Making church attractive

Matthew 4: 12 - 23 

Simon, Andrew, James and John immediately left their nets and followed him. Jesus walking by the sea of Galilee simply had to call and these capable fishermen, who knew their trade, learned from their father's hands came straight away

For some years I was a vocations advisor for St Alban's diocese, part of a tiny team that shepherded people from initial wondering to becoming ordinands, training for the priesthood. In the way of central organisations the Church sprang up a target, that we should double the number of people going forward for training. You know the sort of thing, a strategist in Church House sees that there are many priests coming towards retirement so tells the far away churches to double the new candidates and naturally to halve their average age as well. Pressure soon fell on us, there were fewer than eight of us, so we began to think again about how people might be called.

Jumping ahead, I want to tell you that people are coming forward in greater numbers so please be encouraged. Be encouraged too by the quality of candidates. My role was to see those who were at the earliest stages of questioning. They came from all walks of life, several standing out but let me illustrate with one example. Min Min, British of Chinese heritage had excelled at Oxford, gone on to take a doctorate, joined a prestigious biochemical research centre and in between times had trained as a professional soprano. Now she was in my front room timidly sharing her sense of being tugged towards becoming a priest so that I could recommend her to others in the diocese. She knew her trade, was prepared to leave it and by the way did go on to be ordained. She left her nets.

I have to say though that her initial call was nothing to do with the vocation team. We did of course mount road shows, travel to preach in likely places, we worked to drum up interest but this is such a minor part of the story.

Returning to the shores of Galilee Jesus must have been astonishingly attractive, his just walking by ignited a spark in those fishermen who said to themselves "I want to know more about this, there is something interesting here for me, let us see.

Before the many who came to see me on my sofa, they had been attracted to church in some way. In my experience this always comes first, I have not seen a full sudden out of the blue conversion from nothing to fervent activity, even these first disciples had years of learning before understanding. 

Above all then today's church needs to be attractive. Jesus was.

For The Saxon Shore Kirsty, Rachel and James certainly have a part to play by their leadership but the attraction of All Saints Thornham will be more than that, it will be created actually by you. In your community your neighbours when meeting you will notice what you show from being a part of this place, in the way you are individually and the way we are as a congregation.

Frances and I have recently been exploring churches in Bedfordshire, concentrating of course on those with churchmanship that we prefer, and in fact on the smaller rural ones. We have landed on one where we find the congregation friendly and warm, where the village concerned seems to have a good connection, in short one that we find attractive. It is a subtle blend of sufficient attentiveness and visible relationships. This is what I would encourage you to continue to develop your way of being together so that those you meet and who live here say to themselves "I want to know more about this, there is something interesting here for me, let us see. “   Amen

The Flying Scotsman

You will have heard many a clergy person contrast the hurly burly pressure filled advertisement soaked run up to Christmas with the true nature of the Advent season, which to remind you is reflective, penitent, peaceful the season of waiting. But I wonder has it done any good? There is an upside down feeling about the church’s calendar and the one the world is on. I once had a parish where church services were held in a building that doubled as a community centre and village hall. At this time of year the hall would be fully crammed with tinsel and parties for everyone from the buggy group to the old age pensioners and many in between. We of course in our purple are in the season of fasting, Christmastide our season of feasting begins on Christmas day and continues for a few weeks afterwards - by then the hall was booked out with weight watcher meetings. 

The world turns, the Christmas engine is running at high speed (We enjoyed last year’s television broadcast of all the preparations which are made here for example) so let’s just accept that this is the way it is, we ARE in the season of rush not the season of waiting.

My wife Frances among other things is interested in trains while as everyone knows I am interested in old books. In a rare confluence of interest I was reading about the Flying Scotsman in a 1936 account in its heyday. The article was called “The Great North Road of Steel” and is starry eyed about the efforts made to make the journey in the announced time. The train left Kings Cross at 10.00 a.m. precisely, while its sister simultaneously left Edinburgh. So well tuned was the system that the point where the trains passed one another, near Tollerton, could be pinned down to within a yard or so. To manage the non stop trip there was a relief crew on board.

They reached the footplate through a specially constructed passage that made its way through the tender where they could swap with the first team without stopping the train. The engine began with 5000 gallons of water in its tank which needed replenishing, so the tender as well as this secret passage was fitted with a device for filling the tank while the train travelled. For this purpose long water troughs were laid between the rails - at Stevenage, Peterborough, Newark, Scrooby, Northallerton and Bedford - and at the appropriate points the engine driver operates a control lowering a scoop up which the water is forced by the speed at which the train is travelling. By this method an additional 8000 gallons is picked up; every pick up had to be timed to the instant since the scoop was in the water trough for only a few seconds. 

So here we are rushing towards the 25th December and I suggest we too need replenishing. Maybe we can learn from the non-stop Flying Scotsmen and replenish on the move?

