In the same boat

There were, you recall two closely linked annunciations in Luke’s Gospel : The first to Zechariah who was alone in the Temple sanctuary when an angel appearing to him, standing at the right side of the altar of incense said: “Do not be afraid Zechariah, for your prayer has been answered. Your wife Elizabeth will bear you a son and you will name him John.” And the second annunciation was the Angel Gabriel to Mary. “Do not be afraid Mary, for you have found favour with God. And  now you will conceive in your womb and bear a son and you will name him Jesus.”

There is it feels to me something about shared experience be it very good or very difficult that can bond people; being cast off in the same boat brings people together in a special way. I am minded of a small group of my colleagues who when we were training were unexpectedly uprooted from the course of our choice and obliged mid-stream to join a different one with a different curriculum  which was much less suited to us and further more was geographically hard  for us to attend. I am not one for joining old school clubs and in fact rather avoid them, nonetheless I remain regularly in touch with some of this particular small cohort. 

In the  verse immediately after the Magnificat which we read this evening Luke 1:56 simply says “And Mary remained with her for about three months and then returned to her home.” 

So, I fell to wondering why that was? Why do you stay three months with someone who was  but a distant relation? It was not that Mary stayed to help at John’s birth - Luke makes sure that she has returned home before that event which he tells as a separate story in the following paragraph: Luke 1:57 “Now the time came for Elizabeth to give birth.” 

We have to recognise that God’s hand was in both births, both announcements, both angel visits. 

We see this from the first when Elizabeth exclaims “Blessed are you among women and blessed is the fruit of your womb.” They immediately know that they have a shared extraordinary experience. (Remember without any of the advantages of our rapid communications over long distances.) 

I think I want to write a play (maybe for television) which looks at the three months, brings Elizabeth and Mary together on stage, across the threshold (which we are not told about)  and which follows them exploring together their amazement, fear, excitement, all the feelings of knowing they are each carrying a child with God’s blessing and intentions.

Now there is a boat to be cast adrift in.

Amen

Refiner's Fire

Malachi is the last book of our Old Testament and he is writing to the settled jewish community in Jerusalem in 433 BC some 90 years after the return of the exiles. The Temple has been rebuilt, completed in 516 and is once again splendid and a focus for the presence of God, but while the outside looks as it should, inside the spiritual life of the community is far from well. It does sometimes (or maybe often happen) that following enthusiastic completion of a project that attention dwindles and it seems that the ardour of the people has faded. Among the record of misdeeds that Malachi rebukes Israel for in the first two chapters of his book are many to be laid at the feet of the priests. Most prominently the sacrifices being offered in the Temple were inadequate - instead of bringing the very best, the choicest offerings the priests brought imperfect animals including those which were sick, lame or blind for example. Malachi is so affronted by this that he thunders that it would be better to shut the doors of the temple altogether and offer nothing at all than these polluted offerings. He continues his list by condemning them for not faithfully teaching the law and thereby causing many to stumble. The people of Israel (as a consequence of the poor example set by the priests) have gone on to leave their wives and marry foreigners, something that was specifically prohibited during the period of exile. Malach says the people have wearied God by exalting evil over good.

Now, says Malachi, “The Lord will come suddenly to his Temple.” This is what the people have been waiting for - that God will return. But asks Malachi in view of all these bad things which have come to pass who will be able to withstand his reappearing?  The priests in particular will need to be careful; they will be refined like gold and silver. In Thursday’s podcast I quoted from an 1856 book of Metallurgy:

“In the process by which silver is separated from such impurities as iron, copper or tin, the alloy is mixed with lead, placed in a small crucible made of bone ash and then raised to a full red heat in a furnace. When the alloy is melted, air is blown upon it, this causes the lead and other metals to oxidise. At this stage the refiner watches the operation with the greatest earnestness until the metal has the appearance of a highly polished mirror reflecting every object around it. Even the refinner as he looks upon it may see himself as in a looking glass.”

This is written so it seems to me in alost biblical language and would not be comfortable reading for the sons of Levi : except of course that in the end they shall be so purified that even God may see himself in them

Amen

The prophet of hope

Over these last three Sundays of Advent we have been walking our way through the book of Isaiah who is the prophet who is always full of hope. Now, what happened when the exiles returned to Jerusalem turned out to be less smooth, less accomplishable than they had expected. Arriving from Babylon where they had been used to magnificence and sophistication, they found desolation and ruin. It would take over twenty years for even the foundations of the second Temple to be laid. The exiles were trying to fulfill the prophecy they had been given:

“They shall build up the ancient ruins 
They shall raise up the former devastations 
They shall repair the ruined cities
The devastations of many generations.”

But they found themselves living “in between times”, between the promise and the fulfillment - when wold the Lord return to the Temple? With the difficulties they face the people needed strength in adversity and to give them that, Isaiah reminds them who God is:

"For I the Lord love justice
I hate robbery and wrongdoing
And I will make an everlasting covenant … 
Their descendants shall be known among the nations 
And their offspring among the peoples. "

Which would have reminded them directly of God’s covenant with Abraham. 

Jesus himself used the words from Isaiah which we heard introducing our reading when he read in the synagogue:

"The spirit of the Lord God is upon me
Because the Lord has anointed me 
To bring good news to the oppressed
To bind up the broken hearted "

And Luke writing  in his Gospel concludes this section of it with Jesus’ own words;

“Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.”

In so many ways we too are in the “in between times.” We feel this particularly now in the middle of a pandemic, a plague among us, with the promise and now clear signs of a vaccine before us, a light of hope, yet like the Israelites on their return  have devastation before us - loss of loved ones, loss of economic prosperity and I think especially for the young loss of opportunity. Estimates by the pundits of a return to “normal” (if that is what we want) vary but are always counted in numbers of years. 

The disciples expected Jesus to return quickly and it is a characteristic of the Gospel of John an early part of which we heard this morning, that we hear most clearly of the four the realization that we are living in the in between times waiting for Jesus to come again. 

And so how to cope with the messiness of a destroyed Jerusalem? How to cope with the uncertain time to wait for the parousia? And how to cope with the uncertainties of our present epidemic.?The answer was  identified by Isaiah, the prophet of hope, who began  by reminding us who God is - for God is faithful, immutable and steadfast and we need always to hold onto that both in good times and bad.

Comfort Food

 It turns out that we have been turning to the food of our childhood during lockdown with Cadbury and Mr.Kipling in the fore. We know the words “Comfort ye, comfort ye my people saith your God” from the first tenor recitative of Handel’s Messiah. For me this is one of those wonderful openings which sets off a world of sound and of anticipation for both the oratorio and of memories of listening in the past, live in Bath Abbey, and frequently on a frosty Sunday afternoon in late Advent when I am feverishly writing Christmas cards. Although this is chapter 40 of the book of Isaiah everything suggests that this is the beginning of another author usually called second Isaiah. He is writing to those in exile now -his readers had been taken into captivity in Babylon or maybe it had been their parents some forty years before and they remembered sadly and deeply the Jerusalem of the past.  Passages from Lamentations point to the feelings of their hearts:

“How deserted lies the city once so full of people

Bitterly she sleeps at night, tears are on her cheeks 

After affliction and hard labour, Judah has gone into exile 

The roads to Zion mourn

All the gateways are desolate her priests groan 

Her enemies looked at her and not laughed at her destruction” 

And into this come the first words of the prophet: “Comfort ye comfort ye my people.” Now our exiles had not turned to mini chocolate rolls or cupcakes but to the stories of the past. It is in their exile that the laws of Moses are codified, refined, respected and that the identity of Israel, (the people) is delineated. [Many years later - well very very many I observed that the Italians of New Jersey would become more Italian to my eyes than the natives of the country itself.]  And so a voice cries out:

“Prepare ye the way of the Lord, make straight in the desert a highway for our God”

The wilderness or desert recalls instantly the wanderings of the Israelites, which for forty years were very far from straight - neither physically or spiritually - our tenro thought has other ideas:

“Every valley shall be exalted, every mountain and hill made low, the crooked straight and the rough places plain. “

This new exodus, foretold and which will come to pass will be direct and assured for as we have heard “The mouth of the Lord has spoken.” And there follows in our reading a pastoral completely comforting section:

“He will feed his flock like shepherds, he will gather his lambs in his arms and carry them in his bosom and gently lead the mother sheep. 

But we know this is about more than comfort (neither Cadbury or Mr Kipling) it is also more than pastoral for it is another foretelling: the promise that we are in this advent season, in our time, waiting to celebrate, the coming of the great shepherd of the sheep.

Amen 

Advent Sunday 2020

 Advent Sunday 2020

https://open.spotify.com/track/497DNjrgkIdoFVKrLtN9Ys

I am cheating for this piece of music was not written for Advent Sunday, neither is it a cantata but a motet almost certainly written for a funeral and moreover is Bach’s only motet without a Biblical text. It is a setting of a poem which expresses the yearning for the end. 

