Transformation now and at our deaths

“In sure and certain hope of the resurrection to eternal life
Through our Lord Jesus Christ
who will transform our frail bodies
That they may be conformed to his glorious body”

The truth of it is that we do not know what will happen - we understand the earlier part of this prayer - “earth to earth, dust to dust, ashes to ashes” all the more so in our world of usual cremation for this much is clear. We can touch it, see it but what then? In this passage from the story of the transfiguration, Jesus has taken his closest disciples, Peter, James and John up the mountain to show them something. Here is the pictorial, theatrical, enactment of the  teaching that Jesus gave them just a few verses earlier:

“The son of man must undergo great suffering and be rejected by the elders, chief priests and scribes and be killed and on the third day be raised.”

As I said last week, heaven is beyond our understanding, (all the more so resurrection) and we need different ways of grasping Jesus’ words. Moses, Elijah and Jesus were talking, as Luke expresses it, of his departure. This word used is “exodus” - recalling the setting free of the the tribes of Israel from slavery in Egypt. “They were speaking of his departure, which he was about to accomplish at Jerusalem.” They appeared in glory - the passion is announced not with misery or foreboding but with transformation. Jesus is transformed to such a surpassing and Godlike brightness so in the words of Cyril of Alexandria, his garments glittered with rays of fire and seemed to flash like lightning. Notice they are speaking of accomplishment, not failure. Moses represents the law, Elijah the prophets and they are alongside similarly transformed. All this is shown to the disciples and then from a cloud comes a voice:

“This is my son, my chosen; listen to him.”

We are reminded of the account of Jesus’ baptism where again we find a visual teaching: Jesus is seen rising from the water, the holy spirit in the form of a dove descends upon him and a voice came from heaven “THis is my beloved son in whom I am well pleased.”

In both cases, the beginning of Jesus ministry and the beginning of his passion, they are announced unmistakably, and here on the mountain top with Peter and James and John we see a glimpse of the promise of eternal life. In glory and radiance, a tiny sliver of all that we find impossible, we are shown the tip of it all, the beginning of the promise.

Listen to Him


For he will transform us now through his ministry and teaching and and at our death through his resurrection.

Amen

The kingdom of heaven is like ....

The boat in St. James’ Piccadilly and the kingdom of heaven

Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?

Now of course heaven is not a mustard seed, nor yeast, nor a treasure, nor a pearl nor a magic net and nor is the lover a summer’s day. For as Shakespeare says:

“Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines

And often is is golden complexion dimmed

And every fair from fair sometimes declines.

Now, Jesus knew about heaven, he knows it in every detail but he does not tell us expressly what it is, or where it is; he does not define it but even with all his certainty and intimate perfect knowledge contents himself by  saying what it is like. He is aware that heaven is so beyond our understanding, that we can only marginally approach it and then  by signs, symbol and allusion. By looking and thinking of things we know and which we can see and do comprehend we can be helped to touch the ineffable. For this we need language - it may be the language of art, of music, of poetry, it may be traditional, abstract or modern and then more often, it seems to me , it is what is not depicted, not sung, not said, the mystery in cadence, in the spaces that speak to us of the ethereal. But our world is so noisily attuned to “faster”, “more” and “what’s next” that there is no room for spaces and we rush on. To think about heaven we need to go “slower” do “less” stay in the “now” - we have to wonder -

“Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?”

St. James Piccadilly is a big London church set in the bohemian world of Soho with artists of all sorts, creatives from all walks of life  among the congregation. Last Christmas they strung from their roof a real, recovered, refugee dinghy - it was very large, mainly bright orange and it bore the scars of a Mediterranean crossing, a craft brought up from the Italian shore. In a church designed  by Christopher Wren it stood out  and at that season flavoured the story of Mary and Joseph without a bed, of Jesus being born in a stable and of the family fleeing to Egypt.

I thought this was great!  [Pause to look at the roof] we could get something smaller perhaps?