Prayerfulness is most often characterised as times of stillness, of quiet, times set aside to be with God and these is important , valuable, I would say vital practice. But what if we during our headlong business lower a  scoop and pick up nourishment as we go along? Well we can, in all our days there are moments in between for example when we turn from one thing to another or occasionally when we have to wait for someone or something. However brief these are moments for effective praying, maybe about your next task, about someone, about your present anxieties, about the world - God will hear, his troughs of spiritual blessing are not limited to Peterborough or Newark but are there for us to dip into all the time and even if only for a few seconds we will find refreshment.  

Amen

Being With

“Rabbi, where are you staying?” and He said “Come and See.” They came and they remained with him that day.

Which reminds me of an exploratory trip I made to see my school friend Charles then already up at St. Catherines who invited me and two people I did not know to his college rooms. We spent the afternoon there, talking of fine things, I mostly listened being only a lowly sixth former, but I remember our talking about William Golding’s novel The Spire, watching abortive attempts to toast crumpets on the wall mounted electric fire and discovering another way of learning, by coversation, by sharing, by being with. 

Andrew and his companion are alerted by John the Baptist that Jesus is worth getting to know; so they already recognize his potential as a teacher. “Rabbi” they say and Jesus invites them, two people he has only just met, to his lodging. This account of the calling of Andrew is so very different from those in Mark’s and Mathew’s Gospels where the fishermen immediately leave their nets as Jesus calls them to be fishers of men. Here in John’s Gospel we find an encouragement for us: The stories of sudden conversion, by the sea of Galilee, those abounding in the book of Acts and more recent ones for example that of John Newton, author of Amazing Grace, converted when saved from imminent shipwreck, perhaps leave us looking for and expecting moments of brilliant revelation. But it is not always the case, actually I suggest more rarely the case. The number of blinding flashes on the road to Damascus are outweighed by stories of a gradual dawning of understanding and a deepening of belief from the faithful imbibing of God’s teaching, from scripture, from theology and yes from conversation with and participation with others.

Andrew’s perspective is so changed by his long afternoon with the Lamb of God, the presence, charisma and astonishing attraction of Jesus must have been there, but Andrew gains far more from being with him - now he has a depth of belief which leads Andrew to “straight away” find his brother and tell him (he cannot keep it in) “We have found the Messiah.” From Rabbi to Messiah in an afternoon is a big jump, a huge learning. John, who was himself a leader of a learning community, seems to be telling us not to simply wait but to actively take the chances to be exposed. We heard this New Year in the census that the number of people  declaring to be Christian has again fallen - one of the things that I have been noticing for a long time is the paradox that our multimedia world narrows rather than widens our knowledge. It is just so easy to find a group or a programme which conforms to one of our interests or point of view that we do not find the others. How will secularists discover Christianity?

Which brings me (at last you say) to Jesus. You notice ini the account that he is walking by. He is on his way somewhere but when Andrew and his friend call he stops. He makes time for them, so much so indeed that he invites them, two strangers, to his room to spend time together. We can imagine them discussing the world, studying scripture, toasting crumpets maybe, in any case getting to know one another. That is after all the reason to meet with people, to get to know them better. When did you when you were walking by last begin a conversation with a stranger, someone you meet in the supermarket, the post-office, the pub, the marketplace?

To get to know God better we need to copy Andrew, and spend time with him

To bring others to know God we need to copy Jesus and invite them into the conversation.

Amen

Be good shepherds to one another

 There seems to have been a recent renewed interest in sheep and shepherds, Philip Walling’s “Counting Sheep” and James Rebanks best selling “The Shepherd’s Life” both published in the last five or six years come to mind and I am sure there are others, fuelled by the renewed and special subject of traditional breeds. Walling suggest that the lives of shepherds and those connected with sheep husbandry are these days in a parallel world largely unnoticed by the majority of the population yet this was not always so: the wealth of our nations was founded upon woll and in Jesus’ day the flocks were huge and the shepherds numerous although poor and distrusted. Jesus says “I am the good shepherd”, a fine metaphor - if you have a few sheep Anthea has some in her little paddock for example - then you want to entrust them to somebody competent, honest and eligible, someone who knows what is best for them, who can aid their lambing and collect them from their wanderings when they need to come down from the hills in winter. 

Not that all sheep are alike; a few names to think about: The Leicester, Swaledale, Cheviot, Suffolk, Hardwicke and so on each of which have a distinctive appearance and they do have a varied lifestyle. The sheep of Ronaldsay, for example, travel up and down with the tide and are so fond of seaweed that they will sometimes swim out to discover tender shoots on small islands. I have taken lunch with a sheep who, having gained access to the dining room, refused all efforts to budge him out again. So it is worth considering this metaphor some more to substitute any view we are holding of white dots of cotton wool on a green hillside with a much more varied population akin to the variety of the human race. Jesus is the good shepherd and we are all of his flock. 

Of course when we are out and about in the dales the sheep are there doing sheepy things, looking strong and independent and yet as we know they need help quite often. My catalogue of rescued sheep and lambs continues to grow and this week Frances’ phone call included a story of saving an ewe and her lamb from the Dorset highway. We too need help and assistance quite often, especially when shadowed by sorrow or need and we are then able to turn to the great shepherd of the sheep in prayer asking for the help we need. Our shepherd laid down his life for us, and will answer our prayers but most often now in the agency of other people. 