“Come Jesus come, my body is weary, my strength is fading  more and more, I long for your peace. The bitter path becomes too difficult for me.” and on this Advent Sunday we are surely yearning for an end to our own exile. 

I am writing this at the beginning of week two of lockdown two and as I read the words of second Isaiah writing to the desperate by the rivers of Babylon the poignancy of our present situation helps us feel their longing. 

“O that you would tear open the heavens and come down” or maybe even better the King James version “ that thou wouldst rend the heavens and that thou wouldst come down”

This is  a prayer for help, but a prayer for and from people on the edge who are weary of waiting. 

I suppose that the first ever known exile was the expulsion of Adam and Eve from the garden of Eden beautifully expressed by John Milton in Paradise Lost:

………        the hastening angel caught

Our lingering parents and to the eastern gate

Led them direct and down the cliff as fast

To the subjected plain; then disappeared 

They looking back, all the eastern side beheld 

Of Paradise so late their happy seat.

Exile has been practised ever since ,expulsion was a common punishment for ancient tribes, it is very prevalent in Shakespeare’s plots, there have been penal colonies established in many places including Australia and Siberia  there are still governments in exile and today we are painfully aware of the people of Syria camping by the million on the borders and only yesterday in Nagorno-Karabakh the Armenians were packing up their homes on lorries to leave while the Azerbaijanis were preparing to come home. 

So there are plenty of people praying to come home: 

“Do not remember iniquity forever - now consider we are all your people.”

Isaiah remains a prophet of hope and he sees the coming of God as sudden, explosive and immediately effective. “As when fire kindles brushwood” and extraordinarily powerful “the mountains might flow down at your presence.” 

The homeland we are missing for most of us is not far away but is none the less as palpably distant as the Temple and mount Zion for the Israelites. This morning as we begin this season of Advent, we are conscious of being exiled from our own free use of time: unable to meet family and friends, browse a shop in the village, go to the library, cinema, theatre or sit in a tea shop with an unexpectedly met friend. So it is with the longing of Bach’s motet that we pray for imminent release.

Amen   

God is with us now

The book of Ezekiel opens with a vision and a call fully reminiscent of the vision and call of Isaiah. Ezekiel was stunned off his feet, for in the confusion of storm fire and noise he had glimpsed something that looked like the glory of God coming towards him. Now there is a gap of more than a century between these two prophets yet the extraordinary thing is not this passage of time but the passage of place. Ezekiel, you see, is writing from the city of Nippur, south of Babylon and is among the exiles living along a tributary of the Euphrates. 

In the ancient world God is invariably associated with place - consider Solomon’s Temple with its outside courtyard for sacrifices, an inner vestibule or hallway leading finally to the holy of holies housing the Ark of the Covenant and there it is all built on the hill of mount Zion. God was there, up high, inaccessible. In Isaiah’s vision we remember that the lower hem only of God’s robe filled the whole Temple. People might almost unimaginably hope to partially approach him like Moses and the burning bush but this would be granted to very few, like the Devir to the priests alone and then only one day a year. 

Ezekiel and the exiles are far away, they have long since stopped blaming the Babylonians for their troub;les but are filled with the sense of their own sin,  their own distance from their God, their Temple destroyed as a punishment for all they had done wrong.  

So, Ezekiel seeing God coming towards them, there by the rivers of Babylon is completely outside and beyond all expectation. Separated from their Temple they are separated from their God yet he is coming to them. By chapter 34 of Ezekiel’s prophecies this has become very personal: “For thus says the Lord God I myself will search for my sheep and will seek them out. I will rescue them from all the places to which they have been scattered on a day of thick clouds and darkness.”

We think mostly of sheep in flocks, but I have rescued single solitary sheep, snipping the wool of one entangled in barbed wire, gathering a lamb with its surprisingly oily fleece, (which looks so fluffy from a distance) they do really get lost and need seeking out and I hear Ezekiel telling me that the Lord will gather all the sheep “gathering them from the countries” and bringing them back to their own land to be fed on rich teaching and to lie down peaceably and in safety. 

Make no doubt about it this is a big change - God is among us now, no longer far away in Jerusalem on mount Zion but here with all of us, looking down the ravines, up at the crags, in the marshes looking across the whole world. We no longer need a Temple or dare I say for all that I love them a church building. We can carry God with us wherever we are for God is mobile and God will never be far away again.

Amen

When the Lord comes?

Zephaniah 1:7, 12-end 1 Thessalonians 5:1-11

Today is the second Sunday before Advent but as last week was Remembrance Sunday this is the first look we take at the Advent theme. The question is “What do we think happens or will happen when the LORD comes?” 

Zephaniah as befits an Old Testament prophet is unambiguous :

“That will be a day of wrath, a day of distress and anguish, a day of ruin and devastation, a day of darkness and gloom a day of clouds and thick darkness. “

Now, right now mid lockdown this may be the last thing we want to hear; it contrasts greatly with our usual more excited approach to this time of year. Zephaniah was writing between 609 and 604 BC, he was a contemporary of Jeremiah so writing only a little  before the fall of Jerusalem and the exile. He foresees the coming of the Babylonians who will drag people from houses, streets, sewers and tombs where they have been hiding or as he puts it “at that time I will search Jerusalem with lamps.” Why though does Zephaniah write like this? He is it seems to me the sixth century BC equivalent of the graphic images which for a while at least appeared on cigarette packets, some of you may remember them the horrible pictures of diseased lungs :” REFORM,” says Zephaniah “or these bad things will happen to you.” 

Paul’s first letter to the Thessalonians has five chapters and the final verse of each and every chapter ends with a reference to the second coming of Christ. For example, chapter one ends describing “Jesus who rescues us from the coming wrath.” and at the end of this chapter five which we have heard some of this morning it says” May God himself, the God of peace himself sanctify you entirely and may your spirit and body be kept sound and blameless at the coming of our Lord, Jesus Christ.” 

And so here is the difference, there is still the unmistakable imagery of impending tribulations “When they say there is peace and security then sudden destruction will come upon them as labour pains come upon a pregnant woman and there will be no escape” and again just as in the Old Testament there is a warning of darkness to come. But this time the cigarette packet has two pictures, the inescapable diseased ling of sin, the warning is still there, but also a brighter clear picture of healed tissues brought about by Jesus Christ, who died for us that we might be clean. 

When Advent really comes we will give more emphasis to our waiting and this is what we are waiting for, not the day of darkness  but the day of light and so we wait not with the foreboding of the old prophets but with the anticipation of the new.

Amen.

 

Remembrance Sunday 2020

Before 1914, there had been no world wars at all. Between 1815 and 1914 moreover no major power fought another one outside of its immediate region. (there were of course aggressive expeditions of imperial powers against weaker opponents especially in Africa India and Asia.) All this changed in the last century - during the two world wars Canadians fought in France, Americans all over Europe, Indians in the Middle East and Chinese in France and the naval battles were everywhere. One eminent historian called the period 1914 to 1945 the age of total war. But it was not simply a war of combattants, many millions were engaged and affected, civilians, doctors, nurses, cooks ambulance drivers the young the old : everyone.

"Have you forgotten yet?

For the worlds events have rumbled on since those gagged days 

Like traffic checked while at the crossing of city ways

And the haunted gap in your mind has filled with thoughts that flow

Like clouds in the lit heaven of life : and you’re a man reprieved to go

Taking your peaceful share of time with joy to spare." 

These lines are the start of a poem  by Siegfried Sassoon called the “Aftermath.” 

Just those two phrases “Have you forgotten yet?”, “for events have rumbled” on tell us why we are here, to remember, to give thanks for those who made it possible for us to “take our peaceful share of time.”

And today it seems that there is again a world war - against this time an unseen virus and once more many millions are engaged: doctors, nurses, cooks, ambulance drivers, the young the old. And again there are those of great courage who take risks for others. 

There was among all the news coverage a week ago a lady in an hospital recovering from a stay in intensive care who summed it up - she said that the doctors and nurses had treated her without cease, for days working to save her  life, she was still ill, still hoping to be well again and as she told her story she broke into tears of admiration, thanks and amazement. 

So as we wear our poppies this morning remembering those who gave so much for so long for so many let us also acknowledge those who continue to do this today in different ways and in different times but who do so for the same reason: 

“That we may take our peaceful share of time with joy to spare.”

Amen.

All Saints

 We the Church of England have had a hot and cold relationship with saints: Article 22 of the articles of religion found in the back of the Book of Common Prayer says:

“The Romish doctrine concerning Purgatory, Pardons, Worshipping and Adoration as well of images as of reliques and also invocation of saints is a fond thing vainly invented and grounded upon no warranty of scripture but rather repugnant to the word of God.” 

