Easter 7 at St John's College Cambridge

Evensong series: "Reflections on the resurrection - Known in the breaking of bread."

Readings: Genesis 32:22-31; Luke 24 vv. 13-35

You can listen to this sermon here.

“Then their eyes were opened and they recognised him; and he vanished from their sight.” Luke 24.31

It was GK Chesterton who declared in a particularly xenophobic moment: “There is nothing like travel for narrowing the mind!”

Well although I know what he means, I got back yesterday from travelling round the world for a month, meeting exotic new people and preaching at them. It’s what retired Vicars do.

Needless to say it was enriching in so many ways, with new friendships, new ways of exploring faith, and unforgettable moments:

Celebrating mass in the cool early morning by the pool in a villa in Bali where we met to celebrate a fellow priest’s 50th birthday;

Stealing the blow-up unicorn from the villa next door at 2 in the morning;

The Christian commune on a farm outside of Melbourne Australia;

Sharing in the Annual Spam Festival in Honolulu!

Travelling can be life changing.

So in the Gospel reading, it’s Easter Sunday afternoon.

It’s been a traumatic three days for these two disciples of Christ, Cleopas and perhaps his wife Mary or his son Simeon. We don’t know. (Cf John 19.25)

They are despondent, confused, disappointed and exhausted as they set out on the two-hour walk from Jerusalem to Emmaus, hoping to arrive home before nightfall at about 7.

A stranger joins them on the dangerous road - there’s safety in numbers – nothing too surprising there – except that like Mary in the Garden earlier that day, they don’t recognise Jesus.

And he seems to be the only person in Jerusalem who knows nothing of the events of Maundy Thursday, Good Friday and the rumours which flew about this morning that some women had found the tomb of Jesus empty with angels telling them he was alive. So Jesus gives them a Bible study for an hour or two. He explains to them what Scripture says about the Messiah – about himself.

But they still don’t get it.

At last they reach Emmaus and Jesus looks as if he’s travelling on beyond the village. Cleopas and Mary are unwilling to see this stranger go off into the dangerous night and press him to stay for supper and sleep on the couch.

And then there’s the famous revelation; the subject of a thousand paintings, of sculptures and stained-glass windows and the wonderful Caravaggio in the National Gallery.

“When he was at the table with them, he took bread, gave thanks, broke it and began to give it to them. Then their eyes were opened and they recognised him, and he vanished from their sight.” (Luke 24.30f)

They met with the risen Jesus at the end of journey, in the breaking of bread. (Luke 24.35)

The breaking of the word, his explanation of the Scriptures, had not been enough. They had not understood it until his actions took them back to the scene in the upper room on that Thursday three days ago – his Last Supper. It had been the only topic of conversation for them and all the other followers since his death on Friday.

For many people, doctrine and dogma and rationality and Bible verses are not enough. Indeed, they sometimes obscure the presence of Jesus. He is not recognised in them.

It is in the mystery of the Breaking of Bread, the Eucharist, the mass, that he is both recognised and disappears from our sight: the hiddenness of God; the Cloud of Unknowing; the believing and seeing and hoping; yet doubting and wondering where God is, and why he seems so silent.

No wonder Christ said “Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed!” (John 20.29)

In many Christian traditions, we know that liturgy and music, art and symbols can take us beyond words to an encounter with the risen Christ, unrecognised and then recognised.

In the mysterious story of Jacob travelling, with his family, staying behind on his own by the brook, wrestling with a stranger, or with the incarnate God, with the eternal Christ – Jacob begins to recognise who this clinging stranger is, and now he’s recognised him he won’t let go – but Christ wounds him with a wound of love, changes his life, Jacob becomes Israel – and doesn’t that resonate down through the centuries and the last 70 years – and then, the stranger disappears. 

The Emmaus story is about journeying, and those we meet along the way, and understanding what we have learned when we stop to break bread together. (Companions – com panis – those with whom we break bread.) Pilgrimage has always been a part of Christian formation and a part of the Christian narrative, as Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales bear witness.

In 1931, CS Lewis was on a journey with his brother Warnie, travelling pillion on his motorcycle to Whipsnade zoo.

In his autobiography, Surprised by Joy, Lewis related his final step into real joy, for his intellectual conversion two years earlier had been a miserable affair and he described himself as “the most dejected and reluctant convert in all England.” It was all words and reason that had brought him to conversion.

