like the Mum who got into a fight with her local vicar because she’d been to see the film "Gladiator" and wanted to call her son "Maximus", or or the inventor of the Lear light aircraft who named his children Chanda and Gonda. But I have to say that for a baptism on the Feast of the Transfiguration, having just listened to Luke’s Gospel, you couldn’t ask for a better name than Luke. The name means light-bearer and later in the service we’ll give Luke a candle as a symbol of the light he’s going to bear into the world for the whole of his life. St Luke is also patron saint of doctors – Paul describes him as his beloved physician, but most significantly of all, perhaps, Luke is known as the author of what people often call the “Gospel of Compassion”. Because Luke writes with the heart of a healer, as someone deeply touched by people’s sufferings and struggles, but at the same time he has this irrepressible joy. Only Luke gives us angels and shepherds, only in Luke those hymns of joy: the Gloria and the Magnificat; he gives us a woman looking desperately for a lost coin then throwing a party when she finds it, and in fact more stories about women than any other Gospel; only in Luke a desperate Father rejoicing over his prodigal son (which, if we had no other Gospel story, is probably the only one we need), and time and time again he gives us Jesus reaching out to the despised and rejected right up to that encounter with the Good Thief on the Cross – only in Luke. So Luke sheds light on what human experience is actually like, and also on what it can be if we’re open to the light that shines from the mountain. When I was doing a little bit of research on Luke as a popular baby’s name on Google, it turns out that one reason for the popularity of the name, is not so much to do with St Luke as with Star Wars. Young Luke Skywalker is the hero of the films, and his destiny is to be a Jedi, a servant of the Force – the great mysterious power that holds the cosmos in being. And to do that against all temptations to turn to the Dark Side (having Darth Vader as your Dad isn’t a great start). But Luke will, no matter what, live out the meaning of his name. He’s an unconquerable light-bearer. As is Jesus whom we see today on the mountaintop surrounded by dazzling light. Jesus will live out the meaning of his name too: God saves. And he’ll take his light into the deepest darkest places of human experience to show to us that this light shines even there and the darkness never overcomes it. There’s a sense in which every one of us shares that mountaintop. We stand in that place where God gives us a name that includes all names – and that name is Beloved. Who are we? We’re Luke, or Andrew or whoever… But most of all we’re Beloved. The name we have in the heart of God before we’re given any other name, before anyone lays eyes on us. The un-named name parents have for children before they’ve picked any other name. For his Mum and Dad, Luke was the Beloved before he even had a name, and that’s the knowledge we want him to have every day he opens his eyes for the rest of his life. Because it’s a dazzlingly wonderful thing to be a human being. We see it in that strange vision of Daniel. Everything is given to this Son of Man, nothing’s too good for him, and Jesus fulfils that vision – and shares it with us. On the mountaintop heaven splits open and the human Jesus stands there bathed in love and glory to hold up a mirror to how God sees you. That’s what a human being looks like to God. We’re just amazing, enough to take God’s breath away. Just the other day when I went to see Vivian’s new baby, Joshua, the nurse on duty showed me into the wrong room. A seemingly delighted Mum thrust her baby into my arms for a blessing saying: I wasn’t expecting a priest – this is wonderful. And it struck me that priest or no priest, all babies enter this world under a blessing. Baptised in the love of their parents before any other baptism, drenched in the love of God, celebrated with that heavenly chorus that Luke clearly thought was indispensible for any major event, and just radiating light and love. My first baby daughter, I remember, was born during a hospital laundry strike, and handed to us wrapped in j-cloths, but all babies are wrapped in divinity, they radiate that light from the mountaintop which is the meaning of Luke’s name and with which he’ll bless other people and bring them joy for the whole of his life. Amen.