Which you may agree is extremely cold indeed. The Catholic church on the other hand has had no doubts about this subject and venerating the saints has long been an element of their devotions. Following Pusey, Newman and the Oxford movement, Anglicanism has as ever tried to follow the via media restoring some recognition to the saints in modern times. The general argument is that saints are close to God because of their holiness but also accessible to man whose nature they share. There was a feeling that the worshipping community on earth was but an outlying colony at some distance from the true worshippers who we read about in the book of Revelation. 

“There was a great multitude, that no-one could count from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages standing before the throne, before the Lamb robed in white with palm branches in their hands.“

As my schoolboy nuns taught me “seeing God is heaven” and recognising this as we hear in this passage is a far cry from invoking saints’ interaction with the living. Yet this was previously so much the case that relics were moved from one place to another where it was thought that they might do more good. In Anglo Saxon England for example, St. Oswald was moved from Tynemouth to Gloucester and St. Judoc from Cornwall to Winchester. Sometimes the demands made on the saintly remains were more specific: Otto the 1st who was fighting in Magdeburg moved the body of St. Maurice the soldier saint from Burgundy to be among his troops in the field of battle. More prosaically but still current is the thought that we should pray to St. Anthony when we lose our car keys. 

Opinions have ever wavered on this,  St. Augustine himself changed his mind about saints being effective in the present, coming to this positive conclusion only much later in his life when he made use of the relics of St. Stephen. These  were brought to Africa to work daily miracles in St. Augustine’s growing congregation. So there is a range of views. 

In this church - All Saints Burnham Thorpe, you will observe the clear Protestant emphasis. There are no images of any sort, we are undistracted from our focus on God who is the only object of our worship. (Article 22). On this festival of All Saints, here, hearing again those words from Revelation we consider and reflect upon the examples of the so many faithful servants of God who have gone before us. Servants of all ages, sexes, races and conditions. 

Yet whatever their origins they are there “before the throne of God and worship him day and night.”

Here surely is the saintly example which we might all agree on , that above all we are to constantly give thanks and praise to God.

Amen 

Being Holy

 Knowing that I needed to talk to you about this passage from Leviticus I set out on Monday morning to be holy; I sprang from my bed with holy intentions, I said to myself, yes I will try to spend a holy day. By 7.35 - AM that is, the enormous red digger that was there, right there against the garden fence roaring and crushing great stones and boulders and being shouted at by the foremen of the site and disturbing my reflections was already causing me irritation. Moreover it was a chilly day and the best place to sit was in the sun facing the monster leaving me the impossible choice of being either cold and irritated or deafened and irritated. All attempts at holiness had leached away and my love for my neighbour, now an ugly red digger was non-existent. 

Yet Moses when speaking to the congregation of Israel, the nation set apart by God as his special people, is told to tell them “You shall be holy, for I, the Lord your God is holy.”  Which begs the question who shall we emulate? We hold an advantage over the Israelites of Moses’ time for we have Jesus Christ as our example and we may and I would argue we should set our sights on him. Faced though with inevitably falling short, what do we understand holiness to be? The book of Leviticus famously telles us many things that holiness is not of which only a tiny number are mentioned in this morning’s reading. It is not judging unjustly, and we might say in the light of Jesus’ teaching that it is not judging at all. You shall not hate your kin, and again in view of what Jesus tells us we shall not hate anyone at all even our enemies. 

Emulating God, “be holy for I am the Lord your God”, seemed too much for me and I am  not sure that Jesus makes it easier. A priest friend of mine used to say they preferred to emulate Peter, at least he had made notable mistakes and so there may be a sporting chance. I continue to say we should try to be like Jesus, after all he came to show us the way. But then what would it be like to try to be truly holy by being like Jesus? It seems I have to first love myself. This I can assure you is not easy, for I know, or think I know, or think I might know the terrible things in my heart, all the pent up unholiness past and present.  It would seem much easier to love someone else, Frances, my children, you, of whom I know comparatively little. 

Still there is that line from Plato to consider:

“Is that which is holy loved by the Gods or is it holy because it is loved by the Gods?”

So there we are, If God can love me despite those things that I know, think I know, think I might know but God does know then, maybe that makes me holy as a creation of God himself. So it is important for me to tell myself every day “God loves me” otherwise I shall forget and then red diggers or not I have no chance to be holy at all.

Amen

The Vineyard

I have been waiting for this reading from Isaiah ever since Frances and I visited Bulgaria over a year ago. We were staying in the Balkan foothills and our billet was at the top of a hill above the town, so each day we began downhill in the heat and the dust to perhaps catch a bus or to forage for lunch and on the way we passed small holdings which frequently were walled vineyards. The walls were protected by barbed wire not watchtowers and you could see the vines climbing trellises and strings, their grape clusters shining in the hot sun. In corners were primitive water butts and buckets, half drain pipes for irrigation. I recognised then more fully than before that each of these was a labour of love, the terrain, climate and soil needed to be harnessed, needed work and dedication to produce good grapes and that this was individual or family work. Later we would see men on motorbikes or a small car pulling little trailers filled with grapes taking them to the collective distillery to be made into their own wine. 

Isaiah  describes a perfect vineyard, on a fertile hill, well dug, cleared of stones and protected - his listeners would have understood as easily as my Bulgarian friends what this meant and would have shared in the frustration of the result Isaiaih describes of the well chosen vines being overwhelmed by wild grapes. 

The parable of the vineyard carries over from the Old Testament times to the New, where we recognise the care of the viticulturist, and we share the sense of anger at the injustices meted out by the tenants of the landowner’s vineyard to the slaves and most outrageously to the Son. These stories are universal, understood by any culture and any age group.

Isaiah speaking God’s words asks “What more was there to do for my vineyard?”

In 1968 Bill Anders on Apollo 8 took the photograph that has ever since captured our imagination.  “Earthrise” , a picture of our own planet rising with the grey surface of the moon in the foreground. The astronaut’s famous  picture is said to have changed our view forever and has been credited by some with the launch of the many environmental movements we are familiar with today. This is the vineyard we have been given, in all its beauty and diversity.

I have given up watching David Attenborough, not because I disagree with him bit because it is all so sad: the retreating ice caps, the breaking icebergs, the polluted oceans, savaged rain forests diminishing species numbers - actually it makes one cross:

“And now I will tell you what I will do to my vineyard, I will remove its hedge, and it shall be devoured. I will break down its wall and it shall be trampled down. I will make it a waste, it shall not be pruned or hoed and it shall be overgrown with briars and thorns; I will also command the clouds that they rain no rain upon it. “

As tenants of the Lord’s vineyard, as stewards of his creation, the Church is rightly putting its weight behind increased responsibility to the earth itself - that's the one in the famous picture, the one that is permanently under threat - and we are urged to do all we can to help.

Amen

Look after others

Today when we think of a poem, I suspect we will imagine something short, a page or two at most but it is not always so - consider Tennyson’s In Memoriam or  the poem I have in mind this morning “Leaves of grass” by Walt Whitman which is really a whole book. And the reason that I have this in mind is that little passage we have heard in this morning’s reading from Philippians:

“Let each of you not look to your own interests but to the interests of others.”

Whitman believed that everything joins up with absolutely everything else that amazing diversity and individuality and oneness were the same thing. He wrote\;

“I believe a leaf of grass is no less than the journey work of the stars.”

Like many in the nineteenth century he thought that the triumph of democracy was inevitable and of course that America was the epitome of that ideal and would lead the way for the rest of the world. 

“Thou Union holding all, fusing absorbing tolerating all / Thee ever thee I sing”

I cannot help thinking that we (and surely the Americans) have lost our way and the principal reason for this is that we have been inattentive to that verse from Philippians. Somewhere in the struggle the tenets of unbridled self interest triumphed over the nobler thought of loving our neighbours. Our wisdom is that if everyone does what is good for themselves then the clockwork mechanisms of supply and demand, profit and loss, labour and capital will gently ratchet to the common good. Sometimes to be fair this can be true, there have been long periods [Macauly writes eloquently of these) over the centuries when prosperity has been generally increased. God’s wisdom is that if everyone does what is good for others then the result will be better. It is I think important to note how revolutionary, how upside down this is, so it was in Jesus’ time and still is now. 

2020 America is very different from 1885 America - a lady from Boston sitting in my house recently said she would not like to go back home to her country, for all the division, racial strife, economic disparity and political ugliness there now. It is hard to disagree, when Frances and I lived there now over thirty years ago it was still a place full of hope with an extraordinary appreciation of geography, flora and fauna - I am not sure we would recognise it now. 

