Lent 2, St Paul's Knightsbridge

Solemn High Mass (St Patrick's Day) - Reality & Ideals

Readings: Genesis 15.1–12,17–18; Philippians 3.17 – 4.1; Luke 13.31–35

You can listen to this sermon here.

“our citizenship, is in heaven.” (Phil 3.20)

Lent can sometimes be quite disappointing for us if we have been too ambitious in setting our disciplines of denial – what we’re going to give up; or engagement – what extra we’re going to give or do.

Those of us who know ourselves, know it is better to set modest goals that give us at least a little success; rather than to set goals which end in spectacular failure very early on in the 40 days.

It reminds me of the new priest in the village who started going into the pub opposite his church every evening after Evensong. He would order two Gin and Tonics, drink them both and then order another two.

After a few weeks of this the barman asked him why he always bought his drinks in pairs.

“Well its quite simple really” he said, “when my twin brother moved to work in Australia, we decided whenever we were having a drink we would always order two, as a reminder of each other.”

After a few months the priest came in and ordered just the one gin and tonic. The barman feared the worst about his twin brother.

“Is everything alright with your brother?” he asked.

“O yes” said the priest “it’s just that it’s lent, and personally I’ve given up alcohol but my brother hasn’t.”

So aim for modest success in lent.

Our three readings today, deal with this disappointment, this tension, between how things are in reality; and what we would like them to be; and the pain and sorrow which that can often cause.

The reading from Genesis tells us of Abram, who has just had a wonderful spiritual experience being blessed by the mysterious Melchizedek, King of Salem (the city that would become Jerusalem).

Yet here in his old age, no blessing or wealth could undo the reality that he and Sarai were childless and desperately unhappy and did not feel blessed.

Even in his vision he complains to God. “The word of the Lord came to Abram in a vision, ‘Do not be afraid, Abram, I am your shield; your reward shall be very great.’ But Abram said, ‘O Lord God, what will you give me, for I continue childless…”

The reality was far from the longed- for ideal.

Then in today’s Epistle we saw how St Paul wanted the churches he had established, like the one in Philippi, to be Christlike in their love for one another and their compassion for those around.

He laments: “Brothers and sisters, join in imitating me, and observe those who live according to the example you have in us. For many live as enemies of the cross of Christ; I have often told you of them, and now I tell you even with tears.”

The reality was far from the longed-for ideal.

In the Gospel, Jesus rails at the self-serving and self-righteous political and religious leaders in Jerusalem. He cries out in disappointment: “Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the city that kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to it! How often have I desired to gather your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you were not willing!”

Luke later records how Jesus entered Jerusalem on Palm Sunday: “And when he was come near, he beheld the city, and wept over it.”

The reality of Jerusalem was far from the longed-for ideal.

Well this is a common enough experience for all of us.

We know what we should be, what we can be, what our church should be, what our country should be, what our world should be – but the reality is far from the longed-for ideal. 

And it is in this context that Paul reminds the Philippians - who were not members of the EU, for Philippi had been a Roman Colony for nearly 400 years, named after Philip II of Macedon – no, like Paul, they were Roman citizens with all those privileges - but Paul reminded them that “our citizenship is in heaven.”

And for Christians this is the perspective from which we view the dissonance between what is and what should be.

“Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth, as it is in heaven” – our homeland.

There is always forgiveness, hope, trust in God and one another, new beginnings, and over all, and in all, sacrificial love.

We rejoice with our Welsh friends today on their great rugby victory yesterday. I am always fascinated but bewildered when I hear our Welsh-speaking parishioners chatting together. It is a wonderful and nuanced language.

The word hiraeth is not easy to translate into English.

It is a kind of homesickness, longing, nostalgia – a yearning for a home that you cannot return to, or perhaps no longer exists, or maybe never did exist.

It may include an element of grief or sadness for who or what you have lost, what you have become, losses which make your “home” not the same as the one you strive to remember.

It was something of this Welsh word hiraeth that perhaps  inspired the Irish writer CS Lewis who wrote much about our heavenly homeland:  “All the things that have deeply possessed your soul have been hints of it [he writes] – tantalising glimpses, promises never quite fulfilled, echoes that died away just as they caught your ears. It is the secret signature of each soul, the thing we desired before we met our wives, made our friends or chose our work, and which we still desire on our deathbeds.” (The Problem of Pain, edited paraphrase.)

This was the vision of the saints like Patrick, of the hymn writers like John Mason – we shall sing his hymn of heavenly perspective as we come to the end of the service. (How shall I sing that Majesty - listen here.)

And this is what can help carry us through all the circumstances of life - from disappointment and tears, to an unexpected hope and belief that all will be well, and all manner of things will be well. (Mother Julian of Norwich)

For “our citizenship, is in heaven.” (Phil 3.20)

Advent Hope (Advent 2)

"May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace as you trust in him, so that you may overflow with hope." Romans 15.13 (Readings Is 40.1-11; 2 Peter 3.8-15a; Mark 1.1-8)

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

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

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

For many children, Christmas Eve and Christmas Day still testify to the truth of the Proverb (13.12)

Hope deferred makes the heart sick,
But desire fulfilled is a tree of life.

Of course since the 1950s we’ve moved on. Increased standards of living and credit cards have taken ‘the waiting out of wanting’ – that infamous Access Card slogan of the 1970s.

