Armageddon out of here!

Advent Sunday

Many millions of people over two millennia have thought they were living in the end times of the world. They are all united by one thing – they were all absolutely wrong! The world has not come to an end.

Looking at it from a slightly different perspective though, you could say that  they were all absolutely right, because their world, their lives did come to an end, as everyone’s will – they died.

When talking of “the end” we all have a very definite personal end time – our own deaths – so I would say that the best and most relevant way to interpret apocalyptic literature nowadays is not to try and discern any end date for the universe because you will certainly be wrong but concentrate your mind on your own personal end time;

Because to live your life as if this were your last day on earth, is no bad thing. When people have been given a definite time before their death, perhaps when diagnosed with a terminal illness, when they know they are going to die, first of all this can frighten and grieve us to distraction obviously, but what it can also do is concentrate the mind wonderfully, and you gain a wider perspective on life.

For example, that row that has kept you from speaking to your sister for twenty years, because of your and her  pride, can look pretty pathetic when pitched against your impending death.

All the things you really worried about, like your image and status, suddenly will seem profoundly unimportant in the greater scheme of things.

The things you used to strive for, like money and possessions suddenly lose their allure. They appear as they are – absolutely useless

Your focus may shift from yourself and be more focussed on others, especially your family, and you may wonder what legacy you leaving behind, in the sense of how loved you are and how much you loved, and whether your family is provided for. You may ask yourself whether  your life made a positive difference to the world?

If you have never really thought about the question of God before you may start asking some serious, searching questions for the very first time about the nature of life and death itself. You may indeed start looking for God.

You may realise that all the things you should have done and said, like telling someone that you love them and appreciate them, that you really must do these things before you just can’t do them any more. 

In such circumstances most people become much more rounded and gentler and better human beings faced with their own demise, with a focus naturally shifting away from material things to the less tangible but, in the final analyses, far more important things.

I think the biblical imperative here is to say “ Don’t wait until you know you are dying to start thinking and acting in these ways.”

 Forgive now. Love now. Be as concerned about others as you are about yourself now. Find God, meaning and purpose now. Be more generous. Be a better person now.

 When faced with a gospel passage like this urging us to keep awake, to be alert, I can think of no better interpretation of that , than to start living your life as though every day were your last, because one day, I assure you.........it will be. 

All for one and one for all.

The parable of the sheep and the goats is well known one yet how people decide who is a sheep and who is a goat has usually been decided without any reference to the actual parable itself.

People have decided who is a sheep or a goat based on what religion you follow, or whether you follow particular cultic laws or observe certain prohibitions. Others have decided that the difference between sheep and goats is how much faith you have, and at the more fundamentalist catholic and evangelical ends of the Christian spectrum, you are a sheep or a goat determined by what kind of Christian faith you follow. Human beings as a whole get endless fun from deciding who is in or who is out, and traditionally Christians on the whole haven’t been much different

The problem with all of these is that they are human projections onto a parable that says nothing of the sort about what club you belong to.

The only criteria by which God knows who is a sheep or a goat, and conversely the only way you really know God, is whether you have compassion or not.

In the examples given, which are by no means exhaustive, just representative examples, God knows whether you know him or not on the basis of whether you fed a hungry person, offered a drink to a thirsty man, welcomed a stranger, clothed the naked, took care of the sick, or visited prisoners.

Whether you are a sheep or a goat is determined by how compassionate you are towards your fellow man. That’s what the parable actually says.

But for me, the far more interesting point, is why should we be compassionate at all? What premise is our compassion based on?

The way Jesus describes why we should be compassionate indicates an innate interconnectedness and in a beautifully poetic phrase he says “Just as you did it to the least of these, who are members of my family, you did it to me”. At a very deep and very real level what you do for one, you do for all, including yourself and including God. Separation from God is the illusion, communion is the reality.

The premise Jesus gives, if you understand him properly is that all creation, including all the people in the world are a part of the divine being – that nothing is separate from the divine being, and as such we are all one, we are interconnected. That is the true state of our existence.

This is exactly the point of what Paul, (or at least one of his followers), is saying in this letter to the Ephesians. In a beautiful phrase Paul prays that “God our father, may give us a spirit of wisdom and revelation that our heart may be enlightened”.

So you see, enlightenment is not the sole preserve of the Eastern religions. Paul prays that we may be enlightened. Enlightened about what?

Well Paul then goes on to laud this great and immeasurable power of God, a power which he notes he put to work and revealed in the life of Jesus. This power of immeasurable greatness, which raised Jesus from the dead, is within all of us, which connects all of us.