 But it could have been different, if instead of looking after ourselves we had learned first to look after others. The paradox is that the clockwork would be the same but working consistently and more certainly. This looking after others is the missing skeleton of our modern democracies, the substance that would hold all the bones together. As Paul says:

Do nothing from selfish ambition or conceit

Then perhaps Whitman could again write:

“And a song make I of the One formed out of all. “

Amen. 

Christian leaders need be radical

 Romans 12:9-end 

It occured to me that this reading from Paul’s letter to the Romans might help us with the American election. At this week’s Republican convention one of the president’s supporters said: “This election is about whether you want Church, Work and School or Riots, Violence and Disorder. What I found interesting about this was not the extreme exaggeration or questionable truthfulness of the effect of voting for Joe Biden but the Republicans positioning themselves with the ultra conservative, solid core ideas of church, school and work when only the week before at the democratic convention their delegates had explained that a vote for them was a vote away from extreme change and a return to normal. Both candidates I believe have laid claim to Christian credentials which are aligned with …….

Well, there is the question, what should today’s Christian be modelling? Paul begins his instructions, and they are after all expressed as imperatives, with things that are easy to agree with: Let love be genuine, hate what is evil, love one another with mutual affection, rejoice in hope and more but soon the messages get harder if not hardest. Bless those who persecute you, do not curse them, if your enemies are hungry feed them.

It is worth, I suggest, remembering who Paul was at the beginning of the book of Acts: 

“Then they dragged Stephen out of the city and began to stone him and the witnesses laid their coats at the feet of a young man named Saul. And Saul approved of their killing him. And a few lines later to emphasis his character we read: “meanwhile, Saul still breathing threats and murder agianst the disciples of the Lord, “

What a change has been wrought in this young man. He of all people may have been the least expected to advocate nourishment, fondness and blessing for his enemies. Paul’s manifesto is completely changed and not even to  a pre-existing one. Early Roman writers commenting on the Chritians are all amazed at and praised the way they “loved one another and cared for the poor, the destitute and the widows.” Paul’s and the Christian  manifesto was changed to a radically new one unknown in Roman times. 

And surely this is what we need; it will not be enough to return to the doctrines of national self interest which have been ever present until now.  I do not want to go back to a normalcy or to a sentimental nostalgia for a past that never really existed. If we have learned anything over the past few months it is I suggest that our systems of international cooperation do not work. As a world people we have failed. 

Back to Paul: “Live in harmony with one another, do not claim to be wiser than you are, extend hospitality to strangers, do not be overcome by evil but overcome evil with good.”

Imagine, that we, and here I am talking about nation states, had been living to this agenda, how different would the last eight months have been? 

In this light the manifestos of the presidential hopefuls and certainly the manifestos of Christian leaders need to be radical.

Amen

Including Eunuchs Isaiah 56:1, 6-8

The verses from Isaiah that we have just heard are very few but very deep. I started by wondering “ What would be an acceptable sacrifice to God? ” and I will return to this question but first I realise that the passage is not about what but about who can offer sacrifices. Our reading as it was set in the lectionary has some verses missing. Verses 3 and 5 speak of the foreigner : “Do not let the foreigner say ‘The Lord will surely separate me from his people and do not let the eunuch say ‘ I am just a dry tree ‘ For thus says the Lord to the eunuchs who keep my sabbaths I will give them an everlasting name. “ I do not know why the lectionary compilers left put these verses, perhaps to avoid talking of eunuchs - which is a pity. Montesquieu gives a description of harem life explaining that ordinarily in a noble's house there would be between six and eight eunuchs whose job is to insist on obedience, order and silence in that strange world. Strange world indeed and it must have been strange for Isaiah’s audience to hear that these too will be welcomed by God and will be brought to the Holy mountain and that their burnt offerings and sacrifices will be accepted on his altar. 

Isaiah writing more than 500 years before Christ, so more than two and a half millennia ago would be shocked to discover how little progress we have made.  Only a few years ago, a Catholic couple one of who had been divorced came to be married in our Church of England church. Because of the divorce they were not allowed to take communion in their own church. I wondered if they would like a marriage with Holy Communion they were overjoyed so that is what we did. Now they were faithful parishioners coming to our services on Sunday for their own integrity - they did not need to as they qualified to be married by living in the parish - and they went to saturday evening mass with their children to maintain the connection. This carried on for a year. Listen to Isaiah again:

And the foreigners who joined themselves to the Lord

To minister to him, to love the name of the Lord

And to be his servants all who keep the sabbath

And do not profane it and hold fast my covenant

These I will bring to my holy mountain

And make them joyful in my house of prayer.

I do hope and pray that our wedding couple are still joyful.

When will we truly absorb what Isaiah is telling us? That the Lord’s house shall be a house of prayer for ALL nations and that He will yet bring home all that remain to be brought in. …. All that remain to be brought in …. Why are some people’s sacrifices not acceptab;e to some denominations or even some wings of our own churches?

What is an acceptable sacrifice to God? Isaiah and the jewish thinkers who followed and even later Paul make clear it is not about physical descent, or nationality; there is no longer Jew, or Greek, no longer slave or free there is no longer male or female or for that matter EUNUCHS -the covenant outweighs all other considerations. The acceptable sacrifice is

That we should love our God  with all our heart, with all our soul with all our mind and with all our strength. 

And when we do this we may come to the Holy Mountain and be filled with joy.

Amen 

 

Where do we look?

After Elijah’s extraordinary demonstration of the power of the Lord at Mount Carmel, where he set fire to his sacrifices on an altar surrounded by water simply calling on the Lord to set light to them he took all the prophets of Baal to the Wadi at Kishon and killed them there. For this reason he is fleeing for his life he is on the run from Jezebel and her forces and is hiding in a cave. Now often when we are in peril we turn to God for help  and Elijah of course does just this. But the question then will be where do we look for God and how do we find him? I went through  a phase of reading books about mountaineering not so much Chris Bonnington but storires of much earlier climbers with little more than ropes who climbed the Swiss alps, one book I recall was called Summits and Secrets and it provided insight into the climbers’ minds, their delight and awe they found in crossing glaciers, camping on ridges, and naturally on attaining summits. They were inspiring accounts and certainly a mountain would be a very good place to connect with the divine. 

So we need to imagine ourselves in shelter high up on a mountain having been told that the Lord is to pass by. Now this is a stimulating idea, how would we feel if we were told that the Lord is to pass by out there just next to St. Clements? We would surely go to see and we might be even more inclined to go if there were a mighty wind, after all God is big and all powerful so a wind so strong that it was splitting mountains and breaking rocks could seem to be exactly what we expect, but the Lord was not there. An earthquake, likewise deeply resonant, terrifying literally earth shattering but the Lord was not there nor in the flickering tongues of fire and the crackle and snap of burning woodland. And then there was the sound of sheer silence.

Pause

I doubt any of us has ever heard it - maybe Mike Tapper in his submarine lying on the ocean bottom - but even then I am not sure. It is so difficult to find total quiet, deserts are claimed to be the best - here is Gertrude Bell writing to her father during her first desert journey: “Shall I tell you my first impression, the silence. Silence and solitude fall around you like an impenetrable veil.” Usually there is always something making a noise somewhere, and in any case this silence is not an absence not arrived at by stripping away the sounds of animals, birds, insects, twigs or heartbeats but it is a presence. The Lord passed by bringing the SILENCE of the very beginning with him.  This may be more terrifying than all that went before, the earth was a formless void and the darkness covered the deep and God said “What are you doing here Elijah?” Contemplate that for a moment, that you have gone to look for Godin one of your favourite and expectant places, on the marsh in a cathedral, p a mountain and God comes in this great silence and asks:

“Steve what are you doing here?” 

John Greenleaf Whittier, an American Quaker poet born in 1807 in Massachusetts is known to us as the author of Dear Lord and Father of Mankind,. We all recall the final line of the hymn referring to our passage from 1 Kings “speak to us through the earthquake wind and fire, O still small voice of calm” but in the original poem, called “The brewing of Soma” which is about priests seeking the divine there is this verse omitted from the hymn:

With that deep hush subduing all

Our words and works that drown 

The tender whisper of your call

As noiseless let thy blessing fall 

As fell thy manna down.

The Lord passes by and brings down the impenetrable veil subduing our words and works which are filling God’s silence which is there within us - and when we find this deep inner peace than we are ready to face the question:

“What are we doing here?”

Amen 

Sourdough Bread

It seems amazing that it was only a few weeks ago, well actually it was just before June the 6th, that I dropped a mustard seed of an idea in Frances’ direction. It was the smallest of seeds but as Jesus told us it grew into the greatest of shrubs and ever   since I planted it I have been a sourdough bread widower. All I suggested was that it may be fun and interesting to try to make some and ever since …..

