"Domination" and the cross: a sermon for Holy Cross Day

Holy Cross Day marks the day when, so the legend tells, the True Cross was discovered in Jerusalem by Saint Helena in the early fourth century. A few short years later this led to the dedication, on this day, of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre on that spot by the son of St Helena, the Emperor Constantine, in 335AD. This was a defining moment not simply because it brought the Christian faith to the heart of political power and influence, but because it used the Cross – that ultimate sign of imperial power and cruelty – as the defining symbol of that new union of the sacred and the secular. In some ways this day marks the culmination of the remarkable story of the rise of Christianity from an obscure, ignored and sometimes persecuted sect to being the, in the reign of Constantine, the ruling and guiding religions of the Empire.

This is a story we can read in two ways. The first is that it speaks of the providential victory of the cross and the universal kingship of Christ. The second is that is leads us to a more cynical view of the history of the Church. Where religious ideas were co-opted to political power and gain and the symbols of that faith used to mask and airbrush these relationships of human power and influence.

This second view is taken by the academic and popular writer Professor Alice Roberts in her new book Domination. In it she argues that the triumph of Christianity in the late classical world owed more to the relationships of power and money that flowed through it, than the virtues of its theological identity and piety. What marks Robert’s text out from other similar interpretations of the rise of Christianity is that this cannot be laid at the foot of a ruthless and cynical Constantine. Rather these patterns of power and wealth were hard-wired into Christianity from its foundation. As she argues:

The Church…needed to do three things, which can be defined as: financial management, relationships with political power, and brand management (which is where theology comes in). All three were linked: there was a deep theological need to maintain control of the brand, but there was an economic and a political imperative as well.

Through the exploration of archaeological finds from the edge of the Empire – beginning in Wales and Britanny (with a brief visit to Carlisle) through to the Italian heartlands of power and influence – she argues that rather than be co-opted by powerful elites, the identity of the Christian faith was always yoked to the lure of power and money. Through the book Robert’s begins with the material evidence of Roman power and argues that these were steadily and systematically co-opted by the Church in its quest for power and influence. Some of these were big and bold: villas becoming Churches, bath houses becoming baptistries and so on. Others more subtle: the adoption of votive bells from classical religion in funerary rites or the co-option of the ancient cypher which used the Greek letters Chi and Ro as a uniquely Christian symbol and archtype denoting the person of Jesus as the Christ.

What is striking in Robert’s argument about the three-fold pattern of power, money, and brand-theology within the rise of Christianity is not what she says about the first two. You don’t need to be – as Robert’s is – the Vice President of Humanists UK to see the deep and problematic history that the Church has as with power and money. What is striking is the almost total lack of attention that is paid to the key symbol, key brand marker of Christianity, that symbol which lies at the heart of this day, the cross.

For all the focus on the branding of Christianity there is scant reference to or focus on the symbol of the cross. In one section, for instance, St Paul is critiqued, with his claims that the foolishness of God is greater than the wisdom of the world, as akin to the modern anti-intellectualism and rejection of experts prevalent on social media. What is passed over – even when quoting St Paul at length – is that in Paul's argument “God’s foolishness” is not akin to a lazy spat on Twitter between a keyboard warrior and an expert university professor. God’s foolishness is found in and through the sign and symbol and reality of the cross. As Paul tells the Church in Corinth:

[T]he message about the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power God.

As we heard St Paul say in our reading this morning, it is in the cross that we see the true reality of who God is for us in Jesus Christ. That in taking the form of a slave:

he humbled himself

and became obedient to the point of

    Death –

even death on a cross.

What is both shocking and amazing about this day is that at this moment where Christianity was brought into the heart of imperial power it was the cross that was elevated as the symbol of this union. If those wielding the levers of power wanted an easy life other symbols were available. Symbols such as the Chi-Ro or the Ichthus-Fish symbol, both of which Robert’s discusses at length. What remains a conundrum is why the cross, that "instrument of painful death” became, in words of today's Collect a sign and “the means of life and peace” at the heart of imperial power.

The lack of focus on the cross should not be a surprise. Not because this book lacks a level of moral seriousness or intellectual focus. The lack of focus on the cross should not be a surprise because the cross is hard. I can only speak for myself, but the cross is that still point, that lode-stone at the heart of our faith which we know is there, but which we would do anything to side-step and avoid.

The cross is hard.

It is a symbol, for all its ubiquity in the modern world, which we cannot simply breeze past or explain away as clever branding. It is a symbol of deep and terrifying moral seriousness. The cross is a symbol which – the more we look to it – demands that we face up to the most base and cruel intentions that political and financial power can create. 

