Author: ROSAMOND MISKIN

I’m going to reflect on some aspects of the gospel reading first, and then tell you a little about the Lambeth Conference where I served for a week. The conference saw 650 bishops from Anglican churches across the world gather to pray, study and worship together.

But I can’t leave today’s gospel alone! It’s one of those readings that grabs our attention! Gone is gentle Jesus, meek and mild. Today Jesus says he’s bringing division, fire and causing family rifts. What’s going on?!

Jesus says he comes to bring fire. Fire is a symbol of destruction and judgement – it is to be feared. But equally, it contains a cleansing element. After the fire there remains ash, and seeds. New life can grow after the cleansing judgement – but the judgement is there to cleanse, to eradicate the evil and to show us the consequences of our rejection of God.

It made me reflect on where we are as a nation. In 1940 Britain had a national day of prayer, when the nation – probably awkwardly, probably with a lot of doubts – took some moments to just throw up prayers in anguish, hoping for help. I don’t pretend Britain was a Christian country, but I do think many ordinary folk did just take a few moments of humility, asking God for help.  A few days later the Dunkirk evacuations took place with the English Channel in a unique state of calmness, facilitating the small armada of ships.

In 2022, we don’t want to talk about that fact, we instead want to say the soldiers were heroes, our nation is great, and faith should be a private matter. When Covid sent millions to an early grave, the churches were shut and national leaders offered little attempt at national prayer. After a time we came up with a vaccine but then failed to share it widely internationally because of copyright issues, condemning many more to death. And as politicians skip work, the ground burns, the earth warms, the land disappears under concrete, Ukraine is destroyed by bombs, people risk life and limb to flee wars, and the consequences of printing money and massive debt are coming home to bite us all as a recession, why don’t we see the signs…?

Jesus also says he comes to bring division not peace. Now this has to be read carefully and in context. Luke is adamant that the arrival of Jesus is peace towards all humanity, it is God reaching out to us in peace. We are called to live in peace.

But this world is in rebellion against God. Peace with God places us at odds with the world. 2000 years ago this was very clear, and today in some cultures this is a reality: your faith is not just a private matter, it is your identity. If you leave your religion, you bring shame on your family. Fathers can and indeed do betray sons to death.

Of course we are called to love our families and our biological relationships are the first calling in our lives, but equally we are to look beyond our tribes. We are called to live in peace and love with everyone if we can, and to realise that our own family might reject us because of our faith. But fear not: the Christian family is a new creation, a new family of people.

William our vicar has a lovely family, but when I had to leave Russia suddenly, I was welcomed into his family, given a place to live, fed at meal times, treated with kindness, care and respect. I have no biological connection to the Gullifords, but that hospitality shown to me is exemplary of the new family we are called to be in, showing Christian love and kindness to other Christians!

And the same with Christians in Africa, Asia, the Middle East, Europe, the Americas. These people are just as much, and sometimes more, our family as your brother or sister. That is a revolutionary idea, but a great comfort to people who were thrown out of their community for following Jesus.

And so to Lambeth. And this is the connection: I met bishops from across the world. Bishops with tribal scars on their faces. One bishop who had actually fought a lion as a child. Bishops from the war in South Sudan, bishops dealing with historic abuse cases in North America. Bishops struggling day-to-day in Israel / Palestine. These people came together at Lambeth and shared their stories, told how God was faithful to them, and strengthened each other.

These people, and their churches, are our brothers and sisters. They are our family. Jesus calls us to love them as we love our parents or siblings. Are we listening to them, responding to their needs?

We had about 650 bishops, plus 650 husbands or wives, plus a few hundred extras like me! The days started with prayer, breakfast, then a bible study on the first book of Peter. Peter, the lead disciple of Jesus, dealt with all of the same issues we experience today – persecution, division, bad ideas about God, and suffering. Then the bishops had time to study, then they had time to share their stories, then they came together in the afternoons to make calls to the wider world.

These Lambeth ‘calls’ are the united voices of the church’s leadership urging Christians to take action and committing themselves to taking action.

It means that when someone has committed abuse in a church, that abuse is not covered up, but the abuser is arrested and the abuse compensated, even if it bankrupts us. It means us in the West using our power to bring justice for those in poorer states. How can we sleep well having eaten food that was grown by a poor Christian working almost as a slave? How can we rest easily when our emissions are burning the soils of poor Christians in South America? There is much we can do to help our brothers and sisters internationally.

Of course there was talk about human sexuality, and there is a great division between the majority of the church and minority Western churches, but the bishops chose to walk together, recognising that people will always disagree, but Christ calls us to be committed to loving one another. We are all unique and different, but Jesus said humanity will know that you are my disciples if you love one another.

I checked the BBC headlines during the week, and was saddened. When the leaders of 85 million Anglicans committed to planting a Communion Forest to combat climate change, the media ignored it. For some reason, Kym Marsh being on Strictly and Chrissy Teigen’s pregnancy were deemed more important. Whoever she is, I wish Chrissy all the best and pray for a wonderful baby for her, and hope Kym enjoys Strictly, but if that is news, I’m a turnip.

But this is what Jesus is saying (not I’m a turnip!!) – the world is going to hate and reject us. Christians are at odds with the world. Even the Science and Faith commissions launched at Lambeth to make it clear to the world that there is no clash will be ignored, because the world does not want to hear the message of repentance and submission to Christ.

The world wanted a big dispute about gay marriage, but instead got bishops who wanted to work together. The world wanted a fight, but my experience of Lambeth was hundreds of bishops signing up to link their dioceses together – poorer parts of Africa joining in work with richer parts of London or America. That is brotherhood, sisterhood, and the revolutionary new family of Jesus.

Let us commit ourselves to seeing how we might serve and love our international brethren. Amen

In the opening sentence of today’s Gospel reading, we learn that Jesus is reassuring his disciples that they need not be afraid of opposition, particularly from the Pharisees, because they have the promise of the Kingdom of God.  No-one can take that promise from them because it does not rely upon earthly possessions, so cherished by the Pharisees, but upon ‘treasure in heaven’.

Jesus’s call upon his disciples not to worry features many times in Luke’s Gospel. In the text preceding today’s reading, Jesus tells his disciples not to fear those who kill the body, only fear God who has ‘the authority to cast into hell’. He goes on to urge them not to worry about their life because God will care and provide for them.

If we read on beyond today’s Gospel text we realize that what Jesus is asking of his disciples by way of fearless trust in the promise of the Kingdom is a tall order because, as Jesus says of himself, he has come ‘to bring fire to the earth’ and ‘division in households’.  I would have thought that any one of us would have needed much reassurance in those circumstances that to follow Jesus need not be a fear ridden task.  The controversy that Jesus engendered was, after all, going to lead to his death on the Cross.

I believe there is a message here for us all in today’s world, which is mired in pandemic and anxiety about the future.  A message that says if we trust in the promise of the Kingdom we need not buckle under the weight of issues that confront us.  Rather let us stand firm and protect the weak and let us shift away from too much value on material possessions and towards trust in the provision that God makes for us. There is much evidence of this happening today in the increase of help given to others in the difficult circumstances we are in.   Here, I believe, is a sign of God working his purposes out as the waters cover the sea.

Returning to today’s Gospel reading, we learn that the disciples need to be ready for the Son of Man ‘coming at an unexpected hour’. They must be on their guard as they wait for this to happen.  So to be fearless does not mean that they can relax but be mindful at all times of the coming of the Son of Man.  They must be ‘dressed for action’ and have their lamps lit.

This watching and waiting cannot have been an easy task for them as watching and waiting can be more demanding in a tense situation than action.  I think here of the soldiers of the First War who would have had to endure the silence and stillness in the trenches before going over the top to confront the enemy.  Here we see that being alert and waiting does not in itself necessarily bring about a happy conclusion.  In opera and literature we can also find unhappy endings that result from watching and waiting. In Puccini’s opera ‘Madam Butterfly’ the heroine, Cio-Cio San, the Japanese geisha, waits throughout the night in utter stillness and trust as she looks out on to the horizon for the return of the one she loves, Lieutenant Pinkerton, but he does not come at that time.  In Thomas Hardy’s novel ‘Far from the Madding Crowd’ Sergeant Troy waits in the church for his bride-to-be, Fanny Robin, but disastrously she has gone to the wrong church and he can wait no more.

Watching and waiting though can produce a happy result and there is a wonderful example of this in the recent triumph of the Lionesses in women’s football after many years of waiting, but it is a variable.  Yet this variable does not negate what Jesus is asking his disciples to do. He is calling upon them not to achieve a result from watching and waiting that relates to earthly existence but a result that has a heavenly meaning. That heavenly meaning is the Kingdom to come. This will require an agonizing death on the Cross and we know that this requirement was so demanding that even Jesus himself cried out on the Cross ‘My God, my God, why has thou abandoned me?’.  Only then can the Resurrection follow and the promise of the Kingdom be fulfilled.

It is the Resurrection and the promise of the Kingdom that we are assured of in this call to the disciples to watch and wait.  The disciples followed Jesus until near the end of his life and although they could not quite watch and wait until the end as they fell asleep in the garden of Gethsemane, it did not prevent Jesus encountering them once more after his death and instructing them to go and, as given at the end of Matthew’s Gospel, to make disciples of all nations.

Here we have for us today this assurance of the outcome of the Resurrection and the promise of the life to come.  In our highly mobile world, that is what puts a value on stillness and watchfulness.  Stillness can help us to stay calm and focussed in the storms of life and allow us time to reflect upon the glory of the Kingdom to come.

So in our troubled world today, let us not look down in despair but upwards to the sky above where, as the Psalmist wrote: ‘God watches us from heaven, fashioning our hearts and observing our deeds’.  It is that heavenly realm that is our ultimate destination.  A destination where there will be no more fear, no more need to watch and wait, only to dwell in the light of God’s love for us all.

 

Amen

 

 

 

 

 

 

I do apologise because you’ve now had me three Sundays in a row, and the plan was for me to be on next week too! But Ros is kindly relieving me of the sermon next week – many thanks! Yet it’s always a blessing for me (perhaps not for you!) to be on the preaching rota, because I get to look into the passage in depth – and it is so rewarding digging into the teachings of Jesus!

The message today is quite simple: avoid greed and the entrapment of objects. Guard yourself against the enticing power of objects. Remember: possessions are never owned by you. You are possessed by them. You are the temporary thing, not the object. You might have a Ferrari all your life, but on the day after your funeral, it will still be there and you will be gone. It is more accurate to say that it possessed you…

Heart Motivation

In the gospel reading today we have a man crying out for someone to support him in a family argument. My brother should divide our inheritance with me! On the face of it, this seems right. It implies that the brother is doing something wrong in not dividing the inheritance. However, we should note the reaction of Jesus – there seems to be more going on here than meets the eye.

Jesus responds by saying “Man, who made me the judge in your Family Court law suit?” It’s quite a natural reaction really – if you shouted “help me get to the airport on holiday”, I could say “who made me your taxi driver?”. The use of ‘man’ by Jesus, in that culture, is like a rebuke.

But also, Jesus is not liking the motive at work. The guy calling out is trying to get money from his brother, and it seems that Jesus sees that this man is not seeking an equitable distribution of the inheritance, but actually just wants some more money! We should remember that Jesus has a history of seeing right through our pretences to exposing the heart of what we are saying.

You can’t take it with you

And so we have a key sentence in our reading: your life is much more than the stuff you own. Your life does not consist of the objects you collect in your house. Who you are, who you follow, who you become matter far more than things that you never really own. You can’t take any of it with you – just ask the pharaohs! The objects they were buried with to help them in the afterlife are today being dug up by archaeologists in Egypt. Meanwhile, the pharaohs themselves, their qualities and their characters, are mysteries only known to God.

Jesus thus reacts to the guy wanting some more cash. He tells him “don’t seek after money and wealth because stuff on this planet us not real treasure”.

And yet, the more we get the more it controls us. Have you seen the film “All the Money in the World?” It’s about Jean Paul Getty (played by Christopher Plummer) and his grandson who was kidnapped. Getty, the richest man in history, initially refused to pay any ransom. When asked “You are the richest man in history, what would it take for you to feel secure?”, he growls “More!”

And so the man in Jesus’ parable is probably deceiving himself too. “I’ll lay up my wealth, store things up, and then I can sit back and enjoy the income, enjoy the fruits of my labour, and I can eat, drink and be merry!” The Good Life! Yet how many people actually do that? I had a relative who worked to earn so he could have the good life, but never had enough. Then he realised he had stage 4 cancer and his days were numbered. All his work went to someone else.

Selfishness V Sharing

There are numerous messages in this parable, but I think the one that hits me is the attitude of “looking out for number one” – which Jesus opposes. This attitude is in essence one of selfishness.

The guy in the parable lives in ancient Israel. Most people lived in small village communities. The lives of everyone in that village were entwined. They all knew who was struggling, who was suffering, and who needed help. Yet here we have a guy making some money, doing well, finally getting some prosperity, and thinking immediately … of having a yacht, a Rolls-Royce, and putting his feet up!

There is nothing wrong with yachts and Rolls Royces. But when Christians – our brothers and sisters – are being hunted to extinction in the Islamic world, when Christians are being forced into poverty by climate change, and when Christians are being silenced and arrested even closer to home, to think of getting luxury items before helping the vulnerable and suffering, is selfish. It is earning treasures on earth and rejecting treasure in heaven.

In the year 2000, Peter Mandelson said “New Labour is intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich”. I wish he had added a bit more to that statement, because as it is, I don’t think Jesus would agree. Getting filthy rich is fine so long as everyone else is doing well or that you are willing to step in to spend your riches paying for healthcare for the homeless, for the sick, or for the elderly.

The man in the parable lives in a community. He is well aware of the struggles of others. Yet his first and only concern is storing up his own wealth. “I’ll be fine, even if the others are not”. This man has no community spirit, no connection with his fellow humans, and no thought to God. He does not see himself as having any duties or responsibilities. He has, in essence elevated himself to godlike status.

The Thrust of the Scriptures of God

And in a society like ancient Israel, that was awful! He was going against the entire thrust of the Old Testament scriptures and the prophets who wrote them, teaching us to care for one another and support our families and the vulnerable elderly. His first thought was “how can I relax more” rather than “how can I help the people for whom I am responsible?”

As an only child, I have always prized being an island. But I am wrong: No man is an island! John Donne is right. We are connected to each other, and Christ calls us to be his body, his connected church, a family dedicated to worshipping God and showing the world a new kind of love.