Which brings me to the second of Jesus’ metaphors.  “The kingdom of heaven is like yeast that a woman took and mixed in with three measures of flour until all of it was leavened.” If only it were so simple: actually it seems the science of sourdough is simple but the mythology extensive. Of course we all know we need a starter with or without grapes, to American or European recipes, and that only a small amount retained from a previous dough is needed to make another starter which by the way, you treat like a small pet creature but there are questions of temperature, fridge or windowsill, of catching it at the peak of her rising, of blending with the bread flour. Never apparently to knead, oh no,  but stretching and folding every thirty minutes on the dot for uncountable hours and then allowing the whole to rise in a preferred corner of the room for a very long time and then kneeling in front of the glass door of the oven like someone from bake off watching a curious thing and waiting impatiently for it which is called the oven bounce whilst protecting the crust from blackening.  The first few loaves had holes deemed too small so researches were made into the viscosities of various mixtures. Two or three times a week Frances rose so early as to disturb even the dogs to begin this day long endeavour straining at the worktop to continue her experiments.

So I ask how is this the kingdom of heaven?


It might be that the King James’ version is easier in this instance because it says:L “The kingdom of heaven is like unto leaven which a woman took and hid in three measures of meal until the whole was leavened. “ So we have not yeats and doughnut leaven and leaven. The word that is translated as measure in our version comes from the Greek and three sata  is about 50 lbs of flour, a huge quantity even more than Frances used up. Also we need to take the right viewpoint - what did Jesus mean when he spoke of the kingdom of heaven?

Jesus came to us and so in himself brought the kingdom of God which is not a place but an activity, not a territory but a whole new society described and inaugurated by His coming and of course it is a society that is radically quite different from ours.  My favourite commentator Matthew Henry talking about leaven considers this yeast as the word of the Gospel working in our hearts . Only a small amount is needed, and I like to think of it as no more than a whisper which once there,  in our hearts, rises silently yet purposefully to change us, just as Frances’ sourdough starter after many hours will produce a dough that will become a beautiful bread. But, notice the story of Frances’ experience is useful, for she has been working at the process, not simply hearing the word and leaving it unattended but putting in hours of practice, adapting and refining her ways until  …..

Well I have to say I think the loaf is perfect now.

Amen

God's Word and Joy

Matthew 13:1-9, 18-23 and Isaiah 55:10-13

I am presently reading a huge book of fiction where a nineteenth century Hungarian politician is introduced to us as having “an enormous mouth which seemed to have become over-developed perhaps by the tremendous number of words that were constantly emerging from it.” This made me stop to think and to wonder at our ambivalent relationship with words.  Often we dismiss them as just so much hot air  but occasionally we want to pin people down with the “but you said”  that children say and actually so do a lot of grown ups.

This morning we are contemplating our relationship not with other people’s words but with God’s word. These are of course special and singularly worthy of contemplation. Many Bibles including the one in front of me now use red ink for Jesus’ words to highlight this which means that almost all the reading which we have heard from Matthew is in red. I was struck by how using a parable to explain how words work becomes self referencing. A parable is itself a particular type of word - they do not work directly but need to be listened to, sucked on slowly like a sweet in the mouth, allowed to develop as a seed in fertile ground. This parable of the sower is about the quality of our listening. The second half of the reading uses the word “hear” five times in as many sentences. We are prompted to ask how well do we listen to God’s word, should we not listen to it more carefully and thoughtfully than to an Hungarian politician say?

But then we might ask, “How do we know what God’s word is?” Even if our ground is not paved, rocky or thorny how can we be sure that the interpretation we have made from our fertile earth is sound? It is a puzzle and archbishops, bishops and theologians use words like discernment or seeking to understand to describe it. They appointed working groups to develop the Living in Love resources that we are all waiting for (Now postponed to November by the way)
 It seems it is more difficult to discover God’s word than simply  looking for the red ink.

But let us return to Isaiah. Chapter 55 begins with an invitation, an invitation to everyone that says let everyone who thirsts come to the waters and includes the lines:

“Listen to me and eat what is good, incline your ear and come to me, listen so that you may live.”

Isaiah is so sure about God’s word : “my word that goes out of my mouth shall not return empty but it shall accomplish that which I purpose and succeed in the thing for which I sent it.”

And what is the purpose:

“For you shall go out in joy and go out in peace, the mountains and the hills before you shall burst into song and all the trees of the field shall clap their hands.”

Listen carefully says Isaiah, and  I want to add that if what we discern does not meet the invitation to everyone and does not bring joy then it most likely is not the word of God we are hearing.

Amen

Back to Church

There are many emotions in church this morning. For some it will be a joyful return, others may be perturbed by the differences that we have had to introduce, not a few will be anxious and some of you will be bringing the sadness of loss with you. During these lockdown weeks I have really enjoyed and taken advantage of the National Theatre streaming among whose notable productions were Twelfth Night, A streetcar named desire, Frankenstein and most recently Midsummer night’s dream. Although they were called National Theatre LIVE of course they were not but were recordings made in earlier seasons. A particular live theatre production is special and each one unique, created by the individual cast performance and by the audience whose reactions to and with the play form a vital ingredient of the whole experience. It has been good,  might say very good to see these plays from my armchair but it is not the same as being there.

And so this is what I feel about today ; the online services from the great cathedrals and dare I say in one case from a kitchen have not been the same as being here. There is an indefinable but nonetheless completely palpable sense of coming together, in sharing the liturgy, saying some of the words, feeling the presence of others, of being in the same space and intent on worshipping, confessing,  taking communion, praying, giving thanks, receiving blessing, looking at one another, being one body.

This particular service will not happen again and that mix of emotions that you have brought is part of what will make this a unique event, we shall not feel exactly the same again so let us keep a short quiet moment to feel the spirit and atmosphere of now.

Our reading from Matthew’s Gospel “Come to me all that are weary and carrying heavy burdens and I will give you rest “  is perfect for today. It always reminds me of walking up steep dry mountains in Yugoslavia as it eh was carrying backpacks and coming across the refreshing cooling steams that flow down to the beautiful blue lakes below. Which of us has not felt weary at some point, the aching tiredness brought on by the drudge of daily toil or perhaps an unwanted and unexpected burden. As ever Jesus seems to offer a paradoxical answer - already burdened he says we are to take his yoke upon us. The point is that in jewish literature the “yoke” was the total of obligations which according to the teaching of the Rabbis must be taken on to follow the law. The yoke of the Torah would have been  a well known expression and  Jesus is saying “Throw this off, take on my teaching, learn from me. How easy are my simple commandments compared with the regulation and legislation of the Pharisees - discard these ideas and learn to love your neighbour as yourself and to believe in me.

So after 100 days of closed churches, here we are welcomed back with these beautiful words. Slough off the burdens, the claustrophobia, the fatigue, the anxiety the sadness, “Come to me all of you” and find rest for your soul.


Amen 

So what advantage ... ?

Romans 6:12-23

So what advantage did you get from things of which you are now ashamed?

Fagin, in Oliver Twist condemned to death is given a chapter in the cell as he waits for his execution.

“He had only one more night to live. It was not until the night of this last awful day that a withering sense of his helpless desperate state came in its full intensity upon his blighted soul.; not that he had ever held any defined or positive hope of mercy but that he had never been able to consider more than the dim possibility of dying so soon. He had sat there awake but dreaming. Now he started up every minute and with grasping mouth and burning skin hurried to and fro in such a paroxysm of fear and wrath that even they who waited on him recoiled from him with horror. He cowered down on his stone bed and thought of the past. “ 

Now Fagin is cruelly painted throughout the book and we cannot draw a line under nor be but horrified at Dickens’ antisemitic language which is especially strong in the early chapters but reaching the end after many hours of audio book I found myself asking exactly the question that Paul asks us this morning and at the critical moment I suppose Fagin asks himself when he thought of the past.   “So what advantage did you gain from things of which you are now ashamed?”  Was Fagin, the receiver of stolen goods, the thief and teacher of boys, the author of Nancy’s murder ever happy? I want to say no; he may have had a pride momentarily in the artful dodger and a deal of self conceit for his own imagined ingenuity and control of others but I read of no joy taken in any moment.

Reading Paul always takes us to the Damascus road for as much as any man Paul understands the transformation wrought in our lives when we understand the full meaning of Jesus Christ’s life, death and resurrection. He was if you like pulled up by his bootstraps and turned from persecution to belief. He tells us “No longer present your members to sin as instruments of wickedness but present your members to God as instruments of righteousness.” He explains that if God is our master then we are informed by his teaching and our road will not be from iniquity to iniquity but from blessing to blessing and ultimately to eternal life.