Returning to the letter from John where we read that:

“… we ought to lay down our lives for one another. How does God’s love abode in anyone who has the world’s goods and sees a brother or sister in need but refuses help?”

This gives a different emphasis to laying down our lives. There are thankfully few who are called to physically give their lives for a cause but we are ALL enjoined to lay down our lives in the sense of dying to self, setting aside our own wishes, dislikes and priorities to help others. We did see this during the last year in many communities, including our own. The team which twice a day, every day for week after week checked on the RED/GREEN cards to be sure that residents were safe had to forgo a warm morning or night at home and sometimes probably more. In this sense they laid aside something of their own lives. There are many other examples but all of them help us to remember that we each need to be Good Shepherds to one another. 

Have we not seen miracles enough? Exodus 16:4-15

I love the Old Testament  and tonight's reading from Exodus illustrates one of the reasons. I noticed the other week or so in the Guardian an article lamenting the performance of Sir Keir Starmer as leader of the Labour Party. Now such a lament is to be expected from the Telegraph but since this was in the Labour Party’s house journal I sat up to take notice. After all, it was not so long ago that the same paper had so high an opinion of Sir Keir that they daily polished his reputation. What had happened? Well it does not really matter because I want to return to the Israelites. Only in the chapter before our reading we hear the song of Miriam:

“I will sing to the Lord for he is highly exalted
Both horse and driver he has hurled into the sea
The Lord is my strength and my defense
He has become my salvation
He is my God and I will praise HIm 
My father’s God and I will exalt him.”

But at the beginning of our chapter the Israelites are grumbling: “Why have you brought us into this desert, we should never have come, at least in Egypt we sat around pots of meat and had all the food we wanted, but you, you have brought us to this wilderness to starve us to death.”

It is the same you see, “Kier at least under Corbyn we knew where we were, now we are lost straddling fences shy of attacking this horrid government “ or anyway something like that.

And I love that the people of the Old Testament are as real, as human and as fickle as we are. For then it is easy to get inside the story. The Israelites were unhappy as slaves of Pharaoh, they watched the various plagues sent, they saw the parting of the Red Sea, the defeat of their enemies and now on the 15th day of the second month, so a mere 45 days after the Passover they are unreasonably cross with Moses and Aaron. Had they not seen miracles enough?  But yet they complain. The Lord hears them, has compassion upon them and sends quails in the evening and so much manna in the morning that it seems like frost on the ground. 

Which is why I am optimistic about the environment. Have we not seen miracles enough? God gave us the miracle of this planet and all its abundant life and I am certainly not saying that we should continue abusing it in the ways we have been nor that we should not amend our ways but I am confident that we were given miracles in the past and that there are miracles we do not yet know about and that there are more to come.

Amen

 

Peter from wayward to obedient

 Peter sometimes gets a bad rap. We remember him trying to set up booths for Moses, Elijah and Jesus. We remember him having insufficient faith to walk across the sea to Jesus, we remember him refusing to let Jesus wash his feet, and that threefold denial before the cock crows. His frailty and fallibility are undoubtedly encouraging to us for even with all these weaknesses Jesus makes him the head of the church. 

This morning’s reading from the book of Acts, Luke’s account of the early days of the church has been set adrift from its context. “When Peter saw it he addressed the people.” A strange beginning which prompts us to look back to answer our question “When Peter saw what?”

The preceding story is set at the beautiful gate of the Temple where a lame man is being carried in as he is every day to lay there and to beg for alms from the people going in for the three o’clock prayers. Peter and John seeing him there begging from them declined to give him any money but instead Peter said: “I have no silver or gold but what I have I give you - in the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth stand up and walk.” The lame man is spectacularly healed and he enters the temple walking and leaping about praising God.” When the people saw this they all ran to Peter and John who by now are in Solomon’s portico. And this is what Peter saw, an excited, enervated crowd running to them to hail them and give him and John the credit for the miracle. Now this is a new Peter, not the one who ran away from a servant girl and the taunting when she said “He is one of them!” but one who has been empowered by the events of recent weeks. 

The transforming effects of the resurrection and of Jesus’ appearances to them all the coming of the Holy Spirit (for all this takes place after Pentecost) not to mention his own self confidence boosted by these miracles of healing have so altered Peter that he wants to confront, argue with and if possible change the crowd in front of him. He absolutely grasps the opportunity to do so which may be even more surprising since here in the Temple he leaves us in no doubt that this audience are the “crucify” crying people of Good Friday. Brave therefore in the face of possible attack or arrest yet he does not hide his belief and allegiance. 

