Matthew 2.13-23 - sermon preached by Teresa Morgan

Matthew’s story of the birth of Jesus is a mystery wrapped in a melodrama. Violent – exotic – unpredictable – we are so familiar with it that it’s easy to forget how extraordinary it is. An angel appears out of the blue to an ordinary man and announces that his fiancée is carrying God’s child. The baby is born and a caravan of very grand astronomers arrives from somewhere in the East, to worship the baby and bring him expensive gifts. Then tragedy strikes: King Herod hears of the baby, and in a fit of paranoia orders a massacre of the children of Bethlehem, while Joseph and his family flee to Egypt.

It’s as complicated as an opera plot, with just as many loose ends. (Have you ever wondered what happened to all that gold and frankincense and myrrh? Or why no-one ever seems to recognize the adult Jesus as the Virgin’s Son, or as that child the magi visited? Or why it matters that he came out of Egypt?) It’s complicated because Matthew has a lot things to say, and to express them all he has woven at least three stories into one.

The first story is for Matthew’s Jewish-Christian listeners, and is about the Messiah. It tells how Jesus was descended from King David, as many Jews believed the Messiah would be, and how his birth fulfils prophecies about the Messiah from some of the great prophets of Israel – Jeremiah, Isaiah, Hosea and Micah. It shows angels guiding his parents through his birth as they had guided his ancestors, Abraham and Isaac and Jacob.

Matthew’s second story is for his gentile-Christian listeners, and it tells of a Great King in the gentile mould. Jesus was the son of a human mother and a divine father – like Alexander the Great or the Emperor Augustus. When he was born, astronomers spotted a new star rising in the sky, as they always did when a great king was born or died. When Herod discovered that a new King of Israel had been born, he tried to kill Jesus, and Jesus only escaped by going into hiding – just like the Persian King Cyrus had had to do, or Cypselus the Greek tyrant. Gentiles would have recognized many parallels between the birth of Jesus and their own great men.

The third story is very different, and equally surprising to Jews and gentiles. It tells of an illegitimate child, born in a very ordinary household, who becomes a refugee, fleeing his country in danger of his life. Who even when it’s safe to return, can’t go home, but has to settle in another part of Israel. (Luke says Joseph and Mary lived in Nazareth and went to Bethlehem for the census, but Matthew implies that they lived in Bethlehem, and says that when they came back from Egypt they moved to Nazareth for the first time.)

The intertwining of these stories makes Matthew’s Jesus what he is – Galilean, Son of David, Messiah, Son of God. They are all important and challenging in different ways. But, paradoxically, the most challenging of all is perhaps today’s story of Jesus the refugee from an ordinary family, which on the face of it is the simplest and least colourful.

Jesus will always be ordinary. His ministry will be almost entirely among ordinary Jews. And to many of them, he will always be the carpenter’s son. Eventually he’ll be crucified like a slave or a common criminal.

And Jesus will always be a migrant, a stranger. ‘Foxes have holes,’ he will say, ‘and birds of the air have nests; but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head.’ He will leave Galilee as a young man, and never live there again. He will often find himself unwelcome in the towns where he preaches and heals, and have to move on. He will be driven periodically by the Spirit into the desert. At least once he will leave Israel completely, for Tyre and Sidon. He will make different places his base – Capernaum, Bethphage – but he will never be able to settle or finish his work in any one community.

He will always be in danger from authority. Not because he courts power, or makes trouble: at the beginning of his ministry, the devil will tempt him with political power, and he’ll refuse it. It won’t be his idea for crowds to shout ‘Hosanna to the Son of David!’ when he enters Jerusalem. He will tell the Pharisees to pay to Caesar what is due to Caesar. He will even impress the Roman governor. But in the end religious and political leaders will see him as a threat; and neither the Jewish nor the Roman authorities will feel safe with him alive. The things he says and people’s reactions to him are too powerful.

And all his life and after, Jesus will bring danger and even death to people close to him. At Bethlehem it was the children, whose only link with him was that they were about the same age. Later, Jesus will warn his followers, ‘I am sending you out like sheep into the midst of wolves... Beware of them, for they will hand you over to councils and flog you in their synagogues, and you will be dragged before governors and kings because of me… you will be hated by all because of my name.’ The history of the early Church shows how right he was.

So today’s story poses a profound challenge to Matthew and his listeners. Jesus’s life is marked not only by power and hope and glory, but by conflict and failure and death. He and the people he touches are terribly vulnerable. His very existence has consequences beyond his control, some of which are disastrous.

Matthew is grappling here with something which has always been a special problem for Jews, as he was. When God sends the Messiah, Jews believed, there would be no mistaking him. He would appear in a blaze of glory – take over Israel – change the world – and nothing would ever be the same again. But Matthew finds himself believing in a Messiah who was poor and obscure and vulnerable – who never intended to take over Israel – who called people to change, but never forced them to – who transformed some lives but left others untouched – who had hardly begun his work when he was taken for an ordinary trouble maker and killed.

It’s an absurdity; a paradox; a mystery. And yet he does believe it – passionately and profoundly, in every moment of his transformed life. The rest of his gospel is Matthew’s exploration of how this mystery can be – that such fragility can be the means by which God hopes to change the world. That God sent his only son, the Messiah, to live in poverty and die on a cross.

As we travel through this year in Matthew’s company, this is the mystery we ponder too.

The heart of this is perhaps that contact with Jesus is always dangerous – has unpredictable consequences, for good or ill. God introduces something to the world which can’t be closely controlled. Like other elements of creation – natural forces, life forms…

The Hebrews lesson says that it’s only because Jesus has been tested that he knows what it’s like for us.

 I never know quite what to do with the stories of Jesus’s birth. It’s one thing to talk about the Incarnation itself – how the love of God reaches out to us in Christ. How humanity, led by Mary and Joseph, responds. How Jesus as a baby draws us all to him. How somehow we receive and hold God’s gift, and between us go on holding it.

But it’s another thing to talk about the details of the birth stories themselves. And if one is harder than another, then for me it’s Matthew. Why does Matthew tell the story he does? Complete with angelic visions to Joseph, magi following a star from the East, King Herod killing the children of Bethlehem (and if he had done that, it would surely have got into the rest of the history books), the family decamping to Egypt and coming back years later to settle in Nazareth. Granted that Matthew wanted to say that Jesus was special right from the beginning – why does he tell this story?

It’s really at least three stories in one. For a start, there is a story about the Messiah of Israel, told through genealogy and prophecy. In Matthew’s day, many Jews were expecting a Messiah, and many of them were expecting him to be a king from the house of David. So since Matthew believes that Jesus is the Messiah, he tells us that his father Joseph is descended from David – and even better, from Abraham too.

One of the things Matthew and Luke have in common is the idea that Jesus was conceived out of wedlock – and people have wondered whether the story of the Holy Spirit coming to Mary was Christians’ answer to some rumour that there was something irregular about Jesus’s background. Both writers make the best of it by citing the messianic prophecy of Isaiah, ‘A virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and they shall name him Emmanuel.’