But then I thought “but this is OK for St. James’ they are used to such things, these men and women of theatre land but we Streatley folk are of less gaudy cloth not given to large gestures.   I tracked down the reverend Lucy Winkett and asked her

“How do I prepare my Christmas congregation who have come for carols and candles, how do I prepare them for a boat in the roof?”

She looked intently and penetratingly at me and said “You don’t - just let the image speak on its own!”

And so I am not going to unpack our Gospel, not give my explanations of the symbols but am going to ask each of you to choose the image that resonates most with you - think about it - savour it - give it space to speak to you.

Paolo becoming a priest

Paolo becoming a priest

What I am just so pleased about is there is no delay, no gap, no waiting. Only yesterday we were in the Abbey watching and listening as Bishop Alan placed his hands on Paolo calling down the Holy Spirit to ordain him  a priest. And now here we are at the first possible opportunity joining Paolo as he celebrates his first Holy Communion with us. Our Gospel which is taken from the instructions that Jesus is giving to his disciples says

“Whoever welcomes you welcomes me, and whoever welcomes me welcomes the one who sent me.”

Or using a slightly different translation :

Jesus says “To receive you is to receive me and to receive me is to receive the one who sent me”

As we receive Paolo this morning it is it seems to me as if we are receiving directly from the Bishop’s hands, who received from the Holy Spirit, who was sent by the Father. And so we welcome Paolo newly elected and invested into the Holy priesthood.

Paolo, you remember the first stirrings of your calling, how a still small voice spoke in you, then visits to vocations advisors, the time with a mentor, the preparation, a director of ordinands, the discernment and study for the Bishop’s Advisory Panel, the joy of being selected - not to become a priest but selected for training , the three years as an ordinand in that training, lectures attended, essays composed, residency at far flung Ditchingham late nights at the bar pondering the  hypostasis   

- all these things and even a year of curacy have been endured on your journey but they are neither toll nor tithe.

We read in Matthew that Jesus gave his disciples authority to cast out unclean spirits, to cure every kind of sickness and disease, to proclaim the kingdom of heaven, even to raise the dead.

Now this was not because the disciples had somehow earned these powers, they were given them - it is a source of wonder to me that Christ should bestow his power, to bless, to forgive sins, to celebrate the Lord’s supper on anyone for we are  vessels made of clay, but you (and I) are a priest today not through the process and the study but because of the unlimited generosity of Jesus Christ. It is this unbounded giving, the giving that led him to open hs arms wide upon the cross, the giving of the sacrament that you will shortly celebrate for us that we give thanks this morning.

And so Paolo we welcome you as a gift - a gift to us all - a blessing to us all

Amen

I am the gate for the sheep

Last week I needed to be at the Peace Hospice in Watford for a meeting of chaplains and as is my way I was there exactly on time - well to be very accurate I was alongside the building which for some reason was at the top of a cliff. I had not known there were cliffs in Watford but this was a cliff and as I looked hopefully up from the dual carriageway of the Watford ring road I could see the hospice with a welcoming portico, its impressive four greek style columns on my left - up there somewhere. Ahead by the town hall was a roundabout and I found there was a little carpark in the middle of it where I might safely park. Or I could have done if there had been spaces - there were none or at least none that were not reserved and so I spun around and was spat out along another spoke of the roundabout my bearings quite lost in search of another sheepfold for my car.  There seemed to be a car park by the town hall so I headed there only to find it was for staff only and took another one or two circuits of the roundabout before seeing Sainsbury’s offered a possible harbour and with difficulty I found the entrance before discovering that much of Hertfordshire were already queuing for a place and in so doing were blocking the exits and so I remained stuck for a while before finding a way to leave and once more navigate the roundabout with the town hall.

By now  I was more than fashionably late so rang the hospice to say that I was struggling to abandon my car - oh the lady said come and park in our car park (which you remember is at the top of a cliff and hidden somehow behind the building ) She began her directions with “Do you know the town hall roundabout?

