(Genesis 14,17-20; John 2,1-11)

After a family wedding some years ago, we sent a video of the ceremony and the reception to relatives who had emigrated to Australia. Some time later a report came back that their Australian in-laws were very surprised at how sober  and well behaved everyone was at the reception. It left us wondering what goes on at some Australian wedding receptions – they are obviously not always the nice respectable affairs you used to see on ‘Neighbours’ and ‘Home and Away’!

I can’t help wondering what the video of the wedding at Cana-in Galilee would have been like. With 120 to 180 extra gallons of wine to consume, even at a Middle Eastern wedding reception which goes on for some days, it must have been some party, and the majority of guests must have been really merry by the end of it all!

This Gospel reading always used to strike me as rather strange. Here we have Jesus performing a miracle, not to heal someone or save them from disaster, but simply for social convenience – to get a friend or a relative out of an embarrassing situation caused by their own incompetence. Not at all Jesus’s usual style.

Yet John placed this miracle at the beginning of his gospel and highlights it as the first sign which Jesus did, which caused his disciples to believe in him, and revealed his glory.

Then, however, I read more about John’s Gospel, and particularly about the Signs Gospel that scholars think underlies it. The seven signs included in John’s Gospel reveal what is already present in Jesus’s presence among us, and anticipate the glory that is to come at the end of time. As the Methodist Biblical scholar, Kenneth Grayston says, they are more like parables than miracles.

We always have to read John’s Gospel at two levels, looking for the hints, the references, the code that informs us what it is really all about.

On the surface, this story tells us about a happy occasion at which Jesus, his mother and his disciples were present. It tells us about his kindness, and about the trust that existed between him and his mother. It tells us about a rather spectacular miracle.

But at a deeper level, the story is about who Jesus really is, and what his presence on earth means for those who meet him; and to understand that, we have to decipher the clues.

A story about a wedding feast should immediately alert us that this is a story about the end times, the Day of Lord, when God will intervene in a decisive way, and reward those who have been faithful. In the Old Testament, Hosea writes of a marriage feast when God would renew the covenant with Israel, remarrying her in spite of her faithlessness. Christians also took up this symbol, particularly the writer of Revelation who, in the passage set for the third reading today,  writes about the marriage feast between the Lamb and his bride, who is clothed with the good deeds of the saints, so represents the church.

Wine is a symbol of rejoicing, healing, unity and the favour of God, especially at the end times. Amos writes that at the end time the mountain streams will run with wine not water. 2 Baruch a Jewish apocryphal book, written about the same time as John’s Gospel, says each grape will produce 120 gallons of wine in the last days. This association would also have been understood by Gentiles, for there was a myth about Dionysus, the Greek god of wine, who would turn the local village stream into wine when he visited.

Our first reading spoke about Melchizedek, a mysterious figure who was believed to be both priest and king, and to be the ancestor of an alternative line of priests from the Aaronic line. You note he brought both bread and wine to Abraham, so here is an association being made with the Eucharist. In the Psalms Melchidedek is associated with King David, who like him, the passage says, will be a priest forever; the NT letter to the Hebrews applies this to Jesus. But a contemporary meditation on the story, by the Jewish philosopher, Philo, says ‘let him (Melchizedek) give wine rather than water, and give souls strong drink, that they may be seized by divine intoxication’.

As John explains, the water was used for the Jewish rites of purification, so is understood to stand for approaching God through obedience to the Law, or, more positively, for repentance. The number of jars, six, one less than the perfect number, seven, implies that this way of approaching God is imperfect. Mary, in John’s Gospel, stands for the perfect female disciple, as the Beloved Disciple stands for the perfect male disciple. She is addressed as ‘Woman’ as she is again at the foot of the cross when she and the Beloved Disciple are committed into each other’s care. When Jesus answers her, he says,’his hour has not yet come’. In John’s Gospel, the ‘hour’ is  the hour of the cross, when reconciliation between God and humanity is accomplished by Christ’s death.

So, the story looks back into the Old Testament, and forward to the cross. Most telling of all is a phrase which is unfortunately missed out in the lectionary portion we heard. The story begins “on the third day” a phrase which any Christian believer immediately associates with the day of resurrection. This is the strongest indication that this story is actually about eschatology, not matrimony. It’s about the glory of Jesus revealed when God raised him from death, and the reconciliation that brought, not just about the glory revealed at a wedding in Cana. The miracle we are meant to wonder at is not the turning of water into wine, but the the turning of sinful human beings into welcome guests at the divine wedding feast.

This morning we meet to share in Holy Communion, which is meant to be a foretaste of that heavenly banquet. What can the story of the wedding reception at Cana tell us about what we should expect from this experience?

The first sign in John’s Gospel tells us we should experience the glory and grace of God, pouring over us and into us, like hundreds of gallons of wine.  It tells us we should anticipate a real celebration, as we do when we go to a wedding. Do you feel like this when you come to communion? If not,  ask yourself, why not?  Could it be that our worship provides more water than wine? That is to say, we are more concerned with the rules and regulations than with joy and grace and love?  And if this is so, what can be done  to change things?

This sign also tells us we should experience the joy of union with God in communion, as the Eucharist is a symbol of the mutual love and self-giving between Christ and the church, in the same way as a marriage symbolises the mutual love and self-giving of the couple. But we are in Christ as a corporate body, not individually, so the communion should also express our unity as a congregation, as a church and as Christians – which is an appropriate thing to ponder on this Sunday in the Week of Prayer for Christian unity.

The Gospel and epistles of John speak a lot about love; but some commentators believe that John was speaking of an exclusive understanding of love, only between those who were within the community, and not of a love which included everyone, including those with whom they disagreed. That exclusive sort of love is very often demonstrated by groups of Christians who believe they alone have the truth, and those who disagree with them should be excluded from fellowship or from the sacraments.

I think however, that this sign, of water into wine, speaks of the superabundant, overflowing love and grace of God, which is available to everyone, regardless of their beliefs of practices. I think we are called to express that in our worship and in our fellowship.

We have come a long way in ecumenical activity during my lifetime, to a stage where most Christians can now express what unites them by sharing in Holy Communion together.  The Week of Prayer is a chance for us to give thanks for that progress, to repent of those things that still divide wedding guest from wedding guest, whether within  churches or between them, and to rededicate ourselves to cooperate more widely with God to bring more people to share in the divine wedding celebration.

There’s a joke that is often told in religious circles, about someone who dies, and goes to Heaven, and is shown round by St Peter. In one part of heaven is an area surrounded by a high wall. The person asks to see inside, but St Peter says “No. We can’t go in, because it would destroy their illusions. They think they’re the only people here”.

Who ‘they’ are depends on who’s telling the joke. Sometimes it’s the Roman Catholics, sometimes the jehovah’s Witnesses, or the Fundamentalist Evangelicals. It’s never the denomination of the person telling the story!

As we laugh at the punchline, perhaps we should remind ourselves of the times when we have mentally placed ourselves in that exclusive enclosure – when we have believed that we, and those who think like us, are the only ones who are going to heaven. We have all done it, to a greater or lesser extent; but that is not the attitude of the God described in this sign, who turns the water of purification into the abundant wine of celebration.

The miracle at the wedding at Cana reminds us again of our need to invite Jesus into our homes and our churches, to be present in our meals and our religious life, and to allow him continually to change our reliance on rules and standards, purification and separation into the enjoyment of the new and better wine of joy and love and fellowship which he provides for us, a sign of our unity with God and each other, a sign of his glory which we are charged with revealing to the world.

