The meaning of Christmas

 

Christmas Eve and Christmas day readings

Isaiah 52: 7-10. A messenger appears on the horizon bringing good news to a broken and besieged city that salvation is on its way. When the watchman realise it is good news they spread the message amongst the people of Jerusalem and eventually they all sing for joy. Emmanuel “God is with us” is the message of Christmas, and our role is to react with joy and spread that message until the whole world is singing with joy

Hebrews 1: 1-4. Whilst the humanity of Jesus is the subject of chapter two of Hebrews the letter starts by stressing the divinity of Jesus much like John’s prologue which follows. The wisdom of God is manifested in Jesus “the reflection of God’s glory, the exact imprint of God’s very being”. This manifestation of God’s presence and glory in the world is what we call “the Christ”

John 1: 1-14. The Christ was not a bolt from the blue but was “with God in the beginning” a revelation of eternal truth. The universal Christ made human in Jesus, is the presence of God himself who stands at both the beginning and the end of all history – but was made tangible at a certain point in historical time – making clear and apparent the will and purposes of God to human beings. God is Love and Grace and Truth and He wills the healing and salvation of all creation. Quite a message! And we are charged with living out and spreading that message.

 

What does believing that God’s son walked this earth in human form mean for the way we see and the world, perceive human life, and our place within it.

Our first reading talks about a messenger bringing good news to a city under siege – a message of freedom – of salvation - and that message is heard first by the watchmen on the city walls and then spreads like wildfire amongst the general population, evoking a reaction of pure joy as their dire situation is relieved and they break into song.

For Christians, Jesus Christ is that message that appears to a captive and broken world – and the people who first see and believe it are the watchmen who then pass that message on to a world that badly needs a message of hope. Our watchmen were the apostles and saints, who dedicated their lives to making sure that everybody knew and understood that our captivity is over.

Human beings are held captive by the spectre of death and pointlessness, by the fear that everything they are and everything they do is worthless and without meaning. Held captive by the thought that their lives and the lives of everyone they love are merely illusions – that love isn’t real – that death is the end of an existence that never had any meaning in the first place. They can feel disconnected, alone in a cold heartless universe that doesn’t care about them.

The message of Jesus is – think again!

The world and everything in it is good and we human beings are very good. God exists and loved the world from the very beginning and will love it to the very end.

Love is real – your love has substance because the very nature and being of God is Love.

You are intimately connected to all things through God who is in all things. When you believe the message, your self-perception changes from being a person alone and disconnected from people and the world around us to being a child of God – having a connection with other people and all things and all based on you having an intimate connection to God.

That is the true meaning of the word religion. It means to re-bind to all things -to re-connect - and all things are held together by the spirit of God.

The message is that your death is not the end so everything you do now is not pointless but in fact has eternal importance and meaning so be more mindful about what you say and do.

The message says that even when you fall short, when you pick yourself up and dust yourself down and admit where you’ve failed the depths of God’s forgiveness in inexhaustible.

This message of salvation, a word which means healing and wholeness of your mind, body and spirit, and re-connecting you to the source of all life and being is true good news for all creation. And you are an integral part of that creation.

In the end, the Christian faith is a choice.

Do you choose to believe that the world is just an accident, nothing more than the physical matter you see around us – essentially lifeless and without morality, purpose or ultimate meaning. That you are alone and don’t matter.

Or do you choose to believe the message of Jesus – that the world is good and innately connected by the Spirit of God. That Love is real, morality has substance, that you are intimately connected to all things and that you matter.

The choice is yours and it is the same choice God has always offered as it says in the Hebrew scriptures. (Deuteronomy 30:19)

 ¹⁹ I call heaven and earth to witness against you today that I have set before you life and death, blessings and curses. Choose life so that you and your descendants may live, 

 Choose Life. Choose Christ.

 Amen

 

The Blessed virgin Mary

 

Sunday 20^th December - Advent 4

 

This Sunday the fourth candle on the Advent wreath is lit commemorating Mary, the mother of Jesus as the most obvious antecedent in the Jesus event we call the incarnation. 

2 Samuel 7: 1-11, 16. The important question that this piece raises is “Does God need a house or any special building to reside?” This is of enormous significance for Christians as we believe that the spirit resides in believer’s hearts wherever they may be – that we human beings in fact are the Temple of the Holy Spirit of God (1 Corinthians 3: 16-17). While God’s Spirit lives in us in a very special way, He is also present in all things and believing that God can be located to one place is when you think about it diminishes and attempts to domesticate to universal and infinite God that knows no boundaries.

Romans 16: 25-27. The mystery of God, the eternal word, whose Spirit manifests the Kingdom of God whenever anyone follows the way of Love was always true but only became fully apparent in the life, works, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. God didn’t start loving the world 2020 years ago in Jesus Christ– it was always true

Luke 1: 26-38. The mystery – the eternal Christ – was incarnated (revealed) to a largely unsuspecting world in the body of a woman, Mary. Mary’s “Yes” was absolutely pivotal to the revelation happening at all. This is why Mary is so revered in both Eastern and Western Christianity and attracts so many honorific titles. Symbolically she is the “New Eve” undoing the disobedience of the first Eve. Theologically she is forever honoured with the title Theotokos which means the God-bearer.  

 

One of the unfortunate consequences of the reformation in the Western world is the unseemly culture war over the position of Mary the mother of Jesus in our respective denominations.

 

Thankfully I was privileged to serve for three years in an Eastern Orthodox country where of course there has never been a reformation and I gained a more rounded and deeper appreciation of Mary’s place within truly catholic (in the sense of universal) Christianity, untouched by the fights and struggles in the West between Roman Catholics and Protestants, for which I am eternally grateful.

 

The entire Christian understanding of the relationship between God and the world and how God can be accessed by human beings depends on the whole notion of understanding what “Emmanuel” really means. God is with us – He is not separate from us and can never be separate from any of us or anything.