It was the cross which was used to put down and humiliate the slave rebels led by Spartacus – with 6000 rebels crucified along the Appian Way. It was the cross which was used in the last decade by Isis fighters in Iraq to degrade and torture Yazidis and Christians caught in their wake. And it was the cross which was used by a panicking Roman governor to quell the murmurs of rebellion and religious upheaval when a carpenter’s son preached of the love and judgement of God’s coming kingdom.

Histories of the Church, like the life Christian faith, are nothing without the cross. 

Without the cross the story of the Church is one which – as Robert’s points out again and again – speaks of the fallibility and limitations of the people that made it up.  With the cross we see how, despite all the calls of power and money, the Church is constantly pulled away from these patterns of human sinfulness to live a life of sacrifice and love we encounter in its truest form in Jesus Christ.

Without the cross, the life of faith can be painting as merely branding and window dressing to mask the baser instincts of human endeavour. With the cross the life of faith becomes anchored to that truth of God’s love, a love which would go anywhere, even to the cruel and shameful death on a rubbish heap in an unfashionable corner of the Empire, to show the way to promise that lies beyond it.

Through our history and in our lives we get it wrong again and again. But it is the cross which God places in the middle of our reality and experience to draw us back again and again to the life and calling God sets before us in Jesus Christ. We can look for other reasons and we can seek different answers, but what discover is that without the cross all other explanations or reasons are missing that one true thing.

Pictures of God - a sermon for the eighth Sunday after Trinity

How do we, with our limited minds, come to know the true scale of God’s promise and love to us all?

How do we, as I heard one theologian put it, make sense of the “sheer God-ness of God”. Well theologians have often encouraged us to us philosophical ideas a schemes to make sense of this. Proofs or ways to know who God is whether an “ontological” proof from first principles or from the evidence of creation, and so on. Another approach, born from these theological debates comes in formulas within our worship. The Creed we will use later is full of them – “very God of very God”, “make of all things, seen and unseen”.

If we look for this answer in the bible we find a different approach. Here it is through pictures, images of who God is for us, that our limited minds are drawn into the limitless mystery of God’s love and God’s own self. 

Our readings today include two of these powerful images. The first comes in the book of the Genesis. Having heard God’s call, the aged Abram begins on his great journey, but is fearful for how and to whom the promise God has made to him will be fulfilled. Not having a child of his own, and not believing this will now be possible at his age, Abram asks what will be the reality of the very great reward God will give him. To this challenge God presents Abram with one of the most foundational and potent images for God’s promise which he said would be revealed through the promised descendants of Abram.

He brought him outside and said, ‘Look towards heaven and count the stars, if you are able to count them.’ Then he said to him, ‘So shall your descendants be.’

In our modern world of street lighting and light pollution some of the potency of this image can be lost on us. But for the generation on generation the vast scale of this promise would not have been lost in this picture. If you have every seen the full expanse of the stars on a clear truly dark night, you will have a sense of the immenseness and vastness of this promise. Stars and points of light to many for anyone to count with the naked eye.

It is an image which, like so many poetic images, doesn’t fall down when interrogated with a modern scientific gaze. Images from modern space telescopes do not undermine this picture, but if anything make it even richer. Even a small snapshot of, what one commentator has described as, a “galactic landscape” shows that the small points of light that we might view as stars with the naked eye are in fact whole galaxies. And that light we see in these images started travelling to us thirteen-billion years ago.

This is not a proof of the existence of God so much as a picture for us to reflect on as we seek to comprehend who God is for us. This image of the vast scope of God’s promise to humanity – which began life in these ancient texts – becomes even greater and larger and more impossibly infinite the more we reflect on it.

Against this vast image of the power of God’s promise we have a very different image in our gospel reading today. Coming within a longer series of teachings on the nature of true value, Jesus encourages us to see the preciousness and intimacy of God’s promise of the kingdom. Although Jesus does not set up this image in this way, it is like one of those hypothetical questions people pose to see what we truly value. Imagine, they might say, your home is burning down, what one object would you save. Some of us might imagine a photograph or album, others a book or precious and sentimental gift. Whatever the thing is, Jesus is asking us to imagine some small precious thing – like a purse holding a thing of incalculable value. But unlike all those things we might imagine saving in our little thought experiment – this is something that will never decay or be stolen. This unfailing treasure in heaven is carried on our heart because as Jesus says:

Where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.

Here against the vastness of the heavens we have the promise of God’s kingdom shown to us in the smallness of a tiny purse held close to our hearts.

So, what might we make of these two images?

