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C Sunday after Ascension	Acts 1: 1-11 and Luke 24:44-53
One of my prized possessions as a young child was an illustrated children's Bible. It was replete with pictures of biblical scenes and personalities. I would read the text primarily to make sense of the illustrations. Two illustrations spring immediately to mind. The first was the strapping image of Samson strapped to the pillars of a temple dedicated to the Philistine God, Dagon. You may recall that Samson, in an awesome act of self-sacrifice, sends the Temple crashing down in an act of Herculean strength. The second illustration that springs to mind is one of the Ascension. Jesus is depicted launching off into heaven rather like a NASA space rocket, his hands and feet bearing the scars of his crucifixion, with one the band of disciples desperately grasping for his foot in the hope of keeping Jesus securely anchored to earth. The Ascension of Jesus is one of the most puzzling events in the New Testament. Most modern Christians tend to be rather ambivalent about the Ascension, perhaps rather embarrassed by its overt supernaturalism. There seems to be something faintly ridiculous about the image of a man so manifestly defying the laws of gravity in order to take up an exalted position at the right hand of God the Father. This ambivalence is perhaps reflected in the status the Church has accorded it in the Church calendar. It's true that it falls on a Thursday because the Church has staged it forty days after Jesus' resurrection. But you would have thought that as an article of faith enshrined in the Creeds it deserved a special Sunday of its own. I want to suggest that our supernaturalistic 'take on the Ascension is a misleading distortion of its true significance and that the Ascension has a great deal to teach us about the nature of Christian hope. The picture we have of the Ascension is greatly influenced by the late medieval three-layered picture of the universe with hell "down there", earth "up here" where we are, and heaven "up there" somewhere. The difficulty with his view is that it assumes that the human challenge is simply to avoid going "down there" and to ensure that we "up here" leave "up here" and somehow get "up there" with God. This is not only a spatial distortion of the truth, but also a theological distortion. And this theological distortion is what I want briefly to address. In order to understand the meaning of the Ascension, we need to have right map of the Universe. And the right map of the Universe is to be drawn from the first Temple of Jerusalem. This was the Temple which was build by Solomon in Jerusalem in about 950 BCE and was severely damaged by the Babylonians 350 years later. The Temple itself was modelled on the Days of Creation. Day One represented the most important part of the Temple was the Holy of Holies, the inner sanctum of the Temple, which contained the throne of God, the hidden heart of creation, the source of life. The Holy of Holies was where ancient Jews believed God dwelt. The inner sanctum of the Temple symbolically lay beyond space and time. Separating the Holy of Holies, the place beyond space and time, from the rest of the Temple was the Temple veil, the huge curtain that reached from ceiling to floor. This curtain represented the material creation, the web of matter that concealed the throne of God from human perception. Beyond the veil were distributed a number of Temple features which represented the other Days of Creations such as the table for the bread, the seven branched lamb, the altar of burnt offering and the High Priest himself, how alone, on the Day of Atonement alone, was permitted to enter beyond the veil, and address the throne of God Himself. The High Priest, one of whose titles was 'servant' would offer himself as a self-offering because of which the High Priest was exalted to the highest place 'which is the throne of God'. The High Priest would then re-emerge from beyond the veil to complete the atonement and to bring the judgment. Paul's great hymn in Philippians 2 is really a 'high priestly' movement. We read that Jesus takes the form of servant; therefore he is exalted to the highest place where all creation worships him. The High Priest who represents humanity which is created on the Sixth Day of Creation, as creation's 'crown', moves through space and time to the place which lies beyond space and time, beyond material creation, i.e. beyond the veil, where he is exalted in an act of self-offering, and returns, through the veil to complete the work of atonement. I believe that Luke is describing the Ascension as the moment when the great High Priest returns to the holy of holies. Jesus blessed the disciples and was taken into heaven. A cloud takes them from their sight. This is temple imagery - the high priest entering the holy of holies surrounded by incense. The Ascension is the moment when Jesus, passes from a particular time and place in the visible creation into the eternal present beyond the veil. We should recall that for Luke the Ascension is the pivot on which his Gospel turns. The story is there at the end of Luke's Gospel; it is there again at the beginning of Acts. The Ascension is the exodus which, as we read in Luke's Transfiguration story, Jesus is to accomplish at Jerusalem. The Gospel of Luke ends and the Book of Acts begins with the disciples worshipping in the Temple. Why should the Ascension matter? For a number of reasons: Firstly, because it reveals that the atoning work of Christ - the great high priest - has now been completed and that creation which was blocked by sin can now begin to flow freely once more from beyond the veil - which has been rent asunder - from head to foot - as a result of that atoning work. Secondly, because it reveals to us that heaven and earth are not two jointly exhaustive mutually exclusive spheres which somehow we have to get from one to the other. The Ascension is the harbinger of the 'new heaven and the new earth' which as the Book of Revelation makes clear, are one and the same thing. There is now an unhindered interpenetration between the eternal present beyond the veil and the economy of space and time. Thirdly, because it reveals to us that we have a part to play in the enablement of the free flow of creation. We are born again of water and of Spirit. It is through the Spirit that we enact the atoning work of Christ in transformed lives, transformed communities and the engendering of that ecology of justice, peace and righteousness that Christ's atoning work has made possible. This is made possible above all by undergoing the forgiveness that has come at us through the crucified one, so that we are empowered to forgive others as we ourselves have been forgiven. We can see now why Jesus had to go away to be with his Father in order that the Spirit might come. And with the Spirit all things are possible and the world is not enough. AMEN.
Proverbs 8:22-31; John 16: 12-15 Who do we think God is?	Trinity Sunday 30th May 2010
One of the fascinating aspects of studying history is learning the origins of words and concepts we now take for granted. The word 'person' is a case in point. Most of us, when we think of a person, we think of an individual, 'one-brain-in-one-body', a single mind within a clearly circumscribed continuum of skin, 'an individual substance with a rational nature' as one ancient Christian philosopher put it. In our modern understanding, persons are by definition separate beings, holding each other, as it were, at arm's length, until they choose, if it suits them, to come up close to another face-to-face. Margaret Thatcher was very much of this view when she once famously said that "there was no such thing as society, there are individual men and women." But the language of'' personhood' first emerged in the technical debates in the early Church that surrounded the question 'who do we think God is'? And the answer the Church came up with was in a nutshell 'God is three persons in one substance or one substance in three persons'. The language however was slippery and has caused endless problems ever since. The English word person derives from the Latin word persona which originally meant an actors mask. This was then extended to mean the character that lay behind the mask, and then extended further still to mean the human individual as it presents itself to others. The other word the early Church used was the Latin word substantia , which we translate in English as 'standing under' or foundation, or what underlies everything. And in the attempt to answer the question, who do we think God is, the church took up this vocabulary in order to say that the Father, Son and Holy Spirit each had distinct identities, but were not individual substances, but of one being with each other. This may all sound rather mind-bending, but it is important to remember that what we call the doctrine of the Trinity was not something thought up by clever scholars but something that grew out of the Christian experience of worship. From the very beginning, the church's pattern of prayer was to the Father, through the Son, in the Holy Spirit. And from the outset Christians attempted with the best language they had available to them to give an account of who the God was to whom they prayed. And they very quickly discovered that even the best most precise language available fell short of the reality they were falteringly trying to express in words. The great St. Augustine, said, "We say three persons, not because that expresses just what we want to say, but because we must say something." However intractable the reality was they were trying to describe, the early Christians were clear about two things: firstly, that God was not simply a monad - a simple unit; secondly, that the Father, Son and Holy Spirit were not three separate gods. The truth lay somewhere in-between, and there were sometimes vicious debates about where in-between the truth was, with the opposing Christian parties accusing each other of not actually being in-between but somewhere at the extremes. This is a cheap, but rhetorically effective, debating strategy. We may with over fifteen hundred years of hindsight regard these as rather pedantic debates, but for the early Christians, the question, who do we think God is, was of unsurpassable importance. And as modern Christians, I would like to suggest that it's also the most important question we can ask. When we pray to the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, who is it that we address our prayers to? Our reading from the book of Proverbs gives us a clue. The clue is that the God to whom the biblical tradition testifies is a God who is in relation with the world because he created the world. Moreover, the God who created the world continues to be in relationship with it because in spite of its fallen-ness he delights in it. The figure of Wisdom is of key importance here. Wisdom is presented in strikingly personal and feminine terms, as God's companion and 'master worker'. Wisdom is presented as a key agency in God's creative work, a trained architect who was beside God before God set about creating the foundations of the universe, setting down boundaries and giving the world shape. So Wisdom becomes a key mediator in God's relations to the world, and it is in reflection on God's relationship to the world that the seeds of the doctrine of the Trinity are to be found. In the Christian experience of worship, this line of reflection is taken a stage further. In the Prologue to John's Gospel (John 1:1-14), Jesus is called the logos of God, the Word of God. We read that the Word of God, who in the beginning was with God, comes into the world and literally 'tabernacles' with humanity. This passage has remarkable similarities with a piece of inter-testamental literature (Wisdom 24) which speaks of Wisdom coming down and tabernacling with Israel. The implication in John's Gospel is that in Jesus Christ, the Son of God, the two key agencies mediating God's relationship with the world - God's Word and God's Wisdom - become flesh in the unique person of Jesus Christ. This leads to a startling conclusion, that the Creator God, the God of the Universe, has identified himself completely with what he has created, by becoming flesh and dwelling with humanity. God's Word and God's Wisdom are so intensified that they take human form in the person of Jesus Christ the Son of God. Another key agency mediating God's relationship to the world is the Spirit. At the start of the Book of Genesis, it is the Spirit of God that hovers over the waters of chaos before God utters the created order into being, "Let there be light". In our Gospel reading, the Spirit brings forth fresh light from the word of God and enlivens the word of the readers. The Spirit is the agency of God's continuing and continual creative act taking what belongs to the Father and the Son and declaring it to the Christian community. The Spirit testifies to the mutuality and inter-dependency of the relationship between Father, Son and Holy Spirit. So who do we think God is? The answer can't be answered in the terms in which the question is put. The doctrine of the Trinity is a mystery, not simply, in that it can't be explained adequately with the resources of human language. It is a mystery also in the sense that it is a reality which must be entered and experienced in order to be known. This is why worship is of such fundamental importance. For the doctrine of the Trinity as it is articulated in the Creeds is the Church's best, albeit, inadequate attempt to articulate what it is that Christians do when they pray and , in that light, to articulate who it is we think God is. AMEN.