How should we live?

So how do we live? Possessions are traps. Jesus is telling us to guard ourselves so that we do not become the possessions of our possessions. He is talking to people who had some stuff, not a lot, but who were tempted to see the solution as more stuff. Jesus knows you need stuff, he’s guarding against the desire we all have for more stuff.

If only I had a new computer, I’d be happier. Wrong! If you want true pleasure, the solution is to lay up riches toward God. Stuff fools us into thinking we are gods, and we forget our passing, temporary nature on this earth.

Jesus is telling us to watch our hearts and give an honest assessment. The rich man received an abundant harvest – which ultimately is a gift from God – and immediately thought of his own profiteering.

When we are doing well, do we immediately think of a new iPhone or do we think of helping others? Do our lives, does the money we earn, help the world’s poorest? Are you and I storing up treasure in heaven by helping the suffering, spreading the good news of Jesus, and feeding the poor? When we are weighed in God’s balances, will we have used our financial blessings to help God’s family…?

Let us commit ourselves to love shown in giving more of the blessings we enjoy.

Amen

 

One of my pet peeves in church is going to happen today, in this service. In fact, I’m going to be involved in leading it. It involves the Lord’s Prayer. I have been attending churches since I was a baby, and I, like many of you, have rattled through the Lord’s Prayer a million times. Many of us are so used to it we can say it backwards in our sleep!

And today, we will canter through it again – and if you are anything like me, autopilot switches on, and you just say the words. The Lord’s Prayer has become a Harry Potter magic spell. Just say the words in the right formula, and all will be good.

No!  Although we will go through it with some pace and rhythm today, I really encourage you to think later, in your own times of prayer at home, about what we are praying.

I also want you to consider that the Lord’s prayer is not a magic combination of words: it is a framework. The framework for prayer goes like this:

1. Praying for God’s kingdom and will to be done, for him to be exalted in all that happens on earth
2. Praying for my / our daily needs
3. Praying for forgiveness and that we Christians continue to be merciful, forgiving people one to another
4. Praying for deliverance from temptation and hard, painful times
5. We then conclude with a doxology of praise: for thine is the kingdom, the power and glory, forever and ever, Amen!

So that’s prayer for God’s will to be done, prayer for our needs, prayer that we will be forgiving, and prayer for protection and endurance.

It should also be noted that Jesus says “When you pray”. There are no Christian disciples of Jesus who do not pray. That should be a wake-up call to everyone, me included!

So in the Lord’s prayer, we pray for three things immediately: that God’s name be hallowed and honoured; that His Kingdom shall come, and that His will shall be done on earth. They all flow from the first point: if God’s name, that is, if God is honoured, then obedience flows. I honour the Queen and Parliament by obeying the laws that are passed in this land. My actions are directly linked to the authorities before which I submit.

Praying for God’s kingdom to come, for His name to be honoured in Britain, is incredibly important. Jesus, who brought in God’s kingdom and began implementing it, targeted hypocrites in politics and the temple (or in today’s world, the church). Hypocrites in politics and the church. Sound familiar? Sound relevant today? How we need the Kingdom of God today!

In modern Britain, according to Cancer Research, about 1000 people are diagnosed with cancer every day. According to the Alzheimer’s Society, in modern Britain, one person every 3 minutes gets dementia. Jesus, who introduced the Kingdom of God, brought healing. How we need the Kingdom of God today!

In modern Britain, Crisis estimates that 230,000 people are homeless. Statista say that 2 million people use foodbanks. Jesus, introducing the Kingdom of God, established the Christian church, which over history went to the poor and sick, washed them, cared for them, and nursed them back to health. We are the inheritors of a Christian faith that has saved more live in history than any other organisation! The church launched health and social care in so many countries across the world! How we need the Kingdom of God today!

In modern Britain, it is estimated on a good Sunday that less than 5% of the population go to worship and ‘hallow’ the name of God. No wonder there are so many confused people out there. How we need the Kingdom of God today!

And this is what we pray for: Father! Let your kingdom come! Father, make your will be done on earth! Father, help us to be agents of your Kingdom! Help us to push forwards worship, prayer and care in this world, bringing it into line with heaven. The more people who hallow God’s name, the more people who love their neighbours, and the fewer people in hospital, in social care, and in need of foodbanks.

You see, the Lord’s prayer is not just spiritual – it is practical. Forgive us our debts says Jesus. Not sins: debts. Of course sin is like a debt to God, one we cannot repay, but as God has dealt with the sin and written it off, so we are to act likewise: be forgiving people.

Don’t encourage or make it easy for people to get into debt, and if they do get into debt, help them get out or look at how they can repay over a longer period. Do not exploit each other but seek the flourishing of each other! This is the Kingdom of God: it is not about profit, but about humans behaving as God made us to behave and living up to the calling God has on us.

Jesus follows the Lord’s Prayer with some examples and illustrations. The first can easily be misunderstood: it is not saying “badger God and eventually he will give in”. It is illustrating the point that persistence is respected and rewarded. If you really have faith, you will keep going back to God in prayer, and you will trust he is hearing and will act.

So, Jesus says, Ask! Seek! Knock! Persist and trust, for God has heard you! Rejoice that he has heard you, don’t be anxious about the things you brought to him in prayer – something is coming! It might be a direct answer, it might be grace to change you: but something will happen.

Jesus then illustrates God’s character. We all know we have good side and bad sides – even the best of us are compromised. Yet we being evil know that a fish is better than a snake. If your daughter wants an egg, you don’t give her a scorpion! If she wants bread, you don’t give her a stone and tell her “get your teeth into that”!

No, we faulty and wicked people can do good. So, logically, HOW MUCH MORE then does God do good!

And the gift God gives is the Holy Spirit – his Spirit to enable, embolden and empower us to do his work. God is a good father, who wants you to be filled with His Spirit, the Spirit who tells you more about how much God loves you, and how God wants you to follow him. His gift of the Spirit is a gift of being known: God sends His Spirit so that you know God knows you!

And if you truly know that God knows you, and God hears your prayers, then you become less anxious. I’ve prayed, and God has heard me. Hallelujah! I need not worry, for He will act, for He has heard, because He is a good father.

I may wish the answer to be different, but I will become less dependent on my own comforts, and more trusting that God does know, is all-powerful, and will lead me into abundant life as I pray “Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven”. Asking for his kingdom to come is saying “It is not about me, but about God. Let my life glorify Him.”   Amen

Two sisters: Mary and Martha. They are one of the most famous female duos in history. We’ve all heard the lesson “don’t be a Martha, be a Mary”, telling us that Martha was flapping about in a panic but Mary sat at the feet of Jesus, listening. Mary did the right thing. Martha on the other hand…

Actually, Martha has been the subject of quite a bit of sympathy. A theology website pointed me to a poem by Rudyard Kipling called “The Sons of Martha”. I quote certain verses here:

The sons of Martha… “do not preach that their God will rouse them a little before the nuts work loose. They do not teach that His Pity allows them to drop their job when they choose.

As in the thronged and the lighted ways, so in the dark and the desert they stand. Wary and watchful all their days that their brethren’s days may be long in the land.

And the Sons of Mary smile and are blessed — they know the angels are on their side. They know in them is the Grace confessed, and for them are the Mercies multiplied.

They sit at the Feet — they hear the Word — they see how truly the Promise Runs: They have cast their burden upon the Lord, and — the Lord He lays it on Martha’s Sons.”

Mr Kipling is making a point. It’s a point repeated by George Orwell and articulated by the journalist Richard Grenier: “People sleep peacefully in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf”. We enjoy peace because the army and police are ready to physically protect us from bad people.

So why pick on Martha!? Mary can sit and learn and enjoy herself because Martha is feeding the disciples! Mary is neglecting her duty! Surely Jesus has this wrong!

We should always be aware of the context of passages, and the overall themes and concerns of an author. Luke gives us this story straight after the Good Samaritan, which basically says practical help is essential. The practical care you give to people in need is the proof that you really love God and your neighbour. In other words, in this context, Martha’s behaviour cannot be bad! She is not being condemned in this story.

We humans learn best when we are doing things. Actions speak to us in ways that abstract ideas do not. When we do something we learn far more than when we understand a concept. Indeed, reality is where many concepts (like communism) come undone. Thus when we serve, when we care, and when we give practical love, we grow and understand life and the compassion of God far better than when we sit and learn from a book.

For me, the experience of caring for sick and elderly people shaped me far more than anything I read about care. The experience of visiting the YMCA in my home town, and the Salvation Army in Moscow, taught me far more than reading websites or newspaper articles about poverty.

There really is no substitute for putting yourself in someone else’s shoes to understand their problems.

To summarise: Martha is not doing the wrong thing. She is serving, and practical action is praised by Jesus as evidence of loving God.

This week, a member of our church has been managing water engineers, lost keys and dealing with church security. We need people like her! People like Martha, and Jesus praises your hard work and commitment to serve.

So where is the problem?

May I suggest the problem comes from three areas. The first is attitude. Martha is judgemental and trying to control other people. She is jealous and frustrated. A humble person would look inwardly, asking “where is my frustration coming from?”, identify the source in judgementalism, and do a reset: thank you Lord that my sister Mary is having a rest!

Instead Martha is distracted, worried, anxious and troubled. This leads her to accuse Jesus of not caring that her sister has left her to do the work! She is bossing Jesus about, trying to manipulate him! She is ordering Jesus to tell her sister to help her! It’s very passive aggressive!

The second is Mary’s faith. Think about this: I’ve always seen Mary as a sweet delicate lady, but she is sitting at the feet of Jesus, like the men, in a culture where the women should not be doing that!

She is breaking social convention! Sure, Jesus is welcoming her, but she is also showing remarkable faith and determination to sit and be judged by those around her. I think Mary is the founder of ‘Girl Power’! She is showing faith and bravery, and Jesus commends her for being willing to endure social criticism for the sake of learning more from Christ.

And thirdly, Mary had recognised what our New Testament reading in Colossians was telling us. I don’t think the words can be said any better, do I’ll repeat Colossians: He – Jesus – is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation; for in him all things in heaven and on earth were created, things visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or powers—all things have been created through him and for him. He himself is before all things, and in him all things hold together. He is the head of the body, the church; he is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead, so that he might come to have first place in everything. For in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, and through him God was pleased to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, by making peace through the blood of his cross.

Mary saw the image of the invisible God sitting before her. Martha was too busy in herself, too wrapped up in her own serving performance, and conforming to others, to see who was actually there.

There is a difference between being a good host because you care for the person visiting, and going through the motions of care, but your heart is elsewhere.

So, Mr Kipling, you got your dichotomy wrong. It’s not a choice between Mary and Martha, the spiritual life and the physical life, between head knowledge and serving. It’s both, and it’s balance.

Lives of service to God expressed as love for your neighbour begin in spending time with God. That’s why Mother Teresa and the nuns of Calcutta prayed in the morning and worshipped before ministering to the world’s poorest and sickest people. That’s why worshipping communities of Christian friars often opened and ran hospitals, pioneering health care across the world. Their service began in prayer, worship and commitment to Jesus.

The spiritual life of prayer and contemplation, of learning from Jesus and of worship, must lead his disciples to service. Mary simply got the order right: learn and worship, and then serve.

Dear Friends,

 

Today is very special. Fr Glen is celebrating the Eucharist for the first time. Glen remains the curate of St Andrew’s Moscow. In a sense he is in exile here at St Mark’s. Until another posting is agreed, an absentee from his normal place of operation, we have the privilege of being his refuge. So dear Glen we rejoice as you stand as one of the newly minted priests of God’s Church. You may now, as a priest absolve us, preside at the Eucharist and bless us.

 

I want to say something about what priests do, on this day when it is particularly in the limelight, I want to say something about the Feast Day we commemorate, and St Thomas. And I want to say something about the Holy Spirit, whose particular graces are implored at a first Mass. As we get to know Glen and his background, his interests and abilities, we recognise how his character and his call are bound together. We realise that priesthood and personality are an amalgam of a particular kind. Just as all people are different, so all priests are different, even if they have a common call and set of tasks. This underlines that we are firmly in the territory of the Incarnation – where words are made flesh. Where call is lived out in the lives of real people.

 

Yesterday three deacons were ordained priest in the Diocese in Europe about 35 in the Diocese of London.

 

Amongst several other weighty questions they were asked:

 

Will you faithfully minister the doctrine and sacraments of Christ as the Church of England has received them, so that the people committed to your charge may be defended against error and flourish in the faith?

 

These are solemn words which have ramifications both for Glen as the minister of those sacraments and us as their recipients. What is offered from pulpit and altar, in equal measure, defends against error and for our flourishing. The Bishop says:

 

Priests are to be messengers, watchmen and stewards of the Lord; they are to teach and to admonish, to feed and provide for his family, to search for his children in the wilderness of this world’s temptations, and to guide them through its confusions, that they may be saved through Christ for ever. Formed by the word, they are to call their hearers to repentance and to declare in Christ’s name the absolution and forgiveness of their sins.

 

There are important echoes from a much earlier age, a time of threat and menace, when Jerusalem was on edge of capture. Habbakuk was a sentinel watching out for the fall of his people, standing on the ramparts, aware of the impending catastrophe as the Babylonians were advancing.

 

I WILL stand upon my watch, and set me upon the tower, and will watch to see what he will say unto me, and what I shall answer when I am reproved

 

So are priests called to watch over the people in the latter times, following the example of the ancient prophets, watching and waiting.

 

The constellation of priestly tasks, watching, stewarding, teaching even admonishing, is to ensure that the people know and are constantly reminded that Christ’s salvation is for ever. The repetition of the words of forgiveness, and the words of institution of the eucharist are so that there can be no forgetting that salvation is achieved, because we need drawing back from the desert not only of temptations but the wilderness of despair, where it is all too easy to linger.

 

The Bishop continues:

 

Priests are to preside at the Lord’s table and lead God’s people in worship, offering with them a spiritual sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving. They are to bless the people in God’s name. They are to resist evil, support the weak, defend the poor, and intercede for all in need. They are to minister to the sick and prepare the dying for their death. Guided by the Spirit, they are to discern and foster the gifts of all God’s people, that the whole Church may be built up in unity and faith.

