Peter's Bravery and an Open Church

Acts 4:5-12

The previous day a man lame from birth was being carried to the Temple where he daily lay at the Beautiful gate to beg for alms. Peter and John were asked for gifts along with everyone else but instead of giving him money Peter said “I have no silver or gold but what I give you, I give you in the name of Jesus Christ.” “Stand up and walk.” And he took him by the right hand and raised him up. And immediately his feet and ankles were made strong - jumping up he stood and began to walk and he entered the temple walking and leaping and praising God.”

The Temple police came and arrested Peter and John and put them in custody until the next day.

Now I have been in a custody suite - as a visitor I hasten to add not as a customer - and even in our modern times and our enlightened country they are uncomfortable places: bare, made of steel, institutionally coloured, barred, unfriendly, worrisome, threatening, destabilising, and once there you do not know what will happen next.  The term custody suite is a misnomer with its sense of comfort, of facilities, of sofas - not at all - the depersonalisation starts here, you are a number in a system that will grind its weary way with you - thankfully in our country more rationally than in many others we might think of where we know the conditions are more violent. Believe me they are still intimidating though and it is in this context that Peter and John with a sleepless night in the cells behind them are arraigned.

And arraigned in front of whom - none other than Caiaphas and Annas and other members of the of the high priestly families who controlled the temple. Peter and John know already how powerful and ruthless this group are for they have seen them act with Jesus, these same authorities had been instrumental in Jesus’ crucifixion they have no limits to the sanctions they might impose in the name of the temple law and of bolstering their place - beating, scourging with rods, unlimited imprisonment. These are people not to take lightly not people to irritate  - they made the prisoners stand in their midst not I imagine a gentle invitation “Will the prisoners please stand?” but physical threatening and probably chained.

We know things about Peter, that he denied Jesus three times, that he sank into the ocean when Jesus asked him to walk towards him, that he was reluctant to have his feet washed, that he was impetuous but now in an aggressive legal setting far from his experience as a fisherman and surrounded by his enemies we witness a forthright declaration of faith. He has certainty that the power that cures the lame man came from Jesus Christ and nowhere else. Notice there is no temptation to accrue any credit to himself or John and this is not humility or shyness but bravery. We see a Peter who is brave.

Jesus said, and we read this in Luke’s Gospel, “When they bring you before the synagogues, the rulers and the authorities, do not worry about how you are to defend yourselves or what you are to say for the Holy Spirit will teach you at that very hour what you ought to say.”

And surely the Holy Spirit was with Peter and Luke tells us that Peter was filled with the Holy Spirit, but still, you know, even if you hear the voice of the Holy Spirit you need to be  brave.

It is unlikely that we will face a situation where we need choose between proclaiming our faith and  being imprisoned or worse although many have been and many still are challenged in this way but nonetheless we sometimes have to take risks we have to give things up or make ourselves vulnerable to change how we are to proclaim the things we believe.

As you know just outside those windows is a the Icknield Way, probably in use since at least the Iron Age one of the four key highways of medieval Britain, running from Norfolk to Wiltshire and today it is used by many ramblers and walkers both local and from afar. Our church stands on this route and so during the summer weekends we plan to open our doors and to encourage people to visit us, to spend a moment of prayer within and to discover our church. As well as walkers this will I know be welcomed by the very many visitors to the graveyard. The PCC have agreed that we should experiment this year and to help with that I am asking for volunteers to sit in the church for a few hours on a Saturday and for two hours on a Sunday.

I have placed a sheet at the back of church with times and spaces for you to sign up. I would appreciate your help with this and once the volunteers are known we can meet to discuss the details. And of course there will be sheets for July and August to follow.

Bishop Alan a few years ago gave a Presidential address to Synod outlining the signs of a welcoming, flourishing engaged  church and one of those was that their doors should be open - and I agree with him and think that we are ideally placed geographically, emotionally and spiritually to do just that.

Amen

Jesus appears to the disciples

Jesus appears to the disciples.

Some years ago now I visited my aunt , I happened to be in the area so I called in for a cup of tea. It had been a long time since we had met but Auntie Sheila was just the same as ever. While we were talking I glanced out of the kitchen window and at that moment I got a shock, for there walking up the path was my uncle. Now it was not that I was trying to see my aunt in secret that startled me but the fact that he had been dead for ten years. It took a perceptible time for my mind to work out that this could not be my uncle but twas my cousin, who had grown so like is father as to be indistinguishable.

So the disciples were gathered together, this is still Sunday, they knew the tomb was empty but were there together talking of recent events; sharing their guilt, sorrow, disappointment, puzzlement, surprise, disbelief and reliving it all in their grieving just as we do with our family and friends when someone we love dies.