Well, the first is that both seek to point us to a promise and reality which is beyond the limits of our comprehension. Beyond the finite limits of own experience to the infinite and limitless form of this promise. One image asks us to do this by gazing on something so vast that we can count it or hold it, an image which when we look at it even more closely the vaster and greater and more impossibly infinite it seems. The second asks us to take something familiar and trustworthy but to imagine – beyond our experience – that rust or corruption or decay will never take it away or harm it. Both images, on diametrically opposed scales, draw us beyond the limits of our experience to imagine the truly infinite nature of God’s promise to us.

And it is in the contrast of these images that we also find a deeper truth. That in their difference we are drawn a recognition not only of God’s promise, but also who God is for us in Jesus Christ. To paraphrase the popular worship song The Servant King, the one whose hands flung those stars into space, were also the hands that were nailed, in intimate suffering, to the wood of the cross. That the Word, that was in the beginning and all through whom all things came into being, is also the one who became flesh and dwelt among us first as a tiny and precious baby.

What these readings point us towards is that one true picture we should look to if we want to know who God truly is, and that picture is the person of Jesus we find and encounter in the pages of scripture, in the heart of our faith, and in infinite and intimate promise of the bread and wine we will share in this service. That the seemingly infinite and impossible promise of God’s kingdom is not pie in the sky, or an promise beyond hope. The promise of God’s kingdom comes to us in the person of Jesus Christ which reaches beyond all our understanding and yet is closer to us than the very breath on our lips.

"The dead shall be raised incorruptible" - a sermon for the Second Sunday of Easter

Stanley Spencer’s painting The Resurrection: Cookham is one of the great works of twentieth century Christian art. Painted in the 1920s and first exhibited in 1927 it was immediately recognised by one critic as “the most important picture painted by any English artist in the present century”. 

The painting itself is enormous, a little under three metres high by five metres wide and depicts the dead rising from their graves in the pastoral beauty of the church and churchyard at Cookham in Berkshire where Spencer lived for most of his life. It is an image which speaks very much of its time and so has become, for some contemporary critics, a problematic work of art. That understood it is an immensely moving image of that great promise of the general resurrection, that moment at the end of time when, as St Paul describes in one of the earliest written understandings of the resurrection:

the trumpet shall sound, and the dead shall be raised incorruptible 

In Spencer’s vision this future promise is depicted as an outworking of the beauty and peace of his home in Cookham, a place he called “a suburb of heaven”. So, in his painting those he knew and loved are seen climbing out of their graves dressed in contemporary clothes as they make their way down the path to a waiting river boat to carry them to the paradise of God’s new creation. This is not the vision of the resurrection of the great and the holy, but of the mundane and ordinary.

For us, today, this image is a helpful one as it helps us makes sense of one the most challenging aspects of the Easter promise. That in Jesus we find not the resurrection of an idea, nor the possibility of some sort of life on some kind of spiritual plain, but the resurrection of a man in flesh and blood which itself points us to that promise of the bodily resurrection of all the faithful. That moment when, in words from the book of Job used at the funeral of Pope Francis yesterday:

…after my skin has been thus destroyed,

    then in my flesh I shall see God,

[…]

    and my eyes shall behold, and not another.

At the heart of the Easter story is the promise of the bodily resurrection. Through all of the resurrection appearances in the Gospels there is the confident assurance that the Jesus who appeared to the Apostles on that first Easter Day and beyond was not some sort of spectral apparition or ghostly figure, but a real person in flesh and blood. In the Gospel story we heard last Sunday morning Jesus tells Mary Magdalene “do not hold on to me” as she sought to hug and touch Jesus in her shock and joy. Later, on the first Easter Day Jesus meets disciples on the road to Emmaus and reveals himself to them only when he has sat and eaten with them. And then today in our Gospel reading we hear Thomas’ doubt turned around as he is invited by Jesus to:

Put your finger here and see my hands. Reach out your hand and put it in my side. Do not doubt but believe.

We are told again and again about the bodily reality of Jesus’ resurrected self for two reasons. The first is that it provides veracity to these resurrection accounts. These were not hallucinations or visions, but the appearance of a real person, present to them in flesh and blood. The second is that in asserting not only the promise of the resurrection, but the bodily reality of that resurrection, the Christian Gospel is presenting something radically and transformatively new.

The idea of resurrection is not one which is unique to Christianity. Through the Hebrew Scriptures we hear echoes of this idea. Initially it appears as a metaphor alluding to the renewal of the people of Israel after a time of exile. These then develop into the assertions of something beyond death as the dead are carried down to a shadowy existence in Sheol. These ideas were not limited to Judaism with, for instance, Greek philosophy drawn from the ideas of Plato asserting life beyond our material bodies in the theory of the immortality of the soul.

However, in the Christian story – told both in the Gospels and in the writings of St Paul – the promise of life beyond death is held together with the promise of a full and corporeal and bodily resurrection for those who come to God through Jesus; the resurrection and the life. 