(1 Samuel 3, 1-10; Psalm 139, 1-6, 12-17; John 1, 43-51)

I’m not the sort of person who has visions; and I can’t say that there was a distinct moment when I was converted, as some people have: I was simply brought up in a Christian household, and continued to attend church when I was an adult. Nor can I identify a moment when I was ‘called’ to the ministry of Reader (or Local Preacher in Methodist terms). I began by speaking at family services, and ‘ghost writing’ some sermons for my then Vicar, and one day I had to take over and actually ‘preach’ one at a Parish Communion. It was at that point I decided that I ought to get myself properly trained and authorised if I was going to continue. So I did! And this particular ministry has felt right for me ever since.

Was that experience a calling from God? I don’t know!

Our readings today, in their different ways, explore the idea of being called by God.

In the first, from the Book of Samuel in the Old Testament, the boy Samuel is called to the life of a prophet, speaking ‘The Word of the Lord’ to the people of Israel. The second, from Psalm 139, explores the relationship with God to which we are all called, from before our birth to our death. The passage from John’s Gospel describes the calling of two disciples, Philip and Nathanael.

The passage from 1 Samuel can be heard as a rather sweet story, of a small child coming to personal knowledge of God for the first time. But, set in its context, it is a much more frightening and serious tale. The previous chapters of I Samuel have interwoven the story of the birth of Samuel with a description of sins of Eli’s sons, and therefore the failure of his role as a father and a priest. Eli’s sons have exploited their hereditary position to satisfy their greed and their lust, by taking the best meat of the sacrifices for themselves and using the women of the temple as prostitutes.

The beginning of our passage shows that, at first, Eli fails to discern the Lord speaking to Samuel; but eventually, he does recognise that this is the divine voice speaking, and he not only teaches Samuel how to respond, but demands to hear what Samuel has been instructed to prophesy, however bad it may be for him and his family.

The following verses of 1 Samuel describe the fate that God has in store for the priestly family: the death of the two wicked sons, Eli’s blindness and his eventual death, and the descent of his family into poverty.

Yet, they also describe Eli’s acceptance of all this as “what is good to the Lord”. No matter how much he has failed God, no matter how much his family has misused their position of privilege, he has not departed so far from his original calling as to fail to recognise the voice of God calling, nor to reject the truth when he hears it.

God’s call to the young Samuel is to a ministry that proclaims the replacement of the old, failed order of priests, represented by Eli and his sons, with a new order, of prophets, who hear and proclaim the true Word of the Lord. Samuel is to become the first representative of that new order.

Psalm 139 (a favourite psalm of many people) describes how God calls us: how God searches us out and knows every one of us from the first moments of our existence in the womb. It is because God knows us in such an intimate way that we can know God. As the end of our passage reminds us, the knowledge is not equal: God will always know much more about us than we can ever know of God. The psalm reminds me of the theology of Paul Tillich, who speaks of God as both transcendent, existing outside and beyond all that is, but also as immanent and intimate, ‘the Ground of our Being’.

Perhaps we may be alarmed by the idea of a God from whom we can never escape, no matter where we run to, and who knows every detail of our lives before we live them. We all of us have our ‘dark side’, the bits of ourselves that we prefer others not to see, lest we be judged wanting. But there is no sense in this psalm of judgement, simply of a God who understands, loves and provides for us from before birth until after death. It speaks of what Martin Buber called the ‘I-Thou’ relationship.

In our New Testament passage we heard John’s description of the calling of two more disciples, Philip and Nathanael. Previously Andrew has been called from being a disciple of John the Baptist, and has brought along his brother, Peter. Now, having returned from the Jordan to Galilee, Jesus calls Philip, possibly a Gentile, who in turn brings along his friend Nathanael.

The passage seems to reflect a certain amount of rivalry between the towns of Galilee. Philip, Peter and Andrew are natives of Bethsaida (which means ‘house of fishing’) and Nathanael from Cana, where the first of Jesus’s seven signs which John describes takes place. Nathanael clearly doesn’t think anything worthwhile can come from Nazareth and particularly not the expected Messiah! Since Nazareth was located right on the border with Samaria, you can understand why those from other parts of Galilee might consider it a dodgy place!

Since this is John’s Gospel, the simple story is full of hidden meanings. Jesus describes Nathanael  as an Israelite, a son of Israel. The former name of Israel was Jacob, and Jacob means ‘trickster’ or deceiver’. But Jesus says Nathanael is not a deceiver.

Jesus says he saw Nathanael sitting under a fig tree. The fig tree is often a symbol of peace and prosperity, and of the Jewish nation.  Was Jesus then calling Nathanael from his old life as a faithful Israelite to a new life as a disciple of the Messiah?

Nathanael certainly thought so. He acclaimed Jesus with the Messianic titles, ‘Son of God’ and ‘King of Israel’.

But then Jesus immediately refers back to Jacob again, with his reference to a ladder along which angels pass from heaven to earth. His ministry will be one where heaven and earth are open to each other, where God and human beings are connected. But whereas, when Jacob saw the ladder, it marked a holy place, Bethel, where God was encountered,  now it marks a person, Jesus, where God is encountered.

None of the Gospels tells us much more about Philip or Nathanael. In this story of their call, they seem to represent the disciples in the post-resurrection church. They have seen the miracles of Jesus; they are aware of his supernatural knowledge. The only proper response to the this person’s command to follow him, is to do so, and to worship him as King and Messiah.

But that is not the end of the story. The disciple is to follow Jesus, and to believe. But the disciple is also to extend the invitation to others to “Come and see”. This section of John’s Gospel emphasises the important role of personal connections in the making of new disciples. It is an invitation to us, as well as to those first disciples. We who have seen the Word made flesh, we who have heard the Word of the Lord are not supposed to keep it to ourselves. We are to go and invite others to come, and see, and hear for themselves.

And what are we inviting our family, and friends, and workmates and neighbours to come and see? We are inviting them to meet a God who knows us intimately, and who is present in everything we do; who is with us in the bad times as well as the good, who accepts our dark side as well as the light in us.

We are inviting them to meet a God who accepts us as we are, who chooses the most unlikely people to bear the divine message: a small child, being raised by an elderly failed priest in a corrupt environment; a foreigner; a cynical adult, deeply prejudiced against people from a rival town, and supremely, a man from a rough border town.

We are inviting them to meet a God who is transforming the world, replacing the old order of evil and corruption with a new one, led by those who hear and proclaim the true Word of the Lord. We are inviting them to meet a God who is not distant, but who comes to us in human form, who invites us into the relationship of intimacy and co-operation with the divine for which we were created.

We are inviting them to meet a God who calls human beings to become agents of the divine in changing the world and making transforming it into the Kingdom of heaven.

Who’s calling?

God is!

Come and see!

(Isaiah 60, 1-6; Matthew 2, 1-12)

May I wish you, again, a happy Christmas!

Yes, I know that, for the secular world, Christmas is behind us, all the decorations have been taken down, and we’re well into the New Year.

