Sermon for Ordination 27th June 2010.
If you go to the top of our house and look out the bathroom window across the roof you will see two baby seagulls known to us as Bertie and Tickles. They are still young and they’ll probably be poddling about on the tiles letting the wind blow through their baby feathers.
They look vulnerable and although it seems slightly silly to say so, I feel worried for them. What will happen when they first make the leap off the roof and into the sky?
Today five people who only a year ago began a new role in their community as Deacons are to be ordained as priests. Like Bertie and Tickles they are about to take a leap into the unknown.
If I wanted to give someone some words of encouragement about my new life as a priest, the kind of spiritual equivalent of Fabio Capello’s pep talk to the team before this afternoon’s game, I think one could do worse than turn to the words we’ve just heard from the prophet Isaiah: ‘The Spirit of the Lord is upon me because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor.
Priests, like prophets, don’t just pop up out of nowhere, they don’t grow on trees or fall out of the sky, they come from families and communities, from places and cultures, sharing histories and experiences. Isaiah when he gets up in chapter 61 to announce his call doesn’t do it from a blank canvass. The people of God from whom Isaiah comes have been besieged by their enemies, many of them are taken into exile in Babylon, torn away from their homeland, returning much later to rebuild their life in Jerusalem.
Given this dramatic canvass you might think that Isaiah would strut about a bit, play the warrior leader but the model that dominates the book of Isaiah is the servant. The servant engaged in the journey from repentance to renewal, to return, returning to be part of God’s people once again.
Priesthood, of course, is all about servanthood, about accompanying people on the journey from repentance to renewal. Like Isaiah, need to have a passion for people, a kindness, a concern for the broken, the marginalised and the excluded. Its a passion energised by a living faith in what God has done for us in the death and resurrection of his Son Jesus Christ.
For the root of our concern, the root of our passion is not disconnected and disembodied, it finds its lived reality through belief in what God has done for us in Christ.
On the first day of the new government coalition as I got the kids breakfast together and feeling mildly resentful about the result I began listening to the radio. It didn’t help and a few minutes later I nearly chucked the radio out the window when I heard a commentator say: ‘This is the new age, a managerial age, an age too of personality, the age of ideology is dead’.
Imagine Isaiah saying that. Today as Bishop John lays hands on these five Deacons, I want to say forget management, forget personality and think again about ideology.
And before you run screaming out the door I want to add that rescuing ideology from the dustbin of history is not about being a slave to political system but rather about belief, a belief that calls each of us to account through the institution of the church and through the interactions of our beliefs with the wider community. Belief which calls us to engage with issues of peace and Justice in the wider world. Beliefs which in opposition to much contemporary Western thought, actually calls us to repentance and renewal.
We often fight shy of speaking of the institutional church because we want to talk about relationships – and there is something very proper about that. But even if you don’t think so yourself, in the eyes of many people priesthood chains you to those two deeply unfashionable words: Institution and doctrine. As a priest you need to learn to dance in the gaps between institution and person, between doctrine and lived reality. Our job here is not merely as spectators – we’re supporters but also participants. We need to dance too.
But I want to say something even simpler and it’s something which I feel about the ridiculous baby seagulls on the roof, something which in a more dramatic way grips the heart of the servant Isaiah. John O’Donohue in his lovely book of Blessings puts it brilliantly when he says
“Despite all the darkness, human hope is based on the instinct that at the deepest level of reality some intimate kindness holds sway. This is the heart of blessing.”
I love that phrase ‘intimate kindness’ and I suppose if I wanted to say anything to a fledgling priest I would say that. Be kind. In its very naivety it invites mocking. But if we are to begin for ourselves, never mind helping anyone else, if we are to begin for ourselves the long journey through repentance to renewal to being God’s Holy People once again then we must first recognise, see again as if for the first time, the intimate kindness of God.
A kindness which allows us to live as servants in the contested space between institutional church community and vulnerable individual believer. Its a place for servants, its a place for prophets, a place for priests, a place where we are all called to take a leap into the vast sky of the mystery of God’s love. Amen.
Trinity Sunday 2010
Trinity Sunday always fills me with a certain foreboding. It’s not just the thought of hundreds of green coloured Sundays stretching into eternity, its also the thought of trying to say something about God. When we celebrate a story or an event in the life of Christ things seem to come alive, but Trinity Sunday feels like the celebration of a doctrine, too big, too dry, too mysterious to do anything useful with.
So what follows are three acts of iconoclasm, three little acts of destruction. Celebrating the Trinity might first be about taking apart the picture of God which we have in our heads and trying to live with different pictures in our prayers, our actions and our relationships.
Of all the persons of the trinity we often picture God the Father as the most self contained, the most other, the most complete and powerful. Its a picture which can leave us with a God who is almost hermetically sealed. But the God of the Judeo-Christian tradition is also a God who gives continually of himself. A God who holds nothing back, who pours out the totality of his love into creation.
One theologian writes in a beautiful phrase ‘ God knows no holding onto himself’. So when we think about God as fullness, as without limit we should also remember God as poverty, as someone who gives away that fullness as gift. The love contained in the fullness of God the Father is not held onto and defended, it is given away.
To think about God is to think about the possibility of pouring out the completeness of yourself for love’s sake alone. God’s self emptying is the ultimate act of love, an act done purely for its own sake. There is no holding back in this self giving, it seems mad to us because we are forever calculating, forever making assessments, being cautious, in the words of Eliot’s Prufrock, ‘we measure out our lives in coffee spoons’, but when we try to imagine what God is like it should be like a massive waterfall, just a constant out pouring out of love.
But life isn’t all waterfalls of love, in fact quite the opposite. Some atheists and sceptics see faith as a crutch for the intellectually and emotionally feeble. For them Christians look to God merely for consolation.
We rightly hold up Jesus as someone rather different from others in the scriptures, but in doing this we sometimes make Jesus into a kind of Godly automaton. We want a Jesus who teaches, exhorts and heals, who reveals to us a powerful God who can change things for the better. But Jesus is not only divine he is also human, and in many ways his story has parallels with other biblical figures that go before him. When we really begin to read the bible in our search for God we find people who often hoped for consolation and were met with reality. Here’s what one of my favourite writers Gabriel Josipivici says about it:
‘Many of the lives of key figures in scripture start out as fairy tale and then at some point encounter a shattering reality. It happens with Adam, born in the garden of Eden, growing up immortal, then (as he would see it) only transgressing momentarily and mildly, but finding suddenly that he has been exhiled forever and forced into a different and harsher life and with the prospect of death always before him; it happens to Jacob, who gets his own way until he wakes up and finds he has slaved for seven years not for his beloved Rachel but for her plain sister Leah; it happens to David, who has led a charmed life from the moment he emerged as a young shepherd boy and defeated the giant Goliath until the death of Saul and his assumption of the kingship, who one day sees a women he desires, sends for her, sleeps with her, and suddenly his whole life turns tragic; he finds himself committing not just adultery but murder by proxy, there follows the death of his child, then the death of a grown son after he has raped his sister and finally the death of his favourite son Absalom in an ill-fated rebellion against his Father. And it happens to Jesus…’
Josopowici’s point is that Jesus isn’t just a happy ever after tale after all these ‘also ran’ characters from the Old Testament. It is Jesus who is finally led to that garden in Gesthemene where he asks ‘O my Father, if it be possible let this cup pass from me, nevertheless not as I will but as thou wilt’ and gets no reply… only silence. Its a silence that we will feel with increased anguish as Jesus cries from the cross on the ninth hour ‘My God, My God why hast thou forsaken me? Resurrection is difficult to picture – tell me the name of a good painting of the resurrection – but the moment of human suffering, of desolation and loneliness, we know what that means. Often we want a Jesus who gives us consolation but we see when we read scripture a human Jesus who like many before him is knee deep in the ugliness of reality. There is consolation here but it is no cheap fix.