That is the only basis by which Paul can call the church “the body of Christ”, because the church here represents the extent, humanly speaking, in which this revealed truth is known and realised – that God fills everything and connects everything. Paul puts it like this, “the church, which is his body, the fullness of him who fills all in all”

Compassion has its source in connection and empathy. Jesus and Paul both point out that “connected” is what we most truly and deeply are. Realising the fact is a work of God’s power working within you and leading you to this enlightened state. From darkness to light, from spiritual death to life in all its fullness.

Remembrance Sunday - Lest we forget

Death is the great leveller both in peacetime and in times of war,

In the first world war, when the mustard gas drifted over the trenches, death didn’t ask whether you were an officer or a private, a hero or a coward, whether you had a degree or left school at 14.

When the bombs fell on this country in world war two, the bombs didn’t care if you were a man woman or child, rich or poor.

In Iraq, the snipers in Basra didn’t care if you were black or white, whether you were religious, agnostic or an atheist.

In Helmand province in Afghanistan the IED that blows your legs off doesn’t ask if you are American or British or an Afghan child.

Remembrance of people that died in warfare is especially poignant because without exception all these deaths were premature.

The church of England in its role as the National church, takes its duty seriously, as acting as a spiritual framework in which all people, whatever their religion, class or colour can come together to mourn and remember those who whatever their differences in life are now all united in death.

What is an act of remembrance? Is it just merely remembering or does it go any deeper than that.

Well here I think Christianity has something to offer, some insight that may help.

Every week I stand at the altar and recite the words at the Holy Communion “Do this in remembrance of me”. The original word which translates into English as remembrance is in the original Greek actually much stronger. More than merely remembering the word actually means to make present. The act of remembrance implies bringing to mind something so very powerful that the person and the act itself are almost palpable. It is as if you can touch it, and indeed in the Communion we make that real by sharing bread and wine.

In the act of remembrance of the war dead it is an act that brings their sacrifices, their blood sweat and tears, their bravery and fear so close to the forefront of our minds that we can almost taste it and feel it.     

But why do that at all. What’s the point? The point, both in the Communion service and in this act of remembrance is the hope that this very act should change us or move us in some way, perhaps to make us more aware of the frailty of humanity, make us determined to try and emulate all that was good in their actions and sacrifice, to allow their tragedy to teach us something vital about the sanctity of life, about bravery, about loss, about waste,  about love and hate, about duty and responsibility, about war and the causes of war. Perhaps also to make us consider questions concerning the meaning and purpose of life itself. It could lead us to question our politics and the way we approach geo-political problems.  These are all positive things, but..

On the negative side, our very natural regrets could also trigger bitterness  and recrimination and re-kindle old enmities and rivalries. The Christian insight here though is that in indulging that side of things only ultimately harms ourselves and poisons our own minds and makes future deaths in future wars even more likely. Forgiveness and acceptance is the key to countering these negative thoughts. 

Remembrance is more than a simple act of remembering, it is an action that can potentially move the heart, to move a person from one place to another, better, place.

Finally, let’s address that great largely unspoken question that hangs over all deaths – where are they now? Here we speak of mystery and see only through a glass darkly as St. Paul said. But the spiritual intuition is that nothing that is good is every really lost and in a Christian sense “nothing, neither death nor life can separate us from the love of God”.

But for both believer and non believer, one certain way that they can live on is if some or all of the positive qualities that they lived and died for; a sense of duty, responsibility, sacrifice, bravery, the courage of their convictions were actually to be embodied in the lives of each one of us, if in fact we were moved to change by the act of remembrance, the world would automatically be a much better place than it was before and in a very tangible way they would be living on; their example embedded in our lives. 

Give me oil in my lamp

Matthew 25: 1-13

I’m glad there is a baptism of an infant today because the very fact we are going to baptise a child who cannot yet make a personal assent to any faith is of vital importance to getting a deeper understanding of God and God’s grace, which is love. I’ll return to that thought later.

First of all, let me explain what the oil in the bridesmaids lamps symbolise. Oil symbolises good deeds. The oil in your lamp is the positive loving response in your life to a very personal knowledge of God. The bridesmaids are all believers in God or (anachronistically) Christian disciples waiting for Jesus’ return.

Oil in your lamp is loving your neighbour, forgiving people, helping when you can – a demonstrable working out of your faith in your life.

The parable says that 5 of them had oil and 5 didn’t. They all professed faith, but for only some of them had that faith been translated into a living response, a life that had actually been changed by their faith.

The brutal truth the parable conveys is that faith alone cannot save you. And when I say “save” I don’t mean life after death, I mean the quality of our lives in the here and now. Sometimes we need to ask ourselves some pretty harsh questions like, do my beliefs actually make much difference to my life.

