by church news | Apr 25, 2016 | Sermons
In 167 BC, the Greeks, who were the latest occupying power in the land of Israel, decided to eliminate all vestiges of Jewish faith and impose Greek patterns of worship and theology on them. At its most extreme, this involved sacrificing pigs on the altars in the Temple at Jerusalem – about as bad as it can get. A popular uprising ensued, led by Judas Maccabeus, and in 165 BC, the land was cleared of the Greek overlord and the Temple was re-consecrated. Lamps had been lit during the revolt, and one, in the Temple, unattended, had burned for 8 days. To celebrate this great victory, a new festival was established, the Dedication, or Consecration festival, but which is now called Hannukah. It is a midwinter festival, very close to our Christmas celebrations, only Jewish children get presents every day for 8 days, which can get a little taxing for their parents.
This is what is going on in Jerusalem in our Gospel reading this morning. Jesus is in the Temple during this 8 day festival, teaching, talking, meeting people. And some want to know if he really is the Messiah, as people are claiming that he is, or just another preacher and miracle worker. Fair enough, you say, we would want to know precisely that, too.
Does Jesus give them a straight answer? Yes and no. Yes, he has told them that he is the Messiah, and the things that he has done show that, but no, because a lack of faith is getting in the way of them hearing exactly what he is saying.
But there is more to this than a simple yes or no. Back in 165 BC, after the Greeks had been cleared out, the people unanimously made Judas Maccabeus their king. His family ruled Israel until the next Mediterranean superpower swept in – the Romans – but they had other ideas. They deposed the Maccabean dynasty, and imposed the Herods – a bunch of Rome-based Jewish sophisticates who had never set foot in Israel until this moment. However, to secure himself a bit of legitimacy, Herod the Great married a great great granddaughter of Judas Maccabeus.
A midwinter festival. A celebration of a cleansed Temple. Light that no one could extinguish. A new king. Does this all start to sound familiar? And just to throw a bit more into the mix, Jesus talks about sheep, his sheep, who listen to his voice and follow him – pure Isaiah, pure Ezekiel, pure restoration prophets, calling for a purging of the leaders of Israel and the coming of a new shepherd king – the Messiah.
All of that is going on as Jesus talks with these people. He wants them to be part of the new flock, he wants them to listen carefully to him and believe, so that they can fully know God, and share fully in the life of his family.
And all that is going on this morning, too. We have a child, who is listening, who is gazing around at us all, who is all dressed up and waiting for something to happen. Surrounded by parents and godparents, family and friends, the child waits. How much is going in, of what is happening here? Everything! It is all there, deep inside, waiting to come out as the child grows. And how is that to be released? By all of us. We are going to make promises on this child’s behalf, we will promise that we will pray for them, care for them, walk with them in God’s ways, and little by little, year by year, as we give this child a good example of faith and worship, of prayer and engagement, everything that this child has heard and seen today will make sense, and they will join with us fully in expressing their faith.
We have just started the process of preparing a group of 9, 10 & 11yr olds for admission to communion. These are children who have all been baptised, just as this little one will be soon, and who now, as they have grown up and learnt an enormous amount about God, about his Son Jesus Christ, about the life of the Church, they want to be fully part of the Christian experience. They want to eat of the bread of life, they want to drink of the true vine, they want to be seen for what they are, children of God like all of us here, sheep of God’s flock, believers.
And all that is available to this child, too. As they grow up, they will start to put into practice everything that they see here, everything that we talk about and show them in Junior Church, in the normal things that churches do like eat cake and drink tea, share burdens and joys, sing, watch the seasons go by and celebrate week by week the goodness of God. Baptism is the beginning of that process, the first step on a journey that will take them to communion, to participation, to involvement in the life of the people of God.