But how can we speak of God the Holy Spirit? How can we speak of the spirit as more than a kind of religious extra sensory perception, a kind of ghostly knowing? The theologian Nicholas Lash has said that we should maybe stop always thinking of God the Holy Spirit as ‘not matter’. That instead of thinking of the Spirit as not matter we should think of the spirit as not death., not as mist hanging over the marshes but as the marshes draining, the flowering and fruitfulness of things.
The bible doesn’t give us an opposition between bad flesh and good spirit but rather between a world of peace, reconciliation and love and a world of sin, death and disintegration. Part of being a people concerned with peace and justice is about being able to see God’s Holy Spirit at work in and through matter, through flesh.
I am glad to get to the end of another Trinity Sunday sermon. As I said at the beginning I find it a difficult task. I am left with a deeply felt ambiguity about the language of God. A language which, as it journeys through my many competing personalities – Believer, Cynic, Campaigner, Compromiser – still ties me up in knots.
In the end maybe, we can only listen to the stories about God. Usually we find the stories that resonate with us, engage with the reality of human living with all its potential for pain and suffering. But the stories that stay with us are also stories about redemption, about the possibility of love even when it appears that love and life are about to get up and walk out the door. Amen.
Pentecost 2010.
I had a strange religious experience last week, and I find religious experience difficult to talk about, it always feels the slightly shabby end of reality! I was sitting in the back of a car and picked up a book which began with a quote from the lesser known Gospel of Thomas, it said, ‘To draw near to me you must draw near to the fire’. I thought nothing of it until during a discussion later in the day when a woman I know who has practically no links with the organised church said that she wanted to quote some scripture that she knew by heart and proceeded to quote the same line from the Gospel of Thomas: to draw near to me you must draw near to the fire. Then later in the day when we were sent off to mediate in a corner of the garden I found myself sitting staring at a great big fire – unfortunately the fire was not lit, it was just a vast heap of grey ashes topped by some rather wilting greenery.
How often do we wish for fire in our lives to be greeted by a heap of ashes? Well today is Pentecost. When after the rushing wind, fire comes down and alights on the disciples heads. Filled with the Holy Spirit they all speak different languages but they can understand each other. Parthians, Medes, Elamites, Mesopotamians, Cappadocians and many more – The disciples hear and understand them all – in our own language we hear them speaking about God’s power.
How can we be open to the spirit to such a degree that we can hear those we consider foreign or alien speaking our own language?
There’s a wonderful bit at the end of Eliot’s Little Gidding picturing the Holy Spirit as a dove:
‘The dove descending breaks the air
With flames of incandescent terror
Of which the tongues declare
The one discharge from sin and error.
The only hope, or else despair
Lies in the choice of pyre or pyre-
To be redeemed from fire by fire.’
We have to let God in, the descending dove does not alight gently, he breaks the air with flames of terror. The choice according to Eliot is pyre or pyre, the cleansing fire of purification or the fire of damnation.
This isn’t going to be a hell fire sermon – I am a bit weak on the fires of hell but it is saying that this Church is not a club or a society or a leisure choice. You don’t come because of what I or others lay on for you or because you like or dislike the vicar. But most importantly you don’t come to mix with your own sort. We are still slaves to the Victorian idea of the deserving and the undeserving poor – as if we might offer help and friendship and support to those who derseve it because they are making an effort or showing willing in some way.
The day of Pentecost is not a coming together of the like minded to form a comfortable club which will admit new members who are willing to pull their weight but not too many passengers. That is not the Church. I can’t say this strongly enough. There is a sense in which we are here to get taken for a ride, to get turned over, to get made a fool of because we follow a Christ who suffered and was put to death, who gave himself to death not for the righteous, not for the deserving, but for you and me.
The Dominican monk Timmothy Radcliffe says that at the heart of the monastic life is humility, not the grinding humility of those who hate themselves but the humility of those who know they are creatures, and that their existence is gift. And that, says Radcliffe, is why monks sing, indeed why we should all sing.
We can only forget our personal prejudices, our individual hatreds and dislikes, our unspoken antipathy towards others when we realise that we are creatures of a very fragile universe.
Thousands lost their lives recently in the earthquake in China. I wemt to an art exhibition at the Marina this week to discover that hundreds of followers of the meditative practice Falun Gong had been killed by the authorities in China – just it appears for praying – life is fragile and frightening and apparently random. To sing is to give voice, to give thanks for the gift of life. An act of hope in the midst of our vulnerability and fragility. The glory of God escapes our individual languages, but we can sometimes glimpse it in song, glimpse the mystery of a God who breaks our little ideologies, our tiny worlds.
But I realise that I am asking a lot, to be redeemed from fire by fire, and to sing joyfully while you do it in the presence of people you maybe don’t really like. I can think of better things to do on a Sunday. But until we open ourselves up to the consuming fire of God’s Spirit we are still living a half life, walking in the shadows.
Living in the presence of other languages, other discourses, other music is not an easy option. Living with humility in the presence of other languages other music is impossible without the Spirit. But it is not your spirit but rather the spirit of God living in you – gentle as a dove, terrifying as a consuming fire.
At Mass on Friday the Gospel was that amazing passage from the end of John. Jesus keeps asking Peter do you love me. The third time Jesus asks Peter is hurt, ‘Lord you know that I love you – and we here all know that we love Jesus. But Jesus continues one step further:
‘In truth I tell you when you were young you put on your own belt and walked where you liked but when you grow old you will stretch out your hands and somebody else will put a belt around you and take you somewhere you would rather not go’.
You know, here in Hove, here at All Saints we have to make some difficult decisions about where we are going, about what kind of a community we are. We have to find ways of singing at the limits of our language, on the margins of our culture. Barriers of race, of class, of social status, of deserving and undeserving, of intellect or culture have no place here, in this church, they are not of the spirit. Because the tunes, the songs we are called to sing are not our own, they are God’s.
Singing the melody of God’s love may not lead you where you want to go but it can bring you face to face with great jubilation, great joy at times when you least expect it – that is what it might mean, in the words of the Gospel of Thomas, to draw near to the fire. Amen.
Sermon for Easter Four – APCM followed this service.
As a young teenager at the parish church in Coventry I used to love my dad’s sermons. They were a passionate call to arms, a vision of the Kingdom of God imbued with a deep vein of questioning. They turned the world upside down like a rollercoaster ride and it all flowed from a real, beating, loving, generous heart. But the sermons I knew I’d missed but which I’d have loved to hear were the ones from his first parish on a council estate on the edge of Coventry in the late 60s and early 70s. From the time when I know everything had been happening for dad. That passion for the kingdom of God almost fatally mixed with the knowledge that the church was no longer the centre of his little community. That the working men’s club was where real community happened, that the 1960s really had brought changes for him and the people of his community which seemed to leave the church on the outside looking in.