Do I really have the inner peace, joy and contentment and completeness that my faith promises or do I actually find it quite elusive? Because it is only out of that joy that transformation can start to take place.

The real underlying difference between the wise and foolish bridesmaids is this, Do they just believe in God or do they actually know God. Knowing in a way that transcends our minds. All the bridesmaids could assent intellectually to God, but only some felt any real connection where it would then started to dramatically alter their way of life.

That is why in the dramatic last act Jesus says “Truly I tell you, I don’t know you”. I would say that the truth is the flipside to that statement  which is “You don’t know me”.

The reason all the established churches baptise infants before they can ever say yes no or maybe is making a dramatic and important theological point.

It says quite boldly and straightforwardly. “God knows this child already”. God loves this child already  whether or not any response ever comes. The child may grow up and reject God for all any of us know. But what we affirm here today is that whether he does or whether he doesn’t God will never reject him. God loves this child now, he loved him before he was born and he will love him on the other side of life, and it’s the same for every one of us.

The parable of the 10 bridesmaids tells us that true peace and completeness only comes when we discover that simple but elusive fact for ourselves, not just through intellectual knowing, but at a deeper level, a level of knowing that is so hard to describe- an intuition -that we are not actually alone, but we are held. That is why infant baptism is so important. It confirms the constancy and magnitude and closeness of God’s love for us that is not dependent on our response and out of this beautiful love, once known, is where our transformation begins.

It says boldly and proudly that God’s love for us always precedes any response to that love that may come from us. That response from us even when it does come will be imperfect, may come in fits and starts, will be half hearted at times and at other times may be full on, sometimes resulting in a permanent state of inner peace or just giving us brief glimpses. In others it may never happen at all. But whichever category you think you belong to, wherever you are in your relationship with God, infant baptism affirms that God is with you and loves you regardless. 

The Kingdom of God is within you

All Saints Sunday ; 1John 3: 1-3

Sometimes there is a wonderful symmetry to life. As you may be aware my spiritual journey has taken me far and wide this past year since the death of Alex and is gathering pace.

Being together with my daughter who is on a similar wavelength this past week saw another step forwards when we watched a film presentation about Quantum physics and what this means for spirituality, and I read one of the most instructive and powerful books I have ever read called “The power of now” by Eckhart Tolle, a man who does not want to be labelled but draws on Christianity, Buddhism, Hinduism and Sufism.

What all this searching far and wide and embracing different spiritual traditions like Buddhism and Sufism has done for me is not kill my Christianity but transformed it.

My Christian faith was like a dying plant. My leaves were going brown and I was drooping. What all this input from outside the faith has done is not lead me to abandon Christianity but infused it with a new vitality. By simply letting go of dogma and being open to truth wherever it may lie has seen my spiritual life fed and watered and the oxygen of the spirit is being drawn up into this withering plant and bringing new life to it. Within every religious tradition there lie jewels common to each other like the “pearl of great price” or the “treasure hidden in a field” that Jesus spoke about

I speak of symmetry because when I sat down to write today’s address and I read 1 John 3: 1-3, I felt goose bumps. I don’t remember ever reading this passage before, and if I did, perhaps it didn’t make much of an impact, but now I’m imbued with a much greater spiritual wisdom and practice than I have ever possessed before the words leap out at me and speak of a timeless wisdom that is present in all religions, but because of human arrogance or ignorance and folly is generally buried deep beneath silly dogmas and irrelevant supernaturalism.

Here lies the truth and as John says elsewhere the truth will set you free.

Buddhism teaches that what we are trying to attain – peace and joy and unity -  is in reality what we already have but we just can’t perceive it. I think it is exactly the same direction that Jesus was pointing.

The peace and feeling of completeness and joy – this fullness of life - is not something that we get from somewhere else, it is our natural state and what practices like meditation are doing is uncovering what is ours already if we did but realise it. It uncovers the truth about ourselves and God and reveals that they are one and the same.

Let us go through this short reading and uncover the truth;

“See what the Father has given us, that we should be called children of God; and that is what we are.”

It is what we are! Not what we will be one day, not what we might be if we follow all the rules, believe all the right things, or something we will attain if we try very, very, hard. Being a child of God is a fact of being human. We are an emanation of the divine, a manifestation of God, as Genesis attests we are made in the image and likeness of God who is present in every atom of our bodies. We are children of God; and that is what we are!

