Emmanuel, Midnight Mass 2005

Midnight Mass – Emmanuel

"Look, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and they shall name him Emmanuel, which means, God is with us." Matt 1.23

And a reading from one of my Christmas presents from many years ago – from Winnie the Pooh:

“Pooh”, said Piglet taking his paw.
“What?”
“Oh, nothing. I was just checking that you were there…” (The House at Pooh Corner)

Humans, like piglets, are social animals. We need the sense that someone is ‘there’. We are, for all of our lives, in some way dependent on others.

God himself is a social being: Father, Son and Holy Spirit in the mystical, eternal intimacy of the Trinity.

Then in his incarnation which we celebrate this Christmas night, God became a tiny dependent baby, mewling for his mother’s milk and subject to Mary and Joseph. The boy Jesus needed them to be there.

As a grown man too he needed companionship and had many friends: men, women and children.

He had an inner circle of close friends: James and John, and Peter - there with Jesus for the transfiguration; there in the Garden of Gethsemane - Jesus wanted them with him in his most agonising hour of decision. He goes off to pray, but keeps returning: “just checking that you are there”.

And they were there at his crucifixion: his best friend John, and his mother Mary, who had bought him into the world in that stable in Bethlehem – (Rood Screen) there are John and Mary, at the foot of his cross as they are in churches throughout the world.

So now, physically, he is with us no more. No hand to hold. No Lion to hug.

But there is an even profounder reality of God’s continuing companionship.

For Mary has conceived and born a son, and his name is Emmanuel, which means, God is with us.

He is with us because he shared our joys and sorrows, he can empathise with us in all that we go through. He is not distant and unmoved, but he is with us in all the richness and vagaries of our lives.

Then he has taught us that all humans are made in his image, and are to be loved and cared for. So all our kinships and friendships are part of God’s being with us.

We cannot hug God, but we can hold the hand of a friend, to check that they are there. And in our turn we can sit with friends and strangers, and by our physical presence assure them that God is with them.

But companions leave us and Christmas is always a reminder, especially as we get older, of the empty seats around the table.

At the end of Matthew’s gospel, the disciples are filled with foreboding as they realise that Christ is leaving them, from the manger to the skies. So the end of Matthew’s Gospel re-echos the beginning: he reassures them in his words of parting: “I am with you always, to the end of the age”. (Matt 28.20)

Here is an even deeper spiritual mystery. For it has been the experience of Christians through the ages, that by God’s Holy Spirit, they sense the loving presence of God; Emmanuel; he’s there.

It’s of course very subjective, but nonetheless real for being that. Loving our partners and friends is very subjective, but nonetheless real for being that.

Last weekend I was in Stockholm with my good friends Stefan and Helena and their little boy Eynar. We were in a flat he’d never been in before and at one point his parents left the room with our host. He looked at me, said something in Swedish, then remembered I was that poor simple man who didn’t understand anything. So he came over, put his thumb in his mouth, and held my hand. Just checking I was there.

"Look, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and they shall name him Emmanuel, which means, God is with us."

I hope you have a very happy Christmas, and a deepening sense in your life of the continual and reassuring presence of God.

Love Actually, Carol Service 2005

Love Actually

I was given an Early Christmas present the other day – Love Actually (DVD) - an improvement on last year's gift from the same person – 'Life’s Little Deconstruction Book – self-help for the post-hip'.

The film is indirectly connected with Christmas because the interwoven stories come to some sort of dénouement on Christmas Eve: the prime minister (played by Hugh Grant) falls for a down-to-earth domestic help with chubby thighs - from south of the river! A little boy feels the pain of unrequited love; a smitten novelist falls in love with his Portuguese cleaner but they don’t speak the same language.

The film has a curious title - Love Actually - but it comes from the words in the opening sequence of the film which shows people hugging and greeting one another in the airport arrivals lounge. The narrator says:

“General opinion's starting to make out that we live in a world of hatred and greed - but I don't see that - seems to me that love is everywhere.
Igniting laughter, wreaking havoc, breaking hearts, daring commitments, forcing choices, catapulting spirits, forging inroads, creating risks - ecstatic, exciting, unexpected, unwelcome, inconvenient, inexplicable, inelegant, unequalled.
Love actually is all around.”

It’s a common enough sentiment. It was the 25th anniversary of John Lennon's death the other day and we were reminded again that ‘All you need is love’. But at a deeper theological level as well as at ordinary human level, love actually is all around. It’s part of the deeper meaning of Christmas.

A theme that runs through the film is communication between people in love; and between people who simply love one another in the bonds of friendship -

For the joy of human love,
brother, sister, parent, child,
friends on earth and friends above...

Christmas signals God’s supreme communication of love; a communication of his very self for God is love and so ‘Love came down at Christmas’.

In the words of the Bible: “God so loved the world…”

We give Christmas presents as tokens of love for one another, because God first gave us, on that first Christmas, his supreme gift of love: the gift of Jesus.

The late John Betjeman muses on the meaning of these Christmas presents and how they relate to G0d’s surprising gift to mankind:

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.

The Bread and the Wine remind us, as do many of the carols, of the cost of God’s Christmas gift of love. True love is not about a sentimental feeling or costly gifts. It is about giving ourselves in love to God and then to others.

May you have a very happy Christmas and experience the mixed blessing of God’s love:

Igniting laughter, wreaking havoc, breaking hearts, daring commitments, forcing choices, catapulting spirits, forging inroads, creating risks - ecstatic, exciting, unexpected, unwelcome, inconvenient, inexplicable, inelegant, unequalled.

Heaven, Advent 3

Advent - heaven

“But our citizenship is in heaven, and it is from there that we are expecting a Saviour, the Lord Jesus Christ.” Phil 3.20

Father Murphy walks into a pub in Donegal, and says to the first man he meets, "Do you want to go to heaven?"
The man said, "I do Father."
The priest says, "Then leave this pub right now!"
He approaches a second man. "Do you want to go to heaven?"
"Certainly, Father."
"Then leave this den of Satan," says the priest.
He walks up to O'Toole. "Do you want to go to heaven?"
"No thank you very much Father.”
The priest looks him right in the eye, and says, "You mean to tell me that when you die you don't want to go to heaven?"
"Oh, when I die? Yes, Father! I thought you were getting a group together to go right now."

Most of us like the concept of heaven. We’re just not keen to leave right now.

In popular culture heaven is full of clouds, harps and halos; angels peeling grapes, chubby little cherubim. Each age has represented Heaven as the best of their own geography, cuisine and music, although they have often done so with a little tongue in cheek.

Here’s Alan Bennett, presumably calling on childhood holiday memories, in Habeas Corpus:

My life I squandered waiting,
Then let my chance go by.
One day we’ll meet in Heaven.
That Matlock in the sky.”

The Koran describes heaven beautifully, albeit in very earthy terms which would comfort many a priest on a Sunday morning after one of those Saturday evenings: “It is the garden in which there are rivers of water, flowing springs, branching vines with all kinds of fruits. There the saints shall recline… no headache shall they feel there from wine, nor shall their wits be dimmed. They shall be served by large-eyed damsels of modest glance.”

I had the misfortune to be in Oxford Street yesterday. There you had all the traditional advent themes in tableaux: heaven, hell, judgement and death.

And today we look to the promise of heaven: those unspeakable joys which God has prepared for those that unfeignedly love him.

Is the concept of heaven just whistling in the dark, keeping ourselves cheerful in the fearsome face of death? This is what bare-fact atheists such as Richard Dawkins or Ludovic Kennedy would have us believe.

No, death itself points any reasonable person to the continuity of personhood in the life to come. The natural inclination of all humankind has been to suppose that there is yet more.
Who has not lost a friend, a family member - perhaps someone vibrant with life, loving and much loved; or perhaps at the end, weak and frail. And is not the sense that they are still ‘here’ overwhelming and almost tangible at times?

This is how that great rationalist CS Lewis felt about the death of his friend Charles Williams:

“No event has so corroborated my belief in the next world as Williams did simply in dying. When the idea of death and the idea of Williams thus met in my mind, it was the idea of death which changed.”

It is only simplistic ‘nothing buttery’ - human life is ‘nothing but’ this or that - which says, that because there is no scientific evidence for the life to come, then there is none.

It is only simplistic ‘nothing buttery’ which says, that because there are psychological reasons why we should fool ourselves into believing in the life to come, then there is none.

Obviously we no longer believe that heaven is in any sense ‘up there’. We have moved beyond the Ancient Near Eastern inverted colander that separates the waters above from the waters below. And we no longer adhere to the Greek view of layered heavens - God being beyond the seventh heaven.

Tom Wright, the Bishop of Durham, puts into words a valuable and common insight of Christian thinkers:

“A proper Christian understanding of heaven is not as a place remote from the present world, but rather as a dimension, normally kept secret, of present reality… ‘Heaven’ is God’s dimension of present reality.”

CS Lewis again hints at this in his science fiction novels. The hero, Ransom, questions an angel who appears to be shimmering as he stands before him. The angel explains that in heaven, he is usually still, but he has to perform amazing contortions to appear stationary in front of a human.

For we are on a spinning planet in a spinning solar system, within a whirling Milky Way, within an exploding group of galaxies, within a rapidly expanding universe. As we are sitting in church this morning, we are in fact spinning around at dizzying speeds of thousands of miles per second.

Religions are still divided in what they believe to be the nature of life after death.

Re-incarnation has a long and honourable history both among Hindus and Buddhists. And recently in the West it has become fashionable to remember a past life in which you were a consort to the Pharaoh or a Lady in Waiting to Elizabeth I. Less frequently, I find, do people remember their life as a goose or as a wretched medieval serf.

There is no place for reincarnation within the Judaeo-Christian tradition, for it is neither in the Scriptures, nor does it sit easily with the view that every person is of infinite value to God; loved by Christ; the temple of the Holy Spirit.

More popular in recent years is the idea that we will be absorbed into nothingness. This again has come from the East. Here is the Hindu Upanishad: “ My friend, welcome the joy of impersonal nothingness - nothing, this is the end, the supreme goal.”

For the Buddhist, Nirvana is a similar concept. And of course it has had its adherents within the Christian church.