So, what can we draw from this great mystery?

The first is that it reminds us that the resurrection is not a rupture in God’s promise with his creation. Rather it teaches us that the resurrection is the consummation of that promise. That in his bodily resurrection Jesus does not leave behind the physical body which walked and ate and, with a healing touch, transformed those he came to save. Rather in his risen body he carries with him the marks of that ministry – in the holes in his hands and side he shows to Thomas and the other Apostles – that all that Jesus showed in his earthly life echoes across all time and space in the resurrection.

The second is that it points towards that same promise for each one of us. Through the Gospels we are given for-echoes of that future resurrection. In stories where Jesus raises people from the dead,  like the stories of Lazarus and Jairus' daughter, we are told that the new life Jesus promises us is not just the reviving of our old selves, but a reorientation of everything that we have been – warts and all – to what we will be in Christ.

If these first two understandings point us to a future hope, within these is a third understanding which draws us back to our present reality. And here we might return to Spencer’s image of that resurrection at Cookham. What is so powerful and moving in that image is the ordinariness of it. It is full of simple, ordinary acts and actions. People dusting off their clothes as mother might tidy her scruffy son before leaving the house. Some reclining and reading, others resting before the journey to come. All being made new, all being transformed in and through their ordinariness.

These details are a reminder of the deep hope we find in the promise of bodily resurrection. Not only that God will use – on the other side of time – that which he has given us on this, but also that we can use those ordinary things to bring into our own reality the promise of the new creation we seek in this Easter season.

In this week when we have given thanks to God for the life and witness of Pope Francis so often it has been the extraordinary power of his ordinary actions which have shone through. His desire to live in relative humility amid the opulence of the Vatican, his breaking of tradition and washing the feet of female prisoners as part of his Holy Week observance, his calling for peace in South Sudan not only by his words, but by kneeling and kissing the feet of the leaders of that war torn place.

These vivid examples are a reminder that it is through ordinary things – through bread and wine, through water, through our own bodies – that God can reveal the new life of the resurrection. A promise we can know not only on that great day when the trumpet will sound and the dead shall be raised, but here and now in our own lives and in the little suburbs of heaven which we call home.

 

"Hear us, good Lord" - learning from the wisdom of The Litany: a sermon for the second Sunday of Lent

The Second Sunday of Lent, Carlisle Cathedral: 
Genesis 15: 1-7, 17-18 & Luke 13: 31-end.

The Litany, which we heard sung in procession at the beginning of this service, is one of the defining liturgical expressions of the English Reformation. The form we heard this morning began life in 1544. Authored, at the request of Henry VIII, by Thomas Cranmer it was the first English language service to be authorised for use in the newly established Church of England. 

In this way is carries with it all the radicalism and compromise which characterises the English Reformation. It is radical in that it is in English rather than the Latin of the pre-Reformation Church. It is also radical for what it omits, not least the long lists of saints whose prayer would have been asked for in a pre-Reformation prayer of the same type. 

It is, however, also a compromise. Like much of Thomas Cranmer’s prayers and liturgies it relies on, what one historian has called, his “scissors and paste” approach to composition. In forming it Cranmer borrows from sources deep within the tradition of the whole church – most notably St John Chrysostom and the Sarum Rite – and then moulds them to the reformed patterns of theology which were inching their way into the newly independent Church of England. This compromise was also found not only in the content of The Litany, but also its form. It began life as a free-standing service to be sung in processions mirroring the popular open-air processions of the pre-Reformation Church. Then in a later iteration the procession was moved inside the church building. Then the procession was replaced with rubrics for the minister and choir to sing The Litany from the body of the church with the Minister leading it kneeling from a faldstool or litany desk.

What is of more interest to us though is the way in which The Litany expresses one of the more thorny and complex aspects of the English Reformation – the relationship between the life of faith to the world around us. This complexity is woven into form of The Litany. Its original commission from Henry VIII came not, as you might imagine, from the King’s desire to increase the piety of his people and his new Church. Rather the motivation came from the rather more earthly desire for the prayers and petitions of his people as he sought to renew his war with France.

We should though not be surprised to find these patterns of public prayer running across the distinctions we might see between the church and the world. The word litany is derived from a Greek word for prayer, but very quickly within the life of the early Church a litany became linked to a particular form and pattern of visibly, communal and public prayer. They would often be invoked and used at times of calamity. For instance, in the fifth century the Bishop of Vienne in the south of France called from the recitation of litanies on several days during a time of volcanic activity and earthquakes in the Auvergne. Later in the middle-ages litanies and processions we central to the marking and celebration of the cycle of the year with saints invoked to pray-away the spirits that might blight the land and harvest. These processional prayers were known also as "rogations" – a word which has found its way into our pattern of prayer for creation at Rogationtide.

