Sermon for Mattins, Pentecost.

Here I am, resurfacing only when posting a sermon!  Preaching at Mattins is an interesting experience - quite different to the Eucharist, where the main point of the service is still to come; here it's hard not to feel like it's a bit of an appendix.  But it was very good to have a chance to come at Pentecost from a different angle, wonderful though the Eucharist's readings about the first gift of the Spirit are.

In other news, I have survived the academic bit of my first year at theological college (though there's still two weeks of term left).  Much contemplation to be done...

The readings were: Genesis 11: 1-9 (the Tower of Babel) and Acts 10: 43- end (Peter preaching to Cornelius and the gentile believers at Caeserea).

When I think about the gift of the Holy Spirit to the church, which we celebrate today, then I tend to only think about the famous story in Acts of how, at the Jewish celebration of Pentecost, the Holy Spirit came to the disciples in the upper room, and they were able to preach to the crowd, who understood them in their own language; that’s the reading we will hear this evening at the Eucharist.  But the readings we heard this morning give us a slightly different focus, and remind us that our celebration of Pentecost is not just about a one-off event, but about the life of the church as a whole – but also about more than that, for today’s reading from Acts shows us God at work in the world outside the institutions of the church, and, sometimes, challenging our own easy assumptions about where God can be found.

The passage we read from Acts is part of a longer story, and we can’t really understand its full significance without putting it in that context.  Peter is preaching to a group of gentiles who are lead by a centurion called Cornelius, described as ‘God-fearing’ and as being well thought of by the Jewish population.  ‘God-fearing’ here is a technical term; they were gentiles who had been impressed by the Jewish religion, and who believed in much or all of its teaching, but did not convert for one reason or another - not wanting to be circumcised seems to have often played a role, as did the implications which observing Jewish food laws had for your relations to the rest of society.  Before the passage we read begins, Peter has just had two unexpected experiences; in the first, he sees a vision of number of ‘unclean’ birds and animals, and is told to kill and eat.  At first he refuses, but a voice tells him ‘What God has made clean, you must not call profane.’  Then, on waking, he meets messengers from Cornelius, who tell him that an angel told Cornelius to send for him, and Peter feels the Spirit prompting him to go with them.

So this is the context in which Peter begins his impromptu sermon by declaring “‘I truly understand that God shows no partiality, ³⁵but in every nation anyone who fears him and does what is right is acceptable to him.”  Peter has learned from his vision of the ‘unclean’ animals that, whatever markers we might set up to determine who we think are acceptable to God, God sees beyond that.  The ‘unclean’ animals of the vision map on to Cornelius and his gentile friends.  We know from elsewhere in the New Testament that the question of whether gentile converts to faith in Christ  had to become Jews and receive circumcision and obey the dietary rules became a big issue for the fledgling church.  And you can see, I think, why there was a debate about it.  I've talked about it from the gentile side, but you can see why the Jewish believers struggled with the issue too.  The laws that had been given to the children of Israel were, after all, of enormous importance: they were how you lived as one of the people of God, how you lived a life pleasing to God.  And if these gentiles weren’t willing to sign up to that, well, you might ask, how committed could they truly be?   

The ‘God-fearers’ had become stuck in a position where they were permanently second-class religious citizens; the Jews in Caesarea may have praised Cornelius as a good man and not the oppressive kind of Roman, but I imagine that the praise had a fairly large proportion of condescension in it.  He was a good man – for a gentile.  But he wasn’t one of the chosen people.

But God sees things differently, as the vision has just forced Peter to realize.  God shows no partiality; God loves Cornelius and his fellow God-fearers just as much as he loves Peter and his fellow members of the church, and as Peter speaks to them, much to everyone’s surprise, the Spirit of God ‘falls’ on them, drawing them into the ‘inside circle’ and making it plain that, whatever anyone else thinks, God wants them to be part of the body of Christ.

The focus of the story, then, isn’t really about the ‘speaking in tongues’, or rather, the ‘speaking in tongues’ is only important because it demonstrates what’s going on.  It is significant that it is demonstrated in that way, though.  In the reading from the Old Testament, the loss of a universal human language, and hence the division of humanity into warring nations, is portrayed as a punishment for human ambition and a limitation on it.  Humans, the story seems to say, are so flawed and wicked that they can’t be trusted with the gifts that God originally gave them.  But the gift of tongues at Pentecost shows that the redeeming work of God seen in Christ’s birth, life, death, resurrection and ascension, and continued in the work of the Spirit, does something fundamental to human nature.  In that gift, the curse of Babel is reversed; the barriers of language and nationality and race fall away, and all become one in Christ.

