Sermon for the Light of Candlemas

Sermon. St Michael and All Angels, Little Ilford. 3 February 2019

Candlemas/The Feast of the Presentation of Christ in the Temple

Luke 2.22-40

I’ve been in prison* since last we met. And I have to go back, or there’ll come looking for me. (How else could I begin?)

I’d struggle to sum up prison life. I don’t think that’s just because I am new to it. I think it will always be hard to sum up prisons. They are places of suffering, isolation, violence, drug abuse, helplessness - and also of making the best of it, of learning, courtesy, humour and hope. Places rich in sin. And rich in holiness. Being immersed in that life as I now am – for the hours are not short and the tasks are not few – I find I see lots of things in a new light.

Now, let’s be clear: I have wanted to be with you for this Feast, for months. It’s been long planned. The timing is not accidental. I wanted to make sure you got to keep Candlemas, or the Presentation of Christ in the Temple. And Feast it surely is. Let us feast (whether on cake or toast)!

But being in prison I find I see lots of things in a new light. People have long seen that today’s Feast is a bittersweet one. (In truth, most Christian festivals are, but go with me on this.) For me, this is to the fore in a new way. Yes, today is about rejoicing, about praise, about the promise of glory, about the assurance that here, with this child, Gd’s word has been fulfilled. And today is about the awareness that what is to be said about this same child is painful and difficult. It is about conflict; it is about grief. The way that the Church puts it is this: Candlemas marks the moment when the joys of the birth of Jesus - the joys of Christmas - come to their own fulfilment, and we begin to think (already) of the sombre truths of the Passion (for Lent is at hand).

Bittersweet. Let us hear again the words that are less easy from today’s encounter. Simeon to Mary: “This child is 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 a sword will pierce your own soul too.”

More literally, he says: “So that they may be revealed - out of many hearts [the] reasonings.” [hopos an apokaluphthosin ek pollon kardion dialogismoi] I know that’s nonsense in English; in Greek it does work. It’s what makes me think we might translate: “So that how people reason in the privacy of their own hearts will be seen, will be ‘out there’.” And let’s not kid ourselves: here we are not talking about our good thoughts (those we just speak out); nor are we talking about our neutral thoughts (they need no privacy); we are talking about thoughts which are dark, and have greed or hatreds or fears.  

Being in prison, I find I see lots of things in a new way. Most of us surely receive these words as a threat or a warning. “So that how you reason in the privacy of your own heart, will be seen, will be ‘out there’.” It’s like that nightmare when you find yourself naked in the middle of town, isn’t it? But what if? What if… it weren’t a threat, but a promise.

“So that how you reason in the privacy of your own heart will finally be seen. So that you won’t have to hide anymore.”

*

Whether prisons work is a big, big question, and is for another place. But if prisons did work, they could surely be a place where these words are heard as a good thing. Wouldn’t it be great if prisons were safe spaces for fairly convicted prisoners in this way: safe spaces for them to fully examine their motivation; the excuses that they have made; the fears, the compulsions, or the coldness of heart that led them to act as they did.

“So that how you reason in the privacy of your own heart will be seen - seen by Gd.” 

In truth, how you reason in the privacy of your own heart has always been seen by Gd. You cannot hide things from Gd. You cannot hide from Gd.

And Simeon today is telling us (whether we are in prison or outside), that the very presence of Christ enables each of us, over time, to let the ways we reason in the privacy of our own hearts to be seen, understood, forgiven, transfigured, and healed.

You cannot hide from Gd, and you really don’t need to. You cannot bamboozle Gd, give excuses to Gd, manipulate Gd, play the tricks with Gd that you play with those around you. And this is a good thing. You can drop all that effort, and just rest in the fact that you are already seen by Gd who loves you as you are.

Here are two short ways of making the point. First (you’ll have heard this before, but it bears repetition):

there is nothing you can do, to make Gd love you more;

there is nothing you can do, to make Gd love you less.