And even more recently we have seen how ‘Looting takes the waiting out of wanting’. (Bricolage, 2009)

And all this means that it becomes increasingly difficult to keep a good Advent; to defer Christmas till Christmas Day.

Hope is one of the three theological virtues, as they are called: faith, hope and charity.

And hope is of the essence of our Christian faith.

The Sundays of Advent, are all waiting-in-hope Sundays. We have closed the curtain on the annual drama of the liturgical year, and start again, preparing, waiting, hoping, for the long-expected Jesus.

And it is no accident that Advent coincides with the run-up to the darkest day of the year, the winter solstice - in the bleak mid winter.

We live in hope that the winter will pass; the light will come back; spring will return.

This is at the heart of God’s message to Isaiah: ‘Comfort, O comfort my people.’

Isaiah was to give fresh hope to the Israelites in exile in Babylon, weeping by the waters, losing hope that they would ever return to rebuild Jerusalem.

He’s to comfort them, stir them up. The word originally means ‘to give great strength to’.

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

He is comforting them, giving them great strength, encouraging them.

Similarly in the collect today ‘with your great might succour us’. Again literally, ‘run up to us’.

This is the ministry of comforting, of reviving hope.

John Watson was a great Scottish preacher of the second half of the 19th century. He was the product of a Highland Jacobite, Roman Catholic mother, and a strict Free Church father. Shortly before he died in 1907 he told friends: ‘If I had to begin my ministry again, I would preach more comforting sermons.’

Why do we lose hope and need so much comforting?

Three reasons strike us from today’s readings.

Firstly, our thinking is often too short-term. So Peter has to remind the church in his letter ‘that with the Lord one day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years are like one day.’ Jesus had said he would return again – so where was he? Where is he?

It was the American screenwriter Ben Hecht who said: “Trying to determine what is going on in the world by reading newspapers is like trying to tell the time by watching the second-hand of a clock.”

Waiting, the weeks of Advent, seem dull and negative. Why can’t we cut to the chase?

I always find that little comparison about the age of the earth a healthy way of keeping my historical perspective.

If the 6 billion years of planet earth’s existence were put on a 24 hour clock, then humankind appeared on the planet less than a second ago.

Hope requires a long-term vision.

Secondly, people lack hope because of their personality. Some of us are optimists and some pessimists.

You probably know the story of the brother who was a pessimist and his sister who was an optimist.

Just to see what would happen, on Christmas Eve their father loaded the boy’s room with every imaginable toy and game while he filled the sisters room with horse manure.

On Christmas morning he found the boy sitting amid his mountain of new gifts, wailing:
“I'll have to read all these instructions before I can do anything with this stuff. I'll constantly need batteries. My friends will be jealous and my toys will all eventually get broken."

Next door, the father found his daughter dancing for joy in the pile of manure and shouting, "There's got to be a pony in here somewhere!"

Most of the prophets were pessimists, and often depressives. When the Lord gives Isaiah this upbeat message, what does Isaiah want to cry?

“All flesh is grass. The grass withers, the flower fades, when the breath of the Lord blows upon it.”

It’s another reason why we need each other to counterbalance either excessive pessimism, or naïve optimism.

And a third reason why people lack hope is because they don’t know, or won’t see all the facts.

John the Baptist was a prophet and therefore given to pessimism and depression. He recognises Jesus as the Messiah, and yet in the depths of his despair before his own death he sends his disciples to ask Jesus: “Are you the one who was to come, or should we expect someone else?”

We need to understand our world and our personal situation so that we can be realists about life.
The hope that we try to nurture during this waiting period of Advent, is the hope that should comfort us in all the ups and downs of our daily lives.

We know that ‘hope’ does not usually mean getting what you want. The illness doesn’t go away, we do lose our job, the loved one does die. Yet despite what happens, life and hope go on.

Did you hear photographer Giles Dules on Richard Coles’ Saturday Live yesterday? He lost both legs and an arm earlier this year in Afghanistan and said how he felt he was in a better place now than he was a year ago. That’s the product of hope!

And that is why in this Advent season Christ’s first coming as a baby is always set against the backcloth of his second coming in glory. Wars have not yet ceased and we have not beaten our swords into ploughshares. But we live and work in hope, not just of outcomes in this life, but of all that is yet to be in God, now and forever.

There’s a poem by Sheena Pugh which expresses this advent hope of waiting and watching expectantly 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)

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

Candlemas

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

“And a sword will pierce your own soul too.”
Luke 2.35

I sometimes sit in church here after the 6pm mass, when the lights are out and the west doors locked, but the votive candles are still alight at all the shrines around the church.

There is quietness and the strange beauty which flickering candlelight brings to a house of prayer; the lingering smell of incense, the aroma of God; dark, cavernous shadows and pools of golden light.

Life only holds its interest because of the shadows, because it is bittersweet: from the pain of childbirth to the joy that baby brings; to the pain of passing through death and the joy of the mystery of heaven.

At a more mundane level, as I sat in the pub with four old school friends after Christmas, they all looked the worse for wear – not those bright eyed boys from the 1960s – with myself as an obvious exception; but then, what stories they had to tell! The bitter-sweetness of having a life.

But of course we always dream and long for sweetness without bitterness, knowing that even if it were possible, it would be dull existence.

Our Lady 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 is past.

It’s six weeks after Christmas, and now she brings her pride and joy, her baby boy, to be presented in the Temple in Jerusalem: the first fruit of her womb to be dedicated to God.

