Sermon for Christmas Day - A Prison

Gospel: John 1:1-14.

I will be honest with you. I am not sure whether to begin with “please” or with “thank you”. But, actually, now I think about it, a good motto for life is: if in doubt about what to say, say thank you. It applies to human beings often, and to God always.

If in doubt about what to say to God, say thank you.

And I want to say thank you to you, my brothers. Why? Because you are here. You do not have to be here. In prison life (we know) you often have to be in certain places at certain times, or penalties follow. But none of you has to be here. The only one who has to be here is me (well, and the Officers who are kindly assisting us). That’s worth thinking about.

You have chosen freely to come here, and together we mark Christmas as one. We mark Christmas not with great feasting – I don’t have turkeys and mince pies hidden away – not with feasting, but with worship. We are here to worship. And I thank you for it. Thank you.

Christmas in prison is hard. We do not have to hide from that. I am not going to say it is a good thing to be a prisoner in prison on Christmas Day. I won’t insult you. Only, there is just this one thing, one aspect of Christmas in prison:

it just is easier to strip away the false layers.

The voices that say it is all only about partying and excesses, and getting on with everyone without any effort “because it’s Christmas”. These voices we can shut up. Or we can let them fade away.

What is left? I am going to put it simply:

what is left is the truth of the Christmas story,

the earthy story of the birth of Jesus.

You know, you know already that the story is of difficult times:

·        a difficult announcement by an angel,

·        difficult journeys,

·        a difficult search for a place to rest,

·        a difficult ruler

·        making for a difficult flight.

There weren’t any crackers or tinsel or sparkling lights. There probably wasn’t even a party, at least not one that took weeks to plan. So be it! This is the reality. And we, even here, even now, are free to embrace that reality. The real Christmas can be ours, can be yours, even here, even now. Thank you for being here. Here, where the real Christmas is.

And so to my “please”. I want to say “please” to you, brothers.

“Please… forgive me”.

Please forgive me, if you came here today expecting the whole Christmas story I have just referred to – you know, with angels and shepherds, and journeys, and Mary and Joseph, and the manger.

It’s perfectly fair that you might expect that.

Now, you do get a lot of it in our carols. But it is true that you don’t get any of it in our readings. And I am sorry about that. Sorry, but it had to be. Had to be, because in my Church the one reading you simply have to have at Christmas is the Gospel reading we have had. And that is the opening of the Gospel of John: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God…” and so on. Why? We’ll come back to that.

After my thank you (thank you for being here)

and my please (please forgive me),

I want to add one other thing.

That is: “I wonder”.

I wonder… if you can tell me something.

I wonder if you can tell me where Jesus was born?

[Participation]

There are many answers you can give: in Israel/Palestine; in Judaea; in Bethlehem; within the family of Mary and Joseph; in a manger. But, sure, among the answers that people tend to give, we’ll always have:

in a stable.

But! But you will not find any mention of a stable in the gospels, or anywhere else in the New Testament for that matter. We in the West have tended to think about a stable, because of that reference to a manger.

What is a manger? ... A feeding trough. So animals are around. If they are not right there (they too are not actually mentioned), they must have been near enough by. As they would be in a stable.

But! But there are other possibilities.

One is that Jesus might have been born in a cave. There are caves around Bethlehem to this day, and a cave is, of course, a good place to shelter animals. It’s a natural shelter. All you may have to do is put a feeding trough in, and, there you are: an animal shelter. So was Jesus born in a cave?

Another thing to bear in mind is that, in the ancient world, families and animals often stayed under one roof. People didn’t have the money for more than one building. So, when the weather was bad enough for animals to need shelter, the animals slept in one part of the building, and the people slept in another part. What this means is: Jesus gave birth in a back room which animals would also use, not in the guest room, a guest room with some luxuries, some comfort.

So, I wonder. I wonder what you think?

Was Jesus born in a stable, a cave, or a back room?

I cannot tell you. But I also wonder this: I wonder if it makes any difference. I myself think it makes little difference. What is important is what Luke’s gospel makes very plain: Jesus was placed in a feeding trough,

because otherwise there was no room for him.

That is, I think, the most difficult part of the difficult story of Christmas.

God comes to us, to us, human beings, and we have no room for him. We give him no room. He is pushed out, pushed to a place which will do, but only just. There is no room for Jesus, who has come to help, guide, and heal us. We human beings say – all of us in different ways – to Jesus:

“No. Not here. Not with me. Go over there.

I am giving you no room.”

And there is this. This of course means that Jesus is from the beginning close to those who are also told that society has no room for them. I won’t labour this point. You get this point. It means

Jesus is from the beginning especially close to you, brothers.  

