Light of Christ - Midnight Mass 2002

The Light of Christ

From tonight’s OT reading:

“The people walking in darkness have seen a great light” Is 9.2

The midwife arrived in the middle of the night to find an anxious husband and his wife, due at any moment with their first child. Just as it all began to happen, there was a power cut, but the midwife calmed the husband and gave him a torch to hold. ‘Don’t worry’ she said, ‘I’ve done this lots o times before.’

Soon there was a cry, and the midwife was about to show the husband his first-born, when she stopped and said ‘hold on a moment - yes - it’s twins’. They were overjoyed, but suddenly the midwife said, ‘No, hold on, it’s triplets!’ All went pitch black. ‘What’s happened’ said the midwife to the husband. ‘I turned it off’ the man said, ‘I think the light’s attracting them!’

And the Light still does attract them.

Despite all the darkness in our world - and the media never miss an opportunity to remind us of it - most men and women are attracted to the light. They recognise goodness wherever they see it. They appreciate acts of kindness.

The light enables them to see how they should behave, with mercy and self-giving love. (We’ve just collected £600 for Crisis by carol singing around the parish - you can add to that tonight as you leave.) And the greatest light that has ever come into the world is Jesus Christ our Saviour, whose birth we celebrate symbolically at this dark midnight hour, in a church ablaze with light.

“The people walking in darkness have seen a great light.”

Or as we shall read in John’s Gospel later this morning:

“The light shines in the darkness, but the darkness has not understood it... The true light that gives light to every man was coming into the world.” (John 1.5, 9)

In his careful use of language here, John is countering the theological position called dualism: the idea that there are two equally opposed forces at work in the universe: good and evil; light and darkness.

John asserts with the Jewish-Christian tradition of more than three thousand years, that darkness is only an absence of light; evil is but an aberration of good.

Light is our native home.

We are attracted by the light. Yes we are fascinated with evil, and often beguiled by it. But it is not our homeland. It is but a journey to far country.

The light recalls us to our senses. It reveals and shows true colours. It allows us to recognise and love our friends. It reveals the painful path ahead in loving our enemies. It is our hope in life’s dark hours.

And all this is encapsulated in this baby. In this Great Little One, who comes from his dwelling in unapproachable light to our dark world, that has always been shot through with his light, but has never really understood it.

And although we do not now fully understand it. We may not even know just why we came to church tonight. Yet we are attracted by this mysterious and compelling light.

Scripture asserts three things about the essence of God:
God is Spirit
God is Light and
God is Love.

And this is why we celebrate this baby’s birthday by commemorating his deathday and his glorious resurrection. Because the darkness was not able to overcome the light. Hate and malice cannot defeat love.

Remember tonight’s collect at the beginning of the mass:
“O God, who hast made this most holy night to shine with the brightness of the true light: grant we beseech thee, that we, who have known the mysteries of his light on earth, may also attain to the fruition of his joys in heaven.”

The joys of heaven have touched earth in this wonderful birth, so that light and love are inextricably bound up in this baby. Love came down at Christmas.

This Christmas night, receive the light and love of Christ in the sacrament set before you. Here is the mystery of the Christian faith enacted before you. Let the light of Christ draw you ever deeper into his love, as you receive this simple Christmas Presents of Bread and Wine.

Listen to the late John Betjeman:

And is it true? For if it is,
No loving fingers tying strings
Around those tissued fripperies,
The sweet and silly Christmas things...

... Can with this single Truth compare -
That God was Man in Palestine
And lives today in Bread and Wine.
(Last 2 stanza of ‘Christmas’ shortened)

“The people walking in darkness have seen a great light” Is 9.2

Prophecy & Politics

Preparing the Way

The Prophetic Voice in Politics

“Strengthen the weak hands, and confirm the feeble knees.” Is 35.3

This has been the prayer of many a curate at Sunday evening Benediction, which comes so soon after the last bottles of lunch have been drained. But it also reflects a ‘double theme’ which runs through Isaiah, and indeed all the prophets.

On the one hand, the prophets tell us, if we would but realise it, we are weak and depend on God for strength and encouragement more than we know.

On the other hand, having experienced that strengthening and support from God, we must in turn protect the weak and vulnerable in our society.

In most of the OT there was not yet developed an international dimension to this calling - that is to protect the weak and vulnerable in all the nations - indeed, a cursory reading of the OT prophets might leave you thinking that wholesale slaughter was the way of dealing with differences with neighbouring countries.

But there were hints in the prophets and law of a broader responsibility for universal care. So the refugees, sojourners, migrant workers - these are all singled out for particular care by the people of God.

And the prophets point forward all the time to an age when all the nations will be drawn into the loving purposes of God - a theme that is common to much of the Advent emphasis on the Second Coming of Christ.

This ‘looking forward’ has come to be so identified with prophecy, that in common language, prophecy is often synonymous with foretelling the future.

But it is not primarily that. It is speaking for God; bringing the message of God; reminding God’s people of the promises God has made to them and of the responsibilities he places on them.

In the 1960s and 70s, the charismatic movement produced a whole spate of modern-day prophets, exercising what they saw as the gift of prophecy referred to by St Paul in his list of gifts of the Spirit. There were many prayer cells where futures were foretold for various participants.

I remember my scepticism being fed by one particularly zealous young ‘prophet’ who started with the memorable words apparently spoken on behalf of the omniscient God: “Thus says the Lord: “I have nothing against you… as far as I know.””

Most biblical prophecy is in fact a forceful restatement of God’s principles for life and worship; and a forceful restatement of God’s love and mercy. The looking forward was in order to strengthen people in the eschatological hope of God’s coming. The idea that there would be a resolution when justice would be seen to be done.

On this 3rd Sunday in Advent, when we think of the role of John the Baptist, imprisoned and beheaded not for his religious beliefs, but because he meddled in politics; I want us to think about the church’s prophetic voice in politics.

We have only to look at the present war footing of the Britain and America to be reminded that politics is too important to be left to politicians.

The OT prophets, who play so prominent a part in our Advent preparations, knew no distinction between politics and prophecy.

What is our working definitions of politics? It is to do with authority, social structures, the exercise of power within society. The politics of different groups at different times in history have varied enormously. At present in the West, the two great shaping democratic ideologies have become capitalism and socialism.

Of course popularly, these are both regarded with great suspicion. As one cynic has put it: capitalism is man’s exploitation of man, whereas socialism is the exact opposite.

Now the OT prophets knew no distinction between politics and prophecy, because they operated within a theocracy. God was Head of State. His priests and prophets spoke on behalf of God and received revelations from him in the Divine Privy Council. There was no need of a king, but Israel demanded one, and reluctantly God gave them Saul and that was the beginning of the end of theocracy.

Over the two thousand years following the anointing of Israel’s first king, eventually the church became the new Israel and arguably, Christendom became the new theocracy. But now it was no longer prophets who spoke the voice of God, it was the rulers of church and state - which were often synonymous.

One of the struggles of the last three centuries in the West has been to try and separate religion from politics.

In America, they have constitutionally done it in theory, although not in practice. Whereas in Europe, we have generally done it in practice, while not in theory.

So where does that leave the prophetic voice in politics?

Some of you might raise a mild St Mary’s cheer if I were to answer that question - where does that leave the prophetic voice in politics? - with ‘nowhere!’.

But that has not been the response of the historic churches over the last century. It has been the response of some sects - the JWs, the Mormons, strict Calvinists; but it has not been the response of either mainline Protestants or Catholics.

Sometimes political intervention and a so-called prophetic voice has been disastrous. It has added to the bigotry and misunderstanding that divide nations and encourages mental and sometimes physical violence.

So although theocracy is all but dead, thank God - it is still advocated by some fundamentalists. There are those in Britain and America - restitutionists - who want to bring back a state that enforces OT law. I’ve read their leaflets, for instance, advocating that after a two week warning to ‘change your lifestyle’, gays should be executed. It would certainly ease congestion in central London, but most of us would not recognise this as the prophetic voice in politics.

But sometimes the prophetic voice has been heroic and Christlike in it’s attempts to bring peace and justice: Bonhoeffer, Romero, Mandella, and hopefully, Rowan Williams.

If the church is to speak into our society, including the political structures, in any sense as ‘for God’, then we are left with what the prophets majored on anyway - the broad sweep of Biblical ethics, reinforced by our Lord’s own teaching: summed up in Isaiah

“Cease to do evil; learn to do good; seek justice, correct oppression; defend the fatherless, plead for the widow.” (1.16)

or in Micah

“He hath shewed thee, O man, what is good; and what doth the LORD require of thee, but to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God?” (6.8)

Our Lord echoes these prophetic signposts with his command to love God with the totality of our being, and to love neighbour as self.

And this has little to do with party politics. When we say ‘we don’t like politics in the pulpit’ we usually mean we don’t like politics which are different from ours in the pulpit…

A Christian who is involved in politics - and thank God for the many who are - must in the end decide on certain policies; and these result from political ideologies.

But these political ideologies must never be presented as the prophetic voice of God. The church is on catastrophically shaky ground when it starts making policy statements. This is to try and return to a theocracy, where we presume to know the mind of God on specific issues.
The prophetic voice of the church in politics must always be to call our leaders to pay heed to those underlying truths of human authenticity: goodness, justice, mercy.

And to remember, lest we get above ourselves, that we need God’s help and Christ’s example in ordering our society.

Doesn’t it strike you sometimes, as you look at our world and some of the chaotic forces at work within it; the proliferation of nuclear arms; the development of biological weapons - just how fragile our world order is? That anarchy lurks just below the surface?