Both she and the baby God are ritually unclean through childbirth. They must offer the two pigeons as a sin offering and a redemption price, for the firstborn belongs to the Lord and must be redeemed.

Mary and Jesus represent the two aspects of this Feast we keep today, as the 1662 Prayer Book entitles it: “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 I 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, to do with flames and torches, and chasing away the darkness of winter, and baptize it; Christianize it!

So because Christ is the Light to lighten the gentiles, we bless all the candles we will use in the coming liturgical year.

And like our pagan ancestors, we process with our torches and candles, putting to flight the steel grey skies of winter and hoping for signs of spring.

Of course our American cousins are busy doing the cross-cultural trick backwards.

So Candlemas, a Christian feast, becomes the secular celebration of Groundhog Day, based on an old Scottish couplet:

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

A sunny Candlemas means the severity of winter will continue – the groundhog will return to its sleep. But if it is dull and overcast, the worst of winter is past.

Candlemas is also a pivotal day in the Christian calendar. It is bittersweet, as we look back on the joy of Christmas and Epiphany, as Simeon and Anna rejoice in the Temple; and yet we look forward towards 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 pain. Who has not watched children grow into adults and not known the bittersweetness of parenthood?

Who has not loved deeply and not known the bittersweet 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 sometime and felt so alone and lonely.

We should be optimistic about ourselves and about our world, while knowing that we are constantly nagged by intimations of despair.

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 year after year at war and violence.

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 that God implants within all of us.

We were hardly aware of it in the full blaze of day, in the sweetness of life, but in the gloom we can see the beckoning light of Christ. Or to use CS Lewis’s metaphor, ‘God whispers in our pleasures, but shouts in our pain.’

As Christians we believe that the Light is Christ. The bright radiance of candles around the altar draws us to him, the source of all light, our comfort and joy.

At the altar we see 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: like us; tested like us. Here at the altar he is crucified and yet exalted; the Lamb that was slain who yet lives.

And we live this strange but alluring bittersweet life in the light of glory, and in the presence of Christ.

John Donne lived his life to the full, and knew pain and pleasure, shame and holy exultation. His vision of heaven was of a state of being where these two sides of human life and human nature would be miraculously transformed into the equanimity of Christ our Lord; perfect composure.

So he prayed:

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 in the Gospel, as we celebrate this Candlemas, we shall not fear, even if

“A sword will pierce through (our) own soul too.” Luke 2.35

Epiphany

“Arise, shine, for your light has come.” Is 60.1

I suppose I always get a bit maudlin at Christmas and New Year - another birthday, another year, another wrinkle, a stronger pair of reading glasses. And even bishops begin to look young.

The Feast of the Epiphany can help us to look more joyfully at our own mortality.

The Epiphany - the Manifestation - the Showing; or the Theophania as it was also called - the showing of God - it's 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.

What were they expecting as they followed the star? They had riches and wisdom, and yet left the security of their homes to follow a hunch. Maybe they were going through a mid-life crisis and needed some adventure in their lives?

I think there is some truth in that. Men and women, often at the height of their powers, secure with family and jobs, sometimes question what life is all about. Some change jobs; some climb mountains; some have affairs; others hit the bottle, and some look for the meaning of life. These wise men, from outside of the Jewish tradition, came looking for the one who was to unlock the key to life.

In the paradox of Christian faith, and of this Mass, they found the answer to life in death.

This is a theme in TS Eliot’s famous Journey of the Magi, written as Eliot was going through his own mid-life changes in 1927 when he gave up agnosticism and was baptised.

The poem ends with one of the Magi reflecting on their momentous journey:

All this was a long time ago, I remember,

And I would do it again, but set down

This set down

This: were we led all that way for

Birth or Death? There was a Birth, certainly,

We had evidence and no doubt. I had seen birth

and death,

But had thought they were different; this Birth was

Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death.

We returned to our places, these Kingdoms,

But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation,

With an alien people clutching their gods.

I should be glad of another death.

The gifts the Magi bear to the infant Christ, although never mentioned in the poem, fit well into this theme of death and life. They symbolise, if you like, Three Deaths.

1. Gold represents the Death of Self. Christ was born to be King, symbolised in this king of metals - gold.

"Born a king on Bethlehem plain, Gold I bring to crown him again..."

In his earthly ministry Jesus was to demand total allegiance from his followers, promising them that only by death to self, would they ever find their true selves.

"For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will save it." (Lk 9.24)

Jesus is encapsulating the heart of the Gospel: it is in loving abandonment to Christ that we become fully human, and learn how to love ourselves.

The little boy is standing up in the back seat of the car (this is before seatbelts) and his father keeps telling him to sit down. At last the father stops the car and forcibly sits the boy down. As they continue the journey, the sulking boy in the back shouts: “I may be sitting down on the outside, but I’m standing up on the inside!”

This is the individual, assertive self that wreaks such havoc in our lives and in our world; the Naked Self, the Selfish Gene. It does not deserve our loyalty. We only need to look at the world around us to see how love of this self leads to destruction and death. Fealty to Jesus is the only way to life; and to bring life to others.

But wait a minute, we are western liberal thinkers, and all this loyalty to Christ alone sounds a little too exclusive. So let’s look at the second death.

