Author: Toby

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Speaking truth to power

7th Sunday after Trinity. Year B.

Readings: Ephesians 1:3-14 & Mark 6:14-29.

John the Baptist always seems to be a rather marginal figure in the modern church given how prominent he is in the gospels.  

We probably know more about him than any other figure apart from Jesus.

Unlike the disciples, we get an account of his miraculous birth and parentage, we get constant updates on his provocative and impactful mission, and we get an account of his death.

Born only a few months before Jesus himself, he obviously hits the ground running in order to fulfil his scriptural role as the voice crying in the wilderness.

By the time Jesus is ready to undertake his ministry, John already has a large and dedicated following for his message of repentance symbolised by a ritual of baptism.

Indeed, it seems like Jesus is waiting for John to lay that ground work, to make smooth the way of the Lord.

One of his first actions after all is to go to John and undergo this ritual of baptism that John has been using.  No, surely, to wash away his sins, but more to show that he is building upon the foundations that John has laid.

Not that this stops John’s followers from remaining a distinct and at times antagonistic group from those following Jesus. 

The message that John was giving was obviously distinctive enough that disagreements like this could break out.

John was a prophet in the great tradition of old testament prophets.

A biblical prophet is not someone who predicts the future – that is a more modern usage of the word.  A biblical prophet is someone who publicly declares God’s truth.  Often this does involve speaking of the future, but normally only of immediate consequences of anticipated, current or past actions, not grandiose predictions of the end of the world.

The important thing that a prophet is doing is warning people that their actions are not righteous, not in accordance with the way we should be behaving if we want to be true to God.

And often prophets are warning those in power.  Prophets are the antidote to the corrupting influence of unchallenged power.  

A particularly apposite example from the old testament is the prophet Nathan, who lived in the reign of King David.  When David sleeps with Bathsheeba and then has Uriah the Hittite killed, in order to be able to marry her, Nathan is on hand, using a parable, to get David to admit that what he has done is wrong.  It is to David’s credit that he doesn’t punish Nathan for his truthfulness.

John is in a similar position with Herod.

This is not the Herod of the nativity – who was Herod the Great.

This is Herod Antipas, one of his many sons, who ended up as ruler or Tetrarch of Galilee.  It’s the same Herod that Jesus is sent to by Pilate, presumably because, coming from Galilee, he is one of Herod’s subjects.

The Herod who executes James and imprisons Peter is yet another Herod – Herod Agrippa, who was his step-nephew, and brother of Herodias.

And this was the nub of John’s problem – Herod had married Herodias who was both his step-niece, and also his step-brother’s ex-wife.  And not because his step-brother was dead – this was no levirate marriage where a brother marries his brother’s widow in order to provide for her.  That would have been fine under the law.  No, the brother, also confusingly called Herod, was still alive.

So John very publicly called out Herod for marrying Herodias on two counts – she was his niece and his still-living brother’s divorced wife.  Unlike Nathan, he doesn’t seem to have done it with a subtle parable, but then he wasn’t a court prophet so probably didn’t have the level of access that Nathan had to David.  No, he has done it publicly, and Herod has had him thrown in jail for it.

Herod though seems to be content to stop at this though – he recognises that John is a prophet, and righteous and holy.  It is an interesting observation that he enjoys his sermons, even if he doesn’t understand them.  It feels like Herod is guilty mainly of falling in love with someone that he shouldn’t have, although that is a failing in someone in a position of authority like Herod, and if you want to go and read more of the history of the period, you will see that his love for and marriage to Herodias is the root of events that lead to his downfall, and probably a lot of grief for his subjects as well.  

Herod feels like he was a weak ruler – wanting to rule wisely and well, but not able to do so because he couldn’t control his passions, and maybe wasn’t as clever as his father, although also not as cruel as well.  Certainly he gets trapped into making rash promises and then isn’t strong enough to refuse to honour them when they lead to the execution of an innocent man.

Herodias his wife emerges as the villain of the piece, maybe in an echo of the relationship between Ahab and Jezebel.  It is she who wants John to die for what he has said.  Is this the action of a cruel and vindictive woman, or is it someone who is constrained by her time and culture, someone who despite her royal upbringing is fated to be defined by who she is married to, and therefore for whom the validity of her marriage is core to her existence?  By criticising this marriage, is John striking at her very sense of being?  Is this why she is so vehement that he should die?  Do her motives come from a place of weakness rather than cruel strength?  We will never know.

Whatever the motivations, the outcome though is very definite – John’s speaking of truth to power leads to the ultimate sanction for a prophet – his own death.  Speaking truth is dangerous, both in biblical times, and in modern times, as the modern prophets and martyrs Janani Luwum and Oscar Romero could testify, along with many others. 

Speaking these truths is what we are all called upon to do as Christians, wherever we find ourselves.  In every interaction we have, in our families, amongst our friends, in our workplaces, even, or most especially here in church, we can always be aware of behaviour that is wrong, where people are abusing their positions of privilege and power to take advantage of others, or demean them, or aggrandize themselves.  To behave in a way that is not kingdom-affirming, that doesn’t conform to the gospel message of love, harmony and equality before God.  And we can take that opportunity to remind people gently, calmly, lovingly, that there is another way, a better way, a way that affirms the God-given dignity of all human beings.  And filled with the Spirit, our words will be heard.  Maybe not acted upon today.  Maybe not for years.  But those words will be heard.

Amen

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Love in the Song of Songs

Sixth Sunday of Easter, 2024. Year B.

Readings: Song of Solomon 4:16 – 5:2; 8:6,7 & Revelation 3.14-22.

One of the delights of the ‘lesser’ services like Evensong is that the lectionary departs into the hinterlands of the bible, with passages from books that we might not often hear in church for various reasons.  This evening we had two such passages, from books whose content is regarded with suspicion for different reasons.