“The reason the world does not know us, is that it did not know him. Beloved we are God’s children now”

This speaks not of intellectual knowing but a deep knowing, a feeling from within, a connection with Being. People who are in the world and see only separation and materialism are unable to recognise those who have found God within. It is the difference between being enlightened by the light of truth and living in darkness. As John’s prologue states “The true light that enlightens every man was coming into the world........yet the world knew him not”

“What we will be has not yet been revealed. What we do know is this; When he is revealed we will be like him, for we will see him as he is”

When we find God, this pure being, this mystery, that dwells within us and all things, and live in accordance with this deep knowing, we identify ourselves with God, rather than our fearful and frail egos, and start to become like him. In Christian terms we start to live out of his being and wisdom and spirit rather than our own. It is what St. Paul meant when he wrote. “It is not I who live but Christ who lives in me”.

“And all who have this hope in him purify themselves, just as he is pure”.

We become a vessel for the sacred, the holy. But much more than this we see all life – people, the trees, rivers, moon and stars, the entire universe as being a vessel, a carrier of the sacred. Anything and everything can speak to us of God because God is in all things. When you recognise the divine being within yourself you recognise the same divine being within all things and can relate to them. As the psalmist discovered and wrote 3000 years ago “Deep speaks to deep in the thunder of your waterfalls” (psalm 42:7).

If the ground of our being is God, who is pure being as the Jewish people knew already by calling God “Yahweh” or “I AM”, pure undifferentiated being – then death does not touch your essential true self. Your physical form surely dies and goes on to become other things – atoms don’t die they just disassemble and reassemble in different forms. Your false self image will die but the essential true you cannot die because it is at one with God. Remember we are children of God – it is what we are - and God is eternal.

Because God is the ground of all being we are all inter-connected. Nothing is ever truly separate. This is true both scientifically and spiritually.  This is All Saints day. And we believe in the communion of saints don’t we?  That means that we are never entirely separate from anything whether alive or dead. If you’ve ever gone into an Orthodox church and wondered why it is the shape it is and is decorated the way it is, the reason is theological not aesthetic. The body of the church is the earth and the dome represents heaven and they are one. The walls are covered with paintings of the saints – conveying the fact that we are surrounded by a cloud of witnesses and the dome is painted with a giant representation of the risen Christ to represent God. An Orthodox church is a representation of Heaven and earth as one, with all the people past and present, alive and dead occupying the same space.

We all knew and loved people who have died. Where did they go? In the deepest truest sense they didn’t go anywhere. Their impermanent form dissolved for sure, but they were and still are part of the whole – pure being, the “I AM”.  Nothing that was good is ever lost.

When a wave on the sea loses its form you can say that it is gone but in reality the wave never truly had a separate existence. The wave was always just the sea in a particular form for a particular period of time. All form is impermanent. When the wave stops being a wave it hasn’t died or ceased to exist, it just reverts to what it truly always was – the sea. 

Subversive speech

Matthew 22:15-22

The kind of sermon I’m preaching today has  proved a little controversial in the past. In Bucharest we had a fair sprinkling of diplomatic staff and advisors coming to church. One such, a good friend, had been one of Tony Blair’s advisors in the run up to the invasion of Iraq, he’s now in Brussels and my sermon on “Jesus is Lord” led to a “spirited discussion” shall we say.

Because what passes almost unnoticed by so many people is that saying something like “Jesus is Lord” is highly political. Because to say that Jesus is Lord is to say quite pointedly that all the Kings, princes, Presidents, Governments and states on earth are NOT Lord. By saying Jesus is Lord you are nailing your colours to the mast and saying my primary loyalty is to another kingdom, not yours.

So used to we at thinking that politics and faith are separate we don’t even recognise when we are being subversive.

Trying to keep the two spheres of activity entirely separate has been always been helped by a particular interpretation of today’s passage. An interpretation that has allowed church and political leaders to give each other mutually exclusive realms.

Needless to say I believe that this interpretation misrepresents what Jesus says – in fact I think it turns it on its head. Anyone who knows anything about the life of Jesus knows that he was hardly flavour of the month with the authorities, and it was an unholy alliance between Temple and state that conspired to murder Jesus as an enemy of the state.

I would contend that in this fascinating little exchange, when examined closely is revolutionary and subversive. The Pharisees, realising that all these parables that we have been hearing these past weeks were aimed at them they decided to send some of their young acolytes together with some young Herodians (Why some Herodians? to represent the state) First of all they flatter Jesus and then to try and entrap him. In asking him whether it is lawful to pay taxes to Caesar or not, they hope to snare Jesus. If he says "yes" then many of the people would be disillusioned with him for many thought it treasonous to pay taxes to Rome and the young supporters of the Pharisees would have been able to bury him in derision. If he had said "no" then technically he is guilty of treason and the Herodians are there to make that accusation would stick and have him arrested. But instead Jesus asks for a coin which has Caesar's image (icon) on it and famously says "Give to Caesar what is Caesar's and to God the things that are God's". Impressed and non-plussed by this sleight of hand his questioners withdraw.

