"All we can do is wait" - a sermon for Advent Sunday

Isaiah 2: 1-5; Matthew 24: 36-44.

We have, as a Church, entered Advent, the season of joyful hope, the time when we are called, in the words of that wonderful prayer of the season, to be found by the Lord watching and waiting.

Unsurprisingly for Advent Sunday our readings focus on this theme of waiting. No where more so than in our reading from Matthew’s Gospel. In this Jesus implores his followers to keep awake because you do not know when the Lord is coming.

On Advent Sunday we stand with the first hearers of Jesus’ teaching waiting expectantly for the coming of the Messiah. Our waiting will be short lived – just over four weeks – although that will feel agonisingly long for some of the younger in heart among us. However, for Jesus’ disciples, for the people of Israel, the wait for the coming of the Messiah, the saviour, had been a long long struggle, centuries old.

Commentators remind us that this theme would have been at the forefront of the first hearers of this Gospel. For the people of Israel the waiting had got all too much for them. After the long-held promise of the Messiah had not seemingly come to pass, they were beginning to take matters into their own hands. Threatening and eventually taking up arms against their Roman oppressors, to do the work they expected their Messiah, and so God, to do. But this human impatience only led to the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem as Jesus foretold.

This problem of impatience, of not wanting to wait, is not an historical phenomenon, but one which we all experience day by day. We like to hurry things along, to get on with things, and if needed to sort things out ourselves if things haven’t got started soon enough for us. Impatience, a reluctance to wait, is, you could say, hard-wired into all of us. What, after all, were the actions of Adam and Eve eating the fruit of the Tree of Life, but the ultimate human act of impatience? We might want to get on with things, to hurry things along, but God does not want us to do this. God wants us to watch and wait. 

So, as we fast-forward two thousand years we find that this human impatience, this reluctance to wait, is still there. If your email inbox is anything mine it has been full of insistent Black Friday deals for the past two week telling us to buy things now before all the good deals are gone. “Buy things now, not tomorrow, now, and even better buy them yesterday, for delivery now!” Even if it was found that 98% of “Black Friday deals” weren’t worth buying.

Or perhaps you remember the story of voter in Sheffield at a recent general election who was furious because the polling stations had closed before they could vote; however as they told their story it turned out that they had gone to polling station several times earlier in the day, but had left, because the queues were too long and they couldn’t be bothered to wait.

But God wants us to watch and wait, and the thing is, if we do, then amazing, unexpected, and glorious things can happen. 

For a long time we, as a family, have loved the South-Tyne Valley running from Alston to Haltwhistle. It was a decent day trip when I was a curate in Whitley Bay and on our doorstep when I was Vicar a little further east in the Tyne Valley. When this job became available an attraction of it was that we would still be close to a place we have come to think of as home.

Once when walking there on a day off, we walked along the riverside. As we walked I saw, in the corner of my eye, a flash of grey-blue and heard a splash and we realised that the Salmon were swimming and leaping their way up stream. This is one of those natural wonders we had never seen before, so we decided to watch and wait and see if another Salmon would leap out of the river. There is no way we could make the fish jump, and no way of knowing how long it would take to see this would happen again, if at all.

All we could do was wait.

And as we waited, not really knowing what would happen, rather than get bored, we started to notice more and more the vibrancy, and beauty of everything around us: in the colour of the late-autumn trees; the sound of the river flowing; the changing patterns of the clouds in the sky – things we would not have seen, not have noticed had we not chosen to watch and wait.

The problem for all of us is that when we are asked to wait we assume it is for something and we get impatient for it. But we fail to realise that there are glories all around us, hidden in plain sight, if only we had the time and patience to watch and wait. When we are forced to wait we accept that we can’t do anything to change the situation. We could not make the Salmon leap. All we could do was wait. 

But in that waiting, in releasing ourselves into God’s time and God’s plan, we become more able to see the glimpses and promises of God’s grace all around us. And as we learn to wait we discover these glimpses of grace come not only from our attentiveness to the world around us, but to our attentiveness to God’s presence with us in the midst of our hurried and busy lives.

Ann Lewin finds this insight, as I did, by a riverbank.

Prayer is like watching for the

Kingfisher. All you can do is

Be there where he is like to appear, and

Wait.

Often nothing much happens;

There is space, silence and

Expectancy.

No visible signs, only the

Knowledge that he’s been there

And may come again.

Seeing or not seeing cease to matter,

You have been prepared

But when you’ve almost stopped

Expecting it, a flash of brightness

Gives encouragement.

All we can do is wait.

So, we are all invited to take the chance of Advent, this season of joyful hope, to take time to stop and to wait. You might come this evening to our Advent Carole Service and watch and wait in words and music in the beauty of this ancient place. You might buy and sit with an Advent Candle each day and allow yourself to watch and wait as the candle burns down each day closer to the end. You might stop and read scripture each day or realise that we are never ever too busy to pray.  Or you might simply wander somewhere and see the changing glories of the countryside all around us.

If we find the patience to wait and watch and hope, as we found standing by that river-bank, you will encounter more flashes of wonder, more simple signs of God’s grace, than you could ever have imagined.

So, did we see the Salmon leap? 

Well all I can say is that it was worth the wait.

"Trust in the Lord" - a sermon for the second Sunday before Advent

Malachi 4: 1-2a; Luke 21: 5-19

See, the day is coming, burning like an oven, when all the arrogant and all evildoers will be stubble; the day that comes shall burn them up….so that it will leave them neither root nor branch.

….or so I thought as I was put on hold by the bank for the third time!

Whether in our day-to-day interactions, or on the global stage, or in our perceptions of the world around us, the strong and prophetic language of the prophet Malachi has a deep resonance for us. Scientific journals and the popular press are increasingly full of studies that seem to suggest that people’s fear, and so people’s frustration and anger, is increasing because of a perception that things are falling apart all around us.

This is not always as trivial as not being able to speak clearly and easily to someone at the bank – although we are all getting used to the Kafka-like processes that often involves. However, there is clear evidence of “catastrophe anxiety” or “doomsday fear” or even “apocalyptic dread” in our modern lives.

You only have to look at the news this last week to find examples and predictions of the imminent collapse of civilisation. For some the inconclusive outcomes of the American midterm elections are evidence of a nation stuck in political ideological gridlock which, for some, is leading inexorably towards public disturbance and civil war.  The urgency around the COP27 summit in Egypt is heightened by predictions of the environmental and climate break down. Every movement in the war in Ukraine is read and interpreted in light in the instability over the leadership and control of Russia’s nuclear arms.