Easter 3	18th April
There is a rather grisly story told of an Anglo-Saxon king who met a martyr's death. After leading a devout life, his enemies conspired against him and murdered him. They then cut up his body into little pieces and buried them at the four corners of the kingdom. They died this in order to make it much more difficult on the Day of Resurrection to reconstitute the disparately distributed body parts into the personal form of the martyred king. The king's fate is the ultimate example of double-jeopardy. It's bad enough to suffer brutal murder by your enemies, let alone have your spiritual fate jeopardised by having your mortal remains scattered across the country. At the heart of Christianity lies the difficult and controversial belief that human beings survive death. The Apostle Paul provides the snappiest summary of this core Christian doctrine in his First Letter to the Corinthians" "For I handed on to you as of first importance what I in turn had received: that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures, and that he was buried, and that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the scriptures, and that he appeared to Cephas, then to the twelve Then he appeared to more than five hundred brothers and sisters at one time, most of whom are still alive, though some have died. Then he appeared to James, then to all the apostles. Last of all, as to one untimely born, he appeared also to me." Paul was adamant that without resurrection belief, Christianity was pointless: "If Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile and you are still in your sins". Neither Paul nor the Gospels make it clear how precisely the dead are raised, but they are agreed that it is in some sense a bodily resurrection, though not necessarily in the stringently physicalist terms of Anglo-Saxon belief. As I have pointed out in a previous sermon, the resurrection and post-resurrection stories have mysterious and elusive features. Jesus is recognizable but not immediately. He has a bodily life as his breakfast on the lakeside in Galilee testifies, but he can walk through walls. His body bears the scars of his earthly life, but they are no longer sources of suffering. The disciples are able to address Jesus and engage him, but somehow Jesus remains beyond their grasp. The disciples recognise that the post-Easter Jesus is the same Jesus whose earthly life they shared, whose ministry they supported, and whose death they witnessed. But he is somehow radically transformed. What are we to make of the centrality of resurrection belief to Christian faith? For many, the notion of life after death is absurd. This is based on the philosophical conviction that dead people simply don't rise again. It may be supplemented by the moral conviction that too much focus on an afterlife detracts from the more serious business of making the most of what we have been given while we are still alive on earth. The post-resurrection appearances can be explained away in mythological or psychological terms and should not be interpreted as part of history. And anyway, you are led into absurdity the moment you begin to speculate on the nature of a resurrection body. The resurrection belief which forms the core of Christian faith is quite simply unbelievable. There are a number of things I would like to say in response: Firstly, the notion of resurrection is absurd unless you first belief in a created order in which resurrection is possible. The key distinction within Christian theology is not between the spiritual and the material, as many people would have it, but between the Creator and Creation. God created the world 'out of nothing' (ex nihilo) and declared it very good. And to crown his creative work, God created humanity, out of the dust of the earth, into which he breathed the breath of life (in Hebrew nephesh). Human beings are neither purely spiritual beings like the angels, nor purely material beings, but integrated totalities of body, mind and spirit. When Paul writes of the struggle between spirit (pneuma) and flesh (sarx), he is not distinguishing spirituality from materiality, but rather contrasting a life lived for God body mind and spirit and a life lived contrary to God -body mind and spirit. The resurrection is best understood as a re-creation in which God by an act of power raised Jesus and raises us body mind and spirit from the dead. Secondly, the notion of resurrection also needs to be understood in the context of God's plan for creation. In addition to the rather unfortunate distinction we've drawn between the spiritual and the material is another between earth and heaven - with earth being down here and heaven being an otherworldly kingdom bearing very little resemblance to the one we now inhabit. This is what we assume when we accuse some dopey vicars of being 'so heavenly-minded, they're of no earthly use'. Jews in the time of Jesus would not have thought like this. For Jews, the kingdom of God or the kingdom of heaven was simply where God was present. And they hoped that when the Messiah came, God would transform the present order into a new order -in a radically transformed world. When Paul exclaimed that in the resurrection of Jesus "the old has passed away, the new has come", he was talking about the reality of a radically transformed world, and a radically transformed existence, lived in the intimate presence of God. Thirdly, what was extraordinary for many Jews about claims for Jesus' resurrection wasn't the fact of it, but rather the timing. Many pious Jews expected a general resurrection at the end of time - meaning the world as they knew it. What they didn't expect was the claim that someone -Jesus of Nazareth - had pre-empted that general resurrection at half-time, as it were. Why does all this matter? It matters because claims about resurrection challenge us to reflect more deeply upon the nature of the world we believe ourselves to inhabit. And I am convinced that many of the difficulties that people have about notions of resurrection stem from views about the universe and the nature of being human that renders resurrection belief incredible or unintelligible. If you believe, as many of the ancient Greeks did, that the universe has always existed, and that humans are either essentially spiritual or essentially material then your sense of incredulity is wholly understandable. For my part, there is too much in the Gospel narrative to be explained, simply to explain it away. Ultimately, the Gospel story is about love. God by his very nature is love. The world that he created is God's love made concrete. The creation of human beings with conscious bodily lives was purposed by love. Perhaps our supreme purpose as human beings is to grow in our capacity for love. One of the early church fathers eschewing the intensely physicalist view of the resurrection of the Anglo-Saxons argued that what God resurrections is our personal form or eikon which is by degrees formed by love which has the everlasting property. And that therefore our lives are a kind of pedagogy in which we allow ourselves to be formed by love and to form others through the love we have for them. This is perhaps why another church father called our bodily lives a laboratory of the resurrection. My prayer is that we would model in our personal lives and our lives together the love that is by its very nature survives the disintegration of our earthly bodies and shapes the form of our resurrection bodies. These will bear the marks of our earthly lives, but they will be radically transformed as Jesus' own body was. AMEN
Easter C - John 21:1-18	4th April 2010
One striking feature of the Easter story is the variety of responses to the presence of the risen Jesus. We are told at the end of Matthew's gospel that while many believed, some doubted (Matt. 28:17). One can see Jesus and still doubt. Even so-called Doubting Thomas says, "Lord is it really you", when he encounters the incontrovertible physical presence of Jesus. We are not told whether Thomas takes up Jesus' empiricist challenge to insert his fingers into his wounds. Nevertheless, he falls to his knees and declares "My Lord and my God!" Throughout John's gospel there is a great deal of emphasis on "seeing and believing". But John's "seeing and "believing" is not of the "I'll believe it when I see it" variety. It's something more profound, more akin to 'recognition', the "penny dropping", a sudden clarity of vision. The great question posed by the Easter story is how we come to see the Risen Lord, to become aware that he accompanies us, to grasp hold of his hand. What separates the believer from the unbeliever? One popular answer to that question is based on evidence. Some Christians claim that the Resurrection was a historical event to which we can apply tough rational criteria, the wise man proportioning his belief to the evidence. If we could apply the same level of rational scrutiny of the Resurrection as we do to other historical events, then we would surely come to believe that the Resurrection was true. There are trunk loads of books on the evidence for the resurrection, mostly written by Christian lawyers, which seek to provide a knock-down argument for the truth of Christianity's central claim. But things are not quite that simple, because it doesn't account for the variety of responses that encounter with the Risen Jesus evoked. Another answer to the question tries to address the problems with the first. If we base our belief solely on the evidence, we will never achieve certainty because there will always be room for obscurity, error and doubt about the evidence. Instead we must through faith, leap into the void and enter into a new world. There is no substitute for this leap of faith because it is our only means of achieving certitude. The trouble with this answer is that is seems implausible. It seems to be a form of 'blind faith' which isn't as concerned with the evidence as it should be. How many of us know people who crave faith, but say rather wistfully that they simply don't have it. "I wish I had your faith" None of these answers captures the mysterious and elusive element of our gospel reading this morning. Mary Magdalene turns a number of times before she recognises the risen Christ. At first, she mistakes him for the gardener, and she finally responds to the calling of her name. Mary turns, and then turns again. She gradually comes to believe before the penny drops. The same mysterious process is at work in the story of the journey to Emmaus. There Jesus' companions gradually come to believe as he accompanies them, relates the whole history of Israel as the hearts burn within them, before the penny finally drops at nightfall when they break bread together. Recognising Jesus is not simply about evidence or a 'work' of faith, but about a process of spiritual change in which we learn to see 'Christ aright'. Recognizing Christ is not simply about being presented with the brute fact of Jesus' resurrected presence, but involves a process of moral and spiritual preparation, in another words, a great deal of hard work. In his poem, Suddenly, R.S. Thomas talks about discerning truth 'not through the eye only' but 'with the whole of our being'. Mary's multiple 'turning' and the physical progress of the companions towards Emmaus hint at the fact that we simply can't make sense of the Christian faith unless we first begin to practice the Christian faith. It is in the practice of the faith - the engagement of our whole being especially our bodies- that we become apt to discern Christ's risen presence. This supplies us with a new perspective on worship and Christian practice. Our participation in the liturgy, our effort to cultivate the Christian virtues, is not simply responses to our prior beliefs, but the context in which those beliefs become intelligible and our faith more securely anchored. I think it is deeply significant that it is in the context of the breaking of bread that the Emmaus companions recognize Jesus, who, intriguingly, promptly disappears from their midst. The breaking of the bread occurs at the completion of a day of physical and spiritual pilgrimage imbued with the exposition of Israel's story and the Messiah's place in that story. Mary Magdalene, who I identify with Mary of Bethany, seems to get the plot earliest, pouring the alabaster jar of pure spikenard onto Jesus' feet, in service to Jesus and in preparation for his burial. Her powers of discernment seem more advanced than those of the other disciples and her status as the first witness to the Resurrection not at all surprising. The journalist John Cornwell interviewed the novelist Graham Greene shortly before Greene's death. He wanted to get some purchase on Greene's religious views. He asked him, 'Do you believe in God?' "No", Greene replied, rather waspishly. 'Do you believe in Jesus Christ?" "No" he replied again apodictically. 'Then what do you believe?' Cornwell asked. "Well I sort of believe in the resurrection?" Greene replied. "I have doubted many things, but now I have begun to doubt my doubts." This raises a rather astonishing thought that doubt far from being the enemy of faith provides the necessary grist. It also seems to make better sense of the way many of us quite naturally oscillate on the borderlands of faith and agnosticism. Cornwell makes a telling observation about the atheistic certainties of Richard Dawkins and his ilk. These so-called "new atheists' seem to be incapable of faith, he suggests, because they seem to be incapable of doubt and therefore incapable of doubting doubt, which is the path to a securely anchored faith. The great Archbishop of Canterbury, St. Anselm, wrote about 'faith seeking understanding'. The striking feature of Anselm's best thought is that it emerges out of prayer and worship. His Christian understanding emerges from his Christian practice. If we want to see the risen Christ, if we want to grasp hold of him, then we must begin the hard work of seeing Christ aright. This means allowing ourselves to be drawn more deeply into the life of God through prayer, through public worship, especially the breaking of bread, through listening to Israel's story and the place of Israel's Messiah within it and through the faltering effort to lead a Christian life. We must discipline ourselves to discern truth with the whole of our being and not through the eye only. In this way, we make ourselves apt to recognize the risen Christ, who calls us by name, and invites us to drop to our knees declaring "My Lord and my God. AMEN.
