Candlemas – Joy and Sorrow – 1 February, 2026

The last week has been a very hot week. If you have been driving, or even walking, it’s been quiet. But it’s also interesting to see who else is out: children to school, or a neighbour walking the dog very early or very late. But think: every person you pass by offers a fleeting opportunity for a life-changing encounter—a glance, a word, an accidental entanglement that might mean nothing or everything. And while most of those encounters will never materialize, their promise makes the air thick with hope and intrigue, like the stillness before a summer thunderstorm that never seems to come this year. There is mystery and there is revelation in the city streets for the one who is willing to walk them.

And so it is for the Holy Family in today’s Gospel passage, moving through the crowds of Jerusalem with an infant in tow, headed to the temple to fulfil a ritual obligation. Dust and splattered mud. The smell of market stalls and incense. Livestock and oven smoke. Voices laughing, arguing, negotiating the price of wheat. A city, in all its vulgarity and glory and capacity for surprise.

Then, as they enter the temple, a man steps into their path. A stranger, yes, but there must have been something about him—an air of trustworthiness and devotion—because Mary places her precious child into his arms while Joseph stands there, quizzically holding the turtledoves as the unheeding crowds in the temple courtyard rush past. The old man is rapturous at first, praising God, saying something to himself about light and promises and the Gentiles. Mary can tell from his expression, though: he knows. He knows this is not just any child. He knows who her son truly is.

But this is not the end of the encounter.

For then, the aged Simeon looks at the hopeful face of Our Lord’s mother and utters the words she must hear, the words that she never wanted to hear:

“This child is destined for the falling and the rising of many in Israel, and to be a sign that will be opposed so that the inner thoughts of many will be revealed– and a sword will pierce your own soul too.”

This is what might happen when we meet a stranger on a city street; they might reveal the truth to us, including the truth we didn’t want to know. The truth that we must carry with us to our own cross on Golgotha.

Thus, we are left with a bit of a conundrum in our celebration of the Feast of the Presentation, Candlemas. Is it a joyful occasion? A sombre one? Can we ever fully separate between those two experiences in this Christian journey?

There is much gladness, to be sure, in both Simeon and Anna’s meeting with the Christ Child. Both of them recognize that, in this moment, what the Prophet Malachi promised has come to pass: “The Lord whom you seek will suddenly come to his temple.” Thus, God has fulfilled God’s promise to Israel; the King of Glory has come in, and redemption is at hand.

But there is also pain, or a promise of pain: those haunting words, “a sword will pierce your own soul too.” The child destined for glory is also destined for suffering, and whether Mary knows it already or not, now there is no escaping the fact: her baby will one day come back to Jerusalem for another purpose, and there will be no happy ending here. The temple priests who bless her son today will one day seek to crucify him, and there is no turning back from this.

The pain and the gladness are interwoven so very tightly, forming a pattern that is not yet discernible. There is only this moment, this encounter of blessing and dread, as the city goes about its business.

Ancient though this encounter might be, the scene could still seem familiar to us, rushing as we do through the crowded marketplace of 21st-century life. We know what it is like to go about our business, focusing on the task at hand, distracted by pain or a heartbreak or rumours of war. And just when we start to get lost in our own narrative, a stranger bumps into us and tells us something we needed to hear. It might be a kind word; it might be a sobering one. But it is something true, something that jolts us back into an understanding that our lives are not simply our own private drama to be enacted according to our preferences. We are part of a larger story, one that contains all manner of joy and sorrow, and the world will draw us into that story whether we like it or not. A sword will pierce our own souls, too, and sometimes we must be reminded of that, lest our hearts become deadened to the full scope of God’s vision.

As followers of Our Lord, in fact, we must pursue these hard and surprising encounters—we must follow the Christ Child into the temple, as it were, and see who we might encounter there to tell us about ourselves. We do this in any number of ways—by coming to church each week, by going out into the community to serve others, by taking a stand on issues of justice.

In all these activities and many more, we are placing ourselves in a vulnerable position that risks the likelihood of colliding with wise and terrifying strangers. We must be mindful about doing this, especially now, because in an era of echo chambers and increasing isolation, to do so is decidedly countercultural.

But we know that if we should not, the Simeons and the Annas of the world will never find us. We will never rejoice with them; we will never see what they see; we will never understand ourselves through the reflection of their piercing gaze.

So, on this day, on a feast that contains both joy and sorrow, in a temple that contains both blessing and burden, we learn this: in the city, as in all of life, there is much to be found. Some of it is wondrous, and some of it is disturbing. There are strangers around every corner, and every so often, one of them will stop us in our tracks and change our story forever.

There is danger here, and banality, and distraction, and, yes, goodness. God can be found it all of it, though, and the fundamental lesson is that we must present ourselves in its midst, in the cacophony, in the muddy streets, in the jostling sea of searching souls—we must make our way to the temple and allow our fragile hearts to be pierced, because somehow that is the only way we can live. For we know, that despite the pain and the suffering, Our Lord has taken that pain and suffering, taken even the sword that pieced his mother’s heart, and the hearts of all parents throughout time. But it is redeemed. For the Cross of suffering is turned into the resurrection and new life, new hope will always be given.

Base on a sermon by the Rev’d Phil Hooper.

Conversion of Paul – 25 January

When you look through the New Testament, you notice there are twenty-seven Books. For those who cannot remember such trivial facts there is a very easy way: the words “Old Testament” has three letters then nine, and there are thirty-nine Books of the Old Testament, and there are the same number of letters in “New Testament” and three nines makes twenty-seven. See, it’s all to do with mystic numbers, but don’t ask me about the Apocrypha.

Anyway, there are twenty-seven books of the New Testament. Of these, thirteen are accredited to Paul. Now for the pendants in the congregation, I am not saying he actually wrote them all, but that is another story. So nearly half are accredited to one man.

Yet, when you look through our Calendar, we don’t get many special days dedicated to St Paul. You just get his day of martyrdom, which he shares with Peter, the 29^th June, and today. Peter, in contrast, gets last Sunday for his confession, the feast day with Paul mentioned before and the more obscure feast of the Chains of Peter on 16^th January, which is so obscure that not even we keep it. But at least it is one ahead. Whereas Our Lady gets days popping up all over the year.

When you come down to it, though, Paul is just not a cuddly saint. Our Lady is an easy one to love. One can sympathise with Peter, his fallibility, his trust in the Lord, his impetuousness; but Paul is not easy. 

So today is the festival when we brush up why we should like Paul. The first thing to remember is that he is Jewish. This forms his whole attitude: he is a man versed in Scripture and he is what we would now call a Rabbi, a man who had studied the Law under the best of his time, Gamaliel, mentioned in the reading. This made him a biblical lawyer, a man who knew his way round the Bible and could argue every passage. If you ever should have the chance to read any of the Chaim Potok books, you will get a sense of what this means, the great ability to immerse yourself in the Law and how they argue and fight it out all the time. They are some great novels to introduce you about Hassidic Judaism. Being a Rabbi in this sense is a very robust skill – you are meant to be able to publically argue what you believe.

So when Paul was converted, the Church did not just get a new convert – it got its first lawyer. That revolutionised the church. He brought with him a keen mind that systematically tested and developed its theology. The nature of Christ is that God comes to us, gives us himself, but then expects us to work out the rest. Our Lord did not give a clear guide to every facet of life: he didn’t leave writings, just the stories and the actions of baptism and the Last Supper, then he gave himself and his example, and trusts us, with the Holy Spirit and the Church, to work out the rest. 

So Paul comes and is the first one to take the events of Christ’s life and teaching, and starts to push the boundaries of what it means. He realises that is it more than being Jewish, it has a message for the whole world.

For that’s the next fact you need to remember about Paul: he was also a Roman. The Romans were great absorbers – as imperialists who adapted what they took for the better use of Empire. Paul’s Roman heritage made him aware of the underlying Greek philosophy of current thought and of Greaco-Roman social structures. You see it all the time in his letters. Take for instance his greetings: grace and peace to you – grace being a Greek greeting and peace being a Jewish greeting. Or his use of the idea that we are the adopted children of God: Jews don’t adopt, that is Greaco-Roman legality. Even his change of name may be a Roman motivation: some scholars think he changed his name from Saul to Paul not to show a new start (like Abram to Abraham in the Old Testament, but that seems a very archaic precedent) but rather because he was using it as a sign of having a new patron, the pro-consul Sergius Paulus, who Paul converted as mentioned in Acts, and whose family was influential around Antioch in Pisidia, an area in modern Turkey where Paul did a lot of his ministry. This may explain the rather odd usage in Galatians, which we heard to today, where Paul keeps referring to Peter as Cephas, the title given him by our Lord for Rock: as a man who also has taken on a patron’s name he would have been used to and happy to use other people names that were used to symbolise patronage – in this case emphasising Peter’s patronage by our Lord as the prophesied Rock of the Church.

Paul achieved the fusion of thought between Jews and Gentiles: he made the theology of Jewish thought and understanding about the nature of the Messiah accessible to the wider world. If you should read the Letter to the Hebrews, (not by Paul) for example, it is totally inaccessible without an understanding of the Jewish Temple and the nature of the sacrifices offered there. Paul created a new synthesis, that allowed the wider Greaco-Roman world to understand the nature and teaching of the Jewish Messiah. 

Paul’s writings have been used by a variety of theologians. Most of the Reformation teaching of justification by faith alone started by Luther are from Paul. Modern commentators don’t use Paul in the same way. It’s because faith is not such an absolute term for Paul as it was used by the Luther and his followers. So we are still arguing about what Paul taught and what it means for us all these centuries later.