2. Frankincense represents the Death of the gods. We live in a pluralist society. And rightly, there must be acceptance and dialogue with those of other faiths and no faith.

But true as this is, there has also been much twaddle about all faiths being basically the same. They are not. Look for similarities between Mormonism and Melanesian Frog Worship and you will look in vain.

I will respect and defend the rights of others to practise their faith, but I must also proclaim as a follower of Christ that I believe him to be a unique revelation of God to all nations and cultures.

There is no contradiction in thinking in this, and indeed the Incarnation leaves us no choice - 'Incense owns a deity nigh'. We do not believe that Jesus was just a good and holy man, or a prophet. We worship him, with all around the crib, as God. There is no God other than the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ.

Now this is not to say that he does not reveal himself to others outside of the Christian faith. Or to put it another way: a good Muslim may be much nearer to God than a bad Christian. But I must not let my acceptance of others and their ways of believing paralyze me from holding on to my own Christian faith.

"There's a wideness in God's mercy, like the wideness of the sea" as Faber put it. But if we believe that Jesus is Very God and Very Man, there can be no other gods.

3. And that brings us to the central mystery of our faith, and the 3rd Death: The Death of God.

CS Lewis puts it this way:

"The heart of Christianity is a myth which is also a fact." Mythology is full of dying and rising gods. But in Christianity, "we pass from a Balder or an Osiris, dying nobody knows when or where, to an historical Person crucified under Pontius Pilate…" ('Myth Became Fact' is in Undeception and also in God in the Dock.)

Myrrh represents the Death of Death in the Death of Christ (the wonderful title of John Owen's book).

Mary must have felt one of the first pains of the sword piercing her heart as she was presented with myrrh - used for embalming the dead.

This tiny, mystical life was directed from its first human moments towards a terrible death. But in this death he was to rob death of its finality and darkness. Death is a part of the human condition and is only ‘gone’ when we pass through it to a fuller life.

This is why at times we long for death - moments of despair, moments of ecstasy ('les petits morts'), moments of loneliness, moments of deep faith, moments of deep doubt. At the heart of our faith, at the centre of this Mass, is a Death which brings Life.

I’m a person who always gets very emotionally attached to the community I find myself in. So ever since primary school, I have wept whenever I have left any community: schools, university, colleges, churches. I always wanted to stay.

But of course I have realised as the years have passed that all these little deaths have been necessary if I am to flourish and grow.

Every death has led to a new life.

Or to put it the other way round, as we journey with the Magi, may we not so much “be glad of another death” as embrace the bubbling life of the Christ-child that will invigorate our living, now, through death, and forever.

“Arise, shine, for your light has come.” Is 60.1

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

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

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)

Where is your Security? (2nd before Advent)

Security, 2nd before Advent

Malachi 4.1-2a; Psalm 98; 2 Thessalonians 3.6-13; Luke 21.5-19
Hymn “All my hope” (reproduced at end of sermon).

“But for you who revere my name the sun of righteousness shall rise, with healing in its wings.” Malachi 4.2

George was a devout golfer, getting ready for retirement, and one Sunday morning he said to his priest: "Tell me, Father, are there going to be golf courses in heaven? I really have to know."

"Well," said his priest, "I'm not sure, but tonight I'll say a special prayer and see if God will tell me."

Next Sunday after the service George made a beeline for the priest. "Did you get the answer, Father? Are there going to be golf courses in heaven?"

Well, George," the priest replied, "I've got good news and bad news. Which do you want to hear first?"

"Tell me the good news first," George said.

"The good news is that, yes, there are golf courses in heaven. Beautiful courses, where the sun is always shining, the rough is not too deep, there are no sand traps, and you never have to wait to tee off."

"That's tremendous!" exclaimed the golfer. "But what's the bad news?"

"Well, the bad news is that St Peter has you down to tee off this coming Tuesday morning at 8."

Today’s readings as we approach advent, are a mixture of good news and bad news.

But a common thread running through them is: ‘where do you place your confidence?’

Now we all know the correct answer is ‘God’ – the opening line of the opening hymn stated that: “All my hope on God is founded…”

But of course the right answer is not always the honest one.

Like the young boy who was asked by his particularly evangelical Sunday School teacher: “What’s red and has a bushy tail and eats acorns?” “Please miss, I know the answer must be ‘Jesus’, but it sounds like a squirrel to me!”

If we are honest, we know that our confidence, our sense of security, our hope, is bound up in a complex network of feelings and emotions – and yes, faith.

The Scriptures recognise that, but still warn us about false confidence and misplaced hope.

Today’s Gospel starts with the disciples marvelling at the magnificent edifice which was the rebuilt, Second Temple; renovated by Herod before the birth of Christ and still being decorated and finished (it was completed in 63AD.) Its foundations stretched back a 1000 years. Here was a religious centre that was surely founded by God himself!

But Jesus warns that this is a false confidence. By 70AD, the Temple would be destroyed and never rebuilt.

In the words of the opening hymn again: “what with care and toil he buildeth, tower and temple fall to dust.”

However attached we become to a particular building, or to a particular style of worship, or even to the group of worshippers who meet there week by week; it is a transitory thing.

We should be grateful for this holy place, our liturgy, our music and our fellowship, but never place the weight of our spiritual confidence in them. That is idolatry and we a doomed to disappointment.

