Tom Ambrose

This is sermon to mark Gay Pride month,, preached on the 4th Sunday after Trinity 2024

Trinity 4

Mark’s story of the calming of the storm opens up a great tradition of Hebrew mythology. In this, the sea is a place of evil, of disorder. It features like this in early creation stories, in the flood, in the parting of the Red Sea and in the story of Jonah who tries to run away from God. Crossing the sea, in Mark’s gospel, is a journey from Jewish to Gentile towns with complete differences of culture so it means going to alien places. The storm symbolises all that is evil, and today’s psalm is a pattern for the gospel.  And, if you recall the gospel recently when we began ordinary time, Jesus’ healing is portrayed as a battle with evil, as Jesus was accused of casting out devils by Beelzebub.

But there wasn’t a battle to be fought. There is no Beelzebub. The mythical monsters are all imaginary. Galilee is freshwater lake, not the open ocean. Experienced fishermen, like Peter, James and John would have known how to deal with it. It sounds as though the others who were not used to fishing boats, started a panic when the boat rocked. Mark uses the story to illustrate how the event brought Jesus’ disciples closer to understanding whom Jesus was. They ask themselves, ‘Who then is this, that even the wind and the sea obey him?’  

Mark doesn’t have infancy stories of Jesus, nor anything like the prologue of   John’s gospel to assert the divinity of Jesus. Instead, he uses stories like this which give us the evidence that Jesus in no less than Immanuel, God with us. Mark’s gospel is written, most probably for Christians facing political hostility and persecution in Rome, facing storms of their own. Mark tells the story to assure his readers that they must have faith in facing the storms of life.

Yes, there are real challenges, but in the midst of them, it is easy for us to frighten ourselves even more with myths. This month is now marked as Pride Month. There were three parish events last weekend to celebrate this, with the title Love is Love.  The first was a talk by Charlie Bell, then we had a concert on Saturday and to round it off, the Sunday Eucharist.

In Charlie Bell’s talk, he began with the creation myth. And this is precisely where today’s reading began. Out of a scene of primeval chaos, God asks Job, ‘Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth?  Tell me, if you have understanding.’

We have to ask ourselves, ‘What kind of creation is it?’ And more particularly, does our creation myth actually convey a true idea of what creation is? Or is the myth just some kind of imaginary bogeyman to frighten people? Is it, like the people in the boat who were not used to sailing, setting up a panic, indeed rocking the boat to the extent that everyone was in danger?

I answer this as a lifelong believer in the goodness of God and also as someone who has explored some of the mysteries of creation as a geologist. Looking at the past, through the insights of science, we aren’t limited to what we see today. We can probe back further into the dawn of creation towards that point where God ‘laid the foundation of the earth.’

When we do so we find the myth is false, and that building a picture of what God is like out of it can lead to mistakes. We create bogeymen to frighten us. The first and most obvious mistake must be the notion that creation was finished, in six days. It never was finished and isn’t finished yet. Throughout the whole of time from the big bang at the start, new things have come into being. Evolution has taken place. There were billions of years before there was even a solar system and our earth. As Jesus says, in John’s gospel chapter five, when he was accused of healing on the Sabbath, ‘My Father is still working, and I also am working.’ Jesus could see his father at work in the world, constantly doing new things. Evolution is still taking place.

My second point then is that the creation myth, in assuming a fixed creation, imagines a world which was perfect, and imagines that we know what such perfection consists of. It is wrong. No such world ever existed. And we only have to think about it for a moment to realise that, had such a world ever existed, nothing could possible have happened, because it would have broken the original perfection. The problem with the myth, then is that it portrays what we see, not as God’s creation, but as something broken by humanity’s sinfulness. That is the story of the Fall and the expulsion of Adam and Eve from Eden.

The myth is a lie. Creation has been changeable, uncertain, open to new things, from the very beginning. We can now probe back into the past and recognise that there was time before our world existed, never mind just time before the dinosaurs.

Scripture imagines that ‘God made the round world so fast that it cannot be moved’. But it spins like a top. A better simile might be to suggest that creation proceeds like someone riding a bike, constantly in motion, and constantly in danger of falling to right and left without doing so, for 14 billion years.

Once the myth had been exposed by the theory of evolution, it was famously ridiculed in a joke in W S Gilbert’s Mikado. Pooh-Bah says ‘I am, in point of fact, a particularly haughty and exclusive person, of pre-Adamite ancestral descent. You will understand this when I tell you that I can trace my ancestry back to a protoplasmal primordial atomic globule.’

Once the myth becomes a joke you don’t have to be afraid of it. It is a fundamental mistake by the Christian Church that instead of demolishing the creation myth, as Jesus did when he healed on the Sabbath and showed this was the work of God, continues to tell the creation story as if were proof that we are all to be blamed for destroying a primeval perfection.

No, it’s not that kind of creation. The creation into which we came is one full of hard decisions at every turn, and perpetuating the myths means that we won’t be able to see the world as it is.

And the simple fact when we see it is that, as last weekend’s posters said, ‘Love is Love’. That’s what it is wherever it is found.

As Christians we have a particular problem with the creation myth, which is the ways in which St. Paul, following on his training as a Pharisee, unfortunately built so much on the myth. In his best moments, he realised the error of his ways. To the Galatians he describes what it was like. He writes

Now before faith came, we were imprisoned and guarded under the law until faith would be revealed. Therefore the law was our disciplinarian until Christ came, so that we might be justified by faith. But now that faith has come, we are no longer subject to a disciplinarian, for in Christ Jesus you are all children of God through faith. As many of you as were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ. There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus.

He understands this to the point of asserting that Jewish food laws are unnecessary, and circumcision in order to admit Gentiles into Christians faith – there is no longer Jew or Greek, he says.

Yet he persists with the myth in saying  that women are inferior, he persists in the idea of an original perfection followed by the Fall, saying ‘Since by man came death’ and he persists in claiming that love is only in marriage, and not open to anyone else. But all of this simply uses the mythical creation stories as though they were fact, whereas they are only the bogeymen of imagination, made up to frighten people.

Throughout Christian history the Church has used the myth of ‘original sin’, a doctrine not shared by Jews who have always used the books of Moses as their scriptures, to enslave and frighten believers. Anselm and others in formulating ‘doctrines of the atonement’, strengthened the myth, though such doctrines have never been part of the catholic creeds. It was only when the implications of the theory of evolution were understood that the ancient bogeyman could be laid to rest. But it held the greatest theologians in thrall for generations.

Jesus calmed the storm. It might  just have been danger caused by panic in an overloaded boat, We don’t know how or what happened, but the disciples calmed down and sailed safely to shore. When Jesus was accused of ‘casting out devils by Beelzebub his healing the paralysed man both disproved the myth and demonstrated his divinity.

But perhaps our greatest bogeyman today is the belief in the myth that this is a creation broken by human sin rather than the place of rich and changing variety which God created, and in which we are increasingly required to act to secure its future.

God did not make the round world so fast that it cannot be moved. It is spinning like a top and could go off course if the human race is not willing to do something about it.

