Living in Between

Living in Between

"May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace as you trust in him, so that you may overflow with hope." Romans 15.13

As a young boy growing up in the 1950s, Christmas night was always one of the most tantalising and frustrating. It was so near to Christmas day and yet not Christmas Day. The anticipation was amplified by the fact that Christmas Day is my birthday as well.

And although the presents were only going to be a torch and a dinky toy and a Rupert Annual – all labelled ‘for birthday and Christmas’ – the wait was nearly unbearable,

Throughout those dark December Advent days, I felt like the children in CS Lewis’s Narnia, where it was always winter but never Christmas. I would fall asleep on Christmas night, exhausted by hope.

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. We live always in hope. The Bible tells us all we need to know about the future and more importantly, 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 the birth of the church.

And some years after Pentecost, Paul is teaching that the Church is still 'in between'. The Saviour who had come, would come again.

So here we are on an 'in-between' Sunday – an Advent, waiting-in-hope Sunday. We have closed the curtain on the annual drama of the liturgical year, and start again, preparing, awaiting, the long-expected Jesus.

Traditionally in Advent, we consider the last things: heaven, hell, judgement and the return of Christ. It is heavy stuff. But it is part of a bigger theological picture.

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, from the point of view of the final return of Christ, bringing in the kingdom described in Isaiah’s prophecy this morning; this work of God 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 this 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 second Sunday in Advent, in the 2004th Year of Our Lord, we are poised between that first coming of Christ nearly 2000 years ago, and the end of the world, or our own death, whichever comes sooner.

The early Christians expected Christ’s return before their own deaths – an issue which Paul addresses in his letter to the Thessalonians. Most modern Christians only vaguely comprehend or expect the second coming of Christ – we say it in the creed each week, but have no idea how it might actually happen.

Well, not to worry. We will see how events unfold, either while we are here on earth as part of the church militant, or in heaven as part of the church triumphant.

But before that time, retroactively if you like, the coming kingdom of God, is the ideal which must empower our Christian living, ‘in between’. We struggle to fulfil the vision of Isaiah when, ‘They will neither harm nor destroy on all my holy mountain, for the earth will be full of the knowledge of the Lord, as the waters cover the sea.’

This is what we mean every time we pray, as we will this morning: "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. For 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 at work in the Church.

These ‘in-between times’ have always been as potent as the special events that sandwich them. 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, the years shoot by, and we wait with some apprehension for the one and only event left for us.

But at whatever stage we are in our life’s journey, a consistent theme throughout 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 you might have life, and have it more abundantly."

And a consistent theme in the teaching of the Apostles, is that we must live in love-driven hope. So in the verse following our text today, Paul prays that God, the giver of hope, will grant us a spirit of unity as we follow Christ.

Peter says when he deals with this subject in his epistle, that living this way 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.

So John the Baptist in today’s Gospel calls us to repent of sin, to turn from its self-centred destructive force, and to see that the kingdom of heaven is near – although it is not yet here, in between, we must live as citizens of the kingdom of God, the kingdom of love. The judgement theme of Advent, is a judgement of love. This is the touchstone of our Christian living.

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 the 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 dialogue of prayer with God and engagement with his Word and with each other. As Paul says in today’s epistle, ‘that through endurance and the encouragement of the Scriptures we might have hope.’

So it is the past and the future, the coming of Christ, 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 description 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." (Heinemann 1989 (1922))

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

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

"May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace as you trust in him, so that you may overflow with hope."

The Dishonest Steward

The Dishonest Steward

“Make friends of unrighteousness mammon; that, when it fails, they may receive you into everlasting habitations.” (Lk 16.9)

In one of my churches, the deacons (the Baptist equivalent of the PCC only with weaponry) [famously defined by the girl in my baptist baptismal class - I asked her ‘what is a deacon?’ And she replied, ‘something you put on the top of a hill and set fire to’ - if only...] - the deacons forbade me from going into local pubs.

It was leading the youth astray into a life of drunken debauchery. I was spending too much time with the sinners and not enough with the saints.

I was comforted then, by the accusation made of Jesus recorded in Luke’s gospel: “This man welcomes sinners and eats with them” (15.2 )

It is a grand irony that this wonderful Gospel truth, that Christ came for sinners, is expressed by the mealy mouthed pharisees, who are the self-righteous defenders of those who need no doctors.

