Field of Dreams: if you build it, they will come!

A sermon preached at All Saints, Clifton, Wednesday 22nd February 2012

It is one of the little quirks of the English language that our word for the season we are beginning today is quite unrelated to its name in other European languages. The Italian Quaresma, the French Carême, come from the Latin Quadragesima, referring to the Forty Days in which our Lord was in the wilderness before his public ministry. Our word Lent, however, is related to the English word “length”- it is the season when the days begin to lengthen, when winter is on the way out, and springtime is on the way in. In our northern regions it is indeed springtime, and the season for spring-cleaning.

Our motto this Lent is “seek and ye shall find”, and when we begin spring-cleaning the first thing we find is usually dust and cobwebs and things like that. Cupboards full of junk that has accumulated over the past years, stuff that we have forgotten why we ever got it in the first place. It is much the same with our spiritual lives: we ourselves are, spiritually, rather dusty and full of junk. Lent should be the time when we make an effort to sort ourselves out.

I suggest, then, that the first thing we need to do is to take a good look at ourselves, making a note of all the various things that need attention. “Examination of conscience”, it is usually called, an exercise we often associate with the preparation for sacramental confession, but which is valuable in its own right. With domestic spring-cleaning, it is useful to make a list of the jobs to be done, perhaps with a rough plan or timetable for doing them. We can find it just as useful in the spiritual realm.

In today’s Gospel, our Lord focuses on three spiritual exercises: almsgiving, prayer and fasting. These are three useful headings for our self-examination. Fasting in its most literal sense is going without food, but we can take it more widely. Compared with most people in the world today, you and I live pretty comfortable lives. We eat and drink well, we have comfortable homes, we have all sorts of entertainments to occupy our time. These are good things, things to be very thankful for: but do we take them too much for granted? Are we as grateful for them as we should be? Are we sometimes a bit too keen on them, a bit too greedy? Do they make us, shall we say, a bit too soft? This is where “giving up” things comes in, cutting out the excesses not just in eating or drinking, but in anything we are conscious of slightly overdoing. Time itself is a valuable and strictly limited resource which it is all too easy to waste. Ask yourself how much of what you do and have is strictly necessary.

Next, almsgiving: again, not just in the restricted sense of giving money, but in the wider sense of being generous with our resources, being more conscious of the needs of others, and our power to bring happiness to them. Once again, the gift of time is underrated: to spend time with other people, especially those who may be lonely, is sometimes more urgent than seeing to their material wants. If fasting involves looking at ourselves and our excesses, almsgiving means looking at others and their needs- looking outwards. Ask yourself not how little you need to do for others, but how much you can.

The third thing is prayer, not just saying prayers and performing religious devotions, but deepening our awareness of God, of our Lord’s constant presence, of his friendship. It is easy enough to take family and friends for granted, how much easier it is to forget God! God is both within and without, in the depths of our hearts and in our fellow men and women. But if we are too self-absorbed, we overlook him in both. Prayer should be a constant inner dialogue with an ever-present friend. Read the Bible as if our Lord were sitting beside you, looking over your shoulder, as it were. Go out and about as if he were walking visibly beside you, as he is invisibly. Examine yourself not about your feelings (or lack of feelings) of devotion, but about your intentions; how much do you really want to know God better?

We have six weeks ahead of us to make a start. Make your survey, make your plan. As the days draw out and the sunshine (we hope) floods into our homes, make them fit for our Lord’s visitation. Not tomorrow, or the next day: now is the proper time, today is the day of salvation!

A sermon preached at All Saints, Clifton, Sunday February 5th, 2012

We have just heard an extract from St Paul’s letter to the Philippians. Who were they, and why was Paul writing to them? Philippi is in northern Greece, and it was founded by Philip II of Macedon in 356 BC. In 42 BC it was the site of the famous battle when Octavian and Mark Antony defeated Brutus and Cassius, following the assassination of Julius Caesar. After the battle, many Roman veterans were settled there, and it became in effect a Latin city in Greek territory. It seems that the religion of the non-Latin part of the population was devoted to Egyptian gods and their rites.