Although we live in a society which can all too easily make a sharp distinction between the concerns of the life of faith the work of the world, the pattern of The Litany is a reminder that this is a very modern and, in many ways, artificial distinction. 

In both of our readings today we see the way in which the concerns of religious experience and worldly life have always been more intertwined than we might recognise today. In our first reading from Genesis, we hear of God’s first covenant with Abraham. This is not a private or inward-looking religious act, but the establishment of God’s concern for his people through Abraham and his descendants who will be more numerous than the stars of the heavens. This is as much a political as it is a religious act, and one which is sealed and inaugurated through ancient cultic ceremonies of animal sacrifice.

In our Gospel reading we find this interweaving of the religious and the worldly in even sharper relief. Pharisees, who we might see primarily as religious leaders, come to Jesus to tell him of the danger he faces from his political overlord King Herod. To this warning Jesus does not seek to make a sharp distinction between his religious teaching and various political concerns. Rather he argues that Herod’s political opposition could not hinder his ministry which was still to achieve its intended end and goal.

In both readings, as with the form and tradition of The Litany, these religious acts exist within and for the redemption of the political landscape within which they are placed. So what use is this to use today?

Well, someone would have had to be looking in a very different direction not to notice and recognise that we are living in a political landscape which is more challenging and troubling than it has been for a generation. Seeming certainties within the political order of the west are being tried to breaking point. Malign forces and greedy nations seem to be looking to assert the will and the cost of the lives of the innocent, and against hard won and deeply held norms and rules. And beyond this, and too often hidden from our headlines, there is the growing persecution of religious and other minorities as national and racial identities are used to cleanse difference from so many places.

In face of this uncertainty there is a power and eloquence to The Litany, and the tradition of prayer within which it stands, that we would be wise to listen and return to. I am not advocating the return to full blown processions of sung litanies through the streets of our towns and villages – although I’ve heard stranger ideas suggested in the life of the Church of England. Rather there is a wisdom inherent in the tradition of The Litany that we would be wise to listen to. The genius of The Litany is that, for a pattern of prayer born out of the capricious contingencies of the reign of Henry VIII, it speaks beyond them because at its heart are three key and recurring prayers which we can and should return to again and again.

The first is that so many of the trials and tribulations of this world come from our failure to recognise our, and humanities collective weakness and fallibility. That we are all, as The Litany says, in a form which is perhaps a little unfashionable but no less true for that, “miserable sinners”.

The second is that in our weakness our only true hope comes in through the life and death and resurrection of Jesus. The pattern and power of God’s love and grace through which we can call for our “good Lord" to "deliver us.”

And between these two points of recognition there is no place or form or pattern of our shared life through the whole history of the world and the Church, from its earliest moments to our current needs and challenges, into which we should not and cannot call again and again for God, in Jesus Christ, to “hear us good Lord”.

For all its strangeness and deep history we live in a world and time that needs the wisdom of The Litany more and more. Whether this is through public processions or regular recitation doesn’t really matter. What matters is that we find the words again to admit publicly and regularly our shared fallibility and faults. That we should place ourselves and our world into the redeeming power of God’s love in Jesus. And that through that we would know more deeply that it is only, and can only, be through the “Lamb of God that takest away the sins of the world” that we will ever truly be granted peace.

 

"I wonder as I wander" - a sermon for the Second Sunday after Epiphany

In 1933 an  American, John Jacob Niles, was at an outdoor meeting in the town of Murphy in the  Appalachian Mountains in North Carolina. At that meeting a girl stepped out to the edge of the little platform attached to a car and began to sing. 

Niles, writing many years later, said, ‘her clothes were unbelievable dirty and ragged, and she, too, was unwashed. Her ash-blond hair hung down in long skeins.... But, best of all... in her untutored way, she could sing. She smiled as she sang, smiled rather sadly, and sang this line.

I wonder as I wander out under the sky,

How Jesus the Savior did come for to die.

For poor ordinary people like you and like I...

I wonder as I wander out under the sky."

There is nothing about this Carol which places it especially in this Epiphany season. In a later verse, we have the Wiseman, but they appear with the Shepherds. There is, I guess, a focus on the star that led the wise men, rather than the Angelic chorus of the Shepherd’s. But on first hearing it seems like many of the beautiful carols we have heard sung through these last weeks. But this always feels like an Epiphany Carol to me.

Unlike many of the Carols of Christmas it has neither the bombast of Hark the Herald Angels, nor the sentiment of Away in a Manger. Rather it is reflective. It suits these weeks when we stay and ponder more deeply the Christmas story after the rest of the world has packed Christmas away and got back to normal life again. This reflective tone is complimented by the plaintive tune which, with the words, ensures that our reflections keep an eye on the whole of the story. Lifting our gaze from the stable door to the life and passion of Jesus our saviour who “did come for to die”. And these reflective themes come together in that deep virtue of this Epiphany season, one repeated through this carol, the virtue of wonder.