I never heard those sermons but I have one very precious memento from them and its this. A huge poster for a local beer with a bright red cockerel striding across it. Take Courage. My only input is the crayoning that I did on the very bottom of the poster as a toddler. Take courage.
After this morning’s Eucharist we will gather together for our Annual Parochial Church meeting. Legally we have to have such a meeting but for me these meetings can focus on much that I dislike about the church community. It is difficult to put my finger on what I mean. When I was 20 years old I once drank five pints of the aforementioned Courage bitter and then ran down the oxford road in Manchester and threw a brick through the window of the local theological college whose views i disliked. I’m too old and frightened to vent my ideological rage on other people’s property any more but I wonder if we come to an APCM with any of that passion with a sense that we have been grabbed by something or someone, that this community really matters, that the decisions we make about our common future are somehow linked to our deepest desires, to the God who came to us in Jesus and has changed how we live forever. And in saying that, and this is important, I am not talking about having the courage to be angry, to share our petty frustrations, our cynicism, to progress in our lengthy and highly personal wars of attrition against some individual or group that we have never quite approved of in the church. Rather I’m talking about having the courage to let go of these things and to be open with each other, to engage, to have generous hearts, to see the face of Christ in our neighbour.
Changing community is not about getting rid or marginalising the couple of people in the community who seem to mess everything up, who annoy or frustrate us, its about seeing ways to welcome and include them. And changing community is not about a kind of coasting, a cultured indifference, an apathetic mere attendance. And neither is it a social club, a place where we hang out with our friends and steer clear of the people who we don’t know or don’t like.
In todays Gospel the jews ask ‘How long will you keep us in suspense. If you are the Messiah tell us plainly.’ We too are always waiting for that definitive answer. You know the worst APCMs are full of questions like the one Jesus gets asked. Interrogative, closed, and refusing to engage. Some people are still waiting for a Jesus who will take away all equivocation, who will make plain to us who he is and who will justify all this to the people out there who haven’t got it. They are going to be waiting a long time.
If we want to know Jesus, if we believe we do know Jesus, the Jesus who died for us on the cross, who rose again that we might have life, then it is not because we have merely processed the right amount of information, not because we have finally hit upon the rational intellectual key to the meaning of life. Jesus calls us into relationship with him, a relationship which demands in us a moment of conversion, a movement from one community to another, a re-ordering of our lives, an increased focusing on the things of the heart.
You know when I think of all the nonsense that we have had to deal with here in the past few years. Other peoples projections about what this community is and what it stands for. All Saints the Civic Church, All Saints the Parish Church, All Saints the Victorian Church who won’t move forward, All Saints the church that closes its eyes to the changing community around it, All Saints the church that won’t move on. Rubbish! Other people’s issues.
But the problems that we have had, the image problem that in some ways we still suffer from is a place of strength for us. It gives us the opportunity to ask ourselves who we really think we are. And it helps us in our journey back to the things which really matter, back to the essentials.
We should take courage from the increased sense of openness in this place, from our willingness to engage more with each other. Two weeks ago there was two people at the altar rail weeping because someone they loved was dying in the hospice up the road. I was frustrated because I couldn’t get to them to speak to them, But it was someone from our community, someone who didn’t know them who took them on one side, who sat with them and listened to their story. There are endless little happenings like that that go on here in this place, and they are evidence that people have had the courage to open themselves up to other peoples stories.
People still ask me how much it is going to cost to keep this place going. But of course the heart of this place is not ultimately in the stonework. God knows we need to carry on giving financially to keep our community afloat but what we really need is the gift of courageous hearts. As we share in the body and blood of our Lord jesus Christ this morning, as we are called to share in his passion, death and resurrection, pray also for the gift of a courageous heart.
Not the courage to empower our anger, our bitterness, our thirst for quick answers and self justification, but rather the courage to let go, the courage to be open to each other, to be generous and to be loving. And most of all, and I ask this for myself more than anyone, the courage to try again when we fail.
Because as today’s Gospel tells us belief is not about hearing the right answers, rather it is about hearing the voice of Jesus, Jesus who calls us to have the courage to enter into relationship with him. A relationship which takes us into the possibility of open, engaged, loving community, not in the future, not in a little while, not in some other place, but here, now, in Hove at All Saints.
Sermon for Lent 3 2010.
I’m not sure I like Lent. At the end of a week when I have felt either tetchy, grumpy or just mildly irritated, I keep thinking I hope Lent is going to end soon. Of course the awfulness of Lent stems not from other people – although they might be the ones to have to live with my grumpiness – but rather from over exposure to the gap between my plans for a Holy Lent and the reality of how I live and act.
In Lent I hope to become a slightly more prayerful, slightly more attentive person but instead it feels like people and events conspire against me to leave me morose and well, grumpy!
Of course my experience isn’t anything new or particular to me. In fact its what Lent has always been about. This is how Thomas Merton puts it:
‘The Christ we find in ourselves is not identified with what we vainly seek to admire and idolise in ourselves – on the contrary, he has identified himself with what we resent in ourselves, for he has taken upon himself our wretchedness and our misery, our poverty and our sins…we will never find peace if we listen to the voice of our own …self deception…we will find peace when we listen to the death dance in our blood, not only with equanimity but with exultation because we hear within it the echoes of the victory of the risen saviour’.
Before any of you get anxious, I think the reference to the death dance is not entirely literal – it is also about dying to ourselves, to our pride, our anger, our resentments. This is where Christ finds us, not in our vanity but in our faults and failings.
Our gospel today begins with some gruesome deaths which seem a bit obscure. This is what I think it means. Bad things happen – the Galileeans killed by Pilate, the 18 killed by the falling tower at Siloam, but bad things aren’t necessarily punishments, and they don’t necessarily happen to bad people. All sorts of terrible things happen to people – and good things – but whoever you are the key to salvation is not what happens to you but repentence.
And repentence comes not when we seek to identify Christ with all the good things we do but when, in repentence we recognise that Christ died for our failings, our self deception and our wretchedness.
Lent is painful because it brings us face to face with our own failures, with our pettiness, our laziness our lack of discipline but it is also revelatory because it enables us to recognise our need of the love that God revealed to us in Christ.
In a few moments we are going to give thanks for the birth of Poppy. When I first met Poppy’s mum and dad they were having a difficult time of it. Poppy’s mum Hannah had to go into hospital for a big operation. In fact I think I remember saying something like, ‘at least you’ll be out for Christmas and Hannah saying, no, I’m going in to have the operation over Christmas.
But Poppy’s parents reacted to their difficult situation in what was an authentically Christian way. Firstly, They made plans for today, for giving thanks for Poppy in church and secondly they had hope for the future of their life together as a family. Thanksgiving and Hope.
Everything about Jesus’ life is a thanksgiving – even if it leads to his death –thanksgiving comes first. For Christians, what lies at the heart of thanksgiving is not the glib hope that everything will be alright in the end, but rather the hope that whatever happens God in Christ will lead us back to the love of God.
