The Virginity of Mary - Advent 4

“Here am I, the servant of the Lord; let it be with me according to your word.” Luke 1.38

I must have told you about the man who is on his first parachute jump. The instructor says: "you just jump out of the plane, the chute automatically opens, you land in that field - there'll be a nice cup of tea waiting for you."

The man is sceptical. "What if the chute doesn't open?" "No problem. You pull the emergency chute cord. Another parachute opens, you land in that field - there'll be a nice cup of tea waiting for you."

The man jumps. Nothing happens. He pulls the emergency cord. Nothing happens. As he plummets to earth he's muttering to himself: "Bet there's no cup of tea either..."

Today I want to speak about the virginity of Mary, the mother of our Lord. When I was studying theology in the 60s and 70s, ‘the virgin birth’ was a hot topic of debate and you would often be asked whether you ‘believed in it’.

The theologian Rudolph Bultmann had been busy ‘demythologising’ the Gospel in the 40s and 50s and the virgin birth was one of the doctrines that had gone out of the window.

Modern people couldn’t believe in the virgin birth of Jesus, the argument ran, so rather than have it as a stumbling block, it should simply be removed.
And what has this got to do with the man with the parachute? Well, if neither of your parachutes has opened, then debating whether or not ‘there is a nice cup of tea’ is rather pointless.

Put the other way round, if you believe that God, the creator of all, entered the space time continuum, and came to our tiny planet, and implanted himself within a foetus in a womb in Palestine over two thousand years ago, then in comparison, the virginity of Mary is a miracle of small matter.

To use Jesus’ own metaphor in a different way, why swallow a camel and then strain at a gnat.

On the other hand, there is no spiritual merit in believing a hundred impossible things before breakfast.

Do we need to believe in the virgin birth?

Richard Hooker was a very early Anglican theologian at the end of the 16th Century. He famously gave the model of a three-legged stool – Scripture, Tradition and Reason – as being the balanced way of considering theological questions.

So let’s apply this to the virgin conception of Christ.

Scripture, such as that read today in the Gospel, the most important leg for Hooker and for the church down the centuries, seems to point to the virginity of Mary, although it is not an absolutely solid case.

Tradition is certainly on the side of the Blessed Virgin Mary. It is in the two most important creeds, the Apostles’, and what we shall say in a few minutes, the Nicene creed. Indeed, the perpetual virginity of Mary, something I shall come back to in a moment, was established in the Lateran Council of 649.

And the third leg, Reason? Well yes, I and many others see the doctrine as eminently reasonable. The conception of Jesus, from our limited point of view, was a supernatural act.

If he was and is truly God and truly Man, then Mary provides his human lineage, and God the Holy Spirit provides his divine DNA, if you like.

We shall say in the creed in a moment: “and was incarnate by the Holy Ghost of the Virgin Mary, and was made man.” And some of us will bow to acknowledge the awesome miracle of the incarnation, the graciousness of God in coming among us as one of us.

The doctrine is part and parcel of the mind-stretching, miracle of the incarnation. I hardly think it makes that miracle any easier to believe, if we don’t have to believe in a virgin birth.

The perpetual virginity of Mary, Mary ever-virgin, is a much harder doctrine to defend. It certainly has tradition on its side, even Luther and the protestant reformers adhered to the dogma.

But a plain reading of Scripture does not seem to support it. Mention of Jesus’ brothers has to be explained by saying they were in fact cousins, or Joseph’s children by a previous wife who had died.

And as for Reason, I and many of my colleagues would say that it is not reasonable to expect Mary to have remained a virgin throughout her married life.

This brings us on to the final point which we might call the cultural icon of the Virgin Mary.

Whether she remained a virgin or not, the enduring image of Mary in art, music and popular devotion, is of a pure young woman who willingly submitted to the incredible will of God.

And in this, she touches both on our common humanity and on our immortal longings for God.

In our common humanity there is a recognition that as sexual awareness grows there is some ‘loss of innocence’ – and we hardly know what we mean by the phrase.

It is not about some mediaeval concept that sex is bad or polluting, it is rather to do with the realization that the world is more complex and our relationships more messy than childhood might have led us to believe.

Our sense of wonder becomes dulled, our expectations of life take disappointment into account.

We can never look at life through the simple, and in some senses, pure eyes of childhood again.

And yet in Mary, especially with the child who is God on her lap, we have a picture of the miracle of innocence regained.

It’s captured in the Christmas Carols:

I syng of a mayden
That is makeles;

Moder and mayden
Was never non but she;
Wel may swych a lady
Godes moder be.

Or again:

There is no rose of such virtue
As is the rose that bare Jesu;

For in this rose contained was
Heaven and earth in little space; Res Miranda – what a wonderful thing!

And in this most powerful icon, we see ourselves as we long to be: pure, full of wonder, intimately in touch with God our maker and sustainer. We see trust and calm contentment – the sleeping cat in the bottom left of Barocci’s picture on the front cover.

We see too, our immortal future, and somehow this young woman’s faith helps us to believe. She is like us and draws us out in faith to gaze upon her son in wonder and worship.

And then, the Blessed Virgin Mary encourages us to echo with her and all the saints through the ages:

“Here am I, the servant of the Lord; let it be with me according to your word.” Luke 1.38

Carols

I syng of a mayden
That is makeles;
Kyng of alle Kynges
To her Son she ches.

He cam al so stylle
There his moder was
As dew in Aprylle
That fallyt on the gras;

He cam al so stylle
To his moderes bowr
As dew in Aprylle
That fallyt on the flour;

He cam al so stylle
There his moder lay
As dew in Aprylle
That fallyt on the spray;

Moder and mayden
Was never non but she;
Wel may swych a lady
Godes moder be.

1. There is no rose of such virtue
As is the rose that bare Jesu;
 Alleluia.

2. For in this rose contained was
Heaven and earth in little space;
 Res miranda.

3. By that rose we may well see
That he is God in persons three,
 Pares forma.

4. The angels sungen the shepherds to:
Gloria in excelsis deo:
 Gaudeamus.

5. Leave we all this worldly mirth,
And follow we this joyful birth;
 Transeamus.

6. Alleluia, res miranda,
 pares forma, gaudeamus,
 transeamus.

Intervention - Advent Sunday

“O that you would tear open the heavens and come down.” Isaiah 61.1

Well it’s been another week of depressing and frightening events. And of course the terrible deaths of the 200 in Mumbai have eclipsed the news of violence in the Congo and Zimbabwe and Orissa and Thailand and Iraq and Nigeria and Somalia and so the list goes on.

And like the prophet Isaiah, and men and women of faith throughout the centuries, we cry: “O that you would tear open the heavens and come down!”

Why doesn’t God do something!

Christians have moved in two opposite directions in trying to answer the question: why doesn’t God do something.

At one extreme there is a theology which sees God as the Grand Designer who created the universe like some huge clockwork mechanism, wound it up, and then retired to see how the next few billion years unfolded.

William Paley popularised this in the 18th century in his book on Natural Theology. If you had never seen a watch, he argued, and found one, you would assume that it had both an intelligent designer and a purpose.

The universe is much more complex than a watch and it too, he argued, must therefore have a designer and purpose.

Richard Dawkins partially refuted this argument in his early book The Blind Watchmaker.