 

This has always been true and will always remain true but that core mystery was only fully revealed to us through the birth of Jesus Christ and that happened through Mary.

 

Atonement – being at one with God – is something that has to be attained through believing in an “atoning sacrifice” in much Western theology but in classic catholic/Orthodox understanding of the world – we have always been at one with God and the sign and seal of this innate oneness is the incarnation.

 

We are also a religion of original blessing. Prior to any notion of original sin, God created (as it is written in Genesis) all that is and saw that it was good. Human beings as I’m sure you remember were created as VERY good.

 

God always loved the world from the very beginning. He didn’t suddenly start taking an interest 2020 years ago.

 

Mary’s role then is pivotal. She has always been lauded as a sign and symbol of the Christian life, in the following way;

 

Mary said yes to the Spirit which grew inside her until she gave birth to the physical Jesus in Bethlehem. That is the Christian way also. We also have to say yes to God and his spirit will grow within us until we give birth spiritually to Christ in the world. Mary is an icon of the way of Christ.

One of my most precious books is by Rowan Williams called “Ponder these things” a series of reflections on Orthodox icons of Mary and Jesus – Madonna and child.

 

I can’t hold a candle to Rowan’s intellect or insight – he learned Russian so he could read his favourite Orthodox theologians in their original language for example- but I can ride on his coat tails.

 

His insight is that icons of Mary holding the infant Jesus nuzzling up to his mother are profound revelation into the nature of the relationship between humans and the Divine.

 

The infant Jesus is dependent, vulnerable, adoring his Mother. Mary, looking out imploringly to the viewer is saying to us “This is your God”.

 

We have the capacity to nurture God in our lives or neglect and ignore Him until he just shrivels up and dies.

 

My most recent insight was on the use of the word “virgin” to describe Mary. One that breaks through centuries of wrangling and disputes over the meaning or mistranslation of words to understand the virginity of Mary as less to do with biology and more to do with a fundamental attitude towards God and life was a real breakthrough for me.

 

Humility, a chasteness of heart and mind that simply receives with gratitude from God despite not knowing where the journey will end is a state of being that precedes her “yes” to God.

 

“Let it be to me according to your word”.

 

And as I wrote earlier in the week, once we can say that along with Mary, we are truly ready for Christmas.

 

John the Baptist - Advent 3

 

Sunday 13^th December – Advent three.

The third candle is lit honouring the role of John the Baptist in the Christian revelation.

Isaiah 61: 1-4, 8-11. This piece of Isaiah is quoted by Jesus in the synagogue (Luke 4:18-19) ensuring that it is one of the best-known pieces of old testament prophesy, which he uses to refer to himself. In its original context it is addressed to Jewish returnees from exile in Jerusalem between about 540 and 520 BC. and is the prophet convincing his listeners of his credentials as a true prophet of God. The people were free but impoverished but the soaring rhetoric powerfully expresses hope for the future.

1 Thessalonians 5: 16-24. A piece demanding that our whole lives be oriented towards God – a life nor compartmentalised into religious and secular bits but where every decision and every moment have a relationship to the reality of God. But the “good” and the “evil” are not quantified, leaving the discernment of God’s will to be tried and tested (not automatically accepted) within the community. The church is called to be a community of moral discernment to test the various voices that claim to speak God’s will, to see if there is divine guidance for the confusing decisions of life.

John 1: 6-8, 19-28. The one “who you do not know” is coming after me, challenges the church to acknowledge its presumptuous assumption that we do know who Jesus is. Portrayed as an innocuous infant, dispenser of salvation, revolutionary leader, spiritual guru or a dozen other ways, all of them grasps just one facet of Jesus’ identity. They are all subsumed within the understanding of Jesus as the incarnation of the eternal word – the Christ.

According to the Bible, John the Baptist always acknowledged that he was secondary to Jesus and was merely pointing the way to the true Messiah.

That may be true for the man himelf but not for many of his followers and many people followed this charismatic preacher in opposition to Jesus.

Even today in the Middle East, the descendants of a people that reveres John the Baptist as the final prophet – a people called the Mandeans – number some tens of thousands – though now dispersed as a result of the Iraq war.

The fact that the New Testament acknowledges the fact that Jesus let himself be baptised by John was a huge problem for the early church because it suggests subordination to John and the fact that when John ended up in prison his previous certainty failed him and he managed to get a message to Jesus asking him directly whether he really was the true messiah or should they wait for someone else?

In the words of Jesus himself, He identifies John as the prophet Elijah (Matthew 11:14) who the Jews were expecting to precede the coming of the Messiah and He also says that he needed to be baptised by John to fulfil all righteousness (Matt. 3:13) which is indicative of his complete humility. As Paul writes in Philippians “He didn’t cling to equality with God. He emptied himself, taking the form of a slave.”

When Jesus replied to John’s question about his authenticity he responds by simply asking to be judged on what anyone can see for themselves, and therefore challenging John to make a decision.

“The blind see, the lame walk, lepers are healed, the dead are raised and good news is preached to the poor”. What do you say?

Word and deed completely in accord. Here is someone who demonstrates the difference that would be made if the presence and purposes of God were fully manifested in a human being. A healing, life-filled and life-giving existence.

When faced with such a person as Jesus “the Christ” it is not surprising that we shrink because we know how imperfect and compromised we all are, and the standards of Jesus seem so far beyond our grasp  which is why the lives of the saints became so important to the church.

Because they weren’t perfect beings at all. Think about St. Peter after whom this church is named. Flawed, imperfect, misunderstanding and who actually denied even knowing Jesus in his hour of need.

We can readily identify with a man like that who despite all of those human faults and failings – his underlying faith and insight led to him being described as the Rock by Jesus.

Perhaps I should also say that this is probably why Mary, the mother of Jesus is so popular. When faced with an Angel of God telling her something extraordinary she just accepted it in complete obedience and humility. “Let it be to me according to your word.