As the prophet Malachi says:

See, the day is coming that shall burn them up….so that it will leave them neither root nor branch.

In one sense it is important that we are alive to and open to these threats and fears. The world certainly feels a more uncertain place than it did even a decade ago. But we also need to be able to take a broader view of these threats and fears. Certainly, they are magnified through the effects of a culture of polarised twenty-four hour news and social media. I know from my own experience during the pandemic lock-downs that I had to ration my exposure to the news – preferring the hourly updates on Radio 3 to the constant flow of information on other channels – to preserve some perspective and balance.

Equally outside of the lens of modern media and our contemporary experience we could argue that these threats – or those like them –were ever thus. Looking this last week at some of the books in the Cathedral collection with a colleague was reminder that the seventeenth-century intellectual world of Thomas Smith was suffused with the fears of the end of days and collapse of all things wrought by the ravages of the English Civil War. Equally, nearly a thousand years ago, the millennial fears of the end of days informed peoples interpretations of the Norman conquest of this country, and of the harrowing and taming of the north that that led to, of which this Cathedral’s story is part.

So, when we come to the texts that we read today, with their apocalyptic frame and scale, I always need to lift myself from my current anxieties and concerns and remind myself that it was ever thus. There is something, I think, deep in all of us which makes us tack to the response favoured by Chief Vitalstatistix of the Asterix books, and fear that inevitably the sky will fall on our heads.

The source of this fear is often an understandable and evolutionary fight-or-flight response to the world around us. But it is also magnified by our implicit understanding of our own humanity. We fear catastrophe because we know, deep down, that none of us are perfect. We like to imagine that if push came to shove we’d be magnanimous and generous, but fear that we would not. 

Perhaps that profound and inciteful Scottish thinker, imbued I’m sure with a deep and unbending Presbyterian upbringing, was right when Private Frazer said again and again: “we’re all doomed!”

Well that’s a cheerful place to get us to.

But there is hope – there is always hope.

We find that hope implicit in both our readings today. A hope made explicit to us in the book of Psalms and Psalm 42 in particular. In that wonderful Psalm, which are saying each day in our service of Morning Prayer. There we hear these words of assurance:

Why are you so full of heaviness, O my soul,

and why are you so disquieted within me?

O put your trust in God;

for I will yet give him thanks,

who is the help of my countenance, and my God.

Or as we hear again in the book of Proverbs:

Trust in the Lord with all your heart,

    and do not rely on your own insight.

In all your ways acknowledge him,

    and he will make straight your paths.

In both our readings today, we hear this message. That whatever might befall us, whatever the future has to hold, whatever fears we might carry with us – however justifiable or realistic – we need to hold onto one thing and one truth – “Trust in the Lord”.

Now the cynic and sceptic might rightfully say that this teaching is merely a panacea – the opiate of the peoples – to persuade us to look away from the injustice of the world and the failure of others as we put our hope in an unlikely and unknown future.

But those who say that have not known what it means to trust in the Lord. 

To trust in the Lord, to acknowledge him, is by implication to acknowledge our own failures and limitations. To trust in the Lord is to see our own imperfections as clearly and vividly as we see those imperfections in others – now what a difference that conversion would make in our political discourse! 

To trust in the Lord is to trust in the gifts that God has given us, including the wonder of creation and our gifts of ingenuity and innovation and self-control as we seek to live with our changing environment and climate with deeper care and understanding. 

To trust in the Lord is to trust that in a world of palpable evil and malice the light shines in the darkness and the darkness cannot and will not overcome it.

We live in a changing and challenging world. To place that in a broader frame and perspective is helpful but should not diminish the very real challenges we live with.  But what that broader frame reminds us of is that as we face the changes and chances of this fleeting world we do so knowing one unchanging truth: trust in the Lord, because in that trust is our hope.

Or as the Prophet Malachi puts it rather better than I can:

For you who revere my name the sun of righteousness shall rise, with healing in its wings

Living expectantly - a sermon for All Saints'

Daniel 7:1-3,15-18 & Luke 6:20-31

Before I was ordained I spent about a decade studying and working in universities. At the heart of this work was the PhD I undertook looking at the philosophy of an English seventeenth-century theologian called Ralph Cudworth.

Cudworth was born in 1617 and lived and worked his entire career in Cambridge University where he was Master of Christ’s College. His use of classical philosophy, and particularly Neoplatonic philosophy, has led him to be remembered as one of the leading members of a group known as the Cambridge Platonists.

My work on Cudworth looked at him as a philosopher on the cusp of modernity. Investigating his ideas of freewill and ethical responsibility which I argued – or at least I hope I argued – did something to inform the development of modern ideas of individual liberty and freedom. To do this work I spent very many long hours in the manuscripts room of the British Library straining my eyes to read Cudworth’s unpublished manuscripts on freewill. 

Not all of these manuscripts focused exclusively on these “modern” ideas. Some, to our modern eyes, seem strangely backward looking. In particular two impenetrable manuscripts entitled “A Commentary on the Seventy Weeks of Daniel”. 

These works go through line by line the prophecies of Daniel which we heard the beginning of in our Old Testament reading today. In these you get a very different image of Cudworth. Here we have not the forward-looking philosopher, but the Professor of Hebrew waiting expectantly as he combs the pages of this prophetic book to seek evidence of the second coming and end of all things.

These manuscripts paint a picture of Cudworth which, to our modern eyes, would seem to be at variance with the early enlightenment thinking on freedom and liberty that I was interested in. Here instead we have theologian caught in maelstrom of the Civil Wars which ripped this nation – and this Cathedral – apart. Here is a thinker focusing not on an imagined future of rights and democracy, but on a future of God’s providential action breaking in. The future promised to Daniel where:

the holy ones of the Most High shall receive the kingdom and possess the kingdom for ever—for ever and ever.

It is, in many ways, not a surprise that this apocalyptic aspect of Cudworth’s thought, and for that matter this dynamic in the writings of other “enlightened” thinkers of the seventeenth century – most notably Sir Isaac Newton – has fallen from view.

But there is something in this view which is worth us holding onto as we come to this All Saints’ Sunday and this season and period of remembrance and remembering which the Church has come to call Kingdom Season.

