God

When We Are Angry At God: Sermon Preached on 12th February 2023 (Second Sunday before Lent)

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Romans 8. 18–25; Matthew 6. 25–34

Preached at St Mary’s, Potterne

“…the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory about to be revealed to us.”

Can any of us imagine anything more terrifying than an earthquake? In Turkey and Syria last week millions of lives were devastated in the space of a few minutes in the middle of the night. The images on our screens overwhelm us even from this distance; we can scarcely imagine the feelings of those on the ground, sleeping in tents or in their cars amid the rubble.

When I was in my twenties, I took three holidays travelling on my own in southern Turkey, around some of the regions worst affected by this week’s earthquake. Cities mentioned in news reports this week – Şanlıurfa, Diyarbakır, Adıyaman – aren’t abstract places to me. They’re where I met the Arab workmen on the bus who didn’t speak Turkish, let alone English, but shared their peaches with me. They’re where I met the police officer on the first morning of Ramadan who invited me to break the fast in his home with his family that evening. They’re where, a few days later, I found the pub on the upper floors of an office building that was still open in Ramadan, and got drunk late into the night with left-wing political activists while we taught each other Irish and Kurdish folk songs.

It is a part of the world with its troubles, like many places, and also an incredibly hospitable one, rich in music and architecture and human kindness. Its people did nothing to deserve the hell visited on them last week.

Two men and a woman walk past a building flattened in the 6 February 2023 earthquake in Hatay, Turkey. Dust from rubble clearly hangs in the air.
Earthquake damage in Hatay, Turkey. Credit – Hilmi Hacaloğlu.

Earthquakes aren’t caused by human beings. The slipping of tectonic plates is simply the way the world works. Their randomness and violence can leave us angry at God. Perhaps all the more when we hear Jesus telling us in this morning’s Gospel reading to look at how pretty God made the lilies of the field and so trust that He will make sure we will have all we need. But sometimes God doesn’t send people what they need to eat and drink or wear. Many thousands of people over the next few weeks, especially in Syria, some of them devout Christians, are going to die from hunger and cold. Let’s be honest about that. A faith that is incapable of being honest about the reality of human existence is a faith that is scarcely worth having.

Stephen Fry, who is a rather crusading atheist, was once asked in an interview about what he would say to God if he found out after he died that there was in fact an afterlife. He responded with honest anger “I’ll say, ‘Bone cancer in children? What’s that about? How dare you?’” If the best answer Christians can give to that, or to the dead children under the rubble in Turkey and Syria, is that if only everybody lived as Jesus taught us, then the world would be wonderful, then we deserve to be rejected by the world. If promises of material security – that often seem to be broken – were all there were to the Christian faith, then the world would be right to reject it.     

That isn’t the whole story, however. St Paul reminds us in this morning’s epistle that we do not hope for things we see, but what cannot be seen. Our hope as Christians doesn’t lie entirely in this world, but also in what lies beyond it. St Paul writes in this morning’s epistle that the agonies of today are the labour pains that herald the coming glory, which we wait for along with the whole of creation.

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The Power of Names

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“Fear not, for I have redeemed you, I have called you by name and you are mine.” In the Common Worship Daily Office, this verse from Isaiah 43 is recited three times on Thursdays. It was written for the community of Hebrew exiles in Babylon at a time of much fear, when some were losing faith and wondering if there could really be a single creator God. This was a silly ideal to their sensible neighbours in Babylon, to whom it was obvious there were many gods. There seems of have been growing apostasy from Judaism and assimilation into the cosmopolitan mass.

Therefore, God reminds them here that he has not forgotten them in their long exile, but remembers each individual by their name.

Names are powerful statements in Scripture. After winning an all-night wrestling bout with a mysterious angel, Jacob is renamed Israel, meaning, “I have striven with God and with humans, and have prevailed.” But the successful contest has come at a cost – Israel’s hip has been dislocated in the struggle, and he will presumably spend the rest of his life walking with a limp.

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The walls of the Hall of Names at Yad Vashem in Jerusalem are lined with black binders, each containing hundreds of pages bearing witness to those who died in the Holocaust. Stacked neatly on shelves, they stretch along the walls of the circular chamber like the rings of an alien planet. Decades of research means that by now 4.8 million names of roughly 6 million Shoah victims are now known and memorialised in those binders. With the passage of time, the identities of most of the remaining million or so will soon be lost to history – but not to God, who remembers His children by name forever.

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Good Enough for God?

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Dom Kenneth Newing on the Diamond Jubilee of his ordination to the priesthood, at the tender age of 93.

This article first appeared in the July 2021 edition of the parish magazine of St John with St Mary, Devizes.

Among my closest friends are the three remaining Anglican Benedictine monks from what was once Nashdom and then Elmore Abbey, now resident in Salisbury Cathedral Close. When I first came to Wiltshire in 2013, they were four, and Dom Kenneth Newing, who had been Bishop of Plymouth before taking monastic vows, was one of the dearest, wisest, and holiest friends I have ever had. 

Dom Kenneth Newing on the Diamond Jubilee of his ordination to the priesthood, at the tender age of 93.
Dom Kenneth Newing on the Diamond Jubilee of his ordination to the priesthood, at the tender age of 93. © Gerry Lynch, 30 September 2016.

I first met Kenneth when he had just turned ninety, and he already showed signs of mild but definite cognitive impairment. He took time to process complex conversation and find the precise words in response, but he remained an acute observer of people and retained excellent memory for both the immediate and distant past. For those with the patience to take time to talk to him, he was wise and perceptive in conversation. He remained so almost until his death five years later. In his last years, he contributed much to the Church and the life of those he lived and worshipped among.  

The Church of England has set itself the task of becoming younger and more diverse. On the surface, nobody could object to this. Scratch deeper and this objective is riddled with problematic assumptions. The Church should seek growth, just as the leaves on the trees do at this time of year. That’s one of its jobs. Must new or revitalised Christians, however, necessarily be young? Are the older members of our society redundant passengers to be ignored in favour of those likely to have more years of active Christian commitment? Similarly with diversity. We must absolutely reject anything in ourselves that refuses to embrace as equals everyone regardless of race, class, gender, or sexual orientation. But are congregations that look less like our metropolitan centres and more like our provincial small towns of less value to God?  

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