Posts by Robert:
- An Ethiopian official…. Why did we get the Olympics? One reason was that London today is less an English or British city and more a world city that finds itself in England; the people who pass you in the street (here or at the end of your commute), whether ordinary or powerful, could have roots that go back to virtually any part of the globe, not least Ethiopia. Modern London (as the prophets said about ancient Jerusalem) is a city that has the potential to make the whole world feel at home.
- …in a chariot… The first century’s chauffeured Mercedes, a car not unknown on Richmond streets.
- …who is a eunuch… Not a condition I encounter much round here, but that’s not for lack of variety. If we’d spent yesterday people watching in Richmond town centre, we’d have seen a kaleidoscope of difference in people’s lives and how they live them, by choice, by force of circumstance, because of the culture we inhabit, because of what we each received when we received the gift of life itself.
- …reading the Bible... Use the bus, tube or train, and you’ll be struck by how many passengers use that small Sabbath in the day to read their holy book.
6th Sunday of Easter, 13th May, St Mary’s, morning
May 15th, 2012Reading John 15.9-17
Preacher Canon Robert Titley
If you have even the tiniest interest in football, you probably know that today and the next six days are a period of unusual importance. Today brings the final day of the English Premiership season, next Saturday the Champions’ League final. Depending on how each team performs in ninety-odd minutes, one of two could be champions of Europe, one of another two champions of England; any two of four teams could qualify for next season’s Champions’ League – or fail to, with the loss not just of glory but of tens of millions of pounds – while at other end of the table, one of two teams will drop through the impoverishing trapdoor of relegation.
Imagine you are one of the managers involved. What do you put in your pre-match talk? What do you say to the pricey star, recently returned to form but still fragile? What to the journeyman who knows he’s only in the team because your first choice is injured or suspended? How do you achieve that alchemy, the perfect mix of praise and threat, encouragement and warning, that will not only make the team fight, but release their guile and imagination and flair?
In the film The Damned United, Derby County manager Brian Clough (played uncannily by Michael Sheen), adopts a spare approach as his team sits round the tight walls of the dressing room before taking on those giants of the 1970s, Leeds United. He quietly prompts them to repeat pithy phrases he’s told them in training, things they can hold in their heads in the heat of battle.
‘Know what your job is today?’
‘Yes, boss: stay in position, keep the shape.’‘Clear what you’re doing today?’
‘Be big. Be strong. Any chance I get, flatten Paul Madeley.’
Last Sunday’s and today’s gospel readings come from what we call the farewell discourses of John’s Gospel. It’s another scene in a confined space, Jesus at the last supper, the night before he is arrested, talking to his team of close followers – now just eleven in number – preparing them for the ordeal that will come when he is arrested and taken from them and killed. He adopts a similar approach, giving them things they can hold in their minds in the middle of fear and confusion. Last week it was a vivid image:
‘I am the vine you are the branches,’
Today it’s a series of nuggets:
‘Keep my commandments…Love one another…I no longer call you servants, but friends;’
and, most remarkably, this:
‘You did not choose me; I chose you.’
What a thing to say, and to hear. Unforgettable. In a few hours’ time, when they are surrounded by menacing faces in the lamplight, by swords and clubs of violent men looking for Jesus, when they wonder how they ever got themselves into this, ‘You did not choose me…’ When things are demanded of them that they just do not feel up to, ‘You did not choose me…’ When they are convinced that Jesus has been raided from death, when they see that this thing is vastly bigger than they realised and feel out of their depth: ‘You did not choose me…’ It is inspiring – and terrifying – that someone sees more in you than you can find in yourself. In the college where I was trained for ordination, a place in which it was easy at times to feel deskilled and inadequate, we saw those words every morning and evening in the chapel, written on an open book held by Jesus in an icon:
‘You did not choose me; I chose you.’
What can we learn from this? One thing is that here in the scriptures we receive words of life. A powerful reason for getting to know the Bible better is to have by heart words through which God can strengthen us. A colleague of mine said that in tough situations she would have in mind the words of Jesus that night as he waited for the violent men to come:
‘Your will, not mine be done’.
Foe moments like that I have a verse from the Psalms:
‘In God I trust and will not fear. What can flesh do to me?’
But what of today’s particular verse, ‘You did not choose me…’? The only point in hearing these words here is that they are true of us. Consider this: the most important thing about any of us here is not that, say, you have exercised your free will in choosing to come, but that God (whose face we see in Jesus) has chosen you. What looks like free choice is actually your response to a call.
If that is true, that changes things. When you feel out of your depth at work, or if work is folding up: ‘You did not choose me…’ If circumstances have changed, years have rolled by, and people who gave purpose to your life aren’t there now: ‘You did not choose me…’ But why did he choose you? And what for?
Jesus continues,
‘…I chose you, and appointed you to go and bear fruit.’
And what could that fruit be? Last week we touched on one thing, finding our own words to speak about God. But that’s not the only fruit. What else?
Do you think you have something to offer the life of this church? What might that be, and who are you going to tell about it? Or have you something to offer ‘out there’, in places that may have nothing obviously to do with this or any church? Or is it something else again? Yesterday during the May Fair (and thanks to everyone who made it all go so well) Fenella Warden filled this church again and again with good music and fine pictures, created by young people. Is that the kind of fruit God has in mind? What was that talent you had as a child (so long neglected); that passion you had all those years ago, that has got crowded out by the stuff that fills our lives?
Happily, these are fruitful times in our churches: six people from our congregations are to be confirmed here tonight, a great act of openness to the purposes of God (come and support them, and be inspired); several people are in conversations of one kind or another about whether they are being called to some ministry in the church; and, two weeks today, our Christianity at Work group moves to its new slot, over coffee here on a Sunday morning, with its brief to help us make connections between the work people do and the purposes of God.
All that matters is that, however we do it, you and I discover the fruitfulness for which God has chosen us, that we receive the nourishment we need to bear that fruit. And this is how.
Every Sunday, on your behalf, bread and wine are placed on the altar. Bread, basic food, stands for the essentials of life, the things that you have to do, at home, at school or at work. Wine, not basic but very nice, stands for those parts of life where you celebrate, enjoy yourself, or relax. All of your life and mine summed up in wafers and wine, placed on the altar, put in God’s hands. And a few minutes later God gives it all back, bread and wine, work and leisure, your life and mine, back in our own hands again; except now it has been transformed, and we receive it with the words ‘The body of Christ…The blood of Christ’: your life and mine, now vivified, revived with the life of Christ. That is why God has chosen us to be here, to receive this nourishment, so we can bear fruit in places only we can reach.
Notes
The Damned United http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xp_0ITy8nrk&feature=relmfu
Bread and wine These thoughts owe much to Charles Elliott’s, Praying the Kingdom (DLT, 1987).
What does God want to give you here? What is it that you need? And what is God calling you to do?
5th Sunday of Easter, May 6th 2012, St Mary’s, morning
May 15th, 2012Readings Acts 8.26-40 John 15.1-8
Preacher Canon Robert Titley
So, Boris is back, in what proved to be one election too many even for Ken, the come-back king of London politics. Prominent in the thoughts of both men must have been the Olympics: Mayor Livingston was part of the team that won the games in 2005, while Mayor Johnson received the Olympic flag at the end of the 2008 Beijing Games, and held a memorable press conference in which he claimed that table tennis, that sport so much associated with his Chinese hosts, was actually invented on the dining tables of England and was originally called ‘whiff whaff’. His slogan for London 2012: ‘Whiff whaff’s coming home.’ As long as the games go fairly well, how satisfying it will be for him, having sown some of the seeds and watered the shoots, to see them come to fruition. That’s today’s theme, bearing fruit.