As I say many have tried to use this cameo as ammunition to keep church and state entirely separate or even to relegate God to an entirely separate realm and to imply that the Bible sanctions complete obedience to the state, but a deeper and truer meaning is implied by Caesar's icon(Greek) - his image.  For in reality according to the Jewish tradition, and of course Christian tradition as well, all human beings are made in God's image.  We all bear God's image and therefore we all of us ultimately (Caesar included) belong to God. There is no separate realm - political or otherwise - that is not also part of God's realm. Because God is God, the Lord of creation.

So because we all have a prior loyalty to God, it doesn't matter what sphere we are operating in, economic or political, our primary loyalty is to God and his kingdom and his values. 

As I wrote this week this does not deny governments their legitimate and necessary sphere of activity, but it does set our allegiances into a primary and secondary order. God first, the state second. Our ultimate loyalty can never be the state, not from this exchange or from that statement “Jesus is Lord”. If and when states act in a way that denies the divine image in all people by the way it treats people then our duties as citizens of those states, whose first loyalty is to God, become very clear. We must act as the conscience prodding the sides of our Governments. If any Governments anywhere try to discriminate against people, and act unjustly, or deny people their God given freedom we must recognise that they bear the same image of God that we do and stand with them. 

Food for thought

A Harvest festival sermon based on Matthew 22: 15-22

I always remember this passage (about the ten cured lepers and only one returned to say thank you) being read at a special service for all our families at Mirfield. And when the children were asked why they all hadn’t gone back to thank Jesus, my daughter Claire put her hand up and said, “because he hadn’t asked them to”. This flummoxed the young ordinand for a few seconds before he regained his composure and ploughed on trying to get the response he was looking for. We all had a little laugh of course but....

Now looking back I kind of find myself partly agreeing with Claire. Is that the response that God wants, to find us constantly giving thanks and praise to God, for in the church those two words are joined at the hip – thanks and praise – or would he be far more satisfied by us simply enjoying what we had been given and enjoying it to the full, as the other nine cured lepers did?

After all, thanks and praise are not needed by God, he is complete in himself, but do we need them?

At the Harvest festival for Gainford school here on Friday, I noted that as we get older we tend to lose our capacity for wonder and awe at the world we live in. We are so busy, so distracted, so worried about the future in many respects, that the ability to just stop, just stop and notice the intense beauty all around us is lost.

When was the last time you just looked up on a clear cold night at the millions and millions of stars, contemplating the enormity of the universe, and realising that I, the one doing the looking am an integral part of it all. Mind blowing.

Or when did you last stop and notice the beauty of the river right on our doorstep, sometimes nearly dry sometimes a torrent in all weathers, the trees, the heron, the ducks, cows, horses and the donkey.  Do we just give ourselves time to just stop and take it all in?

Gainford is surrounded by productive farmland, animals and crops, the fruitfulness of the earth is staggering. We are surrounded in church today by products produced by this bountiful earth from all around the world.

Jesus once said that to enter the kingdom of God you had to become like a child. Meaning not childish, but childlike. Part of becoming childlike I would say is recapturing a lost sense of awe and wonder – to be able to just rest in it, enjoy it, because in enjoying it you are deepening your experience of life by appreciating the world around you.

And here’s the rub. In communing with nature and beauty and appreciating the fruitfulness of the earth, we are actually also communing with God, for God communicates with us through things, through matter, through the ordinary physical world in which we live.

If it wasn’t that way there is no way we could commune with God through eating bread and drinking wine. We commune with God through the ordinary made extraordinary by realising the sacred presence of God in all things. I often say that in the Eucharist we are drawing back the veil on the reality of all matter and existence – that truly God is present in all things – and what is true for the bread and wine is true for us and for nature and the natural world in all its beauty and diversity.

A celebration of nature and the fruitfulness of the earth should fill us with wonder and awe. I believe that in enjoying and communing with creation we are already honouring the creator perhaps in the very best way possible, which puts us all, both inside and outside the church, with the nine cured lepers. But we, inside the church are like the one who returned to Jesus to say thank you. We go just that one step further, not because God needs it or requires it, but because we need to, because our faith is built on a relationship with the divine, and in a relationship, if it is to grow and deepen we need to communicate, we need to talk, and sometimes we need to say thank you when we have been given something wonderful.