That is an example of a response that is a model for all human responses to the prompting of the Spirit of God.

A response that Paul writes about today as well. A whole community that collectively says “Let it be to me according to your word” is the church.

And we follow Paul’s injunction to Rejoice always, to pray without ceasing, to give thanks in all circumstances, not to quench the Spirit but discern what the Spirit might be saying to us.

We are of course an imperfect and flawed community. We are bound to be because we are made up of human beings, but I have faith that just like Peter, or Mary or any of the saints or apostles, if we just keep finding it within ourselves to say Yes to the Spirit of God, to say “let it be to me according to your word” we will be led inexorably to a far better place.

Amen

The Peace of God

 

Sunday 6^th December – Advent 2

Our first live services for a month and I will be presiding at Holy Communion at 9.30am at All saints East Budleigh, John Archibald will be presiding at Morning prayer at St. Michael’s Otterton, and Rev. Karen Young will be presiding at the 8am and 10am at St. Peter’s Budleigh Salterton.

Isaiah 40: 1-11. This piece of Isaiah was written while the Jews were in exile in Babylon (587 – 540 BC) so is, as it says a note of “comfort” which is much stronger in Hebrew than in English and conveys a promise of action and hope in the future. The future messianic aspect, that Christians applied to Jesus, was of the promise of a future leader (God himself) “who would feed his flock like a shepherd: he will gather the lambs in his arms” That the imagery from this piece about making straight paths in the desert is used in the opening chapter of Mark’s gospel reading today has ensured it is one of the best known pieces of prophetic writing.

2 Peter 3: 8-15a. Peter addresses the fact that the “return” of Jesus is not happening as expected by combatting the scepticism and moral laxity by maintaining the “Day of the Lord” will happen but not according to our limited perspectives and timeframe. When the end comes it will be sudden, not according to any timetable so we should live lives marked by holiness and godliness and peace and righteousness until that time.  Those qualities characterize the mood of the Advent season 

Mark 1: 1-8. The role of “making straight the way of the Lord” is ascribed to John the Baptist by the Christian church. There is continuity and obvious discontinuity between the Jewish religion and the new “way of Jesus” but here great effort is made to portray John as a wild and woolly Old Testament prophet in the wilderness here. The text is saying that however new and unique Jesus may seem, he was no bolt from the blue – he was foretold and expected and in line with Old Testament prophesy.

 

That the Christian way ushered in a radically new way of being and seeing and understanding the relationship between God and creation is beyond question. So radical is it that we measure the passage of time itself from that point when we estimate the time of birth of the man we came to know as the Christ.

In that way you can say that Jesus marks a complete break with what went before, a kind of discontinuity with Judaism.

What the opening chapter of Mark does is proffer the scenario that however different Jesus might seem, there is also continuity with the Jewish revelation and prophesy.

Mark does this skilfully by drawing on Old Testament prophesy and marking out John the Baptist as the Herald prophesied by Isaiah and deliberately describing John as the quintessential Old Testament prophet – the wild man in the wilderness, breathing fire and judgement dressed in camel’s hair and eating locusts and wild honey.

However radical Jesus’ message might be, Mark wants to make clear that He is understood as being prophesied and therefore of God and the Jewish religion.

Jesus’ life and death and resurrection were momentous things in themselves but as Christians meditated on these events the full import of what became known as the incarnation began to be fully appreciated and understood and this new understanding bore fruit both within the pages of the New Testament and in the further and ongoing revelations through the church Fathers, a process that has never stopped down to the present day.

The revealing of the full meaning and import of Emmanuel – God with us – is never ending. The Spirit of God reveals the mind of God to those receptive to his prompting continually, and what the gospel means for us all has to be continually re-interpreted for each age and context.

A favourite question we were invited to ponder at college was “What does salvation look like to a single mum on benefits living in a flat on the 19^th floor.”

What can our faith give her? What does good news look like in concrete terms? 

Conversely, what does salvation look like to a successful happily married businessman living in a detached house in the home counties surrounded by adoring children.

What can the gospel of Jesus give to that man?

That second scenario I have personal insight on because there was such a wonderful well-dressed handsome man with a beautiful wife and lovely children attached to my first church where I attended in Kent. I can still picture him in a casual white suit on our Sunday school picnic playing with the children. I remember admiring him as having a perfect life.

I also remember that he threw himself under the Eurostar train on Christmas Eve. Wracked by anxiety, he just couldn’t face the future.

In the concrete details of their lives, salvation will perhaps look very differently to the two different people but whether you are poor or well off, all of us share basic human needs.

I am sure we could all reel off a few basic needs, but one of them that is common to all people in all situations is also one that seems to elude us and that is peace. Peace in our hearts, minds and souls. 

Not just peace as in “an absence of conflict” - a peace of mind more akin to the Hebrew concept of Shalom – that speaks of wholeness, contentedness, an inner stillness.

This is the peace of God that transcends all human understanding I speak about during the final blessing. God is here within you and he loves you eternally.

This elusive peace can be glimpsed in moments when we realise that God is in all things, including us, and he loves us no matter what and will forgive us when we turn from what we know to be wrong.

It is easy to say the words but it takes much longer to absorb those words and they become a reality in your life. Even if you don’t feel much peace in your life right now – keep saying and believing those words for they are the words of truth and the truth will set you free.

Advent Sunday

Sunday 29^th November – Advent Sunday

The church year starts on Advent Sunday and 2020/2021 is Year B which means in effect that most of our lectionary readings we hear on Sunday will be from Mark’s gospel. Last year was mostly from Matthew, and after this year they will be mainly from Luke. John’s gospel gets distributed fairly evenly across every season

Isaiah 64: 1-9. This passage expresses both hope and frustration so is a fitting choice for Advent, a season that lives with the frustration of hoping and waiting for a better world that is beyond our capacity of human beings to achieve. In the time it was written, the Jews had returned from exile in Babylon and the re-building of the Temple was a possibility but lack of progress or any signs from God were undermining confidence.  