Our second passage was from Revelations; a book that some Syriac churches still regard as not being part of the canon.  It certainly has a style and tone that sets it apart from all the other books of the new testament, except some particular chapters of Matthew, Mark and Luke, but which follows in the tradition of the book of Daniel, and of many contemporary Jewish works of the first century.  It therefore fits firmly into the biblical tradition, but unfortunately, all too often is read outside of that context, as a literal prophecy of the end of the world, rather than in its proper apocalyptic genre.  The reward for persevering through the heavy metal lyric inspiring section though is the beautiful description at the end of the final culmination of history, the new heaven and the new earth, joined by the glorious city of God where the faithful will once again live in the presence of God, as it was in the beginning in the garden.

Our first passage though is from a book that is indisputably part of the canon, but unfortunately rarely referred to.  Generations of commentators have overlaid on the Song of Songs allegorical structures to explain how it tells of the love between God and Israel, or between God and the individual worshipper, in order, it always seems, to cover the undeniable truth that this, in the middle of the bible is a book of scandalously erotic love poetry.  Undeniably beautifully written and evocative, but not really seemly in a serious religious work, surely.

And yet, why should this not be at the heart of scripture – scripture that celebrates a God who so loves us that he embraces our own flesh and lives amongst us.  At the very start of the Bible, in Genesis, God celebrates loving human relationships.  Nakedness is not sinful in Genesis – it is rather the shame at their nakedness that shows that Adam and Eve have taken a God-given gift and made it something to be shameful of.

Too much of the rest of scripture is filled with admonishments that reinforce this attitude of shamefulness, or that we have interpreted in this way, without seeing that actually many of them are concerned with reinforcing structures of oppressive power inequality and abuse.  Clever and manipulative humans can take God’s words and use them for their own ends – then as now.  The prophets knew this, and that is why they were moved by God to rebuke those who failed to live up to the intent of God’s laws.  The shining thread that runs through the Gospels is Jesus’ preaching of a kingdom of heaven where all are equal and included.

And the Song of Songs gives us a beautiful picture of lovers who are utterly entranced with one another.  There is no coercion, no arrangement, no bride-price, no dowry.  There is no inequality between man and woman in the Song of Songs – both love the other openly and equally.  As Paul says a millennium later, love does not envy, it does not dishonour others, it is not self-seeking, it keeps no record of wrongs.

Yes, the commentators are right, this is a description of the love that God feels for us, and that we hope to feel for him; but it should not be read as only that.  The Song of Songs is God telling us also that our physical love for each other can also be pure and divine, and when it is, it is a wonderful way of showing us God’s love as well.  It is not something that God wants us to feel ashamed of, or embarrassed by, or hide away.

But, we still feel shame and embarrassment, because this is a broken and fallen world, and we are broken and fallen with it.  Physical love is a powerful positive force, but also something that we all too often misuse, in unequal, coercive, manipulative, exploitative or abusive relationships.  And our shame and secrecy often allows such misuse and abuse to flourish, even in an environment like church where we should be modelling the equality of God’s kingdom.  It is our failure to live up to this Gospel and kingdom imperative which means that our safeguarding policies and practices are not bureaucracy gone mad, but are us living out our Gospel driven missional life in the world.  So let us rejoice in our safeguarding policies as an expression of God’s love for us and our love for each other, in all its manifestations.

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Adoption

Second Sunday of Easter 2024. Year B.

Readings: Galatians 4:1-5.

Much of Paul’s literary output seems to be dedicated to trying to sort out his own theological questions, which I suspect is something that links many of us and him, even over the span of two thousand years.

Paul has an outsized influence on early Christianity, probably because of his education and erudition.  As he himself tells us, he was taught in the school of Gamaliel, one of the great Pharisee rabbis of the first century.  He, like Jesus, is steeped in the scriptures in a way that many of the other leading apostles like Peter, James and John, simple Galilean fishermen were not, at least initially.

This deep scriptural understanding forces Paul to think about the impact that the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus have had on his Jewish history and faith more, or earlier, than we see the other apostles do, although to be fair to them, during Jesus’ life, their expectation is still a traditional Jewish Messianic expectation.  They are not forced to re-evaluate this expectation either until after it stops following the script that they had expected.

Paul has a similar, but at the same time completely different change in his understanding. The difference is that we hear less of Paul before his conversion experience.

Paul’s reflection here, in Galatians, regarded as one of his earlier letters, uses some common themes of his, based on the customs of his time.  As children, we are not in control of our own actions, but are enslaved by our guardians and trustees.  Hopefully not a situation our young people identify too closely with.  But then with the coming of Jesus, he doesn’t do the obvious pivot to us becoming adults, possibly because elsewhere he is keen to continue to stress that we are still children and slaves, but to God rather than to the forces of the world.  Instead, he introduces one of his other great ideas – that of inheritance by adoption, to explain how the covenant that the scriptures had made clear was for Abraham and his descendants could become available to everyone.

Adoption was a big thing in the Roman world – for noble houses where lineage was everything, adoption of a relative, or even a trusted ex-slave on occasions, was the best way to ensure that the noble line continued without interruption.  So the language of adoption for Paul may carry very different overtones to what adoption might mean for us today.

What is consistent in Paul’s writings is an overtone of dispensationalism – the idea that God’s revelation had been progressive throughout history.  First to the Jews in the covenant with Abraham and then with the law of Moses; then later in a completely new covenant based on Christ and the cross.  This finds its most explicit expression in Paul’s letter to the Romans, with its contrast of Jews living under the law and Christians redeemed through grace.  

This, along with other of Paul’s writings, have, unfortunately, throughout history led to a degree of justification for anti-semitism, and a characterisation of Judaism as being narrowly legalistic, which ignores the breadth of belief in second temple Judaism, and the emphasis on divine grace that is evident in extant writings of the Pharisees and Essenes.   

What Paul is trying instead to do, rather than castigating his own race, is to find the fulfilment of God’s promises – not just those to Abraham and Moses, but also the earlier ones to patriarchs such as Noah – find the fulfilment of these covenants, not just in Israel, but in the whole world, including Israel as God’s faithful servants, culminating in Jesus himself.  