But a by-product of this whole line of reasoning that goes back to the Greeks, Thomas Aquinas, and the Deists among the 17th century Anglicans, is the notion that God is incapable of intervening in his creation. That would somehow be breaking his own rules.

Then there is the other extreme view about God’s role in human affairs. God is forever tinkering with the mechanism – a little fine tuning here, a replacement cog there, the occasional rethink about how the whole thing is going – perhaps I don’t want a clock, maybe I want a mechanical jack-in-the-box!

The trouble with both these extreme views is that they do not take into account either the complexity of God, or the complexity of the universe.

Another model more consonant with Scripture and our experience of life, the universe and everything, is the relational model.

God is bound up with the universe he created in a similar way to how we are bound up in our network of family and friends.

Genesis paints the picture of God in relationship with his human beings, made in his image, walking in the garden with them in the cool of the day.

And then, things go wrong. And relationships between the humans, and their relationship to the Creator, become far more complex.

But then so does God’s relationship with the whole universe become more complex.

We also know now that although the cosmos is in many respects like some vast mechanism, it nevertheless has some bewildering characteristics.

Quantum mechanics means it is full of strangeness, uncertainty and unpredictability.

Well where does all this leave us? It leaves us with the joys and pains of living in relationship.

In our prayers, we of course express to God our frustration that he doesn’t act, that he doesn’t rend the heavens and come down. We tell him what we want to happen in the world. We bring our sorrows and anger and hopes and fears.

And do we expect him to turn up in Zimbabwe and give that Mr Mugabe a talking to? (A lightening bolt would do Lord!) No! Of course not.

Or do we expect those cancer cells to suddenly disappear from our loved one’s body? Sadly, no.

But we know that the world is a much stranger place than we can imagine, and that wars cease, dictators are deposed, and that cancer sometimes does go away.

And so we talk to God, not to try and persuade him to do something, but to express our dependency on him to make some sense of it all; and of course, because we wish he would do something!

The Scripture themes in advent are generally dark and bleak, an opportunity to take a long hard look at life red in tooth and claw, but always against the background that ‘Christmas is coming’. God will tear open the heavens and come down.

He will be born among us, the strangest creature in all the universe. ‘God contracted to a span, inexplicably made man’.

And somehow, this is enough to break through the sadness that all these injustices bring to our life. We know that God knows, and that he meets us both as God and as one of us; he meets us here in the mystery of the mass, and in one another.

There’s a poem by Sheena Pugh which expresses this advent hope of waiting and watching through all the changing scenes of life. It’s called Sometimes.

Sometimes

Sometimes things don’t go, after all,
from bad to worse. Some years, muscadel
faces down frost; green thrives; the crops don’t fail,
sometimes a man aims high, and all goes well.

A people sometimes will step back from war;
elect an honest man; decide they care
enough, that they can’t leave some stranger poor.
Some men become what they were born for.

Sometimes our best efforts do not go
amiss; sometimes we do as we meant to.
The sun will sometimes melt a field of sorrow
that seemed hard frozen; may it happen for you.

Sheena Pugh (b.1950)

“O that you would tear open the heavens and come down.” Isaiah 61.1

Remembrance Sunday

Remembrance Sunday

“Do this in remembrance of me.” (Luke 22.19)

Last weekend was my little sister’s 50th Birthday and so 25 or so of our extended family spent the weekend celebrating in a Chateau outside of Cherbourg.

We spent a cold and grey Sunday on Omaha beach where on D-Day in 1944 the Allies had made the bridgehead into France.

My great nephew James was old enough to clamber over the gun emplacements and run down into the grassy shell craters.

My nephews Neil and Jason were older than most of the 4,200 men who died there that day. They were just old enough to have seen Saving Private Ryan when the film came out ten years ago, with the horrific opening sequence of the Americans landing on Omaha beach.

The rest of us were old enough to remember the barbed wire and tank blocks of our childhoods on the beaches and rivers of Sussex.

What will each of us remember of the family day on Omaha beach in 20 years time, and will great nephew James remember any deeper significance of the place in the bloody history of the 20th century?

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 is the stuff of family get-togethers – for better for worse!

Remembering where we have been, helps us to make sense of where we are now. 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.

The short-term memory is the most vital and sometimes the most fragile. Sentences begun but unended with ‘what was I saying?’

Perhaps you suffer like me, from phone memory syndrome? You push a single phone memory number, and in the ten seconds the call takes in connecting, your mind wanders to other subjects and other things to do; so that if someone finally answers simply with ‘hello’, you’re left wondering ‘who have I telephoned?’

Long-term memory is even more of an enigma. A cameo appearance of an old friend 40 years ago is there in all its vividness: the flares, the knitted 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!

Then there is communal memory, which is what today is about, passed on from one generation to another.

The Bible and the Church have always placed a strong emphasis on the integration of our communal memory - commonly owned history - into the present reality.

Indeed there can be no present reality without a sense of what was.

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? You'll remember 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 Afghanistan or the Congo.

These yearly community remembrances; the counting of the decades of uneasy peace; these 63 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. And once it has taken root, it is difficult to remove.

Increasingly fewer of us now have direct experience of the two Great Wars, 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 our future.

Catherine Pickstock at Cambridge wrote a startling but difficult book a few 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, 35 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 amongst 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 63 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.” (Luke 22.19)

Sacred Space - Dedication Festival

Sacred Space – Dedication Festival

“This is the house of God, and gate of heaven.” Gen 28.17 (Introit verse for Dedication Festival)


I Google Earthed the house I grew up in last night – 160 Old Shoreham Road, Shoreham-by-Sea – to see if the shed is still there. And it is!

I listened to the Third Programme in that shed, built radios, did my homework and said my prayers.

In the house, we four boys were in one room, my granny and my two older sisters in another, and mum and dad and my baby sister in the box room. The shed was a Godsend. It was a poustinia, a retreat, a place for a young boy to dream about another life.

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. It’s not homogenous, but interrupted by either memory, or in some places where we have never been before, by a sense of mystery.

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 sum of its masonry. It is full of memory and mystery.

In today’s epistle, the writer to the Hebrews reminds Christians that when they gather together in earthly temples such as this, they are drawing on the collective memory of the church, and uniting in the unseen mystery of heaven.

He could have been looking at the angels and saints which are depicted everywhere in this building, and as his eye moves from the roof to the walls, to the cross, to the altar he declares:

You have come to Mount Zion and to the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem, and to innumerable angels in festal gathering, and to the assembly of the firstborn who are enrolled in heaven, and to God the judge of all, and to the spirits of the righteous made perfect, and to Jesus, the mediator of a new covenant, and to the sprinkled blood that speaks a better word than the blood of Abel. (Hebrews 12.22-24)

We maintain this memory year after year in our liturgy, the Bible readings, the music and vestments and in the very architecture of the church.

The Baptistry is at the entrance, for Baptism is the sign of admission to the Church of Christ.
This is why we should have a stoup of Holy Water at the door – to remind us every time we enter that we have been baptized. Perhaps some of you can remember when ours disappeared?

The altar and cross is the obvious focus – the place where the Gospel is re-enacted.

The pulpit and lectern stand either side of the rood screen, for the reading of the word and the interpreting of the word, the pulpit on the north, nearer the barbarians who came from the north.

