Posts by Ruth:

Sunday 15 April, 2nd of Easter, St Mary Magdalene, Choral Evensong

April 15th, 2012

Readings Psalm 143 v 1-11, Isaiah 26 v1-9, 19, Luke 24 v 1-12

Preacher Ruth Martin

May what we think and feel and say be acceptable to you, O Lord.

‘And they were perplexed’ …..

On Friday one of my younger colleagues burst into my office at about 2pm. My office door had been closed, which signifies to people that I am not supposed to be disturbed, and for good measure I had also put up my  big red ‘do not  disturb’ sign  too as I really needed to get something done which demanded my full attention.

Michael -as I will call him- a very quiet and rather taciturn young man when ‘management’ is around – burst in to tell me that the mother of his best friend had just died.

He pulled himself up a chair and out tumbled his story of a lonely only child with a father in the Army which he detested, as he had to live on an army base, and so spent most of his youth from the age of 12 in the house of his best friend, whose mum was bringing him up alone after a messy divorce…and she had just died of a cancer that he knew nothing about.

Michael is one of the young lads I frequently pretend isn’t wearing earphones to hear music whilst working, or I turn a blind eye to the lack of smart business dress in the office, and he is one of the young staff from whom I gently retrieve wine glasses at the end of a staff party, as too much has been consumed…..he lives a batchelor lifestyle a long way from his home town.

As he sat there telling me all of this, I could see he was really troubled, upset and also perplexed. This had been unexpected. He had had to tell someone straight away- and as he sat there he also had to get his head round it.

And so it was in the story of from our New Testament tonight.  The women in our  reading   had gone to the tomb expecting to find a body. They had seen with their own eyes the terrible death of Jesus, the hasty transfer of his broken body to an empty tomb, and they were going to the tomb to anoint and properly prepare Jesus’ body.

Instead they faced the unexpected; the stone rolled away and no dead body. They were perplexed. When they then saw two young men in startlingly white clothes telling them that Jesus had gone as he said he would…. they were still perplexed, and afraid. They ran to tell others.

As we ponder this tonight, we need to remember that although we all shout ‘Christ is Risen’ and Alleluiah in our Easter season , actually it is only with the benefit of our Scriptures, our traditions and the gift of the Holy Spirit in our own lives, that we can say with such confidence  Christ is Risen. At the time of this story in Luke, the disciples including these women, did not know that Jesus  had become Christ  resurrected; they only knew that his body was not there.

They had to deal with the unexpected. It perplexed them.

We have had some appalling examples in the news recently of how people deal with the unexpected. The riots last summer when a young Malaysian student, disorientated and hurt, thought he was being helped when in fact the young people purporting to assist him were actually stealing from him. Only last week , as a Tsunami threat was suddenly published  for Thailand and other coastal areas in the Southern hemisphere, following a massive earthquake in  Indonesia,   the fast food company KFC, known for its ‘finger licking’ chicken, issued the following advice

‘People should hurry home this evening to monitor the earthquake situation and don’t forget to order the KFC menu that will be delivered direct to your hands’. A swift apology followed.

And if we think that dealing with the unexpected in ways which yield a personal or commercial advantage is new, we must remember that the soldiers at the foot of the broken Jesus on the Cross drew lots to see who would have his clothes as he hung there in agony: the soldiers knew that this was a different death and there might be something ‘in it’ for them later on.

Whereas sometimes dealing with the unexpected brings out the worst in human opportunistic behaviour, more often it is met with disbelief; we simply cannot get our heads round it.

For the women at the tomb in the early hours what they saw did not make sense, they did not understand. They ran to tell the other disciples what they had seen …..and were  generally not believed.  Then Peter decides to look for himself and is left ‘wondering to himself’ at the end of this passage.

In Luke’s Gospel, there are 40 days between Easter and the full expression of the Holy Spirit, and in our church seasons, we have 40 days between Easter and Pentecost, following the Luke pattern. These  days represent the period of time between the resurrection and the Gift of the Holy Spirit being received,  accepted and recognised.

So in Luke, this time is represented through a succession of Jesus’ appearances during the rest of Chapter 24 in the Gospel; appearances to baffled, perplexed and gradually- over time- believing, transforming, Disciples. It took a while for Jesus’ disciples to be convinced that Jesus had indeed become the risen Christ. During this time they moved from fear, doubt and confusion to become the  fearless, determined missionaries  of the new faith we see in the book of Acts.

