Adolescent Christ

The Adolescent Christ

“And Jesus grew in wisdom and maturity, and in favour with God and men.” Luke 2.52

I was sitting with old friends this week discussing their children. I remember each of the five being born and have seen the two oldest married. The fifth child, a precocious twelve year old, had come to London this week to see the spectacular new production of Much Ado with her parents.

But our conversation was taken up with the fourth child; an unusual child, now a teenager; his parents describe him as ‘special’. There’s nothing as far as anyone knows ‘wrong’ with him, but since 11 or 12, he has been a strange boy, completely unlike his four siblings.

As parents, they are mystified. His upbringing was no different to the others and yet they wonder how this delicate soul will cope in the world as he grows older and hopefully more independent.

Most parents experience a degree of wonder, bewilderment and sometimes anxiety, as they watch their children pass through adolescence. Where will it all end?

Ten years ago I visited Nazareth, and climbed the 250 steps up to the Church of Jesus the Adolescent. Although it’s French Gothic in style, its foundation stone was laid just 100 years ago. It affords a wonderful view over Nazareth’s rooftops and the Galilean hills.
It is the chapel of a trade school, run by the Salesians of Don Bosco, where teenage Palestinians are trained, some still to be carpenters – a church dedicated to a boy their own age – the adolescent Jesus.

We can visualize the baby Jesus (although cannot grasp exactly how he is God). We have a mental image of the man Christ Jesus, although almost invariably framed by those blue-eyed, blond Jesuses around the Sunday School walls and in our confirmation bibles.

But an adolescent Saviour? - gawky and spotty with a voice that can’t make up its mind – it’s difficult to imagine. And as for a ‘sinless’ teenager – it makes us redefine our understanding of the sinlessness of Christ.

The Bible is remarkably silent about the years between Christ’s birth and his final three years of public ministry.

There is just this one incident recorded, which Luke introduces with the verse before today’s Gospel: "the child grew and became strong, filled with wisdom; and the favour of God was upon him." (40) This is to look back on the previous 12 years. Then Luke finishes the story by looking forward to the adolescent years and early adulthood: "Jesus increased in wisdom and in years, and in divine and human favour". (52)

Perhaps the purpose of the story is to remind us that the incarnation was a reality at every stage of the human life of Christ, from conception to death on a cross. He was as we are, and yet always lived in perfect harmony with his heavenly Father.

I wonder what his self-understanding was as a 12 year old? We all dreamed then, didn’t we, that we were someone special; we were somehow different; our thoughts were somehow more profound than others’. We had a destiny. And when we discovered what sex was, we knew we must have been adopted, for our parents could never have done anything like that!

Jesus must have had such thoughts and shared them with close friends on the hillsides around Galilee. He wondered who he would marry, or if he would marry.

And here in the Temple, as he approaches his thirteenth birthday and official Jewish manhood, he is caught up in the spiritual and religious discussions of the day.

Luke’s account mirrors the story of the boy Samuel. Interestingly, throughout world literature, you will find endless stories of precocious 12 year olds discovering their destiny. We were thinking of Harry Potter and the more recent Eragon at Midnight Mass, but there are parallels in Moses, Cyrus, Alexander, Apollonius, Si Osiris and Buddha, to name but a few.

There is nothing supernatural here in Luke’s account however, and although the boy discusses well what he would have been taught in school, he is not ‘teaching the teachers’. You only find that in the apocryphal writings such as the Infancy Gospel of Thomas and the Arabic Infancy Gospel.

Jesus is simply growing in his spiritual awareness and understanding of the grown up world.
A point John Pridmore makes in the Church times this week when he writes: “There is a life in relationship to God appropriate to the years when the child is becoming an adult. It’s good news for Year 7s.”

Jesus tells his parents, who have been so desperately looking for him, that he must be "about his father’s business", or “in my father’s house” – the Greek is impenetrable here, but either translation gives the right flavour.

Mary and Joseph are not the first parents of adolescents who are baffled by their behaviour and their answers. Jesus is not the first teenager who doesn’t know what his mother is so worried about. It happens again in his adult life when she is worried that he isn’t eating well. He is possible the only creator of the universe who has ever been told by his mother to put a vest on because it’s cold out!

All parents must go through the pain of letting their children grow away from them. They must know how gradually to let go. For if they hold on too long or too tightly, there will be tears before bedtime and probably years of therapy.

We don’t know what Jesus meant by this strange reply. Had he at this age grasped that he was in some unique relationship with God? He knew the village gossip about his own birth. The other boys at school must have made jokes about his mother.

But it would not seem possibly for a 12 year old even to entertain the possibility that he was God made human. On the other hand, maybe it was easier for a 12 year old than a 33 year old?

Whatever, it is evident that he had at this age a clear sense of vocation, even if it was as yet unclear as to what this would mean.

As we pray for those around us who are ‘growing up’ we should remember that early aspirations are often correct indications of where they are heading.

I’m just reading John Cornwell’s fascinating memoir, A Seminary Boy (Fourth Estate, 2006), which is a deeply moving account both of a child’s powerful sense of vocation and of the bewilderment of perplexed and sometimes angry parents failing to make sense of it.

So as we continue to keep the Christmas Feast of the Incarnation – God as baby, boy and man;
as we stand at the door of the 2007th Year of grace;
let us pray for and nurture the adolescents among our families and friends;
some of them ‘special’, like my friends’ son;
and let us pray for ourselves, that as the years go by, it may be said of us as it was said of our Lord:

“And Jesus grew in wisdom and maturity, and in favour with God and men.” Luke 2.52

Midnight Mass 2007

Christmas Midnight Mass Incarnation

“And the Word was made flesh and dwelt among us, and we beheld his glory.” John 1.14

Like most families, we have developed various traditions around Christmas. I and my 5 brothers and sisters and their families never attempt to spend more than 3 hours together in the same house – or even on the same continent. This year two sisters are in Florida, one in the South of France, a brother in Dubai and another in St Alban’s. It’s a tradition that has kept us a big happy family.

There are so many traditions wrapped around Christmas, some more recent than others:

Nine Lessons and Carols– 1880
Queen’s Christmas Message on TV – 1957
Christmas Trees – 1840s
Christmas Cards – 1844
Christmas Crackers – 1850s
Christmas Pudding – well not as we know it, but 14thC
Christmas Day falling on December 25th – 330
Midnight Mass – 340
The Nativity Scene – 1223

And in recent years of course, Hollywood has got in on the act. Christmas wouldn’t be Christmas without that now greatest of traditions, an epic sword-and-sorcery blockbuster.

Harry Potter wrestles with the evil wizards, corrupted by their own power. The various Lords of the Rings struggle with good and evil. Last year it was schoolchildren again, entering Narnia to do battle in The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe.

This year, it’s the turn of Eragon, a larger-than-life story of dragon riders, cruel sorcerers and evil despots. It’s certainly action-packed but somehow doesn’t match up to the subtly of Tolkien or Lewis.

It has all the usual ingredients that we love in our ‘grand’ stories. An orphan boy lives with his uncle out in the sticks, discovers amazing powers and leaves home to be schooled in the ways of magic and dragon riding, and along the way, to ‘fulfil his destiny’. So far, so good – and so very similar to Star Wars, Harry Potter, The Lord of the Rings... But what is missing in this year’s Christmas blockbuster, and it’s quite a substantial omission, and a departure from tradition, is God.

Or, to be more specific, a Godlike figure: a venerable sage with a pure white beard whose powers are to be feared, and whose wisdom can only be dismissed at great cost to the hero. Chances are that in the course of events the old man will also end up sacrificing his life for the greater good, only to be resurrected in a form even more powerful than before.

Step up, Obi-wan Kenobi, Albus Dumbledore, Gandalf and the Oh-so-obvious Aslan. You are God-types in our Christmas epics.

And this brings us to the tradition that lies behind all our Christmas tradition.

For in all the best tales of sorcery and magic; in the most loved heroes of our myths and sagas; there is a longing in all of us to discover the extraordinary, behind the ordinary. It is a human yearning for a deeper significance to our life on earth.

As Christians, we believe this immortal longing is part of God’s gift to humanity. It means that at our best, we long and strive for peace and hope and love and justice and a better world.

But much more than this, all these myths and Christmas epics point to our longing for God himself. As Augustine says: “He has made us for himself and our hearts will not rest until they rest in Him”.