Jesus also warns us in this passage about putting too much confidence in human relationships: “You will be betrayed even by parents and brothers, by relatives and friends…”

Now this is not to suggest that we should hold ourselves aloof from any sort of trusting relationships – indeed our Lord teaches us the opposite. But there can be a dependency on others that is nearer to an addiction than a loving, mutually supportive relationship.

Betrayal is always destructive, but if the relationship is basically healthy, either amends can be made, or the break does not leave one or the other party completely debilitated.

And sadly, death betrays us all in our relationships. It was of course in the aftermath of the death of Herbert Howell’s son, Michael, Mick, in 1935, that he wrote the tune (named Michael) to those words of the opening hymn.

They meant a great deal to him at the time, although by the end of his life in 1983, 48 years after Michael had died, aged 9, of polio, he confided in his daughter, Ursula: 'I don't believe there's anything'. I think his music tells us another story, but that’s another sermon.

The prophet Malachi railed against the oldest and commonest misplaced confidence: a confidence in ‘self’ that amounts to arrogance and pride. “The arrogant will be turned to stubble”, he bellows.

Again, this is not to discourage proper self-confidence; appropriate self-esteem. It was our Lord who said that we should love our neighbours as we love ourselves – it is right to have a healthy view of ourselves.

But when we begin to think that we are invincible; that we are self-made men and women; that we have a right to enjoy the best things in life because of who we are, or what we do, or how much money we have – then our Lord says to us: “You fool!”

And where does today’s epistle fit in? The Apostle Paul has it in for those who won’t work. But in context, we see that they won’t work, because they are living in a spiritual cloud cuckoo land.

They are so convinced that Jesus is about to return in the next few months, to bring the universe to a climactic end, that they don’t bother to work.

They busy themselves with church and spiritual affairs while sponging off the less spiritual who still go in to the office every morning.

Strangely, their false confidence is in Christianity itself. Or at least, they are so confident of their own interpretation of Christianity, that they have no time for others who suggest they might have misunderstood.

So neither can our confidence be completely in a particular brand of Christian faith alone, for as yet we see through a glass darkly.

While all these other things then, in their proper place, help to make us feel secure and to give us hope, our ultimate confidence can only be in God himself, and even then we have to acknowledge our inability to comprehend him fully.

So that profound opening hymn has it right again:

God unknown,
he alone
calls my heart to be his own.

It is with this humble, searching faith that we come to God, and in so doing, especially as we come to this Table, we find that his love embraces us and re-assures us of the presence of Christ in our lives:

Christ doth call
one and all:
ye who follow shall not fall.

This was the purpose of Jesus’ teaching in today’s Gospel which ends with our Lord’s words: “ By your endurance you will gain your souls.”

And it is the hope infusing Malachi’s prophecy, to reassure those who revere and trust in God. The Light of Christ will uncover what is now unknown and will bring a sense of healing and wholeness which is beyond mere human understanding.

Our proper confidence is in God alone, as revealed in Jesus Christ, foretold by the prophets:

“… for you who revere my name the sun of righteousness shall rise, with healing in its wings.” Malachi 4.2

All my hope on God is founded;
he doth still my trust renew,
me through change and chance he guideth,
only good and only true.
God unknown,
he alone
calls my heart to be his own.

Pride of man and earthly glory,
sword and crown betray his trust;
what with care and toil he buildeth,
tower and temple fall to dust.
But God's power,
hour by hour,
is my temple and my tower.

God's great goodness aye endureth,
deep his wisdom, passing thought:
splendor, light and life attend him,
beauty springeth out of naught.
Evermore
from his store
newborn worlds rise and adore.

Daily doth the almighty Giver
bounteous gifts on us bestow;
his desire our soul delighteth,
pleasure leads us where we go.
Love doth stand
at his hand;
joy doth wait on his command.

Still from man to God eternal
sacrifice of praise be done,
high above all praises praising
for the gift of Christ, his Son.
Christ doth call
one and all:
ye who follow shall not fall.

Words: Robert Bridges (1844-1930); based on the German of Joachim Neander (1650-1680)
Music: Michael by Herbert Howells

Living in Between

Living in Between

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The revelation of God in Trinity has had particular foci - historical events - over the past five thousand years.

But the work of Father, Son and Holy Spirit, from the point of view of the final return of Christ, bringing in the kingdom described in Isaiah’s prophecy this morning; this work of God has been evident, retroactively if you like, throughout all of history.

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

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

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

Now on this second Sunday in Advent, in the 2004th Year of Our Lord, we are poised between that first coming of Christ nearly 2000 years ago, and the end of the world, or our own death, whichever comes sooner.

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

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

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

This is what we mean every time we pray, as we will this morning: "Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, in earth as it is in heaven."

This was the objective of Adam and Eve as they were cursed and expelled from the garden. For they would not re-enter the kingdom of heaven through the garden gate, guarded by the angel with the flaming sword. They would only move towards paradise regained through the passion of Christ and with the help of the Holy Spirit at work in the Church.

These ‘in-between times’ have always been as potent as the special events that sandwich them. Becoming is every bit as important as arriving. All of our life, as human beings, is caught up with 'in between', which is one reason that we are so preoccupied with the passing of time.

When we are young we cannot wait till the next event. When we are old, the years shoot by, and we wait with some apprehension for the one and only event left for us.

But at whatever stage we are in our life’s journey, a consistent theme throughout Scripture is to live as if life matters; to make our life count for God and for others. In the words of our Lord: "I have come that you might have life, and have it more abundantly."