From the gospel reading today we learn that the life of faith withers if it does not bear fruit. Jesus gives an alarming warning about those who are not fruitful, the people to whom he gives nourishment but who keep it all for themselves. So his followers are meant to be fruitful; but what is that fruit? What might it look like? Let’s look at the first reading today, from the Acts of the Apostles, a scene – on the face of it – pretty far away from your experience or mine: an Ethiopian government official, who is a eunuch (someone who’s been deliberately castrated), sitting in a chariot reading the Bible. Look at the items in that scene, however, and it’s not so alien to us. Consider.
Into this cosmopolitan scene (not so remote from us) comes the apostle Philip, nudged by God to go up to this stranger, but with no instructions about what to do next. Wisely, he doesn’t steam straight in, he listens. The man is reading the prophet Isaiah (in those days people read out loud even when reading to themselves), and Philip’s first words are a question: ‘What you’re reading there, do you know what it’s about?’ Only when the man invites him does he really start to talk.
Philip is offered to us as an example of how to share the good news about God, which is what you and I should do: it is one of the types of ‘fruit’ that should appear among us, the branches of the vine called Jesus. But how do you share that good news? What words do you use? Sometimes you don’t need words at all.
May 15th sees the start of Christian Aid Week, a time in the year that makes me feel good about being a Christian, because it shows the world that the Lord we worship longs for the good of the world – things like clean water, decent schools. If you can spare an hour or two, why not offer it to collecting for Christian Aid? You will be offering sixty to a hundred and twenty minutes of authentic Christian mission: you will be doing a small piece of work for God’s new creation, and you will be demonstrating in flesh and blood that life with God is so much bigger than the world of religious busyness.
You can achieve all that without ever saying a word about God; but the moment will come sometime when, as with Philip alongside the chariot, someone invites you to speak for God. I remember, one May afternoon, doing some door-to-door collection for Christian Aid Week. Someone asked me in for a cup of coffee, then someone else wanted to chat on the doorstep, and I was grateful for both, because earlier I’d been handed back a string of empty envelopes, encountering what war correspondents call ‘pockets of stiff resistance’. These two people were genuinely interested to meet someone who was part of the life of the church of God, and it was a privilege to be asked about it. But – again – what do you say?
In the Acts of the Apostles we see that the Spirit of God offers to each believer the power – the capacity and the authority – to speak about God and for God. And the moment to do that for you or me could be as imminent as this morning in the churchyard, when someone might say, ‘So you’ve just been in there; what’s all that about, then?’ What do I say? I can’t say nothing; and to say, ‘I like the music’ or ‘I work there’ would be to say things that are true, but beside the point. And it will be no good quoting a clever phrase I’ve picked up from somewhere – that will be giving someone else’s answer to a question that has been put to me.
Whatever comes out of my mouth at that moment doesn’t have to be clever, or completely worked-out; it can be tentative, even unsure, but it has to be the child of my own heart. That is all God needs to touch another human heart, and who knows what might come from that? Through those faltering words of yours or mine someone else might begin to discover that ‘new creation’ we shall sing about in Charles Wesley’s hymn at the end of the service. We will be part of what Charles’ brother John called ‘Christian conversation’, in which one person allows another to clothe in their own halting words what God seems to be doing in their life.
Clothing experience of God in words we have made our own. That is part of what our course Exploring Christianity has been doing. Six members of that group are to be confirmed in this church next Sunday evening at half past six. They represent the very best kind of fruit that a church can produce, and they deserve our support in their great step in the journey of faith. Please keep them in your prayers this week, and please be with them at the service if you possibly can.
Jesus is the vine, we are the branches, and he promises that we shall bear much fruit. Part of that fruit is bearing witness to whatever faith you and I have; and faith is the first of three themes in the Bishop of Southwark’s Call to Mission for all the churches in our diocese. ‘Faith, Hope, Love’, is an invitation to ponder, over the coming weeks, these three pillars of the Christian life. There should be a named envelope for you with a letter from Bishop Christopher at the back of church. Do pick one up before you go today. It contains no request for money, so it’s safe to open.
You and I, the branches of the vine that is Jesus, are called to be bear fruit, and sharing the good news of God is one of those fruits. For that, though, we need first to be fed, and God will do that for us now, as we gather around the Lord’s table.
Notes
Charles Wesley’s hymn ’Love divine, all loves excelling.’ The final verse begins ’Finish, then, thy new creation…’
29th April 2012, Fourth Sunday of Easter, St Mary’s, evening
May 5th, 2012Readings Exodus 16.4-15, Revelation 2.12-17
Preacher Canon Robert Titley
Dr Sangster, the great preacher of the last century, was a man of advanced opinions, at least for an eminent churchman. He was not, for instance, a complete opponent of the cinema, and enjoyed the odd trip himself. When asked about one film, however, he said that it had, alas, been a waste of time because it contained no sermon illustrations.
This week I had a cinematic experience that scored a little higher on the sangsterometer. Salmon Fishing in the Yemen tells the story of a sheikh’s dream to bring cool water and Scottish fish to the desert of the Arabian peninsula; not a million miles from the Israelites in the first reading, from Exodus, seeking food and water in the wilderness of the Sinai peninsula. Both stories are about faith. The sheikh loves his fishing and his people, for whom he wants to provide fertile land, so irrigation and recreation come together with money no object. When his Scottish fisheries adviser, a self-confessed ‘facts and figures’ man, is sceptical, the sheikh says he must have faith: isn’t that what all fishermen need for a pastime in which hope so much outruns experience?
So Faith brings fish to the desert and food in the wilderness, but the two cases also differ: in the film, human ingenuity is the mechanism, whereas in Exodus they just have to wait; and as for the will of God, it becomes less clear to the sheikh just what that is, whereas in the wilderness it is clear as can be: God speaks to Moses. My point in this sermon is to ask what it means to say that God ‘speaks’, to Moses, to St John in his vision in the second reading, or to any of us.
I am speaking to you now and you will perhaps speak to me once this service is over. We know about this speaking business. We know it so well that we don’t think for a moment what a mind-bending business it is. You are hearing me speak. You hear – what? – a stream of sounds, to which you apply the rules of a code called the English language and make some sense of it. But the sense you make of it is not just the bare meaning: you interpret the tone of voice to get a fuller idea of what my aim is in speaking to you; you check what you hear, moment by moment, with whatever you know about me, or – if you know nothing about me – with what you know about people like me, or people in general. It’s a good job that this is something (like riding a bike) that you do by instinct, because it is, as one philosopher has said, ‘an imaginative build-up [that] is untraceably complex’.
This has led other philosophers to claim that when we speak and listen there is no real conversation going on at all: on their reckoning, you construct the reality of what you imagine I am saying rather than find that reality in anything I actually say. And they have a point – have you never had a conversation where someone ‘heard’ what you never said? – yet we don’t really take them seriously. We reckon we know enough about human beings to get through life on the basis that when you meet someone and a stream of sounds comes out of their mouth, you can by and large get the drift of what they are trying to communicate to you. So, after the service, speak to me – you know it makes sense.