Sometime in 48-49 AD, St Paul arrived on his first expedition into Europe. On the first Sabbath he looked for a Jewish synagogue, but evidently there were not enough Jews in the city to have a permanent building for worship. Instead, there was a place of prayer outside, near the river, and it has been suggested that this was mainly to serve Jewish travellers along the main Roman road who happened to be there on the Sabbath. The group Luke mentions were all women, including a businesswoman called Lydia from Thyatira, a dealer in purple dye.

From this little group Paul made his first converts. Luke is characteristically vague about how long Paul spent at Philippi, but reading between the lines of Acts and the Epistle, it was long enough to build up a well-organised and generous community. Eventually, the local pagans complained about the effect on their own community, and Paul was arrested and flogged, with his companions. He was released with apologies when he made known his Roman citizenship, but thought it prudent to move on to Thessalonica.

It is clear from what Paul writes in his letter (some time later) that the Christians of Philippi continued to send him financial support for his mission. In thanking them profusely, he says that they were the only church to do so at that time. It is interesting that those he mentions by name (like those mentioned by Luke) are all women. Possibly this contributed to the annoyance of the pagan men: Paul was putting disturbing ideas into their wives’ minds!

Thee is argument among scholars as to whether the Epistle is a single letter, or a compilation of three sent at different times. Part at least was probably sent from Ephesus, maybe three of four years after his time at Philippi. After a gap in which the Philippians had had no opportunity to send him assistance, they had re-established contact, sending money with Epaphroditus, who had then fallen ill. Paul had to wait for his recovery to send his message of thanks.

In the letter as we have it, Paul begins with an update on his situation. After some success at Ephesus, he has suffered a setback, and has been in prison (yet again!). But he has some hopes of visiting them again, and encourages them to live as Christians should. He reminds them that the Messiah, Jesus, did not cling to his rightful dignity, but for our sake allowed himself to be humiliated and even killed. It is precisely because of his trusting obedience to the Father that he is now the glorious Lord in heaven.

This is the point at which we came in tonight: “Therefore, my beloved, as you have always obeyed, so now… work out your own salvation with fear and trembling; for God is at work in you, both to will and to work.” This is the key-text: the rest of the extract develops it, and continues with the topical matters I mentioned, such as Epaphroditus’ illness.

Therefore- it is because of Christ’s obedience that we are what we are, and can do what we do.

My beloved- not just beloved by Paul, but dear to him because they are dear to God.

As you have always obeyed- again, he does not mean that they have been obedient to him, done what he told them; rather, from the beginning they have been open to the word of God, receptive to the message which God has sent them through him. The message, of course, being that God loves them, and that in Christ he has given us the proof of his love. Our obedience is simply our positive response to this message.

so now… work out your own salvation with fear and trembling- “work out” not in the sense of trying to find out, but by giving complete effect to. Our salvation- the word can mean both a state of safety and a safe return home- requires this positive response, which should be given not in a routine or complacent way, but with the awareness of how great a danger we are in, if we do not put our trust in God. The words are very, very strong: terror, quaking. Yet this is still to be combined with total confidence in the love and power of the Lord.

for God is at work in you, both to will and to work- if our salvation depended on our unaided efforts, we should be terrified; but in fact it is God who works in us, even to the extent of giving us the will to do right, let alone the ability to do it.

So there it is, the simplicity of Paul’s Gospel: the centrality of Jesus Christ, the overflowing generosity of God, the requirement on our part that we should be open and receptive towards him. After that, we should let God direct our lives, so that we become more and more like him.

A sermon preached at All Saints, Clifton, Sunday 29th January 2012

Tonight I want to think a little about St Paul, whose Conversion we celebrated last Wednesday. At Mass I made some more or less extempore remarks, which I should like to put in more coherent form now.

We all know the outline of St Paul’s life. He was born in Tarsus (in modern Turkey), studied in Jerusalem as a Pharisee, rejected the claim that Jesus was the Messiah, and persecuted those who made it. Then, suddenly, on the road to Damascus, he had a vision of the risen Christ, which turned his whole life upside down. From then on, he passionately proclaimed what he had previously denied, and saw it as his special mission to preach this not simply to his fellow Jews, but to people of any and every nation. He wrote a number of letters to the churches he had founded, and was eventually sent to Rome as a prisoner, there to be martyred under the Emperor Nero.

