Homily 5th Sunday after Trinity

Louisa M. Alcott’s book Little Women is essentially a morality tale. But it is told with great liveliness, and centres around the relationships between four sisters, each of them very different. They don’t always get on with each other, but they love and trust each other enough to learn from each other. If they had been more alike in character, the story would have been far less amusing, and there would have been far fewer opportunities for each to grow. Their differences are essential to the plot.

Martha and Mary are clearly very different characters, too, but today’s Gospel reading suggests that the learning is all one-way: Mary is right and Martha is wrong. But probably most of us, particularly, perhaps, the women here today, have a sneaking sense of sympathy for Martha, and a feeling that Jesus is being less than just. After all, somebody has to make preparations for guests, get dinner ready, wash up and so on. We can’t all sit about in a contemplative daze.

This story about Martha and Mary is one that we tend to think we know quite well, only to realise that what we think we know is actually an amalgam of several different stories. We tend to associate Mary with the sinful woman who anointed Jesus with costly perfume, and who had a brother named Lazarus, whom Jesus raised from the dead. But Mark tells us the bare facts that a nameless women anointed Jesus’s head; Luke says she was a sinner and that she anointed his feet, but still gives no name, and John tells us that Mary anointed Jesus’s feet, but say’s nothing about her sinfulness. It is also John who tells us about Lazarus.

So, let’s look with more care at the passage set for us today, and see what it actually says, rather than what we think it does.

It says, for one thing, that this all happens in Martha’s house. There is no mention of any male family member or relative. All Luke’s first readers would have known instantly that this was an example of Jesus’ famed radical stance towards women. He is doing something very daring by being in that house at all when they are not his family. But Martha and Mary are also doing something daring by welcoming this man into their home. Their reputations are definitely going to suffer. No wonder Martha is in a bit of a flap: if it is her home, she is the one who has taken the bold decision to invite Jesus in.

If Paul’s letters are anything to go by, Luke’s first readers, the earliest Christians, would have been meeting in such homes, and would have been debating whether or not women could be hosts and leaders of their gatherings. Luke, with his well known interest in women, is suggesting that Jesus set them a precedent here.

Luke goes on to show Jesus specifically commending Mary for sitting at his feet and listening to him. Students might sit at the feet of rabbis to learn, but women didn’t. If women were present at all, it was simply to provide food and drink, and to remain quietly out of sight. Once again, for Luke’s first readers this would have played into the discussion about women disciples. Were they just here to enable and facilitate the men’s vocations, or could they be true disciples themselves? Luke is saying that Jesus has already answered that question.

 It is ironic that this vignette of the full participation of women in the mission of Jesus should have turned into a story about a fallen women and her harassed sister! If we take the context seriously, Jesus’ words to Martha are a clear call: women, like men, need to put discipleship above everything else.

 And that is surely the point. Like Martha, we are all “worried and distracted by many things". There are so many things that have real claim upon our time and our hearts, where we feel justified in saying with indignation, “We can’t all be contemplatives. Someone has to do the work!”

And, of course, that is true. But we must not let our worries and duties mask our real nature, or most important task, which is to be disciples of Jesus.

Illustration: Christ in the House of Mary and Martha, by Diego Velazquez. Circa 1620, oil on canvas. National Gallery, London.

Sermon, Sunday 13th July 2025

Year C Trinity 4 2025

Deuteronomy 30: 9-14 & Luke 10: 25-37 (Good Samaritan)

Yesterday I learned how to make scones. I had a book. The recipe declared itself to be foolproof. What could go wrong? But there’s foolproof and then there’s me. You see the instructions were in English, I understood every word. Butter, yes. Self-raising flour, yes. Sugar, yes. But even though I understood the words I was a long way from making a successful scone. ‘Work the mixture with your fingers until a crumb is formed.’ But what sort of crumb? ‘Add the milk and vanilla essence and form a wet dough.’ But how are we defining wet? ‘Bake for around 10 minutes.’ But is that actually 9 or 11 minutes?

Anyone that has followed a recipe, or tried to put together an Ikea flat pack, or learned just about anything from a text book, knows that there is a world of difference between the words on the page and the way things turn out. There is something between the two, words – end product, and it’s a crucial third component that you can’t do without, replace or fake. And that’s experience.

Experience gives flesh to the bones of instruction. Experience takes us from point a to point b. Experience makes the abstract into something actual, useable, real. By the third attempt the recipe finally started to make sense. I knew that cold butter makes a better crumb. By the third attempt my scones emerged from the oven as something that might just be OK at an afternoon tea, so long as they’re hidden at the back of the plate behind Jane’s. 

‘Good teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?’ You know where this is going, don’t you?

Law, litigation, life; these are the things that we are asked to think about in our readings today.

First we had a little bit of Deuteronomy, when the Lord has given the commandments, the laws by which the people of Israel are to live, and Moses says, well now you’ve got to live by them, with all your heart and all your soul. But it’s a tricky calling that, far easier said than done. And thousands of years later the way the Law given to Moses should be understood is examined again this time by Jesus and this expert on religious law, whose Q and A session is wrapped around one of the most popular parables of the New Testament, the parable of the Good Samaritan.

There are five questions in the conversation surrounding this story of the Good Samaritan. Two of those questions are posed by the lawyer, three by Jesus.

The first seems to be a fairly basic one. ‘What must I do to inherit eternal life?’ But Luke says that the lawyer’s question is a test, not a genuine search for truth. The only other time this particular word for “test” is used in this book is during Jesus’ temptation by the devil in the desert at the beginning of his mission, when Jesus quotes Deuteronomy to say, “You shall not put the Lord your God to the test.” Luke is showing us that there’s devil in this question too, then, a trap set for Jesus to fall into.

So Jesus responds to the test with two questions of his own. “What is written in the law?” and “What do you read there?”

I cannot overstate how important I believe it to be that Jesus asks both, “What has been written?” and “How do you read?” These are not the same thing, and together imply that the Scriptures are living texts of interactive possibility. They are not, on the one hand, stagnant words that simply say the same thing to whoever is reading them. Neither are they blank pages for us to make up what we like. No, instead there is the written and there is the reading of the written. The recipe and the scone. They are each needed to make sense of what we read in Scripture, and the gap between the two, as the parable will set out, is experience.

The lawyer then asks the question that sets off the parable- ‘who is my neighbour?’. It’s another loaded question this. It doesn’t ask ‘how do I show love’ or ‘what is a loving action’ but rather, ‘who do I have to love?’ ‘Where can I draw the line? Who can I get away with not loving?’

What matters in the parable that follows is that the hero at the centre of it all is a Samaritan. Commentators tend to go heavy on the hatred between Samaritans and Jews, something that is true, but in Luke’s story, there is an added spice to the characterisation.

In the previous chapter, Jesus had sent messengers to find shelter, to seek hospitality for him in a village in Samaria on his way to Jerusalem (Luke 9:51-55). But the villagers are having none of it. ‘You’re on the way to Jerusalem? You’re not welcome here.’ James and John Jesus’ disciples are so cross they want to call down fire from heaven to destroy the village. But instead Jesus bides his time and tells a parable where despite the lack of welcome they just experienced; a Samaritan can still be the hero. This isn’t just told for the benefit of the insufferable lawyer; it’s for the disciples too.

The fifth and final question pulls us back out of the Samaritan story and into the debate between Christ and the questioner. “Which of these three, do you think, was a neighbour to the man who fell into the hands of the robbers?”

The translation we have says, which of these three was a neighbour to the man? But it should be translated as ‘which of these three became a neighbour to the man who fell into the hands of robbers.’ Jesus has brilliantly brought the question of the lawyer back on itself. He asked, ‘who is my neighbour?’ Jesus asks, ‘who has become a neighbour?’ The category of neighbour after this parable is not fixed. It is the experience of mercy that unpacks the letter of the law allowing a fuller understanding of what it is to be a neighbour, of someone worthy of mercy.