You can’t be a Christian without being a Paulist in theology: his whole nature of the church, the nature of sin are all developments taken from his thought. Life as Christians is a journey, a journey to the heavenly city Jerusalem. As a journey we are continually challenged to move on, to learn, to grow in grace. That’s why reading Scripture and as result Paul, is so important. It keeps us moving. Don’t loiter on the journey of life, keep learning and moving to God. So read. Read Paul. All thirteen letters if you should want, or keep going to the twenty-seven. And grow in faith.

The Confession of Peter – 18 January 2026

But who do you way that I am?

This is Our Lord’s question to Peter we hear today. It’s the great question that is asked of hi, and indeed of all of us. The reading is perhaps a little out of place for today. In the middle of January we have an odd little week off in our liturgical calendar. In case you missed it a few weeks ago we had Christmas, and the calendar then concentrates of what we call the epiphanies, that is the manifestation of Christ. So we have the actual Epiphany day, the twelfth day of Christmas, when we see how Our Lord was recognised as the Christ by the pagan magi, representing the world outside the Jews. We also have Sundays that deal with the baptism of Jesus, when he is recognised as the Christ by his baptism, with that lovely bit about a voice from Heaven showing the Father, and the Dove showing the Holy Spirit. We also get his first miracle at Cana often as well at this time before we conclude this season, forty days after Christmas, with Candlemas, or the Presentation of Christ in the Temple, when he is recognised as the Savour by the two aged representatives of the Law, Simeon and Anna.

But today we drop out of this cycle by having the feast of the Confession of Peter and in a week’s time we have the next one, the Conversion of Paul. Originally these feasts marked the week of prayer for Christian Unity, by seeing in Peter and Paul the twin apostles to the whole of humanity. So today we leave the manifestation of Our Lord as God, the epiphanies, and we come to the question: Who do you say that I am?

In terms of Peter, you have to start by asking, who do the Scriptures say that Peter is? Fascinatingly, the first two readings are contradicting each other on this point. The readings are usually chosen to harmonise on the theme, and we don’t often get to see that at times we have a built in argument going on. This is one of the few times you will see it on a Sunday. The first reading, from Acts, written by Luke, talks of Peter being the apostle to the Gentiles. Then in the second reading, from the letter to the Galatians, we have Peter being the apostle to the Jews. All this points to is to how the New Testament was collected out of early material from a variety of sources, not always in total agreement, but that’s another tangent for another day. So who do we say Peter is? Apostles to the Jews or to the Gentiles? We are not sure.

But Peter had the curly question, who do you say that I am? He was the one who replied that Our Lord is the Christ. But what does that mean? Whatever Peter meant, it was somehow in contrast to the common view of the crowds that Our Lord was John the Baptist raised from the dead, or Elijah the great prophet of old, whom God promised through Malachi to send as a herald of the end times. Of course we know that the crowds were wrong, for Our Lord himself tells us that John the Baptist was the fulfilment of that prophecy, the second Elijah, the herald of the Messiah, not the Messiah himself. No, though Our Lord had a prophetic ministry, though he was the greatest spokesman of God, there was something yet greater about him: he was the Christ. “Christ”, as in chrism and christening, was a title that referred to a ritual act of pouring olive oil over the head of someone chosen by God to hold one or the other of the highest offices in His kingdom. So by calling Our Lord “the Christ” Peter was confessing that he was the Son of David, the One who would come to reign on his throne for ever; and that he was the Son of Aaron, the High Priest who would open the holy of holies to God’s people and deliver to them his holiness. Which of the two was uppermost in Peter’s mind is an unanswerable question, but it seems to me he would have shared the common hope of his people that the Son of David would re-establish the glorious kingdom of Israel, a misunderstanding that the disciples in their slowness would cling to even up to the moment of Our Lord’s ascension, when they asked: “Lord, will you at this time restore the kingdom to Israel?” (Acts 1:6).

But who do you say that I am? The Gospel writer does not give us unimportant details, but leaves it for us to be Peter, and Paul or even Judas. But let’s look at the structure in the Gospel reading today. Our Lord starts by asking what others say about him. That’s what usually happens. We learn about people a lot by what we hear from others. If your child is starting to date someone you first hear about him through your child. You learn first by other people’s opinions. But if your child is going to marry the person you need to know first hand. So Our Lord moves it way from what others think about him by asking directly: who do you say that I am? Belief and faith in the end are not about what other people think, they are about what you believe. It’s not enough to tell what other people say, the question comes to but who do you say that I am?

Please, also learn a little about belief and faith. We see them as absolute terms: you believe or you don’t believe, as if it was an off/on switch. That’s not what it means. The word faith in the New Testament has a range of meaning from certainty to trust. Believing is not an absolute thing. It’s the recognition that there is something. Once we start, God will fill in the rest for us. God takes whatever we offer, and uses that. Our belief and faith may be small, but God works with everything.

Which gets us back again to the whole reason for Scripture. In the early Church they had the witnesses to what happened, the disciples. But they could only tell why they believed, the next generation had also to learn to believe directly. Then as they grew old, they also wanted to pass on what they believed, and that was why the New Testament came into being, so there could be a permanent record of what others say Our Lord is. 

But words and letters are not enough. We can listen to what Peter says, but the Gospel writers, and God want us to go further. Who do you say that I am? It is up to each generation then to take the step: to go from what others say about Our Lord, from what the New Testament sys about Our Lord, to learning that each of us must also learn the Our Lord is still the Son of the Living God. That’s the important part. We have to learn that he is not just a figure of history: the Gospels and New Testament are not written for that. We have to learn that he is not just a holy man who was killed, for many holy people have been, and will be, killed It’s that last bit which is important: “The Messiah, Son of the Living God.”

Baptism – 11 January

I read a nice sermon during the week. I often read sermons, it’s a sort of occupational hazard for clergy, but I read this sermon particularly because it had to do with the readings for this Sunday, and I was looking for a little inspiration. It was a nice sermon about John the Baptist and Our Lord, and what John may have thought about Our Lord and what Our Lord might have thought about John, as cousins who knew each other and as prophet and Messiah. 

I reached the end of the sermon and thought, I must have missed the point. But no, the whole sermon was on what they may have thought about each other on some massive assumptions like they were in constant touch with each other through their childhood. That was the point of the sermon, to do a spot of imagining on what cousins may have thought on each other.

Now, I think that is thin gruel. I strongly believe that minds are like gardens, and need some solid work done on them to make things grow. If you get lazy in a garden, the weeds grow and there is no flowers or food. Not much use. Sermons at church are meant to be little a good weeding and digging, they are meant to make one think and learn a little more. Pleasant imaginings about what someone may have thought about someone else are not up to the mark. Thin gruel and no meat.

Well today I am going to try a little harder than that, for today we touch one of the central sacraments of the Church, baptism. It’s one of the two sacraments expressly established by Our Lord, in contrast to the other five, and full marks to anyone who can remember all seven sacraments.

Now we may not see a lot of similarities between the two major sacraments of baptism and communion, but today I would like to make a few linkages, because they are the two commanded by Our Lord and therefore rather important to ponder. When we think of communion here, we also must think of his death and resurrection, because when we eat the bread and wine, we eat his body and blood, and are thereby linked into the great theology of his death and resurrection. The two great sacraments are linked. Think first about the clothing of baptism. When we are baptised, from ancient times people were either baptised in the nude or with minimal clothes. When people are crucified, it’s the same costume. You don’t get crucified in your best clothes, the clothes are stripped and you may remember how the soldiers divided them as spoils. Baptism in costume is similar to crucifixion. No clothes.

The next thing to remember is that for most people in the ancient world water in any quantity was dangerous and deadly. People were generally non-swimmers. There were no swimming races in the ancient Olympics. Going under water was a symbol of death, because it reminded people of drowning. Baptism anciently was done in warmer climates by full immersion, by going under the water and being dragged up, a type of death by drowning. When people are crucified, they die, obviously. There is another parallel here between the cross and baptism.

However, Our Lord returns from life after being crucified. What happened anciently in baptism that after the person was pulled up from the water, the person is dried and clothed in white and anointed with oil. All these things are symbols of the new life into which one is called.

Baptism is meant to be understood by the faithful of the Church as a type of death and resurrection, a parallel between Our Lord’s death and resurrection. Furthermore, when we take the body and blood of Christ in the sacraments it links us thereby with our own baptism. Why – because by eating his body and blood we join into his body and join this great cycle of death and resurrection that is started in us by baptism. It will, of course, be completed by our own deaths and resurrection in Christ at the end of all things. We are to see the similarities between the two great sacraments. It’s all about death and resurrection.

Now we have done the basic theology we can start to think about the Gospel today. John is reluctant to baptise Our Lord, saying he needs to be baptised by Our Lord instead. We learn from earlier passages that John is proclaiming his baptism for the repentance of sins. John obviously sees Our Lord as one without sin. But Our Lord insists and is so baptised. So why did Our Lord insist? This is where we come again to the identification of Our Lord with us. In all things, Our Lord is like us, except for sin. Therefore he insists on taking the whole way of what is essential for us to follow. He insists of baptism, as it is not just a question of an individual, but of all humanity dying to sin to rise to new life. He has to symbolically die to sin, as he will later truly die with our sin on the Cross. But when Our Lord is baptised, we then get that voice from heaven and the Spirit of God coming upon him. Our Lord transforms the baptism of John, which is only about repentance of sins, to a new level of not only repentance and death, but new life and the Spirit of God. 

Now once we start to think of baptism bringing new life, we start to understand why it is called christening. The word christening coms from the chrism that was anciently used in baptism – we use it in our Anglican custom with the sign of the cross immediately after the immersion of water. In ancient times you might have had a lot more poured upon your head, but we modern Anglicans are a tidier neater race, and restrict ourselves to a neat little cross. Chrism is used to anoint people. Now Jesus is called the Christ, or the Messiah, which means the Anointed One. It’s pointing to that Spirit coming down on him. Christening points to the importance of the end of the rite, the giving of the holy oil of chrism, the symbol of the Holy Spirit coming upon us.