A few years ago, in the midst I lock-down I attended an online seminar led by an experience retired Bishop focusing on the future of the Church. Seminars like this can, if I am honest, be quite dispiriting affairs, where the participants are shown graphs of doom suggesting the decline of the church and of faith in the west is inevitable and irreversible. This seminar, however, stood out not simple because the Bishop leading it was engaging and encouraging. But also because of a perspective which he opened up to us which is too often missing from view. 

When asked by one of the participants what the declining church of the west can learn from the growing church of the global south, he gave an answer which made me sit up and listen. What we can learn from those churches, he said, was “expectancy”. An expectancy that God is at work in the world, that God will change the world, and that if we are open to this, if we are expectant of this, we can see this transformation and be part of it.

Thinking back to my days trawling through dusty manuscripts it strikes me that this sense of expectancy is all too often lost in our modern way of thinking. We cannot understand what fired the work of Cudworth and Newton, stripped of a sense of expectancy. It might have been framed in the grand and apocalyptic language of the books of Daniel and Revelation which will punctuate our worship for these coming weeks, language which can seem foreign to us, but which is full of expectancy.

As we come to this All Saints’ Sunday, and into this Kingdom Season, the encouragement is for all of us is to find again that sense of expectancy of God’s grace transforming the world around us.

It is a generalisation, but one I am happy to make nonetheless, that what marks the lives of all the saints we remember today was that they lived with an expectancy in the transforming power of God’s grace. In whatever way and in whatever form it took in their lives, the internal motor of their extraordinary lives came from this sense of expectancy. 

This theme of expectancy opens for us the “Beatitudes” of our Gospel reading. In this well-loved reading Luke – as in the more well know collection of Beatitudes we find in Matthew’s Gospel – we hear those “Blessings” that Jesus promises to those who follow and seek the path God as set before them. 

However, unlike Matthew’s Beatitudes, in Luke’s Gospel we get also the “Woes”. These woes warn against a life which is too complacent, too set in its ways, too comfortable with the idea that one might have made it. Woe to those, Jesus says, who have no expectation that life and God’s promise can and will be greater than anything the world around us – with all its wealth and rational order – has to give us.

The Blessings, Jesus reminds us, comes to those who live with expectancy that God’s promise can and will be better.

Rejoice on that day and leap for joy, for surely your reward is great in heaven; for that is what their ancestors did to the prophets.

How many of us, if we were truly honest, live in a world where we think we have it all sorted, all done, and can’t or don’t want to expect anything to be different. This might be driven by comfort or apathy or cynicism. What ties these different perspectives is a lack of expectancy. 

How many of us can truly say that we live our lives full of that sense and spirit of expectancy in the transforming power of God’s grace in creation? I know that as I trawl through my email inbox or prepare for my next meeting or when I look with anxiety at the news and my bank balance, expectancy is not  immediately present.

But on this All Saints’ Sunday it is a sense of expectancy which God calls us to find. Whether in the lives thinkers we thought we knew, or in the experience and vibrancy of the global Church, or in the example of the saints, or in the words Jesus speaks to us today, God calls us to  look with the eyes of the saints, and with expectant hearts, and search and seek and expect the transforming power of God’s love breaking into our world and into our lives.

In praise of small things - a sermon for the fourteenth Sunday after Trinity

We have heard a lot about growth, well at least the hope of growth recently.

The political and economic turmoil of the last week has been driven by our new Government’s single focus on what they believe to be policies that will stimulate growth within our economy. Whether these policies are the right or wrong answer to this is perhaps too soon to say. But what is clear is that economic growth is the single reason and rationale given for these new policies.

Similarly, we live within a Church which remains, in many ways, transfixed on the idea of growth. Years of declining numbers has meant that over the last decade there has been a radical refocusing of the resources of the Church on mission and growth. For instance, in the past money was redistributed across the Church of England from richer dioceses to support the poorer ones through a financial and demographic formula.  Whereas now half of these funds are awarded through a competitive tendering for mission and growth projects.

Now there is nothing intrinsically wrong with growth in these different forms. A growing economy, structured to benefit all backgrounds and contexts, can be one of the most important motors of social and economic wellbeing we can create. Similarly, it would be churlish to think that we would not want the church to grow both in faith and numbers. Who would not want more people to know more deeply of the love God reveals for all who follow him in Jesus Christ?

The problem with a focus on growth is not growth as such. Rather the problem comes with the moving seamlessly from a desire for growth to the false equivalency that as we seek growth bigger is always better.

A bigger economy, we are told, will be better. But what if that economy systemically excludes people in certain regions or certain socio-economic backgrounds? A bigger church is better, we are led to believe.  But what is the effect of this mantra on places and contexts where “bigger” is not simply possible?

That was certainly a feeling and pressure that I felt as a Vicar in small rural parishes in Northumberland.  Northumberland is the most sparsely populated county in England. There we worked and developed the life of the church where the reality of “small” was simply a given.

I remember taking a service in one Church in a very remote corner of the county and feeling disheartened that we were worshipping in single figures. And then I flicked back through the service register, which stretched back many decades, to see that congregations had always been in single figures. There in that place, in God’s plan, small was the reality.

Our Gospel reading begins with the Apostles, to use the modern jargon, asking Jesus for a strategy for growth:

Increase our faith!

they ask. However instead of offering the theological equivalent of economic shock-and-awe, or suggesting they develop a strategic vision for spiritual and numerical growth of his followers, or encouraging them to have big hopes and big dreams of a bigger future. Jesus instead asks them to do something completely different. Jesus asks them to focus on the small. And Jesus said: 

If you had faith the size of a mustard seed, you could say to this mulberry tree, “Be uprooted and planted in the sea”, and it would obey you.

Jesus’ response to the Apostle’s desire for growth, for an increase in their faith is not to seek the false equivalency that bigger is better. Jesus, as he so often does, asks us instead to focus on the small things.

When I was Vicar of my small and faithful rural parishes I would have to remind myself that, in a wider church context where all the focus seemed to be on large urban churches, Jesus’ advise to the Church was in fact counterintuitively simple. That at its heart the church is called to be “two or three” and “salt and light”. That, returning to today’s Gospel, if we want things to increase, we should look to the small things and see the growth and transformation that only they can bring.

As we move into a new chapter in the life of this Cathedral we need to remember this wisdom. We are a small Cathedral and that physical reality is not going to change. For some this is a limitation of this place. When I arrived an acquaintance with considerable experience of Cathedral’s, suggested – only half in jest – that we should really think about rebuilding the nave! “What a difference that would make” he jested.