We live, says Paul under grace , or we may say by grace, and grace is something free: God bestows it on us all we do not need to earn it or hoard it or steal it or teach others to steal it for us, it is not accumulated but simply given. It is by the grace of God that we are forgiven for things of  which we are now ashamed, that we wish we had not thought or said or done and who better than Paul to tell us that, Saul who ordered the stoning of Stephen and is now Paul.

There is much in biblical teaching about reaching heaven and the rewards of a good life. So with this in mind the contrast between Fagin on his stone bench in the prison a few steps from the scaffold and Paul’s conviction that he will receive the free gift of eternal life could not be greater. Let us not miss however that following Jesus is joyful - we move from blessing to blessing as we grow and learn and live so please let us see the advantage of living under grace now.


Amen

We are like eggs

Jeremiah 20:7-13, Romans 6:1-11, Matthew 10:24-39

We were in the country heading out for a summer drive in our people carrier along country roads with four children and a dog and the makings of lunch all crammed in when we heard the news of Lady Diana’s death on the radio. We were a bit late hearing it for the press conference had been much earlier at 6.00 in the morning; it was unbelievable and as we knew the road, the underpass at the Pont Alma it made it very graphic and real. Our appetite for the picnic was broken and we went home to telephone relatives in England to talk over the news. For it was bursting from us. There are moments when we have such news that we must tell: expecting a baby, becoming engaged to be married, getting a hoped for job, the death of a loved one.

Jeremiah had been prophesying as only he could prophesy and PASHUR, the priest had taken him and publicly placed him in the stocks where everyone could see him. When he was released Jjeremiah continued saying “you Pashur, and all who live in your house shall go into captivity, and to Babylon you shall go and there you shall die.” Maybe these were not the best words to address to a man who had put you in the stocks and who had the power and willingness to do so again but as we hear Jeremiah in our reading tell is he was compelled to speak:

“For whenever I speak I must cry out.”
“If I  say I will not mention him or speak any more in his name, then within me is something like a burning fire shut up in my bones. I am weary with holding it in and cannot.”

 Jeremiah has received the call, the word of the Lord and he must tell it, he cannot hold it in.

In Matthews’ Gospel we hear Jesus say “Have no fear of them for nothing is covered up, what I say to you in the dark tell in the light and what you hear whispered proclaim from the rooftops.” Here is the same idea as Jeremiah’s; what you have heard from me, and it is Jesus speaking, cannot be contained hidden or covered even from fear (of being put in the stocks say) but shout it from the very top of your house. I remember when I was installed as a curate in St. Mary’s Hitchin, the town centre church with a renowned set of heavy bells, a quarter peal was rung to announce my arrival. In this case the news was shouted from the church top.

Paul, writing in Romans, Paul the convert cannot keep it in. “What then are we to say? How can we go on living like we once did, like we used to, when we have been called when we have heard when we have been baptized? No, he says  we must walk in the newness of life.

All three of today’s readings have this motif of being unable to let our belief and understanding of God go unspoken or unseen. This is surely as vitally important now as it was when these three passages were written. This morning over my coffee I listened to the BBC World Service news summary, it was not an inspiring ten minutes. The number of refugees is at a record high, the number being repatriated at a record low, there have been Indian soldiers killed and captured on the border with China, there are violent demonstrations everywhere. All of which makes me ask have we been shouting loudly enough? Are the words like burning fire but are still shut up in our bones?

C S Lewis writing about Paul’s exhortation to us to walk in the newness of life says: we must go for it, for the full treatment (for the full implication of baptism.) It is not easy, he says, but we are just now with the word of God like eggs; “it might be hard for an egg to turn into a bird but it would be a jolly sight harder for it to learn to fly while remaining an egg.” We must hatch.

And Jeremiah, Paul and Jesus all agree we should hatch and cannot and should not hold in the news.


Amen

Private Prayer

The Psalm which is set for today is Psalm 100:

O be joyful in the Lord, all the earth;
Serve the lord with gladness

Know that the Lord is God it is he that has made us we are his;
We are his people and the sheep of his pasture

Enter his gates with thanksgiving and his courts with praise;
Give thanks to him and bless his name

For the Lord is gracious, his steadfast love is everlasting;
And his faithfulness endures from generation to generation.

From Monday we are at last allowed to enter his gates with thanksgiving and his courts with praise. That is to say that our churches shall be open for private prayer.  Actually this phrase is a bit of a puzzle; Archbishop Rowan Williams in a seminar, or I should say webinar the other day began by saying “There is no such thing as private prayer.” It is always good of course to grab attention at the start by a controversial line. As well as this the trade journal this week (I mean the Church of England Newspaper) has much ink devoted to telling us that we do not need church buildings at all and expounding on how many like to watch big services with bishops on line. Now both of these are right, I suppose, but at the same time I do hope that both of them are wrong.

Archbishop Rowan is talking in view of the Holy Spirit who in that Pentecost arrival revealed the permeating, unifying power of God’s presence and love. To this extent we never pray on our own but are joined in our current prayer with those who are praying everywhere now, to those who have prayed before and those wo will pray in the future. This is a big idea, distinctively Christian, that we are all in the body of Christ but which perfectly allows us to pray alone. Times have changed since Julian of Norwich was immured, but in medieval times every town of consequence wanted to have at least one solitary, anchorite or anchoress, for the town regarded this as part of its welfare services. They were worth maintaining for the spiritual good derived from their prayers and penances. Mother Julian may have prayed on her own but her prayers and revelations sere for us all. Nothing private about that even if in private.

So to the question, do we need churches, should we bother opening them at all particularly just now when we offer no collective worship? We might stay at home guided by prayers on Facebook or Twitter or simply sit quietly in our armchairs. Some or many of you no doubt will do this but for others including me the sacred space has meaning and purpose, the framing of prayer time a value. Firstly there is the going. I know it is not possible for everyone but I like to walk to the church; it is a wonderful aspect of parishes that you can see people on a usual Sunday morning walking up the church path, hopefully not rushing but mentally steadying themselves. Then through the door into a place where countless have come before to bring their hopes and fears a time set apart to talk with God, praying (in the words of the Prayerbook) as well for others as themselves. A church engages multiple senses, the acoustic, the visual, a sense of smell and touch all of which contribute to the way we feel. I am sure we need them.

From Monday then we will carefully open our churches for you to come and pray in them, to give thanks and to bless his name” to be both apart and yet together in the mystery that is now, has been, and shall be for ever.

Amen

Entanglement

Trinity Sunday 2020
Isaiah 40:12-17, 27 - end

The question I want to ponder this morning is “As our human knowledge increases does God become more or less mysterious?” Our reading from Isaiah this morning finds him full of wonder:

“Who has measured the waters in the hollow of his hand
and marked off the heavens with a span
enclosed the dust of the earth in a measure
And weighed the mountains in scales and the hills in a balance?”

Although phrased as a question Isaiah is full of certainty. Faced with creation he is convinced not only of God’s existence but of God’s capability. Ever since Darwin’s dangerous idea1  there have been attempts to take God out of the picture by delving deeper and smaller. Contract this with Isaiah who steps back to look at the big things: the heavens, the seas, the whole earth of the earth, the mountains and the hills and who concludes that God is much bigger than all these. To help us, like a modern photographer who places a person in front of the Great Pyramid for scale he sets the creator against our sizes: a span, a measure, a scale or a balance.

Our science, however, seems more concerned with building blocks, the components of life, the genome, the DNA, the components of the universe, the particles, waves, quantum mechanics. The microscopes and telescopes were not there for Isaiah but if they had been I like to think he would have written in the same way.

Newton is of course now old hat superseded by Einstein who by now may be also partly old hat. Once I imagined I understood the atom, the proton, neutron and the electron, the orbitals and the excited states but that by now is very very old hat. My father- in- law a professional nuclear physicist in his day, wondered recently what he had missed and ordered a first year undergraduate textbook - the book was large, the print tiny and the changes considerable.

Considerable and for me often marvellous. There is a new thing, well new for me at any rate called “Quantum Entanglement.” This is a complex idea now demonstrated by more complex experiments that allows that something can be in two places at once. The technical definition is that entanglement occurs “when two (or more) particles are such that their quantum states cannot be described independently even though they are apart.”

Today is Trinity Sunday, where we reflect on the threeness and oneness of God and most especially the perfect loving, making sure we stress loving here, the perfect loving relationship between them. Or, even though God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit may be far apart they are indivisible and cannot be described independently.

The more we learn the bigger God becomes.

Amen.

1 Dennett Daniel C Penguin 1995

Pentecost Sunday : Language

Every Pentecost I speak about the miracle of language: “And how is it that we hear,each of us in our own native language?” Language is a textured complexity; the acting schools will remind you that the words themselves are only a minor part of any communication, with our facial expressions and tone of voice far and away dominating the story. During lock down I have been doing a couple of things which may have a bearing on this - listening to France Musique and also an audiobook edition of Oliver Twist. 