In Lent we also need to take hold of both thanksgiving and Hope. Thanksgiving for all the things which God has blessed us with, and hope that despite our failures and our sinfulness, despite our fears for the future and despondency over the present, hope that we can also come to know the love that has been revealed to the world in Christ.
You know that wonderful post communion prayer ‘Father of all, we give you thanks and praise, that when we were still far off you met us in your son and brought us home’? There’s a line in it towards the end that says ‘Keep us firm in the hope you have set before us’. Its a lovely line but it used to be even better in an older version of the prayer which read : Keep us firm in this hope that we have grasped’.
If there are times in our lives, especially in Lent, when we find thanksgiving difficult, then may God grant us the strength to grasp hope. And may each of you here today, may Hannah and Christian and their friends, and most of all may Poppy grasp that Hope. For holiness is never the result of giving thanks for the parts of our personality that we admire and idolise, but rather holiness is an act of thanksgiving that despite our many faults we dare hope that God will still heal us and will still raise us up. Amen.
Sermon for Candlemass – Fr.David Weaver
The Child grew and became strong, filled with wisdom, and found favour with God
Traditionally, today is the last day of Christmas.
At S.Michael’s we would keep our Christmas
decorations up till today. Now the trend is to take
them down as soon as possible – for many, of
course, they have been up since mid- November
and they come down the day after Boxing Day.
That’s because Marketing pressures force us to
anticipate so much these days:
The 12 Days of Christmas used to come AFTER
Christmas Day – but today that would not suit
our economy and get in the way of the New year
sales so we have them before instead..
But it’s a shame. There’s a liturgical wisdom in it – having awaited our new Guest – God
with us, Immanuel – we celebrate his presence
with us during Christmas. However, like a lot of
guests, by the time He gets here we are just
exhausted.
Todays Gospel, The Presentation of Jesus in the
Temple is the third showing of Jesus to world –
or his third Epiphany. The first is the visit of the
Kings, the Magi with their presents; the second,
the Baptism of Jesus and the third, today, we see
Mary and Joseph, the proud parents, taking Jesus
to the Temple, as the Jewish Law demanded. The
old and wise Simeon recognises him as promised
bearer of messianic peace, salvation and light.
How does that resonate, vibrate with us this
morning?
Those of us who are parents can identify with
much in the Gospel today. There’s the Pride of
the parents in their child. We are told Mary and
Joseph ‘were amazed at what was being said
about him.’ Do you remember those school open
days when you go along to talk to the teacher –
who describes a child you do not recognise.
Who? Him? Did what?
The teacher also seems to now a good deal of
personal detail about you and your family.
Those News books! We’ve all been amazed at
how others see our children!
But there is poignancy too. Simeon talks about
the child’s destiny – there will be a ‘falling’ and a
‘rising’ – in that order. The cross comes first.
Mary too will be caught up in this destiny. Mary
will learn that division can come into a family by
the role her son has to play. She will learn that
being a disciple of Jesus transcends family ties –
Jesus is to redefine the family. Remember later a
woman says to Jesus ‘Blessed is the womb that
bare thee’ and Jesus replies ‘ Yes, but more
blessed are those that hear the word of God and
keep it.’ And ‘ My mother and my brothers are
those that hear the word of God and do it.’
Given Judaism’s strong emphasis on the family –
how revolutionary this must have seemed.
And for us again there are parallels.
Most parents have wondered why their children
have to grow up? They’re so sweet as
babies, so cute as kids. Too Soon come the
traumas of adolescence – about 8 now, isn’t it?
The hormones kick in, we’re told. We must have
been too poor to have hormones because I never
remember it being mentioned when I was rowing
up.
And Jesus is right – Friends become more
important than family. MSN,Twitter, FaceBook,
I-touch phones – socially interacting – mum and
dad no longer at the centre of their lives.
Then University, Gap Year, Living with friends,
flat-sharing. Or even worse – staying at
home, living off parents until thirty or so! That
slow climb to independent living and maturity –
it says here.
Simeon prophesies to Mary that ‘a sword will
pierce her soul.’ Parents take note : after
the selfish pleasure of parenthood : inevitably
comes payback time.
But finally the Gospel tells us: The Child grew
strong, filled with wisdom, God’s favour
upon him’ We neglect wisdom nowadays. I see
the Diocese is running wisdom workshops – so I
must sign up! We want our children to ‘do well’
‘get on’ ‘have good career prospects.’ Perhaps
we should also pray that they may ‘grow in
Wisdom.’ Not only be lucky, but blessed with
God’s favour, too.
So the Holy Family in the Temple is a reflection
of all families – an authentic human Scenario to
which we can relate. But its message is a stark
one – we must transcend out families – we have
to grow up and away from them.
But perhaps some of you wondered why then was
the second reading that famous passage of Paul to
the Corinthians – read at so many weddings and
funerals.
(ACTUALLY I THINK THAT’S BECAUSE IT
DOES NOT mention the word God, so everyone
can agree with it!) It’s interesting non-church
goers like it because Paul wrote
it to a Church. And the Church is God’s new
family.
Paul is telling the Corinthians to ‘grow up’ – to
grow in love. Paul does not define love in
this passage – he personalises it. The behaviour
he describes – love – is not what we should feel
for a family member – but for others in the
Church family. It’s difficult isn’t it? What love
someone in Church more than my own family?
A very wise woman in the congregation said to
me two weeks ago : ‘It’s all very well talking
about Christian Unity and getting on with Christians in other churches – but
there are people in this one I don’t like.’ She has
a point. What are we going to do about
it – because it is not what Christ wants, for the
group he called friends, his Body, his
Bride..
Paul, like todays Gospel, talks about nurturing
and growing up. All parents know, as Paul says,
that ‘love never ends.’ But as we grow we begin
to see things differently.
‘When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I thought
like a child, I reasoned like a child; when I
became an adult I put away childish things, I put
an end to childish ways,’ writes Paul.
Oh, if only we did! I mean: thank goodness, now
I am an adult, I don’t sulk anymore.
Because adults don’t sulk, do they?
Adults don’t gossip to friends Adults don’t have
temper tantrums : are not easily provoked, as the
AV puts it.
Adults listen to others. Simeon means ‘God
listens.’.
Like Jesus, We are all God’s children, by
adoption, by grace. Paul tells us that as
members of God’s family we too have been
blessed with every spiritual blessing in high
places. May God give us the Spirit of
Wisdom, so that we, like Jesus, may grow in
wisdom, and may amaze others as we
present to them God’s charismatic gifts of Faith,
hope and love, which are our
inheritance as children in God’s family.
Sermon for Epiphany 2 – wedding at Cana, 17th January 2010
Among the souvenirs found in Harold Pinter’s desk after his death was a placemat from a dinner party during which he’d been banging on about politics. “Darling you’re right” Antonia Fraser had scribbled on it “So Shut Up”. Harold Pinter was a man with strongly held beliefs that he liked to share and no doubt his nearest and dearest where the only ones able to tell him to be quiet.