Did I know the town hall roundabout! I had just ploughed a few new furrows round the thing. Their directions were the sort that are good if you know where you are and know where you are going ….I knew neither so was easily lost - I ended up back - at the town hall roundabout - so more phoning was needed before I finally ended up somewhere near the top of the cliff with cul-de-sacs and so on and trying several found myself eventually forty minutes late in front of a promising little red barrier.

In the reading so often used for funerals also from John’s Gospel, Jesus says - “and you know the way to the place where I am going” Thomas asks “Lord we do not know where you are going how can we know the way?” and Jesus’ answer is “I am the way and the truth and the life.”

Now I have preached on today’s reading from John 10 about the sheepfold a few times and of course as you would expect from me I have focused on the sheep, (I have brought bring a sheep!) how they know their master, how they know his voice how we know when Jesus is speaking to us,how we should follow him - but let us this time listen to what Jesus said about himself.

“I am the gate for the sheep.”  This is an exceptional figure of speech, after all a person does not readily liken themselves  to a gate. But that is exactly what Jesus did and it is exactly what we believe. Jesus is the gateway, the portico, the doorway, the portal the entrance the way to heaven, the way to the father the only way to know God.

“I am the gate, whoever enters through me will be saved”

Without Jesus even when I know I want to go to heaven I shall be lost, without him to lead and guide me and to do so even when I start off in the wrong direction, I shall never find the way. Jesus says look you do not need to be lost any more, searching for God, looking for a harbour, for a sheepfold,  I am the gateway, I am all you need for you to know the way to where I am going.  

Without the receptionist in the Peace hospice I might still be on the town hall roundabout.

Without Jesus I am sure my life would have gone around and around in circles.

Amen

The dry bones

"When I was small I would sometimes dream of a city - which was strange because it began before I even knew what a city was. But this city clustered on the curve of a big blue bay would come into my mind. I could see the streets and the buildings that lined them, the waterfront, even boats in the harbour; yet waking I had never seen the sea, or a boat.

The buildings were quite unlike any I knew. The traffic in the streets was strange, carts running with no horses to pull them and sometimes there were things in the sky, shiny fish shaped things that certainly were not birds." 1

Ezekiel’s dream does not say that the bones are in a desert in a  post nuclear world as just described by John Wyndham but I always think of them this way -  the science fiction of my childhood often pictured utter desolation and I see endless brownish yellow dust and bones of all creatures piled in jumbled heaps stretching before me to the horizon and I suppose beyond. There is no hope here.

Ezekiel had known desolation; born in 623 BC he was the son of a priest and was one of those carried off into exile in 598 so only twenty-five years old under the armies of Nebuchadrezza : the trek was tortuous and few of the captives survived the march. Life on arrival in exile was better and he became a priest to the jews who were there as well as a prophet. Their world collapsed when the temple, the focus of their hopes and prayers  was destroyed in 586 and soon after Ezekiel’s wife died.  Ezekiel knew despondency personally and was all too aware of Israel’s sin, profanity and their turning away from their God. And so in his vision we find ourselves in a physical and a spiritual desert. The bones represent those who really died in the conflict and the travels, they represent the spiritual dryness of the people and they are scattered as the Israelites in exile in Babylon and elsewhere.

We may draw a parallel with those on the borders of Syria and Turkey in refugee camps, exiled from their homes, whose families have been scattered or killed and who hear of the destruction of their cities. When I properly look at the pictures of Aleppo it does look hopeless - those shells of apartments were once homes, with tables and chairs, meals, conversations, vases of flowers, hobbies, market squares, coffee shops,  plans for the future. How long I wonder could it take to rebuild all that physically and spiritually?  

Ezekiel had known the depths of bad times and he paints them as the worst possible -

“Can these bones live?”

Ezekiel then reminds us who God is, just how extraordinary and beyond our imagination, he reminds us of the God of Genesis - for in the beginning

“Then the Lord God formed man from the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life. “

Notice that in the vision God again first forms the bones - “there was a noise, a rattling and the bones came together, bone to its bone. I looked and there were sinews on them, and the flesh had come upon them, and the skin had covered them; but here was no breath in them.”