We need the humility to look at ourselves and others and to cry with the prophets:

“Strengthen the weak hands, and confirm the feeble knees.” Is 35.3

Coping with Change

Coping with Change

“Therefore, since we are receiving a kingdom that cannot be shaken, let us be thankful, and so worship God acceptably with reverence and awe” Hebrews 12.28

I must have told you about the strict Baptist minister visiting Newmarket. Out of curiosity he goes to the race course and knowing that nobody knows him there, decides to have a flutter. He goes to the paddock first and is intrigued to see a Catholic priest praying in Latin over a horse. He is even more surprised when it wins. The priest prays over two or three more horses and they all win.

So finally he lays half the church funds on the next horse the priest prays over. The horse starts well but then keels over before the first fence and dies. The minister is distraught and rushes to ask the priest what happened. “Ah that’s the trouble with you Baptists,” the priest replies, “you don’t know the difference between a blessing and the last rites.”

It’s said that the Seven Last Words of the Church will be “We’ve never done it that way before.” The Church does not have a good track record for coping with change. Whether it’s Copernicus and the earth going round the sun, or a new Archbishop who is being tried for heresy before his episcopal bottom has touched the throne.

And we Anglo-Catholics are sometimes the worst. ‘How many Anglo-Catholics does it take to change a light bulb?’ ‘Change!’

Heraclitus had the measure of things in his much slower culture than ours: “There is nothing permanent but change.”

And there is nothing more exhausting. Even young men and women grow weary. But continuous change is here to stay so we all have to learn to cope.

First there is a very important characteristic of the human psyche.

“All change is perceived as loss.”

When 70-year old George dies, we do not go to widow Edith with encouragements like: “He was pretty old and useless anyway, and there are plenty of younger, better men around. A younger husband would improve your image. So just forget George and get to like a new trendier husband.” Of course not. We understand bereavement.

I remember trying to get rid of the pews in one of my churches. I knew I had lost when I found myself denouncing the pews as uncomfortable, jerry-built, Victorian monstrosities. This was no way to prepare people for a bereavement.

What I and others said about the pews may well have been true, but their departure from people who had sat in them for 20, 30, 80 years would be perceived as a real loss. My arguments were pastorally insensitive. (They removed the pews ten years after I left.)

Alvin Toffler, in his classic work Future Shock, talks about PSZs - Personal Security Zones. We all need them and often they comprise familiar surroundings with the comfort that they bring. I still remember the secure feelings engendered by the gentle hiss of the gas heaters in my old church on a winter’s evening.

For the past 30 years the arrangement of bits and pieces in the drawers of my desk has changed very little. I don’t actually use the sealing wax in the Bendicks Bittermints box, but it is somehow comforting to know that it is there.

When for three weeks I was living out of boxes in the vestry down in Torquay, sleeping under the Communion Table where the carpet was cleanest, I thought I could cope until my nice new flat was ready.

But I couldn’t. My emotional life fell apart and more than once I found myself sitting on the floor in the corner of the vestry sobbing. My Personal Security Zones were shattered and the everyday stresses of ministry overwhelmed me. It was a great and painful spiritual lesson for me.

And what is often true about the routines of our daily life and ordering is sometimes even more true of our mindset.

It was George Bernard Shaw who observed that “Those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything.”

One of the hardest areas of change that we have to face up to is the change in our own theological outlook: our view of God and the church.

There is sometimes a psychological play-off we indulge in. As we become less certain about some of the doctrines of our faith we become more dogmatic about liturgical procedures. We may not be too clear any more about what we believe concerning heaven and hell, but we know exactly what speed the ‘Our Father’ should be sung!

Stephen Madden was a retired minister in his 90s when I went as a young minister down to Torquay.

What I admired greatly in him, was his ability to change his mind about various theological issues during his lifetime - even in his 80s. He was secure in his faith in Christ and there was little solid ground anywhere else. He would tell me of views he had held during his ministry, and then chuckled at the thought of them.

It is interesting that old age often gives security and the middle-aged are those most threatened in the church - the men and women who have to face up to so much change in the family and at work and so put all their PSZs in the church.

Of course too may changes at once can push the stress levels up to danger point. Gaius Davies in his book Stress, gives The Social Readjustment Rating Scale: ranging from 100 points for the death of a spouse, through 50 for marriage, 31 for taking out a mortgage, 24 for revision of personal habits, to 13 for the changes brought about by holidays and 12 points for Christmas! It’s a good chart to fill in when you wonder why you feel as though it’s your turn to have the nervous breakdown.

We counsel the bereaved not to make too many changes too soon, yet in personal growth and church life we often expect far too much too quickly. Despite modern technology and Instant Renewal, the mills of God still grind slowly. In my spiritual formation classes, I always encouraged students to try and change only one habit at a time, and even then to take at least six months per change. We all know that crash diets really don’t achieve much. It is the steady discipline of change that which brings about real growth in Christ.
Archbishop Stuart Blanche once wrote that “Change is the angel of a changeless God.”

All this unavoidable change is there to help us grow in grace. In the sovereign purposes of God, he has called us to be a pilgrim people. He constantly shakes our world (Heb.12.22-28) so that we can clearly discern the things that cannot be shaken and place all our hope in the City of God and Jesus Christ who is the same, yesterday, today and forever. (Heb.13.8)

If you read through the book of Numbers which tells of the Israelite pilgrims on their long journey from slavery in Egypt to the Promised Land, then you will see how again and again God reminds his people that their security is not in the ‘flesh pots of Egypt’, but in God himself.

Or while Abraham lived with God in his tents among the hills, his nephew, Lot preferred the security of the cities of Sodom & Gomorrah. But our Lord warns in the Gospels of the consequences of longing to go back to the secure Cities of the Plain with that enigmatic little phrase in Luke - “Remember Lot’s wife!” (Luke 17.32)

Whether it is personal change or change in our churches, they all throw us back onto God. “All my hope on God is founded” is never more true than in times of rapid change. Our faith is renewed; we come to an end of self and church ‘schemes’; we throw ourselves upon God and find in him our strength and shield.

Now an interregnum is not a time for major changes. It is hard enough to be bereft of our Vicar. For many of us he was a very important part of our Personal Security Zone. We are too fragile for too many changes too soon.

But it is a time for taking stock. For thinking about where we are, and praying about where we might be. Some will be frustrated because they want to get on with things. Others will be apprehensive about an uncertain future.

In these ‘in between’ days, the old nun’s prayer has never been truer:

God, grant me the Serenity
to accept the things I cannot change;
courage to change the things I can
and the Wisdom to know the difference.

And in all the changing scenes of life, we keep our eyes fixed on Jesus, the author and finisher of our faith, regular in our attendance at the sacraments, gratefully receiving the security of the Body and Blood of Christ. As the writer to the Hebrews puts it:

“Therefore, since we are receiving a kingdom that cannot be shaken, let us be thankful, and so worship God acceptably with reverence and awe” Hebrews 12.28

Edward the Confessor

Edward the Confessor and Faith

“For it is with your heart that you believe and are justified, and it is with your mouth that you confess and are saved.” Romans 10.10

One of the letters I had from a cousin after my father’s funeral commented on my eulogy. My family had wanted a non-religious service, but I had said in the course of the tribute “I am a Christian and so believe that my dad is now with God, and more alive than he has ever been, and that I shall see him again.”

My cousin wrote: “ It’s a shame that we can’t all believe that there will be life after death and that we will all be together one day. But it’s such a huge thing to believe. Paul, my husband, has such faith and I envy him.”

It is a genuine plea which I have heard so many times down through the years: “I wish I could believe.” And then they often add, “like you”. And I think, “if only you knew how I believe...”

How is it that some people seem to believe so fervently and deeply and others cannot believe even although they want to?

I make no apology for returning to a subject that we have looked at before because it is so important for our own self-understanding and for our understanding of the task laid upon us by our Lord to make disciples of all nations.

Today we remember one of the many rather dubious saints, Edward the Confessor. He was born in 1003 and became King Edward III in a roundabout way, when Hardicanute died unexpectedly in 1042.

He had a fruitless marriage to Edith Godwin, probably because he had taken a vow of celibacy and eventually banished her to a monastery. Rather extreme family planning.

Some historians blame him for the Norman invasion of 1066. If he had left an Anglo-Saxon heir, William the Conqueror might never have invaded.

Edward seems to have been a peaceful man and undertook no wars except to repel an inroad of the Welsh (and we can understand that), and to assist Malcolm III of Scotland against Macbeth, the usurper of his throne.

He was certainly a devout Christian, was very religious as a boy growing up in Normandy, took care of the poor when he was king, and decided to build a great Minster mausoleum to the West of the City of London on the site of St Peter’s Abbey - this became Westminster Abbey. It was consecrated only a week before his death in January 1066,

He was canonized by Pope Alexander III in 1161. His body was translated on this day in 1163 by St. Thomas of Canterbury in the presence of King Henry II.

So much for the history. But was it easier for Edward to believe than for us? Is the gift of faith somehow historically dependent? Did he live in an age of faith?

Well, in the long-term, faith is certainly dependent on our long human history.

And before we look at faith we should perhaps ask where did self-awareness come from in our evolutionary history, for there can be no faith without self-awareness?

Well, we don’t really know. About 3 million years ago - a mere nothing in comparison to the age of the earth. (If the 4 billion years of the earth’s existence are represented by a clock, then we are looking at just over half a minute ago.)

-about 3 million years ago, Neanderthal humans appeared with brains the size of the planet; brains bigger than any other animal on earth. And they used only a tiny proportion of that massive brain.