And then, my rather lose rendering of how Rowan Williams once summed up what he found in the writings of Dostoevsky (trust me, just saying that intimidates me as much as it may intimidate you, but, again, go with me):

Gd is Light, pure Light, 
and the Light is shining on you, 
on you, in particular. 
You are in the focus, under the spotlight, in the Light. 
And the Light that is shining upon you is
brighter and more piercing, more exposing, 

     than you’d imagine in your deepest fears, and 
that Light is more warming, more welcoming and more loving 

     than you’d dare to hope in your wildest dreams.

The Light of Candlemas be with you. Amen.  

*as chaplain, as the congregation knew.

Sermon. Jesus and the Sabbath, Revisited

Sermon. 21 August 2016, St Michael and All Angels, Little Ilford.

Trinity 13 (Year C)

Isaiah 58.9b-end; Luke 13.10-17

I've been away for some time, and am very glad indeed to be back. I thought I might begin here by reverting to type (as they say), and asking a question. 

Here it is: Was Jesus right to heal someone on the Sabbath...?

It would be surprising if we were to think that Jesus was wrong to heal on the Sabbath. This is true for at least two reasons.

First, as Christians, we are not used to thinking of Jesus being wrong about anything. But this is more interesting than it looks. It's not so simple. It is true that Christian teaching is that in Christian faith, Jesus is highly exalted. He is divine, is uniquely the Son of Gd, is Gd the Son. But, even though Jesus can be and is called 'Gd', he is still always as human as we are. Human like us in all things save sin alone. But then it follows that Jesus, like every other human being, had limited knowledge of the world about him. Some of his ideas may have been wrong. Some of his ideas will have been wrong, in the sense of mistaken, just like some of ours are. I am not being unfaithful in saying this. Jesus did not sin. Any imperfect knowledge on Jesus' part does not refer to his moral compass, and did not lead to sin. But we can still say (still have to say) that some of his ways of thinking about the world will have been wrong.

A second reason we are unlikely to think that Jesus was wrong to heal on the Sabbath is that there is something of an ingrained way of thinking about Jesus in the gospels. You know: that pattern which sets the Jewish religious authorities as one monolith, one thing, on one side of a spiritual struggle, as the baddies, and Jesus on the other side, as the single goody. And you may remember that one of my themes is to question that. Indeed, let me be blunt: to undermine that.

So about Jesus healing on the Sabbath we are used to hearing something like this: the Judaism of Jesus' day was boring, cold, authoritarian, and concerned with rules and more rules and more and more rules, relating to all aspects of everyday life, including the Sabbath. This because they thought Gd was distant, or angry, or both. Jesus (so this pattern of thinking goes) came to free us from all that, and restore a sense that what counts is a warm and loving relationship with Gd. So the idea that Jesus in his love shocked the cold, legalistic Jewish religious establishment by doing the loving thing, and healing on the Sabbath fits this pattern well. Brothers and sisters, I say: it is not like this.

***

It has to be worth asking: was it ever against Jewish Law to heal someone on the Sabbath? It is not clear that it ever was. The commandment in the Torah, in the Books of Moses, the first five books of the Bible, states that you are forbidden from working on the Sabbath. But it is not at all spelled out what counts as work. 

The later Jewish book, the Mishnah, does spell out in great detail what counts as work. Simply put, it is anything that counts as 'creating' anything. Or more specifically it's any act that was involved in the building of the tabernacle or temple. This of course rules out quite a lot. You cannot really carry things about any distance, for example. But! But it is vital to note that this later document, the Mishnah, is much later than Jesus and than the completed gospels; it was finalised about the year 200 CE.

What this means is that in Jesus's own day it wasn't at all clear what the 'Jewish Law' in all its details was. We really must find a way to give up the idea that there was one monolithic Jewish establishment which Jesus and his followers stood over against. There were different factions; there was different ideas; there were, some would say, different Judaisms. So the only answer to the question: 'was it against Jewish Law to heal someone on the Sabbath in Jesus's day?' is: 'it would depend who you asked'. So, you see, the synagogue leader who thought it was not lawful to heal on the Sabbath was not giving an effective ruling, or quoting from a law book that everyone agreed on. He was speaking for himself.