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

Peter says when he deals with this subject in his epistle, that living this way will cover a multitude of sins. Sin is that destructive agent at work in our life and in our world. It is trapped in the 'in between' time with us.

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

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

What is important about living in the in between time, is seeing the arrows. It is knowing where we have come from and where we are heading. Of course we don't always get it right, which is why we need the constant dialogue of prayer with God and engagement with his Word and with each other. As Paul says in today’s epistle, ‘that through endurance and the encouragement of the Scriptures we might have hope.’

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

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

"The Skin Horse had lived longer in the nursery than any others. He was so old that his brown coat was bald in patches and showed the seams underneath, and most of the hairs in his tail had been pulled out to string bead necklaces. He was wise, for he had seen a long succession of mechanical toys arrive to boast and swagger, and by-and-by break their mainsprings and pass away, and he knew that they were only toys, and would never turn into anything else. For nursery magic is very strange and wonderful, and only those playthings that are old and wise and experienced like the Skin Horse understand all about it.
"What is REAL?" asked the Rabbit one day, when they were lying side by side near the nursery fender, before Nana came to tidy the room. "Does it mean having things that buzz inside you and a stick-out handle?"
"Real isn't how you are made," said the Skin Horse. "It's a thing that happens to you. When a child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but REALLY loves you, then you become Real."
"Does it hurt?" asked the Rabbit.
"Sometimes," said the Skin Horse, for he was always truthful. "When you are Real you don't mind being hurt."
"Does it happen all at once, like being wound up," he asked, "or bit by bit?"
"It doesn't happen all at once," said the Skin Horse. "You become. It takes a long time. That's why it doesn't often happen to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don't matter at all, because once you are Real you can't be ugly, except to people who don't understand." (Heinemann 1989 (1922))

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

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

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

Faith, hope & doubt

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tennyson put it rather well in The Ancient Sage:

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

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

Like the man who wrote to the Tax Office:

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

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

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

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

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

And how do we call off thoughts awhile?

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

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

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

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

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

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

And is it true? For if it is,
No loving fingers tying strings
Around those tissued fripperies,
The sweet and silly Christmas things...
Can with this single Truth compare -
That God was Man in Palestine
And lives today in Bread and Wine.

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

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

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

The Lamb - Blake

The Lamb

“Worthy is the Lamb, who was slain, to receive power and wealth and wisdom and strength and honour and glory and praise!” Revelation 4.12

My maternal grandmother lived with us until she died. I remember asking my mother when I was about 11, what granny Steele’s maiden name was. “Steele”, my mother replied somewhat curtly. In what was probably one of my last acts of childhood innocence I reasoned out loud: “so she was called Steele and then she married someone called Steele.”

I won’t give you my mother’s exact words of reply, but it was a strong suggestion that I was stupid and that I should grow up.

And I did. I realised that the world of adults was anything but straightforward, and that many things, in my family, among the neighbours, at church, were not what they seemed to be. And horror of horrors, neither was I.

Loss of innocence is a gradual process, but most of us can remember some defining moments. And of course the process goes on through different degrees right through our lives.

William Blake was absorbed by this. He grew up during the turbulent 18th century, with all the uncertainties of revolution and war in Europe. He was a London journeyman engraver. But he was more than that. He was an artist and a free thinker. His Christian views were shaped my his own mystical visions and a strange romantic mythology which he developed in his later writings.

When he was barely 30 in 1789 he published his first, very unusual book, comprising 31 colour plates of poems intertwined with design and illustrations. It was called Songs of Innocence.

To some extent this was influenced by Rousseau’s belief that children are free and innocent until society corrupts them. But in Blake’s peculiar version of gnosticism, that persistent sub-Christian undercurrent, there was also a more traditional Christian understanding of a fallen creation. Blake and his wife practised nudism, unusual in 18th century London, and dangerous for a number of reasons - it was a gesture towards returning to the innocence of Adam and Eve, Blake wrote.

So in today’s communion motet, the last in our series, entitled The Lamb, Blake draws a picture of an innocent child... and of an innocent God. The engraved and then painted illustration shows a small naked androgynous child, talking with an attentive lamb in a rustic setting.

Here are two of God’s creations, harmlessly wandering in a paradisial idyll - “and was the holy Lamb of God on England’s pleasant pastures seen?” - well here, at least, it was.

Christ became a little child, and became known as the Lamb of God, meek and mild. Blake wonders at the beauty and simplicity of it all; the resonances between Creator and created; the sheer grace of God experienced in the delight of nature.

The child senses his kinship with the Lamb and all creation, and with the great God who made them all, and yet who is immanent within his world. He sends up the simplest of innocent prayers - “Little Lamb, God bless thee!”

This is the sweet innocence which haunts us throughout our adult life. If only our life could be full of simple pleasures and simple trust. If only the world and politicians would realise that all you need really is love. If only the church were a pure mirror of the gathered saints in heaven.

But it’s not. As the old doggerel puts it - ‘to dwell above with those we love, Oh that will be glory, but to dwell below with those we know is quite another story.’

Blake was wrestling with those age-old questions:
How do we retain our innocence and yet grow up and gain experience?
How do we gain worldly-wiseness and yet retain a childlike trust and naivety?
and
How can God be all loving and all good, and yet create a world red in tooth and claw?

