"Enough for him": a sermon for the Feast of the Baptism of Christ

There is always a strange pleasure in discovering something unexpected and new in the deeply familiar. This happened to me over these weeks of Christmas. Inspired by a Christmas book, which tells the story of the formation of some of most well-known Christmas carols, I found myself listening with newly attuned ears to the words which were seemingly so familiar to me. In particular to the words of In the bleak midwinter.

Often listed in public votes as the nation's favourite Christmas carol, Christina Rossetti’s beautifully simple carol, which she entitled A Christmas Carol, is a masterpiece of simple elegance and meaning. The author of my carolling guidebook says of it:

It stands as a perfect example of her almost uncanny ability to distil complex thoughts and emotions into a language of almost childlike directness.

We can all look at those words and been drawn in by the simple imagery which captures the impossible majesty of the Christmas season. Like all great poetry we have our breath taken away by the final line’s injunction for the simple gift of our heart. But for me the word which has captured my imagination for the first time in the thousands of times listening and singing these famous words is the simple word which frames the third verse: "Enough". Here is that verse in full.

Enough for him, whom Cherubim

Worship night and day,

A breastful of milk,

And a mangerful of hay:

Enough for him, whom angels

Fall down before,

The ox and ass and camel

Which adore.

Here this one word captures much of the mystery and depth of the doctrine of the incarnation. That the God who, as we heard in our reading from the opening of Genesis, made the heavens and the earth, was content with the enough of his mother’s milk and a simple bed. That the creator of all things. as St Paul says elsewhere:

emptied himself,

   taking the form of a slave,

   being born in human likeness.

And being found in human form,

   he humbled himself

   and became obedient to the point of death—

   even death on a cross.

The God we know in Jesus is a God who comes to us, who communicates his grace to us, in those things which are enough for him. This profound truth is not simply limited to our sentimental images of the Christmas story.

Today’s feast – the Feast of the Baptism of Christ – carries within it that theme of humility, the sense of “enough-ness” which characterises the deep meaning of the incarnation. As we heard in our Gospel reading, Jesus inaugurates his public ministry not with the Judean equivalent of the showy declarations of power which will accompany the political campaigning of this coming year. No. Jesus begins his public ministry alongside the multitudes from Judea and Jerusalem seeking out John the Baptist and his baptism of repentance. It is in this place, alongside people seeking to remake and reform their ordinary lives, that Jesus is baptised and the truth of the incarnation is heard in the voice from heaven. In this place of “enough” we discover who Jesus truly is:

You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.

As we continue through this season we will hear how God reveals Gods-self to us in Jesus in the ordinary things of life: in a celebration of life and marriage at the wedding at Cana; in the religious patterns and ceremonies of his time as Jesus is proclaimed as the Light of the World by Simeon and Anna; and today in the gift and cleansing power of that most simple and elemental thing, in water.

This season of Epiphany, this season of revelation and manifestation, frames who God is for us in Jesus. Developing the poetic frame of Rosetti’s words: we will be shown that for Jesus five loaves and two fish were enough for him to feed thousands; that sharing a table with prostitutes and tax collectors was enough for him to open a vision of the kingdom of heaven, and that the public humiliation of a slave’s death was enough for him to show the breadth and length and the depth and the height of God’s love. As we come to the end of the opulence and generosity of the Christmas season the idea of “enough” is one which should not only frame our understanding of who God is for us in Jesus, but also challenge how we relate to the world created by that same God who saw that it was good.

Another book I have been reading over the last few weeks is called How much is enough? Money and the Good Life by the father/son partnership of economic historian Robert and philosopher Edward Skidelsky. In it they argue that one of the main problems for us, particularly living in the developed world, is that we have lost sight of a true sense of enough. Too much of our life is built not on “enough” but on “more”. Now the authors do acknowledge that there is nothing intrinsically wrong with “more”.  The economic development encouraged by a sense of “more” has brought about huge benefits in many people’s material conditions. But this is a two-edged sword exalting with it, particularly in its modern form “some of the most reviled human characteristics, such as greed, envy and avarice.”

The constant desire for “more”, they argue, has not made us happier. Far from it. Rather the constant searching for “more” has made our modern societies unable to recognise what can make for the balance of work and leisure which characterises, in the authors mind, a truly good life. More than this the corrosive power of “more” has deeper and lasting effects. Growth for its own sake, they argue, “is not only failing to make us happier, it is also environmentally disastrous”.