In New York last week I went round that wonderful mediaeval museum up at the top of Manhattan, the Cloisters.

It gave me two new ideas for St Paul’s: the great ivory liturgical comb, used by the priest to purify his hair before the mass; and the golden straw or pipette to help the faithful in receiving the wine. I don’t know how we’ve managed without them all these years!

So we could go on, using our collective Judaeo-Christian memory to differentiate this sacred space, following the writer to the Hebrews in re-ordering the world of human ‘things’ to reflect God’s order for salvation.

But a Christian church is not just about order and memory. It is also about mystery.

There are some Sacred Spaces of course 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…

However, for a Christian, these Sacred Spaces, whether ordered or ‘natural’ bring the sense of mystery to a focus.

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.

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 Christian 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.

This is the sort of focused, prayer-infused Sacred Space St Paul’s should be, and I believe, is. 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.

Yet we still have more work to do in helping people who sense the numinous here to take another step: to meet the risen Christ and be transformed by him.

And then another miracle occurs. Our reality of time and space is so infused by the presence of God, that we are caught up in the voiceless mystery of the love of Christ.

At the altar, as the priest raises the body of Christ towards the heavens, 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 from around the world whom God has touched through it for over 165 years.

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 28.17 (Introit verse for Dedication Festival)

Review - SCM Studyguide: Christian Spirituality

SCM Studyguide: Christian Spirituality
Ross Thompson with Gareth Williams
SCM, 2008, £16.99
ISBN 978-0-334-04093-4

In many ways this is my sort of book: classifying, diagrams, spreadsheets, all you need to know about a mystic in 2 paragraphs. I can already see my PowerPoint presentation emerging. I suspect the book will annoy others for whom its schematizing and over-simplification is anathema. They might argue that it uses the very methods that are so antithetical to spiritual understanding to explore that same spiritual understanding. But then you have to remember Thompson's audience.

It is a very readable introduction for any thoughtful person, although it is obviously aimed at the undergraduate market and written to give a broad overview in just 250 pages. Also it is written with students who have no faith backgrounds in mind, sometimes stating the obvious for those of us who have grown up in confessional Christianity. The large type and classroom format help draw you through the schema of the book. The style is like a very long Grove booklet, but with a much more liberal groundswell.

Part One is a selective history of spirituality, running from the Old to the New Testament, through Patristics, the 'Dark Ages' and Medieval period, to Reformation and the post Enlightenment. It is inevitably patchy, and your particular gurus may not be selected. Nicholas of Cusa (1401-64), for instance, gets a bigger mention than Pentecostalism. It attempts an almost impossible task which Thompson admits emerges as something of a 'fireworks display', designed to introduce some of the main concepts and to give a sense of the shifting understanding of spirituality over the last three thousand years.

Part Two is more substantial and looks thematically at the intersection of spirituality with Experience, Science, Theology, the Body, the Psyche, Ethics and Difference (Postmodernity and Pluralism). This is more intellectually demanding and the language and quotations will sometimes be a challenge to readers. It is very much a teaching text, which in the hands of a good teacher will open up the subject. The bibliography is extensive and some more restricted suggestions for further reading and a feel for some of the key texts would have been useful. For the target audience a shorter, annotated bibliography would have avoided intimidation.

Thompson acknowledges that the book approaches the subject in a 'middle way' (which is well suited to Anglicans): 'self-implicating rather than confessional or detached'. In this sense it is a contemporary approach to spirituality, although there are times when the author's 'self-implication' inevitably skews the content. A look at his website (holydust.org) explains something of the direction permeating much of the work. However, this is a book I will keep and browse, and recommend to those wanting to learn more of Christian Spirituality.

Church Times

The Wedding Banquet - Justification

The Wedding Banquet. Matthew 22.1-14

“I will greatly rejoice in the Lord… for he has clothed me in the garments of salvation.” Isaiah 61.10

As a young working class lad, I remember being very nervous in my first few terms at Cambridge, every time an invitation appeared in my pigeonhole to some dinner or lunch or blessing of the university beehives... What was I to wear?

Sometimes the invitation would bear the enigmatic phrase: “Doctors will wear Scarlet.” But I wasn’t a doctor. That didn’t help.

Gradually I learnt the dress codes and visited the charity shops where I picked up tail coats and dinner jackets and patent leather shoes – all of which I still have in my wardrobe. They have survived the last 40 years considerably better than my body has.

Many of us have dreams about being inappropriately dressed on posh occasions. Or worse still, there is the nightmare that we are completely naked. Of course Mr Freud had plenty to say about that.

And this surprisingly common feature of human dreams around the world, is what gives something of an edge to today’s parable of Jesus – and to the plight of the poor man being bound in the picture by Merian the Elder which adorns the front of our service sheet.

This parable, sometimes called the Great Banquet or the Wedding Feast, has a twist at the end which is not in Luke’s version of the same parable. (Lk 14.16-24)

Let’s do a little Bible study on the Gospel this morning.

The context of the story is Jesus’ teaching that many of the Jewish leaders had rejected the message of the Gospel that he was proclaiming. “He came unto his own and his own received him not” as John put it. (John 1.11)

Matthew also used a perfectly legitimate Jewish teaching method of interpretation – called pesher – which embellished the original parable in the light of what had happened since Jesus delivered it.

So the slaves being beaten and killed is a description of what happened to many in the Christian church in the four decades after Christ – especially the early missionaries.

Matthew adds too that the King was furious and sent troops to destroy the City. Certainly Christians after the destruction of Jerusalem and the Temple in 70AD could not see this as anything other than God’s judgment on a nation that had rejected the Messiah.

So Jesus came to the Jews and they did not want him, and the Gospel was then thrown open to the whole world. The servants were to bring in good and bad, Matthew tells us – everyone was welcome to the Banquet in honour of the King’s Son.

But what about this man without a wedding robe?

The king immediately spots him: ‘Friend, how did you get in here without a wedding robe?’ And he was speechless. Then the king said to the attendants, ‘Bind him hand and foot, and throw him into the outer darkness, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth. For many are called, but few are chosen.’ (Matt 22.12-14)

Now that’s worse treatment than you get if you turn up at the Athenaeum wearing trainers!

But why does Matthew add these curious verses?

Well think for a moment about how the other guests managed to get wedding robes. They were dragged in off the streets.

I can remember my embarrassment at turning up to a friend’s club for dinner, one summer evening, without jacket or tie. It was like the scary dream.

But very politely I was ushered into some cubby-hole where there was a selection of ill-fitting jackets and hideous ties – they certainly didn’t want to encourage you to do it again! But they clothed you in an acceptable way for dinner, even if you felt the style police were about to arrest you at every mouthful.

The simple part of this parable, in both Luke’s and Matthew’s version, is that we are invited to the Gospel party and should accept the invitation.

The more complex part, has to be teased out, and contains a doctrine explained most fully in the subsequent writings of St Paul – the doctrine of justification.

The King in the parable is hugely generous.

He provides his Son - whose wedding feast it is.

He provides the food and the wine.

But what Matthew adds in his version, is that the King provides also the fine wedding robes.

“In this way, nobody need be ashamed of their rags, and nobody can be proud of their party frocks; there is room neither for embarrassment nor for pride in the feast of the kingdom – at this Table. Both attitudes ruin the enjoyment.” (pace Michael Green)

In the words of one of Charles Wesley’s great hymns: “Clothed in righteousness divine, bold I approach the eternal throne.”