And here, in this ordinary baby, born to a peasant girl in Palestine 2000 years ago, is the most extraordinary event in the 15 billion years of our cosmos. God, who created all things, became a human being and lived among us. He entered all the pain and the heartache of our world, which is why we celebrate his birth by celebrating, at this altar, his death.

But here we celebrate also his resurrection, for he is Emmanuel, God with us for this life and in the life to come.

At this Midnight Mass we repeat the belief and the hope of Christians throughout the world and down through the centuries: that this is not another grand myth of magic and miracles. It is the underlying Truth of the Universe; it is the transforming Truth of the Gospel; it is the Truth that, in the words of Jesus, sets us free, to live life to the full – an extraordinary life.

Of course we have become so used to myths, that we hardly dare believe that this is a true myth; that God can be “born in us today”. Yet that is what we celebrate around the world tonight

Father Alan quoted from a John Betjeman poem this morning, and his familiar words sum up what most of us feel when faced with the miracle of the incarnation; the enfleshment of God in the baby Jesus:

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.

May you have the happiest of Chrismasses and sense the extraordinary presence of Christ in your own lives.

“And the Word was made flesh and dwelt among us, and we beheld his glory.” John 1.14

Christ the King 2006

Christ the King

“You say that I am a king. For this I was born, and for this I came into the world, to testify to the truth. Everyone who belongs to the truth listens to my voice.” John 18.37

An interesting letter caught my eye in the Independent yesterday: “Sir: I have just received my first invitation to a carol concert in which ‘Songs of a religious nature may be sung’. Can’t say I wasn’t warned.”

And of course MacDonald’s coffee cups warn us, sometimes optimistically, ‘contains hot liquid’.

It reminds me of the wonderful warning I saw when I was a boy in our local butcher’s shop. Mr Harmsworth was a bit of a wag and had written up: “Will mothers kindly refrain from sitting their babies on the bacon slicer as we are getting a little behind with our orders!”

The Feast of Christ the King reminds us that Christianity carries a life-time warning: becoming a follower of Jesus Christ requires the surrender of your will, your intellect, your money and possessions – in fact of everything.

In the stark words of our Lord himself: ‘Whoever comes to me and does not hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, yes, and even life itself, cannot be my disciple.’ (Luke 14.26)


Jesus uses typical Jewish hyperbole here to show us that his Kingship is foundational to all other relationships and indeed to life itself. (Obviously, he doesn’t actually mean we should hate those close to us!)

But it all sounds a bit extreme. It smacks of fanaticism and it’s not very Church of England.

However, we need to understand what this Kingship of Christ means, and our unconditional surrender to him.

In today’s Gospel, Jesus has just explained what it doesn’t mean to Pilate. It is not a political kingdom; it is not the establishing of a Christian theocracy. It is not a bid to make Bishop Richard the Mayor of London.

So now, in our text, he finally tells Pontius Pilate what the Kingship of Christ does mean. In John’s theology, why the eternal King was born into the world. And it is simply this: that as King of the Cosmos, he came to testify to the truth – to testify to the truth. And truth, in this context in John’s Gospel, means ultimate reality.

In a world subject to unreality, illusion and self-delusion, Jesus has come to offer the reality of a personal relationship with the only true God, moment by moment and day by day; a truth that gives meaning to our deepest longings and hopes. And this truth sets us free; free to be ourselves and to know the love of God.

So here is a paradox. The prisoner, Jesus, offers his captor, Pilate freedom. But Pilate is too world weary and cynical to ‘taste and see that the Lord is good’.

As Francis Bacon (1561-1626), the Reformation philosopher put it: “‘What is truth?’ said jesting Pilate; and would not stay for an answer.” (Essays - Of Truth)

People often say they are looking for the truth, or for spiritual answers, but only want to listen to Jesus selectively – to pick the bits of his teaching that suit them. They don’t want to wait and listen – like Pilate they are too busy with the affairs of their own life.

Here in the United Kingdom, technically at least, we are not citizens; we are subjects of Her Majesty the Queen. We are not citizens with rights; we are subjects with privileges.

All good earthly monarchy is modeled on Divine monarchy. We have no ‘rights’ before the God who made us. But we have privileges that when we begin to grasp them, take our breath away.

In our text today, Jesus says ‘Everyone who belongs to the truth listens to my voice.’ Jesus and John are reminding us of another image of Christ: the Good shepherd whose sheep hear his voice. Christ’s Kingship is always a gentle rule. He is both totally demanding, and totally understanding and sympathetic to us.

The promises which Laura will make in her baptism today and which we will echo, are promises of complete obedience to our heavenly King.

The money that we give and promise today on this Stewardship Sunday are part of that obedience; they are recognition that the deep truth and reality which we pursue in Christ, make the pursuit of possessions or the love of money, the ultimate folly. For we can’t take it with us, despite the misprint I once spotted in ‘Guide me O thou Great Redeemer… land my safe on Canaan’s side’.

So although the demands of King Jesus are absolute and comprehensive, his promises and privileges to us his subjects are boundless in their grace, mercy and love. His service is perfect freedom.

And here is another paradox of the Kingship of Christ that we will presently rehearse at the altar. Although he is enthroned above in glory, as we have sung in our hymns, here on earth he reigns from a cross. He is a King who lays down his life for his subjects. There is no proud triumphalism in Jesus, only the assurance of loving companionship now and through death into the eternal courts of our King. Let us worship him with glad obedience and the fealty of hearts full of love.

“You say that I am a king. For this I was born, and for this I came into the world, to testify to the truth. Everyone who belongs to the truth listens to my voice.” John 18.37

All Saints Day 2007

“Rejoice and be exceeding glad; for great is your reward in heaven.” Matt 5.12

I’ve been in Berlin all week with our link churches in the Diocese of Berlin-Brandenburg. They keep Reformation Day (October 31st) there in a big way – I attended two full services, one in Berlin Cathedral and one at St Nicolai Kirche in Potsdam – the Bundespräsident Horst Köhler was present there – although it was most memorable for the Reception that followed...

The Lutherans were somewhat surprised that we as Anglican ‘protestants’ do not make more of Reformation Day. And they were mildly horrified that we kept All Saints Day and completely scandalised that we observed All Souls Day. But then the Church of England arguably owes its theology more to a shrewd Queen (ERI) and a Book of Common Prayer than to Luther.

Personally, I always loved Luther’s earthy sense of humour, most of which was far too scatological for a Knightsbridge pulpit. I’m encouraged by one of his famous quotes: “If I am not allowed to laugh in heaven, I don't want to go there.”

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.”

Today we keep the solemnity of All Saints, transferred from November 1st on which it has been celebrated in the Western Church since the 8th Century. (In the 4th Century All Saints were remembered on the Sunday after Pentecost and still are in the Eastern Church.) It is a day when we think about the men and women of God who have gone before us in the faith and who surround us now, represented as they are in the statues and angels around us here - the great cloud of witnesses in heaven.

All Souls day, which follows on November 2nd, was a day set aside to pray for those lesser mortals who have preceded us but whose final destination is thought to be a little less certain. The Church of England abolished this observance during the Reformation, but with typical ambivalence has continued to make provision for it in its liturgies.

On both days 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, any such belief is naïve and misguided.

No, we are those who dare to believe that as we sit here, we are already part of the innumerable but unseen host of heaven, which is not somewhere else; a journey distant; a far country. Here we are mystically caught up in the communion of the saints.

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.”

Religions are still divided in what they believs 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. But that is to trivialise beliefs which in our western culture we find difficult.

However, 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.

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, at our best, always 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 deep love, 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. God is Trinity and we are bound up in the loving circle of his relationships.

Dear Michael Mayne, Dean of Westminster till 1996, died two Sundays ago. He kept a diary of his dying, and towards the end he quoted his old friend John Austin Baker:

‘He who holds me in existence now can and will hold me in it still, through and beyond the dissolution of my mortal frame. For this is the essence of love, to affirm the right of the beloved to exist. And what God affirms, nothing and no one can contradict.’

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 unseen shore, and we are knit together with the saints, who remind us of the reward of abiding love.

“Rejoice and be exceeding glad; for great is your reward in heaven.” Matt 5.12

Glory, Last before Lent

“The Son is the radiance of God’s glory.” Heb 1.3

It’s a funny word ‘glory’. We use it a lot in church. Especially on this last Sunday before Lent. You’ll see it in the collect, the canticles, the anthem the hymns...