In our Gospel reading Jesus stood among them and said “Thus it is written that the Messiah is to suffer and to rise from the dead on the third day and that repentance and forgiveness of sins is to be procl;aimed in his name to ALL nations beginning with Jerusalem.” Notice how closely Peter follows these instructions. He and John are at the Temple in Jerusalem at the very centre of the Jewish world; they are to take the message of the Messiah to all nations. Peter begins his preaching by recalling Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, to underline that Jesus is from the one true God, the God of these people, of their ancestors and of Peter. By this power has the lame man been healed, we Peter and John are but witnesses, just as Jesus said, and look at what Peter proclaims - repentance and forgiveness. He says repent and your sins may be wiped out.

Peter, previously known as wayward; “Get behind me Satan”, Jesus told him, is now fully in line, following the instructions to the letter, he is changed forever. There are the transforming results of all they had seen, felt, herald and now fully believed. Can we reach back to grasp this and be transformed ourselves?

Do not worry C of E

 Deuteronomy 7:7-13

Moses knows full well and so do we that the Israelites can be stiff necked and rebellious, witness their behaviour in the wilderness or at the foot of mount Sinai. Now they are established in Egypt, Moses, is exhorting them to obey God’s commandments and statutes especially those concerning the worship, or I should say the prohibition to worship, foreign gods and idols. As I say they have form on this one. Moses has just reminded them that they are a Holy people to the Lord God and that they have been chosen to be a special people above all the people on the earth. He then explains that this is an outpouring of God’s grace, there was nothing to commend them at all. They were an inconsiderable number when brought out of Egypt and even now settled as they are they are the fewest of all the peoples. [Hittites, Girgashites, Ammonites, Cananites, Perezites are all more numerous.] God chose to love them but not for their merits. God is not earthly, where the greatness of our kings is measured by the numbers of their peoples. He loved them because he would love them. I have mentioned before that Peter Schaeffer’s play Amadeus opens with Salieri looking at a picture, he tells us it is of an Old Testament God, the sort of God you could bargain with. There is a hint of this at the end of Moses’ speech “If you heed these ordinances … he will love you, bless you and multiply you, the fruit of your ground, grain, wine,oil, cattle and flock” which sounds like a good deal doesn’t it. I think that considering it as a bargain though must I think to misread Moses' intent.

Rather he seems to be saying “Look without you deserving anything, God chose to love you and remember that a fruit of that love was the oath he swore to your ancestors so recently exemplified by bringing you out of Egypt. This love moreover is steadfast, returned to you who love HIM to the thousandth generation. 

Actually it seems we already have the gifts of grain, wine, oil, cattle and flock not to mention much else besides all of which are the fruits of his love for us.

So please can we take this on board? I have from time to time commented that in these recent  times the Church of England has become an anxious place; our leaders worry about the size of the declared membership (prepare for probable rending of garments following the census), they worry about balancing their budgets (see the clergy pay freeze and the call for bishops to be paid less) they worry about our buildings (committee after committee in a constant state of review) they worry  about how many clergy there are (see our own diocesan deployment review). Where is Moses in all this? Where is the simple faith “God loves you, he loves his church  - obey the statutes, stick to the great commission and God will bless and multiply you.?

So please do not worry, C of E, do not be disheartened, hear the promises of God which he made down to the thousandth generation. 

Amen

Palm Sunday Eyewitness

I would not usually have been there but my wife reminded me about the flour and herbs we needed for next week and how with so many visitors, the merchants could easily sell out so even though it was a hot afternoon I went out taking my boy Johannes with me.He was six years old and eager to come on the errand, so we cut through the narrow alleyways. I was holding him tightly by the hand for there were crowds from all over come to celebrate the Passover. We headed for the shop on the corner of the main road  where I knew the herbs would be fresh and of the finest quality, dodging the carts and the bundle carriers as we went. But when we reached the shop it was impossible to get in as it was surrounded  by people who were surging out of the city, the road was completely full and we soon got swallowed up in it all, I can tell you. I caught up Johannes and he climbed on piggy back style, his arms clasped tightly around my neck as the crowd sucked us out with it onto the Bethany road.  Outside the city gate it was marginally less of a crush and I could stand at the roadside able to breathe again. There was such excitement about and up ahead I could hear chanting. It was too far away for me to make it out but it seemed to be good natured, joyful and happy and coming toward us. Shortly we could see a small group coming down the hill in front of a crowd, they were all led by a man on a donkey. Now I could hear the chanting: “Hosanna”. 

Well I still did not know what was going on and I tugged at the man next to me

 “What’s happening?”  

“It's the man from Galilee, see he is coming - the one who raised Lazarus,, they say that Lazarus might be with him but look - there is the one they call Jesus - on a donkey.”

“Hosanna, blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord : The king of Israel.”

The enthusiasm was so infectious, the donkey and the man came closer, and I do not know why but I felt an urge to join in; I lifted my arms above my head and asked Johannes to hold the ends of some palm branches so I could  break them off - I had never done anything like this before but Johannes and I waved our fronds and we sang with the others “Hosanna ,Hosanna” and now the crowd around the gate moved out to meet the man and we continued to wave the palm  branches in his honour and then as he got closer, we threw them on the ground to make a sort of carpet for the donkey to walk on as the strange procession went through the gate into the city. The people had thinned out a little bit now so I could put Johannes back on the road, hold him by hand as we followed the stream of people, the chanting now ahead of us as the crowd at the front grew with more and more people coming out of the sidestreets. It looked as though they were heading to the Temple. 