Or as our text from the prophet Isaiah has it: “I will greatly rejoice in the Lord… for he has clothed me in the garments of salvation.”

The biblical doctrine of Justification is simply this: that when we feel all unworthy of stepping into the presence of God; when we feel, again in the words of the prophet Isaiah, that “all our righteousness is as filthy rags” (Isaiah 64.6); when we feel stripped and naked before the loving gaze of the Judge of all the earth – then God clothes us in the righteousness of Christ; he looks on us with unreserved acceptance, because we are in Christ; in the Beloved Son in whose honour the wedding banquet is spread.

The offending guest was offered wedding robes like all the rest. But he chose to wear his own robes – he was good enough for God and didn’t need any charity from the King; any grace and forgiveness from God. He was arrogant and proud in his heart.

So this parable is not a threat or a warning, that if we don’t make the grade we will get bound and cast into hell.

Rather it is a loving invitation, that whether good or bad, as long as we come pleading only the merits of Christ our Saviour, clothed in his righteousness, then we are welcome to enjoy the banquet.

Never believe the self-deception that you are unworthy to receive the bread and the wine. Of course you are unworthy. We all are!

As I shall say in a few minutes as I invite you to receive the Bread and Wine of the kingdom: “Jesus is the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world. Happy are those who are called to his supper.”

And we will all respond, priests and people: “ Lord, I am not worthy that thou shouldest come under my roof, but speak the word only and my soul shall be healed.”

The Banquet and the wedding robes are gifts, to be received joyfully.

As the choir will sing as we eat and drink:

O sacred banquet, wherein Christ is received;
the memorial of his passion is renewed;
the soul is filled with grace;
and a pledge of future glory is given to us.
Alleluia!

[O sacrum convivium a 6
Tomás Luis de Victoria (1548-1611)

O sacrum convivium, in quo Christus sumitur;
recolitur memoria passionis ejus;
mens impletur gratia;
et futurae gloriae nobis pignus datur.
Alleluia!

Words: Antiphon to the Magnificat, Second Vespers, Corpus Christi]

Agnostics and Believers

Agnostics and Believers

15th Sunday after Trinity
Jeremiah 15.15-21; Romans 12.9-end; Matt 16.21-end

“Truly, you are to me like a deceitful brook, like waters that fail.” Jeremiah 15.18

The weary traveller in the hot desert makes his way towards the wadi, the stream, with its promise of water and refreshment. Imagine his disappointment and despair when he finds it is dried up and barren.

This is the great prophet Jeremiah’s description of his experience of God. It is a heartfelt accusation against God. It is frighteningly honest prayer.

“Truly, you are to me like a deceitful brook, like waters that fail.”

I want to talk this morning about honesty and integrity, about agnostics and believers, and about Ralph Vaughan Williams who died fifty years ago last week – you may notice that all our hymn tunes today are arranged by him.

In Woody Allens’s autobiographical movie, Stardust Memories, someone calls Woody Allen's character an atheist. He responds "To you, I'm an atheist. To God, I'm the loyal opposition."

Like many in our present western culture, he regards himself as unable to believe, and like many, he sometimes wishes he could believe. He says this in an interview with Rolling Stone magazine:

"I do occasionally envy the person who is religious naturally, without being brainwashed into it or suckered into it by all the organized hustles; just like having an ear for music or something. It would just never occur to such a person for a second that the world isn't about something." [Rolling Stone 1987]

Or here is the great guru of the postmodern novel, author of Generation X, Douglas Coupland in, Life After God:

“My secret is that I need God - that I am sick and can no longer make it alone. I need God to help me give, because I no longer seem capable of giving; to help me be kind, as I no longer seem capable of kindness; to help me love, as I seem beyond being able to love.” [Douglas Coupland, Life After God (London: Simon & Schuster, 1994), p.359]

And so we could go on, there are so many like them, in our own families, probably some of you sitting here this morning.

And yet, thank God, there are others who seem quietly confident in their faith. Who seem to find the Christian faith a perfectly natural thing to believe and to live their lives by.

Most of us would probably admit that we move, at different times in our life, along the spectrum between 'Devout Sceptics' and 'Ardent Believers'.

The term ‘Devout Sceptics’, by the way, was coined by Sir Leslie Stephen in his book An Agnostic’s Apology of 1931.

Bel Mooney took it up for that fascinating Radio Four series in which she interviewed numerous ‘Devout Sceptics’ such as Clare Short, John Humphrys, Melvyn Bragg, Philip Pullman...

And all this brings us to Vaughan Williams – and we might add Gerald Finzi who died two years before Vaughan Williams; and Herbert Howells and the vaguely mystical Holst…

There have always been men and women who have agonized over the Christian faith, and especially in the twentieth century.

Vaughan Williams and millions more were deeply affected by the two World Wars. And to return to those two ends of the belief spectrum again - as they came to terms with the full horror of man’s inhumanity to man - some people were driven to more fervent devotion and deeper security in their faith in Christ.

And others, like my father and his brothers, were driven to abandon the tenets of their childhood faith. Their experience of God mirrored that of Jeremiah’s in his darkest hours: “Truly, you are to me like a deceitful brook, like waters that fail.”

Yesterday in the church calendar we remembered John Bunyan, spiritual writer. Bunyan was a tormented man in so many ways, and like Jeremiah, pondered in prison what his life of faithfulness to God had gained for him.

During the First World War, Vaughan Williams, at 41, joined up as a private in the Medical Corp – his socialist principals prevented him from using his public school privilege to become an officer – instead he became a stretcher-bearer on the Western Front.

He carried with him at all times a copy of Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress. (You’ll remember that he arranged the Sussex folk tune Monks Gate to 'He who would valiant be'.)

We can guess that Vaughan Williams and many of his contemporaries who survived the great slaughters of the first half of the twentieth century, wrestled with the idea of faith: longing for it while intellectually rejecting it.

For over forty years from 1906 until 1949, Vaughan Williams also wrestled with the score of his last opera, The Pilgrim’s Progress. And in between he wrote some of the most moving spiritual music of the century, with a mixture of the simple tenets of the faith shot through with mystery and longing. Think of the Christmas carol 'This is the truth from above'; or his setting of Psalm 42, 'Like as the hart desireth the waterbrooks'.

The irony is that for many of us, the music of Vaughan Williams has inspired our faith and deepened our devotion to God. It has helped us through those times when we have cried ‘Lord I believe. Help thou my unbelief’; times when God seems like a deceitful waterbrook.

Archbishop Robert Runcie was a godly man, and in his retirement address to the General Synod in November 1990 he reminded the Synod that the Church of England has always been a church without hard edges.

He could have been speaking of Vaughan Williams when he said:

“Confronted by the wistful, the half-believing and the seeking, we know what it is to minister to those who relate to the faith of Christ in unexpected ways. We do not write off hesitant and inadequate responses to the Gospel. Ours is a church of the smoking flax, of the mixture of wheat and tares. Critics may say that we blunt the edge of the Gospel and become Laodicean. We reply that we do not despise the hesitant and half-believing, because the deeper we look into human lives the more often we discern the glowing embers of faith.”