22 June 2008 Hagar and Ishmael The story of Hagar and Ishmael is one of the great stories of the Bible. It’s also one on the most terrible. Because what you see here is in effect the ethnic cleansing of the patriarchal family. Like I’ve said before, people who plead for a return to Biblical family values don’t know their Bibles, because this is just awful. The term dysfunctional doesn’t begin to do justice to this lot. And there is a sense in which you think Ishmael almost had a lucky escape. Because the father-son bonding in this family is a total disaster. You could just imagine Isaac years on from today’s story sitting in analysis (maybe with Billy Connolly’s wife, Pamela Stephenson, if he’s lucky) saying: Well, my Dad took me on this trip one day, and then he made me gather firewood, and then he tied me on top of it, and he raised a big knife to sacrifice me, and then he changed his mind… but I’m over that now. Definitely a lucky escape for Ishmael. But the dysfunctionality goes on because Isaac will totally mess up his relationship with his sons – Jacob and Esau, a story riddled with favouritism, jealousy and greed (Jacob is the J.R. Ewing of this particular family). And Jacob will do the same with his own sons – his favouritism towards Joseph ending up with Joseph (that precocious little dreamer with the fancy coat) standing at the bottom of a well saying: What’d I do? So Ishmael really is well out of it. Only to Hagar it doesn’t look that way now. It can’t. And was there ever a more poignant picture of despair than this woman casting her own child under a bush and stumbling away to sit in the dust and wait for him to die? Sarah’s won, years of resentment have come to a head, and now that she has – by a miracle - her own son Isaac, the slave woman and her son are surplus to requirements. So why do we read this awful stuff about ghastly people doing terrible things? Well, for two reasons. One, this is how life is - the Bible often holds up a mirror to how we are. And two, there’s a much bigger picture here. Because these people are caught up in a drama infinitely vaster than the little bit of their own story they’re experiencing right now. Abraham, as in every situation where his faith is tested gets nothing more than a promise; Sarah is satisfied with her victory and thinks that’s that; and Hagar can barely see through her tears. But the outworking of this story is going to be amazing and it’s only with a God’s eye view that you can make any sense of it. The issue here is faith and trust, as in all the Abraham stories. God says: Leave your comfortable life and go… but Abraham doesn’t get so much as a map. God says: I’m going to make you father of a nation many as the stars in the sky or the sand on the seashore. And Abraham looks at his elderly wife and says: Are you sure about that, Lord? Nobody gets to know the end of the story, they just get to play their part. And the learning along the way is all about letting go. Not managing your destiny down to the last detail of your last insurance policy – letting go of the need to control every event and of trying to control the people in your life, because you have no idea what their destinies are going to be. But we’re beautifully tantalised by a hint of the next chapter for Hagar and Ishmael. We know that God’s not finished with them; we know Ishmael has a future every bit as great as Isaac’s. Because God hears Ishmael’s cry and Hagar’s cry and he just pours compassion into this terrible situation: Do not be afraid, come lift up the boy and make him fast with your hand. God’s four favourite words: Do not be afraid. And suddenly in that dark and barren place, Hagar wipes away her tears, opens her eyes and there is water, a well in the desert. As there very often is, as the psalmist tells us there will be – springs in the desert whatever your desert may be. As Jesus says in our Gospel not a sparrow falls to the ground without the Father knowing, every hair of Ishmael’s head is counted and so are ours. But it gets even better. Remember, this is big picture stuff. If I cheat and fast-forward to Abraham’s great-grandson, there he is standing at the bottom of a well, his brothers having understandably had enough of his dreams of eleven sheaves of corn (which meant the eleven of them) bowing down to that one sheaf which was him, they have stripped him of his psychedelic coat and are now standing round debating whether just to kill him and have done with it or come up with some sort of Plan B. And just at that moment Plan B presents itself in the shape of a caravan of Ishmaelites. Descendents of the rejected Ishmael will be the saviours of Isaac’s descendent, Joseph. As they say, you couldn’t make it up. The prototype saviour Joseph who will save the starving children of Israel and guarantee the fulfilment of God’s promise to Abraham, who will show Christ-like forgiveness for his brothers, is saved to play his crucial part in God’s story by Ishmael’s grandsons. How good is that! I once heard our Dean, Kevin Pearson, preaching on this at a point when I was at a pretty low ebb in my own life, one of those desert places we all have, and he ended up by saying: Expect your Ishmaelites. He said, God always sends them – maybe someone from another time in your story or another part of your life. No matter what guise they might come in your Ishmaelites will be there for you. There will be water in the desert; there will be refreshment; and there will be hope beyond anything you can see now. We don’t know the end of our story; we don’t even know the next chapter, or the people we might never have expected who are going to be part of it. Because the big picture, the really big picture, belongs to God, for whom every hair of your head is counted. Amen.