We have looked at the questions surrounding this parable this morning, and I fear we’re only really scratching the surface of what it’s about. Scones you can get right in about 3 goes. The trouble is that there are no pithy take-aways, not really. Jesus is saying something about God and the law and mercy and it can be read a thousand different times from a thousand different angles. The job of a Christian- our job, is to do just that. To revisit again and again those two questions Jesus asked the lawyer, either side of the parable. “What do you read there?” and ‘who became a neighbour to the man.’

Scripture must not be a dusty book that lives on an undisturbed shelf. It needs to be chewed, read, held up against the world we live in and come alive in us so we don’t just read about but experience the truth and life and mercy of God.

 Illustration: Vincent van Gogh, The Good Samaritan (after Delacroix), 1890. Oil on canvas, Kroeller-Mueller Museum, Otterlo, Netherlands.

Feast of St Alban, Sunday 22nd June 2025

Feast of St Alban, 22nd June, 2025.

Holywell Hill on the other side of the park was thrown into total chaos yesterday by a bursting water main. But of course it was- this is the weekend when we remember St Alban’s martyrdom, so naturally his Holy Well (or at least a water source nearby) sprung up again just as the original is reputed to have done all those years ago. In case you don’t know the story of the Holy Well that gives the hill into town its name, here’s a potted version.

Alban, who lived somewhere over there, was arrested and tried for becoming a Christian after having given shelter to a fleeing priest. Christianity was officially frowned upon by the Emperor Diocletian because he thought Jesus-loving soldiers were the reason his legions were losing so many battles. This was a problem; the Christians had to go. Anyway, Alban was arrested and tried, potentially where the choir are sitting (points), but if not there then near enough, and marched out of the city up a nearby hill for execution, the usual Roman punishment for a first offence.

As for the Holy Well there are two traditions about its beginnings- one goes that Alban, climbing the hill to his execution on a hot day such as this, fell to his knees and prayed for a drink. And up sprung the water, to support him on the way. The other is that he got to the top of the hill unaided, but after he was decapitated a spring opened up where his head fell. It’s conceivable there are other explanations for the site of the well, but they’re boring and don’t involve Alban.

Anyway, however it got there, the spring has long since been covered over and lost, even if the road above it still called Holywell Hill, but yesterday it fought back bursting forth from under the tarmac of the road and reasserting its presence among the landmarks of the city just in time for its big day, the day we celebrate now.

I tell you all this because I think these stories are important. You see I had to explain to a year 6 group who came to church the other week what the saints that we see all around us in church are for.

I had been doing what I thought was a good job of saying who they were, but they were less interested in that than in what the saints are for. I could have said lots in reply, and I held my thinking pose for a good 30 seconds, but in the end I landed on 2 things. First they are here because they tell good stories. Saints tell us their stories, and what makes them saints is that they help us understand the ultimate story we tell in church, the one we call Christianity.

Sometimes Christians are called people of the book, but it makes me squirm a bit because that’s not right. We are in fact people of the Word, by which we mean the Word made flesh, the one who shows us what God is like. We do not worship a book, we worship the person whose story it tells, Jesus Christ who lived, died, and rose again for us. That is the story of our faith, and Jesus is the Word we worship. He is the light by which we read our book.

But we need help to understand this story, and so the saints step up. ‘Those who find their life will lose it, and those who lose their life will find it.’ So said Jesus to the disciples in this passage from St Matthew before he sends them out. All very challenging, but what does that look like in practice we might ask?

Well, here is the story of Alban- sheltering, caring, feeding, and dying for the sake of another. Finding life, and losing it. It is in his story that generations of people have understood a little better the story of Jesus. It is in following Albans example that generations of people in this church and city have learned to be better disciples. The stories of the saints help us understand the story of our faith.

And, secondly, I said that the saints are more than their stories, they are supporters. We live and worship in their fellowship.

Now that’s a word that gets a bit of a hard time. You are, most of you, less cynical than me, so maybe you cope better with this sort of thing but when I go to a church and someone tells me ‘We are going to have a time of fellowship’, I get downcast. They mean someone is going to put an arm around me and speak softly.

But fellowship with the saints is more than that- fellowship is the absolute conviction that we are most ourselves when we are together. Fellowship is for life and beyond death, and because of the resurrection of Jesus Christ those two things are held together in a continuous whole. The saints are our supporters now, praying with us and for us, because they have walked the roads we walk and have not been overcome.

Story and fellowship, that is what we celebrate today when we remember St Alban. May his story well up again like the waters of that Holy Well, to remind us of whose fellowship we share in this place. May his fellowship teach us more about the faith we share in the Word made flesh, Jesus Christ, the true and living God, whom he worshipped and adored.

Amen. 

Sermon for Pentecost, Sunday 8th July

Pentecost 2025

I wonder if you can remember your 18th birthday. (If you’ve had one yet!)

I can, well, I can remember about 2/3rds of it, the rest is hazy, but I was away from home and I spoke to some of my family over the course of the day, but I particularly remember speaking to my grandma who said, ‘of course now you’re 18 you’re a proper grown-up.’ And I suppose I was. All of a sudden I could vote, I could get married without permission, I could buy and consume alcohol and cigarettes. I would be held accountable for my actions in a court of law. And yet I was no more grown up than I had been the day before, and I don’t think I was much more grown-up the day after.

We tend to think that there are moments that change us forever. We might refer to the time when we fell in love. It could be the day of becoming a parent or choosing a school, or making a lifelong commitment like marriage or civil partnership. But the more we think about those events, the more we realize these were, at most, waymarks in a much bigger process.

People become parents on the day of the birth or adoption of their first child, but they will spend the rest of their lives working out what it means. Our 18th birthday was just one day on the journey from childhood to adulthood, whether or not that’s something we ever reach.

I say all this because it is one dimension of what the Scriptures show us in the variety of accounts that we have of Pentecost, the birthday of the church.

You see the bible appears conflicted on this.

St Luke gives us a full 50 days of post-Resurrection appearances, instructions and waiting, before the disciples experienced their baptism by fire and the Holy Spirit. But according to St John, Jesus breathed the Spirit into the disciples straight after his rising from the dead, on the evening of the "first day of the week." Are we supposed to assume that these two accounts just don’t add up, that the disciples were a bit confused?

No. They’re pointing us to the fact that in reality, the Spirit's action in the disciples was a process that started when they met Jesus and deepened each time they acted in Jesus' name.

The Acts of the Apostles tells us that when the disciples began to preach, the people who had come to Jerusalem from across the known world were confused because they all understood what was being said in their own language. People who were accustomed to the boundaries that divided one group from another suddenly found themselves spoken to as one, the heard a message that transformed how they could think about themselves and other people. The old, easy separations fell away as a group of Galileans in from the country shared a message that all could understand.

And it was not an easy message to hear.  

To return to St John’s account, on the day when the resurrected Christ first appeared to the disciples they were struggling to take in the fact that death wasn't what they thought it was, that Jesus was risen, and that he had come to them offering peace. In the midst of their confusion, Jesus said, "As the Father has sent me, so I send you." They who had betrayed him, fled from the scene of his arrest, not shown up to support him in the hour of his death, it was to them that he offered his forgiveness.

He was inviting them to share in his own relationship with God. And then he gave them the one command that would keep his mission alive in and through them: "Forgive."

That was it. No list of instructions, no institution; no orders, hierarchy, hymns or liturgy. Just forgiveness.

The symbol of multiple languages in the story we heard this morning represents everything that divides us.

One glance at the news shows us how good we are at building walls around ourselves, putting barriers between us and people that are not quite like us. Who did you vote for? Which part of town do you live in? What language do you speak?