This is the great Methodist preacher and writer Leslie Weatherhead:
“Would it really matter if I were lost like a drop of water in the ocean, if I could be one shining particle in some glorious wave that broke in utter splendour and in perfect beauty on the shores of an eternal sea?”

Well yes, Lesley, it really would matter.

Historic Christianity has used art and music to paint a picture which emphasises the relational aspects of the world to come: a place of completion, but not dull stasis.

Heaven is the place where the object of our worship can be viewed with unveiled face. Where we will gaze on the Lamb that was slain, who yet lives. Where we will no longer peer anxiously through a glass darkly, but see and know, even as we are seen and known.

Where our thirst for knowledge will be satisfied by the eternal wisdom of God.

We will be the people we have always really wanted to be. We will be free at last from the restlessness that drives us and the whole human race towards great beauty and ingenuity, and towards madness and self-destruction.

And we will be with the saints, and the angels, and with those whom we have loved in this life, now made perfect in Christ. Heaven is a social concourse, for there can be no being, no personality in isolation from others.

But even when we have painted our pictures, Scripture reminds us that, ‘no eye has seen, nor ear has heard, no mind has conceived’ what God has in store for those who love him.

And here in the bread and the wine, at this altar where the veil is thin, the dimensions of heaven break through into our own dimensions.

The mystical Body of Christ, lifted towards heaven, is viewed by another innumerable company, on another shore, and we are knit together with the saints.

And we are reminded again that

“…our citizenship is in heaven, and it is from there that we are expecting a Saviour, the Lord Jesus Christ.”

Phil 3.20

Advent Apocalypse

Advent Apocalypse

“…you are not lacking in any spiritual gift as you wait for the revealing of our Lord Jesus Christ.” 1 Cor 1.7

So Brother George leads this Christian Sect who are sure that the second coming and the end of the world will be on December 31st at midnight. He and his followers gather on a local hilltop, ready to greet the returning Lord. Midnight comes and they look to the skies – nothing happens. Quarter past midnight – still nothing. 1am – still nothing. Br George’s followers gradually begin to go back down the hill until only his right hand man is left. At 2am, even he leaves – and as he passes George, he pats him on the shoulder and says “never mind George. It’s not the end of the world.”

It’s Advent Sunday again, the beginning of the Church’s liturgical year, and once again we have all these readings about the end of the world, the day of judgement, the parousia – meaning the second coming of Christ, the apocalypse – the revelation of Christ.

And what is it all about? Men with sandwich boards in Leicester Square proclaiming ‘The End is Nigh’? Will the universe be brought to an abrupt and cataclysmic close?

Reading through Mark’s gospel, the chapter from which today’s Gospel is taken, comes like a bolt out of the blue. Everything has been fairly straightforward in this shortest, probably earliest and almost tract-like gospel – the gospel we shall follow through in the Sunday readings for this next year.

Then we hit an apparently impenetrable prophecy full of foreboding, apprehension and warning.

It is sometimes called the Little Apocalypse (the word means ‘revelation’) and is reminiscent of the sort of language and imagery found in parts of Daniel (quoted in vv. 14, 19, 26) or in the book of Revelation. There are many shared characteristics of apocalyptic writing, although these words of Jesus, probably collected together by Mark from a number of his sayings over the years, also show some distinctive differences.

There is more hope than usual, with a purposeful rather than pessimistic view of history. And there is exhortation included, albeit with an uneasy tension that we still live with: “the end is not yet - do nothing” and “these are the end-time signs - act and don’t be caught off guard.”

As you stand and look at very distant mountains, you can discern the peaks but are not always sure which peak is in the foreground and which peak is further off in the background. The twin peaks of this prophecy appear to be the relatively imminent destruction of Jerusalem in 70AD (I think Mark was writing some years before this event) and the more distant close of the age, the Parousia which we still await.

Now which descriptions belong to which event is not at all easy to sort out. Before we look at the verses in today’s Gospel, let’s just spend a moment on that first peak – the destruction of Jerusalem.

In 168BC Antiochus Epiphanes, King of Syria, desecrated the Temple in Jerusalem, setting up an altar to Zeus on the burnt offering altar and sacrificing pigs. This is often seen as the fulfilment of Daniel’s prophecy concerning the Abomination of Desolation (Daniel 12:11) Luke’s version (21:20) mentions more explicitly the King’s armies that surrounded the city.

Jesus uses the same language here (v.14) and calls up the common memory of this horrendous event before he looks forward to an even worse destruction of the Temple, and perhaps even further forward to the then unknown terrors of the 20th century holocaust.

And in such days of suffering and confusion, our Lord warns us of false christs and prophets. False Christ’s never seem too difficult to spot – I have had a number of people tell me over the years that they are Jesus Christ – and I have never felt the need to take advice on their claims.

But false prophets are altogether harder to identify. Perhaps there is something in the way that they parade their miracles and signs and wonders. It is significant that Jesus never ‘did tricks’ or performed miracles on demand.

The apocryphal Gospel of Thomas, wisely left out of the New Testament canon, has Jesus, as a boy, making clay pigeons and throwing them in the air where they spring into life. Jesus never uses signs and wonders to compel faith or confound sceptics. They spring from compassion for the sick and needy and are often accompanied by a plea to “tell no one”.

It contrasts starkly with some of the tele-evangelists and miracle workers who are still busy around the Christian world.

But let’s move on to the verses we read today.

They are full of familiar Old Testament imagery, where Jesus uses phrases from Isaiah (13:10; 34:4), moving on now from the nearer events of the destruction of the Temple, to describe the Parousia.

Jesus takes up Daniel's vision of the Son of Man (Daniel 7:13,14) coming in glory from the Ancient of Days with authority over all peoples. And the gloom is touched with the hope of glory (vv.26, 27) for the disciples of Christ in every age.

The fig tree is very common in Palestine where most other trees are evergreen. So it is one of the clearest indicators of the passing seasons. Perhaps too Mark is hearkening back to Christ's cursing of the fig tree (11:12-20) with his pronouncement of judgement on the Temple and religious establishment.

In contrast, the fig tree of this parable is a sign of summer and hope. In testing and depressing days it’s hard to hold on to hope. (I read on a staff notice board in school: "To make savings during government cut-backs, the light at the end of the tunnel has been switched off...")

So Jesus reminds them and us that his words are more certain than the seasons and will endure longer than the physical universe.

There are still groups of Christians around the world obsessed with trying to predict the date and mechanical niceties of the Second Coming.

Jesus puts an end to all such 'almanac discipleship' by asserting that he, the Son, does not know the timetable, and that if he doesn't know, then no one can know. The pre-occupation of Christians should be with how to conduct themselves in these end times - between Christ's first coming and his Second Coming – this is the Advent theme.

But then some of us have become so blasé about all this that we don’t really believe the words we will say in the Nicene creed in a moment: “And he shall come again with glory to judge both the quick and the dead.”

If we are theologically minded we may have bought into some form of ‘realised eschatology’ – often attributed to Albert Schweitzer and CH Dodd – the idea that everything has already happened in the first coming of Christ. There’s nothing else to wait for.

But more commonly, we just can’t imagine an ‘end of the world’, and hope it doesn’t come before our holidays!

Scientifically, the world will certainly end, and the earth will collapse into the sun – although not while there is a labour government. And of course, through the good services of technology, we are perfectly capable of destroying all life on the planet ourselves. It’s the stuff apocalyptic films and novels are made of.

But this is to miss the point of our Lord’s teaching.

On the ‘how’ or the ‘when’ this parousia will happen, we must remain agnostic.

Rather it means there should be a sense of 'edge' in our Christian living; a knowledge that we may not have all the time in the world, that we should ‘carpe diem’ – seize the day. That we should use the spiritual gifts that we have, and following on from last Sunday’s theme, the resources that we have, now while we still have time. We should plan for our spiritual future, by investing spiritually in the present.

Remember that Jesus also used the imagery of watching and waiting for the bridegroom - a much more positive metaphor. It’s like the excitement we feel in the days leading up to the visit of a long-absent and dear friend. Our waking moments are tinged with the inner flutter of anticipation of a joyful reunion.

We can’t permanently live in a state of anticipation – but this Advent season is a reminder that the re-union with our dear friend will happen, sooner or later!

“…you are not lacking in any spiritual gift as you wait for the revealing of our Lord Jesus Christ.”

Review - 3 OT background books

Old Words New Life: Reflections on 40 Key Old Testament Words

By David Winter
BRF £6.99 (1-84101-391-9)

Connected Christianity: Discovering the riches of the Old Testament

By David Spriggs
BRF £8.99 (1-84101-420-6)

Standing Up to God

By Anthony Phillips
SPCK £9.99 (0-281-05699-4)

The Old Testament Lectionary readings often leave the congregation baffled at best, or convinced that God must have written it before he became a Christian! And preachers often, understandably, choose the Gospel or Epistle to expound. So it’s good to have these books, which are both accessible and readable for the intelligent layperson as well as providing pithy background for those preachers who dare to venture into the OT. David Winter’s list of 40 key words, from Atonement to Yahweh, can be used as a reference book or a source for daily meditation – each brief chapter ends with a reflection. Some words not listed in the 40 are touched on under other another label. So ‘Sin’ also contains a paragraph or two on ‘wrath’. There is a devotional undercurrent always in Winter’s writings and at times, the brevity may frustrate but will whet the appetite for some more serious study of the Hebrew Scriptures.
David Spriggs has provided just this with a thoughtful OT background, touching on much recent scholarship, but without a German word in sight! The book has questions for group study and a useful annotated yet brief bibliography. Spriggs gently opens up the contextual issues of Ancient Near Eastern history, cultic religion and textual genre, but without getting bogged down in them. The final chapters segue from monotheism, messiah and mission into the connection with the New Testament.
Yet still those puzzling Old Testament passages, like the testing of Abraham and of Job, the angel wrestling with Jacob, Isaiah’s suffering servant – point uncomfortably to the ‘shadow side of God’ as Anthony Phillips calls it. He engages with these texts, and others, drawing them into the mystery of Christ’s passion. There are certainly no trite answers here to the problem of theodicy, or to why bad things happen to good people. With integrity and some bold theological assertions (that God occasionally ‘loses the plot’), Phillips believes that through faith and love, the light of hope can eventually pierce the darkest shadows.