As a boy, my theological development was greatly hindered because I had an Aunty Glory, and thought that all references were to her.

When I spoke at her funeral a few years ago, I discovered she was named glory because my grandmother had given birth to 7 boys and when the midwife said ‘it’s a girl!’ The response came back - ‘glory be!’ And so she was.

Isaac Newton, the great 17th century scientist and friend of Christopher Wren who designed this building, was fascinated by the word ‘glory’, especially in the stories about Moses. He taught himself Hebrew and Greek so he could better understand the Scriptures.

The word for glory in Hebrew, ‘kabod’, means heaviness or weight, and Newton became convinced that Moses had hidden the inverse square law of gravitational attraction in the text of the Pentateuch - the first 5 books of the Bible.

He had hidden it so that common people would not discover it and abuse the knowledge.

This prisca sapientia, ancient wisdom, was there for the true theological scholar to discover - God would reveal it to him. So Newton spent years sifting through the Hebrew text with various mathematical cyphers. Newton needed to get out more…

The Old Testament in fact develops the idea, not from the inverse square law of gravitational attraction, but from the idea of ‘an eminent man’ who had heavy possessions; heavy bags of money; heavy responsibilities - and even many heavy wives. A heavy man displayed gravitas.

When the Old Testament was translated into Greek between the 3rd and 2nd centuries BC, (the Septuagint) the word ‘doxa’ was used to translate ‘glory’. It comes from the root word meaning ‘to think’ or ‘to seem’ and in classical Greek meant:

reputation (what others think of us) and;
opinion (what we ourselves think).

And this is obviously to do with fame, honour and praise.

There’s one more little element left in this etymological tale. In Scripture, whenever God displayed his crushing heaviness of being, his glory, there was light - lightening, or blinding light, or a shining cloud, or a pillar of fire, or the burning bush of our Old Testament lesson - the Unbearable Lightness of Being. Or in the New Testament it is the rumbling, thunderous voice of God from heaven revealing Christ, the Light of the World – ‘the radiance of God’s glory’.

Years later, when Moses was doubting whether God had ever actually called him to service, we read these words in the book of Exodus:

Then Moses said, "Now show me your glory." And the LORD said, "I will cause all my goodness to pass in front of you, and I will proclaim my name, the LORD, in your presence. But, you cannot see my face, for no-one may see me and live." (Ex 33.18-23)

Moses is told that God’s glory is unbearable, and all God would show was the shadow of his glory - his goodness - his moral perfection and beauty.

So the glory of God is full of light. He dwells in unapproachable light. Christ, the King of Glory, is the effulgence - the shining radiance - of God’s glory. And in that light of Christ we see ultimate moral beauty.

As Christians, we are summoned to follow Christ, the King of Glory, so that as we feed on him, we too begin to reflect the glory of God – as humans we are ‘crowned with glory and honour’. We become heavier, more substantial, more solid as people.

It is a great mystery of the Christian life, testified to by all the saints, that as we grow in faith, spiritual realities become, not more certain - we are often plagued by doubt - but somehow, more solid, almost tangible. As John Newton’s great hymn of glory ‘Glorious things’ puts it: “Solid joys and lasting treasures, none but Zion’s children know.”

In CS Lewis’s allegory about heaven and hell, The Great Divorce, and in the Narnia Stories - everything is more solid in heaven. The present life on earth becomes ‘thin’ and insubstantial, wraithlike in comparison. We live in the shadowlands.

Now our society talks much of ‘spirituality’ - the buzzword of school Ofsted inspections. It’s fashionable to be spiritual.

But there is little focus to that spirituality; and indeed often a denial that there is any objective ‘other’; the transcendent God of Glory. Spirituality is seen as something purely internal, subjective and personal.

Because of this absent substantiator in postmodern society; an absence of the One who gives weight to human existence, there is a lack of solidness in society, of glory, of weight.

We are in danger of becoming all surface and image.

Tesco ergo sum. I shop therefore I am.

Not that there’s anything wrong with a bit of surface and image occasionally. A little of retail therapy is just the thing when we’re consumed by metaphysical angst. It’s amazing what a new mobile phone can do!

But if image is all there is, then we are empty, and simply manipulated by the fashions of the age.

Friedrich Nietzsche reflected on this in the 19th century. He wrote: “When there is the ‘death of God’ in a culture, it becomes increasingly hollowed out, ‘weightless’”.

I was watching a film the other night in which there was a character named Ichabod… - the glory has departed.

It was the name given to Eli’s grandson Ichabod, who was born just after a particularly crushing defeat by the Philistines who also stole the Ark of the Covenant which represented the glory of God.

In fact it’s a rather tragic story which the Jewish writer turns into a little joke at the end.

"And it came to pass, when the messenger made mention of the ark of God, that Eli fell from off the seat backward by the side of the gate, and his neck brake, and he died: for he was an old man, and heavy." (I Sam 4)

So the grandson, born at the same time is called Ichabod, 'the glory has departed' - the Ark of the Covenant has been carried off. But it could mean, the heavy one has departed - the fat man has died.

Ichabod might be a suitable epitaph for the last 20 years: much spiritual interest but little spiritual depth or weight. Believe but don’t belong. Enjoy an occasional spiritual experience, but don’t get too involved.

It is a simple truth of the Christian faith that we must not neglect the spiritual because of the ever pressing needs of the secular.

To neglect nurturing our relationship with Christ is to increase our superficiality and weightlessness. It is an ultimate vanity that leaves us to consume our own images.

The glory of our music, our architecture, our liturgy, is all supposed to draw us into the weightier glory of God. The senses lend support to our mind, for Christ, the transcendent King of glory cannot be grasped by reason alone.

...so may this weight of glory make us people of substance, able to serve Christ the King of glory; able to offer solid joys to others as we proclaim that Jesus

“The Son is the radiance of God’s glory.” Heb 1.3

Inclusion

Inclusion and living with differences

“Peacemakers who sow in peace raise a harvest of righteousness.” James 3.18

In America – I’m sure this could never happen in England! - there was a feud between a good catholic Episcopalian priest and his very evangelical organist, who loved Moody and Sankey Gospel hymns.

The first hint of trouble came when the priest preached on the need for change and the organist chose to sing "We Shall Not Be Moved."

Trying to believe it was a coincidence, the priest put the incident behind him. The next Sunday he preached on the need for increased giving, and was not amused as the organist led them afterwards in the hymn "Jesus Paid It All."

Sunday morning attendance swelled as the tension between the two built. A large crowd showed up the next week to hear his sermon on the sin of gossiping. The organist struck up with "I Love To Tell The Story?"

There was no turning back. The following Sunday the priest told the huge congregation that, unless something changed, he was considering resignation. The atmosphere was electric as the choir set out on the old Gospel standard "Why Not Tonight."

Other local churches were empty the following week as people crowded into the church to hear the resignation sermon. The priest explained that Jesus had led him to the church and now Jesus was leading him away. The organist could not resist it: "What a Friend We Have in Jesus."

Divisions in a church and divisions between churches are all too common and, despite the jokes, are really very sad. They are a major hindrance to the mission of the church. But they have been around since before Apostles like James wrote their letters, trying to heal the differences that were opening up in the early church – the ‘fights and quarrels among you’ (4.1).

Today’s OT reading is about prophets plotting to kill another prophet – Jeremiah. And the Gospel is about competitive ambition amongst the disciples?

Of course, Christians disagree and fall out about nearly anything and everything. Although to be fair, this could be said about any group of people who hold strong religious, political or philosophical views. It is part of the process by which fallible human beings come to hold some common group identity.

A key part of this process is the way in which we handle the differences, and the degree to which we demand conformity. Like cliffs, the real dangers come at the edges.

The history of Christianity over 2000 years, running parallel to the development of the modern democracy, has demonstrated a growing degree of inclusiveness in handling differences, and a lessening concentration on exclusiveness. This is not surprising, as arguably it was the Reformation in Europe in the 16thC which provided the conditions for democratic nation-states to thrive.

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

Whereas, thoroughgoing liberals interpret any demand for conformity as an affront to the great god of individual freedom, and democracy with a capital D.