1 Corinthians 1: 3-9. It is a shame that the lectionary compilers left out the first two verses because they set the scene for what follows – that we are all called by God. Paul is called by God but also the congregation are called to be Holy and they all “call” on the Lord Jesus Christ. Importantly they are all “called into the fellowship on his son Jesus Christ our Lord”. This is important because of the factionalism that has to be addressed further into the letter. Given that the factions were based on the use and abuse of spiritual gifts, Paul makes sure he emphasises that the gifts are a gift from God and not as a result of any inherent merit in the congregation.

Mark 13: 24-37

As previously discussed, Apocalyptic expectations are all set within a very brief future which is why the readers were told to “keep awake.” The spirit of the piece is expectation of a new world order under the control of Christ “the Son of man coming on the clouds of heaven”. However this should not be read in isolation from the previous verses in which the emphasis is on not thinking that the end is near and as verse 32 says not even Jesus knows when the end will come but “only the Father”.

 

It would be foolish to maintain that the church is not affected by the clamour and emphasis put on Christmas by secular and commercial interests.

And because of that our own clamour in the church is increasingly directed towards an endless Christmas season – so much so that the Christian season of Advent that immediately precedes Christmas is in danger of being lost and ignored.

Advent is much more sober and reflective – indicated by the fact that the traditional colour for Advent is purple – the same as Lent- and we don’t say the Gloria in services because that is too celebratory.

The season is defined by hope tempered by frustration.

We hope for a healed and redeemed world where all wrongs are righted, where every tear is wiped from every eye, where Justice and peace roll down like a river, and yet as we look at the world we realise that by our own efforts this is as unlikely now as it has been unlikely for 2000 years.

Yet hope springs eternal in the human heart, that this is the future we are committed to and we dare not let that vision slip from our imaginations.

It says in proverbs (29:18) that “without a vision the people perish” so we have to keep that flame of hope alive in our hearts, and while we have to realise that the end game is beyond us, we nevertheless are as a community of love, agents of God’s love and grace in the world and we work towards that future regardless. We are people of the Kingdom.

One of the most profound verses in the Bible about the coming of the Kingdom is in Luke’s gospel (17: 20-21)

²⁰ Once Jesus^[a] was asked by the Pharisees when the kingdom of God was coming, and he answered, “The kingdom of God is not coming with things that can be observed; ²¹ nor will they say, ‘Look, here it is!’ or ‘There it is!’ For, in fact, the kingdom of God is within you.”    

The kingdom of God is wherever you are, when you are as Paul used to say “in Christ”.

A transformed Christ-consciousness is where the kingdom of God is on earth.

So where we are, we bring the love and grace of God into every situation we find ourselves.

Thus, the Kingdom of God has no boundaries or limits

When Christ’s consciousness becomes our consciousness He becomes the cornerstone of a limitless spiritual building – the body of Christ.

The hope and joy of Christmas – the realisation that “God is with us” is the basis of the Christian life – that is where the story starts – but Advent is where the rubber hits the road, when we are called to live out that truth that God is with us in our daily lives and we find that our underlying joy is tempered with unfulfilled hopes and expectations.

Hope and frustration undergirded by Joy is a pretty good description of the Christian life and it is the life we are called to live as Paul writes in his letter today.

Like the Corinthian church then and the church now we find we go down many cul-de-sacs, and we fail continually to consistently maintain the standard set for us – and we then continually ask for forgiveness.

Nevertheless, God has chosen to work through us – yes – us – to bring people a taste of the Kingdom in these between times. We do so imperfectly, we fail often, but as I say quoting St. Teresa’s words so often – Christ has no other body except ours to work through.

But we go on regardless because we have seen the end. The end is Christ as he is also the beginning. I am the Alpha and the Omega, says the Lord God, who is, who was and who is to come, the almighty.

And while the going may be hard and difficult at times, hearing words like that from Revelation, we can just echo Peter when he says “Where else can we go. You have the words of eternal life”

     

Christ the King

 Sunday 22^nd November – Christ the King

Ezekiel 34: 11-16, 20-24. Kingship has always been closely entwined with Shepherding in the Hebrew Bible and indeed had been a common motif for centuries beforehand. Pharaohs are often depicted carrying a shepherd’s crook for example. In the first section (11-16) God himself is the shepherd and in the second section (20-24) the shepherd will be a restored king of the house of David, which in Christian theology finds its fulfillment in Jesus Christ.    

Ephesians 1: 15-23. To modern ears this can sound quite mesmerizing and if actually written by Paul finds him in full “preacher” mode. Developing from his earlier “Rapture” phase, the church is now Christ’s body on earth – his “presence” (Parousia) in a spiritual unity. Christ is the universal spirit and presence of God on earth although we must still pray for wisdom (verse 17) as we “work out our salvation with fear and trembling” as Paul writes in Philippians 2:12

Matthew 25: 31-46. “Christ the king” was instituted by Pope Pius XI in 1925 as a counter blast to Fascism but like this text from Matthew it is ambiguous and subject to many different interpretations. The text appears to be about what happens on the “Day of the Lord” when “All the nations” (Verse 32) are gathered before the Shepherd king. Salvation is doled out not on the basis of faith, which isn’t mentioned once, but on how we treat others so on the face of it is “salvation by works”. A warning to complacent Christians perhaps? However one interprets it, the main point is that Christ identifies with those who suffer, and love for them is a service to Christ who fills “all in all” (Ephesians 1:23)

 

As I wrote in my notes “Christ the King” was instituted by Pope Pius XI in 1925 as a counter blast to Fascism. It was meant to say of course that Christ is king of our hearts not any earthly leader or movement.

But of course, kingship in itself is a problematic concept for many evoking harsh and arbitrary dictatorial images and is linked with brute force, injustice and serfdom.