Through their book the authors make a series of practical suggestions for how we could reorder our lives and world around the principle of “enough” and not simple “more”. Particularly for those of us who live comfortable lives it asks “how might a society which already has 'enough' think about the organisation of its collective life”.

We have, in a short time, travelled a long distance from my Christmas musings on a favourite carol to the structures and building blocks of modern society. But what ties this all together is a sense that unless we can capture the liberating power of “enough” we are in danger of being pulled into the siren calls of “more” with all the corrosive and destructive tendencies that brings. Tantalisingly as they conclude their book the Skidelskys’ ponder whether it is possible to pursue a vision of the common good build on a real and practical sense of “enough” without a religious impulse to stir and inspire us.

In this Epiphany season, in this time of revelation and manifestation, we find that God in Jesus presents us God’s transforming promise through those small things, those simple things which were enough for him. As we emerge blinking from the warmth of Christmas into the light and reality of the new year, particularly as we look ahead to the choices that we will be called to make not least in a General Election, we might be wise to remember again the deep wisdom and power of that simple word “enough”. 

Not simply as a way of discovering again the deep and transforming truth of who God is for us in Jesus. But also how, transformed by that truth, we might change our lives and transform our world if we had the courage to turn away from the siren calls of “more” and live and work and rejoice, as Jesus did, with those things which were enough for him. 

Absence and Presence - a sermon for Advent Sunday

Advent is the great season of absence. All the great poetry and hymnody of Advent speaks and yearns of this absence.

“O Come, O Come, Emmanuel”

“Come thou long expected Jesus”

“Lo he comes, with clouds descending”

All our attention is pointed towards a coming presence which, by its very nature, speaks of the absence that we experience at the heart of Advent. 

For many of us that absence has become something of a battle of wills against the oncoming presence of the Christmas season. As the march to Christmas begins earlier and earlier the desire of many to hold back that tide, to hold the place of absence that Advent speaks of, becomes stronger. Some of us, well I can only speak for myself, can place a perverse pride in holding off eating a mince pie, sipping a mulled wine, or putting up anything that smacks of a decoration, for as long as possible. In this modern Advent ritual, the absence of Advent and the presence of Christmas play a tug-of-war with only one true winner.

This playful pattern of absence and presence however only scratches the surface of the great spiritual and even existential truth that the absence at the heart of this season points us towards. Our readings today both speak of absence. From Isaiah we heard a prayer of longing echoed in the great Advent prose which opened this service. Here Isaiah yearns that God, despite the sinfulness of God’s people, will break into a reality seemingly devoid of God’s presence:

O that you would tear open the heavens and come down,

   so that the mountains would quake at your presence—

[…]

to make your name known to your adversaries,

   so that the nations might tremble at your presence!

In our Gospel reading Jesus, though present in the telling, describes the terrifying place of absence that will mark the time before his coming again. Where:

the sun will be darkened,

   and the moon will not give its light,

and the stars will be falling from heaven,

   and the powers in the heavens will be shaken.

These visions of the absence of Advent take us far beyond the abstemious habits that some of will seek to model in the coming days and weeks. This is a terrifying reality where God appears to be visibly and palpably absent. Another great Advent hymn, one which has though fallen from our hymn books, captures something of the existential fear of this truth.

“O quickly come, dread Judge of all;

for, awful though thine advent be,”

In Advent we are challenged to look deeply into the truth of our faith. That hard truth of our faith that however hard we might look for God’s presence we most often find ourselves in the place of a double absence spoken of in our readings today.  The first absence focuses on our present reality, where we seek the presence of God in a world where God appears to be absent, and where many remain indifferent to this reality. The second is an eschatological absence. One which looks to the end of this this present age, between the stories of the first coming and the promise of the second. A place where the Church stands longing for God’s presence in Jesus – known by the apostles and promised in the new Jerusalem – but recognisable only to us in the stories of the past, hope of the future, and the vivid absence of our present.

In these two experiences of absence there is a danger that absence and presence are placed in opposition to one another. If though we look to those stories of Jesus’ presence in the Gospels we find again and again that the great stories of God’s presence through Jesus lead to, or are defined by, an absence. Jesus’ baptism, that moment when he is revealed as God’s anointed, is followed by his withdrawal and absence into the wilderness. The truth of the resurrection is fulfilled not only by the presence of the risen Jesus, but the absence of the Cross and the empty tomb. The tangible experience of God’s Spirit in the gift and feast of Pentecost is promised by Jesus, but only once he absents himself and is taken into heaven at the Ascension.