8 June 2008 Troublemaking Jesus This is a great gospel because in it we see Jesus having an absolute field day, and we find him just almost leaving a trail of wreckage behind him, only it’s good wreckage, because the things he’s destroying need to go to go. First on the scene is tax collector Matthew. About a year ago we had a brand new traffic warden in our part of the West End who on his first day had a gloriously happy time cheerfully ticketing everything in sight, including cars with valid parking permits. Which zealousness might have been commendable, but it didn’t exactly endear him to the locals. Well Matthew was just about that popular, only less so. He’s a tax collector, a collaborator with the Romans. But Jesus doesn’t care. Jesus can see past his job and other people’s hatred, to see Matthew. Where you or I might see just a figure everyone loved to hate, Jesus can still see the man. Jesus sees Matthew, and the amazing thing is that Matthew knows himself to be seen and is so seduced by this once in a lifetime encounter that he just gets up from his counter and follows, and presumably the light-fingered crowd round about – once they get over the shock - think its their lucky day. Having wrecked one taboo, now Jesus really gets into his stride. After he has a meal shared with people most folk wouldn’t share the time of day with, now we see him scandalising, if you like, “disgusted of Morningside” in one of his most shocking encounters with women. Just on Thursday night last week I went with a friend to see the new film of “Sex and the City”. My excuse being that a friend of my friend, a Scottish folk singer, sang the bit of Auld Lang Syne which is part of the soundtrack and he wanted to hear it. It was, I have to say, a kind of mass hen night, which made the two of us feel definitely out of place. Which is exactly how Jesus should have felt in this as in other stories, not so much in encounters with women en masse, but even more of a challenge, in his encounters with women, one-to-one. Because Jesus shouldn’t have been there; should never have put himself in this position. This is a woman, and he does not know her, and she’s haemorrhaging blood which makes her ritually impure – and contaminates him by any contact he has with her. She’s even seen as being under a curse by the righteous, treated as if her condition is her fault – and anyone who touches her would have had to perform several ritual washings and wouldn’t be able to mix with other people again until after sundown. But just as Jesus recognises the human being in Matthew so he does the same with this woman. He acknowledges her touch and her need and he brings her out of hiding, right to centre stage and he restores this woman to her dignity, not caring a fig whether anyone approves or not. But he’s not finished yet. This busy day of wrecking has one more stage to go. Because this Jesus, whom we know is going to be Lord over life and death has one more taboo to break, and it’s the taboo of death itself. He goes into the bedroom of a dead child, a dead female child – that’s two strikes against him already, and touches her. Again, the only remedy for that spectacular transgression would have been multiple washings, but death is the last taboo of all, and he’s having none of it. I’ve sometimes heard people who’ve been bereaved say that after a loved one has died even old friends might cross the street almost as if you could be contaminated by sadness, but this is just one more wall that Jesus tears down, because for the God of life and death no human being falls out of his love whether it’s a tax collector, or a bleeding woman, or a dead child or anyone. Every human being is centre stage – and no-one is told just to go away and hide. So it’s been a busy day for Jesus… But all this is as relevant and as urgent today as on the day when he shocked all those disapproving bystanders. Because he’s saying: Don’t give up, because God isn’t giving up on you. We’re the children of crazy old Abraham to whom a promise was given and it’s exactly in those times in our lives when we’d like to hide ourselves away that God repeats the promise to us. We’re not dirty, unclean – no-one needs to wash three times because they’ve touched us. We’re more than the job we do or the money we have, and we are infinitely more than anyone’s opinion of us, even our own. Last night I was part of a sketch in my eldest daughter’s dance school variety show in support of Macmillan Cancer Care. In the classic “Class sketch” which featured in the Frost Report years ago, you might remember, a bowler-hatted John Cleese casts a contemptuous eye on a trilby’d Ronnie Barker (that was me): “I look down on him because he is middle class”; then Barker, “I look up to him because he is upper class, but I look down on him because he is lower class”. And poor old Ronnie Corbett of course has to look up to everybody because he doesn’t have much choice. “I know my place”, he says, stoically. But of course, it’s only funny because it is way too close to how we are. But our trouble-making Jesus today destroys all of that terrible way of seeing other people and ourselves. He sets us free. He restores us. Like those Pharisees who had such a lesson to learn, we’d better not look down on anyone because God won’t have anyone look down on us. Today, God wants to take you by the hand, and give you a better sense of who you are than you have ever experienced in your life. Amen.