Pentecost is the moment that breaks down these boundaries of time and culture, and most of all, of our settled and certain attitudes that are demonstrated in an unwillingness not just to forgive, but to be forgiven.

When Jesus said to enter the kingdom of heaven we must become like little children, he meant at the very least that we need to have the humility to admit wrong and seek forgiveness. A heart that is too hard for confession and forgiveness is a heart in need of the Holy Spirit because without forgiveness there is simply no space for God.

That’s why we need to celebrate this festival each year.

Just as at our 18th birthdays we weren’t suddenly adults, so Pentecost is a long process.

When we are baptised we receive the Holy Spirit, but that’s not the end of the story. God doesn’t just complete working in us all at once and then we’re fixed, forgiven, finished.

The Holy Spirit grows in us and we grow in it, not just each year but each week and each day as the barriers that separate us from God and from each other are worn away by the gifts that only the Spirit can give. That is what we are here for each Sunday. That is why we need to be here each Sunday. To acknowledge of our needs for forgiveness, for fellowship, for the gifts of the Spirit that must be renewed in us because without them we are wanderers in a thirsty land where there is no water. We are here to seek nothing less than the water of life.

So this Pentecost our prayer must be a simple one, prayed with hearts open to what we most deeply need.

Spirit of the living God, fall afresh on me.

Illustration: Mikhail Vrubel, Descent of the Holy Spirit on the Apostles, 1885, fresco at St Cyril’s Monastery Kiev, Ukraine

Emily Lloyd’s Final Sermon on Placement, Sunday 18th May

Emily Lloyd final sermon on placement– John 13:31-35

I asked my friend Google what love is. As you can imagine he came up with lots of different answers. For example, Wikipedia says  “Love is a complex and diverse feeling of attraction and attachment to a person, animal, or thing.” Lots of little sayings popped up in my search too, such as “love is not what you say, it’s what you do” and “love is like the wind, you can’t see it but you can feel it.” I’m sure everyone here has their own idea or image of what love is. The thing about love is that it is very hard to define.

However, in our reading from John’s gospel Jesus says to his disciples “I give you a new commandment, that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another.” Jesus, who was very good at ambiguity, tells us very clearly in this verse what love looks like, and it looks like him.

The disciples are having their last supper together, and just before where our reading picks up Jesus has realised that Judas Iscariot is going to betray him. Jesus was “troubled in Spirit,” deeply saddened that “one whom he loved” was going to betray him.

As this story is told so often in church I think it’s easy to forget how heartbreaking this situation is. I have to  remind myself sometimes, when I feel slighted by someone or I’m struggling to forgive something, that Jesus knew one of his closest friends was going to betray him in return for money. Yet, moments before, Jesus had been washing Judas’ feet in an extraordinary display of grace and forgiveness. Jesus knew that his disciples would mess up; that Peter and Judas would betray him and perhaps, also, that they would not stay awake to pray with him in the Garden of Gethsemane. And yet, Jesus shares a meal with them and washes their feet - they are forgiven even before they commit the sin.

I think two of the trickiest verses to unpack in our reading are when Jesus says “Now the son of man has been glorified, and God has been glorified in him. If God has been glorified in him, God will also glorify him in himself and will glorify him at once.” Jesus is speaking about how he has been glorified through washing the disciples feet and God has been glorified, in other words, honoured, through Jesus’ action of service. Jesus washing the disciples feet symbolised his imminent death, where he would make the ultimate act of service by laying down his life for us.

So going back to those definitions of love from the internet, the first about love as a complex feeling of attachment. Well yes it can be, but it’s much more self-giving than that; Jesus showed unconditional love to everyone - friends and strangers. The second, “love is not what you say, it’s what you do.” Looking at Jesus’ life, love is about action, but he showed compassion through his words too which were always very considered. And finally, “love is like the wind, you can’t see it but you can feel it.” Well this one’s not right either, Jesus showed his love in everything he said and did. None of these definitions or sayings define the love that Jesus speaks of when he tells us to love one another. And I’d argue that nothing can define love apart from Jesus – because God is love and Jesus is God and the only way we can see what love truly is, in it’s purest form, is by looking to Jesus. Because, like the disciples, however good our intentions, we are human and we will make mistakes, we will fail to show love as Jesus did, and does.

However, what we can do is show Jesus’ love when we meet together as a church family and when we share in the last supper. We come to the altar for communion, acknowledging our failures and asking God to sustain us and help us to show the kind of love that he showed.

Illustration: Ford Maddox Brown, Jesus washing Peter’s Feet, oil on canvas, 1876.

Sermon for the 4th Sunday of Easter, April 11th

Are you familiar with the term ‘glamping’?

Perhaps you’re not, but it’s simply the putting together of two words, glamour and camping, to make one word, ‘glamping’.

Glamour and camping. For me if you put the words glamour and camping together you come out with something that sounds a lot like ‘hotel’, but for other people like Mrs Lloyd to whom the thrill of the outdoors is calling, but the practicalities of living in a tent are not, ‘glamping’ offers a half-way house. You can wake up to sounds of the dawn chorus, but avoid the sound of other people in the toilet block.

If you want to glamp the possibilities are endless. You can stay in a ready made ‘bell tent’, complete with awning and fire-pit. You can stay on a landscaped yurt retreat with all meals included. You can have a fixed camping pod with composting toilet. Or, and this option is the most expensive so far that I have come across, or you can stay in the modern take on a shepherd’s hut. Fold down double bed, solar powered television, cast-iron fireplace, these options make the modern glampers’ shepherd’s hut an exclusive place to stay. David Cameron bought one to write his memoirs in.

My point is, these things called shepherd’s huts are a long way away from shepherding. I know practically nothing about modern animal husbandry, but what I do know is that the more closely you have to care for someone or something, the less glamourous it becomes. When it’s lambing season and the ewes are struggling and it’s raining- that’s when shepherding today is probably at its least glamorous. There is a big gap between the glamping vision of it, all brass fittings and hot cocoa and the reality of getting on a quad bike at 5am to bring a sheep in.

Although glamping was not invented, the same gulf between expectation and reality is at play in our Gospel reading this morning.

Jesus is in the Temple, and the people questioning him want to nail down just who they’re talking to, once and for all. ‘How long will you keep us in suspense, they ask? Are you the Messiah or aren’t you?’

This question is a big one. The Messiah, translated in the Greek as Christos, Christ, means ‘the anointed one’, the kingly one, the new version of King David that God chooses to free his people from oppression and slavery. And Jesus says in answer that a shepherd is what God is and that that is what he is too.

Now this idea isn’t new. The people to whom Jesus was speaking knew that very often in scripture God was described as a shepherd:

Psalm 80: ‘Hear O thou shepherd of Israel, thou that leadest Joseph like a sheep.’

Psalm 23: ‘The Lord is my shepherd, I’ll not want’.

King David is known as the shepherd of his people, he was literally called from tending his father’s flocks to defeat Goliath and then be King after Saul. So Jesus in identifying himself as shepherd, blends these themes together, of God and David, Lord and King, and says that that is what they see before them.

Was it any easier to be a shepherd 2000 years ago? No, very much not. In fact it was such hard work that most of the time people who owned sheep employed other people to be shepherds because the places where there was enough pasture were a long way from the comforts of civilisation.

But perhaps the people questioning Jesus had forgotten what shepherding actually looked like.

Are you the Messiah, they ask? Because you don’t much look like one. There was no space in their idea of a Messiah for someone who looked and smelt like Jesus, making the claims he makes; claims that God was not interested in glamping with his people but shepherding them. Real, difficult, painful, tiring shepherding for the sake of a flock that was just as hard to manage as any on the hills outside Jerusalem.

‘I am the Good Shepherd, Jesus said, ‘who lays down his life for his sheep.’ My sheep hear my voice, I know them and they follow me.’