I mentioned the somewhat unlikely title of this book, ‘The joy of being wrong’, when I wrote about Peter and Paul. One of the things they have in common is a confession of going wrong, and of recognising their mistakes. They are not unique.

The most memorable book by one of the theologians of the early church is St. Augustine’s ‘Confessions’, in which he describes his youth as a pagan before coming to Christianity as an adult. The very title of this autobiographical book expresses the joy he found in being able to admit he had been wrong in his search for God. He rejected pagan religions and found faith as a Christian. And he describes how hard it was to give up his sinful life. Indeed, he constantly wrote that it just isn’t possible to be perfectly good all the time.

We keep going wrong all our lives. St. Paul writes, (Romans 7)  ‘When I want to do what is good, evil lies close at hand. For I delight in the law of God in my inmost self, but I see in my members another law at war with the law of my mind, making me captive to the law of sin that dwells in my members.’

We can see what we ought to do, but don’t do it. And for this reason, people have imagined that God, who is perfect, must have created a perfect world without any ‘mistakes’ but that later it went wrong. This ‘going wrong’ came to be known as ‘The Fall’ and people have imagined there was an original perfection. But modern science reveals that this isn’t so. Random change, ‘going wrong’, has always happened, and without this nothing new could ever have happened in the whole of the 14 billion years that the universe has existed.

Many people of faith, not just Christians, are disturbed by the idea from scientists that changes, and evolution, appear to be just random. They ask ‘Why would the creator choose such and inefficient and unthinking method as randomness to drive creation? Doesn’t it make God look like a bad engineer?’

In a paper presented to the Faraday Institute in Cambridge, the physicist Prof. Russell Cowburn presented an alternative view.

• Without random energy fluctuations, the universe would be cold. There would be no stars, no evolution, and no life. Everything we know springs from randomness. It isn’t an afterthought but is central to the nature of the universe.
• The heart of physics is quantum mechanics which studies randomness. The best engineers harness this randomness to make many essential tools, including steel, transformers and nuclear reactors.

In short, the entire universe has been random and hence ‘going wrong’ since the beginning of time. There never was any kind of perfection and never will be. From the moment the first living organism emerged it was, ‘going wrong’. This failure to reproduce exactly is precisely what allowed all the myriad life forms on earth to appear.

So, whilst a reading of Genesis might suggest that ‘going wrong’ is what got Adam and Eve thrown out of the Garden of Eden, this interpretation of the story is founded on a mistake about the whole nature of creation. ‘Going wrong’ is central to all life: a child learns to walk by falling down and correcting the mistakes of overbalancing.

Jesus understood this perfectly from the very outset of his ministry. When he heals a paralysed man whose friends lowered him through the roof of a house he says ‘Son, your sins are forgiven.’ Later, Jesus deliberately calls a tax collector, someone known to be ‘sinner’ because of the way he makes his money, to be a disciple. We are then told that When the scribes of the Pharisees saw that he was eating with sinners and tax-collectors, they said to his disciples, ‘Why does he eat with tax-collectors and sinners?’ When Jesus heard this, he said to them, ‘Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick; I have come to call not the righteous but sinners.’ Mark 2.16-17. Nobody is without sin. Jesus calls people who admit they go wrong and try to do better.

We should apply this understanding to our present situation. We can’t expect political leaders or health professionals to get it right every time. The threat from the virus was completely unknown, and indeed, seems to have been concealed in the country where it first emerged. No-one could know perfectly what to do. We need to recognise this. What we and our leaders should do is admit to making mistakes and learn from them. That is the only way we can save not only ourselves but the whole human race. We all need to find ‘the joy of being wrong’, admit our failings and try to do better. That, for Peter and Paul, Augustine, health officials and politicians, for all of us everywhere, is what God calls us to do.

The joy of being wrong, James Alison, Herder and Herder, 1998

Making sense of randomness in the physical world, lecture by Prof Russell Cowburn FRS

Making Sense Of Randomness In The Physical World

Peter and Paul, 29^th June and ‘The joy of being Wrong’

It may seem curious that Peter and Paul, the greatest of the apostles, have to share this feast day when some of the less well-known followers of Jesus get a day all to themselves. There is a reason. The tradition is that both were martyred in Rome on this day, so we remember them together.

But we often want to separate them out. Petertide for us marks the season for ordinations, and here we are celebrating the patronal festival of St. Peter’s Church. The Norman archway and the fabulous font witness to the fact that this was a parish church long before the university of Cambridge existed. Clustered around the castle on the hill, and stretching down to the river crossing, this was the heart of Cambridge. Today we remember Peter here.

So, on this very day, what of Paul? Two years ago Gill and I went with my brother Ivor, who lives in Greece to the ruins of ancient Corinth. There, we found that on this day they remember Paul. Today, at this very hour, (our service was at 6 pm) in the ruins of the ancient city of Corinth, it is St. Paul who is remembered in a service of solemn vespers led by the bishop in the open air. Paul had lived and worked here with leather workers and tent makers, with whom he shared his faith in the synagogue. But this provoked a disagreement, and some of the synagogue members brought him to be tried before the Roman governor. The site of the trial would have been the large raised marble platform, the Bema, which still dominates the centre of the Forum. What took place there could have turned out like Jesus’ trial before Pilate, with an angry mob yelling for Paul’s execution on grounds of heresy. But, as we read in the Acts of the Apostles (Ch 18, verses 12-17) , Gallio, the governor, wanted no part in what he considered to be an internal Jewish argument. Paul lived to fight, and write, another day. So, at this rostrum, this evening, the Greeks of Corinth are, with their bishop, celebrating the Great Vespers in honour of Paul.

What interests me today, on this feast day of Peter and Paul  is not the differences and individualities of these great characters, about whom we know so much from the New Testament. What I would like to celebrate today is one of their chief similarities, which, as you will soon realise, is the title of one of my favourite theological books. The book is called ‘The Joy of Being Wrong’. It may sound like a contradiction in terms to say, ‘The Joy of Being Wrong’, but in fact we know more about the wrongdoing of Peter and Paul than of any other saint in scripture.

Peter, having started well by seeing that Jesus is the Christ, thinks he has to turn Jesus away from Jerusalem and is rebuked in the words ‘Get behind me, Satan.’ But he tries again, and then, most famously, boasts at the Last Supper that he will never desert Jesus. He is then told that he will do so three times, before the cock crows to announce the dawn. The unforgettable image of Peter with the accusing cockerel has inspired artists from earliest times. And, if we accept the tradition that Mark’s gospel is in fact a digest of Peter’s sermons, Peter glories in telling us how many times he got it wrong. Think of the storm on Galilee. There was Peter, with the other disciples, scared stiff and begging Jesus to wake up. It doesn’t do the big fisherman much credit, does it? No. It’s again the joy of admitting he was wrong.

Paul, as the pious Pharisee Saul, had thought he was doing right in persecuting the early Christian Church. The story of his wrongdoing, followed by his seeing a vision whilst on the way to Damascus, is told three times over in the Acts of the Apostles, and also by Paul himself in his letter to the Galatians.