Being forced to confront the unexpected, a new reality, different to everything that had gone before, moved them on.

They had to be open to move on.

And so it is with us. We need to allow time, to be perplexed, even afraid, of what the changes in our own lives will bring as our own faith emerges and changes over time too. We need to be open to receive, to accept, to recognise, God in our lives …..and that enables us to continue to move on.

Returning to my young colleague Michael on Friday, as he stared at me with incredulity, gradually things began to make more sense to him: the absence of the mother from local reunions, the sadness of the fact she hadn’t been at her son’s wedding. He had been too busy with his friends to notice. He was now gradually absorbing the unexpected news, making connections that had been there all along but he hadn’t seen.

During the period between this new dawn in the Gospels witnessed by the women and the full recognition of the risen Christ, we know that the earliest disciples went on to see  connections that had been there all along, not only  in Jesus’ life and in his teaching ,

… even in the words of the young men in dazzling clothes on that first morning

‘Remember how he told you, while he was still in Galilee, The Son of Man must be delivered into the hands of sinful men, be crucified, and be raised again. …Then they remembered his words.’

We too need to be prepared to give ourselves time to absorb the full impact of a risen Christ in our own lives and world today, to be open to change, to see connections….and to be prepared to face the unexpected knowing that we have the Risen Lord to help us and sustain us.

 

Amen.

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Sermon 18 March Evensong 4th Sunday in Lent

March 27th, 2012

Sermon

Sermon. Ruth Martin, St Mary Magdalene  Lent 4 . Choral Evensong

Numbers 21 v 4-9, and Ephesians 2 v 1-10

May what we think and feel and say always be acceptable to you oh Lord, and may we be open to the Spirit in our Lenten journeys

 

Is the Church of England in its own Lenten wilderness, grumbling and  being bitten by poisonous snakes ?

In our Old Testament reading we have the  story of the people of God journeying in the wilderness , grumbling  against God  through Moses about the food they are being given and having yet further difficulties come their way through poisonous snakes.

In his resignation announcement on Friday the Archbishop of Canterbury  cited  controversies within the church that had dogged his leadership,   and went on to say that his successor had to have the constitution of an ox and the skin of a rhinoceros. . A few days earlier  he  had challenged Christians to consider their role in what he called the religion factory. I think we can safely say from what we can read in the media, that the Archbishop  must have felt bitten by poisonous snakes  after he has done his best to give sustenance to the people he has been trying to lead, and there may well  have been occasions when he felt very much in a hostile wilderness as he led what many people outside of the church would see as a ‘religion factory’.

If our leader has been pushed to the brink, where does it leave us in what we have to do?

Lent is the time of the Christian calendar when we try and pause, spend time reviewing our own lives, and seek to recognise our failings.  The response of the people to the food they had been given  in our OT reading was to grumble and moan and to call into question the providence of God.  When matters worsened , through the snakes,they returned to God seeking His providence again:

‘ We sinned when we spoke against the Lord, and against you,[Moses] Pray that the Lord will take the snakes away from us’.

God didn’t actually take away the venomous snakes. He provided an antidote based on faith, articulated through Moses  and a brass snake- if people who had been bitten  looked at that snake, they would be healed.

In our own times, God doesn’t take away the snakes biting us. When we face our own wildernesses, our own difficulties, and things seem to go from bad to worse, God will not abandon us, but nor  will he remove the temptations  that come our way-to give up, or lose hope  in the face of tragedy and trauma and change in our lives

We all grumble, some of the time. We all face wilderness times in our lives when we feel abandoned by God, when we don’t feel we have been given enough sustenance to help us through .  The answer God gives is to call us to a deeper faith , . One of the  features of the Old Testament story is that in the time of Moses, we know that the people of God were emerging from slavery,  and from a  time when the worshipped of humanly crafted physical idols was widespread.

So the provision of a brass snake met a need that could be easily  grasped and  understood by them all.  It brought hope and reignited faith.

The movement from being enslaved in our own world  to one of hope and grace  in Christ, is also the theme of our reading from Ephesians. In His several letters Paul often refers to the transformation from slavery to freedom in Christ. Slavery  would have been , as the brass snake in Moses’ time, easily grasped and  understood .

