Sermon. Advent 3. Redeeming "Lo, He Comes"

Sermon. 15 December 2019. St Michael and All Angels, Little Ilford

Advent 3 (Gaudete), Year A

·       Matthew 11.2-11

Here’s a simple summary of where we are today:

·       We have lit a candle, which people often call “the pink candle for Our Lady”.

·       That said, that is wrong.

·       It is the rose candle for our joy, because a traditional service would begin with a call to rejoice (Gaudete!).

·       That said, we don’t do that.

·       That said, the theme linked to the candle is not Mary, nor joy, but John the Baptist.

·       That said, we were already introduced to John the Baptist last week.

·       That said, we might be invited to introduce Our Lady today, if we had chosen the canticle, the great Magnificat.

·       That said, she is not the theme and the candle is not hers!

Confused? Brothers and sisters, every Western Christian is surely confused by this great pile-up of themes. Worry not; take from it what speaks to you.

But, any way, there is something confusing about the hero of today’s candle, John the Baptist. He is difficult, and confusing. Consider what might sound like an easy question: Was John the Baptist a Christian? He was and is a saint, but was he ever a Christian? And this doesn’t mean: Was he a churchman who was baptised in the name of the Trinity and recited the creed? We know none of that applies; such things developed centuries after his death. But really the question is: Did he ever become a follower of Jesus? In today’s gospel it is clear that he is considering becoming a disciple. But we are not told whether he actually did. Did he welcome the answer to his question: “Are you the one who is to come?”, or did he find it evasive? We are not told.

So Saint John is often – and not wrongly – presented as one of the principal bridging characters. He bridges the Old and New Testaments. He bridges (for Christians) the Judaism of the Old Testament and the Second Temple and the emergent Christianity of the Jesus Community. This means, while it might be controversial, it’s not wrong to think of John the Baptist as a Jewish but not a Christian saint.  

The Jewish saint, John the Baptist… Yes! Yes, you are right in supposing I do want us to reflect on Christian approaches to Jews and Judaism. (No apologies for that.) But I am going to do so via what you may well think of diversion.

By a diversion, I mean I want us to think about… the hymn we will sing at the end of this service. That hymn is Lo, He Comes. It is a great hymn, in many ways one of my favourites. But I do have problems with it. They relate wholly to the second verse. Let me remind you:

            Every eye shall now behold him

            robed in dreadful majesty;

            those who set at naught and sold him,

            pierced and nailed him to the Tree,

            deeply wailing, deeply wailing, deeply wailing,

            shall the true Messiah see.

I can see that you will enjoy singing it. Many do. How often do we get to sing about wailing, in church, to a powerful, Wesleyan tune? Only really here. But! But I feel a need to say that the problem with this verse is this: the most natural subject in mind, for “those who set at naught and sold him/pierced and nailed him to the Tree” are… Jews, and even “the Jews”. And that is wrong, and that is bad, and even wicked. Wicked, because the underlying theme here is: at the second coming, most of humanity will rejoice, but the Jews will be found out and blamed for killing their Messiah; all they will get to do is wail for their sins.

“[T]hose who set at naught and sold him/pierced and nailed him to the Tree”. Yes, I know that a historian will say: that’s not the Jews; that must mean the Romans. Historically, the Roman overlords, in all their well-reported brutality, were responsible for the killing of Jesus. The trouble with that is that the Romans had no concept at all of a Messiah. To say to ancient Romans: “Here at last is your true Messiah! Wail!” would mean literally nothing to them.

“[T]hose who set at naught and sold him/pierced and nailed him to the Tree”. Yes, I know that a good preacher or theologian will say: that’s not the Jews; that is us, all of us. When we sin, we set in train the spiritual dis-ease which ultimately leads to the killing of Jesus. It’s good theology, but again, it doesn’t work here. It’s really the same point (though this is a harder claim to make). I am going to say that “Messiah” isn’t a Christian word. (Many, many apologies to Handel; it is certainly a Handelian word!) Messiah is an English version of the Hebrew word, Mashiach. But Christians (as their name suggests) overwhelmingly use “Christ”, the English version of the Greek word, Christos.

They both mean the same thing. They mean “anointed”, “the Anointed One”. But still the Christian preference for “Christ” over “Messiah is clear. It is clear in the New Testament, where the word Messias occurs how many times? Only twice [Jn 1.42, 4.25]. (The “Messiah” in today’s gospel is the translator’s interpretation of the Greek “Christos”.) It is clear in all our hymn books. It is clear in this hymn book [Common Praise]. You look for mentions of “Messiah”; you will find few. So, again, we are given a real nudge to think not of ourselves, but of the Jews, others, over there.

