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The Word

Homilies from the pulpit at St. Olave’s:

1. Lent 2: 28th February 2010: Prayer

2. Funeral Sermon

3. The Baptism of the Lord

4. The Epiphany

Lent 2: 28th February 2010: Prayer

Many of us find the road of prayer hard going. It is often because our approach to prayer is determined by a rather primitive view of God. Though we might protest, many of us just do not really listen to Jesus Christ telling us in his parables about the true nature of God. He speaks of the prodigal son; the host who invited everyone, even the most miserable beggar, to his table; and the woman caught in the act of sin. Yet we still cling, in spite of everything, to the image of a God who is ever ready to avenge and punish us. Small wonder that we often find it a grim and nerve-wracking experience to talk to such a God in prayer.

The apostles were not afraid to ask Jesus to teach them how to pray. He knew their weakness and gently set them on the road to prayer. "In your prayers do not babble as the pagans do, for they think that by using many words they will make themselves heard. Do not be like them; your Father knows what you need before you ask him. So you should pray like this: Our Father ...” You all know the rest. In what is known as the 'Great Prayer of Christ' following the Last Supper, which is recounted in St. John's Gospel, Jesus takes his followers to the heart of the meaning of his life and his death, which is to follow on the next day. In this prayer Jesus shows us that prayer is at the centre of his and of our relationship with God. In the prayer, Jesus glorifies his Father and gathers up all who follow him into that prayer. He prays for those who have heard his words and believed in him. He prays that in their unity with him they may discover a unity amongst themselves, so that all may be one, united in Christ and so united with his Father in heaven.

In this unity they will share in the redeeming work of Christ and in the suffering which he is to undergo. But in sharing that suffering they also share his glory. All who are faithful in unity with Christ will share the glory and joy of the resurrection. In all this they are to be faithful not only to the words of Christ but also to his way of the Cross, to his way of unconditional love for their fellow men and women. Christ prays for his followers and will continue to pray for them; he will protect them and he will consecrate them to himself through his prayer always.

In short, then, prayer unites us with Christ and with his Father so completely that the world will know that Christ was from God, in our faithful reflection of his life and death. Many have travelled the same road of understanding since the days of Christ himself and their experiences form part and parcel of the rich tradition of the Church. It's impossible, in the short time I have to preach on a Sunday morning, to outline all the advice and guidance of so many men and women who have gone before us. But there are certain clear steps to prayer which can help us all.

1. Prayer is a meeting. We cannot allow ourselves to forget this. Prayer is a meeting with God. It is not some magic formula for disciplining the mind. Neither is it a soothing way of escaping from the pressures and worries of life. First and foremost prayer is a meeting with our heavenly Father and if it is to be a real meeting, we must take a second step...

2. We must be ourselves. We've all heard of the sad clown who hides behind a smiling mask. All of us have a wardrobe full of masks and we can use them as well as any quick-change artist. The tragedy is that as long as we have our mask on nobody ever meets us. They meet the highly professional business man, the skilled worker, the home-loving mother, but they never see the insecure, anxious sad clown that we really are. What a relief, then, when we can reveal our true self to someone who loves us. God loves you. God loves each one of us. It's easy to be ourselves with him. Once we try this we find we have taken the second step of prayer. But if the meeting is to be success, there is something else we must do...

3. We must let God be himself. It rarely strikes us how arrogant we are. We're like the child who told his mother he was about to draw a picture of God. "But no-one knows what he looks like" he was told. "Not at the moment," he agreed, "but they will when I've finished." We think we know God and understand him. Somewhere in an old attic of our minds we store a picture of him and keep on bringing it out like some dog-eared photograph from the family album. Yet there is a truth we cannot avoid. No man or woman can fully understand the Creator of all things. He is completely beyond our grasp or understanding. We have to learn to throw away all our preconceived notions about him and let God come to us as he really is, not as we would have him. Then we will be ready to take another step forward...