Resurrection: "Beshti and Behud: A Voice for the Silenced"	Easter 2 11th April
Today is the Second Sunday of Easter and we are still basking in the early sunshine of Eastertide, celebrating the Risen Christ, marvelling at how God raised him - breaking the power of dfeath and evil, and liberating a fresh upsurge of hope, poptential and expectation. "Death has lost its sting", and God has given him the victory. And is it not the case that there is nothing quite like the proclamation of the Risen Christ for rediscovering the 'yes factor' of our faith and for our living, that can so easily desert us. And it would seem to me that this 'yes factor' is especially alive and vibrant in the early chapters of the Acts of the Apostles, where our first reading is located - although from its six short verses we catch only a limited sense of the energy and vibrancy of what is going on. This is mostly because it describes an instance of conflict with the religious hierarchy. Because in Acts Ch.5 vv.27-32, Peter and John are brought before the council. The incident comes, however, in the middle of a section that describes the activity of the earliest Christians in Jerusalem after the resurrection, the ascension and the giving of the Spirit at Pentecost. It pictures the believers going in and out of the temple to pray on a daily basis; it refers to how Peter, John and perhaps others too performed healings, in particular of the man lame at birth who was sat at the Beautiful Gate, and the casting out of unclean spirits. What is happening is that in the power of the Spirit and in the name of the risen Jesus, the disciples are carrying on the work of Jesus, just as he said they would! There is a terrific sense of resurrection energy bursting out in encounters and conversions and the growing of confidence and the taking of responsibility. The mission, however, is not without its sharp and stark challenges. The reality of being empowered 'to do as he did', is accompanied by opposition. The incident in Acts 5 is the second time that Peter and John are arrested and brought before the council (just as Jesus was) and both times they end up in the temple prison. On the second occasion they do not get let off without a beating. In addition, this whole section of Acts Chs 2-7 culminates in the incident of the martyrdom of Stephen, whose stoning and death contain many strong echoes of Jesus' own death. And yet, the overwhelming impact of Acts Chs 2-7 is of disciples living out their resurrection faith, and doing so out of the empowering conviction of the presence and power of the Risen Christ, given through the Spirit. Unquestionably, in my opinion, we should allow ourselves to draw on the power of these stories in our own desires to discover what the Risen Christ is doing in our midst, and how we can become part of that. On a different tack, some of you will remember a play that came to Birmingham just over 5 years ago called 'Beshti'. It was by a Sikh woman called Gurpreet Bhatti and it became quickly notorious because protests outside the theatre on the first night resulted in the play not being staged, and the total run being cancelled. (I wonder if you remember it??...) Well, there may also be some here who like me have recently seen her new play called 'Behud'. It closed at the Belgrade last night after a two week run. (Did anyone see it??...) Well, the reason I mention it is that 'Behud', the new play, was in fact a telling of the story of how 'Beshti', the original play, was received on its first fateful opening night in December 2004, and what went on in the process of it being first challenged and then cancelled; because when I thought about it, and also experienced the play itself, the retelling of the Besthi story in Behud struck me as a powerful example of, if not resurrection, the unstoppability of a true passion for life and truth: which is a very close second. It is as though the playwright was saying, emphatically, that Beshti was not going to be the last word: just as we would say of the death and resurrection, that evil was not going to have the last word on Jesus. The controversy of the first play, as many will know, was that it involved the portrayal of abuse against women taking place in a Sikh Gurdwara - a fictitious Gurdwara of course, (or was it?..): either way, this was sufficient to incite the protest and indeed fury of many in the local Sikh communities ( and some from further afield) - how could someone write about such things happening in a Gurdwara, and a member of the Sikh community to boot?! (It was alleged that if the story had been set in a community hall no offence would have been taken, but I am not so sure.) And it was these voices of protest that ultimately prevailed and caused Gurpreet Bhatti's voice to be silenced. What has happened, of course, is that she has not allowed herself to be silenced, and has found a context in which to dramatise the very issues that sabotaged her first play - and she has done so very successfully in my opinion. The new play, Behud, lays out a number of tensions that surrounded the controversy: 1. The tension, for example, between an older generation of Sikhs whose perseverance over years and whose work with local councillors, or as local councillors, has secured their interests within localities on the one hand, and a younger generation of British born Sikhs on the other hand, who are much more vocal, less inclined to compromise and more assertive about their rightful place in British society: the old guard and the new guard; yet both somehow uneasy about the play Beshti. 2. Another tension was highlighted between liberal western culture, as expressed through the theatre, that prizes freedom of expression of a particular kind, over against a desire within the minority community (Sikhs in Britain) to assert its right to opt out of this set of western cultural assumptions and to be allowed to present its own version of itself on its own terms. Underlying this was the sense for many that the playwright, although a Sikh herself, had sold out to dominant cultural modes of expression. 3. There was then the tension, to my mind very significant, surrounding the acceptability of a woman making theses statements. Among the male Sikh players in the drama, most wanted to at least defame her, some to eliminate her; one or two wanted to protect her from herself. All displayed variants on the theme of male patronage, from the relatively benign to the positively threatening. 4. Finally, there was the tension that existed for the city council as sponsor of the arts: did it owe more to the theatre as a longstanding vehicle for providing what was in the end a public service, which should not be allowed to be compromised by threats or public disease; or did it owe more to its standing with the majority voice of a growing Sikh community, (and the Sikh vote!), and its cross cultural or multicultural credentials? Interestingly, it was the latter to which the council swung! The play Behud posed the question, therefore, 'Was Beshti, the original play, brought down and silenced' (a) by the majority voice of a Sikh community unwilling to suffer exposure or risk its positioning in present society? (b) Or was it the arrogance of liberal culture in assuming that its modes of expression should automatically be the right vehicle for the airing of all or any issues, including these? (c) Or was it male hegemony, once again unwilling for women to transgress proscribed roles and acquire equality at the table of adult discourse in this case out in the public square? (d) Or was it the bald matter of 'push and shove' in the marketplace of local financial and political interests? My point here is not to answer that question - any more than the play does - but to try and make a connection with the theme of resurrection; and to simply observe that the most vulnerable voice within that complex situation, namely the voice of the playwright, a Sikh woman, was bold enough and sufficiently convicted to rise again from the ashes of Beshti and produce Behud! And this alerts me, and perhaps alerts us all this morning, to a connected matter about resurrection, which is this: When Jesus is raised form the dead, who's doing the cheering and the shouting? Or, to put it another way, for whom is resurrection really brilliant news?!! Because in the story, it's the group of very ordinary Galilean folk locked in a house in fear of their lives, whom we meet this morning in John Ch 20 on the evening of the first day! These are of course the same people who marched into Jerusalem in that alternative procession on Palm Sunday, behind the would-be prince of peace! They thought that their cause had been well and truly crushed. But now it was being given back to them! They were the dispossessed of Galilee who in Jesus had found a voice and a future, and even a kingdom! And now their confidence in him was vindicated. My contention would be that the ones who are cheering because Behud has risen up from the silencing of Beshti, are likewise a group of people who thought their cause had gone underground - oppressed women everywhere. And this leads me to a final thought to leave us with, which is that resurrection, - is not just about personal empowerment, although it is certainly that, and there is something in it for all of us; - nor is it only about community empowerment, although it is very much an occasion through which the community of faith is rejuvenated and reinvigorated, just as were the earliest communities of Christians in the Acts ; - but it is also about what I would call, transformative empowerment with a strong political dimension. Through its reversal of fortunes, and its victory for hope and its conquest of evil, resurrection usurps the power of every domination, oppression and subjugation: and that, surely, is something to cheer about and something worth living for! Amen.