What is the point of all this? It is to show how different it is if we think of God speaking to us. In the reading, the writer describes a conversation of Moses with God such as that which two human beings might have, ‘as one speaks to a friend’ (Exodus 33.11). More often, though, when someone says, ‘God spoke to me’, they mean something more inward, rather than speech which you might, as it were, catch on tape. In that case there isn’t the same reassuring certainty you find in human conversation, in which you can hear the noise of someone speaking, and make judgements about it from what you know (because you are human too) about how human beings tick. Not so with God. God’s thoughts are not our thoughts and God’s ways are not ours. So how, then, do we know it is God that we are hearing (or ‘hearing’), rather than part of that ‘conversation’ that’s always going on in our heads?
Here surely there is the danger of constructing reality rather than discovering it. If I say, ‘God has told me to do this’, I might have just gone in for one of those complex operations my imagination is so good it, so that what I want to do gets fed into my brain at one end, and comes out at the other end dressed up as the will of God. We are so good at deceiving ourselves, and the practical effects can be serious. Some examples.
Yesterday there were people in George Street accosting shoppers to get them to sign up for – I think the charity was Shelter. Suppose I’d said, ‘God is telling me to sign’, and did so. Well, whether I was strictly correct or not, no harm done, if you believe that God’s general will is to help those who are homeless, as the book of Exodus suggests it is.
But consider this. Today is Vocations Sunday, when we are asked to consider the vocation to public ministry, so suppose someone says, ‘God is telling me to be a priest’? God wants some people to be priests, and God may want this person to be a priest, but surely we must test the idea. Think what harm might come if what is actually going on here is the acting out of some fantasy, or an attempt to make up for some bad deed in the past, rather than response to the real call of God. (You’ll be relieved to know the church is quite rigorous about this.) And if anyone ever says, ‘God is telling me to marry you,’ my advice is – run; just run: God often does want two people to spend the rest of their lives together, but God uses rather different and more enjoyable ways to make that clear.
Then, of course, we know that there are some people who seem to think that God is telling them to murder people. I remember the words of a Muslim MP soon after the July 7th attacks in 2005, who denounced the bombers with a confidence to match any they might have shown: ‘They thought’, he said, ‘that God told them to kill and be killed, and promised heaven as a reward, but God didn’t; and now they are not in heaven but in hell.’
Faced with such confident and contradictory claims about God ‘speaking’ to us, you might think it’s safer to stop any such dangerous talk. But we can’t, not without emptying Christian faith of its potency. Men and women followed Jesus because he spoke to them, because the words he spoke had a claim upon them, an authority they could not duck, words that drew them, that seemed to come with the voice of God. And when Jesus was no longer with them in the flesh, still other people joined them. They had never met Jesus as those first followers had, but they too sensed the life of Jesus among them, they felt the same claim, the same magnetic authority, they ‘heard’ the same voice of God. So we have to talk of God ‘speaking’ to us. We borrow this word from our human experience as the best we’ve got to hint at the way that God invites us to become the people we were created to be. And perhaps the word is not as misleading as it might appear.
If you say, ‘I think God is speaking to me,’ telling you to do this or to be that, you can test your hunch: if I think this is God speaking, how does it compare with what Christian faith believes to be the general will of God, and the character of God as we have received it, above all in the person of Jesus? We know about Jesus’ character from the four gospels in our Bible; we overhear his followers’ response to him, both there and in the other books of the New Testament; and in the Hebrew scriptures, our Old Testament, that part of the Bible Christians share with their Jewish cousins, we find the soil in which Jesus’ thought grew. Listen to the voice that comes through your reading of the Scriptures and then ask: does it sound like the same voice that I think I’m hearing?
And – thank God – you don’t have to figure all this out on your own. God gives us the church: not a building, not even an organisation, but that body of people who are in the habit of listening to God, of engaging in what John Wesley called ‘Christian conversation’. If we are serious about God speaking to us, this is where we belong.
Note
An imaginative build-up Austin Farrer, ‘Imagination: Poetical and Divine’, in Interpretation and Belief, edited by Charles Conti, SPCK, p40.
4th Sunday of Easter, 29th April 2012, St Matthias, morning
May 5th, 2012Reading: John 10.11-18
Preacher: Canon Robert Titley
Baptism of Avery Lingle Elliott
What a day of promise. Avery has arrived to be baptised and David Gardiner arrives tomorrow as our new parish priest here. And into this moment of promise comes the 10th chapter of John’s gospel with its description of Jesus as the good shepherd. Archbishop Rowan Williams recommends that, whenever you hear a piece of scripture, you ask yourself, ‘How should this passage change me?’ So what about this one?
Shepherds and sheep are not part of my life. I am a thoroughgoing townie – if I encounter sheep it’s generally by the kilo – and I really need my nephew here, because Jonathan lives near a farm. For his third birthday he got a toy farmyard. His parents showed him the animals one by one. ‘Look,’ they said, ‘here’s a cow.’ ‘Moo!’ said Jonathan. ‘Here’s a sheep.’ ‘Baa!’ ‘Here’s a dog.’ ‘Woof!’ ‘Here’s a fox.’ ‘Shoot it! Shoot it!’ said Jonathan. He had got to know their neighbour’s hens and, a few nights before, a fox had got in and killed them all, and Jonathan’s words were actually the farmer’s words about what to do with a fox. Even the green and pleasant land of the modern English countryside can be a place of danger. Take yourself back twenty centuries to the first people to hear John’s gospel, and the danger is multiplied, with human as well as animal predators.
Jesus introduces us to two people from that world: the shepherd and the hired hand. The hired hand is not a bad person, but he has no job security: his welfare lies not in protecting someone else’s sheep but in being fit himself to work next day, so when danger comes he does his sums and runs away. The shepherd is quite different. His security is entirely bound up with the security of his sheep. He owns them. They are his livelihood – if he loses them he loses everything – so when danger comes he does his sums and protects the sheep, even at risk to his own life. ‘I,’ says Jesus, ‘am that shepherd.’
How should this passage change me, you, us? First, can I see us in the passage? Are we living in a place of danger? Well, the Olympics are nearly upon us, when London will become the most targeted city on the planet for terrorists, criminals and others who wish us no good. And we are back in recession. I was talking to Avery’s mum and grandmother, Barbara and Jenett, whose business is recruitment in banking sector, so they know all about the risks of these days. And what about the days to come? Think of Avery, at the very start of life: who knows what the coming decades will bring for her? Well – this is depressing – if you thought too much like that you’d never have children at all – and the Bishop of London got the balance right a year ago today, preaching at the wedding of Kate and William, when he said that ‘We stand, looking forward to a century which is full of promise and full of peril.’
How should this passage change me? In a time of peril I hear an invitation to trust in Jesus – or trust more in him – as a source of fundamental security that circumstances can’t take away. Jesus says to you, to me, to Avery:
I am the good shepherd: your welfare and mine are so bound up together that I am willing to lay down my life for you.
And (John’s gospel adds) that is therefore what God says, because God’s nature takes on human flesh in Jesus, the good shepherd. Once you know that the one who gives warmth and meaning to the universe feels like that about you, then there’s nothing you cannot face.
How should this passage change me, in an age of peril that is also full of promise? Just before what we hear today, Jesus also says, ‘I am the gate for the sheep.’ He promises security – as the good shepherd – and he is also the one who opens the way to life-giving pastures, if only I dare to poke my sheepish nose outside the gate. And that’s tough, because in times like ours people become cautious: they spend less, they dare less, they hope less, they give less. But it must not be so among us. We are right to look to God in Christ for security; but if we cling on to security, our hearts become shrunken and ungenerous, and faith becomes joyless, defensive and – dull.