But this smallness is a gift. Where we can find an intimacy in our worship within the grandeur of this place. A unique combination which is hard to find in many of our bigger and brasher Cathedral siblings. Similarly, through the summer we were able, through our Rest under the Stars installation, to find a small, simple, and creative way for us to draw new people into the unique gifts of this small place.

The desire for growth that we hear of in our political and church life is one we can all recognise and understand. Whether it is for our society, our church, or for our own faith we can all understand the apostles’ prayer for things to increase and grow. 

So, as we make this prayer for ourselves we need to avoid the temptation that this can only come from seeking the things that we are told are bigger and better. Instead, we need to look to the virtues of the small in our life, and in our church, and in ourselves. We need to nurture those small things, like mustard seed, and know what unexpected growth that will bring, if we only have the patience and faith to see the deep gifts that God reveals to us in the small things God gives us.

Knowing whose servant we are - a Sermon for the Fourteenth Sunday after Trinity

 Luke 16: 1-13

This last week has seen all of us shifting some of the certainties of our common language.

Many of us will have felt the jolt, and some of us the intense emotion, of singing the words “God’s save our gracious King” for the first time. Similarly in the solemnity of the accession of the King we have seen this new language used – surrounded by the echoes of the old familiar language of Queen and country. For instance, at the accession council last weekend the King sat on a throne still embroidered with his mother’s royal cipher. Similarly, an acquaintance of mine shared online the copy of the oath to the sovereign he took to become a new incumbent on the evening of the Queens’ death which his resourceful Archdeacon had hurriedly amended by hand to reflect this new reality and language.

As the Church established by law, the prayers and offices of the Church of England have come to reflect this change over this last week. I will admit to a few butterflies as I sang the responses for the first time since the Queen’s death last week, focusing intensely as I came to sing “O Lord save the King”. 

With these changes there is an opportunity not to be simply drawn into this new language and new reality, but through that reflect on the relationship between the Sovereign and the Church in defining our identity as the Church of England, and in that who God is calling us to be as the Church and followers of Jesus through this.

Over this last week I think I have seen this most clearly in the Collect for the King which comes towards the beginning of the Book of Common Prayer Communion Service. Here it is in full:

Almighty God, whose kingdom is everlasting, and power infinite: have mercy upon the whole Church; and so rule the heart of thy chosen servant Charles, our King and Governor, that he (knowing whose minister he is) may above all things seek thy honour and glory: and that we and all his subjects (duly considering whose authority he hath) may faithfully serve, honour and humbly obey him, in thee, and for thee, according to thy blessed word and ordinance; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who with thee and the Holy Ghost liveth and reigneth, ever one God, world without end.

This is a classic articulation of the reformed settlement which Thomas Cranmer’s Prayer Book sought to establish through the turbulent years of the sixteenth-century. The Collect, which survives pretty much in the same version from Cranmer’s original 1549 Prayer Book, hangs on two central claims of the English Reformation. 

The first is that the religious settlement of the nation was defined by the faith of the Sovereign – “our King and Governor” and no other. When we hear these words spoken we don’t always recognise this emphasis. If you know the Prayer Book you will know that one of Cranmer’s tropes is to put information of vital importance in brackets – to remind the reader and listener of their significance. 

In this Collect we find this trope used not once but twice.  The first reminds us of the sovereign’s service to God in all things –– “open brackets” remembering whose minister he is “close brackets”. The second, reminding us of our duty to the sovereign because of that authority that we “open brackets” duly considering whose authority he hath “close brackets” may faithfully serve, honour and humbly obey him.

The sceptic might argue that these linguistic tropes were merely a means of Cranmer delivering the theological veneer to the political settlement demanded by his Tudor political masters. But this misses the reality that Cranmer was writing in. In his world view the theological and the political were indistinguishable.

Even if our world view has changed from that of Cranmer’s, the theological underpinnings remain the same for us now as they did when this prayer was written. We find this in the second principle of the Reformation implicit in this prayer. That this political reality hangs itself on a deeper theological reality. That our meaning is drawn not from the intrinsic moral or personal value of the Sovereign, nor on their force of arms or political might, but from God’s grace alone.

If we strip away all the grandeur of this language this truth remains. That we are, at the base of all things, reliant on God’s grace in all things.

Today’s Gospel reminds us of this deep truth in our life of faith. This passage from Luke’s Gospel is, in one sense, a little bit of a hotch-potch. The first half, the Parable of the Dishonest Manager, which seems to suggest that in life, we might like to be cunning and calculating like the dishonest manager. 

This Parable is then contrasted with a series of “sayings” on faithfulness which seem to undermine this Parable, reminding us that, at the end of all things, as cannot serve two Masters. Read together they however provide ballast to Cranmer’s injunctions for the Sovereign and the underlying theological message to us all. You might live a life of political cunning and, through that, be seen by some to be a success. But in the final analysis, at the end of all things, what will we be judged on Jesus asks? Our success in life, or our service of others? On our devotion to our own ends, or our service to God in all things.

As we have reflected this last week on our late Queen’s remarkable life this truth laid out for us in Jesus’ teaching, and echoed in Cranmer’s prayer, has been played out again and again in one word that defined the life of our late Queen – service.

From the public promise she made as twenty-one-year-old Princess – that her whole life whether it be long of short would be dedicate to our service – through to her final public act in appointing our new Prime Minister two days before her death. The Queen lived in the spirit of these words. Serving the nation and commonwealth – duly considering whose authority she had – and doing so always in a life and calling knowing whose minister she was.

As we live through these extraordinary days marked by these shifts in our common language we can reflect and recommit ourselves to these principles and truths which have come to underpin the life of this nation and the Church of which we are part. Our new King has, more than one, committed himself to the life and pattern of service which marked his late mother’s life. 

As we prayer for her, and prepare for her funeral tomorrow, we can rightly thank God for this service. Built on the sure foundations of her faith, and on her knowledge of whose authority she had. And we can pray for our new King that he will know the support of God’s grace and through that, know whose minister he is. But this change is not limited to the constitutional structures of Church and State, nor to the personal faith and integrity of our sovereign. In these prayers and promises lies a universal truth that we hear in our Gospel, and which we can recommit ourselves again today.

That God calls us into lives built on the sure foundation of God’s grace alone. That whatever the temptations might be, a flourishing life does not come from playing the margins like the dishonest manager, but in serving our one true master, in whose service is perfect freedom. That each one of us would know whose minister we are, and so recommit our lives in service of him and his creation.