4. Then we will be able to give God our worries. "Come to me all you who labour and are overburdened and I will give you rest..." As long as we hang on to our worries we will have to carry a burden which is so unwieldy that it obscures our vision of God. It's important that we take God at his word and give him all our worries. Once we start trusting him it's amazing how relieved we will begin to feel. It's like taking a heavy haversack off your back after a long and gruelling walk. Once this barrier has gone, we are ready to talk to God. We can use set prayers, if we wish, or simply talk to him naturally if we are able to do so. Alternatively, we can simply sit in companionable silence with him. This leads us to final step of prayer...

5. We must listen. An old saying comes straight to the point. "God has given you two ears and one mouth that you may listen to him twice as much as you speak to him." It's easy to ignore the obvious, but a conversation is not only talking but listening. It is important for us to be silent and listen to God speaking to us. More than that, we must let Jesus Christ speak through us. He will, if we give him the chance. And when he does, we shall "...with all the saints have strength to grasp the breadth and length, the height and depth; until knowing the love of God which is beyond all knowledge, you are filled with the utter fullness of God". So wrote St. Paul in his Letter to the Ephesians. Such is the reward of a diligent life of prayer - something to practise with renewed vigour this Lent. Amen.

Funeral Sermon: Win March: 15th February 2010

In the world in which we now live death has become the great taboo; few of us want to consider our own mortality and when the subject conies up in conversation it's usually quickly changed. I was doing a little reading recently and came upon a phrase that emphasises the point: in the passage I was reading death was described as 'the new obscenity' — so obscene in fact that at another funeral I recently conducted, right in the midst of the service, one man (for some reason it is usually men who find funerals more difficult to bear than women), leapt up blindly from his seat, suddenly and without warning, fell over the back of a pew and rushed from the chapel through its doors, slamming them behind him. Whether we like it or not, even though the subject for the most part seems to have become unmentionable, death remains inescapable. The one sure fact of life is that one day, with or without warning, quietly or painfully, it is going to stop.

There are now, it seems, an increasing number of people in the world, who are happy increasingly to marginalise us people of faith, who judge in their own minds that, in the end, the same fate awaits man and animal alike. One dies just like another they say - both after all are the same kind of creature - a human being is no better off than an animal, because life has no meaning for either. They are both going to the same place - the dust. They both came from it; they will both go back to it. How can anyone be sure that a man's spirit goes upwards whilst an animal's spirit goes down into the ground? The best thing we can do, say such people, is to enjoy what we have worked for; there is nothing else we can do. There is no way for us to know what will happen after we die.

Despite such a defeatist attitude on the part of modern man in general, in my experience, which I admit is purely anecdotal - I have no idea whether any empirical study has ever been conducted into the matter - the majority of people I bump into, most of whom have little or no idea of what Christianity is properly about, do have in and of themselves a real sense that there is more to life than living. The majority of the British population have now given up bringing their children for baptism and given up too on Christian marriage; but when someone they love dies, there is invariably a knock on my door, or more usually a telephone call, asking me to conduct a funeral for the family; and beyond the lame choices they make concerning overly sentimental songs to be played at the service, and beyond the fact that so many these days can't bear having the curtains close before them at the crematorium separating the coffin bearing their loved one from them, and beyond the mawkishness of some of the poems that are routinely dredged up to be read, I sense that most people I meet at funerals still have an underlying appreciation that mankind is, in his very being, somehow different, something set apart. And I stand before you, this morning, as a man of faith, to bear witness to you that it is that underlying, almost intuitive sense we have of what we are that is the gift of truth that God gave us as Christ rose from the dead.

Before the days of Christ, people could and did believe that there was life beyond death, because they rightly thought of man as a creature made in the image of the eternal God - that said, their ideas about life after death were very vague. The resurrection of Jesus, however, changed the situation radically, for here was a man who died, but was raised from death by the power of God. Yes, death is THE fundamental human problem, for if death is really final nothing is worthwhile except selfishness and self-indulgence. 'If the dead are not raised' writes St. Paul in the 1st Letter to the Corinthians, 'let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die.' And no religion or philosophy which cannot come to terms with death is any real use to us.