It was ever thus and the writers of the Bible advanced a hybrid vision of a perfect and just and compassionate King – that of a "shepherd" king.

This idealized “Shepherd king” in the minds of the prophets would be embodied in a future king from the house of David.

Skip forward 1000 years, you can see why the early Christian church who were all Jewish of course and steeped in the scriptures and prophesy were so keen to emphasise the link between Jesus and the house of David, because for them this perfect Shepherd king, the Messiah, the Christ had come in Jesus of Nazareth.

In that link they found continuity but also discontinuity. Jesus was not the Messiah anyone expected. He was not a military leader who would rid the land of an occupying army by force. He never took up arms or even opposed the Roman occupation as far as we know.

One incident does come to mind of course that has great bearing on the Spirit of the feast “Christ the King”. It is the incident when Jesus was asked whether it was right to pay taxes to Caesar and taking a coin with Caesar’s head on it said Give to Caesar what is Caesar’s but give to God what is God’s.

All Jews knew that everything belongs to God ultimately, so in that one brief exchange Jesus acknowledges temporal power but asserts that there is a power far above anything in this world to which everything is subject which of course is exactly the focus of this feast day.

Whatever temporal control we are subject to, or powers we show allegiance to, there is a greater moral and spiritual power that has a prior call on our hearts and minds.

We are followers of the way of Jesus.

It is true that Jesus never asks us to worship him but does ask countless times that we should follow him.

In this way Jesus, the eternal Christ, is king of our hearts, when we follow his example and teachings.

The other main way that the shepherd king was different to what had been expected by so many, is that instead of being a saviour for the Jewish people exclusively he was recognised as the saviour of the whole world.

This was a Shepherd King for the whole world and everything in it. This universalizing of the  message is why it is important that we retain our use and understanding of the word “catholic” which simply means universal and we affirm that in our creeds every time we meet to break bread together.

I am a Catholic Christian because I believe that Christ is God’s revelation to and for the whole world. Healing and wholeness for all things is the will of God, made explicit to us in the universal Christ.

Christ’s message written in his life and deeds and recorded in the New Testament are for all people in every age. They are words of unity, peace, compassion, mercy and salvation and are rooted in the Divine revelation that God is Love.

It is this Christ that we invite to be king of our hearts and follow – the Perfect Shepherd King of our lives and he has prior claim on our lives above all temporal powers and authorities.  

Christ has no body but yours

 

Sunday 15^th November – 2 before Advent

Zephaniah 1: 7, 12-18. The God of blood-curdling vengeance is given full rein here. What starts with carnage against Israel ends with carnage against the whole world. There is a certain logic here though. If the Jews are supposed to be “a light to the gentiles” but in fact produce only darkness, then their fate will be shared. At any rate the passage warns against indifference or neutrality towards God who will “not do good, nor will he do harm” (v.12)

1 Thessalonians 5: 1-11. There is no timetable for Christ’s return and so Paul urges constant readiness using martial metaphors of a breastplate and a helmet. In other words, for a Christian, the answer to the question “When will the day of the Lord come?” is always “Now!”. This is a message that Christians living 2000 years after these words were written still need to take on board. God stands at both the beginning and end of all life “the alpha and the omega” and the question is not so much of timing but remaining faithful to the promise that Christ means salvation.

Matthew 25: 14-30. So, “God supports the capitalist system” is probably not supposed to be the take-home message of this piece. A “talent” was a weight of about 100 pounds so about 6000 Denarii, so to have even one was an extraordinary amount of money to play with. To have five meant extreme wealth. The church has always allegorized the talent to mean something more like our modern understanding of “Talent” or more like “spiritual riches” or “spiritual gifts”. If you have been given these gifts we should use them, whatever they are, for the good of the whole church to build up the body. Squandering a spiritual gift is almost a direct rebuke to God. The message is of course that whatever we have, we should use it for the good of the body of Christ so that it functions well, firing on all cylinders!

It is a naturally difficult thing for a Christian to come to terms with but what we believe as Christians today doesn’t have to be exactly what Paul or the apostles believed then.

The Parousia or the return of Christ in glory – the so-named second coming- is a prime case in point. Most of the early church, Paul included, (at least when he wrote this first letter) believed in the imminent return of Christ in their lifetimes. The end of the world was nigh.

Christ would appear to everyone all at once all over the world and take his followers up in the sky to be with him forever and the world would be at an end

This belief, known as Millennialism, was no doubt a powerful galvanising force, gave them a sense of urgency and every religion has millennial movements within it, including from time to time Christianity.

What unites Millenialists from all religions through the ages, including the early Christian church, is one rather obvious fact – they were all wrong.

Christ did not come again in his lifetime as Paul expected to take those believers still alive into the clouds to be with Christ

They were wrong in the literal sense of course. But the symbolism of the coming of Christ in glory still has a central place in Christian faith but it has to be interpreted sensitively. And Anglicans, like mainstream Christians everywhere are not Biblical literalists. Even so, few Christians are willing to just disregard what is written in scripture, so we need to re-interpret the text in a careful and spiritual way.  

The underlying reality underpinning the belief in return of Christ is the final defeat of evil and the triumph of God’s purposes.

Jesus never appeared in the sky but what definitely did happen in those early years though is that the church came into being – the church being a community of people  who have been freed from the power of sin in their lives, and God rules as king in an inward and spiritual way. Christ is present when the body of Christ is present

This is a foreshadowing of the final coming of God’s kingdom – the day of the Lord – the coming again of Jesus on the clouds of heaven.

In the Bible the phrase “second coming” just doesn’t appear. It is an interpretation of the word “Parousia” literally the “being present” of Jesus.

The “being present” of Christ – the Parousia – the second coming – is imminent in every moment of time.  

For such a community of believers Christ has already come in glory because he lives in them and is the binding spirit that constitutes us as Christ’s body. And obviously this did happen in Paul’s lifetime.