 

This calling is rooted in primitive notions of sacrifice, tempered by the words “of praise and thanksgiving.” But sacrifice is at the heart of what is shown forth. Priests stand at the altar, and the symbols of sacrifice in the Temple are re-purposed, because they are so potent, and because, as John tells us, Our Lord’s death took place at the same moment the Paschal sacrifices were being offered. The old is completed by the new. The ancient cultic systems of sin-offering and ritual cleansing are sanctified by a whole new understanding of forgiveness and restitution, which took place once and for all on the Cross.

 

We might ask what: is the significance of St Thomas, in all of this? His encounter with the risen Christ in the upper room, eight days after Easter symbolises something of what priesthood can mean. Jesus had greeted the fearful disciples that first Easter day in the evening, and had gladdened their hearts. He had greeted them with peace not of this world, and had poured out his Holy Spirit. Peace, joy and the promise of forgiveness were Jesus’ gifts with the Holy Spirit that first Easter Day.

 

Eight days later, Thomas is with them. And into the midst comes Jesus himself. The sceptical Thomas is allowed his personal Paschal encounter. Word is made flesh, as the words Thomas has heard from his friends of the real presence of Jesus after his death, becomes real for him, in person. “Reach hither thine hand, thrust it into my side, be not faithless but believing.” Word becomes flesh, just as bread becomes body through a mystical and spiritual transformation of mind over matter. “My Lord and my God.” Thomas sees and believes and conveys in those simple words the crescendo of John’s Gospel. No wonder it seems the Gospel might end there. What else is there to say?

 

The first church historian, Eusebius, tells us Thomas moved East with his words of promise. From eastern Persia it is no distance to India, and from the north via the breezy trade routes along the west coast to the near ends of the earth and the spice lands of Kerala. There has been a Jewish community in Cochin since the first century AD and it would be imaginable that Thomas made it there to preach, and possibly thence to Mylapore near Madras or Chenai, where local custom claims he was martyred in 72 AD.

 

Poor Glen was ordained deacon on 18 July last year, the Feast of another Martyr, Elizabeth of Russia. I joked then that he would not be called to martyrdom. Little did we know that eight months later he would be packing his bags and evacuating from a place he knew all too well, to end up a refugee here for an uncertain period a white martyrdom of its own.

 

Your first mass Glen is not without the connotations of suffering, sacrifice and martyrdom as well.

 

I hope the reality that this is also by tradition an invocatory mass of the Paraclete, allows the red hangings and vestments of martyrdom to be conjoined by the red of the fire of the Holy Spirit.

 

On bended knee we have asked that the Holy Spirit’s uncontainable dynamism may be alive in your ministry for the rest of your life, as it has been at work in you for many years leading up to this point. We pray too for your friends in Moscow and not least Malcolm and Alison Rogers, with whom you shared ministry there and the many friends there or now dispersed. Malcolm continues to keep the flame burning in Moscow under the protection of the embassy. He wrote recently in a letter to The Times, reflecting on diplomatic developments in sanctioning Patriarch Kiril:

 

By imposing sanctions… the UK is playing into the narrative that the conflict in the Ukraine is a defensive fight for the survival of Russia against expansionist western forces that are set on destroying everything that is Russian, including the Orthodox Church.

 

In a note to friends since Malcolm says:

 

Please pray for relations between our churches and that St Andrew’s Moscow can continue to be an open door between Russia and the West, especially in the UK, while many other doors are closing.

 

You and I both feel it is important his words are uttered today, because of the role he has played in mentoring and supporting you.

 

Glen, your priesthood, as we keep St Thomas’s day is marked by all that you are and all that has brought you to this point. Your time in Russia has shaped and left an indelible mark upon you. We hope this priestly chapter in your vocational life job will be a blessing to the wider Church. Words become flesh as you utter Our Lord’s words of promise and salvation.

 

You will take bread and wine and offer them as a sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving. You have known sacrifice in the journey to this point, and it will be received by our loving Father who blesses all that is broken and poured out and who will restore it to us a hundredfold.

 

Blessed art thou, Lord God of all creation, of thy goodness Glen has this bread to offer, may it be for us the bread of life. Amen.

Naming someone is an extraordinary gift.  I wonder, who have you named?

We have three children, and we took much time in naming- what the names meant.  You know that name may shape who they are, how others look at them, and it will play a part on how they grow.  Names are important- I wonder why you were given the name that you were given?  What does your name mean, and what part has this played in shaping your life?

Incidentally, I am Robert- apparently meaning- famed, bright and shining.  I’m not sure if my wife would agree!

And so we come to the naming of John.

Now, let’s be honest, this was no ordinary birth.  This birth was promised by the message of the angel to Zechariah (meaning the Lord has remembered). A promise that spoke of Elizabeth (a name meaning Oath of God).  Extraordinary that Elizabeth, who had gone through the menopause was to conceive- miraculous with God, leading her to the place of joy.  We know of Zechariah’s disbelief of the Angel’s words, and because of his hard heartedness, he was unable to speak for the time of the pregnancy.  Elizabeth has since had a visit from Mary, the also now pregnant mother of Jesus, where we are told that John lept in the womb in the presence of Jesus Christ, and now John is to be born.

You can imagine the scene, neighbours and relatives all hearing the news that it was time for the birth.  Zechariah was still unable to speak and 8 days after the birth, it was time to dedicate this child to God through circumcision.  The naming of the child, and the child’s incorporation into Israel.  The general consensus was that he would keep the family name- that of his dad- all was set- Zechariah it is.

No- cries Elizabeth. No.  What’s this- most unacceptable. He needs to be called John.

So, all eyes now fixed on the Father- he will do what is required and stop this silliness.  Zechariah writes- his name is John- a name which means Yahweh is gracious, God has shown favour- and then having been obedient to the words of the angel, he begins to speak again.  Wow, these things were talked about all over Judea- what then will this child become, leading Zechariah to offer his extraordinary hymn of praise in the Benedictus, having been filled with the Holy Spirit.  That is the reading that we had tonight.

The Benedictus is filled with Old Testament imagery.  It is the outburst of joy and of praise, not only that Zechariah can speak, cheer, and sing again, but that John was born safely, and has now been named in accordance with God’s wishes- that Elizabeth is safe.

There are two sections, first, from verses 68 to 75, a sheer explosion of faith in God, retelling his story- his testimony.  A reminder that God is faithful, rooted in oath, promise and here is something of the fulfilment of that promise.  The second section is one of prophetic wisdom- sharing his insight, his hope for this child that has now been born. He will point towards Jesus, going before the Lord to prepare his ways- sharing wisdom and knowledge in the gift of forgiveness.  Pointing towards the cross and new life made possible in Jesus Christ.  The promise of God in our midst.  Light in the midst of darkness, and guiding us toward the gift of peace- the gift of the resurrection.  Peace be with you, says Jesus as he appears to the disciples.  Peace be with you.

Tonight, those being confirmed are caught up in this drama.  The God who has called you is faithful, and the God who has called you draws you closer to Jesus Christ in the power of the spirit.  The one who ultimately brings us into light and guides us into the way of peace.

May you continue to discern that calling- by name, that the Holy Spirit is at work through you, and today the Kingdom is enlarged as a result.

Amen

Recently I watched on television the harrowing drama Cathy come home by Ken Loach.  Written in the 1960s, it tells of the plight of Cathy, who, through a series of misfortunes, is left homeless and separated from her husband and children.  In the last scene we see her trying to hitch hike a lift to join her husband in the north of England but as we watch her on the roadside looking right and left for a lift, night falls and we are left uncertain as to whether she will get to her destination.

My reaction to this uncertainty was a longing for Cathy to get to her destination and reunite with her husband and an anxiety that she might not succeed and be left in the dark.  This anxiety and concern reflects the need we all have to have a sense of belonging somewhere and, as we learn from today’s Gospel reading, Jesus was no exception here.

When his disciples assure Jesus that they will follow him wherever he goes, he replies that ‘Foxes have holes, and the birds of the air have nests, but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head’.  I detect a sadness here in not having a home to go to now that he is on the journey to Jerusalem.  This is not, though, the whole story.  In spite of his sorrow, Jesus then asks his disciples to leave behind family commitment in order to follow him. They must not go back to bury their dead or say farewell the living if they are ‘to be fit for the kingdom of God’.

It appears then, from this Gospel text, that a sense of belonging somewhere matters to us all but Jesus is giving greater significance to a sense of belonging in the kingdom of God.  To achieve that sense requires a journey that is not an easy one.  It is hard work.  As Jesus reminds his disciples, they will have to put their hand to the plough.  If we read on through Luke’s Gospel we learn that the disciples will be ‘lambs in the midst of wolves’ and cannot take any possessions with them on their journey.  They may be housed as a labourer or they may not be welcome; there are no guarantees.  Their task is to heal others.

Why does a sense of belonging in the kingdom of God require such sacrifice and hard work?  If God loves us all why does it have to be this way?  I believe that the sacrifice and hard work were essential for these first followers of Jesus because they were called by him to follow him on his journey to Jerusalem and death on the Cross.  As Jesus as the Son of Man had no home and was rejected to the point of death, the disciples had to share this situation with him.  If they could do this then this would pave the way for their participation in the glory to come when Jesus would rise from the dead to join his father in heaven.  Over the centuries, and in today’s world, many people, in recognition of this requirement for participation in the kingdom of God, have also given up a sense of belonging to hearth and home; some to the convent, some to the monastery, others to serve as missionaries, all to focus on their relationship to God.

This journey to Jerusalem reflects the pattern in the Bible of exile and restoration that reflects our turning away from God and his restoration of us that is rooted in his love for us. As Tom Wright expresses it in his book ‘Simply Christian’ the expulsion from the Garden of Eden was the first ‘leaving home moment’ and there follows multiple exiles and restorations.  He writes that ‘Israel’s multiple exiles and restorations are ways of re-enacting that primal expulsion and symbolically expressing the hope for homecoming, for humankind to be restored, for God’s people to be rescued, for creation itself to be renewed’.  He then goes on to write that ‘only by one last shocking exile and restoration can we go through the door to new access to God by Jesus’.  It is that particular journey of exile and restoration that the disciples of Jesus are being called upon by him to meet head on.

Exile and restoration is a pattern that has continued over the years in human affairs. The current refugee crisis comes to mind here.  In a milder format there is the theme of going away and coming back again which has been used many times by writers.  In childrens’ stories, there are two examples;  Peter Pan in the journey to the mythical island of Neverland and the return of the children home and Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz going over the rainbow and back home to the chant of ‘there is no place like home’.  There is a point to be made here though that, in these childrens’ stories, the message is that children need to have a home in which to grow up.  Once they have grown up then they have the opportunity to go out into the world to live and serve others.

We need not, though, dismiss childhood journeys into fantasy land as fairy tales.  There is more to it than that. When Harry Potter departs from platform 9½ he is going on a journey to defeat evil. Judy Garland, who played Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz, said in later years, ‘Somewhere over the rainbow is not about reaching a goal, it is about hope’.  Similarly the journey that Jesus invites his disciples to share with him is a journey of hope.  Hope that we may all enter the kingdom of God.

As the journey to Jerusalem is about this hope, it is, as the Commentary on Luke entitled ‘journeys with Luke’ expresses it, a journey of recognition rather than a travelog. As such, we do not need a guide book, nor reference to distances and specific places to visit.  What we do need to do, as the Commentary expresses it, is to ‘turn our gaze to the fate of Jesus as he had to ‘set his face to go to Jerusalem’.  This is to share in his resolve to face up to what was to come and to face up to our own ups and downs in life. To keep hope alive as the journey to Jerusalem was a journey of hope for the glory to come.

So let me finish by saying that whilst we value home and home life greatly we can keep in mind that ultimate security is to be found in relationship to God.  As St Augustine wrote: ‘our hearts are restless until they find their rest in thee’.

 

 

 

 

 

 

From Galatians 3:26 For ye are all the children of God by faith in Christ
Jesus. 27 For as many of you as have been baptised into Christ have
put on Christ.

From St Luke 8:39 Return to thine own house and shew how great
things God hath done unto thee. And he went his way and published
throughout the whole city how great things Jesus has done unto him.”

Please be seated and wish me luck. It seems to be my brief at St
Mark’s to work with children and animals (whether live or biblical). And
so it is today, when pigs briefly fly and a special infant is named and
welcomed.

We meet today on first Sunday after Trinity, which this year includes the
holy baptism of Blake Adu-Nti. As his family and our congregation
participate in this sacrament of new life and admission to the Christian
community, we enter a long series of “Sundays after” – one of the two
periods known as Ordinary Time that form part of the Roman Rite
liturgical year. Today begins the stretch between Easter season and
Advent. Not ‘ordinary’ as in ‘without distinction’ but from the Latin
word for ordinal numerals that indicate sequence, not quantity (primus,
secundus, tertias and so forth). Named with a term for the type of
counting that emphasises relationship, it is a fit season to build on the
basics: to believe in God’s Word so lavishly shared over the great
feasts; to keep his commandments; to build up the common life of the
Church by spreading the good news. Today’s gospel and baptism
service remind us it is also foundational to denounce the devil. Your
spiritual health depends upon it. Your ability to navigate a chaotic,
violent, and uncertain world with any degree of sanity and equanimity
relies on it. It may feel to some like an outdated, quaint, possibly overdramatic
element of the service, so I hope to share some scripture that
may ramp up your enthusiasm when you are called to reply.

I must confess that the statement above lands me in an uncomfortable
place, for I come neither to deny nor to promote the demonic. Perhaps
the expression of possession in the Bible doesn’t align with modern
experience and world view other than that represented as fictional in
the arts and film; that said, the incidence in the Old Testament is also
rare – you can count its report on one hand. In the New Testament
numbers increase, but are far outstripped by reports of healing and
raising from the dead. Then, as now, most illness arises within the
physical and can be treated medically, as our gospel-writer and
physician Luke well knew.

On the other hand, if we believe that Jesus is the Son of God who
breaks into earth time and space to redeem our sins and bring
salvation, we are operating in spiritual realms as well as in our fallen
world. So neither too much, nor too little can be made of devils. They
are neither cause nor resolution yet must be taken into account. As
C.S. Lewis notes in “The Screwtape Letters”, “There are two equal and
opposite errors into which our race can fall about the devils. One is to
disbelieve in their existence. The other is to believe, and to feel an
excessive and unhealthy interest in them. They themselves are equally
pleased by both errors and hail a materialist or a magician with the
same delight”.