For baptism is a life-changing sacrament. Now you can receive communion many times, and I hope you have. But you can only be baptised once, as it is the foundation sacrament of the whole theology of death and resurrection. It is the start of the Christian life, the start of the whole cycle of death and resurrection, the giving of grace in the Spirit. For the Jews only men had an initiation rite in circumcision. But Christianity has a rite that shows how it is open to all people, men and women, in baptism. Also it operates within a community of faith and therefore even babies are baptised, as the community takes on the promises to follow, but the rite of death and resurrection in baptism are played out in the infancy of that child.

As an aside the way baptism is performed is done in many different ways, from the full dunking to the pouring over the head, and that makes no difference – it’s not a magic ritual, as long as the intent is there that the child is baptised in the name of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit, it’s ok.

Now I hope that a few of you are still awake after all that theology. I don’t want you to go away today with nice thoughts about two cousins meeting at the Jordan. That’s not enough. I want you today to think about how the whole cycle of death and resurrection starts in baptism. I also want you to see how this cycle of death and resurrection frames our wholes lives. We are continually dying. Not only because we are getting old and our backs are giving out, but dying to our relationships as friends move on or die, dying to our work as we change jobs, dying to our homes as we change houses. Change is always a form of death. But Christians cannot be stuck there. It’s not enough. We also, from the very moment of baptism, state that after death there is resurrection. Yes, our health gives out, but we still find new things that we can do. Our friends die, but there are still people to meet. Our homes and work are left behind, but new places await. Resurrection is a key to Christian life, initiated in us by our own baptism. That’s why it’s important.

Epiphany – 4 January 2026

Long before telescopes and computers, people named the stars and charted their long journeys through the heavens. These early stargazers noticed patterns and consistency in their movements. They felt the stars were part of a greater story, and that the stars had the power to influence events on earth.

Early books of the Bible testify to the power of stars in the life of ancient people. Job mentions three constellations of the heavens. Childless Abram goes out at night and hears a promise from God that he will have many children, as numerous as the stars. Stars are said to “Sing together” and “shout for joy” in the Book of Job, and Psalm 147 tells us God names all the stars and determines their number. Clearly, the stars held meaning for the ancient people of God.

In our Gospel reading, we see wise men coming from the east, following a star. It is not clear to a modern reader how they knew this rising star announced the birth of “the king of the Jews,” as the connection between the rising star and the birth of a king is shrouded in mystery. What is even more strange, perhaps, is how everyone in the story—especially Herod—just goes along with this, accepting the wise men’s account of the star and the birth of the king. In fact, King Herod takes the wise men’s astronomical report so seriously that he drops everything to search for and eliminate the baby.

There are dozens of theories on where the wise men originated and how they knew so much about stars; the Greek word used in Matthew’s gospel is Magi, which has a wise meaning but includes learned scholars who advised kings by interpreting dreams and astrology. While much about the wise men is unclear, what is clear is that these men are not Judeans, but Gentiles. They are bearing witness to a cosmic event of astronomical proportions: the birth of a baby—though nobody seems to know exactly where he is.

We can imagine their shock when the Wise Men discover that Herod is initially clueless about where this baby was located. Surely, King Herod would know if a king were born in his kingdom. It is in this detail that we can see how foreign these wise men are; they are seemingly naïve, unaware of the dangerous politics of Judea and unaware of how different this new king will be from other kings. They are simply seeking the king whom the star announced.

But they get a clue there. They have started their journey by looking to their own wisdom, to the stars. This told them that a king had been born. But it is not enough for them to find where the king. is In Jerusalem they get another clue – Bethlehem. Their wisdom of timing, that a King had been born, and the wisdom of Scripture where that birth could be, allow them to continue their journey.

It’s also worth pondering the multiple ways of messaging here. Shepherds and Mary had angels, Joseph had multiple dreams, Herod had the Scriptures, but the Wise Men had the stars. God does not have one way of messaging. This is part of how God works. God always reaches out, and to reach out God adapts to where we are and how we can receive messages. 

Then, after Jerusalem, the star appears again to the Wise Men. They follow the star until it stops over the place where the Christchild is. It’s so simple. While it may seem mysterious and strange to us to follow a star this way, it is not strange for them. It is simply how they understand the world. It is simply how they found Our Lord.

We must be open to the many ways people find Our Lord, especially the ways that people different from us find Jesus. The Feast of the Epiphany commemorates the manifestation of Jesus to the peoples of the earth. Just as every human culture is unique and different, the ways in which different cultures find and understand Jesus will be different, too. We cannot predict or assume how the diverse cultures within our own communities will find Jesus. We must be open to all the ways the Spirit leads people to our Saviour, Jesus Christ.

Our reading from Isaiah captures art of that diversity we hear. “Nations shall come to your light, and kings to the brightness of your dawn.”

Besides the message of diversity that the Gospel brings us today, the most important thing is that Our Lord is born to be God for all peoples. But this is not a God who is distant – this is the God who comes to us and lives with us. But even more – this is the God who continues to reach out to us in different ways. Remember how shepherds and Mary had angels, Jospeh had dreams, Herod had Scripture and finally, those non-Jews, the Wise Men, had their stars. God reaches to us where we are – that’s the most important part. Access to God is not some arcane secret, for we don’t have to find God: God will always find us.

St Teresa of Avial, a great 16^th C mystic taught about finding God in two stages. First, we deliberately reflect on how God is with us. We do this by conscious reflection. But we are the Temple to the Spirit, and God lives in our interior selves, our own selves which are little castles, and the second phase then happens – we become aware of God constantly with us whatever we do. For the Good Lord will adapt and dwell by his Spirit in us. So, the Epiphany reminds us that God will always come to us, to dwell with us, because God yearns not only for Shepherds and Mary and Joseph and Wise Men, but also for us in our daily life.

Holy Innocents – 28 December 2025

One of the stories about Bondi struck me – about a woman who was going to the celebrations but at the last minute did not. Of course, we know the rest, she was saved but the others were not. You hear other stories like that, people who didn’t go to something, often crediting the hand of God that saved them.

But of course, many of those killed were undoubtedly faithful believers in God. They were not saved. They did not get the hand of God.

Well today we remember another time when innocents were not saved, when the hand of God was not offered. The Holy Innocents are a reminder that the work of God still takes place in a dark world.

There’s no getting around it: St Matthew’s “slaughter of the innocents,” as the Church has called it, is a dreadful text. Some of us may remember being taught “the Flight into Egypt” as children, usually in a matter-of-fact way, sometimes as an adventure story designed to make Mary and Joseph heroic, when in fact they were simply refugees. We have that lovely picture over the sacristy door that once was over the high altar about on that very theme. I don’t recall being terrorised by images of soldiers slaughtering babies, but I certainly got the point: this was one very dangerous world for Our Lord. As the tinsel and angels crowd round the manger, an evil king, scared for his succession, comes down like the wolf on the fold. The work of God still takes place in a dark world.

Herod’s actions are consistent with everything else we know about the Herod family. They were a nasty bunch. It was likely to be quite small in the scale of genocides – maybe 40 or so baby boys. It’s not that different to what we see in our own lifetimes, across this still-dark world.

But the story does make us question about God’s action in all this. Herod is acting completely to plot. This is what Herods do. This is what all vicious, suspicious dictators, from Tiberius Caesar to Kim Jong-un with all his concentration camps, do. You might even, if you were to put on your Reading Glasses, see some parallels in the way kings David and Solomon act when they come to power.

But what is God doing here? Just the one family – his own, if you like – get the warning. All the others – nothing, or maybe a dream that is ignored. So the Christchild gets away, apparently so he can fulfil an Old Testament prophecy, while the others die – the first witnesses to Our Lord, in later tradition.

But like the dictators, God also has form here. After all, as the Egyptians were killing the Hebrew babies, there was one who snuck through, hidden in a basket. As the children of Jerusalem died at the hands of the Babylonians, just a remnant survived. This is not a bug. It appears to be a feature.

I would like you to consider another fact about the Holy Innocents: none of them were Christians. After all, Christ had just been born, and none knew that besides a few grubby shepherds and some foreign Magi. The children were all Jewish, caught up in the same bureaucratic nightmare as Joseph and Mary having to go to Bethlehem. Like those at Bondi. Evil is the darkness that cannot stand the light, and attacks all belief in a Good God.

The Powers that Be, of course, caught up with that last baby, Our Lord, in the end. The job Herod’s men failed to do, Pilate’s henchmen managed to do later. Maybe some cursing Our Lord around the cross – old men now, of course – were among those who couldn’t catch the King of the Jews 30-odd years earlier. Satisfied to see the job finally done. The final Holy Innocent.

And that’s where the odd part of the story – one I trust in, though I can never quite understand it – cuts in. The bit where God says yes, I didn’t save all the kids in Egypt – and a lot of innocent Egyptian babies died, too, don’t forget. And I didn’t save the babies in the fall of Jerusalem. And I didn’t save the Holy Innocents. And I didn’t save those at Bondi. And in the centuries to come, this theme will repeat itself – again and again. But then God says, I died as well.

Matthew doesn’t just tell this story as news. It’s a story in the most literary sense, one designed to draw us beyond “what happened to them” to the depths of “what is happening to us.”  Reading about a Joseph with prophetic dreams should remind us of another righteous man who ended up exiled from his family in Egypt. Hearing of baby boys slaughtered by Herod would remind Matthew’s readers of the way Moses narrowly escaped that fate as well. And any Jew hearing this story in 1^st Century Palestine would remember the more recent terrors under Antiochus, when any mother caught circumcising her son would be rewarded with a dead baby hung around her neck.