And we adults will be watched. This child will fix their beady eye on us on a Sunday morning, and observe what we do – how we pray, how we sing, how we share the peace, how we listen, how we talk to people. We adults are the ones that they will set their standards by. We adults are the ones from whom they will build their expectations – yes, primarily their parents, their godparents and family and friends, but in church, it will be us they are looking at. That is an awesome responsibility – this child, this lamb in the flock, will grow up to be a useful, fulfilled sheep, if what they see in us is real, authentic, heart-felt and faith-meant. If they see us take bread and wine with joy and faith, they will want that. If they see us pray, and work to make our prayers answered, they will want to learn to pray. If they see us bear one another’s burdens, they too will be generous with their care and support as they grow older.
It is a joy and a delight to baptise. It is a great responsibility too. I may pour the water, but we all are part of the process of baptism by our assent, our promises and by our example. May this child know the joy of the living God, flowing through their life, every day. May these parents know the pleasure of seeing their child grow to maturity of faith. May these godparents know the satisfaction of a role fulfilled. May we all take seriously our undertakings as the people of God on this child’s behalf, and may we rejoice together in Christ our king, our good shepherd, our light, our life.
by church news | Apr 9, 2016 | Sermons
When the fragile boats, overloaded with their human cargo, finally make their way onto Greek beaches, there is a whooping of delight, arms are raised and smiles cover previously anxious faces. For these people, this is a resurrection moment. They have fled terror, hatred and destruction. They have travelled with nothing through hostile territories, suspending all that they are and have been. They have passed through the deep waters of death, and now they stand alive, on European shores, resurrected.
When Mary, struggling in the garden to comprehend the empty tomb, hears her name fall from the lips of the risen Christ, she too experiences her resurrection moment. She turns, calls him “My Teacher”, and flings her arms around him, never to let him go.
When was your resurrection moment this morning? Waking up and finding it was an hour later than you would have liked? That first taste of chocolate? Seeing the Easter Candle lit for the first time? That first Easter hymn? We have all had one – rejoice! Christ is risen! Alleluia!
Asad Shah, a shopkeeper in Glasgow who wished his customers a happy Easter and was murdered for his generosity, has had his resurrection moment. Easter is a dangerous thing, resurrection is risky.
When Patrick lit the Easter fire in Ireland against the wishes of the Irish chieftains, his actions were dangerous, and his devotion risky.
Mary is told not to cling on to Jesus, for resurrection is risky, but needs to be shared – she was not believed, and was never counted as an apostle, even though she witnessed the resurrection first hand, for Easter is dangerous, and resurrection needs to be controlled.
So why the danger? Where is the risk in resurrection? What could possibly induce feelings of murder in someone who sees a “Happy Easter” message in his local shop? What did the Irish chieftains fear in Patrick’s bonfire?
Resurrection posits a different kind of life, a different kind of God. Resurrection talks of continuity, of abiding love made real in abiding life. Resurrection talks of the end of death, it takes away the sting of death, replacing it with everlasting love. Resurrection is glorious, as it fully explains God.
God in human form could die, but could not stay dead. God in human form, who had shown us love in all its glories and in all its practical fullness, could not stay dead. God is bigger than death, love is stronger than death, God’s love bursts out of the tomb on Easter morning, and Mary tries to keep it to herself forever, so wonderful is it.
This Easter day, we too need to cling to the risen Jesus, hold on to him so tight that he has to say to us, as he said so gently to Mary all those years ago, “do not hold on to me”. And as we physically let go of the risen Christ, so we are empowered to take him out to the world, to share his love, to live his love. We take his love to refugees – which will involve battering at the borough’s conscience until it cracks, and giving of our goods and time as best we can and as imaginatively as we can – we take his risen love to hate-ridden communities, we take his love to the indifferent, the lonely, the forgotten.
And we do all that with Easter joy, with delight in our hearts, for Christ is risen, he is risen indeed, Alleluia!
by church news | Mar 2, 2016 | Sermons
How is your Lent going? Good? A struggle? A learning experience? Made absolutely no difference? Did this morning’s reading from Isaiah have you salivating at the thought of free food and wine? They really oughtn’t to give us such passages during Lent. Not good for discipline, I feel.