So, why must we hear, today of all days,

“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God and the Word was God… and the Word became flesh…”?

There is a reason. A good reason.

Today (and every day) we need to hear that

the Word was (and is) God, and the Word became flesh.

Became flesh and blood like you and me.

God is God as God is God.

And God is a human being as human beings are human beings.

So what?

What this means is that when we meet with God in Jesus,

it really is God.

It is not a faint echo of God.

It is not some idea of God.

It is not even some teaching from God.

But it is God as God is God.

 

You see, Christianity is all about intimacy.

We meet with God.

You meet with God.

You are invited,

here and now (and always) to meet with God.

You are invited to be with God.

That’s the best Christmas invitation of all.

And it is for you.

 

We can say “thank you” to God in Jesus for this closeness.

We can say “please” to God in Jesus, 

that we will be helped truly to make the most of this.

We can say “I wonder” –

I wonder how God can love us so much

that God freely comes to a place where there is no room for him.

Amen.

The Invitation - the Challenge - of the Beloved Disciple

Sermon. St Mary’s, Little Ilford (live-stream only). 27.12.20

St John the Evangelist

John 21.19b-end

 

Have you ever had a conversation with a hermit?

 

It’s a serious question. I am not pretending for one minute that John the Evangelist was a hermit. I am taking us round the houses. I admit that. But bear with me.

 

So I ask again: have you ever had a conversation with a hermit? You may well say: Of course not. Hermits live in solitude. They don’t have conversations. Well, I say: that is half right.

 

It is right that hermits don’t do conversations in the sense of chatting, gossiping, debating, or small talk. There’s no point inviting a hermit to your dinner party. It is also right that hermits choose silence, a great deal of silence. They are at ease with stillness and silence. They pray, out loud at times, speaking words at times, but the words of prayer are set in the context of silence, in a sea of silence, in an ocean of silence.

 

But! But that does not mean that hermits do not have to do with people. Hermits do talk. People visit hermits, and hermits are up to being visited. Hermits have not so much cut themselves off from people as cut themselves off from what get called “civilisation”, and all the comforts and pointers of what is considered a “normal” life. You know: job, career, partner, children, status in the community. All of those perfectly natural – and intrinsically good – markers of identity. A hermit is one who is, as it were, an embodied experiment in what it might be to be a human being, when all the ways human beings “fit in” are taken away.

 

I used to visit a monk in the Lowlands of Scotland. (I have mentioned him before – Brother Roland Walls of Blessed and Righteous Memory.) He himself was not a hermit (we’re still around the houses). He lived in community. But, to be fair, the community was often a community of two. So we might perhaps think of him as a “semi-detached hermit”. He’d taken a vow of poverty, but someone gave him some money as a gift. He immediately made mental plans to spend a fortnight in Lanzarote or somewhere like that. But then he felt called to go and visit a hermit (a particular hermit he’d heard of), as hermits are, as I say, up for being visited.

 

It is not that easy to visit a hermit of course. Living away from civilisation, they can take some tracking down. It can take an arduous journey to get to them. In other words, it takes a pilgrimage. And it’s a pilgrimage which has a definite goal, a definite end. On meeting the hermit, the pilgrim makes a particular request. They say: “Speak to me a word, Father, that I may live.” “Speak to me a word, Mother, that I may live.” It’s as solemn and as straightforward as that.

 

Typically the word that the hermit gives is simple. They may say: “Pray constantly.” “Weep for your sins.” “Love your enemies”. Sayings like that. The pilgrim may even feel cheated. They wanted someone to reflect their life-story back to the them, and instead what they get are pithy sayings that they might as easily get by opening the Bible at random. But of course this word is deceptively simple. The hermit distils what the pilgrim most needs to hear.

 

I told you I was taking you round the houses. Thank you for indulging me (not that I gave you a choice). But all is now set for the point. The point is that when Brother Roland met the hermit he did indeed say: “Speak to me a word, Father, that I may live.” And the hermit responded with this (and only this – this was it): “St John was so close to our Lord he could hear his heart beat.”

 

”St John was so close to our Lord he could hear his heart beat.”

 

I imagine you’ll get the reference. Indeed, as we have just been reminded, in John’s Gospel, when Jesus reclines for his last meal (not a Passover meal in John, by the way), the Beloved Disciple, whom we call John, was next to him. Here’s a rather literal translation of the Greek [John 13.23]: “There was, reclining, one of his disciples in the bosom of Jesus, the one whom Jesus loved.” [En anakeimanos heis ek ton matheton autou en to kolpo tou Iesou, hon egapa ho Iesous.] Yes, it is as close as that, as intimate as that.

