The Word

Homilies from the pulpit at St. Olave’s:

1. Ordinary Time 21: 22nd August 2010

2. Ordinary Time 17: The Lord's Prayer: 25th July 2010

3. Ordinary Time 12: Jesus the Christ: 20th June 2010

4. Sunday after Ascension: 16th May 2010

Week 21, Year C Sunday 22nd August 2010

Why does the Church get us to listen to the Bible at Mass week by week? Why do we have to hear about Put and Lud and Moshech, which were marginal places even in Old Testament times, and certainly don’t make the headlines - or even footnotes - in our own day? Is the Bible simply an old book which is only interesting and instructive to those who like ancient history?

The church would not be commending it to us if it were just that. It is the Christian's belief that God speaks to us now through the Bible, it is in the Bible that we hear God’s Word. If then what the prophets said thousands of years ago challenged the people of their time, so does the Bible continue to challenge us today; and if in his day Jesus divided people by what he said, offending some and cheering others, then we in our day need to examine whether what he says offends us or cheers us now.

But first, let’s look at the beginning of the Gospel for today. Jesus was a great traveller, always on the move. What drove him was the Gospel, the Good News of the Kingdom. Somehow it was a burden to him that there were people who had not yet heard it and so he kept moving: ‘Through towns and villages Jesus went teaching, making his way to Jerusalem.’ Luke’s Gospel and Luke’s other book, the Acts of the Apostles, are full of the idea of journeying. Jesus doesn’t just sit in one place and wait for people to come and listen to his teaching; he himself continually moves forward in obedience to his destiny. Those who want to hear him must travel with him; for us that means being willing to move, to be changed and to learn new things.

Jesus is, of course, still travelling today, still on the move, still bringing the Good News to the towns and villages of the world. He has handed this great task over to his body, the Church, and the energy for this mission comes from the same source, the need to bring the Word to all who have not yet heard it or responded to it.

And so Jesus comes this morning to Church Walk SW16. This morning we have heard God's word proclaimed from the prophet Isaiah, the Letter to the Hebrews, and the Gospel of Luke. Jesus comes to us today as he came to the towns and villages of Palestine - he comes ‘teaching’. He is going to teach us this morning.

I wonder if we properly appreciate that Jesus’ travelling was part of his teaching. His travelling wasn’t aimless; it had a direction, and when we join the dots up we see he was, as the Gospel says: 'making his way to Jerusalem, his own 'narrow door', the place of his suffering. Jesus doesn’t just teach the truth; he lives it. The truth is that Jesus is the truth.

In point of fact the whole of the Bible is about movement - away from Egypt, to the Promised Land, away into exile, back to the promised land; and not only God's chosen people get moved: the people of all these foreign places with peculiar names like Put and Lud and Moshech are invited to move, to come to Jerusalem, the place of God's glory. To live is to move - away from our smaller world into God's larger world.

But the fact that we are known as God’s people doesn’t mean that God isn’t interested in others. God may possess us; we don’t possess God. So Jesus challenged his hearers not to imagine that, just because they had had contact with God through the scriptures read in the synagogue, or had been visited by Jesus as he went round preaching, they were assured of a place in the kingdom: the question was, had they responded to God, and desired a place in the kingdom, like hungry and needy people? Had they desired him, like the people from east and west and north and south, the outsiders who would be welcomed into the feast with Abraham and Isaac and Jacob simply because they wanted to be there?

Someone said to him, ‘Sir, will there be only a few saved?' The ‘Jews’, those Jews opposed to Jesus, used to imagine that there would be only a few saved and that they would be the few. They thought themselves pleasing to God for the same reason that they found themselves pleasing: because they scrupulously kept all the little details of their man-made laws.

Jesus doesn’t argue the case. As we have observed time and again during election campaigns, our politicians refuse to answer questions because they often seek to hide the truth; Jesus, though, frames his answer to illuminate it. He teaches his listeners, and us, that the real question we should be asking is not ‘Will many be saved?’ but ‘Will I be saved?’ This is why he changes the future tense to a present imperative: ‘Try your best to enter by the narrow door’... ‘try’ - now - the door is open now... ‘your’ - don't worry about others, worry about yourself... ‘best’' - (in Greek the word ‘best’ means ‘struggle’) - with every fibre of our being. Before us all, uncompromisingly, stands the narrow door. The Greek word also includes the sense of straight and therefore excludes anything crooked from entering the Kingdom.