We are the first-fruits of the great triumph of God at the end of time.

In this way, the theological and spiritual integrity of the texts is maintained not in the literal sense but re-imagined in the light of historical facts.

Christ is present when I act in a Christ-like way, when someone loves, when the spirit of Christ is evoked in the Eucharist.

And this body of Christ – this community that embodies the love of God - needs all hands on deck when it comes to expressing God’s love in our lives which means “not burying our talents in the ground” in the words of the gospel parable.

We all have different gifts and abilities, which is the meaning the slaves being given different amounts – 5, 2, and 1 talent but whatever we have been given we should use them to the full in the service of God.    

Christ present and active wherever you as a believer are is the presence of Christ in any and every situation and this way of perceiving the parousia of Christ – his being present – is what lies behind that famous piece of writing by Teresa of Avia.

 

 

 

 

Teresa of Avila (1515–1582)

Christ Has No Body

Christ has no body but yours,
No hands, no feet on earth but yours,
Yours are the eyes with which he looks
Compassion on this world,
Yours are the feet with which he walks to do good,
Yours are the hands, with which he blesses all the world.
Yours are the hands, yours are the feet,
Yours are the eyes, you are his body.
Christ has no body now but yours,
No hands, no feet on earth but yours,
Yours are the eyes with which he looks
compassion on this world.
Christ has no body now on earth but yours.

 

 

 

The way of Transformation

 8^th November - Remembrance Sunday – 3 before Advent

Amos 5: 18-24. This famous piece from Amos criticizing the sacrificial cult in Israel as ineffective as long as it was disconnected from justice and righteousness in society is as true for all modern worship today as it was then. Personal piety must be linked to just achieving justice in society so that at least for Amos religion and politics definitely do mix!

1 Thessalonians 4: 13-18. A piece of scripture often misinterpreted by fundamentalists and given to refer to what they call “the rapture”. This is actually a piece brimming over with hope concerning the future of fellow Christians who had died before the return of Christ which in the very early church Christians thought was imminent. Paul uses the only linguistic tools he has at his disposal, the language of “Jewish apocalyptic” informed by his belief in Jesus as the Messiah to try and explain what was happening  They were of course wrong in the prosaic physical sense – Jesus did not return - but right in the wider spiritual and theological sense that God wills the salvation of all things, so it doesn’t matter when you die. The guarantee of our own resurrection is based in the fact of the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.

Matthew 25: 1-13. In this parable one could say (and I do!) that the ten bridesmaids represent all Christians and the fact they all fell asleep means that they all died before the return of Christ (see 1 Thessalonians above). But some had oil in their lamps, and some didn’t. Oil here represents the oil of good works – the outworking of faith in our character and actions without which our faith probably isn’t worth very much - The book of James has much to say on this point! This is not a parable to predict the number and fate of the damned but an exhortation to Christians to respond to Grace (the bridegroom) with the genuine light of goodness (the lamps)

 

 The overarching theme of today’s readings is transformation. Personal transformation in the case of the gospel parable, societal transformation in the case of the prophet Amos, and all based on that ultimate transformation from death to new life that underpins the entire Christian revelation.

On a day when we commemorate the millions who have died in warfare it is so obvious that such wholesale transformation is sorely needed.

Let’s start with the gospel parable which is directed towards Christian believers ourselves. The marriage feast is a symbol of the final consummation of all things and the bridegroom is Jesus. But the bridegroom is delayed (he doesn’t return immediately) and all the bridesmaids fall asleep which is a Biblical idiom meaning that they all died before Jesus returned.

When he did return, not all of them had oil in their lamps which means the oil of good works which makes them shine as lights in the world. And as a result Jesus didn’t recognise them as his own because they hadn’t allowed the Grace of God to transform their characters and their actions.

So this is a parable urging the change in people to become more Christ-like so that Christ himself will recognise himself in us.

This is no way negates the fact that we are saved by Grace, but Christian believers must surely respond to that Grace.

This is the major theme of the letter of James which I encourage people to take a look at, especially chapter two which ends with the famous verse “faith without works is dead”

But not only James. Paul too says of course, and it is axiomatic to our understanding of salvation that we are saved by Grace and this grace is made effective in our lives through faith.

As changed people we will naturally want to model the society we live in according to the same principles that guide our own lives which is what Amos was writing about.

He derides the Jerusalem cult for operating in a bubble completely divorced from the injustice, cheating, deceit and exploitation going on in Hebrew society as though it didn’t matter. Their personal piety was the only thing that mattered, even though the society in which it was situated was corrupt.

Amos writes, “Let Justice roll down like waters and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream”

So we have personal and societal transformation but why? Why should we want either and what basis for either change do we rest on and draw our strength and resolve?

They are both based on our faith in the resurrection of Jesus Christ which has always underpinned our faith. This is basically what Paul is saying. He states it within the context of people fretting that their friends were dying before the expected return of Christ and they were worried about what would be their destiny?

Paul asserts that they all share the same destiny because the Grace of God is all sufficient for all things whenever they died and whether Jesus has returned or not.  

And that message is a powerful one for remembrance Sunday. While we lay wreaths and commemorate their service and sacrifice and mourn the manner of their death in such terrible circumstances, we can be sure that our destinies are shared. Jesus died and was raised for the whole world. In death we are undivided.

For this act of remembrance to be effective in our lives it would force us to confront the systems, politics, and cultural norms that led to their untimely deaths in the first place.

We would let the grace of God flow though the very act of remembrance and allow it to change us and through the change effected through us, to subsequently change our societies.  

That is the overarching rationale of the Christian Way.

"For all the Saints"

 

Sunday 1^st November – All Saints day

Revelation 7: 9-17. Who are the great multitude John sees in heaven? If the 144,000 just referenced in verses 4-8 are Jewish, the great multitude by contrast would be gentiles. God’s true chosen people are from all the nations on earth and most importantly they are all Martyrs who hold a special significance for the seer. John extends the meaning of the Greek word “Martus” meaning a witness, to mean specifically someone who witnesses through death, who has shared in the suffering of Christ and have won salvation.