“Daddy, who was that? Why are all these people here?”

To be truthful, I did not really know how to answer Johanes’ question - how do you speak to a small boy about Roman occupation, about the imprisonment of Palestine, which is his country but which he has only known this way. How to tell him of the freedom we crave and the hope that exploded with the coming of this miracle worker seated on a donkey riding into Jerusalem just as Zechararia had foretold? 

"Johannes,” I said “ this is a special person, come from God, a really good man, and I am so glad that you have been here today and that you have seen him.”

You know I forgot all about the shopping, the flour, the herbs, I forgot everything in those Hosannas.”

Melchizedek

You might like me be puzzled about MELCHIZEDEK and the comments in our reading from Hebrews. What is the order of Melchizedek and why is the writer of Hebrews (who most likely was not Paul) equating Jesus with him? What could this be about? A couple of weeks ago now we were speaking about Abram/Abraham and it is in the middle of this story that Melchizedek appears. Abram has successfully defeated a group of eastern kings who among other things had captured Lot (Abram’s nephew) and after this rescue, suddenly without previous mention we read in Genesis 14:18-20b:

And King Melchizedek of Salem brought out bread and wine; he was a priest of God most high. He blessed him and said:

“Blessed be Abram by God most high maker of heaven and earth and blessed be God most high who has delivered your enemies into your hand”

And Abram gave him one tenth of everything.” 

The first thing perhaps to notice is that he was priest and king - a sacral king therefore exercising authority in Salem later to become Israel’s holy capital and of course the place where Jesus would come to show that he was the Messiah. To understand why this comparison is being made, and the writer will make it more fully in chapter 7, we need to remind ourselves about the office of “High Priest.”

In the Jewish tradition the high priesthood is established (in the book of Exodus) when Moses ordains Aaron as the first high priest, the one charged with entering the Holy of Holies on the day of the atonement. All high priests were to be descendants of Aaron. Originally the high priest’s status was secondary to that of the king but gradually the authority of the high priest extended to the political arena. The important point is that Melchizedek of Salem is pre-Moses - he is not part of this hereditary lineage. He is both priest and king and even Abraham, the father of all Israel paid tithes to him and was blessed by him. 

The author of the Hebrews is determined to explain that Jesus is superior to all other beings, he is uncreated, immortal and permanent, superior to all biblical heroes including Abraham and Moses. His priesthood was divinely appointed:

“So Christ did not glorify himself in becoming a high priest but was appointed.”

The letter to the Hebrews (although rather more like a sermon than a letter) stresses that the incarnation of Christ is a rupture with the past.The language of continuity between the covenants and laws of the Old Testament and the marriage of the New which we are used to is not found here. Rather it is overturned expressing the suppressionist view that Christianity replaces everything else, particularly Judaism. Hence this link was made to Melchizedek, drawing a line from Genesis directly to Christ bypassing everything else. Hebrews will explain that Christ’s sacrifice on the cross is the ultimate one, superseding all sacrifices made from Moses to to the end of the Temple period by any high priest, descending from Aaron. 

The purpose of this book then is to reinforce the new covenant to pass us from previous religious rules and to engage unhesitatingly in the spiritual cleansing and renewal that Jesus urges on us. A very suitable passage for the fifth Sunday of Lent.

Amen

The ten commandments are less popular now

 The ten commandments are less popular now. Although there is provision for them to be used in modern Common Worship services some churches like ours use a summary of the law and even  more usually go directly to the invitation to confession. The first 1549 edition of the Book of Common Prayer, however did not use the commandments in the Communion service but began with a Psalm and then the nine verse form of the Kyrie:

Lorde have mercie upon us (three times)

Christ have mercie upon us (three times)

Lorde have mercie upon us (three times)

Ten years later in  1559 edition a new instruction was added at the beginning of the service:

“The shall the priest rehearse distinctly all the ten commandments”

The ninefold Kyrie was adapted to serve as responses to the individual commandments and this is what we see in our current editions of the Book of Common Prayer. In 1547, so a couple of years prior, during a general demolition of rood screens and images, churches were white lymed and commandments were written on the walls. This Protestant revolution, where images were replaced by words, was formalised under James 1st when it was required by Canon (1604:82) that the Ten Commandments were to be set on the east wall of every church. St. Clement’s Overy has a fine example of this and we can easily picture the faithful looking at these words as they were preparing to receive communion with them in their hearts.

But the ten commandments are less popular now. It may be that visitors to our churches and perhaps even those regularly in the pews do not notice, do not see the writing on the walls. Now, in this the season of Lent we are called to self examination and repentance, to positively take to heart the assurance of forgiveness proclaimed in the Gospels. But against what is this self examination to take place?  