Epiphany is a season of Wonder. 

We hear it again and again as we sing of the “star of wonder, star of night” that frames this season. We hear of it again in one of the traditional themes of this season, that of “The Three Wonders”. This theme comes from an antiphon, a short anthem, sung either side of the Magnificat on the Feast of the Epiphany, which is then echoed in the opening section of our Eucharistic Prayer:

Three wonders mark this day we celebrate: today the star led the Magi to the manger; today water was changed into wine at the marriage feast; today Christ desired to be baptized by John in the river Jordan to bring us salvation, alleluia.

Over the last three weeks we have been marking these three wonders, reflecting on these three stories in turn – the visit of the Magi, the Baptism of Christ, and the Wedding at Cana – three great stories which mark what the early Church called in Greek the Epiphanous, what we would translate as the manifestation of Christ to the world. Wonders indeed.

But there is a danger with these wonders that we simply observe them, study them, look at them from afar. So, for instance, on this Sunday, we might look in turn at the story of the wedding feast at Cana and pull apart its constituent parts trying to find the meaning. We might muse that it happened on “on the third day”. We would reflect on the imagery of the six water jars and the abundance of wine and calculate its volume and ascertain some meaning in the spirit of numerology. We can examine and survey the story so much that we discover that from considering this wonder, this story has lost its wonder.

To reflect deeply on these wonders, we need to return to our Carol and remind ourselves on what it is to wonder. The Three Wonders of Epiphany are wonders as a noun. These are events which meet the dictionary definition of a wonder, as a thing unexpected, unfamiliar, or inexplicable. But Epiphany is also a time for us to spend time with wonder as a verb. 

This is what we find in our Carol. Here we glimpse what it means to be surprised again by this great story, and through this wonder desire to know more about God’s love for us all. That as we wonder as we wander we glimpse afresh the extraordinary truth of what God came to do for “poor ordinary people like you and like I.” In our lives of certainty and right and wrong wondering is not something we naturally do. It does not create clarity and it certainty does not encourage productive activity. But wondering is such an important part of faith.

Godly Play is the name of a form of creative Bible Story telling that I know some of you will be very well versed in. Often used with children, but equally effective with all ages, it uses beautiful objects to creatively tell Bible stories. It encourages those listening to the stories to learn about them not through their personal experience and response to the story that they have heard. These responses are encouraged, but not coerced, through a series of questions framed: I wonder…

I wonder what you like best about this story…I wonder which is the most important part…I wonder where you are in this story?

Through this a skilled Godly Play storyteller can help those who hear the story cut past those things we think we are supposed to do when we are learning; like gaining knowledge or learning the right answers. Rather they help foster a personal response and spiritual engagement with God’s word and God’s presence in our lives. In this Epiphany season, as we reflect on these great wonders, we need to remember again what it is to wonder.

We need to wonder, as those travelling wise men did, on the path that God’s quiet but insistent voice is calling us to follow. We need to wonder in the manifestation of this call in the waters of baptism and hear the voice from heaven that calls us all as the beloved in who the Father is well pleased. We need to wonder on the super-abundance of God’s love in Jesus. In a love which is not just enough, nor a bit generous, but ridiculously and laughably generous as at a wedding feast overflowing with the finest wine.

Epiphany is a time of wonder: of manifestations and miracles, of proclamations and Godly power, and for us to find this we must wonder. We must wonder again about the deep and transforming truth God shows us in the birth of his son Jesus Christ, and wonder again on that deep truth that 

…Jesus the Saviour did come for to die.

For poor ordinary people like you and like I...

"Love Him in the World of the Flesh": a sermon for the Feast of Christ the King

I sit in one of the dives

On Fifty-second Street

Uncertain and afraid

As the clever hopes expire

Of a low dishonest decade:

Those words begin WH Auden’s great poem “September 1, 1939”. Written in America by the exiled Auden they are a direct response to the news of the invasion of Poland by the German army on that date. An act which, as we all know, precipitated the beginning of the Second World War in Europe.

For a poem which is so rooted in its very specific time and place, it has had an extraordinary afterlife. Many young Americans reached for it in the weeks after the attacks of September 11th. Finding in it a sense of shock and loss at the sudden crumbling of a seemingly naive and comfortable consensus. One could imagine similarly idealistic young Americans looking to it again in the last few weeks as the re-election of Donald Trump means that his political life was not, as they hoped, a seeming aberration but a setting of a new, and for some, strange political landscape.