Matthew goes further than Luke, though, and his story is littered with prophecies. There had been hundreds of prophecies about the future of Israel, so he had plenty to choose from, and I suspect that it is mostly not the individual prophecies that matter here, so much as the prophets themselves. After all, some of the prophecies – like the one about Rachel weeping – don’t really add anything to the story, and others – like the one about God’s son being called out of Egypt – are never referred to again.
I suspect that Matthew, wanting to make the point that Jesus was the Messiah foretold by the prophets, used whatever prophecies fitted his story best. But it is notable that his prophecies come from the perhaps the greatest and most influential prophets of Israelite hope and salvation – Jeremiah, Isaiah, Hosea and Micah – and from the times of Abraham and David – just the texts that people would look to, to confirm that the promised Messiah had come.

The second story Matthew tells, interwoven with the first, is not for a Jewish so much as a Gentile audience. Writing when Gentiles were already becoming Christians, he wanted to show that Jesus was a king in a way Gentiles would understand. So his birth story is full of ideas borrowed from Gentile stories of the birth of kings.

The idea that the king is really the son of a God, is widespread in the Greek and Roman worlds. Alexander the Great, for instance, was widely regarded as the son of Zeus, who visited his mother, possibly in the form of a snake. And it was typical for astrologers – magoi – to spot a new star rising in the firmament when a new king was born or came to power. It is also a common story that while one man is king, a child is born who will supplant his line. The present king tries to have the future one destroyed, as Herod does Jesus, but the future king escapes by going into hiding, as Jesus did. Later, he returns and eventually takes power. It happened to the Persian king Cyrus the Great, for instance – who was well known and admired by the Jews for freeing them from slavery in Babylon in 539 BC. And who, by coincidence, was the original subject of some of Isaiah’s prophecies, which were later applied to Jesus.

Matthew’s third story is very different. The story of an illegitimate child, who is born in an ordinary household. Who becomes a refugee soon after his birth, fleeing the country in danger of his life. Who narrowly escapes a massacre in which perhaps dozens of other innocent children die. Who even when it is safe to go back to his country, can’t go home, but has to settle in another part of Israel. (Luke says Joseph and Mary lived in Nazareth and went to Bethlehem for the census, but Matthew implies that they lived in Bethlehem, and says that when they came back from Egypt they moved to Nazareth for the first time.)

Which, if any of these three intertwined stories has any basis in fact, we have no idea. But perhaps the most remarkable thing about them all, is how unimportant they seem to be in the rest of the story of Jesus. All that gold, frankincense and myrrh that the magi were supposed to have brought – what happened to them? All those angels who guide Joseph in the first two chapters – they appear briefly at the end of the temptations and at the resurrection, but never otherwise. No-one ever recognizes Jesus in later life as the child the magi visited, or for whom the innocents were killed, or as the subject of those birth prophecies. It never seems to matter again that Jesus spent time in Egypt.

It seems that Matthew is trying to convey to the people he expects to hear and read his gospel, how exceptional Jesus was, in language that he thinks they will understand. He is the Messiah – a king as great as any Emperor – a Son of God.

And strangely, Matthew is perhaps less successful in capturing the importance of Jesus in these chapters than anywhere else. Was anyone ever brought to repentance, to prayer, to love of God and their neighbour by these stories? I doubt it. It is in other places that we see the power of Jesus shine out irresistibly from Matthew’s pages. ‘Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven.’ ‘You have heard it said, Love your neighbour and hate your enemy. But I say, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you…’ ‘Do not worry about your life, what you will eat or drink or wear. Consider the lilies of the field…’ ‘Ask, and it will be given to you…’ ‘Take heart; your sins are forgiven.’ ‘Come to me, all you who are weary and heavy laden, and I will give you rest.’ ‘If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me.’ ‘Let the little children come to me… for it is to such as these that the Kingdom of Heaven belongs.’ ‘All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me.’

Paradoxically, in a way, what Matthew shows us in his birth story is how little the conventional trappings of power matter – divine messengers and rising stars and distinguished visitors and expensive gifts. What matters is what is the baby himself, and the man he will grow up to be.

Amen.

The Human Queen of Heaven - sermon preached by Teresa Morgan (23 December 2007)

If you look at Jemima Newman's monument on the north wall of the church, you'll see it shows the angel Gabriel talking to Mary. Mary, taken by surprise, has dropped a couple of books: a variation on a well-known theme. Since the Renaissance it's been common to show Mary reading when the angel comes to her, because reading was a proper thing for a young girl to do. Earlier, when most women couldn¹t read, Mary is shown, for the same reason, either spinning wool, or carrying water.

Pictures of Mary - like the many beautiful images in the windows around this church - tend to suggest that Mary was chosen by God because she was a sweet, gentle girl who would do what she was told. In today's gospel, Matthew implies that he thinks so too. Mary is going to bear a son by the Holy Spirit, to fulfil the prophecy of Isaiah which we've just heard. Matthew isn't really interested in Mary's feelings about the news; he is more worried about Joseph, because naturally a man who found that his fiancée was pregnant wouldn't want to marry her. So an angel is sent to reassure Joseph that it's all right.

Luke, of course, gives us a different story, and one which makes us think again about Mary. When the angel comes to her, Mary is perplexed - not afraid, but perplexed - and wonders what kind of greeting this can be. Don't be afraid! says the angel, inappropriately. You have found favour with God! Mary should be overwhelmed, but she doesn't seem to be. She shows rather a lot of spirit and a knowledge of anatomy which the (sexless) angel is perhaps not expecting: 'How can this be, since I know not a man? 'Nothing is impossible with God', retorts Gabriel, and only then does Mary say, 'I am the servant of the Lord.';

By the time Mary goes to visit her cousin Elizabeth, she has come to terms, magnificently, with what is happening to her. 'My soul magnifies the Lord, and my spirit rejoices in God my saviour.' She sees herself in the line of Abraham and Jacob, as one of those through whom God glorifies Israel. Her confidence is amazing; her faith is infectious. It carries her right through the trip to Bethlehem and Jesus's birth.

As Jesus grows up, Mary watches over him and holds the prophecies about him in her heart. She isn't intimidated by the fact that this is God's son - in Luke's gospel, when the child Jesus runs away to the temple, it's Mary who scolds him. In John's gospel, it's Mary who makes Jesus as a young man, help the couple who run out of wine at their wedding.

You could paint her as a quintessential Yiddishe Momma - bossy, possessive, so proud of her son, the Rabbi. And like many mothers (Yiddishe and otherwise), she is a fool for love. One of the most disturbing stories in the gospels is about Mary's love. Jesus is teaching in Nazareth. His mother and brothers arrive at the synagogue, which is packed out. They send a message: Your mother and brothers are outside, asking for you. Hopeful? Confident? Proud? And Jesus says, 'Who are my mother and brothers? Whoever does the will of God is my brother and sister and mother.'

We recognize in that, the teacher whose words often shocked his followers. Let the dead bury their dead! I come to bring fire to the earth! The single-minded prophet on his Father's business. But we also hear a son publicly snubbing his mother. Didn't it occur to Jesus that if anyone on earth had done the will of God, it was Mary? That by being his mother, Mary was doing God's work? At that moment, Mary teaches Jesus a fundamental lesson about love. It makes fools of us all, and being foolish makes us vulnerable. And if we really love someone, we keep hold of them, even when they have the power to hurt us. It's a lesson which Jesus learns to the full.