Church Times

Remembrance

“Do this in remembrance of me.” 1 Cor 11.24

The fourth Harry Potter film is upon us. Another classic battle between good and evil.

Central to the Harry Potter books is the theme of Harry recovering his memory - his personal history - and in so doing realising who he really is and the powers that he has.

Memory is a strange but very important human ability. It creates the substance of our being. There can be no ‘What I Am’ without the memory of ‘What I have been.’

In human evolution, it was the creatures with memory that won over those early creatures with no memory.

It is the foundation of all our deep relationships: shared history; shared memories. How often in our conversations with friends do we start a sentence with “Do you remember?” (It binds us to people of our own age-group. Fireworks yesterday.)

The short-term memory is the most vital and sometimes the most fragile. Sentences begun but unended with ‘what was I saying?’ There is, by the way, a fascinating website called shorttermmemoryloss.com which celebrates at the moment the 60th Anniversary of Housmans Bookshop in the Caledonian Rd by King’s Cross – it’s been the home of the peace movement for these past 60 years. “60 years of peace” it proclaims “but little quiet”. Indeed more have been killed in wars over these past 60 years of peace than in the previous two terrible World Wars.

Remembering where we have been, helps us to make sense of where we are no. So music has no beauty without the memory of what was. The resolution of the chord or the conclusion of the book is meaningless without the retention in your memory of what has gone before.

Long-term memory is even more of an enigma. A cameo appearance of an old friend 35 years ago is there in all its vividness: the flares, the tie, the bicycles on the tow-path with the Sturmy Archer 3-speed gears. But what happened in 1964 when you were in the fourth form? - the entire year is a complete blank. [Of course my older sisters say that if you remember the 60s then you weren’t there?!]

Then there is communal memory, passed on from one generation to another. Two Millennia seems half of the age of the earth. But the age of the earth is in fact about two million times two millennia.

The psychology of historical recall means that 500 years ago has as much relevance to our three score years and ten lives as 500 million years ago. Shakespeare is as alien to us as dinosaurs.

There is another complication. We live in an accelerated culture where the rate of change in so many aspects of our daily lives is always increasing. Young people now suffer from premature nostalgia. The nineties is already ‘retro’ - history. There have been more inventions and changes in these last 60 years of peace than in the previous 5,000 years! The slide-rule that got me through Cambridge engineering is now in the Science museum!

And we all know the experience of looking at old family photos. There is a 17 year old you, in braided jacket with a school prefect’s badge. But how is that you/me? I’m a stranger to myself. Every cell in my body has changed many times since then and half my brain cells have already died - and the other two are feeling queasy.

The Bible and the Church have always placed a strong emphasis on the integration of our memory - commonly owned history - into the present reality. Indeed there can be no present reality without a sense of what was. The postmodern assertion that yesterday is another country, is a denial of the Christian view of personhood and Heilsgeschichte - Salvation History – which shapes our present.

These vestments, the liturgy, the music, the art and symbols of recent and long past centuries - these all give greater reality to the ‘now’.

Why has Remembrance Day become arguably of greater significance in the last decade than, say, in the 60s and 70s? There were calls for its abolition back then.

Many of us now have no direct memories of the world wars, yet the act of remembrance - the liturgy at the Cenotaph, the poppies, the veterans, the engraved walls, the war poems - all these give substance to the reality of the war dead, and a poignancy to the new struggles with terrorism and the daily casualties in Iraq or the latest location of indiscriminate violence.

These yearly community remembrances; the counting of the decades of uneasy peace; these 60 years of nervous optimism that we will never fall into another world-wide conflagration – these ceremonies of thankfulness and hope. They help to give expression to our inner longings for peace and a better society; for an end to violence and hatred. They are a shared history, which guides us in shaping the present.

Of course there are cultures whose communal remembering is rooted in vengeance and hatred which prolongs the relentless cycle of bloodshed. This sort of remembering must be expunged if the culture is to survive.

Well few of us now have direct experience of war, but of course none of us have direct and experiential memories of the man Christ Jesus; who lived and died and rose again these two millennia past - 50 generations ago. Yet we believe that our remembering of this man, deeply affects our present and future.

Catherine Pickstock at Cambridge wrote a startling but difficult book a couple of years ago entitled After Writing: On the Liturgical Consummation of Philosophy. It is an attack on the floating, postmodern self, detached from history and memory. She wrote of this service, the mass:

“… the worshipper’s forward journey is precisely its journey towards memory: the occasion of our meeting God is our memory of him.” (p.231)

“Do this” says Jesus, “in remembrance of me.”

I remember, as a young teacher, standing in the memorial cloister of Lancing College at the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month, 32 years ago.

And looking at the 500 young men and masters around me, and then at the 500 names etched in the cold November walls in front of us. The lesson needed no words of explanation.

Today we remember and honour the war dead. We give thanks for their sacrifice and pray to God that we will not let such carnage happen again. It is Remembrance Sunday. Our communal memory encourages us to work for a better present reality – and if we remember rightly, it brings that reality into being.

Which is why for Christians every Sunday is Remembrance Sunday. Our communal memory allows God to make himself a reality among us in bread and wine and fellowship.

So, a deep understanding, a deep sense of who we are; what we are doing on this war-riven planet; why our relationships have any value; how the suffering and death of God in Christ nearly two thousand years ago affect us today; the conviction that the Risen Lord is with us now, and that we will be with him and all those who have gone before; and the hope that 60 years of peace will lead to that time when the lion will lie down with the lamb, and they will study war no more…

…this is all bound up in the profound utterance of our Lord which we and the church universal repeat in every hour, of every day, of every century:

“Do this in remembrance of me.” 1 Cor 11.24

Immortal Longings, All Saints 2005

Immortal Longings – All Saints

“‘Who are these, robed in white…?’ ‘These are they… who have washed their robes and made them white in the blood of the Lamb.’” (Rev 7.13f)

‘And what do you want to be when you grow up?’ Every child gets used to that question.

My earliest longings were to be a cowboy - too much Roy Rogers and Lone Ranger!

Then I discovered music and wanted to be a conductor or a famous pianist - and then when I saw it on TV, to be a pianist who conducts from the piano!

And then I longed to be a missionary - my religious phase; and then to be a professor of mathematics - my precocious period.

And the result of all those boyhood dreams? - a Church of England Curate - some might say a combination of all those longings!

It is a part of the human condition to be absorbed by longings and desires. And as we move from childhood to middle age, we fulfil some of those longings, and realise that others are never going to be acjieved.

I know now that I shall never be a bishop by 30.

But we begin also to realise that behind all our desires and longings, there is a deeper longing; at once both inescapable, and unquenchable.

Fergus Kerr, the Regent of Blackfriars, Oxford, has written a fine book with the intriguing title: Immortal Longings (SPCK, 1997).

It looks at the philosophy of Martha Nussbaum, Martin Heidegger, Iris Murdoch... and others, through Barthian spectacles. You will be glad to know that we don’t have time to discuss it this morning.

Suffice it to say, that he examines the various ways in which philosophy has struggled with this universal human longing for transcendence - for the ‘there must be more to life than this’.

In everyday terms, we see it in the realm of beauty and mystery: art, music and the glories of the natural world. There is an inner longing to comprehend their magnificence, which is at times almost painful.

We see it in the realm of love and human intimacy - that too is an immortal longing.

Today’s readings emphasise, in our Lord’s words in the Gospel, that it is the pure in heart who will see God, whose longings will be satisfied. Now this mustn’t be confused on this All Saints day with ‘being good’, never doing anything wrong.

Our texts today makes clear that our robes are dirty – they are made white and clean by the Blood of the Lamb. The Saints are not those who have led blameless lives. They are those who have a pure heart; an attitude of godliness; or as Archbishop Temple put it ‘a passionate aspiration towards the holiness of God’.

Jesus was always concerned with the direction of the heart, the object of our longings. Do we long for God or for self-satisfaction? The Scriptures make clear that everything which stifles immortal longings and turns beauty, mystery, love and sex into objects of their own end, fosters ugliness, bitterness, hatred and violence – and the eclipse of our true selves.

Adam and Eve grasp the object of desire that they might become like gods. Their longing is not for God himself, but to usurp his power. As St Paul describes this human reversal of immortal longings: “claiming to be wise, they became fools and exchanged the glory of the immortal God... and worshipped and served created things rather than the Creator...” (Romans 1.21-25)

Or as Shakespeare puts it in the words of Cleopatra – for Shakespeare struggled with the ambiguity of his own longings: “Give me my robe. Put on my crown. I have Immortal longings in me.” (Antony & Cleopatra, V/ii/283)

And all the Saints, known and unknown have had immortal longings.

It was Pope Gregory III (731-741) who consecrated a chapel in the Basilica of St. Peter to all the saints and fixed the anniversary for 1 November. Until then, only martyrs were regarded as worthy of a place in heaven with the Saints. Gregory IV, a century later, (827-844) extended the celebration on 1 November to the entire Church, although the orthodox still keep it on the first Sunday after Pentecost.

And today we keep it, anticipated from Tuesday, to rejoice with all those with a pure heart who now see God – the object of their life’s deepest desire.

But in the question posed at the beginning of our text today: ‘Who are these, robed in white…?’

Well, the theological world has moved on since Gregory IV and we live, we hope, in a more generous Christian church. The Feast of All Souls which we will keep on Wednesday, was instituted to pray for all those Christian ‘commoners’ who hovered in purgatory, never receiving the Beatific vision of the pure in heart, until we, the church militant, had prayed enough for them; given enough alms; and most important, said enough masses.

But if we answer the question, ‘Who are these, robed in white…?’ in a post-reformation and more biblical way, then there is encouragement for us all.

There is Noah, who found favour in the sight of the Lord, and who shortly after landing the ark, was found naked, drunk and unconscious by his children.

There is Rahab the prostitute who helped the Israeli spies in Jericho, and who finds her way into the genealogy of King David and so of Christ.

