Readings – Isaiah 52: 7–10; Luke 24: 13–31
Heaven in Our Hearts: Sermon Preached at St John’s Devizes, Sunday 30th October 2022 (Commemoration of the Departed for All Souls’)
christianity
Paddington Bear and the Girl with Blue Hair
A little think-piece on class, faith, and evangelism in the England of 2022.
I encountered the girl with blue hair when we both replied to a mutual on Twitter. She was a graduate who worked in the arts in a university town. She didn’t agree that the Royal Funeral would do the Church of England any good, because in her social bubble the reaction to it and everyone involved in it had been negative.
I gently challenged her that her social bubble may not be representative, and she agreeably agreed that was the case; indeed the world would be a different place if her friends were representative, she said. She seemed genuinely amiable, in a way that few people on Twitter are.
Like all of liberal Protestantism and Vatican II-embracing Catholicism, the Church of England has long been obsessed with people like the girl with the blue hair – highly educated, thoughtfully intelligent, genuinely kind, and seeming to represent the future, something exemplified by enthusiasm to remain on trend culturally and politically. Much effort has been expended in trying to produce a Christianity that can be embraced from within their value system – one that is focused on building the Kingdom on Earth and minimises the importance of what it is in Heaven.
But the liberal upper-bourgeoisie has never been representative of the population as a whole – indeed, they may be the segment of the population most closed to coming to a lively Christian faith. Mainly from secure backgrounds and often with a healthy combination of agreeableness, intellect, and diligence thanks to having done well in the genetic lottery, they can expect to have comfortable and rewarding lives. Faith in the crucified God may not be appealing to them, whereas Faith in the perfectibility of humanity may, barring some major external personal or social shock, simply seem natural.
View from Yerevan in The Tablet
It’s good to be in print in this week’s The Tablet (11 August 2022 edition) with a “View from Yerevan” – a piece about beautiful town planning, the revival and the absence of churches, losing a war, refugees from far away, and having one of the world’s most difficult geopolitical positions. It’s easy enough to … Read more
The Gardener of Life: Sermon Preached at St Mary’s, Potterne, Sunday 17th April 2022 (Easter Day)
Readings – Acts 10: 34–43; John 20: 1–18
Supposing him to be the gardener, she said to him, ‘Sir, if you have carried him away, tell me where you have laid him…’
What a strange encounter between Mary Magdalene and Jesus in this morning’s Gospel. How could Mary possibly fail to recognise Jesus? She and Jesus were, after all, close – just two days before, on that terrible Friday, she had been one of the very last of Jesus’ disciples to be present at His crucifixion, when nearly all others had fled in fear. How could she of all people mistake Jesus for the gardener?
Then we hear another odd phrase from Jesus’ lips when she might have been expected to hug Him: “Do not hold on to me, because I have not yet ascended to the Father.”
It is the first Easter morning, and Jesus is risen from the tomb! Alleluia! But something has changed. This is no mere resuscitation by a sort of divine defibrillator. Jesus is alive, speaking to Mary Magdalene, as they meet in the beauty of a garden on an early morning in the Jerusalem springtime. But she doesn’t recognise this intimate friend at first, and He asks her not to touch him. What is going on here?
Some of you may remember the Bishop of Durham back in the 1980s, David Jenkins, causing a bit of a flap by saying the Resurrection was no mere conjuring trick with bones. This was interpreted by the press to mean that the Resurrection wasn’t real. That wasn’t what Jenkins was saying at all, although I have to say as someone who used to be a bishop’s press officer that, for all his many virtues, Jenkins was his own worst enemy in dealing with the press.
Yet David Jenkins was absolutely right. The Resurrection is no “mere conjuring trick with bones”. It is something far greater than that. Heaven also isn’t simply an endless perfect day on earth, but a reality that is different, greater, than the one we experience in our physical bodies. In heaven we will be the human beings that God has created us to be, as individual and unique as all of us are, and yet also in harmony with one another, with God, and with the whole created order, in a way that simply cannot be in this world. Here death and sin have power over us; in heaven we will be liberated from them for eternity.
War and the Devil: Sermon Preached at St John’s, Devizes, Sunday 6th March 2022 (The First Sunday in Lent)
Readings – Romans 10:8–13; Luke 4: 1–13
“Jesus … was led by the Spirit in the wilderness, where for forty days he was tempted by the devil.”