However, the fact that Jesus spends more time with the sinners than the saints, doesn’t mean that he is uncritical of these “sinners” that he welcomes.

And that is the context of the parable in today’s Gospel. In chapter 16 of Luke there are two parables especially for the tax-collectors and sinners mentioned in 15.1. The murmuring scribes and pharisees of 15.2 have had the 3 lost-and-found parables of chapter 15 aimed at them.
So these 2 parables: The Shrewd Manager (more often known as The Dishonest Steward) and Dives and Lazarus, were specially for wealthy sinners. And such had been Matthew - the tax collector turned disciple. Matthew had exemplified the truth shown by Jesus in this rather difficult parable.

Before we look at the message of the parable, let us spend a moment on the method used by our Lord.

Jesus was speaking to Tax-collectors: “wealthy rogues who had made a good living from other people’s financial affairs.” Jesus shaped this parable to appeal to his particular audience - something we’re often not very good at doing in the church. As Jesus himself pointed out:

“…for the children of this age are more shrewd in dealing with their own generation than are the children of light.” (16.10)

The advertisers and spin doctors know how to communicate; how to target a particular group. Depressingly, I’m beginning to notice all those Saga adverts now. Victoria Wood has that wonderful observation that you know you’re getting old when you walk through Marks & Spencers and think: “Mmm, those look comfortable...”

Communication is the name of the game, and whether we like it or not, the church is caught up in that.

So compare these two church magazines: Tenn (for Epicentre) and Salve (for St Mary’s Bourne St). They are clearly aimed at two different audiences.

Tenn goes for a rather select, postgraduatey, Generation X, young professional.

Salve goes for a rather select, high culturely, professional independent thinker - some of them still alive.

It is a truism that our Lord expressed Gospel truths in culturally relevant terms.

Many people in Britain today are very sympathetic to the Christian message, yet often they are unable to hear it in clear terms which they understand.

I enjoyed the Philip Pullman books – the His Dark Material trilogy, but in them he is rejecting a Christian faith which I don’t recognise. Too many of our contemporaries have never really understood Christianity in any depth. They have rejected a childish faith along with Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy.

The interviews in Third Way magazine are fascinating for similar reasons: Lord Puttnam, Melvyn Brag, Ian Hyslop, Polly Toynbee, Will Self.

There is not just one culturally relevant way - Jesus used a number of ways - parables - symbolic actions - argument; and often these related to the sort of people he was addressing. Think of that extraordinary exchange with the Canaanite woman: "It is not fair to take the children's food and throw it to the dogs." (Matt 15.26)

Christian worship certainly reflects this diversity of approach, although there is always a tendency to regard our own brand as the preferred universal one. (“You worship God in your way. We worship him in his...”) But this is true not only in public worship. It is the task of every Christian to make Christ known, and to do so in language and with symbols appropriate to the situation.

We are used to doing this in other spheres of life. When you explain your job to different people: to children; to people who know nothing about it; to people who know a lot about it. (I remember explaining what Middle Babylonian was in very simple terms to a man who seemed not to be firing on all cylinders. He turned out to be a Professor of Assyriology.)

At a wedding last week I found myself explaining the Christian concept of free will in terms of quantum mechanics to a physicist.

So for each of us, with the help of the Holy Spirit, we can give a reason for the hope that is within us, in terms understood by our particular group of friends and acquaintances. And we can make use of our own particular backgrounds to defend the faith.

It requires some courage and not a little effort to do it, but it is part of our calling as followers of Christ. Matthew (whose Feast Day is this Tuesday) did it from the start of his life of following Jesus - he threw a party - something he was good at - and let Jesus meet his friends. We should all be exercising our version of Alpha courses.

Let’s turn from the method to the message.

It’s a compelling story that must have had maximum curiosity effect on the hearers - is the Good Teacher really saying what he seems to be saying?

For mismanagement of funds, the steward’s dismissal was immanent. So, working on the sound theological principle, ‘in for a penny, in for a pound’, he makes a lot of dishonest people grateful for his dismissal.

“Make friends of unrighteousness mammon; that, when it fails, they may receive you into everlasting habitations.”
[Make friends for yourselves by means of dishonest wealth so that when it is gone, they may welcome you into the eternal homes.]