So late Neanderthals or maybe Cro-Magnon humans began to use this spare brain capacity for inventing language and tools and weapons; and then art and music; religion and laws; and eventually political parties and Kentucky Fried Chicken…

At some point, and the experts differ as to when, these humans started to reflect upon themselves. They realised they would die, like the animals which they killed to eat.

They realised they were conscious - they were self-conscious. Julian Jaynes in his controversial book The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind (Penguin 1990) (it would have sold a lot more copies if it had had a more memorable title) reckons that self-consciousness as we know it appeared less than 4 thousand years ago - that there was a dramatic shift in the hard wiring of the human brain. Most scientists think it was much earlier.

Whatever, our God-consciousness emerged as part of our self-consciousness.

Non-realist theologians, sometimes called textual nihilists (Don Cupitt and the Sea of Faith group) and many philosophers of other faiths and none, assert that God-consciousness is only an extension of our inward monologue.

In other words, it cannot be an awareness of a Mind that is ‘other’ and somehow separate from our own minds. It is a defence mechanism that religion provides to make sense of our existence. It is talking to ourselves.

This argument runs, that the elaborate development of religions is an internal trick that has served human evolution quite well. It has socialised us and, for quite long periods, stopped us living like the beasts we are, red in tooth and claw.

And the argument concludes that in the 20th and 21st centuries intelligent men and women can’t believe in this objective reality of God any more.

But of course many millions of people do believe. And many wish they could, and can’t.

Is it hard-wired in our brains? Is it in our psychological make-up? Is it a gift from God, given to some and not to others?

Remember Elsie whom I met in Southlands Hospital in my home town of Shoreham- by-Sea? She’s an elderly lady and Southlands is a dilapidated, run-down old 30s building, that was due to be rebuilt after the war.

She had been close to death at one point, and a bright young doctor had asked her, if she lapsed into unconsciousness, whether she wanted to be revived?

“I ask you” Elsie said, “I’m at the gates of Paradise and they ask me if I’d like to come back to Southlands!”

I envy that sort of faith.

The Myth of Certainty (Daniel Taylor, Word, 1986) is a book I found very helpful back in the late 80s when all the certainties of my faith seemed to be deserting me. I was sinking into post-hippy scepticism. And more importantly, I was turning grey and turning 40. I was beginning to think that faith was believing what you know isn’t true.

And so I learned, with many others down through the centuries, to abandon certainty and to embrace genuine biblical faith. That is, acknowledging what I believe - more strongly on some days than others - and acting upon it.

We cannot wish for the faith of others if we will not build on the little faith we have. “Lord I believe. Help thou my unbelief!” is the cry of all of us.

However intricately tied up our faith is with perhaps our genes, our psychology, our upbringing, an unpleasant experience with a nun...

If we wish to follow the likes of St Edward the Confessor, then we must act upon what we do believe.

There are certainly sufficient reasons for faith, but in our age in the West, few seem to find sufficient reason for a religious faith that results in action.

Biblical faith and hope always spring from action. If we believe half of what we are about to sing in the creed, then the hope and love which are the hallmarks of Christians, will flow from the actions we take in the light of that belief.

People stay away from church and sacraments and then complain that they find it hard to believe - it is hardly surprising. Those of us who come regularly to the altar often find it hard to believe!

People act in unloving and embittered ways and complain that they cannot believe in a God of love. It is hardly surprising.

John Donne, that early 17th century poet priest, was in some ways a great man of faith, another great confessor, and yet he hardly dared believe. He ends his Hymn to God the Father with these words.

I have a sin of fear, that when I have spun
My last thread, I shall perish on the shore;
But swear by thyself, that at my death thy Son
Shall shine as he shines now, and heretofore;
And, having done that, thou hast done;
I fear no more.

Whether we have great faith, or only a tiny mustard seed of faith, if we act upon it, and treat it as a revelation of God’s truth, the hope of the Gospel,we can be free from fear.

“For it is with your heart that you believe and are justified, and it is with your mouth that you confess and are saved.” Romans 10.10

Flesh & Spirit

Flesh & Spirit

“Walk in the Spirit, and ye shall not fulfil the lust of the flesh.” Gal 5:16

A prominent element of the religious culture in which I grew up in the 60s and 70s was the ‘testimony’: people telling us how they had been ‘saved’; how they had come to faith.

They were amazingly varied and many of them very moving, and some quite remarkable: Peter in front of his TV in Australia; Mary in her wheelchair in the orphanage chapel; Kevin in a memorable restaurant called Fudpuckers.

But there was a genre, usually recounted by burnt out looking thirty-somethings (I see a number of you here this morning), which ran along the lines: “There was no sin and debauchery to which I had not sunk (sometimes they went on to add “and then at the age of five...”).

Yet others would give you a tantalising glimpse of the sins and broad hints of the debauchery of their misspent youth. And I would often sit and complain to God that I’d become a Christian far to early to get a good crack at debauchery.

Today’s epistle from Paul’s difficult letter to the Galatians, contains this list, which even as a child you would mentally tick off as we ran the gamut of the sins of the flesh. [I was never sure what ‘lasciviousness’ was, but by the very sound of it, I’d committed it...]

Paul’s teaching on ‘the flesh’, or rather a misinterpretation of it, gave rise to a number of heresies in the early church.

These heresies were both to do with the person of Christ, and also to do with our attitude to the human body and to sex in particular: docetism, modal monarchianism, ascetic gnosticism, antinomianism - the names remain in the minds of all theological students long after the contents of the heresies have been forgotten.

The Scriptures, and Paul himself, use the word ‘flesh’ to convey a variety of meanings. Here’s half a dozen of them:

1 - Meat - Ps 78:27 “He rained flesh also upon them as dust...”
2 -The Body - the usually meaning of the Greek word ‘sarx’ (sarcasm - the rending of the flesh) - and of the equivalent Hebrew word for flesh.
3 - A Person - Gen 2:24 “Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife: and they shall be one flesh.”
4 - People - human race - Isa 40:5 “And the glory of the LORD shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together...”
5 - Frail human nature contrasted with God’s power - Mark 14:38 “The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak.” (You remember how the Russian translator struggled with this idiom and translated “The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak.” by “The vodka is OK but the meat is terrible.”)
6 - Fallen and perverse human nature - “the lust of the flesh”.

Or if you don’t like the biblical imagery of the fall in the garden of Eden, then you can follow Richard Dawkins and his ‘Selfish Gene’: we’re born that way - we’re part of nature, red in tooth and claw.

Or indeed if you look into your own soul, you know that it is easier to be selfish and self-centred than to be generous and altruistic - that takes effort.

This 6th meaning is what Paul has in mind in here in Galatians and he goes on to amplify it.

His hit list of fallen human nature covers three dominant areas of our lives: sexuality, spirituality and society.

1 Sexuality - fornication, impurity, licentiousness
- the pursuit of sex as an end in itself, regardless of the feelings, responsibilities and respect we owe to each other - and to society. And to society - Christianity is essentially a communal faith where individual freedoms are moderated by social responsibility.

This is very difficult to work out in our divided society where there are very varied sexual mores. And of course some would argue that what we do in the bedroom is nothing to do with wider society. This was the late Abp Runcie’s view expressed in his candid biography.

In our understanding of human relationships, intimacy and sexuality, we must certainly hear scripture; and we must certainly pay heed to the tradition of the Church; but we must also listen to wider human society - and I don’t just mean its liberalising clamour, nor its sometimes reactionary response to embarrassed confusion.

We have to recognise that in the last four thousand years, guided by God, much has changed in this area, and much, inevitably, has yet to change. It is only the underlying principles of Christian behaviour which remain constant.

2 Spirituality - on Paul’s list, idolatry & sorcery
- the need for human kind to worship and the danger of worshipping ‘other gods’ of our own making. For example:

- the cult of self - the body beautiful and self-gratification - fuelled by the
- the cult of money - the love of which is the root of all evil
- consumerism - shopping mall temples - Tesco ergo sum - retail therapy
- the cult of ‘my church’ - pride, intolerance and lack of Christian charity
- the cult of others - worshipping the lover, the spouse, the children

Each of us has our own personal idols which claim our devotion, may sap our energy and ultimately lead to disintegration and enslavement.

3 Society - enmities, strife, jealousy, anger, quarrels, dissensions, factions, envy, drunkenness, carousing
- the ills which fragment community life and lead to distrust, social isolation, pain and anguish.

So Paul’s ‘lust of the flesh’ is not to be confused simply with desire and the enjoyment of our bodily appetites. It is not primarily to do with what the President of the US did with a young assistant; or with what King David did with a beautiful married woman.

It is about why they did it; whether they abused their charisma to achieve it; and what they did subsequently - privately and publicly. These are the lusts of the flesh.

So what is the Apostle’s solution to this civil war within us - the backcloth of so much human history, literature and art; the backcloth of our war-riven century; the backcloth of our own experience of the messiness of life.

It is to walk in the Spirit, the Holy Spirit; to be what you are in Christ.

It is to have that attitude which was in Christ Jesus. Paul lists the fruit of this Spirit of Christ in relation to God, Others and Self.

God - love, joy, peace - these should be our characteristics.
Others - patience, kindness, generosity. I come across too many people in our churches who think a balanced personality means you have a chip on both shoulders.
Self - faithfulness, gentleness, self-control.

We crucify the flesh: we make those moment by moment decisions to exhibit the fruit of the Spirit rather than to follow our demanding animal self - the lust of the flesh - the selfish gene. And we need not only the help of God’s Spirit, but of his Word and Sacraments, and of his people, and of the best of his world.

At it’s very simplest level, it is like the young boy standing by the apple barrel outside the grocer’s: “Are you trying to steal one of my apples?” “No sir, I’m trying not to.”