One who decidedly did not cause them delight was Jesus. That could
be why the incidence of possession and casting out of unclean spirits
or demons peak in the Gospels, when Jesus walked the earth, acting as
a rain-maker for co-habiting evil spirits. At the start of his gospel, Luke
tells of Mary Magdalene’s release from 7 demons and there are several
others, such as the possessed man we meet today. Every time, the
tormenters recognised Jesus in the flesh and feared their ultimate doom
at his hand.

Luke tells us that for some time the Gadarene man had been possessed
by such forces; separated from home, family, city, his own mind, even
his clothes; he stayed in the tombs outside the city or was driven into
the wilderness; he was unnaturally violent and strong, uncontainable by
any physical forces of law, custom or restraint. The resident demons
were fully in charge, “Legion” in number and in name, relentless and
aggressive in driving the man to self-destruction – until Jesus landed on
the shore with his disciples and commanded the unclean spirit to leave
the man. Note how they recognised Jesus immediately as the Son of
the most high God, the one with authority to cast them into “the deep”
or abyss, a boundless pit and prison reserved for Satan and his hordes.
Note how they appear to defer to him, asking consent to enter a large
herd of swine as a preferable alternative…though the beasts
immediately launch themselves into a watery grave at the bottom of the
Sea of Galilee. Every last one. The swineherds charged with minding
the livestock valuable as food for the Gentiles and perhaps for some
less observant of Mosaic law’s ban on pork as unclean, take off in fear
and dread to report the loss. No doubt they pointed the finger of blame
at Jesus for destroying their livelihood and their masters’ property.
What in the world was he even doing on this side of the sea? Why
couldn’t he have stayed where he belonged? What will they do without
their pigs? They would certainly vote for eviction of Jesus from their
land before he does any more damage. Best take care, though, this is
a matter for the proper authorities to handle because there is something
scary going on here.

Meanwhile, the demoniac from the tombs is transformed. He sits at the
feet of Jesus – washed, dressed, restored in mind, speaking with his
own voice.

When the delegation returned from the city to the scene of the incident
to make their enquiries, they saw that the possessed man who had
terrorised the community for years, costing time and money in failed
attempts to control him, had been healed by Jesus in one brief
encounter. They were minus a considerable number of valuable swine;
they were plus one reformed character. It didn’t seem a good bargain;
there was no rejoicing reported…no whisking away of Jesus to heal and
preach and help others in suffering and trouble. Instead, we hear from
Luke that they were afraid. After all, isn’t it was normal to fear further
loss of power and possessions? To resist a different reality, fear a
future different than the one they expected? For it is difficult to
imagine any way to live other than the familiar. Better the herd of pigs
you know, no matter how devil-ridden. The delegation requests that he
take his leave, and Jesus re-boards his ship and returns from whence
he had sailed. For his plan to bring salvation to the Gadarenes was
already in place and God’s work could continue amongst the Gentiles.

How can that be?

The exorcised Gadarene wants to be with Jesus, expressed in Luke’s
biblical Greek as asking to be bound to Jesus, echoing the same word
as his would-be jailers earlier in the passage. Through the power of
God, a person restored to spiritual health is freed to live a better life and
counteract the swirling craziness of those around them. Even someone
once possessed by demons and demonised by society can answer the
call as disciple. His wish is granted in spirit, if not precisely the way
requested at the time. He is “in recovery”, and Jesus realises that
returning to full spiritual health means returning to dignity, voice and
crucially, agency. Only someone in their right mind can act freely,
without bedevilment, because divine love empowers without restraint.
God made us in his image and sees that reflected divinity within us, no
matter how obscured by demons like fear, greed, pride, addiction,
despair, and so on. All these dysfunctions are designed to separate us
from communion with God, disconnect us from spiritual health and
power, and exile us from the abundant life that awaits every moment.

Jesus reconnects the circuit by sending the healed man back to his
own house, his own people, charged with spreading these glad tidings.
Luke tells us that the new disciple did so, fulsomely, throughout the
whole city. I like to imagine that heaven has a good stock of Gadarene
Christians who heard it first from a man who overcame his devils
through the grace and authority of Jesus Christ, and the love and power
of God: a divine prescription in action. (And for those who fret over
different spellings or multiple possible locations, a chance to resolve the
matter – you know who you are…). In return, he fulfilled his
responsibility to bear witness. Here is Christian CBT in action, designed
to free a suffering sinner from repetitive irrational behaviour and deeply rooted
wrong-doing. In this way, we too can “put on Christ” and learn
to live in our “right mind” – or at least to be mindful of when our spiritual
health begins to suffer.

This is the precious legacy of Jesus’ outreach of healing and teaching
by vivid example in a Gentile territory, where he seeks out unfriendly
and unclean locales to appoint a former demoniac as his missionary.
This man had lived a truly miserable and debased life. Yet Jesus
sought him out, valued him, loved him specifically and personally. Not
only is the message one of inclusivity, but it is also one of boundless
hope. We honour our responsibility for this gift by coming together to
hear the Word, break bread and share the cup, wash Blake in the living
water of baptism whilst renewing our own vows. In this way, we “put
on Christ and learn to live in our “right mind”. And denounce the devil!
Thanks be to God for his spiritual healing. Amen.

What a gift it is to be called upon, with one day’s notice, to speak on the unexplainable mystery of the Holy Trinity of God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit. I might be being a little sarcastic!

I spent a few moments thinking “how do I explain the Trinity?”, but then remembered that is the pitfall of many a preacher.

The Trinity – God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, a unity in diversity; a threeness in one – the Trinity is quite simply beyond human comprehension, beyond the categories we have. It’s like the particle physics of quarks and Higgs-boson units meeting the general theory of universe creation: things are so complicated that they leave even the greatest minds baffled.

But while we can’t learn about the mechanics of the Trinity, we can look at the relational core. And in the core of the Trinity we find love.

We have the Holy Spirit, joyfully serving Jesus Christ, glorifying Jesus and bringing back the words of Christ to our minds and hearts. The Spirit seeks only to remind us of the truth and of wisdom, and to guide us back to the truth, back to wisdom.

The truth is in Jesus, and in the words of Jesus: he is the Word, the source of wisdom and truth. The Spirit, the fire of the glory of God, able to incinerate the universe in a split second, is in fact gentle, kind, caressing, leading us always not to worship of the Spirit, but to the Son of God.

And Jesus Christ, Son of God, begotten of God, of one being with the Father: Jesus Christ seeks not to exalt himself. He came from God, in the form of God, yet emptied himself, becoming like a servant. Becoming like a human, like you and me.

And being in human form, he humbled himself further, allowing others to hurt him, being submissive even to death on a cross. Jesus did not exalt himself, he served us. Again, the essence of Jesus is serving love.

So we have the Spirit bringing glory to Jesus, pointing all the time towards Christ.

And we have Jesus, serving us, calling us all back to obedience and loyalty to God.

And then there is Father Almighty, the ruling judge of the cosmos, rightfully able to obliterate the evil, sinful, rebellious humans that we are, we who have spat in his face, deliberately ignored his instruction, brought destruction to his good earth, and who abuse the likeness of God in our fellow humans: God the Father, who instead of striking us with judgement, came to us in love to save us, offering us – if we choose it – a way back to Himself.

Thus we find at the core of the universe not hatred, bitterness, chaos or randomness, but love. The Spirit who loves Jesus. Jesus, who loves the Father. And the Father, who loves the Son and Spirit: a Trinity of love that reaches out to us in love.

And love, in case you are unsure, is not the warm fuzzy feeling – anyone can have that. Love is sacrificial service. You know what love is when you sacrifice a night’s sleep to be with a crying child. Or you help wash and clean a dying parent to make them more comfortable. Love leads us to make uncomfortable sacrifices. And the ultimate sacrifice was Christ on the cross, giving his pure life to ransom us from the consequences of our choices.

On the front of your service sheets, you will see a picture of Andrei Rublev’s famous icon from the 1400s. The chaplain in Moscow loves this icon, and gave me a little picture of it, and when we sat discussing our plans for the week, we sat under a copy of the icon.

It shows three angels but represents a picture of the Trinity. You see them all nodding towards one another: Christ and the Holy Spirit bringing glory to God: yet God giving glory back to them. The icon shows the unity of purpose, of mind. There is no division or selfish desire in God.

Yet look at the shape of the two angels nearest you. Follow the line from their arms to their legs, and you see a cup shape emerge: one edge on the left, the other edge on the right.

And in the middle of that cup is the actual cup on the table.

We can’t escape in this icon the image of Christ’s blood, shed for you and for me. Jesus who made the great sacrifice on the cross, spilling his own blood, to save you and me from ourselves, from the alienation we create as we choose rebellion and not God.

So as we come to communion today, as we bring ourselves and our messy lives, our brokenness and our wilful rebellion against God, let us remember the essence of God’s love for us: his willingness to sacrifice and suffer to offer us a way back.

We won’t understand the Trinity intellectually, but we can know the love that binds God, and pray that we may have the grace to practice sacrificial love to our family and neighbours more and more. And as we learn to exalt Jesus and deny ourselves, we too will begin to reflect the love of God found in the Trinity.

Let us pray:

Help us Lord to understand the extent of your love towards us. Help us to repent of our selfish ways and follow you, and learn to live in peace and love, caring for the people around us. Help us Lord to welcome the work of your Spirit in our lives, pointing us to Jesus, who shows us how to live rightly and bring glory to God. Amen

I’ve lately been reading a book by Iain McGilchrist about how the modern Western world has become increasingly left-brained ever since the Enlightenment. We are obsessed with taking things apart to see how they work, and then trying to build them up again. It’s a very useful skill, but it is only one part of how we relate to the world. The ancient and mediaeval and non-Western cultures have been much better at prioritising the right-brain ability to see the bigger picture. It’s in the right brain that music, art, poetry and metaphysics flourish.

Every year when we come to the feast of the Ascension, I realize that we post-Enlightenment folk have turned a celebration into a problem, and it’s because we are so earnestly literal-minded in a way that our ancestors were not.

Rowan Williams quotes the novelist Anna Mason’s words: “There is a kind of truth which, when it is said, becomes untrue.” In other words, any attempt at expressing the inexpressible in human categories is doomed to fail. God is not an object in the universe and cannot be adequately spoken about in human language.

So what do we do with a story that attempts to describe the resurrected Jesus disappearing into the sky? First of all we should look more closely at what is actually said. The event is described in Acts as a cloud receiving Jesus, and in Luke as Jesus being removed from the disciples’ sight in the act of blessing them. Whenever we hear of a cloud in the Bible, we know that we are in the mysterious presence of God, especially when a cloud appears on a mountaintop, a place of awe and wonder. And remember that the disciples’ eyes are opened when Jesus blesses the bread at the supper in Emmaus – in the act of blessing, he is made known.

I think we can draw two conclusions from these accounts, using the imaginative faculties of our right brains. Somehow, when Jesus no longer appeared to his friends on earth, they became convinced that he was at one with God – that’s the cloud that removed him from sight – and that in his withdrawing from them he was blessing them. They tried to hold two things simultaneously in mind: Jesus is now completely at one with God, and Jesus is now actively present in the believers on earth.

Like so many things in the Christian faith, this is a paradox beyond the limitations of our modern minds. The Bible accounts try to put into words a sequence of events – resurrection, appearances to the disciples, ascension, the coming of the Holy Spirit – that cannot be laid out on a dateline. Taking them one at a time may help us to reflect and meditate on different aspects of our faith, but we mustn’t be chronological fundamentalists.

What happened on Easter Day and afterwards remains beyond our language and our understanding. What we have is an emptiness, an absence, of the slain Jesus in the tomb, and then a fullness, a presence, of the risen Jesus in the Christian community. Living in that new reality, the first Christians struggled to find ways of expressing how one led to the other.

As I am sure we are all aware, the stories of the resurrection appearances differ in the four gospels, and I am delighted by this. There is a mysteriousness that the witnesses simply couldn’t pin down. Each one told their own story in their own way. And I think that that richness and elusiveness persists in the story of the return of Jesus to his Father, and to the coming of the Holy Spirit. The whole experience was simply beyond the powers of description. Whatever it was, it was bigger than their usual categories of thinking.

But what the disciples knew for sure was this: they had been cast down into the depths of despair, and now they were full of joy and energy. They had felt abandoned and alone, and now they were empowered. They were transformed from a rapidly disintegrating band of losers into a new thing on earth: the Body of Christ. This didn’t come from an exercise of their imagination: it came from outside them. It was realer than anything they had ever known.

They knew this from their experience, not from thinking abstract thoughts. God had moved powerfully in ways they hadn’t been able to imagine. They could only witness to the changes that occurred in their own lives, as they accepted the extraordinary gift of the good news that makes the whole world different.

The Methodist writer J. Neville Ward writes of the Ascension that “We think of Jesus and God together now, to be trusted and loved, as indeed life is to be trusted and loved because it is God’s love expressed in time. All this is faith; no one knows it to be true, no one knows that it is not true.”

God’s love expressed in time: that is a way to think of Jesus’ life on earth, and it is also the way to think of our life in the Body of Christ. What God gave to us in the human person of Jesus, God continues to give to us as we live the risen life in our generation.

We don’t need to understand or explain anything in our left-brained way. We need to open our hearts to the right-brained vision of life lived in all its fullness.

So the keynotes of the feast of the Ascension should be joy and thankfulness. Nothing is taken away. God pours out the gift of the divine life not just on those who walked and talked and ate with Jesus, but on everyone who is baptised into his death and resurrection.

We observe the last nine days of Eastertide as a time of anticipation of the coming of the Holy Spirit. But remember that it is still Easter, the season of the resurrection. We don’t leave Easter behind as we celebrate the Ascension; we don’t put the Ascension in the past as we celebrate Pentecost. We are celebrating three different facets of the one divine gift of love expressed in time – love that conquers death, love that dwells with the Father, and love that empowers us to be the Body of Christ on earth.

The cloud of glory surrounds us too as we meet to celebrate the heavenly meal that unites us with the risen Lord.

You might have seen in the notices that we have our triennial visitation from the Archdeacon on Wednesday. It’s a mixture of pep-talk, Ofsted and gutter inspection.