Both Peter and Paul know ‘The Joy of Being Wrong’, or rather the joy of admitting they were wrong and discovering God’s forgiveness. For this reason I am happy to admit that I feel closer to these saints than to many others whose lives seem so perfect and untarnished by sin. God uses sinners to do his work. For as Jesus had said when he told his parable of the two debtors, the one with a trifling debt and the one with a massive burden, it is the debtor who has been forgiven most who will love the lender more. The love which Peter and Paul showed, taking the good news to the very heart of the Roman empire at the risk of their lives, founded Christianity as a world religion.

At its heart is the realisation that God is Love. God is love and God forgives. He forgives, and when we realise how much we are loved and forgiven, he empowers us to do his work.

Following Peter and Paul let us admit our faults, and then, in the strength of that forgiveness, go on doing the work of God. It isn’t at all the way of the world. Make a mistake, in government, in business, in anything, and there are cries for resignations and sackings. And those who take over afterwards are then frozen into inactivity because the fear of going wrong is greater than the challenge of seizing the opportunity to do good.

Jesus will have none of this. He takes people like us, earthen vessels, and makes us his people. He remakes us in his image. He calls us out of darkness to live his marvellous light.

Today, on this feast of Peter, we live in the strength which the risen Christ gave to him, ‘Whosoever’s sins you forgive, they are forgiven’. Released from the power of their sins, Peter and Paul were freed to obey the command to ‘feed my sheep’.

Today, knowing the joy of being wrong and being released from our sins, let us rejoice in God’s forgiveness, rejoice in his love, and rejoice to share that love with all.

Maundy Thursday

Inclusive community

St. Paul’s words provide the first description we have of Christian worship, written even before the gospels. What he says points to something important about the nature of the church.

St. Paul only quotes the words about the sharing of the bread and cup in order to emphasise his understanding of its meaning. It seemed that the Eucharist was still, like Passover, a meal. But it had become a scandal. The rich brought their equivalent of the hampers from Fortnum and Masons, whilst the poor had nothing. The rich couldn’t wait for the prayers before they began to eat. So tonight we are called to look to each other. Tonight, on the night that Holy Communion was instituted, we are invited to Holy Communion, and invited to be a holy communion – a blessed, sanctified fellowship of Christian believers. The very word ‘Communion’ expresses our togetherness in what we are called to do. And holy – not because of our own intrinsic virtue, but holy, because we are called to be holy, we are made God’s holy people, by our Father. We are forgiven – We receive absolution, we receive the blood of Christ shed for the sins of the whole world, we are baptised people.

All this forms the background to the words we quote from St. Paul in tonight’s service, and his teaching, specific to one particular situation in Corinth, has had to be applied countless times since where there has been a disagreement at this table. Because there was no real sharing then, the Eucharist ceased to be celebrated as a meal. It was reduced to the sharing of bread and wine, so that all might share on equal terms and accept each other.

Time and again in history Christians have found reasons to divide, and have, as at the Last Supper, and as at the Church in Corinth, have broken the unity, the communion, which Christ wills for his people. It lays a heavy responsibility on us.

It would be tempting to think that on this night of all nights when we come to the Holy Communion, we come to fix our eyes solely on Jesus. Indeed, it might almost seem that a pair of blinkers, as fitted to horses, might help us to focus our gaze. But the spirituality demanded of an occasion described as Holy Communion, demands that our communion be with each other as well as with the Lord – with that motly crew at Corinth, with those who shared at the Last Supper and then betrayed or denied their Lord.

St. Paul is asking the people of Corinth to consider the kind of Church which Jesus had wanted when he broke the bread in the upper room. At one level it seems like a small exclusive group of those particularly chosen. It’s not. St. Paul’s understanding was that this group contained the representatives of the whole human race. In Christ there is neither Jew nor Greek, male nor female, slave nor free. The Christian Church was to be inclusive, rather than exclusive, but Paul was never allowed to have the last word. Throughout the centuries there has been division about whether the church should be the one or the other. Should the church use the ancient liturgical language of Hebrew, or modern everyday speech? What about the Jewish food laws? What about food sacrificed to idols?

The detail, of course, pales into insignificance when set against the picture of the Last Supper. Jesus gives the new commandment, and washes even the feet of the man who will betray him. The picture is one of openness and of welcoming. John Wesley described Holy Communion as ‘a converting ordinance’ and there was just a hope that Judas might have been converted by his sharing in that Passover meal. He wasn’t turned away. The picture is of the sacrament being freely offered to all to be shared by all. The picture of the Church which it gives is of an inclusive community.

St. John’s first letter turns the great commandment about loving God and loving neighbour round to make the point clearer. He says

Those who say, “I love God,” and hate their brothers or sisters, are liars; for those who do not love a brother or sister whom they have seen, cannot love God whom they have not seen. The commandment we have from him is this: those who love God must love their brothers and sisters also.

In recent years an organisation has emerged in the church in Britain called “Inclusive Church” In particular it is inclusive of women and of those who are gay. And we are finding in the Anglican Church that being inclusive, in the sense that Paul was inclusive, is very costly, because this issue is producing a huge split in the Church to the extent that people will not share in Communion together or come together to the Lambeth conference. Tonight of all nights we focus on the meaning of our Communion. First we have Paul telling us that we must accept each other. Then we have the example of Jesus in the gospel acting it out.

At the Last Supper Jesus got up and washed not the hands, but the feet of his disciples. In this he was doing not the service required from a disciple, but instead doing the work of a household slave, who might wash the feet of guests as they arrived for the meal. Peter blurted out the indignation and embarrassment of them all. The household slave does not eat with you. The person who washes feet doesn’t eat with you. But this gesture shows that Jesus is completely inclusive.

In what Jesus told him he was able to re-assure Peter that the roles were not actually reversed. Jesus said ‘If I, your Lord and master have washed your feet, you also ought to wash one another’s feet.’ Jesus did not cease to be Lord and Master in washing his disciples’ feet. He was still the king who had come into his holy city amid the shouts of triumph of the crowds. He was a king who had, in sharing our life, also taken the form of a servant.

What Jesus did was part of his responsibility as King. A king is responsible for the safety, the care, the protection and ultimately the life of his people. This washing of his disciples’ feet is first the acting out of that care for those closest to him.  Jesus was saying to his disciples ‘This is how you must treat each other.’

Now you may well be saying to yourself ‘This bit doesn’t apply to me. I’m not a king, I’m not the lord and master. I’ll just have a dose for five minutes.’ If that’s what you are thinking, then don’t. Because we all find ourselves at some point in that position. Every single person needs to accept the dignity and the worth of everyone else. Everyone matters. That is what Jesus was saying in doing this, everyone matters to God, to Jesus, and if we are his followers then we should show that everyone matters to us. If Jesus can do this for his disciples, then he tells us that we must do the same. It applies to us when we invite anyone to our home. It applies to anyone who offers any kind of service – a teacher, a local government employee, a tradesman, a dinner lady, a receptionist. Whoever we have dealings with, they are the people who matter.

Following the example of Jesus we are called to respect the dignity of everyone – the King is there to serve, and we are all to serve each other. It is this model which is the basis of Christian society that our conduct towards each other should be determined by a concern for every person, and in particular for those in need, for those who need our care. Human rights, now enshrined in European legislation, start with our king, our god, who washes his disciples feet.