The miraculous story of water into wine at the wedding in Cana is all about belief, all about the disciples growing into belief. But this week all of us have been struggling to believe, struggling to comprehend the stories that have been coming out of Haiti, the stories of death on an unimaginable scale – the Red Cross estimated 100,000 and rising, the stories of horrific injury, of lack of food and shelter.
Talking about belief in the face of disaster can sound almost offensive. This week there has been an outpouring of compassion for Haiti, a sense of powerlessness coupled with a desperate desire to respond. We can so easily become discouraged by how little we feel we can help. There will be a retiring collection this week and next for Haiti and we also offer to God our prayers, prayers which reflect our glimmer of understanding about the horrors suffered in Haiti, prayers which come from our solidarity with them in their grief.
For us this solidarity is something we caught from the man Jesus – the story of the God who became man and who showed his solidarity with all those who suffer in his death on the cross, and spoke to us also of the possibility of hope in the midst of death through his resurrection. The horror and the glory of Christ’s death and resurrection are revealed to us first in this little story from the early section of John’s Gospel. The story of the wedding at Cana finds Jesus telling his Mother that his hour has not yet come, words he will return to at the beginning of his farewell discourse in chapter 13 when we are told ‘Jesus Knew that his hour had come. The story of the wedding at Cana points us forward to the death of Jesus but also to his resurrection, note the wedding story begins ‘on the third day’.
The story is a strange one. Both the old Roman Missal and the Book of Common Prayer place this story on the second Sunday of Epiphany, the intention being that this stupendous miracle would convince potential converts of the truth of God’s glory. But nowadays miracle stories convince us of very little, we see them as rather the shabby end of belief. We are too sceptical, too cynical, too frightened of being taken over by something which is beyond our control. Like the sensible refusal of that extra glass of wine, we fear an intoxication with something that we can’t control.
The story of the water into wine is a revelation of the person of Jesus – it tries to tell us something about who Jesus is. And for Jesus who always lead to for what. For Jesus being is also about becoming, his presence at the wedding feast points forward to his mission of salvation on the cross. Belief is never just for itself, belief in Jesus takes all of us from a realisation of who we are in the eyes of God into action on behalf of others.
The wedding setting is important because weddings in the Old Testament symbolise the arrival of the messiah. The head waiter saying’ you have kept the good wine until now’ is like a proclamation of the coming of the days of the Messiah. Here before them is the Christ, the new Messiah.
But more important than the wedding itself is the abundance of wine. We are told that each of the six jars holds 20 to thirty gallons of water, meaning Jesus creates at least 120 gallons of wine. Again in the Old Testament the abundance of wine is associated with the joy of the coming of the messiah. In Amos we read of the mountains dripping with sweet wine and all the hills flowing with it. This is a foretaste of God’s glory – gratuitous, abundant, intoxicating – it knows no bounds. It is all about the generous heart of Jesus, or put more simply it’s about love.
For us that love involves the possibility that God in all his glory might someday be made real to our struggling attempts to put belief at the heart of living. Belief not as assent to an impossible list of doctrines but belief as inebriation in the love of God.
Our discipleship starts here with this foretaste of glory. It is a story which points us on to the true site of Glory, the resurrected Christ. Right now we struggle to see this glory in the news we hear from Haiti, right now we can see only the death of the cross. But like Harold Pinter we should be troublemakers charged with the passion of our beliefs. Not a belief in a purely spiritual reality, but in the God who became flesh, the God who came to be in solidarity with the poor, the destitute and the suffering.
When we fear the strength of our compassion for the people of Haiti, when we are made numb by our scepticism, our cynicism about how we can help we should remember the 120 gallons of wine that appeared in Cana. We ought to be inebriated, knocked out and helpless not through an excess of wine but through our desire to make real the love revealed to us in Jesus. This is not the time to keep silent, not the time to let others do the work, we should keep shouting and keep acting in the name of the God who showed the abundance of his love for us in the death and resurrection of his Son Christ Jesus. Amen.
This sermon was preached in the very sad absence of Sister Frances – who wasn’t well – someone said they liked it because it was short, gee thanks.
Sermon for Advent 2
Repentance from the Greek Metanoia literally means turning away from a life of inertia or rebellion towards God. This turning is not a single act but an ongoing responsiveness to the will of God. This turning from the death of sin to new life in Christ is never fully finished in this life. There is a sense in which we are always repenting, always making that turn. It is a continuous experience made possible by the grace of God. I’ve heard more than once this week people who have been studying the Gospels on the first two Sundays in Advent saying Oh they’re so depressing – when are we going to get away from all this end of the world sin and condemnation stuff and start looking forward to Christmas. Well the turn is happening, the good news of the coming Christ is being opened up to us. But if we are honest this advent movement from condemnation of sin and from judgement to repentance and the turning once again to the vision of God in Jesus is a reflection of how we all live now. Life is not all tinsel and shiny wrapping paper as we know all too well, and the willingness to repent, to turn to Christ is not some agreement to a set of rules and regulations to get us into heaven. Real repentance is not alien to us in the church community, it is the DNA of our life together, the turn, the turning from the death of self to new life in Christ.
A friend of mine has been trying to tell his little boy about the difference between a cross and a crucifix. The little boy had got horribly confused and pointing to the crucifix, he asked his dad ‘Is that Baby Jesus on the cross?’ You can see how, with the approach of Christmas the confusion arose but in that amazing way that children have he had actually stumbled up on a central truth of the Advent season. It wasn’t baby Jesus on the cross but you can’t separate the incarnation of Christ from the passion of Christ. Christ’s arrival in human form is synonymous with his mission, it is synonymous with his passion, death and resurrection.
Christ died for our sins – this is where repentance begins.
And if this repentance becomes a reality in our lives, then we will see its fruits – not just surface do –goodery but an authentic turn into a life lived for Love.
Sermon for Advent Light Service 29th November 2009.
The angel of the Lord appears to Zechariah, the angel Gabriel appears to Mary, Mary goes to greet Elizabeth and is filled with the Spirit, an angel speaks to Joseph in a dream and John the Baptist wanders menacingly around the Jordan quoting Isaiah. Something is happening here and we are being invited to toy with the possibility that things could be different, that a birth will take place that will change our perceptions of how the world is.
But we have seen Advent come round time after time, we are anxious about the fact that we still haven’t done our Christmas cards, that we still haven’t confirmed arrangements for who we are meeting over the Christmas holidays and where. The Advent readings seem to want to invite us to listen, to change, to be attentive to something new but they can easily slide in our minds between signpost and sentiment, between drama and banality.
There’s a wonderful short story by the American writer John Cheever called ‘The Swimmer’. Cheever lived in suburban America, he had a wife and family and a full social diary but he suffered with depression, alchohol addiction, and a sense of being trapped. In the story he writes a man called Ned Merrill is sat some miles from his home by a friends swimming pool when it occurs to him that he could get back to his own house eight miles to the south by water – by swimming through his neighbours pools. We’re told ‘the day was beautiful and it seemed to him that a long swim might enlarge and celebrate its beauty’…First there were the Grahams, the Hammers, the Lears, the Howlands and the Crosscups, he would cross Ditmar street to the bunkers and come after a short portage to the Levys and the Welchers…making his way home by an uncommon route gave him the feeling that he was a pilgrim, an explorer, a man with a destiny and he knew that he would find friends along the way…’
Ned begins his mammoth swim. He meets friends, neighbours even an ex-lover and part way through he wonders ‘At what point had this prank, this joke, this piece of horseplay become serious?’. Like a lot of Cheever’s stories the ending is dark and dispiriting, when he finally gets home the house is locked and empty and we, the readers, are left wondering how much of this man’s story was really true.