Mary never lets go of her son. In St. John's gospel it is only Mary and John, who are with Jesus at the end - who dare to watch those hours as he hangs on the cross. In art, it is always Mary who holds Jesus in her arms as his body is taken down from the cross, and although that scene is not in the gospels, it seems inevitable and right. And in Matthew, Mark and Luke, Mary may be (in the apocryphal gospel of Philip, she is) one of the women who come at dawn on Easter Sunday to embalm the body, and find the tomb empty. Perhaps of all of them, Mary was the least surprised to find that Jesus had disappeared again on a new mission. Tomorrow, we celebrate the miracle of God's love which reaches out to us in the Incarnation. But today, we celebrate the human contribution to the Incarnation: the miracle of Mary.

Mary has a miraculous faith - the kind of faith that founds a nation and changes the world. She is the new Abraham, mother of a new Israel. And even as she calls herself God's servant, she blesses God, because she knows that God and she are partners in the work of salvation. And Mary has a miraculous love, a love in some ways very like the love that Jesus has by the end of his life. She gives her life to God, and she's far too busy doing God's work to care what happens to herself. But above all, Mary is - unlike her son - only human, which means that she doesn't know what will happen when she says 'Yes' to God. She doesn't know what Simeon means when he says that a sword will pierce her heart. She may not understand when Jesus seems to reject her. She goes on loving anyway. Mary's love is the kind that gives everything and doesn't ask for guarantees. Which risks everything for a hope. Which doesn't count the cost, because it can't. It is the essence of human love: humanity's gift to God.

Our human lives are something like the widow's mite. You remember in Luke's gospel, how Jesus sees a poor widow in the temple, giving a tiny coin which is all she can afford, and says that that coin is worth more to God than all the gold of the rich. Our lives are like that - small change in the vastness of creation. But like the widow, Mary gives it all to God - recklessly, without worrying about tomorrow - and teaches her son to do the same. And that tiny gift turns out to be worth more to God than anything.

The life of Mary's son will reveal two things to us. How much God loves us, to reach out to us, wanting our love. And how precious our gift of our selves is to God - and even more so because, being only human, we seem to have so little to offer. Jesus will teach us to begin to see ourselves as God sees us - to show us what we are worth, by showing us how much we are worth to God. He will release us from the bitter and destructive passions, the ill-thinking and ill-doing that warp our personalties, the disappointment we so often feel in ourselves and each other. He will give us more hope for humanity greater than we ever dreamed of. And by so doing, he will open up new worlds - in which, partners with God in the work of re-creation, we will found new nations, transform our relationships, discover more richness than we knew existed in human life.

Mary brings that love and that revelation to us. In her own response, she shows us how to respond to it - how not to be afraid, but to give everything we have and are for love. She offers us a new way to see the world - as a place where God's love is sown, and grows and flowers and flowers.

In the fourth century, people began to appreciate just how important Mary's contribution was to the Incarnation: that the humanity she gave Jesus was just as important for his mission as his divinity. People realized that in talking about God as Father and Son and Holy Spirit, they had perhaps been missing something out. And they crowned Mary Mother of God, and Queen of Heaven.

Amen

The importunate widow (sermon on Luke 18.1-8  by Teresa Morgan - 21 October 2007)

At the beginning of today’s gospel, Jesus has been talking about the bad times that are coming, when there will be wars, and people will lose their homes and livelihood, and those who try to save their life will lose it, but those who lose their life will save it. The parable of the widow and the judge is one of several stories which are told to help us prepare for that time.

The setting of this story is very dark. A city where the chief magistrate, the local authority, has no religion, no morals, no affections, no sense of responsibility towards his people. A dangerous man, making his city a dangerous place. And in the same city, a widow, the lowest of the low. She seems to have no family – at least, no-one’s helping her. When a man died, his widow was often turned out of the house, which is why the New Testament emphasizes the importance of helping widows, along with orphans. A widow is a person without power or status. She has nothing to interest the magistrate; nothing to bribe or threaten him with. So he turns her away.

But she won’t go. She keeps coming back to him, saying, give me justice. We can imagine her, haunting the court house with the other hopeless petitioners. Perhaps she persuades a clerk to let her into the court room, where she shouts from the public gallery and causes a disturbance. When she gets thrown out she camps for days on the benches outside, to clutch the judge’s cloak as he sweeps by. She hovers on the steps and blocks his way as he emerges into the sun. Roman courthouses looked a bit like the Old Bailey, so we can imagine the spectacle she made. Maybe she gets thrown into the cells to cool off – and Roman prisons were foul places. But she keeps coming back.

And against all the odds, after who knows how many months or years, the judge has had enough. Maybe he begins to feel that she is making a spectacle of him. Maybe people are beginning to talk, or laugh. A man who has no respect for people may still need people to respect him. Maybe people are getting angry. Whatever the reason, one day the magistrate hears the case, and finds in the woman’s favour.

This nameless widow is an astonishing person. She is so determined to be heard that she has no pride. She goes far beyond caring about herself – how she looks, or what people think of her. She gives her whole life to getting justice – not only for herself but for her city, so that it shall be a city where justice is done. She reminds us of all the other characters in the Bible who struggle and argue and give everything they have for what they know is right. Abraham, bargaining with God for the lives of the people of Sodom. The Canaanite woman who talked Jesus into healing her daughter when he didn’t want to. Jesus himself, who spent his life bringing God’s good news to his people, and in the end spent his life for them.

The woman is also very clear-sighted. She knows that whatever this dispute is with her opponent, she can’t deal with it on her own. She needs the law. If we see ourselves in her, as Jesus invites us to do, she reminds us how completely we depend on God, who is the law of our universe. How much we need to be able to ask for God’s help, and accept it when it comes.

But perhaps the most important thing about this woman, is that she is so sure she’s right. She has an instinct – a moral compass – which can’t be shifted, by her opponent or her environment. Finding no justice in her city, she sets out to create it, and she succeeds. That instinct, that moral compass, I believe, exists in all of us. It comes from God who made us, and it answers when God calls to us. It is the thing which makes repentance possible; salvation possible; heaven possible. It may often get battered by experience, and it may get deeply buried in some of us. Perhaps it’s a bit nearer the surface in children, and that’s why Jesus tells us to receive the Kingdom of God like little children. Perhaps it comes to the surface when people suffer, and that’s why Jesus blesses the poor and the hungry, the weeping and persecuted. But it’s there in all of us.

It has many parts. Love is part of it, and so is faith, which turns us towards God, gives us ears to hear when God calls, and strengthens us to answer. Faith gives us confidence in God, the confidence which keeps us battering at heaven like the widow at the court house door. ‘Ask, and it will be given to you,’ says Jesus; ‘seek, and you will find; knock, and the door will be opened to you.’ Like the widow, never give up. And (17.6): ‘If you have faith the size of a mustard seed, you could say to this mulberry tree, “Be uprooted and planted in the sea,” and it would obey you.’

Jesus likes mustard seeds – he uses them several times in his teaching. If faith is like a mustard seed, then it’s a tiny thing, which does great things. And as a mustard seed is planted in cold, dark earth, and grows into a tree so great that all the birds of the air come and nest in its branches (Mt. 13.31), so we plant faith in cold, dark places and times, and it grows into a whole Kingdom.

All this, the parable teaches us. But it also leaves us with a question. If the unjust judge is forced to change his ways, says Jesus, ‘will not God grant justice to his chosen ones who cry to him day and night?… And yet, when the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on earth?’ Does that mean that if God doesn’t answer our prayers, it’s because we don’t have enough faith? Christians and Jews have struggled with this problem for centuries. One answer often given is that if our prayers aren’t granted, we may have faith, but perhaps we have been praying for the wrong thing. I don’t know the answer, and it’s not for human beings to judge each other’s prayers. But just before today’s gospel, Jesus says that at the end time, ‘those who try to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life will save it.’ It is the heart, as well as the hardest part of faith, to learn to say to God, ‘Not my will, but yours be done.’