There is another memory Matthew wishes to stir up here, though, one with hope. The evangelist is quoting Jeremiah 31:15, which called to mind the matriarch Rachel as the Babylonians sacked Jerusalem and marched families off into exile. Rachel’s weeping occupies a key turning point in Jeremiah, when the prophet shifts from declaring God’s judgment to promises of hope. “Keep your voice from weeping … there is hope for your future … your children shall come back.”

Why Rachel? The ancient rabbis tell a story (midrash) of God’s response to this pivotal tragedy in Judah’s history, at the time of the exile to Babylon, when the Jews were forcibly removed, Jeremiah, they say, called up Moses from his grave, who in turn called the patriarchs to bear witness as the exiles left their homes. Each of them responds with indignation at what God had allowed.

God is not moved, not by Abraham or Isaac or Jacob or Moses himself, until finally Rachel stands before God, and she cries for her children, and her words alone turn the tide. Rachel is recognized in Jeremiah as mother of all, and even God must respond to her insistent plea for mercy. Fairness has nothing to do with it; it is the promise of God to Rachel, one parent to another: your children will come back.

Matthew, in turn, invokes Rachel in the midst of this story of God-with-us, the birth of a child whose name is a verb: save. God’s salvation may seem far off and inadequate to the mothers who mourn, but the promise is deeper than this moment in time. The threat of this Herod passes for a time, only to be replaced by another Herod, yet another ruler without scruples. But when this child of Rachel returns to Jerusalem as an adult, God enters into the fate of every doomed child and every bereft parent.

For Christians, the birth of Christ can and must remind us that there can be no cheap comfort for those who mourn. Cute pageants and pious carols do nothing to stop the devastation of those who have lost a child—for any reason. Or those over 230,000 who lost their lives in that tsunami twenty-one years ago. Or the dead at Bondi, Port Arthur, Gaza, Ukraine, Sudan and too many other places. Only something deeper, God’s entering into this world of sorrows, will accomplish the depth of healing, the salvation we need.

This is not a cheap kind of sympathy, a soothing cliché that it will all work out in the end. Mothers still wail, daily. But if God is with us, then perhaps we can bear to listen to the cries of sorrow and pleas for justice of our time too, knowing that all our weeping is gathered up by the one who will turn it into dancing. Nothing, not even death, can separate us from our children, our parents, and even from our enemies. Nothing, not even a bottomless pit of grief, shall keep God away from being with us, yes, from saving us.

The Faith of Joseph – 21 December, 2025

When examined as a group, the Gospels for the Sundays of Advent may seem to be ordered in a rather peculiar way. They are in fact arranged chronologically backwards. On the First Sunday of Advent, the Church reads from about the signs of the end time from Matthew 24. This sets a theological note that will be repeated throughout the season: the first coming of Christ to redeem the world is often contrasted to the second coming, when He shall return to judge it. Then the next two weeks the readings jump back to deal with the story of John the Baptist. Now we jump back again, to the start of the Gospel, to listen to the story of Joseph’s dreams. We move back in time to reach the birth of Our Lord, the pivot of our and all times.

In our Gospel for today, the spotlight falls on Joseph. We have this story about an ordinary, quiet, faithful man. Joseph might have been uncomfortable in the spotlight. But our Gospel asks us to look closely at him, because through the quiet faith of this ordinary man, God was accomplishing extraordinary things.

In the history of Christian reflection on the birth of Our Lord, from the heights of art to the simplicity of Christmas pageants, Joseph is almost never front and centre. In paintings of Mary and the child, Joseph is often absent. If he is present, he seems set off uncomfortably to one side. He seems like a man who is not too fond of family pictures. When the camera comes out for the family photo, Joseph is like the man who is a bit embarrassed by the whole thing. He knows that as wonderful as pictures are, they distort reality, because life isn’t all wonderful moments. Life is more about the grace of daily obligation, the hundreds of small decisions we make every day. For Joseph, a carpenter, a man who was probably more comfortable working with his hands than talking, life is more like finding the right tool for the right job than a face book picture.

In Christmas pageants we all know who the star is – Mary. While we’ve all probably heard plenty of stories of little girls who were disappointed because they did not get to play Mary in the Christmas play, there are fewer stories of little boys who felt slighted because they didn’t get to play Joseph. If you are a little boy, you want to be one of the three kings, or, if not a king, at least a shepherd so you can wear a tea towel wrapped around your head. After all, when you think of Christmas plays the images that probably come to mind are of Mary and the Christchild, the three kings bearing gifts, shepherds and angels, maybe even oxen and sheep. Joseph almost seems like an afterthought.

If Mary were the first to hear the good news of the birth of Christ, Joseph must have been the second. But for Joseph, the news that Mary was pregnant was anything but good at first. In fact, it must have been quite a shock, because he knew the child could not be his. Our Gospel says, “Mary had been engaged to Joseph, but before they lived together, she was found to be with child.” In those days, there were two steps leading to marriage. The first was betrothal. This was a legally binding period that lasted around a year before the couple actually married and started living together. If anything happens during the betrothal to dissolve the relationship, it’s legally the same as getting a divorce. Mary and Joseph are in this first stage, legally bound to one another, awaiting the day of their marriage. So when Joseph finds out that Mary is pregnant, it is not good news. It’s bad news, very bad news.

Joseph, like any man in his position, might have felt hurt, humiliated, disappointed and even angry. But Joseph must have been a man of few words. At least, St Matthew in the Gospel does not tell us what Joseph was feeling. What we do know is that Joseph was an ordinary man. He learnt that the woman to whom he was engaged to was pregnant. He knew the baby wasn’t his. He drew the obvious conclusion. What more was there to say?

But St Matthew tells us that Joseph was a righteous man, which means Joseph loved God and tried to follow God’s law. In all things, a righteous man will try to follow the commands of God. So when Joseph finds out that Mary is pregnant, he turns to God’s law for guidance. According to the law, he has two options. His first option is to bring charges against Mary in public. He could publicly accuse her of the sin of adultery. The penalty for adultery under the law is death. His second option is to divorce Mary privately. In the presence of two witnesses, he can write out a paper of divorce and present it to her. In this case, there would be no public charges against Mary. There would be no penalty. People would eventually find out that Mary was pregnant and unwed, but she would be at least spared the public hearing and punishment.

Because Joseph was a righteous man, he had to choose one of these options. As much as he might have loved Mary, he could not disregard the law. He could not put his own will above the will of God revealed in the Law. To do so would be to say that his relationship to Mary exists outside of their relationship to God. Unthinkable. He was a righteous man. But as Joseph surely knew, God’s righteousness is always tempered with mercy. He decides to dismiss Mary quietly. Righteousness tempered with mercy.

Then something extraordinary happens to this ordinary, righteous man. Joseph has a dream, and in this dream an angel of the Lord says, “Joseph, Son of David, do not be afraid to take Mary as your wife, for the child conceived in her womb is from the Holy Spirit. She will bear a son, and you are to name him Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins.”

Well, that’s an amazing revelation! Yet, how does Joseph respond to this extraordinary news? St Matthew’s narrative is terse, but it fits exactly the character of Joseph. He responds like the ordinary, righteous man that he was. When he awoke from his dream, he did as the angel of the Lord commanded. Full stop. Joseph was a righteous man. He spent his entire life trying to follow God’s commands. Out of a lifetime of devotion to God and to following God’s law, Joseph knew when he was being given a message from God. He needed no extra words, no extra explanations.

The young Mary, when she had heard the news of the birth of Christ, quite naturally asked, “How can this be?” But Joseph was older. Joseph would have known the passage from Isaiah: “Look, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and they shall name him Emmanuel, which means ‘God is with us.’” When Joseph awoke after the angel of the Lord told him he should take Mary as his wife and name their child Jesus, that is exactly what he did. No extra words. No extra explanations. Joseph, an ordinary man, a faithful man, a man of few words, did what the Lord commanded him to do. He had been doing it his entire life.

The wonder of this story is that through the faithfulness of an ordinary man, God was doing something extraordinary. The amazing news that God is sending his son to be born of a virgin, to be the Saviour and Redeemer of the world, is working itself out in the faith and obedience of a humble man like Joseph. The angel proclaims the miraculous news that God is coming among us as a little baby, and unlike Mary, who responds with joyful exuberance by saying, “my soul magnifies the Lord and my spirit rejoices in God my Saviour,” Joseph speaks no great words. Joseph was not a big talker. He was a carpenter, a practical man.

Joseph was also a faithful man, but he didn’t need to make a big show of it. He listened for God’s word, and he tried to follow it. And when God spoke to Joseph in a dream, Joseph got up and did all that the Lord commanded. He married Mary. He got them to Bethlehem. He named the child Jesus. And through his no-nonsense, faithful response, God was working out his plan for the salvation of the whole world. 

Not all of us are called to showy displays of faith. Joseph is a good model for most of us. We used to have his statue up in the sanctuary, but we moved it down to the back of the church many years ago, so most people pass it as they enter. I like it there, as we all have to pass this remarkable man. It’s a reminder to just work away at the faith. Trust God. Do God’s will. That way the quiet and long-term plan of God will be done and we will be the better for it.

Based on a sermon by Fr Joseph S. Pagano of Annapolis, USA.

Answers and Questions – 14 December, 2025

We like answers. We crave them; we seek them; sometimes we demand them. I now have Google on my home system, and I can answer it questions directly, to save me time. We can survey the vast, muddled landscape of our experiences, hoping to catch sight of something clear and telling. 