But l suspect that most people when reading the story are stuck by the possibility, the excitement of this new route, this other reality. Advent Sunday ought to strike us as an invitation to the possibility of a life beyond our suburban expectations and desires. Advent should overtake us in the way that this mad journey overtakes Ned. And the question we need to ask ourselves is not, is this all true, is this invitation real, are any of these angels talking to me, will I get to my destination and find the house locked up and empty? The question is rather are we willing to take the risk to see the world differently?
The wonder of all the readings from Daniel and Revelation we’ve being having recently, their apocalyptic excess, is that they tear us out of the safety and security of the narratives we have created for ourselves. People say Cheever’s short story is dark and despairing in its conclusion but after all of the invitations and announcements of the advent readings this evening we ended with Matthew: ‘ two will be in the field; one will be taken and the other left. Two women will be grinding meal together; one will be taken the other left. Keep awake therefore, for you do not know on what day your Lord is coming’. Advent invites us to a vision of the world which through Christ is not only radically different but also frightening because it keeps calling us to the point of decision.
Like Ned something stirs in us to take us on a different route, to see the possibility of a different reality. And like Ned who swims home through his neighbours pools we are not invited to leave the suburbs, to escape but rather to allow ourselves to see them differently. Who knows where this invitation can take us?
Rev’d Judith Egar’s sermon for the feast of Christ the King.
Living in Reverse
Christ the King, 22nd November 2009, All Saints, Hove
Daniel 7.9-14, Revelation 1.4-8; John 18.33-37
I’d like to share with you a poem that I came across by chance a few weeks ago. It’s called ‘Reverse Living’.
Life is tough.
It takes a lot of your time,
all your weekends,
and what do you get at the end of it?
Death, a great reward.
I think that the life cycle is all backwards.
You should die first, get it out of the way.
Then you live twenty years in an old-age home.
You are kicked out when you’re too young.
You get a gold watch, you go to work.
You work forty years until you’re
young enough to enjoy retirement.
You go to college,
you party until you’re ready for high school.
you become a little child, you play,
you have no responsibilities.
You become a little boy or girl,
you go back into the womb,
you spend your last nine months floating,
and you finish off as a gleam in someone’s eye.
I don’t know whether the author of the poem had this in mind, but it is a wonderful description of the Kingdom of God – a Kingdom which, gloriously, gets death out of the way at the very beginning. When we are baptised, we are symbolically united with Christ in his death so that we can be raised with him to a new, resurrection life. And our growth in that new life is in many ways a process of becoming younger, freer and more playful – the little children to whom, Jesus says, the Kingdom of Heaven belongs – until we are reunited with the Father who loves us unconditionally and eternally.
‘My Kingdom is not of this world’ said Jesus to Pilate, and in the Gospels he overturns every conventional understanding of what a kingdom should be. ‘The Kingdom of God is like this’ he tells us. It’s like a tiny mustard seed that grows into a huge tree. It’s like a pinch of yeast that causes a whole batch of dough to rise. It’s a wedding feast where the invited guests refuse to come and criminals and outlaws take their place. It’s a realm where the poor and marginalised take centre stage and the rich struggle to be let in, where the first are last and the last first, and prostitutes take precedence over priests. It’s a topsy-turvy world where the king dies for his people rather than the other way round. It’s subversive, radical, exciting and not remotely respectable.
So on this Sunday when we celebrate Christ the King and acclaim his power and his glory, we need to prepared to have our conventional ideas of what those words mean challenged and overthrown. The disciples had a rather endearing habit of looking for Jesus in the wrong place – gazing into the empty tomb when he had gone ahead of them into Galilee, or up into the sky after the ascension, until two angels brought them gently back to earth. It’s easy for us to do the same – to be distracted by the wonderfully vivid apocalyptic passages in both the Old and New Testaments into speculating about the second coming and taking our eyes off what is happening around us. Jesus himself warned against this ‘It is not for you to know the day or the hour’ he said, ‘Be ready, and then you won’t be taken by surprise’. The truth is that the Kingdom of God is already here, although not yet fully realised. Jesus didn’t teach us to pray ‘The kingdom, the power and the glory will be yours at the end of time’ but ‘The kingdom, the power and the glory are yours, now and for ever’.
So where do look for evidence of Christ’s power and glory in our world? It’s striking that in today’s Old Testament reading, Daniel’s vision of the eternal king focuses on his humanity. ‘As I watched in the night visions I saw one like a human being, coming with the clouds of heaven’.
St Irenaeus, the second century Church father and apologist, famously wrote that the glory of God is a human being fully alive. And that is where we still find the heart of Christ’s kingdom, in the ordinary people whose lives he shares and heals and transforms, his power poured out upon those who have no influence or status in the world but who find in him the dignity and strength that comes from knowing that they are loved and valued by God.
Let me end with another poet’s vision of the kingdom – this time from R. S. Thomas. May it catch our imaginations and fire our purpose as we stand together on the brink of the Church’s new year.
It’s a long way off but inside it
There are quite different things going on:
Festivals at which the poor man
Is king and the consumptive is
Healed: mirrors in which the blind look
At themselves and love looks at them
Back: and industry is for mending
The bent bones and the minds fractured
By life. It’s a long way off, but to get
There takes no time and admission
Is free, if you will but purge yourself
Of desire and present yourself with
Your need only and the simple offering
Of your faith, green as a leaf.
Amen
Sermon for All Souls – 2009
I am still aware after sitting with countless recently bereaved people of the lack of answers, the lack of solutions, the lack of words in the face of death. I remember finding a kind of comfort for myself in these paralysingly difficult encounters with the bereaved, in Anne Stevensons poem ‘The Minister’. Its a poem which when I read it makes me a little unsure if I am being mocked or not! This is the first part of it:
We’re going to need the minister
to help this heavy body into the ground.
But he won’t dig the hole;
others who are stronger and weaker will have to do that.
And he won’t wipe his nose and his eyes;
others who are weaker and stronger will have to do that.
And he won’t bake cakes or take care of the kids —
women’s work. Anyway,
what would they do at a time like this
if they didn’t do that?
No, we’ll get the minister to come
and take care of the words.
He doesn’t have to make them up,
he doesn’t have to say them well,
he doesn’t have to like them
so long as they agree to obey him.
We have to have the minister
so the words will know where to go.
Tonight I will say the words over the bread and the wine as we remember our departed loved ones together. And the way I say the words and the ways in which you hear my words won’t particularly matter. What does matter is the we have gathered and that through the ritual of this service we have remembered God’s promise to us in Christ, and that we have remembered that promise in a particular and sometimes painfully specific way because it is a promise that we hold dear for someone we have loved and lost.