Archdeacons don’t get the best press in the canon of English literature. Archdeacon Mr Theophilus Grantly, Rector of Plumstead Episcopi is described by his creator Anthony Trollope in the Warden as looking

like an ecclesiastical statue … as a fitting impersonation of the church militant here on earth; his shovel hat, large, new, and well-pronounced, his heavy eyebrow, large, open eyes, and full mouth and chin expressed the solidity of his order; the broad chest, amply covered with fine cloth, told how well to do was his estate; one hand ensconced within his pocket, evinced the practical hold which our mother church keeps on her temporal possessions; and the other, loose for action, was ready to fight if need be for her defence.

The Archdeacon of Hampstead is a rather different and more approachable character.

I hope you don’t mind if my sermon this morning takes the form of a letter to him, which I will ensure he gets. It arises to some extent from a set of online forms our churchwardens need to complete, and from the preparations for his visit, I draw in some thoughts about today’s readings as well so that the Gospel will indeed be preached.

Dear Archdeacon,

We are looking forward to welcoming you to St Mark’s.

Perhaps you might be asking us how we have fared during the Pandemic?

We might want to think about what we are discerning about the Church and its future.

We know that diocesan forms ask us to categorise all our expenditure in terms of Mission; we would certainly like a word about that with you.

There is a new General Synod, and there will be a Lambeth Conference this Summer. For the Church of England there is now a tight agenda in the debate and reception of the Living in Love and Faith process.

Looked at all together, what are the signs of the times and where might things be going? What does the significance of this moment in the Easter season spell for us as we turn towards what Jesus says in this morning’s Gospel about his departure, the character of our love, and the vision of the heavenly Jerusalem in the lesson from Revelation?

How have we fared in this two years? This feels like a provisional answer because time is yet to tell in some ways. But as the parish priest, I remember closing the doors on Mothering Sunday 2020, knowing it might be a little while before we opened them again, but not guessing it would be anything like as long as it was to be. I felt perplexed, numb, fearful, and very sad. To think that a place of gathering, of refuge, of hope and communion, could be a place of danger, of infection and harm. Perhaps it is fruitless to regret the interdict, which meant clergy were explicitly banned from tolling their bells at times of prayer or even entering their churches. Did hope escape us? Was there a hesitation from our hierarchy when we most needed it? Thank goodness in the months that followed, when easing meant cautious return, and local decision-making was empowered again, that sense of super-caution dissipated. And hurrah, we were allowed to meet again. On that July Sunday, as we opened the doors ceremoniously once more, the utter joy of seeing friendly smiling faithful faces was the most deeply moving gift. In that time of terrible suffering, we lost virtually no one, but the shock, the remoteness, the pain of separation has left a mark. There was so little with which to compare it and prepare us for it. Not to have known trauma is not to have been human. All the more real the joy of return. All the more real the celebration of togetherness. Our virtual life was not bad, indeed aspects were fun, imagination was remarkable and we did not give up our coming together. We have been strengthened by it, tested in the fire perhaps, but so grateful for our return.

What have we learned about God, what has he taught us? Perhaps most signally that we are not as supreme as we might think. A virus of microscopic proportions has placed the life of the world on hold. It has illuminated dreadful and growing injustice at all levels of society. It has caused us to think of ourselves in relationship with others, and to value human relations more than ever.

As churches return to their former patterns or discover new ones, we realise that the Church itself is thinking again about its life and order. What is essential; what is extraneous. We cannot claim revival, we know we have been “the only show in Town” for much of the time since July 2020 when things re-opened, and healthier numbers may be a positive spin-off of that. But the fact people wanted to come to church, and were open to unusual innovations like garden micro-matins on the Sundays we were shut or when people did not want to gather inside, was an encouragement. When we could not sing, wow were were grateful for professional singers who could, and not least when two singers in one household standing together but at long distance from others in a big church meant for a bigger choir!

We find ourselves in this new moment completing forms which ask about Mission. It was quite hard to do this because worship and maintenance, all costly parts of our budget were separated out from mission – when we view them as at its core. Beautiful worship speaks to the soul, it invites, challenges, soothes, encourages – in short it does all the things we think Jesus told his disciples to do. It is an invitation. The mass itself derives from words which give us mission Ite missa est. When we are dismissed in the peace of Christ at the end of the Mass, we are missionised. That is what the term mass means. Dismissed – sent out into the world to share the Good News, which is encapsulated in our worship. Why have segmented mission from worship, or even from maintenance. This building is our mission. We beautify it and adorn it because from its heart springs forth our life. It is the well-spring of the Good News. Its spire is the confident sign pointing this community to God. Its bells ring out the wild joy of our faith and mark when bread and wine become the body and blood of Christ in this community, for the love of the world. Why cannot worship and love of this building be seen as missional?

We know that the wider Church is discerning God’s will in matters of great seriousness in relation to human and gender and sexual identity. There are to be debates and even decisions about this at the level of the National Church. We have engaged with this and our youngest ever preacher has challenged us to engage with not only the modern world but the younger generation in re-thinking how human love might be sanctified. Living in Love and Faith has been an impressive process. Might it not be cop out if in partial summary, and with liberal hearts on sleeves we admit that the traditional teaching of the Church about marriage must remain key, but perhaps cannot encapsulate all that Christians might want to say about human love. We can see that marriages do not always reflect Divine love and some do die. Divine love can be seen in the commitment of people in their lives together. In the discussions which will follow, we pray for the Unity of the Church, and the subservience of human will to God’s will. There is more still to learn and discover.

This Sunday’s Gospel reading comes from that moment after Judas has left the upper room – there is a chill in the last words of the verse which precedes today’s reading – And it was night.

Jesus says “Little children, yet a little while I am with you. Ye shall seek me: and as I said unto the Jews, Whither I go, ye cannot come; so now I say to you. A new commandment I give unto you, that ye love one another.”

Archdeacon, please know from the parish priest at St Mark’s, as we turn to Ascension that this community loves one another. They do so with tremendous care and tenderness and acceptance. Our mission is to live by word and sacrament, to be sustained by prayer and worship, and to extend God’s love into this community by loving service and a simple welcome.

We know that our attempts to be disciples fail, and we are beset with human frailty and personal shortcomings, but yearn for “the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down from God out of heaven, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband.” As John depicts it.

In the Gospel, love that is shared, as Jesus says, is his legacy, as he departs: By this all will know you are my disciples. His remaining love is typified in the descending heavenly City. We cannot establish this by ourselves, many have tried, mistaking their human Jerusalems for the heavenly one. We pray that striving and hoping for that heavenly city may hasten its presence in our hearts and in our lives. Amen.

Today is Rogation Sunday.  In the Christian tradition, Rogation is a time of procession, praying and fasting that looks towards the Ascension of Jesus to be with his heavenly Father.  It is also a time of the blessing of the fruits of the earth. I believe that this blessing is important now for us to engage in at a time not only of the war in Ukraine, but also when  the farmers are struggling to make ends meet in the current cost of living crisis. In ancient times there was a swatting with branches of local landmarks to maintain a shared mental map of parish boundaries.

It is this last aspect of Rogation practice that I would like to focus on in my sermon today.  I would like to consider the meaning and purpose of boundaries.

Boundaries can be mental or physical and it seems to me that some boundaries are there for good reason while others are not.  A good mental boundary is one whereby a person listening to the problems of another sets a boundary on the encounter to avoid the wearing down of both parties and to allow for future stages in the dialogue to take place.  A good physical boundary is one which defines and beautifies an area designated for a shared purpose which benefits all.  An example of such a boundary is our stone wall that surrounds our church garden, adding to its beauty and defining it as an area for all to enjoy in a variety of ways. It is a hallmark of the value we place on it that we are endeavouring at present to have it repaired; a task which has not been done for many years. A bad physical boundary is one which does all it can to keep people apart in a state of hostility. With this in mind there was much rejoicing when the Berlin Wall came down in 1989. Then there are the bad boundaries that aim to keep out immigrants who are trying to enter a country having fled in desperation from war and want their own native land.

It is not always obvious, though, whether a boundary is good or bad. In his book ‘Tales of a Country Parish’, that recently had a very successful launch here at St Mark’s, the Vicar of Savernake Forest, the Reverend Colin Heber-Percy, refers to the writing of Simone Weil, the French philosopher and theologian, who was born in 1909 and died in 1943.  Simone writes of two prisoners whose cells adjoin.  They communicate with each other by knocking on the wall.  The wall is the thing that separates them but is also a means of communication.  Simone goes on to say that it is the same with us and God.  Every separation, he writes, is a link.  Following on from this line of thought, Colin Heber-Percy gives an example of the Prodigal Son who is separated from his father but then returns and the father rejoices.  It is, Colin writes, the separation that gives this text its meaning.  To my mind it reflects the eternal love of God for us all that forgives our sins and rejoices in our turning to him, particularly if we have gone astray.

It is this eternal love of God that knows no boundaries and is the overriding theme of John’s Gospel.

In the text that precedes today’s Gospel reading, Jesus assures his disciples that he will not leave them orphaned. He will, after his death, continue to live in them and they will live in him.  The Crucifixion, then, appears to be a boundary between us and God but it will fail utterly as God the Father and God the Son will come to the disciples and, as John expresses it ‘make their home with them’.  The effects of this are peace and rejoicing that Jesus is going to the Father.

Let us pause to consider what this peace offered by the eternal boundary-free love of God means for us all.  For the disciples, John goes on to say that they will receive the Holy Spirit to ‘teach them everything’ and remind them of everything that has been said to them.  He is also reassuring his disciples in saying what is to come in a way that will allay their fears of the Crucifixion.

This assurance will bring peace but not as this world gives.  The peace given by the world is bought at a price.  As Fergus King writes in his commentary on John’s Gospel, the so-called ‘Pax Romana’, that is the peace claimed to have been established by the Roman Empire, came about through ravage, slaughter and rape.  Today, peace and prosperity are looked for through the suppression of dissent, freedom of speech and even the curtailing of human rights.  This does not mean that people have never sought peace but they tend to seek it in a way that does not benefit the many, only the few.  Having recently refreshed on my studies of European history, it appears that the Congresses that were convened in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries failed to create a lasting harmony in Europe and the League of Nations that was the forerunner of the United Nations did not succeed either.  We remain therefore in a world where there is always a war going on somewhere which does seem to be a terrible waste of life and potential for the future.

Nevertheless, in this war-torn world of ours we need not give up hope for a better, more peaceful life.  There is hope to be found in many of today’s crusades.  The crusade for climate change and the breakthroughs that many charities have made following petitions to Government for a better state of affairs.  Then there is the hope that many people have given to refugees in offering their accommodation to them.  There is the quest for a deeper appreciation  of nature to pass on to new generations.  There are the breakthroughs made by medical research for the cure and prevention of diseases and so the list goes on. No-one can say, although it is not yet universal, that the modern world does not strive for peace in good ways.  It does, but I believe that we can help ourselves further towards peace by avoiding where possible any bad boundaries that separate us from each other in a negative way.  Covid has cast a deadly shadow across the world and there is a cost of living crisis but if we avoid bad boundaries and remind ourselves through prayer and worship of the boundless love of God then I believe we will win through.

To keep us on track I will end with the first verse of an eighteenth century hymn by Robert Robinson:

‘Come, thou font of every blessing,

tune my heart to sing thy grace;

streams of mercy never ceasing

call for songs of loudest praise.

Teach me some melodious measure

sung by flaming tongues above;

O the vast, the boundless treasure

of my Lord’s unchanging love!

Welcome to our patronal festival of St Mark the Evangelist, with First of
May greetings to all. Perhaps you also enjoyed Radio 4’s broadcast of
the Magdalen Choir singing an Old English air from the vantage point of
the college’s historic tower. Across the land and often from a town’s
highest point (such as St. Catherine’s Hill in Winchester), similar
celebrations of hope and renewal will be taking place today and
tomorrow.

Let us hold onto this image of joy and gratitude on the day we honour
St Mark, particularly as we consider two passages that contain some
mighty discouraging words.

Firstly, from Acts 15: v 39
And the contention was so sharp between them, that they departed
asunder one from the other: and so Barnabas took Mark, and sailed
unto Cyprus…
And
From the pen of St Mark 13: v 5
And Jesus answering them began to say, Take heed lest any man
deceive you…
v 9
…take heed to yourselves…
v 13
…ye shall be hated of all men for my name’s sake: but he that shall
endure unto the end, the same shall be saved.

“We’ve got trouble, my friends” Professor Harold Hill sings to the good
people of River City in The Music Man (other theatrical productions are
available). Though tuneful, it is a common-or-garden deception, a slight
example of Jesus’ warning in his Olivet Discourse as set out by Mark in
chapter 13. That’s because everyday deceptions and false claims
damage our shared society, particularly when weaponised by the truly
evil.

The Discourse remains as disturbing and relevant as it was on the 11th
of Nisan AD 33, when anxious apostles gazed across the Kidron Valley
at the incomparable golden Temple of Jerusalem…whilst their beloved
master pondered the soon-to-be-accomplished events of crucifixion,
resurrection, and deployment of a fledgling church.

For we do have trouble, don’t we? All kinds of claims and remedies
and preposterous assertions are touted for power and profit; terrible
conflicts and escalation of war clog our news; climate change disasters
multiply. How are we to navigate a fallen world in faith and arrive at
salvation?

Enter John Mark, who appears in the Bible as the son of Mary Mark in
Acts 12. Peter turns up at her front door following an angel-enabled
escape from Herod’s prison; inside, many believers were gathered to
pray. From this report, we glean that Mark’s mother made her
apparently large and staffed home available as a church and refuge; this
puts Mark squarely within apostolic and earliest Christian circles, most
likely involving contact with Jesus. Tradition has it that her home was
the location for the Last Supper. Her teenage son, Mark, could well
have been the man with the water jug who escorts two trusted apostles
to the Upper Room; after all, they would be able to recognise each
other. Later that momentous night, it is widely agreed that he was the
unnamed young man who fled naked from the scene of Jesus’ arrest.

Mary Mark also appears on our high altar reredos with her son as a
young boy who carries one of his attributes – a volume representing his
future Gospel, dedicated often with the Pax Tibi angelic greeting the
Evangelist received on a stop in Venice.

It is the shortest and the first of the written gospels, and its narrative
form sets a pattern for the gospels that follow. Mark begins with
assertion of authority of the gospel of Jesus Christ the Son of God as
written by the prophets, now proclaimed by his messenger, John,
crying in the wilderness and preaching the baptism of repentance.
Jesus appears as an adult reporting for his baptism, to receive the Spirit
of God from above before fasting and temptation in the desert – a lot of
territory is covered in the first 13 verses!