In doing this, and in trying to work through this thoughts on this, he introduces a whole new idea, one that fell on more fertile ground in the eastern church than in the western church. 

This is the idea of deification – that Christ became human so that in some way, through his incarnation and scrifice, we might become more divine.

Here it finds one of its earliest vocalisations, the idea that we, as adopted children, can share in God’s own divine nature, through the sacrifice of Jesus Christ, who in living and dying as one of us, brings us closer to being one with God.

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Christ is risen

Easter Sunday, 2024. Year B.

Readings: 1 Corinthians 15:1-11 & John 20:1-18.

I remember many years ago taking a spring holiday driving around southern Greece, and on a particular Saturday ending up in Patras, which is not a city I recommend if you are ever looking for accommodation that is both cheap and clean.  Anyway, as we were prowling the city centre late at night looking, futilely, for somewhere to have dinner, suddenly the doors of a church we were passing were flung open and a crowd of Greeks emerged shouting happily at the tops of their voices.  It took us a while to realise that this was Orthodox Holy Saturday, and they were shouting Christ is risen in Greek.

Like them, we are proudly proclaiming the most joyous day, not just of the year, but of eternity.  This is the day that divinely overturns the human verdict of Good Friday.  The day that delivers on the promise of Christmas Day.  And the seventh day that completes the work of the first six days of creation.

It is often a peculiarity of our church calendar that two events that were originally widely separated in time fall within a single year’s calendar on close dates.  Jesus’ presentation in the temple and his baptism for example, despite being separated by thirty or more years, occur only weeks apart in our observations.

It would be easy to assume, from the outside, that Easter was a circumstantial coincidence like this.  It seems extraordinary that Jesus could go from broken agony to triumphant glory within the space of three days.  It hardly feels like we have had a chance to come to terms with the tragedy of Good Friday before we are overwhelmed by the joy of Easter Sunday.  Where is the time to process our grief?

And yet how much more of a whirlwind must it have been for those who knew Jesus in person.  His disciples, overcome I am sure with not just sorrow, but also guilt at how they had behaved at the time of trial.  The women, including his mother, who had stayed true and had stood and watched every moment of his agonising death.  For them surely, a blessing that their despair could be so quickly turned into joy.

People that I work with, when they find out that I am a Christian, exhibit a range of reactions.  One of the strangest to me, but building on a popular trope, is that I will disapprove of anything that looks like fun.  I like to point out to them that Jesus was someone who appreciated a good party as much as the next person.  How many of his parables involve feasts.  I don’t know where generations of Christians have got the idea that enjoyment is ungodly, but it is not from the gospels that I read.  Yes, God has rules for us.  But these are not arbitrary rules and prohibitions.  Jesus said, love God and love your neighbour, and at essence the rules that God gives us are about loving our neighbours – our fellow people.  God condemns fornication and adultery through Paul for example, not because he objects to people having fun, but because it is a betrayal of a relationship.  We do not love our neighbour if we betray them, or exploit them, or demean them, or gossip about them, or lie to or about them.  We do love our neighbour when we rejoice with them, laugh with them, dance with them, or cry with them.  And when we rejoice, laugh, dance and cry with them, we are also rejoicing, laughing, dancing and crying with God as well.

Joy in God’s own creation is right with God, for his own Son becomes part of that creation, not just once, but for a second time this morning, perfected by the sacrifice of the cross, but not perfected into an abstract spirituality, but into a concrete joyous reality, that once again meets, eats, drinks, laughs and rejoices with his followers.

We have, this morning, been given good news.  Let us go out and share the joy of the knowledge and love of God with everyone we meet.

Amen

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Foolishness in Corinth

Third Sunday in Lent, 2024. Year B.

Readings: 1 Corinthians 1:18-25 & John 2:13-22.

“For the message about the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God”, says Paul to the Corinthians.  It is “A stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to gentiles”.

The passage we have just read follows from his opening appeal to them to heal their divisions, and stop the factional infighting that he has heard is plaguing their church.

Corinth in Roman times was a wealthy and outgoing trading city, but unlike some of its neighbouring Greek cities, not one with the confidence of antiquity in its culture, because the ancient Greek city was completely depopulated and destroyed by the Romans in 146 BC, and the city we know of from Paul’s letters was only refounded by Julius Caesar in 44 BC, so maybe only 90 or 100 years before Paul was writing his letters.  

So the Corinth he is writing to is a young, brash city still trying to assert its identity amongst its older, more established neighbours, with a population drawn from many different cultures.

And it’s important to remind ourselves that Paul’s letters are pastoral letters – he is always writing in response to a specific situation in a specific place at a specific time.  

The advice he gives is rooted in scripture and his theological thinking, and deeply inspired by the Holy Spirit, but we can’t just take it wholesale and apply it verbatim to another situation.  

In the same way that Paul sifts through the Jewish scriptures that were written for other people at other times in other contexts and creatively reinterprets them in the light of the Cross, so we too have to do the same with his writings, in the light of our context, with our knowledge of the scriptures, and listening to what the Holy Spirit is saying to us.

And to do this in a way that is inspired, that is filled with the Holy Spirit and is true to the whole message of the Gospel from incarnation to crucifixion to resurrection is not simple or easy.  

Anyone who says that understanding and interpreting the Bible is easy is either a saint, or hasn’t been reading their Bible with enough attention.  

The Bible is a complex body of writing, appearing at times to be contradictory, often saying things we don’t want to hear.  It is written in many voices, each reflecting their own understanding of God.  It is hard to understand.

God isn’t trying to make things hard for us, he sent his only Son to die for us after all, but the proper working of his creation as he intended it is too vast and complex for us to easily understand.  

It is his unending love for us that is what leads him to the progressive revelation that we can see at work in the Bible, showing us what we can understand, and then as we grow in the Spirit, revealing the next step of the Gospel message.  

God doesn’t call us to him, He comes to us and walks with us as we progress towards him, however slowly.

