An Act of Love, St Francis – 5 October

“The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult and left untried.” This is according to G.K. Chesterton, who found Christians, including himself, did not put their faith into action. Chesterton was a great writer, perhaps best remembered today by his Father Brown stories, the original ones, not the banal tv versions. But even Chesterton would agree there was a notable exception with the ideal of Christianity. That would be St Francis.

So, let’s think about St Francis of Assisi, the saint who launched a million birdbaths, hundreds of thousands of statues, including our one here, and the occasional service of Blessing of the Animals, who was, for Chesterton, the one Christian who actually lived the Gospel.

Francis was the son of a wealthy textile merchant and as such part of the new Italian middle class that was coming into its own. His father’s wealth and Francis’ own natural charm made the young man a leader of the youth of his town. Francis gained a rock-star like following by the early 1200’s. He remains famous today not because of his own words and actions so much as because his words and actions conformed so closely to those of Our Lord.

As a boy Francis dreamed of earning glory in battle. He had his chance at an early age when he enlisted, along with the other young men of Assisi, to fight in a feud against a neighboring city-state. Assisi lost the battle and Francis was imprisoned for a time. Defeat in battle and serious illness in prison caused Francis to turn away from his visions of glory on the battlefield.

Francis’ path toward God took a series of turns closer and closer to God, rather than an all-at-once conversion. However, the course of Francis’ life was profoundly changed by at least two formative experiences. On a pilgrimage to Rome, Francis saw a beggar outside of St. Peter’s. The Holy Spirit moved him to trade places with the beggar. Francis exchanged clothes with a beggar and then spent the day begging for alms. That experience of being poor shook Francis to the core.

Later he confronted his own fears of leprosy by hugging a leper. Leprosy was one of the great feared diseases of the Middle Ages, with no known cure. Like trading places with the beggar in Rome, hugging a leper left a deep mark on Francis. Shaped by his experiences with the beggar and the leper, he had a strong identification with the poor. Francis cut himself off from the opulent lifestyle of his father and sought out a radically simple life.

By the time of his death, the love of God had compelled Francis to accomplish much toward rebuilding the Church. He could look on thousands of lives transformed by his call for repentance and simplicity of life. His Franciscan friars travelled and preached a simple message to those who felt the church no longer reached them. Yet, Francis of Assisi was simply a man transformed by the love of God and the joy that flowed from a deep understanding of all that God has done for us.

Francis’ approach to his life of Christian service fits with Our Lord’s words to us in today’s Gospel reading which tells those who follow him that they are to serve with no thought to reward. Our Lord said, “Who among you would say to your slave who has just come in from ploughing or tending sheep in the field, ‘Come here at once and take your place at the table’?’ Would you not rather say to him, “Prepare supper for me, put on your apron and serve me while I eat and drink; later you may eat and drink’? Do you thank the slave for doing what was commanded? So you also, when you have done all that you were ordered to do, say, ‘We are worthless slaves; we have done only what we ought to have done!’”

So, when you come in from doing something for God, don’t expect a reward, only more work. It’s a wonder the crowds followed Our Lord at all. But what exactly is the work of God? In what way are we to serve him? We have the example of Francis, to add to that of Our Lord’s own life and ministry. Yet, how can we in our own time and place attempt to live more fully into the Gospel?

Scripture teaches that all Christians are ministers of the Good News by virtue of their baptism. Then as ministers, each of us has a wide variety of jobs to do in the kingdom of God based on the gifts God has given us. While congregations benefit from the ministry of priests and deacons, and sometimes even bishops, the real work of the Church happens when the people in the pews live out their faith in their day to day lives. This includes many thankless tasks, showing love and mercy in even small ways and even if no one notices.

You know how thankless these tasks are because you have the same issue at home. Do you get thanked every time you do the dishes? Or mow the grass? Or wash the laundry? Or make your bed? Probably not. But permit time to pass without doing the dishes, cutting the grassing, washing the laundry, or making your bed and you are sure to hear about it. These are thankless tasks, and you take them on with no thought to getting praise for doing them.

Notice that in this Gospel reading, Our Lord tells of the servant who does what he or she is supposed to do, in response to the disciples asking for more faith. Then he tells them the parable of the mustard seed and how the tiniest amount of faith is enough to accomplish great things for God. Then he goes on to describe the thankless task of serving God his Father. It is in serving God that we find our faith strengthened.

We are not to serve others for the thanks we get. We are to serve others as serving Our Lord, because that is the life God calls us to, knowing that we will benefit more than the people we help. We will benefit in increased faith and increased love. Francis took his mustard seed of faith and used it to trust that he could hug a leper, though he was terribly afraid. In the process, he found the faith to work among lepers. So, again and again, his steps of faith emboldened Francis to trust God more. It is the same for us. Each step of faith strengthens our trust in God to follow even more boldly.

To come back around to G.K. Chesterton, he advised, “Let your religion be less of a theory and more of a love affair.” That was Francis, living out a love affair with God. When we are living into the love of God, then Christianity will have been tried and not found wanting, nor will it be a series of thankless tasks.

Walking the life of faith then is not done in search of thanks or praise but is simply an act of love. Then you and I can join Francis in saying that we are merely servants doing what we were called to do. We call ourselves servants knowing that what we do, we do for love, for the one who knows us fully and loves us more than we could ever ask for or imagine.

Based on a sermon by Bishop Frank Logue of USA. .

Matthew – 21 September

I have always wondered what the morning was like after the day Matthew became one of the twelve. Think about it. There you have the others: Simon and Andrew, James and John: fishermen by trade, for example. Like all small businessmen, they probably found trade was difficult: you can imagine them complaining about the poor markets in Capernaum, the competition from the less scrupulous dealers from further down the Sea of Galilee, the difficulties of finding experienced fishermen to work, or the high taxes that they had to pay to the Romans and the parchment work that had to be filled in. 

Then think of one of the other apostles, this one is a rather shadowy figure that we know little besides his name: Simon the Zealot. He was a member of a group who opposed Roman rule: by Roman standards a terrorist who certainly would have had very interesting friends whom the Roman authorities would have loved to have met and entertained at his imperial pleasure.

It is interesting that we don’t know a lot about the different occupations of the twelve. Only six are given backgrounds that give us an insight: Peter and Andrew, James and John, Simon and, of course, our saint of the day, Matthew.

Now we don’t know for sure whether the Gospel we know as Matthew’s was written by the same Matthew who was one of the twelve, or was the original source of the material for Matthew: these are parts of the mysteries of the early church. However, the Gospel according to Matthew has one interesting point about the calling of Matthew – he was the last of the twelve chosen. So he completed the dozen.

Now, Matthew was a tax collector.

Now there were a variety of taxes that people paid in the ancient Roman Empire. In the time before efficient records, the easiest ways to collect taxes was by revenue taxes. As an aside, income tax is only a late introduction into our lives, only becoming the main base of the taxation system in the 19^th Century under William Gladstone – at a time when records on people was much more advanced. Before that, the British government, colonial Governments and all earlier governments, depended on revenue by direct taxes on goods and people. Hence the old excise men of England, chasing down brandy smugglers. In the ancient world, that taxation system was privatised, as we would explain it, with different groups bidding for the right to impose taxation and paying a set fee to the central government in return. The great Emperor Augustus, who had ruled at the time of the birth of Christ, had started a reform of the taxation system, so it was beginning to be run directly by the state. But in Our Lord’s time, the actual taxes were collected by officials who were private contractors: they had to give a certain amount to their employers, but were allowed to otherwise extract what they could. It was not a pleasant process. They had little toll booths by the sides of the road, where they would stop those going by: they could then make you unpack your load, put all the goods in the view of everyone, while they calculated the tax. It could be a humiliating procedure: imagine if you were stopped in your car and caravan every time you went across to Victoria, and had to pull everything out to allow some official to go through it and work out it value. There were taxes on everything, and probably a few were invented o the spot: taxes not only on goods, but on carts, cart axles, road usage, bridge tolls: the list was endless. All that mattered was getting money out of those caught on the road.

Well, that is what Matthew did and that is why he was sitting in the booth mentioned in the Gospel. People like Matthew were inevitably locals, who therefore knew everyone, and were duly disliked in return. They were exploitative, petty officials who had collaborated with a foreign government. 

Matthew was the last of the twelve called by Our Lord. Don’t you wonder what the other eleven thought when they found out that they were going to be travelling around with one such as Matthew? What did Judas the Zealot think of this collaborator?

So why did Our Lord call him?

Now our Lord undoubtedly calls everyone. This is a good idea in abstract, but we must remember that our Lord calls us not only as individuals but also as a community. This is one of the consequences of God being Trinity: God exists in community and therefore calls us to be in community. But community cannot be tidily organised like the spectrum of a rainbow, with people carefully graduated according to some mystic sliding scale. No, community is the messy mixing of all sorts that are guaranteed to lead to problems of likes and dislikes. Therefore the Church will also find the same messy conflicts of types. Woe betide a congregation when it is made up of only your friends: that is precisely the time our Lord will want to send some more difficult people along to make us learn all over again the need to open ourselves to strangers. Think about the lost sheep that our Lord seeks: it’s not likely to be the fluffy lamb: lambs tend not to be lost and keep to their mothers. No, the lost sheep is going to be the difficult old cantankerous old ram. That’s who our Lord wants back.

Now you start to see the point of Matthew. Matthew was the difficult outsider for the eleven, who had to learn to live with those they despised. And full marks for Matthew for sticking it out too. Interestingly, even though he was the tax collector and good at money, he was not the one they entrusted with keeping the common purse: that job Judas Iscariot took on instead. It makes you think: did the eleven not trust him, or was Matthew wise enough not to press them too much? What is that saying about the tensions in that group of twelve?

Now, the twelve were not a perfect group. We know how the story ends, how they run and hide and betray him at the end. Yet, somehow, somehow, that is the group Our Lord wanted, not a perfect group, but a group who learnt to live with differences. That’s what love means. It makes being a Church that much harder, we should not expect to get on with everyone, but we should be working on learning to live with differences. That, of course, works both ways – Matthew did the hard work of learning to live with people, such as Judas the Zealot, he probably didn’t like as well. Don’t come to Church expecting to get on with everyone you meet either. We are not a social club, we are the people who follow Our Lord, like the twelve, and learn to find he is the resurrection and the life, and that is what counts.

The Cross – 14 September

Now the sermon today has two parts. The first is the pretty story, the legend of the Cross. It comes from one of the great best sellers of the later Middle Ages, the Golden Legend.

It goes like this:

As Adam lay dying, his son Seth journeyed back to the gate of Paradise to beg Michael the Archangel for some remedy for his father. Michael gave him a branch from the Tree of Mercy. Michael promised that Adam would be healed on the day that the tree grew during this cutting would bear fruit.

But Adam was already dead by the time Seth returned home, so he planted the marvellous branch on his father’s grave, at a site outside what would eventually become Jerusalem. It grew into a splendid tree that was still flourishing thousands of years later in the reign of King Solomon. 

Solomon wanted to use the tree’s wood in building his Temple. But its wood never proved suitable because the boards shrank or stretched before they could be fitted into place. The frustrated king had the wood thrown across a pond to serve as a bridge. When the Queen of Sheba visited Jerusalem, she had a vision of the wood’s future and refused to step on it. After she explained that someday a man hanged on this wood would end the kingdom of the Jews, Solomon had the wood buried deep in the earth.