 

If we remember this detail, we are unlikely to consider it important. But now we have heard the life-giving word of the hermit, we are encouraged to pay attention.

 

”St John was so close to our Lord he could hear his heart beat.” This is to say: extremely close. About as close as you can get. I think there is something here for us, something somewhere between an invitation and a challenge.

 

I said on Christmas Day that preachers often preach on Love – so often that the words become too familiar. We expect them. They wash over us. We are of course at heart glad that the words of love are there. We hear that Gd loves us. We know that Gd loves us. But these words don’t cut through. It is, bluntly, hard for us to listen to the love-song Gd is singing, as it’s commented on so repetitively, and perhaps so unimaginatively.

 

Well today I’d like to speak of the love of Gd in a different way. Not, for once, Gd love for us, but our love for Gd. Our love for Gd in Christ. Our love for Christ. Dare we… no, really, dare we place ourselves in the bosom of Jesus?

 

I want to suggest that two things are true:

1.     It is true that our love for Gd and Christ is an organic response to our sense of Gd’s and Christ’s love for us, and

2.     It is just as true that our love for Gd and Christ is a task we are called to.

There is no technique that brings about love for Gd and Christ. It is not something than can be taught as things are taught. But the solemn invitation or command can still be delivered: find your way of loving Christ. Loving Christ intimately. Nurture it. Nurture it always. Place yourself, over and over, in the bosom of Jesus. Be so close to our Lord that you can hear his heart beat.

 

We have heard that John’s Gospel ends by owning that “there are also many other things that Jesus did; if every one of them were written down, I suppose that the world itself could not contain the books that would be written.” Most assuredly we can say that there are many other things that can be said about John, the Evangelist, the Evangelist of Gd as Love, the Beloved Disciple. Fear not: I do not propose to attempt to list them.

 

I return to the heart of John’s message, yes, to its heart-beat. For he was close to our Lord’s that he could hear his heart beat. Into this place we are invited, and the invitation stands, in season and out of season. It will not be withdrawn. Let us make it our own.

 

Blessed Feast Day. Amen.

Sermon: Our Need for the Prologue to John

 

Sermon. St Mary’s Little Ilford. 25.12.20 (live-streamed only).

Christmas Day

John 1.1-14

 

As the Church throughout the world has her traditions, so individual churches have their traditions. You know the sort of thing. These are the expected carols. The tree goes up then and goes there, and is taken down then. We call the candle of the Third Sunday of Advent the pink, no the rose, no the pink, no the rose candle.

 

Well, families and persons have their traditions too. (I am not telling you anything you do not know.) Here is one of mine. Whenever I preach on Christmas Day on today’s Gospel reading, I first apologise. I apologise in case there are people in the congregation, perhaps guests (who are very welcome), who came to church precisely to hear what gets called “the traditional Christmas story”. You know its parts: the angels, their song, the shepherds, their listening, the Holy Family, the journeys, the lack of room, the child bound up safe in a manger. You get none of that in today’s Gospel. None. So I always allow for the possibility of disappointment, at precisely this point in the service. (And this year I can’t see quite how disappointed you are! And I am quite a connoisseur of your disappointed expressions, for reasons to obvious to name!)

 

Some may even feel more than disappointment. They may feel a frustration bordering on resentment. “Why do we have to have this Gospel reading?” they may be thinking.

·        They may think: it’s poetry, doubtless melodious in the original, but it has no point of contact with my life.

·        They may think: it’s abstract theology, that just shows us that some people in the early church had too much time on their hands, and turned to empty speculation about the inner workings of Gd.

·        They may think: in truth it’s ideology. It’s a power thing. All that talk about our Founder (and only our Founder) being one with Gd and being Gd is just an elevated way of saying “Our Gd is bigger than your god”.

Well, I won’t surprise you one tiny iota, if I say that any who are thinking any of these things have got things really rather wrong. I go further: I feel this Gospel reading - this Prologue to John – this headline message to the whole Gospel of John - may be just what we need to hear, here and now.

 

“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with Gd, and the Word was Gd… And the Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen [the Word’s] glory…”

 

The Word was with Gd, and the Word was Gd. There is in truth nothing abstract here. Here is Gd’s revelation, Gd’s promise to us that Gd is (in Gdself) communication. Even before – outside of – the creation of the universe, Gd is love and communicative Love. It is not so much that we find love in the world (though we do), as that we find the world in Love.