Over 16 hundred years ago Augustine tried to give a rule for dealing with the squabbles of his own century:

[In necessariis unitas, in dubiis libertas,
In omnibus autem caritas.}
In essentials unity, In debateable areas liberty,
But in all things love.

The current debate here and in the States, focussed on human sexuality and the role of women, is a debate about whether this is something ‘essential’ to Christianity or whether it is a debateable area. The vitriol that all this has sometimes released is all a long way from the prayer of Jesus ‘that they may be one’.

However, our Lord himself points the way forward in all our disagreements.

In the teaching of Jesus there seems to be a breadth of inclusion for all imperfect disciples (and we all are imperfect disciples) who nonetheless do good. So in Luke 9.49-50:

"Master," said John, "we saw a man driving out demons in your name and we tried to stop him, because he is not one of us." "Do not stop him," Jesus said, "for whoever is not against you is for you."

On the other hand, there is a renunciation of those who regard themselves as doctrinally correct, but who nonetheless do evil. Luke 11.23 “He who is not with me is against me, and he who does not gather with me, scatters.”

When we do see exclusion in Our Lord’s teaching, it is based on what we might call the ‘big’ ethical issues.

Thus in the sermon on the mount, Our Lord is looking for Kingdom living among his followers, for "Not everyone who says to me, 'Lord, Lord,' will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only the one who does the will of my Father in heaven.' (Matthew 7.21-23)

But notice the ethical issues are broadly-based, and come under Our Lord’s summary of all ethics: ‘Love God and love your neighbour’, what James calls in the previous chapter ‘the royal law’. It is doing as you would be done by; it is in showing compassion and mercy to the poor and the downtrodden; it is healing the sick and visiting the imprisoned.

For you and me this means that in our relationships with other Christians, other political persuasions, other religions, and so on; we should be generous and inclusive wherever possible.

The Old Testament and the teaching of Jesus and James urge us to be preoccupied with poverty, oppression, injustice, abuse; and to exclude from our society those who foster these scourges.

So how do we deal with our present divisions?

Well, the Bible is certainly our guide, but it has been interpreted in so many different ways concerning what are the essentials’ and ‘non-essentials’. That’s why there are well over 12,000 registered Christian denominations, all with their own particular interpretations of the bible. We presume too much when we presume to know the mind of God in interpreting every jot and tittle of Scripture. As the Orthodox mystic put it: “Man’s walls do not reach up into heaven.”

As the not-so-mystical Edwin Markham put it:

They drew a circle that shut me out
Heretic, rebel, a thing to flout.
But love and I had the wit to win
We drew a circle that took them in

There is not even any infallibility within the good old C of E, for Abp Rowan is not a Pope. And attractive as the idea of a Pope might be to some, we all know from our Roman Catholic friends that he is quietly ignored when it suits! (Newman, 1875: ‘conscience first, and then the Pope.’)

However, Scripture overall presents a test – not always simple – but indicative of the way we should go.

And remember that belief always precedes action. Orthodoxy should always lead to orthopraxis.

So: Is what you believe about God enabling you to love others, with kindness and good deeds? Is it leading you to a place of personal acceptance and freedom? Does it foster hope within you?

Or: Is what you believe leading you deeper into self-absorption and self-righteousness; an inability to give yourself in love to others; and an underlying fear of life and of others who are ‘different’?

I hope you are within the first category. For it is within this secure context, with not a little humility, that we come to deliberate and pray about the ethical dilemmas of our day and culture, using the minds God has given us and the knowledge we have thus far gleaned to study his Word.

And it is to this Table, where the bread and the wine speak to us of the Love of God, that we come because we may, and not because we must;
we come because he first loved us and gave himself for us;
and we come in love and charity with our neighbour, forgiving as God forgives us, and living affectionately with our differences. This is righteous living, that produces a righteous church, society and world.

“Peacemakers who sow in peace raise a harvest of righteousness.” James 3.18

Eucharist & Life

Eucharist and Life

‘Very truly, I tell you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you.’ John 6.53

It’s a very stark statement of our Lord - “no life in you”. It has led the church into great debates which have largely missed the point of the words. But then the church is good at great debates that largely miss the point...

This verse became a proof text for receiving the Eucharist in 2 kinds: bread and wine. It encouraged the practice of feeding the sacraments to babies, lest they die with no life in them.

But what is the life that Jesus speaks of here and how do we receive it?

These verses 51- 58 from John 6, form a later, cogitated part of John’s teaching, already beginning to reflect early church eucharistic practice.

It is always difficult in John’s discourses to tell where the words of Jesus end, and where the pondered theology of John begins. And often the words of Jesus are selected from different times in his ministry and then run together thematically.

In fact the earlier verses from 35 - 50 form the backbone of our Lord’s teaching, and so help us to understand our text in its context. Raymond Brown, the great Roman Catholic commentator on John puts it this way:

“The juxtaposition of the two forms of the discourse teaches that the gift of life comes through a believing reception of the sacrament” (cf.47 - “he who believes has eternal life.”) (Raymond Brown p.292)

John is stressing that Christian mystery is not pagan mystery, nor is it like the magic of the Jewish gnostic cults. There is no hocus pocus, no hoax (which despite most lexicographers who think the phrase derives from the magician’s nonsense bit of dog-Latin hax pax max Deus adimax, I and others think comes from the words of the Latin Mass, hoc est corpus meum - hocus pocus).

The church has spent much of the last 500 years arguing over what actually happens in the Eucharist.

Transubstantiation was the doctrine developed most fully by St Thomas Aquinas in the 13thC: the conversion of the Bread & Wine into the Body & Blood of our Lord, only the ‘accidents’ (appearances of bread & wine) remaining. This fitted well into the Aristotelian metaphysics that so greatly influenced Aquinas.

Consubstantiation was Luther’s re-interpretation in the 16thC of the mediaeval doctrine: the Body & Blood of our Lord coexist in the Bread & Wine. But there was no transformation.

Memorialism, or Zwinglianism - Zwingli was the People’s Preacher in Zurich in the early 16thC - stressed the purely symbolic value of the elements. In contrast to the Anglican ‘harmonisation’ described as the Real Presence, Zwinglianism was caricatured as the Real Absence.

The ARCIC (Anglican Roman Catholic International Commission) report of 1971 tried to avoid all troublesome descriptions of process and simply referred to ‘the mysterious and radical change’ which takes place at the consecration.

One of my friends - Nick - spends all his time on the internet. Most of his waking hours are spent in Virtual Reality; in Cyberspace - there is no ‘there’ there.

Sometimes theologians live too long in doctrinal cyberspace. To take Kant’s words out of context: ‘God is not an it to be discussed, but a Thou to be met.’ The Blessed Sacrament is not a doctrine simply to be analysed, it is a meal in which we encounter the living God.

This very earthy, everyday stuff of bread and wine, is to remind us that reality, that eternal life, that starts from this moment and goes on into the glory beyond death, is ours through Christ. The everyday act of eating, is in this sacrament, the assurance that we share in the eternal life of the Son of God, who loved us and gave himself for us.

It was Archbishop Temple who remarked that Christianity is the most materialistic of all religions. We worship a God who became flesh – like us. And the central act of our worship is in the very human act of eating and drinking these everyday elements of bread and wine.

It is such a real and earthy re-assurance that despite all our doubts and fears and feelings of unworthiness, we are forgiven and deeply loved by God.

And it points ahead as well, to a love that is so strong that it continues after death and holds us in life for all eternity.

In this Feast, we eat the Bread from heaven so that one day we will drink with all the saints in glory.

‘Very truly, I tell you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you. Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood have eternal life, and I will raise them up on the last day’. John 6.53

Predestination

Chosen (Predestination)

“In him we were also chosen, having been predestined… for the praise of his glory.” Eph 1.11f

Frogs in Cream p.90

Two frogs fell into a can of cream,
Or so I’ve heard it told.
The sides of the can were shiny and steep,
The cream was deep and cold.

“Oh, what’s the use?” croaked number one.
“Tis fate, no help’s around.
Good-bye, my friend! Good-bye, sad world!”
And weeping still, he drowned.

But number two, of sterner stuff,
Dog-paddled in surprise.
The while he wiped his creamy face,
And dried his creamy eyes.

“I’ll swim a while at least,” he said,
Or so I’ve heard he said;
“It really wouldn’t help the world,
If one more frog were dead.”