Advent teaches us to seek and know this great paradox of our faith. That God, in Jesus, reveals God’s presence, very often through his absence. Knowing this these absences we experience now take a new form. They are no longer vacuums, but places where, if we have the courage to look, we can discover God’s presence. The Welsh priest poet RS Thomas, that great bard of paradox, speaks of the truth of presence in absence in his poem Via Negativa:

        God is that great absence

In our lives, the empty silence

Within, the place where we go

Seeking, not in hope to

Arrive or find.

As the poem goes on he seeks to take this challenging, but often abstract truth, and ground it in realities of our lives. Perhaps echoing Jesus’ vision of the absence of star-less sky, he speaks of God as “the darkness between the stars”. Then as footprints which God has left which we follow. Then with a physical and visceral truth he says:

        We put our hands in

His side hoping to find

It warm.

However, we do it, Advent calls us not to simply seek out these places of absence, but to attend to them, and in that attention discover God’s presence through them.

I had an extraordinary experience of this recently. A few weeks ago, I was able to take a few days away from the Cathedral for a time of personal retreat. For a few days I focused my reading, reflection, and prayer on the themes of Advent and particularly the theme of absence. On my final morning of retreat, I decided I would try to ground this reading by taking myself to a physical place of absence. So, I drove and then walked along Hadrian’s Wall to the gap in the Wall where, until recently, the great Sycamore Tree stood. 

As many of you will know, this was a place very familiar to me and my ministry and so there was both a familiarity and shock as I walked up the path, seeing the outline of a landscape which was both reassuringly familiar and deeply strange. In the middle of that familiar dip in the horizon stood a great gap, a great absence. Where the tree had stood there was now just a bare stump. And there with me other walkers and pilgrims stood in silence and looking deeply into that place of absence. But as we looked into that absence, and came closer to where the tree had stood, a small sign, placed there by the National Trust, came into view. It reads:

“This tree stump is still alive

If we leave it alone it might sprout new growth”

I very much doubt this simple sign was intended to articulate so well the deep paradox and truth of absence and presence that lies at the heart of this great season. But for me, in that moment, it spoke more deeply of this truth than all the hymns and poems and sermons I could find. Having gone to that place looking for the reality of absence I found unexpectedly and beautifully, a promise of presence echoing Isaiah’s great words of Advent hope and promise:

A shoot shall come out from the stock of Jesse,

   and a branch shall grow out of his roots.

The spirit of the Lord shall rest on him,

   the spirit of wisdom and understanding,

   the spirit of counsel and might,

   the spirit of knowledge and the fear of the Lord.

His delight shall be in the fear of the Lord.

The promise of Advent, not only for this season but also for our life of faith, is that in God’s seeming absence is always a presence breaking in. Our task and invitation through this season is to seek and attend to those places and spaces and times of absence that punctuate the realities of our everyday lives; to spend time with them; and speak into those places of seeming absence that great Advent prayer:

“Amen, Come Lord Jesus.”

The wisdom of silence: a sermon for Remembrance Sunday

We gather on this day of solemn and national remembrance with the storm clouds of war gathering across the world. On this day when we mark the end of war and the commitment to peace, we find ourselves surrounded with the news and stories of conflict all around us.The two-year old war in Ukraine is calcifying in a stalemate with a fifth of that country still occupied by the armies of Russia. In Israel and Gaza the simmering tensions of that place have, in the last two months, erupted into bloody and cruel fighting.

As we seek to make sense of, and understand more fully, the reality and nature of these conflicts we find our vision blurred by new and competing factors. Instead of the receiving a steady supply of information filtered through recognised means, the news we hear comes from many and different sources. Grainy images and videos on mobile phone, self-appointed online experts, and most worryingly of all, images altered and manipulated by artificial intelligence, compete with the traditional forms of media as we seek to understand of the truth of this intense and complex conflict.

Added to this are the ways in which these conflicts have become mapped onto the political and cultural touchstones of our own society. Strong opinions are voiced and sides are taken which can struggle to hold the decades and centuries of relationship and difference at the heart of this conflict. Passionate claims about the brutality of one side and innocence of the other are painted in such bold and vivid colours that it can be hard to discern the nuance and meaning, let alone truth within this terrible conflict.

