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

The Messianic Banquet

Isaiah 25:1-9 :The Messianic Banquet

“I will extol you my God and king

And bless your name for ever and ever

Every day I will bless you

And praise your name for ever and ever

Great is the Lord and his greatness is unsearchable”

These words are from Psalm 145 and I quote them to show you how the first verse of our reading from Isaiah echos this hymn of praise and thanksgiving in shape and content. Just as in the psalm  God is unsearchable so in Isaiah we hear that his plans were formed of old, faithful and sure, stressing the limitless range and space of God’s power in history.  

To understand this passage we have to look at what has gone before.

On one level Isaiah has been writing about the clash of two world empires, the Egyptian and the Assyrian and the effects that this has had on Judah, Israel and Palestine. Caught in the paths of the warring parties, sometimes making unlucky alliances these smaller states were often crushed. Specifically in the preceding chapters(23 and 24) we have heard of the destruction of Tyre -

“Wail o ships of Tarshish for your fortress is destroyed

When they came from Cyprus they learned of it”

Which put me in mind of John Masefield’s famous poem which begins

“Quinquireme of Nineveh from distant Ophir

Rowing home to haven in sunny Palestine

With a cargo of ivory

And apes and peacocks

Sandalwood and Cedarwood and sweet white wine”

No rowing home to sunny haven for the ships coming to Tyre in Isaiah’s day for it was completely destroyed and the sailors only discover the catastrophe when they arrive.

On another level isaiah is writing about the ever present war between good and evil so a little later in the chapter we read:

“The earth is utterly broken, the earth is torn asunder the earth is violently shaken. The earth staggers like a drunkard, it sways like a hut ……..it will not rise again.”

So you might by now be wondering why after all this the new chapter begins with a hymn of praise. Are we to be pleased that the city is a heap of rubble, that it will never be rebuilt? And the answer is yes for we have reached the moment of the Messianic banquet - the royal banquet where God swallows up the cursed shroud of permanent death and brings ALL people to feast at his table.

I wonder if you like me were horrified by the footage of the Iraqi army rather joyously setting out for the city of Kirkuk - so recently liberated from so called ISIS by the combined forces - the Iraqis want to reclaim the oil rich lands from the Kurds, who only a month ago were fighting alongside them for freedom.  It was a moment to shout at the television set -  ‘enough - surely there has been enough fighting in this land, enough blood lost enough already! ‘

“Only God can stop this.” and this is what Isaiah is celebrating:

The idea of a feast for ALL nations to celebrate the destruction of God’s enemies and the beginning of a new era of peace and security is a very ancient one - found in North Canaanite and other Asiatic mythologies it would have been a familiar image. The prophet Amos describes a sumptuous banquet - the guests lie on beds of ivory eating lambs and calves, drink wine and sing songs and anoint themselves with oil. And so Isaiah prefiguring the well known passage in Revelation concurs:

“On this mountain, the Lord of hosts will make for all people

a feast of rich food, a feast of well matured wines

Of rich food filled with marrow, of well matured wines strained clear.”

“He will swallow up death for ever.

Then the Lord God will wipe away the tears from all faces.

I am a fan of travelling by train for you can look out of the windows at the countryside flashing by and I was struck recently by a passage in D H lawrence’s Women in Love where swishing through Bedfordshire one of the characters looks at the land passing by in the evening saying to himself

“Well, if mankind is destroyed, if our race is destroyed like Sodom, and there is a beautiful evening with the luminous land and trees, I am satisfied. That which informs it all is there, and can never be lost.”  

It is a strange thing to contemplate the destruction of the earth as we know it, the destroying of mankind the shaming of the sun and the moon but there is that divine promise so eloquently found again in the last book of the Bible:

See, the home of God is among mortals,

He will dwell with them, they will be his peoples

And God himself will be with them

He will wipe every tear from their eyes

Death will be no more,

Mourning and crying and pain will be no more.

And this promise was made by God to the people of Israel, by Jesus to all people, by the Holy Spirit to all creation and most crucially to you and me.

Amen

The vineyard, wild grapes and God's mercy

Isaiah 5:1-6

The Jewish plains, especially around the sea of Galilee were especially fertile and were known as JIZREEL, God’s own plantations. Whilst each farm had a tendency to produce everything it needed (much as say a croft in Fairisle might do)  - there would be a kitchen garden and three or four sheep for the family’s wool and even the poorest family would have vines so they could have grapes. There were also real vineyards worked in a big way with watch towers like those the shepherds built to keep a lookout for robbers both four footed and two. Figs and fruit trees might be planted in the enclosure so that the vines might climb them but also vines were allowed to grow at ground level simply running along the earth. Pruning was quite unknown - the vine was not pampered, it simply did extremely well in the fertile soil and climate of Palestine. The Biblical expression “under the  vine and the fig tree” meant the delight of doing nothing whatever!

This is the kind of agriculture that appeals to me.

Isaiah’s poetic words were easily recognized by his audience - my beloved had a vineyard on a very fertile hill, he had provided everything for it; dug the rich soil, cleared it of stones, planted the choicest vines, built a watchtower to protect it and prepared for the harvest by hewing out a wine vat. Here is a lucky man blessed and diligent expecting his reward. His love will surely be rewarded and repaid with clusters of plump and vintage grapes and fine wine to follow.

But this was not to be - wild grapes, which are bitter and offensive and of no use were all that came.

This parable which is a teaching parable is typical of many found in the Old Testament and of a type often used by Jesus himself. We are drawn into a situation which we can easily relate to and then asked to comment on it. “Judge between me and my vineyard!” - only to discover usually too late that that parable is about ourselves and our own behaviour. The wild grapes in this case were the people of Judah and Jerusalem. But let us recognise that this has been  a long conversation with God which began in the garden of Eden. God had provided everything - “what more was there to do for my vineyard that I have not done in it?” All Adam and Eve needed to do was obey one rule, not to eat of the fruit of the tree of knowledge but they could not.

It is too an ongoing conversation with God. Here we are hard on the heels of our harvest festival confronted with the question - having celebrated all God’s gifts we are forced to ask ourselves why are there so many places on our fruitful earth with wild grapes? This week  in Las Vegas, recently in Myanmar, for years in Syria.

And you know, when things are bad for us individually, when things are unfair to us do we sometimes feel like tearing up the hedge, breaking down the walls, trampling upon them, hacking down the watch tower and just letting it all go to rot and become overgrown with briers and thorns? I know I do.

And though we can see that God might easily have done just that, it is not what has happened. God never gives up on mankind, yes he could have torn up the blueprint right then in the garden of Eden and started again but he did not - he sent his prophets like Isaiah to warn and instruct, he sent his son to teach and to be an example and when we, like those in our Gospel  reading, put Jesus to death even after that we have been  promised the Holy Spirit, the Comforter to be with us always.

Isaiah penned a great poem, it is a poem we should read often for the graphic way it presents us with the disappointment God may justly feel in his creation but especially for the way it shows how God did not react in human ways but continues to forgive and have endless, truly endless, mercy.

Amen