The strangeness of the Resurrection - a sermon for the Third Sunday of Easter

Luke 24: 13-35

Avengers: Endgame brings to an end the third phase of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. The film focuses on the efforts of some of the Avengers – namely The Hulk, Captain America, Thor, Ironman, Blackwidow, Antman and Hawkeye – to defeat their alien foe Thanos. The film picks up after the end of Avengers: Infinity War where Thanos had gathered all the infinity stones and used their power to remove, with a click of his thumb, half of all the living creatures in the Universe, including some of the best loved of the Avengers.

However, using a time machine which allows the remaining Avengers to shrink to a miniscule form to travel through the quantum realm they are able to collect the infinity stones before Thanos was able to find them in that time line and portion of the multiverse. Once collected they are able to recreate Thanos’ gauntlet of power and use the infinity stones to resurrect those who had been previously killed by Thanos. Then, in the final battle, Ironman sacrifices himself to use the infinity stone to finally destroy Thanos and his armies of darkness.

Simple really!

You don’t need to know anything about the Avengers, or the Marvel Cinematic Universe to get a sense of the deep story of love and sacrifice and resurrection that so many of these films speak of. So many of the stories in our popular imagination – from Harry Potter to The Lord of the Rings, The Chronicles of Narnia to the heroes of superhero stories – draw on the themes of sacrifice and resurrection which imbue our faith and the stories of this season. All of these in their different ways – although none with quite the brashness of Avengers: Endgame – reflect on the themes of death and rebirth, in our language of cross and resurrection, in simple and bold ways we can't fail to miss.

However, as we come to the source texts – the gospel accounts of the Resurrection – we find that the stories are so much stranger, so much odder and beguiling, than these big budget derivations. As we come to these weeks after Easter, and we hear the stories of the Resurrection appearances one by one I am always struck by just how strange they are. Given the magnitude of the Resurrection, the world changing and reality altering power of this moment, you would imagine that it would be told differently. Perhaps not with the brashness of Avengers: Endgame, but still with grand gestures or displays of power.

But as we learn of the Resurrection there is no stirring soundtrack and fanfare of off-stage trumpets. Rather we have the sight of a man walking alone along a road towards evening drawn into conversation with two confused friends. Instead of appearing in triumph in front of his accusers proclaiming his victory before their shocked faces, Jesus quietly listens to his two shell-shocked travelling companions and patiently explains to them how all that they experienced had been promised by Moses and the prophets. And perhaps most beguilingly of all, Jesus proclaims this great truth and they don’t even recognise him until he sits down with them at a way-side inn and breaks bread with them.

The story of the Emmaus Road shares with the other resurrection accounts this overwhelming strangeness. Never told with the straightforward boldness and clarity of a Hollywood blockbuster, they tell of an experience so disorientating that even those experiencing them did not know what or who they were seeing.

This is not only a reality that we hear of in the pages of scripture. In my experience the moments of rebirth and resurrection we glimpse in this life seldom appear like the finale to a great film. Instead, they come to us in beguiling and strange moments of understanding that we very often, like those first disciples, fail to recognise.

One of the great privileges of ministry is that one is very often privy to these moments, these glimpses of the Resurrection hidden in plain sight. I’ve recently finished reading a clergy memoir which is full of such glimpses and insights. It’s called Touching Cloth, written by The Rev’d Fergus Butler-Gallie.

If you have heard him speak, or have read any of his other books, you will know what an engaging and funny speaker he is. Like many who use humour with care and deftness he uses his wry insights not just to make us laugh, but to point to the deeper truths that many of us fail to see. What runs through all these stories is not only a deep love for the people he encountered, even in the most extraordinary occasions, but how in these encounters we so often find the strange and beguiling power of God’s resurrection love revealed in the most unexpected way. 

Reading this book, I was reminded again how our lives exist in a constant relationship between the twin poles of this season. Not between scientific cause and effect, or self-righteous right and wrong, but between cross and resurrection. That through all the small experiences of death which pepper and mar our normal, ordinary and broken lives God’s love is constantly breaking through in ways which surprise and revive our lives, even if – like those disciples on the Emmaus Road – we don’t at first recognise what is front of us.