This is how he describes that journey that was to change his life and therefore the lives of many others: "I know very well when, but hardly how, the final step was taken. I was driven to Whipsnade one sunny morning. When we set out I did not believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God, and when we reached the zoo, I did."

That journey to Whipsnade Zoo was Lewis's Emmaus Road, his breaking of bread. Of course he would still have many periods of darkness and doubt through the rest of his life.

Early Christians were called the people of The Way.

Christ is not only the destination, he is the Way: he is the journey, and our unknown travelling companion, helping us to piece together all that happens to us as our life unfolds.

And sometimes, when we come to the eucharist, the breaking of bread; or evensong; or fall in love; or hold a new-born child; or go to the zoo on a motorbike; or memorably steal a unicorn…

…then this opening of our eyes helps us to look back on the ups and the downs of our life journey so far, and although we did not recognise the presence of Jesus with us at the time perhaps, we can now reflect more deeply on being surprised by joy, by the eternal presence of the risen Christ; even if, as is the way of life and faith, the moment soon passes.

“Then their eyes were opened and they recognised him; and he vanished from their sight.” Luke 24.31

Epiphany

“For you know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, who, though he was rich, yet for your sakes became poor, that you through his poverty might be rich.” 2 Cor 8.9

In the little thumbnail sketch of themselves, which some people put on Facebook, there is a heading entitled, relationship status, and another entitled, religious views.

Some of my friends have in both those boxes the simple phrase “it’s complicated”.

Well relationships are sometimes complicated and none more so than our relationship with God.

However simple our faith may be:

Jesus loves me

This I know

For the Bible tells me so;

the way we sometimes come to faith and grow in faith is often complex.

Evelyn Waugh converted to Catholicism in 1930 and added to his extremely complicated human relationships a devout but complicated divine relationship.

Twenty years later in 1950 he wrote probably his least-known book: Helena.

It’s an historical novel that explores faith through St Helena, the mother of Constantine, as she travels to Palestine in the 4^th Century to find the ‘true cross’.

On this day, the Eve of the Epiphany, she finds herself at the place of Christ’s birth in Bethlehem contemplating the magi and her own late arrival to the Christian faith.

The Epiphany - the Manifestation - the Showing; or the Theophania as it was also called - the showing of God - has been celebrated since the early 3rd Century. By the 4th Century, in the Western Church, its focus became the Revelation of God to the Gentiles - personified in those three Wise Men from the East, or were they Kings, or Astrologers? We don't know what they were, or for that matter how many of them there were. That’s why we have the traditional three in our crib scene, but these two magnificent kings on elephant and camel still travelling over here by the sacristy. And we don’t know when they arrived. Matthew makes clear that Jesus was probably a toddler by the time they presented their gifts.

Traditionally, they came to be known as Caspar, Melchior and Balthasar and many customs have grown up around them especially in Europe.

There will be some Anglican and Roman Catholic priests tomorrow visiting the homes of the faithful and chalking over the doors the initials of the three kings:

20 + C + M + B + 14

This represents a New Year blessing: Christus mansionem benedicat (May Christ Bless this house).

And here this morning we will have our own Galette des Rois - King Cake – with our wine after the service.

But let’s return to Helena in Evelyn Waugh’s Novel, and listen to her meditating on the Magi around the shrine of Christ’s birthplace:

“How laboriously you came, taking sights and calculations, where the shepherds had run barefoot!

How odd you looked on the road, attended by what outlandish liveries, laden with such preposterous gifts!

You came at length to the final stage of your pilgrimage and the great star stood still above you. What did you do? You stopped to call on King Herod. Deadly exchange of compliments in which there began that unended war of mobs and magistrates against the innocent!

Yet you came, and were not turned away. You too found room at the manger. Your gifts were not needed, but they were accepted and put carefully by, for they were brought with love…

You are my especial patrons and patrons of all late-comers, of all who have had a tedious journey to make to the truth, of all who are confused with knowledge and speculation, of all who through politeness make themselves partners in guilt, of all who stand in danger by reason of their talents…

For His sake who did not reject your curious gifts, pray always for the learned, the oblique, the delicate. Let them not be quite forgotten at the Throne of God when the simple come into their kingdom.”

The Church in London continues to grow and we see at baptisms and confirmations that many now come to faith later in life, and often they come with a complex understanding of their relationship with God in Christ.