How should this story change me, or you? What is the promise here for St Matthias as we start a new page in our history? for Avery as she begins the story of her life? On this day of promise, the Easter Jesus says,
I have laid sown my life for you and taken it up again: I have been to hell and back to show you there’s nothing that can happen to you, nothing that you can do, that can snuff out my love for you. Let that sink into your hearts. Let it make you bold. Let it make you excited by the promise of life, not paralysed by its perils.
There is a third thing happening today. Today is Vocations Sunday, when our thoughts are directed towards listening for the call of God (as sheep hear the voice of their shepherd). What is God calling you to, if you are among Avery’s parents and godparents? What is God’s call to you as a regular worshipper here, as this church begins to write new page of its history?
Every response to what you think might be the voice of God is risky. In the end, though, the bigger risk is staying, scared, in the sheepfold, because there our souls starve. We are always at risk, but we have to learn to value something more than safety. That something is what Jesus offers, life; life in abundance.
A young student I knew once consulted a Jesuit priest, who was getting on a bit, about a particular choice facing him. This was the advice he got.
When you reach my age, and look back over your life, it is not your extravagances you regret, but your economies.
St George the Martyr, Sunday 22nd April 2012, St Matthias, evening
April 23rd, 2012For St George the Martyr
and the Annual Parochial Church Meeting of the Richmond Team Ministry
Readings Jeremiah 15.15-end, Hebrews 11.29-12.2
Preacher Canon Robert Titley
We know little about George, the soldier saint, the embodiment of Englishness, except that he was probably Palestinian (or possibly Turkish) and that he gave his life for his faith in Jesus. Venerated in the Eastern churches, he was a natural draw for the warrior knights of the crusades, who adopted him and brought him home. So when Shakespeare’s Henry V wants a few more ounces of aggression from his men in the siege of Harfleur, it’s our man he invokes; and if Mr Rednapp finally gets the job of managing the national team, we can all shout as they take the field against France at the start of the European Championships in June,
‘Cry God for Harry, England and St George!’
In the real world, when a Richmond family wanted to beautify this church in memory of their son, killed in the First World War, they too were drawn to him, and it is their son who provides the face of St George you see in the All Saints chapel.
Martyrs are the antidote to religion as a consumer activity. It is a particular kind of sin to make God dull, and when you hear as I did last week about how especially moving two different people found our worship in Holy Week, you thank God that we are doing something right. But when someone says they’re giving up church because they don’t ‘get anything out of it’, you know what they mean, but you also know that that is not really the point. When it comes to God, the martyr asks not ‘What can I get?’ but ‘How much am I prepared to lose?’ Martyrs remind us that all this is not about us. George, then, is not a bad person to have among us as we prepare for the Annual Meeting.
The passage from the letter to the Hebrews is often read when the church celebrates a martyr. The writer addresses a church that is beginning to face hostility, even persecution, and so has the challenge of bearing witness (which is what martyrdom means) in what today’s military people call a non-permissive environment. His approach is to show them that they are not the first to face this problem. He develops the theme with a list of people who have faced trouble because of their faith in God. He seeks, like Shakespeare’s Henry, to ‘stiffen the sinews’ of faith, and he does it by telling them about men and women of faith who by the grace of God found triumph out of their troubles: the Israelites escaped from Egypt (which we marked in the Easter vigil) – a real result – and captured Jericho – another result; others conquered kingdoms, shut the mouths of lions, put out fires, put foreign armies to flight – great results all. But then this: others were mocked; put in jail; tortured; stoned to death; sawn in two. Is that going to stiffen the sinews?
In Nick Park’s award-winning animation Chicken Run, Ginger the hen and Rocky the American rooster have a difference of opinion about how to get the hens on the farm to keep up the effort of trying to escape. Ginger has just told them that the farmers plan to fatten them up and slaughter them. Result: feather-flying panic. Rocky takes her aside and tells her, testily, ‘Over in America we have this rule: if you want to motivate someone, don’t mention death.’ A good rule, so why does the writer to the Hebrews break it? In the film, Ginger replies, ‘Here the rule is: always tell the truth’, and the truth for the writer to the Hebrews is that sometimes people do get killed. Some people didn’t like what Jesus stood for – that’s why they killed him – so you shouldn’t be surprised if those who follow him sometimes get a bit of the same.
This can help each of us see where we have reached on the Christian journey, and where the balance lies in our congregations in the life of faith. One Sunday, someone (not a regular) told me, ‘I was feeling so down and thought I needed to go to church and now I feel so much better.’ Wonderful, and quite right – why ever would you start coming to church if you didn’t get something out of it? – but you cannot stay for ever in that frame of mind. It’s a matter of the vivid and the sustained; it’s the difference between falling in love and being in love, and between being in love and just loving. In his poem ‘The Dry Salvages’ (the third of his Four Quartets), TS Eliot considers moments of intense and vivid encounter with God. He talks – in a way that is very fitting for Evensong – of
music heard so deeply
That it is not heard at all, but you are the music
While the music lasts.
But it can’t always be like that. The rest, says Eliot, is
prayer, observance, discipline, thought and action.
So it must have been in those first days after the first Easter, and the vivid, bewildering experiences of the risen Jesus that first launched the rocket of Christian faith. It was not to last, nor could it, nor should it, for life would be unbearable if it consisted only of successive shocks and constant intensity.
In the life of faith there is the mountain top and there is the plain. And then there is the vale of tears. I have remarked before that one of the lazy criticisms of faith in God by some of our cultured despisers is that we do all this simply as consolation, as a psychological crutch. It’s no doubt true of many believers sometimes, and of some believers most of the time, but the writer to the Hebrews and his audience, and George himself, would smile a wry smile at this. For them, not being Christian would bring the pretty big consolation of staying alive and well; and it seems that some among the church the writer addresses have already taken that path now the heat is on.
If I am established in my faith, am I now willing to suffer for that faith? Some of you already do. You may, say, suffer ridicule at work or from friends and family, which is not as bad as being sawn in two, but it still hurts. And if you are willing to put up with some of that, then that’s a sign that you want to live by the Christian story not just because it feels good, but because it’s true, because it tells the truth.
So here is something we might have in our minds through tonight’s meeting. We had a wonderful evening here yesterday, celebrating the life of the Team Ministry and looking at what we want to do in the coming year. Someone asked about the Street Pastors initiative in Richmond: was here any way of judging the effectiveness of the work? Good question, and one to pose about anything we do. One criterion is that of numbers: is giving up or down, is the electoral roll growing or shrinking? We shall be doing some of that, but that’s about quantity. How do we weigh the quality, the significance, of what we do? One criterion is how much people like what they get, and that’s OK, but it’s not enough: I like all sorts of things that are not entirely good for me.
So what about this question? In the range of things we do in the Team – the website launched yesterday, the words that we say or sing, in the prayers and in the breaking of the bread – how much are the sinews of faith being strengthened, to face the challenges that come to us? If we seek that first, all these things will be added to us.
We are here tonight because we have received a gift from all the people who have before us been part of the story of faith in this land: those who first believed in Christ in these islands, those who made sure we could read the Bible in our own language, those who defended the church when others tried to hijack it, those who kept up the round of prayer and worship and the sharing of the good news of God. All this they did in faith. Some had an easy time of it, some a hard time. And now it is our turn.