1 John 3: 1-3. However fully “realized” the fourth gospel may be, meaning that the presence and salvation of God are fully here now – the first letter of John holds out the vision of a future yet to be revealed. And that future aspect holds out the glorious hope of a spiritual union with the divine (“We will be like him”). This doctrine of growing more God-like ending in unity is known as Divinization or theosis in the East and as Sanctification in the West.

Matthew 5: 1-12. The statements in the first half of the beatitudes refer to everyone who is to enter the coming age, not a set of alternatives – we are all poor, meek, mourning for the way things are in the world, longing for God to rule, abandoning status and privilege, peacemakers and you will be persecuted. Similarly, the reward contained in the promises are in effect all one reward, entry to the kingdom of heaven!

 

 In the Apostles creed we currently recite every Sunday we all affirm that we believe in the “communion of saints” but it is not something we pay too much attention to on a day to day basis.

The communion of saints is the church triumphant – those who have died and the church militant – an old-fashioned way of referring to ourselves, the church still here on earth.

So, it is a communion of the still alive and the faithful departed and no-where is this more true than in the sacrament of Holy Communion – where we enact the mystical union between God and ourselves through Jesus Christ.

This mystical union joins us with God and “us” in this case includes all those who have gone before us in this spiritual union.

This is brought alive to Orthodox Christians every time they step inside a church because the Sacred architecture of an Orthodox church.

Every Orthodox church is a representation of the entire universe, with the Dome representing Heaven usually resplendent with a icon of Christ Pantokrator (meaning almighty or all powerful.)

Then depicted are the saints and Angels cascading down the walls, a riot of colour to enclose the congregation who are joining in with what is happening eternally in heaven here on earth.

You are enclosed, held, safe, in the ever-loving embrace of Christ and it is in this arena that the participants commune with Christ which is a communion with everyone standing around you and everyone symbolically depicted on the walls.

Christian experience of communion is expanded beyond the purely private and personal and becomes corporate and the church becomes what it declares itself to be – the body of Christ.

In the letter to the Hebrews the author describes in chapter 11 all the heroes  of the faith starting with Abraham running through Isaac, Jacob, Joseph through thousands of years of Hebrew history and all the prophets, who despite their faith never saw the true messiah, and in chapter 12 he describes them as a great cloud of witnesses surrounding us.

So who gains access to the kingdom of heaven?

Well in the gospel reading today Jesus gives us the characteristics of a follower of the way of Christ and they share these traits;

The poor in spirit, the meek, those who are constantly mourning for the way things are in the world, those longing for the rule of God, those who don’t depend on status and privilege, those who are peacemakers.

Jesus in the beatitudes is describing the disposition of people who want to follow him on the way that leads to God.

Jesus says himself that it is a narrow way and few find it as he says a little later in chapter 7 of Matthew.

Those that are not sharing those characteristics shown by his followers logically need to “repent” which means we should change our hearts and minds so we too start to become more Christ-like, that is exhibiting the same character that Christ describes in the blessings. But repentance is a process not a once for all event so what helps to encourage that change?

You encourage that process of change by doing what we are all doing here this morning – hearing and responding to the word of God and participating in the life of God through communion and practising the presence of God in our prayer lives.

It is a short step of faith to realise that in Holy Communion we are communing not only with God and your neighbours but everyone that has died and gone before us in a mystical union.

Amen

Love is a many splendored thing

SUNDAY 25th OCTOBER 

Leviticus 19: 1-2, 15-18. A Dictionary defines Holiness as “perfect in goodness and righteousness” and the attempt to define what this means when it is lived out is spelled out in different parts of the Bible including Leviticus. Verse 18 carries the most important meaning identified by Jesus because he quotes from it in our gospel reading today – Love your neighbour as yourself as the natural corollary to “Love your God”.

1 Thessalonians 2: 1-8. The watchwords that describe what Paul is saying here are courage and integrity. We need the courage of our convictions to “preach the gospel”, a very grand way of saying that we owe it to God to not be cowed or embarrassed when asked what we believe – to be strong . We can “preach the gospel” through our actions as well of course, which requires integrity of thought, word and deed.

Matthew 22: 34-46. The centre of the law – the greatest commandment – is to love God with all your heart, soul and mind (or strength). A Jewish teacher would expand this by saying that to Love God was to obey the law from the heart (i.e. The will), to risk one’s life (or soul) in defence of the faith and to put ones strength (property and resources) at the disposal of Israel. This way love is not an emotion but a programme of action. Thus, love can be commanded. And the second commandment is like it. Love is commanded towards one’s neighbour.   

 

"Love is a many splendored thing" as Nat King Cole sang all those years ago and defies adequate definition because it encompasses so many different things; such as a mother’s love, which is different from the love of a husband or wife which is different from me saying I love wine! The Greeks had five different words for different kinds of love, but in English we only have the one. Consider this statement from the gospel;

"You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul and with all your mind and you shall love your neighbour as yourself.

On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets."

To which a modern person brought up in our secularised western culture would have a right to ask.

“Hold on a minute – you can’t command someone to Love – love is an emotion which you have or don’t have for another person”.

They would feel justified in asking the question because in western culture the meaning of love has narrowed to mainly describe the emotion of romantic love, excluding every other meaning. Where it is used in a wider context to describe familial love that would still be seen as an emotion, purely an instinctual one that again, cannot be commanded.

Yet the Bible and more particularly Jesus himself who is the arbiter of Christian belief after all, insists that Love can be commanded.

Which must mean of course that Love is understood in the Bible rather differently to the way we normally understand it.

In the Bible, Love covers the full range of meanings but in the New Testament it is seen more as a “programme of action” than a simple emotion which is how Love can be commanded.