There is one encounter where he describes a moment when he had reached a peak of self-righteous anger at the end of Lent which he was seeking to keep piously. But then he comes to realise that in focusing on his own self-indulgent needs he was failing to see the realities of the true wildernesses, the true places of death that those he was encountering in his ministry in central Liverpool were living through. Then through the divine ministrations of a scratch card – you really have to read the book for this all to make sense! – he encounters “Chris”, a man who had struggled in life. It is Chris who reminds Fergus of the ways in which his small acts of kindness had brought him to life in the past. Not because of his super-human holiness or self-righteousness, but because of the life that comes as a divine gift in those beguiling moments of friendship and holiness revealed, on that occasion, in a ten-pound win on a scratch card.

Towards the end of the book he reflects more deeply on this theme. He recognises that this truth emerges in the truth of the cross, in the reality of death. As he goes on to say:

I'd been preoccupied by dying to self, dying to the past, dying from heatstroke. I suppose what that year - full of joy and disappointment, festivals, funerals, chaos and Christ - taught me is what I ought to have known all along: that death isn't an end but a beginning.

As we move through this Easter season it would be understandable to hope that we would see signs of the Resurrection painted with the dramatic palette of a Hollywood movie so that we could not miss them even if we tried. But what the gospel accounts of the Resurrection tell us again and again is that this truth is stranger and odder and more beguiling than we can possibly imagine. 

As R.S.Thomas - another Anglican priest who also had a gift for seeing the beguiling strangeness of God’s resurrection love all around us - tells us, we need to become:

        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.

Our Easter faith is about seeing the power of that love, the strange truth of the Resurrection, reveal itself before us in the oddest and most unexpected of places. Whether in the flowers covering a rusted tractor of R.S.Thomas’ poem; or Fergus Butler-Gallie's recognition of the grace revealed in a scratch-card; or as in our gospel story of a meal shared by an unexpected stranger with two bewildered and confused friends at a wayside inn. 

In all these ways, and so many more, we discover that the strange power of the Resurrection – in all is odd and beguiling glory – is all around us, we just have to be willing to look.

Sing to the Lord - Triduum addresses on the ancient songs of the Church

These are three adddresses given during the Triduum at Carlisle Cathedral in 2023 focusing on three of the great hymns and antiphons of the Church: Ubi Caritas, the Improperia, and the Te Deum.

Maundy Thursday: Ubi Caritas

In the second century after Christ, Tertullian, the great father of Latin Christianity, suggested that the identity of Christianity – still at the time a marginal and persecuted sect – might best found not in words alone but in their deeds. Unlike the pagans he opposed, Tertullian argued that people should look at Christians and remark, above all things, on how they love one another.

This phrase has become through the history of the Church one which is used less in hope and more in bitter irony. If there is one constant in the life of the Church it is that Christians are all too often unable to show the world that they “love one another”.

A brief look at social media posts by members of the Church of England since the meeting of General Synod in February shows that there appears to be very little love on display between those at the opposite ends of the debate on how we respond, in love, to those in same-sex relationships. But this is not an Anglican problem. You don’t have to look very far to find in Roman Catholic discussions deep divisions and animosity over doctrinal questions, or liturgical language, and the pattern of possible church reform. And keen students of American politics will be all too aware of the way in which Christian identity has been weaponised on both sides of the current culture wars gripping that nation.

 Christians…see how they love one another.

But love one another is what we are called to do, today and this night above all nights. This is Maundy Thursday named after that command, that mandatum, that Jesus gives to his disciples at the end of our Gospel reading and as we begin our journey through these great days of our faith.

As we begin this journey together, I want to, in the series of addresses I will give today, tomorrow, and Sunday afternoon, to focus on the ancient words of the church which we will hear sung through these days.  On Sunday we will bring our journey to a close through the singing of a solemn Te Deum, tomorrow we will be accompanied to the foot of the cross by the words of the Improperia or Reproaches, and this evening we will relive that ultimate moment of our Lord’s love and service as we witness the washing of feet and hear that great antiphon, Ubi Caritas.