The Corinthians come over as brash and cocky in their attitude to life.  A real bunch of know-it-alls.  It feels at times like they have the outward confidence or even arrogance of those who deep down are very insecure about themselves and their place in the world.

The Greeks and Romans amongst them probably included many who had had a good education by the standards of the time in rhetoric, grammar and logic.  The Jews probably included many who had completed much study of the Jewish scriptures.

Paul comes amongst them to preach the Gospel, and he admits elsewhere he is not handsome or prepossessing, he doesn’t speak like a great orator or debate with the eloquence of a leading advocate.

And he says many of them form a low opinion about him and his message because of this.  They think they are more learned and intelligent than him, and they listen to other Christian missionaries who are more to their liking – smoother, more glib, maybe giving a simpler message.

But Paul’s message to them in this passage is that all their learning is of no use to them when it comes to understanding the Gospel message.  Indeed, he tells them, it is actively hampering them from understanding it and becoming one with Christ.

Rather than being rich in learning and wisdom, they are impoverished spiritually.  And they don’t even realise it as they indulge in their petty squabbles.

Because the Gospel proclamation, the message of the Cross, is not something that can be accessed through knowledge or philosophy.

Those amongst them who were students of Greek philosophy might have listened to accounts of Jesus’ teaching and nodded approvingly at some of his parables.  

There a whole strand of literature today still that tries to recast Jesus as some sort of wandering Jewish stoic philosopher, whose simple message was wrapped in a load of religious mumbo-jumbo after his death by his followers to build a sort of religious Ponzi scheme.  

But to do this means we have to ignore a lot of what Jesus said and did because it doesn’t fit into this conceptualization.  

And it becomes hard to explain why the Romans would crucify a wandering philosopher, and requires a complete denial of the resurrection entirely.  

And it reduces Jesus to just another man, whose words we can pick and chose, take or ignore.  

It falls into the trap of all humanism, that there is no baseline truth against which everything else can be measured.  Everything, every experience and every truth just becomes relative.

Maybe this is why Paul so rarely refers to Jesus’ teachings and parables, because he is working so much amongst Gentile populations who too easily seize upon the philosophical teaching, and Paul wants to bring them to a more spiritual understanding.

For the learned Jews amongst the audience expecting the Davidic Messiah of Daniel or Ezekiel or Enoch – the Son of Man coming to God on a cloud of glory, having brought all the world under his rule, then Jesus’ death on the cross is even more of a stumbling block.  The Messiah, taken by Gentiles, broken and tortured, and then hung on a tree, the curse of God in the Mosaic law.  Such a man could never be the Messiah, surely.

But Paul is saying to them that they have things back to front.  They cannot come to Christ through their traditional knowledge and learning, through the categories that they have always thought in.  

The cross has changed everything, he says.  All their previous knowledge and understanding needs to re-evaluated and placed into that context.

They must come through faith, and then, in the light of that faith, they can re-use their knowledge and reason to truly understand the message of the cross.  

The message is not written on the outside of the curtain, but rather on the inside, and we must pass through that curtain so that we can see it from within, and only then will we be able to start reading the true message.  

As he says, the message about the cross is the power of God to us who are being saved.

The disciples in John’s story bear witness to this.  They hear Jesus’ words – “Destroy this temple and in three days I will raise it up”, but it is only after he has been raised from the dead, in the light of that re-understood faith, that they remember that he said this and they believed the scripture and the word he had spoken.

Time and again in the Gospels, we see that despite their faith, their understanding is lacking.  And at times, we also see that despite their knowledge of Jesus, their faith can be lacking.  

But, God has come and met them where they are, and walking alongside them in the poverty of their understanding and faith, he helps them and guides them, so that their knowledge increases their faith, and their growing faith informs their knowledge, so that that increased knowledge can in turn move them forward on that journey of faith.  

It is not a single revelation, but a continuing cycle of growing and understanding and believing.  A cycle that all of us, as disciples of Christ, should be in, and continue to be in throughout our lives, hopefully always humble in the poverty of our human faith and understanding.

Let us pray.

God of understanding and wisdom.  We come before you conscious of our own limitations of wisdom and faith.  Walk with us this Lententide as we seek to follow you more fully in the humility of our faithful witness.

Amen

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The sovereignty of God

Twentieth Sunday after Trinity, 2023. Year A.

Readings: 1 Thessalonians 1:1-10 & Matthew 22:15-22.

There aren’t many people who enjoy paying taxes, so I guess it’s disappointing that Jesus doesn’t use this exchange to provide us with a sound basis for a religious exemption from taxation.

Even if we may not enjoy paying taxes though, much of modern taxation is something that has a moral and ethical basis in principles of either charitable redistribution from the wealthy to the poor, or as insurance, where we all pay for things like a health service that we hope we will rarely need to use, but have the comfort of knowing is available and accessible if we do need it.

Ancient taxation rarely had that sort of moral aim and was normally purely a way for the rulers to support themselves to enjoy a standard of living that greatly exceeded that of the ruled who were paying for it.  

And Roman tax gatherers were notorious for their greed, rapacity and corruption. Taxation was to be a source of dissent and rebellion throughout the Roman Empire for its entire history.  In first century Judea though, the issue of Roman taxation carried extra, religious weight as well.

The historian Josephus tells us that there was a rebellion in 6 AD over the introduction of Roman taxation after the death of Herod the Great led by another Galilean, although called Judas rather than Jesus.  

The trap the Pharisees are laying is to see if they can get this new Galilean troublemaker to also come out, in public, as an opponent of Roman taxation like his predecessor, and give them ammunition to maybe denounce him to the Roman authorities.