And at that point, the parable breaks down, as all stories eventually break down, and can’t help us any more. And then, like the widow, we’re on our own in an often dark and complicated world, with only our moral compass, our instinct for God, to guide us. And that is when our faith really starts to grow.

Amen

This looks at first sight like one of Jesus's more straightforward stories. There's a bad rich man who won't help a good poor man; the rich man dies and goes to hell while the poor man goes to heaven. Everyone knows who to sympathize with, and the moral is, be good, and be good now, because after you die it'll be too late.

But when a parable looks that simple, we should probably be slightly suspicious. A few chapters ago, Jesus told the parable of the sower, and afterwards his disciples asked him what it meant. He said (8.9), "To you it has been given to know the secrets of the Kingdom of God; but to others I speak in parables, so that looking they may not perceive, and listening they may not understand".

The word "parable" means anything from a fable to a metaphor to a riddle. The meaning of a parable is by definition hidden, and if we think we get it straight away, we are probably, actually, listening without understanding. What, then, might be the hidden meaning of this parable?

We might start by reflecting that Luke is the gospel writer who talks most about the poor. Where Matthew, for instance, says, "Blessed are the poor in spirit", Luke says just, "Blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the kingdom of God". For Luke, the Kingdom of God is a place where the rich are cast down and the poor are raised up. Mary sang of it in the Magnificat: "God has brought down the powerful from their thrones and lifted up the lowly; he has filled the hungry with good things and sent the rich away empty."

But it's noticeable that those passages don't say anything about whether the rich and poor people are good or bad. They don't say that all rich people are wholly bad; they just say that they will be cast down. For Luke, beingrich in itself seems to be enough to get you cast down. "Sell all you have", Jesus tells one young man who asks him what he should do to gain eternal life. Perhaps our parable is an illustration of that: if so, we should be worried, since most of us are probably not about to sell all we have.

But perhaps that's not the meaning either. Maybe the real message is political. Jesus says that the rich man dresses in purple and fine linen. And in principle, the only people who wore purple in Luke's day were the Roman Emperor and his family. So perhaps the rich man stands for the Roman Emperor and the poor man for the Church; and Luke is warning Romans that they will burn in hell for persecuting Christians.

Or maybe it means something quite different again. There is something very curious about the conversation between the rich man and Abraham. The rich man, from hell, begs Abraham to send Lazarus to his family. "If someone goes to them from the dead", he says, "they will repent". Abraham refuses, saying that the family have the Law and the prophets to tell them how to behave, and that should be enough.

If that is true, where does it leave Jesus? We believe, and Luke believed, that God sent Jesus because the Law and the prophets were not enough, and Jesus not only lived and died in love for the world, but rose from the dead to confirm what he had done, and hundreds of people saw him, and believed, and repented. Why does Luke make Abraham say that Jewish tradition is enough to save people, when Christians by definition didn't think so?

Just before the beginning of today's reading, Luke tells us that Jesus is talking here not to his followers, but to the Pharisees. As a Jew to Jews, he is saying that if you live by the Law, and even more if you do not keep the Law, you will die by the Law. And after death no-one can help you. So perhaps this story is told not to tell us how to be good, at all, but to show why Luke believes that despite the Law and prophets, the world needs Jesus Christ. Christ died and rose again to help people turn to God, and to bridge that chasm between hell and heaven.

We could go on, finding new interpretations of the text. Does it mean that if we suffer in this life, we'll be rewarded later? And how does the rich man know the name of the beggar outside his gate? Is his real sin that Lazarus was his friend, or servant, or brother, and he threw him out? Or is this the story of what would have happened to the prodigal son if his father had not taken him back?

The more we look at parables, the more complicated and mysterious they become. Until they shift and dissolve under our eyes and we don't know what to make of them at all. But we are here today to hear Jesus's teaching. To pray for help, for guidance, or reassurance, for the coming week. So what do we do?

The message behind every parable, is that we can't comprehend them on our own. The only parables the disciples ever understand are the ones Jesus explains to them. And we too should perhaps focus less on the story than the storyteller. When Jesus tells us a story, the first thing he is saying is, trust me. Don't beat your brain against a mystery. Don't try to climb to heaven on your own two feet. Stories aren't codes to be cracked by human intelligence. Whether they're parables, or gospels, which in some ways are one big parable.

Trust me, Jesus says. Listen. Wait. And maybe you'll get an explanation. Or maybe not. Maybe you'll get an instruction, like Jeremiah in our Old Testament reading, who did a completely irrational thing because God told him to. He bought a field in land occupied by a hostile power, which he had no reason to think he¹d ever be able to farm. And beyond all expectation, one day he did farm it.

Trust me, Jesus says. There may be a hundred meanings in this parable, and depending who you are and where you are in life, you may see in it, something quite different from your neighbour. Listen, and think about what you hear, and be open to hearing something else another day.

The stories of the gospel are like a stained glass window. As the sun moves over it, different colours and figures leap out and strike us with significance. And as we pray and turn our hearts towards Christ, he shines through Luke's words, lighting up sometimes one and sometimes another. In my father's house there are many mansions, Jesus says, and in every story there are many meanings. But if we listen, in trust and love, something will shine out from the words each time we hear them. The heart of our faith is to be open, to let Christ shine into our minds and light them up with new meanings.

For me, this week, this was a parable about why we need Christ. Because however hard we try, Laws and prophets, teachers and rules are not certain to bring us to God. The surest way for God to reach us was to send his son, to touch the human heart with a human heart. Because no teaching changes us like the love of another human being. Just as nothing lights up the gospel like Christ himself shining through it.

Amen

The gospel is urgent... (sermon on Luke 12.49-56 by Teresa Morgan)

This week, I spent several days trying to think of a way not to preach on today’s gospel. Because it’s one of those passages many of us prefer to gloss over when we’re thinking about Jesus. Jesus has just been attacking the Pharisees, and now he turns on all the people who have come to hear him. He calls them hypocrites who don’t understand the time they’re living in, and threatens to bring fire to the earth and conflict to humanity.

It’s very much at odds with the picture most of us prefer, of Jesus as a man of peace, preaching and practising love and forgiveness. But after several days of evading it, I decided that I ought to face this text. So what can we say about it?

Part of Jesus’s mission and his gift is to look deeply into people’s hearts. What he sees there sometimes dismays him. And he is driven by this tremendous sense of urgency: the Kingdom of God is at hand. You must repent – now – there isn’t much time. So when he’s talking to people he thinks are ignoring or flouting the Word of God, he believes he is helping them by not pulling any punches.

Jesus’s teaching about how people should keep the Word of God is very radical. Love your enemies. Don’t worry about your life. Give all you have to the poor. These are difficult things really to hear, let alone to understand, let alone to do. It’s not enough for Jesus that people listen, and nod their heads and say his ideas are very beautiful, and then go home and don’t put them into practice. He wants them to try – really to try – to love God with all their heart and all their soul and all their mind and all the strength, and their neighbour as a second self. He has to strip away people’s complacency, get past the cosy level of easy agreement, and plunge his message deep into their hearts. To do that, sometimes he has to frighten them out of their skin.