The words for this antiphon remind us of the dual call that God in Jesus makes to us today. At the end of our Gospel reading, we heard Jesus’ great command:

I give you a new commandment, that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another. By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.

A command which is echoed in our antiphon:

Ubi caritas et amour, deus ibi est 

Where love and charity are to be found, God is there 

As we reflect on this command – and on the journey that lies ahead of us – there is much for us to draw from these words. These words help us recognise the differing, but complimentary elements of Jesus’ command to us.

The first is to recognise that where there is love, there is God. St John, in his first letter, reminds us that "God is Love". This direct characterisation is taken on poetically by others. George Herbert famously names the chief protagonist in his greatest poem, Love III, not as God, but as “Love”. So, in Herbert’s words, it is “Love” who bades us welcome, and “Love” who invites us, unworthy as we are, to sit down and eat. In this spirit we know what it is to know God as we know love.

The challenge for us this evening is though whether we can live out the next part of this great command. Too often, in our fractured and faltering care for one another the language of love can be misused and misinterpreted. “I’m saying this out of love” one person might say, before a particularly cutting or barbed statement.

So how do we save ourselves from this? Here the wisdom of our antiphon helps us. Rather than use the same word for this call to find God in the divine and in serving one another we are encouraged to find God in our charity to one another. Keen students of the King James Version of the Bible will know that there “charity” is often used where other translations use “love”. It is not for me comment on the quality or otherwise of these translations. But it does remind me that as those older translations have fallen out of use, we have perhaps also fallen out of knowing what it means to live with one another in and through this divinely sanctioned charity.

It is in caring selflessly for one another, in opening ourselves to the other, as Jesus does for us this night, do we encounter the true divinity in this calling. In charity there is no hiding behind our cleverly constructed words or guarded consent. In charity to one another we live out that love which Jesus lives out in his words and actions this night. If we recognise that in love and charity we find God we not only have a fuller way of living out the command our Lord gives us this night, we also have a path to follow as the sure foundations of this faith a challenged and shaken over these coming days.

On this night when those who Jesus loved and served will abandon and betray him one by one. In the day to come the love who invited us to sit down and eat will be arrested and torn from our view. In this journey to the foot of cross we will see the love we know in Jesus expire before our eyes.

As we begin this journey, we need then to recognise the power of this twin calling to love God and live in charity with one another. Because as one seems to fall away, we need to know, more than ever, that even if it appears that God is absent from our view, if we live in deep and abiding charity with one another, God is there even if hidden from our eyes.

Ubi caritas et amour, deus ibi est.
Where love and charity are, there is God.

 

Good Friday: The Improperia

On this Good Friday we might all ask ourselves where are we as we hear this story? Are we distant observers of a dimly remembered event from an unfashionable corner of the Roman Empire two millennia ago? Or are we a little closer to the action, sharing the gaze we are given in Isaac Watt’s great hymn as onlookers, one step removed from the action and drama, as we “survey the wondrous cross”? Or are we, as the words of the second of the ancient church texts I want to reflect on over these days, drawn firmly into the heart of this story facing the reproachful look of the one who hangs on the cross?    

The Improperia, or The Reproaches are an amalgam of words and prayers which took their current form in the ninth-century. At their heart are a series of accusations or reproaches. In one sense the tone of these reproaches fit the tone of other words we hear today. In the Lamentations of Jeremiah, for instance, which we often hear on Good Friday, the onlookers mock the personification of fallen and ruined Jerusalem:

All who pass along the way

   clap their hands at you;

they hiss and wag their heads

   at daughter Jerusalem;

‘Is this the city that was called

   the perfection of beauty,

   the joy of all the earth?’ 

In a similar vein, in some of the gospel accounts of the crucifixion Jesus is mocked and challenged by the crowd. As we hear in Matthew’s gospel: 

Those who passed by derided him, shaking their heads and saying, ‘You who would destroy the temple and build it in three days, save yourself! If you are the Son of God, come down from the cross.’