In 1794 Blake published Songs of Experience. The perspective of the child in Songs of Innocence is now replaced with the perspective of an older and more bitter man, who has seen the evils and suffering of the world. The poems in these two volumes run in loose parallel and the corresponding poem to The Lamb is The Tyger.

No innocent child can stand and discuss names with a tiger, when the tiger simply wants to say ‘grace’ and get on with lunch. (Although Yann Martel has written a compelling novel which explores the life of a boy and a Bengal tiger at sea on a lifeboat, The Life of Pi)

Who dared frame the tiger’s ‘fearful symmetry’? Was it the same God who made the little lamb?

Blake is unequivocal in his answer. Yes, it is the same God. There is no escape into a gnostic dualism which places blame elsewhere. In Luther’s striking words, which encapsulates the problem for Christians: “Always remember the devil is God’s devil!”

The Tyger is about having your reason overwhelmed at once by the beauty and the horror of the natural world. "When the stars threw down their spears / And watered heaven with their tears" is one couplet from The Tyger. In the creation story in Job, the stars sing for joy at creation, a scene which Blake illustrated.

In Blake's later books, the stars throw down their cups at the collapse of a previous clockwork universe founded on pure reason. For Blake, the stars represent cold reason and objective science. Blake greatly appreciated the explosion of scientific knowledge during his era, but he was hostile to any attempts to reduce all phenomena to chemistry and physics,.

‘There is something about seeing a tiger which you can't learn from a zoology class. The sense of awe and fear defy reason. And Blake's contemporary "rationalists" who had hoped for a tame, gentle world guided by kindness and understanding must face the reality of the Tiger.’ (Ed Friedlander)

To change the historic setting, postmodernity with its ironic and wry take on the world has nothing to say to the jackboot. Pure rationalism, the enlightenment project, has failed. As all the recent surveys show, human beings are irrepressibly religious. There is more to life than what we see.

John Tavener, the contemporary composer, Russian orthodox convert and Hellenophile, is making a similar point as he describes the icon-like nature of his work:

'There is in ikons an uncontrolled wildness, a coarseness almost, a deep sense of the untamed ferocity of the desert, from the fact that the Orthodox fathers lived in the desert in close contact with nature. Thus Orthodoxy is so different from the scholastic intellectual approach of the Roman Catholic Church … I try to recreate today in my music just this uncivilised and surrealistic wildness'.

Our text today, comes from a passage which attempts to paint an impressionistic picture to help us in our understanding of innocence and experience. In the Revelation of St John the Divine we see the central figure as the Lamb, slain yet standing.

John has in his mind the writings of the Old Testament pseudepigraphal book, the Testament of Joseph (19.8f), in which the lion and the lamb appear together: the Lion is the Messiah from Judah and the Lamb is the Messiah from Aaron. And in this Testament of Joseph, the Lion and Lamb are not contrasting figures, they are different ways of looking at the same victorious and righteous God.

St John takes the conflation of the images one step further and proclaims Christ as both priest and victim; Passover lamb of sacrifice and the Lamb with seven horns and seven eyes who opens the seals and judges the world; the crucified, risen and ascended Lord.

There is no loss of innocence, only a carrying forward of that innocency into experience. He who knew no sin became sin for us.

And so the Christian path becomes for us not so much a loss of innocence - our childhood is still with us, sometimes in very positive, and sometimes in very destructive ways - but a maturing of innocence. We must keep on trusting even when our trust is sometimes rejected.

We must keep on loving, even when the love is not returned.

We must keep on forgiving, even as we are constantly forgiven by God.

And we must keep on working and praying for a better world, where, even if the lamb does not lie down with the lion, at least both will be content and truly themselves.

We must persevere until that time when we join all those who have struggled through innocence and experience, in themselves and in their understanding of God; until at last our innocence is restored and makes perfect sense of our experience. Then we will join the unnumbered host and proclaim:

“Worthy is the Lamb, who was slain, to receive power and wealth and wisdom and strength and honour and glory and praise!”

Death of Queen Mother - Easter Day 02

The Christian Hope
Easter Day

“ But we do not want you to be uninformed, brothers and sisters, about those who have died, so that you may not grieve as others do who have no hope. For since we believe that Jesus died and rose again, even so, through Jesus, God will bring with him those who have died.”
” (1 Corinthians 4.13,14)

We mourn the loss of our beloved Queen Mother, on the day that we rejoice in our beloved Lord’s resurrection.

And St Paul tells us, not, that we should not grieve, but that we should not grieve as those with no hope.

Of course we will grieve. It is a symptom of our humanity; it is a sign of our affection for a good woman who has figured in the backdrop of our lives since before any of us were born.

But as Christians, on this First Day of the Week; on this First Day of the New Creation; on this Resurrection Morning which lifts the pallor of our lenten disciplines...

...as Christians, we grieve with hope: the hope that she who has lived life long and full, is now complete and summed up in Christ who is the firstfruits from the dead.

Elizabeth is not just a memory. She is not ‘kept alive in our hearts’. She is kept alive by the power of God who raised Jesus Christ from the dead. And this our hearts know well although our heads are full of doubt.

I first learned grief from children’s stories. When I was too young to read, my father told me stories of an imaginary boy called Alby. But soon I was reading Rupert Bear - those lovely picture books with the rhyming couplets under each picture.