In the face of all this complexity I have found myself again and again drawn to the wisdom of the twentieth-century philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein who famously said that “what we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence.”

When faced with the seeming complexity of human conflict there is biblical precedent for turning first to silence. In the account of Jesus’ trial and cross-examination in the Gospel of John we find Pilate seeking from Jesus’ clarity of who he truly is against the claims and counter-claims of his accusers. Here is a story of someone straining to find and discern the truth through a cacophony of noise. In this passage Pilate asks Jesus a series of questions and after failing to extract from Jesus a satisfactory answer Pilate remarks – as we might faced with the complexity of our own age – “what is truth?” And to this final question Jesus responds to with silence.

As we search for truth, and faced with such deep and seemingly intractable complexity, there is a simple eloquence in silence. A simple eloquence which we will all share in today. The tradition of holding a time of silence in the midst of remembrance is one which is yoked to the commemorations of this day. Although it is not clear who originated the idea of a time of silence, it was already common in the final months of the Great War for daily times of silence to be held to remember those who had already died. The idea was then taken forward with the encouragement of King George V who, in preparation for the first anniversary of the Armistice in 1919, called for “locomotion [to] cease, so that, in perfect stillness, the thoughts of everyone may be concentrated on reverent remembrance.”

I encountered the simple eloquence of this yesterday on Armistice Day. Meeting someone in the hustle and bustle of the Cathedral Café suddenly and gently peace and silence broke out at 11am. Without announcement  or fanfare the few dozen staff and customers gathered there held a time of remembrance and silence.

It would though be wrong to think that that silence is a retreat from the complexities that we face. In silence we are drawn to two important truths. The first is that in silence we can look beyond our own concerns and prejudices. Another philosopher, this time the French seventeenth-century philosopher Blaise Pascal, reminds of this truth when he stated a little provocatively that: “all of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone.” In silence we learn to get out of our own way and find the space to recognise the deeper and more complex truths the world presents us. 

The second truth is that, within the Christian tradition, it is in silence that we most clearly hear still small voice of God’s love. Silence stands at the heart of the writings of another great philosopher, this time St Augustine, on whose traditions and teachings this Cathedral were founded. For Augustine it is in silence that we hear the deep truth of God. As he wrote: “If you are silent, be silent out of love. If you speak, speak out of love.”

This is the silence that Jesus presents to Pilate, this is the silence we share in today, this is the silence that speaks to us from the silence of the cross. In this silence, the truth that Jesus draws us to is that against all the hatred and bitterness of the world, amongst all the self-serving statements and bitter recriminations which mar this and every age, stands one clarion truth revealed through the silence of the cross.

No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.

The truth we hear through our silence – whether in Pilate’s court, or own prayers, or as we hold before God the names and memories of those who have died in time of war – is the truth and power of love to change and transform the world. It is a truth that convinced St Paul that:

neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.

It is this truth which binds our remembrance of past conflicts to the challenges of this present time. 

It is often said that those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. I am not always convinced by this idea. What I do know, though, is that whatever the future holds, whatever means there might be to remake our broken and fractured world, it will never succeed unless it is built on the truths and peace and sacrifice and love which we will hear if we tune our ears again to the silence that lies at the heart of this day.

"It seemed that I saw a most wondrous tree" - a sermon for the seventeenth Sunday after Trinity.

On Thursday morning many of us woke to news that the landscape of our region had changed irrevocably.

After the storms of the night before it was discovered that the Sycamore tree, which had stood as a solitary sentry in a clear gap on Hadrian’s Wall had fallen. Initially it was thought that the wild winds of the north had finally claimed the tree, but quickly a more sinister truth emerged. 

The tree had fallen not by natural means or by an act of God, but by human hands. Almost unbelievably someone had felled the tree. This was not an act or wild and frenzied destruction, but one achieved with cold and calculated efficiency. In the dead of night someone had taken professional equipment, marked the cutting line in white paint, and then felled it with a professional skill which would, in other circumstances, bring the admiration of the most experienced workers of the nearby forests of Wark and Kielder.

As many of you will have seen, and some of us will have felt, this act has brought about an unexpected level of grief and anger. Perhaps exacerbated by the calculated nature of this action, it has asked many to reflect on what that tree meant to them. It is a reality which means something to me as well as I was, for six-and-a-half years, that tree’s Vicar. I know the family that farms that land, the people who work in the nearby visitors’ centres and pubs, and have talked often both there, and here in Carlisle, to walkers looking forward as they made their own pilgrimage to the Sycamore Gap.