Often what pains us most about the remembrance of those we have loved and lost is the memory of touch, the handshake, the kiss or the hug. Physical touch is such a powerful sign of being in relationship to another. But our Gospel passage this evening is also all about relationship, about the relationship between the Father and the Son. It is not an exclusive relationship but one to which each of us here are called to share in. The relationship between the Father and the Son is one that transcends the apparent chasm between life and death.
We never stop loving people because they have died, love is not a switch we can just turn off. But our relationship with those who have died is changed forever. Jesus’s promise to his Father that he will lose nothing of what he has been given, is also his promise to us that we continue to share with the whole church living and departed every time we share this meal at the altar.
Tonight we gather quietly around this altar to hold our loved ones names before God and to grasp the hope that in Christ our relationship with them is changed not ended, for one day when the love of God in Christ Conquers all things, we shall joyfully greet them again.
There are no clear answers, not clear solutions but as I can’t bake the cakes, as I’m not looking after the children or wiping away the tears, then I shall say the words, hoping that somehow, they make a difference. Amen.
Sermon for St.Luke 18th October 2009 – This sermon was preached just over a year after I arrived at All Saints. In some ways it sets out some ideas about how I want us to grow as a church. Some people were inspired by it and others felt told off! It’s certainly a sermon for a particular community and occasion.
‘Start off now…take no purse with you, no haversack, no sandals’.
Holidays, weekends away, days off, even visits to friends are always, at least a little bit about escape, there is always hidden somewhere in the motivation a desire not just to get away but to be somebody different even if it is just for a short time. We want to be able to say that this life, this job, this set of people dosen’t define us, that we also find something of ourselves elsewhere in another life on another journey.
We usually come back to our everyday communities refreshed and ready to see new possibilities. All of us, within the church community have to deal with the twin poles of memory and hope, Past and future. Nicholas Lash in a sermon about church communities talks about the two ways in which people do this: One approach is about the performance of the old rites, the old words and the old institutions. Without this faithfulness to memory, to what was, to what has always been, the Gospel would be betrayed. For other people it seems that truthfulness and integrity of the church can only be sustained by having the courage to break with the past for the sake of the future, by having the courage to discard inherited possessions, to leave nostalgia behind and travel light into the wilderness.
In one sense, as Nicholas Lash points out, the decision is made for us. The world is changing and if we can’t move forward to explore what it means to be Christ’s disciples in this new and changing world then we will die. It is not that we need to ignore our heritage but that we need to be constantly re-discovering our continuity with the past in new ways – and to remember that our continuity with the past, our shared memory of how the church was is a gift not a possession.
We come here to this building not merely to indulge our memory but also to inform our future. So as we set out on our journey of discovery as a Church community maybe we need to think about what we might be trying to do here, about what the nature of this journey might be. I think its a journey of exploration, a journey made together, a journey of the heart, a resurrection Journey.
Firstly A journey of exploration – someone said to me last week, we like you Fr.Phil but we’re not sure where you’re coming from, and I probably should have said, join the club, I don’t know where I’m coming from either. Often people, in a church community want a lead from their priest which tells them what kind of church they are in: are we high, low, catholic, protestant, traditional or experimental. I am quite keen to deliberately fight shy of being pigeon holed as a particular brand of Christian – that’s not just about being desperate to please everybody, its about being open to the variety and the individuality of people’s journeys with Christ. So although the Sunday Eucharist will usually be like this, you may occasionally walk in here and see a nave altar out here, or the chairs in a circle, or incense, or bells or even as we had once, a labyrinth. It doesn’t mean we are going off the rails it means that we are a church on a journey of exploration about what it means to be Christian community. Our identity is not static. All Saints has sometimes been labelled as ‘choral and floral’ or ‘traditional Anglican’. These labels are fine, they say something about us but they are not the whole story – and any church worth its salt is capable of maintaining a particular identity while occasionally exploring other ways of worshipping. It is sods law that the days we are very trad all of the more experimental people come and the days we are very experimental all of the trad people come. But if we are judged negatively on such unimportant matters then so be it. We’re not a shop we’re people on a journey.
Secondly this is a journey made together and I really can’t stress this enough. Maybe the first thing to say here is that being the church is not ultimately about numbers, about getting more people to join our club, rather it is about the quality of our shared life together. There has to be a shared sense of integrity about our desire to follow Christ in Community.
There are so few places now where we can experience quiet together, where we can have a shared sense of praying together. There is never the prayers and then the rest of the service, the whole of the service is a prayer, and it’s never my prayer or the prayer of whoever is speaking but rather it is the common prayer of the gathered people. Each of us needs to connect ourselves with that sense of shared experience if this is going to feel like a people a prayer.
Thirdly I think its important that this is a journey of the heart. We exist here as community not because we have a grade one listed building or a robed choir, or because the mayor or the Lord Lieutenant makes the occasional visit – we exist because we are here to make real the possibility of loving Christian community. Today we celebrate St.Luke and we remember him as Luke the Physician, the man who brought healing. The community of the church cannot be immune from all the pains and struggles, the jealousies and bitterness of any human community. We are not better than anybody else, but we ought to be looking at ourselves and saying is this action, are these words of God and do they speak of the love to which we witness? By a journey of the heart, I think I mean a journey which is concerned with healing and reconciliation as a priority not a useful extra. You are not called to like everyone here but you are called to try to love them. And if we are looking for a place to start then we could do worse than look to our own brokenness, our own desire to be reconciled, to be loved.
And lastly this is a journey centrally concerned with resurrection. When I said at the beginning that ultimately we were all having to face a Christian journey which was about dispossession I didn’t mean that this was easy. The way of dispossession, of letting go, is intricately bound up with the way of the cross. Too often in the church we have been about what one writer has called ‘the cultivation of invulnerability’. As if the church is about creating for ourselves a place where we can hide from struggle and pain. Here, in this place, we begin to explore together the landscape of the human heart, a landscape that we begin to see is being transformed by the death and resurrection of Christ.
One day we shall come to see that the church is not about geography or statistics but about resurrection. The institution can’t take us to resurrection because resurrection begins in here. And when people still talk to me in the street saying ‘are they closing your church or not’, I want to say that they are asking the wrong question. Because God in Christ didn’t plonk us down here to occupy geographical space in a rather beautiful Victorian way, he sent us out.
And we need to understand our exploring, shared, heartfelt journey as something which is continuing, as a work in progress. Start off now, but look I am sending you out like lambs among wolves. Take no purse with you, no haversack, no sandals. Whatever house you enter let your first words be Peace to this house…cure those in it who are sick and say, ‘the kingdom of God is very near to you’. Amen.
Sermon for Michael Maine’s Last Sunday (Michael was our Director of Music, among other things, and served the All Saint’s Community for nearly thirty years before leaving for Mirfield to train for the Priesthood)
A good sword and a trusty hand!
A faithful heart and true!
King James’s men shall understand
What Cornish lads can do!
And have they fixed the where and when?
And shall Trelawny die?
Here’s twenty thousand Cornish men
Will know the reason why!
Well I hope Michael won’t suffer the same fate as Trelawney – either by getting locked up in the Tower or by becoming a Bishop in the Church of England but I do know that like Trelawney there are going to be a lot of people supporting him with every fibre of their being in the journey he is about to undertake.