One of my favourite films is a movie made eleven years ago named Margin Call. It is a fictionalised version of 24 hours in the life of a big New York merchant bank at the start of the 2008 financial crisis.
In the small hours of the morning, two well-tailored bankers assimilate the possibility of the world economy collapsing thanks, in part, to their extreme investment risks. At one point, the younger one turns to the older and says, “This is bizarre. It’s like a dream.”
“Oh, I don’t know”, comes the reply, “Seems like we may have just woken up.”
The world of these men and women collapses in the space of a day, to their shock and horror. As the movie progresses, however, it becomes apparent that they knew all along that they were following a path that was unsustainable, but one that was making them all rich. They were lying to the rest of us, of course, but mostly they were lying to themselves. Part of the movie’s power comes from the way it depicts how the system rapidly seduces the young graduate trainees into believing that this world of greed and lies is normal, even good.
Ironically, the wise old trader in that exchange was Kevin Spacey – soon afterwards disgraced, and deservedly so, for using his artistic genius as bait to exploit young men who dreamed of being stars.
Both the movie and the real-life story of its star are metaphors for the world of the last thirty years, which indulged itself in the myth that humanity was starting to escape the restrictions of its nature, and that freedom and prosperity for all could be best ensured by each of us pursuing our desires and demands to the maximum extent.
We need to face facts: we are never far away from the wilderness, where the Devil lurks.
Send Me: Sermon Preached at St John’s, Devizes, Sunday 5th February 2022 (The Fourth Sunday before Lent)
Readings – Isaiah 6: 1–8; Luke 5: 1–11
‘And I said, ‘Here am I; send me!’’
I think it would be fair to say that as a congregation, we don’t think of ourselves as being pious or particularly holy. In fact, that sort of understanding of what being a Christian means rather freaks us out – and thank the Lord for that. In my experience, we tend to see ourselves as pilgrims on the road towards God, travelling as much with those outside our walls as within them, and certainly not as some sort of vanguard of God’s chosen people. That understanding is also big part of how I see my ministry as a priest.
We are nothing special. We have the same failings as anyone else. And yet we are chosen by God to follow Him, each of us as individuals, and collectively as His people here in the centre of Devizes, worshipping the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit in this building as people have done for 892 years. It is awe-inspiring to think that the people who built St John’s in the decades after William had conquered were closer in time to us today than they were to Peter and James and John on the shore of the Sea of Galilee when they left everything and followed Him. Yet across these vast gulfs of time, we are all joined together in the chain of those who have broken bread and shared wine in Jesus’ name that stretches back, unbroken, to group of friends who shared supper with Him on an early Spring evening in Jerusalem, just before His death.
It is not, my brothers and sisters, because we are particularly good that we follow Jesus Christ but because the God who is love calls us to follow Him, as the people we are, and as the community of Christians here in St John’s that we are.
God has always chosen people who didn’t think they were anything special. Isaiah, when he was granted a vision of heaven, cried that he was a man of unclean lips. Still remembered as a thinker and wise counsellor after 2,700 years, from a time when very few names survive except for those of warriors and kings, Isaiah was nonetheless a man well aware of his own limitations.
Dear old Peter, never a man who failed to say what he meant, was entirely freaked out when he realised who Jesus was and what He had just done shouting, “Go away from me Lord, for I am a sinful man!” Our modern presentation of Jesus Christ rightly focuses on Him as our loving brother, but we have lost something of this sense of awe at the majesty of the Holy and Undivided Trinity.
This awe-inspiring God is calling everyone in this church this morning to speak for Him, to serve Him, to be fishers of men. “Here I am – send me”, says Isaiah, in full awareness of his failings. God’s question to Isaiah, “Whom shall I send, and who will go for us?” is addressed to each one of us.
Fresh Wine and Springtime: Sermon Preached at St John’s, Devizes, Sunday 16th January 2022 (The Second Sunday after Epiphany)
Readings – 1 Corinthians 12: 1–11, John 2: 1–11
Everyone serves … the inferior wine after the guests have become drunk. But you have kept the good wine until now.
I think you all know me well enough by now to know that I enjoy the good things in life. So, clearly, did Jesus. In this morning’s Gospel, Jesus turns water into wine on an industrial scale at a wedding. The water filled six huge jars, each holding “twenty or thirty gallons”, which by my calculations would make more than 900 bottles of wine – which the guests found to be of superlative quality. This is a lot even for a seriously boozy wedding reception. It is so much wine that even the people at Friday evening lockdown parties at Number 10 Downing Street might not have managed to finish it all.