An hour or two he kicked and swam,
Not once he stopped to mutter,
But kicked and kicked and swam and kicked,
Then hopped out, via butter!
(TC Hamlet)

Well, that’s as good an introduction as any on a hot summer’s morning, to the subject of predestination. Is our eternal fate already fixed? As v4 puts it, ‘he chose us in Christ before the foundation of the world.’ Or can we, like frog number two, work out our own salvation?

Remember the expunged verse of All things bright and beautiful...

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

Is it God who orders our destiny? Prince or pauper? Famous or infamous?

Is our vocation and ministry - the words of our opening collect; ordered by God’s governance - the words of the final collect?

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

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

I’m not preaching on John the Baptist today (Fr Alan has a fine sermon on him delivered at St George’s Windsor recently, and due for a re-run here) but he was a very odd choice for the forerunner of Christ. He would certainly never have got through our Anglican selection processes!

Amos himself admits what an odd choice he was to bring the prophetic message of judgment to Israel. As he admits in the last verse of this morning’s reading: “‘I am no prophet, nor a prophet’s son; but I am a herdsman, and a dresser of sycamore trees.'” (7.14)

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

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

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

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

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

But if you’re not careful, you can end up with a capricious and almost vicious god, and a view of life that is fatalistic – que sera sera. (Like the Calvinist who fell down stairs and said “Thank goodness that’s over with!”)

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

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

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

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

Our Lord quotes the prophet Isaiah when explaining why he uses parables. “That seeing they may see, and not perceive; and hearing they may hear, and not understand; lest at any time they should be converted, and their sins should be forgiven them.” (Mark 4.12)

You see the principle at work in weak King Herod: “When Herod heard John he was greatly puzzled; yet he liked to listen to him.” (Mk 6.20)

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

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

Mortals are contingent to the universe. They are not the authors of it. We rightly wrestle to increase our knowledge of the way things are. But that knowledge, by definition, can never be exhaustive. In the scientific world this is known as Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle.

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

It’s the righteous who are blessed and used.

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

The wisdom literature of the Bible knows that plenty of bad things happen to good people.

And Scripture is also brutally honest in showing us that many of the saints were bigger sinners than you and I will ever manage to be.

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

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

But we also use this same argument to try and justify ourselves. And by this I mean that we say, we’re not holy enough or good enough to be used by God, or even to be Christians, or part of the church.

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

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

Paul is so excited by the fact that we are all called by God, and all used by God, that he dictates the twelve verses of today’s epistle as one long, complex Greek sentence – and the burden of the sentence is the praise of a loving God.

The mystery of why we are Christians, why we believe when many of friends and family don’t seem able to believe, should lead us, certainly not to pat ourselves on the back; but to praise God who is beyond all praising.

I’m very bad at noticing engagement rings, but when I met my friend’s daughter and her boyfriend the other day, it was the smile on each of their faces that made me immediately look to the ring finger. And there it was!

The modern Greek word for engagement ring is αρραβων, and Paul uses the word in the last verse of today’s epistle to describe the Holy Spirit as the pledge, the αρραβων, of our inheritance in Christ. It should bring a smile to our faces and praise to our lips.

“In him we were also chosen, having been predestined… for the praise of his glory.” Eph 1.11f

Sacred Space, Dedication Festival

Sacred Space

“This is the house of God, and gate of heaven.” Gen 28 (Introit verse)

I used to preach at the Brighton Railway Mission as a teenager. It was one of those tin tabernacles that sprang up at the end of the Victorian era.

They used to have those big gospel posters outside in day-glow colours, and I remember one Sunday arriving to see “Are you tired of sin? Then come inside.” And someone had added with a felt pen underneath. “If not, phone Brighton 2374.”

The little group who kept the Chapel going loved that building although it was of no architectural merit whatsoever.

Most humans have a strong sense of place. So returning to the place of their birth, or a place associated with their first love; a place of great happiness or a place of deep anguish - these places are more than mere geographic locations.

Through memory and its linked emotions, space becomes differentiated for us, divided by familiar tracks.

Here’s how one writer has expressed it:

“For religious man, space is not homogenous; he experiences interruptions, breaks in it; some parts of space are qualitatively different from others.” (Eliade 1959:20)

On a Dedication Festival such as today, we are giving thanks for the building itself, but in so doing we are recognising that it is far more than the some of its masonry.

When you look at religious people around the world you can see that there are two important processes going on in sacred spaces: re-ordering and focusing.

Re-ordering is repeating the work of God in creation, bringing meaning and order out of chaos. This is the purpose of the careful structure of Genesis chapter one, a literary masterpiece reflecting God’s cosmic intentions.

So our church is carefully ordered if we can but see. The Baptistry is at the entrance, for Baptism is the sign of admission to the Church of Christ. The altar and cross is the obvious focus – the place where the Gospel is re-enacted. And so we could go on, differentiating this sacred space, re-ordering the world of human things to reflect God’s order for salvation.

There are of course some Sacred Spaces that need no ordering: places and events that produce awe and a sense of the transcendent - the total otherness of a vast universe and the feeling that there is continuity and meaning to human life. And yes, even the feeling that there is a God.

Mountain tops and seascapes; quiet gardens and vast deserts; friends in candlelight; the beauty of music, poetry, art…

Eclipses have always produced an immense and silent Sacred Space that sweeps around the world with darkness, beauty and the numinous in its wake.

But then there are of course the Focused Sacred Spaces, of which this church is one, where the general feelings of awe and transcendence, of longing and loving, and occasionally the mysterium tremendum et fascinans (Otto) - the compelling and fascinating mystery at the centre of life and existence - these feelings find particular focus in the life, death and resurrection of Christ, and in the lives of his saints.

This is the sacred breaking into the profane.

For Christians these sacred spaces - these houses of prayer - although they do not fully explain the sacred, nevertheless give shape and form to what we believe to be a Christian explanation of truth.

Many people in our post-Christian society today do not know how to use them. They are unaware of the meaning of the symbols.

They are even in danger of worshipping the created rather than the Creator; they follow the line of beauty in a curve that turns in on itself. Sadly, they miss the living messages of a house of prayer, a gate to heaven.

We live in a culture where people don’t like focus, because it brings responsibilities and duties. The answer to everything is a sort of blurry thing. The revelation of Christ as Lord of Sacred Space necessitates response and an effort to live differently.

A fuzzy sense of awe at an eclipse, will not transform human society in the way that the church has. Christ’s people, however imperfect, have done immeasurable good in the world and still do.

This is the sort of focused, prayer-infused Sacred Space St Mary’s should be, and I believe, is. A man rang me when I was here to book a time that he could bring a group of psychics to ‘feel the remarkable energy’ (his words) present in our church. I hope you continue to support the daily offices and mass. This is at the heart of maintaining the Divine energy of this sacred space, the presence of Christ.

There is one more important aspect of this sacred space. Listen to Mircea Eliade in his book The Sacred & Profane:

“But the irruption of the sacred does not only project a fixed point into the fluidity of profane space, a center in the chaos; it also effects a break in plane, that is, it opens communication between the cosmic planes (between earth and heaven) and makes possible (ontological) passage from one mode of being to another.” (1959:63)

Here today is a ‘break in plane’ - along the cosmic axis of this altar and the crucified Christ above.

The altar here is a sarcophagus with relics - the bones of the saints - the place of the dead. Above Christ’s head sits his Mother in Heaven - the place of eternal felicity.


And later as the host is raised along this axis, and as the monstrance is poised above the tabernacle, there is a ‘break in plane’; eternity touches earth and our bodies and souls are fed with manna from heaven. The sublime is made tangible.

We give most hearty thanks today for this Sacred Space, and for all the lives it has touched from around the world and for over a century.

And as again we offer gifts of bread and wine; we offer prayers of thanksgiving and wonder, or sometimes of anxiety, pain, bewilderment; but we remember with faith and hope that

“This is the house of God, and gate of heaven.” Gen 28 (Introit verse)

Trinity Sunday 2006

Trinity - Dancing with Angels

“This grace of the Holy Spirit enables them... to dance with the angels.” St Basil the Great On the Holy Spirit (Divine Office Bk II p.670)

This reading in the Divine Office comes up each year as we move from rejoicing in the Resurrection to welcoming the Spirit at Pentecost and then on into the mystery of the Holy Trinity. Each year it strikes me afresh.