3rd Sunday of Easter, 22nd April 2012, St Mary’s, morning
April 23rd, 2012Readings Acts 3.12-19, Luke 24.36b-48
Preacher Canon Robert Titley
We are in the season of bank holidays, with their promise of what we call ‘a bit of peace’, and peace is the first thing the Disciples hear from the risen Jesus in the gospel reading: ‘Peace be with you’. Since Jesus materialises from nowhere, however, their reaction to these friendly words is anything but peaceful – they are ‘startled and terrified’. It’s a common greeting, like ‘’morning to you’; but, as this is the final scene of Luke’s gospel, the writer is not using words casually, so we should hear more in Jesus’ words than a simple ‘Hi, there!’. ‘Peace’ opened the stage on Jesus’ birth in the song of the angels from heaven
Glory to God in the highest,
And peace to God’s people on earth (Luke 2.13-14)
and now it is on Jesus’ own lips just before he is taken up into heaven. So what is ‘peace’?
‘Peace’ is a popular guest on a Sunday morning, especially when accompanied by her softly-spoken sister ‘Quiet’. Peace and quiet, P&Q, are what weekends are for; unless you work at B&Q, with which they must not be confused. This kind of peace is about the absence of things – trouble, noise; it describes what’s supposed to be left when you strip away the layers of busyness. But if this is all there is to peace, Jesus could have said ‘Peace be with you’ at the very start of his ministry, after his time away from it all in the wilderness. His gift of peace would be a matter of inner calm purchased by rest and spiritual refreshment, and I’m not against that: we have the Parish Weekend coming up (keep the date, October 5th-7th) which is in part dedicated to P&Q.
Yet you and I know that peace isn’t something you can always find just by gazing at a field of cows. Sometimes, a bit of quiet does not bring one bit of peace, but simply creates space for unpeaceful thoughts to swell up. That’s why holidays can be bad, and returning to busyness can be a relief. This, however, is not the peace Jesus has in mind. His kind of peace seems is bound up with the hands and the feet he shows his disciples, with the wounds he suffered on the cross and the things that caused him to be wounded. And that raises the whole question of what we are to make of this story of a deceased person appearing to his friends.
Imagine you take a clipboard to the DIY emporium which I just mentioned. You do a Q&A in B&Q. You tell the shoppers the stories about Jesus being seen after his death, and ask them what they think really happened. You may find (before your expulsion by the management) that you get as many answers as you have conversations. What happened at the first Easter? The grieving disciples had hallucinations; Jesus didn’t really die; they saw a ghost, or (this from someone who combines loft conversion with new-age spirituality) Jesus had a very strong aura, which persisted visibly after his death. The gospel-writers’ world had similar ideas – Luke’s disciples think they’re seeing a ghost – but the Easter stories defy any one category of explanation. Today Jesus appears very bodily indeed – he eats a piece of fish! – but that’s after he has not walked through the door but just appeared. How to make sense of it?
Many Jewish people of the time believed that at the end of the age, our ‘space’, this screwed-up world of living and dying, would be invaded by God’s ‘space’ and move into a new mode of life, set free from decay, from hurting and being hurt. It would be a new world and a peaceable one, and the dawn of this new world would come with the resurrection of the dead; all of them. Now that seemed the best way to describe these experiences of meeting Jesus after his death: God’s space overlapping with theirs, bringing a new mode of living.
Here, then, was God’s future, but not as they had expected: not a general resurrection and an all-round new world, but the raising of one person in the middle of their old and weary world. Pain and failure were not abolished, yet in the midst of it all, as they inexplicably met Jesus, they could be caught by God’s future, and know the spiritual energies of the age to come. The Acts of the Apostles tells stories about this. In this morning’s reading, Peter has just healed someone, and now he takes the crowds to task in a way hard to imagine from the man who, on the night Jesus was arrested, denied that he even knew him. Peter, it seems, has found a bravery not his own.
The peace Jesus holds in his scarred hands and offers his friends is the heart of a new world. It has more to do with abundance than stripping away; it means rich and fruitful human living, and – first of all – the uprooting of all that might hinder this blossoming of human lives. Jesus can give this peace only because he has been to hell and back, because he can show that the love of God (made flesh in those wounds of his) is not to be snuffed out even by the worst that our unpeaceful world can do. Jesus offers a peace he has bought at a dear price.
We hear this having entered a period of history in which peace may be as fragile as a protester’s head in Bahrain. Hard times for coming out of school or college, or moving into retirement, for getting a job, or hanging on to one, and we’re still talking about the budget. Why? Because the old debates about how to hand out the fruits of plenty have given way to arguments about what to squeeze, who to tax, where to cut, who gets hurt. As we prepare to elect a mayor for London, our French neighbours are at the polls today to elect a president, and we see the danger of frightened people turning on each other, of voices raised against those who ‘don’t belong’, or ‘don’t deserve’ a share of shrinking public services. And there are always people on hand to exploit the politics of fear.
Not the best of prospects, on the face of it, for rich and fruitful human living. But if you’re a bit older than I am, you’ve seen worse times; and think of the times this church has seen: civil war, world war, persecution, depression, plague. People have prayed here and known God here through all of that. And in each of the eight centuries a church has stood on or near this site, this story has been heard: the risen Jesus saying ‘Peace be with you’. In a moment we’ll say those very words to one another, and we’ll take that, scarred, risen body of Jesus into our own bodies as we share the bread and wine of the meal he gave to his friends. And that raises the startling possibility that you and I, in the middle of all this mess, might become places in which a new world begins to take shape.
What God will embody in us will differ from one to another, but it will always touch on the wounds of Jesus: it will confront the dark places of life, someone betrayed, people hurt, hopes disappointed – all those things bound up in our stories and the story of Good Friday. It won’t let us cover them with busyness, but it will help us face them with a bravery that isn’t really our own. It will teach us to repent – change our course – before we blame others, and it will come with the assurance of forgiveness.
A place in which a new world begins to take shape. What might that look like for a whole church? We touched on that that last night at the wonderful Stewardship evening at St Matthias. It’s a question to have in mind during the Annual Church Meeting this morning. And what might it look like in one human life? Something to have in mind if you come up to receive anointing or the laying on of hands during the giving of communion. Or a question to brood on this afternoon; if you can find some peace and quiet.
Easter Day, Sunday 8th April 2012, St Mary’s, evening
April 14th, 2012Readings Ezekiel 37.1-14, Luke 24.13-35
Preacher Canon Robert Titley
Every Easter the church dabbles in advertising. We work quite hard to let the world know about what we are doing in this most important week in the Christian year. Leaflets and handbills are printed, posters put up, websites refreshed. The professionals in this area say that the key is to have crystal-like clarity about what you are selling. A locally-based charity have been given some free work by an ad agency and they have been in conversation for months to hone the message – Who are you? What is the thing you exist to do, the change you want to make in the world?
From this point of view, marketing Easter is not easy. There is a riot of variety in the Easter stories. This morning, Mark’s gospel told us how the women, the first apostles of Easter, go to the tomb; they don’t see Jesus at all, but are told that he has been raised and gone ahead of them (Mark 16.1-8). John’s gospel says that Mary Magdalene lingers at the tomb and meets Jesus, though she mistakes him for the gardener (John 20.11-18); that evening, he does appear to some of his disciples, apparently materialising in the room where they are hiding (John 20.19-23); much later, he appears to all the disciples by the lake, takes Peter back to the dark night of his betrayal of Jesus, and promises him that he has a future (John 21.1-17). Now tonight two disciples walk to a village outside Jerusalem and a stranger – so it seems – falls in with them as they go. What sort of a figure is it who is solid and physical, but who can appear and vanish at will? What sort of a figure is it who is known at once on one occasion, but who can then remain unrecognised throughout a long walk?