Next Mark moves on to the active public ministry of Jesus. Extensive
use of time words (now, then, when) and rapid succession of actions
move through his ministry in earth-time to explanation of what lies on
the other side of ascension… when the end-days progress like birth
pains delivering the Second Coming in God’s own undisclosed and
sovereign time. In between Jesus’ acknowledgment as the Son of God
at his baptism and his ascension, Mark emphasises the Passion,
devoting 6 of his 16 chapters to chronicling the event, which he
foreshadows from chapter 8. The first gospel-writer incudes nothing
more or nothing less than required for full commitment to radical
spiritual transformation.

Fundamental to this earliest gospel is the relationship between Mark
and Peter, which sits at its heart. In chapter 1, Peter is mentioned twice,
and in the final chapter 16, within the first 8 verses that are undisputedly
Marcan, the women are exhorted to “go tell the disciples and Peter”;
this placement of mentions is called an “inclusio”, a classical device to
indicate the source of the contents as the person named at the
beginning and the end. In between, Peter is mentioned more times
than any other disciple, not least because Mark joined in the work of
spreading the gospel throughout Asia Minor and on to Rome. In his
first epistle during these years of setting up and mentoring churches,
Peter writes of Mark as his son. Tradition has it that during earlier times
in Jerusalem, Peter acted as a spiritual godfather to the young man,
encouraging him to continue and complete his studies of useful
languages and of law. In this way, Mark became Peter’s Boswell, a
scribe and recorder of the apostle’s eyewitness accounts of Jesus in
words and in deeds. Testimony of early church voices such as Papias,
Clement of Alexandria and Tertullian universally assert Mark’s Gospel
provides an accurate account of Peter’s teaching, which Luke in turn
relies upon in his later gospel.

As we learn in our first reading, not all of Mark’s relationships within the
early church flourished. In Acts we learn he had set sail with Paul
accompanied by his cousin Barnabas on the first missionary expedition,
serving as an “attendant”. But at Perga, in Pamphylia, (present day
Turkey), he went AWOL and returned to Jerusalem, no doubt to the
care and comfort afforded at his mother’s house. The text does not
speak to specifics; perhaps Mark had fallen ill and realised that being
on the road with Paul was not a prescription for recovery, perhaps he
was just homesick. Or both. We are uncertain of Mark’s age although
he was most likely born up to 15 years after Jesus was; clearly, he is
the junior partner-in-training. As such Paul could not forgive his
dereliction of duty, so much so that when Barnabas approached him a
considerable time later to propose that Mark be given a second chance,
the senior disciple flatly refused.

Thanks to his cousin, Barnabas, Mark’s career as evangelist continued
to develop through ministry in Cyprus. Tradition has it that the Mark
family, though Jewish and most likely Levite, had roots in Cyprus
although Mark was born in the city of Cyrene, north Africa (modern day
Libya) before his parents decided to return to Judea when he was a
child. At the start of his work, he evidently preferred preaching to fellow
Jews in Jerusalem or ministering in the Cyprus of his extended family.
The full fruition of Mark’s evangelism, however, would be throughout
North Africa, the cities of the Pentapolis including Cyrene and Carthage,
and finally, Alexandria. For our patron saint is particularly revered in the
Coptic Orthodox church as the founder of Christianity in Africa, the first
Bishop of Alexandria, and most holy martyr of the faith. There is a
treasure trove of stories about Mark, as well as attributed theological
writings arising from this time that form a central part of the Copt
tradition.

With an Aramaic name meaning “son of comfort”, Barnabas gets my
vote for enabling a second chance for a young man ideally positioned
by his age and connection to apostolic teachings, education and
literacy, family wealth and relations, devout and supportive mother, a
serious mind, and a constitutional sense of urgency, to lead the early
and rapid expansion of the gospel into an established church. In
Mark’s case, a regrettable rupture between believers was eventually
reconciled and redeemed, when the now experienced evangelist spent
time with Paul, then imprisoned in Rome, as a “fellow-worker” given the
high Pauline accolade of being “useful to me”. Surely a lesson in
conflict management, and for avoidance of splintering of focus and
efforts when confronted with the task of “publishing the gospel among
all nations”.

The life of our patronal saint and Christian hero is beautifully depicted in
the stained-glass window above his dedicated altar on the south aisle
of our church. Created by the distinguished English artist John
Hayward, its luminous composition tells the evangelist’s story from
boyhood to martyrdom (including lushly red wounds), accompanied by
the person and spirit of his mentors, primarily Peter. Completing the
window is an image of his leonine Live Creature. Although our window
is vintage early 1960’s, it reminds me of the 800-year-old Miracle
Windows from Canterbury Cathedral…their vivid colour, evocation of
extraordinary encounters and undeniable reverence. At St Mark’s, we
possess the cherry on top in the form of the dove of the Holy Spirit, an
abiding memorial for the late and much-loved Anne Griffiths. A second
lion takes a central position above the high altar, so we have an
aesthetic representation of Mark’s faith when confronting two lions in
the wilderness with prayer…and living to tell the tale, as Copt tradition
relates… or perhaps the lions also represent the Baptist roaring to
prepare the way of the Lord. When you have trouble, two lions are
better than one!

A final touchstone for our St Mark experience today is the icon sent in
glorious colour with the weekly email of service. Here is a powerful
depiction of a young Mediterranean man, in robes of passionate red,
ablaze with mission and inspiration, swathed in the deep blue of
eternity. His companion the Lion acts as subdeacon, holding the
gospel for the reader – both us and Mark himself. He sits where his
mystical lion’s wings would be the active principle in proclaiming the
gospel. Now his words have wings because they are received from the
Holy Ghost, very God of very God, all powerful, unknown by us,
emerging from its cloud of glory.

We are fortunate indeed to have St Mark’s life and spiritual journey so
vividly displayed for us as an example of how to take heed and endure
unto the end. This is the mission of the Marcan gospel expressed in the
very fabric of our church, where together as companions and fellow
workers, we can help others and ourselves along the way. And in the
closing lines of a poem William found in the church archives circa 1967:

“Give us your faith that we may not turn back
But go on in God’s service to life’s end.”
Amen.

This last week I had training in Woking on preaching, and William led the first two sessions. So what I’m saying is – if this sermon is great, well what did you expect from me?; if it’s terrible, blame William…😊

Today we will explore the reading from John, and the identity of Jesus. Why is it important that Jesus is one with the Father? And how do we remain in his flock?

Later this year, we have HM the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee! It will be a big event, one that does not happen very often! And in our gospel today, Jesus was at a big event – though I admit it happened much more frequently, occurring each year. Our Jewish friends call it Hannukah.

Hannukah celebrates the rededication of the temple in Jerusalem. Why did it need to be rededicated? A nasty man called Antiochus Epiphanes had come to power and he decided that all religions, especially Judaism, should be merged into one; that one sacrifice to Zeus would cover everything. He banned Jewish circumcision and he had pigs – an unclean animal – slaughtered on the altar in the Jerusalem temple.

Talk about red rag to a bull! It would be like driving a car covered in protestant/unionist symbols through a catholic/nationalist neighbourhood in Northern Ireland. Eruption and riots would erupt. And sure enough, the Jewish world exploded, led by the Maccabees brothers.

You can read all about the Maccabean revolt elsewhere, suffice to say they won and the temple was retaken. But it was now seen as dirty, defiled and unclean, and so it was rededicated and restored. It was made ready and fit for the sacrifices to God to resume, making things right between God and his people.

They got the temple back in order, but they still waited for a godly and holy king, a great leader to save them. Imagine Aragorn in Lord of the Rings, a righteous and virtuous king riding in to lead the overthrow of Greek and Roman rule.

So when Jesus turns up, and with him comes the big fuss and massive reputation about what he’s been doing, the priests ask him: are you the messiah?! Are you the one? Tell us plainly! Well, it’s true Jesus had not explicitly stated his identity to them, but equally, he had said it in other words, and he heals the sick, raises the dead, casts out demons and turns water into wine. The elemental chemistry of planet earth changes at his whim. The prophesied kingdom of God is erupting as lives are changed, deformed bodies restored, sinners corrected into living rightly. The evidence of his identity is pretty clear…

If it is yellow, peels, grows in bunches and is curved, then it is probably a banana. If someone ticks all the boxes of your hoped-for Messiah, then he might just be that Messiah!

Jesus responds to their doubt in an exasperated manner. I told you and you don’t believe!  The things I do show you who I am! Why can’t you see this?!

Before WW2, many people admired the strongman leader of Germany. They saw a man delivering results. A few lone outliers, like that “troublesome” Churchill, warned that this Hitler was evil and that authoritarianism leads to horror and war. Some people, like Churchill, had eyes to see the truth, even when everyone else was blind.

Jesus effectively said the same about the priests: their shepherd was in front of them, but they refused to recognise him.

Jesus uses sheep as a metaphor. Sheep are often used to describe God’s people of Israel, but here Jesus gives the shocking truth to the priests: they are not God’s sheep!  Imagine you spend your life serving and volunteering for a charity, doing good things, and then suddenly a faction hi-jacks your charity and leads it to an extreme position, accusing people like you of not even being a member! You’d feel very insulted, upset and grieved. You gave your life to that organisation!

That’s how these leaders felt! The leaders of Israel – not God’s sheep! It’s such an insult! But Jesus’ sheep listen to his voice, and these leaders clearly do not see or hear Jesus.

Jesus then gives the incendiary statement: he and his Father are one. If the priests wanted a direct statement, this is it! But why is it important that Jesus and God are also One?

First, if Jesus and God are One, then it means the teachings of Jesus are the teachings of God. And if you can’t listen to Jesus, you can’t listen to God.

Second, if you ever feel dirty, devalued, used, flawed and just ‘wrong’; if you ever wish you were an angel, or a unicorn, or a ghost; then I have news for you: Jesus Christ, One with God, became flesh just like you and me. God became us: that’s how valuable and precious we are!

Third, if Jesus is God and man, then Jesus is where God meets us. He is the new temple. He replaces the stone monolith in Jerusalem and himself becomes the gateway and door to God.

And if you are his sheep, you are safe. God himself protects you. No one can steal you.

But… please note, no one can steal you, but you can probably wander off. You must keep an eye on your shepherd. By all means explore and ask questions: Christianity is about learning and growing to embrace the fullness of your responsibility as a child of God, serving him and making the best choices. It is psychologically healthy to question your faith, to find answers and go deeper; to wrestle with God and to mature. But remember – No one can steal you, but you can lose yourself.

So how do we remain in the flock? Ask yourself: can I see my shepherd? If you are not coming to church, meeting with Christians, you are isolated and losing touch with the shepherd. Indeed, if you can love fellow Christians, it often seems you can love anyone! Persist in praying. Ask questions, but continue to serve. And read the bible, let it form you to be like Jesus. Because his words are the words of God, and his temple is now made of people like you and me.

So persist in your faith, don’t wander off. Stay loyal, and remember your value – God took on flesh just like you and me; that’s how much he cares!

 

“We are such stuff as dreams are made on / and our little life is rounded by a sleep.”

Familiar words of Prospero to his future son-in-law, from Act IV of Shakespeare’s entrancing and slightly mystifying play The Tempest.

 Dreams and sleep play their part in the Passion narrative in particularly fascinating ways.

I will take forward thoughts about this in relation to the Passion in a moment, but I would begin with a simple acknowledgement of the dream we all share, I am sure for peace in our world, and not least in Ukraine. The visit of Lord Williams to Kyiv this week, as a simple witness with other faith leaders, from the RC Church, the Greek Orthodox Church and several other faiths represented in the UK was a brave statement of connection, and I hope and pray it was able to speak louder than words.

My eldest is reading English, but has found herself in her final year becoming rather taken with a range of literature, and not least Biblical writing. A study she made of dreams in the Bible, and particularly women’s dreams, caused me to look again at two narratives, which owe a great deal to her close reading of them. if there are any feminist readers of the Scriptures present, you might be intrigued by her findings. I was.

The first of the dreams comes from the Song of Songs, which has strong connections with St John’s account of the Resurrection; and the second is just one little verse in Matthew’s Passion narrative (not John’s which we have just heard), which we don’t often hear preached on because it is sung on Palm Sunday without a sermon normally.

The Song of Songs is an arresting read. It’s only eight short chapters. It’s x-rated material, beware. It’s clearly a conversation between lovers. King Solomon, its author, we see as the first. According to I Kings 11: 3 had 700 wives and 300 concubines. One assumes he knew something about love. From his father, King David, he inherited the gift of poetry. The book is a to and fro between the lover and his belove; which one of the 1000 women in his life is not clear. As with modern novels, not only are there no speech marks, there is no clear indication which of the protagonists is speaking at any one time. Literary scholars love this deliberate enigmatic style.

In 5: 2 we read “I slept but my heart waketh.” And then, “Hark my beloved is knocking.” The beloved is the male lover knocking at the door, his damsel is sleeping but her heart waketh.

She writes:

The text is a long, mystical poem, elusive and delirious with metaphors such as “a garden inclosed is my sister, […] a spring shut up.” It evokes the idea of trapped love and desire, unable to be found or opened, and the male lover cannot touch this Rapunzel. The female speaker, who sounds as though she is in a trance, opens this book with “let him kiss me with” “kisses” as his love is “better than wine”. This analogy of desire is heightened by the similarity in Hebrew of the verbs to kiss, and to drink: yishshaqeni and yashqeni. This romantic poetry cannot be the language of one who is awake, as it is drunk and disconnected from reality, lost in a world of desire.

While this is fitting, as the images are so palpable, the reader does not quite have access to them, as the images flit too quickly and nothing is ever certain. This is perhaps the beauty of the text, as the dream never remains one clear image.

One Theologian Valentine draws on, Andrew Bishop, puts forward the fascinating idea that certain sorts of sleep in the Bible, equate to a spiritual state: he coins the term Theosomnia – godly or hallowed sleep. What is distinctive about Theosomnia, as opposed to normal sleep and normal reverie, is that the subject finds its deepest longings met in the experience. From the profound sleep of Adam in Genesis, as bone of his bone, his wife is taken from his side, through the dreams of Jacob and Joseph, the great patriarchs of old meet God. Here in the Song though, uniquely in the Old Testament, it is woman whose heart is awakened in sleep, and the significance of this is profound: she is equal to her beloved. There is a symmetry reminiscent of Eden’s primordial equality. While sleeping HER heart waketh.