Often, they are quite matter of fact, the questions we ask and the answers we seek: What should I make for dinner? Where should I go next weekend? How big a ham do I need at Christmas?

And yet at other times, the questions are more subtle and lingering: What should I make of my life? Where should I go to feel like I am not alone? How long till Christ makes all things new?

But whether our questions are practical or essential, decisive answers are usually what we’re after. Because we are formed and guided by words, we often imagine an answer as a thing that fits nicely into a single phrase or insight. Surely, we think, whatever it is that we want to know is waiting out there, just beyond the tip of our own tongues.

Unfortunately, though, perhaps more often than we would care to admit, answers are not so easily translated into simple turns of phrase. The more important the question, the more likely that this is so. Despite our human fascination with fortunes told and secrets disclosed, the truth is that answers to our most profound questions are more often discerned slowly, in broad shapes and patterns of meaning, than they are discovered in clear, obvious flashes.

This is important for those of us who follow Our Lord on the Christian path, and it is especially important in this Advent season, when we engage the sense of heightened anticipation that God will, somehow, come and make an answer to all of our enduring sorrows and longings. What is the Word that we await? What sort of answer are we expecting to receive from on high? A crisp, clear phrase with which to flatten our enemies; to unlock the mysteries of the ages; to solve the problems of ourselves? 

But what if that is not what’s coming?

In today’s Gospel, John the Baptist has a question, too, and it’s quite clear that he wants a “yes” or “no” sort of answer. Are you the one who is to come, or are we to wait for another?

So much, everything, really, depends on the answer, and we can’t blame John for wanting to know plainly. He has given his whole life over to this question. He has been made wild and holy by the yearning of this question. He has become burdened by the weight of this question. Ultimately, he will die for the implications of this question.

Because to ask whether Jesus is “the one who is to come” is, in itself, to assert that nothing, and no one else in this world, can be the fulfilment of everything. No emperor or king, no treasure, no philosopher or fortune-teller can contend with “the one who is to come,” because this One will be the answer to every question and the remedy to every wrong. So, of course, as his own days dwindle down in some dark prison, John desperately wishes to know if his waiting has been in vain.

He, too, may be asking: What have I made of my life? Am I alone? How long ‘til God makes all things new?

And yet, as is so often the case, Our Lord does not answer John’s question directly. 

Just as when he teaches in parables, Our Lord replies to John in this moment with images and with an invitation to look closely at them. Go and tell John what you hear and see: the blind receive their sight, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the poor have good news brought to them.

In other words: John, the answer is all around you. It is not found in simple assertions of identity or authority. It is in the shapes and patterns of healing and life and justice that come forth wherever love reigns. 

Anyone can claim to be a messiah or a king: and goodness knows many have done so. But only God can bring forth the fruits of the Kingdom within us and among us. Only God can transform our wildernesses into a sanctuary. Only God can show us how to be the answer rather than just wait for one. 

This is the essential paradox of the Messiah we are shown in Our Lord: he is the expected one who will not conform to our expectations. He is the one who has come, and yet he points away from himself the moment he arrives. He does not respond directly in part because he refuses to succumb to the idolatry of easy answers. He’s not Google. It is perhaps in this refusal, in Our Lord’s rejection of the deceptive simplicities of our lesser gods, that we begin to know that he is the Son of God. For only Truth would be content to let the results speak for themselves. 

So what does this mean for us, we who, like John, are still captive to the world’s many cloudy “truths” and are still hungering for a clear and piercing response to our questions?

It means, quite simply, that we must reorient our search for answers. The things we are seeking to understand as followers of Our Lord are not insights locked away somewhere, reserved for the especially wise or powerful or pious. The answers, instead, will always be found in the living enactment of the good news: the practice of love and righteousness in our churches and communities and homes. The real answers are to be found in doing the same things that Our Lord did: listening, healing, reconciling, liberating, giving thanks, and letting go. Remember in the parable of the sheep and goats that when the King says that when he was a stranger and you invited me in, I needed clothes and you clothed me, I was sick and you looked after me, I was in prison and you came to visit me, whenever you did this to the least person, you did it do him. If we should do these things, then we could look back one day and say, Oh, yes, I see: there it was. There was my answer. There was all of the answers, to every question.

It means, too, that we should be wary of any institution or figure, political, religious, or otherwise, who claims that they alone have the answer or, even worse, that they are the answer. In the face of such assertions, we must resist and remember that even Christ himself was loathe to claim his identity as the Messiah. He was most concerned with helping others find their own inherent dignity, not with them worshipping his. Let that be a benchmark for the ones whom we entrust with authority.

Finally, hopefully, it means that perhaps we can rest a bit, in the midst of all our Advent anticipation. Instead of waiting with bated breath like John, with our whole lives dependent upon a single word of response from God, perhaps we can look around at how the answers to our deepest questions are already springing up around us. The answers are already being given. This is the gift and the power of a sacramental life: You will catch a glimpse of God in the gleam of a candle or in the phrase of a song; in a bag of groceries left on a doorstep or a hand reached out to you in forgiveness. It may come to you in the liturgy on a Sunday, or in the broader liturgy of your life.

The point is this: God’s answers are here; in the words you already know how to speak. They have come (Oh yes, John, they have already come). But they have come softly, softly, like promises kept, like all those small mercies we overlook while searching the skies for grander resolutions. They have come to us, John (these answers that contain the Answer} in a way that must be lived to be believed. 

The question that Our Lord asks all of us is this: Will you live it this way? Will you dare the joy of living it?

And maybe, just maybe, in this Advent, God is waiting for our answer, too. 

Based on a sermon by the Rev’d Phil Hooper of St. Anne Episcopal Church, West Chester, Diocese of Southern Ohio, USA.

Repentance and Change – Advent 2 7 December, 2025

There certainly sems to be something strange going on in the first reading today. We hear that the wolf will live with the lamb, and the leopard with lie down with the kid, while the calf will be with the lion. We are hearing of a world that is overturned in its natural order. As we know, wolves and lambs do not live together, leopards and kids do not lie down together, nor do calves associate willingly with lions. Not from where I come, anyway.

But note that the disorder is from both sides. A wolf will not willing lie down in peace with a lamb, nor will a lamb overcome its timidity to lie down with the world. Similarly with leopards and kids, calves and lions: both sides have changed to be able to associate together. It is not that one has become fiercer, or one more timid, there is a new balance in operation here: all have changed. Cows and bears can graze together because the grass is satisfying enough for both; a whole new order has come into play.

This new balance is the vision of Isaiah: the shoot from the stump of Jesse, the ancestor of the house of David. This new order is the result of the holy mountain, for the earth will be full of the knowledge of the Lord. 

When we come to the Gospel reading, we are once again struck with a note of disorder: John the Baptist. John is not a normal person, he wears camel hair clothing, and his food is locusts and wild honey. Even for two thousand years ago, this is abnormal behaviour. And as for now, it’s not normal. Not from where I come, anyway.

His abnormal behaviour is shown also when he deals with the Pharisees and Sadducees, the religious leaders. They are not given the respect due to them; instead John calls them a brood of vipers. Tact was not his strong point. But they are not the only ones going to him: we hear that the people of Jerusalem and all Judea were going to him. All people were going: like the wolves and lambs a whole society comes to him, and all are baptised. A new order is being called into being.

Yet John speaks of what is happening as only a start. He baptises with water only for repentance, and speaks of the new baptism to follow, a baptism of the Holy Spirit and fire.

The poor Sadducees and Pharisees are warned that they must bear fruit worthy of repentance, worthy of this baptism he gives them. So how do we bear such fruit? How is this repentance to be done?

Repentance comes in the Gospel from the Greek word metanoia, which means to turn around. It means doing a 180-degree turn. We not only turn from sin, but we turn our backs on it and face God. It is not enough to try and turn away from sin, because if we do that, we are left without a vision to replace it. You must turn right around. We must find the new vision of God to replace the call of sin. It’s not enough to stop sinning, that’s only a partial turning: we can stop, perchance by ourselves a short time, but unless we find a replacement we drift back into sinful ways. Repentance means turning away and finding a new vision of God to fill the place of sin. That is turning around, not just turning away from sin. That is how we bear the fruit worthy of repentance, fruit that only comes from a complete change and new vision.

It is that new vision that can change us: it can make the wolves peaceful and the lambs brave.

John speaks of the new baptism that is to follow, the baptism of the Holy Spirit. The early Church continually made the distinction between the baptism of John and the baptism of the Christians. The early Church baptised in water, like John, but then made the point about a new life that follows. The one baptised comes out of the water and then is dressed in new clothes of white, anointed, and hands are laid upon the person to show the Spirit comes to make a new place. Once more the symbolism shows: we must not only repent and renounce evil, but we also must fill the place of evil with the Spirit to replace it, or otherwise we drift back to evil ways. Similarly in the promises made before baptism, it was the custom in many places to renounce evil facing west, then to turn east and makes the promises to follow Christ, symbolising that 180 degree turn of repentance. 

There is also another element in this idea of repentance being a turning around. Sin in one definition is being turned into oneself. Sin is essentially a selfishness, an ability to do without regard to the consequences to others. Sin is to do what we want without regard to others. When we start to worry about the consequences to others, how we hurt others, but what we do, then we know that we are turning away from ourselves, and opening to God. Repentance is taking place.

Advent is the time when we wait for the coming of the Lord. We do this by repentance, turning away from evil, and opening ourselves to God. John calls us today to the coming of the kingdom of heaven. But the response to this is not praise and merry making, but rather repentance, so we can open ourselves to its renewing possibilities.