Well, you might say, that’s all very well, but what has it to say to us?  If you look at the church today, you can’t help but be conscious of its divisions, the barriers which we set up between each other, the lines we draw.  I don't just mean the boundaries between denominations, but the divisions within them too.  And then there are the people we consider, for whatever reason, to be ‘not good’ enough to be part of God’s kingdom, even if we try to avoid using such crude language, even in our own heads.  Maybe it's just me.  But I know, if I honestly examine myself, that  I’ve got lots of categories in the back of my head of people and viewpoints that I find unacceptable, and if I’m not careful, I find myself not only drawing red lines that shut people out, but also assuming that God draws the same sort of lines in the same sort of places.   

In one sense, it doesn’t matter why we start assuming that someone’s views or actions make them unacceptable, whether we’re damning them for being a liberal or a fundamentalist, socialist or Tory, catholic or protestant.  When we start assuming that God can only work redemptively in the right kind of people, the categories we approve of, we’ve got things wrong.

I’m certainly not arguing that it doesn’t matter what we believe or what we do; I’m not arguing that God doesn’t call us all to lead new lives that are more in tune with the kingdom of God, which means that all of us will have to change our attitudes and our actions somehow, and some people more than others.  I’m not even arguing that we should never debate and even fight about things in the church, because otherwise there could be no challenge when the church as an institution is complicit in injustice, we could never recognise when we’ve gone astray. Sometimes that challenge and conflict can be part of the work of the Spirit.  

 But what Pentecost calls on us to realize is that there are now no boundaries to where God can work.  We can’t assume that the Spirit is only given to people we approve of or would recognise as ‘people like us’.   

God is at work outside the lines we draw, and outside the church, too.  And we, like Peter, are challenged to discern where God is at work, and join in.

Sermon for Lent 1

I seem to post nothing but sermons on here... hopefully soon there will be time for more original content, but it turns out that this training business is quite time-consuming (indeed, as soon as I've posted this, I must return to my exploration of Leviticus).  Yesterday's sermon was on Genesis 2.15-17; 3.1-7 (the Fall); Romans 5.12-19; Matthew 4.1-11 (the temptation of Christ).
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“I can resist everything,” Oscar Wilde wrote, “except temptation.”  It’s a good line – snappy, memorable, though possibly a bit over-used.  But I think I prefer the variation on the idea which Wilde uses in “Dorian Grey”, where the cynical, hedonistic Lord Henry advises the naïve protagonist: "The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it. Resist it, and your soul grows sick with longing for the things it has forbidden to itself, with desire for what its monstrous laws have made monstrous and unlawful."

It’s a very comfortable bit of advice, in a way, though I’m not sure that it’s one you’d want to follow –Dorian Grey came to a rather unpleasant end.  But there’s a good bit of psychological insight in there.  There are certainly times when I’ve done things that I probably shouldn’t have, just because I couldn’t stand thinking about it all the time.  It’s certainly amazing how much more you think about things when you know you can’t have them.  To take a trivial example, I know I thought more about chocolate in the times when I’ve given it up for Lent than I normally would! 

And one aspect of temptation is getting so obsessed with something that we can’t see how to do without it.  It just feels too difficult to go without, or stop doing what we were doing, or start doing something we know should, but – well, we haven’t got the energy, or the time, or the guts.  Or the imagination.

Because while, unlike Lord Henry, I don’t believe that it’s impossible to resist temptation, I do acknowledge that it can be very uncomfortable to do so.  It often means taking the hard road, not the easy one, and who wants to do that?  Of course, we have to remember that there are also temptations to do what you think is the hard, right, thing because it makes us look admirable, even if it hurts others or ourselves.  But there, resisting it involves admitting things that we may not very much like about ourselves.  And often that’s the hardest thing of all.