What is offered to us in our own wilderness times , is a new covenant of faith, available freely  though our own openness to God  in Christ, whose   death and resurrection enables us to receive faith in our hearts, through the Gift of the Holy Spirit.

It means we have Hope. As Paul says,

‘For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith, -and this is not from yourselves, it is a gift from God – not by works, so that no one can boast’

And What symbols of faith do we have that can be grasped, understood  by the many?

Nearer to home as you know Robert and I are Street Pastors, and what distinguishes us on the streets is that we are people of faith first and foremost. I was out last night as we had an extra team on following the rugby and there were some very seriously drunk people around. Last night one woman became violent after being refused a drink by staff as they judged she was too drunk to be served, and as she was ejected from the premises she had a running verbal and physical battle with the doorman, who behaved impeccably. As I was the nearest street pastor to hand, he called me over to try and help calm her down; as she continued to swear at me too, her companion immediately rebuked her and said ‘ she is only trying to help’

Why had the doorman called me over? Why had the woman’s companion rebuked her? It is because we wear a loud uniform of being a street pastor; it shouts to the world ‘faith first’, not good works, even though of course that is what we also try and do. Had I not had that uniform, the doorman would not call me over –after all he had never seen me before and it was not personal- and the friend would probably have told me to keep away in no uncertain terms had I not had that uniform on, rather than rebuke his friend.

Street Pastors is a symbol of a faith that can be easily grasped, understood by others and in its application is a visible service .

This is  just one example where our Archbishop should start to take heart and lead  us in hope in his remaining months of leading what he called the ‘religion factory’.

There is another symbol of faith that has been understood and grasped by millions far more extensively than Street Pastors , and that is the value of our Church of England Schools. A report will be released this Friday in which the Church of England will announce   200 more church schools. We currently educate 1 million pupils and the church has realised that its Anglican schools now bring more people into contact with Christianity than Sunday church worship. This parish of course has Christs school as its own example.

And so the education of our young, the dealing with disorder and drunkenness on our streets, these are the places in our society where our faith shows and is valued to those outside the church community.

Moreover as we continue to take up our Cross we can have hope  that our Lenten journeys are not in vain, as we know we are  moving  towards the significance of Easter,  as we can grow in our own faith and  through being open to God in the Spirit  .   Our faith can be the foundation of our service to others, especially to those we might know in the midst of their own awful wilderness times, – also as a parish when we contemplate planning our future together when we have a chance to meet later in April- and finally on the wider world stage  . We need therefore to learn to be less concerned about the bickerings of the ‘religion factory’ and look at the good we already most definitely have, so  to build upon  that a new view of ‘church’ can emerge which can be grasped and  understood and applied in the  wilderness of the secular world.

Amen

 

 

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2nd Sunday of Epiphany – Parish Eucharist, St Mary Magdalene

January 27th, 2012

Preacher: Ruth Martin

Readings: 1 Samuel 3-10, John 1 v43 to end

May what we think, feel and say always be acceptable to you Oh Lord

Can anything Good come out of Nazareth?

I was in Leeds last autumn in the week of Jimmy Saville’s funeral there. Crowds lined the streets , sometimes 8 deep, and the City Centre on a wet day of persistent drizzle, was simply unpassable as tens of thousands lined the streets ready for his funeral. Most of us over the age of 30 will remember him on the TV and in the news; from the 1950s right through to the 1990s he was a TV personality, a DJ, who for twenty years hosted the ‘Jim’ll fix it show’ to grant wishes.

But he will probably go down in history as a rather eccentric fund raiser who wore bright track suits and smoked large cigars; he raised £20 million alone for the spinal injuries unit at Stoke Mandeville Hospital, and £40 million from running marathons; his bequests include a new cardiac unit at Leeds Royal Infirmary, where he worked as a volunteer porter. If you asked anyone in Leeds has anything good come out of Leeds, there is a strong chance that it will be his name that will be recalled. He gave a staggering 90% of his income away.

Epiphany is the season of how God revealed himself to the world and reveals Himself now. Through a tiny baby whose family fled from Bethlehem and settled eventually in Nazareth , we know that something amazingly Good came out of Nazareth and God continues now to reveal himself through unlikely people and unlikely places.

So in our own community of the people of God, can anything good come out of Richmond?