In our day-to-day lives we like wide doors with plenty of room for movement. The modern phenomenon amongst all too many Christians is to recast the Faith to their own liking and do away with the awkward ‘narrow’ bits, things like homosexuality and one’s Sunday obligation to come to church, is a clear expression of this tendency to accommodate the truth to suit the comfortably ‘wide’ ethics of the world. But Jesus makes it plain that we can't saunter in through the ‘narrow door’ casually at our own convenience and on our own terms: ‘I tell you, many will try to enter and not succeed'. The door, the ‘narrow door’ stands open now and the merciful love of God invites us now to strive with all our might to enter by it because ‘once the master of the house has got up and locked the door, you may find yourself knocking on the door’. The phrase ‘you may find yourself’ is intriguing and evocative. Everyone has had the experience of pushing on a shop door only to find it locked. We push and pull but the door doesn't budge; it's closed and locked; trading hours have finished. The surprise we might feel (gosh, is it six o’clock already, I thought it was only five?) standing in front of the locked door, will not alter the fact that it is locked.

‘I thought’ will not count against the Lord's clear warning of ‘I tell you'... To our surprise we may find ourselves arguing the case as we so often do in our lives, making excuses for our sins, giving ourselves privileges, seeking exemptions. Notice again the past tense? “We once ate and drank in your company; you taught in our streets". We have all heard the equivalent in our day. "Well, I used to pray, I used to go to Mass, I used to sing in the choir, I used to serve at the altar, I used to be good…"

God won’t be wheedled into admitting into his Kingdom those who ignored, or changed, his teaching in favour of some superficial acquaintance. Rather than the presumptuous overconfidence so prevalent among people today I would speak in favour of a healthy fear. I've always been an Anglican, I've always attended Mass, and I have been a priest for many years. Is it possible that I have still never let God convert and change me - that it has all left me just as selfish, gossiping, judgmental, dishonest, self-seeking and impure as ever?

‘Then there will be weeping and grinding of teeth, when you see Abraham and Isaac and Jacob and all the prophets in the Kingdom of God, and yourselves turned outside’. We can only gain admission to the heavenly banquet on one condition: that we are hungry to get there. Those who think they have a right to be there will get a shock; they have not tried their best to enter by the ‘narrow door', which paradoxically welcomes countless unexpected guests through it; it is the door of humility, of need, of poverty in spirit. Those who have had a good, godly upbringing may think that that is all they require; somehow they're already in the club, and they needn't bother to apply. But the fact is that we can only come into God’s presence if we come as needy people who know we have nothing to offer but everything to receive.

If you have been creating ‘wriggle room’ for yourself by adapting the Church’s teachings to your own preferences I would counsel fear. Be afraid, very afraid. And have done with that complacency. Get rid of your false confidence and listen again to the Jesus' words: ‘Try your best to enter by the narrow door’. Amen.

Ordinary Time 17: The Lord's Prayer

Whenever I watch a craftsman at work doing something exceptionally well, my first impulse as often as not is to ask him what the secret is and, secondly, to ask him to teach me how to do it, and that is exactly what we read about in the Gospel today.

Jesus had been praying one day, and his disciples, witnessing the impact this kind of experience had on him, asked, "Would you teach us how to do what you're doing? We want that experience in our own lives" In response, Our Lord did two things. First, he gave them a model to emulate, "When you pray, here is how to do it," what follows being a shortened form of The Lord's Prayer. Simply put, it is a basic outline of the kind of concerns that make up authentic prayer and forms the pattern we use day by day at the Mass. It's like a piano teacher giving a set of scales to a new pupil and saying, "If you follow these rules, they will increase your capacity to play." And one of the best ways to deepen our individual capacity for prayer would be to take the words of the prayer our Lord gave us and make them our own. In other words, we can begin to learn to pray by letting the Master Teacher direct us in how it should be done.

However, there is more to this morning's gospel than having a model of prayer to follow; it contains as well an insight into the mystery of the person to whom our prayerful words are addressed. To do this, Jesus invited the disciples to use their imagination, telling them the story of a reluctant neighbour.

Put yourself in the position of a man asleep one night and there's a knock on your door and you discover a friend, on a journey, asking to spend the rest of the night in your house. Such a request would have been a common experience for any one of the disciples in their day, because in that part of the world the heat was so great that people wouldn't begin a journey until late in the afternoon and then continue into the first part of the night. There was also little in the way of public accommodation, so the only way peasants could find a place to sleep was to go to a friend and beg hospitality.