It may be that this gesture by Jesus at the Last Supper has done more to further the idea of a democratic society than any other, for it demonstrates that the role of the King is to respect, honour and serve every one of his disciples, his subjects, his people. It upholds the dignity of every person. It may be that we have reached a point where this action, far from becoming superfluous, needs to be acted out not just in the Churches, but by Presidents and Prime Ministers. And when that is done it needs to be remembered that this service is to be imitated by civil servant and clerk, by doctor and banker, parent and by child, by everyone, whether what the service they perform is paid or unpaid. And the other side of this is to assert everyone’s need to serve, whether that service is paid or unpaid, for the good of the whole community, and first for the good of the person who performs the service, for in this we follow in the pattern of Jesus, and we obey his greatest command, the command at the Last Supper, to love one another.

2 before Advent

Jesus warns that ‘the days will come when not one stone will be left upon another; all will be thrown down.’

Maybe you have watched David Attenborough’s programmes on seven continents, and the introduction illustrates the point.  Having seven continents is, in geological terms, a fairly new phenomenon, and they continue to move at surprising speed. At some point in geological history, enormous earth movements started to take place on a scale never before recorded on earth. The once stable single great continental land mass began to break up. We know the details today: India crashing into Asia to form the Himalayas, the Atlantic Ocean opening up, splitting Africa from South America, or, nearer to home, Labrador from Scotland. The consequence of all this was newly emerging land masses, and new environments for life to colonise, with plants able to grow on land, animals able to colonise the land, and ultimately, amongst all the variety of life, the appearance of humans.

But then, what the programmes also bring to our attention is that fact that things can’t continue in the same old way. Things have to change. We must stop cutting down rain forest to grow palm oil, stop the nonsense of using palm oil as bio fuel and pretend this is better than using oil, stop relying of cheap air travel and giving away air miles. We must stop discarding plastic. Our way of life is unsustainable.

When Jesus spoke of the end of the temple in Jerusalem, it seemed unimaginable. The Herods had created the most impressive religious edifice in the Roman world; greater than anything in Egypt, greater than Delphi or the Parthenon in Athens, a cult sustained by thousands upon thousands of sacrifices. To give an idea of its size, the Acropolis, the natural plateau on which the Parthenon was built in Athens, is about 3 hectares in area. Although Jerusalem is always spoken of as being on a hill, the natural one is insignificant in size, but Herod built had commissioned a mound 10 hectares in area, an artificial hill of immense stone blocks. We can still marvel, as Jesus’ disciples did, at the size of the stones forming the foundation for the biggest religious building in the world. As Jesus and his disciples looked at it, it was still being built and indeed, it was never finished.  Within a generation, this temple, and the city of Jerusalem would be no more. Jews and Christians would be forbidden to live there. Yet, Jesus advises, this is not the end of the world. It is a warning to be resolute in the face of persecution.

Today our prophets are different, and their message is different, but it seems evident that their message is as vital to our generation as Jesus’ message was to the infant church. Our prophets might be the very old, like David Attenborough, or the young like Greta Thunberg. But what is the world doing? In some ways nations appear to be doing what the Roman emperor was doing in the days when Luke wrote his gospel. Nero was accused of fiddling whilst Rome burnt. The saying has become a byword for leaders who, in any generation, neglect the urgent needs of their people. Are our leaders, fighting over the coming election, fiddling whilst our cities and indeed our planet choke on the pollution we have made?

Some countries are taking notice. I was struck this week by the way the Dutch Prime Minister announced ways of reducing nitrous oxide emissions. His government had already frozen 18,000 road, airport and housing projects to meet EU targets on nitrogen oxide pollution. But it wasn’t enough. So the national speed limit is to be reduced on motorways from 130 kph to 100 kph between 7 p.m. and 6 a.m. And farmers have been ordered to reduce numbers of pigs because nitrogen emissions are four times the EU average.  He said it was urgent because it causes asthma, brings on asthma attacks, and increases heart disease in the elderly. Quite simply, in order to heal ourselves we need to heal the whole planet. And in particular we need to heal the places where there is the highest density of population and the greatest damage to the health of people. We are changing the climate and see the results in floods at home, floods in Venice, and floods in India. We have wildfires in California, in Australia and we have had them in the Pennine Moors. And yet the papers yesterday were celebrating a non-stop flight from London to Sydney, which used 15 tonnes of fuel per passenger. Are our goals the right ones?

The planet needs healing. And, as this is a healing service, allow me to tell a story of healing services some 30 years ago and more. Someone came to the services, and she sought out healing services everywhere. She approached ministers of all churches asking for special prayers of healing. It is no exaggeration to say that I and other ministers were driven to distraction by her incessant demands. She would approach caring people violently in order to get attention.

At one healing service I had preached on a story of Jesus telling a man to get up and walk (John 5). I spelt out what the consequences of that must have been. For, if Jesus could heal him, he could no longer get charity.  He would have to work for his living. When he asked Jesus to heal him, to make him stand up and walk, he knew that his entire lifestyle would change, and he accepted the challenge. Paul, in today’s epistle, commends that sort of life. The woman I mentioned had always refused to get medical help, and she was furious, as so often before, at my sermon. Her doctor, a friend who was a Reader in his parish, said, ‘Do we have a patient? He could do nothing because she refused any help.

12 years after the onset of the illness, and after I left the parish, I received a letter from the woman. Her illness had been caused by a simple chemical imbalance; she wrote. Within weeks of receiving treatment from her doctor she was back to her old self, and helping people in the community as St. Paul commended, being a blessing to all around her.

I tell this story because, as I watch David Attenborough or listen to Greta Thunberg and climate activists, I wonder, ‘Do we have a patient?’ Have we realised that our present lifestyle is unsustainable? Do we recognise ourselves as patients, do we recognise the illnesses we are causing ourselves and our planet, which can only be cured by accepting that we must live differently? Some countries are refusing to admit that climate change is happening.

The temple in Jerusalem effectively destroyed itself, because it had ceased to point people to God. When God appeared in its midst, he was rejected. We could be doing something similar on a larger scale today, larger than Nero’s fiddling while Rome burns, and refusing to recognise that our lifestyles and what we are doing to our planet are making us ill. Only then, if we change, as Malachi promises, will the son of righteousness rise, with healing on his wings.

The Feast of Christ the King began only last century in 1925, at a point when kings were reducing – indeed, some had already gone to the guillotine. It only reached our calendar as the last Sunday of the Christian year in 1970. So we might wonder what it’s for, especially when Royalty doesn’t always get a good press. Last week we had one such. The king, Mauricio Pochettino, the manager of Tottenham Hotspur football club, was sacked. Just as suddenly, there was a new king, Jose Mourinho, who had been waiting, idle in London, since being kicked out of his last team, Manchester United, 11 months ago.