All that is true, but it is not all the truth. There is more. By God’s providence, we have not only most of the letters he wrote; but we have at least an outline of his career in the book called “Acts of the Apostles” by St Luke, the author of the third Gospel. Paul was by no means the only missionary of the first decades of Christianity, but he was the one whom Luke knew best, and so he became the hero of the second half of Luke’s book. But Luke only gives us the view from the outside. It is in the Epistles that we see inside Paul’s mind, an even more interesting view.

Because Paul’s letters are “Bible”, they are read by many in a naive and uncritical way as “God’s word”, without reflecting on the human mind through which that word comes to us. Paul is made to answer questions which he had almost certainly never thought of, and his words are given the technical meaning of later theology, forgetting that neither Paul nor his first readers could have understood them in that way.

So what was St Paul’s essential message, his Gospel? It can be summarised in words he wrote to the Corinthians: “God in the Messiah was reconciling the world to himself, and he has entrusted to us the message of reconciliation.” St Paul accepts that the world as it is, is full of hostility and conflict, between human beings and God, and between human beings themselves. This is not how things ought to be, not how God intended it. Never mind how it has come to be, what has God done about it? He has sent the Messiah. Jesus has reconciled the world to God.

How has Jesus done this? He has reversed the process of human disobedience by his own obedience. Though he was rich, he made himself poor. Though he was in the form of God, he emptied himself. He proved his utter obedience to the Divine will by submitting even to the death of the cross. The very fact that was originally a stumbling block to Paul, he now sees as the key to God’s purposes.

One of the great divisions in humanity, as Paul saw it, was that between Jew and Gentile. God had revealed himself to Abraham, and again to Moses. He had formed a People, made a covenant with them, given them a Law. Many Jews (himself included) had seen this in an exclusive sense: we are chosen, you are not. Paul now realised that the mission of Israel had always been a universal one, to bring all nations to God. This could not be achieved until the Messiah came, but now the mission to the world had to begin in earnest, and he himself had been specially commissioned by Jesus himself to promote it.

Paul was, and is, much misunderstood. He did not reject or even belittle the Law God had given to Israel. He merely said that it was not, in all its detail, binding on any but the Jews: Gentiles could come to God, through Jesus, without it. The Law had been a preparation, Jesus was the Living Law who fulfilled it, by his own faithfulness. It is this faithfulness to God, and in particular to God in Jesus the Messiah, that counts. Obedience is in the heart, not just in outward conformity. We are put in a right relationship with God (“justified”) when we trust him entirely (“have faith in him”). God’s faithfulness to his Word is our reason for being faithful to him.

Blessed are those invited to the marriage supper of the Lamb.
Melchisedek king of Salem brought out bread and wine; he was priest of God Most High.
On the third day there was a marriage at Cana in Galilee.

It isn’t hard, is it, to see how these three readings overlap and illuminate one another. The story of Cana is one of the three great Epiphany manifestations:

“Manifested by the star to the sages from afar;
Manifest at Jordan’s stream, Prophet, Priest and King supreme;
And at Cana wedding guest, in thy Godhead manifest;
Manifest in power divine, changing water into wine.”

“This, the first of his signs, Jesus did at Cana in Galilee, and manifested his glory.” Nonetheless, it is possible that if we had been there we would have noticed nothing out of the ordinary, barring some whispering among the waiters and then some unexpectedly good wine. The sign was there, but only for those who knew where to look and how to look: Mary, first of all, and then the little group of disciples.

If you compare John’s Gospel with Mark’s (the one we shall mostly be hearing this year), you feel the difference straight away. Mark is full of incidents, described quickly and immediately going on to the next. In fact the opening chapters are punctuated by “and immediately”: and immediately Jesus did this or did that. John’s Gospel has relatively few incidents, but each one is told at length and reflected upon. Mark’s is the first Gospel, full of anecdotes about Jesus for new disciples who wanted to know what he was like. John’s is the last Gospel, with no need to repeat well-known stories, but more concerned to ponder more deeply upon some typical examples, but again to help disciples understand what Jesus was like. “He came to his own home, and his own people received him not.” Nevertheless the signs were there. John wants us to see them.