It is not for us to decide who is and who isn’t a Christian. It is for us to be welcoming, and beckoning; to fan the flames of faith. It is for us to be ‘honest to God’, in our earthly pilgrimage; to live out our lives with integrity.

We rejoice with some of the saints who have gone before, and with many of our brothers and sisters today, who firmly believe and give us an example of joyful devotion to Christ.

Indeed, we must preach for conversion and invite men and women to take up their cross and follow Christ. It is a Gospel imperative. There are many whose lives will be revolutionised by an encounter with our risen Lord.

Yet we must always acknowledge that God is bigger than all of our dogma and human institutions, and that sometimes we can see God more clearly in the lives of others than they can see him in themselves. They dare not believe what is to us, at least much of the time, so obvious.

We are grateful to God for the gifts he endowed on men like Ralph Vaughan Williams, or women like Iris Murdoch; who struggled with any conventional Christian faith, yet continue to nurture the faith of so many of us.

Walking with honesty and integrity was a difficult path for them, as it was for Jeremiah and for John Bunyan, and as it is for all of us as we take up our cross and follow Christ.

The collect we said yesterday for John Bunyan reminds us that, whatever our particular path through life, we will one day, with Jeremiah and Bunyan, and Vaughan Williams reach our true home:

God of peace,
who called your servant John Bunyan
to be valiant for truth:
grant that as strangers and pilgrims
we may at the last rejoice with all Christian people
in your heavenly city; through Jesus Christ our Lord.
Amen.

Hymns:
All creatures of our God and King
Words: after Francis of Assisi (1182-1226)
Music: ‘Lasst uns erfreuen’, Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872-1958)
Take up thy cross, the Saviour said
Words: Charles William Everest (1814-1877)
Music: ‘Deo Gracias’, English 15th C, arr. Ralph Vaughan Williams
Father, hear the prayer we offer
Words: Love Maria Willis (1924-1908)
Music: ‘Sussex’, trad English melody adapted by Ralph Vaughan Williams
I heard the voice of Jesus say
Words: Horatius Bonar(1808-89)
Music: ‘Kingsfold’, adapted from Eng folk song by Ralph Vaughan Williams

This is the truth sent from above 
The truth of God, the God of love
Therefore don't turn me from your door 
But hearken will both rich and poor

The first thing that I do relate 
Is that God did man create
The next thing which to you I'll tell 
Woman was made with man to dwell


And after that, 'twas God's own choice 
To place them both in Paradise,
There to remain of evil free 
Except they ate of such a tree.

But they did eat, which was a sin, 
And so their ruin did begin,
Ruined themselves, both you and me, 
And all of their posterity.

Thus we were heirs to endless woes 
Till God and Lord did interpose
And so a promise soon did run 
That He would redeem us by His Son.

And at that season of the year 
Our blessed redeemer did appear
He here did live and here did preach 
And many thousands he did teach

Thus He in love to us behaved 
To show us how we must be saved
And if you want to know the way 
Be pleased to hear what He did say.

Parable of Wheat & Tares - living with differences

Wheat and Tares – living with differences

“Let both of them grow together.” Matt 13.30

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

‘Why are you trying to end it all?’
‘I’ve nothing to live for!’

‘Don’t you believe in God?’
‘Yes I do.’

‘Well that’s great - so do I! Are you a Jew or a Christian?’
‘A Christian.’

‘Me too! Are you a Protestant or a Catholic?’
‘A Protestant.’

‘What a coincidence - so am I! Anglican or Methodist?’
‘Anglican.’

‘Who’d be anything else! Does your church use the Prayer Book or Common Worship?’
‘Common Worship.’

‘Amazing. So do we! Traditional Language or Contemporary language?’
‘Contemporary.’

‘Die heretic!’

Most Christians have so much in common and yet they let so many things tear them apart and divert them from building the Kingdom

Today’s Gospel is one of the many Kingdom parables of Jesus. Remember that Sunday School definition of a parable? - an earthly story with a heavenly meaning.

And remember too that all parables have one main point. They are not allegories where you try to find meaning in every part.

It reminds me of the Welsh preacher who was getting into a lather as he described hell (not at all what this parable is about) as a place where “there will be weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth”. A little old lady pipes up from the back – “what if you haven’t got any teeth?” “Teeth will be provided!”

So what is the main point of this parable? Well it’s not primarily about Church discipline, or church order. Matthew 18 gives instructions about how to deal with disagreements in the fellowship.

And we must also remind ourselves that the Kingdom of Heaven (Mark calls it the Kingdom of God) is about how God exercises his kingly rule, how he operates in our world here and now. The Kingdom of Heaven is not the Church, although it includes the Church.

So this parable is about that constant temptation to try and do God’s work for him; to decide who are really on the side of the angels.

And then when we’ve decided, to drive out those who are not one of us – one of God’s chosen; to dig up the weeds and consign them to the flames.

Jesus reminds us that God is patient, and although judgement will come, it will come in God’s time and in God’s way. “Let both of them grow together”, says Jesus, “until the harvest.”

Now this is not to say that we shouldn’t lock up murderers, or throw out the church treasurer who has been fiddling the books.

It’s about those areas where we have to make judgements, but where we cannot always be sure our judgements are correct.

Let’s bring this home to what’s been happening in our own Anglican Communion over the past few years and to the divisions that are already evident as 230 bishops stay away from the Lambeth Conference.

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, like being socialist or conservative, or Anglican or Baptist.

A key part of this process is the way in which we handle the differences, and the degree to which we demand conformity. This is at the heart of the present controversies.

Despite all the sensationalism that we read in the papers, 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.

We only have to look back a century or so to see how we excluded Jews and Roman Catholics from full participation in society.

Now this greater inclusiveness is not surprising, as arguably it was the Reformation in Europe in the 16th century which provided the conditions for democratic nation-states to thrive.

Some Conservative Christians such as those who met at GAFCON in Jerusalem last month, regard all this as the rottenness at the heart of liberal Christianity. They caricature Christians like many of us, as believing so little that we have no Gospel to proclaim!

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

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.

On the role of women as priests, the Church of England and the wider Anglican Communion has put structures in place (or in the case of women Bishops, is putting arrangements in hand) to allow for freedom of conscience. It’s not always a comfortable state of affairs, but with Christian charity it has allowed us to move on with the main agenda.

With regard to gay laity and clergy, we have lived with wonderful Anglican fudge and English reserve, so that we know it is tolerated in many of our churches, positively welcomed in others, and is complete anathema in some.

This too is often an uncomfortable state of affairs, but like all growing pains, it must be endured with patience.

Of course each side in these disputed areas thinks the others are the weeds. If we could just get rid of them we would have a much better harvest.

But the teaching of Jesus makes it clear that there can be no ‘pure’ church; no wholly good nation. And this is because it is made up of men and women like us who in our own lives reflect the parable of the wheat and tares.

Paul put it this way in today’s epistle:

We know that the whole creation has been groaning in labour pains until now; and not only the creation, but we ourselves, who have the first fruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly while we wait for adoption, the redemption of our bodies. (Rom 8.22f)

We are imperfect creatures in an imperfect church in an imperfect world. “Get over it!” says Jesus.

Now this is not an excuse for not bothering, for not striving to be better people; for not helping to build a more loving church and a more equitable world order.