And immediately after he has finished saying these things they take up stones to kill him. This version of God is blasphemous, too dirty, too ordinary, too shepherd-like, to be true. The man must be stopped. And Jesus is stopped, as we know, via the horror of the cross.

As his followers will come to understand, Jesus is making both a statement and a prophecy here- he is the good shepherd and he will lay down his life for his sheep. A prophecy and a promise, that through his death he opens the gate to the sheepfold, to the gift of eternal life.

This is the version of God that we are here to worship today.

This is the version of God that we need. Not a glamping God who achieves precisely nothing, but a real-life shepherd who goes to the places in us that are dark and dirty and sinful. Goes to these places, and doesn’t turn away with disgust but offers to free us from them with rejoicing. We are not held by these things because Jesus the good shepherd is not held by them.

This Easter and always may we hear his voice, ask his forgiveness, and follow him home.

Illustration: Christ the Good Shepherd, Mosaic, Early Byzantine (c. 330–750), Mausoleum of Galla Placidia, Ravenna, Italy.

Sermon for the 2nd Sunday of Easter April 27th

The hymns and songs we sing at Easter are full of energy, joy and triumph. Rightly so, because we celebrate Christ conquering death and opening the gate of eternal life. They stand in stark contrast to the hymns and carols of Christmas, where, despite the joy of the incarnation – the coming of God among us as the Christ child – we sing about quietness and peace:

“How silently, how silently, the wondrous gift is given"; “Silent night, holy night, all is calm, all is bright.”

The irony of this is that the Christmas narrative in scripture is actually rather noisy. Angels sing in the sky, shepherds rejoice and glorify God, a mass census takes place in crowded Bethlehem, strangers from the east cause fear in the palace of Herod, who orders a terrible massacre of children. Even though we sing about peace and quiet, the Christmas story is loud.

At Easter, we sing with gusto of choirs in new Jerusalem, Christ conquering, bursting from the tomb: “Up from the grave he arose, with a mighty triumph o’er his foes.”

And yet, when we read the Gospel accounts of the resurrection, we find only quietness, secrecy and peace. Jeus slips into rooms, appears unrecognised, walks quietly alongside people and breaks bread with them. The resurrection is not triumphantly brash at all; it is rather quiet and unexpectedly unassuming.

The resurrection appearances in our Gospel reading today gives two examples of that quietness. In the first, Jesus is in the room with his disciples. Although the doors are locked, Jesus does not break them down. He is simply and suddenly present among his friends. These are fearful people, and a loud entrance would not have calmed their fears. It is the evening of Easter Day, so we know that Mary Magdalene has already seen Jesus that morning and has shared her news with the disciples. But they are grief-stricken and no doubt perplexed by what Mary has told them. It’s significant, then, that Jesus’ first words to them are “Peace be with you.” He speaks a peaceful greeting, then confirms who he is, by showing them his wounds. Then comes John’s version of the giving of the Holy Spirit. We are probably more used to Lukes’s version, recounted in Acts 2, where the sound of the Spirit is ”the rush of a violent wind”, but here, Jesus breathes. It is a quiet dispensation. To those who are frightened and grieving, he breathes peace and the Spirit. For Thomas, not present that evening, Jesus returns to bring something more. Again, he offers peace as his greeting and an invitation to touch and understand. He doesn’t berate Thomas, but rather offers him an opportunity for encounter and faith. To the one who doubts, Jesus gives assurance.

So, what does this tell us, that the first Easter was quiet and unassuming? It tells us that Christ, even in his triumph over death, is not triumphalist. If we struggle with loud, noisy, brash interpretations of faith, then this can give us heart. Jesus appears quietly, breaking bread, on the beach, walking alongside people, offering peace.  Even the Holy Spirit is given in a quiet breath, rather than a noisy rushing wind. Jesus appears to people who, despite having heard the news of the resurrection from Mary Magdalene, have locked the door out of fear. They are, to say the least, wary about what she has told them. Jesus does not wait for them to grow confident or certain – he comes to them anyway.

Jesus meets with those who are fearful, uncertain, doubting and grieving, and offers simply his presence and his peace. For those who struggle with faith, or with expressing it boldly and confidently, this is enormously helpful. We know that from such humble and inauspicious beginnings these uncertain and frightened disciples spread the good news of Jesus, so that two thousand years later we’re still reading this story and marvelling at God’s love and glory. Those of us who might find it hard to be bold can look to those disciples and know that we too are able to be vessels of the Holy Spirit and sharers of the good news, because Jesus Christ is quietly present, always by our side.

Illustration:

Christ and the Doubting Thomas by Luca Signorelli, fresco, Basilica della Santa Casa, Loreto, Italy. Early Renaissance 1477 - 1482.   

Easter Day Sermon 20th April

Easter Day 2025 Yr.C

It was an easy mistake to make. Garden, gardener. Early morning before the fierce sun made manual work impossible, was the right time to be tidying up, sweeping the paths. Who else would be there at that hour, among the dead?

She was there to get away, as much as anything. So much had happened, so fast. The supper, the arrest, the hasty trial, the rush to execution, so much fear and grief in such a short time. And then the confusion of finding the tomb empty, and Peter and John no use, having a look, going away again, no efforts to find him.

She knew he wasn’t there, but still she stayed. It was quiet, and empty. After all the noise, the rush, the emotion, now there was nothing, nothing but the still air, the dark space in the cave, and, away in a corner, the gardener doing whatever gardeners do.

He had rescued her. She had been ill, despised, an outcast, a woman with no friends, stared at in the street, living on the edge. He had drawn her into his circle of friends, his new community, were people who were nothing gained infinite worth. Under his gaze she had blossomed. She had learned of the new world where God reigned, where all the rules and regulations that had so oppressed her were overturned, where the poor were rich and the humble exalted, where the sick found healing and the tormented found peace, where even death could be challenged. But then they had come for him, as the powerful do for those who stand up to them. And now he had gone, leaving behind this empty space, this nothingness.

There was no going back. He had loved her, and once you have been loved, the world is different for ever. She had a job to do, she knew. There was his mother to console. There were his friends to support while they decided what to do now. And then there was a future to find, a way of hanging on to it all. The new world of God’s reign was too precious to lose.

The gardener was nearer now, disturbing her peace. Suddenly she was angry, that someone had taken the body away, denying her a last look, a quiet goodbye. Roman soldiers perhaps? The religious authorities? Misguided disciples? The gardener might know.

But then there was the voice, “Mary,” he said. The voice that had called her home into his family, calling her again. Even through her tears, she knew him. Not the gardener, then. She should have known, of course. How could she have believed for one moment that death could defeat him? Had he not shown them that love was stronger than death? How could she not have seen? How could she not have felt, in the quiet, in the emptiness, creation holding its breath waiting for his reappearing?

It was an easy mistake to make, Garden, gardener. A stupid mistake, perhaps. Or perhaps not. Because the garden was changed now. No longer the patch of scrubland carved from the dusty city. Now there was a new creation, and the garden was that garden from long ago, when the new human beings enjoyed the fresh dawn of the world where fruit fell from the trees and God walked in the evening cool. In the cool of this dawn God walked again, the world’s gardener, coaxing from the dust of death the growth of fresh new life.

Like Eve, she had to leave Eden. She would have loved to stay, enjoying his company all to herself. But there was a whole world out there that didn’t know that Eden had returned. Most would not believe her, but some would. They would take the message of the new creation until the seeds of Eden were planted all round the world.

Mary’s story helps us to see the resurrection of Jesus through one person’s eyes, someone to whom Jesus had been immensely significant, who grieved his loss desperately, and who had the courage to believe the resurrection message and act on it, taking the news of death’s defeat to the traumatised and sceptical disciples.