There is King David himself, who killed 100 philistines to gain one of his wives; who committed adultery and had the woman’s husband killed; who lied and feigned madness to escape from king Abimelech, and who wrote a Psalm about it which we sang today.
The Old and the New Testament record God’s verdict: “This is a man after my own heart.”

There is the common thief who was crucified next to Christ – “today you will be with me in paradise!”

And seeing some of our friends from St Mary’s Bourne Street here today, there is Mildred Steele – a dear companion whose loss we are mourning.

Any of you who have visited St Mary’s would remember her: the 5 foot Hollywood actress with a ten foot personality; married three times – forty years to her last husband; with many Hollywood adventures recorded in the obituaries last week which recalled her MGM sobriquet, 'the pocket Venus'.

But Mildred had a pure heart, and a deep devotion to Christ, and now her colourful clothes, hardly spotless after 94 years, have been washed in the blood of the Lamb. She has joined the great army of saints triumphant, worshipping the Lamb that was slain, who yet lives.

And so let all our immortal longings, our pure hearts, our singleminded devotion, lead us to the immortal God and his overwhelming love and care for us. Then we will join with All the Saints, as we do this day around this table, and rejoice in the Lamb.

“‘Who are these, robed in white…?’ ‘These are they… who have washed their robes and made them white in the blood of the Lamb.’” (Rev 7.13f)

Thanks - Harvest

Thanks – Harvest

“Sing and make music in your heart to the Lord, always giving thanks to God the Father for everything, in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ.” Eph 5.19, 20

Some people are chronically grateful; which can be infuriating for the rest of us. It sometimes makes you want to scream. Ogden Nash points it up beautifully in the last few lines of his poem about a moaning wife with an ever-grateful husband: “The Outcome of Mr MacLeod’s Gratitude”.

So she tired of her husband’s cheery note
And she stuffed a tea tray down his throat.
He remarked from the floor where they found him reclining
“I’m just a MacLeod with a silver lining.”

Harvest Thanksgiving is a day in the Church calendar when we try to regain a proper sense of gratitude to God. Fortunately, we live in a part of the world where we are no longer dependent on good harvests, rain in due season and all the other vicissitudes of nature, ‘cruel in tooth and claw’.

But this gives us an even greater, and in some ways harder responsibility to acknowledge our ultimate dependence upon God for life and breath and, in the words of our text, everything. And from this right sense of gratitude flows praise to God and compassion for others – another traditional theme of harvest-tide.

It is perhaps a symptom of living surrounded by plenty that we rarely say grace before meals these days. It is not only right to give thanks to God, to ask for his blessing, but also, in the words of our Bishop, ‘to enlarge our sympathies and make us mindful of the needs of others.”

Even George Herbert, writing in the 17th Century, in an age vastly more uncomfortable than our own, realises that complacency is setting in. So in his poem 'Gratefulnesse' from The Temple, written in his fortieth and final year:

Thou that hast given so much to me,
Give one thing more--a grateful heart:
Not thankful when it pleaseth me,
As if thy blessings had spare days,
But such a heart whose Pulse may be
Thy Praise.

Why do we find it so difficult to live with that proper Christian attitude of thanks, praise and compassion?

Let’s speculate for a moment on today’s well-known Gospel story: the ten lepers.

You are part of a band of complete outcasts from society, facing an unpleasant death within a short time. Then one day you meet a healer called Jesus. You all shout; you can’t get near, it wouldn’t be allowed. You are told to go and show the Priest you’re better; how ridiculous, how embarrassing – but it’s worth a try, and as you traipse off, expecting nothing, you begin to notice signs of genuine healing. It’s a miracle!

So why did only one come back to say thank-you? What happened to the other nine? A lack of gratitude usually signifies a problem in attitude. So let’s do some guesswork, based on our own observation of humankind.

The first person was the nervous fearful sort; he was scared, completely confused and terrified, not knowing what was going on – he hid.

The second person was offended. She wanted to do something difficult for her healing. God helps them that that help themselves. The simplicity of the miracle offended her.

The third person realised, after the fact, that he did not want to be healed. He’d forgotten how to live, who he was without his leprosy. He’d allowed it to define him. Jesus took away his identity and he wasn’t grateful.

The fourth person, well, here is an easier one to identify with. She forgot. That’s it, nothing more, in all the excitement and joy she just forgot.

The fifth leper was unable to say thank you anymore to anyone. For years he had been shunned by family and friends and forced to beg. By living in constant need, he lost the ability to be grateful, for anything.

The sixth person, had contracted her Leprosy eleven years ago, when her children were toddlers. She had to leave her precious family. So when she was healed, she ran, like a bullet from a gun – she had to see them, she had to know how they were.

The seventh, well the seventh did not believe there was anything to be thankful for. It was entirely a coincidence. There had to be some logical explanation. Perhaps the water in that place. It was nothing to do with Jesus, why say thank you?

The eighth person was quite the opposite. She knew it was Jesus, she’d heard all about him and now she had experienced his healing touch. She couldn’t wait to tell as many people as possible that this really was the Messiah.

The ninth – what of the ninth? I don’t know. There could be so many reasons. Some are a mystery, beyond our imagination. He didn’t, he couldn’t, he wouldn’t, he forgot, he meant to but got distracted…

There are lots of reasons for not living a life of gratitude to God and others. But as we focus on the tenth leper, we begin to see that it is the transforming love of Jesus which is at the heart of our gratitude; the pulse of our praise.

The tenth was a Samaritan, despised by the Jews. His religion was a version of Judaism but ‘not pure’. So he had been an outcast from Israel long before he contracted leprosy.

Of course we are used to thinking of the Good Samaritan, but Jesus only told that parable to highlight the contradiction to his Jewish hearers – the good Samaritan. We can think of parallel attitudes as we listen to some of the rhetoric in the Middle East today.

Among lepers, among the ten, other outcasts, the Samaritan had found a community of Jews to belong to. He had been rejected, and then in his illness found acceptance.

In sending him back home, his healing robbed him of his community.

So why did he say thank you?

Perhaps this Samaritan recognized something deeper in Christ than the immediate benefit of being free from leprosy. He had been healed with Jews; he had not been excluded from that.

In the middle of the confusion of what to do with himself after his healing, he had realised one thing. Jesus had not rejected him: Jesus, a Jew, a healthy Jew.

Perhaps he was beginning to see the heart of the Gospel which still we find so hard to grasp, sometimes even in the church. The healing love of God in Christ reaches out to all; the sick and the well, the Jews and the non-Jews; the people we like and the people we don’t like… We are all valuable to God. The same sun shines on the just and the unjust. Earthquakes and hurricanes strike where they will.

So however others respond, our response should be one of thankfulness, in all the changing scenes of life. From this springs all else. As Cicero said: “Gratitude is not only the greatest of virtues, but the parent of all others.”

As we come to this Eucharist, this giving of thanks over broken bread and outpoured wine, the liturgy encourages us to ‘…feed on him in your hearts by faith, with thanksgiving.’

Carry this with you into each moment of your week and of your lives.

Thou that hast given so much to me,
Give one thing more - a grateful heart:

“Sing and make music in your heart to the Lord, always giving thanks to God the Father for everything, in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ.” Eph 5.19, 20

Mary's Birthday

Birthday of Mary

“Those he justified, he also glorified.” Romans 8.30

There are only two saints whose birthdays we celebrate: John the Baptist and Mary. For most others we remember them in their death; and so Mary is also remembered at her Assumption.

The Feast of the Nativity of the Blessed Virgin Mary has been kept in the Church in various ways since at least the 6th century. (In fact today our Roman Catholic brothers and sisters at Walsingham are keeping the Feast by remembering England as Mary’s Dowry.)

September the 8th was chosen as the Octave of the Byzantine New Year on September 1st. (And December 8th was then nominated as the Conception of our Lady, nine calendar months previously.)

Nothing, of course, is known of Mary’s birth at all. But the theology of Mary the God Bearer, meant that her conception and birth portayed the preparation of the human Temple that would receive the Incarnate God.

Martin Travers draws on this tradition and the words from Revelation 12 (which we will hear at Evensong this afternoon) in his 1920s sketch for St Mary’s Bourne Street.

It depicts Our Lady Queen of Heaven (Moon beneath her feet, crown of 12 stars, with the sun behind her) cradling St Mary’s Bourne Street, another human temple, in her arms.
This image reminds us that those whom God justifies, he also glorifies. Mary is the archetypal Christian.

Mary reminds us that we all hold dual citizenship. We live here on earth, but our home country, whither we shall all return, is heaven. We are second generation immigrants, sons and daughters of Adam & Eve. But Jesus, the second Adam, our true brother, has laid open through his passion a way to our true homeland.

Mary, the faithful Eve, was received into that heavenly homeland by her Son, and as a type of the church, she has made the journey and holds us in her prayers until we too make the final journey - “in the hour of our death”.

Now there is a real tension involved in holding this dual citizenship of earth and heaven, for often we are too comfortable and content here on earth to be troubled overmuch by thoughts of heaven.

Father Murphy walks into a pub in Donegal, and says to the first man he meets, "Do you want to go to heaven?"
The man said, "I do Father."
The priest says, "Then leave this pub right now!"
He approaches a second man. "Do you want to go to heaven?"
"Certainly, Father."
"Then leave this den of Satan," says the priest.
He walks up to O'Toole. "Do you want to go to heaven?"
"No thank you very much Father.”
The priest looks him right in the eye, and says, "You mean to tell me that when you die you don't want to go to heaven?"
"Oh, when I die? Yes, Father! I thought you were getting a group together to go right now."

Most of us like the concept of heaven. We’re just not keen to leave right now.

All the Marian feasts, like the Martin Travers drawing, force us to contemplate heaven.

In popular culture heaven is full of clouds, harps and halos; angels peeling grapes, chubby little cherubim, so beloved by Martin Travers, (and there in the two upper corners of the picture I described, scattering flowers and petals before our lady.)

Each age has represented Heaven as the best of their own geography, cuisine and music. Although they have often done so with a little tongue in cheek.

Here’s Alan Bennett, presumably calling on childhood holiday memories in Derbyshire, in Habeas Corpus:

My life I squandered waiting,
Then let my chance go by.
One day we’ll meet in Heaven,
That Matlock in the sky.