Now, these are not straight eye-witness reports, written down just after they happened: the gospels as we have them were written over thirty – some would say well over thirty – years after the events, and some of their Easter stories show signs that they have been given a literary working over. So this is not raw data straight from the scene. But wouldn’t you expect the passing of time and the labours of the gospel writers to deliver a clear, worked-out account of this, the event that launched the Christian faith? After all, people have knew that it’s good to get your message clear long before the Mad Men of the ad world brought us their particular wisdom. But what we get is this inconvenient kaleidoscope of stories. Inconvenient, but compelling; and, in their wild way, authoritative. As people had asked of Jesus himself, so now we ask of these texts, ‘Where did all this come from?’ (Mark 6.2)
You can see how they might tell a story about Jesus ascending into heaven – there were similar stories about great prophets like Elijah doing that (2 Kings 2.11) – but there is nothing in the Hebrew scriptures like these Easter scenes. Another principle of good advertising is to mix novelty with the familiar, but these Easter stories can’t be fitted into any picture of what people were expecting to happen. These stories that I can’t explain or fit together speak to me of dazzled, confused people trying to put into words experiences for which nothing had prepared them, not their own Jewish faith, not even the teaching of Jesus himself. And they are not the only stories that could be told. Paul, writing long before any of our four gospel writers, tells his church in Corinth what had earlier been passed on to him, that Jesus died for our sins, that he was raised on the third day, that he appeared to Peter, then to the twelve (including Peter again, we assume) and then he was seen by five hundred of the faithful at once (1 Corinthians 15.1-11). What was that about? He says some of them are still alive at the time of his writing.
So the gospel writers give us only a selection of these arresting stories, that can be believed or not believed, that can be interrogated, but that cry out to be heard. They record them as an act of witness; to say, Look, something happened when the friends of Jesus saw him die and thought that they and all things were lost; something happened and it was something like this. And they choose these stories, I think, because there is something about each one that will be useful for those who will follow. They are not saying that experiences just like this will always be part of the package of Christian faith, but they are saying that here were different men and women who lost themselves in the death of Jesus and needed to find themselves again; and each did, in their particular way.
How will he meet me or you? From these stories, it seems to depend on what you and I need to see and hear. Peter failed Jesus; he needed to see he was forgiven. Mary Magdalene had lost the person she loved; she needed to know that the ache of loss was not the last thing she would feel in this life. And this evening’s pair of disciples have a rather modern problem. They are disappointed with God. Jesus has let them down – ‘we thought he was the one who would redeem Israel’ – so they need, not pretence that the world is fine when it isn’t, but truths that will tell them that this is how it has to be, for now; but God will succeed in doing what God has working so long to achieve among us; and it will be very good. And God will do this because God’s energies to remake and renew are never spent.
Easter – what is the message? It’s a season lasting fifty days, and in these days God invites each one of us to bring the stuff of our lives into the presence of God; in particular, perhaps, those parts of life that have gone dead, where you might feel like the people of Israel in the prophecy of Ezekiel: ‘our bones are dried up.’ Bring that into the presence of God, the same God who raised Jesus from the dead. Bring your need to be forgiven, bring your aching loss, bring your disappointment with God. And Christ will come to you, not abolishing all the ills of the world, but making your heart burn within you as you walk with him along the way.
Heavenly Father,
you have delivered us from the power of darkness
and brought us into the kingdom of your Son:
grant that, as his death has recalled us to life,
so his continual presence in us may raise us to eternal joy;
through Christ our Lord. Amen.
Easter Day, Sunday 8th April 2012, St Mary’s, morning
April 14th, 2012Reading Mark 16.1-8
Preacher Canon Robert Titley
How would you like the story of your life to end? What would you like to be the words that left a lasting impression in people’s minds? Kindness? Reliability? Success (whatever success is for you)? Your answer will say a lot. And I suspect that how we’d like others to see us when they look back on our lives may be at odds with how we live our lives day to day. You know, the gap between desire and performance: the story I’d like to be told about me is that I always had time for friends, or my parents, or the kids’ homework, whereas the story of my life day to day is more about time in meetings, on phones or in front of a screen. It’s a puzzle, isn’t it?
Today the good news of Easter comes to us from a book of puzzles. Mark’s gospel contains 114 questions, half of which go unanswered, and perhaps the biggest puzzle is how the story was supposed to end. The story of Good Friday was how Jesus was arrested, tried, nailed to a cross and killed, and his body laid in a tomb. Today we pick up the story early on the Sunday morning, when the women came to embalm his body but found the tomb open and the body gone; and how, after an encounter with a mysterious young man, they ran away and ‘said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid.’ And that’s it. Our version of Mark ends there. No meeting with the risen Jesus. No joy. How odd.
If you pick up Mark’s gospel, chapter one verse one tells you that it’s about good news. But what we hear today sounds like anything but. The words of that gifted and grumpy singer Avril Lavigne come to mind,
All this time you were pretending,
So much for my happy ending.
Mark couldn’t have meant to end like that, surely, and (as your Bible will show) people have added ‘proper’ endings, with Jesus meeting the disciples, like in the other gospels. But what happened to the real ending? There are various theories. Was the author arrested, pen poised over chapter 16 verse 9? Or was the ending eaten by mice (it used to happen to documents in the ancient world). Or… well, you can think of others.
Or, is the original ending still there? Are we are looking at it, as the women run from the tomb speechless and scared? Mark is the gospel of the riddle of Jesus: people just don’t know what to do when they have the Son of God on their hands: ‘Who is this man?’ they keep asking. ‘Don’t you understand?’ Jesus keeps asking his followers (and generally they don’t). ‘Don’t tell anyone,’ says Jesus to a man he heals, who then does the first-century equivalent of going on Twitter. And so on. So if the young man at the tomb now tells the women to get the news out, but they run away and don’t say a word, isn’t that the perfect ending to this story of God’s grace and human perversity?
Well, whether the writer intended it or not, the earliest version of Mark that we have does stop just there. And even if the author originally wrote more, perhaps God can still speak to us through this strange, unsatisfying ending. It could be like looking at an ancient, damaged statue, and finding that it speaks to you with a power that the intact work of art might not have. And if God is speaking through this unfinished gospel, what might God be saying ?
A lot of life is unfinished. How many people here left work on Thursday night with the desk still unclear, mocked at by the bottomless inbox? How many of us have things we know we need to do for people who matter to us, but life keeps getting in the way? Well, Mark is the gospel of unfinished business. Mark’s take on Easter is for people who find themselves getting the wrong end of the stick, who keep getting caught up in the wrong story about themselves.
What God offers us this morning, however, is not what some people imagine faith in God provides: no satisfying experience to make it feel alright, no cosy picture of how things will be. But perhaps you’d see through that, because your experience of life has made you suspicious of neat solutions, fairytale endings, the ‘closure’ that exists in stories but not in the real world. If that is you, then God may speak best to you through Mark’s jagged ending: no neatness, no closure; instead, a promise: ‘He has gone ahead of you’, says the young man to the women, ‘you’ll see him there.’