Through Mary, we too receive the news. Death no longer has the last word. The seeds of Eden are here too. There is new life, eternal life, for those who are willing to take it. Love has proved stronger than hate, life stronger than death. Today the gate of Eden is open, and all may go in.

Good Friday Homily 18th April

Transcript of Good Friday homily 2025. ‘Holy Failures- thank God it’s not just me.’

This year, during Holy Week, we've been looking at the theme ‘Holy failures thank God, it's not just me.’

We've examined the tendency, exacerbated by social media, to only ever present the best bits of life, to curate joys and gladnesses and put them on the internet for other people's inspection and to ignore the things which are hard or difficult or bad or disheartening or which cause us grief or sorrow or disappointment or despair.

As a society I think we’re getting used to ignoring failure, and yet the reality of life for so many people is not like that. For every person that ‘makes it’, how many just as talented are working as child labourers in a mine in the DRC? For each person happy at work, how many more are dissatisfied, unfulfilled, marking time? For every picture of happy families we might see on a sit-com, how many people watching know the reality of strained relationships, broken promises, love gone cold? And no matter how we get there, the reality that faces us at the end of all our lives is the ultimate failure, the great taboo in modern life- death. As the Psalmist writes in Psalm 103, ‘our days are but as grass, we flourish as a flower in the field, and as soon as the wind blows over it, it is gone.

And so this week we've examined the reality of failure in Scripture and in the lives of some of the saints. We’ve explored the failure of Moses, that great prophet of the people of Israel, and the failures in the relationship of covenant between the people of Israel and God.

We’ve reflected on the failures of some saints who have not made it where they hoped to. Charles de Foucault murdered in a North African fort. St Paulinus of York, who, at the end of his ministry, looked at the ruins of all he'd tried to build and must’ve wondered what on earth God had called him to. Where was the power of the resurrection in the burning ruins of the churches he had built, the hastily discarded faith of those he had nurtured?

The ‘happiness only’ model then cannot be a model that we buy into if we are to call ourselves a church. And that is because in Holy Week, the most important week in the church’s year, we are preparing to follow the footsteps of a profound failure.

If we are to be true as a Christian church, then we have to be honest about failure, because we are a church founded on the failure of Jesus. When we look at the cross on Good Friday we look at the most profound image of failure.

And it is a failure, the cross. The hopes of the disciples, the promises of Jesus, the power of the miracles, all turned to dust when he breathed his last.

We have had 2000 years, (ish) of this story, which is why it's so easy to look past the cross, to be inured to its bleak forlorn-ness and to say, ‘Oh, well, Good Friday will soon be over. Easter is on its way, and even in this sad moment, there are seeds of new life on the cross, if only we can see them.’

But the trouble is, this underplays the total failure of the cross.

Christ is not just pretending to be dead. He's not in sleep mode. He's not knocked out but will come around later. The point we have to get here is that he is totally and utterly devoid of life. The soldier's spear pierces his side, punctures lungs, heart, and proves that there is no life left in him. This man who said he was one with God, all the promises that the disciples had just started to trust, just started to believe, just started to hope in; all that is failed.

On Good Friday, we are looking at project failure, and it's only when we acknowledge the total failure that is the cross that we can take seriously what comes next.

Because as we look to Easter Day, we don't hope that Christ will come back having hidden away somewhere for a while. If his suffering were a simulation, if his death and passion were fake, well frankly that would not be worth our attention, our yearning, our faith.

No, on Easter Day we are looking at something that is totally new. Not an old creation that looks a bit different. Not Jesus as a sort-of human boomerang. On Easter Day we glimpse a new thing, because it will spring out of nothingness, from the reality of the failure of death, starting something radically, completely, totally, new.

In Christ, after the fullness of failure comes the fullness of new life. Easter Day celebrates a new creation that only God can make and that only His Son, Jesus Christ, can share with us.

But that is for another day and another time. Today is for sorrow, and for now we look at the failure of Christ hanging on his cross.

And we look at the failure, because there is nothing else to see.

Sermon for Mothering Sunday

In the TV drama series Downton Abbey, the “upstairs-downstairs” encounters are often played out as dressing scenes, when a valet or personal maid is attending to their master or mistress. Several scenes, for example, show Lady Mary Crawley at her dressing table, sharing the secrets of her heart with her maid, Anna, as she brushes her hair or helps her into one of those constrictive corsets. Similarly, the Earl of Grantham is shown being dressed by his valet in his ceremonial uniform – and again this may be a time when confidences are shared between the two of them.

Today’s Gospel reading from John is short and to the point. The scene, played out in just two-and-a half verses, is one of the most poignant and powerful passages from the Bible. Mary stands near the cross upon which her son hangs dying, with the disciple whom he loves (who is generally thought to be John) standing nearby. When Jesus sees them, he discerns the needs of their hearts and brings them together: “Here is your son …here is your mother.” In response, the disciple instantly obeys Christ, taking Mary into his own home.

It is a touching, pared-down scene, simple and striking. Yet, as with all truly brilliant writing, a great deal is packed into those lines. It conveys to us the unimaginable rawness of a mother’s grief, her helplessness at having to watch her son die, and Christ’s compassion for his mother and for his disciple, even in his own suffering, even as he draws near to death.

In the second series of Downton Abbey the First World War breaks out, and the daughters of the Crawley family trade glamorous gowns for nurses uniforms, roll up their sleeves and learn how to drive. Yes, it’s fiction, and probably a far cry from your experience – but there will be times when you have found that all those things that preoccupy you daily – your appearance, your social or financial status – simply become irrelevant in the face of something far more important and urgent.

Famously, at times of great crisis, people reach across barriers to help one another. Class distinction, wealth and status dissolve in the face of a shared experience. In recent years, some of the reports that emerged in the aftermath of awful acts of terrorism have been testament to this. Life becomes “stripped down” and that’s not to say that there isn’t a place for ceremony, even for pomp and circumstance. Our particular flavour of Christianity is, after all, a sacramental one, to which we use the symbolism of the Eucharist to remember and re-enact the Last Supper, and welcome someone into the faith with the symbolic act of baptism. But these are the outer garments that clothe the Church, beneath which beats the heart of the Body of Christ.

Turning to one of the New Testament readings for today, taken from Colossians, we are told that we need to clothe ourselves in compassion, kindness, humility, meekness and patience. These garments never weigh heavily on our shoulders, are never constraining or constricting, never hinder our breathing or movement, and never create status barriers between us and other people.

Over six weeks the season of Lent prepares us, through tradition, ritual, ceremony and sacrament, to face one of those really big moments – the death of Christ upon the Cross. On Mothering Sunday we look upon this horrific scene through the eyes of his mother. The one who gave birth and life to the Messiah must also witness his death. So, as we stand at the foot of the Cross with Mary, and fleetingly share in her grief, we understand that beneath the ceremonial outer garments of the Church lies the beating heart of faith, and we commit to learning more in our daily lives about compassion, kindness, humility, meekness and patience.    

When challenged by five year olds…

Isaiah 43: 16-21 & John 12: 1-8

When Jesse (our 5 year old) is looking thoughtful at bedtime I know I’m in trouble. He has been concocting a big question, and has decided now is the time to deliver it. This week was a tough one. ‘Daddy, why doesn’t God love everyone?’

‘He does Jesse, very much.’

‘Not everyone.’

‘Yes Jesse, very much. Night night now darling, let’s pick this up in the morning yeah?’

‘Well then why did he kill the Egyptian soldiers when Moses was escaping in the sea?’

‘Ah well, right, I see, well, ah, it’s complicated…’

It is complicated, isn’t it? The story of our scriptures, the story of our faith. 

How do you explain to anyone, let alone a 5 year old, that the Old Testament is a patchwork of myth and history and poetry and exaggeration? a theological matrix laid over the story of a people who chart their relationship with God across thousands of years. The Church of England has been around for about 500 years and we haven’t stood still in our understanding of God and each other, nothing like it.