We might immediately think of the establishment of our own local charity for the Homeless, Spear, founded by Penny Wade. However we might also ponder that we have just emerged from a Christmas where more people than ever before came to our service aimed at children and their own families, our Christingle service. Thanks to lots of people here who prepared everything , both that service and also on Christmas morning , they poured through our doors and collectively we welcomed them. Here we are in the Epiphany season, the season when we reflect on how God reveals himself to us, like me you may be wondering how can we connect our faith to those who only come once a year, those who perhaps only reconnect again with God by bringing their own children to glimpse God through the baby of the Christmas Story.

For them and us we need to see that firstly God reveals himself in Hope.

Whether we are parents or not, one of the extraordinary features of nurturing a new baby is that the baby holds a power over us; the baby’s power is in being loved; as we respond in love we feel not only an obligation but a real sense of caring. The baby is a symbol for the future; a sign of hope.

The numbers who worshipped with us in the Christmas season in our own church are a sign of hope that in our community, in Richmond, something good can come from the efforts we make to welcome, to connect, to avoid cynical judgement of occasional churchgoing.

Some of us in our team ministry are involved in Christ’s school, fewer than 50% of Richmond parents use the state schools in the borough, yet many more people apply to Christ’s school than can possibly be accepted.; what attracts parents from many miles around is the fact that it is a faith school, where values and attitudes and beliefs are shaped through Christ; that too is a sign of hope in our community. human.

Secondly, God reveals himself in Joy.

In our Christmas story, those rough hewn Shepherds-outsiders- were drawn to the baby by seeing a multitude of angels; they found Him, and returned to their work with joy. In a recent British Social Attitudes Survey published just before Christmas, regular church attendance has dropped again, almost all due to declining numbers in the Church of England. Yet millions watched the royal wedding in a church last year, and thousands sang in Hyde Park to hymns they had never sung before, to a God who they glimpsed through human joy.

Rowan Williams says

‘When our joy is liberated so will our generosity and compassion be’……..

So Thirdly God reveals himself in generous giving.

 

We have the generosity of those magi still to be seen at our crib by the All Souls chapel. They had seen a sign of God’s generosity in the sky and set off on a long, probably difficult journey to discover it for themselves. They then presented gifts to show how much they saw God revealed through this tiny human being.

Can there be such a thing as joyful giving? The one question that all 20 or so of us who are Street pastors on our streets have been asked is ‘what do you get paid?’ It is a source of genuine amazement that people will go out and give their time just to help others particularly in the ugly side of drink on a cold dark night, whereas those of us who do so find it joyful; so addictive can it be that we are advised to do so only twice a month! And it is through a generosity of time that people who know nothing of church, can connect to the significance of faith held by others.

The joy of giving is so different to the resignation of compliance with rules. After all no one thrills to the chance to pay more tax, but gifts offered freely attract support. In my own sector, finance, a sector that needs to re-learn how to give and share, there was a boost last week when the head of Lloyds bank this week asked not to be given his bonus this year, some £2 million.

So we must learn what it is to provide for others not out of compliance with rules , not even in pursuit of targets for social corporate responsibility, but from a genuine desire to care, a real love for other people born from the hope, joy and generosity that God is revealed through humanity.

In our Old Testament reading we heard young Samuel finally realising that God is calling Him by name and we- like him- need to listen and discern right action.

Just as we celebrate God revealed as human, so today amongst the bling of showbiz, the rough and the drunk, God can be found and we can respond if we wish by joyful generosity and compassion. Can anything good come out of Richmond? Plenty has and plenty more can.

Amen.

 

 

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Bible Sunday 23 October 2011 St John Divine Morning

October 26th, 2011

May what we say and think and feel be acceptable to you Oh Lord

When I was on the plane for my first solo visit to the
Kingdom of Saudi Arabia in 2004, for my employer, I suddenly realised that I
was carrying something illegal in my hand luggage. Now that Kingdom is not
known for its tolerance, especially to women, and especially women travelling
alone and I did somewhat dread the immigration process that awaited me. It was
the same item that nearly 400 years earlier had been carried across to America
on the Mayflower in 1620 and which led the 7^th president of the USA.
Andrew Jackson, in the 1830s  to declare’it is the rock of our republic’.