Creeds and the Lord – Advent Sunday, 30 November, 2025

Now, for those of you who follow the religious news and not Trump, the big story of the week has been the Pope’s visit to Turkey. He’s there for a few days and then off to Lebanon today, his first overseas visit. The secular reporters are a bit lost trying to explain why he has gone to Turkey, but they have mainly used nice photos to get around this, or mentioned that Pope Francis was planning to go, and avoid the reason why Franics was planning to go there.

But of course Pope Leo has gone there to celebrate the 1700 anniversary of the Council of Nicaea. We remember this Council every week here by saying the Nicene Creed, the great statement of faith.

He is also meeting at Nicaea the Patriarch of Constantinople, Bartholomew, for whom we pray each week, as the leader of Eastern Orthodox Christians. He is the leader as once Constantinople, now Instabul, was the capital of the Eastern Empire, and although that was some six hundred years ago, things don’t change very much when it comes to hierarchy. Take for example us Anglicans – our leader is the Archbishop of Canterbury because that town was the capital of the Kingdom of Kent where Augustine, the first bishop went, and there hasn’t been a kingdom of Kent now for some 1300 years. Christians don’t change fast.

Nowadays there is only a tiny number of Christians left in Turkey as most were deported after the WWI when the Moslems were expelled from Greece and the Christians were expelled from Turkey. But once Constantinople was the capital of a flourishing Christian Roman Empire, and the first Christian Emperor, Constantine, the modest founder of the city he named after himself, summoned the bishops of the empire there is 325 to meet and tidy up the rules of the Christian faith.

The end result of all this, with a bit of later tweaking, was what we call the Nicene Creed. It became the touchstone of faith; what we believe in.

Now, this is important for us as we enter Advent. Happy new church year by the way, as our calendar starts with Advent, as a period of preparation for Christmas. Advent is a time of watching and waiting for the Lord.

So for what Lord are we waiting?

Now there is a lot of rubbish out there about who our Lord may be and when he might be coming. That’s not a new thing either, as long as there have been Christians there have been some weird wacky ideas about Our Lord and his coming. The Devil never gives up on sowing confusion, the tares amongst the wheat. So the early Church, after the times of persecutions that finished with Constantine, wanted to get people back on the same page. So the great Council of Nicaea was called to tidy things. They made a few rules, sorted out a few problems, and also put out what became the Creed.

The Council felt that a joint statement of faith was essential. There were a number of early creeds around – some were used for baptisms for example, and the Apostles’ Creed is one instance of that. One delegate to the council, a man called Eusibius, brought his own Creed that he had been using to refute ideas that he was a heretic. He was cleared, and went on to write a very good history of the Church which included a glowing report of the Council. Presumably he would have been less glowing if he had run into trouble.

The Creed had though a rocky start. People did not know what use it would be. Gradually it came to be used for the consecration of bishops, presumably to make sure the new bishop was not a dud heretic, and then it slowly spread, mainly for us through the Empire of Charlemagne, to be used in the mass every Sunday.

From there it became the touchstone of what we believe as orthodox Christians. The Book of Common Prayer carefully preserved it, and it has remained in use in our churches. We do not make up our own creeds every week to reflect our own personal views – we use a Creed that defines the faith of the whole Church.

This is part of what Our Lord is saying in the Gospel today. We don’t know when he is coming. So don’t be taken in by the doomsayers who endlessly predict the end of the world – it’s not that easy. If we knew when he was coming, we would, like all normal people, put off doing what we should do till the last moment. Instead, we are warned that we must be ready at any time, for the Son of Man is coming at an unexpected hour. So we need to be prepared, and being prepared means having a spiritual life. Read the Scriptures. Take the sacraments. And think – the ability to think is solely underestimated by Christians, who sometimes think that baptism means a lobotomy. Thinking is where the Creeds come in- they tell us something of the nature of God. The Creed gives us the theology and guidelines on how we can think about God. They are wonderful guidelines, how God is in three persons and how that holds together. There is enough meaty theology for a life of prayer there.

Christ the King – 23 November 2025

It may strike us as odd that, as we celebrate Christ the King, we focus on Christ on the cross. This passage from Luke’s Gospel might strike one, at first glance, not the most obvious way to celebrate what Pope Paul VI in 1969 named this day, the Last Sunday before Advent, the Solemnity of Our Lord Jesus Christ, King of the Universe; often shortened to Christ the King Sunday, or The Reign of Christ.

Christ the King Sunday was the creation of an earlier pope, Pope Pius XI, during a time of gathering darkness throughout Europe, not dissimilar to what the Jews at the time of Our Lord suffered under the oppression of the Roman Empire. They wanted a Messiah, a saviour. This mighty saviour, of course, is Our Lord, of whom many had hoped would rescue the Israelites from the severe darkness of Roman rule. 

In 1925, as the world was being gripped by nationalist, secularist, anti-Semitic, and authoritarian-fascist dictators like in the old Roman Empire, Pope Pius XI instituted Christ the King Sunday to refocus the Church, the Body of Christ on Earth, on why we are here at all – to be icons of God’s love in this world. As Christ’s disciples, we are to serve the world as Christ did: loving God his Father, and loving all people as neighbours – even to the extent of telling us to pray for and love our enemies. This would be a hallmark of a Christlike life: to love others as Christ loved all others, and as our Risen Lord and King loves us today. No doubt, Pius XI would recognize the signs of a similar gathering darkness once again, throughout the world today: so-called “strong men,” dictators, and fascist governments are once again promising peace and prosperity, but delivering nothing close to the promise.

It is our God’s tender compassion, which one sees at work even as Our Lord is already nailed to a Roman cross. The scene, as Luke describes it, is dark. They are at the Place of the Skull, a hillside outside the city gates of Jerusalem, where the Romans have crucified countless others, considered, like Our Lord, a threat to the empire. As Our Lord is crucified alongside two other criminals, he forgives the soldiers doing the empire’s dirty work, “for they do not know what they are doing.” People in the crowd and leaders of the community are mocking Our Lord. If indeed he be the Christ, the Saviour of God’s people, why does he not save himself? Why doesn’t he order his followers, who are many, to revolt? But we, as readers, all know, however, that is not the way of God’s love, mercy, and forgiveness.

Then, one of the criminals also crucified joins in the jeering: “Are you not the Messiah? Save yourself and us!” But the other says, “Do you not fear God, since you are under the same sentence of condemnation? And we indeed have been condemned justly, for we are getting what we deserve for our deeds, but this man has done nothing wrong.” He continued, “Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom.” He replied, “Truly I tell you, today you will be with me in paradise.” We hear Luke’s Passion every three years on Palm Sunday. Perhaps, however, we miss the greater meaning. Our Lord does not say, “Someday in the distant future you will be with me in paradise – in my Father’s kingdom, living with me under the reign of Christ.” That is, we can all be with Christ, whom Pope Paul VI calls “the King of the Universe.”

A short note about the word paradise here. St Luke chooses this word carefully, using the Greek version of the Old Testament, the Septuagint. In that version in Genesis, God does not make a garden in Eden, God makes paradise in Edden. Our Lord is promising a return to the Eden, the beginning of Creation when Adam and Eve, man and woman, walked in innocence with God. Luke’s readers, being Greeks, would have seen this reference, and may even have seen the place of the skull as that of Adam’s burial, as later commentators certainly did. That is why on many crucifixes you see a skull at the foot, with Our Lord’s blood dripping down on it: the blood of the New Adam overcoming the death of the Old Adam.

The author of Colossians reminds us, in agreement with the opening words of John’s Gospel, this Jesus, the Christ, the Word, was with God before Creation itself, and is “image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation.” This is the Universal Christ and King of the Universe itself, which we know to have been set in motion nearly billions of years ago and is still expanding, still growing, still evolving! The Good News for all of us is that the kingdom of God’s beloved Son, in whom we have redemption and forgiveness, is open to all today, here and now. For the cross was not the end of the story. It was just the beginning of the reign of the resurrected Christ, whose Spirit is with us and in us, at all times. 

The prophets of old, and Our Lord were all familiar with a world of bad shepherds, dividing, misleading, scattering God’s people, God’s flock, in darkness and fear. Such bad shepherds are at work throughout the world today. It is on the cross that Our Lord promises to gather those of us who look upon the crucified Christ and see just who we are and whose we are. Christ the King Sunday is meant to be a day, a moment in time for us to be freed from all darkness, freed from the clutches of bad shepherds everywhere. In Christ, through Christ, and with Christ, we can learn to let go of any and all attachments to empire, and let all fears, worries, and obsessions fade into the background. Our wrongdoing will never be held against us. We are forgiven. We are free. We are freed to be with Our Lord in paradise today. This is Our Lord’s final declaration from the cross. May God forgive us, may Christ renew us, and may the Spirit enable us to grow in Christ’s love, mercy, and compassion for all persons, and all creation itself.

Based on a sermon by the Rev’d Kirk Alan Kubicek of the Diocese of Maryland, USA.

The Penultimate – 16 November, 2025

The word for today is “penultimate.” It’s from the fine old Latin word paenultimus that means “next to the last.” Not the last, that’s the ultimate, but next to that, before that. The penultimate things are not the ultimate things, but the things that are a step down from them, things come before them. 

Penultimate is a great word to hear and ponder as we listen to these wonderful Biblical stories about the end of all things, about “dreadful portents and great signs from heaven” and the day of the Lord burning like an oven, and how not one stone will be left upon another. We always hear stuff like this as we get close to Advent; it’s good for us, and these saying are really all about that little word.

Let’s start with the temple in Jerusalem. In the first century, the temple was absolutely the centre of Jewish religion, history, culture, civilization, and civic pride. Here all the Jews could go. In its thousand-year history, the Temple had never been as glorious, as extensive, or as popular as it was when Our Lord and his disciples visited. Herod may be remembered as a tyrant from the Scriptures, but he was also a great builder and he had significantly rebuilt the courts around the Temple and made it a magnificent centre of Jewish worship.