But in the church year, the season of Christmas continues until Candlemas, the Feast of the Presentation of Christ in the Temple on February 2nd; and although we are now into the part of the Christmas season we call Epiphany, on this particular Sunday we are actually hearing another version of the story of Christ’s birth. This time, not Luke’s version with the Annunciation to Mary, the census, the journey to Bethlehem, the child in the manger, the visit of the shepherds, the presentation in the Temple and the peaceful return to Nazareth; but Matthew’s version, with the Holy Family living in Bethlehem, the annunciation to Joseph, the magi led to see the new born baby by a star, their visit to King Herod, their gifts of gold, frankincense and myrrh, their return home by another way, the flight of the Holy Family to Egypt, the slaughter of the innocents by Herod, and the family’s decision to live in Nazareth, rather than Bethlehem when they return. Two very different narratives, but asking the same questions and giving the same answers about who this child is, and what it means  to follow him.

The Archbishop of Canterbury was roundly criticised in some quarters for his Christmas Day sermon,which some people thought was ‘too political’. Politics can be defined as ‘of, for or relating to citizens’ or as ‘the process of human interaction by which groups make decisions’. Whichever definition of politics you use, the whole of the Bible, the Gospels and the Nativity stories in Luke and Matthew are about politics.

Do you remember the series of comedies starring Rowan Atkinson called ‘Blackadder’? In the one set in Tudor times, Miranda Richardson, playing a rather petulant Queen Elizabeth I had a catch phrase, which she produced whenever anyone disagreed with her: “Who’s Queen?” And that question is what the Nativity narratives are all about. Who is in authority, who wields ultimate power, whose laws do we obey?

Luke, writing for a predominantly Greek audience asks: who is the emperor, who is the Son of God, who is the Prince of Peace, who is the Saviour of the world? Is it the Roman Emperor Augustus, to whom all these titles were given at the time? Or is it Jesus?

Matthew, writing for a predominantly Jewish audience, asks who is the King of the Jews, who is the Son of David, who is the Messiah, who is the successor of Moses? Is it King Herod, the puppet king, installed by the Roman Emperor; or is it Jesus?

Matthew’s Nativity story demonstrates that Jesus is greater than the Roman Emperor, by mirroring the myths about the founding father of the Emperor’s dynasty with the story of the journey of the Magi. The imperial mythology tells of a star which led the ancestor of Augustus, Julus, his father Aeneas and his grandfather, westward from the doomed city of Troy to found the Roman race. Matthew tells of a star which led the wise men westward to worship the new born King of the Jews.

But Matthew also wants to show that Jesus is greater than, and is the summation of, all the leading figures of the Old Testament, and in particular the law giver, Moses, and the iconic king, David.

The Jews believed that Moses was the author of the Torah, contained in the first five books of the Old Testament. So Matthew includes in his Gospel five great discourses, giving the new Torah; and this pattern of five occurs also in his birth narrative, which is like the Gospel in miniature. There are (very unusually for a Jewish genealogy) five women mentioned in the list of Jesus’s ancestors; there are five dreams which guide Joseph and the Magi; there are five mentions of the town of Bethlehem; there are five texts of the Old Testament which illuminate the events of Jesus’s birth.

Matthew’s birth story also mirrors closely the non-biblical elaboration (targum or midrash) of the story of the birth of Moses. First century Jews and Christians would have been very familiar with these, but we miss the echoes, both because we don’t know these stories, and because we rarely read or hear the whole of Matthew’s story. Usually the visit of the Magi is tagged onto the end of the end of Luke’s nativity story, and we never hear the climax of the story, the killing of the baby boys in Bethlehem, (unless the Feast of the Holy Innocents falls on a Sunday – and we all know how small congregations are on the Sunday after Christmas!).  Yet Matthew wrote about this slaughter as a direct parallel to the slaughter of the Hebrew boy children by the Pharoah.

In the Moses midrash the Pharoah has a dream that a Hebrew boy will be born who will threaten his power. So he decrees that all Hebrew boys are to be drowned at birth. The Hebrew men vow to divorce their wives, so they don’t produce any more boys. But Moses’s father is told in a dream to remarry his wife, as their son will be the saviour of Israel. He does so, and the child is protected and survives the slaughter of the babies to lead the Hebrews out of Egypt.

In Matthew’s version, Joseph (another name that harks back to the time in Egypt) vows to divorce his wife after finding she is pregnant. He is told in a dream to take her back, which he does. Herod finds out about the child from the wise men, and attempts to kill him, but through messages given in dreams, the child is protected and escapes to Egypt. When the danger is passed, in a new Exodus he returns to Nazareth to grow up, and eventually begin his ministry.

The Moses midrash is not the only Old Testament reference in Matthew’s birth story. The references to Bethlehem, and to the king who will be a shepherd to his people, refer back to the story of David, the greatest Jewish King. The five prophecies refer back to the prophet Isaiah and the threat from Assyria, the hope for a restoration of the Davidic kings, the Exodus, the Exile in Babylon and the time of the Judges. As we heard in our first reading, Matthew also draws on passages in Isaiah and the Psalms (particularly Psalm 72 on which Hail to the Lord’s Anointed is based); these refer to foreign nations and kings being drawn to the light of God in Jerusalem, and bringing gifts of gold and incense. Other passages which influenced his story include the prophecy of Balaam in Numbers 24, 15-19  and the dreams of Daniel.

But Matthew’s birth story does not just look back to the Old Testament and its prophets, kings and heroes who served God, revealed God’s will before Jesus, and so prefigured him. It also looks forward, to the climax of the story of Jesus in his death and passion, and his continuing story in the life of the church. The third gift of the magi, myrrh, foreshadows his death. The attempt by the Romans’ puppet king, Herod, to kill a rival King of the Jews, foreshadows the decision of the Roman governor, Pilate to crucify Jesus as King of the Jews. The escape to Egypt foreshadows Jesus’s escape from death through the resurrection.

The star foreshadows the acclamation of Jesus in the Gospels, especially John’s Gospel, Paul and Revelation as the light, which reflects the glory of God;  and the Magi, foreigners and pagans who recognise and worship Jesus as the Messiah when the Jewish leaders try to destroy him, foreshadow the Gentiles of Matthew’s church, who recognise and worship Jesus as their Saviour, when many of his countrymen reject him. Matthew’s birth story is filled with joy, like Luke’s, but is much more obviously filled with conflict and foreboding – which perhaps explains why we prefer to ignore many of its details.

But if we do only read ‘the nice bits’ of Matthew, we will fail to hear the message Matthew intended us to hear. Matthew wrote in a tradition that believed that hearing the stories of the past made these events real and effective in the present. His story says that Christmas is not just something that happened two thousand years ago; it happens now, and demands a response from us, as it demanded a response from those who witnessed it then.

It asks us who we are in the story. Are we like the Magi who follow the light, and refuse to comply with the attempts of those in religious and political power who want to extinguish it?

It asks, who is king and emperor over our lives? A secular ruler or party leader, or the one who embodies the values of God’s kingdom? When we vote, who is uppermost in our minds.

It asks what most completely discloses the divine will for us? The law of Moses or the grace, forgiveness and sacrifice shown by Christ?

It asks what really brings light and peace to the world? The exercise of military and economic power or following the example of a persecuted and crucified Messiah? Peace through military victory or peace through justice?

Matthew’s Christmas story is not a nice story for children, about exotic kings, guiding stars, dreams and strange gifts.   It is an adult story, about religion, and power and politics, and how they can be abused. It places before those who hear and read it a choice about  the decisions they make, and the guidance they follow.

The Christmas story proclaims the beginning of a new world order, initiated by the birth of Jesus, It challenges all of us to consider what we are being called to do to bring about that new world order in our time, in our church and our town. And that’s politics!