The Koran describes heaven beautifully, albeit in very earthy terms, similar to those in the Judaeo-Christian tradition. It says:

“It is the garden in which there are rivers of water, flowing springs, branching vines with all kinds of fruits. There the saints shall recline… no headache shall they feel there from wine, nor shall their wits be dimmed. They shall be served by large-eyed damsels of modest glance.”

The natural inclination of all humankind has been to suppose there is yet more.

Who has not lost a friend, a family member - perhaps someone vibrant with life, loving and much loved; or perhaps at the end, weak and frail? And is not the sense that they are still ‘present’ overwhelming and almost tangible at times?

This is how that great rationalist CS Lewis felt about the death of his friend Charles Williams:

“No event has so corroborated my belief in the next world as Williams did simply in dying. When the idea of death and the idea of Williams thus met in my mind, it was the idea of death which changed.”

It is only simplistic ‘nothing buttery’ - human life is ‘nothing but’ this - which says that because there is no scientific evidence for continuation, there is no more.

It is only simplistic ‘nothing buttery’ which says that, because there are psychological reasons why we should fool ourselves into believing that there is continuation, that there is none.

Bishop Tom Wright of Durham, puts into words a valuable and common insight of Christian thinkers:

“A proper Christian understanding of heaven is not as a place remote from the present world, but rather as a dimension, normally kept secret, of present reality… ‘Heaven’ is God’s dimension of present reality.”

Historic Christianity has used art and music to paint a picture which emphasises the relational aspects of the world to come: a place of completion, but not dull stasis. Mary stands resplendent in heaven, but is concerned for us, here on earth. In the imagery of Martin Travers, she cradles the Church in her arms.

Heaven is the place where the object of our worship, and of Mary’s worship, her Son, can be viewed with unveiled face. Where we will gaze on the Lamb that was slain, who yet lives. Where we will no longer peer anxiously through a glass darkly, but see and know, even as we are seen and known. Where our thirst for knowledge will be satisfied by the eternal wisdom of God.

We will be the people we have always really wanted to be - the people that God intended us to be. We will be free at last from the restlessness that drives us and the whole human race towards great beauty and ingenuity, and towards madness and self-destruction.

And we will be with Mary, the saints, and the angels, and with those whom we have loved in this life, now made perfect in Christ. Heaven is a social concourse, for there can be no being, no personality in isolation from others.

But even when we have painted our pictures, Scripture reminds us that, ‘no eye has seen, nor ear has heard, no mind has conceived’ what God has in store for those who love him.’

And whenever we take the bread and the wine, at this altar where the veil is thin, the dimensions of heaven break through into our own dimensions.

The mystical Body of Christ lifted towards heaven is viewed by another innumerable company on another shore, led by Mary our Mother. And we glimpse our true homeland, and remember

"Those whom he justified, he will also glorify."

Spiritual Satisfaction

“This is the Bread from heaven.” (John 6.58)

A Scotsman moved into the area and started drinking at his local pub. He ordered 3 double whiskies and then spent an hour sipping a little from each of them until they were gone, then he ordered three more. The landlord looked puzzled until the Scotsman explained that he always used to drink with his brothers and now they’ve emigrated to America. So he always has the three glasses of whisky to remind him of the good old times. He became quite an institution in the pub.

Then one day he just ordered two whiskies. There was a hush that fell over the pub and the Landlord, sensing the mood, offered his condolences to the Scotsman for his deceased brother.

The Scotsman smiled and said; “ Och no. My brothers are fine. But it’s Lent, and myself, I've given up drink.”

Part of the discipline of self-denial in lent is to remind ourselves that there is more to life than food and drink. And in an inverse sort of way, that is one aspect of today’s Gospel - the Feeding of the 5000.

This is a strange story, set in the relative wilderness to the east of the sea of Galilee, the Golan Heights. It is the only story, apart from our Lord’s Passion, that is recounted in all four Gospels.

It was obviously an important part of early Christian tradition, and although there have been various attempts to ‘explain away’ the miraculous heart of the story, most Christians have always accepted it, as I do, as one of the miracles of our Lord.

The disciples had just returned from a successful preaching tour - thousands won to the Catholic faith - and were in need of a rest. So Jesus takes them away to a quiet place. But as usual, the grapevine soon spreads the news to the local populace and this crowd of 5,000 men, and presumably at least that number again of women and children, gather expectantly.

It is late in the day. And then the young boy’s picnic lunch (a typical eye-witness account mentioned only in John’s Gospel) – the 5 loaves and 2 small fishes become the stuff of history.

The thoughtful Mother who wrapped them up and thrust them into her son’s hands, no doubt with the instruction that he was to wear a vest as it got chilly on the Golan Heights, could never have imagined that 2000 years later billions of people would be spiritually fed by her simple act of motherly love.

But why did Jesus perform this miracle? The people were not about to die. They would make it to their homes.

The Jesus of the four Gospels does not do tricks to try and persuade the crowd that he is the Messiah. Indeed, at the end of this story when the crowd want to hail him as the new Prophet, he flees into hiding.

In most miracles, Jesus responds to need, and occasionally, as in the water in to wine, this story and the following sign (in John’s Gospel), walking on the water, he shows his mastery over nature and also provides teaching through such an ‘enacted parable’.

In other words, the primary function of the miracle is to illustrate a concept he is trying to teach, usually to his immediate disciples.

And so it is here, that our Lord is making a simple point and, as it turns out later, another very complex point, to his disciples.

The simple point may be expressed in this way: Jesus is not nearly as discouraged as we are, by the little we have to offer. In fact, one of the prerequisites of true worship is the recognition of our inadequacy.

“What can I bring him, poor as I am.”

For Philip it was hopeless - ‘how can we feed them?’ For Andrew it was a little better - he found the little that there was - and this was enough for the Lord.

We are to bring what we have in the recognition that only the Lord can multiply it to meet the needs that are there.

So in our worship: we bring our music, our liturgy, our preaching, our vestments, our art and culture; with the recognition that it is inadequate, but it is the best we can offer. Only Christ can transform it to worship in Spirit and in Truth which is acceptable to the Father and which truly prepares us for heaven.

And in our daily lives, our prayer must always be that God will take what we offer, the little we are able to do, and by his power give our acts of service significance and influence far beyond their meagreness.

But John’s Gospel also points to deeper truths in his account of this incident.

There is a little phrase (in v.4): “and the Passover was nigh”. (Mark’s account makes the same point by another eye-witness touch - they sat down on the green grass. Any of you who have been to the Holy Land will know that about the only time there is any green grass on the Golan Heights is before Passover.

The Passover. Here is John’s axis of interpretation.

If you read on in John’s version, there is a clear movement from miracle to theological discourse, from Jesus to Moses, from bread to flesh.

Our Lord is preparing to show them that hard teaching that will make many leave him: he is the Bread come down from heaven; the panis angelicus; the bread that satisfies the human heart and feeds the soul.

Soon the Passover lamb must be slain and eaten, as a reminder that the Angel of death passed over the Israelites as they were being released from slavery in Egypt.

And soon the Lamb of God must be slain and give his flesh and blood for the salvation of the world.

This story is not just about feeding hungry people. It is about a Saviour who alone can satisfy the spiritual hunger that is everywhere evident in the world.

And there is yet deeper truth here. For even when we have received, as we will in a moment, the Bread of Life, we are still not satisfied and as part of our human condition we will long for more. As CS Lewis says:

“All joy (as distinct from mere pleasure, still more amusement) emphasizes our pilgrim status, always reminds, beckons, awakens desires. Our best havings are wantings.”

Our best havings are wantings.

When we have had a satisfying meal, when we linger over the port, is it not then that we most clearly realise that there is more to life than good food and drink.

And when we have truly enjoyed a spiritual meal at mass in the bread and wine, or in some private moment of spiritual revelation, do we not then most clearly realise that we are spiritual pilgrims who have as yet only just set off along the path.

In Epstein’s wonderful representation of Jacob wrestling with the angel (which you can visit in Tate Britain) you can see another metaphor for this giving and yet holding back of God. The Angel, while injuring Jacob, is yet supporting him, solidly holding him up, blessing and renaming Jacob for the next stage in the journey.

The 5000 were fed and we are fed. Like them, we bring the little that we have and that we are, and offer it to Jesus. We will do this symbolically in a moment in the offertory.

But like them we will only truly find sustenance for our journey when we realise that although our needs are met, there is a divine dis-satisfaction in us which always beckons us on.

Because this is miraculous bread.

“This is the Bread from heaven.” (John 6.58)

Take him earth - London Bombings 7/7

Take him earth – (The London Bombings) 7/7/05

A verse of a hymn written in the fourth century by Prudentius, but which reminds us of some of the horrific pictures we have seen this week:

Take him, earth, for cherishing,
To thy tender breast receive him.
Body of a man I bring thee,
Noble even in its ruin.

Today has been chosen to commemorate the 60th anniversary of the ending of the Second World War. The Queen is attending a service in Westminster Abbey this morning and there are various events throughout the day. Fifty million people lost their lives in that war. And more than that number have lost their lives in wars since then. Tomorrow is the tenth anniversary of the massacres in Srebrenica.

But whether fifty million or fifty in our own City, cut down by terrorist bombs on Thursday, we struggle to make sense of the violence that has been the undercurrent of human history since Cain slew Abel.

Of course, there is no sense to make of it. We live with human wickedness, and like every generation, hope for a better world and an end to violence. This was Isaiah’s vision in our first reading today. We are helpless and angry, but dare to hope that the goodness of God will triumph.

And in the face of evil, and when words of comfort fail, the people of God have always sung.
Our text, this 1600 year old hymn by Prudentius, was chosen by Herbert Howells as the text for his own composition to be performed at a memorial service for John F. Kennedy in Washington Cathedral in 1964. I often listen to it when contemplating the death of family and friends.

I cry for them and at the thought of my own mortality.

Prudentius’ hymn is a profoundly Christian work. Nevertheless, it is expressed in the high language and solemn imagery of Late Classical Latin. To that extent solemnity and faith mingle. Dignity and mystery are the keynotes of this elegy, just as dignity and mystery will be the keynotes of the many memorials we will hold for those who have died so tragically this past week.