However what marks out the Improperia is that the reproachful voice is not that of the onlooking crowd, but of Jesus himself on the cross. Alongside these, woven together with the Trisagion, the ancient prayer of the Eastern Church, we hear again and again these questioning words put into the mouth of Jesus from the cross: 

O, my people, what have I done to you?

How have I offended you? Answer me! 

At this point it is worth making a health warning. There is no suggestion in the gospel accounts that Jesus turned on his accusers as a condemned might from the gallows. The only words of reproach come as Jesus quotes from Psalm 22: 

‘Eli, Eli, lema sabachthani?... ‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’

But to his accusers and attackers Jesus remains silent.

The prayer of the Improperia is not intended as a way of imputing an intention or motive to Jesus in the words to use. Rather they use poetically the drama of the occasion to turn the spotlight firmly and squarely on us.

This pattern introspection through the words of divine reproach is a form of prayer drawn from the great depths of our faith beginning life in the Jewish pattern of remonstrance prayer. The words we reflect on today are drawn initially from the prophesy of Micah. There in chapter six the prophet challenges the people of God to explain how they have fallen so far short of God’s plan for them:

O my people, what have I done to you?

   In what have I wearied you? Answer me!

For I brought you up from the land of Egypt,

   and redeemed you from the house of slavery;

and I sent before you Moses,

   Aaron, and Miriam.

In Micah this is not simply an empty rhetorical tool, but an open challenge to those who had fallen short of God’s promise for them. As another translation forms this opening indictment: 

My people what have I done to you…Testify against me. 

The challenge is not simply to call out the failures of God’s people, but for them to answer for these failures and make amends.

As we move forward into the Improperia this pattern of indictment is made even stronger and sharper. We hear a series of juxtapositions between the promises made to God’s people through his love and covenant and the reality that they see before them on the cross. So, borrowing from Micah we hear: 

I led you out of Egypt, from slavery to freedom,

but you led your Saviour to the cross. 

And then later drawing from Isaiah’s great image of God’s promise as a fruitful vineyard: 

I planted you as my fairest vine, but you yielded only bitterness:

When I was thirsty you gave me vinegar to drink, 

In other verses of the Improperia, this pattern continues: 

I rained down manna for you in the desert:

but you rained down blows and lashes on me.

 

I raised you up in great power:

but you raised me up on a cross. 

As we explore the rich imagery and lineage of these words there is a temptation for us to remain one step removed. After all these could be accusations put imaginatively into Jesus’ mouth as we looked on at that original crowd. Those who, in his own time, had refused to see Jesus as he fulfilment of these promises made through Moses and the prophets. In this reading we remain, like Isaac Watts, one step removed. But now rather than the enlightened surveyors of a landscape we are observers in the gallery of a court room where claim and counter claim are exchanged. However why should these reproaches stop with those original witnesses to the crucifixion? 

Last night we reflected on the words of the antiphon Ubi Caritas – where there is love and charity there is God – and as we come to the cold light of this day we find that Jesus’ command woven into this ancient text have already been forgotten. So, we might imagine, in the pattern of these reproaches, new ones being formed. Looking to Peter we might hear: 

I told you to love the Lord your God, and yet you denied me three times. 

Or to the disciples who accompanied Jesus to the Garden of Gethsemane: 

I told you to love one another as I have loved you, and yet you left my side and fled into the night. 

But more than this, as these questions and challenges can be brought forward from the memories and stories of God’s chosen people to the experience of Jesus’ disciples, so this pattern of challenge can be directed at each of us. Through them we recognise our failure to follow Jesus’ teaching and find that we become as worthy a focus of these reproaches as those first witnesses of disciples. 

I told you to treat to greet the stranger as you would treat me 

Jesus might be heard to say: 

But you live in a world of plenty where people still live on the streets. 

We hear that voice again saying: 

I told you to care for my creation, but yet you pollute and mar my world for personal gain and convenience. 

Or:

I told you to worship only me, but yet you seek the idols of power and praise from the world around you. 