And when he says that his teachings will divide father from son and mother from daughter, he is only telling the truth. The gospel is a challenging path, and people who aren’t following it won’t understand, and may feel you’ve abandoned them, or you’re no fun any more, and try to make you go back to what you were before. When you chose a difficult road in this life, there will always be people who will use every weapon, every kind of peer pressure, to try to get you to abandon it. Jesus’s words in today’s gospel are a serious warning, that if you opt to follow him, you may well face hostility and misunderstanding, and you need to be prepared for it.

Taking all that into account, we may still feel that the Jesus we see in this passage is very unlike the Jesus who drew people to him by his radiant gentleness and compassion. I think Luke feels it too. This passage is part of a rather loose collection of teachings in the middle of the gospel, which Luke inherited from an earlier source, and which in some ways is rather different from Luke’s picture of Jesus at the beginning and end of the gospel. Luke own view of Christ is very much that of the Son of God: always calm, always in control, always loving and forgiving. Even on the cross: it’s in Luke’s gospel that Jesus says, ‘Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.’
Whereas in the section we heard part of today, Jesus is much more like an Old Testament prophet – a man, fired by divine inspiration, standing on the edges of society and criticizing it.

We have a number of different traditions about Jesus in the gospels. It would be wrong, though, to regard any one of them as more authentic than another. It’s more likely that all of them reflect different ways that people saw Jesus from the earliest days. And when we think about our own lives, that isn’t really surprising. We all look slightly different to our parents and our grandchildren, to family and friends and colleagues at work. How you see someone depends on where you’re standing, and that’s as true of Jesus as anyone else.

People see what they expect to see, or want, or need to see. The Romans were interested in law and order, so if someone was speaking out, they saw him as a criminal and executed him. The Pharisees were interested in God’s Law, so if someone was speaking out they saw him as a blasphemer. People who needed healing saw Jesus as a healer; those who wanted teaching saw him as a teacher; those who were waiting for the Messiah saw him as the Messiah. They were all right. Jesus has many aspects, and often he comes to meet us in whichever form we need most.

But we also know that sometimes we can surprise people, and change their view of us – and sometimes that happens accidentally, but sometimes we choose to do it. Jesus sometimes surprises people who meet him, because what they want to see in him isn’t what they need to see. Like when the disciples try to keep a group of children from bothering the great man, but Jesus says, Let them come to me. Of such is the Kingdom of Heaven. Or when Jesus heals the slave of the Roman centurion – the hated foreign oppressor – and tells his disciples, ‘I have not found such great faith anywhere in Israel.’

We too sometimes meet in the gospels a Jesus we didn’t expect to meet and may not think we want to meet. But when we encounter passages like this, we have to ask ourselves, what are they teaching us, that we didn’t want to hear? What is it about Jesus in this passage that it’s important for us to understand?

That’s a question we each answer for ourselves. For me, this week, this passage reminded me that the gospel is urgent. ‘I came to bring fire to the earth, and how I wish it was already kindled!’ God can’t wait till I have a bit of free time to think about Him. I need to think about Him now! It reminded me that following God has consequences, which can be painful. ‘Do you think I have come to bring peace to the earth? No, but rather division!’ We need to be prepared for that, and to hold fast to our faith while still living with and loving the people who dislike it. Last of all, this passage reminds me that everything we do for God, Jesus has already done. Every step of the road of faith we walk, he has already walked. And as we take his way of insight and compassion, of challenge and hope and forgiveness, he is walking it again, with us.

Amen

Our Old Testament reading this morning came from the Book of Proverbs, which begins with a father teaching his child about wisdom. ‘Hear, my child, your father’s instruction, and do not reject your mother’s teaching.’ The father is extremely moral and well-meaning, and just a bit dull. ‘My child, if sinners approach you, do not be tempted… Save yourself from the loose woman… Dedicate your first fruits to the Lord, and then your barns will be filled.’

But as he speaks, Wisdom herself keeps breaking in, and she is anything but dull. She stands at the street corners, in the market square, at the city gates, and stretches out her hands, and calls people to listen: ‘I will pour out my thoughts to you; I will make my words known to you.’

The father goes on lecturing his child. ‘Do not plan harm to your neighbour; do not quarrel with anyone without cause. Do not envy the violent and do not choose their ways…’ But Wisdom breaks in again: ‘Listen, O people… my cry is to all that live… The Lord created me… before the beginning of the earth… Before the mountains had been shaped, before the hills, I was brought forth… When he established the heavens, I was there… When he marked out the foundations of the earth, I was beside him, like a master worker, and I was daily his delight, rejoicing in his inhabited world and delighting in the human race.’

The song of Wisdom is the song of creation, the voice of God, and it speaks to our inmost being: ‘Happy are those who keep my ways. Happy is the one who listens to me, watching at my gates, waiting by my doors. For whoever finds me finds life, and understanding of the Lord.’

On Trinity Sunday, we tend to talk about the Trinity as something unique to Christianity. God the father, the creator; God the son, through whom all things are made; God the spirit of life and truth. But when we look closely, the picture of the relationship between God and Wisdom in the book of Proverbs is not unlike that of the Trinity – with Wisdom playing the parts of both Christ and the Spirit.

Like Christ, at the beginning of St. John’s gospel, Wisdom is God’s firstborn and partner in creation. The way Wisdom calls us in the street, is like the way Jesus calls his disciples. Like Jesus, Wisdom says that whoever comes to me, comes to God, finds the way of truth and understanding, comes to life. Like Jesus, Wisdom tells us that she is building us a home in heaven, with bread and wine for us to feast on. And like the Holy Spirit, Wisdom comes as a gift from God, and becomes part of us, and brings us home to God. She reminds us that there is no division between God and us, or between person and person, or heaven and earth, or body and spirit. We are all one, all God’s, all family.

The idea of the Trinity is saying something very similar to us. When we think of God as parent, we remember that everything comes from God, and comes back to God. In Christ, God meets us in human form, so that our human understanding can recognize God and respond. In the Spirit, God becomes part of us, to remind us that we are part of God.

I started thinking about Trinity Sunday just over a week before it, when I was talking to a friend, and she said something that struck me very much. ‘It’s hard to believe,’ she said. ‘It sometimes is very hard to believe.’ We were talking about different views of God in the Old and New Testaments, and about how a lot of traditional images of God don’t make much sense nowadays. We know that the sky doesn’t sit over the earth like a lid, and we can’t lift it up and find God behind it. Hell doesn’t lie under the earth nor heaven above it, like a cosmic block of flats. Very few of us imagine God as an old man hiding in the clouds, or riding on the wind. But we haven’t really worked out a new picture of God, that chimes with our new understanding of the cosmos. I’m sure we will. These things take time to grow. But just now we’re rather between myths.

And that makes it hard to know quite how to think about God, and sometimes that makes it harder to believe in God at all. But here, I think, the Trinity may help us. When Jesus calls to us in the street; when he stretches out his arms, and embraces us, and loves us into being more fully and wonderfully ourselves – that’s God. When the Spirit breathes herself into us, and guides us to greater love and understanding – that’s God. The mystery of the life that runs through each and all of us – that’s God. Understanding it is not our top priority. Responding to it – living it – sharing it – those are much more important.

It’s striking that in the Book of Proverbs, God’s presence on earth is called Wisdom. Which sounds as if it’s to do with thinking and understanding things. But Wisdom isn’t like that at all. She’s a power who calls us, to hear her – come to her – fall in love with her. She’s a relationship. And she doesn’t just speak to us. She sings; she’s music.