Whilst the language and form of the hymn is redolent of Late Antiquity’s fear and respect for honourable death, in fact the heart of this poem is the redeeming death of Christ; a combination that made it especially appropriate for the funeral rites of the murdered President Kennedy. What’s more, the tragic, even gruesome circumstances of that untimely death are reflected in the poem’s use of the classical device of entrusting; entrusting the "Body of a man… Noble even in its ruin" to the cherishing, gentle breast of his Mother-Earth.

This thought is personified in the Pietà, those paintings and sculptures of Mary clasping the ruined body of Jesus to her breast. (You can see Bellini’s depiction in the order of service).

Of course, this concept is a deeply classical, a very Greek and Roman instinct – straight out of Homer’s Iliad! You can almost hear the lamentation of a Hecuba or Helen over the dead and despoiled body of their beloved Hector. Humanity has always lamented its dead and fallen; its heroes and innocent victims.

But if this hymn is classical, it is certainly not pagan! For yes, it does turn upon the body, upon this fallen flesh, but in a specifically Christian way.

The Early Church Father, Tertullian, wrote, "The flesh is the hinge of salvation" and this is why Prudentius (and his poem) pivots between two worlds. For death is the end of mortal existence. In the end it does all come down to bones and ashes and our bodies return, however reluctantly, and after all modern medicine can do, to their native earth. Yet, in that very returning, we have another poetic device; this time a very Christian one. It is the ‘bargain’ God makes with Mother Earth.Prudentius puts it like this:

"Comes the hour God hath appointed
Then, must thou [Mother Earth], in very fashion,
What I give, return again."

This is about Resurrection. The earth will one day give up its dead.

Thus, the Funeral March of this fallen warrior which you can feel in the metre and in the music of Howells’ motet, is not the resigned lurch of pagan hopelessness; it is not the sleepwalking oblivion of the pagan dead, drinking deeply in the waters of forgetfulness. Rather, it is what St Paul refers to when he wrote:

"Awake O Sleeper
And Rise from the Dead
And Christ will shine upon you".

This is the poem’s "shining road" that leads through death to the fields of Paradise, the open woodlands of eternity.

But this poem is not just about imagery. It is more than mere form. There is real substance here. This hymn is about you and me, about our dying and rising, because Christ has died and has risen in the substance of our flesh. It is this Paschal Mystery (of Christ’s Dying and Rising) that separates pagan from Christian – separates death as defeat from death as victory.

If Prudentius lived at a time when Europe was waking up to its Christian consciousness, we perhaps live at a time of cultural forgetting. More and more people today "live in a land where all things are forgotten". The Greek word for ‘forgetting’ is of course Lethe, the River of Forgetfulness in Hades. The word for truth is a-letheia, not-forgetting. And this is what death, Christian death, is about. Death is not oblivion but awakening to full consciousness of the truth.

Because of this, unlike most ‘modern pagans’, we Christians do well to remember our own death. The "Memento Mori" is a spiritual exercise commended to us by the Church. This is why the Church surrounds the death of the faithful with help, with support. It is why in the Prayer Book Litany we ask, "to be delivered from sudden death". We wish to be prepared.

In an age of forgetting, when Europe falls back into pagan forgetting of its Christian Faith; at a moment in history when war and death and terror may seem all too close, let us remember the great mystery of our faith: Christ has died; Christ is risen; Christ will come again.

We mourn our dead, and pray that we will be delivered from evil; not as those without hope, but as those who believe in the resurrection of the dead, and that God’s kingdom is coming.

Like those early Christians, we sing with Prudentius of the mystery of a suffering God; of a king who rules in love from a cross.

And we entrust – give our dead, and our world and ourselves - to God’s strange cherishing.

Take him, earth, for cherishing,
To thy tender breast receive him.
Body of a man I bring thee,
Noble even in its ruin.

By the breath of God created.
Christ the prince of all its living.
Take, O take him,
Take him, earth, for cherishing.

Appendix
Take him Earth for Cherishing – Prudentius (348-413) & Howells (1882-1983)
Translated by Helen Waddell

Take him, earth, for cherishing,
To thy tender breast receive him.
Body of a man I bring thee,
Noble even in its ruin.

Once was this a spirit's dwelling,
By the breath of God created.
High the heart that here was beating,
Christ the prince of all its living.
Guard him well, the dead I give thee,
Not unmindful of His creature
Shall He ask it: He who made it
Symbol of his mystery.
Take him, earth, for cherishing.

Comes the hour God hath appointed
To fulfil the hope of men,
Then must thou, in very fashion,
What I give, return again.
Take him, earth, for cherishing.
Body of a man I bring thee.
Take, O take him.

Not though ancient time decaying
Wear away these bones to sand,
Ashes that a man might measure
In the hollow of his hand:

Not though wandering winds and idle
Scatter dust was nerve and sinew,
Is it given to man to die.
Once again the shining road
Leads to ample Paradise;
Open are the woods again,
That the Serpent lost for men.

Take, O take him, mighty Leader,
Take again thy servant's soul.
Grave his name, and pour the fragrant
Balm upon the icy stone.

Take him, earth, for cherishing,
To thy tender breast receive him.
Body of a man I bring thee,
Noble even in its ruin.

By the breath of God created.
Christ the prince of all its living.
Take, O take him,
Take him, earth, for cherishing.

Holy Spirit - Comforter - First Mass

The Holy Spirit

“The Comforter, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, will teach you all things and will remind you of everything.” (Jn 14.16)

It’s a great pleasure to be here among friends tonight at St Matthew’s for Ian’s first mass. We’ve known each other for some years now and have both been on a long and unexpected journey.

I was very nervous before presiding at my first mass. I was 15, and it wasn’t so much a mass, as holy communion in a tiny Baptist tin tabernacle nestling in the South Downs. I remember it, because as I gave out the little tray of wine glasses to the ageing Baptist deacon to distribute to the half a dozen old ladies and a sheep dog that were present – he looked very puzzled.

It was only after we had drunk the wine and I was thinking ‘what comes next’, (no liturgy to follow) that I spotted the loaf of bread on the table. I had forgotten the bread! We had it after the wine, and people were too polite to mention anything. They usually are Ian!

Ten years after that, I was Commodore of the Fleet. It was a very small fleet. In fact it was the Lancing College Sailing Club - but the Master in Charge of our battered fibre glass dinghies was known as the Commodore.

Those were happy afternoons on the River Adur; or occasionally, if I misjudged the tides very badly, in the English Channel.

You learned early on in small boats that the wind is both exhilarating and exasperating. It is unpredictable, and so you are constantly on your toes, changing the position of the boat; the position of yourself and the crew; adjusting the sails.

On the one hand you might capsize; and on the other you might hit a lull and become becalmed and directionless. You can only steer a boat when it is in motion.

In Holy Scripture, the Spirit is often referred to as the wind or breath of God. Those are both possible translations of the Hebrew and Greek words.

For the Jewish people, living by lakes and the sea, the wind was full of wonder. It was intangible yet powerful. The very air we breath; invisible yet giving life.

This is why Jesus likens the Spirit to the wind, blowing where it listeth. (Jn 3.8) And in this respect the Spirit is like the Father and the Son.

The incarnate Jesus was unpredictable with a mind of his own. As our first lesson from the book of Wisdom reminds us: “Who can learn the counsel of God? Or who can discern what the Lord wills?” (Wisdom 9.13)

Well of course, some of our fellow Christians will tell us very clearly what the Lord wills! But most of us know that discerning his will is a hard task.

This is why Jesus says earlier in this passage (v 16) “I will send you another comforter” - another, because it will, as it were, replace him. It is (in Luther’s word’s) an alter Christus - another Christ. Our Lord enfleshed could only be in one place at one time, with one group of people. The Holy Spirit would be poured out on all people. He was to be the paraclete (called alongside), the counsellor who leads us into the Truth that is Jesus.

The theme of this mass is the Holy Spirit, because any new priest or deacon, must always recognise that they are utterly dependent on God’s Holy Spirit, and that God’s Holy Spirit is unpredictable.

He is given so many roles in Scripture that we cannot possibly list them all.

We’ll consider just this one word: comforter, or counsellor as it is usually translated.

John emphasises a typically Trinitarian construction in the words of our Lord: “And I will pray the Father, and he shall give you another Comforter.” The Son prays to the Father and the Spirit proceeds. Or in our text: the Father sends the Spirit in the name of the Son.

The Comforter (counsellor, advocate) - he mysteriously works within us saying things will be alright. And all priests need to sense somewhere deep in their spirits, that things will be alright. As Jesus promises, the Spirit will give that peace which the world cannot give. As Paul puts it – the Spirit enables us to cry ‘Abba’, Father – and to know that nothing can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus. Or as Lady Julian of Norwich put it:

“All shall be well and all shall be well and all manner of things shall be well.”

It is hardly surprising that the last half Century has often been called the age of the Spirit.

Not just because of the rise of Pentecostalism and the charismatic movement - certainly the fastest growing section of the church today.

But because in an age of uncertainty and doubt, when propositional truth becomes more slippery by the moment, then we all need the wise counsel of the Spirit to our inner beings,
that all will be well.

That the absurd paradoxes which as Christians we say make sense of life, are true.
That God did become Man in Christ, died for us and rose again. This is the mystery of our faith.

It is only the transcendent Spirit who proceeds from the Father and the Son who can provide this inner calling and witness to our faith.

But there is another aspect of the ministry of the Comforter. He is not just the encourager who leads us into all truth.

In the Bayeux Tapestry, that 230’ picture which tells of everything leading up to the Battle of Hastings in 1066 – there’s a section with the caption “Harold comforteth his troops” - the picture shows him jabbing a spear into a soldier’s backside.

The Spirit doesn’t just comfort us with an inner witness of well-being. He disturbs us. He encourages us to get on with the work of the kingdom. At Pentecost he not only came alongside the Apostles, he forced them out like drunken men and women into the Jerusalem crowds, and to every nation on earth.

