All Saints

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Amen 

Being Holy

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

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

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

Still there is that line from Plato to consider:

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

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

Amen

The Vineyard

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Amen

Look after others

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Do nothing from selfish ambition or conceit

Then perhaps Whitman could again write:

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

Amen. 

Christian leaders need be radical

 Romans 12:9-end 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Amen

Including Eunuchs Isaiah 56:1, 6-8

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

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

And the foreigners who joined themselves to the Lord

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

And to be his servants all who keep the sabbath

And do not profane it and hold fast my covenant

These I will bring to my holy mountain

And make them joyful in my house of prayer.

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

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

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

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

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

Amen 

 

Where do we look?

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

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

Pause

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

“Steve what are you doing here?” 

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

With that deep hush subduing all

Our words and works that drown 

The tender whisper of your call

As noiseless let thy blessing fall 

As fell thy manna down.

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

“What are we doing here?”

Amen