As the story unfolds, having found yourself with an unexpected guest, rather than sending them to bed without food, you go to your cupboard, and, lo and behold, discover it’s empty. However, instead of ignoring the custom of hospitality, you go next door and knock up your neighbour to ask him for the loan of three loaves. A peasant's cottage in those days was little more than a single room and the response you get is negative, the sleepy voice inside saying, "I can’t get up and give you anything. Didn’t you see my door was already closed? Don’t you realize my children are here around me asleep? If I get up to get you food, I'll wake everybody up. I cannot answer your request."

Jesus continues: if you persist, not particularly because your friend wants to help but because of your determination, finally, the children probably having been woken up, your neighbour will find some bread and give it to you, if for no other reason than to restore the peace.

Is this story telling us then that persistence in prayer is its highest virtue? Is Jesus suggesting that God is actually indifferent to prayer and we have to keep nagging the Holy Spirit until finally out of exasperation, God gives us what we’re asking for?

The short answer is, of course, No. (There is a longer answer about the various translations of the Greek word kai and its contextual use, but we don't have time for that this morning.) Suffice it to say that the reluctant neighbour does not portray the one to whom we pray. Rather, the essence of the gospel lies in the contrasting passage that follows. Jesus said, "But I say to you, ‘Ask and it will be given. Seek and you will find. Knock and the door will be opened.’” And then he gives us the true image that ought to shape our understanding of who God is, namely that of a caring, loving parent, whose response, when a child asks for something honestly, is not indifference or reluctance but the spirit of someone who cares deeply for the welfare of the child and gives them not only what they may want but gives that which in the eyes of the heavenly parent is absolutely the best for the child.

It is important to realize that this doesn't imply that God will always give us exactly what we ask for, because most of the time we're not wise enough to properly understand our needfulness - next time you pray to win the lottery you ought to remember that. By saying God will give the Holy Spirit in response to our requests, what is really being suggested is that the wisdom and goodness of our heavenly parent is going to shape whatever it is that God gives us in answer to our prayers.

Just before I sat down yesterday afternoon to write this, I had been preparing next month's Parish Calendar. Towards the end of August is St. Augustine's Day and it reminded me of a part of St. Augustine's Confessions where he talks about how his mother, Monica (who herself became a saint so profound was her faith), had so wanted to bless her son with a Christian vision.

As a young man Augustine followed the example of his profligate father with no interest whatsoever in the things dear to his mother's heart. Augustine was a very gifted, young scholar. Raised in North Africa, he realized that Italy held artistic promises North Africa didn't possess, and so resolved to go to there that he might study more fully his chosen discipline of rhetoric. Monica felt that if he ever left her side, he would never come to the Christian faith. And so one night she was praying earnestly in a chapel on the coast of North Africa that Augustine would not leave her when, in fact, he was boarding a ship and setting off across the Mediterranean to Italy.

He went to Milan, which at that time was the cultural capital of Italy, and once he got there was told that if he wanted to hear rhetoric in its finest form to go to the cathedral each Sunday because Bishop Ambrose was recognized as its greatest practitioner at that time. Augustine was told that he had no need to pay any attention to the content of what Ambrose was saying but rather, how he said it. But as it turned out, the young pagan began to do exactly that, and, lo and behold, through Ambrose's rhetoric the wonder of the Gospel began to break in on the consciousness of the young Augustine.

It was, then, through human weakness, that God eventually brought Augustine to a profound conversion that led him to become one of the great shapers of Western Christendom. The nub of the story is that Monica had no idea, of all the people in the world, that St. Ambrose was better equipped to bear witness to her son than she was herself. And years later, as Augustine looked back on the experience, he said of the night when Monica prayed earnestly that he not leave her side, that God denied her the form of her request that he might eventually give her the substance of it.

The point of the story is to invite us who follow to trust, to believe that at the bottom of the river of reality there is nothing but unambiguous goodness. God is light and in God there is no darkness at all and, therefore, when we pray, we make our requests known to a wisdom and goodness greater than our own and then trust that the way God will respond is not like the indifference of a reluctant neighbour. The response will come from the heart of a heavenly parent who loves us better than we love ourselves and knows, in the profoundest sense, what is best for us.

So I, as your priest, invite you as you pray to trust the goodness of the One who hears your prayers. Amen.