It’s part of that disturbing work of the Spirit that led to the formation of Epicentre, and then to Moot, here at St Matthew’s. It’s that ‘spear up the backside’ that can sometimes lead us to uncomfortable places. In the memorable words of Dad’s Army – “they don’t like it up em!” As an Anglican communion, we’re in an uncomfortable place at present, a place we’d rather not be. But that is a sure sign of the working of God’s Spirit.

Let me go back to sailing boats. A friend of mine had a good boat - but I never went sailing with him. I often went out in the boat, but never sailed. He only ever rowed it, you see. He found sails and rigging, cleats and halyards all a bit of a nuisance. If the wind became gusty, you got water in the boat and it was all a bit messy and strenuous.

For each of us both the encouraging and disturbing work of the Comforter will take different forms. And this is true at a corporate level as well. The Spirit will lead Holy Trinity Brompton in another way than that of St Matthew’s Westminster. He has led the Orthodox along a different path from the Catholics.

This diversity, says Paul in our epistle this evening, makes up the whole Body of Christ. We need each other, even if we think we are the only real bits of the body.

There will always be the temptation to avoid anything too strenuous or messy - to quench the spirit. But that path leads to boredom and death. We should be excited by the variety and tensions within the church. It shows we are on the move, and like a sailing boat, we can only be steered when we are moving.

The Holy Spirit, whom we celebrate in our Eucharist this evening, is to encourage Ian in his ministry; to encourage all of us to dare to believe; and to provoke us to be more adventurous in our life of faith.

“The Comforter, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, will teach you all things and will remind you of everything.” (Jn 14.16)

Priesthood - priesting Edmonton

Peter priesthood priesting

“And I tell you, you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church, and the gates of Hades will not prevail against it.” Matt 16.18

I found myself chuckling again today over the biography of that delightfully eccentric priest, Brian Brindley, remembered with affection by many of us here.

Damian Thompson describes his memory of him striding through Sainsbury’s, dressed in all the finery of a Roman Catholic Monsignor – patent buckled shoes with huge scarlet heels, clip clopping across the linoleum in search of ever creamier puddings. His fatness was covered by a soutane with 39 red buttons. As Brian explained “one for each of the 39 Articles I don’t believe in!”.

Well I don’t think William will be following quite in Brian’s footsteps, but it raised the question again for me ‘what is a priest?’

We know what a deacon is: as one of my Sunday school children explained when another child asked what a deacon was: “it’s something you put on a hill and set fire to.”

But to be a priest in today’s world, indeed, in today’s church, is a high and difficult calling.

Of course there has been quite a movement in the last 40 years to try and make out that a priest is just an ordinary person like any other Christian.

I think it was that great 60s theologian Spike Milligan who saw through the shallowness of this: “never trust a clergyman who wears a rollneck sweater and says ‘call me Ken’”.

Paul Avis in his latest book A Ministry Shaped by Mission, has redressed the balance, and reminded us that although all Christians are called to discipleship, only a few are called to that onerous ministry of priesthood, which is a special gift to the Church.

Now I don’t want to get into a big debate about priestly identity. As Pope Benedict said when he was but a lowly Prefect in the wake of Vatican Two: “we are tired of discussing priestly identity!”

Rather I want to suggest that we display our priesthood in two ways: by sign and by service.

And these two ways reflect our Lord’s instructions to all Christians, priests and people, that they are to be a light to the world, and the salt of the earth.

I remember Bishop Richard saying at a deanery chapter as he looked round the room at those few not wearing dog collars: “I want no anonymous priests in my diocese!”

[Two priests decide to go to Hawaii on holiday. They’re determined to make this a real holiday by not wearing anything that would identify them as clergy. As soon as the plane lands, they buy some outrageous shorts, shirts, sandals & sunglasses.

The next morning sitting on the beach, enjoying a drink, a gorgeous blond in an imaginative bikini walks by. She smiles at them and says, "Good morning, Father, Good morning, Father."

They were both stunned. How in the world could she have known?

The next day, they bought even more outrageous outfits - so loud, you could hear them before you saw them. Well after a while, the same gorgeous blonde, this time accompanied by a stunning brunette, walk along the beach, turning heads as they go.

As they pass they both nod and say "Good morning, Father, Good morning, Father."
Astonished one of the priests shouts out “How do you know we’re priests?”

The blonde turns with a puzzled look and says, "Father, it's us, Sister Angela and Sister Monica!"]

But it is of course more than simply donning clerical dress, or for the laity, wearing a cross or some other Christian symbol, or carrying a large black Bible and reading it on the tube.
As lights to the world, we are to be signposts to the transcendent God. What does that mean?

At some social function this week I found myself, for the umpteenth time, trying to explain what a priest does.

People are generally happy with your doing good about the community, but what genuinely puzzles most of our contemporaries is any sense of devotion to God; of meaningful engagement with the Almighty through prayer and by the sacraments; of saying you can’t meet them for drinks till 7 because you are saying your prayers.

They don’t understand why I should spend so many hours in church every day or week. They do not understand that a priest’s engagement with the world is dependent upon his or her engagement with God.

It is especially in this way that the ordained are called to be the focus of transcendence; an archetype of the priesthood of all the baptized. Our life in Christ should be a challenge to those round about us. It is a signpost to the transcendent God.

We must not be tempted to hide our light under a bushel, with some false humility that argues: ‘I’m such a poor priest that I’d better keep quiet about it.’ As the lady said to the Vicar on the door after a particularly fiery sermon: “Oh Vicar! We never knew what sin was until you came to the parish!”

Our involvement with church must be seen to be an involvement with a God whom we believe to be there; and not just as president of a local social club with nice music. William has not chosen a career – he could find much more profitable ways of using his talents! – he is answering a calling, which has been recognized by the church, whose representatives are here tonight.

Religious faith has become so internalised over the last 50 years - it’s all a matter of private belief - that many in western society find it very strange when Christians assert that it is a public truth. That the transcendent God has revealed himself to us in Christ, and that we are all called to respond.

So a priest is, in a very particular way, a sign, a light to the world.

But secondly, and more briefly, we also exercise our priesthood in service. We are to be the salt of the earth.

In the threefold office of the church, we are ordained deacon first, then priest, and if the Prime Minister calls, bishop. But a priest or a bishop is still a deacon.

Often when we lay out the bishop’s vestments, we have a lightweight dalmatic which he puts on over his alb, and this is to remind him that he is still a deacon - a servant of the church.

Paul Avis again in his book makes the case that the Diaconate is the pivotal office of the Church. It is where we all started our ordained life; he calls it the flagship of ministry.
Jesus himself set us the example:

“the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life a ransom for many.” (Matt 20.28)

Salt that remains forever in the saltcellar is of no use. As priests and deacons we should have a strong sense of public service. In the simplest of terms, we should be known to be people who are kind and who do good in society.

In the history of the Anglo-Catholic movement we read time and again of great public funerals of priests in many of the deprived cities of our land. They were loved and honoured because they served Christ as salt in society. Of course we must shut ourselves away to say our prayers, but we must also be open to the world, ready to infect society with godliness.

Today’s epistle is a lovely story – the church are locked away praying fervently, and presumably believingly, for Peter’s release. An angel of the Lord releases him and he turns up at the door of the prayer meeting. When the door girl tells them all he’s there, they think she’s mad! Our prayers are to take us out into the world where God is already at work.

As salt and light, we will be following the example of Our Lord, and of the apostle Peter. And in so doing, what our Lord said of Peter, he will say to all of us – priests and people:

“And I tell you, you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church, and the gates of Hades will not prevail against it.” Matt 16.18

Time & Eternity

Eternity in their Hearts

“He has made everything beautiful in its time. He has also set eternity in their hearts; yet they cannot fathom what God has done from beginning to end.” (Eccles 3.11)

Today’s readings need little explanation. Jeremiah is about lying prophets, Romans about sin, and the Gospel about generous hospitality. God is against the first two and for the last one.

So that gives me time to think about our verse from Ecclesiastes.

Now it’s no secret that tomorrow is a significant birthday for Fr Alan. In fact I overheard a conversation the other day when a small boy, awed by his mature gravitas, asked him: “Were you in the ark?” “No” chuckled Fr Alan. The thoughtful young boy looked quizzically at him and asked “Then why weren’t you drowned?”

The last 40 years have seen a significant shift in the philosophical climate of our society. It is nearly 40 years since Alan Bennett wrote Forty Years On, and the world is almost unrecognizable. Fr Alan belongs to that demographic group called ‘Generation X’ who grew up in the 60s & 70s. I bought (for 1 shilling & ninepence!) the book ‘Generation X’ published the year before Fr Alan was born. The year Mandela went into prison on Robben Island.
Those 40 years also saw the emergence of ‘postmodernity’.

Although written two and a half thousand years ago Ecclesiastes is a fascinating book. Its famous opening words could be paraphrased: “Vanity of vanities, all is postmodernity.”

Postmodernity describes, not so much a movement, but a mood in contemporary society. It is meaninglessness with attitude; emptiness covered up by all the good things money can buy. Tesco ergo sum - I shop, therefore I am. The loneliness and ennui is eased by friendships and music, sex, alcohol and other drugs; and lots of idle humour. Veni, vidi, velcro - I came, I saw, I stuck around.

“Yet” says the Preacher in our verse, “they cannot fathom what God has done from beginning to end.”

Postmodernity is one of the most exciting, painful, challenging, opportunity-filled, anxiety ridden, faith building, depressing, faith destroying, enjoyable and contradictory of times to be alive. Postmodernity is the cultural climate that is increasingly pervading the world, spreading like a virus through TV, the arts, popular culture, ‘new’ politics and designer religion.

What would the Preacher of Ecclesiastes make of it all?

He would most certainly speak from the point of view of identifying with, and being part of, the culture. This can be one of the church’s biggest stumbling blocks, because most Christians are firmly locked into modernism, the outgoing philosophical climate; yesterday’s weather.

Worse still, many of us feel that there is something inherently Christian about modernism, despite the fact that it has only been around for a century or so, although the Judaeo-Christian faith has been around for at least 35 centuries.