People couldn’t help but notice the Temple and its fineries. The disciples noticed; everyone noticed! And Our Lord noticed them noticing. So, he says, “Take a good long look at these enormous, beautiful stones. Notice the masonry and the artistry. At the end of days, not one of these stones will be left upon the other; all will be thrown down.”

We can almost hear the disciples whispering to one another. “How can this be? This place is indestructible! Look at it! It’ll last thousands of years!” And yet, although the disciples didn’t know it at the time, Luke knew just how true Our Lord’s words were. By the year 70, all that would be left of Herod’s Temple would be a pile of rubble.

Our Lord was ambivalent about the Temple. At times he seems almost hostile: he drove out the money changers and the animals, causing the sacrifices to stop. The Tempe was a centre for Jews: but still a place where divisions mattered: Gentiles were separate from Jews; men from women, and priests from laity. Even God was separate: hidden away behind the curtain in the holy of holies. Our Lord continually taught about a kingdom of heaven where Jews, Samaritans and Gentiles could enter, certainly not a temple. Also, he seems to want to end the whole notion of sacrifice, that blood offering of animals can transfer our responsibility for hate.

There are two things that Our Lord predicts in the Gospel today. The first is, that the Temple would soon be completely destroyed – that not one stone would be left upon another – which is exactly that the Romans did about 35 years later, after an unsuccessful Jewish rebellion.

That’s the first thing Our Lord says. The second is more subtle: as he predicts the destruction of the temple, and the chaos that goes with it, Our Lord also says, (again quite correctly) “the end will not follow immediately.” The Temple will crumble, there will be problems, but things will go on pretty much as before. There will still be much to do. There will be people to help, and evil to resist, and prayers to say – just like before the Temple was destroyed. So, the Temple falls, but “the end will not follow immediately”.

That must have been a hard thing to hear. It was almost impossible for any Jew or early Christian to imagine the destruction of the Temple. What would be even harder to imagine was the destruction of the Temple and the rest of the whole world not coming to an end right then. After all, everyone knew that the Temple was the ultimate thing, the final thing: if it went, everything else was sure to go, too.

But that was wrong. The Temple was not the ultimate thing after all, it was only one of the penultimate things, something that was next door to ultimate, maybe, but that’s all.

All of creation did not hang on it. The main thing, the one truly important and indispensable thing, is God, and what God is up to. Everything else is penultimate.

Everything else takes a back seat. Everything else can – and will – crumble to dust. Anything else can, and will, crumble to dust. The fate of creation hangs on none of them. Who God is and what God is up to: this is what abides, this is the main thing. This alone is ultimate.

It can be difficult to remember this. When the Temple actually fell, (and the world did not end) the fledgling Christian Church in Jerusalem (as well as many Jewish groups) faced a huge crisis of faith.

Many people then simply could not separate what was most important and most valuable and most immediate to them from what was most important and most valuable and most immediate to God. For many, the Temple’s fall was devastating, and seemed to prove God false. They had confused the ultimate with the penultimate.

But Our Lord left something instead of the Temple – a new way of living through his body, through his sacraments. It was a way that all people could enter, as St Paul puts it, Jew or Greek, male or female, free or slave. The Temple made distinctions: Christianity was not meant to do so. The Temple meant transferring our guilt and hate into sacrifice: the taking of bread and wine was meant to overturn sacrifice and make us a community based on love.

Now, of course we failed. But we can never forget that at the heart of our faith is our God as the victim, making it impossible for us to persevere in our prejudices.

We all also have our temples, our penultimates. We all have our own ideas of what is indispensable to creation – these may be personal things, or religious things, or social things, or cultural things, or election results, things we cannot conceive being otherwise, or doing differently, or losing – things we cannot imagine that either we or the world or God could ever live without. 

But also, every now and then, we need to be reminded that these things are not quite ultimate.

It’s very important to be able to make this distinction—to be able to realize that our special concern, our pet project, our current passion, is not really the same thing as the kingdom of God, nor the will of God. This whole business of the last things, the end of the world, all of that is here to remind us that our stuff, no matter how important it may be, our stuff is not ultimate. It will all pass away. Remember that word…penultimate.

Instead, it is who God is and what God is doing, right now among us, that is of ultimate importance. Nothing else matters nearly as much, nothing else will matter for so long. The point is not to hang on tight to what we have. The point is to keep our eyes and hearts open, and our hands busy at what we need to be about.

Partly based on a sermon by Fr James Liggett. Liggett of Midland, Texas, USA.

God is God not of the Dead, but of the Living – 9 November, 2025

One of the most ancient claims about God made by our Jewish brethren is that God is the God of the living. The ancient Hebrew name for God, Elohim Chayim, means “living God” or “God of life.”

Here in St Luke, chapter 20, our gospel today, Our Lord drives home the point.

But wait: Don’t Christians believe that when our mortal bodies die, that is the gateway to life with God? At the requiems here we use the beautiful prayer as part of the preface:

“So that, although death comes to us all,

yet we rejoice in the promise of eternal life;

for to your faithful people life is changed, not taken away;

and when our mortal flesh is laid aside,

an everlasting dwelling place is made ready for us in heaven.

So, what could Our Lord possibly mean?

The first thing that Our Lord is teaching us is a gentle grammatical correction: It is not enough to say that God is alive or the God of the living; rather, God is life. It is from God that all life flows forth, and to God that all life finds its ultimate fulfilment. We do not live in a “closed system” created by God a long, long time ago, then left mostly to run its course like some sort of great clock; rather, we live in a universe which is, at this and every moment, constantly being sustained with Divine Life. If God were to hold God’s breath, even for a moment, all creation would cease to exist.

Our Lord is employing the oldest trick in the teacher’s handbook: shaping and moulding a teachable moment in response to a silly question. The Sadducees, St Luke says, didn’t believe in the resurrection in the first place. When they ask Our Lord about whose wife the woman who had been married to seven successive brothers would be in the resurrection, the trap is set from the beginning: they don’t believe in resurrection anyway!

The fact that the Sadducees created their hypothesis based upon a Levirate marriage is also no accident. Levirate marriages, which were the custom both in those days and centuries after, aimed at providing physical and financial care for the widow. These were inherently complicated arrangements, and seven successive marriages under this practice would have meant a level of complexity bordering on absurdity.

But, of course, the Sadducees don’t care about the woman or the resurrection; they care about entrapping Our Lord. They may as well have come asking the perennial ‘gotcha’ question, “could God make a rock so big that God could not lift it?”

“God is God not of the dead, but of the living…”

For much of human history, death could be a barbaric, agonizing ordeal replete with suffering so great as to rival torture. As Our Lord was dying on the cross, he was offered wine mixed with myrrh — an ancient herbal pain reliever, and likely one of the few medicines in existence at the time that was in any way effective at treating such gruelling pain.

Fast-forward to now, however, and the landscape looks quite different. Thanks in large part to the advances in modern medicine and science, and the great advances in palliative and hospice care, the sheer agony and brutality of death can largely be treated and managed much more successfully than at any other time in human history — though access to this important care is still limited in many areas.

While the holy work that palliative and hospice care centres do must be celebrated, somewhere along the way, as our fear of the agony and barbarity of death began to diminish and subside, much of the Western world began to try and make peace with death — to treat it as something other than the final enemy.

In some circles, death came to be thought of as a “friend,” as a gentle guide that takes us by the hand, leading from this life to the next. In other circles, death began to be altogether avoided. “Celebrations of life” replaced funerals; large, attractive portraits of the deceased overshadow the coffin and speakers only give a glowing account of a life passed.

Christians must work to ease suffering and to bear one another’s burdens together. Sitting vigil at the bedside of a loved one who is dying is to come on bended knee onto holy ground. Christians must support the incredible care that hospices and palliative care centres can provide. Death requires the utmost pastoral sensitivity, and there are good and right reasons for a variety of decisions families make in the wake of death, but at the end of the day, to make a deal with death and treat it as anything other than the enemy of life is to exchange the truth for a lie.

“God is God not of the dead, but of the living…”

For the Sadducees, death was simply the fate of every human when we’ve run out of life. The grass withers in autumn and dies in the winter frost, so too, at the end of our days, are we made ready for the worms…

…But God isn’t satisfied with that outcome, it seems.

No, to believe in the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, revealed in the person of Jesus Christ, is to believe in the God who is life; who is giving and sustaining all life, and ultimately, the God who breaks death’s back once and for all in Christ’s resurrection from the dead on the first day of the week!

At every corner of our existence, at every moment since God called forth creation out of nothing and called it good, God’s life is at work, swallowing up the defeat of death in the victory of Christ’s resurrection and life.

St Paul’s taunt of death in light of the resurrection puts the Christian hope of resurrected life in the face of death plainly before us: “O death, where is your victory? O death, where is your sting?” (1 Cor 15:55)

“God is God not of the dead, but of the living…”

We affirm this central belief of our faith at every funeral, when we stare death in the face and sing that ancient song of defiance: Alleluia, Alleluia, Alleluia!

May the living God; the God who is life continue to sustain our life until we stand at last on that other shore in that greater light, among the saints whom no one can number, whose hope was in the Word Made Flesh, as the words of our Saviour enliven our hearts: “Well done, good and faithful servant, well done!”

Based on a sermon by the Reverend Dr Marshall Jolly of South Carolina, USA.

All Saints & All Souls – 2 November, 2025

Let’s ponder grief and joy. We all know what they are and have felt them: grief at losing something or someone, joy in finding and loving.

They are opposites, but of course related. We need both to be able to tell the difference. We also cannot escape them in life, but will feel both.