The poem also carries in it a reflection of human experience as our expectations of our world and life suddenly change. Returning to the original context of the poem Auden sees the fault of Europe's moral and political crisis in careless enlightenment ideals of his time. 

The enlightenment driven away,

The habit-forming pain,

Mismanagement and grief:

We must suffer them all again.

As things he thought he knew were coming dramatically to an end one can recognise in Auden’s words both an anger and resignation to the lot and life that lay ahead of him in these newly uncertain times.

The book of Daniel, which we heard read in our first reading today, could be seen to pre-echo some of the sense of human dislocation and uncertainty that colours Auden’s poem. On first look the book of Daniel tells of the prophetic ministry of Daniel, exiled to the court of Babylon, who through his ability to interpret dreams comes to be one of the leading players in the court of Kings Nebuchadnezzar and Belshazzar. 

For a short book it includes some of the most well-known biblical images which have found their way into our common language. It is, of course, Daniel who is thrown into the Lion’s den. It is also where King Belshazzar great feast is cut short by the sight of a disembodied hand and the “writing on the wall” and where he is weighed in the balance and found wanting.

We can find in the vivid stories of Daniel the same human experience of uncertainty and dislocation that we find in Auden’s poem. Although set during the time of the Babylonian exile in the sixth and fifth centuries BC, the text we have now was formed and brought together later, possibly in the second century before Christ where the experience of the people of Israel was dominated by the conquests of Alexander the Great the later Maccabean revolt and the looming threat of the Roman Empire.

Like Auden, like Daniel, we live in uncertain and unsettling times. Just in the last few months there have been momentous elections in America. We are coming to terms in our own world with large and significant decisions made by our new government which will affect many people’s live and homes – not least in the farming community. Within the life of the church the repeated failures in safeguarding have made many question what the true future of the church in our national life could and should be. This list could go on and on.

In the face of this we could all be tempted to be like Auden in his poem and reject those old certainties which he tags as the impossible hope of “universal love”. Instead, Auden says we must look to the small things we can hold onto – almost literally – in family and loved ones. As he says towards the end of his poem:

For the error bred in the bone

Of each woman and each man

Craves what it cannot have,

Not universal love

But to be loved alone.

Despite the deep popularity of this poem its focus on a limited hope troubled Auden as his life went on. Over the years he tried to edit and change this poem which, as one critic has said, offers “simple answers to difficult questions, which is not necessarily a good thing.”

And with that insight we might return to the book of Daniel. Faced with a world of uncertainty and dislocation Daniel’s response is not to turn in on a simple more limited hope. Instead, the hope he looks for draws from the largest and possible canvas. The reading we heard today comes from the second part of the book where, faced with the experience of dislocation and uncertainty, Daniel sees in dreams and visions the great apocalyptic landscape of God’s promise and hope for creation.

As I watched,

thrones were set in place,

   and an Ancient One took his throne;

his clothing was white as snow,

   and the hair of his head like pure wool;

his throne was fiery flames,

   and its wheels were burning fire.

A stream of fire issued

   and flowed out from his presence.

A thousand thousand served him,

   and ten thousand times ten thousand stood attending him.

On this Feast of Christ the King, standing as we do at the end of the great cycle of prayer and praise we have followed through this year, we are called to lift our eyes from the troubles and dislocations of our present time and place them in God’s time.

As we look to that promise and hope we find it coming to us again in the journey of Advent that we will begin next week. That deep promise that through all the changes and chances of this fleeting world the God of Daniel, the Ancient of Days, will come to be with us in a baby born amongst us and a man who will walk with us.

Moving away from this one poem this was, in truth, a reality that Auden himself knew. In 1941, possibly in the darkest days of the Second World War, Auden began work on his long poem For The Time Being which had the subtitle A Christmas Oratorio. In that great work Auden finds a hope which he could not see in 1939. It is a great hope that we begin again to look to. It is that great hope and promise of the incarnation.

As his oratorio ends, we hear him lift his eyes from the present and place his hope again the promise of that universal love. That promise which we should set our hearts to again at this turning of the year.

He is the Way. 

Follow Him through the Land of Unlikeness; 

You will see rare beasts, and have unique adventures. 

 

He is the Truth. 

Seek Him in the Kingdom of Anxiety; 

You will come to a great city that has expected your return for years. 

 

He is the Life. 

Love Him in the World of the Flesh; 

And at your marriage all its occasions shall dance for joy.

Amen

Chronos and Kairos: a sermon for All Saints'

Time and tide, they say, waits for no one. 

I have come to a time in my life where time, all of a sudden, seems to be a real and palpable thing. This last week I was visiting my parents in the house and village I grew up. Just in conversation with people I met there I realised that our family association with that place now stretches over half-a-century; that my memories of living there are now better counted in decades rather than years; and even my young children speak of the years they have been visiting there.