1 June 2008 Visit of Mary to Elizabeth I’ve just come back from a country where you really couldn’t get away from Our Lady even if you tried. In Italy she’s there in a little shrine on every street corner, and in every home, church, chapel or even people’s gardens. I saw Our Lady statues with neon lights and fairy lights, Our Lady statues with a literal “sword to pierce your own soul too” (in Simeon’s words) – usually accompanied with an expression of mild surprise - even some Our Ladies rather spookily dressed in black silk, and Our Ladies painted in every shade of blue from the Dulux colour chart. And of course, around Naples and Sorrento, there she is facing out across the Mediterranean from harbour walls and clifftops, protectress of fishermen and voyagers – Our Lady, Star of the Sea. In times past, Mary was for Italians a symbol of hope for a nation struggling towards freedom and democracy, rather as Our Lady of Czestochova was for the Poles under communism. Because just as with Hannah, so with Mary this is a mother whose hope for her children can never be silenced. Hannah: The bows of the mighty are broken, but the feeble gird on strength. Mary: He has put down the mighty from their seat, and hath exalted the humble and meek. These are mothers for peace, mothers for justice and nothing can keep them from singing their song. Elizabeth too is just such a mother. Old Master paintings often depict Elizabeth and Mary after their two boys have been born, complete with the infant John the Baptist dressed in kind of camel hair babygro. Nothing like starting your prophets young, so to speak. But the point is that these mothers stand for Israel, and their role is to give birth not just to two very unusual cousins, but to a messiah and a messiah’s forerunner, and a kingdom and a whole new way of seeing the world and our place in it of which we are the direct heirs, the beneficiaries. Because what they reveal to us, if you like, is the mother heart of God. Which you see expressed in Jesus when he sighs over Jerusalem and says: O how often I would have gathered you like a mother hen gathers its chicks under its wings and you would not let me. Or like the psalmist who says: I have stilled my soul like a weaned child, like a child on its mother’s breast is my soul within me. This is the God who nurtures things into birth. This is the patient God, who waits for the seed to ripen; who cherishes seeds that grow secretly. This the God who, just like the best of mothers (or fathers) watches you grow – sends rain on good and bad alike – and will do you no violence in the process. God doesn’t attack the weeds in your life, but lets them be as part of the mix of the precious person you are, knowing that there will be a time for separating wheat and weeds, but it isn’t yet. This is the patience of God, which you see in the good mother and you certainly see in Mary. This is the God who cannot see past you. It’s almost like he has that mother’s blindness which only sees the good in you no matter what you do, not because he ignores evil, but because he never loses his sense of wonder. We can lose it – I can lose my sense of wonder and joy about my life, or the world or other people; but for God that never happens because for him we are as fresh and as startling as our first cry, our first blinking entry into the world. For God, mother-love is love against all odds, even against all evidence. Elizabeth is thrust into her role, barren as she was – first sign of a love that’s going to win in this salvation story, no matter what the world might throw at it. Herod will have John’s head, because his poisonous wife, Herodias, can’t bear the truth John speaks. Mary is thrust centre stage, just a slip of a girl and not even married – and her Jesus will come to his own but his own will receive him not. Rather they’ll kill him and she will have to watch, and take back into her arms a dead son. But this love will win. Hannah’s love, and Elizabeth’s and Mary’s will have their Easter, because this generative, nurturing, forever life-giving love flows through them straight from the heart of God. Mary and her sisters are icons through which we see things about God that we need to know. A mother’s demand for justice for her children, the desire to protect and nurture, to patiently watch and wait to see every human child emerge through growth and – yes, through pain - into joy. That’s God. That’s the grace of which Mary is full and which just bursts from her lips as the Magnificat. Italians quite clearly have an instinctive understanding of all this. Watching a magnificent Corpus Christi procession in Sorrento last week, Christ’s sacramental presence was taken through the streets under a golden canopy, surrounded by incense and candles, men bearing lanterns, people singing, local officials in their uniforms, boys scattering rose petals and at the very front the children who had made their first communion that very morning – bedecked in the very best white garments their proud mothers could find. There was Jesus, in the midst of the city, gathering people under his wings just like a mother as he always wanted to, and with children at the heart of it all, as with him, they always were. I guess what Mary asks of us is this. As she visits us today, will we recognise the life-giving Lord she wants not to be born in her again, but to be born in us? This is both a challenge and a celebration to make the heart of every one of us leap for joy. Amen.