The word “iconic” is overused in our culture, but the Sycamore Gap is, or was, iconic. When I moved to be Vicar of Haydon Bridge and Beltingham with Henshaw - what we later called the "Parishes by the Wall" -  I shared a photo of the Sycamore Gap. Well more accurately I shared a picture of Kevin Costner as Robin Hood standing at the Sycamore Gap to announce my appointment to friends. The prominence of the Sycamore Gap in our popular imagination came for many from that film, its improbable placement between Dover and Sherwood Forest giving it a notoriety and fame in our popular imagination.

The Sycamore Gap is also ubiquitous. When we were thinking of a logo for the Parishes by the Wall we considered using the Sycamore Gap. We then discounted the idea as it would not differentiate us from the local schools, accountants, plumbers, holiday lets, and very excellent beer who all used the image as their logo.

However, there was more to the Sycamore Gap than simply begin in a scene from a famous film or a ubiquitous image. It was intrinsically aesthetically beautiful. The tree, which was evenly and symmetrically shaped, standing in the middle of an equally symmetrical gap in the Whin Sill; it was “picture perfect”.

But none of this, in itself, explains the strength of reaction that felling of this tree has caused over the last few days. As I have been reflecting on this, I have found myself reflecting on why so many people were drawn to visit and walk to the something which, some might say, was “just a tree”.

Trees, of course, play a defining and recurring role in our shared cultural and spiritual life. All cultures have myths and legends built around the simple elegance of trees. Whether that is Ash trees as the Tree of Life of Norse mythology; or the evergreen trees of North America which defined the creation myths of their own culture; or closer to home, the role the oak tree has played in the spiritual pre-history of these islands where the druids were literally “oak men”.

As we reflect on the power of trees in our popular consciousness it is impossible to find one simple root or basis for this identity. Reflecting on the tree of the Sycamore Gap I found myself recalling the theories of anthropologists of religion, who have pointed out how trees act as a break between the horizontal realm of our earthly experience and the vertical realm of the heavenly and the divine.  Like a standing stone, and later great church buildings, they draw our eyes to heaven. Trees, often solitary trees, standing in the landscape create and intuitive link between our rootedness on earth and the heavens that their bows and branches draw our eyes too.

It would be possible to discount and dismiss all of this as mere folk-religion, except for the way in which Christian iconography and writing has drawn on this image. One of the finest examples of this is in one of the great poems of Anglo-Saxon England, The Dream of the Rood.

It begins with a vision of the Rood, or rod - the old English name for the cross - as a glorious and bejewelled tree:

It seemed that I saw a most wondrous tree

raised on high, wound round with light,

the brightest of beams.

As the elegy to this tree continues the voice of the narrator changes to that of the tree itself.  Through the voice of the tree we hear it tell of waiting to be felled. Thinking this would be an ignominious fate, the Rood learns that, instead, it will carry not a criminal, but the Son of God. The tree then becomes our Lord’s retainer, feeling and carrying the wounds and pain of his crucifixion which became a sign and badge of honour for that unsuspecting tree:

Lo! the King of glory, Guardian of heaven’s kingdom

honored me over all the trees of the forest,

As the voice then turns back to the original narrator we hear of this link between the horizontal and vertical, of the eloquence of the tree to point us beyond ourselves to heaven. So, we are told of the ongoing power and dignity of the Rood to link us between the human violence of the cross and the heavenly hope and victory it points us to:

He who here on earth once suffered

on the hanging-tree for human sin;

He ransomed us and gave us life,

a heavenly home. Hope was renewed

with cheer and bliss for those who were burning there.

We are often told that we live in a less religious world. I think that the outpouring and emotion I have seen over the felling of a free over the last few days would seem to counter that narrative. It is true that we live in a less religiously literate world. The language of faith and hope, of judgement and redemption and the stories than accompany them are less present than they were even a generation ago. What remains though is an often inarticulate longing for the numinous, for the other which simple signs in our landscape, like the simple eloquence of a tree in a dip in the horizon, speak of. It is for this reason, more than its faded fame in Hollywood movies that the tree at the Sycamore Gap meant so much to people.

It was a place where couples, whose weddings I took, got engaged. Where the ashes of dearly loved relatives whose funerals I conducted were scattered. It was a place which weary pilgrim and walkers, taking on the most challenging section of the Hadrian’s Wall path, would seek and long to get to. It was a place, to quote the words of that great prayer of St Augustine which we heard echoed in our Collect today, that so many found rest for their restless hearts.