Interpreting the present time - a sermon for the Ninth Sunday after Trinity

Dreams and dreaming play an important role in scripture. In the Old Testament dreams, or more particularly the ability to interpret them, are central to the stories of Joseph and Daniel. In both these stories they unexpected protagonists – both aliens in a foreign court – prove their worth through their ability to interpret the dreams of the powerful. The interpretations allow the dreams themselves to be authentic vehicles of divine revelation, and through that lead to good favour falling on the foreign land. Through this God-given skill both Joseph and Daniel find themselves fame, fortune, and favour. As we move into the New Testament we find dreams also appear as a means of divine communication and revelation. In Matthew’s Gospel, for instance, it is through dreams that Joseph of Nazareth is told of the true reality of Mary’s unexpected pregnancy and then how Joseph and his young family, as well as the travelling Magi, flee the wrath of King Herod. With this context in mind it is perhaps hard to know what to make of the prophet Jeremiah’s all-out assault on the power of dreams in our Old Testament reading today.

I have heard what the prophets have said who prophesy lies in my name, saying, ‘I have dreamed, I have dreamed!’ How long? Will the hearts of the prophets ever turn back—those who prophesy lies, and who prophesy the deceit of their own heart?

In his characteristically vigorous style Jeremiah does not pull his punches. Those who claim to know the mind of God through the power of their dreams are no better than those turned from the one true God to the worship of idols and Baals. What Jeremiah attacks are not the dreams we find in the stories of Joseph and Daniel and the beginnings of Matthew’s Gospel. These dreams act as a model of divine revelation telling us something of the power of God’s message told through these extraordinary people and their extraordinary stories. By contrast the dreams Jeremiah attacks are the dreams of those who claim to have some deep access to a hidden truth, revealed to them and allowing them to see a unique future only known to them. These words might hold some power with some, Jeremiah says, but they are nothing to the deep engagement with God’s will and word found in true prophets. The true word is full of life and fruitfulness, like wheat, the other worthless like straw. We live at a point in time where the prediction of what the future might look like is of a pressing need to us all. All of us, of course, are keen to know what the coming weeks will hold. Those, for instance, about to leave for summer holiday will look for predictions about how the weather will be in the coming week and hope to plan accordingly. But as the cost of our food and fuel rises, and we hear of predictions of what the cost of living might be in three- or six-months’ time many of us, all of us, are beginning to think deeply about how we might afford these rising costs. Whether we will be able to heat our homes, or fill our shopping baskets. At a point like this we might hanker for a latter-day Joseph or Daniel who can read the runes and speak with confidence about how we might prepare ourselves for the coming storm. But sadly, those who we look to, or will look to, to navigate us through the coming challenges smack more of the dreamers Jeremiah cautions us against. As the mounting cost of living crisis grows, we are living through a period of political paralysis and inaction. From Downing Street, we are told that it is not for the present government to act while we wait for the formation of a new government in September. Against this the candidates to be Prime Minister sound like those dreaming prophets Jeremiah attacks. One claiming to have a “plan to deliver” against further energy cost rises, whilst not stating what that plan would be. The other cautioning confidently against the projections of recession simply because some projections have been wrong in the past. In the face of this heady combination of inactivity and dreaming the signs of the impending storm only grow stronger. This week, for instance, it has been predicted that more than half of British households, 54%, will be in fuel poverty by October and two-thirds, 66%, by January. Forecasts of the economy like the weather can be wrong, but all the graphs are pointing in the same direction. Writing this week from his experience of when we faced a similar economic storm, Gordon Brown – who was Prime Minister through the financial crisis of 2008 – has counselled for action now rather than dreams of tomorrow. He writes:

There were two great lessons I learned right at the start of the last great economic crisis in 2008: never to be behind the curve but be ahead of events; and to get to the root of the problem.

In criticism pointed as much to the Leader of the Opposition as well as members of the current Government, he argues that:

Time and tide wait for no one. Neither do crises. They don’t take holidays, and don’t politely hang fire

Action, he argues, is needed now. This is not an easy fix, like the crisis he helped the world navigate through in 2008 this is not something one person or government can fix it. Rather, like in 2008, coordinated international cooperation is needed to avert this oncoming storm where the most vulnerable and poorest in our society will pay the highest price both economically and personally. His wisdom and experience remind us that whatever we think the future might hold, whatever dreams our political leaders might dream, none of that can replace the need to act now. To use Jeremiah’s image, it is better to seek the fruitfulness of the wheat now, than find us with straw later. In our Gospel reading Jesus with prophetic power of the need to be ready now for the oncoming reckoning. Now Jesus, of course, wasn’t speaking about fuel bills and the cost of living in 2022. But like Jeremiah, he reminds us that all the dreaming of dreams and predictions of the future are worthless if we do not see the challenges we are face with here and now. Our call as followers of Jesus is to be ready to act now to the sake of the poorest and most marginalised in our society, to be focused now on the needs of the most vulnerable, to be present now to the oncoming storm.

And Jesus said: ‘When you see a cloud rising in the west, you immediately say, “It is going to rain”; and so it happens. And when you see the south wind blowing, you say, “There will be scorching heat”; and it happens. You hypocrites! You know how to interpret the appearance of earth and sky, but why do you not know how to interpret the present time?’

"Feed my sheep" - a sermon for the third Sunday of Easter

John 21: 1-19

Food and nourishment are central to our Gospel reading today. 

First Jesus reveals himself to his disciples by preparing and sharing with them a simple breakfast he had cooked around a charcoal fire. Second, later in the passage, as Jesus commissions Simon Peter to feed and tend his lambs and his sheep. Two contrasting but linked images of food and nourishment.

On one hand we should not be surprised to find these images and stories of food in this passage from John’s Gospel. As this Gospel draws to a close with this chapter, these images remind of the number of times in which Jesus practically uses food and water to share his message, and then uses the language and imagery of nourishment to communicate the truth he shares with us. So what is happening here?

Well one reading could be that these images and uses of nourishment are used to communicate something of the abundance and grandeur of God’s love for us in Jesus. For instance in the first of Jesus’ signs – the miracle at the wedding at Cana – it is not just the transformation of the water into wine we are asked to notice, but the sheer abundance of this transformation. 