I have been worried by the case of Anna Sacoolas, the driver of the car which collided with 19 year old Harry Dunn who died following the accident at RAF Croughton. The circumstances of Mrs. Sacoolas fleeing to the USclaiming diplomatic immunity are well known, extradition to attend a hearing in the UK was refused but last week news came that a civil  case could be brought even though Mr. Sacoola’s lawyers argued that it could not because the case should be heard in the UK where she will not go! What worries me is that our laws of social justice, our international courts and our basic government constructs have failed to find a place for the simple question “What happened?” to be asked and answered.

The ten commandments are less popular now - I am the Lord your God, make no graven images, do not take the Lord's name in vain, keep the sabbath, honour your parents, do not kill, do not commit adultery, do not steal, do not bear false witness, do not covet. It does seem that had they still been in the forefront of society’s thinking then the story of Harry Dunn would have read differently and that Mrs. Sacoolas would have been able to hear her conscience.

We need a sounding board for our reflection and meditation in Lent and indeed throughout our lives and I can think of no better than the decalogue.

Amen.  

Bubbling Over

Here is a perfect example of Mark in a hurry. Jesus appears, is baptised, driven into the wilderness, tempted and is back proclaiming the kingdom of God, almost without drawing breath. We read “ and was baptised by John, and just as he was coming up, and the Spirit immediately drove him into the wilderness and as well now after John was arrested. It is as if Mark cannot wait to get to the miracles, the story is brimming inside of him, he cannot hold it in, in fact he doesn’t for the first words of Mark's Gospel are “In the beginning, the good news of Jesus Christ the Son of God.”

For a long time this Gospel was thought to be less authoritative than especially the Gospel of Matthew. Matthew after all was accepted to be one of Jesus’ apostles while Mark was not. Here is PAPIAS the bishop of HEIRAPOLIS (a city then in modern day Turkey) writing on the topic in AD 140:

“Mark, indeed, who became the first interpreter of Peter wrote accurately as far as he remembered them the things said or done by the Lord, but not however in order for he (Mark) had neither heard the Lord, nor had been his personal follower.”

It was not until the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that led by German theologians who had been examining the interrelations between between texts that it became generally accepted that Mark’s was the first Gospel and that Matthew, and Luke relied heavily on this account. [Incidentally this is why our Bibles present the Gospels in the order Matthew, Mark, Luke and John because Matthew was thought not only to be the most important but the first of them to be written.]

So this most enthusiastic of evangelists is someone we know very little about; he is mentioned in the book of Acts and some of Paul’s letters but only in passing. Nonetheless he absorbed Peter’s teaching and preaching and was fired up to tell the world what he had heard and what he fervently believed. 

There is something here for all of us, this Gospel is short easy to reads focussed from the start on who Jesus is and this is repeated at the end when the Centurion says “Truly this man was God’s son. ” The enthusiasm that Mark has and more importantly conveys is a lesson. We like him did  not hear the Lord directly, have not had the inestimable privilege of being his personal follower in the sense that Papias intends it but we have had the benefit of two thousand years of preaching and teaching  not as intimate as Mark’s from Peter but distilled, refined, pondered, debated, agreed, codified and written down from Augustine to Moltmann, from Aquinas to Williams.

All of which is very fine, but for me (at any rate) will not touch the first chapter of Mark; I want to be bowled over again by the God News of Jesus Christ. To try and find a way of telling people about that bubbling over of belief, of faith, of knowing, is something please that we should all be striving to convey to others.

Amen.

What is Peter thinking?

There are many questions to ask about the Transfiguration. Did Jesus really become luminous ? What kind of light was it? Where did Moses and Elijah come from? Why did Jesus tell the disciples not to speak of about this? Where did Moses and Elijah go? But the one that has been bothering me this week is “What on earth was Peter up to? I am trying to get into his head “Rabbi it is good for us to be here, let us make three dwellings one for you, one for Moses and one for Elijah.” Why did Peter want to make homes, booths, tents, tabernacles or shelters all of which descriptions appear in the various translations of the Bible that I consulted? It seems so strange, Moses and Elijah have certainly come from heaven, after all they have been gone a long time, and Jesus has also come from there even if Peter may not know that yet. So really they hardly need a hut! 

Peter’s reaction then cannot be about Jesus, Moses or Elijah but must be about him. He says “Rabbi, it is good for us to be here.” I believe him too, on top of a mountain, high up, with his closest friends James and John and then suddenly so clearly and palpably in the presence of the divine. Moses, Elijah and Jesus, himself so gloriously transformed, and the voice of the Father. It would have been good to be there. So Peter’s instinct is to preserve this, to hold onto the feeling, the intensity of which we can only guess at. And as we might have done he suggests a way to keep the moment, to keep Moses, Elijah and Jesus there in a tabernacle, a tent one for each. It is at once a slightly childish idea, let’s keep everything the same and all will be OK and also a very deep thing : a need for security an escape from fear of the future or as he so clearly expresses it a shelter : it is good here and now.