As in Genesis there are two stages and although this is a deliberate reminder of the creation of man Ezekiel’s vision is about more than the creation of man, “Mortal, these bones are are the whole house of Israel”  “and the breath came into them and they lived and stood on their feet, a vast multitude.”

We may at times have stood at the grave of our hopes - hopes for ourselves, for our families for the world and perhaps in these days for the church. Ezekiel’s vision is a message to those who find themselves spiritually thirsty, gravely ill, bereaved, unbearably lonely, trapped and unable to see a way forward. It is for those who have lost all grounds for hope. It is a message about who God truly is - the God of total renewal, God who never gives up, who does not abandon. It is not about individual resurrection but about complete transformation; in Ezekiel’s world the renewal of the state of Israel and by extension in ours the transformation of the whole of community from dryness and selfishness to a world of life.

As we shall say in a moment at the end of the creed “we look for the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come.”       

Amen

1 Wyndham J. The Chrysalids, Penguin Books, 1973 London

The Samaritan Woman

The Samaritan Woman

She is used to hiding, she is accustomed to cowering, she knows what it is to feel and be invisible. It was not her fault, actually none of it was her fault. Aisha had gone to school one morning in the sunshine, expecting trigonometry, tests in English, time with her friends, but she got guns, grim faced men and kidnapped. She was carried away into the remote Nigerian jungle along with 275 others then separated from them. The so called choice she was offered was to marry a “fighter” or to become a slave; either way for a seventeen year old girl the result was the same - violation, degradation and brutality. Eighteen months later she was freed by a military operation and she was  elated and wanted to go home to Chibok. But Chibok is a very conservative community. They don’t want any “Boko Haram wives” there and Aisha learnt what it was to be stigmatised, ostracised bullied, hated and harassed. She taught herself to be invisible and to keep out of the way.  

So she comes to draw water in the heat of the day, at noon when the sun is at its highest, when she knows nobody will be around. She comes to the well but there IS somebody there. Why we wonder does the Samaritan woman who feels just like Aisha, why does she come out of the penumbra when there is a man there, a stranger, most obviously a Jew? Why does she come still to the well?

Firstly of course, she needed water, she was thirsty both physically and spiritually and secondly Jesus must have seemed welcoming, non threatening, nor should we be surprised, if just Jesus’ presence sitting by, was attractive. She felt she could safely approach.

There are always Aisha’s around us and among us. Not released brutalised hostages perhaps, but men and women who feel marginalised, who may be saying “nobody notices me”, or “I am invisible.” (Usually) it is not their fault, actually none of it is their fault. They are people who are thirsty, perhaps just for companionship, for someone to listen to them or thirsty for the God they feel has abandoned them.

The good news is that we at least in St. Margaret’s are here. We have come to what we hope and pray is a well - somewhere in our variety of services or our clubs and activities we find spiritual nourishment, support and fellowship.

The bad news is that if St. Margaret’s is a well, then we are its temporal guardians. It is we who are sitting by, we who have to model Jesus’ example. We who have to appear welcoming, non threatening and attractive.  Sitting by the well we have to be attentive, ready to discern who is coming in and how we shall receive them. This is not about those on the door, giving out the books even though our sides people are appreciated and important, but it is about how each of us responds. Our church needs to be like Jesus particularly for welcoming the other:

“How is it that you, a Jew, ask a drink of me a woman of Samaria?”

Oh, it is easy to welcome those who look like us, who dress like us, who behave like us but that is not Jesus’ way:

“The disciples were astonished that he was speaking to a woman” but they were not engaged enough to ask why he was talking to her, what had taken place, what had they said to one another? And look at what they missed. The Samaritan woman went home and said “What a great well this is - come and meet who I met there.”

Will our next unexpected, unknown visitor who has come because they are thirsty go home and say the same?