Don’t misunderstand me. I am not suggesting that when you sing, you consciously think: “the Jews killed Christ and this is about how they’ll get their comeuppance”. This is not a conscious thing. But we do have to have some historical awareness.

We do have to face clearly that from very early days, Christians have been saying “the Jews killed Christ”. And (even worse) not just a particular group of Jews, in Jerusalem around 33 AD. No. All Jews, everywhere, throughout time and space.[1] The Jewish people as a people have this guilt.

It was around – it was preached in sermon and sung in liturgy – already towards the end of the second century. Great saints like John Chrysostom (349-407) in the East and Augustine (354-430) in the West proclaimed it proudly. Martin Luther (1483-1546) also became increasingly insistent that it is so. It’s hard for us to hear this. But the historians are clear. They even speak of a “teaching of contempt”.[2] It’s not wrong to say that it has been as-natural-as-breathing for even great Christians to teach contempt for Jewish people.

It follows that we do need to go out of our way – we really need to go out of our way – to make sure we are not teaching or even hinting at that contempt now. And - in that context - to sing: “those who set at naught, and nailed him to the Tree, deeply wailing, shall the true Messiah see” must surely leave something of a bitter taste. You cannot not know that you are being given that nudge – whether directly or subliminally – to think that “the Jews killed Christ”.  

Fortunately, we do not have to abandon this otherwise lovely hymn. Nor does it need rewriting in any complicated fashion. What we can do is simply change one word, one syllable.

We can sing instead: “We who set at naught and sold him…”. That brings us back to the good, healthy theology I mentioned before. It is our sins which ultimately lead to the death of Christ. We should wail – deeply wail – that sorry state of affairs, always safe in the knowledge that we will be forgiven and restored. What is not to like?

So, brothers and sisters, I am going to encourage and, yes, urge you to do that, and not to please me (nor even to shut me up), but because it is a change that tells the gospel, that “speaks Christian” better than what is actually written in the hymn-book: “We [not “those over there” but “we over here”] who set at naught and sold him…”.

You may object on any number of grounds.

·       You may say you don’t understand what I’ve said. Please tell us this. Your preachers need to know if and how and when they are being understood, and this is a natural time for a review of our preaching.

·       You may say I have made claims but not brought much evidence. That is true. It has been (I know) a long sermon without “putting the quotes” in. But I can provide the quotations and statistics, if we seek some more teaching.

·       You may say that I’ve just preached on my hobby, my hobby-horse, Judaism. To that I want to say gently but clearly: No. To be a Christian is to engage in Jewish-Christian relations, even if we never meet a Jew. Our Scriptures, are all (or almost all) written by Jews, and are drenched in Jewish themes, like Israel, election, Hebrew heroes of faith, the hope of the prophets, and more.

·       You may say (most likely option, I’d say) that I’m a pedant! You don’t think about what you sing anything like as carefully as I’ve presupposed, and I should get over myself. To that I also say gently but clearly: No. It is precisely what we find ourselves saying or singing, without any need to reflect on it, that tells us what we truly believe. What we need to reflect on, we are still in some ways weighing up. What just launch forth into with gusto, that is what we have uncomplicatedly signed up to. That is worthy of our attention, from time to time.

Here I do finish. Please notice that I am not at all saying: We need to water down what we believe and sing, for fear of giving offence to Jews or others. I am a million miles from saying that. I am saying that here that, given how Christian history has unfolded, we have a chance and a need to improve what we sing, so that we can become better, more truthful, more authentic, and, yes, more orthodox Christians.

“We who set at naught and sold him,

            pierced and nailed him to the Tree,

            deeply wailing,

            shall the true Messiah see”

            and He will love us, forgive us, heal us,

            and give us what we need

to love and heal ourselves, heal others,

and bring and be reconciliation throughout the world.

Amen. 

---

[1] Perhaps starting with Melito of Sardis, d 180.

[2] Coined by Jules Isaac (1877-1963)

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.

 

Sermon: Paul Takes on the Foolish Galatians

Sermon. St Vedast-alias-Foster. 29 May 2016.