Taxation is a very concrete expression of sovereignty.  I encountered an example of this in my job a few years ago with one of our customers, a Native American tribe that were operating a casino on their tribal reservation, which is permitted even in US states that don’t permit gambling because the supreme court ruled that tribal reservations are sovereign territory, outside of the control of the states that they were physically located in.  This customer wanted us to add in a software check for online wagers to see if the online wager was being placed while the player was standing on tribal land, because if so, they refused to pay the state gambling tax on those wagers.  The cost of implementing the check was far higher than the amount they would save, but it was a matter of principle – paying the state tax could be taken as an admission that the state had sovereignty over them.  That was something that they were unwilling to risk.

For religious Jews of the time, who believed that they were a nation that was ruled directly by God, paying Roman taxes could similarly be viewed as denying the divine authority of God.

In addition, there were the Roman coins themselves, which had to be used to pay Roman taxes.  Roman coins, like the denarius that Jesus requests, carried the image of the emperor – Tiberius at this point, although undoubtedly there were still plenty of coins with Augustus’s image still on them as well.

Obviously having an image is bad enough, given the second commandment, but around that image would have been the words ‘Tiberius Augustus, Son of God’, which just compounds the blasphemy for a monotheistic people.  How can a mere man claim to be son of God?

So for observant Jews, even handling such money would have been idolatrous.  It is not to the Pharasee’s credit that they are able to produce such a coin here, in the Temple courtyard, in the house of God.  Not permitting such idolatry in the Temple is why there were money changers in the Temple for Jesus to throw out, so that only coins that conformed to Jewish law were present in the temple.  Jesus turns them out because they are profiteering from the ordinary people, not because he objects to the temple coinage itself.

So here we have a question posed to Jesus where the ‘correct’ religious answer is fairly obvious, if somewhat dangerous.  

Is Jesus just cleverly equivocating to avoid being entrapped and having a premature end brought to his ministry, rather than standing up for what he believes in?

Or is he actually answering a completely different question; the more interesting question that he wants to answer, like a good modern politician?

Jesus’ main message in the Gospels is pretty clear – the Kingdom of God has arrived.  It is here and now.  Most of his listeners don’t understand this because they are looking for a different manifestation of the Kingdom of God.  So he has another message for those people who are seeking to establish the Kingdom through violence and rebellion against the Romans.  

He warns them again and again, in parables and in apocalyptic visions, that the outcome of violence will be destruction and devastation for everyone.  In Jesus’ time this might just be an accurate assessment of the power and brutality that the Roman state could bring to bear, but it is also a timeless reminder that violence will always create more violence.  The zealots are hoping that God will intervene to bring them victory, but Jesus is here to warn them that God wants a kingdom built on love and sacrifice instead.

Jesus’ message is that the Kingdom of God is already here, and yet, 2000 years later, we look around us, and it sometimes seems that we are increasingly far from the full manifestation of that kingdom.  We know that we are called to inhabit a liminal place – we are called to work in and towards a kingdom that is here, and is also yet to come – but sometimes that work can feel very unrewarding and unproductive.

The very fact of the incarnation tells us that the kingdom of God is a kingdom of this world.  

It is not a kingdom that is a reward for us in heaven after we are dead.  

It is not a kingdom that is only found within the walls of the church for two hours on a Sunday morning.  

It is a kingdom that must and will transform the everyday world around us, inside and outside of these walls.  Jesus tells the Pharisees that we should return to the world what is the world’s and to God what is God’s.  This is obviously a false dichotomy, because the world is God’s anyway; but what Jesus is also saying to us here is that we should be in and part of the world rather than trying to withdraw from the world.  

The way of the Essene or the hermit or the cloistered monk or nun may be a worthy way of life and means of worshipping God, but God demands more than worship from us.  He demands that we should go out into the world, in the footsteps of his Son, and be the kingdom in the world.  Jesus doesn’t call all of us to give up everything of the world for him either.  Some, like the disciples, are called to give up everything and follow him.  But the tax-gatherer, to use an appropriate example, is merely called to be honest and open in his dealings when gathering tax.  That itself would have been behaviour so unusual as to have been a strong witness.  The Kingdom that Jesus promises is not a place of self-denial or joylessness.  Instead it is a great feast, where all are welcome no matter who they are, and where all are seated with equal honour, and where no one is forced to serve another, but all share and help one another willingly.   A feast where we don’t exploit one another, or God’s creation.

That is the kingdom we are called to bring in.  Our two hours on a Sunday morning in this building are a time to recharge our spiritual batteries – the other 166 hours a week that we spend outside this place are where we are called to discharge those spiritual batteries, and give to the world.

Amen

8 am version

The Pharisees are posing a question to Jesus where the ‘correct’ religious answer is fairly obvious, if somewhat dangerous.  Is Jesus just cleverly equivocating to avoid being entrapped and having a premature end brought to his ministry, rather than standing up for what he believes in?

Or is he actually answering a completely different question; the more interesting question that he wants to answer, like a good modern politician?

Jesus’ main message in the Gospels is pretty clear – the Kingdom of God has arrived.  It is here and now.  Most of his listeners don’t understand this because they are looking for a different manifestation of the Kingdom of God.  So he has another message for those people who are seeking to establish the Kingdom through violence and rebellion against the Romans.  

He warns them again and again, in parables and in apocalyptic visions, that the outcome of violence will be destruction and devastation for everyone.  In Jesus’ time this might just be an accurate assessment of the power and brutality that the Roman state could bring to bear, but it is also a timeless reminder that violence will always create more violence.  The zealots are hoping that God will intervene to bring them victory, but Jesus is here to warn them that God wants a kingdom built on love and sacrifice instead.

Jesus’ message is that the Kingdom of God is already here, and yet, 2000 years later, we look around us, and it sometimes seems that we are increasingly far from the full manifestation of that kingdom.  We know that we are called to inhabit a liminal place – we are called to work in and towards a kingdom that is here, and is also yet to come – but sometimes that work can feel very unrewarding and unproductive.

The very fact of the incarnation tells us that the kingdom of God is a kingdom of this world.  

It is not a kingdom that is a reward for us in heaven after we are dead.  

It is not a kingdom that is only found within the walls of the church for two hours on a Sunday morning.  