Can it be an accident that at this “first sign”, and at the last, when blood and water flowed from the side of Christ, and John is at pains to stress the reliability of his witness, the Mother of Jesus is present? There was a marriage, and the mother of Jesus was there; and when the wine ran out, the mother of Jesus said to him, “They have no wine.” Standing by the cross of Jesus was his mother. In the first sign, water was transformed into abundant wine; in the last, water and blood poured from the side of Christ, his very life poured out for the salvation of the world. “He who saw it has borne witness- his testimony is true, and he knows that he tells the truth- that you also may believe.” “This, the first of his signs, Jesus did at Cana of Galilee… and his disciples believed in him.” Sign and belief are the two poles of revelation: God gives the sign, faith recognises it.

The signs Jesus gave were not intended as knock-down proofs of anything. In Mark, he often tells those he has helped not to say anything about it (but they do). When some Pharisees asked him for a sign, he asked why they could not perceive the signs he had already given. He chided the disciples for being so slow. The implication is surely that you need the right eyes to see, the right ears to hear. You have to be receptive and perceptive to get the point.

Young John saw the signs, old John gave us the fruit of his meditations on them. Water and blood, bread and wine, the symbols that he repeatedly holds before us are sacramental. “My flesh is food indeed, and my blood is drink indeed. He who eats my flesh and drinks my blood abides in me, and I in him.” Last Sunday evening, as it happens, the second Lesson at Evensong was the passage from the Letter to the Hebrews in which the author muses on the words “a high priest according to the order of Melchisedek.” Melchisedek, as we heard in our first reading, was the priest-king of Salem, the later Jerusalem. His name (possibly it was in fact his title) means “King of Righteousness”, or “Righteous King,” and he brings gifts of bread and wine. In the account, he has no father named, and no mention of his fate. As a literary figure, he has no beginning or end: no wonder early Christians saw in him a prophetic foreshadowing of Christ; especially as Psalm 110 also refers to the Messianic King as “a priest after the order of Melchisedek.”

The author of the Book of Revelation may or may not be the same John as wrote the Gospel, but his mind works in the same way. At the close of his vision, as he sees the Holy City, new Jerusalem, coming down from heaven prepared as a bride adorned for her husband, he hears an angel crying out, “The marriage of the Lamb has come, and his Bride has made herself ready: blessed are those who are invited to the marriage supper of the Lamb!” Did he, at that moment or afterwards, remember the simple country wedding at Cana of Galilee, at which Mary was present and the disciples of Jesus were invited? It is easy to get sentimental over weddings, but there are implications in the Scriptural texts both for our understanding of Jesus and our understanding of marriage. The Marriage Service of 1662 gets it right:

“Dearly beloved, we are gathered together here in the sight of God… to join together this man and this woman in Holy Matrimony, which is an honourable estate, instituted of God in the time of man’s innocency, signifying unto us the mystical union that is betwixt Christ and his Church; which holy estate Christ adorned and beautified with his presence, and first miracle that he wrought, in Cana of Galilee.”

The union between Christ and his Church, between Christ and each believing soul, is one of love and fidelity, permanent and unbreakable on his side, intended to be creative and fruitful, however unfaithful and failing in love we may be. It is the marriage of his divinity with our humanity, in which by sharing our weakness he enables us to share his strength, transforming (if we will let him) our watery selves into divine wine. Pope John Paul called marriage “the primordial sacrament”, because it existed before all the others as an effective sign of God’s love for humanity- as the Prayer Book says, “instituted of God in the time of man’s innocency”. In today’s Gospel we see how Christ further adorned it by the first sign of his saving mission, manifesting his glory. May it bring us to believe in him, as did those first disciples. Amen.

A sermon preached at All Saints, Clifton, 15th January 2012

Ps 96: Sing to the Lord a new song, sing to the Lord all the earth. Is 60.9-22: Jerusalem among the nations. Heb 6.17-7.10: Abraham and Melchizedek.

It is always something of a challenge, to see whether the various bits of Scripture that we are given for one service can be woven together to offer us a coherent message. The Psalm, and the two readings tonight, seem at first sight to have little in common. There’s the challenge!

Let’s start with Abraham and Melchizedek, the subject of the second Lesson, from the Epistle to the Hebrews. One of the principle points for discussion in the New Testament writings is how Jesus relates to what had gone before, in the Old Testament. To what extent is there continuity, to what extent is there discontinuity? To what extent does Jesus fulfil what has been prophesied, to what extent does he replace what has hitherto been laid down?