18 May 2008 Trinity A couple of weeks ago I watched an episode of “the Apprentice” in which the two competing teams of wannabee entrepreneurs had the task of coming up with a new greetings card idea. The idea which one team came up with was that of a card celebrating what they wanted to call National Singles’ Day. Apart from the fact that they spent three hours deciding where the apostrophe in “singles” should go, there was just something about the concept that seemed all wrong, as Sir Alan pointed out in his usual direct fashion. And maybe that’s because there’s something even about the word “single” that just jars with us. You might be unmarried, widowed or divorced; but actually there’s no such thing as a truly single human being – not if it means flying solo through life, or even perhaps not needing anyone. There is, of course, a tradition of the rugged individualist, the superhero who lives in some kind of splendid isolation. But even Batman has Robin, Superman needs Lois Lane, Jason needs his Argonauts. Even heroes need help, even heroes need people. So absolute singleness doesn’t exist – even the Jesus who contends with Satan in the desert and went into the wilderness to pray alone, he needed disciples, needed Martha and Mary and Lazarus as friends. The Jesus who was in so many ways a man with a mission – the ultimate superhero, if you like – he needed friendship and touch and even tenderness. And this is, in fact, the Mission of God, to call us out of isolation, out of any misguided striving to go it alone, into that divine family we call Trinity. And the mission of Jesus is to come and get us, to reach out for you and me in whatever circumstances we find ourselves and draw us beyond ourselves into wholeness and joy. And in the Gospels that’s what we see him doing all the time. With the Samaritan woman at the well, she of the five husbands, Jesus breaks down every social barrier to reach this woman, to connect with her; as he does with publicans and prostitutes and Roman soldiers – all the people whom the Pharisees had isolated, the way we all sometimes cut people off by labelling them. Zacchaeus, you’ll remember is almost hiding in the branches of a tree, cut off not just literally from the crowd beneath, but cut off socially and emotionally because he was a tax collector and hated by everybody. But Jesus is having none of it – Zacchaeus, I’m coming to your house today! – which must have nearly made him fall out of his tree. But this is a word of love straight from the heart of the Trinity: Why do you say, O Israel, my way is hidden from the Lord? This is addressed to a nation lost and cut off, exiled. But it’s addressed to us too. When you feel yourself battling alone with a problem, when it seems like no-one knows or cares – when it feels like your way is hidden and there’s no-one who understands – the voice of God comes to us: Those who wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength… they shall mount up with wings like eagles. And Jesus spells it out to the disciples, I am with you always; I will not leave you orphans. The rescue mission of Jesus goes on, only its our hands he uses to reach out to each other. Margaret Sandison, who died just this week, she could have borne witness to this, to that sense of being held in the love of friends. And this is how it’s meant to be because this is God’s own nature at work in us. We’re hard-wired for communion, fellowship and love. The Trinity is actually in our DNA. Nothing in the universe exists by itself or for itself. God doesn’t – and neither do we. Every “I” needs a “Thou”, or the “I” just withers. Mother Teresa often said that the poverty of the west, so different from the poverty of her world, was the poverty of loneliness. And this is a great challenge to the Church to be Jesus for lonely people it’s too easy to forget about, because if we’re going to find wholeness and healing and strength we are only going to find it together. This is not flying solo. One writer reflects on how this is seen in the behaviour of wild geese (and the Wild Goose is, of course, a Celtic symbol for the Holy Spirit): Wild geese fly wing tip to wing tip, you can hear the beat of their wings, whistling through the air in unison. And that’s the secret of their strength. Together, co-operating as a flock, geese can fly a 71% longer range. The lead goose cuts a swathe through the air resistance, which creates a helping