 

Anything but abstract, here is our bedrock hope. If in this strangest of all years, at this strangest of all Christmasses, we have found ourselves close to rock-bottom, then we need to hear and dwell on the fact that at the bottom is this Rock. This. Rock. Love, communicative love - love which finds the words, the gestures, the silences, the actions, the songs, the dances which show love, which show you how loved you are – this love, in all its varieties, is there to be found and always will be. Because it is out of such communicative Love that the world is made, that you are made. 

Preachers often preach about the love of Gd. Perhaps too often. In any event, we can hear the words of the love of Gd, and have them wash over us. We can think: "That's the reference to Gd's love, done and dusted. So far, so predictable." So I cannot know if anything that I say here will hit home. But I do insist: whether we can hear it fully or not, here is bed-rock. Here is the rock. 

 

“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with Gd, and the Word was Gd… And the Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen [the Word’s] glory…”

 

That the Word became flesh is

·        both a natural development of the Hebrew story, because in that story Gd is constantly accommodating Gdself to be alongside weak and foolish human beings,

·        and something utterly shocking, for flesh is weak.

We know it, brothers and sisters. Our flesh is weak. Not only is it vulnerable to knives and guns and such, but this year we have had it put right in front of our eyes how our flesh is vulnerable to microscopic attack, how invisible entities that are so insubstantial that biologists aren’t even sure they can be called organisms in their own right, can enter into our flesh, and send us into agony, and kill us. (Over time, you wouldn’t thank me for dressing this up.)

 

Gd knows just how weak we are. In our weakness (in all of its parts) we have not shocked Gd, or let Gd down. Gd knows our weakness. From the inside Gd knows – is acquainted with – our weakness (all its parts). He is in solidarity with us, and our anxieties and sadness, our legitimate anxieties and sadness. We are flesh, and Gd knows how fleshly flesh is.

 

“And the Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen [the Word’s] glory…”

 

Do we see the Word’s glory? Our instinctive answer may be: No. Not now, no. The glory has departed. All we get to do is muddle through at best, and desperately fight stress, and heaviness of heart, and terrors, and harm, and pain, at worst. No glory here. Except there is – there is – glory here. When we care for each other, picking up the phone (as you do). When we care for ourselves and others, donating to food banks and refugee organisations (as you do). When we care for the world by speaking out about the wrongness of racism and all the rest of it (as you do)…

if we have eyes to see – when we have eyes to see – there is the Glory of Gd the Word.

 

Not that that is all is all that is to be said about the Glory of Gd the Word. We are here – and I do want to say that we are all “here”, we are gathered as one - to worship. We are drawn to worship. We know – even if we don’t say it – we know that Gd is attractive, is beautiful, draws us in. Our orientation to worship already intimates the Glory that is there to greet us. And this is our birth-right. (That’s a message in today’s Gospel too; I invite you to read it over again in the course of the day.)

 

It is true that so many of the prompts that make for the sense of the glorious worship of the Glorious One are diminished or just plain absent right now.

·        No singing together.

·        No processions or elaborate liturgical flow.

·        And, saddest of all (or at least joint first with not singing together – I am a realist), no sharing of a meal of bread and wine, such as has sustained us, year in, year out.

But Gd is unchanged.

 

The angels, their song, the shepherds, their listening, the Holy Family, the  journeys, the lack of room, the child bound up safe in a manger. We have given you none of that in today’s Gospel. But if ever there were a need to replace the microscope, which examines the story in its finest details, with the telescope, which enables us to see the biggest possible picture, to see the panorama, that need would be ours today.

 

Seeing the panorama

·        reveals Gd is Love, is communicative Love, with a longing to communicate love to you, not because you’re always simply lovely, but because that is who Gd is;

·        reveals that Gd knows what it is to be flesh, to be weak as flesh, and so is alongside us in our weakness (in all its parts);

·        reveals that Gd’s Glory is found in every single act of kindness, and overflows (precedes) all our actions and intentions, such that Gd is saying to us always, in season and out of season, in church and out of church, in pandemic and out of pandemic, “Come to my Glory, bathe in my Glory, rest in my Glory".

 

“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with Gd, and the Word was Gd… And the Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen [the Word’s] glory…”

 

Merry Christmas. Christ is born. Glorify him. Amen.

One Sent From Gd...

 

Sermon. St Michael and All Angels, Little Ilford. 13.12.20

Advent 3: Gaudete (Year B)

John 1.6-8, 19-28

Today’s Gospel is full of negatives and absences. What a way to begin! I really don’t wish to lower the mood – the Gaudete mood. I know we all need comfort and hope, and a reliable supply of both and more, in these days. And there are, of course, good things in today’s Gospel. But, at a rather technical level, today’s Gospel is full of negatives and absences.

Negatives.

Let’s recall John’s dialogue with those sent from Jerusalem to Bethany, across the Jordan:

J: “I am not the Messiah!”