The writer to the Hebrews, whoever he was (no author is given in the opening, indeed it does not read like a letter at all, like the other Epistles), says, “So when God desired to show more convincingly to the heirs of the promise the unchangeable character of his purpose, he interposed with an oath.” Clearly the author here wants to emphasise the continuity of God’s purposes: they are unchangeable, and God wished the heirs of his original promise to Abraham to understand this. It becomes clear from what follows that the oath the writer has in mind is the one referred to in Psalm 110: “The Lord sware, and will not repent: Thou art a priest for ever after the order of Melchizedek.” In fact, he quoted these very words earlier in the Epistle.

Psalm 110 has always been regarded as addressed to the Messiah: “The Lord said unto my Lord, sit thou on my right hand.” It is the Messiah, the descendant of David, who is “a priest after the order of Melchizedek.” But who was Melchizedek? What has he to do with Abraham and his descendants? Apart from the Psalm and Hebrews, all we know is contained in a very short passage in Genesis chapter 14. Abram (his name had not yet been changed to Abraham) had been engaged in battle with some petty local rulers who had kidnapped Abram’s nephew Lot and taken all his belongings. Abram and his servants chased the raiding party, defeated it and rescued Lot and his goods, and returned to his camp at Mamre, not far from Salem, later Jerusalem. “And Melchizedek king of Salem brought out bread and wine; he was priest of God Most High.” He blessed Abram in the name of God, and Abraham gave him a tenth of what he had won in battle. That is all. Scholars have puzzled over this enigmatic passage. Some have speculated that when David conquered Jerusalem centuries later, he took over some of the titles and functions of the earlier kings. “Melchizedek” means literally “King of righteousness”, or “Righteous King”, probably not just a personal name, but a title. David’s priest Zadok has a name of similar form, and there has been speculation that there were two lines of priesthood, one descended from Aaron and so from Abraham, the other connected with the surviving line of Melchizedek. Probably we shall never know for sure.

Psalm 110 probably implies that the Kings of David’s line were seen as having some priestly character, though not of course the Levitical and Aaronic priesthood of the Temple. For the author of Hebrews, it is a foreshadowing of the High Priesthood of the Messiah, which could not be descended from Abraham. His argument is involved, and follows Rabbinic methods of reading Scripture, but the upshot is that Christ’s authority, as priest and king, is not simply a matter of human descent, but is of divine origin. The author did not have the vocabulary and the concepts of later centuries to speak of Christ as God Incarnate, both divine and human, but he is trying to express this thought as best he can. Melchizedek as he appears in Genesis comes from no-where (no parentage is given, as would be usual), blesses Abraham, and is heard of no more! No beginning, no end! The author takes this as symbolic of Christ, who as divine has no beginning or end in a far more profound way.

In this way, the author suggests that although there is continuity between Christ and Abraham, there is also something radically new. In his own way, six centuries earlier, the writer known as the second Isaiah was wrestling with the same problem. After the Exile, there was a real conflict between those who thought that the way forward was by a narrow and exclusive approach to the Law, which led ultimately to the Pharisees, and those who accepted a broader understanding of Israel’s role  in God’s purpose for all mankind. It is the second approach that we see in Isaiah. Jerusalem is still central to to God’s plan, the Holy City in which he dwells, but all nations are to be drawn towards it in order to share in the worship of God.

Isaiah’s language is echoed in the Book of Revelation, where the City of God comes down from God, a city that has no need of the light of sun or moon, because the glory of God himself enlightens it. This belongs to the End-time, the World-to-come. There is continuity between the world-that-is and the world-to-come, because the former is a foreshadowing of the latter. The People of Israel, the Davidic kingship, the Temple, the priesthood: all of these are brought to fulfilment in the priestly kingship of the Messiah, and the Holy People which is itself the City, Temple and dwelling-place of God, precisely because God has taken human nature to himself.

That is why we are told to “sing unto the Lord a new song,” to “declare his honour unto the heathen [the Gentiles].”

“Ascribe unto the Lord, O ye kindreds of the people: ascribe unto the Lord worship and power.