uplift for the two birds behind him. In turn their beating makes it easier on the birds behind them. Each bird takes it in turns to be leader. The tired ones fan out to the edges of the V for a breather, and the rested ones surge toward the point of the V to drive the flock onward. If a goose becomes too exhausted or ill and has to drop out of the flock, he is never abandoned. A stronger member of the flock will follow the failing, weaker one to his resting place and wait with him until he’s well enough to fly again. For us the Spirit of Jesus, is that wild goose that stays with us when we need to lick our wounds, or the wild goose is the friend who listens or picks up the phone because somehow they can sense we’re struggling, the person who comes with us wherever we need to go. The Trinity icon on our service sheet really sums it up. The nature of God is tenderness and sympathy as those symbolic angels lean towards one another, their wings overlapping almost in a kind of mutual sheltering love. But this isn’t some kind of divine mutual admiration society. Because there’s a space at the table, and the space is for you. The Trinity wants to draw me into that banquet which is all about love. Just as we pray and trust for Margaret, thou hast prepared a table for me and my cup overflows, in the Trinity every human heart finds a welcome beyond imagining. Amen.
11 May 2008 Pentecost Sitting down to write this sermon I remembered an essay I had to write in my student days. Question: Is there a consistent theology of the Holy Spirit in the Old Testament? Just the kind of thing to make your heart sink. In fact the answer is no, but it’s all the more fascinating for that. The Spirit is there, page one, Day One: The Spirit of God broods over the face of the waters before anything else is. It’s the energy that somehow turns the Word of God – “God spoke” – into the acts of God – “and it was so”. This is the ruach, the breath of God, a mighty wind that makes things happen. In Exodus the Spirit of God is given to a man called Bezalel so that he’s equipped with artistic gifts for the building of the ark: I have filled him with the Spirit of God, with ability and intelligence, with knowledge and all craftsmanship, to devise artistic designs and to work in gold and silver… The Spirit of course anoints and grabs and empowers the prophets, fills them with fire and probably made them impossible to live with. But God also sends an evil spirit into Saul when his time is up, leaving you with an uncomfortable sense that there’s something wild and undomesticated about this energy of God. Definitely more a lion’s roar than a pussy cat’s purr, so we’d better watch out. When Ezekiel has his vision of Israel’s dry bones reclothed in flesh it’s the Spirit that does the work: I will put my Spirit within you and you will live. When Jesus outs himself as Messiah in the synagogue in Nazareth, it’s Isaiah’s words he uses: The Spirit of the Lord God is upon me. And this morning, when Peter wants to explain why the disciples are behaving like they’ve just emerged from some kind of all-night rave – drunk at nine o’clock in the morning, he reaches back into the Old Testament for his explanation. This is what Joel said: I will pour out my Spirit upon all flesh. So the Spirit of God manifests in all sorts of ways, as Holy Wisdom (described interestingly in the feminine) as artistry, and energy and zeal and a literally untameable power. T.S. Eliot really gets this when he writes: “The Dove descending breaks the air with flame of incandescent terror”. This is light blue touch paper then retire to a safe distance if you can. Because to open your life to this radical energy is a genuinely scary thing to do. Archbishop William Temple completely understood this. He wrote: “When we pray, Come Holy Ghost, we had better know what we are about. He will not carry us to easy triumphs of gratifying successes. He may take us through loneliness, desertion by friends, apparent desertion even by God; that was the way Christ went to the Father. If we invoke him, we must be ready for the glorious pain of being caught by his power out of our petty orbit into the eternal purposes of the Almighty, in whose outward sweep our lives are as a speck of dust. The soul that is filled with the Spirit must have been purged of all pride and self-reliance; but that soul has found the only real dignity, the only lasting joy. Come then, Great |