There are only two certainties in life: taxes and death. We will all be ‘dismissed’, and in that striking Gospel platitude - you can’t take it with you.

[Notwithstanding the misprint I saw in an order of service which included the hymn Guide me O thou great Redeemer: ‘Land my safe on Canaan’s side.’]

The bottom line of this parable is quite clear: We should live now, before we die, in a way that invests in our future in eternity.

This does not mean that we become so heavenly minded that we are of no earthly use. CS Lewis wasn’t the first to observe that:

“If you read history you find that the Christians who did most for the present world were just those who thought most of the next.”

How do we invest in the future? It is a matter of focus. The world (unrighteous mammon) focuses on wealth, security, health... And there is nothing wrong in these. But they are unworthy objects of our desire and affection. And ultimately they are empty.

Christ is reminding the tax-collectors and sinners; you and me; that our focus should be living now in the light of the world to come; living to make a difference; to make the world a better place, to bring in the kingdom of God; to be naive enough to ‘do good’ and to be kind to strangers and asylum seekers; to invest in friendships and work for a just world and a just society, shot through with mercy.

It will not make us penniless, but it will be costly. These Holy Mysteries remind us of the Divine cost and the Divine joy. Happy are those who are called to the banquet feast of the Lamb.

Live now, before you die, in a way that invests in your future in eternity.

Or as Jesus put it:

“Make friends of unrighteousness mammon; that, when it fails, they may receive you into everlasting habitations.” (Luke 16.9)

Faith, hope & doubt

“Faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things unseen.” Hebrew 1.1

A little boy asked ‘what is faith?’
He thinks awhile and then says: ‘Believing what we know can’t be true!’

Today’s readings are about faith – especially the epistle. Most of us find the opening verse a tall order: “Now faith is being sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not see.”

I left my old college 35 years ago. I was young and very certain of what I believed and of what I knew, but rather uncertain of who I was. Thirty five years on, I’m much more confident about who I am (and who I am not), but far less certain about what I know.

So today, I want us to think about faith, but by considering one of the Bible’s most famous doubters – who yet believed. He is always remembered as ‘doubting’ Thomas.

This is a little unfair. We don't remember ‘denying’ Peter; nor the beloved disciple, ‘streaker’ John.

And it’s unfair because we ALL doubt. And I don’t mean thoroughgoing scepticism - doubting everything as a view of life. (parachutist - cup of tea joke)

And I don’t mean unbelief - believing or not believing is an informed decision of the will. I mean, just letting hard questions float around in our mind.

Questions like: “Is God really there or have I just fooled myself?”
Questions like: “Why do such bad things often happen to good people?”
Questions like: “Am I really called to be a priest?”

And a host of others, particular to you. Why do we doubt? What’s behind it?

Sin - distrusting God is at the root of many of the problems of our human condition. Questioning is not a sin - distrust of God is - it’s the ancient sin of Adam and Eve. As long as we struggle with sin - and we will always struggle with sin - we will struggle with the doubt of whether God is really good.

To compensate for this we will often fall into another sin - the sin of certainty. For the opposite of faith is not doubt, but certainty. It is our doubts that unite us. Our convictions divide us.

Which of course doesn’t mean you shouldn’t have convictions - but it does mean you should hold them with a degree of humility. We all know the sort of person for whom there are only two positions on all subjects - theirs, and the wrong one.

Listen to Luther’s ‘doubter’s’ prayer:

“Dear Lord,
Although I am sure of my position,
I am unable to sustain it without thee.
Help me, or I am lost.”

And here we acknowledge another factor leading to doubt: human frailty - our limitations in grasping the infinite. And our temptation to think we know it all. Job and Ecclesiastes and good St Thomas remind us of this.

Until like Thomas we meet the risen Christ face to face, (and we won’t do that until we pass through the gate of death) we will always be those who walk by faith, and not by sight. We will always need to keep on believing, despite the doubts. “Happy are those who have not seen me” says Jesus “ and yet believe”.

Tennyson put it rather well in The Ancient Sage:

For nothing worthy proving can be proven,
Nor yet disproven: wherefore be thou wise,
Cleave ever to the sunnier side of doubt.

And that brings us on to another factor in doubt: personality - some Christians find it very hard to ‘cleave to the sunnier side of doubt’. They are by nature prone to look on the gloomier side of most things. They lie awake at night worrying about everything.