For what it's worth, when later Judaism - the Judaism of the rabbis as we know or think of them - did spell things out, then there is no ban at all on healing on the Sabbath, if 'healing' means prayer, or declaration of healing, or even laying on of hands.

In any event, it is important to be clear what the rules about the Sabbath – whether there be few or many – are all about. We know that Jesus says that the Sabbath was made for humankind not humankind for the Sabbath. But/and/but that idea is also expressed by the rabbis [e.g. b.Yoma 85b]. It is not a challenge to the Jewish way of thinking; it is very much at home in Judaism. We do not refrain from working because work is a bad thing. Not at all. Rather we stop working in order to enjoy and relish rest and recreation.

Jewish friends put it to me like this: it's like having Christmas Day once a week!

That's not in terms of presents (which you don't really get – sorry about that). But in most other ways. You eat, eat a lot, and good, rich food. You gather as a family; family members have to commit to gathering as one. You also invite guests; that is both an honour and something of an expectation. And, most importantly of all, you spend time together. 

You chat. You may chat about the Scripture readings of the day, or the rabbi's sermon (if you went to synagogue – not all that important in the great scheme of things). You may chat about issues of the day, or your more personal concerns. The point is that the conversation flows, and is 'discursive'. This means it has twists and turns. So you stand every chance of hearing new ideas, and thinking about old ideas in new ways. But even if you don't, through spending what we now – and rightly – call 'quality time' with one another, you deepen your friendships, with friends, and also within the family.

Once you have a sense of this, you might then be able to see too how there do have to be some rules. It is perfectly true that we all might have our own personal views about what counts as rest, and what counts as work. But if you want your family to share the same rest and recreation, you'll have to agree on some ground-rules. And it's the same (or more so) if you are to agree as a community. Think about it. To go back to the analogy: we could not keep Christmas Day as a society unless we agreed on the date, and agreed that at least most things will be closed.

To say it again: the rules are all there so that the Sabbath can be what the prophecy of Isaiah in today's reading calls a 'delight'. The Jewish liturgy in turn says that the Sabbath is 'orah ve-simchah', a light and a delight, and 'Shabbat menuchah', a Sabbath of rest'. And Jewish worship and mysticism goes further. The mystics say that the Sabbath is the Bride of the Jewish people. You turn to greet Her as Queen as she 'comes in' on a Friday evening. It is so much the jewel of Judaism that it has been said 'the Sabbath has kept the Jews more than the Jews have kept the Sabbath'. Another idea is that a Jewish person receives a second soul each Shabbat. All of these ideas are different ways of insisting that Gd is close, and comes close to us, not only when we 'work', but also when we 'rest'. Being at rest, being most naturally and uncomplicatedly ourselves, means we can enjoy a special closeness with Gd. 

So I say that if you ever get the chance to experience a Jewish Sabbath, to feel its specialness, sacredness and recreational, re-creational power, my advice is: grasp it! (Just leave your mobile phone at home.)

Today's gospel says that after the healing, Jesus's opponents were 'put to shame'. It isn't clear why they were so ashamed. There are different ideas about this. But, in any event, it might be said that, today, where we are, Christians might be put to shame by the way our Jewish friends keep the Sabbath. Delightfully but also seriously. Seriously, but also delightfully.

So, yes, I commend to you the light and the joy of the Jewish Shabbat. In saying this, I don't think I am suggesting that we as a church join the Lord's Day Observance Society or anything like that. I fear that Christian Sabbath-keeping as that has often been understood can tend to mean just the rules about the things you are forbidden from doing. That school of thought that imagines the commandment says: 'Six days shalt thou labour and on the seventh day... thou shalt have no fun either'. No. Anything but that. But, heaven knows, in our '24-7' commercialised, consumerist world, we surely do need to protect a sense of Sabbath rest as our birthright. We are worth our Sabbath rest. For we – all human beings – we are more than producers, and we are more than consumers. We are all children of Gd. Like the woman in the gospel today, we are called to think of ourselves too as sons and daughters of Abraham, made for rest, recreation, fullness of fun, and healing. Amen.