Here, however, like it or not, Christianity stands out. Alone among the world's faiths and 'isms', Christianity views death as conquered - for Christian faith is hope resting on fact - namely that Jesus rose bodily from the grave and now lives eternally in heaven.

By now you may be thinking, Oh, there goes yet another priest drivelling on, trying to reinforce an old stereotype - this has nothing to do with the real world. If you are thinking something along those lines, I would say to you, that you are wrong. What I am saying has everything to do with the real world, for what Christianity uniquely does and what the world at large usually will not do, is actually face death. The world that does not embrace the faith of Christ routinely uses language about death which robs it of its meaning, and will in the normal course of events do anything to place itself as far away from death as it can and then, irony of ironies, claim some sort of moral superiority over those who would look death squarely in the face.

Yes, death is an end, but let me tell you, it is not THE end - there is more to life than living in this vale of tears and in the fullness of time each of us will blossom into the creatures God originally destined us to be. And the occasion in which we join today, whilst it might mark an end for us who are left, inaugurates a new beginning for Win.

People often describe life as a journey. There has been for quite a while now a series of advertisements on television, placed by a well-known high street bank who sum up the services they offer in the strap-line to their ads as 'for the journey'. They of course don't look towards the journey's earthly end but instead stress the delights of living.

Resting now within the walls of the church where once she regularly worshipped, we have come together to mark the end of Win's life here, but there is much more than that to a funeral. This, Win's funeral service, inaugurates a new beginning for her. As she was baptised into the family of Christ and sustained in her day by the sacrament so now is she born again, and as much as we gather here to give thanks for her life on earth, so too are we to commend her to God, that her passage from this life to the next may be peaceful and blessed. Amen.

The Baptism Of Our Lord (Year C: 10 January 2010)

Once the days of Christmas are past it is always difficult to get worked up about anything else too quickly. The Feast of The Epiphany seems to come far too soon, and since we have already too often heard sung We Three Kings and other familiar carols at Christmas, their effect seems somewhat lost when the 6th of January comes around. I suspect we in the western Church have always rather downplayed The Epiphany leading to something of a misunderstanding of its significance, which I hope, at least to a degree, I put right in last week’s sermon.

In the Eastern Church there has never been such a misunderstanding. In Orthodoxy, The Epiphany has always been the equal of - some commentators would say more important than - Christmas, because Epiphany celebrates, as I hope I made clear last time, the most dynamic aspects of the Incarnation - the moment when Christ actually showed himself to the whole world. For Eastern Christians the Epiphany has three parts: the coming of the Magi, the Baptism of the Lord and the Wedding Feast at Cana in Galilee; since it is in each of these moments that Christ manifested himself (remember epiphany means manifestation), showing himself, to the world as the Son of God. It is true that these elements are also part of the Western Epiphany but it is only in recent years that we have given Christ's baptism a particular focus and made it a separate feast on the First Ordinary Sunday after Christmas.

So then, why is it so important? Certainly it is something that people have found difficult to understand over the years. At the centre of it as he was, the first person who found it difficult was John the Baptist himself. At the heart of the gospel we have poor old John exclaiming that it is he who needs baptism from Christ and not the other way round.