Will we follow his star? Will we bring our gifts to offer to him? How will we pay him homage?

A sermon for Christmas  Day with visual aids.

Have you ever sung the song about the 12 Days of Christmas?

Did you know it has a secret, religious meaning?

Everything mentioned in the song stands for something else:  4 calling birds are 4 Gospels, 2 French hens are the Old Testament and New Testament, & partridge in a pear tree is Jesus; & ‘my true love’ who gave all the gifts to me over the 12 days of Christmas is God.

I thought I might do a version of the song with you today – with presents in this Christmas stocking which stand for 12 of the gifts we are given at Christmas with the coming of Jesus.

“On the first day of Christmas my true love gave to me:” a baby boy – a son; as Isaiah prophesied in Jesus we are given the Son of God. (baby doll)

“On the second day of Christmas my true love gave to me:” a royal child. Isaiah said, & the angels said baby would be Prince of Peace, King of Jews, reign on throne of his ancestor David. (crown)

“On the third day of Christmas my true love gave to me:” a Saviour. The name Jesus means ‘God saves’ and angels told shepherds baby born would be their saviour. (St Bernard dog with brandy. This might not look like a saviour to you, but if you were buried in an avalanche in the Swiss Alps, it would!)

“On the fourth day of Christmas my true love gave to me:” the Messiah, the Christ. The angels told the shepherds that the Messiah would be born. Messiah or Christ means anointed one. Priests and kings anointed with oil (jar of oil)

“On the fifth day of Christmas my true love gave to me:” a light. Isaiah said people who walked in darkness would see light when the special child was born, and John’s Gospel proclaims Jesus as that light. (torch)

“On the sixth day of Christmas my true love gave to me:” the Word. John’s Gospel says Jesus was the Word or Wisdom of God made flesh. Gospels and NT are words about the Word of God. (New Testament)

“On the seventh day of Christmas my true love gave to me:” A shepherd. The prophets foretold  a shepherd King like David, and in John’s Gospel, Jesus calls himself “The Good Shepherd” who gives his life for his sheep. ( model sheep & crook)

“On the  eighth day of Christmas, my true love gave to me:” A vine. In John’s Gospel, Jesus calls himself the True Vine, of which we are all branches. If we remain in him we bear fruit. And in this Holy Communion we drink the fruit of the vine to remember him (grapes)

“On the ninth day of Christmas my true love gave to me:” some bread. Bethlehem where the Gospels tell us Jesus was born means ‘House of Bread’  & in John’s Gospel, Jesus says he is the true Bread, the Bread of life. In this Holy Communion we share bread to remind us we are the Body of Christ. (roll)

“On the tenth day of Christmas, my true love gave to me”: A Lamb. John the Baptist called Jesus the Lamb of God, and we remember that in this Communion service, when we give thanks for the Lamb of God who died to save us from the wickedness of this world. (lamb)

“On the eleventh day of Christmas, my true love gave to me:” a Redeemer. In the olden days, money was paid over to redeem people from slavery. Today we celebrate the birth of Jesus, whose life and death redeems us from slavery to evil (money)

“On the twelfth day of Christmas my true love gave to me:”

Emmanuel, God with us. The Christmas stories tell us that Jesus was both human and divine, the Son of Man and the Son of God. (Rubik’s cube puzzle)

That’s a mystery, that Christians have spent 2000 years thinking about, trying to puzzle out what exactly it means for us. And we will go on trying to puzzle it out throughout this coming year.

I hope you will enjoy your material presents this Christmas, and the spiritual presents that God gives us in the birth of Jesus. I hope you will go on trying to puzzle out what exactly the birth of Jesus means for you and the world, and that you will be here with us during the year to help us unwrap all the gifts that God gives us.

(Romans 16, 25-27; Luke 1, 26-38 & 46b-55)

It’s a question people constantly ask you this time of year. “Are you ready for Christmas?”

Is anyone ever ready? There’s so much to do, so many things to arrange at home and at church: services to plan, shopping to do, meals to prepare for, presents to buy for different age groups, and celebrations with family members to co-ordinate. No wonder so many people collapse exhausted on the actual day!

The trouble is we all want to have a ‘perfect Christmas’. When the Archbishop of Canterbury spoke on Radio 2’s Pause for Thought’ last Thursday http://tinyurl.com/7qk9g5t, he spoke of his belief that God doesn’t wait until we are ready and everything is perfect; God comes to us, in the same way as he came at the first Christmas, in the middle of the mess, to bring love and joy.

In the account we heard from Luke’s Gospel, it’s quite obvious that Mary wasn’t in the least bit ready for the events of the first Christmas Day. She wasn’t ready to be a mother: she was betrothed to Joseph, but, as she explained to Gabriel, they weren’t yet living together and she was still a virgin. She certainly wasn’t ready to be the mother of the Messiah, the Saviour of the World and the Son of God. So her response to the angel’s announcement was, “Why me?”

As she knew, she wasn’t anyone special. Two thousand years of Christian devotion may have turned her into something remarkable, through doctrines such as her Immaculate Conception and bodily Assumption, and titles such as Theotokos (God-Bearer), Mother of God, Queen of Heaven and Co-Redemptrix; but, as many of our TV Nativities show, in reality she was a simple girl, probably still a teenager, from a provincial village in an occupied country, with very little education, destined for a life of hard work, marriage and motherhood. The choice of her to be the mother of Jesus was nothing to do with her special qualities; it was an act of God’s grace.

Luke’s account tells us about Mary’s response to the announcement of Jesus’s coming birth, and at the same time, gives us pointers to how we can make ourselves ready to receive him when he comes into our lives.

Mary responded with humility. She puzzled over the announcement that she was ‘highly favoured’, because she didn’t think she had done anything to deserve that. But she accepted God’s plan, not just as a ‘handmaid’ or ‘servant’ as the text is usually translated, but as a slave, which is what the Greek original usually means. She demonstrated that she was ready to go along with what would happen to her, even though she knew it would make her life very messy and turn the ordinary life she was looking forward to upside down.

She also responded with acceptance and obedience. “Let it be with me according to your word”. She accepted in spite of her doubts and questions, believing that with God’s plans, even the most unlikely events were possible. She demonstrated at the Annunciation that ‘obedience of faith’ that Paul spoke of in his letter to the Romans.

Mary also responded with joy. The Magnificat, which we heard in our second reading from Luke, is a psalm of praise to God for everything that will come about through the birth of Jesus, the Saviour.

But she also responded with insight. The Magnificat is a prophecy, which describes the distinctive and revolutionary character of the Messiah which Jesus will be. Through his coming, the poor will be exalted, the mighty will be brought down, the hungry will be fed and the proud will be scattered. This anticipates the whole of Luke’s Gospel, which  proclaims that  the titles which were given to the Roman Emperor – Saviour of the World, Prince of Peace, Son of God – actually belong to Jesus, not Augustus Caesar. The coming of Jesus undermines the worldly standards of wealth, status and power; his reign is not just for the Jews, but includes the Gentiles and those considered outsiders (Romans emphasises this as well). A peaceful revolution is about to begin!

What the Magnificat also tells us is that Christmas is not just about the birth of Jesus. It is about the birth of a whole new order of peace, love and justice, which this child brings into the world. It is about the birth of the Kingdom of Heaven. How ready are we for that this Christmas?