Through the searching ancient wisdom of the words of the Improperia we find, whether we like it or not, that today we are not distant observers of the landscape, nor are we dispassionate onlookers. Through the ancient wisdom of these words, we are drawn into the heart of the drama of this day, to the foot of the cross, facing the cruel and stark reality of this day. 

On this day of days each one of us is confronted by the stark reality that we are part of a fallen and sinful world. And that we are as fitting recipients of these reproaches as were those first witnesses of the crucifixion. That on this day we stand with all humanity in all time and space and hear the haunting and searching words of a broken and dying man who has only ever shown us love: 

O, my people, what have I done to you?

How have I offended you? Answer me!

 

Easter Day: Te Deum

On Easter Day in 387AD a baptism took in Milan. The priest was the venerable and saintly Archbishop of Milan St Ambrose. The candidate was the brilliant, aristocratic Augustine then aged thirty-three years old.

A little under a year earlier Augustine’s life had been transformed by a spiritual encounter in a garden in that same city. After living a life of social and political ambition and of wide intellectual and philosophical exploration, Augustine had come to a point of deep mental crisis. All this worldly ambition and pagan ideas had led him to a dead end, a place of utter emptiness and despair, his own Golgotha, his own place of the skull.

Reflecting on this moment Augustine later wrote: 

From a hidden depth a profound self-examination had dredged up a heap of all my misery and set it ‘in the sight of my heart’ that precipitated a vast storm bearing a massive downpour of tears. 

Out of this place of utter darkness came a shining moment of grace and rebirth. As he goes on to say: 

As I was…weeping in the bitter agony of my heart, suddenly I heard a voice from a nearby house chanting…over and over again “Pick up and read, pick up and read”…I opened [the book of the apostle] and read… “put on the Lord Jesus Christ and make no provision for the flesh”. 

And so, the Easter following the moment of grace and transformation, Augustine’s conversion to Christianity     was complete with his baptism by St Ambrose as he was reborn, as we all are this day, in Christ.

 At that moment, so the story goes, Augustine looked to heaven and exclaimed: 

Te Deum laudámus: te Dominum confitémur. 

To which Ambrose responded; 

Te aetérnum Patrem omnis terra venerátur. 

And so, as the legend tells us, this two great Fathers of the Church extemporised the words of the Te Deum this supreme expression of Christian rejoicing which will bring our prayers and praises to a close this afternoon.

Sadly, it is probable that this tale of the authorship of the Te Deum is apocryphal. Although known originally as the Canticle of Ambrose and Augustine, and being part of the Ambrosian Hymnal which influenced the worship of the early church, it is more likely to have come into the form that we have it now through the combinations of texts and authors in the fourth and fifth centuries. However, this more prosaic account of the origins of the Te Deum should not minimise both its importance to the church or the power and meaning it has for us as we come to this Easter Day. 

Over these days we have been exploring the great hymns of the Church that accompany us through these days. Beginning with the antiphon Ubi Caritas on Maundy Thursday evening, and then on Good Friday with the searing words of the Improperia, we come to the completion of this great journey with the Te Deum. In one sense each of these hymns leads one to the other. The call of Ubi Caritas to seek God in love and charity to one another is brought into sharp and painful relief by the reproaches of the Improperia. Words which remind us again and again of our own sinfulness and fallenness which Christ gathered to himself in love on the cross. Moving forward the penitence of the Improperia stand as a mirror to the praise of the Te Deum. In the Improperia we were called to account for our failure to live as God has invited us to. Through those words we were drawn into the centre of the drama of Good Friday and hear the words of reproach directed at us: 

O, my people, what have I done to you?

How have I offended you? Answer me! 

In that place, living with the reality of our own fragility and fallenness, we found that there were no words we could muster, no form of self-justification or redress that we could find. All we could do was come to the foot of the cross in sorrow and lament and silence. But today, through the silence and tears, through the garden and the empty tomb, through the voices of angels and strangers on the road we find the words which we could not find three short days ago. 

Te Deum laudámus: te Dominum confitémur.

We praise thee, O God : we acknowledge thee to be the Lord.

All the earth doth worship thee : the Father everlasting. 