As Waugh and many others have recognised, we often come thinking we have gifts to offer God; only to find that the gifts are accepted, although not needed - accepted because they are brought with love as a response to the love of Jesus which we celebrate at the altar.

And of course, like the magi, for all our learning and good intentions, we often get side-tracked along the way, and fall into the company of Herod, who seems intelligent, cultured and entertaining, but who is capable of such horrors.

And who has not, through politeness, as Waugh puts it, made themselves partners in guilt?

For others of us, the first part of the journey, when the star shone so brightly, was indeed easy and simple.

Then knowledge and life experiences made our faith seem more oblique. It would be so easy to give up following the star and join the cynics round about us.

But the wise men persevered and although they did not understand whom it was they worshipped with their gifts, they realised that an encounter with Jesus would change the rest of their lives.

Perhaps this is why they are remembered.

They are, not just for Helena, but for many of us, our special patrons, for they encourage us through all our doubts and fears and wrong turns, to persevere in following the light God has shown us. For all of our life is a quest to know God, and therefore ourselves, better – faith seeking understanding – Anselm’s motto, fides quaerens intellectum, which for him means an active love of God seeking a deeper knowledge of God.

And we are so much richer than the magi, for we have the Holy Spirit, the Bible, the church, the bread and the wine, and two thousand years of Christian witness.

We bring simply the gift of ourselves, the adoration of our hearts, and with the wise men, we worship.

“For you know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, who, though he was rich, yet for your sakes became poor, that you through his poverty might be rich.” 2 Cor 8.9

Faith, Trust and Dawkins

“Who do people say that I am?” (Mark 8.27)

Last Saturday I went back to my old College, to celebrate 40 years since we matriculated: a hundred bright eyed public school boys with a smattering of grammar school boys like me.

It was the end of the 60s when, as Philip Larkin reminded us, sex was invented, although we didn’t let that trouble us in Selwyn. We wore flares, long hair and our gabardine macs.

All my contemporaries at our dinner last Saturday seem to have aged an enormous amount and most of them are now at least ten years older than me. We reminisced.

There were twelve Engineers in Selwyn College in my year, part of the 300 engineers in the Cambridge Mechanical Sciences department.

We had to work with laboratory partners, and mine was one of the two women amongst the 300 – I think they thought she would be safe with me because I was a Baptist. In fact she was safe with me for a number of other reasons...

…but why only half a dozen women among the 1000 engineers.

Even today, women are very much in a minority in the engineering faculty.

Is it perhaps because men and women’s brains are hard-wired in different ways? A lot of research would suggest that.

You probably heard in the news last week the findings of Bruce Hood, professor of developmental psychology at Bristol University. He suggests that magical and supernatural beliefs are hardwired into our brains from birth, and that religions are therefore tapping into a powerful psychological force already there.

We have a propensity to believe in God, or at the very least in Santa Claus or the tooth fairy.

Of course this argument can run both ways.

For those of us who are theists and have always thought that it is more natural to believe in God than not to – and that does count for the very great majority of the human race - this comes as no surprise.

It was the Preacher in Ecclesiastes written nearly 3,000 years ago who said:

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

Or the famous quotation of Augustine in the 5^th century:

“Thou awakest us to delight in Thy praise; for Thou madest us for Thyself, and our heart is restless, until it repose in Thee.” (Augustine of Hippo, The Confessions of Saint Augustine, Chapter 1)

And so through the centuries many have argued that there is a God shaped void in everyone.

On the other hand, the hard-wired argument can also play into the hands of evangelical atheists like Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens.

They assert that brave atheists need to lead the way in overcoming the hard-wiring of our brains so that we are not poisoned by religion.

Humans have will-power and rationality and we must smother our inner propensity for religious belief before it destroys all humankind.

The High Mass this morning led by a bunch of militant and deluded priests is part of the mumbo jumbo that supports the destructive forces of religion in the world.

So, hard-wiring or not, there is no scientific proof of God, but the world of science generally reinforces the faith of those who do already believe.

Unless of course you set up some opposition to scientific discovery, as Archbishop Ussher unwittingly did in the 17^th century. He deduced that the first day of creation began at nightfall preceding Sunday October 23rd, 4004 BC – he wasn’t willing to be more specific than that!

But very few Christians take such a needlessly confrontational stance.

So science isn’t in itself going to lead us to God.

Many others have tried to argue for belief in God from reason.