Like the man who wrote to the Tax Office:

I can't sleep at night because I've cheated on my taxes. I enclose a £1,000. If I still can't sleep, I'll send the other £1,000.

I’ve never spent a lot of my time absorbed in metaphysical angst. But I have friends who are constantly plagued by stuff that goes on in their head. St Thomas may have been such a man.

That sometimes tormented priest, Gerard Manley Hopkins, pleads with himself in one of his poems:

My own heart let me more have pity on; let
Me live to my sad self hereafter kind,
Charitable; not live this tormented mind
With this tormented mind tormenting yet.…

Soul, self; come poor Jackself, I do advise
You, jaded, let be; call off thoughts awhile.…

And how do we call off thoughts awhile?

Luke gives us another reason for Thomas’s doubt, indeed the doubt of all the disciples, and all us who have followed them.

“... they still did not believe it because of joy and amazement…” (Lk 24.41)

At the heart of our faith is something almost too incredible to believe. Thomas dared not believe it.

And every time we consider the risen Christ, it’s as if Jesus says to us again: “See my hands... my side; stop doubting and believe.”

This is the mystery of faith:
Christ has died
Christ is risen
Christ will come again.

The late John Betjeman, a former poet laureate, reflecting on the mystery of Christmas, clung on to that faith, although he hardly dared to believe it:

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.

We always hold on to our faith, through doubt. It is the safe way to believe, and allows us to explore our faith with humility and confidence.

For we may not have certainty, for then we would not be walking by faith, but by sight; however, we can have proper confidence in the Gospel: we can enjoy God’s gift to all his children: assurance and personal conviction.

“Faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things unseen.” Hebrew 1.1

The Gravity of Love

The Gravity of Love

“Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind… and thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself”
Matt 22.37-9

I seem to be going to a lot of my friends’ 50th Birthday parties recently, which is odd since most of them are as young as I am. They had even found some hula hoops at one of these dos. Although that sexy gyrating of our early teens had lost its allure when now, in some cases, the hoop would scarcely fit over their hips.

And of course it is de rigeur at these parties to play music from the 60s when we were groovy teenagers in our flares and paisley shirts.

So I found myself for days after a recent birthday bash singing that Beatles classic: “All you need is love.”

It was a nice idea, but it lacked content and context. It could include everything and nothing. As Charlie Brown so famously put it: “I love mankind. It’s people I can’t stand!”

“All you need is love” is both similar to and yet very different from Augustine’s aphorism: “Dilige et quod vis fac” (Epist. Joann. Tractatus vii.8) “Love and do what you want.”

The context of this statement is not the fluffy, feely factor. It is the gravity of God’s love reflected in response by us: “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind… and thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself”

Our Lord says that at the heart of our Christian discipleship is the stark truth: ‘Love God and love your neighbour.’

So what do these two great Judaeo-Christian commandments mean?

Loving God with all our heart. We’re not very good at fervour and enthusiasm. I remember at a recent Labour Party Conference service, one of the Salvation Army Songsters shouted ‘Hallelujah’ at the end of a rousing rendition of ‘Thine be the glory’.

People smiled nervously, hoping there would be no more displays of public emotion. The Prime Minister’s security men were visibly alarmed. If there was somebody here so obviously out of control that he could shout ‘Hallelujah’, then there might be somebody here who could shoot the PM. (Which is about the only thing that would get some of you shouting ‘Hallelujah’...)

The very word ‘enthusiasm’ was originally an insult, meaning ‘possessed by a god’.

The church has usually expelled the lovers of God who display too much emotional zeal for the faith. Like Luther and Wesley. Or with others, like Francis of Assisis, the church contains them within a religious order where they can’t do too much damage.

On it’s own, emotional love without content and depth produces simply sentimentality. God falls into the same category as puppy dogs, old church buildings and Cliff Richard. And this is not enough.

So we must love God with all our soul.

“Out of the depths my soul cries out to you” says the psalmist. De profundis. Profound love of God can come out of those experiences of life which furrow deep into our psyche, into our very being: extreme pain, or mental anguish; inconsolable grief. What CS Lewis called ‘God’s megaphone’.

But also existential moments of bliss; the unbearable lightness of ‘being’; the palpable pain of overwhelming beauty; the moments of supreme well-being often flowing from human love and affection: the weight, the gravity of love.