A football commentator described what happened like this. He said ‘If you look at the anthropology of what happened, it goes back to a very primitive story, of the most ancient tribal societies. They need a king, someone to embody what the society stands for, someone to claim its victories,  embody the tribe and celebrate its successes. But, in tribal societies, every so often things go wrong: the harvest fails, a plague strikes, a powerful enemy attacks, and the king fails to ensure success. Will this new king at Spurs perform, or will he prove to be as self-seeking and useless as the kings of Israel condemned by Jeremiah? The king should be a shepherd for the people, and indeed a football manager is there to shepherd the squad in his charge. But ‘you have scattered my flock, and have driven them away, and you have not attended to them’.

The accusation against Jesus, the charge nailed to his cross, was, that he was a king. And indeed, our gospels are not ashamed to assert that. Indeed,  our epistle reminds us that, before even the gospels appeared in their present form, Paul had included what appears to be this most ancient Christian hymn in his letter, proclaiming that Christ is, not just king, but ‘The image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation; for in him all things in heaven and on earth were created, things visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or powers—all things have been created through him and for him.’ It is the centrepiece of the first Christian sermon, Peter’s proclamation on the Day of Pentecost. ‘let the entire house of Israel know with certainty that God has made him both Lord and Messiah, this Jesus whom you crucified.’

The implication of this, realised by the first generation of Christians, was that our understanding of everything, and particularly the whole of creation, and of what God is like, had to change. And, by implication, what a real king might be, has also to change. For the king, traditionally, leads his people out to battle. The king inspires his football team to believe they can win. The king, in any conflict, is on OUR side against OUR enemies, and leads us to defeat them. He inspires his followers to battle.

But look what happens when we realise the implications of the resurrection of Jesus. He is not only king, but ‘The firstborn of all creation; through whom all things in heaven and on earth were created’. There is now no person on earth who is not a member of this kingdom. No-one is an outsider. No-one is an enemy. There is no place for us to exercise our wrath and our anger because God loves all that he has made, every person that exists. God is not angry, not even with those who put his son on the cross. To those who crucified Jesus he said ‘Father, forgive them; for they do not know what they are doing.’ To the condemned criminal he said ‘Truly I tell you, today you will be with me in Paradise.’

What we believe, in the light of the resurrection, is that he is not only king of all believers but king of all unbelievers also. The very term ‘king’ hardly does justice to what Jesus represents for us. But what might it mean? I think first of Costa Rica; a tiny slip of land uniting two continents, with Nicaragua to the north and Panama to the south. Cost Rica made treaties with its two neighbours, and in 1949 abolished its army. One result was great and lasting prosperity. Another was a huge influx of Quakers from the United States, who wanted to settle and live in a country dedicated to peace. And they have today formed much of the backbone of the country’s prosperity based on farming and tourism. The country is clean, safe, with a delightful friendly population ad stable government.

We have relied on the wrong kind of king; one based on our ancient primitive model of generals, emperors and, let us admit, football coaches, and not one based on the kingship of the one through whom all things and all peoples were made. To such a notion, the very idea of a king of peace is unimaginable. But then, in spite of being a Christian country, we have been a nation of wars, conquest, invasions, and celebrating our foreign war mongering and guaranteeing our peace not with treaties with our neighbours, but with a nuclear deterrent. Our history goes from 1066 through Agincourt and the 100 years war with France through the Spanish Armada, wars with Holland, with Napoleon, and finally two world wars. The scandal is that we’re in danger of remembering more about the wars, including one that ended over 100 year ago, than why we made peace by joining the European economic community in 1973. This began as the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC) in 1951 with the deliberate intention after the second World War in a century of preventing further European wars. Weapons were about coal and steel, so this was an attempt to beat swords into ploughshares, to use steel only for peace. Later the single market was also designed to prevent wars between former antagonistic states. It may not be perfect but when before have that had we had over 70 years without a major European war? We probably wouldn’t fight over coal and steel any more, but the seeds of economic war and jingoistic nationalism are all again rampant in the nations of Europe and beyond. Such narrow nationalistic political leaders are no better than the very worst and most tribal of football coaches.

On this Feast of Christ the King we need to look again at what we mean by true kingship, and how we understand the implications of the realisation that our creator has taken human flesh, lived and died to demonstrate the nature of true kingship. So, on this recently invented feast of Christ the King, may I suggest that, to get truly into the spirit of what it means, you do what is traditional at this season and you listen to Handel’s ‘Messiah’. If you can, join a bunch to sing a scratch performance, and when you do remember that the fabulous climax is the real celebration of Christ the King, which we’ve done for centuries. Sing along to the Halleluiah Chorus, that majestic music which brought the king to his feet and now should do the same for all of us, which concludes with the proclamation of Christ as King of Kings and Lord of Lord, and ‘He shall reign for ever and ever’.

Advent 3

It is the Sunday for rejoicing, traditionally know as ‘Gaudete’ Sunday ‘Rejoice’ is the proclamation of the prophet. Mary sings her Magnificat and the purple of Advent is put away for a day. We light the pink candle in the Advent ring and it could almost seem as though we are celebrating Christmas early.

But John the Baptist is in prison, in the condemned cell from which he will never emerge in on piece. For him, things couldn’t be worse. The doubts and fears crowd in on him. Is this really the Messiah? Will he rescue John the Baptist and drive out Herod and all the Romans? Is this salvation? What is there to rejoice about?

As we heard in our readings, Jesus quotes the prophet in listing the signs that are being fulfilled. ‘The eyes of the blind shall be opened, and the ears of the deaf unstopped; then the lame shall leap like a deer, and the tongue of the speechless sing for joy.’ Yes, it is happening, but is it enough? Tell John that, but the rest of the message should probably not reach his ears. So, after John’s disciples left, those who remained heard this. ‘Among those born of women no one has arisen greater than John the Baptist; yet the least in the kingdom of heaven is greater than he.’

John would die not knowing the whole of Jesus’s message, and, infinitely more important, would not know of the death and resurrection of Jesus. Three of the gospels are written from the point of view of what people knew before Easter Day. They reconstructed the story as though no-one knew what was to come. I believe St. John, knowing of these accounts of the life of Jesus, wrote a very different gospel, one bathed in the light of the resurrection and using this event to shine a light on the meaning of the incarnation and the ministry of Jesus. I have good authority for saying this, because I am quoting Professor David Ford who has spent the last 19 years writing, with periods of careful reading with colleagues, the gospel of John. John, he would claim, knew about those accounts of the life of Christ which attempted to reconstruct what it was like at the time, with all the misunderstandings and doubts which everyone, including the disciples shared. But John writes in the full knowledge of these gospels, his personal knowledge of Jesus, and his experience of the resurrection.

John the Baptist did not, could not, know that Jesus would rise from the dead and that his resurrection would be the ultimate vindication on his ministry. So Jesus says ‘Among those born of women no one has arisen greater than John the Baptist; yet the least in the kingdom of heaven is greater than he.’ This is no criticism of John, but a simple report that no-one could have known that, with the resurrection of Jesus, John the Baptist, Isaiah, Jeremiah, the whole of the rest of them, the psalmist and the lot would share in the resurrection of God’s Son.

And there is this ultimate difference between the messiah and earthly kings. ‘What then did you go out to see? Someone dressed in soft robes? Look, those who wear soft robes are in royal palaces. What then did you go out to see? A prophet? Yes, I tell you, and more than a prophet.’