The Quinque Viae, Five Ways, or Five Proofs are five arguments for the existence of God summarized by the 13th century theologian St.Thomas Aquinas in his book, Summa Theologica.

Descartes, Newton, Pascal and many others have worked to develop this branch of apologetics.

But although, like science, reason reinforces the belief of believers, it cannot present a compelling case for belief in God. The argument is ultimately as sterile as the scientific one.

CS Lewis, a reluctant convert to Christianity in the middle of last century, is more famous for The Lion the Witch and Wardrobe now than for all his Christian apologetics; especially his influential book, Mere Christianity.

He came nearer to the crux of Christian belief by focusing not on the general idea of God, but on the uniquely Christian idea of God in Christ.

He famously sets up the argument by saying that when you consider the teaching of Jesus in the Gospels, he must be either mad, bad, or who he said he was - the Son of God.

He argues that you cannot read a Gospel like today’s and decide that Jesus was just a good man, or even a prophet.

He must have been a great fabricator of lies, or so delusional that he should have been in psychiatric care.

Attractive as this line of reasoning is, it too is ultimately sterile. A postmodern response to CS Lewis’s ‘mad, bad or who he said he was’ is a dismissive shrug and a ‘so what’!

In today’s Gospel Peter answers Jesus’ question of “who do people say that I am?” with a simple affirmation of trust in the man he is following – you are the Christ, the Messiah, the Chosen One.

It is not scientific proof, or clever reasoning, but a transforming relationship with the man, Christ Jesus, that sustains his belief and elicits his trust.

And when Thomas makes a similar affirmation after the Resurrection – my Lord and my God – Jesus says: “because you have seen me, you have believed; blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed.”

Why do people like me and many of you, believe in God, and come to worship in a service like this? Is it because the scientific evidence has swayed us? No.

Or is it that rational argument has left us no other reasonable course of action? No.

It is because we believe that Jesus loves us, and when we commit ourselves to loving God in response, it brings us an inexplicable sense of well-being and rightness.

In Kant’s words, God ‘is not an ‘it’ to be discussed, but a ‘thou’ to be met’. When we approach him in faltering faith and trust, we find he had seen us from a long way off and had run to meet us.

He prepared a simple feast for us of bread and wine, and as we rehearse his dying love, Jesus asks a further question of us as he did of Peter – not ‘who do people say that I am?’ – but ‘who do you say that I am?’

God's self-communication

God’s self-communication

Prov 8.1, 22-31; Col 1.15-20; John 1.1-14 (2nd Sunday before Lent)

“O taste and see that the Lord is good: blessed is the man that trusteth in him.” Psalm 34.8

Facebook. What's it all about? In the five years since it started on 4th February 2004 it has become a social phenomenon. There are over 175 million people signed up in this worldwide network of friends. They upload 850 million photos each month.

There are 20 million active user groups, including St Paul’s Knightsbridge, Stale Expressions of Church and the Richard Coles Admiration Group.

And what’s it all about? Well at it’s most basic level it is about communication on the worldwide web. But more than that, it’s about presenting an image of yourself to family, friends and anyone else who is allowed to see your facebook.

And of course it is highly selective in what you choose to display. I wouldn’t try to give a false impression to people who look at my facebook. It’s just that I don’t happen to have any photos of myself that weren’t taken at least 10 years ago.

And when my hard-working colleagues read in my status that ‘Nick is on a course’, it is only for the sake of brevity that I haven’t written, slightly more accurately, ‘Nick is on a golf course!’

However, you still pick up a fairly good impression of what someone’s like from their facebook.

You could just write a letter. The Valentine’s card I received yesterday spoke volumes: “Every time I see you dearie, I can believe in Darwin’s theory.” It’s a succinct and topical way of saying they admire my animal magnetism.

But if I want some one to know what really makes me tick, I need to spend time with them face to face. Self-communication is better done person to person.

Even then, there are limits as to how completely I am able to communicate myself to another person, partly because I don’t fully know my own self.

The Christian faith is in essence the self-communication of God to us human beings, and it has been a progressive revelation over several thousand years.

The Bible tells us that God’s first self-communication was in creation itself. In today’s Gospel, John deliberately starts with a reference back to Genesis, ‘In the beginning was the Word’.

The passage from Proverbs refers to this Word as ‘Wisdom’ who says: "I was daily his delight, rejoicing before him always, rejoicing in his inhabited world 
and delighting in the human race (8.30f)”

St Irenaeus was to express this in his famous phrase: The glory of God is Man fully alive: Gloria Dei vivens homo.