The Old Testament and the Gospel for today both gave us two contrasting stories about temptation – very appropriately, for the start of Lent.  The woman and the man, Adam and Eve, seem to espouse the Lord Henry model of temptation – the narrative gives no indication that they even tried to resist.  And it’s a very human story.  If someone tells me they know a secret, I want to know.  Humans are incurably curious creatures, and in many ways it’s one of the better things about us as a species.  It’s given us creativity, scholarship, learning – and indeed, just about everything we take for granted in life came about through people wondering what would happen if they tried something new.  I do wonder how someone came up with the idea of cooking, for instance... 

But there’s a darker side to curiosity.  It can be about trying to achieve power over other people, about looking for ways of controlling them – about finding a way to ‘play God’ in fact.

The Gospel story, by contrast, shows us Jesus, who apparently has no difficulty in resisting the devil’s temptations.  The three temptations aren’t chosen at random.  The stakes get gradually higher, but there’s a common thread; and it gets back to this idea of temptation as being closely linked to taking the easy way out.

The first temptation looks fairly straightforward.  Jesus is hungry – unsurprisingly, after forty days of fasting – and the devil tempts him to turn the stones into bread.  The temptation is to use his power, the power of God within him, for his own benefit; but this is not how God’s power and love works – it is always directed outwards for the good of others.  Divine miracles are not cheap party tricks.

The second temptation is perhaps a more insidious one.  You could read it in more than one way.  Jesus throwing himself down from the Temple and being caught by angels would be a very spectacular way of demonstrating his power and identity as the Son of God.  Surely, you might think, that would be a pretty unarguable way of getting people to believe in him?  However, once again – and however much we might sometimes wish that wasn’t the case – ‘forcing’ us to believe is not how God works.

Or there’s another possibility.  The temptation might be playing on Jesus’ self-doubt.  “If you are the Son of God, throw yourself down…”  There are temptations that prey on our own self-doubts; we find ourselves doing selfish, cruel, or just plain stupid things in a desperate attempt to shore up our own identities, our own self-image, our relationships with others.  You can see it on the school playground, how children join in with bullying because they don’t want to end up as victims.  But Jesus knows who he is, and he knows that his identity is his relationship to the Father.  The Son of God is who he is, and he remains true to that relationship by not testing it.  He doesn’t need to demand that the Father prove he loves him; he will not put God to the test.

And then we come to the final temptation: to bow down and worship the devil, in exchange for “all the kingdoms of the world, and the glory of them”.  Such a little act, it might seem, and after all, Jesus would make a better king than Caesar, wouldn’t he?  But it’s a temptation and a cheat – by achieving power by this quick and easy method, Jesus would have turned his back on the Father – and on who he himself is. It’s the same temptation as Adam and Eve faced – to grab power and overlordship.  Now, no-one is very likely to offer any of us world domination, in return for a minor spot of blasphemy.  But it is quite likely that we will be faced with the choice between being true to ourselves, to the people God made us to be, and – well, something easy and attractive.  It might be a job, a position of power or influence.  It might be power over something else, or impressing someone you want to like you.  It might be the temptation to do something bad so that good might come of it – after all, who could doubt that Jesus would be a better king than Caesar?  But Jesus’ example shows us that there are no short cuts, only the hard road to the cross.

But the Cross is also the way to the garden and the empty tomb, the way to resurrection and new life which redeems all the struggles and labours, and that thought ought to comfort us.  And then, too, we can find comfort in Paul’s words in the Epistle: Christ shares our humanity and identifies with our weakness and sin, so that we die with him and rise with him, redeemed and set free.

And if nothing else – for we know there’s likely to come a time when we found the temptation impossible to resist – we can perhaps remember Lord Henry’s views on the subject of temptation after all.  For if we have yielded to the temptation, then we may also realize that, after all, it was not satisfying.  It loses its power, at least for a time – and so, we can realize that we can return in penitence to Christ, for God is the only one who can truly satisfy our desires.  Not an easy satisfaction, but the real ones never are.

Sermon for Epiphany 4: The Intoxicating God

This is a fantastically rich story, and the problem is always working out what one selects to talk about.

Gospel of the day: John 2:1-11

I don't know about you, but I've never been all that interested in wedding planning.  I can't say I would ever sit down and watch "Don't tell the Bride", or anything like that, though clearly some people do.

However.  As (some of you) know, I recently got engaged, which meant that I suddenly found the subject of wedding planning a lot more interesting than I’d ever have expected to.  So the other day, I was looking through a book about how to plan your wedding.  It was full of advice – some of it decidedly more useful than others.  I have to say I find it slightly worrying that it needs to be pointed out that it’s unreasonable to expect your guests to dress according to a strict colour scheme.  But some of it was handy, such as the guide to how much alcohol you’ll need for the reception.