I went to the sort of old fashioned grammar school that taught ballroom dancing to the Upper Sixth. We used to get together with Worthing High School for Girls. The Amanda Foxtrot was the nearest we ever got in those days to sex education. We tried to be bolshy and to dislike it, but it was quite fun.

There is something immensely enjoyable in the social patterns of dancing: the partnerships, the community, the shared knowledge, the complementarity of the steps, the public intimacy.

Wherever we turn in the world, in whatever age, there is an instinct to worship and to dance. With the exception of the Southern Baptists. The old Episcopalian joke puts it well: “Why are Southern Baptists against sex standing up? Because it may lead to dancing!”

So St Basil’s contends that “This grace of the Holy Spirit enables us... to dance with the angels”.

In the early discussions of the church fathers, one of the words used to describe the interrelatedness of the Trinity was ‘perichoresis’: the inter-animation of the persons of the Trinity.

The ‘choresis’ of perichoresis, comes from a similar root to choreography - the mapping of dances.

The dynamic of the Christian God, whom we honour today as Blessed Trinity, is the loving dance of eternity: Father, Son and Holy Spirit caught up in the powerful, yet wordless communication which we mimic in all our human dances.

It is no wonder that over the centuries the divine Liturgy has become a stylised dance. The synchronisation of movements, the courtesies, the communication beyond words, which even the congregation is drawn into through music and symbolic gestures; through the spiritual vibrancy of knowing they are playing their part.

You find it in mediaeval poetry. In the Christmas Carol, Tomorrow shall be my Dancing Day, have you ever noticed the words of the second verse as Christ talks about his incarnation?

Then was I born of a virgin pure,
Of her I took fleshly substance;
Thus was I knit to man’s nature,
To call my true love to my dance.
Sing, O my love, my love,
This have I done for my true love.

Or here is Evelyn Underhill writing in the middle of the First World War in Theophanies:

Heaven’s not a place…
No! ’tis a dance
Where love perpetual,
Rhythmical,
Musical,
Maketh advance
Loved one to lover.

Then of course there is that old Shaker favourite, Lord of the Dance… "Dance then wherever you may be, I am the Lord of the dance says he…"

And as we are drawn into the sacred choreography, so we take on the characteristics of the other dancers in the Trinity. Dancing is a great act of solidarity. (It’s part of the buzz of clubbing.)

The fruit of the Spirit produces the traits of the Father and the Son: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control.

The charismata, the gifts of the Spirit, reproduce the works of the Father and the Son. So together as the people of God we bring healing and wholeness, wisdom and truth, freedom and justice to a world that remembers how to dance, but has forgotten why it dances.

I had lunch with some of my old students the other day.
One of them was Gammy Gordon - the affectionate name the other students gave him because he had a wonky leg. He never wanted to come dancing with us.

We finally persuaded him, but he stood at the edge, watching. Then a gaggle of the girls pulled him into the dance - and he danced!

And he realized that we all look a bit gammy when we’re dancing. And he didn’t look too gammy at all! It worked wonders for his self-esteem.

The God we worship, the Holy Trinity, is a loving fellowship of three in one. He is not remote and alone, but an intimate community. They are so wrapped up in each other, that they are indistinguishable. One in three and three in one.

But not so wrapped up that they have no time for us. Easter was when Jesus the Son, came to call us into the dance of the Trinity.

And although we feel all unworthy, and spiritually akimbo, gammy, in comparison, yet God the Father’s love draws us into the fellowship.

By the indwelling Spirit we take on the Divine. St Basil goes on with great theological daring, dancing on the edge of heresy, to describe the work of the Spirit in Christians who venture to dance with the angels:

“So is their joy unending… so do they acquire likeness to God, so - most sublime of all - do they themselves become divine.”

Don’t sit around the edges of the dance floor, or locked, like the disciples, in an upper room, waiting and watching. You have been baptized! Christ has given you his Holy Spirit! The Father has invited you to the dinner-dance at his Table!

You are called to partake of the Godhead in bread and wine and so to enter into life in all its fullness.

This is the mystery of our participation in the Blessed and Most Holy Trinity.

Or as St Basil put it:

“This grace of the Holy Spirit enables you... to dance with the angels.”

Priesthood of all believers

Priesthood of all Believers

“My Father is glorified by this, that you bear much fruit and become my disciples” (John 15.8)

In the 70s and 80s, many churches used to have those big sign boards outside with a text or a little thought for the week painted on in dayglow colours. eg “Don't let worry drive you to despair - let the church help.”

Some of them were quite witty, but all of them were subject to additions by anyone with a spray can.

So “The meek shall inherit the earth” had added underneath - “if that’s alright by you?”

And someone had supplemented the rather hopeful: “Are you tired of sin? Then come inside.” with “If not, phone Bayswater 7328!”

But I remember it was an Anglican Church in the vanguard of the charismatic movement which had the usual more discreet sign outside, which said:

Vicar: The Revd So-and-so
Ministers: the whole congregation.

So what is the distinction between laity and priests, and how do we carry out our common task as disciples of ‘bearing much fruit’?

Most of my working week at this time of year is taken up with organizing the ordinations of many new deacons and priests. There are about 60 in our diocese alone, which is most encouraging. We have 146 ordinands in training at present.

The 1960s was a time when all distinctions of persons were being swept away and so it is hardly surprising that Vatican II addressed what was seen as the problem of clericalism - nothing could happen without a priest. Priests were to become just ordinary chaps!

I think it was that great 60s theologian Spike Milligan who said: “never trust a priest who wears a rollneck sweater and says ‘call me Ken’”.

The Vatican II document Ulterior temporibus in 1967, while recognising the increasing role of the laity, still maintained that priestly ministry is ‘distinct from the common priesthood of all the faithful... in essence and not merely in degree.’

Many of my low church Anglican colleagues would disagree with this Vatican II distinction between ministry and priesthood. They would agree with the famous Church of England evangelical WH Griffiths Thomas, who was very influential at the beginning of the 20th Century and sometime Principal of Wycliffe Hall, Oxford. He said: “Christianity is a religion that is a priesthood and not one that has a priesthood.” This was seen as a strong part of Prayer Book, Reformation faith for many evangelicals.

Like Luther and the continental reformers they interpreted the Communio Sanctorum not in the medieval sense of being participants in the sacraments – the Communion; but in also being part of the fellowship of believers. They argued that there is nothing true of bishops, priests and deacons that is not true of the whole church.

So we must acknowledge that there is still a debate that divides the Christian church: is priesthood a matter of ontology or function? - does ordination change the very being of a priest, or does it just set a person apart for a particular ministry within the church order? (Eric Mascall gives one of the best and imaginative treatments of this in the last chapter of Theology and the Gospel of Christ, SPCK, 1977.)

Well, however we view priesthood, clergy both model and mirror the priesthood of all believers or the priesthood of all the baptized as it is often stated. We are all disciples, and in the words of our text, we are called to bear much fruit.

I want to suggest that we do this 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!”

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 hide our light under a bushel, or under some false humility that argues:
‘I’m such a poor disciple of Christ that I’d better keep quiet about.’ 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 members of a local social club with nice music. Or as George Orwell put it: "choir practice in a jeweller’s shop".

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. (The late Bp Lesslie Newbigin was very concerned with this.)

So we are a sign, lights to the world.

But secondly, we are to bear fruit by service. We are to be the salt of the earth. Jesus 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)

It was this sense of service which fired the new democracies that sprang out of the Reformation in Europe. People realised that it was not just for clerics to be civic leaders, but all Christians were called to serve their society - for the common good and not just for their own good.

Salt that remains forever in the saltcellar is of no use. As disciples of Jesus Christ 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.

I was at a seminar this week on the theology of development projects. It was for those 80 or so churches in our Diocese who have major building projects on the go and about 40 attended. It was inspiring to hear how different churches were developing their buildings to serve Christ in their community, whether the £35m scheme of St Martin in the Fields, or our own more modest attempt to make our buildings more useful in our mission.

So as priests and people, disciples of Christ, we are all called to be signs and agents of the kingdom of God, to be a royal priesthood.

“My Father is glorified by this, that you bear much fruit and become my disciples.,” (John 15.8)

Abiding in Love

Abiding in Love

“God is love, and those who abide in love abide in God, and God abides in them.”
1 John 4.16

Love is the powerful theme of today’s epistle and it relates of course to the Gospel, for abiding in the vine is to abide in the love of God and to bring forth the fruit of that love.