Paul uses two verbs in this passage to describe the process: being led by the Spirit and walking in the Spirit. The one is primarily passive. The other is active.

To be led by the Spirit is to follow our inner desire for holiness: to pursue the good and the beautiful.

St Mary’s is rightly known for the beauty of its music and liturgy. But this is can become idolatrous unless it is also known as a place of worship and prayer. The Spirit leads us to God.

Then Paul talks of actively walking in the Spirit - ‘keeping in step’ with the Spirit - running with the Spirit.

Two men are running away from a grizzly bear that is gaining on them. One man stops and starts putting on running shoes. The other one says “it’s no use, we’ll never outrun the bear.” “As he finishes tying the laces he says “I know. But I’ve only got to outrun you...”

Paul uses the competitive metaphor of the runner to talk of the disciplines of the spiritual life. These have been the mainstay of authentic Christianity down through the centuries, and they have nurtured the fruit of the Spirit - love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control - in the lives those who like us, try to follow Christ.

So we must put ourselves in places where we can be led by the Spirit, and not by our selfish desires. And as we do that we will continue to train ourselves through the spiritual disciplines so that we can walk in the Spirit. Then we will know increasing growth in holiness and re-orietning of our desires and attitudes.

“Walk in the Spirit, and ye shall not fulfil the lust of the flesh.” Gal 5:16

Review- Priestly Identity

Priestly Identity: A Study in the Theology of Priesthood

Thomas J McGovern
Four Courts Press, Dublin, £19.65 (1-85182-655-6)

This is a book that makes me glad I am an Anglican. McGovern is a priest of the Opus Dei prelature and a student chaplain in Dublin and this substantial book is a model of Roman Catholic orthodoxy. It acknowledges at the outset that there is a crisis at hand, especially in Europe and North America, where defections from the priesthood run alongside a dramatic decline in vocations. The well-known former parish priest of St Francis of Assisi in West London, Oliver McTernan, is one of the most recent losses, lamenting the suppression of the reforming spirit of Vatican II. Of course McGovern’s book is a thinly veiled attack on the direction of Vatican II, if not on the actually content - which necessarily is beyond criticism. He argues that Catholicism ‘from about the time of Vatican II’ (what a coincidence) had begun to slide towards Reformation theology, especially in embracing notions of the priesthood of all believers. This in turn led to a functionalist view of priests, no longer keepers of the cult, but preachers of the word. He maintains that secularisation and agenda-specific cultural forces have lured priests into becoming Christian social workers, promoting the latest cultural issue, whether feminism or ecology.

McGovern has been inspired by the teachings of the present Pope, John Paul II, and quotes from them extensively. He responds to the Holy Father’s 1985 analysis of the clerical crisis that sees the underlying problems as anaemic spirituality, theological dissent and deficient formation, by suggesting that priestly identity needs to be clarified in three overlapping areas: theological, spiritual and pastoral.

McGovern’s last major work was Priestly Celibacy Today (1998) so it is hardly surprising that he devotes one of the first 4 chapters, dealing with theological issues, to re-affirming the centrality of celibacy. He returns to this theme at other places in the book especially as he examines the need for a unity between the spiritual life of the priest and his ministry, a unity which would prevent the dysfunctionality which has surfaced in all the current sexual scandals. It is in the three chapters on the spiritual life and five on pastoral ministry that I found the most resonances and challenges. Although in the section on Mary the ‘Mother of priests’ I found the assertion that ‘in the Eucharist we receive not only the verum corpus natum ex Maria virgine but, in a very real sense, Mary’s own flesh and blood for our nourishment’ hard to swallow.

The book is written primarily for Roman priests but at a time when lay presidency at the Eucharist is being discussed within Anglicanism, this will fuel the conservative arguments.

Church Times

Chosen

Chosen

2nd after Trinity: Gen 12.1-4; 1 John 3.13-24; Lk 14.16-24

“God said to Abraham… I will bless you… so that you will be a blessing.”

Did you hear that the Queen was shaking hands with someone in the crowd on Tuesday, when the person’s mobile phone went off. The Queen quickly said; “You’d better answer it. It may be someone important.”

We were singing in the Fox last week, for purely educational purposes, one of the expunged verses of All things bright and beautiful...

“The rich man in his castle, the poor man at his gate;
God made them high and lowly, and ordered their estate.”

Is it God who orders our destiny? Prince or pauper? Famous or infamous? Is it indeed God’s “good providence” which we invoked in the opening collect today, which governs all our lives?

In that wonderful legal ecclesiastical language, George is Archbishop of Canterbury by Divine Providence; whereas poor Richard is Bishop of London, merely by Divine Permission.

A cynic of course might say that both phrases boil down to ‘Tony Blair’.

And then there is today’s text from Genesis 12, where God chooses Abraham to become the father of the Chosen Race.

How odd of God to choose the Jews.

This little aphorism enshrines a very disturbing theological principle of the Judaeo-Christian tradition: divine choices often leave both the subject of the choice and those who observe it, bemused or bewildered.

In the words of the book of Proverbs: “Man proposes; God disposes.”

Or in our Lord’s words: “You did not choose me; I chose you.” (John 15.16)

The doctrine of predestination was an unsuccessful attempt to give theological shape to this part of the character of God that is basically unfathomable.

This is the ‘u’ in ‘TULIP’ - the little mnemonic for remembering the central tenets of Calvinism: total depravity, unconditional election, limited atonement, irresistible calling, perseverance of the saints.

But you end up with a capricious and almost vicious god, and a view of life that is fatalistic. (Like the Calvinist who fell down stairs and said “Thank goodness that’s over with.”)

Paul begins to get to the nub of the matter when he talks of God’s choosing in the same sentence as he says - lest any man should boast.

“For by grace are ye saved through faith; and that not of yourselves: it is the gift of God: Not of works, lest any man should boast.” (Eph 2.8, 9)

There is at the heart of God’s dealing with humanity, a desire to confound; and at the same time to reveal. It seems it is the only way to deal with us in order to save us from self-destruction - both individually and perhaps as human kind.

So at Babel there is the confusion of languages, the confounding of the superstate’s plans, in order, Genesis 11 tells us, to save humanity from the dangerous consequences of its own folly.

Our Lord quotes the prophet Isaiah when explaining why he uses parables such as today’s Gospel lesson.

“That seeing they may see, and not perceive; and hearing they may hear, and not understand; lest at any time they should be converted, and their sins should be forgiven them.” (Mark 4.12)

To confound and to reveal - this is the mystery of our faith. The mystery of this Sacrament. It is what calls us to walk by faith rather than by sight. (2 Cor 5.7)

But, unhappy with the loose ends our faith throws up, we attempt to justify everything; to square the circle. At one level that is what theological debate and trying to understand life is all about. But part of our childlike faith is being able to accept that there are some things, however hard we struggle, that we will never understand.

Mortals are contingent to the universe. They are not the authors of it. We rightly wrestle to increase our knowledge of the way things are. But that knowledge, by definition, can never be exhaustive.

I met up with a lad I taught at Lancing the other day (he’s now 45...) and we were remembering all the justifications boys came up with for not doing their work. One boy whose looks and charm made up for what he lacked in brains smiled as he told me “I had to go to lunch with my broker in Brighton, otherwise I wouldn’t have been able to pay your salary.”

So we want to justify God (what theologians call a theodicy).

And we want to justify ourselves.

Sometimes we try to justify God by saying he chooses ‘the good’ for special blessing and special purposes. There seems to be lots of evidence in Scripture for this, especially in the OT.

It’s the righteous who are blessed and used.

But even Scripture struggles with this and isn’t it in the book of Hezekiah that we read that the rain falls on the just and the unjust, but mainly on the just because the unjust have stolen their umbrellas?

The wisdom literature of the Bible knows that plenty of bad things happen to good people. And Scripture is also brutally honest in showing us that many of the saints were bigger sinners than you and I will ever manage to be.

Ahh, but deep down God knew they were good at heart? This is why he chose them and blessed them.

Well, yes and no. The heart is wicked and deceitful above all things. The heart is fickle. Actions and the state of our heart are bound up together in a complex way. This is what today’s first epistle of John is labouring to say.

We cannot ignore the plain truth that the men and women that God has chosen to do remarkable things in the history of the world, have by and large been flawed humans - sometimes ordinary, sometimes exceptional, but always flawed.

The fact is, that there is no justification of God. His dealings with us are always mysterious.

But we also try to justify ourselves. And by this I mean that we say, we’re not holy enough or good enough to be used by God.

We keep a sort of mental hierarchy of whom God will bless and use - Our Lord - Mary - saints & martyrs - bishops - missionaries - priests - deacons - churchwardens - PCC members - right down to advertising executives.

“God can’t use me.” And that lets us off the hook.

But the mysterious workings of God mean that he can use even earthenware jars (as St Paul puts it) such as we are. We presume too much when suppose he cannot use us in some way to bring in the kingdom of God. We are all chosen and blessed. And so that, like Abraham, we can be a blessing to others.

Today’s parable of the Great Banquet is not primarily about God rejecting the stubborn pharisees and taking the Gospel Banquet to the Gentiles. Nor is it an endorsement of the pharisees’ chosen status as the children of Abraham.

Rather it is about the wideness of God’s grace. The invitation goes out far and wide. There need be no ‘outsiders’ for the Messianic Banquet. All are invited to enjoy God’s blessing at the Table. Those who would, may come.

God said to Abraham and he says to each of us: “I will bless you… so that you will be a blessing.”