“While they were talking about this Jesus himself stood among them.”

Luke’s Gospel captures those feelings I had when I saw my uncle/cousin by telling us “they were startled and terrified and thought they were seeing a ghost.”

What  would like you to  notice though is the gentleness that Jesus shows: “he stood among them and said ‘Peace be with you’” Surely there were many other things that could have happened -”There you are - I told you so!” or maybe a more exuberant excited expression of joyous reunion but no Jesus comes among them with love: “Peace be with you” Of course he knows that his appearance will unleash a torrent of turbulent emotions and we see his gentle loving approach in all of his first appearances. To Mary in the garden he reveals himself by simply calling her name “Mary”, to the disciples on the road to Emmaus he falls in step with them accompanying them on their journey. Only when he breaks the bread at supper are their eyes softly opened.

This is still Sunday, the cauldron of the vents of Good Friday, the fever and the clamour of those hours from Gethsemane to Golgotha are still in their heads, they cannot erase the picture of the torture, the agonising and painful walk with the cross, the intensity and brutality of the crucifixion and here is Jesus come to them and sensitive to every nuance of feeling:

Peace be with you.

Amen.

Vicar's letter for May : Psalms

He maketh wars to cease in𝀃all the𝀃world :

He breaketh the bow and knappeth the spear in sunder and burneth the𝀃chariots𝀃in the𝀃fire

Dear Friends,

Those words come from Psalm 46, “God is our hope and strength” and we sang them on Easter Sunday in St. Margaret’s between the reading of the first lesson and the Gospel. Now the Psalms are poems and contain all the emotion, hyperbole, lyricism and imagery that we expect from poetry but they are not poems as we might recognise them for their form does not depend on rhyme or metre as our English poetry does but on a different idea coming from the Hebrew tradition.

The Psalms were written by many poets and at many different dates, some do go back to the reign of David but for the most part they were compiled in the third century B.C. They must be read as poems to be understood and indeed these poems were meant to be sung.The most distinctive and pervasive feature of the Hebrew shape is parallelism. Most of the Psalms are composed of two balanced segments where the idea in the first line is repeated in different words in the second, either in developing it or by antithesis. C. S. Lewis makes the  observation that this is an intrinsic aspect of many arts - his example is of the country dance where you you take three steps then three steps again - the movement is the same but the first three are to the right and the second to the left. In modern printings of the Psalms these thoughts are separated by a diamond mark ◆ or a colon : which in some spoken traditions mark a pause between the  thoughts - a space for proper reflection. An alternative interpretation is that they mark a conversation which is why we often say Psalms antiphonally - that is to say one side of the church or choir alternately talks or sings to the other. In this way they agree and reinforce one another.

So in the example of Psalm 46 which begins this letter,  the first line speaks of God’s will for peace and the second develops this in much more detail. You will notice that the lines are not the same length as we would expect in a western poem, but listening again  to C. S. Lewis, he considers this a divine intention. Translating poetry into other languages provokes problems of the syllables in equivalent words, and the intrinsic momentum of another tongue but the notion of repeating or enhancing of an idea is universal.

The popularity of Psalms extends across all musical traditions, from baroque to classical from  reggae to pop and you would probably be surprised at how many you know and the reason is surely the universality of the emotions ranging from lament for example “By the Rivers of Babylon” to glorious praise “I was glad”.  In the quotation above I have used an ancient musical mark to show the separation of the bars in the music - they are sometimes called taste marks and I have chosen them to emphasise that the Psalms are a way to connect with the deep spiritual roots of worship or put another way, to allow us to taste the word of God.

St. Margaret’s choir is exploring the long tradition of Psalmody and you are invited to come on Friday evenings at 7.00 for an hour to sing with us. We will always be rehearsing one psalm (at least)

For  more on this topic please visit Paul Ingram’s web page, where he has collected a wide range of musical offerings for you to sample.

http://www.katapi.org.uk/Sermons/Ps51.html.

With best wishes,

Steve

The message of the cross

The message of the cross

Paul begins by telling us about the message of the cross - but to any contemporary of Paul living anywhere in the Roman and Greek world the “message of the cross” would have been as clear as day :”Don’t mess with Rome.”

Used to punish political agitators, pirates, slaves, reserved for  those with no civil rights it was the most shameful and disgraceful way to die. It was deliberately public and ignominious you were named with a wooden notice and there were at times rows and rows  of crosses - most famously following the slave revolt which was led by Spartacus in 73 B.C. After the Roman army subdued that insurrection they crucified more than 6000 slaves and lined the Appian Way the main strategic road into Rome  for 130 miles with their bodies. There was nothing ambivalent or difficult to understand about this punishment which was used by the Persians, Carthaginians Macedonians, and Alexander the great  for enemies of the state. The image of the cross was crystal clear.