But it is a cry from our Lord to be generous and patient and slow to make judgments about others. For like the Flower Pot Men (whom many of you remember) by making friends with little weeds, they may blossom into beautiful flowers who become our friends.

We should pray for the Bishops gathered in Lambeth over these weeks, and for those who have not gone.

And we must look to ourselves, that we don’t start identifying people as weeds that we would be rid of.

Edwin Markham’s verse is a good reminder of the royal way of love, the way of the kingdom:

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.

“Let both of them grow together,” says Jesus.

A New Name - Baptism - Ss Peter & Paul

" To everyone who conquers I will give some of the hidden manna, and I will give a white stone, and on the white stone is written a new name that no one knows except the one who receives it...." (Revelation 2.17)

Baptism of Charlotte Amelia Hillier on the Feast of Ss Peter & Paul, 29th June 2008

I’m glad I’ve never had to go through the agony of choosing a baby’s names. My most recent great nephew lingered nameless for a fortnight before he became James.

Charlotte can be grateful that she was not born to Puritan parents in the 17th Century. She might have that delightful American name: Through-much-tribulation-we-enter-the-kingdom-of-heaven – the girl wrote that her friends called her Tribby.

Amongst English Puritans, one of the most famous was Praise-God Barbon, the fanatic whose name is associated with the Barebones Parliament of 1653. His brother is said to have been baptized If-Christ-had-not-died-for-thee-thou-hadst-been-damned. He was of course known to his opponents as Damned Barbon.

There’s nothing much we can do about the names we are given at birth and most people stick with them all through their life.

But in different cultures and certainly in the Ancient Near East during the centuries our Scriptures were written, name changing was more common.

In the Old Testament we can think of Abram who became Abraham; his wife Sarai whom God renamed Sarah; and Jacob who became Israel.

In the New Testament we have Saul, who we are grateful was renamed Paul – St Saul’s Knightsbridge would never have worked, would it?

And then on this Feast of Peter and Paul, we remember Simon bar-Jonah whom Jesus renames “Peter’ – the Rock.

But what’s the point of these name changes?

In ancient cultures there was something sacred, even mystical about a person’s name. It was as if the name somehow contained their destiny.

[You’re fairly safe with Charlotte – petite, feminine; and Amelia – invincible or industrious.]

And this brings us back to my curious text taken from the last book of the Bible, the Revelation of St John.

In his mysterious and symbolic way of writing, John says that at the last, we will all receive “a white stone in which a new name is written which none knows save the one who receives it.”

George MacDonald, that great Scottish writer of the nineteenth century wrote about this text: “The true name is one which expresses the character, the nature, the meaning of the person who bears it.”

It is, if you like, another way of saying that in heaven we shall at last be the person whom God intended us to be. Here in our present life, we pick up all kinds of baggage which can slow us down and divert us from our full potential.

And part of the purpose of our spiritual journey is to discover that name which God has written on the white stone; to catch a vision of all that we can be in God and to pursue that dream.

That’s the pattern of life you see in the saints. It’s that same Christian understanding of society and of himself, that drove Nelson Mandela.

Sometimes, as with Peter and Paul, there’s an important moment of revelation. For Paul it was on the Damascus road when he has a blinding vision of Christ; for Peter it was the realisation as we have just read, that Jesus is “the Messiah, the Son of the living God.”

So Jesus renames him ‘the rock’ – the cornerstone of the church that is to come into being.

God’s name for someone, says MacDonald, is God’s own idea of “that being whom he had in his thought when he began to make the child”. In the mind of God, Peter was always meant to be what only Peter could be, and meant to do what only Peter could do.

On this feast of Peter and Paul, when we remember two men renamed to reflect their destiny in Jesus Christ; when we name a baby before God, with all the hopes and expectations we have for her…

It is also a time to reflect on our own spiritual journey.

Are we simply letting events round about us carry us along; shaped by the society and culture around us?

Or is there a spiritual dimension to our lives, which helps us to reflect on our own destiny; on the men and women we are becoming?

For Christians, gathering here around the Table week by week, taking the bread and wine for the journey of life is a way discovering the new name that God has for us. It helps to reflect on who we are and to remind us of who we want to be.

Of course it’s not easy to follow a spiritual path in a society that gently mocks Christianity to death. But if we conquer the temptation to live simply as secular animals and if we look for the hidden manna, the spiritual food which God provides us with, then we will know with St John the Divine and with Peter and Paul:

" To everyone who conquers I will give some of the hidden manna, and I will give a white stone, and on the white stone is written a new name that no one knows except the one who receives it...." (Revelation 2.17)
(With acknowledgement for original idea to John Pridmore of the Church Times.)

Persecution - lack of!

Trinity 5, persecution

Ex 19.2-8a; Rom 5.1-8; Matt 9.35-10.8

" suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not disappoint us…" (Romans 5.3ff)

A lawyer is sitting quietly in his chambers when Satan turns up.

“I’ll make sure you win every case, that you become vastly wealthy, that you are the youngest QC ever, and eventually that you become the greatest reforming Chancellor in history.

All I require in return is the souls of your wife and children.”

The Lawyer thinks for a while and then says, “so where’s the catch?”

Lawyers, like politicians, are one of those groups of people who are always persecuted by public mockery and jokes.

I want this morning to spend a few minutes thinking about the persecution of Christians – or, perhaps more worryingly, the lack of it.

The longer version of today’s Gospel includes at least two puzzling statements of Jesus, which is presumably why the verses are left out. (Although at St Paul’s we only shorten readings to make printing the service sheet easier and to allow more time for wine at the end of the service…)

One of the so-called ‘hard sayings of Jesus’ is in the passage we did read: “go nowhere among the Gentiles”. This would seem to re-enforce the teaching of that Exodus reading where God says of Israel: “you shall be my treasured possession out of all the peoples.” (Ex 19.5)

I don’t want to dwell on this theme, because it is obvious from the way the early church developed and from some of the other teachings of Jesus, that the Gospel was to be preached to us, the Gentiles, as well. Although that still leaves us with the problem, not insurmountable, of the actually words of Jesus

The two other problems are found at the end of the extended reading:

“Brother will betray brother to death, and a father his child, and children will rise against parents and have them put to death; and you will be hated by all because of my name. But the one who endures to the end will be saved. When they persecute you in one town, flee to the next; for truly I tell you, you will not have gone through all the towns of Israel before the Son of Man comes.’” (10.21-23)

The last statement of Jesus as Matthew records it is part of a bigger issue concerning the second coming of Jesus. He and the early church seemed to expect his return as the triumphant Son of Man to be imminent – within their lifetime – only months away. That’s a subject for another sermon on another day.

Although it is worth noting, in passing, that it was this very verse that the 19 year old Albert Schweitzer read in his Greek testament while undertaking his military service in 1894. At a time when many intellectuals were supposing that the early church had simply ‘made up’ many of the sayings of Jesus, he realised that they had an authentic ring about them. For why would the church invent such puzzling and problematic sayings and put them in the mouth of our Lord?

But back to the lawyers and persecution. (What do you call a thousand lawyers at the bottom of the sea? A good start!)

Jesus promises his disciples that in the world, they will have persecution. It is a theme taken up by the Apostle Paul and is the context of the ‘suffering’ he refers to in today’s epistle: “we also boast in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not disappoint us…” (Romans 5.3ff)

The problem for many of us in the western church is that society does not hate us and we are neither vilified nor persecuted.