In the wonder of this day we find that God, through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, has transformed our world. And in the face of that truth all we can do is come to God with these great words of praise and adoration. 

Through the whole history of the Church the Te Deum has acted as the culmination and crowning of our praise. Through the medieval church it was used as moment of climax in services of prayer on Sundays and great festivals. It transcended the convulsions of the Reformation which both Luther and Cranmer making vernacular translations of the text central to their new liturgies. Through history it has been used to mark moments of celebration and rebirth such as in 1713 when Handel wrote his Utrecht Te Deum to mark the signing of the Treaty of Utrecht which ended years of bloody conflict across Europe. And in our national life the words have been central to coronation services as moment of rejoicing and rebirth which we will hear sung again at the Coronation of His Majesty the King.

What this reminds us is not only the historical importance of these words, but their universal and collective use. These are not the words of a private prayer, but a shared song of we declaim with people of all time and all places. A song of praise for the universal Church, militant and triumphant. And so we are drawn into this song of praise. At the end of these great days, knowing something of God’s transforming love and grace for all of us, fallen broken people that we are, saved and brought to new life by the love and grace of God. 

If we are downtrodden and overlooked by our world we stand shoulder to shoulder with the Angels and powers of heaven and the cherubim and seraphim and sing God’s praise. If we are the youngest or oldest amongst us we take the lead with the Apostles and the Prophets and praise his name. If we are weary or grieving, poor or forgotten, straight or gay, married or single, powerful or powerless we join our voices with the Martyrs, and the Church throughout all the world to sing this day our great song of praise. 

Through these days, where we have been forced to see our own limitations, our own failings, our own places of the skull, we discover afresh that great resurrection truth. That God in Jesus shows love to the loveless, breathes life to the lifeless, brings light into the dark places of the skull that mark and scar our livess and our world. In the reality of that bright shining truth, born not from our worth but from God’s grace in Jesus Christ, we find ourselves standing with the Church in all time and space with one song coming again to our lips: 

We praise thee, O God : we acknowledge thee to be the Lord.
All the earth doth worship thee : the Father everlasting.

Amen.

 

 

 

Chaos and Creation - a sermon for the second Sunday before Lent

Genesis 1.1 - 2.3 & Matthew 6.25-34

In these Sundays before Lent we are given a foretaste of the promise that lies at the far end of the Lenten journey which we will begin together in a little over a week.

Next Sunday we hear the story of the Transfiguration and recognise in it a foretaste of Jesus’ glory of heaven. This week, we are reminded of the power and rhythm of God’s creative love. A story which echoes from the first day of creation into the vision of the creation in the new creation of the Easter garden and the kingdom of heaven. A theme summed up eloquently in our post-communion prayer today:

God our creator,

by your gift the tree of life was set at the heart of the earthly paradise,

and the bread of life at the heart of your Church:

may we who have been nourished at your table on earth

be transformed by the glory of the Saviour’s cross

and enjoy the delights of eternity;

Although we live with the hope of this promise and reflect on the power of that creative love in our prayers, we have all been this last week challenged by a vision of creation which differs from this vision of the loving intentions of God.

On Monday a magnitude 7.8 earthquake struck in south central Turkey near the Syrian border followed in the hours that followed by a series of aftershocks of similar magnitude. We have all, I am sure, been shocked by the devastation this has caused, and the enormous death toll in the tens-of-thousands which will only grow. Whole buildings and communities flattened by the unbridled power of creation.

This stark reality stands in sharp relief to a benign vision of creation which we could draw from our readings today. Such a juxtaposition asks us hard questions which we should confront. Do disasters like this call us to question the nature of God’s creation or, even worse, question the nature of God and God’s place in the origins of these natural disasters. Events which insurance underwriters ominously term “acts of God”?

In 1755 an earthquake of similar devastating power to that of last week hit Lisbon causing fires and tsunamis which almost completely destroyed that great city. The shock of Lisbon earthquake echoed through European society and made many call into question their deep assumptions about creation and God’s place in that created order. 