It is the same, of course, with the development of the Hebrew scriptures, all the time undergoing a process of reflection, layering on expectation and experience, sifting through all this for the grains of wisdom that resonate with the truth of God. What was cheered as the voice of the divine in one generation was reviewed, seen in a very different light by the next, as they gained more insight into the unfathomable depths of the mystery of the living God.

So it is with the story of Exodus, where the Egyptians take the form of the ultimate baddies: unthinking, unreasonable, so easy to hate. They are like expendable extras in a Bond film; no-one minds the Egyptian army being sunk in the Red Sea because as characters they’re two-dimensional, undeveloped, barely real.

But, and this is so important, BUT the faith of the Jewish people does not stand still. While on the one hand Exodus tells us that the waters of the Red Sea closed over the chariots and riders of the Egyptian army and good riddance to them, on the other hand in the prophecy of Isaiah we have a contrasting voice. In this morning’s reading from Isaiah 43 we see, creeping into the picture, a more complicated story than we might have first thought.

Thus says the Lord, who makes a way in the sea, a path in the might waters,

who brings out chariot and horse, army and warrior,

they are extinguished, quenched like a wick:

Do not remember the former things, or consider the things of old.

I am about to do a new thing; now it springs forth, do you not perceive it?

We see so many basic human instincts at play in the stories told by the books of Exodus and Joshua- the ones that go, ‘my side is good, your side is bad’, the ones that generally end in the wiping out of one population by another.

For many people this remains an attractive thing to believe, as popular today as ever. You’ve got to put yourself first, and other people second. How else could you ever be great again?

But Isaiah’s prophecy qualifies, challenges, circumvents. There will be redemption again through the waters, Isaiah says, but this will be a new spring of water for a new people, not one nation over another but a people gathered from every corner of the earth.

Today is called Passion Sunday. It is not, if you like, the beginning of the end for us in Lent, but it is the end of the beginning. You might have noticed that the images at the entrance to the church and the entrance to the Lady Chapel have been veiled, as has the processional cross. That’s because from now we are supposed to focus solely on the cross that is to come, the cross that Jesus carries on Good Friday. We will hear again the story of the suffering of Christ, which is why these two weeks are called Passiontide, deriving from the Latin for suffering- passio.  

What’s the point of it? Jesus did it once, isn’t that enough? Well yes and no.

We celebrate Holy Week each year because it reminds us of the way God fulfils the words of Isaiah. We are about to witness again the new thing God brings forth; the spring of the water of life that flows from the side of Jesus when he is pierced by the lance of a Roman soldier. And this is a new thing, make no mistake.

The waters are closing in and death is coming. The Exodus story is playing out again. But punishment isn’t coming for the enemies of God; the selfish, the sinful, the scorning. There will be no smiting of Pharaoh’s army this time around. No, instead God opens his arms, is hammered into place, and dies, praying ‘Father forgive them, they know not what they do.’

We don’t know what we do. That is the heart of the Christian faith. We live in a cloud of illusion that we are in control of ourselves. We are not, and sin creeps in and distorts what we want. St Paul, that most piercing of self-critics puts is best in Romans 7:15 when he says ‘I do not understand my own actions- I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate.’ It is on the cross that Christ unwinds our distorted and foolish ways, turns us around and opens to us the gift of grace by which all our wounds are healed.

That’s Passiontide; that is what’s to come. So do come. Take part in the liturgies of Palm Sunday and Holy week, walk with Christ and bear witness to that which only he can do. If I believe nothing else I believe this; that if the world were truly converted by the cross of Jesus it would look nothing like the world we live in now. So it is my job to be converted again and again to God I see on the cross, foretold all those years ago by Isaiah.

Thus says the Lord, who makes a way in the sea, a path in the might waters.

Do not remember the former things, or consider the things of old.

I am about to do a new thing; now it springs forth, do you not perceive it?

Because, as I said to Jesse, God does in fact love us all, so very much.

Sermon for the Third Sunday of Lent

“Do you think that they were worse offenders than all the others living in Jerusalem? No, I tell you.”

Just imagine the furore which would arise if anyone suggested that the victims of the Holocaust, or innocent children killed by a paedophile ring, had “brought it upon themselves”? And yet there was once a school of thought which assumed that if something terrible happened to you, it must be some kind of “payback” for past bad behaviour on your part, or on the part of your family.

Jesus confronted this question directly from one questioner, putting him right. The idea that innocence should be blamed for evil is abhorrent, going against everything we understand about justice. But in the past people had to find meanings for terrible things which happened. Even

uncertainties, unless they can dress them up in creative and beautiful stories, preferably with happy endings, which soften the anguish which uncertainty can generate. They often create meanings, or, worse, identify people upon whom blame can be laid; scapegoats, like people of a different colour or social class, ethnic group or religion. In ancient Israel it was the victims of disaster themselves. As if it were not bad enough to have been made an unintentional victim in the first place, to then be blamed for your own misfortune!

Jesus tries to remove for ever the notion of personal blame through sin for accidents and unavoidable disasters, like blindness from birth. But he implies that if people do not work to change their lives, to accept his promises and have faith in God, they might end up worse off than those whose disasters he describes. Not because God will impose punishments

upon those who stray (after all, elsewhere Jesus tells us about himself as a loving shepherd who goes out of his way to recue a sheep which has strayed). But we call down upon ourselves all kinds of risks when we do not accept the best that is on offer. That is, Christ himself and his relationship with God, of which we are heirs, and which contains everything necessary for happiness. What he is asking of us is a light burden and may save us from a much worse fate. There is terrible uncertainty about living without God, with no foundation which will bear our weight when we need to lean on something or someone other than ourselves in time of trial. The foundation which Jesus offers, the strength which will carry us through when tragedy strikes, is love. Not the tabloid newspaper notion of love, which disperses like summer mist when the first trials occur. But the love which seeks justice, which tolerates hardship and welcomes difference, love which endures in spite of our weakness.

Jesus offers us both the opportunity to accept the love which strengthens and enables us to grow, and also the ability to see beyond the superficial in others and to love them unconditionally as Christ loves us. It is upon this foundation that a perfect world (the kingdom) will be built. It was love which designed the Incarnation, love which inspired Mary, love which carried Jesus through his ministry to his passion and death. It was such love that conquered death, for him and us. But, Jesus makes clear, without adopting his brand of love, and following in his footsteps, we place ourselves and the future of the world in greater uncertainty and at greater risk.

Jesus invites us to arm ourselves against possible disasters and to be able to cope when they occur. But even Jesus cannot make himself responsible for us and our safety if we ignore his warnings and his teaching, however much he might desire to do so. But he goes on giving us “another chance”. One of the secure aspects of Christianity is that every day we wake, we can turn over a new leaf and try afresh to live well.

If we are serious in our intention to become the people Christ calls us to be, then love is our yardstick and action is our proof. Love is the measure of the Christian because Jesus loved us unto his very death, which is about as far as it goes. The horrendous acts of people against their neighbour are not a failure of love on the part of the victim, but in the perpetrator who has ignored Christ and his warnings. We are made for love and it is this love which will save us and our world.

‘Lent’s Strange Harvest’ a sermon for the first Sunday of Lent

Deut. 26.1-11; Luke 4.1-13

On Wednesday we celebrated, if that’s the right word, Ash Wednesday, which means today is the first Sunday of Lent. So I want to say something about Lent this morning, but, as odd as it seems at the beginning of spring, I have to say something about harvest first.

Hearing our readings you may have wondered what the old testament reading was all about, which gave us a moment from Deuteronomy. It’s a point when Moses, looking forward to the future harvest that the Israelites would enjoy in the promised land, told the people what they should do. When the crops are being gathered in, the first thing that the Jewish people are told to do is to take a basket of the best stuff, go to the place the Lord has chosen for his house, and to offer it to the priest on duty there saying: ‘A wandering Aramean was my ancestor… so now I bring the first of the fruits of the ground that you, O Lord, have given me.’