O: “Are you Elijah?” J: “I am not.”

O: “Are you the prophet?” J: “No.”

This ever-more brutal exchange is consistent with what the Evangelist has already told us:

“He was not the Light.”

We are being led to see who John the Baptist is not, and thus already being nudged to think that there is one for whom all these negatives will fall away.

And, on cue, the Baptist says as much:

“I baptise with water. Among you stands one whom you do not know, the one who is coming after me. I am not worthy to untie the thong of his sandal.”

I think this is carefully crafted. I think the hearers of this tale are meant to feel intrigue, excitement. Who is this one? This one we know not, but who is already among us?

Do we feel that excitement? I think it’s unlikely. For most of us, we’ve heard – we’ve read – the story many times, from start to finish. And let me add, that is fine. The Gospels were written to be heard, over and over. If we are comfortable with the story, all is well.

Yet, where we cannot necessarily feel intrigue or excitement, we may yet wonder - wonder if there isn’t here an invitation to hear the story anew. We know the name of the one who is already among us. His name is Jesus. We know him, know aspects of him. He is no stranger. We need not pretend he is. And yet, do we know him as well as we could? Is he not in many ways still strange to us? Might we as-it-were start again: begin a new journey of getting to know

·        the one who changes everything, who is already among us;

·        the one who is already among us, who changes everything?  

*

And so, from the negative to the absence. I suspect you have already sensed that today’s Gospel reading is a real cut-and-paste-and-cut-and-paste job. If you look at the chapter and verses, this is confirmed, What we have are two separate excerpts taken out of the opening of John’s Gospel. And we may well have at the back of our minds the texts in that opening which are absent today. Here are some of them:

“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with Gd, and the Word was Gd…

In [this one] was life, and the life was the light of the world. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it…

The Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory…”

That’s all rather different from the tale of intrigue. This isn’t a story of people pointing to people. This is a grander-scale narrative, a panorama, a view of everything, of all that this. The themes are creation, and the nature of Gd. And it is not prose, but poetry.  

How then does it all fit together? Is it meant to? Or did the writer, or some later scribe, make a mistake? I am confident that they are meant to fit together. We hear of the origins of the universe and the nature of Gd. But before we have any chance to fool ourselves we’ve taken it seriously in, we change focus. And this too is carefully crafted. Intentionally, we are led from the telescope to the microscope.

“There came a person, sent from Gd; John, his name.”

What do we learn from this? I will put it slightly challengingly: we learn that Gd does not care about humanity! I mean: Gd does not care about “humanity” in the abstract. Gd cares only for human beings in particular.

·        For you.

·        For me.

·        For the person next to you.

·        For the person impossibly distant from you, in all possible ways.

·        For the ones you love.

·        And… for the ones you can’t stand.

We human beings cannot sustain that loving attention for literally billions of people. But, then, we are not Gd. Gd is Gd. And Gd does not care for “humanity”, but for human beings. From the absence, we learn this.

“There came a person, sent from Gd, John, his name.” And, being sent from Gd, his presence makes all the difference. This one is the very herald who says the Word-made-flesh is already among us, sometimes known, sometimes (more often, perhaps) not known.

So, indeed, today is Gaudete Sunday. Today is a day of rejoicing, albeit it of gentle rejoicing. Today is our pink (or, as we are perhaps learning to say, our “Rose” day). We are in the middle of our Advent “fast” (how’s that going, brothers and sisters?)! Better put: we are in the middle of our Advent reflections and preparations, leading up to Christmas. And here we relax any restraint we’ve put ourselves under. We, in a gentle and understated way, anticipate Christmas.

“There came a person, sent from Gd, John, his name.” And, being sent from Gd, his presence makes all the difference.

Sisters and brothers, I repeat a theme I have brought before. And I make not the slightest apology for the repetition. (You may chide me, but I will not budge.) What is said of John, can be said of you. You may think of your name; I invite you to.

“There came a person, sent from Gd, their name was [Name]. And, being sent from Gd, their presence makes all the difference.”

And, today, I am not even going to set you (to set us) the task of thinking about all the ways we might be sent from Gd into the world. There is of course a time for that. Of course, being sent from Gd implicates us in a task. Yes, vocation is a task,  a burden even. Yes, further: hardship and risk and danger and sacrifice are all involved. But! But, today (anticipating Christmas) I say: even before and outside of that task, if we are in the world (and here we are), we are sent from Gd. Our very being is sent-from-Gd.

“There came a person, sent from Gd, their name was [Name]. And, being sent from Gd, their presence makes all the difference.”

Gaudete! Let us rejoice! Amen.