Paul, so dramatically converted on the road to Damascus has now come to preach to overturn all this, to say NO, this crucifixion was totally different, none of this applies, this, the  crucifixion of Jesus is not what you think and it has the power to transform everything. In this letter to the church at Corinth Paul anticipates the arguments of the coming millenia and those of our own age. Worldly people will marshall the instruments of logic, science, rhetoric and insult to argue against the resurrection and Jesus’ identity -Oh yes they say I am sure that he was a good man but all the same, surely ….

Ben the chaplain at Maisons Lafitte came years ago to dinner and at the time we lived in an open plan house with the bookcases lined around a mezzanine surrounding the dining room - Looking upwards between courses Ben said “Why have you so many books - you only need the one!” Now I have not yet come to entirely agree with him on that but I do agree that being saved is not a question of knowledge. Paul paraphrasing Isaiah reminds us  “I will destroy the wisdom of the wise, and the discernment of the discerning I will thwart.” Where is the one who is wise, where is the scribe, where is the debater of this age? Winning the arguments using the all the philosophic brilliance of a Plato or a Socrates so beloved by the Greeks will not save you.  

As for his own people, the Jews he criticises them for always demanding signs - as recently as the mid 1500’s at the festival of Hanukkah  a small dark man, his bony frame taut from habitual fasting fetched up in Venice proclaiming himself to be David, son of king Solomon and an ambassador from the lost tribes of Israel - he got a long way, with his imposture including having an audience with the Pope  - but looking for signs will not save you.

Yes a man upon a cross, hanging and helpless, looks foolish and weak not wise and strong but God upon a cross is another thing entirely. In the hospice on Friday a young lady just eighteen held my hand and asked me “Will I go to heaven?”

And in her question is the answer - for as Paul says “God decided to save those who believe.”  That is what we have to do, to believe  that God’s son  hung on a cross to save us - to save us all, the eloquent, the tongue tied, the professor, the expelled from school, the rich, the poor, the slave, the freeman, all these and more - and we need nothing do but truly and with all our hearts believe.

Amen.

Advent One 2017 Isaiah, Matthew and Ted Hughes

As we know, Advent is about waiting or more properly awaiting. The thesaurus alternatives include, wait for, expect, anticipate, look forward to, be ready for, each of which brings its own nuance. In our two readings today, this the first Sunday of Advent,  we discover different ideas about how we might wait:

Impatiently: “O that you would tear the heavens and come down so that the mountains would quake at your presence,” writes Isaiah - he is calling loudly for God to come, what are you taking so long for? We need you now - and how true that still is - and quickly as when “fire kindles brushwood.” We want you back as you were before, when you did awesome deeds, you have hidden your face from us because of our sins and we urgently want you back.

(or we might wait)

Hopefully:  “Do not be exceedingly angry O Lord and do not remember iniquity for ever. Now consider - we are all your people” It is as if once again I am a child suffering under my mother’s sentence ”Just you wait until your father gets home.” I am fearful and at the same time hopeful that mother will have cooled in her telling of the offence that he has had a good day at the office, a swift journey and that all will be far better than I imagine. Nonetheless I worry, do not be exceedingly angry O Lord.

(or we might wait)

Prophetically ”But in those days after that suffering the sun will be darkened and the moon will not shine and the stars will be falling.” Jesus gives us the pointers, the signs that will alert us to the end of the world as we know it. We do wait like this for many things looking through our telescopes, fine tuning our antennae  for signs of what is to come so that we may anticipate and be ready.

(or we might wait)

Attentively Your teenager has borrowed the car, they have travelled to see friends for a night out and it is late, you are in bed, you know they are not back, you will not sleep, listening for tell-tale noises, for tyres on the driveway, for a step on the threshold for a creak of the door or the stair and you say to yourself “keep awake”

My training incumbent, saw me climb into the pulpit with a copy of the Financial Times in my hand once - he said “I never expected to see that paper in the pulpit.” and I think that he might say the same for this poem from Ted Hughes : but it has something to tell us about waiting -

Poem: Ted Hughes “Fate Playing” Birthday Letters Faber and Faber 1998 London p 31

So we might wait

longingly -

As the deer longs for the water brooks, so longs my soul for you O God.