Most of us don’t do much harvesting these days but I’m told that it’s hard work. Sitting on a combine harvester day after day, sun-up to sun-down, waiting for breaks in the weather when it’s been a particularly British summer, I can only imagine that it is exhausting.

Tracking back a few thousand years to the time of Moses we have to take out the combine harvester, which probably means that the work was even more exhausting, even more taxing on the whole community. So I wonder what your instinct might be when the crops begin to fill the barn? It might be to sit down after the hard work of gathering the harvest and to have a feast, it might be to congratulate yourself about how well you’ve done or how much you’ve got. But Moses tells the Jewish people that that is the second thing they should do. First he tells them to do something that I suspect he knows will go against their instincts, to take the first fruits of the harvest back to God.

‘A wandering Aramean was my ancestor…’ Moses is saying something important here. When all the crops are gathered in and the barn door is closed and the money is in the bank you have to stop and remember where it all came from.

It’s important not to misread this passage- God doesn’t want the first fruits of the harvest because he needs them to feel important, he’s not looking for a ‘well-done’ because he got the barley to do its thing for another year. A God who needed an annual ego boost probably wouldn’t be worth the effort.

Rather Moses is saying something more subtle and more important about wealth and power. Moses is telling they people that as great as wealth and power feel, fundamentally they are illusory. ‘A wandering Aramean was my ancestor.’ When the crops are gathered in, remember that things have not always been like this.

When the harvest is good remember that next year it night fail. If you enjoy your health and your fortune remember that they might not stick around. Remember, remember, remember, the only thing that is truly reliable is God.

This is why we have to think about harvest in spring, and the book of Deuteronomy at the beginning of Lent. Because when Jesus went for 40 days into the wilderness to do battle with the devil he did not go alone. He went, as it were, with Moses and the whole people of Israel whose spent 40 years learning to depend on God and not being very good at it. We might note that even Moses and Aaron failed in their own ways, couldn’t quite trust God to provide, and died in sight of the promised land on Mount Nebo, close, almost close enough to touch it, but not quite there.  

Jesus, full of the Holy Spirit, returned from the Jordan and was led by the Spirit in the wilderness, where for forty days he was tempted by the devil.

‘If you are the Son of God, command this stone to become… bread.’ Jesus answered, ‘One does not live on bread alone.’

‘If you will worship me, all this will be yours’. Jesus answered, ‘Worship the Lord your God, and serve only Him.’

‘If you are the Son of God, throw yourself down from here.’ Jesus answered, ‘Do not put the Lord your God to the test.’

Jesus remembers. He remembers three times that plenty and power and position are fake news, and the only thing that is truly reliable is God. The devil’s power is shown to be an illusion, and like any illusion, when it is exposed, it and the devil drift away. When we see through the illusions of life the work of our salvation has begun.

You might recall that John’s Gospel does not tell this 40-day temptation story, but that’s not because he doesn’t like point it makes but because he puts it somewhere else. When Jesus stands silent before Pilate at his trial, Pilate says to him, ‘do you refuse to speak to me? Do you not know that I have authority to release you and authority to crucify you?’ Jesus answered him, ‘You would have no authority over me if it were not given you from above.’ Pilate’s power is like that of the devil, it is an illusion blown away by the truth that is Jesus.

So that’s where we are in Lent. Learning what we can trust, once again. Via the Israelite’s harvest and Jesus’ temptation we are called to remember, for our own forty days, that the only thing that is truly reliable is God. Not our money, not our intellect, not even our geopolitical alliances. During Lent we are called to look hard inside ourselves and see what things have control over us, what things we rely on, what illusions we particularly enjoy, and to know that God’s love is stronger and more reliable than whatever they are.

It takes disciplined prayer to do this. We probably need to spend some time in silence with God every day, even if it’s just a couple of minutes. The habit will take hold across 40 days, and the Holy Spirit might draw you deeper into the reality of God. If you don’t pray daily now then try it. It is the most important thing you can do this Lent. It will be hard, and there will be every reason under the sun not to do it. The temptations not to bother will be strong. The devil hates faithful prayer because it drowns him out. And whatever you do to strengthen your relationship with God and his Son Jesus Christ this Lent please know that I will be kneeling every day in that pew, praying for you to achieve it.

 I’m going to finish by reading a poem. It’s by Malcolm Guite and imagines the devil’s dialogue with Jesus. It’s called All the Kingdoms of the World.

‘So here’s the deal and this is what you get:

The penthouse suite with world-commanding views,

The banker’s bonus and the private jet

Control and ownership of all the news

An ‘in’ to that exclusive one percent,

Who know the score, who really run the show

With in-ter-est on every penny lent

And sweet-en-ers for cronies in the know.

A straight arrangement bet-ween me and you

No hell below or heaven high above

You just admit it, and give me my due

And wake up from this foolish dream of love…’

But Jesus laughed, ‘You are not what you seem.

Love is the waking life, you are the dream.’

May we all wake up to the reality of God’s love for us this Lent. Amen.

Roses are yours, violets are mine, St Valentine died in 269….

Jeremiah 17: 8-10, Psalm 1, Luke 6: 17-26 (The sermon on the Plain begins…)

Roses are yours, violets are mine, St Valentine died in 269.

Or did he?

I’m sure you all know that it was Valentine’s Day this week. This is the week when roses are twice as expensive as the rest of the year, restaurants are hard to book, and you learn that most things from chocolates to toilet roll can in fact be made in the shape of a heart. And all because of St Valentine, who might have died in the year AD 269.

I say might because the details about Valentine are sketchy. The first account of a life of someone called Valentine appears about 200 years later. There is a story that he might have been a priest and a doctor who was martyred by the Emperor Claudius II because he refused to stop converting people to Christianity, including his jailor’s daughter to whom, so later stories go, he wrote a letter, signing it, ‘from your Valentine’.

There is another story that he was a bishop from Terni, in Italy, who was martyred in Rome, at least partly because he refused to stop marrying Christian couples against the wishes of their pagan families.

And the possibilities don’t end there. There are at least 9 saints called Valentine, or a name like it, identified by the early church and recorded in lists of martyrs about whom not much else is know except that they were put to death for their faith. The roses, cards, and novelty menus didn’t put in an appearance until much later. But in a sense it doesn’t matter which Valentine we celebrate on the 14th of February, whether they were a Bishop or doctor, or anything else. What we do know is that there were plenty of Valentines who lived up to their names, Valens meaning strong, robust, courageous. There were plenty of Valentines who lived up to their names and held to their faith even to the point of death.

By chance this Sunday we are given one of the more appropriate readings in the whole year of readings to accompany the remembrance of these Valentines, from Jesus’ little section of teaching often called the ‘sermon on the plain’;

“Blessed are you when people hate you, and when they exclude you, revile you, and defame you on account of the Son of Man.”

This passage has a much more famous cousin called the sermon on the mount- that’s the one St Matthew wrote in his Gospel. In that version Jesus goes up a hill, and teaches the crowd assembled below. Here in Luke’s Gospel Jesus has just been up a mountain, choosing the 12 disciples, and comes back down to sea level. Then he teaches not the whole crowd, but just the disciples. There are other differences too: This is a more immediate, punchier, shorter sermon, and each of the blessings is counter-weighted with an accompanying ‘woe’ or ‘sorrow’. ‘Blessed are you poor – woe to you rich. Blessed are you who are hungry – woe to you who are full. Blessed are you who weep – woe to you who are laughing. Blessed are you when people hate you – woe to you when all speak well of you.’