In our gospel today Jesus invites us all, through a parable, to seek rest for our restless hearts. In this parable it is not by a tree, but in a similarly powerful metaphor, in a vineyard. Here, Jesus says, is a place to which all are called and all are welcome. A place which makes saints of sinners if they only have the courage to truly seek and know God in that place.

And that, after all, is the longing for which we all seek. A place where we can be truly ourselves. A place where we are truly loved and known. That place might be a tree on a distant frontier, or a Cathedral on that same wall. 

Wherever it might be, we need to know that, in God’s love, we are welcome to find and seek that rest. And that nothing, not even the might or cruelty or selfishness of man, can separate us from that truth.

God's judgement and mercy - a sermon for the seventh Sunday after Trinity

Wisdom 12: 13, 15-19; Matthew 13: 24-30, 36-42

John Martin, The Last Judgement

As I have been reflecting on today’s gospel reading and its theme of judgement, and particularly of God’s final judgement on us all, I kept returning in my mind to words I have commonly used when taking funerals. Those words begin like this:

God alone is holy and just and good.

In that confidence, therefore, we commend you

to God’s judgment and mercy,

to God’s forgiveness and love.

As I then sat down to start writing this sermon, I thought I would just confirm where I had got these words from. After a period of extensive searching I couldn’t find them in any of the Church of England’s official liturgies. Now as someone who takes my vow of canonical obedience to use “only those forms of worship authorised and allowed by canon” I started to worry that through all my ordained ministry I had been using forms of words and prayers plucked from some unknown and unattributable source. After more searching, I discovered that these words – which I think I must have picked up from colleagues when I was a curate – actually come from the funeral service in the Prayer Book of the Church of New Zealand. 

As I disappeared and then reappeared from this little liturgical rabbit-hole I was struck by one thing; how little our liturgies at the time of death, and beyond that our worship more widely, speaks with any confidence of the theme of judgement. For instance, when I was searching for these texts through the online versions of the Church of England’s funeral liturgies, I discovered that judgement is only mentioned eight times. Seven of these are either in, or references to, biblical texts, and only once is it used explicitly in the prayers we are asked to use. And even then, this is a third alternative prayer. Similarly, as I was searching for the source of the words I opened this sermon with, I found more than one example of their use where the word “judgement” had been removed.

Why, I wonder, are we so anxious about judgement?

There are, I suspect a whole series of reasons. One reason is that questions of a God who will judge us are difficult to square with the image of a benign and loving God. That then links to our desire not to think too hard about how we might fair on that fateful day. Then we reflect on how thoughts on judgement draw us uncomfortably to the darker angels of our identity and humanity.

John Martin, The Great Day of His Wrath

Too often in human history the justification of judgement has been used to excuse acts of human cruelty in the name of some greater cause or hope. For instance, in 1209, during the siege of the French city of Bezier during the Albigensian crusade, the Cistercian Abbot Arnaud Amarlic was asked how the invading Catholic army could distinguish between the orthodox Catholics and the Cathars they had come to kill. “Kill them all”, Arnaud is said to have cried in judgement, “God knows which are his own”. Such terrifying certainty in judgement is not limited to those seeking a religious justification. Several centuries after the massacre in Bezier, during the aftermath of the French Revolution, the revolutionary General Turreau took troops to quell and anti-revolutionary uprising in the Vendee. There, in an echo of Arnaud’s judgement, he was again asked how to distinguish between those loyal to the revolution and those they had come to put down. His judgement was terrifyingly clear:

I order you to burn down everything that can be burned and to spear with your bayonets all the inhabitants you encounter along the way. I know there may be a few patriots in this region – it matters not, we must sacrifice all.

When faced with this history of the rashness and cruelty of human judgement it is not a surprise to find that we struggle to make sense of this theme when we encounter it in our theology and in our reading of scripture and in our image of God.

Judgement – and in particular God’s final judgement – is at the heart of our gospel reading this morning. Known as the Parable of the Weeds, Jesus helps us navigate this theological conundrum. He does this by speaking of two differing forms of judgement. The first is recognisable to us in their extreme form in the examples from Bezier and the Vendee. In the parable the master’s slaves, when they discover the weeds growing amongst the good wheat, suggest a quick and decisive response:

The slaves said to him, “Then do you want us to go and gather them?”