The celebration of Jesus’s birth should not be an escape from the harsh realities of life, as is the case with so many people’s Christmases these days. Mary is not going to escape reality. Luke’s story shows her as part of a poor family, which is pushed around and has their lives disrupted by the decisions of the civic authorities. She gives birth in squalor, away from the support of her own family and the familiarity of her own home. She has to rely on the kindness of strangers.

It’s very different from the sanitised version that we are so often presented with in Nativity plays, where politics and poverty are very much in the background. Most people prefer it that way, and see the Christmas holiday as a chance to retreat into domestic life, and forget the problems of the world. But the Magnificat calls us to the very opposite of escapism. It calls us to active engagement with the powers of this world, in the name of a God who comes to undermine the established order. At Christmas we are challenged to be part of the new order of things which the Magnificat describes.

We are called to called to engage with the way power is exercised in our world – but to do so as servants, as Jesus  did, not as dictators. We are called to tackle the issues of poverty, but with generosity and through sharing, as Jesus did, rather than by assigning blame. We are challenged to do something about the causes of disease, homelessness, and prejudice; but we are called to do so as collaborators, as friends, as welcomers, as Jesus did, rather than judging and excluding those who suffer from them.

The story Luke tells us this morning, and the psalm which Mary sang, tell us of a new way of living within the old order; a way which is messy, which turns our normal lives and expectations upside down, but which is ultimately joyful and transforming. They call us to connect with the outcasts, the marginalised and the poor of the world and of our community, and to live Christmas in the same servanthood, humility, and simplicity as Mary did.

So, are you ready for Christmas? Am I?

No, I’m not! If I knew one of the local clergy was coming round, I’d have a tidy up. If I knew a member of the Royal Family was going to pop in for tea, I’d get some new crockery and make sure the front room was newly decorated. But how  can I be ready to welcome our heavenly Priest and King into my life, if he’s going to enlist me into his revolution, and turn my life upside down? I’m not a revolutionary, and I like my life the way it is.  How can I be ready to be a servant of the poor and the marginalised, to be open to those whom society disapproves of, to be someone who challenges those who exercise power in church and state in the name of Christ.

I may be ready for the comfortable, sentimental family Christmas, that concentrates on the baby and the animals and the Magi with their strange useless gifts, but I’m certainly not ready for that sort of Christmas.

Yet I know I have to try. That’s what Advent is about. Advent 2011, like every Advent before, is when God gives us an opportunity to become more Christlike, a fresh chance to appreciate the true meaning of Christmas and an invitation to make ourselves ready to welcome the Baby of Bethlehem as the bearer of the Kingdom of Heaven, our King, and the Saviour of the World. So, let us get ready together!

Let us pray:

God of all hope and joy,

open our hearts in welcome,

that your Son, Jesus Christ, at his coming

may find in us a dwelling prepared for himself.

Amen

(© New Zealand Prayer Book)

Last week, the vicar wished you a Happy New Year, as we celebrated Advent Sunday. Today I’m going to wish you Happy Birthday, as we celebrate St Andrew’s Day, our Patronal Festival or Feast of Dedication, and so the ‘birthday’ of this particular church and parish.

St Andrews-tide is traditionally kept as a time of reflection on mission. Both the ASB and Common Worship have a Day of Intercession and Thanksgiving for the Missionary Work of the Church on 29th November, the day before St Andrew’s Day.  It is therefore very appropriate that, as we celebrate St Andrew on the Second Sunday in Advent, our readings should concentrate on sharing the Good News of God.

Second Isaiah announces to the Jewish people that God is going to get them out of jail. They’ve served their sentence (twice over, with no remission), paid their debt, and now they’re going home! The first word of the proclamation is ‘Comfort!’ Comfort originally meant ‘give strength’: the good news not only makes them feel better, it makes them strong.

The prophet then relays God’s command to clear the way for his progress, and that of his people. This is no minor task, but is compared to a major engineering project, the building of a road all the way from Babylon to Jerusalem, levelling hills and bridging valleys through hostile and barren countryside. There are to be no obstacles to this freedom march!

Isaiah speaks God’s assurance that this will happen, because it is rooted, not in the weakness and fickleness of humanity, but in the promise of God.

God then speaks through his herald (and in Hebrew the word for herald comes from the same root meaning as the word for evangelist does in Greek) who is to proclaim from Jerusalem the good news that God is doing a new thing, where no new thing seemed possible. He is to alert the people to the truth that God is coming among them, as their strong protector, and as a gentle shepherd of the weak and vulnerable. The message the herald brings is of captivity turned to homecoming, despair turned to hope, darkness turned to light.

Mark, like all the evangelists, sees John the Baptist as that herald, that prophet speaking God’s message, that one who prepares the road for the one greater than him to travel. He prepares for the Messiah by saying that people need to repent, to change the way they think, and turn their lives round into a new way. He gives them baptism, a ‘sacrament’, an outward and visible sign, to remind them of that change. He tells them that God has forgiven their wrongdoing, and that when the Messiah comes, they will receive the Spirit of God within themselves, just as the prophet Jeremiah foretold.

John, like the ancient Jewish exiles, is seen as travelling in the wilderness. But that wilderness is theological and spiritual, not geographical. The wilderness is the place where nothing is available to keep people going. The wilderness is a place where nothing bears fruit.The wilderness is a place where people’s spiritual lives die – unless they have the help of God, who alone can lead them through the wasteland to enjoy life in all its fullness.

John prepares the way for Jesus in more than his proclamation. Jesus repeats John’s message of repentance, and of God’s forgiveness for what is in the past. Jesus proclaims God’s presence with the human race, saying the Kingdom of Heaven, God’s imperial rule, is close at hand. Jesus gives people a sacrament, the Communion, as a sign of this. But John prepares the way for Jesus in his life, too. Jesus, like John, will tread the road of persecution, suffering and death because of the message he preaches.

Both of them are saying, like Isaiah, God is here; God is doing something new among you; what are you going to do about it?

As some of us have discovered, in the study of Mark’s Gospel we have been following over the last couple of months, Mark frames his Gospel around Jesus’s invitation to the disciples to follow him in the way to life through service, suffering and death. In Mark

El Greco St Andrew

Jesus urges people to think about life in a different way, to proclaim the reality of God’s rule in the present time, and to be prepared to suffer and die (metaphorically or literally) because of their allegiance to God. His call to Andrew and the other disciples was to repentance, mission, service and crucifixion – because that is the only way to resurrection. He calls us to follow the same way.

We are all called by our baptism to be missionaries, to be heralds of the Good News. At the moment, in this church, we are engaged in a process of Mission Action Planning as part of the the diocesan initiative of ‘Living God’s Love’.

But before we can plan our mission, we need to be clear about what we are proclaiming to those around us. What is the Good News we have for the people of this parish at this time?

The MAP questionnaire, which  many of us filled in, identified the major strength of this church as ‘friendliness’. That is a good thing. Research into mission strategies shows that most people are brought to church membership by another person, often a member of their family or a close friend. Friendship evangelism works!

But as Bishop Alan pointed out in his address to the Diocesan Synod in June, there are two sorts of friendliness: there is the sort of friendliness between like minded people that builds them into a strong, supportive, but inward looking community (what is called in the jargon ‘bonding social capital’); or there is the sort of friendliness which impels a group to look outwards, beyond itself, to support and welcome those who are different from themselves (bridging social capital). Which of these sorts of friendliness will be Good News to those we seek to reach with our mission. Which of these sorts of capital will require a real repentance, real metanoia, real ‘change of mind’ on our part?