John himself had been preaching repentance and had actually managed to get some Jews to undergo baptism. It must have been astonishing: baptism in John's day was a practice strictly reserved only for converts to Judaism, and here was John, inspired by God, even before the time of Jesus, turning Jewish practice on its head. And to cap it all, here is the man John knows to be the Messiah coming to submit to his baptism. The one who is sinless comes to receive the baptism that takes away sins. The one who takes away the sins of the world seems to convict himself of sin by his ritual submission. Despite first appearances, though, there is some sense in all this apparent confusion. Jesus has been waiting to declare himself; John through his, what must have been extraordinary, preaching, has convinced the people of their sinfulness and their need of the Messiah who is about to appear, and by undergoing baptism, Jesus legitimises (makes sense of) John's ministry and in the scenes that accompany it place before us the meaning of his own ministry. In these few gospel verses, Jesus is 'baptised', receives the Holy Spirit just as at a 'confirmation', and is 'ordained', picked out as God's chosen Son. Pretty neat isn't it - baptism, confirmation and ordination all in one hit. If only life was like that for the rest of us.

Jesus' ministry, so spectacularly begun, is now to take on the mantle he has so publicly been given. John's work is over. His baptism of repentance now giving way to Christ's baptism and the words used by the voice from heaven 'You are my Son, the Beloved; my favour rests on you.' take us straight back to the prophet Isaiah and the so-called 'songs of the Suffering Servant'. Jesus is being cast directly in the role of suffering servant. The emphasis is on his ministry: his bringing of true justice, his service in the cause of right, opening the eyes of the blind. But one cannot read the songs of the Suffering Servant without remembering that his call was to suffering and to death. I have said as much in the last couple of weeks at the funerals I have conducted - the Christ child whose birth the world professes to celebrate at Christmas came to die an ignominious death on the cross as a young man. It's surprising the reactions I get when I say it - I am sure that for many people the idea of Christmas and Easter being part of the same story has never crossed their minds. Just as the shadow of the cross and the glory of the resurrection hang round the crib at Christmas, so this momentous manifestation of Christ's sonship at his baptism is shot through with images of suffering, death and final glory.

We who have been baptised with Christ are the fulfilment of that ministry; we are heirs with him of the great promises of God. We share Christ's work and to us too are addressed the words of the Father: 'You are my Son, the Beloved; my favour rests on you.' If we accept Christ as Redeemer and Lord and share with him that favour of God, then we too have work to do, and it has to be said, suffering to endure. It may not always be pleasant but it will be worth it, for one day - please God - another voice will resound from heaven and say to us 'Come, you blessed of my Father; enter the kingdom prepared for you from the beginning of time.' Amen.

Epiphany 03 January 2010

When our pagan ancestors, the Romans, first constructed their calendar, they decided to adopt 25th December as mid-winter day and had a feast on that day to celebrate the sun beginning to fight back against the lengthening winter nights - it was a feast of light, of the unconquered sun. Because, however, each year is not an absolute exact number of days, mid-winter's day didn't always fall on the same date, shifting slowly backwards through the calendar as the years went on. Another group of our earlier pagan ancestors, the Egyptians, had realised that this was the case and fixed their mid-winter day on what the Romans came to call 6th January - so the Egyptians had their feast of light on that date. There were then, by the time of the Romans, two popular mid-winter feasts of light being celebrated - in the west on 25th December and in the east on 6th January.

Once Christianity had become a respectable faith and accumulated a power-base, it sensibly decided not to suppress these pagan festivals but to baptise them, to make them Christian feasts instead, feasts of Christ, the true light of the world. In the west we invented Christmas, in the east they had Epiphany: both being about the same thing - about the Son of God showing himself amongst us as a human being. It didn't take long for the western Church to decide to celebrate Epiphany as well as Christmas: Christmas for the revelation of the word made flesh amongst the Jews and Epiphany for the manifestation of Christ to the Gentiles (Epiphany actually means manifestation).

At Christmas, Jewish shepherds in the tradition of David, the shepherd-boy, worship Jesus; at Epiphany, pagan visionaries (the Magi), from the east, worship Jesus. Today then is the feast of the manifestation, the visibility of the Word of God amongst humankind.