This is the response of human judgment. A quick, clear, and decisive response, where the utilitarian desire is to cut away and remove the perceived problem comes, for those who suggest this, with the acceptable cost of destroying the good grain.

Against this we hear of a second form of judgement. Responding to the slaves, the master instead counsels patience. To the slaves question the Master replies:

No; for in gathering the weeds you would uproot the wheat along with them. Let both of them grow together until the harvest; and at harvest time I will tell the reapers, Collect the weeds first and bind them in bundles to be burned, but gather the wheat into my barn.

On one hand we could argue that this second form of judgement merely postpones the fateful judgement what we are squeamish about now. That whenever it occurs judgement brings with it a judgement that some will be saved and others will not. But what this reading misses is the role that God’s patience and love play in this second form of judgement. We have a glimpse of this more benign form of judgement in our reading from the Book of Wisdom. Here God’s judgement is always tempered by mildness. However, the ultimate sovereignty and power of God is not denied.

In our parable Jesus takes this tempered and patient judgement and brings us to a deeper understanding of the inextricable link between God’s judgement and the love God reveals to us in Jesus. It is a form of judgement which speaks, as all Jesus’ parables do, not about us, but about the true nature of God. That, as the prayer I opened this sermon with reminds us, God judgement comes interwoven with God’s mercy, and forgiveness and love.

In his poem Judgement the great English priest-poet George Hebert reminds us of the inextricable link between God’s judgement and God’s love for us in Jesus. The poem begins with a vision of the terrifying forms of human judgement which we do often project onto our understanding of expectation of God’s judgement:

Almightie Judge, how shall poore wretches brook

                                  Thy dreadfull look,

Able a heart of iron to appall,

                                  When thou shalt call

          For ev’ry mans peculiar book?

Faced with this terrifying and dread-filled image of judgement, Herbert suggests that some will seek to present a polished, if not honest account of themselves to God. 

What others mean to do, I know not well,

                                  Yet I heare tell,

That some will turn thee to some leaves therein

                                  So void of sinne,

          That they in merit shall excell.

But, Herbert argues, this cannot stand. At the last judgement we will be called to be honest and open with God about all our failings. That all of us, returning to the image of our Gospel reading, are not one thing or another, but bundles of weeds and wheat in different measure.

However, as he imagines us presenting this ledger of our lives to God only to find that our failings, our faulty, our sinfulness has already been accounted for in God’s love for us in Jesus. It is, Herbert reminds us, Jesus who gathers to himself all the sinfulness and fallenness of our lives in the love and sacrifice of the cross. As the poem concludes:

But I resolve, when thou shalt call for mine,

                                  That to decline,

And thrust a Testament into thy hand:

                                  Let that be scann’d.

          There thou shalt finde my faults are thine.

What our parable reminds us today, and what George Hebert’s poem invites us to reflect on, is the reality that – despite our squeamishness – God’s judgement is something on a vastly different scale and scope than our human models and experiences of judgement could ever show.

God’s promised judgement is not something we should fear or try to hide from. God’s judgement is, and will be, a source of comfort because this judgement does not start with human certainty and confidence. Rather this divine judgement comes from the source of our God who is patient and loving. It is, and will be, a judgement that draws us into the true revelation of God’s mercy, and forgiveness, and love.

John Martin, The Plains of Heaven

Comfort for the comfortless: a sermon for the Sunday after Ascension.

On my bookcase in my study I have a copy of what I think is a wonderful book. It is called the Tutorial Prayer Book. It is, essentially, a commentary on The Book of Common Prayer. Going through the text section by section it shows the differences between the 1662 text and previous versions of the prayer book. However, more interestingly, it shows the more ancient sources for the prayers which Thomas Cranmer both rendered into English, and tweaked theologically to be in sympathy with the reforming agenda of which he was a key advocate.

Perhaps the clearest example of this is in the prayer of preparation, or the Collect for Purity, which we began our service with today. This prayer will be so well known to many of us that we don’t even look at the words. So when the president says:

Almighty God…

we fall almost instinctively into…

…to whom all hearts are open

All desires known, 

And from whom no secrets are hidden.

A dip into the indispensable Tutorial Prayer Book though tells us that this was originally a prayer for the priest's preparation from the medieval Sarum Rite. In that prayer this is a singular not collective prayer, it said in private and not public, and focuses singularly on the purity of the priest before the altar.