Our responses to the questionnaire also identified the lack of members, especially young people and children, as a weakness, and as a hindrance, or obstacle, to our mission. So a major question in planning our mission is going to be “What in the Christian faith will be Good News to this group of people?”

The Good News that Isaiah proclaimed in our Old Testament reading was freedom from imprisonment and exile. So what imprisons and exiles the younger generation from their true selves, the people God created them to be? According to Mark, Jesus proclaimed the Good News by healing people from their sickness, casting out demons from them, and welcoming in the outcasts. So what are the sicknesses of our culture, what demons enslave people today, who are the outcasts in our society?

We won’t find out unless we are prepared to listen. And that will involve being where young people and those outside the church communicate with each other, even though it may appear to us that such places are ‘the wilderness’: listening in to what contemporary music and fashion says, reading newspapers and magazines, watching TV and films and listening to the radio, and most crucially of all, engaging with social media, like Twitter and Facebook and MySpace, where so much opinion nowadays is formed and exchanged.

It won’t be comfortable, in the usual sense of the word – the world inhabited by people outside the church may seem like a wilderness to us – but then Andrew’s call to mission was not a comfortable one either! He and the other disciples were sent out by Jesus, without much training or equipment, to do the same work he did in the towns and villages of Galilee; and later, they were sent by the Holy Spirit to the ends of the earth, and, many of them, to their own deaths, with the same mission.

In spite of this, they went out with joy, the joy that shines through the readings today. It is the joy that comes from knowing that there is no need to prepare for God’s coming, because God is already here in the world, already at work, healing and exorcising, defending and caring for the people of God. So, the mission of those of us who are charged to be heralds of the God’s Good News is simply to reveal, through our words and through our actions, that God in Jesus is already here, and point the way to him. As someone said on Twitter recently: a church should be a signpost not a destination.

Happy Birthday! Happy St Andrew’s Day! Happy Advent!

Happy Mission Action Planning!

(Matthew 25, 31-45) Address for Holy Communion with baptism. 

Have you ever seen the Queen or a member of the Royal Family in the flesh.  Or in a film or on TV? Did they look the same as every other person or different? They are a very different Royal Family from the one described in our reading today. That king would have had absolute power to reward or punish anyone. Think Henry VIII rather than Elizabeth II!

What about Jesus? Anyone ever seen him? Seen pictures – what people think he may have looked like. What do you think Jesus looks like? How would you recognise him if he suddenly appeared before you? Do you think he would look the same as everyone else, or different?

Today  is a very special day in the church. The Feast of Christ the King –  the last Sunday before we begin the four weeks of Advent, which is the time we prepare for the coming of Jesus at Christmas. It’s a time also when we try to prepare ourselves for when Jesus comes  to us again, to judge us.

In this week’s gospel Matthew tells Jesus’s  followers a story about the day they will be judged and surprisingly,  explains  they will  be judged as good or bad by how they’ve taken care of Jesus.

Matthew says when Jesus was hungry they gave him food and when he was thirsty they gave him a drink. He tells them that they took care of him when he was sick, or gave him something to wear when he had nothing or visited him when he was in prison.

But the people are a little surprised to hear this from Jesus – as we might be. We probably know we’ve never taken care of Jesus when he was sick – or given him food or a drink – and neither had many of them. So they said to “We don’t remember doing all these things for Jesus!”

And then Matthew gives them the message that’s at the heart of what Jesus taught. He explains that when we do these things for others who really need them – when we feed the hungry and take care of the sick… when we do good things for other people here on Earth – that we’re actually doing these things for Jesus, our King.

Jesus’ story helps us to remember that we do God’s work every day – and that we never quite know all the places we meet him.

Perhaps some of you may have done these things for Jesus on Friday, when Children in Need were raising money for children in this country. Today is the World Day of Prayer and Action for Children – perhaps you could do something to help other children today. And over Christmas, there will be lots of appeals to help people without homes and needing food and other essentials. There will be appeals at church and elsewhere. Perhaps you could  serve Jesus by responding to these appeals.

What a perfect story that is to lead us into the first Sunday of Advent, when we begin celebrating the coming of Jesusas a tiny baby.

But the story has other lessons for us especially as we welcome J. into the Christian family in baptism. It tells us that God is not chiefly concerned about how we worship, or whether we say the creed, or believe certain things about the Bible, or Jesus or the Church. What really matters to God is how we behave, and especially how we behave to those who are vulnerable and at a disadvantage. As Jesus shows us, it doesn’t matter whether their troubles are their own fault, whether they deserve to be helped or not. We will be judged on how we respond. And that will affect what our world is like – whether it’s the Paradise into which those who helped others were welcomed in Matthew’s story, or the living Hell into which those who ignored the needs of others were sent.

And remember, it’s not a TV personality, or a member of cast of Eastenders, but our King who is telling us whenever we help the smallest  and weakest member of the human family, we are doing it for God.

(based on an outline at The Children’s Sermon.Com © 2008)

When you look at a poppy, what do you see?

I see lists of names. Long lists carved on the Menin Gate, and the Armed Forces Memorial in Staffordshire; shorter lists on war memorials in towns and villages throughout Europe, and in churches like ours.

And I see individual names. Names in the papers of people I don’t know, of service personnel killed in the Balkans, the Falklands, Iraq; and names in my family tree: like Herbert Alfred Peat, born May 1886, married September 1916, killed in France, May 1917; and Arthur John Jordan, born 1891, called up 1916, discharged wounded in the left leg and with gas lung, March 1918.

I see faces. Faces of young men in the trenches, and on the landing craft off the beaches of Normandy, reflecting the fear and the horror of what they are going through. Oil stained faces of sailors pulled from the sea. Faces from the Battle of Britain, and the Falklands conflict burnt beyond recognition; faces of emaciated prisoners from the Far East and Siberia and Korea; the sad faces of elderly men as they remember what they went through in their youth, and their comrades who have fallen; the tear stained faces of men and women and children, mourning members of their family who will never come home; and the empty eyes of those who did come back, but with broken bodies, or, like my father, with hearts and minds that will never again at peace, because they have seen what no human should have to see, have done what no human should have to do, have experienced what no human should have to experience.

And I see places: the battlefields of Flanders; ships ablaze and sinking; aircraft plunging to the ground;

rows and rows of white stones  marking the graves of the millions who died;

the destruction of Coventry and Liverpool, Cologne and Hiroshima; and memories of the bomb sites in Dover and Plymouth which I played in as a child.

When you look at a poppy, what do you feel?

I feel immense and overwhelming sadness: for all the young lives lost, for the futures that did not happen, for the family lives that were broken apart; sadness for the grief of those who remained, for the disfigurement of bodies and minds; for the hatred and resentment that resulted. I feel shame at the waste of precious resources and the destruction of so much that was beautiful and of historical significance. I feel penitence that after two World Wars and so much loss and destruction, governments and nations still have not found a better way to resolve their differences  than to send their young men and women to die.

When you look at a poppy, what do you say?

I say ‘thank you’ for all those who were prepared to go, and give their lives, and risk their health, and their future and their peace of mind, in order that I and others might live free from the threat of Fascist dictatorships and foreign invasion. I say “we will remember them”. I say “Father, forgive us” that we have so often fallen short of the standards Jesus showed us, that we have hated our enemies, that we have not found it easy to go the extra mile to find peaceful solutions. I say “No more’, that there must be a better way than this.