But from this spot, a spring emerged that fed the pool of Bethesda, where miraculous healings sometimes occurred whenever an angel stirred the water. Here, Our Lord healed a paralysed man and forgave his sins. (Jn 5:2-18) Shortly afterwards, the long-buried wood floated up to the surface of the pool. This was used for Our Lord’s crucifixion. The place where the cross was placed was on Adam’s grave, and that is why you will see a skull in some representations of the crucifixion, as Our Lord’s blood cripped down on the skull of Adam, his healing blood removing the blood curse of Adam, on the wood given by Michael.

St Helena found the Cross when she visited Jerusalem after her son Constantine had become Emperor. She took part back to Rome with the titulus, the inscription above the cross, and this can still be seen in the church erected on the site of her palace. The rest of the Cross remained in Jerusalem and was restored there by the Byzantine Emperor Heraclius after it was lost in a battle This event is still commemorated by the Feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross on today,14 September.

That’s the pretty story, and it’s useful to know as it is seen in so much of our art and explains the skull under the cross that you often see. But the Cross is much more than this.

Every Christian has to understand the Cross and its significance. Perhaps the best way to start is to see it as two pieces, one horizontal, and one vertical. The vertical symbolises life, as life always grows upwards, and the Cross is the giver of resurrection life. The horizontal symbolises death, for we lie down when we die. As the two beams meet, so in the Cross life and death meet. And over that meeting of life and death hangs a man, the son of God, who brings life our of death.

All Christians need to come to terms with life and death. We all are given life, and how we choose to live that life is immensely important. The quality of a good life is not in wealth or achievements, but by love. Remember the story of the judgment in Matthew (25:35), when Our Lord welcomes those into his kingdom because when

I was hungry, and you gave me food, I was thirsty, and you gave me drink, I was a stranger, and you welcomed me, I was naked, and you clothed me, I was sick, and you visited me, I was in prison, and you came to me.’ 

It what we do out of love that is gives value to our lives. We are under the judgment of God, and this is the standard that God has set for us.

We are also given death, death as our lives are limited and all good and evil must pass from this world. Death can be feared by many as a loss of control, or power. But death is the realisation that everything is given into our hands as a gift, to be used for good or evil, but is to be surrendered at the end. Christians have traditionally remembered death in the evening prayers, with phrases as: “May the Lord grant us a quiet night and a perfect end,” the conclusion of compline. We are to be aware of our mortality and come to terms with it. Death will come to us all, and a Christian life encompasses that realisation as part of the gratitude of the wonders that God has shared with us. It is that recognition of the limitation of our lives and the gratitude for what we have that will form the basis for the judgment of God at the end of our time.

Now one of the common things we do as Christians is to make the sign of the cross, from our head to breast, then left to right, showing we follow with mind and heart and all our body. But the Cross we follow is the crucifix, with the Son of God on it, and the crucifix always lies on the altar during mass, as he becomes bread and wine, the body and blood shed during his crucifixion and risen by his resurrection. 

When you make the sign of the cross, have you ever thought that the body on the cross then is our own? We make the sign of the cross and supply our own body to it, as the Son of God gave his body on Good Friday. For we are the people who will continue to bring the story of the Cross to another generation, by our lives and death teaching others about the power of God to rise from the grave, to join life and death together in love. That is why the Cross is the most important symbol of Christians that we celebrate today.

Bartholomew – 24 August

I consider myself something of a historian. I’ve studied a lot of history, and it’s been part of my theological studies.

Now one of the hardest things when you read accounts of any period, is that you read it through your own bias. It’s not for nothing that it is said that the past is a foreign county, because you read history with the presumptions of how you live now. You forget that this is not the place you live in, and you easily bring your own prejudices and assumptions.

This applies when we also read about our own Christian history. We easily idealise the past, or make is seem more homogenous than it was.

Which gets me to the saint of today, Bartholomew. It’s not a common name these days, I have never baptised anyone with that name, although my medical friends might know the famous St Bartholomew’s hospital in London and the church friends might know the great church dedicated to him nearby, from which the hospital takes its name. It’s a wonderful mediaeval building and well worth seeing if you are ever in London, and was once a priory of the Augustin Canons; Pope Leo is an Augustin friar that follows the same rule.

But once you concentrate on the name Bartholomew you can see there is a puzzle here. The Jews at that time used the prefix ‘bar’ to mean ‘son of.’ So Bartholomew was the son of – well, whom. This is where ‘tholomew’ becomes interesting, because it is actually Ptolemy. Now that name was the common name of the Greek rulers of Egypt, Cleopatra, probably the most famous member, was a member of that dynasty. It’s a Greek name, but with a Jewish prefix. 

Now this is the point I am finally getting at – Batholomew was obviously from a mixed background, part Greek and part Jewish. When you look at the other members of the twelve you also see Greek names such as Andrew and Philip. The disciples that Our Lord gathered around him were Jewish believers, but not all of Jewish ancestry. They were a mixed bunch of Greek and Jewish ancestry.

Now the twelve all came from Galilee, and this may be why the Judeans looked down upon the Galileans, they probably were not pure enough from them. But it was a perfect mix for Our Lord, who would reach out not only to Jewish believers, but also to Samaritans and Gentiles.

This also ties in with part of the conflict we read about in Acts, when those from Antioch were called Christians. Now we think of Jews and Christians being quite separate, but of course the twelve all thought of themselves as Jewish believers, as did Paul. They believed that Our Lord was the Messiah of the Jews, and did not think that this was a divide. Historically, we know that the Temple was a unifying point for a range of Jewish believers that would not become fragmented until its destruction in 70 AD. Christians were originally those Gentile believers who were not practicing Jews – eventually it covered all believers.

Now that you have had the history lesson, I should get to the point. The disciples of Our Lord, and the early Church, had a range of membership, that often led to conflict. There were a lot of forces, cultural and religious, that wanted to divide them. But their common belief that Our Lord was the Messiah and their experience of him and the gift of the Holy Spirit held them together.

As the Church grew, different tensions played out. Our church stories mainly concentrate on Peter and Paul, and the communities of the gospel writers. The other apostles fade from our written record. St Bartholomew, for example, whom we celebrate today, is practically unknown. He was one of the twelve, he might have gone to India; he might have met his death in Armenia by being flayed alive. These are the legends we have made up for the evidence that does not exist.

But what was the continual problem for the church was the tension that we see in the name Bartholomew, Bar-Ptolemy. In the Church there was a range of cultural groups, who pulled the Church in different directions. The early Church had the Twelve Apostles and the experience of Our Lord, later they would use the development of Scriptures and then in particular the development of the threefold order of ordained ministry with bishops and the great Nicene Creed, which we are celebrating the 1700^th anniversary this year.

I would like you consider this continual tension and its importance. Our history tells us that we will always have tensions – Jews and Greeks, Romans and Barbarians, Anglicans and Catholics, whatever. Our Lord calls all people to him, and we all come with our baggage, baggage that makes us uncomfortable. Just think of some of the problems St Paul is addressing, such as eating food offered to idols, or whether men should have long hair and women have veils – all items we don’t worry about. Instead we worry about whom we can ordain and sexuality. Every generation has its own fights.

What is important then is what keeps us together. How we can be Bartholomew, Bar-Ptolemy, holding different traditions together. For Anglicans, like Roman Catholics, an important anchor has been the historic order of bishops, which is why we are going through such agony over nine months in trying to get a new Archbishop of Canterbury, when Rome can get a new pope within a month. Anglicans also have held to a Prayer Book worship, and particularly the use of the Creeds as well. These have been essential to our identity, especially as we don’t have a controlling centre like Rome to hold to Orthodoxy.

This is why today also commemorates another anniversary, the introduction of the definitive form of the Book of Common Prayer in 1662. During the years before this England had gone through a Civil War that ended with the execution of King Charles I and the abolition of the Anglican Church. It was not a success and the return of the King, in the person of Charles II, was also a return to the use of the Book of Common Prayer and the restoration of the bishops. Like Bartholomew, Bar-Ptolemy, we were going to have to live with those who wanted non-conformity, but we also needed a centre in bishops and Prayer Book.

So on this feast of Bar-Ptolemy in the reign of another Charles, the Third, I would like you to consider your own faith. What are your centres that hold you together in faith? What makes you join with the angels and archangels and the whole company of heaven as you gather around this altar? Also, who are your forces that drive you to the edges, the contrasts that give tension to your spiritual life? What is your Bar and what is your Ptolemy?

The Race – 17 August

The Letter to the Hebrews has some beautiful language. This is our second week on this wonderful letter. Uniquely, this is not a letter to a particular person or community, but to a more general group of early Christians, Jews who had accepted Our Lord as the Messiah. The writer encourages us to persevere in our life of faith, no matter what difficulties we face: “Since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us also lay aside every weight that clings so closely, and let us run with perseverance the race that is set before us.” This letter is written for those who were finding keeping the faith difficult, and we now move on to words of encouragement to help them keep the faith. The unknown writer tells us that you have begun a good thing in becoming Christians, but keep being strong.

This is also the time of the year when the City-to-Surf race happens in Sydney, and next month on the 21^st it is our City-Bay race. As it’s a Sunday, I never see it, but I know a few of you have taken part, or had family members try it. I see it on the television, and you see the big crowd go off together and at the end they come in at all times, some, get in under 60 minutes. Others are not quite so agile. Some are under an hour, some are under two hours, and others, well they finish. But for many it’s not the time that is important, it’s just finishing the race.

Very few must run a marathon — participation is for fun. But the author of the letter to the Hebrews asks us a similar question: Will we finish the race that is our life with faith? Will we persevere? Or will we run off course, or give up? And the race is hard. In today’s gospel, Our Lord tells us, if we would follow him, if we would stand up for what is right, we will experience conflict.

The writer of Hebrews, like a good trainer, gives four pieces of advice about how to finish the race. Firstly: recall who surrounds us. Secondly: remove what weighs us down. Thirdly: rely on strength within us. Finally: remember who goes before us. 

Recall who surrounds us: “Therefore, since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses.” The writer wants us to picture ourselves as athletes in an arena. As we strive toward our goal, to finish with faith, in peace and holiness, we run surrounded by people. The people in the stands are people who have demonstrated faith – faith that persevered, people who by the grace of God overcame great obstacles, and finished the race. These are people of the Bible, the men and women of the Church throughout the ages, not just the saints form some distant past, but people known personally by you and by me, who have even sat in these pews, whose witness encourages us.

They are witnesses, not just spectators. There is a huge difference. A spectator watches you go through something. A witness is someone who has gone through something herself, and the root meaning of the word witness, from which we get the word “martyr,” is someone who might have given his life going through it. We have witnesses cheering us on, not just spectators, people who have gone through what we struggle with, people whose testimonies of the strength God gave them can, in turn, give us strength and courage. We have witnesses cheering for us, weeping with us when we stumble, calling to us when we get off the course, urging us to finish the race.

Our trainer tells us also to remove what weighs down on us. “Let us lay aside every weight and the sin that clings so closely,” says our trainer. What attitudes and actions, what past behaviour and present sins weigh us down? What weights of sin and brokenness do we carry that cause us to stumble rather than sprint? We can set those weights down. God is ready to take them from us. God is ready to forgive and heal whatever we let get between us and God, whatever has come between us and other people, whatever wrongs we do to ourselves.

Our trainer also tells us to rely on the strength within us. We are told to “run with perseverance the race that is set before us.” When the going gets tough, when the road is difficult, obstacles come up around every bend, when every stretch of the road seems like another steep hill to climb, we can rely on spiritual resources within us – spiritual resources we develop in training: in gathering with other Christians, in hearing and reading God’s word, in participating in the sacramental life of the Church.