Time is, of course, something we all focus on more that we realise. Who here is still adjusting the time on clocks and forgotten watches after the clocks changed last week? Who of us, as the schools return tomorrow, will be focusing on the time needed to get organised an out of the door in the morning? Which of us is secretly counting down the shopping days till Christmas? We live lives and, in a world, where time, well at least one sense of time, dominates everything. An understanding of life and the world where value is measured in time and motion studies, where time is money and our lives are calibrated to the minute and even second.

But does it have to be this way?

Many of you will know that in the Bible, and particularly in the teaching of Jesus, time comes to us in two distinct senses. The first is chronos-time. This is the type of time I have been speaking about so far. This is clock-time. In the New Testament, when the Magi determined the time when the star in Bethlehem appeared they were speaking of chronos-time. When Jesus spoke with certainty of the time he has left with his disciples, he is speaking of a clock-time we would recognise.

There is a second, richer sense of time known as kairos-time. Unlike chronos-time this is now about the measuring and calibrating of time. Kairos-time is about the quality of the time we have. This is the time of the right season, the fullness of time. When, at the beginning of his ministry, Jesus declares:

The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near; repent, and believe in the good news.

Jesus is not saying that that is a promise or time to set our watches by, or mark in our diaries. He is saying that the kairos-time is fulfilled, that this is kingdom time.

On this All-Saints’ Sunday, and as we enter this season or remembering, we are called to be in kairos time. As we remember the saints today, give thanks for the faithful departed at our All Souls’ Service tomorrow, and remember those who have died in time of war next weekend, we are not setting them against the time-lines of our lives, rather we are being drawn into their time beyond time.

As I have heard it explained elsewhere, if our chronos-time is a like a string stretched along a table, then kairos-time “loops around, crosses, and intersects at unexpected junctures.” kairos-time is, as the writer Madeleine L’Engle has written “that time which breaks through chronos with a shock of joy”.

When Jesus went up the mountain and began to teach the crowd that sat at his feet this was the kingdom promise he was making in the great Beatitudes we have just heard in our gospel reading. In these timeless words Jesus was giving them a vision of that joy, that blessing, that will come to them, burst into the tick-tock of their lives.

Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness’ sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

As we use this richer sense of time to frame what the church has come to know, in these weeks between All Saints’ Day and Advent Sunday, as Kingdom Season, we can also use this wisdom, I think, to re-frame one of the most pressing debates of our time.

In the coming weeks Parliament will debate a bill to legalise assisted dying for the terminally ill. I am no expert in the details of this debate, but I am concerned by the way in which aspects of this debate can and are being framed. As Lord Falconer, one of the strongest advocates for a change in the law has said:

the last few weeks and the last few months [of someone’s life] are a period where there is plainly nothing but an imminent death – the person retreats more and more. And all that they’ve got to look forward to is more indignity, more pain, more struggle.

There is in this view a deep sense of compassion and care for those who are dying. But it is also a view which, for me, is measured through chronos-time. But as we have seen in our reading today, as many of us will know in our own lives, there is a richness to the time we are given beyond the hours and minutes we might live.

One of the great privileges of ordained ministry is being able to spend time with those who know that their lives are coming to a close. In many of those cases there is, naturally, a desire not to waste the chronos-time they have left. So, whilst they are able they will use the time well and to get things in order. But there is also a palpable sense of the richness and uniqueness of that time. That when the right and fitting end of life and palliative care is in place there is a sense of joy and blessing in the gift of that time. 

I remember a woman in her fifties in my last parish who died of motor-neurone disease. Through the sacrifice and care of family and friends she was able to receive first rate palliative care, and when I asked if she would want to choose the time of her own end, she said didn’t. All she wanted was to be able to open her eyes and see her family. She wouldn’t have used these words, but what she treasured was the gift of that kairos-time.

For me we can find in this debate, in sharp-relief, a challenge which exists in all our lives. That in the pressures of our modern world, in our lives dominated by the utilitarian cost benefit analysis our time, all our time, can so easily become yet another commodity for us weigh and balance and barter. 

But as we sit in this season, surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses; as we still ourselves from the busyness of our lives and pressures that rain in on us from every angle, we need more now than ever to treasure the time we have. To cherish that time where the poor, the hungry, the merciful, the persecuted are given the time to know that they are blessed in the sight of God. To understand in our hearts that time is not primarily thing of utility, but chiefly a gift of grace. To know that our time is not just precious, it is sacred.

Because it is by knowing this deep truth that we can see the rich blessings and true joys of the kingdom-time which all the saints now enjoy.