 

'Whaddya want?' - asks God?

Sermon. Christ Church and St Lawrence, Brondesbury.

Last Sunday after Trinity.

Mark 10.46-52

Where are you?

I am in an unusual position, in that I am a guest here. I do not know you. Yet I can say that I do know, beyond all probability, where it is you think you are. Where are you? You are very nearly there! Just a couple more days and you can welcome your new priest. Just one more week, and he’ll be here, in the ecclesial saddle, and the next stage of this church’s adventure with God can begin. You are very nearly there. It is almost as if it does not really matter what happens this week. If you have to scrape the bottom of the barrel and pick up some random priest, whom nobody knows, to do the business this week, then, so what? You are so nearly there. (Friends, when I wrote that I was joking. But I am feeling so rotten with this cold that it rings a bit too true.)

Where are you?

That is, you will remember, the very first question in the Bible. It goes like this. Eve and Adam have eaten from the fruit of the forbidden tree, and God comes to speak with them. God walks about in the garden in the cool of the day, and asks them: ‘Where are you?’ It’s easy to see this story as what is called ‘crude anthropomorphism’. God is a human-like character who takes a stroll, who does not know stuff, and so has to ask questions. It happens that I do not see it like that. I think it is possible to see this story, which stands as the very first story of humanity, in a different way. I think it says that, from the very beginning of our time with God, God does what is necessary to be with us. To be with us, as one of us. To be an agent among agents. God ‘condescends’ to be with us. God ‘comes down’ and gives up at least some of the privileges of heaven to be with us. God humbles Godself. God – let me say it – humiliates Godself to be with us. So God will present as if walking around in the cool of the day, if that is what it takes to be with us. That’s not some primitive idea. It’s as profound a theological idea as there can be.

And in that condescended, humble, humiliated role, God asks the human beings: ‘Where are you?’ This isn’t a question from an ignoramus, seeking information. But if God knows the answer, what is going on here? I think we can say. God here is asking the therapeutic question. God is here the good, non-directional therapist, putting the question back to Eve and Adam, and asking them to give their own answer to the question: ‘where are you?’ You tell me where you are, so that you truly hear where you are, perhaps for the first time. If that is right, if that is the first question, and in that sense the archetypal question, then it is a good question, and one may have to live with.

What do you want me to do for you?

That is today’s question, the question Jesus puts back to Bartimaeus in today’s gospel. What do you want me to do for you? Do you realise it is not an unusual question for Jesus to ask? He asks it at least five times in the gospels, and really more than that, when you include variations like ‘what do you seek?’

Now, notice this. If I were to say that God in Jesus comes to us to ask ‘what do you want?’ it would be quite easy to portray me in all kinds of unappealing ways. I am a wishy-washy liberal, who thinks Jesus is there to listen to me, nod, and give me what I want, while patting me on the back. Or… I am a friend of capitalism, who thinks that Jesus asks me what I want, so that I spend and get it, ‘because I am worth it’. Or… I am a believer in magic, who thinks that all you have to do is concentrate on Jesus hard enough, with what you want on your mind, and you get it, and all your problems dissolve, as he supplies. No, no and no.

What do you want me to do for you?

Instead of the above caricatures, I am suggesting this is a hard – the hardest – question. To be asked what you want can leave you exposed like no other question. It can make you aware of your nakedness, even more than the ‘where are you?’ question. Typically, we just do not know what we want. We do not stop to think about what we want, and when we do stop and think what we want, we haven’t the first idea how to weigh up the competing desires, impulses, fantasies in our mind. There are all kinds of questions we can answer immediately. What do you fear? What do you want to avoid? What do you expect? What fits in to your pattern of doing things? These questions we can answer. But we do not know, purely and simply, what we want.

Bartimaeus knew what he wanted. He was able to answer the question ‘what do you want?’ straightaway. He wanted his sight. But he had the special grace (I am not saying this flippantly) of desperation. He was already in contact with his deepest need when he cried out in desperation ‘Son of David, have mercy on me!’ Would to God that we were all Bartimaeus, always, but we are not. We do not know what we want.