The word “perseverance” can also be translated as “patient endurance.” Endurance is one thing. We can endure and whine and complain all at the same time. Patient endurance is much more; it is praying without ceasing for ourselves and others. It is encouraging others even in the midst of difficulty. It is saying something kind, or saying nothing at all when something unkind comes more readily to mind. It is giving of ourselves generously, even when we’re not sure what’s ahead of us and our inclination may be to think of ourselves first.

Most important of all, remember who goes before us. We can look “to Jesus the pioneer and perfecter of our faith, who for the sake of the joy that was set before him endured the cross, disregarding its shame, and has taken his seat at the right hand of the throne of God.”

We can and will finish the race strong in faith if we would look to Our Good Lord, if we would keep our eyes focused on him, not being distracted by other things along the way that can cause us to lose our direction or footing and stumble. Our Lord has gone before us, has shown us the way that leads to victory. If we would keep our eyes on Our Lord and follow him, we would not only make a good beginning in faith we, too, would finish and win the race.

In the race of our life, we have people, the saints, cheering us on. We have someone willing to take on our burdens. We can train for patient endurance. We have a guide who leads us and will not leave us. Let us keep running until the prize is ours and we hear God say to us, “Well done!”

True Treasure – 10 August

Let’s test your memory today. Last week in chapter 12 of Luke we dealt with the Parable of the Rich Fool, about the man who laid up bigger and better barns for his riches, when God, in a rare first-person interjection, called the man a fool because his life was demanded of him and he would never enjoy his riches.

We skip over a few verses, which continue this theme, including the lovely passage about considering the lilies of the field how even Solomon was not so well arrayed before we get to today’s passage where we continue the theme of riches.

Perhaps the core of today’s message comes with the line “For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.” This captures the teaching throughout this chapter about the true treasures we are offered in life.

Treasure is one of those words we always like, it rarely has a negative meaning for us. The gospel links treasure and the heart’s desire. We may know from the line of St Augustine of Hippo, that our hearts will always be restless till they find our rest in God: in other words we are created by God, and we only find our true heart’s desire in being with God. For seeking God is like looking for treasure, it has the same fascination and hold that can power our imagination. We search for clues here and there, and can make elaborate theories about God, like trying to work out the clues for a missing treasure.

Yet the treasure of God is not something earnt. We do not become holy through elaborate exercises, climbing the Himalayas or wandering without possessions. We do not need years of training of character building or painful self denial. Such things by themselves are useless. These are false ideas. The treasure of God is that we can be friends with Our Lord. It means that we can trust him and love him, and know that he loves us in return. From that, everything else flows naturally.

This is why we have treasure in heaven, treasure in Our Lord. However, we like to put our trust in worldly treasure instead. The gospels time and time warn us to be careful about false treasure. That false treasure may be any number of false gods, looks, fame, or money. But all false treasure on this world is just a means, and we are to use what comes to us in wisdom. Money, well, money has always been a false good and treasure. People of Our Lord’s time also enjoyed their wealth and like to hoard it up and lord over the poor. Our Lord warns against this. Wealth is a trust, a passing good that must be used for the good of those around.

But of course any treasure, any wealth, can possess our souls. So how do we learn detachment form this? I think the best way is learning to give thanks for what we have as gifts. Recognising gifts is important. Things come to us not as rights, but by gifts. I want to emphasise this, because when we see things as gifts, we also start to realise that they are things that pass, and things that cannot hold us.

The boundary of seeing things as gifts and not rights is very important and ties in with our Christian life. At the core of our liturgy for example, is what we sometimes call the great prayer of thanksgiving, when we take the gifts of bread and wine and offer thanks to God, recalling his last supper, death and resurrection that make them into his body and blood. When we pray, part of prayer is always giving thanks to God for what we have received, thus recognising all things as only gifts. When we recognise things as gifts, and not some sort of right, an important change is made for us – we can learn to let go of the object as we learn to share, or just recognise that some gifts pass from our control. Thankfulness and gratitude for what we receive allows us to sanctify the gift and return it to God and not try and hold fast when it is the time to let go – of what ever that may be, wealth, looks, health, home; tough though the letting go may be.

The gospel warns us that we must be ready at any hour to give an account of ourselves to God. It is no use putting off the good we are meant to do by promising some future amends. That is cheating God and cheating ourselves. For being a friend of Our Lord is a continually changing friendship, of different treasures being revealed. Our faith changes over times, and we understand God in different ways. When we can look back over a long period of faith, we can see time and time again how the Good Lord has helped and enriched our life. A life without faith can be looked over and seen to be empty times of work covering up deeper needs of meaning and purpose. The world will try and give a purpose to you in earning more money or promotion of yet another conference, but does all this fill up the hole in the centre, of knowing God and finding his love, of being a friend of The Lord?

The friendship we are called to by Our Lord is a constant one, one that continually enriches us, and allows us to give an account at any time. It does not make us perfect, but aware of our imperfections, and trusting in God’s love and mercy. Friendship with Our Lord, as with any good friendship, demands a level of honesty, honesty about ourselves and who we are, and not a pretence. I would far, far be more willing to stand before God, knowing my mistakes and trusting in his love to do what is right, rather than believing that I had had a good life, justifying myself, and suddenly seeing myself how I truly am, having my pretences stripped away. I will stand before my friend, Our Lord, knowing his love, rather than having my friends in worldly goods.

The treasure we have in Our Lord is one that will always be with us. A great deal will be given to us in our lives, but it is all a trust, something that we must use for the benefit of those around, for we can take nothing but our souls to heaven. It is a mistake to be taken in by our own temporary treasures, and see our value in the things we have than the beings we are.

There is also another point about the true treasure of Our Lord – we share it most fully with those outside our Church. There’s a bumper sticker that says ‘The Lord is coming. Look busy!’ It is funny, for sure, but it also points to the heresy of believing that as long as we’re being nice people doing nice things, then we are good Christians, or more accurately, nice Christians. To be a follower of Our Lord – to be a disciple – requires so much more. A transformed life means that you can never go back to simply being nice. It implies that the Church has a deeper quest than humanitarian groups and clubs. Those are good things, and we should be part of them, but that is not why the Christian church exists.

William Temple, Archbishop of Canterbury during World War II, is quoted as saying, “The church is the only cooperative society in the world that exists for the benefit of its non-members.” Think about that. We exist to benefit non-members. The people who are not us.

We must learn to live our lives seeing the presence of God is all we do. When we learn to live in this way, we see the treasures of God all around us, in the difficult and dangerous, the damaged children of God who so need our help and prayers. We see the treasure of God in the dysfunctional societies that condemn their people to lives of poverty or refuse to share their wealth and safety with those in need. God never stops making treasures: we just don’t see them.

Obituary for a Fool – 3 August

Obituaries are more than death notices, obituaries are about the life, not just the death of someone. The death is the occasion, but it’s usually reported in just one sentence, maybe with a detail: a disease, a condition, a struggle, an accident, and an age. We make the comments: so young; a long life; so sudden; a shock.

Of course, when we know the person, there’s more emotion as we read the details: the birthplace, activities, schools attended, occupations, associations, and the list of those closest who are bereaved. “She is survived by her loving…” – “Survived.” That’s obituary-speak that softens the phrase’s meaning, “outlived by,” and hints at our hope that the life of the deceased will be lived out by the memories, commitments, or family of those left behind.

But written about a stranger, a celebrity, or a public figure, an obituary is a summary of a life that we already know a little about. Obituary writers collect facts, write drafts, and file them away, waiting for the when and the how. When the time comes, as it will, details are updated. Maybe an agent or spokesperson makes a statement. The death releases the facts of the life into view.

We read the obituary of someone we’ve admired, and we may feel appreciation, maybe sorrow. For someone unknown to us, but impactful, we may feel like we’re getting an answer to a question we didn’t know we had—oh, that’s who . . . In the case of the infamous, we may feel a rekindling of aversion or anger. The most engaging obituaries can entertain or instruct. Some function like a window; others like a mirror.

In today’s Gospel, we read an obituary of sorts. It’s a parable, that Our Lord puts it before us. Do we see through it to some truth? Do we see ourselves? Some of both?

“Mr Rich Man died last night of unspecified causes. Known as very fortunate, some neighbours even called him blessed because his land produced abundantly. Mr Rich Man made plans to build bigger storage facilities for the wealth produced by his land, but he died before building could commence. No spokesperson could be reached for comment, but God, in a written statement, called him a Fool.”

In the parable, God talks to the man. It’s the only time God is seen talking directly in the parables. “You fool,” God says. “Your life isn’t your own, and neither is all that stuff. You poor fool.” The fact of the death releases the details, shows them for all to see. The rich man’s wealth wasn’t his, a fact his death makes clear. Just when he was trying to expand his tight grip on what he thought belonged to him, death loosened it, permanently.

But the rich man isn’t the first person to have his plans interrupted by death. Why call him a fool?

It’s not because he’s wealthy. At least, that’s not stated in the parable, and in Our Lord’s time, it was the same as in ours: money is a tool. Money funds, builds, clothes, and feeds. Money builds hospitals, helps the homeless, teaches our children, supports the arts, feeds the hungry. Our Lord depended on the money of others, especially the women, to support him and his disciples. Our Lord praised the woman who poured expensive perfume on him, preparing him, he said, for his death. Our Lord was buried by a rich man who placed him in his own tomb. In the Book of Acts, a mark of Christian community is not communal poverty, but communal wealth, where through people’s sharing with one another, everyone has enough. The fool’s foolishness is not that he is rich.

But let’s be realistic: wealth can also divide, distract, lure, occupy, and possess. So, Jesus gives the rich fool’s obituary this introduction: “Take care! Be on your guard against all kinds of greed.” The word is “pleonezia,” literally “much-having,” the having of a lot and wanting more than one’s share, the seeking to possess a whole lot of anything, because in seeking more and more, in the greedy quest for “much-having” there will never be enough, and we know the unjust lengths to which people will go to do that. We can spend our lives building bigger and bigger barns and using others in their construction. When we die, our obituary can report we left behind a whole lot of earthly power and prestige and storage units full of stuff, but we can still be impoverished toward God.

Rich towards God or poor towards God. Before we think that’s just a quaint way to describe how we and God have a relationship, or how we’re missing out on something that would improve our lives, biblical literature seems to take the idea of a godly banking system very seriously.

If we should think that treasures and saving them have only to do with accumulating things, money, whatever, for ourselves, we’re missing our most important savings option. If we should think that treasure and how we accumulate it have only to do with our time on earth, we would ignore a whole realm of possibilities for genuine wealth. There’s a whole other banking arrangement, a whole other treasury where riches can be stored and accumulated. We all have access to it. It accepts deposits of all kinds. Also, it’s insured by God.

Our Lord himself advocates this savings plan and tells us its benefits extend beyond this life: “Store up for yourselves treasures in heaven . . . where your treasure is, there your heart will be also” (Matthew 6:20-21).

The fool looked rich, but he was putting all his investments in a plan that was critically short-sighted. It was the vanity of vanities.

Fool. He missed what was going on right before his eyes. His land was producing abundantly. There he was, living on the fat of the land, and all he could think about was “I,” “me,” “mine.” Not, a thanks! Not, what can I learn from this? Could this be replicated? And certainly not, how can I share?

Fool. Even in this life, his major goal was shallow: his own ease, enjoyment, the passing pleasures of food and drink. And he didn’t even get that.

Fool. The man is the only person who inhabits his universe, or so he believes. The man can only talk about himself and to himself. In his obituary, no one else is mentioned. But of course, there were others in his life. Who planted, pruned, and harvested? Who laboured, toiled and sweated? 

What is it like to be the child of this man? The wife of this man? Did he have time for them?