Even the Acts reading of Philip baptizing the Ethiopian eunuch reflects the love of God driving the infant church out of Jerusalem and to those who traditionally had been shut out from the love of God by a bigoted religious establishment.

It reminds me of a little verse by Edwin Markham which captures the essence of John’s teaching in his letters:

They drew a circle that shut me out
Heretic, rebel, a thing to flout.
But love and I had the wit to win
We drew a circle that took them in

St John takes the two great apostolic foundations of the Christian faith - the incarnation and the atoning death of Christ - and clothes them in love. He uproots them from the realm of pure doctrinal necessity and plants them in the fertile soil of God’s great love for us.

Listen to his words: “In this is love - not that we loved God - but that he loved us - and sent his Son - to be the atoning sacrifice for our sins.” (v10)

And then he draws the blindingly obvious conclusion from this: “Beloved, since God loved us so much, we also ought to love one another.” (v11)

Now we might have expected him to conclude “Beloved, since God loved us so much, we also ought to love him.”

But no! Since God is love, both in essence and attitude - both in who he is and in what he does - then the fact that he is in us, through the mystical union of his Holy Spirit; this finds expression in our love for one another.

This is God’s ultimate purpose, the perfection of love as John calls it. He wants to reproduce his love in us so that we can pour out our love to others and so bring them into the circle of God’s embracing kindness.

People are often concerned that they don’t believe the right things. And it’s good to study and to expand our understanding of the faith. But John brings it all down to earth.

He presents a simple test. Is what you believe about God enabling you to love others, with kindness and good deeds? Is it leading you to a place of personal freedom?

Or, is what you believe leading you deeper into self-absorption; an inability to give yourself in love to others; an underlying fear of life and commitment?

Of course it’s never quite that simple. There will always be our daily failures and inadequacy.
There will always be room for improvement. There will always be adverse circumstances and impossible people. As the old doggerel puts it:

To dwell above with those we love
O that will be glory;
But to dwell below with those we know
Is quite another story!

But, John concludes, that if our belief in, and love for God results in a practical love for others, then we will not fear God or man.

I have always remembered the verse that follows our text in 1 John 4.17. ‘Perfect love casts out fear’. At a wedding where I was best man, a pious absentee sent simply that biblical reference in a telegram. But without checking, I quickly turned to John 4.17 and read out: “Jesus said to her, ‘You are right in saying, 'I have no husband'; for you have had five husbands, and the one you have now is not your husband!’"

John urges us to believe in the evidence we see with our own eyes: our love for one another. He urges us to believe that we need have no fear. God is at work in us.

On the other hand he gives stark warning to those who would ignore the Christian’s primary mandate to love God and love others. There is no peace for the loveless heart. It is doomed to the turmoil of fear and distrust.

This first epistle of John is an open letter to the church, with a message very pertinent for our present age. It calls for Christian loyalty, love and understanding as we try to work out our faith in a changing world.

The gnostic deviations of the first century had led to various groups who seceded from the apostolic band. They often claimed that they loved God more than those they had left behind.

Although John admits debate on certain issues, he makes it clear that in one area, and one area alone, there is no room for compromise. There is nothing to debate. He writes:

“Those who say, "I love God," and hate their brothers or sisters, are liars; for those who do not love a brother or sister whom they have seen, cannot love God whom they have not seen. The commandment we have from him is this: those who love God must love their brothers and sisters also.” (vv 20f)

It is the merciful who will know that God will be merciful to them. It is those who forgive who know that they are indeed forgiven. The example for us is the God ‘whose property it is always to show mercy.’ Or as John Donne put it in that Christmas Day sermon (1624):

God made Sun and Moon to distinguish seasons, and day and night, and we cannot have the fruits of the Earth but in their seasons; But God hath made no decree to distinguish the seasons of his mercies. In paradise the fruits were ripe, the first minute, and in heaven it is always Autumn, his mercies are ever in their maturity.

In following Christ we were never promised by our Master an easy life, or a successful life. It is hard to live in charity and peace with all. But we were promised a full life of inner peace and unspeakable joy.

The opening lines of that Hugh Grant film of a couple of years ago, Love Actually, capture it well:

“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.”

In that multitude of ordinary moments of everyday living, with all its messiness and uncertainty, still there is a quiet music in our soul that reminds us that we are loved, and that in loving we fulfil our highest destiny.

And that is why this central act of Eucharist is an invitation to communion with God in the costly sacrifice of Christ, as well as a communion with each other.

Welcome Jesu,
Deep in my soul forever stay;
Joy and love my heart are filling
On this glad Communion day.

“God is love, and those who abide in love abide in God, and God abides in them.”
1 John 4.16

Consciousness, prayer & the Holy Spirit

Consciousness, prayer and the Holy Spirit

Let me read you a part of a letter:

“I venture to put before the conference the following practical recommendations: (1) Education of Ordinands--- That the bishops shall emphasize the need and importance of a far more thorough, varied, interesting and expert devotional training in our theological colleges which, with a few striking exceptions, seem to me to give insufficient attention to this vital part of their work. (2) The Clergy--- That they should call upon every ordained clergyman, as an essential part of his pastoral duty and not merely for his own sake: (a) To adopt a rule of life which shall include a fixed daily period of prayer and reading of a type that feeds, pacifies and expands his soul, and deepens his communion with God; b) To make an annual retreat; (c) To use every endeavour to make his church into a real home of prayer and teach his people, both by exhortation and example so to use it.”

A letter from Evelyn Underhill to Archbishop Lang of Canterbury for the 1930 Lambeth Conference.

I used to tell my students that Christians were permanently guilty about two things: prayer and sex. Too much of one and not enough of the other. And which way round that is depends on whether you are an evangelical or a catholic!

This evening I want to ease our guilt about prayerlessness - a little.
I want to agree with what Evelyn Underhill expresses as her hopes for ordinands and clergy, but to widen it a little. To remind ourselves, in Michelle Quoist’s phrase, that all of life becomes a prayer. To reflect on human consciousness, as Underhill does in some of her own mystical writings.

“The Spirit himself testifies with our spirit that we are God's children.” (Romans 8.16)

Hyenas don’t really laugh. Rather, like the chimpanzees in the tea adverts, we are anthropomorphizing animals and giving them what are uniquely human characteristics. Dogs, if they look as though they are giving you a toothy grin, are usually about to bite you.

Human beings alone (as far as we know) in the universe, laugh. Only humans can blush or be embarrassed. Only humans need to feel embarrassed.

All this is part of our self-consciousness. The fact, that unlike any other creatures, to our present knowledge, we can reflect on what we are. This is the joy and pain of being a human animal: homo sapiens.

Julian Jaynes puts it this way in the opening of his fascinating book with the snappy title, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind (Penguin 1990): (cf Neal Stephenson, Snow Crash)

“O, what a world of unseen visions and heard silences, this insubstantial country of the mind! … A secret theatre of speechless monologue and prevenient counsel, an invisible mansion of all moods, musings and mysteries, an infinite resort of disappointments and discoveries… A hidden hermitage where we may study out the troubled book of what we have done and yet may do… This consciousness…”

But where did self-awareness come from in our evolutionary history?

Well, we don’t really know. About 3 million years ago - a mere nothing in comparison to the age of the earth. (If the 4 billion years of the earth’s existence are represented by a clock, then we are looking at just over half a minute ago.) About 3 million years ago, Neanderthal humans appeared with brains the size of the planet; brains bigger than any other animal on earth. And they used only a tiny proportion of that massive brain.

It’s like the computers some of us have at home or in our office. They are capable of rocket science, and all we use them for is as a glorified typewriter & late night solitaire.

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

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

They realised they were conscious - they were self-conscious. Julian Jaynes reckons that self-consciousness as we know it appeared less than 4 thousand years ago. Most scientists think it was much earlier.

Well what has all this got to do with our text?

Human beings are the only animals that consciously worship. Our God-consciousness emerged as part of our self-consciousness.

Non-realist theologians like Don Cuppit and the Sea of Faith group, and many philosophers of other faiths and none, assert that God-consciousness is only an extension of our inward monologue.

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

This argument runs, that the elaborate development of religions is an internal trick that has served human evolution quite well.

It has socialised us and, for quite long periods, stopped us living like the beasts we are, red in tooth and claw.