And music is a relationship. When we hear it, travels through us and round us, makes the air dance around us, shimmers our atoms like a silk scarf in the wind. Music moves us, sweeps us off our feet and transforms us. We don’t have to understand it at all to be affected by it or to join in with it.

That’s what Wisdom is like, and that’s what God is like. ‘When the Spirit of Truth comes,’ Jesus says to his disciples, ‘he will guide you, into all the truth.’ We don’t have to understand what he is or how he works. We only have to be open to being approached by him, and answer when he calls.

On Trinity Sunday, we remind ourselves that God takes many forms. She may be in the market place, calling us to listen. He may be inside us, in our heartbeat, the music of our creation. We wait to feel the Spirit breathe in us and turn us towards God like a compass turning towards magnetic North. We hope to be swept off our feet and transformed by the power of love. Most of all, we pray that long before we come to understand God, we may express God – in everything we do and say and are.

Amen

The language of resurrection

(sermon preached at Littlemore on 15th April 2007 by John Muddiman)

The Easter Greeting with which we began this service is Alleluia Christ is risen; to which we are expected to respond "He is risen indeed. Alleluia"  My sermon is about the little word “indeed”. Are we just trying to convince ourselves, or is it really true? Put it another way, is it reasonable and honest to believe that the last and greatest prophet of Israel rose from the dead 36 hours after he was crucified?

The question of truth in any historical matter turns on the question of evidence, and for the claim that Jesus rose from the dead we have two sorts of evidence: the first is hard but ambiguous; the second unambiguous but soft. The first is the empty tomb. Hard evidence, because objectively verifiable: either the tomb was empty or it was not, but ambiguous because several other explanations of its emptiness are possible apart from the believer’s explanation. The second is the series of resurrection appearances in the Gospels: this is soft evidence because they are inevitably filtered through the minds and hearts of the witnesses, but unambiguous because in each case they were a life transforming experience..

I will say a little more about the empty tomb before turning to the appearances.

The empty tomb story is found in all four Gospels and each includes at least  two pieces of information which are difficult, if not impossible, to explain except on the assumption that there are true: the tomb in which Jesus was laid belonged to Joseph of Arimathea, a wealthy member of the Jewish Sanhedrin who evidently did not agree with the sentence of the court. And it was discovered empty by one person among others, Mary of Magdala, about whom we would know nothing at all, if she did not do this. I suggest it is less reasonable to dismiss these two persons as fictional inventions than it is to accept the fact of their historicity.

Honesty demands that we admit that there are confusing discrepancies between the accounts on almost all other points of detail, yet the core remains solid: Joseph supplied the tomb and Mary found it empty. But, of course, this first kind of evidence is ambiguous. A natural immediate reaction to it would be to say what Mary says in this morning’s gospel (John 20.11-18) “They have taken my Lord away and I do not know where they have laid him.”

Before I try to ask the question of truth in regard to the appearances I need to ask another question: what does it mean to speak of “rising from the dead”? What sort of notion is involved? For us now Resurrection is a technical Christian term, but when the gospels were written it wasn;t. In the New Testament there are two words translated resurrection which have ordinary normal meanings of “waking up” and “getting up”. They are used almost synonyms because when ordinary folk in first century Palestine woke up they had to get up and roll the beds away to make a living room. There was no chance of a nice lie-in! These words for resurrection then only take on a technical sense when you add the phrase “from the dead”.

Waking up and getting out of bed was thus compared metaphorically to the overcoming of death at the end of time. It was an attempt to describe in language drawn from every day existence something indescribable, the future of God’s new creation. It isn’t quite accurate to say that being raised from sleep was thought of as purely literal and being raised from death as purely metaphorical, for there was felt to be a real analogy between the two. People in the first century were puzzled by the phenomenon of sleep just as they were puzzled and appalled by the all too familiar phenomenon of death. Sleep was seen as a kind of half-way state between living and dying, and since one is regularly woken from the first, one might hope eventually to be woken from the second.

The language of resurrection from the dead is therefore metaphorical, but it is a metaphor that refers to a reality, a real external hope. Ultimately it is a question of who is the greater: the God of Israel who created the world, or the last great enemy Death. So we are not dealing here with a crude notion of resuscitation, but with a mystery of divine transformation of the stuff of this world into the material of the next.  Most first century Jewish visions of the resurrection of the dead imagine it in apocalyptic terms: the shaking of the heavens and the earth, the cry of the Archangel and the blast of the trumpet – loud enough to wake the dead. And this background affects the way some early Christians experienced the risen Christ.

This first kind of appearance is well represented by the reading we heard from the Apocalypse of John (Revelation 1.4-11). The Risen Christ appears like the Son of Man in Daniel, in a long robe with a golden belt, with hair as white as wool, with eyes like flaming fire and a voice like a thundering waterfall, and with a sharp two edged sword, the word of judgement, proceeding out of his mouth. And the Seer falls at his feet like a dead man.

St Paul seems to have had the same kind of visionary experience with a blinding light and the glory of God reflected in the face of the crucified Christ, an encounter that turned him from a persecutor to a preacher of the gospel. And Matthew ends his book with Christ enthroned with all authority in heaven and on earth, sending his disciples out to baptize all the nations.

But the passage from St John’s Gospel that we heard this morning gives us a different sort of resurrection appearance, quieter, more domestic, more like waking from sleep in the early morning. Mary at the tomb, crying because the body has disappeared, not seeing straight because of her tears, thinking she was talking to the gardener and only recognising Jesus when he calls her name in a familiar tone. There are similar stories like  this in the gospels of Luke and John, in which Jesus accompanies disciples on the road or appears in a locked upper room or by the lakeside in the early morning mist and says to them “Peace be with you” and is vividly and tangibly present with the marks of his suffering still there.

The evidence of these different sorts of appearances is soft: it is variable and subjective. But does the subjectivity of these encounters invalidate them as evidence from the historical point of view? No, for in every case a verifiable change is the result – a change from fear and doubt to courage and hope. So, do the preconceptions about the nature of resurrection, which necessarily affect what was experienced by the first Christians mean that those experiences are not true, that is were not genuinely God-given visions? Not at all. God’s grace always works with our nature and mental capacities and not against them.  So can a moderately intelligent and reasonably honest believer respond to the Easter Greeting: “Christ is risen” with “He is risen indeed!”? Yes. That is reasonable: it is not contrary to the evidence. Indeed it is rather more plausible to believe this, than to believe the alternatives: that the disciples perpetrated a deliberate fraud, or were indulging in wishful thinking.

So much for the history.

But when we make our response to the Easter greeting, we are not just making a statement about the past, based on an honest and reasonable assessment  of the available evidence. We are even more importantly making a statement about the present and the future. Easter is so central to Christian faith and life, because this pattern of death and resurrection corresponds to our own present experience. We are selfish and sinful people, we waste our opportunities and tolerate horrible injustices, but we also know, here every week in this Eucharist, the love and forgiveness of God. We reproduce the pattern by dying to sin and coming alive to righteousness. Easter is with us today.

It also also points us towards the future. What is life, but a long and accelerating journey towards the inevitability of death? And yet we believe that our loving Creator is ready to gather up the fragments of our personal lives, purify them, and recreate them for eternal life. That is, in my opinion, a more reasonable view of the purpose of our existence, that we are being drawn into God’s future, than the alternative atheistic denial of ultimate meaning. And this makes Easter absolutely central.