And then Worzel Gummidge, and then Mary Norton’s The Borrowers. I suppose I was 8 or 9 when I began to cry at the end of books - not just because the enchanting story was ended, but because I was old enough to realise that there was no Rupert Bear and Badger; no Earthy Mangold; no Ariadne. They were created in my imagination and then went into oblivion when I turned the last page.

But what of Jesus? That gentle, blond, blue-eyed man in all the pictures around my Sunday School walls. There he was surrounded by all the children of the world - “red and yellow, black and white, all are precious in his sight...” And there he was with the disciples, who looked rather like my local football team - except for one who was dark and looked menacing, and had a large nose - obviously Judas.

Did gentle Jesus too pass into oblivion when we had finished the story, when the Gospel was shut?

We have enacted The Story again through this Holy Week, and as 21st century scientific postmoderns, the Queen Mother’s death and this resurrection Sunday leaves us pondering the same Big Question which is at the heart of our faith and the root of all our doubts.

We can express it in that classical exam question form:
A: Is the idea of a God who became a human being, who died and rose again, a myth which nurtures the ‘Christ within us’; which releases the power of that myth at the heart of our own consciousness; an ancient by-product of human self-awareness?

OR

B: Is there a reality which is beyond the cosmos, the First Cause of the cosmos, a Being who is the Ground of our Being; a transcendent God revealed in the man Christ Jesus?

If you ticked A, then the Easter story ends in the darkness of Good Friday. I was arguing with an atheist in a pub yesterday afternoon and found myself quoting Sartre, “There is darkness without and when I die there will be darkness within.” All the other high-flown talk about the power of myth is whistling in the dark. Although of course priests like Don Cupitt and the Sea of Faith group, the so-called non-realists, or textual nihilists, would deny this. They somehow find hope for living in this myth tradition; this psychological self-trickery.

And if you ticked B when in fact A is correct, then as St Paul puts it, you of all men are most to be pitied. For you have lived your life on a lie. You have supposed there is ultimate meaning when there is none. Life is a Cabaret if you’re lucky, and a Nightmare on Elm Street if you’re not.

But wait a minute, we’re Anglicans. We don’t do ‘tick one box only’. We tick both and keep our options open.

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

In other words: Yes we see the dying and rising myth enacted everywhere around us, and it has deep resonances within our psyche. Christ is within us, and the image of God is implanted within every human.
And the self-awareness of most humans for most of the last 10,000 years has been caught up with god-awareness.

And this is not surprising, for there is a God who is out there, beyond space and time, who has seeded us with longings of immortality. He is there and he is not silent. He woos us to faith by his wounds of love.

Let’s bring it back to the events we celebrate this Easter Day.

Of course I believe in the Death & Resurrection of Jesus both theologically and historically; and I have experienced that new-life-through-death which the Spirit works in me personally. I would not dare stand here unless, having not seen, yet, I have believed.

And yet… at a very deep level I cannot conceive a dead Man resurrected to a new and supernatural state of being. It is alien to all I experience in my everyday world of life and stay-dead death. It relates more to the powerful imagery of legend, saga and myth, whether The Iliad or Harry Potter or The Lord of the Rings.

But if it is just myth, A and not B, then I take no comfort from it. For that would be to deceive myself and others. I want no fairy story to sweeten the bitter pill of life, and more to the point, of death.

Having not seen, I am drawn by the authenticity of Christ and his people, to believe.

That great student of myth, CS Lewis, puts it well: “The heart of Christianity is a myth which is also a fact.” (1979:43) Mythology is full of dying and rising gods. But in Christianity, “we pass from a Balder or an Osiris, dying nobody knows when or where, to an historical Person crucified under Pontius Pilate…” (Eng ed of God in the Dock, Collins, 1979:44)

We are indeed people of the Empty Tomb, and yet we must not rob the Death, Resurrection and Ascension of Christ, of the mystery and potency of myth. Or as Lewis puts it: “ We must not be ashamed of the mythical radiance resting on our theology.” (1979:44/5 ‘Myth Became Fact’ is in Undeception and also in God in the Dock, Eng & US eds)

“…the mythical radiance resting on our theology…”

If only ‘seeing is believing’, then I am an unbeliever. If WYSIWYG - what you see is what you get - then, eat drink and be merry, for tomorrow we die.

The captain on the bridge of a large naval vessel saw a light ahead on a collision course. He signalled, "Alter your course ten degrees south." The reply came back, "Alter your course ten degrees north."
The captain then signalled, "Alter your course ten degrees south. I am a captain." The reply: "Alter your course 10 degrees north. I am a seaman third-class."
The furious captain signalled, "Alter your course ten degrees south. I am a battleship." The reply: "Alter your course ten degrees north. I am a lighthouse."

There are some things that are just non-negotiable. The Resurrection of Christ is a non-negotiable part of our Christian faith.

Today we celebrate the cornerstone of our faith. Christ is Risen, and because he is risen, because I choose to believe that he is risen, then I encounter True Myth. The Holy Spirit gives me a hope that I cannot explain, but which has been the at the heart of Christian experience through the centuries.

Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother believed this and millions of ordinary Christians through the centuries have staked their lives upon this truth.

“We do not want you to be uninformed, brothers and sisters, about those who have died, so that you may not grieve as others do who have no hope. For since we believe that Jesus died and rose again, even so, through Jesus, God will bring with him those who have died.”
(1 Corinthians 4.13,14)