However, deep love, that never looks outward, produces introspection and self-absorption. It can even induce pride and a sense of superiority. It is one of the peculiar dangers of the religious life; those in convents and monasteries who sometimes spend too much time plumbing the depths.

On its own, like emotional love, profound love of God is not enough.

So we must love God with all our mind. Some of us are more at home here. We enjoy discussions about the existence of God and the finer points of doctrine. Although as Lady Bracknell puts it in The Importance of Being Earnest, it is not quite respectable in polite society to be too intelligent. Perhaps Britain is the only country in Europe where the expression “too clever by half” is an insult.

I am alarmed sometimes when talking with students to find that their understanding of Christian theology has not gone much beyond their understanding of Father Christmas and the Teletubbies.

Indeed some of them have a better grasp of the underlying theological position of the Simpsons than the Christian grounding that undergirds most of Western European thought and culture. There’s nothing wrong in getting intellectual about our love of God.

But loving God as an academic idea without emotion or depth simply produces a sterile formula, devoid of spiritual power. On its own it is not enough.

Plato did great damage to the development of Christian thought by his splitting of the human into two parts - body and spirit. For the Jews at the time of Christ, any one of these three things - heart, soul, mind - would have sufficed to indicate the whole person. There was no division or tripartite, or dualist view of humans as body and spirit.

The command was to love God with our whole being: the affective, reflective and intellective; heart, soul and mind; strong love with checks and balances.

If we love God in this way, then we cannot but help love our neighbour as ourselves. This is the second commandment, inextricably linked with the first. And it is not an easy command to keep.

GK Chesterton once remarked that the Bible tells us to love our neighbours and to love our enemies - because they are generally the same people!

This love of God means we will care for the homeless and the refugees; we will protect the weak; we will look out for one another. And we will build societies and churches that do this.

If we do not, then we deceive ourselves, and we do not genuinely love God, with heart and soul and mind. We have some shallow lightweight love which does not reflect the heaviness of God’s love for us.

Soon we come to the altar of God: the passion of Christ. And we remember that we love because he first loved us.

Gravity
The apple, unlike Adam, had no choice but to fall
Speeding to fulfil its creator’s call.
But what force drew him down to us?
He, with a starlit infinity to explore,
He, who could peer into a neutron’s core,
He, who had spoken a thousand million times
And known the sulphuric spit of our self-vaunting crimes
He, whom we had called murderer, liar, thief
And left for dead with enlightened relief.

What force drew him down from above
To reap the grim harvest of rebel pride,
Hammered with nails of truth denied?
What force drew him down from above?
What force but this: the gravity of love.

(Mark Green, November 1994)

Freedom in the Spirit

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

I remember listening to endless ‘testimonies’ when I was a teenager - people telling us how they had been ‘saved’. Many of them very moving and some quite remarkable. (Peter in front of TV in Australia - Neil in Fudpuckers) But there was a genre, usually recounted by burnt out looking thirty-somethings (I see a number of you here this evening), which ran along the lines: “There was no sin and debauchery to which I had not sunk (sometimes they went on to “and then at the age of five...”). But others would give you a tantalising glimpse of the sins and broad hints of the debauchery of their mis-spent youth. And I would sit and complain to God that I had become a Christian far to early to get a good crack at debauchery.

This passage 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...]

The Scriptures, and Paul himself, use the word ‘flesh’ to convey a variety of meanings.

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 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 is what Paul has in mind in this passage, and he amplifies it.

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

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. 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.

Spirituality - idolatry & sorcery - the need for human kind to worship
- the danger of worshipping of ‘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 - 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 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 in relation to God, Others and Self
God - love, joy, peace - these should be our characteristics
Others - patience, kindness, generosity (To dwell above...)
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.

Then Paul talks of walking in the Spirit - ‘keeping in step’ with the Spirit.
Sailing - finding the wind - and the exhilaration of running before it. These are what the spiritual disciplines are for - church, devotions, confession, spiritual reading, retreat, pilgrimage (Walsingham)....

As we are led by the Spirit and walk in the Spirit so we will know the fullness of joy in the Spirit and the abundance of life in the Spirit.


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

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.

Ascension Day 2004

Ascension Day

"until the day in which he was taken up, he spoke of the things, pertaining to the kingdom..." Acts 1.3

So the man rushes to stop this forlorn figure from throwing himself off Blackfriars Bridge.