And yet: when I look at a poppy I remember that poppies flowered  in their millions after the guns were silent in the brown fields of Flanders where the trenches once were. So I see the city centres of London and Plymouth  rebuilt; I see the buildings of the European Union and the United Nations, housing organisations that work to prevent war; I see the faces of the many people who work for peace; and I see the new Cathedral at Coventry, built beside the ruins of the old, and symbolising peace and reconciliation after the conflict.

And when I look at a poppy I also feel  hope in the possibility of resurrection, and faith that death is not the end, and confidence in the promise that love and goodness will triumph.

And when I look at a poppy I say to myself:  The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases, his mercies never come to an end; blessed are those that mourn, for they will be comforted; what does the Lord require of you but to do justice and love mercy;  blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called the children of God.

When you look at a poppy, what do you see? what do you feel? what do you say?

All Saints. Fra Angelico

(Daniel 7, 1-3; Luke 6, 20-31)

I don’t think we’re supposed to have favourites among the Christian festivals – we’re supposed to approach them all with the same anticipation. But, being human, I suspect that we all have our favourites, and All Saints is one of mine.

Perhaps it has something to do with the fact that I was baptised, confirmed and married in churches dedicated to All Saints (or All Hallows in the case of the last two). I know it has something to do with the good hymns we get to sing on the festival, particularly the All Saints hymn, ‘For All The Saints’, with its splendid Vaughan Williams tune, and inspiring words by Bishop How.

But I think that most of my fondness for the festival comes from the fact that this commemoration of all the ‘little’ saints – those not considered important enough to have books, or days, or even in most cases, churches, named after them – does lead me to believe that the name of ‘saint’ could really be applied to all of us, as it was to all members of the congregations of the early church. That somehow through persistence and through God’s grace, and perhaps because of one particular act, we too could attain that ‘blest communion, fellowship divine’ of which today’s hymns and prayers speak.

For the great saints – the giants of the church who wrote gospels or major works of mysticism, or founded religious orders or reform movements – do seem so very distant from the rest of us mere mortals, don’t they? How well Bishop How sums up our feelings when we read about them: “We feebly struggle, they in glory shine”!

The ‘little’ saints we remember today seem much more in our league; achieving sanctity perhaps by one act of courage, one supreme time of witness for their faith, or a lifetime of holy ordinariness. Now remembered only in the small communities in which they lived, and by the wider church on just this one festival.

It is therefore ironic to remind ourselves that the commemoration of saint began, not with the great leaders of the early church, but with these little local saints.

From about he second century, the inspired pastors and martyrs of the early Christian communities began to be remembered by services at their tombs on the anniversaries of their deaths. Then churches were built over these tombs and dedicated to them; but these festivals were all local ones. The first patron saints of churches were remembered only by their friends, families and local communities – as most of us will hope to be after we die.

It was only later that the major church figures were allotted their ‘feast days’ and the celebrations extended to involve the whole church. This continued until the church calendar became choked with these feast days, with one or more saints to be remembered on every day of the year.

All these early saints were ‘patron saints’. They served as an example and an inspiration to those who worshipped in the place that bore their name; and if saints have a function in the life of the Church, this task of inspiring and exemplifying would seem to be it.

One of the  things the Pope did on his recent visit to the UK was to declare Cardinal John Henry Newman ‘blessed’, the first step on the road to sainthood. Since the Reformation, the Church of England has had no machinery for canonising its leaders and heroes. However, the need to designate those who were felt to provide a proper example for others to follow continued to be felt.  In 1958, a commission reported to the Lambeth Conference on what should be taken into account when choosing those who might be commemorated in the official calendar of the Church. Apart from stating that they ought to be people whose lives and histories were well attested (that’s when we lost St George, who turned out to be largely mythical!) and of whose sanctity there was no doubt, the commission also advised that they should be people whose lives have ‘excited other people to holiness’ people who so manifested the light of Christ in their lives and achievements that the Christian community can learn about it from them.

Those early church communities had their ‘patron saints’ chosen for them by the fact that he or she lived and sometimes died among them. But how, I wonder, should we go about choosing a patron saint for ourselves today?

At one time  especially in Roman Catholic countries, a child would be named after the saint on whose feast-day it was born – and that saint would automatically become its patron saint.  When a French penfriend gave me a full list of saint’s days, I discovered that under this system, I should have been called ‘Honoré’ – a saint of whom I was not able at that time to discover anything further! I now find (thanks to Wikipedia) that he was a 6th century bishop of Amiens, and patron saint of bakers and pastry chefs. Not really much like me, I have to say!

St Honoré Cake

Using the same system with the ASB and Common Worship calendar, my birthday saint turns out to be

George Herbert

George Herbert – priest, poet and pastor, 1633 – again, not a very appropriate role model for a twentieth century working wife and mother!

If you are given a fairly traditional name, you can adopt the saint with the same name as your patron saint – even if, as in my case, it turns out to be someone whose life story is wholly apocryphal. But what of the Tracys, Emmas and Darrens – where are the saints for them to follow?

Another traditional way of choosing a patron saint was through your occupation. All the mediaeval trade guilds had their patron saints, and some of the connections are still remembered today. I attended a school founded by a member of the Haberdashers’ Company, whose saint was Catherine of Alexandria, and we were told the story of her martyrdom each year on her feast day, 25th November. Doctors can look to St Luke and carpenters to St Joseph, and tax collectors to St Matthew, musicians to St Cecilia. But what of more recently invented trades and professions? A review I read of Butler’s ‘Lives of the Saints’ suggests some appropriate choices. St

St Basilissa

Basillissa martyred in the third century, and patron saint of those with chilblains, might serve for chiropodists; and St Appollonia, and aged deaconess, who had all her teeth pulled out, and who is usually depicted clutching a pair of pincers which hold a tooth, might be appropriate for dentists; and since carpenters are now not so common, perhaps St Joseph, who is also, I’m told, the patron saint of house hunters, might be persuaded to transfer his patronage to estate-agents!

All very entertaining! But this rather light-hearted survey of possible patron saints does highlight a serious difficulty for us in making the choice. If the function of saints is that their lives should ‘excite us to sanctity’ then surely there needs to be some real point of contact between their lives and ours. Yet, the problem  with most of the saints who we are offered as role-models is that they lived so long ago, and in such a different world from the one we inhabit, that those essential points of contact are lacking.

This is particularly so for women. If you look through the old calendar of saints almost all the handful of women mentioned there were either nuns or virgin martyrs. The ASB improved things a little: its calendar had 10 women out of 76 saints; Common Worship

St Appolonia

has 47 women out of 238 individuals worthy of being commemorated as examples of sanctity by the church. Are men really that much more saintly than men?

The ASB calendar had only three women who were not either virgin martyrs or celibate religious: Anne the mother of the Virgin Mary ( whose live is entirely legendary); Margaret, who was queen of Scotland as well as ‘wife and mother’, so not much of an example to commoners, and the most recently introduced, Josephine Butler, social reformer, wife and mother – the only person in that calendar of saints and heroes of the faith whose life style was anything like what modern  working wives and mothers might experience. It was no surprise to learn she was the most modern of the ASB women saints – she died in 1907. Common Worship added more women to the list – but still very few modern married women or mothers: Mary Sumner, founder of the Mothers’ Union and Henrietta Barnett, social reformer alongside her husband Samuel are two of the few who lived in the early 20th century.