What do you want me to do for you?

Maybe your new priest will ask you this. Maybe – and this is a different point – maybe, you should ask your new priest this. Either way, it will not be an easy question. And I renew my point. What if? What if we knew God in Jesus is really with us? What if we knew God in Jesus wants intimacy with us? What if we knew God in Jesus wants to ask us something? What if the question was monosyllabic: What/Do/You/Want…? Would we have the first idea how to answer? Part of Jesus’ insistence on precisely this question is that he is telling us it is possible to find the answer.

Brothers and sisters, I do not know what you want. But I am going to risk one more thing. I know what I want to want for you. Towards the end of my curacy, someone asked me what I had learnt, informally, not from my incumbent or teachers, but from my peers and informal conversations. I had an answer. It was this. A good motto for church life is: ‘Do less and do it well’. So much of church culture is based on the principle: ‘Do more, however badly you do it’, that it has to be good to press the peddle and say: No. Do less and do it well. I said this to a colleague (a Belgian Roman Catholic priest, it so happens), and his eyes widened. He said: ‘Yes, Patrick, that is right. Do less. Do it in depth. And know why you are doing it’. I thought then what I think now: the Gospel of God has been preached! Do less. Do it well. Do it in depth. Know why you are doing it. With these mottoes in mind, it is at least thinkable that you as a congregation will come to know what it is you want.

Another name for today is Bible Sunday, as the collect reflects. And the Bible is full of stories of people who did not know quite where they were and did not know quite what they wanted, and God keeps faith with them (us) and pulls them (us) through, nevertheless. We are all children of Eve and Adam after all. And another ‘another’ name for today might be the Feast of the Apostles Simon and Jude, the forgotten apostles, so forgotten that Jude comes to be the apostle of… hopeless causes. What would it mean if someone with a hopeless cause were told: ‘It is not hopeless. So tell me, what do you want, and we will take things from there?’ Would that question – ever – be a comfortable one? I wonder.

Where are you? What do you want? These questions seem like the easiest and most trivial. They are the hardest and most profound. Of course, answers to these questions can emerge in the rough and tumble -  in the really practical stuff - of you getting to know your new priest. But my prayer is also that it’s something you as disciples of Christ and as a Christian congregation will also be asking yourselves, any way. Amen.

An almost entirely Olympics-free sermon.

Sermon. St Anselm’s Hayes, 29 July 2012

Trinity 8.

2 Kings 4.42-44

John 6.1-21

Some say the preacher should always be relevant, and relevance at this time must mean a sermon full of references to sport and the Olympics. I have to warn you that I am not one such.  

And so to the gospel today. The multiplication of the loaves and the walking on water. What is happening? I mean: How (if at all) do you picture it? What are we imagining? We might say simply ‘miracles’. Okay, I agree. But what happened? Do we imagine loaves of bread ‘extending themselves’, renewing themselves, once broken apart, or whole loaves spontaneously appearing in the basket? Does it matter that we cannot imagine quite the details of the miracle?

Some say – and don’t dismiss this out of hand – that it happened like this. The boy with the loaves and the fish was the one person who was willing to share the little food he had. Once his offering was presented to the people, the rest were freed from their fears and their selfishness. They were then willing to ‘admit’ that they had food about them, and could of course (they now realise) share it with others. The miracle was the miracle of generosity over fear. It’s not to be dismissed, I think. I mean: surely that boy who ‘admitted’ that he had those bits of food was being quite courageous in offering them. At the very least, he’d have less food for himself. More: he might have been mobbed, and/or he might have been ridiculed.

One thing we cannot do is say that it does not matter what happened because the story is unimportant, just a gloss, a detail, a triviality. No. That does not work. I think we do have some sense that the gospels of Matthew, Mark and Luke are similar in many ways, and/but John is very different. That is right. And indeed I might ask: what is there which is in all four gospels? The story of the passion, death and resurrection of the Lord. And… what else? Not much. The Christmas story, let us remember, is found in Matthew and Luke but not Mark or John. But certainly these two stories, of the multiplication of the loaves and the walking on the water are dound in all four. What is more, like everything of importance in the New Testament, it reflects a story in the Hebrew Bible, Old Testament. We’ve heard that today as well. Elisha has confidence that twenty loaves can feed a hundred people. And they can and there is, as in the gospels, food left over.