First Sunday after Trinity (Year C)

Galatians 1.1-12

Luke 7.1b-10

• Have you ever received a letter where every letter was cut out of a newspaper? Gd forbid!
• Have you ever been given a letter written in green ink? I hope not.
• Have you ever had a letter telling you everything you believe is nonsense (or worse) and putting you right by giving you the pure truth? Perhaps you have (if, for example, you have ever had a letter published in the Church Times, which, for some reason, prints your full address - I know whereof I speak).
• Have you ever been on the receiving end of abuse on social media? I think @StVedast may have been spared that aspect of the twittersphere. But if you are especially active in social media, chances are you will have been unceremoniously insulted.

Why do I ask these questions? Well, I want to suggest that St Paul's letter to the Galatians has some (I emphasise: some) of the qualities of a letter written in green ink. He is being blunt to the point of rudeness. But we may miss this if we don't know the conventions of letter-writing which Paul is breaking.

Today's Second Reading is the opening of the epistle. Paul introduces himself, according to convention. (You sign in rather than sign off.) He then gives his characteristic greeting 'grace to you and peace'. Grace is charis in Greek which may be taken as a homophonic adaptation of the secular opening, 'chairein', or 'Greetings'. 'Peace' (eirene in Greek) resonates with the well-known Hebrew greeting, 'shalom'. So it it likely that Paul is here implicitly insisting that Christianity is a blending of the best of Greek and Hebrew/Jewish traditions.

Crucially, though, what his readers would then have been expecting from him would be a hymn of praise to Gd mentioning them, thanking Gd for their existence, and for their gifts and virtues. For example, this is from the opening of Paul's letter to the Philippians:

I thank my God every time I remember you, constantly praying with joy in every one of my prayers for all of you, because of your sharing in the gospel from the first day until now. I am confident of this, that the one who began a good work among you will bring it to completion by the day of Jesus Christ. [Phil 1.3-6]

If you had grounds to expect something as affirming as that, just imagine how shocked you would be when, instead, you hear this:

I am astonished that you are so quickly deserting the one who called you in the grace of Christ and are turning to a different gospel... there are some who are confusing you and want to pervert the gospel of Christ.

Perhaps you see now why I say Paul is being blunt to the point of rudeness. St Paul is not a cruel writer (though I realise I may have to convince some of you of that over coffee). So what is so exercising him? It is not hard to discover.

Some in the community in Galatia were urging male gentile participants to be circumcised. And this meant much more than a moment's ritual - and rather more moments of pain. No, it meant that the one circumcised, and his female companions, were committing to keep the whole of Torah, all the 613 commandments which Jews believe originated in the meeting with Gd on Sinai.

St Paul thought that was wrong. Very wrong. Dangerous. Undermining. So he is strong in his opposition. Later, he calls the Law/Torah a curse [3.10-14]. And later still he even says: 'I wish those who advise these things would castrate themselves' [5.12]. Or mutilate themselves. He seems to be saying: let those who seek the circumcision of male gentiles rather endure an extra circumcision themselves! Brutal stuff.

And it gets worse. For it is in no small part because of this letter that later Christians saw an unbridgeable chasm between

• on the one hand, Moses and Sinai and Torah and Law (bad),
• and on the other hand Christ and the Cross and freedom and grace (good).
  Judaism and all its ways – many have understood Paul as saying – is passing away, its purposes fulfilled in Christ. As no one needs a guardian or satchel-bearer or nanny as an adult, so now all those specifically Jewish commandments – which no one ever kept fully any way – serve no purpose. Bluntly (on this reading), Judaism and Christianity are against each other.

It is worth pausing here to take full cognizance of the radically different message from today's gospel, from Luke. Here we have what we must surely call interfaith harmony. And note that the harmony actually precedes the arrival of Jesus on the scene. Already the centurion, although from the occupying power, has got to know both Jews and Judaism, and is evidently profoundly sympathetic, to the point of building a synagogue. The centurion and the Jews around him show mutual respect, understanding and empathy. Indeed, the text itself speaks of love. Thus the centurion already has the insight he needs to see in Jesus an impressive figure from the faith he loves, who can heal. Yet he apparently has seen no need to convert to Judaism, and was apparently under no pressure from Jews to do so. So indeed: interfaith relations at their richest and most hopeful.

Back to St Paul. And the good and hopeful news is that the oppositional reading of Galatians I've just presented – that Judaism and Christianity are opposed to one another – has been severely criticised over several decades now, and has been undermined.