The commission who completed the list was instructed that no-one should be included who had not been dead for at least 50 years; but this

Josephine Butler

attempt to preserve the list of heroes and heroines of the church from ‘the cult of the passing moment’ has also left it bereft of role models for working mums, employees of multi-national corporations, and all those who try to live the Christian life in an era of mass-communication, the internet, multiracial societies and space travel.

For some, perhaps most Christians, this is not a problem, and they do find man and women whose lives ‘excite them to holiness’ in the official approved lists of saints and heroes of the church.  But for others, including me, the official ‘saints’ are almost all too remote to be inspirations for our Christian pilgrimage.

Perhaps we should, then, go back to the example of those second century congregations, whose festivals and dedications began the whole business of ‘saints’ and pick our ‘patron saints’ from among those who live our sort of life in our sort of community, in our own time – with or without the official blessing of the church.

What do you think?

Icon

I’m going to read you some bits of the Bible.

En archê ên ho logos kai ho logos ên pros ton theon kai theos ên ho logos.

houtos ên en arche pros ton theon. Panta di autou egeneto kai choris autou ou di hen.

And here’s another bit.

In principio erat Verbum et Verbum erat apud Deum et Deus erat Verbum. Hoc erat in principio apud Deum.

Omnia per ipsum facta sunt et sine ipso factum est nihil quod factum est.

Did that make any sense to you? Well, that was the first three verses in the Gospel of John – “In the beginning was the Word” etc. first in NT Greek, and then in Latin.

And if it didn’t make any sense to you, you now know something of how the Jews assembled in the square before the  Water Gate in post-exile Jerusalem felt. They had been in exile in Babylon for between 50 and 150 years.  Many of them had lost the ability to understand Hebrew, and were unfamiliar with the traditional Jewish Law. So, when Ezra the scribe read the Law to them, they needed the other scribes to explain what it said in a language they understood, probably Aramaic, which was the common language of Babylon. Following on from this initial reading of the Torah, Aramaic translations were written, called Targums, so that those who never regained fluency in Hebrew, were able to understand what was read.

Although Jesus and his disciples spoke Aramaic, the literature of the New Testament was written in Greek, and most of the early Christians would have understood some of that. Later it was translated into Latin for the Western Church, and most people would have understood a little of that, at least until the fall of the Roman Empire. But from then on, until the Reformation and the translation of the Bible into the languages people actually spoke, most members of the congregation were in exactly the same position as many of you were when I read those passages at the beginning – hearing something they really didn’t understand.

You may think we’re in a much better position than those ancient Jews, or pre-Reformation Christians in this country, since we have the Bible in the language we speak, and freely available in a number of forms. But understanding a written document is not just about understanding the words. You also need to understand the sort of writing you are dealing with and the context in which it was written if you are really to get the message. Many Christians don’t have that knowledge and their understanding of the Bible and how to use it is weakened because of this.

Much of the Bible in its present form was put together around 2000 years ago; some of it was written down about 1000 years before that, and much of that contains oral traditions that were in circulation for many hundreds of years previously. We need to understand that, if we are to judge how applicable the actions and attitudes they advocate are to our 21st century world. Added to this is the fact that the words of the Bible are all translated from the original language in which they were spoken or written, sometimes many times, and each translation will be subtly affected by the assumptions of the translators. I have put some copies of a passage from the New Testament in Greek as it was originally written at the back for you to see – all in capitals with no punctuation and no spaces between the words. So think how difficult that makes it to understand what was being said and to recapture the original meaning of the text.

In primary school, our children are now taught to recognise different genres of writing, so that they can better understand what they read. We believers need to do the same with the different genres of writing in the Bible. It contains many different sorts of literature – stories, legal documents, history, prophecy, poetry, myths, letters, philosophical questioning – and we are failing to show it proper respect, and in danger of misusing it, if we don’t recognise this.

So, on this Bible Sunday, I would urge you to take every opportunity of getting to know the Bible better; not just the text, but also the background and the genre and the context of each of the books, and especially of the books of the New Testament. You will not truly be able to hear God’s Word speaking though its pages unless you do this.

One common mistake is to treat everything in the Bible as if it is direct instruction from God, as if it was all preceded by the words: “Thus saith the Lord”. In fact, very little of the Bible is written as direct words from God.  Most of it is human reflection on the mystery of God, or accounts of people trying to understand and communicate God to their contemporaries. They do this both by their words and their actions. Some groups of Christians say only the words matter; in the presentation at Deanery Synod on Women Bishops, one of the speakers said his group in the church would always take a direct command in the Bible as more authoritative for our conduct than an action, even when the action was by Jesus. I can’t understand that. Would we judge by what a person said, rather than by what they did? I don’t think so.

Another common mistake is to take single sentences or passages out of context, and demand that they be applied to quite different circumstances. Whole theologies have been based on this sort of selective reading of texts. For instance, one of the ‘proof texts’ for those who says the whole Bible is literally true, inspired and infallible is 2 Timothy 3, verse 15. This says (depending on how you translate the original Greek) either ‘all scripture is inspired by God and is useful for teaching etc.’ or ‘every Scripture inspired by God is useful for teaching the truth and rebuking error, etc.’. This passage is someone (probably not the Apostle Paul) writing to Timothy to give him advice about how (in his opinion) to use the Jewish Scriptures in his teaching and pastoral work. It is not making an authoritative statement about everything contained in the Christian Bible, some of which probably hadn’t even been written at the time the letters to Timothy were being circulated. Other passages, which are more definitely written by the Apostle Paul, criticise the written Scriptures, saying only faith in Christ brings life, whereas the Torah brings death. Jesus himself challenged those who followed the letter of the law rather than its spirit. Which of these is the example for us to follow?

The Bible is not so much a text book or a code of conduct for us to slavishly follow, as a continuing conversation between human beings and the divine. Like all conversations, things can be misunderstood, and misheard, particularly when we are listening in to someone else’s conversation from some distance away. And people may express different opinions at different times ( that certainly happens with the Bible).

When we read the Bible, we need to think of it as like a conversation with a group of trusted friends, whose advice and experience may inform our decisions about important things. We will need to think about which friend we ask about different problems – some may have something valid to say to us; others, we know, may not have any experience at all of what concerns us. On some issues we may have to consult other people outside this circle, who have more expertise in the subject of concern. Finally, we will need to weigh up all the advice before we make our decision, based on all we know about God’s will for us from many different sources.

On this Bible Sunday, we honour the Bible and the insights of previous generations that it shares with us. At the same time we remember that we are not, as Jews and Muslims are, ‘People of the Book’. The Bible is not the Word of God for us: the Word of God is embodied in a person, Jesus of Nazareth. That person is part of God the Trinity, the God who continues to be revealed to us through the Holy Spirit, day by day and in our own time. We need to recognise that some passages in the Bible most definitely do not reflect the God revealed to us through Jesus Christ.

Anglican theology is not based on ‘sola scriptura’, Scripture alone. It is based on scripture, reason and tradition. This is often spoken of as ‘a three-legged stool’, which is a useful analogy to keep in mind, since a three-legged stool is no use at all if one of the legs is a different length to the other two. Only if all three are equal is it stable enough to bear the weight of what is placed on it!

So, when we read the Bible, we need to take account of the tradition of the Christian church, which is still evolving, and use our God given reason when we interpret it.

We need to remember that we are called to live the Word of God, but that Word is a person, not words on a page.

Jesus Christ, the Word of God