Rather like the self-deception which equates joining a gym with actually going to the gym…

But there is another explanation which our Christian faith provides and which many of us prefer to believe.

The Garden of Eden describes humanity coming to self-consciousness; and asserts that, that self-consciousness is a reflection of God’s self-consciousness. We are indeed made in imago Dei, in the image of God, knowing, and self-knowing. And so part of the human condition is bound up with knowledge of God: who is self-conscious within the Holy Trinity.

Adam is separate from the other animals, and to show his self-consciousness, he names them: they are tiger and horse; they are other; they are not flesh of my flesh and bone of my bone.

Unlike the other creatures, Adam and Eve know good from evil, and know that they are capable of choosing evil. The tiger and the horse can know no shame, but Adam and Eve hide from God, full of remorse and embarrassment.

Cain slays Abel, not for food nor for evolutionary superiority; but because of jealousy and on account of religious convictions.

Self-consciousness leads to self-doubt and to strong convictions. I remember hearing Peter Ustinov remind us again on the radio just before his death that “It is our doubts that unite us. Our convictions divide us.”

Indeed. But we can have no doubts without convictions and it is those convictions which determine what we do with our convictions; and how we handle our doubt.

The Christian story unfolds through the centuries until the second Adam comes: Christ, who as he matures as a man and grows into self-consciousness; grows also into that unique and aweful destiny that is his alone - that unspeakable agony of inner thought - God-consciousness: the horror of realisation that he is God.

For us, the realisation is that we are loved and that we will never be alone. In St Paul’s words: “The Spirit himself testifies with our spirit that we are God's children.”

But for Christ, the Spirit testified to his spirit that he was the only-begotten of the Father.

One of the roles of the Holy Spirit is to direct our inner consciousness – to work alongside it, if you will. And he does this whether we are hectically busy, or whether we are in retreat: the Holy Ghost working alongside the ‘ghost in the machine’.

Maybe the human soul is a virtual reality created by the world’s most complex computer, the human brain. But that does not invalidate the belief that there is a Divine Consciousness, before all things, incarnate in Christ, and interacting with us by way of the Holy Spirit.

We believe that there is an internal dialogue - not monologue. We believe that our Divine Lover is literally, always in our thoughts.

Put another way, this is the testimony of the saints and the men and women of God down through the centuries: that they have tasted and seen that the Lord is good. The Spirit has enabled them, sometimes with faltering conviction, to cry ‘Abba’, Father.”

This understanding of human self-consciousness, certainly encourages us to make time each day when with conscious effort we open ourselves to the Divine Consciousness. It encourages us to make space in our lives in retreat to let our Older Brother heal and remould us in his image.

But it also encourages us to believe even through the guilt of prayerlessness and overbusyness, that even then God’s Spirit is at work in us: we are still useful servants.

We must not be robbed of that joyful conviction that

“The Spirit himself testifies with our spirit that we are God's children.” (Romans 8.16)

The Good Shepherd

The Good Shepherd

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

“I am the good shepherd; and know my sheep, and am known of mine, even as the Father knoweth me, and I know the Father; and I lay down my life for the sheep.” John 10.14, 15

The guide was explaining to the Holy Land pilgrims how an eastern shepherd always leads his flock from the front, gently leading the sheep who trustingly follow. Unlike the western shepherds who drive the flock forward from behind. Just then they drove past a dozen sheep being herded from behind by a man with a large staff and a loud voice. The guide immediately jumped out of the coach to investigate. He soon returned, and obviously relieved declared: “He’s a butcher, not a shepherd!”

It’s a common enough accusation, especially at election time, that our leaders are only out to fleece the sheep, not care for them.

And of course in today’s Gospel, our Lord would have to agree that in many cases, and in particular the shepherds of Israel, the pharisees with whom he is in dialogue, this is a true analysis. They are more concerned with self and self-interest, than their flock and caring for others.

In the scriptures of the Old Testament, the image of the shepherd is a symbol of divine government, and of human government, too, as an imitation of the divine.

Thus, God is addressed as shepherd in the Psalms: "Hear, 0 thou Shepherd of Israel, thou that leadest Joseph like a sheep." (Psalm 80.1) And David, the shepherd boy, divinely anointed, becomes the shepherd King of Israel.

And when Isaiah prophesies the coming deliverer, he too speaks of a shepherd: "He shall lead his flock like a shepherd, and gather the lambs unto his bosom." (40.1)

So when Jesus, offspring of the House of David, calls himself the "good shepherd", his hearers would certainly have had all this background in mind. And that it was a Divine title, which further enraged the pharisees.

The image of the shepherd is a natural symbol of government. Not only in ancient Israel, but also in ancient Greece. From the time of Homer on, the Greeks spoke of kingship in terms of shepherding - a human office, no doubt, but also a reflection of the divine government of the universe. At its best, the image of the shepherd is a natural and universal symbol of divine and human government.

But there is this inbuilt ambiguity about the imagery.

So our Lord, in today's Gospel, draws a distinction between the good shepherd, who cares for the sheep, and the hireling, who is in the business for what he can get out of it for himself. "I am the good shepherd," says Jesus. "The good shepherd giveth his life for the sheep."
Jesus' authority as shepherd, as governor of our lives, is established in his great act of paschal sacrifice: "I lay down my life for the sheep."

The idea of Jesus as the good shepherd is a popular and attractive image, which has inspired centuries of Christian devotion, and I suppose there is no passage in the whole of scripture better-known or more loved than the twenty-third Psalm, with its picture of divine shepherding.

But the image is almost too cute. It is too easy to be sentimentally attached to the image, and thereby overlook the deeper levels of meaning it implies.

In the earliest expressions of Christian art, the paintings which adorn the walls of the catacombs - those narrow labyrinthine tunnels which served as burial places in the early Christian centuries - a favourite theme is Jesus as the good shepherd.

It is natural and obvious enough, of course, that the Risen Lord should be represented as shepherd of the dead. But it's not just that. Jesus is represented there as shepherd of the stars - the universal, cosmic shepherd: the Son of God. He is shown as "the power of God and the wisdom of God," (1 Corinthians 1.24) that is, the good governor of all that is, shepherding all things to their appointed end. Even the mighty Roman Empire which was busy oppressing the church.

The image of the good shepherd is fundamentally an image of divine government, an image of the universal providence of God in Christ. But it is infused with the meekness of the Lamb of God, for Christ is both shepherd and lamb.

George Whitefield preached on “The Good Shepherd’ as his last sermon in London before his final visit to America in 1769 and picks up this same point.

“Meekness is necessary for people in power; a man that is passionate is dangerous. Every governor should have a warm temper, but a man of an unrelenting, unforgiving temper, is no more fit for government than Phaethon to drive the chariot of the sun; he only sets the world on fire.“

One of Dr Spooner’s celebrated ‘spoonerisms’ was to remember that ‘God is a shoving leopard!’ Perhaps in more biblical terms, Jesus is the Lion of Judah. This is the strength and moral demand of God; and yet the loving shepherd displays the self-giving and careful patience of God with human waywardness. The lion lies down with the Lamb.

When I lived in Torquay, I knew a young couple who were sheep farmers out on the moors. I would often spend my day off with them.

At lambing time, there were sometimes orphans left, whose mothers had died in giving birth. And then of course there were those mothers whose lambs were still-born or who died soon after birth.

Hungry little lambs and mothers with no young to suckle; want and plenty side by side.

But to match up these needs, the shepherds had to undertake a rather gruesome operation. They must take blood from the dead lamb and smear it all over the little orphan. Only then would the mother accept the lamb as her own and feed and nurture it. This is an ancient practice.

And so this rich imagery of shepherding; of death and life, is seen supremely in this mass: we are redeemed by the blood of the Lamb; accepted in the beloved; clothed in the righteousness of Christ.

This is the Good Shepherd who is Governor of all things and who orders our universe; this is the Good Shepherd the bishop and guardian of our souls, our loving friend and brother; this is the Good Shepherd who loved us and gave himself up for us. This is the Good Shepherd who calls us to follow his example in self-giving care of one another, in our exercising of authority here in church; or in the workplace, or in the home

This is the God we know and love; and who knows and loves us.

“I am the good shepherd; and know my sheep, and am known of mine, even as the Father knoweth me, and I know the Father; and I lay down my life for the sheep.” John 10.14, 15