“Allow a couple of glasses of champagne per person for the drinks reception, more if it goes beyond an hour, half a bottle of wine per head for the meal, and half a glass of champagne for the toasts (a bottle of champagne half fills eight glasses).”

They also advise, in these budget conscious times, serving cava, not champagne, and house wine rather than anything more expensive.  Sound advice when you’re on a budget, though – having spent the next five minutes mentally reviewing all the people I was likely to invite, and considering how much they might drink, I couldn’t come to any conclusions about whether or not it the amount they recommend is sufficient or not.  I expect I’d end up panicking about what would happen if the drink ran out.

It’s probably not surprising, in the circumstances, that I found all this good advice coming back to me when I looked at the Gospel reading.  The parents of the happy couple in this story seem to have followed the advice on the cheapness of the wine – but they definitely didn’t get the calculations about how much wine to buy right!  And you can imagine the panic among the servants, later spreading to Mary, as they try to find some way to stop everyone noticing.  Which sounds quite impossible, because if there’s one thing everyone notices at a party, it’s when the drink runs out.

Now, running out of wine at a wedding is not the greatest disaster in the world – though I’m not sure that bride and groom would necessarily agree.  It’s not like the situation in the Old Testament reading, for instance, where the widow and her child are in real danger of starving to death before her kindness to Elijah is rewarded by God.  But all the same it would be an embarrassing, perhaps even humiliating situation, shaming the family in front of their neighbours.  Hospitality, after all, was an important social duty, and getting it wrong was at least a moderately serious matter.  This would certainly explain why Mary is so keen to help them “save face”.

Even though we might be tempted to think that the smooth running of a wedding reception is far too trivial a matter to merit God intervening in it – though that probably also says something about our assumptions about what matters to God – that’s not the hardest thing to deal with in the reading. The tricky part when we’re looking at this reading is how Jesus is apparently reluctant to help, so reluctant that he’s quite off hand with his mother.  How do we make sense of this? 

Certainly we can learn that we shouldn’t lose faith if our prayers aren’t answered immediately. Jesus isn’t being as rude to Mary as we might think from the way he calls her “woman!”, because it could be quite a respectful form of address in Greek, it’s still a very strange way to talk to your mother.  Perhaps it would be closer to the spirit of the original to use something like ‘Madam’ or ‘Ma’am’ – but either way, it’s slightly disturbing that Jesus is shown so distant and cold.  I think that the reason it’s portrayed as it is is that the Gospel writer is making the point that Jesus answers to the concerns of the Father – the redemptive work that will become manifest in his “hour”, which as usual in John means his death.  Now, Mary does not know what Father is doing in Jesus.  But Mary does know enough to recognise the work of God in her son.  And this is where Mary’s response becomes an example to every Christian.

In a striking gesture of faith, she just tells the servants to do what Jesus tells them, even before he’s agreed to help.  That is, she doesn’t allow herself to be put off by the fact that she can’t quite see what Jesus is doing.  Rather, she has faith that Jesus will act in love.

And when Jesus does respond, it is in a way that’s a strange mix of the unobtrusive and the spectacular, which I think echoes the way God works more generally. 

It’s unobtrusive, because Jesus doesn’t draw attention to the fact that he’s performing a miracle; the servants take the wine to the steward as if they had just found some more wine somewhere.  And yet, the miracle has an excessive, generous quality.  Jesus provides a massive amount of top quality wine, much more than the most lavish wedding reception could require.  The stone jars of water, used for purification in accordance with the Law become full of the new wine.  And this works as a symbol of the wider story told in the Gospel, the story of how God becomes a human being in a particular, obscure historical context, and transforms not just the lives of all those around him, but the lives of all humanity, and transforming all creation. 

The Father’s grace, manifest in Jesus, overflows and springs the boundaries of what we think is appropriate.  It may not always be immediately apparent what God is doing in, around, and through us, but in this miracle we are reminded that the God who made himself known in Jesus is generous, exciting, and – dare I say it? – intoxicating.