Living in Between

Living in Between

"the end of all things is near..." 1 Peter 4.7

A church member who was a devout golfer, getting ready for retirement, came to talk to his priest one day. "Tell me, Father," he demanded, "are there going to be golf courses in heaven? I have to know."
"Well," said his priest, "I'm not really sure, but tonight I'll say a special prayer and see if God will tell me the answer."
The next Sunday, when the service ended and the congregation was shaking hands with the priest on the way out, the golfer cornered him again. "Did you get the answer, Father? Are there going to be golf courses in heaven?"
Well, George," the priest replied, "I've got good news and bad news. Which do you want to hear first?"
"Tell me the good news first," George said.
"The good news is that, yes, there are golf courses in heaven. Beautiful courses, where the sun is always shining, the rough is not too deep, there are no sand traps, and you never have to wait to tee off."
"Hey, that's great!" exclaimed the golfer excitedly. "But what's the bad news?"
"Well, the bad news is that St Peter has you down to tee off this coming Tuesday morning at 8."

Christians are arguably always caught up in the 'in-between times'. They never arrive. It is in the nature of our faith. And although we would sometimes like to know our future, it is better that we should not know. The Bible tells us all we need to know about the future and about living 'in between'.

First there was the time between the Garden of Eden and the giving of the Law to Moses.

Then between the giving of the Law and the coming of the Messiah, the fulfilment of the Law.

And for the early disciples there was the wait between the events of Holy Week, and the coming of the Spirit at Pentecost.

And some years after Pentecost Peter is able to announce that the Church was still 'in between', but that the end was nigh. The apparent delay of the Lord's Second Coming was always a problem for the early church which Peter and Paul sought to address.

So here we are on an 'in-between' Sunday - with Ascension last Thursday and Pentecost still a week away. In the drama of the liturgical year we are to wait until the Spirit comes.

When I was but a young man in Sussex I went with my Pentecostal friends to 'tarrying meetings' - from the words of our Lord to his disciples in Luke's Gospel: "but tarry ye in the city of Jerusalem, until ye be endued with power from on high." (Lk 24.49)

- we were to pray and wait for the Spirit to fall - or for 9pm - whichever came earliest.

I remember inviting the local Pentecostal pastor to preach at my church in Camberwell and explaining that the service had to finish by noon. He looked at me as if I were mad and exclaimed: "But sometimes the Holy Ghost don't get here till 12.30!"

So was the Holy Spirit inactive until the day of Pentecost? Or to put it another way, did God the Son do nothing until he was born in Bethlehem?

The revelation of God in Trinity has had particular foci - historical events - over the past five thousand years. But the work of Father, Son and Holy Spirit has been evident, retroactively if you like, throughout all of history.

So before the Law was itemised on Mt Sinai, men and women still had consciences, and societies drew up their own laws. St Paul talks about this in the opening chapters of his letter to the Romans.

And before the saving work of Christ's passion, men and women were still saved through faith in a merciful God. The letter to the Hebrews makes it clear.

And before the day of Pentecost, God's Holy Spirit was at work through prophets and kings, through harlots and pagan dictators. Scripture bears witness to it.

Now on this Sunday in the year of our Lord, 2004, we are in between that first Pentecost nearly 2000 years ago, and the end of the world, or our own death, whichever comes sooner.

Does that mean that we will see nothing of the kingdom of heaven until 'the end of all things', the consummation of the age, the dissolution of the cosmos?

No! Before that time, retroactively, the kingdom of God is the ideal towards which we must struggle. As we will say in a moment: "Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, in earth as it is in heaven."

This was the objective of Adam and Eve as they were cursed and expelled from the garden. They would not re-enter the kingdom of heaven through the garden gate, guarded by the angel with the flaming sword.

They would only move towards paradise regained through the passion of Christ and with the help of the Holy Spirit.

It's not as if God was holding out on everyone until the day of Pentecost. As if he commanded them to love God with heart and soul and mind, and neighbour as self, way back in Deuteronomy; but had no intention of giving them the means to do so for a thousand years!

The in-between times have always been as potent as the special events. Becoming is every bit as important as arriving. All of our life, as human beings, is caught up with 'in between', which is one reason that we are so preoccupied with the passing of time. When we are young we cannot wait till the next event. When we are old we wait with some apprehension for the one and only event left for us.

Peter puts it in these practical words of wisdom: "The end of all things is near; therefore be serious and discipline yourselves for the sake of your prayers. Above all, maintain constant love for one another, for love covers a multitude of sins." (1 Peter 4.7,8)

A consistent theme through Scripture is to live as if life matters; to make our life count for God and for others. In the words of our Lord: "I have come that ye might have life, and have it more abundantly."

Peter's little summary here may be paraphrased that we are to live thoughtfully, prayerfully and lovingly. This will cover a multitude of sins. Sin is that destructive agent at work in our life and in our world. It is trapped in the 'in between' time with us.

But Christ has dealt with sin, and if we will live by the Spirit, then sin will not have dominion over us.

So Peter calls for 'fervent charity'. This is Paul's song as well - without charity, Christian love, all is a waste of time. If we are thoughtful, and spiritual, then we should judge our words and actions by love. To neglect this divine injunction is to live in a way that leads to destruction - both personal and social.

A policeman stops a man driving the wrong way up a one way street. "Didn't you see the arrows?" he asks. The driver replies "I didn't even see the Indians!"

What is important about living in between time, is seeing the arrows. It is knowing where we have come from and where we are heading. Of course we don't always get it right, which is why we need the constant reminders of which way the arrows are pointing.

The whole of this mass is a restatement of the saving acts of God which punctuate our history and motivate our day by day living 'in between'. And the mass points us to the future - Christ has died; Christ is risen; Christ will come again.

It is the future, whose power is present now, that draws us on, to the time when there will be no more 'in between'; to the eternity of God.

Meanwhile, we are the 'becoming' ones, always growing and moving on. I'm reminded of that now rather quaint desription of this process as it is described in the 1920s children's story The Velveteen Rabbit by Marjory Williams:

"The Skin Horse had lived longer in the nursery than any others. He was so old that his brown coat was bald in patches and showed the seams underneath, and most of the hairs in his tail had been pulled out to string bead necklaces. He was wise, for he had seen a long succession of mechanical toys arrive to boast and swagger, and by-and-by break their mainsprings and pass away, and he knew that they were only toys, and would never turn into anything else. For nursery magic is very strange and wonderful, and only those playthings that are old and wise and experienced like the Skin Horse understand all about it.
"What is REAL?" asked the Rabbit one day, when they were lying side by side near the nursery fender, before Nana came to tidy the room. "Does it mean having things that buzz inside you and a stick-out handle?"
"Real isn't how you are made," said the Skin Horse. "It's a thing that happens to you. When a child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but REALLY loves you, then you become Real."
"Does it hurt?" asked the Rabbit.
"Sometimes," said the Skin Horse, for he was always truthful. "When you are Real you don't mind being hurt."
"Does it happen all at once, like being wound up," he asked, "or bit by bit?"
"It doesn't happen all at once," said the Skin Horse. "You become. It takes a long time. That's why it doesn't often happen to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don't matter at all, because once you are Real you can't be ugly, except to people who don't understand."
Margery Williams, The Velveteen Rabbit, Heinemann 1989 (1922)

In the 'in between' we are becoming - drawing closer to Christ personally, and trying to shape our society on the coming kingdom principles of justice and mercy.

Christian hope is the ability to hear the music of the future.
Faith is the courage to dance to it in the present.

In the power of the risen Lord Jesus, may we live wisely in these 'in between' times.

Shepherd & Bishop

Shepherd & Bishop

Ezek 34.11-16; John 10.10-20; 1 Peter 2.19-25

“Ye were as sheep going astray; but are now returned unto the Shepherd and Bishop of your souls.” 1 Pet 2.25

If I get asked one more time who I think should be the next Archbishop of Canterbury... and I reply the same way every time: “Tony, you’ve got to decide...”

There are of course a number of parallels between church and state.

For just as democracy is the safest way of preserving social freedom, so episcopacy is arguably the safest way of maintaining Christian liberty.

Good bishops and priests are able to curb excesses among themselves and their people; and are able to nurture and protect themselves and those in their charge.

And both democracy and church order are necessary because of the Flaw in every human being. The Flaw that produces the atrocities that mark each succeeding century; the Flaw that sometimes mars our families and relationships; the Flaw that is able to draw us spiralling down in self-hatred.

And it’s because of that Flaw that Peter is able to state quite simply: “Ye were as sheep going astray;”

A common theme, and not a very flattering one, runs through many biblical metaphors, from Genesis to Revelation: we are wandering children, roaming sheep, stubborn mules, deserting disciples, straying lovers.

This is not only the reality of the human condition, but it is the reality of our Christian condition. There is no ‘Sinless Perfection’, as the heresy is called, this side of the Pearly Gates.

The great Victorian Preacher Spurgeon, in one of many apocryphal stories, is said to have invited a couple of ‘sinless perfectionists’ to dinner, and when they were least expecting it, emptied a jug of cold water over their heads. He remarks that ‘they were not as sinless as they claimed to be’.

It is in our nature to want God when we need him and to want the freedom to go our own way and do our own thing at all other times.

But in that paradoxical way that God deals with us, as we really are, this is a converting condition for us - it drives us to God.

Because we do truly want God, when we need him, so our deepest needs drive us to our deepest beliefs. When we recognise that we are needy, then we understand why we must believe.

The cynic of course will always say that we ‘make up’ what we believe in order to give us comfort in our need. It is the cynic’s right to believe this, and ours to doubt it.