Fool. All those things: whose will they be? Has he left a will that just guarantees that a family that already has more than enough will continue to have more than enough? Rich Man, Junior, will continue to live an over-stuffed, over-indulged life, with nothing saved in the bank account that actually matters? Couldn’t this at least be a time when he thought beyond those with his own last name, those left to carry on some pathetic and passing legacy? Fool.

How we use things, giving thanks for everything entrusted into our care, sharing what we have, caring for others, not just by warm feelings, but by using our things and money, gives us a wealth that uses no physical storage space, does not need to be worried about, managed, or guarded. Those riches will be there when we arrive in heaven. Being rich towards God won’t end when someone writes our obituary and people remember with fondness or contempt and turn the page.

Based on a sermon by the Rev’d Dr Amy Richter of Pasadena and Cormack in Newfoundland, Canada.

The Lord’s Prayer – 27 July

We have some great readings today. I love the first reading particularly, Abraham haggling with the Lord over Sodom and Gomorrah. He gets it all the way down to a promise that if ten righteous people could be found, the towns would be saved. Well, we know that ten aren’t, so it’s curtains for Sodom and Gomorrah. It’s fascinating story, and there is a rabbinic tradition that Abraham should have pushed harder and even gone for a lower number, but that’s another story. Would the Lord save the town for five? Two?

But today we also deal with the Lord’s Prayer, also called the Pater Noster from the Latin, in St Luke’s version. Nothing is more central to our prayer life than the Lord’s Prayer. It’s usually the first prayer we ever memorise, and it is used in all our times of need, from baptisms to deaths. I’ve said it with families with the last rites, I’ve said it at baptisms, I say it several times a day with the offices and mass.

However, the version we all know is from the Gospel according to St Matthew. The reason for that is St Matthew became the definitive Gospel version for Christians early in our history, which is another interesting story for another time, so that is the version of the Lord’s Prayer that we know.

One of the most important parts of the Lord’s Prayer in both versions is the need to forgive: forgive us our sins as we forgive those who sin against us. The ability to forgive is the core of our faith. Think about the mass, the words of institution of Our Lord that the priest says at the consecration of every mass, “this is my blood of the new covenant which is shed for you and for many for the forgiveness of sins.” Forgiveness of sins lies at the heart of the mass. We cannot have Christ coming into our midst without the need of forgiveness.

Sometimes it is said that modern people have lost their sense of sin. Maybe so, or maybe it has just shifted. Saying that people don’t have a sense of sin is sometimes a cover in that people have become used to their sins, rather than overcoming them. There is still idealism, and many people have a very high moral idealism. There is a deep sense of the equality of all women and men. Prejudice against people on the grounds of their colour or their sexual orientation is abhorred. There is an acute sense of the damage we are doing to the environment and of the horror of sexual abuse. And Gaza – who cannot be horrified by what is happening there, or the invasion of Ukraine. It is all very idealistic. But this idealism can be crushing. Also, so much is permitted. How can we hear these ideals if there is no forgiveness for all our failures? Paradoxically, when practically everything is permitted, practically nothing is forgiven. 

For our world is unforgiving. A single mistake, one moment of madness. will stay on the record forever. Social media forgets nothing. YouTube will record your failures forever. We are even tainted by any association with the wrong doings of our ancestors. Statues are torn down; schools and buildings and roads are renamed; former heroes are denounced as villains. The heroes that I was taught about as a child, Captain Cook, and colonisation have a very different interpretation today. That might be a good thing. But the the modern world wants us to be pure, untainted, uncontaminated. This is the purity spiral. People work harder and harder to disassociate themselves from the impure, the offensive. So, people are weighed down with the failure to achieve moral perfection, and often have no conception of forgiveness, and the authority of the Church to preach forgiveness is profoundly compromised by our failures. Who are we to tell other people that sins must be forgiven! How dare we?

But we are Christians, and the heart of our message is that we are a people who fail, and seek forgiveness. That’s why before communion, we say, Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world, have mercy on us. The message of our God is not that we are perfect, but that forgiveness is offered. That does not mean forgetfulness, but it means facing our sins, and learning that God’s love still shines. It’s not that you can say: “Oh, I am awfully sorry that l murdered the the archbishop” and then I tell you, “Oh, we all get carried away. It’s only an archbishop. Let’s forget it.” Forgiving means something very different. After all, the cross was a barren, sterile and meaningless act of destruction. But on Easter Sunday, Our Lord met Mary Magdalene in a garden. This was God’s irrepressible springtime. The dead wood of the cross flowered. In that moment, everything is forgiven. We do not need to forget. Our Lord still died, but he rose, and we remember that death and resurrection each time we come to the mass.

Sometimes the spring of forgiveness takes a long time to arrive. One cannot force it. We pray every day. “Forgive us our sins as we forgive those who sin against us,” but we cannot demand of other people that they forgive. That would be another form of abuse. When people are lost in the wilderness of hurt, they must be given time for forgiveness to emerge. The wounds of decades, even centuries, cannot be healed at our command, any more than can our wounded bodies. Think how long your body took to recover from your last operation. Think of the time that will be needed before the Ukrainian people, or the people of Gaza, will be able even to begin to contemplate the forgiveness of those who are even now bringing about their appalling suffering.

Forgiveness is inseparable from patience. So, becoming forgiving people is not about being forgetful. It is opening the door for God’s creative grace. It is inseparable from learning to talk to the other person who has hurt you. So that the desert of hurt be touched by spring of understanding. 

We share our faith by the way we live, and the way we live as Christians means learning about forgiveness. We believe that Our Lord gives himself to us in the sacrament so that we can become his body, but this is only done by the forgiveness of sins. As I reminded you before, we say: “Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world, have mercy on us,” but we conclude “Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world, grant us your peace,” because that is the goal of forgiveness. Not a forgetfulness, but a forgiveness that acknowledges our sins and mistakes, but finds the healing power of peace and forgiveness. Forgive us our sins, as we forgive those who sin against us.

I will finish with my favourite quote about sin by the late Bishop Fulton Sheen. He was the first of the American televangelists as we now call them, he ran a famous programme in the early days of television in the US. He said: “Our Lord came to put a harlot above a Pharisee, a penitent robber above a High Priest, and a prodigal son above his exemplary brother. To all the phonies and fakers who would say that they could not join the Church because His Church was not holy enough, He would ask, ‘How holy must the Church be before you will enter into it?’ If the Church were as holy as they wanted it to be, they would never be allowed into it! In every other religion under the sun, in every Eastern religion from Buddhism to Confucianism, there must always be some purification before one can commune with God. But Our Blessed Lord brought a religion where the admission of sin is the condition of coming to Him. ‘Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are ill.”

Based partly on a reflection by Timothy Radcliffe, OP.

The Choices – 20 July

There is a lot of eating in the Gospels. Besides the Last Supper, you have quite a few meals, such as the meal in the house of Simon the Pharisee, or Zacharias, the tax-collector, or the wedding at Cana or countless others. Well today we deal with the situation about another meal, the meal at Martha’s house.

Let’s think about who was there at that meal at Martha’s house. There would have been Martha and Mary, maybe her brother Lazarus whom Luke never mentions, and then at least the twelve that were hanging around with Jesus. So we are talking about a crowd of 15 or 16. There are always suggestions that this was not the only crowd: Mark for instance, tells of the women who travelled with Our Lord and used to provide for him out of their own means as well. So it could have been a much bigger crowd. Now any meal like that takes a bit of preparation: imagination the number of potatoes that need to be peeled, if only potatoes had been discovered by then. No one seems to be suggesting that the men should give a hand, so it was up to our hostess to do the work, with some help from her sister.

It’s always curious in this passage that the house is described as Martha’s. Was Mary just visiting as well? Or was she somehow too junior to be a co-owner, maybe much younger, someone who was there really to help in the kitchen and clean the house. If that is so, then you can imagine Martha’s indignation.

Whatever the reason, Martha has had enough and in typical fashion tries to draw in a third party to support her case. It’s called triangulation: using a third person to re-enforce your authority. Maybe you parents know how it works when you use your husband or wife to re-enforce your discipline on a child. The aim was simple: get Mary into the kitchen.

However, our Lord is not going to get into the situation of doing other people’s dirty work. He does not re-enforce Martha’s authority; instead he just tells Martha that Mary has chosen the better part.

There is an implication here: that Mary has changed and chosen something new, and Martha is the one who has not chosen, who has become stuck in a rut, a rut that here is worry about getting the meal on the table and being a good hostess.

There is also a question of timing here as well. These are not normal times. Our Lord is on the way to Jerusalem and his death. In John we have another story of Martha and Mary, the raising of their brother Lazarus, that is also seen a critical reason for the authorities wanting to put Our Lord to death. The Gospel writers seem to see Martha and Mary as being with Our Lord at a critical time as Our Lord confronts his looming death. The time is important: Our Lord is going to his final confrontation and death. There soon will be no more meals and time to hear and learn: this could be a last time and it cannot be repeated. So many times in life we wish we had had another time with a person, a chance to put things right, or learn a little more: but it is not given to us. We are given at times the awareness that this could be the last time: the chance to learn and leave in peace. This was one such moment.

There is also a progression here: Mary has chosen something new, learning to leave behind the business of life to take the moment and learn from Our Lord. It’s Martha who is still running around, doing things that are necessary, but things that can wait. Often in life we do choose the business for the silence: mainly because noise is much easier to live with than silence. In silence you need to deal with yourself and God: in the noisiness of life this can be postponed. This is why Mary has chosen the better part; she has chosen something new and is learning that listening to God is going to be more life changing for her than all the meals she can cook in the kitchen.

Scholars argue a bit about the purpose that Luke has included this story. Is he putting down women who want to be active in the Church – well, that does not tie in with the rest of the women who are presented in the Gospel. It is Luke, after all, who tells us Our Lord’s parable about a poor widow who was so vigorous and aggressive in her demands for justice that she caused a powerful and haughty male judge to cave in. In fact, Mary, who sits at Our Lord’s feet in this story, is actually pictured in the posture of a disciple, an important role normally reserved in that day only for men. Other scholars note how it follows the parable of the Good Samaritan, who showed mercy by acts, and here the better part is not acts but learning.

I think that the balance between the two stories is important. Through the Good Samaritan we learn that we need to act to show justice and mercy: it’s not enough to walk piously away. But works by themselves are not enough: to have a balance you need also to spend time at the feet of Our Lord: learning and being quiet. In Bishop Justin Welby’s, the last Archbishop of Canterbury, first presidential address to General Synod in England, the church’s parliament, he asked that the one thing his listeners were to remember from his address, was that no revival of the church had ever happened without a revival in the prayer life and religious orders. 

For us that important to remember: we need to show forth our love of God by doing things in the world, we cannot just be armchair Christians. But we also can only achieve that when we get our prayer life in order, by remembering to sit at Jesus’s feet and listening. Indeed the Benedictine order has as its motto “Orare et laborare,” “To pray and to work.”

There are these two ways to be a Christian, equally praiseworthy, but you cannot work without the other. Mary has chosen the better part because our labour will cease, we will get too tired or old, but the Church still needs always a beating heart of prayer if it is to do its mission in the world.

Most of us do not lack in our Martha side, with word to do. But how are we looking after our Mary side? So where do you hear God’s voice? Each of us might answer that differently. If you’re having a hard time finding God, go to those places where you know God lives. Come to church, sing the hymns, take communion. Go outside and try to remember how beautiful the sky is, or the ocean, or the trees, or the hills. Enjoy the cold morning sun. Say thank you, even if you aren’t feeling thankful. Act with love, even if you aren’t feeling the love. And love will come to you.