Does this mean there is something wrong with our practice of the faith? Does it suggest that by centuries of establishment compromises, that began with Christianity becoming the state religion of the Roman Empire in the early 4th century and continue today with Bishops in the House of Lords, we have become little more than a spiritual conscience for a secular society?
Well certainly some would have us believe that.

Groups within all religions often claim as ‘proof’ of the rightness of their position that they are mercilessly persecuted. The Albigensians claimed this in mediaeval Europe; the Anabaptists in reformation Europe; even evangelicals and liberal Catholics in the present day Diocese of London. Although, whereas the first two groups were burned and drowned respectively, the latter two groups only exchange snide remarks at Diocesan Synods.

In the early church, there were Christians who thought that martyrdom was such a privilege and a guarantee of a place with the saints in heaven, that they offered themselves to the mob; voluntary martyrdom, which soon came to be condemned by the Bishops. Hardly surprisingly, the Montanists, as they were called, soon died out!

However, there is a much milder form of this still around. You remember CS Lewis’s observation of the way some Christians practise their faith, encapsulated in his comment: “She lived for others. You could tell them by their haunted looks.”

Some Christians live in such a self-righteous and priggish way that they are shunned by normal society.

And some Christians believe such ridiculous things that they are assigned by polite society to the corner where the flat earth society live. They are regarded (to their horror) as away with the fairies. All this has nothing to do with the persecutions of which our Lord speaks.

However, we must not forget that, sadly, throughout the world, there is still much persecution of Christianity, and indeed of other faiths.

It is sobering to remember that there have been more Christian martyrs in the past century than in all the previous centuries put together. The religious freedom we enjoy in Britain is still denied to millions of our fellow believers around the globe, and we should continue to work and pray for their emancipation.

But where does all this leave us personally, as we struggle with the call to be true to our Christian vocation, and yet to be full participants in civil society?

I think passages like today’s Gospel should leave us with a healthy niggle. It should cause us to stop and think about how easily we sometimes fall in with the liberal consensus of secular society.

Sometimes, standing up for our faith and suffering a little verbal persecution, will mean taking an unpopular ethical stance at work or in our attitude towards money, sex and power. Sometimes it will simply be in trying to see the good in someone who has become the butt of everyone’s humour. Sometimes it will be in living below our means.

Jesus reminds us in another passage “Woe to you when all men speak well of you…” (Lk 6.26)

As we reflect and pray about our life before God, day by day, we should be prepared for that gentle niggle, that prompting of the Spirit, that sometimes leads us into patterns of living, which carry with them the mildest of persecutions.

Friends may say behind our backs that we are taking our religion a little too seriously. And they may feel gently rebuked by our life-style. Our popularity may ebb a point or two.

But compared with the persecution many of our brothers and sisters have endured, and still do, and in the light of our Lord’s own sufferings, as Paul reminds us, it is very little to put up with.

And in God’s providence, it is good for us, and for those whom we seek to serve.

" suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not disappoint us..." (Romans 5.3ff)

Corpus Christi

Corpus Christi
Preached at St Paul's Cathedral on the Feast

“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

Think of all the things that have changed in our world since Jesus spoke those words nearly two thousand years ago.

Some have been shallow changes – hair styles, shoes, music, MacDonalds. They have not greatly affected the world we live in.

Other changes have been deep and far reaching – paradigm shifts – the way we understand the universe, the nature of time, our ability to manipulate the human body and the human mind, the rise of science and technology.

These changes continue to shape our world for better or for worse.

And all these changes mirror what goes on in our own lives.

There are superficial changes over the years: hair styles (if you have any hair left to style) and clothes, putting on a bit of weight, needing glasses to read, voting for Boris instead of Ken.

And then there are the deep changes: learning to accept ourselves for who we are; coming to faith or losing our faith; loving someone so much that it changes the way we live; personal suffering and illness; or the changes wrought by years of loneliness.

Our journey through life is marked constantly by these changes: both the superficial ones, and sometimes without realising it, the deep changes.

And what is true of ourselves, is true of this meal, of this bread and wine, of the Eucharist, the Mass, the Holy Communion.

Since Jesus first took Bread and Wine nearly two thousand years ago, the form of this service has undergone many superficial changes: whether in Aramaic or Latin or English; whether in soaring cathedrals with sublime music or in homes with a handful of believers simply sharing the bread and wine.

But beyond the form of this service, and all the outward changes we can trace back through Christian history, there is the deep change which this bread and wine effects in our lives.

The church has struggled over the years to try and give theological explanations of what is going on.

Transubstantiation was the doctrine developed most fully by St Thomas Aquinas in the 13th century. He had been educated in Aristotelian metaphysics, and so he taught that although the elements still appeared to be Bread and Wine (the ‘accidents’ as Aristotle would have called it) they were, in a deeper reality, the Body and Blood of our Lord (the ‘substance’ in Aristotle’s terms.)

Martin Luther re-interpreted this in the 16th century and used the word Consubstantiation: the Body & Blood of our Lord coexist in the Bread & Wine. But there is no transformation of the elements.

At the same time, Ulrich Zwingli was the People’s Preacher in Zurich. He stressed the purely symbolic value of the bread and wine. In contrast to the Anglican ‘harmonisation’ described as the Real Presence, Zwinglianism, or Memorialism as it became known, was caricatured as the Real Absence.

Of course you will still find all these views, and others, represented in the Christian church today.

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

And this deep or radical change is not just about the physical bread and wine, but about how it deeply changes us.

This was why Jesus used such stark language: “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.”

He had already, in the earlier verses of this chapter, linked this ‘life’ with ‘believing’: “ Very truly, I tell you, whoever believes has eternal life”. (John 6.47)

John is stressing that Christian mystery is not like pagan mystery, nor is it like the magic of the many cults around in the first century. There is no hocus pocus, no hoax – both phrases derived from the words of the Latin Mass, hoc est corpus meum - this is my body.

The miracle of this meal, is not in what changes happen to the bread and the wine when the priest says the words of consecration.

No the miracle of this meal, is what changes happen to us as we eat and drink in obedience to Christ’s command.

Jesus said that he came so that we might have life and have it more abundantly.

This meal, this Eucharist is a constant reminder of all that Jesus did so that we can enjoy fullness of life.

And more than that, in a way that we cannot fully understand, we are drawn into the life of God as we take the very life of Jesus into ourselves.

As we shall sing in the recessional hymn: “Faith alone the true heart waketh to behold the mystery.” (Of the glorious body telling.)

This is a deep change. This is being born again. This change, changes the way we deal with all other changes of our life.

We may have very little faith. We may not always believe what we think we should believe. We may think ourselves to be poor examples of Christianity. All the more reason why we should take the bread and wine, trusting in the love God, daring to believe the words of Jesus.

We come to this table not because we must, but because we may.
Not because we are strong, but because we are weak.
Not because we have any claim on God’s blessing, but because we stand in constant need of God’s mercy.

In this Feast, we eat the Bread from heaven, until one day we will drink with Christ and all the saints in Glory.

Thanks be to God for this Most Blessed Sacrament.