Ps 42:1

Amen

Memorial and Thanksgiving Reflection

Memorial Service 2017

Jenny Uglow is a well respected biographer and she has recently published a new book about Edward Lear. The review I read was uncomplimentary. We remember Lear for his nonsense poetry (the pobble who has no toes) and perhaps limericks like this one:

There was an old man of the Hague

Whose ideas were exceedingly vague

He built a balloon to examine the moon

That deluded old man from the Hague.

In her biography though Jenny noted that before this fame he was a traveller, visiting many countries and writing about them. Her book lists all of his destinations including intricate details of his journeys and accounts of the trains, steamers, roads, rivers and omnibuses that he took to reach them. The reviewer criticises her for missing the essence of Lear. I had previously been thinking about what we say at funerals and how we feel sometimes obliged to give an account of a person’s doings in life.

I could for example tell you of my grandmother, that she was born in Cork, moved after being married to Wembley, had two children,was widowed early and lived a long time. But my memory of Nana is something different. She was the woman who came to stay on feast days and holidays, who arrived mysteriously, and turned the house upside down, who unpacked as soon as her bag had barely crossed the threshold, odd helpful gadgets for my mother, paper and crayons for me. She was the woman who bustled with boundless energy, short, round, compact, who would finish her meal before anyone else and hover by your plate to whisk it into the sink the moment you laid aside your knife and fork. Nana who would be always cheerful, laughing, who liked chocolates by the boxful and a whisky before bed and though impossibly impatient was ready to do anything for you.  

Somewhere in there is some of the essence of Nana, and we all have such  memories of the one we love, not ordered, detailed or set to a timetable but a great splash of luxurious colour on the canvas and we know that essence to be unique and somehow we know that spirit is still there in heaven waiting for us.

When I light my candle I will not be lighting it for Nana’s accomplishments  but for the person she was, the person I know and the one I shall keep in my heart for ever.

Amen

All Saints : Revelation 7:9-end

Nearly all the retired people I meet, and by now I have met quite a number, say something like “I don’t know how I found the time to work!” Now I am not entirely sure why this should be so but I am, not quite yet you understand, hoping to find out. I am also hoping to find out what heaven is like and this morning we have heard John’s vision of what is happening there. The earliest parts of the book of Revelation, the letters to the churches and the depiction of the trials of judgement day are concerned with what was happening on earth but now we come to a description of salvation, what is happening up there. Although less surprising to us, reading some nineteen hundred years later, the opening of this passage would have been stunning and shocking to first century Jewish readers.

“There was a great multitude that no-one could count, from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages. “ Stunning and shocking to the seven year old convent boy who even now remembers being told that Protestants were going down. At the time it struck me as very harsh and you will be pleased to know I have abandoned the doctrine. But still we might wonder what we mean when we celebrate “All Saints.” The Penguin dictionary of saints begins with Aaron, who you will remember is a Romano-British saint martyred at Monmouth in the 3rd century and it ends with ZITA, who is patron saint of maidservants. There are many more in between but still even when we take the whole book there is not the “great multitude that no-one could count.”

“Who are these?”, we ask, and John gives us the answer: “These are they who have come out of the great ordeal; they have washed their robes and made them white in the blood of the lamb.”  

He begins then with a message of hope - “out of the great ordeal.” There is no tribulation or trouble so great that it can  to separate us from the love of God. Those standing before the throne have been persecuted by men, tempted by Satan, troubled in spirit and have lost life itself, yet they have come through it with faith intact. We know this for they have washed their robes - we would not wash our robes in blood, for blood stains, but this is the symbol of the blood of the lamb, the sacrifice of Christ on the cross for us, it is our faith in salvation that makes us clean. Jesus died for us and we can only get to heaven through his mediation. So All Saints are those who despite everything believe and trust.

If I have dropped the idea of saints being only Catholics I have retained the other thing that sister Mary Agatha told me which is that “heaven is seeing God.”  In our image of heaven we need to factor God in, for this is where God is to be seen. This is the most significant characteristic of the place.

“All the angels stood around the throne (and around the elders) and fell on their faces before the throne and worshipped God.”

Even the angels fall on their faces - the most excellent of creation, who have never sinned, who are with God continually, not only cover their faces but fall in humblest adoration before the Lord. If they are moved in his presence to do this then how much more shall we be?

“They are before the throne and worship him day and night in his temple.”

We are sheltered by God, freed from hunger, thirst pain and tears. But like my image of lazy retirement, books, grandfather clocks, good claret I may have got it wrong. In heaven we are exceedingly moved to worship God, there we discover that we can praise him and there we may discover that heaven is a place that gives us rest but we are moved to worship day and night and so refreshing yes but not a place of sloth.

Amen