Being Disciples – 6 July 2025

This is one of those Sundays when the readings are a little scrappy. No juicy parable to work on, instead one of those slightly rambling parts. We have part of Isaiah, a rather long book which we think was written by three different authors, this part full of beautiful imagery. Then we have the passage from Galatians, one of Paul’s earliest letters. Finally, we have the story about the sending out of the seventy, two fragments stitched together. That section is perhaps the hardest, as it has to do with St Luke’s record about how missions were sent out and also that mysterious line about seeing Satan fall from Heaven like a flash of lighting, and giving power to walk over snakes and scorpions: not perhaps the most useful modern gift to have.

Let’s consider those seventy. No doubt, they began with the expectant enthusiasm of aspiring novices, but they returned as seasoned ministers filled with genuine joy. We can discover the quality and meaning of this kind of joy as we think through the guidelines and warnings Our Lord set for them in the sending. And we can use it as the current generation of Jesus-followers.

Our Lord sent them as lambs into the midst of wolves. It was a difficult, hostile world Our Lord warned, one true in every time and place. In order to undertake the task, they had to overcome their fears with courage and resolve. Our Lord told them to travel light – no purse, bag, or sandals. In order to get the job done, they would not have time to care about material possessions or to waste time on other distractions. He ordered them, when not welcomed by a group, to wipe the dust off their feet and move on to the next place. The urgency of the moment would not allow them to linger in hopeless situations. They went out on mission. They were so successful that they returned in a spirit of joy. It wasn’t a superficial, but a deeper, satisfying, inner joy of the soul.

As the current members of the Body of Christ, we are the seventy for our generation. Our mission is not unlike that of those mentioned in St Luke’s Gospel account, and the guidelines and warnings are largely the same. We seek to serve God’s people by offering to them the good news of the Gospel, both in sharing the truth and in the actions of care and love.

We, too, go out among wolves. We live in a world that is fearful, emotionally paralysed, or aggressively angry because of a kind of shell-shock. Many of us suffer from acts of violence, near financial depression, or natural disasters.

Perhaps the hardest example to follow from St Luke is to take with us no semblance of purse, bag, or sandal. Many are afraid of loss in the midst of a materialist culture, in our desire not to give up anything of our substance, of not being willing to do without what we want and think we need. But we can easily see how the baggage of materialism can disable us from taking committed action.

Making sense of shaking dust off our feet, a practice of pious Jews during New Testament times, is also difficult. Perhaps the application for us is to make the best and wisest use of our time and energy – a prioritizing intended to maximize the effectiveness of our call to carry out God’s work.

With all this in mind, we can follow these guidelines in our efforts for Christ and to find the deepest joy that life in faith can bring. We use the challenge from Our Lord to the seventy as a model to move into our everyday world, into the lives of those around us – our friends and neighbours, strangers and enemies, sceptics and unbelievers, the poor and victims of injustice – all who are in need of God. We move forward with courage and commitment in telling others about Christ, bringing them into the life of the Church, welcoming those who come into our midst, sharing with them what we have.

Above all, it is necessary to leave behind fear of failure, the inclination to avoid acting because we are afraid that we will be embarrassed or rejected or that it will be too time-consuming or too difficult or costly. We must grasp life with joy in Christ and seize the opportunity to be among the seventy for our generation.

If we should go at our task in this way, following a modern expression of the work of the seventy, we are certain to experience the same deep, meaningful, fulfilling joy found by our forebears in the faith. Not a superficial kind of happiness or delight, but the joy that takes root deep down in our hearts.

Another link for us with the seventy and Our Lord’s instruction to them is found in his sending them out two by two. Like them, none of us acts alone in carrying out the mission and ministries of the Body of Christ. We are all in this together, and we take comfort in the partnerships we share in carrying out Christ’s charge to us as the seventy of this generation. The beauty of a true vocation, however, is that it involves all of the elements mentioned above, while looking completely unique for each person. This is a reason for excitement and joy in itself! God is excited for you to be you, and to follow the joy and passion in your heart right back to him.

Finally, Our Lord regularly tells his followers some version of be not afraid. Our story today finishes with Our Lord declaring that Satan has fallen and that nothing will bring his followers real hurt. He teaches them to rejoice over their names being secure in heaven, rather than being secure in the power they possess. Again, we must unlearn, for the world wishes to teach us that are plenty of things of which we should be afraid. Always remember that the last thing we should carry around with us is fear! Let us also do what we are meant to do—practice the habits and disciplines of the Kingdom, give witness to the hope that is in us—and live rightly, wisely, and Godly.

Peter & Paul – 29 June

Bind and unbind. They are a lovely contrast, that were used in the Gospel today, bind and unbind. I don’t know when we ever use them besides today.

We sometimes call this passage the giving of the keys of the kingdom, and it has been a significant text for Christians through the ages. It has shown that one who can deny and repent can become the surest foundation for the Church. It has been used to argue the primacy of the pope over all Christians. The power to bind and unbind has been used to excommunicate, to deprive people of the life that is offered to them in Christ.

It is a text worth understanding. Peter, especially for Matthew and Mark’s communities of the Church, had a special significance. Yet we know from Luke that he was not the paramount leader in the early Church – we have James the brother of the Lord at Jerusalem for instance and the great commission at the end of Matthew is to all the disciples. Paul also argues in his letters his right as an equal of the apostles and does not defer automatically to Peter, in fact will correct him when he is wrong. In the Gospel according to John has Peter below the beloved disciple. So Peter does not have a clear leadership role that means a primacy over the other disciples.

What happened though was that at Rome, uniquely, both Peter and Paul would die for the faith giving witness to Jesus. Other cities would have witnesses, but only at Rome would two of the greatest disciples die. Rome, the imperial capital, would have the prestige of being the leading city of the civilised world and having the witness of the blood of the two great apostles. From this all other Christians would defer and accept the voice of Rome in the controversies of the years ahead. The death of Peter with Paul would create the primacy of Rome that would in turn rely on this Gospel text.

How this pre-eminence would be exercised would change over the centuries. Popes would have a variety of titles that reflected the beliefs of the different times, from bishop of Rome, or Vicar of Peter, or the servant of servants, to the Vicar of Christ. Its primacy would be exercised in different ways through time: from a voice teaching the tradition of the apostles in the ancient world against the new heresies of that time in the great debates of the early Councils; to the mediaeval law court above all petty kings; to the power to teach infallibility of the 19^th Century; to the superstar traveller of John Paul II. The papacy has always been controversial and never ignored. It still divides Christians instead of uniting the body of Christ. We Anglicans, as in our discussions with the Roman Catholics in the ARCIC Reports, accept through tradition and Scripture that the papacy has a role in being the leader of the Church but wish for a simpler and more consensual form of that leadership. Perhaps we only wish to remake it in our own image of a sort of Archbishop of Canterbury, a reverse Anglican idolatry. Yet Pope Francis struggled hard during his years to introduce a more Anglican idea of synods into the Roman Church, not as extreme as ours but a blance.

Yet Rome’s pre-eminence is because of the martyrdom of Peter and Paul, not just Peter – we must not forget Paul, the argumentative and confronting half of that partnership. It shows that any pre-eminence must include a variety of traditions that work together despite differences.

There is another point that must not be forgotten when we look at this pair. Paul was an apostle to the Gentiles, Peter primarily to the Jews. The early Church was racked by the controversies on how these two groups were going to live together. Rome was a massive city, maybe up to a one million people, of whom 600 were the elite senators, 30,000 the equestrians, the aristocracy and maybe half a million were slaves. It is thought that those 600 senators may have owned about half of all the slaves in Rome. Many slaves would have been the early Christians. We suspect that there were many different Christian churches in the city. It could have easily evolved into a fragmented church with Jewish Christians and Gentiles in separate churches: but the death of both apostles there, would unite it to make one church for the whole city.

For Anglicans and Roman Catholics need a primacy based on Rome. Roman Catholics are increasingly disregarding the teachings of Rome as they reject its moral certainties in favour of a more pluralistic understanding of what is right and wrong. It is sometimes called supermarket spirituality, in that you only take the goods you like, or amusement park spirituality, in that you only take the rides that you want. They find the papacy too confining and accept only part of its teaching. Anglicans are becoming increasingly hostages to the enculturation of local moralities – we are too concerned about what is right for us in one place and culture rather than what is right for all Christians – we find that the structures we have evolved lack central authority. We need new mechanisms to make us remember that we are part of a Catholic Church, which means that we cannot allow our own opinions to exist without being tested by the wider Church. In an ideal Christendom we need a papacy to hold us together. Yet as Churches we are drifting further apart rather than closer. It is particularly sad in our own country that the two great ecumenical ventures of joint theological colleges in Melbourne and Adelaide have both failed.

Yet there is hope. Hope in the strength of different friendships that have formed over the last fifty years since the opening of Vatican II. Christians worship and deal with each other in ways that would once have been impossible. This growing closeness with the urge to share communion is at times stamped upon by those in authority. Yet it continues and is a hope for the future. It’s very much Peter and Paul, different traditions, coming together.

What we must do is to be a Church that holds together and can change – we need our Peters and our Pauls. We also have to be Catholic, to see beyond our own local beliefs and test our morality on universal beliefs, such as the rule of love. Whenever Christians begin to cite isolated passages of Scripture feel uneasy. Even the devil can quote Scripture. We also have to continue to find bridges to share our life with other denominations. We also need to remember that Peter and Paul were humans who sinned and failed at times yet overcame these failures to hold the faith. They may be weak links, but no chain is stronger than its wekest links, and their weakness was overcome by the strength of faith. Finally, we have to pray, and remember that Christ desires and demands that we be one body.

Peter and Paul died together in Rome, the imperial capital of an ancient empire. They were not always harmonious in their beliefs. One was the rock of the Church, one the apostle to the gentiles. Both together created a new centre for the Church. So bind and unbind, bind our hopes together to be one church as we unbind our prejudices of the past and pray again that we may be one as our Lord prayed.

The Trinity – 15 June

There is much theology that treats the Trinity as a mathematical game, trying to work out how three can be one and one can be three. But maths, important as it is for many things, is not the way of salvation.

Holy Mother Church, of course, didn’t preach the Trinity just to solve a mathematical puzzle; the Church preached the Trinity because that seemed to be the best, maybe the only way, to preach salvation. Our Lord Jesus, a human being, was so God-like that his followers concluded that he wasn’t just like God but was God.  It started when, among other things, when Our Lord walked on water and stilled the waves of the Sea of Galilee. That isn’t normal human behaviour. Then his resurrection showed conclusively that this man was indeed God. Then Our Lord sent the Holy Spirit, the Advocate, to do the godlike things he had done. So it was that the disciples experienced three Persons acting like God in a way that only God could act. That’s why theologians have been trying to do the maths ever since. But to help the maths, tradition gives us the Creeds, from the early Church the Apostles’ and Nicene, and later the Athanasian, to make us remember what it means. The Apostles’ Creed goes way back to the early days of the Church, and is the statement of faith for those being baptised, to show they understand who God as Father, Son and Holy Spirit. The Nicene Creed came later, originating at a Council at Nicaea near modern Istanbul in 325, at the time of the peace of the Church after the great persecutions, to help unite all the different Christians by remembering how God was. It was originally a profession of faith for bishops to make sure they understood. We are celebrating this year the 1700^th anniversary of this Creed, as we had our studies on that during Lent. The Athanasian Creed came later for us Westerners in the Middle Ages.

But let’s reflect on one of the most important of the godlike acts of Our Lord and the Holy Spirit. It’s easiest to start thinking first about Our Lord, who as human and therefore the most approachable.