But as we know Jesus and the church needed to move on. Jesus takes the three back down the mountain knowing that he, Jesus, has not come to be comfortable but to challenge the church of the Pharisees as he found it, to go to Jerusalem, to be crucified and then  by his resurrection to show us the truth. 

The newspapers and magazines last week have been full of comment on a leaked paper from Church House proposing cuts in stipendiary clergy. This caused alarm from all sides prompting a volte face from the archbishop of York who had previously stuck to the line “there are no plans, noting to see here” to “there have to be plans but not from me.”  We may be feeling  more or less like Peter : We like it how it is. So let us do what we can to preserve where we are. But the church is n ot our church, it is Christ’s church. We cannot box up God and so we need faith that whatever we may fear Jesus will lead us down the mountain to the right place.

Amen

Jesus came for everybody

Jesus came for everybody - (whichever tier you are in ) You will have heard this many many times and often when we hear something this frequently it loses its bite, the piquancy, the sharpness. But for its time this was a revolutionary thought especially in first century Palestine where the house of Israel were the chosen people of God, and they knew it and behaved knowing it. Now you might say “ Steve this coming for everyone is a later idea, a modern thought but I want to suggest that when we look closely at the Christmas story the signs were very clearly there.

Firstly if you are the son of God you ought to be able it seems to me, you ought to be able to choose the time and place of your birth. We have evidence that this was so, from the appearance of the star (Jupiter and Saturn conjunction or not) and that Bethlehem was the chosen birthplace in fulfillment of a much earlier prophecy about the Messiah’s birth. And more than this, you may have expected Mary to give birth in a quiet place, a home birth even, but God chose to be born in the middle of a Census. As we heard:

“In those days a decree went out from Emperor Augustus that all the world should be registered.” Jesus then is born in a place, where the inns were full, a place  teeming with people of all creeds and races from all over Palestine. When we read a biography we look backwards to events in say authors’, politicians’ or painters’ lives looking for things that influenced them. In the case of Jesus I want us to read forwards. Jesus came into the world not into seclusion but into crowded mele. On Christmas day itself, this night, Jesus came for everybody.

Another sign concerns these three. My knitted shepherds from the travelling crib; “In that region, there were shepherds living in the fields keeping watch over their flock by night.” I need to say from the outset that these knitted fellows are quite inadequate - they are too smart, too well dressed, too refined. Shepherding, although an important job, was a derided one. It was thought to be an occupation for brigands and no self respecting father would encourage his son to take it up. In a book from my shelves published in 1913 there are meticulously researched oil paintings of “Life in the Holy Land,” and there is one showing a shepherd equipped with a sling and a club to fend off predators, dressed in a short sheepskin tunic and there in the lonely, unfenced, uncultivated desert hills where no dwelling is to be seen. These effective outcasts are living in the fields, refugees from the town and strangers to anything but rough sleeping. Yet they are the first to told about the birth and of its importance,

“I am bringing you news of great joy for all the people” said the angel. Furthermore they are urged to go and see the baby. Jesus came on Christmas Day to a full and bustling town and not only that but from the very first Jesus began gathering more of us to him and significantly from the edges, from the social and physical wilderness of the Judean hills.  

Jesus Christ born today came for us all whoever you are, whatever life you have or have had. He came to gather us into one and this intention was clear, clear as starlight from the very beginning.

Amen 

Hearing God

In our passage Samuel is described as a boy. The historian Josephus says he was 12 years old. Eli, on the other hand is old, “his eyesight had begun to grow dim so that he could not see.” It is significant that he cannot see clearly, neither physically nor spiritually contrasting with Samuel who sees well and will do so in both senses. But just now God is difficult to hear :Then the Lord called “Samuel, Samuel” and the boy ran to Eli mistakenly thinking it was he who had called him. 

For a number of years I was a vocations officer for the diocese of St. Albans holding meetings with people, old and young, who wanted to explore and understand whether God had spoken to them. My own experience and nearly always theirs was that like Samual God had been speaking to them for some time but we, I and they had perhaps failed to hear, attributed the words or directions to something or someone else or not infrequently had some suspicions  but had deliberately ignored them. I want to suggest that such mistakes are commoner than we think. We all tend to Samuel’s rationality; three times the Lord called him and on each occasion he went to Eli, who twice saw dimly before recognizing what was happening. Only on the fourth calling does Samuel pay any attention. Samuel was in my view very favoured, he was only twelve and most of us require even more persistence of God before we stop to listen.

I have a childhood memory and it dates from and is associated with the house I lived in only until I was seven. I  was learning all I could from the Catholic Missal that I had been given and was sure that I wanted to be a priest. My mother, like all good Eli's, told me to lie down again!. Not that I regret that at all, it is only when looking backwards that I can  perhaps imagine that maybe God had perhaps been speaking.

Why is it that God is so difficult to hear? To begin with there are so many alternative explanations especially as His word often comes through other people and we can always imagine that they have their own motives for telling us something. For example if now I suggest to someone that they ought to come to church - you can see that this would be easily dismissed as not a divine communication. Samuel, we notice, was spoken to in the middle of the night and I do not know about you but I am very quick to discount the promptings of a disturbed sleep. Added to this why would God be speaking to us anyway? 