This sets the scene for the encounter of Mary Magdalene with Our Lord in garden on Easter morning, where of course we find ourselves back in Eden.

That is to jump ahead though.

There is another dream, another woman’s dream, which is easily missed, we barely notice it, it passes in a trice in one verse of the Gospel of Matthew.

Setting aside our Lord, Pontius Pilate is the only human being named in the creed. He is there, because he is historical; he is named by Philo of Alexandria, Josephus, Tacitus, all four Gospel writers, and there are archaeological fragments attesting to him and his time in office between 26-36 AD, in the reign of Tiberias.

It’s arguable how choice a posting Judaea may have been for a Roman official. At a corner of the Empire known for flare-ups and trouble, Judaea was not one of the fancier provinces in Gaul. But Pilate may not have been one of the first division civil servants, and so this may have been as much as a former soldier might have hoped for to line his pockets and establish himself in gracious retirement in Rome.

The reason for this background is because our second dreamer, was Pilate’s wife. By tradition named Claudia Procula – there are no contemporary independent sources to prove either her name or presence in Pilate’s household during his governorship. Tantalisingly there was a tomb uncovered in Beirut, some think it possibly of the second half of the first century. How she ended up there, we cannot know.

Matthew alone of the Gospel writers tells us that during the interrogation of Christ before the governor, his wife sent him a message “Have nothing to do with this righteous man, for I have suffered much over him today in a dream because of him.” There is no record of Pilate’s immediate reaction to her intervention; we hear directly of the stoking of the crowd against Jesus, baying for the release, in his stead, of Barabbas, apparently an annual Passover sop to the crowds. Mark tells us Barabbas was a murderer, while John tells us he was a robber. Matthew spares us those details, but Pilate does something he does not do in the other accounts, and this may have been one of the results of his wife’s Theosomnia. He publicly washes his hands. The Roman judge and authority wishes no part in Jesus’s death. For the most Jewish of the Gospels, it is particularly striking that Jesus’s own nation is targeted as having been solely responsible for it. Matthew remembers Procula’s dream and its dramatic consequence is Pilate’s, therefore Rome’s, recusal from the death sentence.

From a literary point of view, critics would say that Matthew uses Procula’s dream as plot driver and a cliff-hanger. But it might be seen as a moment of Theosomnia as well. Procula’s heart is awakened, her sleep is hallowed and she dreams the most striking prophecy of them all, in the context of the Passion. For a woman in antiquity to have clear sight and judgement when all around seemed to be losing their own, Matthew is underlining the travesty of the justice to which Jesus is subject.

A Roman pagan and his wife see what the Jewish authorities and those that follow them will not, that the one being condemned is in fact the only true judge. To extirpate his guilt, the Governor may wash his hands, and seem to distance himself from his part in this distortion of justice. Procula is held as a saint in some of the Eastern Churches, and Origen, one of the early Fathers says of her that her insight makes her a prototype of what and who the Church is. A significant accolade indeed, for one whose part is so fleeting in the Gospel. I cannot say how grateful I was to sit at my daughter’s feet in revisiting the Passion this year.

The Gospel in today’s liturgy has the evangelist quoting the prophet Zechariah, in cadences which are almost shrill, declaring ‘“They shall look on him whom they have pierced.”’ This describes exactly our task as we gaze upon the figure of our Lord upon the cross. We are not looking in horror or fear, but wonder and joy and hope. Procula’s waking sleep revealed correctly “that this just man” was indeed both innocent and just. Like Mark’s centurion at the foot of the cross, Procula sees Jesus for who he is. He is of such stuff as a her dreams are made on. Dreams of restoration and the return to Eden, as in the Song, and John’s account of Easter morning.

The prophet Isaiah had foreseen this in the suffering of the Servant of his songs:

Surely he hath borne our griefs, and carried our sorrows: yet we did esteem him stricken, smitten of God, and afflicted. But he was wounded for our transgressions, he was bruised for our iniquities: the chastisement of our peace was upon him; and with his stripes we are healed.

 

Maundy Thursday. I always thought the meaning had something to do with mourning, but if we translate the Latin meaning, this is Commandment Thursday. The day Jesus gave us the command to serve each other, the command to commemorate him in bread and wine at Holy Communion, and the command to love one another.

Today we heard that it was the Passover in Jerusalem, the time when Jews remembered and rehearsed the Exodus from Egypt. They had been slaves; God had promised to set them free; pharaoh refused; God sent the plagues on Egypt; still Pharaoh refused; and so finally God passed over the land of Egypt and delivered a fearful judgement. Yet where doors were marked with the blood of a lamb, judgement was averted. Those doors showed where the people of God lived. The people of God who trusted in God’s promise.

And so, after the judgement of God fell, the people of God – those who trusted him – left Egypt and began their journey to the promised land.

And the Jews remember this every year. God rescuing his people, delivering judgement on their enemies, but saving his people via the blood of a lamb.

In this context, John begins chapter 13 of his gospel. And it struck me how he begins it. “Jesus loved his own who were in the world, he loved them to the end”. He did not abandon anyone.

Jesus knew “that the Father had given all things into his hands”, and Jesus knew that “he had come from God and was going to God”. This is Jesus at his absolute zenith. All, everything, the entirety of the universe was placed into his hands. Jesus saw clearly the glory he had left, and the glory to which he would return.

To find a (bad) analogy, it’s like the footballer Ronaldo – he left glory at Juventus, where he was a legend, to come to Manchester United’s glory, where he was also a legend. Everything was at his feet. And how much more was everything at Jesus’ feet.

And what did he do? He got up, took off a robe, tied a towel around himself, poured water into a basin, and began washing the feet of his rag-tag disciples.

The next US president in two years’ time could be Biden again, it could be Trump, it could be Kamala Harris. But do you foresee any of them, with all that power at their feet, getting up to wash the dirty feet of the people who serve them?

Yet Jesus, Son of God, served us. Remember the context: God saving his people from their suffering via the exodus; averting judgement from them via the blood of a lamb. And in that context of salvation, rescue and mercy, Jesus serves us again.

I have no idea why the washing of feet is not more of a sacrament. I read some arguments on the internet and felt they didn’t particularly hold too much water. I suspect, being a cynic, that we, historically, have been far more comfortable eating bread and drinking wine, which requires less of us, than physically encountering the smelly, warty, deformed, bruised feet of each other.

Yet John’s gospel is quite clear: “If I, your Lord and Teacher, have washed your feet, you also ought to wash one another’s feet.”

We don’t need to take this literally! Though perhaps, for some of us, this might be very relevant. But the point is that we are to serve one another. The Son of God did not come to be served, but to serve us. Go and do likewise. And sometimes service involves smelly feet!

I’ve been deeply honoured since joining this church to be welcomed and served by so many of you, welcomed for meals and given such kind hospitality. It has humbled me, and I am so grateful to you all. You have served me so kindly.

In his example of serving everyone, Jesus washed feet, and even honoured Judas. His love and service was sacrificial – discarding his status and even his dignity. He went down to serve people like us before going up to glory.

When I was in Moscow, there was a person who really knew how to make enemies. This person was inexplicably hostile to many people, and difficult to get along with. I found this person difficult, but then the chaplain gave me some wisdom: “the best way to deal with difficult people, your enemies, is to serve them”. That Sunday I gave bread and wine to that person, and it was a powerful moment for me, serving this person and remembering that Christ died in service for them because he loved them.

So let us too follow Jesus’ example. How might we serve each other sacrificially? How can we honour people we find difficult? How can we love those we dislike?

Jesus died for us, to make us one family, to rescue us from pointless existence.

Let us continue to follow our master and serve each other, showing the world just what a difference following Jesus makes to our lives. People will find faith by experiencing how we love them: so let us love them, being their servants, as Jesus would.

But let us remember that love begins here in church with our family. Love each other, forgive each other, learn to see through the eyes of your neighbour, and via love and humility, you will grow more like Christ.

Today is Mothering Sunday.  How gentle that sounds at a time of continuing pandemic and the horror of war in Ukraine, with its destruction of people and places.  The cards, flowers and gifts that mothers will receive today as expressions of gratitude for all the love and support they have given their children stands in stark contrast to the bombing of the maternity hospital in Ukraine.

It appears, though, that the history of mankind has been one of both gentleness and horror.  Acts of loving kindness whereby we build each other up and acts prompted by fear and hatred whereby we bring each other down. It is a seesaw that has yet to stop going up and down and rest in balance across the world.  Only when that happens will the lion lie down with the lamb.

We may be decades away from that position but we must not despair.  To keep hope alive let us look at today’s Gospel reading to see where that takes us.  Jesus is about to die on the Cross.  An agonizing death being witnessed by his mother, his mother’s sister, Mary the wife of Clopas, Mary Magdalene and the beloved disciple.  It seems at this point as though hatred has triumphed as not even maternal love can save Jesus from his death.  Mary’s love can only be expressed in the agony she must have felt in losing her son in such a terrible way.  Yet even at this time of extreme suffering there is a moment of gentleness.  Jesus puts his mother into the care of the beloved disciple and says: ‘Woman, here is your son’.  Then he says to the beloved disciple: ‘here is your mother’ and the disciple takes her into his own home.

In this Gospel narrative, John gives us a perfect example of an act of loving kindness amidst an act of destruction that is a pattern we are all familiar with.  It is in this particular act of kindness that we can find the hope we are looking for.  We can find it because it is a missionary act.  The mission we all have to love and care for one another is not destroyed by the death of any one of us.  In this, his last act of mission before his life on earth ends, Jesus is completing his earthly task before bowing his head and giving up his spirit. Our mission is to continue in such acts of loving kindness.

We also know that this death of Jesus is in itself our hope because it is a death that saves us from the power of sin and offers us an eternal life in the kingdom of God.  God has put his son on the Cross as an act of ultimate love for us all and our hope lies in this love that is our past, present and future.  It cannot be taken from us by destruction and death.

I hope that I have gleaned enough from today’s Gospel reading to offer us all hope beyond the despair we can feel when all around us seems to be going awry.  You could say, also, that when times are hard it can bring out the best in us.  The lockdown imposed by the pandemic produced numerous acts of kindness. The financial hardship now experienced by so many is being offset by people volunteering in food banks and donating generously.  The plight of the refugees from Ukraine has mobilised people left, right and centre in offering aid and accommodation.  This is mission in action on a grand scale.

Then there is the positive effect of the narrowing down of some of our daily activities in lockdown, prompting us to reflect on life and to evaluate where we are and what matters to us.  All these are positives in the sea of negatives that we currently find ourselves in.

Hope, though, is not just for those who actively seek God’s presence in their lives and do good works for the benefit of others.  It is also offered by God to those who regret their wrongdoing.  One such was Dismas, the Penitent Thief, who, according to the Gospel of Luke, was one of the two thieves crucified alongside Jesus.  Dismas asks Jesus to remember him when he comes into his kingly power. Jesus responds by saying ‘Truly I say to you, today you will be with me in Paradise’.  When I was reading ‘Dismas, the Penitent Thief’ by Mark Thomas Jones, he writes of the synergy between the Virgin Mary and Dismas who are both experiencing agony.  For Dismas the physical agony and for Mary the emotional anguish and trauma in losing her son.  In the Catholic church St Dismas is commemorated on 25^th March, the same day as the Feast of the Annunciation of the Blessed Virgin Mary, when Christ was conceived and so became Incarnate.  For Catholics, Mary is Dismas’s Gate of Heaven and she is the refuge of sinners.  I thought it appropriate to look at this description of Mary on this Mothering Sunday as one of parenting of offspring in trouble.

So Mary can be seen as our refuge, God as our ultimate refuge and we can be a refuge for those seeking to escape persecution.  All this keeps hope alive and demonstrates our trust in the love of God.

 

 

 

1. Glen, could you just introduce yourself to us and give us some sense of your background and life prior to your move last July to be curate of St Andrew’s, Moscow?

Thank you very much for welcoming me, it’s strange to think that this time last week I was in Egypt and two days before that in Moscow.

I am from Lincoln, 800 years ago, a rival to London. I studied International Relations and managed to get a job in a political campaign, working in Westminster. Then I headed to Moscow to try teaching, learn Russian, and have an adventure. One year turned into two, two into three, and I kept going back! I got a job with KPMG, a large consulting firm, and also got more involved with St Andrew’s Anglican Church in Moscow. One thing led to another, and I was asked if I had considered ministry. I said yes, I had considered it, and I began the discernment process. I left Russia in 2018, spent two years in Cambridge, then we had the Covid year, and finally I got back to Moscow in 2021.

 

2. Could you tell us about St Andrew’s, Moscow, its regular worshipping community, its history and its life in normal times before recent events?

St Andrew’s is in many ways both a church and a cultural meeting centre. The English have lived and worked in Moscow since Ivan the Terrible, 500 years ago. Our sailors went across with a letter from Queen Elizabeth I, and they were granted exclusive trading rights. The English and Scots prospered there and started many of Moscow’s great businesses. These British settlers were allowed to build their own church and worship in their own style, showing how good relations were.

The Communist Revolution put an end to all that, and St Andrew’s, purpose built for the worshipping community, was requisitioned and turned initially into the Finnish embassy before becoming a recording studio, due to its excellent acoustics. Some of the best music of the Soviet era was recorded in St Andrew’s!

The British who had lived in Russia were scattered abroad, not welcomed by the Communists. Their goods were taken, and many of them, having been born in Russia with no knowledge of English, found themselves living in poverty in England.

When Communism fell, St Andrew’s was handed back to the Anglican church, and a thriving community re-established. On a normal Sunday, there is a 9am Book of Common Prayer Communion, then a 11am service which was getting well over a 100 people, and we had just launched a Third Service to ease pressure on numbers in the morning. There is a Communion service on Wednesdays as well.

The church building is rented by musical groups putting on classical music concerts almost every day of the week, which is an important revenue stream. AA and 12-step groups use many of the rooms in the crypt, and some private businesses rent other office space. This helps the church remain financially viable.

Being a brick-building in a climate that goes from months of minus 20 to months of plus 30 Celsius, the building is a headache in terms of being repaired. As an architectural monument, we have to preserve it, but we can’t do anything without official permission, and so vast sums of money are constantly being raised to pay for architects and builders to keep the roof up!

 

3. Could you tell us something about the context of St Andrew’s ministry – what is it like to be guests in a country rediscovering its Orthodox roots for example and what is the significance of the role of the Orthodox Church in contemporary Russia?