Scholars have noticed that nowhere – not in Galatians, nor elsewhere – does Paul suggest that Jewish boys should avoid circumcision. Indeed, twice in Galatians Paul says that neither cirumcision nor uncircumcision count for anything. But that cuts both ways (no pun intended). It means there's no special virtue attached to being uncircumcised either. It follows that Paul's argument must be that Jews - but only Jews – should circumcise their sons. And the whole question is entirely irrelevant when it comes to the matter of salvation. You don't need to be Jewish to be saved.

Scholars have also noted that this understanding – that you don't have to be Jewish to be saved – is actually itself very Jewish. It's part of rabbinic Judaism – that's much later than Paul but probably with very early roots. Let me remind you of the Tosefta (Sanhedrin 105a), which insists (and I quote): 'The righteous of all the nations have a share in the world to come'.

Further, even the idea that Torah is something like a curse, an all-but-unbearable heavy burden, is something rabbinic Jews might themselves say – when engaging a potential convert. Within a Jewish circle, Torah is hard work, but also a huge privilege, offering real intimacy with Gd. But when discussing it with someone who says they want to convert, in order to be sure that their motivation is pure, you present the Jewish way at its most negative. Let me, again, refresh your memory of the process of accepting a convert set out in the Talmud (Yevamot, 47 a & b). The Jew says: 'Do you not know that Israel is now afflicted, persecuted, humbled, distracted and suffering chastisements?' and goes on to make clear all the penalties for disobeying laws the gentile currently does not have to keep. (By the way, the successful convert says in reply only: 'I know, and am not worthy'.)

It is certainly possible that Paul is standing near the beginning of this rabbinic Jewish tradition of presenting Torah as negatively as possible to those who are drawn to it. So his argument is not at all that Judaism is done-away-with. Rather, it is that the Church must be an internally diverse community. I'd say the Church is necessarily a multinational body, but I don't want to be heard as commenting on any imminent referendums.

What I must say is this: for Paul, the Church is a community we join as we are. No one need 'cross the floor'. No one need pretend to be something they are not. The one thing that is absolute according to Paul is Christ's welcome. It is for all. It is for you.

'Just as I am without one plea

save that thy blood was shed for me'

Charlotte Elliott's Edwardian sentiment actually echoes down through the centuries right back to Paul and the Galatians. Paul's rudeness – ruder than we should ever dare to be in our church discourse, even with recalcitrant bishops or archdeacons, I hope – is because he felt in his bones that this universal acceptance was being obscured. Indeed, lost.

As we now enter into the great period of Ordinary Time, green after green, perhaps we can forgive Paul his metaphorical green pen, and with him, with Charlotte Elliott, with the centurion, make Christ's welcome, and Christ's healing, our own. Just as we are, without one plea. 

Amen. 

Sermon on choosing... after the election

Sermon. 10 May 2015. St Michael and All Angels, Little Ilford.

Easter 6 (Year B)

Acts 10.44-48.

John 15.9-17.

'You did not choose me but I chose you.'

I have been thinking a lot about choosing. How I choose. And how others choose. This was especially the case on (when was it now... ah yes...) Thursday evening [general election day] and in the small hours of Friday morning. Yes, I fulfilled my constitutional duty and voted, and then kept a keen eye on the election results as they came in (I can't help myself).

'You did not choose me but I chose you'. Here's a funny thing. The Greek word for 'to choose' used in the above passage is eklegein (here: exelexasthe) and if you think you hear in that an echo of our words 'elect' and 'election', you are right. Our word 'election' comes from the Greek via the Latin. Eklegein means to 'speak out' in the sense of 'pick out' in the sense of 'choose'. So we might even translate:

'You didn't elect me, but I elected you!'

It sounds bizarre and wrong, doesn't it? That it might make any sense to speak of 'electing' Jesus! And I agree: it does not make sense. As if Christians 'elect' Jesus! The way we decide who to vote for is very, very different from the way we decide who to follow in our spiritual lives, or which faith to immerse ourselves in, to give our lives to. It is perfectly natural (at least many have often thought so) for people to try to persuade us to vote one way or another. But most of us, most of the time, are reluctant to try to persuade people to convert to our faith – at least not without some severe encouragement from the other person.

I don't think that is lack of courage on our part.

Rather, we are recognising this point: that we do not 'choose' our faith (if we 'choose' it at all) the way we may choose who to vote for. For most people, their faith identity is closer to their personal identity. It is experienced as a 'given'. It is who they are. It is how they were brought up. It's the cultural frame of reference which all the rest fits into. It's their first language of faith and hope and love, of longing and rejoicing and prayer. It is what makes sense. It is where they feel at home when they need to pray, or when they have a rite of passage to mark. Some combination of some of these ideas.