It is a kingdom that must and will transform the everyday world around us, inside and outside of these walls.  Jesus tells the Pharisees that we should return to the world what is the world’s and to God what is God’s.  This is obviously a false dichotomy, because the world is God’s anyway; but what Jesus is also saying to us here is that we should be in and part of the world rather than trying to withdraw from the world.  

The way of the Essene or the hermit or the cloistered monk or nun may be a worthy way of life and means of worshipping God, but God demands more than worship from us.  He demands that we should go out into the world, in the footsteps of his Son, and be the kingdom in the world.  Jesus doesn’t call all of us to give up everything of the world for him either.  Some, like the disciples, are called to give up everything and follow him.  But the tax-gatherer, to use an appropriate example, is merely called to be honest and open in his dealings when gathering tax.  That itself would have been behaviour so unusual as to have been a strong witness.  The Kingdom that Jesus promises is not a place of self-denial or joylessness.  Instead it is a great feast, where all are welcome no matter who they are, and where all are seated with equal honour, and where no one is forced to serve another, but all share and help one another willingly.   A feast where we don’t exploit one another, or God’s creation.

That is the kingdom we are called to bring in.  Our two hours on a Sunday morning in this building are a time to recharge our spiritual batteries – the other 166 hours a week that we spend outside this place are where we are called to discharge those spiritual batteries, and give to the world.

Amen

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Proclaim anew to each generation

Evensong, 2nd Sunday of Lent, 2023. Year A.

Readings: Numbers 21.4-9 & Luke 14:27-33.

Sometimes when writing a sermon you get two readings that relate to each other in a very obvious way, either through the intention of the lectionary compiler, or because they also interact with the events of the day in a particular way.  This evening didn’t feel like one of those evenings. 

The first reading we heard was from Numbers, and is one of those strange passages in the Pentateuch that really make you wonder if they have crept in by mistake, a bit like the one in Exodus where God attacks Moses in the night just after having given him his mission to go to Pharoah. 

The Israelites, detouring through the wilderness, complain once again about the conditions.  God gets angry and sends poisonous  (or maybe fiery) serpents to bite them.  The Israelites repent and ask Moses to intercede – he does, and so God tells him to make a bronze serpent on a pole, and everyone who sees the bronze serpent doesn’t die when a snake bites them. 

Why doesn’t God just stop sending the snakes? 

This is the bronze serpent, by the way, that King Hezekiah destroys in 2 Kings 18 verse 4, because the people are worshipping it with incense, and treating it as an idol. 

And maybe this is a clue to how we should be treating this passage.  Like much of the Bible, we shouldn’t be looking at this as literally true in a historical sense.   

If we do so, we just devalue the truth that is in the Bible.   

Instead, this is a mythological passage.   

In Jerusalem there was a bronze serpent on a pole that people said was originally made by Moses.  This story is a myth explaining why the temple had a bronze serpent on a pole that was made by Moses, despite it being somewhat inconsistent with later religious practice. 

Does this mean that the Bible is not telling the truth? 

No, it doesn’t.  Because in this case the Bible isn’t about literal historical truth.  In this case, the truth the Bible is telling us is about the relationship that Israel saw itself having with God through the ages.  The ways in which they understood providence – how blessings and curses came from their behaviour.  This is a true account of their relationship with God. 

To us now, it makes for tales of a God who can seem vindictive and un-loving, and also wildly inconsistent, if we have a more classical view of God as unchanging and benevolent.  But the Old Testament experience of God was different, and this was a different people in a different place and culture that it is hard for us to really understand. 

Christianity has a scandal of particularity – Jesus was incarnate in a particular place, Judea, at a particular time, the first century AD.  We can see this in our Gospel reading.  The examples that Jesus gives are just examples that his audience of the day would have understood.  They are probably not personal experiences – few of his audience would have built a tower, or decided to wage war on another king, but they are comprehensible, and the weightiness of them helps to emphasise the weightiness of the decision that Jesus is asking his audience to make.  We should not be analysing these examples in detail – he is not giving project management advice to anyone considering an extension – but focusing our attention on the first and last verses of the passage, and the verses we haven’t heard that immediately bracket it – his demand that we cannot follow him unless we hate our families and indeed life itself, and his exhortation about the value of salt. 

Jesus here is speaking in prophetic mode – in broad brush strokes, with exaggerated metaphors to emphasise the importance of what he is saying.  Again, this is not to be read literally.  If it were, the ranks of true Christians would be reduced to a mere handful of friars and monastics, for who else amongst us have given up all of our possessions? 

When the Church of England licences or ordains, one of the declarations states that the duty of the church is to proclaim the faith, revealed in the Holy Scriptures, afresh in each new generation.  Scripture reveals faith – it is not faith itself.  And that faith must be proclaimed afresh in each new generation.  Because of the particularity of Jesus’ incarnation, we cannot look to his literal words as a guide for all the ages, because he spoke in a manner which would enable his audience of the time to understand.  Jesus was eternal, but his audience we of that time. 

We are not that audience, and we deny two thousands years of the outworking of God in the Holy Spirit if we demand that we should still be that audience, and should still understand God in the same way that they did.  Jesus says that we must carry the cross and follow him to be his disciple.  He does not say we must follow the law to be his disciple.  He does not say that we must quote scripture to be his disciple.  He points us to the cross instead, the non-verbal symbol of his divine willingness to suffer and serve us, in order to reveal God’s unending love for all of his creation.   

In the shadow of that cross, we are called to proclaim the faith afresh, and the source of that faith is the true word of God, not scripture which reveals the word of God; but the true word of God, the logos, the Son that died for us, and was raised on the third day. 

Amen. 

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The Trinity

Trinity Sunday, 2022. Year C.

This was a short sermon (actually probably a little too long even then) for our early service on Trinity Sunday. The sermon itself suddenly came to me very quickly, and was a response to people often asking me ‘why does the Trinity matter?’. I’m not saying that this is the only reason, or that the Trinity doesn’t matter, but the thought came to me that it’s very complexity is appropriate to our times.