But of course it is not about free food, or free wine, or never having to worry about anything anymore. It is about the goodness of God, the grace of God, the generosity of God in all circumstances. This is written to an enslaved and exiled people, who interpret their exile in Babylon as punishment for past sins, so the offer of grace, of generosity, of forgiveness, is to people weighed down by their past, to people who see no way home, who have given up on God. The offer is there, made by a generous, loving God: they have to return to him in thankfulness and repentance, and they will be filled.
Paul takes a classic hard line on disobedience to God, quoting the example of the Children of Israel in the desert, who built and worshipped a golden calf while Moses was up the mountain receiving the Ten Commandments. Punishment comes to those who fail, but there is always a way out of testing, says Paul – so however much that bar of chocolate is calling to you in the middle of Lent, resist, because it is really not that big a deal – in the grand scheme of salvation history.
But a bigger problem is posed by Luke, which has been called, “Why do bad things happen to good people?” – there is a book by that title, but I have not read it, as it is way too long, when the simple answer is, “because we are human.” We are subject to corruption, before we put on the incorruptible, and the process of corruption is never easy, nor pleasant. However, Jesus is absolutely clear that people who suffer bad things are not receiving divine punishment, they are not being singled out for their misdeeds or general level of failure: they are simply in the wrong place at the wrong time. These things happen. This is very important. God does not engineer earthquakes to kill bad people. God does not allow made people to run riot with guns so that a few sinners can be removed from this world. Absolutely not. Humanity fails, the earth does extraordinary things, people make mistakes. We cannot blame God and we must not blame God. Nor must we necessarily blame ourselves, unless we run amok or do something wrong. It is not like that.
Jesus gives the example of the farmer, who cultivates his farm in hope, who works to make trees improve, who betters their fertility by his actions. This is God’s way – he provides everything we need, he perseveres with us again and again, day in, day out. How many times must we forgive our brother, according to Jesus? Peter suggest 7 times, but Jesus whips back with 70 times 7, which, though an actual figure, is tantamount to saying, “every time”. Why? Because God does that. God loves, forgives, rebuilds, restores, draws us back, day after day, year after year, Lent after Lent.
And that is one of the reasons we observe Lent: to be rebuilt, to be challenged, to rediscover discipline, direction, purpose for our worshipping lives as well as our human lives. To bring together our experience of God and our experience of the world, so that the restorative love of God is real to us as we go about our daily lives, not just when we are in church.
This week’s temptation is to blame God for bad things. Resist! God is not their source, nor is he remotely pleased or satisfied by them. No. God is love, God is gift, God is merciful and gracious, longsuffering and infinitely kind. Let us seek out that God this week instead, and rejoice in all he does for us, every day.
by church news | Feb 27, 2016 | Sermons
2nd Sunday of Epiphany 2016 “Follow the money” was the advice given to Woodward and Bernstein by their inside source at the White House, as they investigated the Watergate Affair. It’s not quite as dramatic as that for us this morning, but our own covert source, otherwise known as the Boys Own Big Book of John’s Gospel mutters, “Follow the bridegroom.” But I hear you say, “The bridegroom only appears at the end, during a conversation about the quality of the wine.” And you would be right, so what is going on? Maybe the bridegroom is someone else. There is a constant reference in all the Old Testament to the image of Israel as God’s bride, the nation being married to their God. At times of breakdown, it is like a divorce. Hosea’s prophecy hangs on him marrying an unfaithful wife, so that his very life talks about Israel’s unfaithfulness to God. When the relationship is good, then images of bridegrooms and brides abound, with feasting, extravagance and delight. Is it any wonder, then, that John situates his first story of the miraculous powers of Christ (his first sign) at a wedding? And it is at a wedding where things are going wrong. The wine has run out, the water for ritual purification is low, even Mary, Jesus’s mother, is getting a little anxious. And Jesus transforms the means of legalistic righteousness – the water in the six stone jars – into the joy of the Kingdom of Heaven. Water for external washing is replaced with the wine of heaven; water for outdated rituals is replaced by the new wine of sacrament. What before was necessary externally is now a