And so he has. Whatever lies ahead – a whole lifetime, as for Gilbert & Edward who will be baptised here next Sunday, or a new life together as for Daniel and Joanna, whose banns of marriage we’ll read in a moment, or just a new week – whatever lies ahead, we shall meet him there, if we dare to seek him. But what will it be like? And how will we know him? At this point, it’s as though Mark our writer looks up and says,
Yes, you’ll meet him, but I can’t give you pictures to prescribe how it’s going to be. I’m putting my pen down. This is your story now. It’s over to you; you and God’s unquenchable promise, you and the love and forgiveness of God that will survive the worst you can do or suffer. For as Jesus died for you, so he has been raised for you. And he waits for you now.
5th Sunday of Lent, March 24th, St Mary, morning
March 31st, 2012Reading John 12.20-33
Preacher Canon Robert Titley
Since Ash Wednesday we have been directing our eyes towards the suffering and death of Jesus. The focus now narrows further, because today begins the season of Passiontide.
There’s a word, ‘passion’. I heard someone say once that ‘passion’ is like ‘Dresden’, for both instantly put you in mind of opposites. With the second it is delicacy and destruction: Dresden china, wonderfully fragile cups and saucers and figurines; and the Dresden raid, the obliteration of that German city and 35 thousand of its people in 1945 by Britain and American bombs. And ‘passion’ is like that too. First, passion is strong, even violent feelings for a cause or a person. Take two recent Sun articles (required reading for all good Anglicans now the Archbishop of York is a Sabbath columnist): General Sir Peter Wall mounts ‘a passionate defence of the fight for peace in Afghanistan’. Then the ‘Dear Deirdre’ column has a letter headed, ‘Desperate for husband to forgive my passionate toyboy affair’ (see what you’re missing, all you Times and Telegraph people). But passion is also pain – if you are compassionate, you feel someone else’s suffering. Benoit Assou-Ekotto, the Spurs footballer, said in Monday’s Standard,
There are some moments that make you look at the world with different eyes. But sometimes in these moments there is a magical power because people connect, people see the human in each other and people feel another person’s pain…
He was describing how it was when his opponent Patrice Muamba lay on the pitch after cardiac arrest. That was a moment when the two passions came together: desire, strength of will – then suffering. And the two passions come together in Jesus: two weeks ago we saw Jesus’ strong, even violent feelings, as he turned over the tables of the money changers in the Jerusalem temple courtyard. Today he hints at what is to his come, ‘Unless a grain of wheat falls into the ground and dies…’; and next Sunday, Palm Sunday, we will hear the Passion Gospel, which tells of Jesus’ arrest and trial and suffering. Passion. Jesus knows both kinds, and so must we.
It’s a horrible thing to use a tragedy or atrocity for your own ends, but sometimes it works that way whether you like it or not. Nicolas Sarkozy’s handling of the Toulouse murders will do him no harm in the Presidential election; and, as we prepare to say goodbye to Archbishop Rowan, among the largely appreciative pieces about him, some see the so-called ’Muamba effect’ as a sign of what – and who – the church needs next. Patrice Muamba’s story – refugee, hardworking student, top-flight footballer – is one to celebrate, he is a credit to his sport, so big public sympathy is no surprise, but what is a surprise is the manner of it. ‘Pray 4 Muamba’ the T-shirts urge, a message echoed by players, fans, manager, and fiancée, who adds that ‘God is in control’. Now Muamba is recovering, the word ‘miracle’ is being spoken. ‘At a moment of crisis,’ says one article, ‘an old-fashioned kind of religion has taken centre-stage.’ It argues that, ‘if the church is to return to the centre of national life, it will be through passion’. And that, it seems, points a certain Sun columnist getting the top job.
Leave aside the entertaining stories about runners and riders in the Canterbury stakes. There are big questions which surround this old-time religion. If being in control means making it all OK, and if God was in control at White Hart Lane and afterwards at the London Chest Hospital, was God not in control in Toulouse? If you come forward to receive anointing and the laying on of hands during communion (as I hope many of you will), how will God be ‘in control’ then? Someone put it very well in an email to me:
The question is about how God does act in the world…it [is] really hard…to understand how he does, but if he doesn’t…then I’m bound to ask what’s the point of prayer?
But if he doesn’t…? Exactly. An inactive God is not gospel. If Jesus’ God just felt our pain and no more, the stories about him would have been different. We would not have seen him overturn the money-changers tables. He might have wept at his dead friend’s tomb but he would not have said, ‘Lazarus, come out.’ Never must we suggest that praying is like putting a coin in the slot and getting a Mars bar. But faith in a God who never makes a difference can never be a passionate affair, for such a God might as well be dead. So, with faith is God as with life in general, there is contradiction and confusion. How might we live faithfully within it all? Let’s look at another word: glory.
In today’s gospel, pilgrims tell Philip the disciple that they want to see Jesus. Philip and Andrew tell Jesus, who then says something puzzling: ‘The hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified.’ ‘Son of Man’ refers to Jesus, so how is Jesus to be glorified? We all know what glory is – glory is the sunshine outside, glory is triumphant success – so is this Jesus’ moment of glory, with people flocking to him? (If we had queues every Sunday outside St Mary’s, we might be forgiven for calling these our glory days.) No. Jesus is talking about his death, and since when did glory mean disgrace and pain and darkness and lost life? The church has sometimes gloried unhealthily in suffering, saying that pain or poverty are not to be fought against but put up with, borne with dignity, because they are good for the soul. So is there any way – any way that isn’t sick – that we can see Jesus dying on his cross as a glorious thing? Or are we giving it a name that isn’t true but just convenient, like the People’s ‘Liberation’ Army or ‘cotton-rich’ socks? Are we using the word in an Alice in Wonderland kind of way?
‘There’s Glory for you,’ said Humpty Dumpty.
‘I don’t know what you mean by glory,’Alice said.
‘I meant there’s a nice knock down argument for you.’
‘But glory doesn’t mean a nice knock down argument,’Alice objected.
‘When I use a word,’ said Humpty Dumpty in a rather scornful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean, neither more nor less.’
John’s gospel never uses words carelessly, and ‘glory’ is a key word – it’s bound up with Jesus’ relation to the one he calls his Father: the word of God became flesh in Jesus, says John, ‘and we beheld his glory’. Glory is when you see God here among us, here at work in our world. When Jesus turns water into wine, there’s glory for you: God among us, making us drunk with joy. When Jesus raises Lazarus from the dead, there’s glory for you: God among us, defeating the last enemy. But can God be among us in that other passion of Jesus, in his suffering and death?
If God can, then here is a God who really is made flesh, who gets under the skin of what makes you and me human, who really does enter our world of confusion and contradiction. And that really is glorious. We can be passionate about such a God, about helping others to know such a God. We can even say that such a God is ‘in control’, not in the sense of immediately making it all better, but in drawing all things – often painfully – to the point where ‘all shall be well’.
In these days leading up to Good Friday and Easter, you and I are invited to give some time to seeing if we can find this God among us in our confusions and contradictions: not as a weak, spiritual something-or-other but as a strong presence, a source of strength and a spring of action, action and passion. If we can, then there will be glory for you, and for me.
Notes
Who the church needs next Terence Blacker: ‘Like it or not, Sentamu is the best hope for the Church of England’ http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/terence-blacker/terence-blacker-like-it-or-not-sentamu-is-the-best-hope-for-the-church-of-england-7578163.html
We beheld his glory John 1.14.