God wants you to enjoy life to the full. There are going to be enough tough moments in life as it is – the last two years, for example – so there is nothing wrong in making the most of the times when things are going well. Indeed, if you have been generally fortunate in life, do what you can to help others, but also be grateful, rather than being guilty, for your blessings, for your gratitude can inspire a wonderful lightness of life but your guilt helps no-one.
As well as enjoying the good things in life, most of you will also know by now that I like to preach about how Jesus Christ was both truly God and truly human, and how God loves us in our humanity. Our Gospel reading this morning presents a very human scene, which takes place in a real human culture: a Jewish one. If I made a film about this scene, I would cast Maureen Lipman as Mary and Adam Sandler as Jesus. Jesus is clearly annoyed with his mother for trying to get him to intervene and keep the party going; Mary completely ignores Him and tells the staff to do whatever He says. Jesus, completely outfoxed by his mother, complies with her request.
So here we have Jesus, God made man, enjoying and helping others to enjoy the best of what it means to be human. What does this mean for us and for today’s Church?
Have Mercy On Me: Sermon Preached at Holy Cross, Ramsbury, Sunday 24th October 2021 (The Twenty-First Sunday after Trinity)
“…he cried out even more loudly, ‘Son of David, have mercy on me!’”
In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
This morning’s readings can be great sources of hope for us, but they can also be disturbing. It all depends what mood or what set of experiences we approach them from. In their very different ways, both Job and Blind Bartimaeus have been dealt a rough hand by God, and have suffered for years. Then, in response to prayer, God fixes each of their problems in a trice. The second part of their lives will be so wonderful they could hardly have dared wish it for themselves. The readings can also be disturbing, however, because God does not do this for everyone, not even for many people who pray faithfully.
I read an article in Church Times a few weeks ago about a brilliant young academic, who met the love of his life when they were both reading for their doctorates. He had been brought up outside the Church, but thanks to his fiancée, he came to faith in Christ for the first time. The he was struck by what seemed at first to be a routine viral infection, but this left him with a crippling post-viral syndrome which has now lasted for many decades. He has lived in almost permanent exhaustion and pain. His career went nowhere, and his condition placed enormous burdens of caring on that young girlfriend who became his wife. Decades of faithful prayer for healing were met only with occasional false dawns; after so many years, the answer to his prayers was, finally, a sense of peace with his illness, with God, and with the world.
Where, one asks, is the justice in all that? If we accept that God does at times answer prayer in miraculous ways – and I do accept that – it leaves us wondering why He doesn’t do it more often.
Ecclesiastical History Rocks: 1960s Pentecostalism and Nigerian Anglicans
I spotted this interesting article and follow up letter in the Church Times when exploring its coverage of the 1968 Lambeth Conference. The article notes that the number of Anglicans in “the western part of Nigeria” was declining in favour of Pentecostals. Nigerian Anglicanism had gone through phases of shedding both sects and adherents towards Independency since at least the 1920s. But this was possibly the first report in the press of a new phenomenon which would have significant impacts on Anglicanism across the world.
There was a major Third Wave of new Pentecostal Churches emergent in Africa from the mid-1970s; in Nigeria, the continent’s most populous country, Jesse Zink locates this surge as beginning a little earlier, with an evangelical revival during the civil war of 1967-70. It would be incubated and then enormously multiplied in student groups meeting in the margins of the expanding Nigerian university system of the 1970s. Matthews Ojo understands these African movements as originating in the 1960s Pentecostalist revivals in North America and Britain; but Nigerian Independency long had links with the Anglo-Saxon north, and the influence wasn’t always unidirectional either.
Also of note here is some indirect evidence of Muslim-to-Christian conversion in Nigeria, which is far from unknown but somehow seems to escape everyone’s notice.
Anglicans facing competition from the burgeoning Pentecostal scene in Africa was one of a complex cluster of reasons why the issue of homosexuality became so toxic within world Anglicanism from the mid-1990s onwards.
From the Church Times, 9 August 1968
Fewer Anglicans in W. Nigeria
The number of Anglicans in the western part of Nigeria, West Africa, is declining, to the benefit of other denominations.
This is revealed in the report published giving the results of a research project into the “Role of Religion in Yoruba Society,” conducted by the Institute of African Studies of the University of Ife, Nigeria.