In the first case during a news bulletin there was a description of how the virus beginning in  bagts “S’est passé par un petit animal qui s’appelle un Pangolin.” In the measured and gentle tones of a (proper) French accent I developed a sympathy for the little animal which previously had been to our minds a hard scaly insect ridden malevolent creature responsible for devastation in unimaginable degrees.

And a single sentence from the beginning of chapter 27 of Oliver Twist:

“As it would be by no means seemly in a humble author to keep so mighty a personage as a beadle waiting, with his back to the fire, and the skirts of his coat gathered up under his arms until such time as it might suit his pleasure to relieve him; and as it would still less become his station, or his gallantry, to involve in the same neglect a lady on whom that beadle had looked with an eye of tenderness and affection, and in whose ear he had whispered sweet words, which coming from such a quarter might well thrill the bosom of maid or matron of whatsoever degree; the historian whose pen traces these words - trusting that he knows his place, and that he entertains a becoming reverence for those upon earth to whom high and important authority is delegated hastens to pay them that respect and to treat them with all that duteous ceremony which their exalted rank and (by consequences) great virtues imperatively claim at his hands.

Which when translated means “I will take up my story where I left off.” These words take us unerringly to the dark smog of Dickensian London and an age that was all its own and where we wait with held breath for the next issue of the magazine Bentley’s Miscellany.

All those people, the Parthians, Medes, Elamites, those from Mesopotamia, Judea and Cappadocia, Pontus and Asia ,Phrygia and Pamphylia, Egypt, parts of Libya, Cretans and Arabs heard not just the words, the consonants and vowels of their languages but the cadence, the tone, the whole message with their hearts. The miracle of the Holy Spirit is so much more than  a “Google Translate” for they each heard the words of Peter perfectly. Of course any miracle must be perfect, by definition, after all it is a gift from God. The Holy Spirit came and still comes  to speak to us on any wavelength, in whatsoever ways we find most easy to understand.in ways that we can take into our hearts and which can change our perceptions and our souls in ways we may not yet imagine.

Amen

With One Accord - The Sunday after Ascension Day

When the disciples arrived back in Jerusalem they went to the room upstairs where they were staying. It will help our reflections if we go with them and although it may not have been, though some say it was, let us in any case, imagine that it is the same upper room where they celebrated the Passover Supper on the eve of the crucifixion. Since then they have known despair, were likely angry with one another (surely in the immediate days they asked themselves couldn’t they have spoken out more and done something to prevent this somehow?) . Soon afterwards they retired in defeat to Galilee, back to their boats then joyfully there were days spent with Jesus again, and now they are in Jerusalem fearful that the authorities may try to root them out for association and they gather. What to do surrounded by the memories, the cushions they lay on that night, the torture they witnessed, the uncertaintly of an empty tomb? But with Jesus having appeared to them and with the promises he gave them - everything he told them that would happen did happen: They must believe him now.

They were constantly devoting themselves to prayer or as the King James Bible says more strongly “These continued with one accord in prayer and supplication.” I do not know why modern versions omit that phrase, with one accord, for it is an important component of the scene before us. They were together in fellowship and harmony, united in experience with no quarrel or discord between them. Their instinctive response to Jesus’ ascension is to pray together. Behind and informing these prayers is that fullness of trust in Jesus, his being the Son of God that they had seen and felt and been part of. This depth and completeness of trust may at times be elusive to us so many hundreds of years on. But our view of the upper room with followers praying is not a picture we are looking into but one we

are part of. As we stand or sit alongside the men and women on that room we feel that they are afraid for the future; we are afraid for the future. They are, with the vision of Jesus ascending in recent memory, hopeful for the future; we are hopeful for the future. They know they will need help for the future; we know we need help for the future.

Their intuitive response to these uncertainties is to pray, but let us ponder a  moment. before this day, before this afternoon in Jerusalem they would not have prayed to Jesus. Is this the first time? Of course they would have prayed with Jesus many times and they should have had the inestimable benefit of his teaching them how to pray to the Father and how to make this a way of being,  a constant part of their daily lives but now, gathered together with Jesus not physically with them, palpably so, no look,no touch no certain presence they pray with one accord. Not, to a distant impersonal God but to a God they know and trust. Let us remain in their room awhile, with all our anxieties sharing the tensions they feel and pray with them to the God we know, and who we know knows us, for the things we know he knows we need so that when we leave the room we do so with confidence and trust.

Amen

Ascension Day Reflection

Just before we spend a moment or so reflecting on the Ascension and what it may hold for our present understanding, the sharply observant may have noticed that I continued the usual reading in Acts by adding verse 12 which says: “Then they returned to Jerusalem from the mount called Olivet, which is near Jerusalem, a sabbath day’s journey away. As well as giving the location where the ascension happened it speaks to today’s situation. A sabbath day’s journey did not mean something you could accomplish in a single day but it was a specific distance that you were allowed to travel on the Sabbath. The Dead Sea scrolls restrict it to 1000 cubits or if you were pasturing animals then 2000. Despite the parallels with our modern day restrictions operating in France Spain and elsewhere it reminds us that 1st century Palestine was not our world.

The ancient’s understanding of what lay beyond the dome of the sky was limited; it was certainly where heaven was and in addition a cloud was frequently met in the Old Testament (Exodus, Daniel for example) as a sign of God’s presence. With all respect to my Walsingham friends whose chapel of the Ascension has feet poking down from a ceiling, I do not really find this imagery helpful. Even Luke, writing in Acts does not really dwell on it - he is more concerned it seems to me with what is being said.

The question uppermost in the disciples’ minds is “What next?” Having seen and fully understood that Jesus is raised from the dead they want to know if he would now go on to fulfill the expected purpose of the Messiah, to restore the kingdom to Israel. The answer they are given is “It is not for you to know when this might take place and your job rather than asking these questions is to be my witnesses in the world, in fact to all the ends of the earth.” And when he had said this as they were watching he was lifted up and a cloud took him out of their sight. The disciples witnessed a change from Jesus’ physical presence with them to a spiritual one. They certainly felt that, Luke and doubtless others sought to explain this transformation in terms of things they knew using language that their hearers and readers would understand.

I am comfortable with that. It is a very human thing to do. I was looking recently at an old Japanese print that was seeking to explain the existence of air. The print contained a picture of fish in a bowl. The artist and scientists of those times had no concept of the composition of air, which came very much later,  but they understood that fish inhabited a medium and were able to describe our place in an invisible emptiness as being something like this - something they could see and touch, like fish in water.

The transformation that happened there on Mount Olivet is quite beyond us and I am happy that it is: Paul writing in 1 Timothy  3:16 puts the untouchable ethereal nature of Jesus well:

He was revealed in flesh
Vindicated in Spirit
Seen by angels
Proclaimed among the Gentiles
Believed in throughout the world
And taken up in glory.

Amen

The Rainbow

Genesis 8:20 - 9:17

The bows appear as concentric arcs with the common centre on the line connecting the eye of the observer and the light source. Most frequently only one bow is visible. It appears on the opposite side from the source; its angular radius of the red border is about 42 degrees. Other colours of the spectrum can be seen inside of this border ending with the violet. Occasionally another secondary rainbow is observed above the primary rainbow. Its angular radius is about fifty-four degrees and the sequence of colours is reversed. The centre of the bows is angularly as far below the horizon as the source (sun) is above.

This entry from the 1964 edition of the encyclopaedia Britannica is less picturesque than Genesis:
“This is the sign of the covenant that I make between me and every living creature that is with you for all generations. I have set my bow in the clouds and it shall be a sign of the covenant between me and the whole earth.”

People have marvelled at rainbows always and as an example of the beauty and mystery of God’s creation they do evoke wonder and questioning, awe and admiration. Yet the science that I have quoted dates only from 1611. The 1771 Encyclopaedia Britannica finding all this still quite modern devoted pages 435 to 441, so some six pages, and a set of exquisite diagrams to the entry. It i s a miracle that we ever came to understand it so minutely, another example of God’s gift to us of reason, deduction and creativity.

All creation is God’s way of revealing himself to us; the perfection that we see in nature, tiny leaves, buds, flowers, fruits always seeming to be the right shape, in the right place, looking as if they ought to be there. But the rainbow is a special sign: God said to Noah “I will remember the everlasting covenant between God and every living creature of all flesh that is on the earth.”

It is always thrilling to see a rainbow and remains so for most of us well  beyond childhood. Here is Wordsworth thinking about that:

My heart leaps up when I behold
A rainbow in the sky
So it was when my life began
So it is now that I am a man
So be it when I grow old
     Or let me die
The child is father of the man
And I would wish my days to be
Bound each to each by natural piety.