Another reading is that the language of food and nourishment points us to the deeper spiritual nourishment we receive in Jesus, that nourishment we will receive this altar today. As many commentators have noted, John’s Gospel is the only Gospel which does not include an account of Jesus sharing the bread and wine at the last supper. But that is not to say that the image of the Eucharist does not suffuse John’s Gospel. All through the John’s Gospel Jesus speaks of himself as the “bread of life” and the “water of life” – that in him we literally find the nourishment we need to find eternal life.

There is though another interpretation of this language of food and nourishment which I would like to explore this morning. That when Jesus uses and speaks of food, he is asking us to attend very deeply not to just a sign or a metaphor, but to the thing in front of us, to the food and nourishment we need, we all need, to thrive and flourish in our lives. And to the spiritual dimension to this practical need.

There is a pressing need to us to explore this theme at this time. We are, whether we choose to notice it or not, standing of the edge of a food crisis not simply within this country, but across the world. The crisis in Ukraine has merely sought to exacerbate a crisis which our farming communities have been facing for some time, that the underlying costs of food production have in some cases doubled or tripled in recent times.

Added to this we have become accustomed to cheap food. This might seem a strange claim to make as we all face a cost-of-living crisis. But in real terms our food costs are about one third of the same costs in the 1950s. 

This revolution in cheap food – supported by changes in farming methods and the increased use of scientifically developed fertilisers and crops – has not come without a cost. Increasingly we are being made aware of the ecological cost of this more intensive use of our land. 

These three factors – the immediate challenge to farming, the downward pressure on food producers for cheap food, and the ecological cost of these practices – are coming together into a crisis which will affect us all.

One person who has thought deeply about this is the Cumbrian farmer and author James Rebanks. In his recent book English Pastoral – an inheritance he recounts his own journey in farming, from his earlier enthusiasm for the supposed benefits of efficiency in farming to a realisation of the ecological – and one might even say spiritual – damage this was causing.

The cause of this, he argues, is deeply woven into the assumptions of modern society. As the modern world has developed over the last few centuries we have become dislocated from the world around us. But this comes at a cost, as he says at one point bluntly:

We live on earth; we cannot float above it like angels or separate ourselves from it entirely. 

It is common to think that a retreat to the rural – like television programmes which encourage us to “escape to the country” – is somehow an escape from the realities of the modern world. In fact, the opposite is true. Everything we do has an effect on the rural landscapes we treasure – how we shop, how we eat, how we vote. All of us have a part to play in this. 

For Rebanks this revelation has led to a fundamental transformation of the form and practices of his Lake District farm: allowing the return or crop rotation; the use of different grazing and breeds of sheep and cattle for this grazing; the reestablishment of natural watercourses; the planting of trees. And the transformation has been dramatic, with the return to a biodiversity in flora and fauna, otters in the streams, and a rejuvenation to the soil of the land of his farm, degraded by years of supposedly “efficient” farming which no longer need the chemicals and pesticides that add such costs to our farming economy.

Although he does not use this language, this has a spiritual dimension to it as well. In one part of the book describing the effect of the life of his farm on a boy visiting with his school from a distant town. Through the day the troubled, silent and timid boy is gently brought to life by his encounter with the life and diversity of the farm.  Although his book titles this vision a utopia, the reality Rebanks says is a little more realistic. As he says:

One of the best ways to create a better rural landscape is to mobilise the farmers, and other country people, working with what is left of their old culture of stewardship, and tapping into their love and pride in their land. We can build a new English Pastoral: not a utopia, but somewhere decent for us all.

This is something we can all be part of. As he says later in his book, famers:

have to rely on the shopping and voting choices of the rest of us to support and protect nature friendly, sustainable agriculture.

How can we do this – given the challenges all of us face in the cost of living and the pressures of everyday living. As James Rebanks’ says at one point: “who is rich enough to be that holy?”.

Well perhaps one place for us to start is with the image we have of Jesus in our Gospel today. Here the food he shares with us is not simply metaphor for our spiritual life. The food which nourishes us, and the practical everyday choices we make about that food, should be part of our spiritual life and wellbeing.

As we think about the food, we eat we might consider the value, the cost, and flavour of the food we buy. But do we think about how the food we buy will nourish us deeply, not simply in ourselves, but in how the production of that food will nourish the creation of which that food is the chief product, a creation which of which we are part. 

These are choices with a spiritual as well as practical dimension. This can be as simple moving – if you can – to a local fruit and veg box scheme and not rely on what Tesco has flown in from Spain or North Africa. It might mean eating less meat, but what meat we eat coming from local sources and breeds. It might mean cultivating some land we might have – in a garden or allotment – to grow our own produce.

This is not easy, and it will not be quick. As I was writing this sermon and reflecting on the choices I have made this last week I can say that I have singularly failed on all of the suggestions that I have just set out. 

But this is something we must do. As James Rebanks concludes in his book:

The old social contract between farmers and society is stretched to breaking point. We need a new deal…that brings farming and ecology together…Some of the solutions are small and individual…other require big political and structural changes…that see…[the]… land and what happens on it as being at the heart of building a more just and decent country.

As we hear today those words of Jesus to feed his lambs and sheep, we must hear this not only as a spiritual call, but as a spiritual call to practical action to nurture, nourish and transform God’s creation for all.

That through this spiritual and practical transformation we might recognise the food we eat in the way Jesus used food to feed his disciples. Not simply as an image for the life-transforming power of God’s love he brings, but the real and tangible food he shared with them in that beachside breakfast to strengthen them to begin the work of building the new creation he brings.

"Holiness in the common" - addresses for the great days of Holy Week and Easter, Carlisle Cathedral 2022

Address for Maundy Thursday, Carlisle Cathedral, Thursday 14 April 2022.

Exodus 12:1-4; 1 Corinthians 11: 23-26; John 13: 1-17, 31b-35.

Tonight we begin to walk the great journey that takes us to the foot of the cross and beyond. As we walk that journey, we can notice many things. The power of the story or the variety of the worship. But as we begin this journey, I would like to suggest we look to something else, the symbols of this journey, and more particularly to the simplicity of those symbols.

Tonight, as we remember the Last Supper and the service which Jesus mandates at the heart of that, we are guided by the simple signs of bread and wine, water and a towel. Tomorrow we shall be confronted by wood and nails. Then as we wait through the quiet hours that follow, we sit with silence and the stone of the tomb as we look to the promise that erupts into the light and wonder of the Easter garden.