joy-bringer, internally, in a shared experience of worship. The initial bridegroom had not provided enough wine for the feast. The real bridegroom provides sufficient, and then some, and of the very best quality. If Jesus is the new bridegroom, who then is the bride? The bride in Cana doesn’t get a mention in John’s story – the only woman with a speaking part is Mary, and she is portrayed in an ambiguous light. Is she pushing her son in a direction he is not ready for, or is she just trying to deal with an embarrassing situation? And why does she imagine that Jesus can do anything about the lack of wine at a wedding? And does that make her the bride, to Jesus’s bridegroom? Absolutely not, she remains his mother, even in the spiritual dimension into which we have strayed. No, but she has an essential part to play, later on. If the nation was the bride of God, then the new bridegroom, God in human form, needs a new nation. And who might that be? At the end of the passage, there seems to be a fairly prosaic summing up of the story, but it is far from that. “..and his disciples believed in him” tells us everything we need to know about this new bride. The disciples and Jesus’s mother, are the ones who believe that in Jesus they have found the Messiah, that they are in the very presence of God himself. They come to this faith position after seeing this first public sign of Jesus, and they will take that forward, right through their lives, as they give birth to the new people of God that is the Church. That is the foundation of the Church, according to John the Evangelist. That is what it took, a gracious miracle to save the blushes of the bridegroom and his family, to set in motion the process by which we now exist. But I want to stop all the theorising there, and look instead at our liturgical context today. We are in the second Sunday of Epiphany, and our theme remains the revelation of God to the world, this time by the actions of Jesus Christ. In those actions, turning water into wine at a wedding feast, we see revealed the love of God, the grace of God, the timing of God and the inclusivity of God. Jesus’s time had not come, as he reminds his mother – the cross is a long way away – but in the meantime, Jesus still has much to do. He has to show God to the world, so that the world can understand what God is doing on the cross. We are the Church, today, in this place. Our task remains the same as it ever was, to reveal Christ to the world, to share God’s love with the world, and to worship together as Christ commanded us – united, around bread and wine. When the world looks at us, is that what they see? Do they see a united church, demonstrating God’s love, worshipping together, or do they see the fragmentation of the Church as portrayed on an almost daily basis in the press? I sincerely hope that when visitors come to this building, and meet with this group of people, they find the love of God, a unity of purpose and a deep, shared worship together. One step outside, however, and they can point to the existence of multiple denominations, a fractured Anglican Communion that is constantly tearing itself apart, and a wider religious backdrop that appears to be the driver of violence and hatred across the world. This grieves the heart of God so much, and was not the intended outcome of the miracle of the wine at Cana. As Anglicans, we ought to be able to live with each other, you would have thought, but we cannot. Having had all sorts of issues over women priests that threatened the breakup of the Anglican Communion, we have ridden that one out only for the issue of homosexuality to come charging in behind it. We have stuck to our guns on women priests and bishops, let us stick to our guns on the welcome, the love and the inclusion we give to everybody, regardless of gender and sexual orientation. It is not ours to judge other people, whatever we might believe and whatever we might believe what the Bible says – because we can be pretty sure that someone else believes quite the opposite after reading that same passage. It is ours to welcome and to worship together, nothing more, nothing less. We want everyone from the parish to feel welcome here, to be part of us; and for that to happen we have to leave judgement to God, and get on with the love, the welcome and the worship together. There is much more to be said on this, but during this coming week, we shall be praying together as Christians to enable us to get past our denominational differences and to worship and witness to God as one body. Those times of prayer – Monday evening at St Anne’s, Tuesday lunchtime at St Luke’s, Wednesday lunchtime at the Barn, Thursday afternoon at Raleigh Road and Friday morning at St Winefride’s – must be treasured, enjoyed, hallowed, for out of them will come a deeper unity than we can ever voice and that denominational structures could ever express. And we welcome, and love, and welcome, and love, day by day, for in that we shall reveal truly the love of God expressed in the person