I haven't discussed this with you in any detail. But I am sensing that at least some of this is some kind of 'common sense' to you. I do not think this church in this community centre in this parish would flourish, if we thought we had a duty, always and everywhere, to try to persuade people of other faiths to convert to our ways of doing things. We'd be worn out in the misplaced effort, I suggest! We have people of other religions in our congregation, and as friends and neighbours, as people who serve us in shops, restaurants, and with other services. And of course we are fellow users of this community centre. And, to my knowledge, we have good relations, and really rather enjoy the good terms we have.

What do we make of the fact that the people we have to do with in our parish and in this very building are at least as likely to be Muslim, Sikh or Hindu, as they are Christian or without a religious background?

Sometimes it can seem as if we have a stark choice. And by the way you are almost as likely to meet this stark choice in the university and in books and articles as in churches. The choice is this: on the one hand, we might say the other faiths are wrong, and the sooner people convert to Christianity the better, for their own good; on the other hand, we might insist that all the faiths are equivalent and equal, just different routes to God, God who is above all names and all human ideas. I don't know if you feel you have to make that choice, or if you feel one of those options is obviously right.

I for my part wonder if there isn't a middle, or a third way. It may be that we are given a hint that there is, in the first reading from Acts. You have to put it in context to get the force of it though.

In today's gospel Peter is amazed that the Holy Spirit has been poured out even on the gentiles, and suggests that those experiencing the Holy Spirit are baptised. So, yes, a group of people from outside the Church (and outside Israel for that matter) are brought into the Church through preaching or at least teaching and then baptism. So far, so conversionary.

But! But what is not clear from the brief, brief passage is that this baptism comes at the end of a very dramatic story, with three miraculous or near-miraculous events to get us to where we are. First, an angel has appeared to the devout Roman, Cornelius, and intimated that he must meet with Peter. Second, this is when Peter goes for a snooze on the roof of his friend's house, and has a dream-vision of 'unclean' animals, which means not dirty but non-kosher animals, unfit for Jews to eat. Peter interprets this as telling him to think again about gentiles, about non-Jews. And, thirdly, there has just come the powerful appearance of Gd Holy Spirit, who has fallen on the gentiles, and done so long before - as Peter saw things – before they were ready for it. That is why he is amazed. So Peter is led to recognise that the Spirit is clearly active outside of the Church knowingly so-called. And the Spirit is active beyond the Church's judgements about where the Spirit should be.

Now, it is true that Christians tend to look for a united, reconciled world. In that sense at least we look for one harmonious faith community (not uniform but still free of violent disharmony) at the end of time, worshipping the one Gd. And since we believe it is not wrong to call Gd Holy Trinity, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, then we can indeed call that reconciled community 'the Church'. But! But for that Church - the Church of all - to be manifest in this world, it takes the special action of the Holy Spirit. And since we are not the Holy Spirit, nor are we holy and wise enough to spot the Holy Spirit infallibly, we can frankly leave all such moves to the Holy Spirit, and the Spirit's timings.

Outside of those special divine actions, it is not as if we have nothing to do. We can come back to one Christian virtue. I am referring to the Christian insistence on the importance of offering hospitality to all. Remember: some thereby have entertained angels unawares. This insistence on hospitality is an absolute. People sometimes present it as relative, saying (for example), 'we can't have our church meetings in their mosque, why should we let them meet on our premises', or 'they don't give Christians rights in Saudi Arabia, why should “they” have rights here'. Whatever the merits of these positions (if there are any), these are not Christian arguments. The Christian duty of hospitality is absolute.

I am not telling you anything you have not long known. For Christian hospitality was surely the motivating factor behind this centre, was Fr Froud's vision. I appreciate that the community centre as it has come to be is secular, and an independent trust. But that takes nothing away from the fact that the energy for it was a conviction that the Church should be offering hospitality to all in this place. What those to whom we offer Christian hospitality make of it is (almost) none of our business. Leave that to the Holy Spirit, whom we can trust.

After all, let me say it again: none of us chooses our faith-commitment like we choose who to vote for. After all, all of us who are here can do no better than meditate on these words:

'You did not choose me but I chose you. And I appointed you to go and bear fruit, fruit that will last'.

Amen.