Jesus in the temple John 2.13-22.
Water into wine John 2.1-11.
Lazarus John 11.53.
All shall be well The words of Julian of Norwich, English mystic. c1342 – c1416.
3rd Sunday of Lent, 11th March 2012, St Mary’s, morning
March 12th, 2012Readings: Exodus 20.1-17 John 2.13-22
Preacher Canon Robert Titley
The other day I went to Leeds with our daughter Julia for a university open day. It was a good day, and it had an artistic bonus, because in the unremarkable building where we gathered there is a quite remarkable war memorial. Vice Chancellor Michael Sadler wanted to commemorate those from the university killed in the Great War. He approached the sculptor Eric Gill, a quite remarkable man who tried to combine being a mystic with regular breaking of the seventh commandment (if you can’t remember which that was in the first reading, it’s not the one about coveting your neighbour’s donkey). This is the result, unveiled in 1923: not a cross, or a sword, or an angel or a soldier, but the scene today’s gospel describes, Christ driving the money changers out of the Temple.
Why choose that scene? Gill wrote to a friend,
I’m thinking of making it a pretty straight thing — modern dress as much as possible, Leeds manufacturers, their wives and servants, don’t you see…Here is a sermon given into my hands, so to say. I didn’t invent the notion — I got it from the Gospels, if you’ll believe it!
Gill doesn’t say more, and Sadler wrote that ‘the carving will tell its own tale’. So what tale does it tell? Let’s first understand why Jesus does what he does in the original gospel story. What is wrong with the money changers?
They and their colleagues selling animals in the Temple courtyard are providing a service for the worshippers, who need to pay their Temple tax in special coinage and get animals for sacrificing. There is no evidence that they are ripping pilgrims off, so what’s the problem? Is it that the whole money thing is wrong in such a place? Show me a temple or synagogue or church or mosque that can function without money and a cash prize can be yours. What does Jesus say to them? ‘Don’t make my father’s house a market-place!’ I read Jesus there like this: the Temple is a place of prayer, where earth and heaven come together, a place where mystical, wonderful, unspeakable experiences might come upon someone; but for you it seems to be mainly a business opportunity.
Gill’s money-changers, the industrialists of that great Yorkshire cloth city are no doubt doing well out of government contracts for uniforms in that war to end all wars. What might Gill’s Jesus be saying to them? Perhaps this: these are times of terror, when hell is invading earth, when diabolical, horrible, unspeakable experiences are coming upon people. But for you it seems to be mainly a business opportunity.
We can debate whether that’s fair to the people concerned (the richest industrialist might have had a son at the front) but in the terms of the gospel story and the carving, the problem with both sets of money-changers is that they can’t or won’t understand what is going on, what it’s all for, or what it should be for. What is really going on – in first-century Jerusalem or early-twentieth-century Europe – is something huge, something that can turn life upside down (for good or ill), but they think it is business as usual, an opportunity to carry on the routines in which wealth is created, bills are paid and nice things are bought (and Gill’s are a very well-dressed bunch – love the feathers on the woman’s hat).
Last week came news of six soldiers killed in a war that has lasted over twice as long as the First World War and nearly twice as long as the Second. In that second war, British deaths ran at a hundred a day, but these six deaths have led many to pause ask those same questions about Afghanistan: what is going on? what is all this for? Do British deaths there really save British lives here, as the current Defence Secretary has been just the latest to say? What would be a fitting memorial in, say, Huddersfield, the Yorkshire home of three of the soldiers?
God comes among us in Jesus, Jesus enters God’s temple, and the day’s business carries on oblivious until Jesus cracks his whip. Gill is provocative in using Jesus’ verdict on the official religion of his day to pronounce a verdict on war and wealth; but that does not mean we can treat this story just as political commentary. It is also about us and here. Like the Temple, this is a place of religious busyness. Say you arrived about twenty-five past nine past this morning. The preparations for what you came into began long before that. People began rehearsing music, preparing readings and prayers days ago, and the first person arrived to get things ready for this service a full hour before. We must all be grateful for those who do all this. It is important work, and satisfying – I should know, I make a living out of it – but it comes with the danger that we make it an end in itself, that the Lord comes to his temple – that is, to us – and we don’t notice and the religious business just carries on; the danger that we forget what all this is for.
On Saturday, April 21st we’re going to bring together the three churches of our Team Ministry to celebrate all we do, look at what we want to do and how we are going to do it – and, yes, pay for it. Keep the date, it’s going to be good. It will be a waste of a precious Saturday, though, unless we keep asking, ‘What is it all for?’ Our purpose is not to pursue a fascinating hobby, but to be a place and a people in which earth and heaven come together, where mystical, wonderful, unspeakable experiences might come upon someone.
If God becomes real to you or to me, it is not simply to make us feel warm and fuzzy inside; it is to enlist us in God’s task of changing the world. Richmond, like Eric Gill’s high-end Leeds, has its share of the well off and the well dressed. It certainly has many people who feel the crack of the whip, though it does not (as with Jesus in the Temple) drive them away from their work but drives them in their work: high rewards, perhaps – though not for all – but also long hours in a twenty-four hour economy; insecurity and fear in a globalised economy in tough times; and frequently inhuman work regimes, punctuated by hectic and expensive play, or just plain exhaustion. If even a quarter of the world did its work and leisure like we do in Richmond, how many planets would we need to fuel it? And, again, what is it all for? In our first reading, the ten commandments often gets a bad press – all those ‘thou shalt nots’ – but they offer a sustained answer to that question. There is, they say, a grain to life, so there should be a shape to work and to rest, to what is mine and what is yours; and in the end it’s all for God.
Now, not even Richmond can reinvent the world, but – and this has come up for me in a couple of conversations recently – there may be something we can do and be so that we can make our choices – choices about work and leisure and travel and possessions – in ways that keep in mind what it is all for. When Jesus casts the money changers from the Temple, the disciples remember a text in their holy writings, our Old Testament, ‘Zeal for your house will consume me.’ Perhaps none of us can avoid being consumed by something, but we have some choice in what that consuming thing shall be. It can the busyness that becomes an end in itself, or it be the stuff that leads to God, who is the end of everything.
Notes
Gill and Sadler The quotations are from an article by John F. Sherman, http://www.catholicpeacefellowship.org/nextpage.asp?m=2122 The article also gives the inscriptions on the memorial.
Along the cornice is inscribed: ‘Agite nunc, divites, plorate ululantes in miseriis, vestris, quae advenient vobis. Divitiae vestrae putrefactae sunt.’ (Vulgate, James V.1) ‘Now listen, you rich men, weep and wail because of its misery upon you. Your wealth has rotted.’
In the panel above the dog: ‘Et cum fecisset quasi flagellum de funiculis, omnes ejecit de templo, et numulariorum effudit aes, at mensas subvertit. Et dixit: nolite facere domum Patris mei domum negotiationis.’ (Vulgate, John 2.15) ‘And when he had made as it were a whip of cords, he ejected all from the temple, and the money of the money-changers he poured out and overthrew their tables. And he said: do not make my Father’s house a house of commercialism.’
Inhuman work and hectic play See Archbishop Rowan Williams, ‘Benedict and the Future of Europe’ – Speech at St Anselmo in Rome http://www.archbishopofcanterbury.org/articles.php/1770/