“Ascribe unto the Lord the honour due to his name: bring presents and come into his courts.

This is Isaiah’s vision, that the nations should bring their tribute to God in a renewed Jerusalem.

“O worship the Lord in the beauty of holiness: let the whole earth stand in awe of him.” The well-known hymn makes the meaning explicit:

“Fear not to enter his courts in the slenderness of the poor wealth thou wouldst reckon as thine: truth in its beauty and love in its tenderness, these are the offerings to lay on his shrine.

O worship the Lord in the beauty of holiness! Bow down before him, his glory proclaim; with gold of obedience, and incense of lowliness, kneel and adore him, the Lord is his name!”

Truth and love, obedience and humility: these are the gifts of Christ our High Priest according to the order of Melchisedek, the sacrifice he makes to the eternal Father, and in which he enables us to share.

A sermon preached at All Hallows, Easton, 15th January 2012

The reading from the Book of Revelation gives us a vision of heaven. It’s a dream, of course, full of symbols and signs, not a description of real events. John the dreamer sees a glorious figure enthroned, holding a scroll- a rolled up parchment- fastened with seven seals so that no-one can read what is written on the scroll. John is told that no-one has been able to open the scroll, which causes him to weep with frustration, because he knows that the message is of vital importance to mankind. An angel tells him not to cry, because “the Lion of the tribe of Judah” will open the message. When he looks, he sees not a Lion but a Lamb, who is able to reveal the hidden message of God because he has been sacrificed, and so purchased the whole human race for God.

Well! That is some dream! I don’t know what a psychiatrist would make of it! The John who dreamed is traditionally supposed to be the same John who wrote today’s Gospel, the brother of James who with Peter and Andrew was called from his fishing boat to follow the Lord. In today’s reading, we are in the days following the Baptism of Jesus, which we were thinking about last week. John has described how the other John, John the Baptist, has referred to Jesus as “the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world.” This is an important clue to the dream: the Lamb who reveals the secrets of God because he has been sacrificed to save all people is none other than Jesus!

The Gospel tells us that soon after his Baptism, Jesus decided to go to Galilee, the home area of Peter and Andrew, and several others who were in the group that had been with John the Baptist. Jesus invites Philip to join him, and Philip goes to find his friend Nathanael (just as the previous day Andrew had gone to find his brother Peter). Nathanael is very doubtful that anything good can come from a place like Nazareth, the back of beyond, but he agrees to humour Philip and come and see. On meeting Jesus, he is so impressed that he calls him “Son of God” and “King of Israel”, in other words the Messiah. Jesus tells him that he will see greater things: heaven opened, and angels going up and down over the Son of Man.

I doubt if Nathanael understood at that time what Jesus was talking about; but the point is that Jesus himself claims to be the one for whom the secrets of heaven are an open book, and whom the angels serve. It is interesting to note that, although John does not tell of the temptation in the wilderness, it is at this point in their Gospels that Matthew and Luke show Satan quoting to Jesus the text, “He will give his angels charge of you to bear you up,” while both Mark and Matthew say that after his temptation, angels came and ministered to Jesus.

Christianity is about Jesus: what he taught, and even more about who he is and what he has done. Nathanael gave him titles of dignity, “Son of God,” “King of Israel”. Jesus himself gave himself a title of humility, just “the son of man”, human and vulnerable like everyone else. John the dreamer heard “the Lion of the tribe of Judah” proclaimed, but when he looked he saw only a gentle Lamb, and not just a lamb, but one that had apparently been sacrificed, wounded and yet still alive. In coded form, the message was that Jesus has saved mankind not by power and majesty, but by self-sacrifice and humility.

But what is “salvation”? Each person must look into his or her own heart, and ask what they are most afraid of. Illness? Lack of money? Death? We all have things that worry us. Maybe there are things we are ashamed of, and that worries us too. When we say that Jesus is the Saviour, we mean that we can take all our worries, all our weaknesses, to him. If we trust him, he will sort it all out. We are safe with him. What does the hymn say? “Just as I am, though tossed about with many a conflict, many a doubt, fighting and fears, within, without, O Lamb of God, I come… Just as I am, thou wilt receive, wilt welcome, pardon cleanse, relieve: because thy promise I believe, O Lamb of God, I come.” Jesus is the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world.