“My heart leaps up” and I wonder if the rainbow we see today, comprehensively explained though it is, strikes deep into a spiritual core that we all know we have and have had from the beginning or as Wordsworth says - “So it was when my life began.” So when we look up at a rainbow we are the ones who remember.

I was struck when exploring rainbows to discover Dame Laura Knight’s picture (in the Tate Gallery) called “Spring.” Painted in an impressionist style it shows a pastoral scene of a meadow, a fly fisherman, a country lady with a gathering basket, lambs in a distant field and overarching it all in the sky a rainbow. The picture is dated, 1916-1920 and is so clearly peaceful. I do not know the life story of Laura Knight but it seems to me to be a response to the joy springing from 1918, and the end of the Great War.

We have recently adopted the rainbow to be a sign for the NHS, it may have several meanings but it is I suggest among other things a sign of eternal hope and a reminder of God’s promises to us.

Amen

This sermon can be heard on the following podcast:

https://anchor.fm/vicarsteve/episodes/Service-from-the-Burnham-Benefice-for-May-17th-The-sixth-Sunday-of-Easter-ee1p5v

The painting that I refer to can be found at

https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/dame-laura-knight-1424

June Letter : Carefully unzipping the tent

Carefully unzipping the tent

Dear Friends,

As I write this letter we have had a statement this evening on how we begin easing the lock down. It is, by the way, another world away since a bellow of “Unlock” from the Speaker of the House made us sit up in anticipation of another cliffhanger of a vote. Today is a cliffhanger of a different sort. There is a lot at stake and to help appreciate this I want to tell you about a conversation I witnessed between survivors of the virus. This is not in any way to minimise the grief and mourning of the thousands  of family members of those who have died nor to forget the lives tragically and prematurely lost but to remind the younger and fitter why it is crucial to be super cautious, to be mindful of others and for ourselves.

These two did not previously know one another, neither had been hospitalised  but they were introduced across a wide road. The one in running shorts and a T-shirt outwardly a picture of suntanned health, the other a horticulturalist used to working outside every daylight hour. Both had suffered with Covid -19 and now five weeks later they were still invalids. The runner, not running anywhere, the gardener not pruning or trimming; both were exhausted two days out of three so only a smallish chance brought them both standing at the same time. (Frances could work it out!) And then even on these “good” days there were still hours when they were prone. They shared experience across the white lines where the similarities were striking: The sniffle they thought they had, the interminable coughing, the temperature and fever, the exhaustion, the getting up and the exhaustion again, the full recovery still awaited.

Hopefully by the time this appears in the magazine they will both be springing around like gazelles, which is a source of hopefulness for us all. I am optimistic but my message this month is less for the vulnerable or the elderly who can see the graphs and the big risks but for the younger of you, who will be back at work maybe, who see but the small block on the barchart of mortality but may not be aware of the weeks of illness that may come your way if infected.

We cannot of course stay zipped in our tent forever but as we emerge let us be sure to live well, safely and with a  mind for others who remain anxious.


With blessings


Steve

Faith in difficult times

I forget from where we were returning but there we were, Michela and I at the luggage carousel in Heathrow.  Now Michela was young successful and one of my brightest people , she had a taste for the good life, arts, culture, good restaurants and Cava: suddenly into the tedium of waiting for bags she said, “I wish I had your faith.” I looked at my watch - as if to say - we have not been waiting all that long you know - but then looking at her  I deduced that she was not anxious about her Louis Vitton but was worried about why she did not or could not believe in God while I did. What I have remembered about her remark is that sentiment “I wish.”  It is an odd construction to my mind for if it were something really wished for surely there is no impediment to just believing, or is there?

We meet Philip almost exclusively through St. John’s Gospel. His calling is recorded in the Gospels of Matthew, Mark and Luke but no more is he mentioned by them. The advantage of this is that we have a consistent account of Philip’s life with Jesus. It begins in chapter one “The next day, Jesus decided to go to Galilee. He found Philip and said to him “Follow me.” Now Philip was from Bethsaida, the city of Andrew and Peter. Philip found Nathaniel and said to him “We have found him about whom Moses in the law and the prophets wrote: Jesus son of Joseph from Nazareth.”   Philip took Nathaniel to Jesus.

Philip was there at the feeding of the five thousand, indeed Jesus asked Philip the question “Philip, where are we to buy bread for these people to eat?” he said this to test him for he himself knew what he was going to do. Philip answered him “Six month’s wages would not buy enough bread for each of them to get a little.” Philip helped gather up the fragments of left over bread into twelve baskets.”

In chapter twelve we find Philip once again helping people find Jesus. “Now among those who went up to worship at the festival were some Greeks. “They came to Philip who was from Bethsaida in Galilee and said to him ‘Sir, we wish to see Jesus.’  Philip went and told Andrew, then Andrew went and told Jesus. “ Philip brought Gentiles to Jesus.”

And yet after all this witness we then come to today’s reading which takes place very shortly before the final Passover meal so some three years of following Jesus behind him:

“Lord, show us the Father and we will be satisfied”

No wonder there seems a tone of exasperation in Jesus’ voice: “Have I been with you all this time Philip and you still do not know me?” 

In recent days I have spoken to people who have found their “faith” shaken by recent events. This is way deeper than Michela musing over the luggage. In the face of plague, and surely this is the right word, in the face of so many bad things we might choose to hold up in support of doubt or disbelief it is unsurprising. What to say in the face of such disaster?

Well I want to offer two things - firstly I remain convinced of God’s love for us and in those gifts of inventiveness and creativity given us. I know that the minds we have been given are from God and are capable beyond all our expectations and they will be purposely turned to the searches for prevention, treatment and cure of this virus and I can trust in these things.

And secondly that Philip’s doubt and search for proof, is an encouragement to us. If Philip, who was with Jesus, who experienced all that can still say “BUT only show us the father and we will believe” then let us not be too hard on ourselves when in the face of adversity we may be cross and wavering.

Amen

Reflection on our closed churches

The fourth Sunday of Easter

I want to say sorry to you all.

I have until now been quiet, zipped here in my tent, peacefully behind the flaps but the trouble is I so disagree that our churches are closed for private prayer, tightly shut, slammed, barred and bolted. And I think someone should say they are sorry.

No more can we kneel in dust moted aisles and seek the sweet voice of God as centuries of people before us have done during plague or famine or simply to mourn a single death. These spaces have been nurtured, augmented, fashioned individually by generations of the faithful and the arguments that we do not need them to be close to God true as they most certainly are, nonetheless fall like stones upon my ears because we can see that we have always needed sacred spaces. Think perhaps of Stonehenge or Ravenna or the building of St. Peter in Rome not to mention our Saxon heritage here in North Norfolk.

There are some who are saying that we are returning to the original way of the church yet this morning’s reading makes me question that. The reading comes from Acts 2:42 which immediately follows Peter’s speech to the assembled people of Jerusalem - there is no gap it is not hidden in an obscure sub paragraph but it is there on the very birthday of the Church.

“They devoted themselves to the Apostles’ teaching and fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the prayers.  All who believed were together and had all things in common. Day by day they spent much time together in the temple, they broke bread at home and ate their food with glad and generous hearts.”

A distinctive feature then of Christian life from the beginning was being together, gathering, holding things in common. Now of course I do not think we should hold services and certainly we should not expressly invite people to gather for that would be irresponsible but is there a clear reason for closing churches that are usually open for private reflection and prayer?  It turns out that we are more responsible than our leaders foresaw, and I am not sure that the praying population would be any less so. We can keep two broomsticks from each other in many places (I have just come back from the pharmacy window at the surgery) we can wait our turn affably and have developed a penetrating fear of the outdoors that prompts us to vigorous hand washing on returning home.

At the beginning of the virus outbreak many, often not regularly seen in the pews,  said to me how grateful they were for the chance to go into our churches, our visitor books’ entries illustrate the support for open churches. Lots of people find our places of worship comforting.  Again I am sorry that they are not there today when comfort is sorely needed. As we are constrained to be apart there is something about the sharing, expressed so clearly by the earliest Christians, that is important: When sitting in a church we are there with all who have walked through that 800 year old door to sit by Norman columns carrying burdens we cannot imagine and to lay them before God. We share with the person who was there yesterday, an hour ago and who will be there tomorrow.

In  our Gospel reading Jesus says that he came to open the sheepfold so that the sheep may enter by it. Please could you in your prayers this week include a prayer that this aspect of the Church’s Lockdown - capital C and capital L may be speedily revisited so that we sheep may come into his house, one or two at a time, apart from one another but sharing deeply together. Amen

You may listen to the whole service and this sermon at

https://anchor.fm/vicarsteve/episodes/Service-for-Sunday-the-3td-May--the-fourth-Sunday-of-Easter-edees9