Amen

Genesis 1:27 General Synod

Genesis 1:27

What might it mean then to be made in God's image? Look around you and notice that we are all different, young, younger and very young, round, less round and not round. It cannot be about how we look! Sometimes we struggle to remember the beauty and depth of that assertion made at the very beginning of the Bible, at the very beginning of creation that using the King James Version: "God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him."

In the Hebrew it would  have been clear that "image" meant the whole person, much more than looks it included even then, the powers of thought, communication and feeling. Genesis tells us that we each have God within us. When we look at one another, when I look at my son who has not picked up his clothes from the bathroom, has hoarded the towels crumpled in his bedroom, has used all the hot water, has squashed the soap into a ball, has left the bath unfit for for public viewing .....and that is only a catalogue of one room's irritations, when I look at my son there is God in there. God is in all of us. Now, God made human beings to love that they might love him and love one another.

Last week at General Synod both of these ideas were deployed in vigorous debate - that we are all made in God's image and that we should love one another. From your reading of the news you may have been brought to doubt that these things were present. The Guardian headline was "Turmoil as Synod rejects report on same sex relationships" and similar ones were to be found elsewhere together with excitement that the archbishop of Canterbury had been dealt a blow to his authority.

Let me take you into the chamber with me to tell you what happened. Before the debate began, a debate that had been extended by request of the members, from the original schedule to accommodate the many who wanted to speak we had met in small groups of half a dozen with one of the bishops to work through some examples of pastoral situations together and to talk about our reactions to the report.

The bell rang, the chamber was packed to capacity and the public gallery filled with journalists and cameras. The golden covered chairs are reasonably comfortable but small and close together - you know who your neighbour is. The bishops of Norwich and Willesden presented the report with an explanation of their intent and an apology for any offence and pain that it had caused to sections of the community and the synod. The debate began, more than 160 people had asked to speak, myself among them, and the atmosphere was expectant. I was not fortunate to be called to speak but Synod was fortunate to have very many  high quality thoughtful and passionate contributions. The passion though did not stop everyone being courteous to one another, it did not stop anyone listening - there is no waving of order papers, no noises off as there is in the other place just round the corner. Two hours of creative and persuasive oratory.

The motion in front of the house was "that this synod takes note of this report." I have to tell you what that means: ' Voting to ‘take note’ of a report such as this does not commit Synod members to the acceptance of any matter contained within it' which you may think rather a strange thing to arrive at after two hours of discussion but that is how the standing orders of the synod define a take note debate. The vote was counted using electronic devices, there is a short pause for the computer to work before the result is announced. The result was heard with the proper silence and gravity - no cheering or clapping or groans of disappointment.

The house of bishops unanimously (save one who pressed the wrong button on his voting machine) took note of their own report, the house of laity took note of the report but the house of clergy voted not to. As with everything there were shades of opinion why to vote for or to vote against but in essence the view of many colleagues was that any work proposed would benefit from more thought given to the starting point and from a more kindly worded report. In short for some it went too far and for others it did not go far enough. There was no turmoil.

In responding Justin Welby issued the following statement:


"No person is a problem, or an issue. People are made in the image of God. All of us, without exception, are loved and called in Christ. There are no ‘problems’, there are simply people.

How we deal with the real and profound disagreement - put so passionately and so clearly by many at the Church of England’s General Synod debate on marriage and same-sex relationships today - is the challenge we face as people who all belong to Christ.

To deal with that disagreement, to find ways forward, we need a radical new Christian inclusion in the Church. This must be founded in scripture, in reason, in tradition, in theology; it must be based on good, healthy, flourishing relationships, and in a proper 21st century understanding of being human and of being sexual.

We need to work together - not just the bishops but the whole Church, not excluding anyone - to move forward with confidence.

The vote today is not the end of the story, nor was it intended to be. As bishops we will think again and go on thinking, and we will seek to do better. We could hardly fail to do so in the light of what was said this afternoon.

The way forward needs to be about love, joy and celebration of our humanity; of our creation in the image of God, of our belonging to Christ - all of us, without exception, without exclusion."