In his lovely sermon on Good Friday Simon Thorn quoted George Herbert’s poem on the Sacrifice of Christ. Following his example, I would like to end by quoting another poem of his on the subject of Easter. George Herbert was Vicar of a parish near Salibury and wrote his poems in the three years before he died at the age of 40 in 1633. It well expresses the present impact and future hope of Easter faith.

Rise heart; thy Lord is risen. Sing his praise
Without delayes,
Who takes thee by the hand, that thou likewise
With him mayst rise:
That, as his death calcined thee to dust,
His life may make thee gold, and much more, just.

The allusion in the last two lines is the myth of the philosopher’s stone, on which ancient alchemy was based, that there existed a substance which when calcined, reduced to dust by extreme heat would turn base metal into gold, and if diluted and drunk would become the elixir of immortality. Herbert refers to it in the hymn we have just sung, Teach me my God and King, he entitled it the Elixir, and the last verse reads: "This is the famous stone that turneth all to gold, for that which God doth touch and own cannot for less be told". 

So Easter faith takes the base metal of our ordinary lives and makes it gold, and even more than gold, just, that justified and forgiven and sanctified, beginning to be turned into saints.

Amen

The mystery of faith - Luke 24.1-12

(sermon preached at Littlemore on Easter Eve by Teresa Morgan)

At the very beginning of Jesus's ministry, St. Luke describes him going to the synagogue in Nazareth. He reads to the congregation from the Prophet Isaiah: 'The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor'. And then he says, 'Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.'

He doesn't expect to get much of a hearing in Nazareth: as he says, 'No man is a prophet in his own country.' And sure enough, the people become angry. They drive him out of town, to the top of the nearest hill, and intend to throw him off. 'But,' says Luke mysteriously, 'he passed through the middle of them and went on his way.'

Today, we stand at the far end of Jesus's journey, and the end of our journey through Lent and Passiontide. And as we look back to that early story, we find the whole gospel in it. The Good News and the bad reactions. Jesus being led up a hill to be killed and slipping mysteriously away. And in the years between, Jesus will be in many similar situations, until his enemies finally catch up with him in Jerusalem.

And here we are. This service tonight is in some ways a strange one. We are celebrating the Resurrection. But the gospels say it was Sunday morning before anyone came to the tomb and found it empty. Did the Resurrection itself happen the night before? Maybe. According to the prophecies, Jesus would spend three days in the tomb - and that means we have to count Friday, Saturday and Sunday. But in the Jewish calendar, a day begins when darkness falls the night before, so any time Saturday night would count as Sunday.

The good thing about tonight, is that it lets us explore the gap between Saturday night and Sunday morning - between the time when Jesus left the tomb and the time the empty tomb was discovered - and with it, two sides of the Resurrection story. On the one hand, there's the triumph. But tonight, I want to focus on the mystery.

We might have expected more drama. When Jesus died, the veil of the Temple was ripped in two, the earth shook, rocks were split, tombs were opened and the dead were raised. It wouldn't seem out of place if at the Resurrection, the hillside tomb had erupted, shattered in pieces. Instead, at some point, the stone was quietly, tidily, rolled away. And Jesus walked out, passed through the middle of the guard and went on his way.

It's almost playful. As if he's saying, Did you think you could catch the Spirit in a shroud? Did you think you could shut God in a cave? The Spirit blows where it wills. God walks wherever on earth he chooses. The mystery of the Incarnation is that the Spirit of God becomes a human body. The mystery of the Resurrection is that a human body becomes the Spirit of God. So of course the tomb is empty!

Well, there are a lot of things we could say about that paradox. But one thing is especially relevant to our confirmands, as we welcome them into our community tonight. Because, like the people who buried Jesus, we also sometimes forget that you can't capture God in something made by human beings. We construct doctrines, which try to capture what God is, what Christ and the Spirit mean and what they do. We create rituals and institutions, and say that religion isn't right unless they say so. We build a thousand rules and conventions round our faith, and sometimes, we get a sneaking feeling that Jesus has passed through the middle of them and gone on his way. And so tonight, as we welcome our confirmands, we also remember that God is greater than doctrines or rituals or institutions. And God's love is for everyone, of every institution and none.

But before you start wondering why you're getting confirmed at all then! - I mentioned, earlier, the journey we have been on through Lent and Passiontide. And the best thing about the Church is really that it's a meeting place for people who are on the same journey.

I have been thinking this Holy Week about journeys. Not through place, so much, as through time. I've been in Littlemore eight years now, and many people here have been here much longer than that. And every year, we wait for the coming of Christ together; we celebrate Christmas together; we sing and pray together; on Maundy Thursday we share bread and soup and keep watch through the night together; we kneel at the foot of the cross together, and we wait together for Christ to rise again.

And the relationships we make along the way - the hopes and ideas and friendship we share - those are the things which make us grow most in faith and flower as human beings. And when that's going on, Jesus won't pass through the middle of us and go on his way. Because you can't catch the Spirit in a shroud, but it will always walk alongside you and listen and talk, and sing and pray with you. You can't shut God in a tomb, but you can meet him anywhere on your journey.

In Luke's gospel, when the women finally come to the empty tomb, they find not Jesus but two men in dazzling white, who say, 'Why do you look for the living among the dead? He is not here!' Go! You'll find him somewhere on the road. And in fact Luke's next story is about the two men who meet Jesus on the road to Emmaus.

Here and now, in the mystery of the dark hours of Saturday night, it's the empty tomb itself that speaks to us. Saying, Welcome, to the mystery of faith. Tonight the scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing. Don't wait. Go out into the world in peace. Trust God - have hope - love one another. Christ is waiting for you on the way.

Amen

TODAY we will read how the disciples were overwhelmed by the experience of the risen Christ. Death had not conquered! All their struggles, pain, guilt, shame and grief were washed away when they saw Christ. The first encounter was somewhat hesitant but their joy and jubilation couldn’t be contained when they realised what had happened!

Christ brought new life. New life with healing in its wings. Two disciples closely followed Jesus’ last days. Peter and Judas. Both had been totally dedicated to Jesus. Both went through times when they didn’t understand what kind of Messiah Jesus was. Both had been unfaithful to their Lord. Peter publicly denied Jesus three times; Judas handed him over to be killed. Both realised they had made big mistakes and wished they could go back in time to undo their deeds. Both left the scene of their misdeeds to be alone. However, Peter struggled on with his life, living with a tremendous sense of guilt whereas Judas gave up his struggle and killed himself.

After the resurrection, over breakfast after a night’s fishing, Jesus reached out to Peter and showed he was forgiven. For Peter there was new life. And what a powerful life it was! People later tried to touch his clothes so that they would be healed. Judas never gave Jesus the chance to forgive him and be healed. Before he could be given new life he took it.

The lives of Peter and Judas show us that God is always ready to give us new life, with healing and forgiveness, and hopes that we take that offer. I believe that as followers of Christ we are asked in turn to offer that to others. So let us open ourselves to our new lives in Christ this Easter time and be ready to reach out to others. Have a Happy Easter!