Trinity - Dancing with Angels

Trinity - Dancing with Angels

Preached at Hertford College Oxford

“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)

I went to the sort of old fashioned boys grammar school that taught ballroom dancing to the Upper Sixth. It was the nearest we got in the 1960s to sex education.

We hated it. Yet there was, and 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.

What else could explain the resurgence of that absurdity known as Line Dancing? Or the fact that almost as many people voted in Graham Norton’s Strictly Dance Fever as in the General Election!

Some have argued that contemporary, club-scene dancing is yet another sign of postmodernity: individualism and self-expression; no rules and no partners; the breakdown of social coherence and mutual responsibility.

They see the difference between modernity and postmodernity as the difference between Foxtrot and Industrial Techno; The Little House on the Prairie and Sex in the City; or, if you’re into it, the difference between the original Star Trek & Deep Space Nine.

But clubbing is supremely a social pursuit with codified rules of conduct and dress, not obvious to the outsider - but that is why they are an ‘outsider’. It serves the age-old purposes of waltzes and Morris dancing; of Stripping the Willow and Charleston; of ballet and ballroom.

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

So what of St Basil’s contention 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 late Professor Colin Gunton at King’s London took up the word again more recently. In “The One, The Three and The Many” he writes that the word ‘perichoresis’ is “heavy with spatial and temporal conceptuality, involving movement, recurrence… and a dynamic, mutual reciprocity.”

We might put it more simply than the good Professor - dancing. 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 wordless communication which we mimic in all our human dances.

You find it in mediaeval poetry. In the Christmas Carol, Tomorrow shall be my Dancing Day, 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, of togetherness. That’s part of the buzz of clubbing, of dancing, of being part of the throng of people.

And in that solidarity with the Holy Trinity, the fruit of the Spirit produces in us the traits of the Father and the Son: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control.

Then the charismata, the gifts of the Spirit, reproduce in us 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 a message on Facebook yesterday from one my old students. His fellow students all called him affectionately Gammy Gav because he had a wonky leg. He never wanted to come dancing with us. (I taught a course on theology and culture and it was de rigeur to go clubbing on Friday night.)

We finally persuaded him, but he stood at the edge, watching. Then a gaggle of 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, into the dance.

And as we are caught up in the joy of the Blessed Trinity, we are transformed into the likeness of God: we become noble humankind and not brutish animals. Or as St Basil puts it, with great theological daring:

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

Ezra Pound once remarked: “Music begins to atrophy when it departs too far from the dance.”

Christianity begins to atrophy when it departs too far from the unpredictable dynamic of the Holy Trinity.

So, don’t sit around the edges of the dance: the cynical onlookers of church life. We have enough of those. You’ll atrophy! You have been baptized in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.

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

Living in Between - Sunday after Ascension

LIVING IN BETWEEN

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

There was an architect, a surgeon, an anaesthetist and a politician, arguing about the nature of God.

“He was clearly a surgeon” said the surgeon. “His first act was removing Adam’s rib to create a woman.”

“Ahhh” said the anaesthetist, “but first he caused a deep sleep to come upon the man. He was an anaesthetist!”

“But that’s Genesis chapter two,” said the architect, “in Genesis chapter one, he first designed and built the universe. He created it out of chaos.”

“And there you have it,” said the politician, “who created that chaos?!”

Well, the waiting of the last few months has ended at last. Boris is our new Mayor. (And that has nothing to do with the choice of my text…)

Of course the speculation has now begun as to who will win the General Election in two years’ time. No sooner one arrival than another destination.

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

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

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

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

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

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

When I was but a young man in Sussex I went with my Pentecostal friends to 'tarrying meetings' - from the words of our Lord to his disciples in Luke's Gospel: "but tarry ye in the city of Jerusalem, until ye be endued with power from on high." (Lk 24.49) - we were to pray, and wait for the Spirit to fall - or for 9pm - whichever came earliest.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Now on this Sunday in the year of our Lord, 2008, we are in between that first Pentecost nearly 2000 years ago, and the end of the world, or our own death, whichever comes sooner.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Margery Williams
The Velveteen Rabbit, Heinemann 1989 (1922)

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

Christian hope is the ability to hear the music of the future.

Faith is the courage to dance to it in the present.

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

Doers of the Word - Easter 5 BCP

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

I was desperately looking for a segue this morning to take me from the sad death of Humphrey Lyttletton, may he rest in peace, to our text. But when I rang Samantha for ideas, I found she was out for the weekend at a congress for young Benedictine novices. There’s nothing Samantha likes more… (but I’ll leave you to complete the sentence, and have a chuckle, and thank God for all the joy that Humphrey brought to our lives.)

We all like playing with words. Puns and double entendres are the spices in our conversations. Our Lord used them, as did the prophets and even St Paul.

But our text this morning warns us not just to play with the words we hear from God; to debate and dissect them endlessly; but to act upon them.

Furthermore, our text begs the question: ‘what words?’ James’s epistle was a counterblast to those who said, ‘we have faith, we believe’ and yet showed by their actions that they were not good followers of Jesus Christ.

The last time I preached here on Easter 5 was four years ago – my swan song as I left for missionary work in darkest Knightsbridge. In my sermon then, I attempted to find three words that could sum up the Gospel in the context here where God has placed us.

They were three imperative verbs: love, enjoy, and, understand; and this morning I am going to revisit those words as we see how we are called to act upon them.

It is Jesus himself who gives primacy to the first word: love. It was our Lord who, when asked what is the most important commandment, replied: love God and love your neighbour.

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

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

And if we are to be doers of the word and not hearers only, then that love must be demonstrated by the inconvenience of loving those whom we would rather not; taking loving action, rather than just not bothering.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Preaching at St Mary’s and, I can assure you, at St Paul’s Knightsbridge, is rarely of the kill-joy variety.

We are not those who take the swing out of the budgie’s cage on a Sunday. Indeed we are more likely to add a drop of gin to its water bottle.

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

Today’s Gospel contains one of the many examples of our Lord’s express desire that our life should be lived to the full. “Ask, and ye shall receive,” says our Lord, “that your joy may be full.” It was there in the Old Testament too, as in today’s lesson from Joel.

Listen to these words from Deuteronomy 14 talking of what to do with the tithe money on the festivals: “And thou shalt bestow that money for whatsoever thy soul lusteth after, for oxen, or for sheep, or for wine, or for strong drink, or for whatsoever thy soul desireth: and thou shalt eat there before the LORD thy God, and thou shalt rejoice, thou, and thine household.”

And I’m glad that you and the people of Knightsbridge have heeded the next verse regarding the priests: “And the Levite that is within thy gates; thou shalt not forsake him.” (26f) I am a much bigger man since coming into the deanery ten years ago!

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

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

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

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

And so the third word, ‘understand’.

Augustine reminds us that our reason should be applied as ‘faith seeking understanding’. God’s word helps us week by week to put the world in context, to understand the times, to know how we should act and live.

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

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

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

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

We have to learn that our capacity to love and be loved is marred – it is never perfect.
We have to remember that our ability to enjoy without clinging on to that which we enjoy, is impaired – it is a daily struggle.

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

And this is why we pursue all that we do with the help of prayer and with the support of all the baptized.

So as Humphrey once said, “before the burnished chariot of fate is wheel-clamped by the traffic warden of eternity”

…love, enjoy, understand and then you will be

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