Saying goodbye is a dangerous business fraught with the possibility of misunderstanding and confusion. I have a swiss-German friend who is always bewildered by the English custom of saying,’we really must be going’ towards the end of a dinner party and then not leaving for another half hour – she is always ready with their coats! Quick goodbyes can seem heartless and uncaring, long ones sometimes too intimate or just plain boring.
We often say goodbye assuming that the recipient will take responsibility for making sure that they do fare well. But bidding Farewell is not something passive, it is a commitment that calls for an active response from us. When we bid Michael farewell we do so having done all that we can to ensure his future well being, through our words, our thoughts, our prayers and our friendship.
Saying Farewell is a momentary ritual but when that farewell comes from the heart it should speak of all that we know of Michael and his involvement in this community over the past 30 years. This Farewell is an authentic acknowledgment of the ways in which Michael has played a part in shaping us and our Church family and also an acknowledgment of the ways in which we have shaped him. Families, as we all know, love and hate, laugh and weep, shout and sit in silence, celebrate and mourn together. We are marked forever by our shared life, it is part of who we are. Christ calls us to community and community changes us.
This Farewell expresses our wonder at the fact that we have both been changed by our involvement in this Christian family. So in a very real sense Michael takes All Saints Church family with him to Mirfield. Separated geographically there remains an invisible and unbroken thread which links us.
Michael brought this church the gift of music and the music he brought, like Michael himself, was not something one could ignore or forget. The music here has been truly amazing. Even in one year I have noticed that if, often unbeknownst to me, I have offended or hurt Michael in some way, it is immediately obvious from the moment I see him, or rather his morose looking shoulders under that shabby jacket! But like a lot of sensitive people, and he is a musician what did I expect, he is also a deeply empathetic and kind man. Almost everyone has a story about Michael’s kindness to them and his support during difficult or challenging times. I am not even going to go into all the things that Michael has done to build, nurture and support this church family, they are too numerous to mention. But I want to stress the bonds that they have created between us. Michael has played an important part in weaving together the many strands of this church family and as we as a community move forward we will continue to share in the musical, inspirational and prayerful strands Michael has played a part in weaving into our common life.
Farewells can be a time of insecurity for both parties – if we part then what are we going to be in the future, how can we understand ourselves in this new stage. But we need to put our individual pains and anxieties into the context of this Christian community and the loving arms of God which embrace us. For we are called to more than just this place and we are called to share Christ and to live Christ with a whole variety of people many of whom we have not yet met.
I am touched that Michael leaves this place with all the ways that this community has shaped him, to follow his sense of calling to the priesthood. To a certain extent Christine Wilson is to be blamed for all this. It was at a meeting that Michael had with her that she commented that several people had said that he ought to be a priest. Despite our sadness today we thank Christine for that because in a sense Michael represents the common calling of this community to go out and to preach Christ, to preach the death and resurrection of Christ and to see Christ in the faces of those we meet. Not a remarkable calling for the gifted, the talented and the powerful but God’s calling to each and every one of us just as we are.
Michael it has been frightening to me how many qualities we share in common, occasionally emotionally needy with an often hidden and surprising lack of self esteem but also occasionally unbending in decisions, indulgent, infuriating, inspirational. Thank you for sharing so much of your faith journey with us, we hope you will continue to do so. May God bless you as you continue the journey taking a little bit of Hove to west Yorkshire . For our part we will continue to celebrate that little strand of Ditchling Gold thread woven into the life and witness of this community.
I want to end with a short passage many of you will recognise. Written maybe of a time 10 years hence I hope it speaks of our future hopes for Michael’s ministry:
‘He is still precentor of Barchester, and still pastor of the little church of st.Cuthbert’s. In spite of what he has so often said himself, he is not even yet an old man. He does such duties as fall to his lot well and conscientiously, and is thankful that he has never been tempted to assume others for which he might be less fitted.
The author now leaves him in the hands of his readers; not as a hero, not as a man to be admired and talked of, not as a man who should be toasted at public dinners and spoken of with conventional absurdity as a perfect divine, but as a good man without guile, believing humbly in the religion which he has striven to teach, and guided by the precepts which he has striven to learn.’
Amen.
60 second sermon for BBC Radio Sussex – (I’ll never be asked again! – one of the programmes producers was called Karl after the big man himself so he liked the talk – my congregation were more worried that I had had associations with the Labour party, but all of us have a past…)
Like a lot of people I find Holidays are one of the only times in the year when i can really read, so I always take several books with me. This year I was absolutely bowled over by Roberto Bolano’s 2666. The themes are so rich and varied that it would be impossible to draw them all out. But one of the recurring themes of Bolano’s work is about the relationship between Literature and Life and about the difficulty of talking about the possibility of a relationship between Literature and revolution or social change. Literature so often fails to take sides or it takes sides in ways we don’t expect or find difficult to live with.
In fact many of us have become happy to treat our reading as a leisure activity which doesn’t disturb the ways in which we see the world or the ways in which we relate to others. At the great age of 41 I too feel engulfed in a kind of numb political cynicism and bland relativism. I look back to my youth, and the excitement of being in the Militant Tendency as Trotskyist infiltrators of the Labour party and wish I had bottled some of that passion.
It is sad to say that I have not found the Church of England to be a place where political radicalism or questioning of inherited social and religious structures is welcomed. Faith for many has become almost entirely private and almost always a matter of choice rather than conviction.
This view of faith fits in well with the smug isolation of the late capitalist secular West. As Terry Eagleton points out in his most recent book ‘It is hard to see what role faith could play…in a Western world which some of its inhabitants see as nothing less than the very consummation of human history, lacking nothing but more of the same’.
In Luke’s Gospel Jesus begins his ministry by walking into a synagogue and reading these words from the prophet Isaiah:
‘The spirit of the Lord has been given to me,
For he has anointed me
He has sent me to bring good news to the poor
To proclaim liberty to captives…to set the downtrodden free…’
I’m not sure this is something we see in the Church of England, maybe if we separated ourselves from state and hierarchy, maybe if we were less tied to buildings, we could begin to return to this kind of dynamism. To return from being people who often don’t seem to give a flying monkey to being a church which was genuinely engaged with the link between faith and social justice. A people who saw some of the wonderful books of the bible not as a weekend hobby but as an invitation to see the world differently.
Faith ought to rip us out of our comfort zone and make us question our whole vision of what it is to be human and to share our lives with others no matter what their faith, their gender, their education or their sexuality.
At the heart of the bible is the almost fantastical story of the incarnation, God becoming human yet so often Christians seem to want to hide away from what it means to be human. A faith that fails to question the status quo, that fails to allow itself to fall into the naivety of campaigning for real change is worthless and it deserves everything that Dwarkins dull brand of scientific rationalism can throw at it.
We risk becoming the generation that killed off faith in favour of acquiescence, that killed off the Gospel by making it just another commodity in the marketplace. As Gene Robinson the Gay American Bishop said at Greenbelt recently, ‘if we don’t have a Gospel that offends, challenges and gets us into trouble then maybe we don’t have a Gospel at all’. Faith in Jesus calls us into the silence of reflection but it also sends us back out into the world to live not just for ourselves but for others.