Our mistake is too often to set aside a time for God to speak to us, not that I would discourage this at all, but really God may use many avenues to talk to us, words, music, people, nature, poetry, the Bible(!), there is a panoply sensations at any time.

Samuel was very young but we can still learn from his story: if you think that God may have spoken to you, that you may have beard God’s prompting then you probably have.

Amen

Baptism of Jesus

Jesus is coming ! But from the perspective of first century BC Messianic expectation everything is topsy-turvy from the start. A herald, the forerunner surely should present an image, a taste of the great person they represent, for whom they are an initial ambassador. The first intimation of the coming of the Queen of Sheba should be overwhelming in magnificence. I was living in Paris and had friends in the American embassy when President Bill Clinton came for a visit : There were Jumbo jets full of staff, security organisers of all sorts that flew in before the big day not to mention the final entourage, again of several plane loads, that accompanied him. 

Jesus is coming! As he begins his public ministry he is announced  by a vagrant from the wilderness, clothed with animal skin, tied crudely around the middle who eats locusts and wild honey snatching what he could from the bushes around him. Unimposing in the extreme yet with a charisma that attracts crowds to him on the banks of the Jordan. 

In St. In John's Gospel account of John the Baptist he says: “Among you is the one whom you do not know, the one who is coming after me.” I find this interesting for that phrase “among you.” For again this is topsy-turvy, the Messiah is not coming in a chariot in clouds of glory from above but is there, very ordinarily, having come up from Nazareth, the son of a carpenter yet John says : “I am not worthy to stoop down and untie the thong of his sandals.” 

Baptism in first century Judaism was about purifying the body. The Jewish people immersed themselves to remove ritual purity.  Ritual purity is external, affecting the body alone and is temporal rather than permanent. It may for example stem from touching a human corpse or the carcases of certain animals or indeed from certain normal bodily functions. Most Jews were ritually impure most of the time and this did not impede daily life in any way. Only in connection with the sacred did it become significant: A second Temple Jew could not enter the temple precincts in an impure condition.  Ritual immersion though would allow you to become ritually pure again. Knowing this we can appreciate the importance and novelty of John the Baptist’s ministry by the riverside. John’s ritual immersion was a means for becoming morally pure - you were to repent of your sins before being baptised, or in other words this is about inner disposition. There has to be a change, a turning back from previous wickedness and a resetting and regretting of lives lived. Furthermore he announces that following him is Jesus. Jesus’ baptism is not to do with the body; “I have baptised you with water but he will baptise you with the Holy Spirit.” Baptism with the Holy Spirit will be permanent, not temporary outer cleansing, but lifelong inner transformation.

Jesus' baptism will be of the inside - so from the very beginning we can see and are told that Jesus’ coming will be topsy turvy, inside out and totally surprising.”

Amen 

Epiphany

 T S Eliot’s poem “The journey of the magi” among other things brings us into the lives of the travelling magi, allowing participation in their hardships, their regrets and their puzzlement. The poem is written afterwards, but why, why did they come? The Bible is short on explanation:

“Where is the child who has been born King of the Jews? For we observed his star at its rising and have come to pay him homage. 

In 1705, the twenty year old Bach, newly appointed  organist at Arnstadt asked for a one month sabbatical so he could make a journey to Lubeck more than two hundred and fifty miles north on the German coast. Partly he needed the time because he walked the whole way. This is equivalent to walking from Norwich to Taunton or from Norwich to Newcastle on Tyne and he did this to hear Buxtehude play the organ. Buxtehude was by the way sixty-eight and a renowned organist holding one of the most coveted musical positions in the land, he had attracted visits from Handel and Telemann. We may imagine that Bach had a hard coming of it, but once arrived he stayed to play in concerts that Buxtehude organised. (In fact he was there three months, overstaying his sabbatical considerably.) 

A little before Christmas my regular Saturday morning listening “Record Review” explored  recordings of Mahler’s first symphony. Somewhat to my surprise the “Building a library” recommendation was a recording made by Bruno Walter in 1961 with the Columbia orchestra in Los Angeles. Bearing in mind that this is almost a sixty year old recording the performance had to overcome the technical advantages of more contemporary recordings. I have some bruno Walter recordings of Beethoven symphonies and they are definitely showing their age - but not this Mahler. The nugget though is that aged 17 Walter went to visit Gustav Mahler in Budapest shortly following the first symphony’s first performance. How amazing that 127 years later Walter’s recording is still a landmark.

The magi, Bach and Walter went to visit someone they had only heard about, an act of homage but more it was also an act of learning. When Bach returned from Lubeck his composing style was altered, musical historians can trace the elements of Buxtehude’s influence; when Walter returned from Budapest his appreciation and knowledge would continue to influence his conducting well into his eighties and when the wise men came back they were totally changed, their Zoroastrianism replaced:

“We returned to our places, these kingdoms but no longer at ease, here in the old dispensation with an alien people clutching their Gods.

Amen   

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