Homilette for Christ the King

I was preaching at the college Eucharist on Sunday; it was bashed out in a bit of a hurry, due to pressure of work, and it's not the greatest sermon I've ever written.  It also illustrates my tendency to resort to the Middle Ages when looking for inspiration... But Elisabeth of Thuringia is a Good Thing, so I am less apologetic than I might be!

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Today is Christ the King, when we celebrate… yes, you guessed it, Christ’s kingship.  But what does that actually mean?  Well, the Gospel focuses on the idea of Jesus as king, and how that’s understood – or misunderstood – by those around him, and I’ll come back to those in a moment.  But I want to start somewhere slightly different.

Last Thursday, the church calendar commemorated Elisabeth of Thuringia, or of Hungary, as she’s sometimes called, a thirteenth century German noblewoman.  It struck me that it’s appropriate that she’s usually celebrated round about Christ the King, because Elisabeth’s an interesting figure to help us think about the idea of what royalty means in terms of God’s kingdom.  Elizabeth was the daughter of the king of Hungary, but was sent at a young age to Thuringia, to marry the heir to the dukedom.  And she was very pious, and very charitable – and so far, she doesn’t sound very different from any number of interchangeable mediaeval women saints.  But there are a couple of things that make Elizabeth different.  One thing is that she had an unusually strong sense of justice and awareness of the wider ramifications of political power.  She refused to eat any food which had been produced by unfairly exploiting the poor – I suppose you could call her the patron saint of Fair Trade. 

But the other is that she simply didn’t have any patience with the strict rules of precedence and proper behaviour of the power structures of her day if it conflicted with the loving thing to do.  You can see it in the stories about her spending her dress allowance on food for the poor – which is a fairly standard thing for a mediaeval female saint to do – but you can also see it in less clichéd ways, like the way she disturbed the members of court by actually insisting on sitting next to her husband at dinner, so that they could talk.  And it’s shown, above all, by what happened after her husband died.  Royal widows often went off to found monasteries in the middle ages – it was a respectable retirement job, I suppose, but Elizabeth, to the disgust of her family, and in the face of very considerable opposition, went off to found a hospital.  And she disconcerted everyone by joining in with all the nursing and the chores.  The evidence available, incidentally, suggests her cooking was really dreadful…

Elizabeth’s life turned the conventions of what royalty was supposed to do on its head, and she did this because she was trying to live the life of Christ.  Elizaebth’s ‘royalty’, her power and influence, was only significant to her because she could give it away, and in doing this she was following the example of Jesus, who though, as Paul put it ‘the image of the invisible God’ emptied himself of all his power, to the point of painful and humiliating death, so that there would be nothing in human life, however broken and horrible, where God was not present.  “through him God was pleased to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, by making peace through the blood of his cross”

The gospel reading does some interesting things with this concept of Jesus as king.  The people mock Jesus for claiming kingship, when he’s powerless, betrayed, and abandoned.  Yet the joke is really on them.  Jesus is the king, the lord of all, the only person who can rightfully be called a king.  But the kind of king he is is not what humanity – who think that power exists to be held on to and used over people – expects.  He is a king who gives up his power for the sake of others.  In a final irony, the only person who manages to recognise this is the ‘good thief’.  Luke leaves it totally unclear what prompts him to ask to be remembered ‘when you come into your kingdom.’  Dorothy L Sayers, who as well as writing detective stories wrote a very good series of radio plays based on the gospels, actually suggests that the thief was just being kind and humouring a harmless lunatic – which might explain why he’s the only person in the gospels to call Jesus by his first name, without any sort of title.  But that act of kindness is enough for Jesus, who with the generosity of God, responds to all our attempts at goodness, however inadequate they are.  Jesus’ kingship is about self-giving love, and one of the forms that self-giving takes is God’s willingness to treat us as better than we are – and thus make us into the better people God wants us to be.

It’s hard for us to grasp the sheer goodness of God, of the depths of the love of God which makes him become a human being, and live and die to bring us from death to life.  The world couldn’t cope with Jesus – they couldn’t stand the challenge to the structures of power and authority we all build up in an attempt to protect ourselves.  It’s why they killed him.  And we, too, find it hard to cope with God’s love.  We’re a bit like Elizabeth’s courtiers, unable to grasp why she couldn’t just stick to the rules of proper behaviour.  But she didn’t because it was the loving thing to do; it wasn’t proper behaviour for a mediaeval noblewoman, but it fitted the kingdom of God.