Margreet Armitstead

Christ the King

The Feast of Christ the King is a fairly recent addition to the liturgical calendar. We in the Church of England have only just adopted it, to provide a more resounding finale for the last Sunday of the year. It was instituted by Pope Pius XI in 1925, to sum up the motto of his papacy “Christ’s peace in Christ’s Kingdom.” But there was some ambiguity about it at first. Pius was chiefly worried by the threat of atheistic communism. No liberal in politics himself, he negotiated treaties to protect the interests and freedoms of the Church with the rising tide of anti-communist dictators, Mussolini in 1929, Hitler in 1933, Franco in 1936. He lived to regret it. For the Fascists failed to keep their sides of the bargain and towards the end of his pontificate he denounced their godless divinization of the State and their criminal anti-semitism with ever increasing vehemence. He could see, what the politicians of appeasement at the time could not, that Europe was heading into the abyss. He died just before it started in 1939.

So much for the history, but what does it mean for us today? Perhaps two things above all. This feast tells us that only the authority of Christ is absolute; all other structures of earthly power and political regimes are relative and often seriously flawed. The Kingship of Christ is set over against every form of totalitarianism. In a sense – to compare the great with the small – it functions like our own constitutional monarchy. The Queen’s role, which she performs rather well, is to prevent the prime minister from getting above him or herself!

But secondly, there is a much deeper meaning in this feast, close to the very heart of the Gospel. For Christ the King, the heir to the throne of David, was born in a cowshed amidst persecution from the maniac usurper Herod in the slaughter of the innocents.  He lived in poverty and died on a Roman cross, but his sovereign rule is true power, for it is not based on coercion and violence, but on humility and forgiveness and the ultimate victory of love.

John Muddiman

“Come away to a deserted place all by yourselves and rest a while” - Mark 6 v31

It seems a fitting Gospel reading to have at this time when so many families are about to go on holiday as schools break up and we all feel the urge to escape to our favourite haunts or explore new places and recharge our batteries.

Jesus is addressing his Apostles after a long stint of travelling and ministering to the people. But the key thing to note is that the people continue to need Jesus’s ministry, as we do today, and that even while the Apostles rested, Jesus continued to be the Good Shepherd and to change people’s lives through his teaching, his miracles and his healing.

We must remember, even when we feel it is time for a rest, that the Church, the Body of Christ, continues to pray for and tend to those who cannot look after themselves and for whom there is no rest. We don’t take a holiday from our Christian life, even if we can take a break from some of our responsibilities.

One of the joys of going somewhere new on holiday is attending the local church, and to be welcomed rather like some pilgrim from times past. We might perhaps find ourselves at Mass in a foreign language where we experience the liturgy in a new way. It might be a quite different sort of service altogether from what we are used to, but which makes us appreciate the rich diversity of the Christian family and worship. It is in these fresh encounters with other Christians that we can be revitalised, and, who knows, we might even make some new friends.

 Simon Thorn

‘In the midst of life we are in death’

I attended a funeral recently (my grandmother’s) and this phrase stuck in my mind. What I immediately thought was that despite death and grief, ordinary life goes on - my toddler sitting on my knee chattering away to herself during the funeral service was a good example of that.

Later another meaning occurred to me, which relates to our experience of time. Our minds have a tendency to live in the past (with sadness, nostalgia, or joyful memories) and in the future - sometimes fearfully, sometimes with eager anticipation. But the only time we really experience is the present, even though we are often least aware of this, being caught up in thoughts about what we have done or are going to do.

The present is a constant flux - each moment is gone as soon as we have acknowledged it, and a new moment is happening. This constant change is a kind of death within life. We are reminded of it when we realise that someone we think of as a permanent feature of our lives has been constantly changing. One day we realise our children are growing up - ‘Where did my baby go?’ Reflecting on the whole of someone’s life after their death reminds us that each stage, although it seemed it would last forever, ended and passed into something new.

My grandmother was inspiring in many different ways, but one of her most remarkable features was her optimism and enthusiasm for life. We should give thanks for every moment in our own lives, and in the lives of those we love.

Guinevere Webster

Summer days

In my garden, everything is rushing to catch up after the late spring. Roses are smothered in flowers, from fragile rosa mundi, rose of the world, named for the Virgin Mary, to sturdy William Lobb. The lime-green euonymus glows magically at dusk, and jasmine, speckled with sweet white stars, explores the roof of the garage. Bright red butterflies drift in and out, languidly busy, and local cats compete for their favourite patch of sun.

I love the Trinity season. Earth seems to celebrate, and there is so much to celebrate. The harvest which will be gathered in a few months’ time is growing in fields, gardens and allotments. Grapes which will be turned into wine are ripening on distant vines. We embrace sunshine and store it in our hearts and bones against the cold, dim days of winter.

There are times when it is especially easy to pray. When everything is sunny and beautiful, it comes naturally to rejoice and give thanks. But when everything is dark, when we are in trouble, grief or pain, then too, many people turn to prayer. Prayer is the expression of our deepest feelings.

The collect for this week says: “O Lord, we beseech thee mercifully to hear us … to whom thou has given an hearty desire to pray…” Being given a hearty desire to pray is one of the many things for which we thank God this week. St. Augustine thought he knew why we have it: “O God, you made us for yourself alone, and our souls are restless till they find their rest in you.” On summer days, when we rest in the simple pleasure of being alive, we hope that God hears us giving thanks.

Teresa Morgan

The example of St Alban

Last Thursday we remembered in the Church of England St Alban, known as the first martyr in England. His story is a remarkable story of courage in the face of death.

Alban lived in what is now St Albans in the third century AD. At the time it was a Roman city. One day he gave shelter to a priest who was fleeing from persecution. Alban observed this priest closely for some days as the priest went about his daily devotional life. Alban became intrigued and impressed by what he saw and asked the priest if he could tell him about Christ. Soon Alban was converted.

Not long after the hiding place was discovered by soldiers. Alban then did something quite amazing. He took the cloak of the priest and put it on himself so that when the soldiers opened the door they thought Alban was the priest they had been looking. They arrested Alban and took him away. He was asked to renounce his faith, which he refused. As a result of his newly found dedication to Christ he was beheaded. His tremendous courage made him probably more influential in his death than he could ever have been in his life.

In England we are not persecuted for our faith in Christ anymore, but we are challenged to be courageous. Are there situations in our own lives where we need more courage in our faith than we feel we have? May we  ask God to give us the strength we need to make a real difference, however small, in our own living and working environments.   

Margreet Armitstead

The Kingdom of God

Today’s gospel reading is from Jesus floating sermon; he is sitting in a boat teaching the crowds on the shore about the Kingdom of God. He tells them that the Kingdom is like a seed growing of its own accord into a great harvest, or a grain of mustard growing into huge bush. What is the point our Lord is making? Is it the gradual, natural process or the astonishing  contrast between small beginnings and the end-result? The scholars are divided on that question, perhaps because both of these are true.

The kingdom of God is sown in the hearts of Jesus’ followers and in their common life together, through unself-conscious acts of generosity, through daily faithfulness in prayer for those in trouble, by standing up for justice for the oppressed, yet offering forgiveness when we ourselves are treated unjustly. Thus the Kingdom grows in a hidden and secret way. But on the other hand, these images do also speak of a stark contrast. The world we live in will not reach perfection by human progress. For every couple of steps we take forwards, human beings seem doomed to take a few steps back; if it is left to us we will never get there.

If one really believes that God is God, one has to believe as well that God will one day, suddenly, create a new heaven and a new earth, and finally establish his sovereign rule. The combination of a this-worldly humane realism with an other-worldly divine idealism is unique to the teaching of Jesus.

John Muddiman