Palm Sunday Sermon
There is a story told of a concert pianist. As he was about to walk on stage, there was a scream from the middle of the auditorium. A child had escaped from the company of its parents, raced down the central aisle, climbed onto the platform, climbed upon to the piano stool, and begun to tinkle away discordantly on the magnificent grand piano. The pianist, observing what had happened, and rather startled at first, drew his breath, walked across the stage, placed his large hands either side of the child's and began to play along, creating harmony out of her cacophony. The pianist had rejected two possibilities. He could have denied the child and had her forcibly removed from the stage. Alternatively, he could have simply accepted the child as she was and let her play away, no doubt to the great annoyance of the cultured audience who had paid good money to hear great music, and to the consternation of her embarrassed parents. Instead, he rejected both possibilities, took up the child's disjointed notes, and gave them meaning by placing them within a new framework. I will use this little illustration in a moment to give us some purchase on the meaning of Jesus' symbolic act on Palm Sunday. In our gospel reading, we are at the beginning of the Passover, the most sacred week of the Jewish year. Jesus rides donkey down the Mount of Olives - to the east of Jerusalem - and enters the city of David in triumphal procession, cheered on by his peasant followers. Jesus has now arrived in the city in which he will die a short while later. What isn't widely known, however, although it was common knowledge to all Jerusalemites, is that on the opposite side of the city from the west, Pontius Pilate, the Roman Governor, would have been entering Jerusalem at the head of a train of imperial cavalry and soldiers. He would have brought military reinforcements from his coastal headquarters at Caesarea Maritima in order to supplement the permanent garrison at Fortress Antonia, overlooking the Jewish temple and its courts. We therefore have two processions happening simultaneously. From the west, we have Pilate's procession, with its display of imperial power, but also imperial theology. We should recall that the Roman emperor was not simply a Ruler from Rome. He was also called "son of God", "lord", "and saviour"and" peace bringer". From the east, we have Jesus' "counter procession", with Jesus seated, not like Pilate on a warrior-steed, but on a colt, the foal of a donkey, surrounded by enthusiastic followers and sympathizers largely drawn from the peasant class. They spread their cloaks on the path and shout in praise of Jesus' powerful deed and the peace in heaven he brings. George Bradford Caird, a great biblical scholar, once remarked that it looked like a planned political demonstration. The meaning of the demonstration is clear. His followers and sympathizers would have immediately grasped the connection with kingship from their knowledge of the Old Testament, which Matthew's gospel makes explicit, "Tell the daughter of Zion, look, your king is coming to you, humble, and mounted on a donkey, and on a colt, the foal of a donkey" (Zech. 9:9; Matt. 21:5). Jesus is symbolically claiming to be a king. But what kind of king is Jesus claiming to be? Zechariah supplies a further specification: "He will cut off the chariot from Ephraim and the war-horse from Jerusalem; and the battle bow shall be cut off, and he shall command peace to the nations." What we have here are two alternative visions of the world based on two radically different concepts of peace. We have the Roman peace, which isn't peace at all, but rather, as someone once put it, "a lull between hostilities". Let us recall the words which the Roman historian Tacitus places into the mouth of the British chieftain Calcagus who says of the Romans, "They make a desert and call it peace." And we have Jesus' peace, God's perfect peace, inaugurated by the Prince of Peace, which endures forever. Zechariah promises that God will fight the nations and restore Jerusalem. Many faithful Jews before Jesus had tried to restore peace the Roman way. In the second century before the Christian era, the Jewish leader Simon Maccabeus restored Jewish independence by descending the Mount of Olives, entering Jerusalem, and defeating the pagan Greek emperor Antiochus Epiphanes IV. So did Menahem, leader of the "daggermen", in their ultimately futile quest to rid themselves of the Romans shortly after Jesus' death. Let us return to my initial illustration. Jesus does not deny the expectations that people have that Jesus will somehow change things for the better through his ministry. Jesus does not stay at home in the Galilean countryside. He is here in Jerusalem at the most feverish time in the Jewish year, as Pilate's reinforcements attest. But neither does Jesus simply accept the expectations that people have of great change through further deeds of power. He does not pander to their particular vision, whatever it was, of how they thought change was going to come about. Instead, rather like the concert pianist placing his hands on either side of the child's small cacophonous hands, Jesus places those expectations into the framework of a larger story, a larger framework of meaning. Yes, Jesus is king, but he is a different sort of king, and his kingdom, a different sort of kingdom. Yes, he is a bringer of peace, but of a different sort of peace to that of the Emperor or the Jewish conquerors of old. Jesus is a Servant King, which is a nonsensical idea within any framework other than that of the Gospel. This is the Gospel that testifies that God so loved the world that he sent his beloved Son in order to bring to all who receive him life and life in all its fullness. But this fullness comes at great cost which is the cost of love. It involves death on a Cross, on Calvary, through which, alone, everlasting peace is possible. What does the Cross achieve? Why is it necessary? How does it work? Theologians have been trying to answer that question for the last 2000 years. All I can offer by way of insight is my perception that the love which defeats death involves a form of 'unself-ing' through which we are liberated from our preoccupations with self, and made free to make ourselves 'for' others. And this freedom we have to be for others is what the NT by the royal law of Christ, which is the most profound fulfilment of our humanity. This is the liberation to which we look forward on Easter Day when we shall cry, "Christ is Risen, He is Risen Indeed Amen.
For all God’s worth	Lent 5C - 21st March 2010 - John 12:1-8
This week's gospel passage seems to be in rather poor taste for people badly hit by the recession. Recessionary times are all about austerity measures and tightening the financial belt. I have just read that Higher Education Funding Council (Hefce) have just cut the University budget by half-a-billion pounds. Warwick University just up the road will be taking a big hit. Jobs will be lost, research will be cut back, existing staff put under much greater pressure. At times like these, we are impatient of extravagance, especially profligate extravagance. We would probably regard it not only undesirable, but perhaps anti-Christian. But our current financial problems pale into insignificance against the economic conditions under which the vast majority suffered in Jesus' day. Most people in first century Palestine were very poor indeed, living at or below subsistence level, conditions which were not helped by the draconian taxes that the Roman occupying forces imposed on the native population. These people were known as the am' ha'aretz, or people of the land, a name which was used as a term of abuse by pious Jews, because these people were so poor they couldn't afford to do what they needed to do in order to fulfil the requirements of Jewish law. As if being poor weren't bad enough, they were also religiously ostracized because they couldn't fork out the few pence they needed to buy the sacrificial dove and pigeon. As a result, these people of the land were known as 'sinners'. And into this context of widespread abject poverty is set what would in the eyes of most Jews have been a scandalous story. Mary, or Mary of Bethany as she is sometimes called, is depicted in a dinner party setting with Jesus and her two siblings, the ever-industrious Martha, and the reclining, recently-resuscitated or resurrected Lazarus. She takes an alabaster jar of pure nard, and taking a pound of the costly perfume proceeds to anoint Jesus' feet with it. In Matthew and Mark, the story is also set in Bethany, but the anointing woman is unnamed. In Luke, the woman is also unnamed but is referred to as a "sinner". In the Roman Catholic tradition especially this sinner comes to be identified with both Mary of Bethany Mary Magdalene from whom, according to the Gospel accounts, Jesus expelled a rather large number of demons. Whoever she was, the woman performs an act of outrageous financial profligacy. Pure nard, or spikenard, was incredibly expensive partly because it was so difficult to get hold of. Spikenard is a flowering plant of the Valerian family that grows in the Himalayas on the Indian, Chinese and Nepalese sides. It grows to about a metre in height and has pink bell-shaped flowers. Its underground stems or rhizomes can be crushed and distilled into an intensely aromatic amber-coloured essential oil, very thick in consistency. Nard was, and is, used, as perfume, incense (it was used in the Jerusalem Temple), a sedative, and a remedy for insomnia, birth difficulties and other minor ailments. Judas, who was the apostolic treasurer, reckoned it should have been sold for three hundred denarii's and given to the poor, about a year's wages for the average agricultural worker, who received 1 denarius for 12 hours work. Another interesting feature about this story is that in John it occurs at just the point where in the other Gospels Jesus is overturning the moneylenders' tables in the Temple, which was probably the act that above all others was responsible for getting Jesus killed. Yet another is that Mary does not anoint Jesus' head as the woman does in Matthew and Mark and Luke, but anoints Jesus' feet, in anticipation of Jesus' washing of the disciples' feet a chapter later in John. This act of utter extravagance on Mary's part is very firmly looking forward to Jesus' death. It is an act of devotion to her Lord, whom Mary seems to recognise and understand Jesus and his mission well before any of the other disciples do. Mary is giving expression in material terms to what, or rather whom, she holds most dear, which is Jesus, her Lord, her Saviour, the Son of God. Through this act, Mary gives herself to Jesus without reservation. The story is a scandal only to those who choose to understand it in rational, consumerist terms. It was a huge amount of money, and it could have been given to the poor, as Judas stated, and it would have improved the lives of a number of people for a short while. The very same arguments have been made countless times throughout history. But if financial prudence were the key principle, then none of the great cathedrals, none of the great monuments to God, to human ingenuity or creativity, would have been built. There would always have been, and there will always be, a good financial case for doing something more moral and mundane with the available financial resources. But what kind of world would we have been left with? It would have left us with barren cultural landscape with very few markers of that extraordinary upsurge of the human spirit that yearns to glorify God in remarkable, but expensive, ways. And it would not, ultimately, have made the world a better place. Because the world will only enduringly be made better