However, “She who marries the spirit of the age is sure to be a widow in the next”. So we must not ‘marry’ either modernity or postmodernity. But we must be so in touch with our culture that we feel its pain and know how to apply the balm of the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

Increasingly in our society, purpose is giving way to play; design to chance; founts of wisdom to pools of knowledge; Reason to reasons; the metanarrative, the Big Picture, to the micronarrative, the local story - the soaps, Big Brother. Primary school children know far more about the world of Pokemon and Harry Potter, than they do about the Christian Gospel that shaped their culture and gave them their school.

Dominic Crossan puts it this way in The Dark Internal: “There is no lighthouse keeper. There is no lighthouse. There is no dry land. There are only people living on rafts made from their own imaginations. And there is sea.”

But eternity is firmly set in our hearts, says the Preacher: a divine uncomfortableness, a dis-ease with what is.

Postmodernity is a way of coping with that dis-ease. It does not make sense of life, but it helps you cope.

Christianity is also a way of coping and making sense of life. Not complete sense, for now we see through a glass darkly.

How then should we live? How carry out the Great Commission to make disciples of all?

Well, evangelism has never been easier; but discipleship has never been harder. This is why 70% of our population claim to be Christians but our churches grow emptier by the week. (Although the picture is more encouraging in London, where numbers are increasing and where yesterday in a completely packed St Paul’s Cathedral, 34 men and women were ordained deacon.)

“He has made everything beautiful in its time. He has also set eternity in their hearts,” says the Preacher.

We need to let God grasp people’s hearts and imaginations before God can transform their minds. And we must learn to live with uncertainty. Yet we still have a Gospel to proclaim, even if we must do so with confident hope rather than fundamentalist certainty. Faith is, as Kierkegaard put it, a passionate commitment made in objective uncertainty.

As Christians we assert that we are not alone in the universe, because the Bible, the Church and Reason call us to believe that there is a ‘transcendent’ God, who is before and beyond all things.

Many postmoderns are sick of themselves. But where can they look but to themselves if there is no ‘Other’?

We must present clearly the intimations of transcendence that God has planted throughout his universe – the ‘eternity in our hearts’.

Beauty and love, order and satisfaction, suffering and meaninglessness, the mystery of the Mass, the splendour of this music and liturgy - all point to an Utterly Other.

We believe that the ‘eternity within’ is no less than ‘Christ in us’, the hope of glory, the imago dei, the image of God.

God, the Holy Trinity, is community, and in that community of love we find our identity in the postmodern sea of shifting images and personal fragmentation. Jesus’ command has never been more relevant: “Love one another as I have loved you… by this everyone will know that you are my disciples.”

Part of the tragedy of the rifts that have been dug deeper this week at the Anglican Consultative Council is in the animosity shown by some of the participants.
If we cannot demonstrably love one another, then we are failing the Christ whom we seek to follow.

It is as we worship and love in our Christian communities that we mirror, albeit imperfectly, the eternal God.

At best, the Church’s response to whatever intellectual climate it has found itself immersed in, has been - not a renewed set of dogma, not more resolutions and rules - but a renewed love of God through our worship, and a renewed effort to love and serve one another.

We all get older, and the death of dear friends and our own failing powers remind us that although “He has made everything beautiful in its time,” as Ecclesiastes reminds us, its time to fade will surely come.

Yet “he has also set eternity in their hearts” and in its time, if we will let it, this will blossom into a newer and fuller life which starts now, and which will grow on into the eternity of paradise.

Jonah

Jonah

Jonah prayed “I knew that you are a gracious God and merciful.” (4.1)

The Welsh preacher: "There will be weeping and gnashing of teeth." Plaintiff voice from the back: "What if we have no teeth..."
"Teeth will be provided!"

Many of us within and without the church have difficulty in understanding a God of love who wants to punish wrongdoers. But then poor God can’t win, because when it comes down to it, we also have difficulty in understanding how he can let evil men and women ‘get away with it’ – often at the expense of the good and the poor.

Jonah is a story on this theme; on what has been called ‘The Outrage of Grace’.

This enigmatic little book with its 48 verses, carefully worded and skilfully constructed, is full of surprises and amusing improbability.

Let me remind you of the story. Jonah is not a false prophet but a disobedient one, sent to pronounce judgement on the wicked city of Nineveh - a city that flayed it’s captives alive and whose atrocities are recorded in extra-biblical writings about the Babylonians.

The conversion of Nineveh was not high on the good Jew’s weekly intercessions list. So Jonah, as a good Jew, runs away from the Lord and his duty - to take a cheap Spanish holiday at the opposite end of the Med - in Tarshish.

God brings his ship near to destruction in a fierce storm. The sleeping(!) Jonah is woken, reveals all, and finally persuades the reluctant sailors to throw him overboard: for the storm is his fault. (We’re already detecting a self-destructive streak in Jonah’s personality.)

Now the enormous fish (which is all that most people remember about Jonah) swallows this unlikely servant of Yahweh and after three days vomits him up on the sea shore not a million miles away from Nineveh. That’s package holidays for you.

(The NT draws a parallel between these three days and those of Jesus in the tomb – we read about this in Matthew.)

Thus the fish, as an instrument of God’s grace and mercy, allows Jonah a second chance to obey. He takes it, probably grudgingly, although he is wise enough to realize that God has his mind set on this mercy mission to Iraq – for Nineveh was in modern day Iraq.

So he announces the fate of Nineveh to its wicked inhabitants. To a man they repent - what effective preaching! So God has compassion on them and spares them destruction. But is Jonah pleased with this magnificent story of missionary conversion? Of course not! He’s a religious bigot!

1 But this was very displeasing to Jonah, and he became angry. 2 He prayed to the LORD and said, “O LORD! Is not this what I said while I was still in my own country? That is why I fled to Tarshish at the beginning; for I knew that you are a gracious God and merciful, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love, and ready to relent from punishing. 3 And now, O LORD, please take my life from me, for it is better for me to die than to live.

He sits down, still hoping for a thunderbolt or two. Then the bush, then the worm (appointed - like the big fish) and the sun and the anger again...

10 Then the LORD said, “You are concerned about the bush, for which you did not labour and which you did not grow; it came into being in a night and perished in a night. 11 And should I not be concerned about Nineveh, that great city, in which there are more than a hundred and twenty thousand persons who do not know their right hand from their left, and also many animals?”

And that’s the end.

This fourth chapter now leaves the hearers puzzling over the message of the book and the future of this reluctant prophet. Where is the denouement of a chapter 5 with its resolution of the story and the moral for its listeners? There can be none, for that would defeat the purpose of the book.

Voltaire and lesser known sceptics have mocked the apparently farcical elements of the book, and some Christians, like Luther in his day, would rest easier at night if Jonah had just failed to get into the canon of Scripture.

As a prophecy (Jonah finds himself amongst the twelve minor prophets ion the Bible) it’s almost an oracle free zone. In fact in the Hebrew, there are only 4 words of prophecy in all 48 verses. “Forty - Days - Nineveh - Destroyed” (3:4) (Now that’s a short sermon!)

There is an element of parable in the story. The opening chapter allows the hearer to distance himself from this foolish and disobedient prophet of Yahweh, but as in Nathan’s parable to King David (2 Samuel 12), the closing verses of Jonah round on the hearer with that accusing “Thou art the man!”

Like Jonah you want to limit God’s loving-kindness to Israel alone. You cannot see that his compassion reaches out to all who repent and turn to him; a foreshadowing of the Messiah’s universal mission, the inclusiveness of Pentecost – the Spirit poured out on all flesh.

How just is God? This is the undercurrent of Jonah.

If in God’s world, as the Old Testament recognises it, good is rewarded and wickedness is punished, how can God forgive Nineveh and overlook their sin? To let iniquity go unpunished is as unjust as punishing the innocent.

In Jonah’s eyes it was dishonouring to God for him to show mercy to obvious wrongdoers, even after repentance. For if God is the supreme moral being he must punish or at least demand some penitential good deed or cultic sacrifice to restore the balance.

Like the psalmist, he wonders that the wicked are sleek and fat while he suffers in godly innocence (eg Psalm 73.12.13). Jonah was outraged by grace - the apparent contradiction in God’s moral nature. And he wanted to die and be free from this confusion of mind and from all his self-pity and longings for vengeance.

So finally God points out to Jonah through the incident with the bush, that Jonah’s concern for the plant was motivated by self-interest - whereas God’s concern for all that he had created sprang from the compassion which is God’s very nature.

Perhaps too Jonah was ultimately concerned to vindicate his own theological view of God, rather than to trust obediently in a God whose ways could not always be understood. How could God justify his actions on the grounds of compassion alone? The hearers (you and me) are left to wrestle in their own minds with the tension between crime and punishment: between repentance and forgiveness; and in a latter day Iraq, between Tony Blair & Clare Short.

Is there a New Testament solution? Well, not really. But there is significant further development, shedding light on God’s justice, or lack of it, and his mercy.

The tensions in Jonah’s and the narrator’s theology are partly resolved in the cross of Christ. Here justice and compassion meet as God’s absolute holiness is satisfied by his overwhelming love.

Yet the principled and God-fearing part in all of us wants Christ to come down from the cross and smite the Pharisees and scoffers; to vindicate the honour of a just God and a sinless Son. But in that sense, God is not just - if he were, there would be no hope for us.

Jonah wanted no forgiveness for Nineveh and asked that he might die. God forgave Nineveh and let Jonah live.

But Christ cried ‘Father forgive them’ and God let him die. This is not so much a resolution of the tensions in Jonah, as a call for us to live with that uneasy outrage of grace and mercy in our own lives, in our dealings with others, and in ordering our society.

I spent the New Year in Cape Town enjoying the summer sun, sea, sand and wine. I visited Robben Island where Nelson Mandela was incarcerated for many of his 27 years in prison. As I stood at the door of his cell, I wondered if I could emerge after 27 years, when comrades had been tortured and killed, to smile and forgive and demonstrate the Outrage of Grace; this radical mercy which we are called to show, whether it makes sense or not.

May God’s Holy Spirit allow you to follow Christ in living lives of outrageous grace to all you meet.

Jonah prayed “I knew that you are a gracious God and merciful.” (4.1)