Readings: Romans 5:1-5; John 16:12-15

When Rosie asked me if I would like to preach this morning, she didn’t mention it was Trinity Sunday until after I had agreed. And Trinity Sunday does seem to create fear in the hearts of preachers everywhere, which is a pity when it is also our patronal feast.
So why is this? It depends on how we want to talk about the nature of the Trinity, and certainly the doctrine of the Trinity is one of the most intellectually complex things that you can try and get your head around in Christian theology. But do we need to get our heads around it? Understanding intellectual complexity isn’t the benchmark of Christian faith.
I would argue that it is far more important to our faith to understand the unconditional love and forgiveness of God, and if we really start thinking about that, it is far more complex and difficult to get our head around than any of the arguments about the natures, persons, substances, and wills of the Trinity, and how many of each there are and how they relate to each other.
So why have we made the Trinity so complex? Why do we argue about it so much? The fundamental theological disagreement between western and orthodox Christianity, even 968 years later, is still the double procession of the Holy Spirit. Why did this matter so much to people.
And why do I think it shouldn’t matter now.
It mattered, in a way, because of science, and it doesn’t matter now so much, again because of science, or what we would now call science, and was once called philosophy.
It mattered because the people who had these arguments inhabited a world view where there was an idea that you could measure and define the world. And this became wrapped up in ancient and mediaeval views of rationalism and the relationship of science and religion. The idea that God had made us rational beings so that we could understand his creation, and had made his creation rational for us so that we could witness him through that creation.
We live in a very different scientific view of the world now. We have to understand that the cosmos is a more complex and mysterious place than we can possibly imagine. Many scientists still haven’t made this jump, but I think many Christians would instinctively understand it.
As one of my lecturers once said ‘you can’t put God in a box’. It was unfortunate that we had just been discussing the Ark of the Covenant, which rather undermined his argument at the time, but I think modern Christianity understands well that God is beyond our understanding. As we may say later in the Eucharist – ‘great is the mystery of faith’. Great indeed.
We understand now that God cannot be understood by us, and I think we are comfortable with an ambiguity and fluidity in our understanding of God that I think the apostles were also comfortable with, but which I think intervening generations forgot and we have only recently recovered.
Ambiguity and fluidity are core to our lives these days. There are plenty of people who bemoan this, as if it is removing the certainties of the old days, undermining us in some way, but the truth is that those certainties were never really there – they were just constructs that we created – walls that stopped us seeing too far in case we scared ourselves.
And I believe that as Christians, we should be at the forefront of accepting and understanding and embracing these ambiguities and flexibilities because we are confronted with them constantly, in the irreconcilable paradox that is the Holy Trinity. So rather than trying to analyse and dissect the nature of God, we should rather learn to love the complex and ambiguous God who has poured their love into our complex and ambiguous life themselves.
Amen

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Now, and yet to come

Ascension Sunday, 2022. Year C.

Readings: Acts 16:16-34 & John 17.20-26.

May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all our hearts be acceptable in your sight, O Lord, our refuge and our redeemer. 

Ascension Sunday is one of the two liminal points in the church calendar, the other being Holy Saturday.   Like Holy Saturday we are caught between despair and joy.  I don’t know if the despair felt less for the disciples on Ascension day than it had done on Good Friday – obviously witnessing Jesus coming in glory to the father must have been a much more uplifting experience than seeing him flogged, tortured and nailed to a cross.  But at the same time, the sense of loss must still have been extreme.  The kingdom had come with Jesus, and then been snatched away from them on Good Friday, only to return triumphant on Easter Sunday.  Now, a mere forty days later, Jesus was leaving them again.  They would be excused for being overwhelmed by the speed at which events were taking place, and confused as to how all this fitted in with the prophecies that they had been brought up with, and those that Jesus had told them as well. 

Why, I imagine they must have thought, why do we have to wait? 

And that is the question that we are still asking ourselves. 

We also live in a liminal point.  The kingdom is here, amongst us, and yet it is also yet to come. 

Why are we still waiting for the coming of the kingdom?  Why is the whole world not yet transformed by the glory of God into the creation that was originally intended?  Indeed, as we look around, we could be forgiven for feeling that the state of creation is regressing, rather than advancing. 

Paul, cast into prison with Silas, would undoubtedly have agreed.  Why is everyone resisting the good news so hard.   

Much of Paul’s theology revolves around demonstrating that Jesus is the Christ, the anointed Messiah, but that the consequence of that messianic revelation is not what he and the other Jews had expected it to be. 

Because Paul focusses in on how Jesus’ death and resurrection have affected us, especially us Gentiles who are not part of God’s covenants with Abraham and Moses, because of his focus on the traditional western Christian themes of atonement and substitution, I feel we can have an unhelpful and possibly unhealthy concern about our personal salvation. 

And yet Jesus says, in John’s words, ‘I ask not only on behalf of these (the disciples at the last supper, excluding Judas who has already left), not only on behalf of these, but also on behalf of those who believe in me through their word (that’s us), that they may all be one.’ 

And later – ‘The glory which you have given me I have given them, so that they may be one, as we are one.’ 

So we are all in this together.  God’s kingdom will be a community. 

That isn’t to say that we will lose our individuality, but our individuality will be less important than our commonality.  Not a message that chimes with 21st century western thought.  

And God loves all of his creation, no matter how flawed and broken it is. 

There can be a temptation to see this life as a time of trial, a test almost, that we have to pass in order to get into heaven.  

But God never intending this world to be a test for us.  He created the world good and whole, and made Adam and Eve to enjoy it in his own image and glory.  The world was created to be enjoyed and cared for, by us.  Not because God needed to create it, but because he chose to create it and us, and to share his love with us 

That creation went wrong, and God seeks, through us, to repair and restore it.   

Progressively he has sought to repair it, through his covenant with Noah, through his covenant with Abraham, and his covenant with Moses.  Each time, we have proven to be more stubborn than God hoped we would be, and so creation has proved more difficult to fix. 