At first glance this sermon is a council of despair for most of us who are not made of the same stuff as those early Valentines. Am I rich? Well, in most global terms however you cut it, yes. Am I full? Yes, mostly too much so. Do I laugh? Often. Am I spoken well of? Far more than I deserve.

But- we might have wanted to ask our Lord if we were there on the plain with him- is poverty something to aspire to? Is famine a moral condition more worthy than being nourished? Is misery to be commended above joy? Or seeking notoriety for the sake of being disliked? When all is said and done, what sort of misanthropic mission is being encouraged here?

I fear that faced with these questions Jesus would say we haven’t understood what he’s saying at all.

Like so much of St Luke’s Gospel, what is being held up is a contrast between present and future; the illusion of present reality, verses the reality of God’s future kingdom. If we think back to Advent, before Christmas had arrived and the turkey was still in the freezer, we heard the Magnificat, the song of Mary, Luke chapter 1 verse 46 and onwards. This song is Mary’s manifesto for her manifestation of the mad message of the angel saying ‘you will bear a son and you will call him Emmanuel – God with us’. The Magnificat sets out what we are to expect God’s kingdom to look like. The humble raised up, the mighty cast down, the hungry filled with good things, the rich sent empty away. Jesus’ sermon is true to this vision. But it is not just a pipe dream for some time in the future. You see, along with this contrast between the present and the future runs a contrast between human values and the values of God.

What is the recipe for happiness? A reasonable person would surely answer, ‘prosperity, comfort, peace of mind, and popularity.’ But Jesus didn’t come to be reasonable, and ‘=]]]]]]]]pronounces his blessing on those who fail to find their satisfaction in these goals. What Mary sings for, what Jesus teaches his new disciples to seek, is not the settled wisdom of a world too often satisfied with injustice as long as it applies to other people. Christ invites us to be citizens of a new world that begins in him where the poor are not cheap, and the hungry are not ignored.

The real St Valentine, whichever one was celebrated this week, heard these same words of Jesus that we hear today. He knew that this king does not promise a way of wealth, or glory, or even personal fulfilment; only a road to afflictions and trials. But, like Mary, Alban, Amphibalus, and countless others after them, Valentine found in Christ the reality of a new way of living, a way not driven by fear but hope; hope that the rich promises of the beatitudes are fulfilled. Hope that praying ‘thy kingdom come’ will mean nothing less than a new heaven and a new earth.

Roses are red, violets are blue, but the life of God’s kingdom is offered to you.

Sunday 16th February, 4 before Lent

Here I am Lord, is it I Lord? I have heard you calling in the night. I will go Lord, if you lead me, I will hold your people in my heart.

You probably know this hymn. Written in 1981, Here I am Lord quickly became a global hit for the Dan Schutte, a member of the St Louis Jesuits in America, from the album Earthen Vessels, which I’m told outsold Elton John’s Ice on Fire, and has found its way into every Church of England hymnbook published since. It’s a modern classic. Here I am Lord, is it I Lord? I have heard you calling in the night.

I nearly put it down for us to sing today. Nearly. In the end my courage failed; the director of music is a very reasonable man but we had it twice towards the end of last year and if I overplay my hand I am in serious danger of being on the receiving end of a raised eyebrow. So we’ll wait a couple more months until he’s forgotten.

Anyway, I nearly put this hymn down for today because of our first reading, from Isaiah chapter 6 which tell of the prophet being lifted into a vision of the heavenly presence of God, ending with the lines ‘And I heard the voice of the Lord saying, ‘whom shall I send, and who will go for us? And I said, here am I; send me!’’. Dan Schutte echoes these words and turns them into his famous ditty about being sent out to do something vague, but to do it nicely- I will go Lord, if you lead me, I will hold your people in my heart, and so on.

The trouble though, and another reason it’s not on the list today in the end, is that it doesn’t get what’s happening in Isaiah 6 quite right. This isn’t just a passage about heaven, not really, or vocation, about being chosen to go out in the service of the Lord. Isaiah’s being chosen to be God’s messenger is important, but it isn’t the whole story. To understand that we need to go to the beginning of the chapter.

It begins with the description of the prophet Isaiah’s heavenly vision, ‘In the year that King Uzziah died, I saw the Lord, sitting on a throne, high and lofty… and I said, woe is me, for I am a man of unclean lips, and I live among a people of unclean lips, yet my eyes have seen the King, the Lord of hosts.’ It’s the first part that’s really important here, the bit we can miss so easily. In the year that King Uzziah died, I saw the Lord.

You see, the writer of Isaiah isn’t placing King Uzziah into the narrative here to add a bit of historical ballast, letting us know that this is about the year 750BC. No, he’s there to make a point. Uzziah was the 10th King of Judah, and had been crowned when he was just 16 years old. He was, as is so often the way, a brilliant king. To start with.

He listened to his prophets, he inspired the army to great military feats, he pushed back the borders of Judah, he brought prosperity and peace to the land.

But then he got carried away. Uzziah got ideas above his station, thought he could get rid of the priests that served in the temple and go into the presence of God to offer incense on the altar himself, in contravention of the law that only the priests of the tribe of Levi could do this.

It is a fearful and dangerous thing to enter into the presence of God.

But Uzziah forgot that, thought after all he’d achieved that kings and God could look each other in the eye, pass as equals, you know, so into the temple he marched with his incense and his status and his ego all trailing behind him. And, as the second book of Chronicles tells us, he was promptly struck down with a deadly disease and died soon after. Uzziah’s problem was a failure of humility. Which is why it is important that Isaiah tells us he had his vision of God the year that Uzziah died.

Uzziah presumed he could march in and offer incense; Isaiah is gifted a vision of the presence of God, but instead of saying, great let me join in, he falls to his face and says, ‘woe is me for I am a man of unclean lips, yet my eyes have seen the King, Lord of hosts!’. It is only after he has been cleansed, the fire of the hot coal touching his mouth, blotting out his sin, that Isaiah is ready to answer God’s question, ‘whom shall I send?’

Isaiah’s vision of heaven is not a comforting one, there is no cheering chorus in G major to accompany it. Isaiah gives us fear, the pivots of the thresholds shaking, the awesome presence of the Lord of hosts, the searing heat of God’s forgiveness. Whether you are king or cobbler, to follow the call of God is first to be changed. Our need for humility before God is what Isaiah’s vision is all about. It is the beginning of vocation, the beginning of true relationship.  

On the face of it, the Gospel reading from Luke couldn’t be more different. This is no heavenly vision, just a bad day at the office for some fishermen who are cleaning their nets when Jesus walks by and tells them to put out again, into the deep water. But Luke’s call of the first disciples, different to Mathew, Mark and John’s, is I think deliberately set up to give those with ears to hear an echo of Isaiah. While everyone is astounded by the miraculous catch of fish, distracted by the abundance of the miracle that unfolded in front of them, Peter’s reaction is the same as Isaiah’s- he recognises who it is that has climbed into his boat, who is truly is, falls to his face, and says ‘Go away from me Lord, for I am a sinful man!’.

If you read Luke’s Gospel through you’ll see that this is one of his key themes; true discipleship begins with humility. Each true encounter with Jesus, when people have seen past the glitz and the glamour of the crowds and the miracles, begins with a profound understanding of the need for humility in the face of this extraordinary person. It is the seed of true discipleship- the willingness to be changed by following Jesus.

Each Sunday as we come to receive the sacrament, and to hear the word of God, we are called to refresh our discipleship, to be honest about our sin, and then to hear the words of Christ’s forgiveness that not only calls us to stand and follow him, but also to sit and eat at his table. Every week we are invited again to receive the gift of life from the only one whose invitation makes us worthy to receive it. To renew our discipleship, to eat and to follow. In humility let us approach the throne of his grace, ransomed, healed, restored and forgiven. Then we’ll be ready to sing again the words of that hymn: I will go Lord, if you lead me, I will hold your people in my heart.