St Paul puts it this way in the opening of his letter to the Romans:

Ever since the creation of the world his eternal power and divine nature, invisible though they are, have been understood and seen through the things he has made.

We celebrate Darwin’s 200th birthday this weekend. So let him have the last word on this:

This follows from the extreme difficulty or rather the impossibility of conceiving this immense and wonderful universe including man as a result of blind chance or necessity. When thus reflecting, I feel compelled to look to a first cause having an intelligent mind in some degree analogous to that of man and I deserve to be called a theist.

But in the wisdom of God, simply becoming a theist by considering the universe was not all that God wished to say about himself.

So, thousands of years later in human development, there was a fuller, deeper self-communication: the Word, the Divine Wisdom, became flesh, and dwelt among us.

This was the greater self-communication of God in Christ, a human being like us who lived and taught among our ancestors.

And in a world that was full of pain and suffering, which was, as Darwin observed, red in tooth and claw, God not only became one of us, but suffered with us and for us.

There is of course no answer to the question of why God created so much pain and death in his universe. It’s an essential part of the process of evolution and was a problem that stopped Darwin and many others from fully embracing the God of love whom we see in Jesus Christ.

But although the life and cruel death and resurrection of Jesus doesn’t give us an answer to our questions about the cosmos as it is, it does signify to us the depth of God’s concern and identification with our struggles, and his great desire to reach out to us in love.

There is a third and crucial stage in the progressive revelation of God and this is not determined by the unfolding of history, or the development of human culture and self-understanding.

It is determined by our own personal response to the love of God.

Facebook aficionados will know that you receive messages from people who wish to ‘be your friends’ and who are then able to see your facebook.

But before they can do this you have to accept their request, and if you don’t want to, you simply press ‘Ignore’. They are not told that you have ignored them, and the hope is that they will eventually forget they asked to be your friend and go away. But some are persistent.

God not only reveals his wisdom and glory in creation; he not only reveals his love and compassion in Jesus Christ; he persistently, persistently requests our friendship.

In Kant’s words: “God is not an it to be discussed, but a Thou to be met.”

Or in the words of the Psalmist and of our text this morning: “O taste and see that the Lord is good. Blessed is the man that trusteth in him.”

Men and women, down through the centuries have experienced, have tasted the love of God. By the mystery of the Holy Spirit we believe we are able to apprehend God, to know him.

This is what John marvelled at when he wrote in this morning’s Gospel:

But to all who received him… he gave power to be become the children of God… and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father’s only son, full of grace and truth.

This was what Irenaeus had in mind when he wrote: the glory of God is Man full alive.

This is what Jesus meant when he said: “I have come that you might have life and have it in all its fullness.”

At this Table we see all the progressive revelation of God, all his self-disclosure met in the meal of his love.

We bring the gifts of creation: bread and wine, music and liturgy, the best that our culture can offer; and we offer the one perfect and complete sacrifice of Jesus Christ, the suffering servant; and we bring our souls and bodies to be a living sacrifice. We take God into ourselves. There can be no fuller self-communication this side of death.

As we draw near with faith, the invitation to friendship with God is given again this morning:

“O taste and see that the Lord is good: blessed is the man that trusteth in him.” Psalm 34.8

Candlemas

Candlemas

Malachi 3.1-5; Hebrews 2.14-18; Luke 2.22-40

“A sword shall pierce through thy own soul also.” Luke 2.35

Have you ever had one of those moments, which is so perfect, so beautiful, that it hurts?

In my experience such moments are rare, but I remember well over thirty years ago on a clear, frosty night coming over the Sussex downs on my motorbike, and arriving, frozen, at a friend’s house in Steyning.

There was a huge log fire and the only other light was from candles. We lay on the floor in before the hearth listening to Thomas Tallis’s Lamentations of Jeremiah. Snow fell gently outside and the room was full of the beauty of dark and light, of music and companionship and the pain of knowing that the moment must pass.

I’m with Gerard Manley Hopkins:

Glory be to God for dappled things—
All things counter, original, spare, strange;
Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:
Praise him.

Life only holds its interest because of the shadows; because it is bittersweet: from the pain of bringing a child into the world who then brings such joy; to the pain of passing through death and into eternal felicity.

And yet we naturally and rightly long for sweetness without bitterness, knowing that even if it were possible it would make for a dull existence.