There will also be a fundamental difference between the message of Jesus and that of the prophets including John the Baptist. And there will be a fundamental difference between people’s imaginings about the Messiah and Jesus, the Son of God. Some of this difference is clear in today’s reading from Isaiah. ‘Here is your God.  He will come with vengeance, with terrible recompense.  He will come and save you.’

God does not save you by beating up everyone else. It is not this situation which my 4 year old grandson imagines in his games, where there are good guys and bad guys, and the good guys have free rein to beat up the bad guys. In the creation God made they are all, we are all, children of God. But it is just possible that John the Baptist didn’t understand who was coming. For example, he described the Messiah in these terms, ‘His winnowing-fork is in his hand, and he will clear his threshing-floor and will gather his wheat into the granary; but the chaff he will burn with unquenchable fire.’ It could sound very like the 4-year old’s game of bad guys and good guys. But, apart from healing the blind and the lame, what did Jesus do?

When they showed Jesus a woman who had been taken in the very act of adultery, he said very clearly ‘Let the person who is without sin cast the first stone.’ Those who were claiming to be the good guys were unmasked.

He says ‘‘Do not judge, so that you may not be judged. For with the judgement you make you will be judged, and the measure you give will be the measure you get. Why do you see the speck in your neighbour’s eye, but do not notice the log in your own eye? Or how can you say to your neighbour, “Let me take the speck out of your eye”, while the log is in your own eye? You hypocrite, first take the log out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to take the speck out of your neighbour’s eye.’

He accepted invitations to dinner from tax collectors and sinners, and was criticised for it. But then, he says in today’s gospel, ‘blessed is anyone who takes no offence at me.’

And, following today’s gospel, Jesus says ‘But to what will I compare this generation? It is like children sitting in the market-places and calling to one another, “We played the flute for you, and you did not dance;  we wailed, and you did not mourn.”

For John came neither eating nor drinking, and they say, “He has a demon”; the Son of Man came eating and drinking, and they say, “Look, a glutton and a drunkard, a friend of tax-collectors and sinners!” Yet wisdom is vindicated by her deeds.’

Those who take offence at Jesus will be unable to discern that this is God at work.

However, I’m reminded that we need to say this with some care. I have just read the report by the C of E Faith and Order Commission about our relations with Jews. This is an important issue which has tarnished some of the political discourse recently, when it should have been laid to rest years ago. The report doesn’t give me any advice about how to interpret Jesus’ words in tonight’s gospel, ‘Among those born of women no one has arisen greater than John the Baptist; yet the least in the kingdom of heaven is greater than he.’ There is a danger of seeing this text as proclaiming a kind of Christian triumphalism. And there is no escaping the fact that Christianity and Judaism are different, but then Judaism today is very different from the faith of those who worshipped in the temple in Jerusalem, and Christianity today different from that of those who wrote the gospels.

In all this I find, as did those on the commission, help from St. Paul’s letter to the Romans (9) in which he attempts to heal divisions between Jewish and Gentile Christians. He says ‘I could wish that I myself were accursed and cut off from Christ for the sake of my own people, my kindred according to the flesh. They are Israelites, and to them belong the adoption, the glory, the covenants, the giving of the law, the worship, and the promises; to them belong the patriarchs, and from them, according to the flesh, comes the Messiah, who is over all, God blessed for ever. Amen.

But this does not help me interpret the gospel text from Matthew, so I shall try an approach like that of the 4^th gospel. let me offer you an image of the Baptist which sees him from the perspective of St. John’s gospel.

The traditional picture of the crucifixion, like that on the rood screen in this church, has the crucified Christ in the centre flanked by the weeping figures of the beloved disciple and the mother of Jesus. In the famous Isenheim altarpiece, the scene is radically different. It was created for a hospital, where dying men and women who were beyond the help, but not beyond the care of an order of religious, were placed in their beds to allow them to contemplate religious images. In the tortured figure of Christ on the cross all the pain of the terminally ill patients in the hospital is conveyed in gruesome detail. The agony of Jesus is intolerable. And his beloved disciple, instead of standing on his side of  the cross, has rushed across to comfort Jesus’ weeping mother.

The renaissance, around 1500, was a time for startling new religious images, of great theological depth. The best known is Leonardo’s ‘Last Supper’ showing the moment when every disciple finds himself accused. At Isenheim the traditional altarpiece has, where the beloved disciple has vacated his place, John the Baptist. He stands, full of life, and quoting the scriptures as he points to Christ. He is risen from the dead, and invisible to Jesus in agony. At John’s feet is a lamb, with blood pouring from its breast into a chalice. The Baptist is saying (from John 1) ‘Behold the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world! This is he of whom I said, “After me comes a man who ranks ahead of me because he was before me.”’

It is as though the vindicated Baptist is saying ‘I told you so!’, and alongside the picture of the most hideous, agonising and shameful death he is holding out an eternal,  resurrection hope to the dying in the hospital. Indeed, another of the images of the altarpiece has an unbelievably radiant image of the risen Christ, displaying is wounds, but gloriously alive.

The Isenheim altarpiece, unlike conventional images which try to portray the crucifixion as it happened, shines, like John’s gospel,  with the joy of knowing that, even in the depths of the Good Friday agony, God’s Son will be vindicated. The risen Baptist stands as a sign of hope for all the dying in the hospital. He embodies the rejoicing of ‘Gaudete’ Sunday. And, as proof that those who did not know the resurrection in their earthly lives, and equally saved by God.

In this Advent season we rejoice in the hope coming into the world, the hope given to Israel and treasured through long and difficult centuries, held secure through countless setbacks. For it is the one God, creator and father of all, who planted this message of hope, and it is the one we all worship .

Advent 4

Advent is a time for looking forward, and nothing does this better than the writings we now call the Book of the Prophet Isaiah. One writer described it as ‘simply and of itself one of the great wonders of the world, something like the vital backbone to the whole process by which the Hebrew people gifted the world with authentic monotheism.’ What we have appears in the bible to be the work of one author, but it is the work of an entire school of disciples somehow kept alive over a period of three hundred years, and maybe well longer, the vision which the Judaean court prophet Isaiah had begun to elaborate somewhere around 730 BC. This vision, of a power so much greater than any of the power politics going on around the royal court at the time as to lead to a deeply peaceful critical indifference to them (see Isaiah 7-8), was associated with Isaiah’s priestly vision of heaven surrounded by cherubim in the Holy Place of the Temple.  It is a vision which we quote at every Communion Service, as we join in the heavenly chorus ‘Holy, Holy, Holy, Lord God of hosts. Heaven and earth are full of your glory.

The school of Isaiah were inspired by that vision over the next several centuries, and over time it enabled them to reinterpret the relationship of all the ups and downs of history that befell Israel and Judah, finally leading to the extraordinary clarity which we see in what is called Second Isaiah, the post-exilic reworking of the vision. There it has become clear organically, from within the vision, that the Lord in question is not a tribal deity. God is not another god among the gods. God is not-one-of-the-gods, God is more like nothing at all than what pagan peoples think of as a god. The astonishing, indeed, miraculous thing is that from the terrible experience of the exile in Babylon emerged this vision of true monotheism.