'Why are you killing yourself?'
'I've nothing to live for!'
'Don't you believe in God?'
'Yes I do.'
'What a coincidence - so do I! Are you a Jew or a Christian?'
'A Christian.'
'What a coincidence - so am I! Are you a Protestant or a Catholic?'
'A Protestant.'
'What a coincidence - so am I! Anglican or Baptist?'
'Baptist.'
'What a coincidence - so am I! Strict & Particular or General?'
'Strict & Particular.'
'What a coincidence - so am I! Premillennial or Amillennial?'
'Premillennial.'
'What a coincidence - so am I! Partial Rapture or full Rapture?'
'Partial Rapture.'
'Die heretic!'

Christians disagree and fall out about nearly anything and everything. Although to be fair, this could be said about any group of people who hold strong religious, political or philosophical views.

It is part of the process by which fallible human beings come to hold some common group identity. A key part of this process is the way in which we handle the differences, and the degree to which we demand conformity. Like cliffs, the real dangers come at the edges.

The history of Christianity over 2000 years, running parallel to the development of the modern democracy, has demonstrated a growing degree of inclusiveness in handling differences, and a lessening concentration on exclusiveness.

Fundamentalists regard this as the rottenness at the heart of liberal Christianity. They think that General Synod will soon be including the Devil in the Holy Trinity so as not to make the Satanists feel excluded.

Thoroughgoing liberals interpret any demand for conformity as an affront to the great god of individual freedom.

There will always be these either/or people, who operate rather like computers. I sit at my keyboard sometimes and with my mathematical background 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 in the CPU.

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 true Anglicanism is both famous and famously mocked.

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

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." (And there are 12 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 Messiah King.

But if anything, the exact opposite was true. Christ came to show the futility of any notions of rule by absolute authority and power. Power always corrupts.

So as long as human nature is flawed - that is until the end of the cosmos - there will be the need for some form of democracy. Democracy, like the police force, only exists because of human sin.

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. Jesus did not stay - he left. And the Pope is but a man, fallible like the rest of us.

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 and human nature will always be 'red in tooth and claw'.

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' - what 'has to be'..

Like the Calvinist who fell down stairs, got up and said 'well that's got that over with!'

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. Eat, drink and be merry because all the really important stuff is the other side of death.

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 (British Museum Religion) - you can tell I have 101 unpalatable tasks to do when I'm reduced to reading tracts about Percy Dearmer.

He was a great Anglo-Catholic activist at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries. Like FD Maurice, he was one of the rare High Church left-wingers. We remember him most for his hymns such as 'Jesus good above all others', or translations such as 'He who would valiant be...'.

And I was struck by this 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 extremes - pious beauty and social action - the same root errors which plagued the disciples on the mount of ascension.

So he pursued God through the beauty of Anglo-Catholic liturgy - his Parson's Handbook was a guide for many twentieth century Catholics. And at the same time, he worked for social justice and to establish the kingdom of God on earth - he became a Canon of Westminster Abbey and set up a soup kitchen there.

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.

We must be pious and political. We must attend to our prayers and attend to the needs of a broken world. Then we will follow our ascended Lord and his kingdom agenda.

"until the day in which he was taken up, he spoke of the things, pertaining to the kingdom..." Acts 1.3

Doers of the Word

Doers of the Word

“Be ye doers of the word, and not hearers only, deceiving your own selves.” James 1.22

Last century, when I was but a callow youth, I remember being taken aside by one of the elders after I had preached a particularly humorous sermon. He admonished me with words which have stuck with me throughout my ministry: “You were called to feed the sheep, not tickle the ears of the goats.”

Well I’ve done quite a bit of ear tickling during my 6 years here at St Mary’s. But I hope I have also given both the sheep and the goats something to chew on.

This will be my last sermon from this pulpit for some respectable length of time, and as I pondered on the readings today, I thought back over the years to see what the burden of my preaching has been.

I suppose it could be summed up in three words: love, enjoy, and, understand.

Hardly surprisingly, the commonest refrain has echoed the words of our Lord when asked what is the most important commandment: love God and love your neighbour.

It’s such a simple statement, yet takes a lifetime to work out.

We love God because he first loved us and gave himself for us. That is what we proclaim and rehearse in the mass, day after day.