As a good reformer Cranmer takes that prayer and turns the focus away from the priest and turns it on  the people gathered in worship. Through its shared language we commit together, despite our own shortcomings, to meet God in and through this act of worship; that we might perfectly love God and worthily magnify God’s holy name. Cranmer takes this private prayer of the medieval church and with the tweak of a verb and a change in emphasis articulates one of the central tenets of his reformed catholic faith.

Another place where we encounter Cranmer’s genius is in the collect set for this Sunday which stands between Ascension Day and Pentecost. Again, a quick dip into the Tutorial Prayer Book shows that this collect was not drawn from a mediaeval collect for this Sunday, but instead from one of the antiphons – one of the short prayer-anthems – used around the recitation of the Magnificat at the service of Vespers. A prayer which was, according to legend, used by the Venerable Bede on his death bed. This antiphon can be translated:

O Lord, King of glory, Lord of virtues, who today didst ascend in triumph above all heavens, do not leave us orphans, but send upon us the promise of the Father, even the Spirit of Truth.

In composing today's collect, Cranmer took this antiphon and made two key changes. The first is a technical one, moving it from a prayer to the Son, to being a prayer directed to God the Father:

O God the King of glory, who hast exalted thine only Son Jesus Christ with great triumph unto thy kingdom in heaven

The second change is more profound and shows Cranmer’s brilliance. Both the original antiphon and Cranmer’s collect are used in the space we now stand in between the moment of the Ascension and the coming of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost. In the case of the antiphon being used on the evening of Ascension Day, the collect on the Sunday following.

In that way both the antiphon and the collect speak of the disorientation of this moment.  Jesus who for the disciples, and for the rhythms of our worship, has been front and centre suddenly is removed from our presence. Since Christmas we have walked with the life of Jesus. We have been anchored by the narrative of his life. From his birth, through his teaching, to his death and resurrection. Now as Jesus disappears from eyes we are suddenly unmoored from that certainty.

In this place of disorientation the antiphon prayers plainly: “do not leave us orphans, but send upon us the promise of the Father, even the Spirit of Truth". In place of this direct invocation Cranmer offers us something more subtle but more luminous for it. Rather than use the plainer “orphan” Cranmer draws us unwittingly into a word play on the translations for the Holy Spirit from the original Greek. 

In John’s Gospel the Holy Spirit is referred to in the Greek as, amongst other things, parakletos. This can be interpreted in many ways. Sometimes as guide, in some as an advocate, for some a lawyer for the defence. However, in our translations it is most commonly translated “comforter”. Cranmer then uses that idea of the Holy Spirit in a punning word play with another section from John’s Gospel which is the inspiration for the original antiphon his collect is based on. In that passage of the Gospel Jesus says he will not leave his disciples orphanos – in some translations “orphans” but in others “comfortless”. Cranmer then takes this coincidence of language to create the spirit of this great Collect asks:

We beseech thee, leave us not comfortless; but send to us thine Holy Ghost to comfort us, and exalt us unto the same place whither our Saviour Christ is gone before.

Cranmer’s collect draws us seamlessly into the disorientation of these days, and uses that sense of disorientation, of comfortlessness, to point us to the gift that will come to inspire and draw us forward. That gift which Cranmer refers to in his translation of the Te Deum elsewhere in the Book of Common Prayer as “The Holy Ghost : the Comforter”.

This is all very well and good and very interesting you might ask, but what does this mean to us here and now in our faith? Well the artistry of this collect comes not in its subtle use of language and clever word play, but in the place is stands in our liturgical year and in our life of faith. 

Today we stand in a place which is more common for many of us than we might like to admit. Today we are in that place where Jesus is suddenly distant and out of sight. We are in that place which many of us find ourselves more often than we care to admit. A place where we seek God, seek the real presence of Jesus, but feel merely an absence. It is that place described most eloquently by the great bard of God’s absence R.S. Thomas when he says:

It is this great absence

that is like a presence, that compels

me to address it without hope

of a reply.

If I am honest, very often my prayer life and my experience of faith can feel like this. Looking and seeking God and finding what feels like an absence.  And into that absence, that sense of disorientation, that place of comfortless, we can pray not only today, but all days, Cranmer’s great words of hope and expectation. Where we beseech God to:

leave us not comfortless; but send to us thine Holy Ghost to comfort us, and exalt us unto the same place whither our Saviour Christ is gone before.

Amen.

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.