when we choose to be generous with each other. Generosity, and the love that inspires it, is financially imprudent. There is always a good financial case to avoid generosity. We need to save for that rainy day, or to distribute our resources thinly but equitably across a number of different areas. But love, unlike money, is not zero-sum. The more love we give away, the more we have to give away. On Maundy Thursday, Jesus, after washing his disciples' feet, marks out the characteristic of the true Christian, 'They will know that you are my disciples by the love you show towards each other'. And that love would be an expression of the love that Jesus himself has towards his disciples. Our gospel passage is a challenge for all of us who know the cost of everything but the value of nothing. It challenges us to reflect afresh on what we have given God. Have we given ourselves to Jesus without reservation, and if not, why not? What is it we're holding back? The way we use our money is usually a good indication of where our hearts truly lie. Many of us give generously to our children, which is a good thing. We give generously to our friends and those in need. Our giving may not be strictly financial but in the currency of time and energy and commitment. The great irony is that it is sometimes those acts of profligate, immoral, generosity, that point to deeper commitments, deeper values, that themselves, represent the only means of bring about the kind of world that Jesus came to bring, which, according to John a chapter or two earlier, is a life lived in all its fullness (John 10:10). Mary of Bethany's behaviour is scandalous to those who view value in purely material terms. Mary, however, discerned a deeper truth, and gave it all her worth, which is God's due. AMEN
Luke 3:15-17, 21-22	Year C - the Baptism of Christ
Over the last fifty years, there has been renewed interest in the Person and the work of the Holy Spirit in the Western Church. The Holy Spirit has never really posed much of a problem for the Eastern Church, which has always seemed to give proper weight of significance to the so-called Third Person of the Trinity. For the Western Church, however, the nature and work of the Holy Spirit has always be somewhat a source of unease, discomfort, even embarrassment. This contrast is strikingly apparent in the way the iconographical traditions in the East and West have presented the Person of the Spirit. Think, for example, of Andrei Rublev's famous icon called The Trinity which marvellously conveys the mutual deference and equal dignity of three figures representing Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Then, contrast it with the way the Trinity is conventionally depicted in Western iconography. The Father and the Son are easily identified. The Holy Spirit, however, is rather more difficult to pinpoint, usually appearing somewhat off-centre in the form of a small, rather mangy, dove. The reason for the ambivalence we feel towards the Holy Spirit has a lot to do with the Spirit's elusive nature. We can grasp the concept of God the Father, because we can think of him by analogy with our own human fathers. We can us comprehend Jesus, the Son of God, because in his incarnation, he became one of us, and walks alongside us. But the Holy Spirit seems more impersonal. The great St. Augustine of Hippo described the Holy Spirit as the love, which binds Father and Son together. While the Father and the Son clearly have density as Persons, the Spirit seems to be more like energy, like electricity, lighting things up, but without a personal face. Yet the Church from the outset has sustained a conviction that the Holy Spirit is more than mere energy but, along with the Father and the Son, a divine Person, worthy of worship. 1. One of the distinctive characteristics of Luke's version of the baptism story is the context of prayer - with the Holy Spirit another important theme in Luke. We read that when all the people had been baptised, and Jesus had been baptised and was praying, the Holy Spirit came down upon Jesus in bodily form like a dove. And a voice came from heaven, 'You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.' The activity of the Holy Spirit and God the Father form part of the movement of prayer of the Son of God. And it is this movement of prayer between God the Father, the beloved Son and the Holy Spirit that launches Jesus into his public ministry and we learn sustains Jesus at crucial stages of it: the Transfiguration, and the Garden of Gethsemane. 2. The centrality of prayer in Luke's account should remind us that practice lies at the heart of the Christian faith and the context within which the Church's articles of faith need to be understood. The doctrine of the Trinity developed as the Church's best attempt to give an account of what Christians do when they pray. The basic constituents of what later became the Christian creeds were to be found from very early on in the baptismal practices of the early Christians. Do you believe in God the Father who made the world? I believe and trust in him etc. The doctrine of the Trinity did not, as it were, drop down from heaven, as articles of belief which are intellectually to be accepted on not accepted. The doctrine of the Trinity is rather a carefully crafted shorthand account of the most basic Christian practice of prayer. 3. And it is in the context of prayer that we need to reflect on the nature and work of the Holy Spirit. Prayer is essentially a work of recreation. When we pray we unleash the power of God in creation in us - the Spirit of God hovering over the void and God uttering 'Let there be light'. In the beginning, the triangulation of Creator God, Word of God and Wisdom of God is implicitly present. The Word and the Wisdom of God are the divine agencies that express God in time and space and in lived human experience. An early Church Father called God's Word and God's Wisdom the two arms of God. The Spirit of God comes to be associated especially closes with Wisdom, "unique, manifold, subtle, mobile, clear.she is the breath of the power of God.while remaining in herself, she renews all things. 4. It is the Spirit's capacity to renew things which perhaps accounts for the ambivalence with which the Spirit is so often greeted. The Spirit is not the custodian of the status quo. When the Spirit moves, things are not left unchanged, but transformed. The Spirit is the agent of Creation, the agency through which the Son of God is brought into human being, the medium of that loving assurance that sustains Jesus through his blackest moments, the means by which the Church is brought to birth, and God's love is spread abroad in the world. The Spirit is the agent of new beginnings. This is why those who love the status quo in whatever context wish to domesticate the Spirit, to restrict the Spirit to a small bit-part somewhere off-piste. 5. When I look at the architecture of this beautiful Church of St. John's you see in its very stones the legacy if previous transformative works of the Spirit. I have spent a great deal of time since I have arrived, trying to imagine what the Church looked like at various stages of its development. There are rumours of an Anglo-Saxon precursor. There is evidence that the modest but beautiful Norman nave and crypt were added to. Norman architecture was later complemented by Early English (those pointed arches). The Church was broadened with aisles; the roof rose to create the clerestory; the porch added, the galleries built, and latterly, an extension constructed. These endeavours were, I am sure, works of the Holy Spirit, a Spirit making all things new, but a Spirit who is the same, yesterday, today and forever. These transformations occurred because the Church was enlivened by a community of Christians in whose prayer the Trinitarian movement of Father, Son and Holy Spirit was at play. 6. The question we must therefore ask ourselves is this: what new transformation of the Spirit are we prepared in prayer to open ourselves up to? And what legacy might this opening up to the re-birthing power of the Spirit leave - both in the living stones of the flesh and blood people who make this community up, and in the stones which surround us as we celebrate God in public worship and private prayer? And what is there in us - if there be anything in us - which might make this an unpalatable prospect. 7. The great second century theologian, Irenaeus defined Tradition, as an 'expression of the Spirit in its youthfulness'. The Spirit is the same Spirit who makes all things new. We must distinguish tradition from traditionalism. Tradition is 'the living faith of the dead'; traditionalism is 'the dead faith of the living'. Tradition is active and dynamic; it is continuous with the past, but also radically discontinuous with it. Traditionalism rejects change outright. Tradition and traditionalism are very easily confused. 8. The challenge for us on the day we commemorate the Baptism of Christ is to renew our commitment to prayer. Because it is in the context of prayer that we are drawn into that movement of love between Father, Son and Holy Spirit; it is in the context of prayer that we open ourselves up to the re-birthing power of the Spirit who though the same yesterday, today and forever, also makes all things new. What legacy will this congregation leave in the fabric of these hard stones and the living stones that inhabit this beautiful building? Are we prepared to join with the Spirit in its youthfulness, or will we instead perfect our traditionalism? AMEN

Lent 2 Genesis 15:1-12 Cutting a covenant with God: a "one-way" or "two-way"relationship?	February 28th 2010
Many of you may recall the scene in the movie Amadeus when the Viennese composer Antonio Salieri tries to strike a bargain with God. He offers to devote to God his chastity, his industry, his deepest humility, indeed every hour of his life, if God will in return fulfil his desire for the glory and immortality of a Mozart. He will offer a great sacrifice to God in return for the social recognition he so intensely craved. What kind of God did Salieri think he was dealing with? Clearly he thought that he was dealing with the kind of God who was prepared to do deals, who would reward for service rendered, whether at our own initiative or God's. In short, Salieri thought God was a negotiator. In my pastoral experience, this model of God as negotiator is widespread. We have 'purchase' on God, we think, provided we're prepared give God his 'pound of flesh'. This contractual model of God is attractive because it gives us some kind of hold on God even though the cost of dealing with God in this way is bound to be high. It appeals to our deep-seated intuition that in this world nothing comes for free - even from God Himself. God even appeals to the English sentiment that there is something admirable about naming your price, standing by it and leaving us to take or leave it. God may drive a hard bargain, but if you're prepared to meet his demand, the return is assured. Another widely-held model of God is God as Santa Claus. On this consumerist model, God is principally there to satisfy our preferences, conferring gifts rather like the Christmas Santa who doles out a gift to a child at a department store simply for turning up. The whole point of God on this view is to give us presents like Santa Claus without demanding anything in return. Unlike the bargain-driving model of God which at least sees us in a two-way relationship with God, this model of God sees us in a one-way relationship with God. God is seen as a 'sugar-daddy' profligately dispensing gifts, but not at all concerned about how we get on with our lives and live in God's good world. In our reading from the book of Genesis, God is presented in a very different