This morning’s OT lesson from Ezekiel was certainly in the mind of Jesus, John and Peter as they spoke and wrote. The prophet expands the understanding of our need in the words of God, the shepherd and bishop of our souls to which Peter is alluding. So God says:

“I will seek the lost, and I will bring back the strayed, and I will bind up the injured, and I will strengthen the weak, but the fat and the strong I will destroy. I will feed them with justice.” (Ezekiel 34.16)

Here is insight written two and a half thousand years ago, but describing our frail mortality.

We are lost - we sometimes do not know who we are, or what we believe, or who loves us, if anybody.

We have strayed - although we knew the way to go, we have deliberately, or neglectfully, wandered away.

We are injured - life, with all its unexpected and sometimes unwanted twists and turns, has left our minds and bodies in need of repair. Our consciences are scarred.

We are weak - for we know what noble creatures we should be and yet so often we dabble in the mud.

We are arrogant and unjust - we dare to play at god and even to oppress others, physically or psychologically.

So will God punish us? No!

You know the story of the guide who was explaining to the Holy Land pilgrims how an eastern shepherd always leads his flock from the front, gently guiding the sheep who trustingly follow. Unlike the western shepherds who drive the flock forward from behind.

Just then they drove past a dozen sheep being herded from behind by a man with a large staff and a loud voice. The guide immediately jumped out of the coach to investigate. He soon returned, and obviously relieved he declared: “He’s a butcher, not a shepherd!”

There is that common view of God as the Bad Butcher rather than the Good Shepherd!

“I will seek the lost, and I will bring back the strayed, and I will bind up the injured, and I will strengthen the weak, but the fat and the strong I will destroy. I will feed them with justice.” (E z 3416)

Jesus, whom John characteristically casts as God in replaying the Ezekiel passage, echoes the words of the prophet: “I will feed them with rich pasture.” So Jesus says in the verse before where our Gospel started today: “I came that they may have life, and have it abundantly.”

Peter’s message in the pastoral epistles is the same: that God cares and wants us to live full lives.

When we grasp this reality of our faith in the God and father of our Lord Jesus Christ, then we will want to return to the Shepherd and Bishop of our souls, to find rich pasture for our life.

St Ignatius of Antioch was around in the first century at about the same time that this letter of Peter and John’s Gospel was written. He once commented: “A bishop never more resembles Jesus Christ than when his mouth is closed.”

Beyond the humour, there is deep wisdom in this, and imagery which was common in the early church: an allusion to Christ who is both sheep and shepherd.

So the early church applied Isaiah 53 to Jesus when the prophet uses the image of the Suffering Servant: “as a sheep before her shearers is dumb, so he openeth not his mouth.”

The Good Shepherd, or ideal shepherd, or Jesus’s words can even be translated ‘beautiful shepherd’, perhaps harking back to Samuel’s description of David, Israel’s Shepherd King: ‘ he was ruddy, and had beautiful eyes, and was handsome’ (1 Sam 16.12)...

The Good Shepherd meekly lays down his life for the sheep. He knows them and they know him. There is mutual confidence, trust and mutual responsibility.

The word Bishop, which means overseer or guardian, speaks of this mutual responsibility. And it hints that we have it not just towards our Lord, but towards all those who care for us: our bishops and the priests to whom they have given the cure of souls.

It also reminds us of another heavy theme of Scripture: care for one another; love of God and neighbour.

I was on the edge of a conversation the other day when the vicar of a struggling church was accusing a leader from a big evangelical church of sheep stealing.

The vicar was a difficult man, who may have missed his calling as a bear tamer. In the end, the evangelical, rather exasperated, remarked: “we don’t steal sheep, we just grow good grass.”

[For a moment I thought I had uncovered a n evangelical drug cartel...]

And of course it is true, that if we do care for one another - not with that smothering, overzealous care, that in the free churches is called ‘heavy shepherding’ - wonderful imagery -

- if we do care for one another, and for the other sheep who are not of our flock, not in our clique, then we will grow in grace and the likeness of Christ, and perhaps even in numbers.

On this Good Shepherd Sunday, as it is sometimes called, let us be encouraged to believe that Christ, our Shepherd and Guardian, wants to lead us in green pastures, to restore our souls. He is a shepherd not a butcher.

And let us remember our responsibilities to him and to each other, to be loving and careful; to speak and to act in such a way as builds up the Body of Christ. We are shepherds, not butchers.

For “Ye were as sheep going astray; but are now returned unto the Shepherd and Bishop of your souls.” 1 Pet 2.25

Ascension 2002

Ascension Day

“until the day in which he was taken up, he spoke of the things, pertaining to the kingdom…” Acts 1.3

Sometimes, when I’m surfing the net, which being interpreted for the Luddites means, spending two hours on the computer gathering fascinating information from around the world while in fact trying to find the time of the train from Waterloo to Esher...

...when I’m surfing the net, I think, all this is done with the two numbers 0 & 1; or more simply, with ‘off’ and ‘on’. There is an electric current, or there is not. The computer knows nothing of nuances; there are no middle positions; there is no New Labour.

The scourge of good theology has often been this cybernetic polarity; the simple either/or which is rarely illuminating, but can at least serve to point us towards the both/and; the media via for which Anglicanism is both famous and famously mocked.

At the Ascension of our Lord, the disciples fell into two opposing errors:

1 The Political Error
“Lord, wilt thou at this time restore again the kingdom to Israel?” (v.6)

Calvin comments scathingly on this enquiry from the disciples: “there are as many errors in this question as words.”

The disciples still thought, after these three years and all the events of Easter, and Christ’s teaching during the past 40 days about the kingdom, that he was to establish an earthly Utopia, with himself as King.
But as long as human nature is flawed - that is until the end of the cosmos - there will be the need for democracy.

Democracy is the political way in which we recognise the limits and weaknesses of all human institutions, whether in society or in the church. There can be no Theocracy. The Pope is but a man.

Frustrating and imperfect as they are, synods and councils are the safest way forward, for since Christ has ascended, there can be no heaven on earth. Humanity is not perfectible. Nature will always be ‘red in tooth and claw’.

2 The Pietist Error
“why stand ye gazing up into heaven?” (v.11)

There are those who are so disillusioned with the Big Bad World, and so daunted by its challenges, that they would rather stand gazing into heaven, hoping for a glimpse of the heavenly Jesus, hoping he will come back to establish an earthly kingdom.

They call people to devotion at the expense of action. They look to the ‘then’, and endure the ‘now’.

Or in our own tradition, sometimes like the early Gnostics, they make heaven so spiritual and earth so carnal, that it ceases to matter how they live here on earth - for only the spiritual counts.

Whichever way - excessive piety or careless indulgence - it is not the way of Christ. Since he has ascended, there is a better way.

It is the way of the Spirit. The way of the kingdom.

The disciples were sent to wait for the Holy Spirit. At Pentecost he is to give them heavenly power for earthly responsibility.

I was reading that little booklet today by Canon Donald Gray about Percy Dearmer (The British Museum Religion) - you can tell I have 101 unpalatable tasks to do when I’m reduced to reading tracts about Percy Dearmer.

And I was struck by the sentence about Dearmer: “At Oxford the art master’s son began to realise that there were social, political and religious implications behind his natural instinct to celebrate beauty.” (p.4) Dearmer struggled to follow the media via between these two errors over the following years.

He pursued God through the beauty of Anglo-Catholic liturgy, and at the same time he worked for social justice and to establish the kingdom of God on earth.

Christ, our warrior-king, the priest-victim, returns into his own kingdom. He ascends triumphant, leading captivity captive, commanding us to wait with bated breath for the gift of the Spirit, who will save us from error, lead us into all truth and enable us to live on earth as citizens of the eternal kingdom.

“until the day in which he was taken up, he spoke of the things, pertaining to the kingdom…” Acts 1.3

Death of Queen Mother - Easter Day 02

The Christian Hope
Easter Day

“ But we do not want you to be uninformed, brothers and sisters, about those who have died, so that you may not grieve as others do who have no hope. For since we believe that Jesus died and rose again, even so, through Jesus, God will bring with him those who have died.”
” (1 Corinthians 4.13,14)

We mourn the loss of our beloved Queen Mother, on the day that we rejoice in our beloved Lord’s resurrection.

And St Paul tells us, not, that we should not grieve, but that we should not grieve as those with no hope.

Of course we will grieve. It is a symptom of our humanity; it is a sign of our affection for a good woman who has figured in the backdrop of our lives since before any of us were born.

But as Christians, on this First Day of the Week; on this First Day of the New Creation; on this Resurrection Morning which lifts the pallor of our lenten disciplines...

...as Christians, we grieve with hope: the hope that she who has lived life long and full, is now complete and summed up in Christ who is the firstfruits from the dead.

Elizabeth is not just a memory. She is not ‘kept alive in our hearts’. She is kept alive by the power of God who raised Jesus Christ from the dead. And this our hearts know well although our heads are full of doubt.

I first learned grief from children’s stories. When I was too young to read, my father told me stories of an imaginary boy called Alby. But soon I was reading Rupert Bear - those lovely picture books with the rhyming couplets under each picture.

And then Worzel Gummidge, and then Mary Norton’s The Borrowers. I suppose I was 8 or 9 when I began to cry at the end of books - not just because the enchanting story was ended, but because I was old enough to realise that there was no Rupert Bear and Badger; no Earthy Mangold; no Ariadne. They were created in my imagination and then went into oblivion when I turned the last page.

But what of Jesus? That gentle, blond, blue-eyed man in all the pictures around my Sunday School walls. There he was surrounded by all the children of the world - “red and yellow, black and white, all are precious in his sight...” And there he was with the disciples, who looked rather like my local football team - except for one who was dark and looked menacing, and had a large nose - obviously Judas.