Famously the French Enlightenment writer Voltaire used a focus on that earthquake to question not only the idea of a universal law ordering of creation, but whether there was even a God who benignly and kindly ordered that creation:

To the universal law, all your troubles are for the best. 

To God, you are the same as the vile worms 

[…]

These immutable laws of necessity, 

This chain of bodies, minds, and worlds. 

O dreams of scholars! O profound chimeras! 

God holds the chain but he is not himself chained

As we hold this challenge in our minds we might rightly return to our Old Testament reading today. This is a story and account of creation we know so well. Of God’s ordered and measured process of creation, stopping and reflecting on this work, and seeing that it was good. On first reading this is a vision of creation which is challenged by our experiences of this last week. How can God look on the power of the creation we have seen this last week and say that it is good? Well if we reflect on this great story a little more deeply there are, perhaps two themes which we can draw hope from. 

The first theme is to ask what kind of story this is. Is it, as many think, a story of what God did then in six days beginning, as the Irish Bishop James Ussher calculated, beginning on a Sunday near the autumn equinox in 4004 BC. Or is this, drawing on our more nuanced and modern understanding of creation and cosmology less an historical narrative and more a poetic reflection on the creative power of God’s love in and through all creation. 

We instinctively see this as an origin story, as literally the genesis of our story with God and creation. But when we hear this story in full we find that beguiling rhythm of words and actions which are less an origin story and more the pattern and beat of that creative power that moves through all creation.

The second theme we find is richer understanding of the form of God's creative power. In the opening lines of story of creation we hear that God does not, like the Enlightenment vision of God which Voltaire rejects, create an ordered and benign creation out of nothing like a master craftsman or, to misquote a former Canon of the this Cathedral, a watchmaker. Rather God’s creative love brings order out of the disorder and chaos of the “waters of the great deep”, or as another, more poetic translation of this passage has it:

God began to create heaven and earth and the earth was then welter and waste and darkness over the deep and God’s breath hovering over the waters, God said, “Let there be light.” And there was Light.

We find these two insights into the creative power of God’s love – of the ongoing rhythm of that creative power which constantly brings order from chaos – come together in the God we encounter in Jesus Christ. 

In Jesus God is not absent from creation, resting after his work was done. Rather in Jesus God is moving through that creation and bringing order to the chaos that he encounters. In Jesus we learn that God’s creative love does not spring from a vacuum or nothing, but is always always bringing order, metaphorically and literally, out of the swirling waters of the chaos that surround us all the time. So, Jesus, echoing the disorder of the waters of great deep, calms the waters of the sea and walks on them.  Out of the destruction and cruelty of humanity revealed at Golgotha – the place of the skull - God brings us to the order and creation of the Easter garden tended by one who we supposed to be the gardener.

So does this deeper and richer account of God’s creative love echoing through history, bringing order out of chaos, help is make sense of the chaos and grief and destruction of these last few days? Well the short answer is that it cannot and nor should it.

In the scale of this suffering and tragedy it would be trite to attempt to tie this all up with a neat theological argument accompanied by some well-placed platitudes. In the face of this destruction, we should confront and challenge God with the enormity of this unfolding reality. Some problems, some issues, are too big too complex for a quick answer. Even Voltaire knew that.

But this deeper reading of God’s creative love which we are invited to reflect on today can help us order our response to this tragedy. How, we might ask ourselves, can we help reveal God’s creative love out of this chaos and destruction? Well, we can put our money where our mouth is and support the international aid through the Disasters Emergency Committee which brings the range and experience of over fifteen charities to offer immediate help where it is most needed. 

Secondly, we can recognise that through human ingenuity it is possible to protect against some of the worst excesses of these natural disasters and ensure a greater share of the resources of creation are available to protect the poorest communities. Making these protections available to others in our world in a way we would expect were we to find ourselves living on the lines of seismic activity, rather than turn our eyes away.

And finally, we can pray deeply that the creative power of God’s love - which echoes from the garden of creation, which illuminated the power of the cross, and which will transform the bread and wine of the altar into the presence of God’s love with us - might be known and might work gently and surely to bring order from the chaos for the countless lives and homes and communities devastated in this last week.

"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.