As such, though the initial vision was in the Temple in Jerusalem, Isaiah has no time for the ways in which pagan gods are worshipped, with sacrifices, with violent ritual slaughter. He sees this for what it is, an angry, wrathful and sinful act, glorifying the worst of humanity’s bestial instincts. He says

Wash yourselves; make yourselves clean; remove the evil of your doings from before my eyes;
cease to do evil, learn to do good; seek justice, rescue the oppressed, defend the orphan, plead for the widow.

He looks forward to the coming of the messiah, saying, as we know from Handel’s Messiah ‘The people that walked in darkness have seen a great light; for unto us a child is born, Wonderful Counsellor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace.

He looks forward to worship which is peaceful. Psalm 80 reflects Isaiah’s vision of heaven in the words ‘Shine forth, you that are enthroned upon the cherubim’ and the peaceful worship means that ‘Sacrifice and offering you did not desire but my ears you have opened,  burnt offerings and sin offerings  you did not require.’

St. Paul would speak of true worship, Christian worship, as being a ‘sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving’.

As we look forward to the coming of the messiah we have to acknowledge that time and again we lose the vision of Isaiah, and his vision of peace. We set ourselves against each other, and indeed against other Christians and against other faiths. Instead of one faith we have the tribal deities of catholic and protestant, Roman and Orthodox or Western and Eastern. Everyone does it: with Shia and Sunni Muslims, Buddhists against Rohinga Muslims, Chinese against their Muslim brothers. This Christmas Christians in Gaza will not be allowed to go to Bethlehem. Everywhere faith in the one God is fractured by sin into the worship of tribal deities. India, once trying to be a model of neutrality between faiths, has espoused religious bigoty.

Where do we go? Can I, as we approach Christmas, dare to hope that we may have a possibility of peace in our own land? With the present election, and getting Brexit done, there is space for a peaceful and fruitful relationship with the EEU, and there are models for that in Norway, in Switzerland and with other nations.

Better still, the tribal warfare of left and right may have to cease as the new government recognise that they need to support the whole country, the north, the old industrial heartlands, a health service for all, not just those who can afford to go private, an equal opportunity for all in good education, and policies which respond to the universal challenge to the environment and the health of the whole planet. It may be difficult to stay on course and the siren voices of tribalisms, like old time pagan gods requiring their sacrifices, may re-emerge. But let us pray that we have government for the good of the entire nation, and that peace may prevail in a land where I believe we lost our way, and our moral compass, when we went to war in Iraq.

In conclusion, please turn to today’s psalm, and in particular to this. ‘O Lord God of hosts, how long will you be angry at your people’s prayer?’ God is not going to be pleased with prayers to a tribal deity who is asked to bash our enemies. This is not the true religion of Isaiah’s vision. This is not what the coming of the Messiah was about. So, in this Advent season we pray ‘Turn us again, O Lord God of hosts; show the light of your countenance, and we shall be saved.’

Christmas Day

Tonight we share in one of the most ancient traditions of the Christian Church. As soon as Christianity became accepted in the Roman Empire, a lady called Egeria made a pilgrimage to Jerusalem and wrote of her travels. She saw that Christians would go to Bethlehem on this night for a midnight vigil.  They, like the shepherds, ‘watched by night’ as we do tonight.  This was followed by a torch-lit procession to Jerusalem, arriving at the Church of the Resurrection at dawn. Perhaps I should explain that Orthodox Christians still call what we refer to as the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, built centuries later, by its original name as ‘The Church of the Resurrection’ because of course no-one is buried there, but, far more importantly, it is the place where the risen Christ appeared to Mary Magdalene at dawn on Easter Day. It is not just an empty tomb. It is the place of the resurrection.  In one night, the Christians of Jerusalem celebrated both the birth and the Resurrection of Jesus. They were making the point that we only celebrate Christmas because of the resurrection. And this is what we do in this Eucharist.

So tonight, to present the complete picture of the meaning of Christ’s incarnation, our gospel reading comes from the majestic opening of John’s gospel.

‘In the beginning was the Word’. With this astonishing opening to his gospel, St. John re-writes the entire creation story. He knows that there is no more need for the ancient myths about creation, for he has seen God face to face in Jesus Christ. And what he has seen is that God, simply, is love. The child born in Bethlehem, the child laid in a manger, is love personified. And that love fills all creation.

The message is not confined to John. ‘The ends of the earth shall see the salvation of our God’ says Isaiah. The writer to the Hebrews echoes the opening of the gospel. ‘In these last days God has spoken to us by a Son, through whom he created the worlds.’ Literally, all things and all ages.

St. Paul shares the same understanding, writing to the Corinthians 1 Corinthians 8:6: ‘But to us there is but one God, the Father, of whom are all things, and we in him; and one Lord Jesus Christ, by whom are all things, and we by him.’

In another Christmas reading,  Paul quotes an early Christian hymn in Colossians which sings the same story. ‘Colossians 1:13-20:  ‘Christ  is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation, for through him were created all things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, thrones, dominations, principalities and powers, all things were created by him and for him.’

The creation story must be re-told, so ‘In the beginning was the Word.’ To make a modern analogy to what the apostles discovered, take a motor car. In the old story a creator, the factory, makes the car. And when it goes wrong someone else, a mechanic, fixes it. In the old story creation and salvation, creation and redemption, are two different things. But they are not.

We do St. John a disservice when we read John 3.16 and translate it as ‘God so loved the world.’ What John wrote was not just world, but, in Greek, and in English ‘Cosmos’. God loves the whole of his creation, and everything that exists is the fruit of God’s love. All things came into being through him. It is not a narrow story about personal salvation, it is ‘Joy to the world – let heaven and nature sing.’ And here, in flesh, is the Word who produces order out of a seemingly chaotic universe. Through the Word there is light and there is life, and life moreover, that has a potential for knowing its creator, for knowing that it is created, and wanting to know what the creator is like.

But this is what the world has missed. As St. John says, ‘the world did not know him and did not accept him.’ The world gets is way by wielding death. In Jesus’ day it is Rome overcoming all opposition, or it is the people of Jerusalem fighting to expel the Romans from their holy city. In the Christmas story it is Herod ordering the massacre of the innocents of Bethlehem in his bid to destroy this king. In our day it is the bombing of Syria and Yemen, it is by everything from threats of nuclear war to attacks on a conference in Fishmongers’ Hall, assassinations of critics of Russia or Saudi Arabia and cyber warfare.

The fundamental mistake about God is that God might seek to control the world by using death as a weapon, just because humans, since the myth of Cain and Abel, have wrongly supposed that this was the way to power.

But the truth of what God is actually like did not emerge until after the resurrection. It did not dawn upon the disciples until then. Up to that point they, like everyone else, were completely wrong about what God is like and who God is.