Mary’s life was certainly bittersweet. All the confusion and shame of the conception, the agony of labour, the long uncomfortable journey, the indignity of the stable - all at last were past.

Now she brings her pride and joy, this six week old baby boy, to be presented in the Temple in Jerusalem: the first fruit of her womb to be dedicated to God.

Both Mary and this mewling baby-God are ritually unclean through childbirth. That was the Levitical law. They must offer two pigeons as a sin offering and a redemption price, to buy back this firstborn son.

These are the dual aspects of this Feast, as Bishop Cosin acknowledges in the 1662 Prayer Book which he entitles: “The Presentation of Christ in the Temple, commonly called, The Purification of Saint Mary the Virgin.”

It was primarily a Feast of Our Lord, rather than of his Mother, as the ancient collect which Father Richard sang earlier, taken from the 7thC Gregorian Sacramentary, makes plain.

And the blessing of candles? Well this was probably another example of that early Christian cross-cultural trick.

Take a pagan festival, any festival - like this one to do with flames and torches, and chasing away the darkness of winter, and baptize it.

Christ is the ‘Light to lighten the gentiles’, Simeon’s song which the choir sang as we started our service; so symbolically we bless all the candles we will use in the coming liturgical year and process with our torches and candles, putting to flight the steel-grey skies –Spring is coming!

And after a few centuries, no one remembers that it was a pagan feast of Imbolc & Oimelc which we have displaced with this Christian festival of light.

And while we are at it, let’s make St Blaise (February 3rd) the patron saint of Ear, Nose and Throat, and bless parishioners’ throats with the newly blessed candles to protect them from all the colds and 'flus so prevalent at this time of the year.

Of course our American cousins (pace those of you in the congregation) are busy doing the cross-cultural trick backwards. So Candlemas, which the puritans took over the pond, has become the much more politically correct, Groundhog Day, based on an old Scottish couplet:

If Candlemas Day is bright and clear,
there'll be two winters in the year.

Candlemas is a pivotal day in the Christian calendar. It is bittersweet, as we look back on the joy of the 40-day feast of Christmas and Epiphany, as Simeon and Anna rejoice in the Temple;
and yet we look forwards to Lent and Passiontide: the agonies of our Lord’s pierced Body; the anguish of our Lady’s pierced soul.

In some of the older rites where the blessing of candles took place after mass, the white and gold vestments of the mass were exchanged for penitential purple for the procession of lights.

Candlemas reminds us of Life as we Know It, dappled and pied with pleasure and pain.

Who has not watched children grow into adults and not known the bitter-sweetness of parenthood?

Who has not loved deeply and not known the bitter-sweet wounds of affection.

The joyful comfort of lovers, friends and family is always eventually plundered by death and grief.

And with all our conviviality and social pleasures, who has not sat down and felt so alone, and but precariously loved?

We can be optimistic about ourselves and about our world, but constantly nagged by intimations of despair. Recession hits us when we feared all was going too well.

As Hazlitt put it:

Man is the only species who can laugh or cry because he is the only being who knows the difference between what is and what should be.

We can long for peace and yet stand looking at war.

We can reach for the stars and in minutes be only too aware of our human mortality and of the contingency of all things.

But the Light shines in the darkness: that spark of hope which God implants within all of us.

We were hardly aware of it in the full blaze of day, in the sweetness of life. And even in the gloom we can still choose to turn our back upon it. But the light beckons.

As Barrack Obama expressed it in his appeal to the American people:

In the end, that's what this election is about. Do we participate in a politics of cynicism or a politics of hope?

As Christians we believe that the Light is Christ. The bright radiance of candles around the altar draw us to him, the source of all light: the bittersweet man of sorrows who has been through what we go through, as the writer to the Hebrews reminds us in today's epistle.

We live this strange but alluring bittersweet life in the light of glory, and in the presence of Christ, and so we have hope.

And like John Donne, when we have those fleeting, perfect moments we catch glimpses of the life to be when the shadows have finally passed and we pray with him:

Bring us, O Lord God, at our last awakening into the house and gate of heaven, to enter into that gate and dwell in that house, where there shall be no darkness nor dazzling, but one equal light; no noise nor silence, but one equal music; no fears nor hopes, but one equal possession; no ends nor beginnings, but one equal eternity; in the habitations of thy glory and dominion...