Did gentle Jesus too pass into oblivion when we had finished the story, when the Gospel was shut?

We have enacted The Story again through this Holy Week, and as 21st century scientific postmoderns, the Queen Mother’s death and this resurrection Sunday leaves us pondering the same Big Question which is at the heart of our faith and the root of all our doubts.

We can express it in that classical exam question form:
A: Is the idea of a God who became a human being, who died and rose again, a myth which nurtures the ‘Christ within us’; which releases the power of that myth at the heart of our own consciousness; an ancient by-product of human self-awareness?

OR

B: Is there a reality which is beyond the cosmos, the First Cause of the cosmos, a Being who is the Ground of our Being; a transcendent God revealed in the man Christ Jesus?

If you ticked A, then the Easter story ends in the darkness of Good Friday. I was arguing with an atheist in a pub yesterday afternoon and found myself quoting Sartre, “There is darkness without and when I die there will be darkness within.” All the other high-flown talk about the power of myth is whistling in the dark. Although of course priests like Don Cupitt and the Sea of Faith group, the so-called non-realists, or textual nihilists, would deny this. They somehow find hope for living in this myth tradition; this psychological self-trickery.

And if you ticked B when in fact A is correct, then as St Paul puts it, you of all men are most to be pitied. For you have lived your life on a lie. You have supposed there is ultimate meaning when there is none. Life is a Cabaret if you’re lucky, and a Nightmare on Elm Street if you’re not.

But wait a minute, we’re Anglicans. We don’t do ‘tick one box only’. We tick both and keep our options open.

But by ticking both boxes, we are making a profoundly Christian statement. The Answer to the Big Question is A because of B.

In other words: Yes we see the dying and rising myth enacted everywhere around us, and it has deep resonances within our psyche. Christ is within us, and the image of God is implanted within every human.
And the self-awareness of most humans for most of the last 10,000 years has been caught up with god-awareness.

And this is not surprising, for there is a God who is out there, beyond space and time, who has seeded us with longings of immortality. He is there and he is not silent. He woos us to faith by his wounds of love.

Let’s bring it back to the events we celebrate this Easter Day.

Of course I believe in the Death & Resurrection of Jesus both theologically and historically; and I have experienced that new-life-through-death which the Spirit works in me personally. I would not dare stand here unless, having not seen, yet, I have believed.

And yet… at a very deep level I cannot conceive a dead Man resurrected to a new and supernatural state of being. It is alien to all I experience in my everyday world of life and stay-dead death. It relates more to the powerful imagery of legend, saga and myth, whether The Iliad or Harry Potter or The Lord of the Rings.

But if it is just myth, A and not B, then I take no comfort from it. For that would be to deceive myself and others. I want no fairy story to sweeten the bitter pill of life, and more to the point, of death.

Having not seen, I am drawn by the authenticity of Christ and his people, to believe.

That great student of myth, CS Lewis, puts it well: “The heart of Christianity is a myth which is also a fact.” (1979:43) Mythology is full of dying and rising gods. But in Christianity, “we pass from a Balder or an Osiris, dying nobody knows when or where, to an historical Person crucified under Pontius Pilate…” (Eng ed of God in the Dock, Collins, 1979:44)

We are indeed people of the Empty Tomb, and yet we must not rob the Death, Resurrection and Ascension of Christ, of the mystery and potency of myth. Or as Lewis puts it: “ We must not be ashamed of the mythical radiance resting on our theology.” (1979:44/5 ‘Myth Became Fact’ is in Undeception and also in God in the Dock, Eng & US eds)

“…the mythical radiance resting on our theology…”

If only ‘seeing is believing’, then I am an unbeliever. If WYSIWYG - what you see is what you get - then, eat drink and be merry, for tomorrow we die.

The captain on the bridge of a large naval vessel saw a light ahead on a collision course. He signalled, "Alter your course ten degrees south." The reply came back, "Alter your course ten degrees north."
The captain then signalled, "Alter your course ten degrees south. I am a captain." The reply: "Alter your course 10 degrees north. I am a seaman third-class."
The furious captain signalled, "Alter your course ten degrees south. I am a battleship." The reply: "Alter your course ten degrees north. I am a lighthouse."

There are some things that are just non-negotiable. The Resurrection of Christ is a non-negotiable part of our Christian faith.

Today we celebrate the cornerstone of our faith. Christ is Risen, and because he is risen, because I choose to believe that he is risen, then I encounter True Myth. The Holy Spirit gives me a hope that I cannot explain, but which has been the at the heart of Christian experience through the centuries.

Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother believed this and millions of ordinary Christians through the centuries have staked their lives upon this truth.

“We do not want you to be uninformed, brothers and sisters, about those who have died, so that you may not grieve as others do who have no hope. For since we believe that Jesus died and rose again, even so, through Jesus, God will bring with him those who have died.”
(1 Corinthians 4.13,14)

Review - Challenging Catholics

Challenging Catholics: A Catholic-Evangelical Dialogue

Dwight Longenecker & John Martin
Paternoster, 2001 £? (1-84227-096-6)

We don’t burn each other any more. We are terribly polite and try to respect one another’s positions. And it is very fashionable for evangelicals to have catholic spiritual directors. But we also rarely engaged in honest debate about the issues that divide. All the things you’d hope to be discussed are found here: the Bible, the Pope, Mary, transubstantiation, purgatory, praying to the saints and more.

It’s humorous, good natured and very informative, yet a debate between Anglo-Catholics and Roman Catholics would perhaps reveal some more telling theological differences which are already forcing their way on to the Christian agenda. Both these authors come from the zealous and largely traditional factions of their denominations which give them a great deal in common.

Church Times

Review - Learning to Dance

Learning to Dance

Michael Mayne
DLT £9.95 (0-232-52434-3)

It is Lent and so a confession is appropriate. I know a book reviewer who does not always read every word of the book he reviews. But I did read every word of this book. And kept thinking of people to whom I must give a copy. It is Mayne at his best, reflecting in retirement on life, science, literature, music, art, heaven and everything. His rich life as a priest, Head of BBC Radio’s Religious Broadcasting, Dean of Westminster, Vicar of Great St Mary’s Cambridge, all feed into a book that is both an apologetic for the reasonableness of Christianity, and an autobiography of the interior life.

The twelve chapters follow the months of the year and themes reflected in the medieval Books of Hours. So April moves from gardening to explore the vastness of the cosmos and is an excellent explanation of contemporary cosmology in ordinary language. (There are a couple of terminological and mathematical slips here to keep pedants on their toes.) June takes us romping through hay-making and thence through the startling wonders of DNA, including an investigation of ‘consciousness’.

“I wept when I was born, and every day shows why.” These words of George Herbert’s open August and from the Book of Hours’ depictions of ‘threshing’ we ‘dance in the dark’, contemplating the awful pain of our world and the problem of evil. September follows on with a movingly illustrated chapter on forgiveness, viewed both theologically and politically. The author has the ability to discuss these issues without sounding glib and yet making a real contribution to our understanding of the complexities and tensions of our faith.

Underlying everything is Mayne’s conviction of the worthwhileness of being human; his conviction that our universal sense of wonder points us relentlessly to God; his expectation that ‘the perpetual present tense of living’ (John Updike) will eventually embrace all that we have been and bring us to completion in eternity. Thus December leads us to Easter and to heaven and to the hope of the Gospel.


Of course not everybody likes Mayne’s style. He has an encyclopaedic mind and at times you feel you have wandered into a book of quotations, with gems like Derek Jarman’s “The Word made goose flesh” and Samuel Butler’s assertion that the true test of our imagination is the ability to name a cat. But I agree with Dame Cicely Saunders’ foreword: ‘This is an enchanted and enchanting book.’

Church Times

War on Terror

The War against Terror

“But the LORD God called to the man, and said to him, "Where are you?"” Genesis 3.9

Here’s a strange picture! The almighty, the omnipotent, the omniscient Creator of all things, playing hide-and-seek in the Garden.

“Where are you Adam?”

“Coming ready or not!”

And Adam is not ready. He is naked, and ashamed, and confused, and angry with Eve and with himself. And he has become afraid of the God who is Love.

“Where are you Adam?” This is not a question about location. It is a metaphysical question.

Adam is lost. And so the war against terror begins.

“Where are you Adam?”

I am plotting mayhem and revenge; the slaying of Abel; the atrocities of humanity before the flood; the wickedness of the cities before the scattering from Babel;

I am plotting nationalism and weapons of destruction; infanticide and torture; oppression and racism; inquisitions and discrimination; religious hatred and world wars; holocausts and ethnic cleansing; acts of terror and global injustice.

This third chapter of Genesis is an ancient aetiology of human evil. An attempt to explain why the world is as it is. Since the dawn of civilisation, humans have wrestled with the terror that is within.

They have experienced great goodness - the simple pleasures of walking with the Lord God in the garden in the cool of the day.

And they have witnessed great evil - the exercise of godlike powers to humiliate and destroy those who are ‘other’.

This war against terrorism which we are currently waging is sometimes in danger of assuming that ‘the other’ against whom we fight, is somehow inherently different from us.

But we are all earthlings and tainted with Adam’s sin. We are all children of Eve and under our mother’s curse.

Solzhenitsyn, who certainly suffered at the hands of evil men and women, was wise enough to write:

“If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?” (Quoted in Mayne, Learning to Dance, DLT 2001, p166)

War can only ever be enjoined with a sense of humility and with a recognition that those whom we attack are not all evil and we are not all good.

The little boy is standing up in the back seat of the car and his father keeps telling him to sit down. At last the father stops the car and forcibly sits the boy down. As they continue the journey, the sulking boy in the back shouts: “I may be sitting down on the outside, but I’m standing up on the inside!”