Ordinary Time 12: Jesus the Christ

'One day when Jesus was praying alone in the presence of his disciples he put this question to them, 'Who do you say I am?' It's a good question, that. It was Peter who spoke up: 'The Christ of God' he said.

But what do we understand that to mean? Who, or rather what is, the Christ of God? What did he or does he, consist of? What makes him who he is? How do we in 2010 understand and/or appreciate him? Is Jesus Christ truly the Son of God ... literally God Himself, the Divine living within human flesh? Were Jesus' claims that of a liar or lunatic ... or is He really Lord of the universe? On this question hangs not only the whole of Christian theology, but every aspect of our life of faith.

Christology - which is the branch of theology that seeks to provide the answer to the question, - isn't just an abstract branch of academic study that students have pursued in preparation for ordination, but actually is, or ought to be, the constant activity of Christian believers. As we live out our lives, when we celebrate, when we commiserate, when we work, when we are involved in the things we use to pass the times of our lives, when we engage in social activities - in all the activity of life there is implicit Christology.

Every action of the church in some way states, or betrays, how Christians believe in their hearts and do in their liyes - as distinct from their repeated rhyming off of creeds or the formulas of orthodoxy. Christology is not about defined orders of liturgical practice - it answers the question who the Christ of God is. Some of those statements and actions might show him to be merciful; others might show him to be a killjoy or a tyrant (but in the spiritual realm). There are also some whose attitudes are tantamount to the heresy of Docetism, whose adherents, mainly the Gnostics, believed that Christ never really became an individual human being dwelling in the midst of the brouhaha of life; and there are yet others who have attitudes that see fit to reducing Jesus to nothing more than some sort of moral philosopher, a 'God-like' chap - something that might be said about any number of people, but that is all. There are too, of course, the actions of us Christians, that can and do, on occasion, imply that Christ is irrelevant to the actual living of life in society. We would all do well to remember that when next we are tempted, through embarrassment or because of expediency, to water down what we claim to believe for the convenience of others or of ourselves.

So, then, we have our two starting points: (1) “Who is Jesus?” is as much a question for us gathering today as it was in the assembly in which Luke was telling his story, as recorded in this morning's gospel; and (2) there is as wide a diversity of opinions among those who have heard Jesus' words as there has ever been. It is a rare occurrence when a situation in the gospel and a situation in our community today so completely and relevantly converge. But how do we make the question small enough to be able to say something focused about it during the course of a Sunday morning sermon? Perhaps one could begin with a seemingly frivolous question: what is Jesus' surname? Is it 'Christ'? This is a very common practice in indices in books on the history of ideas where Jesus is referred to as a kind of populist philosopher: how often over the years have I discovered Jesus in the index of a book listed as 'Christ comma Jesus' in just the same way one might find 'Brunel, comma Isambard Kingdom'.

Oddly enough, this isn't a new phenomenon: it is Luke who records that at Antioch the followers of Jesus were first called 'Christians' in the Graeco-Roman world; and many Romans like Tacitus and Pliny thought so as well and assumed that 'Chrestus' or 'Christus' was simply the name of the originator of our cult. And the trend continues even to today when people say 'you followers of Christ'; and we are often just as guilty when we say 'we are followers of Christ'. The word 'Christ', you see, is not a name; rather it is the basic title by which we acknowledge who Jesus is.

Our confession of faith is that 'Jesus is the Christ.' He is the individual whom we call 'the anointed one'. Chosen by the Father to enter into the totality of our human experience, Jesus is Lord; and he is the Son giving to all reality a worth such that it can exist in the presence of God. To say 'Jesus is the Christ' is to say that all humanity is offered the chance to be transformed into the divine image. It is a wholly different, unique and special way of looking at the world and at the human condition.

And if we really see the world in this radical new way - as countless brothers and sisters of Jesus have done down the centuries - then we will in turn react in a wholly different way to the human joys and human sorrows that form the days of the lives of humankind. If all humanity really is offered the chance to be transformed into the divine image, then all that is good and noble can lead us towards holiness and even better, all that is sordid or sad can be transformed.

So a small start, a step along the way towards answering the question who Jesus is would be for us to stop using 'Christ' as if it were a surname - such is the practice of those who have not encountered Jesus but have only heard about him. If we haven't done it before, we ought to reply, when asked, that we believe that Jesus is the Christ, rather than saying that we believe in Jesus Christ, for in so doing we are saying something much more far-reaching about our saviour than merely giving him a name. We ought to use 'Jesus is the Christ' as our basic confession of faith. My friends, Jesus is the Christ. Amen.