Finally, God played his trump card.  He would himself intervene to save creation, by sending his Son to show us what the right creation looked like.  In Jesus, we would be able to see the glory of God, and would know what we were originally called to be. 

And in addition, Jesus would call in all the negativity of creation, all the darkest emotions of anger and hatred, let them do their worst on him, and then three days later, show that they had no power at all over God. 

But showing that these forces of evil are powerless against God doesn’t make them go away.  And there is still evil in the world, as we can see all around us.  

These forces still have power over us, especially if we try to resist them in our own power, rather than trusting in God. 

These powers throw Paul and Silas into jail.   

It is characteristic of this liminal time that we live in, that they, like Peter on another occasion, escape, but many other apostles and Christians did not escape.  Why are Peter and Paul saved, while James for example, is cast into prison and executed? 

Why are nineteen innocent children killed by a deranged teenager in Texas?  I say deranged, but is that the explanation?  Speaking of evil isn’t very fashionable at the moment – we try to find reasons for things, excuses from childhood or upbringing.  Nurture over nature.  And certainly circumstances can cause us to be broken; can tempt us to do the wrong thing.  Adam and Eve certainly discovered that.  Their nature was good, but circumstances and others tempted them to do wrong.  But even if it is all circumstances, we can still talk of evil pervading the world, even if it is of our own making. 

But why is it there?  Why create a creation with the capacity for wrong? 

God doesn’t have to explain himself to us.  It may be a miracle that recued Paul and Silas from prison, but it wasn’t a miracle that put them in prison.  God didn’t beat and imprison them, we did in our pride and arrogance and self-indulgence.  Yes, God permits us to be who we are, and we can ask other questions about why that is, but God does not compel us to be sinful.  We do that to ourselves. 

We, in a wide sense, permit our self-indulgence of wanting to own guns become more important to us than the Gospel message of caring for others.  We may say that here, in this country, we don’t, but we are all one before God.  We cannot just turn our backs on the sins and suffering of others.  We are all in this together. 

So the question is not why we are still in this liminal period of waiting for the fullness of the Kingdom of God. 

We are still in this period because creation still needs to be remade, and God, who made us as the crowning glory of his creation, wants to glorify us yet further by making us part of the remaking of creation.  Not in a narrow, you broke it, you own it way, but because he wants to reaffirm us as the image of God. 

We are part of the problem, and part of the solution.  Certainly not the whole solution – only God can show us what the true rightness of creation is, which he did in his Son. 

So we do not know why we wait for the coming Kingdom, but we do know that it is also already here, in the person of Jesus Christ.  

We do not know why we wait, but we do know that while we do, we are not passive observers, but active participants. 

We do not know why we wait, but like the disciples, we wait in the knowledge that God so loved the world that he gave us his only Son.  We know that the outcome is settled, the victory is won, the new creation will come. 

Amen. 

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Time and eternity

Palm Sunday, 2022. BCP Lectionary.

This sermon was for a BCP service on Palm Sunday, so the Gospel reading was Matthew 27:1-54, which is his account of the trial and crucifixion of Jesus.

Reading the Gospel passage we have just heard made me think when I first heard it about the nature of time, and how we perceive it. Just last Friday, I was being interviewed by HR and being asked when certain events had occurred, and I realised that there were some events where I couldn’t remember if they had happened in August 2021 or August 2020. I suspect I am not the only person in that situation, where lockdown has compressed the whole feeling of time over the last couple of years?
But why did this passage provoke thoughts of time, even before that uncomfortable interview?
I think it is partially because this passage feels like it is being read at the wrong time. This is Palm Sunday – Jesus’ triumphant entry into Jerusalem as the messiah, waved and cheered on by throngs of people confident that the day of the Lord had arrived.
Yet our reading, by the vagaries of the BCP lectionary, is a whistle-stop account of the passion and crucifixion. It’s too early to be reading this – this should be next Friday…
Sometimes the lectionary does this because we are trying to compress the whole of history into a single calendar year each year. The Annunciation, biologically correctly nine months before Christmas, always seems uncomfortably close to Easter.
But in the case of Easter, there is no compression of time. We do go from triumph to despair and back again in the space of one week. Creation and salvation are both encompassed in seven days…
How can events move so quickly, we might think, and yet we live in an era where this is exactly what is happening. Events develop with such speed, that time seems to move faster and faster. The pace of modern life is relentless, always moving on, chewing up the next event and the next.
It makes it a sobering thought then that the war in Ukraine is in its sixth week already, and also both terrible and gratifying that it is still making headlines. Terrible because the headlines are driven by death and destruction on a scale that we are not used to in Europe in the 21st century, gratifying that such atrocities still have the capacity to shock us, even if it is only because they are so close to home. Because there are other wars going on, right now, but further away, which have faded from our consciousness; where the compassion fatigue has set in. It is a depressing reality that ‘the west’ is complicit in so many of them, but if the message of Easter is anything, it is a message that we are always all complicit in all the affairs of the world.
The Easter story is terrifyingly relevant even in a secular way today – it encompasses so much of the political behaviours that we still see in the world.
We see the fickleness of the people – one day saluting Jesus as a hero and king, and four days latter calling for his death. Led not by their own reason, but by rumour and propaganda.
We see the temple leaders stirring up this mob with rhetoric and lies, twisting events to their own profit and ends.
We see Pilate, the absolute governor, struggling to control events that he does not understand. Taking the easy route out even when he knows it to be wrong. Expediency trumping truth.
Today we see Patriarch Kiril, blessing a war against other Christians as a holy war – similarly twisting events to bloster his own power rather than listening to the gospel message.
We see President Putin similarly struggling to control the whirlwind that he has unleashed, and that he does not understand, or want to understand.
Easter is a time of despair, and of hope. Death and resurrection. Destruction and renewal.
Let us pray this Easter, all the more, for peace in our world. The peace that we cannot cannot bring, but that only God can provide.
Amen.