And with this confidence we shall not fear, even if

“A sword shall pierce through (our) own soul also.” Luke 2.35

Baptism of Christ

The Baptism of Christ

“And there came a voice from heaven” Mark 1.11

Lots of people use religious expressions such as ‘God spoke to me’. Most times they mean by this, a strong inner conviction that this is what God wants them to do.

This helps us to understand some of those gory Old Testament passages like the sixth chapter of Joshua where God ‘tells Joshua” to kill every living thing in Jericho, men women, children, animals… Did God really ‘say’ that? I don’t think so! But I can imagine Joshua thought that was what God wanted him to do?

I have had two proposals of marriage made to me on the basis that God ‘spoke’ to the person. On each occasion it would not only have taken an audible voice from heaven, but a considerable band of angels to get me to the altar.

People who hear the audible voice of God from heaven are in a completely different category. Usually they have simply forgotten to take their medication.

But there is a significant, albeit small number, in Scripture and down through the centuries who claim to have heard, as it were, the external voice of God.

I have met one remarkable woman, crippled with cerebral palsy, who I think genuinely heard the voice of God. I’ll tell you her story one day, but she heard God speak her name, ‘Mary’, and it changed her life, and through her, the lives of many others.

It certainly seems that there needs to be a degree of openness in the listener to hear the voice of God. So in John’s version of this story (12.29), when Jesus hears the voice of God at his baptism, most of the crowd think it is thunder. Although the more discerning think it is an angel speaking to him.

It would be nice if we could rely on the voice of God booming out clear instructions at all the difficult turns in our life: a word of encouragement here; a word of warning there.

But that is not the way of faith. Even for Our Lord there are only two occasions recorded where an audible voice is heard. And one of those, Jesus declares, was for the benefit of the listeners, not himself. (John 12.30)

However, at his Baptism, the voice is for the encouragement of both Jesus and John the Baptist.

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

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

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

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

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

Professor Morna Hooker, in her commentary on Mark, I think rightly gets to the heart of the matter.

John’s baptism was not just about forgiveness of sins, it was about the coming of the New Age, the Kingdom Age, the Messianic Age, when forgiven men and women would gladly submit to the gentle rule of God, and would live out Kingdom values in their daily lives.

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

In this light, it would be natural for Jesus, in his full humanity, to identify with the baptized of this new movement.

John’s hesitation was probably not so much to do with Christ’s sinlessness, as with a realisation that Christ was vastly superior to him, in ways that John could hardly imagine possible. He was not worthy so much as to loosen his sandal.

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

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

Or even worse, an inoculation against the ‘real’ thing in later life! Sadly, many of our contemporaries have experienced just enough of the church to reject its message, but not enough to understand its message.

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

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

And to test his resolve, the Spirit drives him from the Jordan to the wilderness for 40 days of temptation, fasting and prayer. (Mark 1.12)

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

Every time we are sprinkled with holy water; every time we cross ourselves with holy water as we enter or leave church; we are reminded of God’s love, grace and forgiveness; but we are also reminded of our baptismal resolve:

to turn from evil and to follow Christ; to love one another as he has loved us, and thus show to all that we are his disciples.

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

For us, there is nothing so dramatic at our baptism or confirmation. No assuring voice rending the heavens to affirm our decision. Not even divine congratulations for joining the Church of England; only the great British understatement, a nice cup of tea and a piece of cake.

The ‘voice from heaven’ that Mark describes is probably his translation of a Hebrew idiom: the bat qol - the daughter of a voice.

Since the last prophet, Malachi, fell silent four hundred years before, God seemed voiceless, and the best the devout could hope for was some echo of the Divine – the bat qol, the daughter of a voice.
In Jewish literature it was often compared to the cry of a bird, the murmuring of a dove – and so the Spirit descends like a dove.

John the baptizer was a voice crying in the wilderness.

But as men and women came to him and turned to God, they heard not only a voice in the wilderness, but a distant voice from heaven; an echo of the Divine.

The Holy Spirit’s subtle work within them gave them hope and strength to live for God. To work for a better society, based on the Kingdom values of love and mercy.

The faith of our Baptism sometimes seems very shaky and precarious. And the most we seem to hear is not even a daughter of a voice, but a distant cousin of the voice of God.

But we do not lose heart.

The murmuring of God’s voice, often in unexpected places and at unexpected times in our life, is enough to bring comfort and fresh resolve.

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

“... a voice from heaven” Mark 1.11

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.