way. In one sense, it is a one-way relationship, but here God is not here presented as Santa Claus. In another sense, it is a two-way relationship, but doesn't have quite the reciprocal character of the God who drives a hard bargain. In our reading, Abram has a dream, and in it, God declares himself to be Abram's protector and that Abram would be the recipient of a very great reward, although we are not clear at the outset what that reward will be. It then becomes apparent on the basis of Abram's need for an heir that Abram's reward will be not only a natural heir but numerous generations of heirs, as numerous as the stars in the sky. And not only will that, but the land of the Chaldeans will be given to Abram for he and his heirs to possess. The $64 k question begged is what precisely God will demand in return for this promise of stellar proportions. The answer comes in what is perhaps one of the most significant verses in the Christian bible, 'And Abram believed God and God reckoned it to him as righteousness'. Abram believes God in the sense that he trusts in the one to whom his faith clings, Abram fixes his heart on God and places himself in the hands of the promise giver. It is Abram's trust in God that is creditworthy and supplies due consideration for the progeny that God has promised him. In other words, in return for what the promise promises, God is demanding no more than that Abram place his trust in him, and it is because of his faith that God formally declare Abram righteous. The Apostle Paul was very quick to spot that this accreditation of Abram occurs well before the first requirements of the law are mandated. Judaism was from the outset a religion based on Abram's faith. And obedience to the law was given not as a precondition of righteousness but as a means of expressing thankfulness for the blessings that God had bestowed. Paul focuses on what Abram becomes by virtue of God's declaration in view of his faith in support of his argument that membership of God's covenant community is based not on the 'works of the law' but an Abram-type faith. Anyone sharing this Abram-type faith is eligible to settle down together in table fellowship in spite of their class, race or wealth. The relationship between God and Abram is therefore a two-way relationship because God's promise of the blessing of offspring expects a faith-response. But it is also one-way because the initiative is God's and the burdens of the relationship fall overwhelmingly on God's side. This is powerfully brought out in the form of that mysterious ritual which occurs towards the end of our reading. This is orchestrated by God in response to Abram's request for further reassurance that God will indeed honour his promises. A very ancient and widespread ritual is enacted whereby animals were cut up and the parties involved would appear to have walked between the parts of the severed animals. The Hebrew idiom 'to make a covenant' means literally 'to cut a covenant' and what is implied in the ceremony is that the parties to the covenant accept that they will share a similar fate to the animals that have been cut in two if they break the terms of the covenant. So God himself - represented by the fire-pot and the torch - is binding himself to the terms of the covenant. He is binding himself in a covenant relationship with Abram and his descendants. He is taking very seriously the implications of being in a permanent relationship with the human race. And the biblical story, as we know, is the story of the way in the face of Israel's repeated disobedience God improvises to put his relationship with Israel on a more secure and permanent footing. The relationship is one-way in the sense that God is faithful even though Israel was repeatedly unfaithful. God does whatever he can to keep the relationship alive and ongoing even to the lengths of dying a sacrificial death on the cross still drenched with the tears he weeps over Jerusalem as he contemplates his destiny. God does not demand his 'pound of flesh'. Rather God has given his pound of flesh, the severed flesh of his crucified body. It is through Jesus' crucified body that we enter upon the blessings of a new community and a restored heaven and earth in which there is no more mourning, crying or pain. God does not need to drive a hard bargain with us because he has no need of anything we might give him. God does not give us gifts with no expectation of return because he out of his own absolute freedom he has bound himself to us in love and wishes to draw us into relationship with him. As we prepare for Easter, let us reflect afresh on what it means to relate to God in a relationship which is "two-way" but also "one-way". All things come from you O Lord and of your own do we give you, In Jesus Name AMEN.
'Nature: red in tooth and claw' Luke 2:22-40	Year C - Candlemas
The feast of Candlemas which we celebrate today falls at the end of a disastrous month for the impoverished Caribbean nation of Haiti. The adage, "it doesn't rain in Haiti, it pours" is literal as well as metaphorical. Natural and man-made disasters have blighted the history of this beautiful and potentially prosperous corner of Hispaniola, the island it partly occupies. Haiti was the first black-led nation in the western hemisphere having revolted against the French in the early 19th century. The agriculturally disastrous policy of deforestation has led to soil erosion and poverty. But a succession of corrupt leaders has to a succession of coups with resulting political and social instability. These human errors have been compounded by a series of natural disasters including a devastating hurricane in 1996 which flooded large parts of the country and led to major loss of life. But this pales into insignificance against the scale of the most recent disaster, a stupendous earthquake, measuring 7 on the Richter scale, which has left upwards of 100 thousand people dead, the near-complete collapse of Haiti's social and political structures and anarchy in its streets, not helped by the apparent inefficiency and fecklessness on the international response and of the squabbling aid agencies. Candlemas is an appropriate occasion on which to remember those in Haiti who have lost loved ones, in particular parents who have lost children and children who have lost parents. In our gospel reading, the aged seer Simeon blesses Mary and then prophesies about Jesus, that 'he was destined for the falling and rising of many in Israel and to be a sign that will be opposed so that the inner thoughts of many will be revealed' - and then Simeon rounds off enigmatically - 'and a sword will pierce your own soul too'. Simeon seems to utter it as an aside and yet it seems to go to the heart of the matter. The 'consolation' of Israel which Simeon hoped for - that is, the restoration of the people of Israel and the fulfilment of God's redemptive work - was to be achieved through the suffering of the Messiah in which those who chose to fall and rise with Jesus would be implicated, especially Mary. The redemptive purposes of God's Messiah could only be achieved through suffering not by trying to effect a redemption is spite of suffering or by evading suffering. The Messiah had to suffer in order to achieve God's redemptive purposes. The problem of suffering is perhaps one of the principal objections that people without explicit religious faith level against belief in a loving God. They reject religious faith principally on moral, rather than religious grounds. These people are sometimes called protest atheists. God, they say, if he happens to exist, is morally culpable for creating something less than the best of all possible worlds, that is, the world which we in fact live in. This was the force of Voltaire's argument in his satirical novella Candide which he wrote in the aftermath of two devastating earthquakes in Lima and Lisbon in the 1740's and 1750's. What impressed Voltaire forcibly was that most people had been in Church when the Lisbon earthquake struck on the morning of All Saints' Day 1755. And when those who had not been crushed by falling debris sought safety on the beaches of Lisbon, they were engulfed by three huge tsunami caused by the earthquake: "Out of the frying pan into the fire". For Voltaire, a God who creates anything less than the best of all possible worlds is not a god worth believing in and this god clearly hasn't. The difficult with this form of atheism is that it is difficult to conceive what a world other than the one we actually live in would look like. The natural subterranean forces by which our world is shaped and renewed do sometimes cause terrible loss of life. The African and European tectonic plates that rubbed up against each other so traumatically in the 18th century were do what tectonic plates naturally do. The evolutionary mechanisms that produce new life forms and thus contribute to the glorious diversity of the animal and plant kingdoms 'ruthlessly' weed out life forms which are not naturally favoured through random mutation and natural selection. Nature can be, as Tennyson put it, "red in tooth and claw". The variety which is the 'spice of life' arises out of profligate natural destruction and wastage. If the world could have been other than it is then it defies the imaginations of human creatures that arose out, and are inescapable part, of precisely this kind of world. There is currently a rather sterile debate at large about whether science, and particularly evolutionary science, is compatible with religious faith. Richard Dawkins is clear that science and religious are in hopeless and irredeemable conflict. The late Stephen Jay Gould argued that this conflict model was inapplicable because science and religion occupy he called 'non-overlapping magisteria' or NOMA for short, in other words science and religion are both authoritative within their own jointly exhaustive-mutually exclusive spheres, but have nothing to say to each other. There is a more fruitful third way, however, articulated by the Revd Charles Kingsley, who is perhaps best known as the author of The Water Babies. Kingsley passionately believed that science and evolution could co-exist with religion. In the face of the arguments of many of his contemporaries in Victorian England, who believed that God had produced a ready-made creation, Kingsley argued that God had done something much cleverer. He argued that God had created a world "that could make itself". The due independence of a creation that "makes itself" is a very great gift because it is then free to become something other than a divine puppet theatre. There is, however, a great cost, because creation is also free to go up blind alleys with fruitless outcomes, the appendix, homo floriensis etc..Notwithstanding, the world that God has in fact created is in fact the best of all possible worlds because it is the only sort of world in which the free response of the created order to the Creator becomes possible. This is the best of all possible worlds because it is impossible to conceive of another kind of world in which love could be possible, the free response of one human creature to another and to God. If the story of Jesus' presentation teaches us anything it is that love comes at huge cost. It cost Mary her son, and it cost Jesus everything. But the good news is that love does not, and cannot, die. Because love is the power by which the Spirit of God raised Jesus from the dead. The sword which pierced Mary's soul is the sword which has pierced the fabric of creation. But it is into that wound that the life-giving, life-sustaining, life-redeeming power of love can flow thus making the impossible possible. My prayer this Candlemas is that the people of Haiti may experience the consolation of Israel's Messiah, and that we might too. AMEN.