And if we are to be doers of the word and not hearers only, then that love must be demonstrated by the inconvenience of loving those we would rather not.

We come to mass to celebrate the forgiveness of God in Christ, and whenever we do so we are reminded that we must be forgiving of others.

Part of the function of ‘the peace’ given and exchanged just before we come to receive the bread and wine, is to remind us that we must be living in peace and forgiveness with each other.

And this is not always easy. In the words I have often quoted of the neo-metaphysical poet:

To dwell above with those we love,
ah that will be glory.
But to live below with those we know
is quite another story.

Sometimes all we can manage is to say honestly to God: ‘Lord I want to forgive, help my unforgivingness.’

But if we are generous of spirit then we will, by practice, learn to forgive.

Living any other way is not only contrary to the Gospel and pattern of Christ, but it does deep damage to the psyche, and prevents us from fully entering into the other two imperatives: enjoy, and, understand.

No wonder then that love is Christ’s primary command to his disciples; the glue of the spiritual universe; the gravity of the Cosmos.

Gravity
The apple, unlike Adam, had no choice but to fall
Speeding to fulfil its creator’s call.
But what force drew him down to us?
He, with a starlit infinity to explore,
He, who could peer into a neutron’s core,
He, who had spoken a thousand million times
And know the sulphuric spit of our self-vaunting crimes
He, whom we had called murderer, liar, thief
And left for dead with enlightened relief.

What force drew him down from above
To reap the grim harvest of rebel pride,
Hammered with nails of truth denied?
What force drew him down from above?
What force but this: the gravity of love.
(Mark Green, November 1994)

And the second word and command with which I have often enjoined you is ‘enjoy!’ Preaching at St Mary’s is rarely of the kill-joy variety. We are not those who take the swing out of the budgie’s cage on a Sunday. Indeed we are more likely to add a drop of gin to its water bottle.

In the Westminster shorter catechism you will remember the answer to the question: “What is the chief end of man?” It is “to glorify God and enjoy him for ever.”

Today’s Gospel contains one of the many examples of our Lord’s express desire that our life should be lived to the full. “Ask, and ye shall receive,” says our Lord, “that your joy may be full.”

And listen to these words from Deuteronomy 14 talking of what to do with the tithe money on the festivals:

“And thou shalt bestow that money for whatsoever thy soul lusteth after, for oxen, or for sheep, or for wine, or for strong drink, or for whatsoever thy soul desireth: and thou shalt eat there before the LORD thy God, and thou shalt rejoice, thou, and thine household.”

And I’m glad that you have heeded the next verse regarding the priests:“And the Levite that is within thy gates; thou shalt not forsake him; for he hath no part nor inheritance with thee.” (26f) I am a much bigger man after my sojourn with you!

However, this command to ‘enjoy’ God’s world has a caveat. We must always hold lightly to the world’s pleasures, or they will take a grip on us which draws us from God and fills our souls with unrequitable longing for more.

As Paul says to the Romans: “Professing themselves to be wise, they became fools... [and] changed the truth of God into a lie, and worshipped and served the creature more than the Creator, who is blessed for ever.” (1.22,25)

The danger is always there that we will begin to love things and use people, instead of loving people and using things.

And this can be true of our peculiar worship here at St Mary’s. We enjoy it and take care to preserve it. But it must never become the object of our love. The liturgy must always serve as a channel for the love of God, in which he reveals his great love for us and we in return, pour out our hearts in wonder, love and praise.

And so the third word, ‘understand’.

Augustine reminds us that our reason should be applied as ‘faith seeking understanding’. God’s word helps us week by week to put the world in context, to understand the times - even postmodernity.

And of course the word helps us to understand God - never fully - but a little more intimately as we enter into the holy mysteries time and time again.

But as James reminds us in our epistle, it helps us to understand ourselves.

We are all prone to self-deception. So we mistake joining a gym for actually going to a gym. We keep half our wardrobe full of clothes that we will wear again when we’ve lost a little weight...

Or as James says here, we look in the mirror of God’s word when we come to church, and then go out to do exactly as we please with no reference to it. We have not learnt, in the words of the prophet, that ‘the heart is deceitful.’

We have to learn that our capacity to love and be loved is marred. We have to remember that our ability to enjoy without clinging on to that which we enjoy, is impaired.