St. John says, ‘He came to what was his own and his own people did not accept him.’ Our gospel writers tell the story against themselves of how, so often they missed the point. But no wonder, for how pervasive this culture of death has been. The tragedy is that it is all too easy to fall into the trap. We turn St. George, a Christian martyr put to death in the 3^rd century in the time of Diocletian, the last pagan emperor to persecute the Christian church into an emblem of crusaders. Christians, and others, go to war over Jerusalem when Christ himself did the exact opposite, he was executed there and foretold that its entire destruction would be inevitable. And when the crusaders invading Jerusalem rebuilt the site of Christ’s resurrection into the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, they were part of a culture which had turned away from the resurrection gospel and glorified slaughter.

The satisfaction theory of the meaning of Jesus’ death gives the impression that God required the death of his son to appease his righteous wrath. No, says St. John, again and again and again. ‘God is love.’ It’s as simple as that.

So, this Christmas we need to renew ourselves in that love. We need to make a spiritual journey, the ancient tradition of making our pilgrimage from the site of Christ’s birth to the Church of the Resurrection. We go to Bethlehem and then join in the song of the angels ‘‘Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace to his people on earth!’ Peace is the first message of the risen Christ on Easter Day to his disciples in the upper room. ‘Peace be with you.’ After he said this, he showed them his hands and his side. Then the disciples rejoiced when they saw the Lord. Jesus said to them again, ‘Peace be with you. As the Father has sent me, so I send you.’ When he had said this, he breathed on them and said to them, ‘Receive the Holy Spirit. If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them.’

Tonight this service is our spiritual pilgrimage. We come in the middle of the night to where a replica of Jesus’ crib is set up. We come to where sins are forgiven and where God’s Spirit is received. We come and join the song of the angels. We share God’s peace with each other, and we share in this Eucharist, the foretaste of the banquet of heaven, which celebrates our risen life in Christ.  We celebrate the entire gospel, acknowledging with John that ‘the Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father’s only son, full of grace and truth.’

Lent 3

Jesus’ words in the gospel sound difficult. ‘Do you think that because these Galileans suffered in this way they were worse sinners than all other Galileans? No, I tell you; but unless you repent, you will all perish as they did. Or those eighteen who were killed when the tower of Siloam fell on them—do you think that they were worse offenders than all the others living in Jerusalem? No, I tell you; but unless you repent, you will all perish just as they did.’ Jesus is adamant that these events are not punishments from God.

As we hear this we have in mind the fifty worshippers in Christchurch who perished in a hail of bullets. We have in mind those in Malawi, Mozambique and Zimbabwe drowned by storm floods.

Jesus says something similar to this at his arrest in the Garden of Gethsemane. When a disciple draws a sword, Jesus says, “Put your sword back into its place; for all who take the sword will perish by the sword.” “You will all perish as they did.” In other words: If you think that Jesus wants us to kill the bad guys in order to bring God’s punishment upon them, then you’re wrong. If you don’t repent, if you don’t turn to a different way of thinking and doing things, then you will die in that same way. “For all who take the sword will perish by the sword.”

But Jesus even extends this point about death from this instance of violent death to one of accidental death. It’s not just about death involving human violence. The same point can be made about accidental deaths, like a tower falling over and killing people, or a deadly tornado, or catching AIDS. If we see these things as punishments from God, and if we don’t repent, if we don’t turn to another way of thinking, then we will die under the delusion of that same way of thinking. We will die thinking that God is punishing us. “We will all perish just as they did.” We will die believing in a false God, We will die believing in a false notion of what God is like. That is what Jesus is saying.

For Jesus came to show us that God absolutely does not bring death to punish sinners. Jesus is quite clear that death was not the invention of an angry god who decided to punish Adam and Eve for eating the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil in the Garden of Eden. Jesus does not believe that myth, because he knows his father is not like that.

 Quite the opposite, Jesus took our human form of punishment upon himself to show us the foolishness of such things. Our thoughts and ways may be tied to death, but, when God raises Jesus from the dead, God shows us once and for all that God is all about life, not death. God is about forgiveness, not punishment. God is about blessings, not curses.

The longest story we have in the gospels explaining this in great detail is the healing of the man who was born blind in John’s gospel. It takes the whole 40 verses of chapter 9, and it begins with a question. “Seeing the man, Jesus’ disciples ask ‘Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?” ‘Neither’ says Jesus.

It is very difficult for us to imagine the huge change of perception underway here. It is nothing less than a change of gods, a conversion, because the people Jesus is talking to have not been listening to the true God’s words of life. It is as a change from a god who is both good and bad, who both loves and punishes, to a perception of God who is only love, in whom there is no darkness at all (1 John 1:5). Jesus is beginning to teach this to his disciples here, but it will remain incomprehensible to them until after the resurrection.

I’m afraid there are people, many evangelicals among them, who just don’t get this. There is this tendency in Lenten piety to focus on the cross and say things like ‘Jesus died for me.’ It’s a kind of romanticising of death like the story of Romeo and Juliet where the couple, stupidly and accidently, both of them end up dead. A far better love story is that of my next door neighbour’s parents who loved each other for 5 years before marriage and then 69 years after, celebrating life and love together and not giving up on each other in all of those years. Surely this is a greater love than that of Romeo and Juliet, which was a mere infatuation lasting little longer than the duration of Shakespeare’s play. The point of the gospel story is the resurrection. ‘They cut me down and I leapt up high, I am the life that’ll never, never die.’

St. Paul, in today’s epistle. Is mistaken when he quotes from a story of the Exodus, “‘The people sat down to eat and drink, and they rose up to play.’ We must not indulge in sexual immorality as some of them did, and twenty-three thousand fell in a single day.’” God doesn’t punish people like that, not even idolaters. If God punished all sexual immorality the world’s population would be considerably reduced, to say the least.

When they ask Jesus about the resurrection, with that trick question about the woman who marries seven brothers in turn, Jesus says ‘But concerning the dead rising, have you not read about the burning bush in the book of Moses, how God told him, ‘I am the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob’? He is not the God of the dead, but of the living. You are badly mistaken!”

He is god to the living, of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, of 50 worshippers shot down in Christchurch, of people in Mozambique swept away by a hurricane. They are not lost. In the words of Richard Baxter’s hymn

As for my friends, they are not lost;

The several vessels of Thy fleet,

Though parted now, by tempests tossed,

Shall safely in the haven meet.

When the Christian Church divided at the great schism a thousand years ago western Christianity made a great mistake, following Anselm and all the rest. In his question ‘Why did God become man’ his answer focussed on Jesus’ death. But the answer is that God became man to demonstrate that for all humanity there is life beyond death. Surely today’s gospel should make us suspicious of seeing meaning in death, whether it is caused by deliberate wickedness or simply the result of an accident. It follows from the persistent Christian myth that this is not the world which God made, but a world which Adam and Eve broke. That is plain nonsense. This is, Jesus says, the world God made in which God does not intervene, to throw people out of a mythical garden of eden, to stop deliberate acts of wickedness, or to divert accidents. God made a real world in which we are responsible for our actions.

This Lenten season we once again have the opportunity to repent, so that we will not perish like others who died enslaved to death. Eternal life begins now when we embrace that love which breaks into our romance with death. It empowers us to live anew today, because we are forgiven. Let us listen and live. Let us repent once again this Lent, so that we will be ready to truly hear and celebrate those words of eternal life that we proclaim on Easter. Amen