Traditions
You may remember (or not as the case may be!) that I recently distinguished the meanings of 'tradition' and 'traditionalism'. Tradition was defined as the 'living faith of the dead' and traditionalism as 'dead faith of the living'. It is astonishing how quickly rather recent church practices acquire the status of 'traditions', the way we have always done things, the way things have been always and everywhere since time immemorial (or at least the way things have always been in our own church). When older church practices are rediscovered, revived and reintroduced into Church life, they are sometimes dismissed out of hand as untraditional novelties, e.g. the practice of server's laying out the table for Communion instead of the priest. It is remarkable, when we think on the transformations this church has undergone over the centuries, how easy it is to become attached to the latest stage of the church's development, or at least the stage of development the Church was at when we personally began to identify ourselves with it, or even the practices of the Vicar who was in charge when we first started attending and who did so much to nurture our faith. What we call the 'tradition' of the Church is in fact simply a snapshot of the Christian community at a particular stage of its spiritual pilgrimage. And tradition lapses into traditionalism when we capture the Church at a particular stage of its life and invest that stage with the status of a law of the Medes and the Persians, which can't be revoked under any circumstances. In our gospel reading, Jesus challenges the traditionalistic thinking of his family, his friends, his neighbours and his compatriots. And this challenge elicits a violent response. The story is breath-taking because with a few interpretative glosses on the bible passage he has just read out Jesus is taken from the heights of popularity and transformed into an object of visceral hatred. Jesus is presented in perhaps as 'homey' and 'churchy' a setting as you are likely to find in the New Testament. Jesus is captured in the early, energetic phase of the public ministry into which he was catapulted at his baptism. He has developed something of a reputation for wisdom, and as a teacher, which accounts for the growth of a large popular following. In Nazareth, Jesus temporarily slips back into the rhythm of domestic life. He attends his home synagogue and is given the scroll of the great prophetic book of Isaiah by the temple attendant. The temple attendant was not simply a synagogue dogsbody but the local officer who had the task of inducting the youth of Nazareth into Israel's scriptures and who himself may have had had a hand in the early biblical education of Jesus himself. One of the speculative sub-texts of this passage, perhaps, is the eagerly anticipated return of the Nazarene equivalent of the 'blue-eyed boy; Jesus reading and expounding the Scripture underneath the proud and benign eye of a former tutor. One of the several distinctive features of Luke's gospel is that Jesus doesn't suddenly emerge with a fully-formed human nature. Jesus is presented as one who grows into maturity, who gradually realizes the wisdom with which he is possessed, who progressively comes into fuller consciousness of his unique vocation as the Son of God, which is drawn out in communion with God the Father and the Spirit of God. Jesus is also indebted, as we all are, to the influence of those who were responsible for his upbringing: his network of family, friends and community, including speculatively the temple attendant. "It takes a village", as they say. In Nazareth, Jesus come fully into his own, into the fullness of his own person, here in the company of all those who were principally responsible for shaping him as a human being, But Nazareth also represents a radical point of departure for Jesus. Because it is here in Nazareth, that Jesus challenges the traditionalism of his compatriots through his appeal to the Scriptures they shared. The words of Scripture are read, Isaiah's great message of liberation, in the spirit of Jubilee: 'The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor, he has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord's favour' In the passage which immediately follows, Jesus announces that the reading has been fulfilled in the hearing of the congregation. And the reaction is of wonder at Jesus' gracious words. Jesus' stock rises, because they think he is confirming their traditionalism. They think that all this liberationist talk is directed solely at them, at Israel. That God would one day redeem Israel from suffering, from their bondage to the yolk of Rome, from the rampant paganism they saw roundabout them. But then, to their horror, as we read in the passage that follows, Jesus introduces an apparent novelty, something untraditional. The things, about which Isaiah speaks, the gracious words of liberationist hope, Jesus strongly implies, are not directed principally at Israel, but at the very people from whom Israel sought to be liberated, the pagans, the evil doers, the paragons of wickedness. Of the many widows that existed in Israel at a time of great famine, God sent Elijah to none of them but rather to the pagan widow of Zarephath. Of all the lepers there were in Israel in the time of Elisha, Elisha is sent to none of them but rather to the pagan commander, Namaan the Syrian. And we read: "When they heard this, all in the synagogue were filled with rage. They got up, drove him out of the town, and led him to the brow of the hill on which their town was built, so that they might hurl him off the cliff. But he passed through the midst of them and when on his way' It's rather like Jesus saying during the Second World War that the message of liberationist hope was principally directed at Adolph Hitler, or, perhaps rather like Robert Runcie asking a congregation to pray for the relatives of Argentinean soldiers killed in the Falklands War. Jesus' interpretation seemed novel and perverse. And yet Jesus' interpretation was anything but novel and perverse. Rather, Jesus was tapping into a deep stream of biblical principle, working out a fundamental biblical logic which was cosmic in conception and universal in scope. And that principle or logic was this: God created the world and declared the world very good. The goodness of the world has been tarnished through human sin. God called Israel to be God's means of redeeming that tarnished world, of restoring creation marred by sin, and overcoming human evil which is expressed in sin. Israel was indeed a distinctive and privileged people, the custodians of the law and the home to the prophets. But God had called Israel into the world not for Israel's own sake but for the sake of every family under heaven. This is implicit in God's call to Abraham who was to be the father not of a single nation but of nations. It becomes clearer, rather paradoxically in the context of this passage, in Isaiah, which depicts Israel in triumphal procession, but also shows the Gentiles in train. What is implicit in the OT becomes explicit in the new. God came into the world not to redeem the world from suffering, but through suffering. Jesus' suffering on the Cross is the exodus - the through way - the risen ascended life he wishes for us all human beings. The message of liberationist hope is not the monopoly of a single community but the legacy for all who respond in faith in Jesus. Indeed, in our gospel passage, what may above all other things have enraged his townsfolk who thought they knew Jesus so well was his implication that he was the one through whom God would effect the message of liberationist hope, 'the Spirit of the Lord is upon me'. Jesus was using Tradition, the expression of the Spirit in its youthfulness, the dynamism of Scripture's deep logic, to challenge the traditionalism of conventional wisdom, people's narrow view of God's purposes. The challenge for us all here this morning is to consider whether our own vision of what God might do is inspired by our contact with the Tradition, or a reactionary concern to preserve things as we think they have always been, even though they haven't, and were never meant to be. AMEN	Year C - Epiphany 3 - 24th January 2010
Sermon: Malachi, the Temple Priesthood and Institutional Religion - a Sermon given by the Revd Julian Francis, National Training Coordinator for Minority Ethnic Anglicans	Advent2 December 6th
Today in Luke Ch.3, we meet John as God's messenger who, on hearing a word from the Lord, goes through the region, issuing a call to repentance; for people to turn to the way of righteousness, such that they, and we, will be ready for Christ when he comes. And this morning I want to highlight both the sense of challenge that John embodies, and the note of hope his presence inspires. And I want to do that through looking at the book of Malachi. We read from Ch.3 v.1-4 and Malachi as a whole holds some critical keys to understanding the figure of John the Baptist, and quite a lot else besides. I recommend a read of it, which even with pauses for thought, takes only a few minutes. For Malachi, who is of course God's messenger to the people in his own day, addresses a particular set of circumstances - namely the decaying religious institution of the temple priesthood of his own day. He singles out the priests in their disregard for the proper exercise of their office and duties. "Where is the respect due to me", says the voice of God, "O priests who despise my name!" But what is going wrong? First of all, the priests are offering polluted food on the altar of sacrifice: they are sacrificing blemished animals that are either dead or sick or disfigured through violence. Instead of bringing to God the best of the flocks and herds, as true devotion requires, they are using animals that have been discarded and can't be used for other purposes. This may seem a relatively minor offence, but it demonstrates a slackness and cynicism that has entered into their practice: they are turning aside from both what God demands and the demands of their office, and from the proper demands they should be laying upon the people. So God says, "I will curse your blessings", referring to the incantations and liturgies performed in worship; and, "I will spread dung upon your faces": thus God will bring them face to face with the rotted product they are offering before the people. Secondly, they are failing in their duty of instruction to the faithful. The text says, "you have shown partiality in your instruction", and "have caused many to stumble". which is interesting. Is the partiality of instruction partly that they are not requiring the bringing of suitable sacrificial animals, or is it something else? There is a comparison drawn between these priests and their more worthy forebears of the house of Levi. The covenant with Levi was originally one of "peace and grace" says Malachi, under which priests gave "true instruction" and the people "gained in knowledge". It would seem that partiality of instruction is a failure to do the necessary work of prayer, reflection and study that will allow insight to be shared and gained. These priests are lazy and they have turned aside from their calling. They are distracted. Something else has taken over, or caught their attention, or is eating up their time and energy: which brings us to the third complaint which is that the priests are spurning their own marriage vows. They are not remaining faithful to their wives: which is presumably part, at least, of what is distracting them. This may mean they are taking temple prostitutes, and thus allowing temple prostitution to carry on unchecked. Whatever the precise context of their faithlessness, however, God is witness to it. For when the priests raise their cries at the altar and shed crocodile tears, complaining that God does not accept their offerings, Malachi is quick to point out that this is little more than an evasion and a diversion: because God does see! "God is witness to your faithlessness to the wife of your youth". And God is not impressed. Thus Malachi lays out the damning details of a discredited institution - the temple priesthood - it's shoddy, insincere worship, the inadequate instruction and the sexual immorality that has flourished in the vacuum created by a lack of true commitment. What comes next, however, is very interesting: because Malachi observes that the priests keep on and on asking, "why is God not accepting our offerings?" And my reading of the narrative is that their lame but persistent protestations are to be understood as a refusal to acknowledge how bad things have become: their anxious questioning is a manifestly diversionary activity that allows them to avoid the truth that is becoming clearer and clearer to those on the outside looking in (including Malachi the prophet): that all is not well. And here I wonder if we might observe some interesting parallels in the malaise that many would say has overtaken