I highlight these symbols because it is in the simple, unvarnished normality of these things which God in Jesus tells the transforming story of God’s love. We might be telling this in the great grandeur of this ancient Cathedral, in the beauty of our vestments, in the glory of our music. But at its heart will be simple things, things I would wager we could all find in our own homes – bread and wine; water and a towel; wood and nails; silence and stone – which will weave for us this story of God’s victory and God’s love.

The Welsh Priest-Poet RS Thomas wove some of the most lyrical poetry of the twentieth century from the simple things and experiences of the communities of rural Wales in which he served. In the lives of farmers, the call of birds, the crash of waves, and the silence of a Church he found in these simple things the notes of God’s love. What one commentator has called “the holiness in the common”.

In one of his poems, The Moor, Thomas finds in the quiet beauty of a solitary walk the simple transforming power of God’s presence. It begins:

It was like a church to me.

I entered it on soft foot,

Breath held like a cap in the hand.

It was quiet.

What God was there made himself felt,

Not listened to, in clean colours

That brought a moistening of the eye,

In movement of the wind over grass.

In the ordinary simplicity of that moorland walk, Thomas encounters the truth of God’s presence not in soaring words or grand pomp, but like the God present to Jesus’ disciples at the Last Supper, present to us in this worship, in the most simple and humble of actions.

And during supper Jesus, knowing that the Father had given all things into his hands, and that he had come from God and was going to God, got up from the table, took off his outer robe, and tied a towel around himself. Then he poured water into a basin and began to wash the disciples’ feet and to wipe them with the towel that was tied around him.

Here in this silent act, in this humility, in the water and the towel, is a God that, as RS Thomas says, “made himself felt, not listened to”.

As we enter these great days, and accompany Jesus to the foot of the cross, we might ask ourselves to attend to the God who makes himself felt, not listened to. Who opens to his disciples the truth of who he truly is, and the world he is truly calling us to, not simply in what is said, but what is felt.

As each one of us looks to the journey that lies ahead of us, we might ask how we can share and communicate this beauty not just in what we say, but in the God people encounter in us and how they come to feel and know that truth themselves.

It is striking to notice that Jesus washes the disciples feet without comment or explanation. Only explaining himself when challenged by, what we can only imagine to be, the shock and surprise of Peter and the other disciples.

The theologian David Ford, reflecting on the silent simplicity of Jesus washing his disciples’ feet, has said:

If the hands that wash the disciples’ feet (and are later nailed to the cross) are the hands into which “all things” have been committed by God, then this foot washing reveals who Jesus is, who God is, and what their love is like.

It is a reminder to each one of us that our faith only makes sense if at its heart lies of life a great love to the needs of others which Jesus calls us to this night. As we enter these great days we will reflect on words, listen to music, and rest in the silence of this great building. But alongside that Jesus draws us to himself, to his actions and person, to the God he shows us to in what is not always said but always felt as we come to know again what God’s love in Jesus is truly like.

As we look through these coming days for the holiness in the common, the meaning in the simplicity, the truth in the silent actions of Jesus, I pray that we would all know and feel in our hearts the true abundance of God’s love breaking in.

As RS Thomas concludes:

There were no prayers said. But stillness

Of the heart’s passions — that was praise

Enough; and the mind’s cession

Of its kingdom. I walked on,

Simple and poor, while the air crumbled

And broke on me generously as bread.

Address for Good Friday, Carlisle Cathedral, Friday 15 April 2022.

Psalm 22; Isaiah 52:13 - 53:end; Hebrews 14: 14-16, 5:7-9; John 18:1-19:end.

From the Gospel of John:

They took Jesus; and carrying the cross by himself, he went out to what is called The Place of the Skull, which in Hebrew is called Golgotha. 

There they crucified him.

There is a terrifying matter-of-factness to these words. Plain and unvarnished they speak of the cruelty of humanity, of a world of nails and wood and stone, of the sacrifice of one man, of the seeming absence of God. Where, we might ask, was God at this place of the skull?

In other accounts of the crucifixion Jesus is mocked both by the crowd, and one of the thieves he is crucified with, because God will not intervene, God will not swoop down and save him. Suddenly and terrifyingly the God Jesus drew people to seems to be absent. A terrifying truth which Jesus affirms from the cross as he prays in in Aramaic from Psalm 22:

Eli, Eli, lema sabachthani?” … “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?

We live in a world which so often stands in the place between the Cross and the Tomb, between Good Friday and Holy Saturday, between nails and wood and stone, a world where God can seem suddenly and terrifyingly absent.

For some, like the crowds who came to gawp at yet another crucifixion this becomes an excuse for goading and cruelty:  “You thought you had it fixed, you thought the sky-fairies would save you. Well, they don’t, they can’t. You were wrong.”

For some the absence of God is more palpable in the cruelty of the world. As we hear the horrifying accounts of the atrocities that have been perpetrated in Ukraine – of mass killings, of sexual violence, of the chilling specifications for how to construct and conceal a mass grave – we are right to ask, not only where God has been in all of this, but to pray with Jesus – “why have you forsaken them”?

One who reflected constantly on the seeming absence of God was the Welsh Priest-Poet RS Thomas. In his often-austere words he reflects on the experience of seeking a God who is too often absent from his experience. Sometimes this is in the context of a world stripped of its wonder and mystery by the cold and clinical advances of science, sometimes merely in unvarnished reality of his own prayer life.

His poem The Absence reflects on both of these realities

It is this great absence

that is like a presence, that compels

me to address it without hope

of a reply. It is a room I enter

from which someone has just

gone, the vestibule for the arrival

of one who has not yet come.

I modernise the anachronism

of my language, but he is no more here

than before. Genes and molecules

have no more power to call

him up than the incense of the Hebrews

at their altars. My equations fail

as my words do.

The cold truth that Thomas draws us to is the reality that we find as we stand at the foot of the cross. That in those places where we feel God to be absent no words or equations or human reasoning can overcome the unvarnished reality of Jesus’ prayer on the cross:

My God, my God, why have you forsaken me.

What then are we left with?

One thing is to look again at the simple unvarnished things of this day: at the hard reality of the nails and the matter-of-factness of the wood. Simple cold realities of the cruelty of this day. And alongside this we find the simple reality of this absence which haunts us today. What holiness might we find in these common things, in the simple reality of the wood and the nails, and the seeming absence which will melt into the silent stone of the tomb?

As we read on in RS Thomas’ poem we can glimpse the path ahead.

What resources have I

Thomas asks

other than the emptiness without him of my whole

being, a vacuum he may not abhor?