And indeed we have to learn that our particular understanding of the way things are will never be perfect and Godlike. We are fallible and so should walk before God and one another with humility.

So love, enjoy, understand and then you will be

“... doers of the word, and not hearers only, deceiving your own selves.” James 1.22

True Myth - Easter Day

True Myth
Easter Day

“Then was our mouth filled with laughter, and our tongue with singing.” Psalm 126.2

A burglar breaks into a house when he knows the owners are away. He’s just about to lift a silver vase when he hears a low growl and a piercing voice saying “God is watching you!”

He hesitates a moment and then goes for an antique carriage clock. There’s a murmur of a growl again and the same penetrating voice saying “God is watching you!”

He shines his torch around the room and is relieved to see a parrot in a cage. “God is watching you!” says the parrot.

He goes up to the parrot and say. “What’s your name then?” “Moses”, the parrot replies.

“What sort of a man would call his parrot Moses?” says the burglar to the parrot.

“The same sort of man” says the parrot, “who names his rotweiler, God!”

I’ve spoken to you before about the strange practice, popular in the middle ages, especially in the East, when the priest would start the Easter sermon with all manner of jokes and ribaldry in order to elicit the Risus Paschalis - the Easter Laughter - from the faithful.

Easter morning has been referred to in some theological writings as the Divine joke. The laughter of God.

The German Protestant theologian Jurgen Moltmann, who wrote the book The Theology of Joy, put it this way: "The Easter laughter is rooted in the wholly unexpected and totally surprising 'reversal of all things.' God had brought this reversal about by raising Christ.... The expectation was for cosmic death, but what comes is eternal life."

It is always difficult for us to recapture something of the surprise of Easter - we all know how the story ends.

But even if it is not a surprise to us year after year, it is an assault to our intellect year after year. For it raises the Big Question always at the root of Christianity’s troubling uniqueness.

Here is the Big Question. And it is of course multiple choice. (Much easier to mark!) You may tick either A or B.

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.

The existentialists were right when like Sartre they asserted, “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 based 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. The only bit of the word ‘fundamentalism’ we like, is ‘fun’. And we’re pretty sure we know which ones of our brothers and sisters put the word ‘mental’ into fundamentalism.

I’m reminded of those words of GK Chesterton: "Life is serious all the time, but living cannot be. You may have all the solemnity you wish in your neckties, but in anything important (such as sex, death, and religion), you must have mirth or you will have madness." (G. K. Chesterton, Lunacy and Letters, edited by Dorothy Collins (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1958), p. 97.)

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

I had of course set up the old rhetorical device of a false dichotomy. The Resurrection of Jesus fulfils all our mythic longings, because it happened. And even more than that. The mythic longings are only there because the death and resurrection of Jesus permeates all time, from before the beginning of the world.

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, I had yet 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 Star Wars.

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, the bitter pill 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…”

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.

The 20th century theologian, Reinhold Niebuhr reminds us that " humour is, in fact, a prelude to faith, and [that] laughter is the beginning of prayer." (Reinhold Niebuhr, " Humour and Faith," in Discerning the Signs of the Times (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1946), p. 111. )

So here is some more risus paschalis from our Jewish friends to aid us in our Easter faith. Christians find it hard to laugh about God sometimes because they often take it upon themselves to speak for God. Our Jewish friends on the other hand, have a wonderful sense of religious humour , partly because they take it upon themselves to speak to God rather than for God.

So there is this atheist Jewish grandmother, who took her beloved five-year-old grandson to the beach. Decked out in his sun suit and hat, the little boy builds sand castles at the water’s edge. The grandmother dozes off, and the boy is suddenly swept out to sea. The frantic woman calls for help, but there is no one else on the beach. So swallowing her pride, she falls to the ground and prays, "God, if you exist, if you are there, please save my grandson. I promise I'll make it up to you and be a good Jew.” Suddenly a huge wave tosses the grandson on the beach at her feet, laughing and smiling. The grandmother hesitates for a moment, and then drawing herself up to her full height, she wags her finger at the sky and shouts: "He had a hat, you know! "

This is the Day of Resurrection hope. And it is the hope of the Risus Paschalis, the laughter of Easter that carries us through this vale of tears and on to join the laughter of heaven.
“Then was our mouth filled with laughter, and our tongue with singing.” Psalm 126.2