much of western Christian institutional religious life. It is easy to knock people and institutions when they are struggling and it is now a commonplace to observe that much of institutional western Christianity is in crisis. But it is nonetheless rather alarmingly true that we are inclined to think - along the lines of the temple priests as reported by Malachi - that so long as people are going to church, and the clergy are turning up, and offerings are being made and sermons are being preached, and instruction is being given; then everything's all right!! But in Malachi's potentially parallel context - albeit in a more extreme set of circumstances - he sums the situation up by warning the priests and people alike; "you are mistaking evil for good!" What you are offering, he says, is far from a sweet offering to the Lord, and its consequences for worship, instruction and public morality are there for all to see. It's no wonder God does not accept your offerings! You have lost your way! The trouble is, you can't see it or you won't see it! So start looking! Because God is coming to judge!... And if there is any parallel to be drawn between Malachi's day and our own, this is something we might want to think about. That we, like the priests might be under a judgement of which we are either wholly unaware, or with which we are choosing not to engage, is alarming - or if it isn't, it should be! To take a topical example, away from the arena of religion, the official inquiry into the Iraq War is raising once again the issue of the extent to which our then leadership, and we as the general public, were caught up in a supreme self-deception about going to war - perhaps of this sort of kind. We were told, and then told ourselves, that what we were doing was right: we called it a necessary evil, being undertaken for the greater good. The inquiry has thus far declared that whilst considerable errors of judgement were made in the execution of the conflict, the process of going to war was legal. What goes unsaid - and we have to supply the script - is the extent to which evil was indeed mistaken for good. And at this vantage point it's hard not to conclude that we are judged. I hope we would want to do things differently with hindsight. It seems to me a very human tendency to get so comfortable with certain established practices (for example in the fulfilling of religious obligations) or so comfortable with shared dogmas (that this or that is the right line to take or the inevitable course of action) that we end up losing a properly self-critical perspective. And when we are challenged we can't even see the problem! Malachi speaks into a very modern condition. But there is a further consideration, which is, what happens when the Lord will come? Because our passage of today begins with the words: "See", says God, "I am sending my messenger to prepare the way before me" (that's Malachi we presume): but then this, "the Lord whom you seek will suddenly come to his temple!" Well, the likely truth is that the last thing the priests wanted was for the Lord to come into the temple and ruin their nice, established, indulgent way of life! There is terrific irony here, because actually they're not seeking the Lord at all! What I fear Malachi is alerting his audience to is that while they think they are serving and seeking the Lord, actually, unwittingly, they are simply perpetuating a rather tired, dysfunctional, and in this case, corrupted institution. Thus, what I think Malachi brings to us is quite a sharp critique of institutional life - particularly institutional religious life. His message lacks some of the passionate critiques of social injustice that we hear from Isaiah, Hosea and Amos, but it rings with truth as we observe how passion, desire and commitment have withered and drained away from this tainted institution. And this is precisely the threat that always hangs over institutions - the banks, our beloved Church of England, the annual keeping of Christmas, the institution of marriage even, which Ed Balls and David Cameron are fighting over currently. As we have observed already, if we are not very careful, we call evil good and close ourselves off from challenges and critique. But! In the Lord's coming there is hope yet!!..... And staying with Malachi, I would say that the hope rests essentially in the contextual and closely particular nature of the remedy. For what will the Lord be like when he does come? The Lord "will be like a refiner's fire and fuller's soap." Why? Because the two things that most characterised the environment of the altar in the temple were fine metal and fine linen! The incense bowls, the vessels and the candlesticks, and the fine altar linen! The Lord goes straight to where the problem lies, the toolkit of the priests and their attendants. "And he will purify the sons of Levi, and refine them like gold and silver until they present offerings to the Lord in righteousness." The silverware, the gold goblets and the linen are a symbol of what awaits transformation: for they can as easily divert and corrupt as enhance and inspire (as intended). The refiner's fire and the fuller's soap are an expression of the necessary transformations themselves. They are the vehicles that can effect change - the reappraisals and the readjustments that can keep us alive. And this will be the Lord's doing! In Malachi Ch.3 God says, "I am sending my messenger (Malachi) to prepare the way before me". In Isaiah Ch.40, in the passage in our gospel reading, God alerts the people to a voice crying out in the wilderness (John) saying, "prepare the way of the Lord." What we hear in Isaiah 40 is that those who will prepare a way will see the salvation of God: which we affirm will come to us in the person of Christ. What Malachi reminds us, and so does John, is that the coming of salvation has a judgement face as well as a joyful face. In our preparations for receiving Christ, we have to be ready to accept the challenges of judgement, and be willing to make sometimes quite radical readjustments in our lives and institutions, if we are indeed to endure the day of his coming. Amen.
WEEK of Prayer for Christian Unity January 24th “When he was at the table with them, he took bread, gave thanks, broke it and began to give it to them. Then their eyes were opened and they recognized him, and he disappeared from their sight.” (Luke 24: 31) The National Gallery in London is the permanent home to the Supper at Emmaus, a painting by the Italian Baroque master, Caravaggio, executed in 1601. The painting captures the moment Jesus’ astonished companions recognize the resurrected but incognito Christ at the breaking of bread. At the centre, a youthful, bearded, faintly cherubic Christ extends his hand in an expression of blessing. Seated to his left, the Evangelist Luke, a bearded gentleman of senior years, sporting the scallop shell of a pilgrim, flings his arms wide in a gesture of complete astonishment. The other disciple, presumably Cleopas, wearing torn clothes, falls out of his chair. The gospel records that Jesus at the moment of recognition vanishes from their sight. This story of the journey to Emmaus is one of the most mysterious and elusive passages in the New Testament. We read that two disciples were going to the village of Emmaus, about 11 kilometres from Jerusalem. One is identified as Cleopas, which was a common Hellenistic name meaning ‘son of a renowned father’. The other remains nameless, though for Caravaggio it is the Evangelist Luke. As Cleopas and his companion discussed “everything that had happened”, “Jesus came up and walked along with them but they were kept from recognizing him”. In the Gospel of Mark, Jesus is said to have appeared in “another form” which is why he is depicted as beardless in the Supper at Emmaus, as opposed to the bearded Christ in Caravaggio’s Calling of St Matthew, where the recruiting Christ interrupts a group of seated money counters. And, again, in the resurrection account in the Gospel of John, Mary turns towards Jesus twice, mistaking him for the gardener. The intriguing feature of the Emmaus story is that the recognition of the risen Jesus is not immediate. The body of the risen Jesus is initially difficult to recognize. Yet as they walked along and at the day’s end broke bread together, there must have been some change in perception which enabled them to sense the presence of the risen Christ. The companions appear initially to oscillate between doubt and faith. The prophet Jesus, powerful in word and deed, has been crucified to death, and with him, apparently, the hope for Israel’s redemption. But strange reports about the loss of Jesus’ body and the appearance of angelic presences lure them into ongoing conversation about the meaning of all that has occurred. Then in rather waspish response to their obtuseness, Jesus relates the whole history of Israel from his post-Easter vantage point, demonstrating against the grain of conventional wisdom, why the Messiah had to suffer die and then rise again. The disciples later recall how their hearts burned within them as Jesus talked with them on the road and opened the Scriptures to them. But it is later on in the breaking of bread that the eyes of the disciples are opened and the incognito Christ revealed, whereupon Christ vanishes from their midst. There are alluring clues in this post-resurrection narrative that there has been some change in the conditions of perception which have something to do with the disciples’ initial disposition, the story that Jesus has told them about Israel and her Messiah, and the parabolic enactment of that story in the breaking of bread. There are clues in this passage which suggest that in order to see Christ aright a good deal of hard work is first required. This is not a work of faith-righteousness in which we attempt to catapult ourselves into faith by tremendous act of will. It is a work of moral and spiritual preparation which involves allowing ourselves to be shaped by a particular story and by a particular set of practices so that we acquire the conditions of knowledge which are prerequisite for sensing the presence of the risen Christ. It is in a Eucharistic context that the scales fall from the eyes of the disciples and risen Christ is perceived whereupon he vanishes from their sight and his risen presence is attested in mission. A few years ago I was reviewing for publication a fascinating paper by a pair of Chilean psychiatrists who were attempting to provide a principled means of distinguishing genuine religious experience from mental disorder. They closely examined the classical tradition and the biblical literature, including our own passage from Luke 24. They noted that in this literature a direct, prolonged and unmediated encounter with the divine would send people mad. In their clinical experience, they observed that pathological experience with religious context had an over-affirmative character. In divine madness, however, in contrast to psychiatric madness, accounts of experiences of the divine have an elusive character, the divine presence moving on at the moment it is supposedly captured. The current ecumenical climate, at least in terms of formal relationships between the Churches seems rather bleak. The heady ecumenical enthusiasm of the 60’s and 70’s seems to have dissipated nearly completely, and an atmosphere of indifference seems to prevail. The Churches as they lapse into probably well-deserved desuetude are principally concerned with internal affairs. Yet all Churches share the same story in which its members are shaped and through which they acquire the means to sense the risen Christ and to see Christ aright. This is a story which is parabolically enacted in the Eucharist which is Christ’s gift to the Church. It is there, above all places, the scales drop from our eyes and we perceive his risen presence, before going forth into the world to attest to his presence. In his 1995 Encyclical Ut Unum Sint, Pope John Paul II challenged each Church to re-appropriate those parts of the apostolic tradition which had escaped from view. This was to be a mutual re-appropriation of the whole of that tradition. It was a humble and humbling document because it acknowledged that no church has the monopoly on the Christian story. Each church is impoverished by its having let go of aspects of the story through its attempts to define itself over and against other churches. Inevitably, the sense of the presence of the risen Christ is dulled as a result. My hope and prayer is that at the local and grassroots level we can do our bit the remind each other of those aspects of the Christian story, those aspects of the apostolic tradition we have lost sight of, so that we can collectively sense more of the fullness of the presence of the risen Christ amongst us and see him aright. AMEN

Previous Weeks Sermons BACK

Easter C - John 21:1-18

For all God’s worth

Luke 3:15-17, 21-22

Year C - the Baptism of Christ

Traditions