Perhaps in the seeming absence of this day God is calling us to look more closely, to search more deeply, and see in the unvarnished ordinariness of the nails and the wood and the stone a deeper reality God is showing us today.

Through Lent we have been offering a weekly online reflection on the theme of Journey and Rest through the wilderness. Visiting speakers have examined for us different themes, from the influence of the saints of these northern lands to the challenge of climate grief. The last of these reflections is a startlingly honest and unvarnished reflection on the experience of long-Covid. In the video – which you can still find on our social media channels and which I encourage you to watch – I am in conversation with Amy Ward, a lay community worker in County Durham. In the video Amy talks of her experience of long-Covid as an experience of personal and spiritual abandonment. 

Earlier in her life Amy had suffered from chronic-fatigue syndrome and had been bed-bound for some years. In that time, she said she would rationalise away her experience and find God in the small kindnesses of others she found in that time. But in the experience of long-Covid – amplified by the enforced separation and isolation of the pandemic – she could not fall back on that well-meaning rationalisation. For her, in her own place of the skull, God was seemingly absent. 

But on Good Friday she found that even if in her desolation it seemed that God was absent, Jesus was not. That in those places where there seemed – in RS Thomas’ words – “an absence” we find instead the one who has stood in that desolation and stands with us and the world in those terrifying places of unvarnished absence.

As we stand in that place between the wood and nails of the cross and the cold stone of the tomb we come to know that even if it feels that God is absent, God in Jesus is not. That even in all the places of the skull that the world and humanity can create we know that God in Jesus is there with is standing silently in those places of desolation. A God who is felt, even as the world around has stopped listening.

In one of his other great poem, The Coming, Thomas draws us to this truth. Describing the world we stand in today between the foot of the cross and cold tomb Thomas tells us of a world where: 

                    On a bare

Hill a bare tree saddened

The sky.  many People

Held out their thin arms

To it, as though waiting

For a vanished April

To return to its crossed

Boughs.  The son watched

Them.  Let me go there, he said.

What we discover in this place of the skull – in all the places of the skull we discover in the world – is that even where it feels that God is absent, in those places of where we seem to only find wood and nails and stone we do not find a vacuum, we find the cross.

Address for Easter Day, Carlisle Cathedral, Sunday 17 April 2022.

Psalm 105; Isaiah 43: 1-21; John 20: 19-23.

Each year it feels like there is a realisation that Easter is upon us is when I read a ponderous and po-faced article in a broadsheet which tries to argue that Easter is – in truth – not a Christian festival, but some kind of imperial appropriation of centuries of springtime fertility and new life ceremonies.

These articles usually say something like: “Actually, I think you will find that stories of a resurrected God are not unique to Christianity. Ancient near-East religions are full of stories of the rising to heaven of a God like figure”. And then go on: “And the imagery of eggs and rabbits are taken from the pagan Germanic rites of the goddess 'Eostre' – oh and for the record it is not an Easter bunny, it's a hare!”

Well perhaps.

After all, in the time of Jesus the Roman cult of the Emperor spoke of him as “the Son of God” who, on his death, was believed to be raised to the heavens to the status of a God. And other religious traditions have marked the turning of the year in the northern hemisphere and celebrated the return of life and light in the budding of the spring. So, what makes our story different, what makes our hope this day unique?

The difference comes not simply in the hope of the Easter garden and the empty tomb. The difference comes because this emerges suddenly and unexpectedly from the shadow of the cross.

We are so used to the stories and imagery of the cross as a sign of hope and victory that we can forget the shame and suffering that it represented. In Roman culture the cross was not simply a means of execution, it was a sign of humiliation and utter cruelty. In the Roman world crucifixion was saved for slaves who had killed their owners, for the down-trodden who had tried to overcome their masters. It was used not only to kill the guilty, but it was also used to disgrace and degrade them in full sight of all. It was, as far as the Romans were concerned, the supreme form of political pest control.

The truth of the story we tell today is not simply of the new life which God brings into the world, or of the life beyond death God speaks of. Both can be found in books of religious anthropology. The story we tell today is of a God who shows us to this new life and hope from the brokenness of the world around us. 

Over these great days I have suggested that we might attend not simply to the story of Holy Week and Easter, but to the simple symbols and things that God uses to weave this story together: bread and wine; water and a towel; nails and wood; stone and silence. The power of these symbols comes not simply in the story that they weave for us. The power of these symbols comes in their plain, unvarnished ordinariness. That God – the creator of the heavens and the earth – chooses to uses these things, these plain ordinary things, to weave this story and build the new creation they draw us to.

As we encounter Jesus’ resurrection appearances in the Gospels in these coming days and weeks we might like to notice that that Jesus again and again uses ordinary things to reveal his resurrected self to his doubting disciples. A fire to cook breakfast for his weary friends; bread broken at a wayside inn; hands scared by the nails that held them to the wood of the cross. Ordinary things which weave for us the almost unbelievable truth of this extraordinary story that he is the Christ, the one promised of God, the one who has risen from the dead.

RS Thomas, who poems have coloured this story we have heard through these great days, brings this theme of the extraordinary truth of the resurrection revealed in the broken and the ordinary in his poem, Resurrection.

Easter. The grave clothes of winter

are still here, but the sepulchre

is empty. A messenger

from the tomb tells us

how a stone has been rolled

from the mind, and a tree lightens

the darkness with its blossom.

There are travellers upon the road

who have heard music blown

from a bare bough, and a child

tells us how the accident

of last year, a machine stranded

beside the way for lack

of petrol, is crowned with flowers.

Here these deep themes of new-life and rebirth are woven for us into the broken things of the world. What RS Thomas reminds us is that God in Jesus reveals this new life not in mythic tales of imperial greatness, or the weathered patterns of the seasons of the year. He reminds us that in the resurrection of Jesus Christ we find holiness in the common, new life revealed to us most truly and most deeply through the ordinary and the broken. 

Today, on this great day, as we proclaim again the resurrection of Jesus Christ we are not simply retelling ancient tales of the seasons or of the grandeur of emperors. In the resurrection of Jesus Christ God tells us – ordinary fallible broken people that we are – that the new world and new creation will be built from these ordinary things like bread and wine, and water. 

That on this day God begins to tell again that great story that began in that Easter Garden, a story that he uses the ordinary things of this world to tell. In the glory of this day we discover God continuing to weave the tapestry of this new creation through the plain ordinary and unvarnished things of the world. Even through ordinary people like me and like you.