Our Lord had trouble with the religious authorities for many things, but probably the most serious of them was claiming the power to forgive sins. He did this when the paralytic was brought down through the roof by his friends so that he might be healed, (Mk. 2:5) and he did it again when the sinful woman poured perfume over his feet at the house of Simon. (Lk. 7:47) The Pharisees were incensed because Our Lord, a human being, was doing what only God could do. Only God could forgive sins and Our Lord had, in fact, done what only God could do.  Before he died, Our Lord promised to send the Holy Spirit to be an Advocate who would lead them further into the truth of who Jesus was. When the risen Our Lord breathed on the disciples in the upper room, he passed on to them and, through them to us, the ministry of forgiveness of sins. (Jn. 20:22–23) Fifty days later, Peter exercised this power to forgive sins when his listeners asked him what they needed to do to be saved. (Acts 2:38)

In one sense then, the Trinity is not a mathematical puzzle but a story of sin, forgiveness and love. In the Old Testament, in spite of some outbursts of anger, God claimed to be a God who was full of loving kindness and mercy. The attitude of the Pharisees towards the paralytic and the sinful woman suggests that they thought forgiveness should stay up in the heavens where it belonged and not get mixed up with humans on the earth. In our angrier moments we can feel the same way. But God’s mercy did get mixed up with humanity: first in the person of Our Lord and then in the disciples through the Gift of the Holy Spirit. So it is that we humans are given the Gift, not only of having our sins forgiven, but we have the Gift of forgiving the sins of other people. Note that it isn’t we who forgive, but it is God who forgives through us. That is, the divine act of forgiveness that came the earth in the person of Jesus has, like the Holy Spirit, spread throughout the whole world. That the greatest gift in a world that holds on to hates and vengeance, that wants to kill enemies, bomb their cities and never forget.

We must remember that nothing is more true, life-giving and comforting to us than the presence of the Holy Trinity in our lives, the source of love and this desperately needed forgiveness. Nothing, in fact, can exist or act or become perfect without the three divine Persons, without God, so that Saint Paul does not hesitate to say that “in him, in fact, we live, we live, and we are” (Acts 17:28).

God is near and we think far away. It is in reality and in events and we seek it in dreams and impossible utopias. That’s like getting lost in a maths problem and not coming back to the application.

Saint Augustine of Hippo, the great African theologian of the 5th C, said that we are led to a God who “Lover (Father), Beloved (Son) and Love (Holy Spirit)”), a God who is love and dialogue, not only because he loves us and converses, but because in himself is a dialogue of love and therefore forgiveness. But this not only renews our understanding of God, but also the truth of ourselves. If the Bible repeats that we should live in love, in dialogue, and in communion, it is because it knows that we are all “images of God”. To meet God, to experience God, to speak of God, to give glory to God, all this means – for a Christian who knows that God is Father, Son, and Spirit – to live in a constant dimension of love and forgiveness. The Trinity is a truly wonderful mystery: revealing God to us, it has revealed who we are.

Forgiveness is the air we breathe. Unfortunately, just as we can pollute the air, we can pollute the breath of the Holy Spirit through our own anger. But fortunately, there is no getting rid of God’s mercy and love. It is all around us and we can breathe it any time we wish. And when we wish it and breathe in the Spirt, we share the life of the Holy Trinity with other people and so help them share the same forgiving life.

Revelation – 25 May, 2025

One of the little things I always like teaching is how to remember the number of books in the Bible. Well, when you look at the titles “New Testament” and “Old Testament,” there are three letters in “new” and “old” and nine in “testament.” Then all you have to remember is that the Old Testament has 39, the New Testament has the multiple of the letters, so three nines make 27. So 39 books in the Old and 27 in the New. I’m going to skip the Apocrypha at the moment like a good Protestant, but there are 14 there. That number is harder to remember.

Now another curious thing about these numbers is that when you add them, 39 and 27 make 66, and the number 666 is talked about in the 66^th book of the Bible, the Book of the Apocalypse, or the Revelation of St John. By the way, this St John is almost certainly not the same writer St John of the Gospel and letters. We are using the Book of Revelation during the end of the Easter season, as the Church starts to look forward to the coming of the Spirit at Pentecost. This book was perhaps the last book to be taken into the Bible as we know it: and even then it’s had a history, being loved by all the wrong people. The Protestant reformer Martin Luther described it as “neither apostolic nor prophetic. My spirit cannot accommodate itself to this book. I stick to the books which present Christ to me clearly and purely.” Martin Luther was very heavily into Romans and justification of faith, and as a result didn’t like Revelation or the Letter of St James either which didn’t fit into his theology as easily. He even called James “an epistle of straw.” John Calvin, who we very ecumenically remember this week in the calendar of holy people and saints despite being a heretic, wrote commentaries on every book in the New Testament, except Revelation. Today, among Eastern Orthodox believers Revelation is the only book that they don’t read in their public liturgy. But there is a sort of poetic balance here – we start in Genesis with the Garden of Eden and we finish in Revelation in the City of God, and our journey is from one to another.

But amongst the loonies Revelation has been well loved. The two churches most common for sending its members knocking on doors to “evangelise,” Seventh Day Adventists and Jehovah’s Witnesses, nearly always begin their door spin with Revelation.

More troubling is the extent to which Revelation still fascinates large numbers of contemporary evangelical Christians, especially in the United States, as seen in the Left Behind series of books. That view that Christians will be taken suddenly, the rapture, is one that only originated in the 19^th C and was popularised in the late 20^th but has no place in mainstream Christian belief.

But that’s not what the book is about. The Book of Revelation shows us a picture of the beastly powers of violence finally collapsing into their own hell-hole of violence, together with a plea to the faithful to maintain their faith. In the midst of relating his vision, John of Patmos pauses to speak directly to those faithful:

Let anyone who has an ear listen: If you are to be taken captive, into captivity you go; if you kill with the sword, with the sword you must be killed. Here is a call for the endurance and faith of the saints. (Rev 13:9-10)

Could the call to nonviolence be any clearer? Yet the images of violence, including the possibility of divine vengeance, seem to overpower such a call to nonviolence. How does one sort through this barrage of images that are rather foreign to our modern worldview? For those who see the New Testament as a call to nonviolence, being able to interpret the Book of Revelation as part of that overall message depends primarily on a strategy of seeing how Revelation takes violent apocalyptic imagery from the Hebrew tradition and means to subvert it from within, primarily through the dominant actor in Revelation, the Lamb slain. It’s that Lamb who was slain who is the light of the Temple that we heard in our second reading today.

The point of Revelation is that it is conveying to us, that the terrifying violence that we so often face in this world is decidedly not God’s violence but the violence of empires under the deception of Satan, the dragon. Earthly empires need to resort to violence: heavenly ones do not. God’s defeat of that violence is not one of superior firepower, of simply having more of the same kind of violence to subdue that of the empires. God’s defeat of violence is to expose it through the love of the Lamb slain, whose self-giving love lets itself be slaughtered by the violence, and the Lamb’s resurrection shows its power of life to be victorious. Disciples of the Lamb follow, not in a hope that there would be a different kind of victory someday, a victory in which the Lamb became a Lion and devoured all its enemies. That’s not what it is about. But followers of the Lamb believe that his slaughter and resurrection have already won the victory, so that we wait with endurance and hope, following in the Lamb’s loving nonviolence if we must, until the day when Satan’s violence finally becomes its own defeat, collapsing in on itself.

Revelation begins to subvert this hope right from the very beginning with the one who has truly won God’s victory on the cross, the Lamb slain. And the Lamb is never portrayed as someday coming back like a lion. Even the great battle in heaven, when Michael fights against the dragon makes the point that the victory is not by force, but by the blood of the Lamb. (Rev. 12:7-12)

This is why in Our Lord’s ministry he does not fight. It is the self-giving of Our Lord through his death for us that brings about the resurrection. Exposed by the greater power of loving self-giving, human beings need no longer look to the Satanic powers of violence as heavenly powers. Duped by the beastly deception, we will continue to be led astray for a time. But the battle has already been fought and won, signified by Michael and the angels throwing Satan out of heaven. And was this victory won by superior divine firepower? No, the nature of the victory is made crystal clear: “they have conquered him by the blood of the Lamb and by the word of their testimony, for they did not cling to life even in the face of death.” It is a continuation of the ministry begun on this earth by Our Lord and furthered through his disciples – his witnesses (martyr in the Greek) – who continue in his way of loving self-giving instead of hate-filled vengeance.

This way of discipleship is obviously not an easy choice. It requires great faith indeed. We love the idea of a sacred divine violence, a Lion of Judah, to attack and destroy evil-doers, is a hope deeply engrained in our way of creating gods to justify our own violent actions against enemies. The Satanic powers of violence have been our heavenly powers since the foundations of our human worlds. But God the Father doesn’t work like that. He gives his Son, Our Lord, into the hands of those who make him a sacrifice. Then that Son, Our Lord, the Lamb, rises again at Easter to unveil that violence. We are then shown that God is not about violence, not about legality, but about the heavenly power of unconditional love and forgiveness, a revelation that continues to take place through the work of the Holy Spirit that we now turn for and wait at Pentecost. We worship the Lamb slain, the great symbol of Revelation.

Based on a paper by Paul John Nuechterlein of the Lutheran Church in the USA.

Nicaea 1700 – 18 May, 2025

In the Gospel Passion of Our Lord according to St Matthew, there is a mention of Pilate’s wife. We don’t know anymore abut her except this slight reference, presumably she was travelling with her husband Pontius Pilate during his his term as governor in Judaea. Roman women were often very political, and capable politicians in their own rights, and it is not surprising that she would be advising her husband. In the Gospel, when Pilate is wondering what to do with Our Lord after he had been accused by the priests, she sends him word to do nothing with this man, for she has suffered much in her dreams about him.

However, as we know, Pilate does condemn Our Lord to death – this will be not the last time that a husband ignores his wife’s good advice, I am sure.

So what was the dream that Pilate’s wife suffered?

Well, of course there is a legend for this. The legend was that she heard countless voices, thousands of thousands, millions, all chanting the same words over and over throughout time, “and was crucified under Pontius Pilate.” She understood that Pilate was to be remembered, that both of them were to be remembered, as the person who condemned Our Lord to death for all time.

We say these words, week in and out, standing and facing East, because they form part of the creeds, and in particular the Nicene Creed that we use on Sundays.

This month marks the opening of the Council of Nicaea 1700 years ago. This was the first in seven of what we call the Ecumenical Councils, meetings of the church to try and work out common policies in the first millennium.

So, why was a Council needed? The recognition of Christianity by the Emperor Constantine in 313 as the favoured state religion meant not only a period of peace after the persecutions but also imperial patronage – for example the basilicas in Rome were built (Old St Peter’s and the Lateran for example) and the great churches in Jerusalem and Bethlehem. It also meant that Christian clergy were accorded new status and legal exemptions. This meant that there was an influx of new converts and clergy, some of whom may have not been tested candidates.

This also led to a growing controversy about some theological questions about the nature of Christ – was he fully equal to God the Father or a later created being and therefore inferior. This question would have profound implications of the nature of how God accepted us – if Christ were inferior, it implied that the acceptance of humanity was also inferior.

There were also disputes about keeping a common date for Easter and the discipline of bishops.

In other words there was a mess, and emperors being emperors, they wanted a tidy system, so Constantine offered to fund a giant get-together in one of his palaces near his capital of Constantinople, at a place called Nicaea. 

The expenses of the council, including the travel of the bishops, were paid by the imperial treasury. Contemporary reports of attendance range from 250 to 300, with the figure of 318 traditionally accepted. 318 is also the number of members of Abraham’s household given in the Book of Genesis, so it’s a good number. With priests and deacons attending each bishop, the total attendance may have been between 1200 and 1900. Most of the bishops were eastern, that is Greek, with about twenty from Egypt and Libya, another fifty from Palestine and Syria, and more than one hundred from Asia Minor. One bishop each from Persia and Scythia, outside the empire, were present. 