The command to Love one’s neighbour doesn’t mean having a warm fuzzy feeling towards Mr. Bloggs who has just insulted your wife/child/husband. You are justified in disliking him intensely (or disliking his actions more properly) but still commanded to Love him – which means acting justly towards him, helping him if he is in need, being patient and kind towards him, wanting the best for him, treating him as you yourself would wish to be treated – loving him AS yourself.

Love in this light is more an act of the will, than a simple emotion. Incidentally that doesn’t make it any easier, humanly speaking to love one’s enemy so we should ask for God’s help when our resources are exhausted. Consider this seminal verse from John’s gospel;

“God so loved the world that he gave his only son that everyone who believes in him shall not perish but may have eternal life”

Love here is given flesh in an act of sacrifice – an act of the will – and as Jesus prayed in the Garden of Gethsemane “Yet not as I will but as you will”

None of this excludes romantic or filial love or seeks to replace one understanding with another. But the Christian understanding of love is an expanded vision of Love that always seeks to embrace a wider understanding that includes a total response of mind body and spirit.

Preaching the gospel – which is simply letting people know that they are loved by God - is an act of service, which is an act of the will.

Pray for the courage to be able to do so and pray also for the gentleness and wisdom to communicate that knowledge in a meaningful and straightforward way which will look different in different contexts and with different personalities.

And all the time remember that the reason we are commanded to love others is that God loved us first. We are simply sharing his love with people who don’t know that they are loved.

Amen

 

St. Luke

 

Sunday 18^th October – St. Luke

 

Isaiah 35: 3-6. If it is true that “without a vision the people perish” (proverbs 29:18) it is essential that God’s messengers make God’s certain salvation the centre of their message. Isaiah writes about a wonderful inspiring vision of salvation, the kind of inspiring vision that Luke emulates centuries later in his gospel.

2 Timothy 4: 5-7. A forlorn Paul sounds beleaguered. The one bright spot – humanly speaking – is that Luke has remained faithful and is with him, giving him support. Loyalty is a devotion or faithfulness to a person or concept or entity.  Luke here is showing loyalty to Paul but both Paul and Luke are together loyal to the revelation of God in Jesus Christ.

Luke 10: 1-9. Luke writes of Jesus sending out evangelists to preach that “The Kingdom of God has come near”. In Christian theology the content of the kingdom is co-terminus with Jesus Christ himself. Jesus instructs the missionaries to travel light, accept hospitality when it is offered and demonstrate the difference that the healing power of God can have when his reality is introduced to any situation. Some scholars believe that Luke himself was one of the seventy sent out.

 

St. Luke has a very distinctive contribution to Christianity. He was a friend and pupil of St. Paul and in the material he selected for his gospel he showed that the truths that Paul proclaimed were not novel ideas but rooted in the life and teaching of Jesus himself.

His gospel is good news – not biography. It should be read as a message of what God has done for us in Jesus. So what are the distinguishing characteristics of his gospel that shine through his text.

Perhaps the most marked characteristic of Luke is his emphasis on the universality of the Christian faith. From Simeon’s song about Christ being a light to the gentiles to the end where repentance and forgiveness of sins should be preached to all nations, the central theme is that Jesus is the saviour of the whole world.

Rather than trace Jesus’ ancestry back to Abraham, the ancestor of the Jewish people as Matthew does in his gospel Luke traces his ancestry back to Adam in chapter 3 stressing that he is of significance to anyone ever born. For the same reason Luke gives such a prominent place to the Samaritans in the gospel

Jesus is good news for the whole world.

In that light we see the special emphasis Luke gives to the outcasts of society. in the parable of the female sinner who anoints his feet with ointment, the lost sheep, the lost coin, the pharisee and the publican, the thief on the cross all work together to emphasise that we are not saved by works but by the grace of God.

His gospel gives more emphasis than the other gospels about Jesus’ special compassion for the poor and the danger of riches. It is Luke who puts these words into Mary’s mouth “he has filled the hungry with good things and the rich he has sent empty away”.

So Luke relates Jesus’ teaching to the problem of materialism because  it pushed God from the centre of life.

Another special characteristic of Luke’s gospel is the prominence he gives to women. While the birth narratives in Matthew centre on Joseph, in Luke Mary is at the centre and women feature prominently in the stories, including those about Mary and Martha. We can trace back to Jesus here Paul’s doctrine that in Christ there is neither male nor female.

Finally Luke gives more stress to the Holy Spirit and prayer both in the life of Jesus and in the continuing witness of the church. The Spirit is present with the people who are prophesying both John the Baptist and Jesus and Jesus’ career is started “in the power of the spirit” and he interprets his mission in Isaiah’s words “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me” and of course Pentecost is the important emphasis of the book of Acts but they are prepared for that event in his gospel with the words “stay in the city until you are clothed with power from on high”.

Luke connects prayer with Jesus baptism, his calling of the twelve, the great confession, the transfiguration. This links Jesus to Paul’s injunction to “pray at all times” (Ephesians 6)

 Luke never claims to be an actual eyewitness to the risen Christ but his writings became instrumental in binding the young movement of people together who witnessed to the effect that his Spirit had on them.

In modern parlance we might call Luke an influencer and a theological educator.

He helped change hearts and minds, and even if he was one of the seventy sent out in the gospel story, or helped Paul on his missionary journeys, like Paul, he changed many millions more hearts and minds through the written word – many more than anyone could have done in person.

So by emphasising the universality of the gospel, the compassion for the poor and lost, the special emphasis he gave to women and the centrality of the Holy Spirit and prayer, Luke has helped mould the character of Christianity and provides the letters and theology of Paul with the grounding these principles had in the life of Jesus.

Luke’s gospel is good news and is a message of what God has done for us all in Christ. It is a testimony of faith to be interpreted by faith. The good news will only have the power of good news when it becomes good news for us.