The Sunday after Ascension: 16th May 2010

The Gospel set for today has come by tradition to be used at services of prayer for Christian unity and is an understandable choice, because it marks the climax of Jesus’ priestly ministry at the Last Supper in which he makes the plea ‘that they all may be one’. It is fair to say that in our limited way Christians do regularly pray we might come closer together in matters of belief, whilst, I suspect, in reality often meaning that other Christians should come closer to us in those matters. Jesus, though, prayed that we would become so close that ‘our’ union would reflect ‘his’ union with his Father.

It would be a dream come true if, by some miracle, all Christians were united, and we could all agree on the same basic doctrines of faith and were one; but if that did all come to pass, what next?

The apostles at the Last Supper were, we understand, united in faith, but at the same time managed to make the main talking point of the evening which of them was the most important. Judas betrayed Jesus for money and Peter disowned him through cowardice, that after having boasted about how brave and loyal he was. The ‘beloved disciple’ John, only a few days before the Passion, had recruited his mother to support his claim to be given the ‘best’ place in the Kingdom ... but despite all this, they were one in faith. The hard fact is that ‘unity of faith’ is quite dead unless there is also ‘unity of love’ and we have witnessed in the media during the last week a good example (in a different sphere of life) of politicians of divergent ideologies attempting the very same trick.

Though the apostles sought for themselves the best places and to be the most important and to be the most admired, they were in truth no different to those many millions of Christians who have followed them. It is basic human nature to seek to belong to what C.S. Lewis called ‘The Inner Ring’, to aspire to being one of the elect, one of the chosen few who are not just different from the common herd, but better than the common herd.

At the Last Supper, though, Jesus told his disciples they must become servants and that only when they had done that would he call them friends. It would be impossible for the world to be totally Christian but still be divided into the massively rich and the destitute, the tyrants and the dominated and those who are slaves and those who are free. Is this the ‘unity’ for which Jesus died?

It does not sit easily with us to be servants. We have all enjoyed too much success in our lives to want to serve. It is really wrong, it seems to me, to call the starving and abused peoples of the world ‘under-privileged’ when so many of us are so emphatically ‘over-privileged’, and I recall that the murderers of St. Stephen actually refused to listen to him because they felt so threatened by his words. They killed him by stoning, a ghastly parody of unity; as in some American states today, it is contrived that the condemned on death row are simultaneously injected by a group of people, no one knowing whose syringe it is that contains the lethal dose, so in a stoning, no one knowing who struck the fatal blow.

We should be grateful for the real advances that have been made in Christian unity over the last forty years. Hearts have certainly changed; however, on the whole most Christians pay little more than lip-service to it, preferring the security of their own worship. What has been achieved so far is a start and no more. In the sacrament of marriage a union has to built by husband and wife, by hard work and endurance. The reunion of something that has previously been broken, which is what the search for Christian unity is really about, is much harder, because there has been so much bitterness and recrimination in the past.

Even the most loyal of us, be we Anglican, Roman Catholic, Orthodox or protestant cannot honestly say that all the fault lies on the other sides. There is much genuine pain felt in the separation of Christians and more pain to be endured in the healing of that separation. We will all have to make sacrifices and suffer pain if Christ’s prayer is actually to be fulfilled. We must jealously hold to our fundamental beliefs and not pretend there are no real differences between us; unity will not be advanced if we don’t.

I would suggest, in these days when Christianity is becoming increasingly marginalized, especially in the West, that the world is crying out for Christ’s followers to unite in their concern for God’s creation. It has taken long enough for us to agree to pray together; do you remember the headlines during the last papal visit to Great Britain in 1981, when John Paul II and Archbishop Robert Runcie knelt together in prayer - the first time that the two leaders of our respective denominations had done such a thing together in public.

This morning’s epistle reading contains the last words of the New Testament, ‘Come, Lord Jesus’, with his promise that he will be with us soon, makes me think of returning to where I began this sermon, to recall Jesus’ words of Maundy Thursday, ‘Love one another as I have loved you’ and until we do we will not rise above the lip service we pay to Christian unity. Christian unity in its true sense is first a matter of love and loving service. And that starts here, at the grass roots, or not at all. Amen.

St Olave's Church, Church Walk, London, SW16 5JH

Fr Paul Ensor
St Olave's Vicarage, Church Walk, Mitcham, Sw16 5JH
Tel: 020 8764 2048