You are probably  already ahead of me, when I say it was
the King James Bible.  Today is Bible Sunday and we are also using this opportunity to particularly mark the
400^th anniversary of the publication of the King James Bible.

There is of course an important connection between my relatively recent  personal stress  taking it into a country like Saudi Arabia ,
and the words of president Jackson referring to it as the rock of a nation; Itis that this Book changes people. For some, that is therefore perceived as a
threat, for others, including ourselves, a comfort, guide and an opportunity .

However there is one claim for the King James Bible that is universally  undisputed: that it has changed the
world ;  here are just a couple of examples ;

The simple fact that it was carried in the Mayflower to the USA, which in term became the global powerhouse of the business world in a
global marketplace, has meant that due to the King James Bible the English language has become not only the worlds’ acknowledged business language, but
also its ‘langua franca’, which means the world’s bridging language, when the mother tongue is not English and in fact when it is even the third language. It
has become the dominant means of communication whatever the technology at our fingertips today, and will be so even when China becomes the world’s
superpower, as all school children in schools in China are now taught English.

Secondly, our understanding of human nature has been enriched by phrases and words that have transcended what we might call
religious language and passed into every day language. Amongst these idioms  are ‘feet of clay’ and ‘reap the
whirlwind’ The Bible  is the most widely published Book of all time ; it was for many households the only book they
possessed and in an era prior to literacy, the only book that was read orally
and regularly . Now many of the phrases in common language  ascribed to the King James Bible actually came
from the Tyndale Bible, which was the first English translation: ‘‘the salt of the earth’ and   ‘the signs of the times’.  84% of the New Testament of the King James
Bible is Tyndale . But Tyndale was burnt at the stake for his Bible , around 80 years before the King James Bible was published.

Why? Because, as I said earlier the Bible changes people: it has the ability to empower. In Tyndale’s time the thought that ordinary people
could have access in their own language to the Bible, which at the time was read and understood only by the priesthood and the very educated elite, was
regarded as a threat . By the time we come to King James, it is commissioned by none other than the King of the time.

In Saudi Arabia it is today tolerated, because the King is a liberal there (although you may have it
torn up in front of you if in you are in the immigration queue where  the religious police are present – By the way I
was fine when I went through that first time and have been fine ever since)!

Why can it still change us, thousands of years after the Bible was originally written down, and after 400 years in our own language? It
is not just a Book. It is the Book of Books because the author is God.

Now you might want to say at this point that it was written by a number of different people over many many years  and there is a whole industry that has over
time debated exactly who and when did the writing. But its distinctiveness surely is that we believe that it is the Word of God, divinely revealed through
his chosen and inspired scribes. That is why it can change people . That is whyit is Timeless.

In [the words of the King James Version of] our Gospel
Reading:

Heaven and Earth shall pass away but my words shall not pass away’

Over the centuries since it was published there have been some amazing highs as human beings have
been called to live out their faith using the King James Bible;  Martin Luther King used phrases from it in
his 1963 ‘ I have a dream’ speech; and there have been soul searching ‘lows’ ;the missionaries took this bible to Africa, Christ’s love interpreted as a
power which in turn sadly became a painful part  of British  Imperialism. .

Today we have the benefit of learning from the mistakes of the past, responding to the Bible  through our own hearts in our own times.

Only on  Friday NightI joined Alyson Barr and four others from totally different denominations, in
fact all from the tradition known as Evangelical- who were  prayer pastors for the  street pastors going out on the streets that
night to help keep people safe in the centre of our town ; it is the Bible thatwas guiding  our prayer that night . Just
as it  is the bible that shapes so much of the direct content of our worship today, in prayer and praise and
thanksgiving, and which enables us to grow in faith as we read it and pray with it

Enabling it to change us sometimes needs help; and one of those can be daily Reading Notes; I organise
ordering these from the bible Reading Fellowship which has sent us some complimentary copies , from the current season, to help us. I do hope you will
take one if you would like and give it a go.

We are all familiar with the two great commandments to LoveGod and each other, that Jesus taught The  contemporary  vernacular translation ,the Message  , reads

‘Love the Lord your God with all your
passion ,and prayer and intelligence’ and ‘Love others as well as you Love Yourself’ 

In thanking God today for the extraordinary and transformational power of the King James Bible we can also ask for the power of
God’s Word to continue to change and empower us to benefit others whatever
version we use.     Amen.

 

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