The Council formulated a creed, a declaration and summary of the Christian faith. From earliest times, various creeds served as a means of identification for Christians, as a means of inclusion and recognition, especially at baptism. In Rome, for example, the Apostles’ Creed was popular, especially for use in Lent and the Easter season. In the Council of Nicaea, one specific creed was used to define the Church’s faith clearly.

It was an attempt to define what it meant to believe in Christ.

Now, it was initially not very successful. The section stating the Jesus was one substance with the Father was particularly troubling for some, but this eventually was accepted as it stated in the clearest possible way that Jesus was fully equal to the the Father, the basis of believing in One God in three persons, Father, Son and Holy Spirit. It also held to the principal of the total acceptance of humanity by God – God in the person of Jesus came and accepted us totally by becoming human, not by sending some angel or some spirit, but by living as one of us totally identifies with us. This assures us of God’s acceptance of us and also allows us, through Our Lord’s divinity, to share in that divine possibility of eternal life and forgiveness of sins. God has become one of us so we can become divine.

Initially the Creed that we use was not widely used, and it was amended slightly later at another Council. But then it became a touchstone for bishops, so they would recite it at their consecration to show that they were orthodox. Then it finally spread to the liturgies, especially in the time of Charlemagne in German and France around the early 800s, and from there it spread to the Western Church. So Anglicans, in the tradition of western orthodoxy, included it in our prayer books, and we are meant to say every Sunday.

Except many do not.

Many parishes in recent years have become lukewarm about theology. Things like the Creed are seen as too hard or divisive. So the Nicene Creed is omitted or replaced with some easier statement of faith that is not backed by the tradition of the council or the Book of Common Prayer.

Yet faith needs guidelines.

What we believe in is important. 

Faith is like the ocean; you never reach the depths of find the end.

This is why things like the Nicene Creed are important and need to be said regularly. It is said not because we easily understand it, we say the creeds because they are lighthouses to faith, calling us to navigate the oceans of faith and knowledge. Faith is a journey for life, and there are countless possibilities, some good and some evil as we explore the spiritual life. But exploration needs the beacons of tradition to guide us to the paths of faith. We should never try and dumb down the faith by abolishing or neglecting the Creeds because they provide essential lights to guide us. That’s why we are celebrating today 1700 years of the start of the Council on Nicaea and the introduction of the Creed. Generations on generations have found in the Creed the voice of the Church guiding and helping the exploration of faith. It still guides us and marks the faith that we join with the millions throughout the ages, just like the dream of Pilate’s wife, affirming the faith of the Church.

The Good Shepherd – 11 May 2025

So here we are in the Season of Easter. We have been considering the post-resurrection experiences of Our Lord and suddenly we are asked to consider Jesus as the Good Shepherd. It is such an intrusion, that we often call this Sunday, “Good Shepherd Sunday” just so people will know it going to be different.  But what does the Good Shepherd could possibly have to do with the Resurrection?

Now, think about the after-tomb experiences that the disciples had with Our Lord. How he appeared mysteriously and almost magically in locked rooms, on the road, on the beach; always encountering the disciples. It makes me wonder if I were Our Lord, if I would really have wanted to go back and hang out with the people who had betrayed, denied and deserted me as a crucified criminal. People who, apart for the women, left me for dead! I am not sure that being with my fickle followers would have made my favourite list. But, that is just me musing of course. I am sure more forgiving people would do as Our Lord did.

But if Our Lord weren’t the Good Shepherd, he wouldn’t have stayed around to heal, reconcile and commission a community of failures into the Church. He would have headed straight for heaven instead.

Not the Good Shepherd though, the Good Shepherd who has “the power to lay down his life and the power to take it up again” who picks up loving and caring; cajoling and commissioning; just where he left off before they strung him up and left him for dead.

Let’s also do some pondering about sheep though. As Australians we have many sheep images: from folk songs like Waltzing Matilda and the Eat Lamb for Australia Day ads. We also have images of pretty little lambs from a range of cultural backgrounds as well.

So when we think about sheep, we probably think mainly about lamb chops and wool. That’s our modern take. But when you take it back in antiquity, sheep wool wasn’t the modern fleeces of Merinos, and people weren’t doing lamb chops on the BBQ. Sheep were primarily about blood sacrifice. The Temple of Jerusalem consumed sheep non-stop.

Do you remember what the very first words spoken to Our Lord are in the Gospel of John? Our Lord is walking down to the River Jordan to be baptized, and John the Baptist looks up and shouts out, “Behold the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world!” This will be in the background now throughout John’s Gospel — Jesus, the Lamb of God — even here in chapter 10 as Our Lord is proclaiming himself to be the Good Shepherd. The Good Shepherd who lays down his life for the sheep, mind you. We can begin to see more clearly how and why a Good Shepherd lays down his life for the sheep when we also know him as the Lamb of God, the one who hands himself over to the sacrificial machinery to be the Passover Lamb for us.

The passage today from John 10 is part of a bigger passage when Our Lord tells the people that he is the Good Shepherd and also the Gate for the sheep. The story starts by the Sheep Gate in Jerusalem, the place where the sheep were driven into the city in preparation for the sacrifices at the Temple. The imagery of this passage takes place not in wide open fields with woolly lambs but with frightened sheep awaiting sacrifice.

Think then of the gate or gatekeeper that Our Lord calls himself. This gate, the Gate to the Temple, is where the shepherd finally leaves his sheep for good — or for ill, when you’re a sheep. The shepherd does not enter the stockyard with his sheep. He abandons them to the slaughter.

But Our Lord is the Good Shepherd who walks right in that gate with the sheep and “goes ahead of them,” out the other side of the holding pen into the Temple courtyard to be slaughtered. So, Our Lord isn’t just laying down his life out in the field for some dangerous wolf. The most dangerous place for a sheep in Our Lord’s day was out in the Temple courtyard. The wolves are already a metaphor for the sacrificers who come to slaughter the lambs in the sacrificial machinery. Our Lord lays down his life as the Lamb of God on the altar of sacrifice.

There has been a barrage of imagery in the Good Shepherd speech: shepherds and sheep; gated pens and pastures; hired hands, thieves, and wolves; life and death. Our Lord switches between the two main images in this chapter: he’s the Good Shepherd who walks into the sheep yard, and then, all of a sudden, he’s the gate. Why the gate? Notice the sheep going freely in and out from shelter to pasture and back again? They no longer will be herded to the altar of sacrifice. In Jerusalem, the place of slaughter for sheep, Our Lord is saying that the sacrifices will end, and the sheep will be led out again. The sheep have had enough. They are no longer needed. The sheep, us, now have a relationship with the Good Shepherd, who can lead them out of the place of sacrifice, because he too is the Lamb of god who has been sacrificed.

It all comes down to a relationship. He knows them, each of them.  He knows us best and loves us the most.

Religion is not about reward and punishment. Some of us believe that we are going to heaven or to hell. Some of us believe that what we do determines whether we go to heaven or to hell. It’s called a work righteousness.

Some of us believe that if we should go to church and put money in the plate we are in the fold. It is simply not true. This text tells us about the relationship. The relationship is about love…God’s love for us and our love for him.

We cannot save ourselves. We cannot confess enough. We cannot repent enough. There is not enough water to save us. You, me – we all are saved by grace, the grace and the love of God.

Now in response to that grace, in response to that love that knows no limits, we do confess, we do repent, we are baptised, we even get confirmed! We commit ourselves to Christ and to his Church – all in response to the love we have received.

Relationship…Our relationship with God Almighty and with the Son, through the Spirit. That is what this text is about. Do you love God more than life? Are you willing to follow Christ no matter where that takes you? Are you ready to feed his sheep and tend his lambs? Are you ready to think of yourself last instead of first? When is the last time you made a sacrifice for heaven’s sake?

Relationships…Are you ready to give all you have and all you are and all you will ever be to the Lord who gave his life for you?

I don’t understand those who fuss about coming to mass and then complain when someone has a deathbed conversion and all they’re saying is that it is not fair. Yet, there is no greater privilege than to come to God’s house to worship with God’s people.

I know that God loves me, that God provides for me, that God protects me from myself. He is calling my name. I recognise his voice and yet I bolt off alone at times, heading for disaster.

Good people of God –  God is calling your name. God knows you. You are part of his flock. You know his voice. He leads you out of the place of death. It is all about relationship. Come on home.

Easter Saints – Easter 2, 27 April

If you look at your pew sheets for the week ahead, we have an abundance of saints coming up. In part, this is because during the week before Easter, called Holy Week, and the week after, called Easter Week or occasionally Bright Week, no saints days are observed because we concentrate solely on the journey to the Cross and resurrection, culminating in the three great days, called the triduum. So, all the saints days get pushed out of the way, either dropped altogether or held over, like our own St George’s Day which is pushed from 23 April to the next available Sunday, that being next Sunday 4 May.

So, we have coming up this week: St Mark, Evangelist and Martyr from the early church; Peter Chanel, religious, missionary in the South Pacific, martyr, who died in 1841; Catherine of Siena, Mystic, Teacher, 1380; Pandita Mary Ramabai, translator of the Scriptures, 1922, Philip And James, Apostles And Martyrs, Athanasius, Bishop of Alexandria, Teacher of the Faith, 373 and our own George, Martyr, Patron Saint, circa 304. So, a lot of people in the seven days following.

Now Mark was the writer of the Gospel of his name and legend has it that he went to Alexandria in Egypt and was martyred there in around 68. He is still revered as the founder of the Coptic Church. Peter Chanel was a Marist Father, who was a missionary to the Pacific, and was martyred in the Hoorn Islands, close to Tonga. He was the first martyr in the Pacific islands (and Captain Cook does not count). Catherine of Sienna was a mystic who convinced the pope to return to Rome and make it again it the centre of the Church again after they had relocated to Avignon in France. She died in 1380. Pandita Mary Ramabai was a high caste Hindu woman who converted to Christianity and became an advocate for women’s rights in India, and translating the Scriptures, dying in 1922. Philip and James were apostles, and it’s easy to be confused about James and there were possibly three of them who are counted as apostles, then Athanasius, who was a bishop who was a great orthodox writer but rather argumentative. As for George: well, I will leave that till next week, and we will see what our visitor serves us up.

This group relate to the Gospel today because they all have to do with belief and doubt. All of them had struggles in the religious life, from Mark the Jew learning what it means to follow Jesus. The Gospel reading today, the second Sunday of Easter, is always on the story of Thomas from John’s Gospel, as it deals with doubt and faith.

One of the distinctive characteristics of the Gospels, is that they do not sugar coat the disciples. They are presented as people who fail: fail but getup and try and gain. We see that time and time again particularly for Peter, from the incident of walking of the water to his denial three times on the night that Our Lord was arrested. Today we have the story of Thomas, who does not accept the good news second-hand, but only when he sees Our Lord directly.

The two appearances of Our Lord recounted in the Gospel today start with Our Lord saying, “Peace be with you,” and the obvious joy the disciples have when they see the Risen Lord. The first time Our Lord gives them the gift of the Spirit, and in the second Thomas confesses, “My Lord and my God!” The resurrection of the Lord changes the disciples dramatically. They now know that death could not hold Our Lord, and that he is God indeed. This changes them from a frightened group hiding behind locked doors, as we heard today, to disciples who would go out into the world and die for their faith. 