In one of the earliest of all Christian writings, written long before any of the gospels, St. Paul speaks of the manifestation of the divinity of Jesus saying that Jesus Christ 'according to the human nature he took, a descendant of David ... was proclaimed Son of God in all his power through his resurrection from the dead.' With the resurrection, first the women, then the apostles and the other disciples began to glimpse the true mystery of Jesus, and as soon as they began to understand they began to announce it. First Mary Magdelene preached it to the apostles and then they all proclaimed: 'The Lord is risen.' But remember that even Mary, when she first encountered the risen Christ in the Garden did not at first recognize him; she thought he was the gardener. Mary didn't recognize him until he spoke to her using her name and the same was true with the disciples who met Jesus on the road to Emmaus; they didn't recognize him until he broke bread with them.

So, to recognize the risen Christ needs more than simple human eyesight - it is in the calling by name, the eucharistic celebration, the invitation to Thomas to touch him, that faith is given and we see him as Lord and God. That is why the historical fact of the resurrection cannot, as such, bring anyone to faith in the gospel. Historical facts are available equally to believer and non-believer alike - only the believer will see the meaning within the fact.

To meet the risen Christ, whether at Emmaus or in the Mass or in his brethren in need, as the Archbishop of Canterbury has encouraged us to do in his New Year's message, is a proof for believers but not non-believers. The most we can do for our non-believing friends, is to show them that what we preach is not an absurdity or impossibility. So then, in the Feast of the Epiphany we are offered both a vision and the faith to interpret that vision. To experience an epiphany in our lives always brings a crisis, a division, a judgement, a separation between believers and non-believers.

When the earliest Christian preachers reflected on the story of Jesus they told his story and theirs in exactly these terms, in terms of the crisis produced by the epiphany they had experienced - the conflict that the presence of Jesus in their lives had brought about. There are those who respond to God's love and accept his devastating critique of all the self-deception and self-righteousness that bogs mankind down, and there are those, especially those who have power, who cannot.

The story of the Magi is just such a story, a story of an encounter with Jesus. First they were moved to come to him by the mysterious behaviour of a star - not yet by faith, not by hearing the word of God in scripture but by reading the night sky. Odd, I thought on Friday, during the last episode of “Doctor Who”, as I watched the chief Time Lord fire a white-pointed diamond, something unique to him and that only he could do, moving like a shooting star through the heavens as a message to those who would recognize it as such on the earth and which brought about the epiphany crisis of the Doctor. Maybe someone should write a book about the theology of “Doctor Who”.

The star took the Magi as far as Jerusalem but not yet to Jesus. To find him they had to confront and accept the prophecies that were in the safe keeping of the Jews. They were gentiles, but as John teaches, 'salvation' comes 'from the Jews'. The Magi hear the word, believe and then find Jesus. Herod, in his turn, hears the word, does not believe and so does not find Jesus. The Magi worship Christ, as Herod seeks to kill him. Once the word is proclaimed, once the epiphany has occurred there is no other choice: we either worship or destroy. I wonder: what do you think about the place of Christianity in the world as 2010 begins?

The Feast of Epiphany tells us that the encounter with Jesus cannot leave us unchanged; for good or ill we cannot carry on as we did before our epiphany. We either live as those who share his life of forgiveness and friendship, or we resist and seek to reject him. Like the pagan Magi, moved by the star but not yet confronted by the word, we may set out sincerely seeking a true way to live, and as 'good pagans' may come to realise that a life without friendship and justice and mercy is not a life fit for human beings. It is when we are confronted in practice by the risen Christ in his poor, homeless and dispossessed that we discover we have to choose between something more than this or something less, between that charity which is a sharing in God's love, and sin.

To choose in favour of the poor is no doubt is to live dangerously, but if we make it, we, like the Magi, will be saved; if not from being destroyed by Herod, at least from the worse fate of being destroyed with him.

And we will all go safely home by another way; to the home that belongs to the poor, 'for theirs is the kingdom of heaven'', that life of friendship, joy and peace, which is the life of God for eternity. Amen.