St Andrew’s is allowed to operate in English, because if we were to preach in Russian, it would be seen as pursuing the Orthodox. If a Russian person chooses to come to St Andrew’s and worship in English, that is fine; but if we were seen to be trying to evangelise Russians in Russian, then that would be severely frowned on, and could jeopardise our status as guests of the Orthodox.

The Orthodox are often seen as one group from the outside, but in reality they are just like the Anglicans – a diverse group of competing ideas. There are churches that are very evangelistic; churches that are much more conservative; churches that revel in liturgy and beauty; and churches that preach a political message supporting the government. I remember visiting a holy place in 2008 and a monk handing me a sheet of paper with information on how NATO was Satan’s work.

Putin very much sees Orthodoxy as part of Russia’s identity, and thus it is important in the process of nation building, creating a sense of ‘us’ against ‘them’. I would suggest that he does hold a belief, but it is in the Slavophile tradition that looks to our eyes much like nationalism.

It should be noted that attendance at Orthodox services is very low, and while they are effectively a department of government, their influence over society seems fairly low, though people do respect the priests. It’s like the UK in the 1950s – people are Orthodox because their passport is Russian, though they don’t necessarily know what Orthodox means.

My personal experiences of Orthodoxy are quite minimal – but sadly I do associate with walking into churches to be shouted at by old ladies for not crossing myself properly! Orthodoxy in Russia, on home territory, is perhaps more rigid and lazy than Orthodoxy abroad.

 

4. Might you tell us something about the build up to the current crisis in Ukraine, as you see it, and have observed it since you first started to live in Russia over 10 years ago? Do tell us something about the different perceptions and narratives both in Russia and here and in different places in the world – I gather you have an academic background in International Relations.

I want to say at the start that the following in no way justifies the invasion, pillaging, murder of children, and brutality of what is happening. My tendency is to be rather academic and this can sometimes appear as ‘too’ balanced!

Russia has always had two movements within: the Slavophiles, promoting the uniqueness of Russian identity; and the Westernisers, looking to the West and to integration. Peter the Great was the leading example of the latter, enforcing great change and opening the inward-looking Russia to Western innovation.

Those forces remain, though in the USSR, they were mixed with a communist ideology. That ideology morphed from revolutionary exportation of ideas abroad to a conservative entrenching to preserve stability within, and so once again, Russia became a conservative, inward-looking state.

With the collapse of the USSR, Russia was quite naïve and vulnerable, and the 1990s were extremely formative. Government officials believed the West, they trusted the West, and many people got rich. But they also saw the West promote things that were clearly in Western interests and designed to weaken Russia. The excessive inflation of 1992 wiped out the savings of many people, and then the crash of 1998 wiped out the savings again. People don’t forget that.

This is where it can be argued Russia lost faith with the West. Boris Yeltsin was clearly incompetent, but the honeymoon period with the West was also over.

Putin came to power with a background in espionage, and thus with a particular worldview and particular insights. He certainly tried to make Russia a place of prosperity, I can testify to the reforms that have taken place for the benefit of all. But Putin’s frustration and anger at being snubbed by Western leaders, and observing how often the West ignored Russian interests, has been mounting. There is an interesting clip of Putin talking to the cameras in the early 2000s, stating that his intelligence agencies had reported to him that the ‘friendly’ West were seeking to break up Russia. It’s one of those clips you are unlikely to ever see on our televisions, but I think it shows our own involvement goes deeper than we pretend.

Putin’s grievances mounted up. Russian interests in Iraq? Ignored. Russian warnings about Afghanistan? Ignored. Russian dislike of NATO moving to its borders: ignored. Russian frustration at how ethnic Russian groups living abroad have sometimes been treated badly: ignored. And then the 2013 Maidan Revolution happened in Ukraine.

It’s worth understanding that Kyiv is the heart of Kyivan Rus, the historic birthplace of Russia. Putin wants to bring together the historic lands of Russia into one united state – part of the Slavophile nation. Yet in 2008, NATO agreed Ukraine could eventually join it. This was concerning for Russia. In 2010, Victor Yanukovich won power in Ukraine, and he was seen as a pro-Kremlin puppet. But actually he was seeking to chart a middle way. He sought to make Ukraine a bridge between the EU and Russia, and polls show the country was pretty much divided 50-50 in 2013 about its choices. However, as one US ambassador stated, Russia cared far more for Ukraine than the EU did, and so Yanukovich was seen as friendly to Russian interests. In reality, Russia cared far more than the EU did.

Then in 2014, Yanukovich was overthrown – this is often painted as a joyous revolution, but was actually a little murkier. It led to the Russian parts of Ukraine feeling a sense of persecution as pro-Western forces left the strategic middle-way and launched into a Westward drive.

This led to the capture of Crimea by Moscow. It was a simple operation – if Moscow did nothing, it would lose its base at Sevastopol as Western influence would force out the Russian navy. So Russia did a ‘surgical snip’ and took Crimea. It was relatively bloodless because most of the people on Crimea wanted to join Russia, recognising their ethnic and financial connections. Unfortunately, Russia seems to have concluded that the ease of taking Crimea in 2014 would be replicated in 2022.

The 2014 NATO summit in Wales promoted interoperability between NATO military forces and Ukraine, taking another clear step towards Ukraine joining the West, agitating Russia further. It was perceived that Kyiv was being stolen from Russia. Kyiv is like London – how can London leave the UK? It is integral to Britain. Our history happens here. Yet in Putin’s mind that was what was happening – the birthplace of Russia was leaving the Russian world. Tensions rose and rose, the Western sanctions after Crimea, and also at work were more societal forces: the shunning of the Sputnik vaccine by the West, despite it working rather well. The perceived promotion of extreme liberalism and woke ideas in a culture that is more conservative. Russia largely views these forces as decadent and as sign of Western collapse.

So basically, if Putin was going to put an end to Ukraine’s westward, decadent drift, then he had to act now. He’s 69, not getting any younger, and inspired by conservative values and a clash-of-culture narrative, he was taken this step, which I fear he sees as almost a crusade.

 

5. Can you characterise the difference between how Russians you might meet in your everyday life feel about the current situation and the that of the government?

Simply put, the older generation don’t know what is happening, because they get most of their information from state TV. The younger generation, with greater knowledge of English and more international connections, are more aware but they have all learned that you don’t talk about politics, because it is dangerous.

So the people I know are reluctant to talk, but generally sad. They don’t like what is happening.

 

6. Can you tell us something about your feelings on leaving Moscow, especially with almost no notice?

My exit from Moscow was swift and it was all so surreal. On Monday I had a job and lots to do; on Tuesday I was packing my bags; Wednesday saw me lead my last service with them; and on Thursday morning I flew out of Moscow.

Surreal is the only word. We flew to Egypt, me and group of others forced to suddenly leave, and they were in a worse state of shock than me. So I had to try and give them time and space to talk too. I tend to focus on being resilient, but honestly it feels like a holiday at the moment, with a strange fact that I won’t be going back; a fact that doesn’t seem real.

 

7. Do you see any overlap between this current situation and the issues raised in today’s Gospel, and Jesus addressing Herod Antipas as “that fox”?

Where do you start with such compelling relevance?! There is so much that can be said, but I want to remind us that the gospel challenges all forms of politics. It overturns this world and its values. Russia is acting like Herod: seeking to enforce its will by power and force, murder and vengeance. This is how people of this world act. Let’s be honest: given the same power, our politicians would be no better. And it is tragic that Christianity, in the Orthodox version, has been entwined to an extent with the machinations of the political state. War has no relationship to the Kingdom of God.

As Christians we must remember to follow Jesus and to lay down our ideas and ideologies, and pick up the good news of Christ. It is that good news, that God has sent a saviour, that Jesus can set you free from sin, anger, hate, addiction and bondage, that we must proclaim and enact.

This is our mission: to live humbly, to serve God and the poor, to bring healing to those who suffer, and to encourage justice and love on earth. God is building a new family. It’s us, the church! We are to become like Jesus, full of love, graciousness, mercy, compassion, gentleness and self-control. Our mission is to decrease, and instead exalt Jesus.

One of the strange things about the last two years of lockdown and restriction is the deleterious effect upon one’s memory. I had forgotten what we did for ashing last year in 2021 and needed to be reminded of how we managed.

Today is actually a day for memory. Remember thou art dust and unto dust thou shalt return, turn away from sin and be faithful to Christ. Words which echo through eternity from chapter 3 of Genesis. From the lies and distortions Adam and Eve had tried to tell God in the garden of Eden, He ejects them from primordial bliss:

In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground; for out of it wast thou taken: for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return. Genesis 3: 19

Our most primitive memories today are sharpened, there can be no forgetting the frailty of our condition: just a few verses after the cherubim with flaming sword are placed at the gate of Eden, Adam and Eve’s second son Cain kills the firstborn Abel. Lies, violence, death. No wonder our sleepy souls need to be called to remembrance.

We have seen enacted already, what Joel prophesies in the first reading:

Let the priests, the ministers of the Lord, weep between the porch and the altar, and let them say, Spare thy people, O Lord, and give not thine heritage to reproach, that the heathen should rule over them: wherefore should they say among the people, Where is their God?

Ancient words from a time of disaster, as the people of Jerusalem prayed for the deliverance, with fasting and prayer. Joel goes so far as to wonder at God’s apparent absence from the impending disaster.

These images are all too redolent, in an international crisis in which we find ourselves. Hot on the heels of a pandemic, we find the world staring down the barrel of nuclear rocket launchers. Perhaps you have friends living in Ukraine, or friends of friends. I have two ordinands there, a third studying here now who previous to coming here had been there for nine years. Our Europe chaplaincy there is a worshipping community whose life is in tatters, as its members are fleeing, living below ground for more than 12 hours a day, or part of the deterrent effort on the ground, as all males between 18-60 are bound to stay and resist if not fight. Our chaplaincy in Moscow is already seeing most of the expats packing their bags.

There are origins to this conflict with significant religious ramifications. Vladimir the Great, the Grand Prince of Kiev, made an active choice to convert from paganism to Byzantine Christianity in 988 BC.

One of the early accounts, known as a near contemporary chronicle tells, Vladimir sent ambassadors to investigate the religions of his neighbours.

Of the Muslim Bulgarians of the Volga the envoys reported there is no gladness among them, only sorrow.

Vladimir thought Islam undesirable because of its prohibition of alcohol and pork. The chronicler reports him remarking: “Drinking is the joy of all Rus’. We cannot exist without that pleasure.”

His envoys sounded out Rabbis. And they visited pre-schism Latin Rite Christian and Eastern Rite Christian missionaries.

At Constantinople they found their ideal: “We no longer knew whether we were in heaven or on earth”, in Hagia Sophia they saw, “nor such beauty, and we know not how to tell of it.” Vladimir’s baptism changed the course of Slavic history.

The fact the presidents of Russia and Ukraine both bear the Grand Prince of Kiev’s name is part of that story too.

Earth’s proud empires have passed away: the Byzantine giving way in Ukraine’s southern reaches to that of the Ottomons, in the South and West the Hapsburgs held sway, to the north the Polish Empire, had its brief flourishing. Always to the East, Russia prized the territories on their side of the Deipner river, with fierce determination to see the cradle of Russian culture uneclipsed.

The Soviet Union maintained Russian influence, some would say the effective subjugation of the distinctive Ukranian spirit. Communism’s collapse in the early 90s meant Russian hegemony was decimated at a stroke. Russian nationalist fervour allied with the rapidly emerging Orthodox resurgence.

Russian communities within Ukraine, some of which were there because of Soviet forced settlement, and arbitrary borders, made for a patchwork of communities, not totally dissimilar to areas of the Balkans.

Thanks to Grand Prince Vladimir, Ukraine is largely but not exclusively Orthodox.

There is a religious fault line which runs through Ukraine. To the west, in former Polish strongholds such as Lvov, of course, there are Latin Catholics; in Ukraine’s central and even Eastern territories, there are sizable Greek Catholic minorities, whose influence dates from the earliest days of the Hapsburg and Polish empires and before, when Uniate rite missionaries succeeded in luring the Orthodox to Roman obedience, with the promise of retaining their favoured Byzantine rites.

For the Eastern Orthodox this was very dimly viewed as a conversion technique.

The fully Orthodox themselves straddle the most complex part of the religious fault line.

You may have heard Sara Wheeler’s A Point of View on Sunday on Radio 4. She tells a well-known story of contemporary Russian folk lore. The Russian Patriarch Kyril, a very powerful man in Russia, appeared in an official photo, in all his robes and pectoral icons. Visible was a very expensive watch he was wearing. Attention was drawn to it in ribald press reports, and the photo was removed, and reissued minus the watch. However, its reflection in the glass table top, on which his arm was resting, was still visible!

There are those Orthodox in Ukraine who remain faithful to the Moscow Patriarchate, under Kyril. But most Orthodox in Ukraine support the newly autocephalous Church, under its Patriarch, His Beatitude Epiphanius I, which was granted its independent status by the Patriarch of Constantinople in January 2019. A matter of months later Zelensky was elected President.

Sadly, many Russian Orthodox have moved from being zealous for their new-found faith in the last 30 years, to espousing full-blown nationalism, and not seeing the fundamental difference.

Arguably the recognition of an independent Ukranian Orthodox Church, the election of Zelenksy by a huge majority, and the perceived threat of Nato, have been too much. Without putting too fine a point on it as well, despite his first name, Zelensky is Jewish, and Russian nationalist feeling is increasingly antisemitic.

We are at moment of real darkness, the chaplain of Moscow last night said this is not the start of Lent, in Russia and Ukraine, it feels like Good Friday.

Discipline, fasting and prayer help us to remember: to remember the frailty of our nature. Lies breed violence, violence brings death. It might seem that there is no health in us, that our nature is the misery of sin.

The sacrificial lamb of God, on Good Friday, through his self-offering, breaks the chain of violence; he transforms the hatred, the lies. His body is broken by them, his blood is poured out, as the sponge of vinegar reaches his lips, his body like a sponge itself absorbs the violence and transforms it. On Sunday we heard the narrative of the Transfiguration. Jesus’s suffering is the transfiguration of violence in himself, and as the priest and victim he makes the sacrifice complete. And so death can have no more dominion, violence is not the last word. The Messiah had to die in Jerusalem, the city of Peace. Only his death can make manifest that peace, which is God’s manner of existence, and goal of all things.