This is the story of the Cross. We take up our cross in life, but we do so, knowing about the Risen Lord. It is that hope of resurrection, that hope of meeting Our Lord, that gives us the courage to undertake the Cross that we bear in life. The Gospels show the transforming power of belief. It changes Thomas from a sceptic to a missionary, and it would go on the change Mark as he became the bishop to the Egyptians, Peter Chanel, who left the comfort of France and his parish to work and die in the other side of the world so others could find the faith, Catherine of Siena, who had the courage as a woman in the Middle Ages to reprove the pope; Pandita Mary Ramabai, who would challenge the conventions of Hindu life in India, or Athanasius as he struggled to hold his church together against the whims of the Roman Emperor who thought he had better theology.

This is why the Gospels are still read, day by day, Sunday by Sunday, Easter by Easter, so we can learn the path of the Cross. We must embrace the sufferings that come our way and learn that there is always hope and new life, faith and resurrection, on the other side. Yes, it would always be easier to deny the Cross. We can take our pieces of sliver and betray. We can stay where we are comfortable. We can ask for more and more proof until we can put our hand in Our Lord’s side. But this is turning our backs on the greatest gift that can be offered, the love of God that gives resurrection when all hope seems lost.

The most important thing that the gospel stories tell us about the power of the resurrection is that our choices in Christ are worth it; worth even for dying. Death is not the fearful end for us; death is only the welcome to new life in Christ. Faith can be a tremendous risk: to learn forgiveness, to let go of bitterness, to have courage, to find joy when it seems impossible.

This week we also remember Pope Francis who died last Monday, in Easter week, a very auspicious time to die. I mentioned that one of the saints of this week was Catherine of Sienna, who died in 1380. She had a profound influence on the popes of her time, unusually for a woman. She was one of 25 children and a mystic, who also convinced the pope of that time, Gregory XI, to relocate to Rome. For the last century or so the popes had lived in Avignon in France and she helped convince the pope that he, like any bishop, had to live in his city. That had not lived there because Rome was an unsafe place, and France was much easier. However, thanks to her, he returned. It was not easy, Gregory did not like Rome and wanted to return, but then died, and then some cardinals did return and elected one pope, and the Roman cardinals elected another, starting a long fight. But she had faith that this was the right decision, and eventually the popes did remain in Rome, thanks to her courage and faith. She did not live to see all of this as she also died two years after Gregory. But faith is like that, it goes on with God’s plan after death.

God’s Answer – Easter Day

Alleluia! Christ is risen! But as today’s Gospel begins, no one gets that yet. Mary Magdalene came to the tomb this morning, not to rejoice, but to weep and mourn. The man whom she believed to be the Messiah, the Eternal King, the Son of God, had been arrested, beaten, humiliated, and killed as a criminal. “How could it be,” she must have asked herself, “that one so good, so wise, so holy and loving could have been so wrong about who he proclaimed himself to be?” if so, what did discipleship mean?

One might answer her that Our Lord’s teaching was the point of being a disciple, and it’s true that, if the world one day woke up and took the teachings of Our Lord seriously — if every single human began to love God with heart, soul, mind, and strength, and love their neighbours as themselves — then planet Earth would immediately start to look like paradise. If everyone followed commandments like “Give to all who ask of you,” and “let someone strike you 70 times 7 times before striking back,” hunger, violence, and poverty would become distant memories, unimaginable concepts from the bad old days. If everyone lived in a state of constant prayer, if everyone were aflame with the love of God, all lives would overflow with meaning and joy. 

And yet, after nearly 2000 years of Christian history, after the Holocaust and Stalinism, even as we watch the continuing horrors of three years’ war in the Ukraine, or over a years’ horror in Gaza, we humans seem to be more inhumane to one another than ever. If the innocent continue to suffer and die — even in an era in which the Bible is the most read book on the planet, and Christian churches can be found in every corner of the globe — then how successful has Christ’s teaching been? Thus far, it seems that the only person who wholly took it to heart was Our Lord Himself. If Our Lord’s ethical teaching were the entire point of his life, it doesn’t seem to have changed the world very much. 

The problem isn’t that Christians haven’t heard the teachings of Christ, but that we have a bigger, more pressing force pushing us away from obedience to him. Behind every human decision to seek revenge, to hoard our wealth, to look out for number one, evil gives us fear – fear that perhaps I won’t have enough for myself, fear that if I let others walk all over me, I’ll be trampled. This fear of violence and privation is ultimately the fear of death. Our mortality looms over us and keeps us from trusting in the words of Christ. In a perfect world, we would be selfless, but here and now, we tell ourselves, self-preservation must come first. 

St Paul tells us that if Christ had not risen from the dead, our faith would have been in vain. If there should be no Easter morning, if the resurrection of Our Lord had not happened, then Christians would be, “of all people most to be pitied.” This is not because the Resurrection was a personal relief for Our Lord — this was not a disaster narrowly averted, like a patient who dies upon an operating table but is resuscitated by doctors. Nor is this because the Resurrection is a display of Our Lord’s great power or proof that he is indeed the Son of God.

Instead, if the Resurrection had not happened, Christians would have been the most pathetic people of all time, St Paul says, because the Resurrection of Christ is God’s answer to all human suffering, is God’s solution to injustice, is God’s destruction of all of the evil and horror of the world: for in the Resurrection of Our Lord, every single one of us is freed from the power of evil and death. 

The so-called wisdom of the ages, from Plato down to The Lion King, would tell us that life is a circle: death is a natural part of life, and at death, the soul merely begins a new journey. For Christians, however, these are nothing but platitudes, lies and heresy. From the Biblical perspective, death is not natural, it is the enemy of life; death is nothing but the ruin and destruction of human beings. Humans, as God created us, are spiritual animals, embodied spirits — body and soul together — and to separate the body from the soul is to tear our humanity asunder.

Nearly two thousand years ago, a kind, loving teacher named Jesus died. He bowed his head, his body went limp, and his soul descended into the darkness of death. It was the same tragic destruction, the same horrific rending of body from soul, that millions of humans had suffered before Him, but on that day, something astonishingly new also happened. For death, as St John Chrysostom, that famous preacher and bishop of over a thousand years ago in long vanished Constantinople, famously said, “death took a body, and received God. It took earth, and encountered Heaven. It took that which was seen, and fell upon the unseen.” Our Orthodox friends still say this sermon every Easter, it’s so beautifully put. At that moment of death, the darkness of death received not only another dead human but also the fullness of God. The darkness of death was suddenly illuminated by the blinding light of Christ’s divinity, the coldness of death was set aflame by the heat of God’s love, the emptiness of death was filled by him who is the source of all that is, and death simply could not hold Christ. This was not a victory for Our Lord alone, for, at that moment, death itself was blown apart, reduced to ruin, utterly vanquished. That moment began what St Paul refers to as the defeat of the last enemy of God: the destruction of death itself.

There are ancient icons of the Resurrection which show Christ bursting forth from the tomb with the gates of death shattered at his feet. In these images, Our Lord is not alone; he holds the wrist of an old man in one hand and the wrist of an ancient woman in the other: it is Adam and Eve — symbolic of the whole human race — whom he pulls from their tombs. In the resurrection of Christ, all human nature is redeemed, is freed, from the power of death. 

Before the resurrection of Christ, the reality of death lay behind every suffering and sadness, but after the resurrection, suffering becomes a temporary tragedy. Before the resurrection of Christ, the fear of death was the most rational thing in the world; after the resurrection of Christ, we are freed to give ourselves fearlessly to others. Before the destruction of death, heroism was foolishness, self-sacrifice was insanity, but now, in the resurrection of Our Lord from the dead, we are free: free to share with him in his perfect love for others, his perfect forgiveness of others, his flagrant self-disregard, as he gives himself in love to friends and family, to annoying co-workers, to people with tiresome political perspectives, to the poor and suffering, to enemies and those who hate him. 

Easter is the greatest of all Christian feasts because, in it, human nature is transformed, we are freed for total love, total goodness, total generosity. On Easter morning, we are invited to accept this reality, to allow it to actively transform our lives: to start fresh, to begin anew. In the resurrection of Christ, we are offered the gift of eternal life, freed from the burden of fear, and invited to share in the risen life of Our Lord Christ our Saviour. 

So, St John Chrysostom proclaims to Hell and Death, “Christ is risen, and you are overthrown. Christ is risen, and the demons are fallen. Christ is risen, and the angels rejoice. Christ is risen, and life reigns. Christ is risen, and not one dead remains in the grave. For Christ, being risen from the dead, is become the first fruits of those who have fallen asleep. To Him be glory and dominion unto ages of ages. Amen.” 

Based on a sermon by Fr Bertie Pearson Georgetown, Texas.

Palm Sunday – 13 April

In the rubrics for today’s solemn mass the following note appears after the reading of the passion:

Because the procession and Passion Gospel are in themselves an eloquent proclamation of the gospel, the sermon may be omitted. 

I don’t know if be because of our extreme Protestant heritage, but I have always felt that a Sunday mass without a sermon is like scones without jam and cream. Edible, but not the best. But I sympathise with the need to allow you to get to your meals and I will not detain you for long.

One of the most important themes throughout Lent is the Cross that we must carry. A Christian is continually challenged to take up our Cross and follow our Lord. Each one of us will have a different cross, but all of them will involve some burden, some grief, some sorrow. We are challenged as Christians to take up our crosses. We can ignore this; and try to live lives that escape this challenge. But a life without a cross becomes a life without depth. The easiest way to think about this is to consider the cross of growing old. We can go for the expensive hair treatments or facelifts or try mutton dressed as lamb, but ultimately our bodies have their say. How we grow and accept the challenge of aging is a cross that we bear. We can do it with joy or anger, but age we must.

That’s the simple level. But there are other crosses that are harder, that come from life. Family problems, work problems, legal problems, health problems: there are endless ways that we are challenged in life to take up our Cross and follow Our Lord.

The Cross is a central theme in the gospel readings today. Uniquely, we have two Gospel readings in the Mass today: the entry into Jerusalem with the salutation of a king, and the death of Our Lord on the Cross. This is a juxtaposition of temptation and fulfilment. The entry into Jerusalem is a temptation to become the earthly king. Our Lord could have continued the progress into the Temple, he could have directly challenged the authorities of the world: Pilate and Herod, and become a king. He could have walked up to those doors and nothing on earth could have stopped him. He would have been the Messiah that many wanted, a ruler, an authority, a power on earth.

But we hear that Our Lord did not take up this temptation. He had already faced this temptation at the start of his ministry when Satan offered him the kingdoms of this world. But that was just between him and Satan – now he publicly refused that power.

So, the crowd then turns on him, and with the authorities, the powers of the world, manipulating, he is seized and condemned instead. The leaders and the soldiers echo the words of the Devil in the Wilderness with the Temptations, with “if you are the King of the Jews”. But Our Lord knows that his Cross is far greater than any power of the world. St Luke also records the penitent thief, asking Our Lord to remember him when he comes into his kingdom. We, also, remember Our Lord each time we take the bread and brake it. The thief receives the assurance that we all dream of having, that this day he will be with Our Lord in Paradise, the assurance that we receive his body in the sacrament today, that sacrament that is bound with his Cross. 

Our Lord has taken the Cross of Suffering, and drunken its bitter dregs, to death in agony. This was the Cross that he had to take; had to, to show his love for each of us. He could have walked down from the Cross, he could have ordered legions of angels, but his agony and refusal not to avoid the Cross is his love for each of us.

Our Lord chose the true Cross of suffering for us today. From this comes resurrection, the giving of new life and hope. This is the challenge for us when we take up our cross and follow him. We, too, can take up lesser, or easier crosses. We too can listen to the false crowds waving palms: but this is not the true Cross. If we should want to find true joy and happiness, we must tackle the hard road of the Cross that awaits us all.