From childhood we experience the division within the self that in this story of Adam and Eve is the result of their disobedience.

In the NT Paul is absorbed with this duality within and uses the word ‘flesh’ to denote the fallen and perverse side of our human nature - “the lust of the flesh” to describe the constant pull of the unrestrained ego.

This is what Paul has in mind in those lists in Galatians where he characterizes the two different sides to our nature.

For Adam and Eve in the garden, the duality within immediately skewed three dominant areas of their life: sexuality, spirituality and society. They were ashamed of their nakedness and sexual companionship becomes an arena for struggle and not just for pleasure; they become afraid of God; and they turn on each other in blame and recrimination.

Paul deals with these same three areas.

Sexuality - in Paul’s lists: fornication, impurity, licentiousness - the pursuit of sex as an end in itself, regardless of the feelings, responsibilities and respect we owe to each other - and to society. And to society? That’s a more difficult point in our divided society where there are very varied sexual mores.

And of course some would argue that what we do in the bedroom is nothing to do with wider society. This was Abp Runcie’s view expressed in his candid biography. Genesis acknowledges that there is an inner tension with regard to our sexuality, and that this must always be taken into account.

Spirituality - the need for human kind to worship and the danger of idolatry - of worshipping ‘other gods’ of our own making - eg

- the cult of self - the body beautiful and self gratification - fuelled by the

- the cult of money - the love of which is the root of all evil - consumerism - shopping mall temples - Tesco ergo sum - retail therapy

- the cult of ‘my church’ - pride, intolerance and lack of Xn charity

- the cult of others - worshipping the lover, the spouse, the children

Society - in Paul’s lists: enmities, strife, jealousy, anger, quarrels, dissensions, factions, envy, drunkenness, carousing
- the ills which fragment community life and lead to distrust, social isolation, pain and anguish

Genesis only hints at an answer to this war within. From Eve there is to come one who will crush the serpent’s head. The NT interprets the work of Christ as the unifying factor that may not end the war here and now, but that may give us a victory over the dark side.

And what is the Apostle’s solution to this civil war within us - the backcloth of so much human history, literature and art; the backcloth of this war-riven century; the backcloth of our own experience of the messiness of life.

It is to walk in the Spirit, the Holy Spirit; to be what you are in Christ. It is to have that attitude which was in Christ Jesus.

Paul lists the fruit of this Spirit of Christ, the other side of this inner duality, in relation to God, Others and Self

God - love, joy, peace - these should be the characteristics of our Christian life

Others - patience, kindness, generosity (To dwell above...) These are to be the marks of our Christian society.

Self - faithfulness, gentleness, self-control. This is the way to tame the self.

So with vivid imagery Paul says we are to crucify the flesh: to make those moment by moment decisions to exhibit the fruit of the Spirit rather than to follow our demanding animal self - the lust of the flesh - the selfish gene.

And for this we need not only the help of God’s Spirit, but of his Word and Sacraments, and of his people, and of the best of his world.

Paul uses two verbs to describe the process: being led by the Spirit and walking in the Spirit. The one passive. The other active.

To be led by the Spirit is to follow our desire for holiness: to pursue the good and the beautiful. Now here is the paradox. For we spoke earlier of the cult of the body beautiful, of aesthetics and the glory of the world. The difference is in our motivation for the pursuit of beauty. Is it to worship the creature - or to worship the creator?

Then Paul talks of walking in the Spirit - ‘keeping in step’ with the Spirit. Or to switch the metaphor, it is like sailing - finding the wind - and the exhilaration of running before it. As we approach lent, the spiritual disciplines are there to help us develop our openness to the Spirit.

God’s challenge to us is as it always has been: to live with him, following Christ and the way to life;

or to hide with Adam and rebel and follow the destructive inner path to death.

“But the LORD God called to the man, and said to him, "Where are you?"” Genesis 3.9

Baptism of Christ

Baptism of Christ

“And there came a voice from heaven” Mark 1.11

While I was in Florida last week, I visited the biggest church in the area: First Baptist Ft Lauderdale! It reminded me that there’s a difference between the way that American Baptists baptize and British Baptists. Not many people know that.

In my former life as a baptist minister, I would stand up to my waist in water and with one hand on the collar and one on the solar plexus of the adult candidate, I would propel the person rapidly backwards until the water closed over their face.

It was dramatic and messy and time will not permit me to tell you of my adventures in a six hundred gallon baptistry with a 24 stone lady, or of the very chic white cotton Italian designer trousers I decided to wear one evening. As I walked down into the pool, they turned completely transparent.

My first baptism in an American Southern Baptist church was a revelation. No unseemly dunking and splashing for them. The candidate held a cloth over their nose and mouth and were very gracefully and slowly eased back under the water as the lights dimmed and the organ played seraphic music.

The pastor of the church explained to me that, as baptism represented being buried with Christ, it was more appropriate to lower the candidate lovingly into the grave, than to throw them into it.

The New Testament imagery of Baptism is indeed of dying and rising in Christ; of being buried with him in death and reborn to a new life in his resurrection.

It was natural for the early church to interpret the words and commands of our Lord in that way.

But John the Baptist’s baptism, was one of repentance, and this posed something of a problem for the first and second century theologians. Why should the sinless Jesus submit himself to a baptism which was for the washing away of sin?

Even John himself is perplexed by Jesus’ actions, as Matthew records: “John would have prevented him, saying, ‘I need to be baptized by you, and do you come to me?’” (3.14)

Here it is more bluntly in the mid-second century apocryphal Gospel of the Nazaraeans, where Jesus says: “Wherein have I sinned that I should go and be baptized by him?”

It is interesting that today’s Gospel reading from John, perhaps the most ‘theological’ of the four, only implies the baptism of Christ, but never describes it.

In my younger years I was among those interpreters who understood the Baptism of Jesus in terms of identifying with sinners: he who knew no sin became sin for us; he identifies with us in sin and vicariously repents for us in his baptism.

But I have come to see that this is an unnecessary interpretation which goes beyond the text.

Professor Morna Hooker, in her commentary on Mark, I think rightly gets to the heart of the matter. John’s baptism was not just about forgiveness of sins, it was about the coming of the New Age, the Kingdom Age, the Messianic Age, when forgiven men and women would gladly submit to the gentle rule of God, and would live out Kingdom values in their daily lives.

It was about extravagant love for God and consequent love of neighbour. It was about hating hypocrisy and deadening religious practice.

In this light, it would be natural for Jesus, in his full humanity, to identify with the baptized of this new movement. John’s hesitation was probably not so much to do with Christ’s sinlessness, as with a realisation that Christ was vastly superior to him, in ways that John could hardly imagine possible. He was not worthy so much as to loosen his sandal.

With naive and unembarrassed simplicity, Mark (possibly the earliest Gospel) faithfully records the incident at the beginning of our Lord’s public ministry.

We are sometimes in danger of making baptism and confirmation the very thing that John the Baptist railed against: an empty ritual embedded in cultic Christianity. A British folk-religion placebo. At worst, an inoculation against the real thing!

The Baptism of Jesus, which we celebrate today, reviving the ancient practice of the church at epiphanytide, reminds us of the authentic roots of our own baptism. It calls us to follow Christ’s example and command.

For our Lord there was no turning from sin and no repentance for a sinful past; but there was a turning to the daunting task before him; a setting of his face toward Jerusalem where in three years he would taste death in all its bitterness and be baptized in blood as he carries the sins of the world.

And to test his resolve, the Spirit drives him from the Jordan to the wilderness for 40 days of temptation, fasting and prayer. (Mark 1. 12)

So for us, the remembrance of our baptism should spur us to turn from sin and selfishness; to live as heralds of the New Age, to wear the mark of Christ in self-giving and love.

Every time we are sprinkled with holy water; every time we cross ourselves with holy water as we enter or leave church; we are reminded of God’s love, grace and forgiveness; but we are also reminded of our baptismal resolve to turn from evil and to follow Christ; to love one another as he has loved us, and so show all that we are his disciples.

For Christ at this turning point in his young life, there is a great affirmation from his Father. Mark records it thus: “And just as he was coming up out of the water, he saw the heavens torn apart and the Spirit descending like a dove on him. And a voice came from heaven, ‘You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.’" (1.10f)

These phrases find resonances in our OT lesson today (Isaiah 42) as well as in Psalm 2 (v7) and the whole scene would speak to first century Jews of God’s breaking of the 400 year silence since the last prophet
- the rending of the heavens to come down and fulfil his promises made to the prophets.

For us, there is nothing so dramatic at our baptism and confirmation. No assuring voice booming out from heaven that we’ve made a wise choice. No paternal congratulations for joining the Church of England. Only a cup of tea and a piece of cake.

The ‘voice from heaven’ that Mark describes is probably his translation of a Hebrew idiom: the bat qol - the daughter of a voice. Since the last prophet, God seemed silent, and the best the devout could hope for was some echo of the Divine - the daughter of a voice. In Jewish literature it was often compared to the cry of a bird, the murmuring of a dove.

John the baptizer was a voice crying in the wilderness. But as men and women came to him and turned to God, they heard not only a voice in the wilderness, but a distant voice from heaven; an echo of the Divine. The Holy Spirit’s subtle work within them gave them hope and strength to live for God.

The faith of our Baptism sometimes seems very shaky and precarious. The most we seem to hear is but a distant cousin of the voice of God. But we do not lose heart.

As we struggle to fulfil our baptismal vows in a very imperfect church, we look to Christ for example and for inner strength, and hope that, however distant it may sound, we too may hear

“... a voice from heaven” Mark 1.11