I don’t know what happened. You know that I don’t know what happened. I don’t know where the emphasis should lie. Is it with the conviction that Jesus performed miracles? That he gave us a whole new sense of what is possible? Is it with the miracle of generosity and courage, when things look hard and narrow? Is it with the continuity between the Testaments of the Bible, that the story of the people of faith, whatever they call themselves, is one? I am tempted to say: yes, yes and yes.

But, brothers and sisters, I am going to say this as well: there is something that is irritating or worse about this story, and about all other stories of miracles in both Testaments and in the history of the Christian community. If God works through miracles – loaves of bread extending themselves or spontaneously appearing – then where is God for us? Our loaves of bread do not do this. If we run out of bread, we have to buy or bake some more. If we cannot do that, we go hungry. We cannot walk on water. If we try, we may drown. Each story of a miracle that we hear is both a blessing – and encouragement – and potentially a curse – a reminder that their story is not our story.

And I speak to you on 29 July. If this 29 July were not a Sunday, it would be the Feast of Mary, Martha and Lazarus. The Feast of Lazarus! The person whom Jesus – according to the same gospel of John – raised from the dead! Miracles are in the air, today, in the Church’s readings and mediations. But… where are they for us? We might be asking: Are we less deserving of miracles? Are we too dull, or too sinful, to receive them? Are our problems, which so mar our lives and hold them back, really trivial, uninteresting to God? Or, is it even worse than that: Are our problems sent to us by God?

Brothers and sisters, I cannot believe that. I start from a different place. I start from the conviction that we are made for each other. And we are made to need each other. If we are to need each other, we must have some problems or issues which others, with us, can solve or work with. We are meant to need our doctors and nurses, and all the rest, and we are meant to need all those people who pray for us. If healing always came in a miraculous instant, none of this would be necessary. None of this would be possible. We are meant to need each other, and there is this good and its way miraculous news: When we own that we need each other, things happen. They shift, they move, they open up.

So, sisters and brothers, I do believe in the possibility of miracles. I do not think we human beings should try to ‘contain’ God, with our cynicism, be it philosophical or emotional. I do want to treat the Bible stories as serious. When a story is repeated, four times (that is: when it is in all four gospels), then I don’t want to be the one who limits its meaning. But I do not stand before you today as one who is in any sense promising more miracles in that style. I stand before you today as someone who believes we are meant to need each other. God means us to need each other.

In that spirit, then, we offer today the liturgy of healing. You are free, if you want, in just a moment, to come forward for prayer. This will involve the laying on of hands and, if you further want this, anointing with the oil of healing. You can come forward for prayer for yourself, or for another. You can just mention the name of the other person when you are with me. It is offered, not because God works through offering instant miraculous solutions to our problems. It is offered because one way of our needing each other, can be for our asking for prayer. For strengthening. For spiritual food, sustenance for the journey. And since the anointing is itslf a sacrament, you are asking for the help of the whole Church, mystically present with us, as at every sacrament. Don’t feel under any pressure to come forward. Certainly, don’t do it to please me. But don’t stay away because you are not sure you believe in miracles any way. I hope I’ve said enough to make it clear it’s not about magical miracles as they might be understood. It is about another way of letting God work with what is already going on in your life.

Whatever actually happened, the message of the multiplication of the loaves is that Jesus feeds us. He nourishes us. He nourishes us, time and time again. He meets us at the point of our need, and we are strengthened, and things are opened up, and there is light for us. If we keep on, knowing that we are for each other and that we are meant to need each other, we will be nourished by our Lord. We may be more than strengthened. We may find there is a spring in our step. We may even find ourselves drawn to be, ever so slightly, sporty. It’s a good time for that sort of thing, I hear! Amen.