In one sense this is why we organise the calendar of the Church in a particular way. Tomorrow will be the feast of All Souls, when we remember and pray for the dead, and also remember our grief. Today we keep, in the octave from Yesterday, the Feast of All Saints, when we remember those in heaven now.

Christians have had a long theology about these two days. In the early Church people just remembered the faithful dead as the saints. After all, saints just means holy ones, and all who have persevered in faith are holy. In the early centuries there were no Christian cemeteries, the Christians were buried with their pagan neighbours in the cemeteries, and on the days of anniversaries of the dead the relatives, pagan or Christian, would gather at the grave of a beloved and have a feast there. Pagans would pour libations to feed the soul of the dead. Christians developed the feast of the mass, which after all is also a meal, in memory of the departed. 

But gradually, at the ending of the Roman age, people started to worry more and more about the nature of the departed. In part this reflects the growing social disruption of the age, when pagan barbarian hordes invaded and disrupted settled life. One tends to be complacent about death until one lives with the fear of sudden death from a barbarian with a large sword turning up in your backyard unexpectedly. Was everyone going straight to heaven? Even all the nasty ones? Most people were prepared to believe the obviously good go to heaven and the obviously evil go to hell; the sheep and the goats that Our Lord had talked about. But most people also realised that the vast majority of people did not fall automatically into either camp, they were the almost good and the almost bad, the middling people for whom most of us categorise ourselves, a bit of sheep and a bit of goat.

It was in this time that a change started to happen in our theology and burial practices. People wanted more assurance that they could get to heaven. Christian cemeteries sprung up to show assurance that we would all go to heaven together. Also ideas about purgatory were developed: people who had not grossly sinned could be purged of their last imperfections and find entry into heaven.

In line with this grew the two festivals of the Church, All Saints and All Souls. All Saints commemorates those we remember in heaven. They see God now. All Souls were for those we were not so sure about, those perhaps in what is called purgatory. The dates for these festivals partly reflect the dedication of early churches to All Saints, such as the Pantheon, in Rome. All Souls grew around the need to help the dead in purgatory, by saying prayers for their release and freedom from the last pains before entering heaven at the end. This was popularised by the great Benedictine Abbey of Cluny, in France, that affected so much of our liturgy in the middle ages. But that’s another story.

However, these festivals also reflect earlier beliefs, that still shadow us in things such as Halloween, the fear of the dead, as if the dead were envious of us and seek to possess us to live again. Against these fears Holy Mother Church has long been opposed. Our Lord Jesus went down to the dead and rose again to show that the dead were not some closed evil company, but a place where even God has been. This is what we sometimes call the harrowing of the dead. Death ultimately is not a place of fear for us, for our Lord, the God of love, has been there. Do not be afraid, the dark realms can have no hold on us.

Nowadays, there is not the same obsession about the afterlife. People certainly still fear death, especially a long painful death, of that I am sure, but they don’t want to talk about it. Many just believe in oblivion, a wiping out at the end, and no life beyond. The sense that they can help the dead by prayers on All Souls has diminished. Even at the few non-church funerals I go to, all fear and grief is kept away by happy pictures and a glowing report card on their life that often hides the reality that many people are just difficult and not easy to live with. But the presentations like to show we are all going to the Good Place. It was so noticeable last Thursday for those who came to Emily Harding’s requiem, what a difference a church full of mainly believers makes.

But we still need to grieve. All Souls, and the customs of Christian funerals are designed to make the reality of death clear. It hurts. We will not make such friends again. We will not know such love again. Grief is part of the human condition and needs to be dealt with. We have to learn in our lives that grief is there, so we can face the tragedy of the world and help others in need. All Souls, with its black vestments, names of the departed and imitation coffin, are part of that process. We do not forget those whom we loved: and neither does God. These are who we continue to pray.

All Saints is the other part of that process: we grieve, but not without hope. All Saints is the joy of believing that God has a place in heaven for all that is created. Today, All Saints, we think of the endless blessed in heaven who rejoice in the presence of God. This is what we hope for. These are who we ask their prayers to help us now. In contrast to the black of All Souls we have the white of joy and celebration, the colour of Easter and Christmas. We know that even the thief on the cross was promised paradise by Our Lord as he too died in pain. In the same way, we to, thieves and other sinners, look forward to that same paradise.

Eulogy for Emily Harding – 30 October, 2025

I don’t know how many of you have been to Vienna, but it’s a great city, still redolent of the Austrian Emperors, who ruled there for hundreds of years. Over time, an elaborate ritual evolved around the burial of the imperial family. There would be a great requiem mass at the Stephandom, the Cathedral of the city, usually celebrated by more cardinals and bishops that would ever fit in St George’s. Then the funeral would leave the cathedral, carrying the body to the resting place of the imperial family, a church not that far away, under the care of the Capuchin monks. The procession would stop outside the gate of the monastery, before the closed doors, and a beautifully dressed court official would bang on the doors thrice with a ceremonial staff.

Then from behind the doors a voice would be heard – who comes here?

The official would then read out the title of the deceased, usually a lengthy list, emperor of Austria, king of Hungry and Bohemia, Duke of so and so, and on and on. Finally, the list of titles would run out, and behind the closed doors they would hear the reply – we know him not. The doors would not open.

So the flunkey would again knock three times on the door, and again the question would be heard, who comes here? Once more the lengthy titles would sound, a list of the honours of the world, and again the reply would come, we know him not. The doors remained shut.

Well, Austrians are very persistent, and again the doors would be struck three times. Again the question would be asked – who comes here? 

But this time, there would be no recitation of the great and powerful titles of the world. Instead, would come the simple answer – a sinner, a mortal man.

This is the point of death. We all face it, and all the glory of the world and our hopes finish at death. Some in this world live in fear of death, fearful of the loss of all they hold so tightly, wealth, family, possessions. Lives become a race to defeat death but accumulating as much as possible to find value here, because they fear that all will be dust.

But Christians hold a different view. We know the love of Our Lord, and know by his life, death and resurrection, our lives live on past death. We have the assurance that where Our Lord has been, through the gates of Hades, he has opened for us a way to follow him. This way is open to us, not because we have power and wealth in the world, not by our merits and arcane knowledge of religion, but because we know that Our Lord loves us, and in loving us, offers us forgiveness for all the sins we have committed, because love triumphs over all.

Now I did not tell you what happened when the reply to the question, who comes here was asked the third time, and the reply was a sinner, and a mortal man. Then the great wooden doors were opened, and the monks came out, and the body was accepted and taken for burial in the great vaults below, filled with bodies of countless members of the imperial family, all who though were great in life, knew also that they were sinners and mortals as well.

So, if you should ask today who we are burying with all the pomp that St George’s can offer, do not say it is for Emily Shaw Harding, Bachelor of Theology, lay reader, synod representative to the diocese, treasurer of the parish, oblate of the Benedictine Abey of St Michael’s Camperdown, member of our Cell of Our Lady of Walsingham, sacristan for many decades, communicant of this church. Today we know her not as this. Do not say it is for Emily Shaw Harding, sister to Rosalie, aunt, friend and presence in this church for so many years. Today we know her not as this. Today we know her, as we know ourselves to be, sinners and mortals.

And the gates of heaven will open wide for her, and all the trumpets will sound, for heaven is always open for those who love God.

Modern-Day Donatism and the Gospel – 26 October, 2025

Let me tell you today about my heresy of today, Donatism. This goes way back to the church in North Africa in the fourth century. Between around 303-312, the Roman Emperor Diocletian persecuted Christians throughout the Empire, including North Africa, which was then Roman. If any of you should have been to the great Roman palace in Split, Croatia, that’s the emperor. During the persecution, any Christians who renounced their faith, made offerings to the Roman gods, and turned over any sacred scriptures they had were spared. Those who refused, especially those caught with Christian texts they refused to hand over, were usually killed. While many Christians resisted and were martyred, many others did not. They renounced Christianity, allowed their books to be burned, and were spared.

Now, let’s fast forward a little bit. The persecutions died down and with Diocletian’s successor, Constantine, it became a lot easier for Christians, as he became a Christian himself, the first Christian Emperor. The Greek church up the road from us is dedicated to him and his mother, Helena. So many of those who had denied their faith returned to the Church. But what really upset some people was that a number of clergy, who had lapsed or renounced their faith, returned to the church and were functioning again as clergy. Many Christians in North Africa did not want to allow lapsed clergy to return. They considered it offensive to the memories of those who had the courage to become martyrs. They believed that such priests might return to the Church as laymen, but not as clergy ever again. This issue split the Church and a person named Donatus became the chief spokesman for the rival church. Donatus said lapsed clergy were ineligible to perform the sacraments, and that any which they may have performed were invalid. So, for example, if you were baptised by a lapsed priest, you weren’t really baptised. They thought the impurity of the clergy somehow infected the whole Church. They wanted a pure Church, led by pure clergy, composed of pure members. The opposing Church, which became the mainstream Church, responded by saying that lapsed clergy could be restored to full authority after having performed appropriate penance. They based this on the concept of forgiveness for all. They claimed that the holiness of the Church is not based on the purity of its leaders or the purity of its members. All are sinners who have fallen short of the glory of God. The holiness of the Church rests entirely upon the holiness of God who graciously forgives us our sins in Jesus Christ. This became the orthodox Christian position. It was a question of what is orthodox – to be orthodox was to believe in the right dogmas, but what we call orthopraxis was right behaviours, and we all fall short there.

Now Donatists, both ancient and modern, are people who are really worried that the impurity, moral failings, and erroneous beliefs of others – or perhaps better, what they perceive as the impurity, moral failings, and erroneous beliefs of others — will somehow corrupt or infect them. It’s not just in the Church. People can become really concerned with their ideological purity, political purity, nutritional purity, moral purity, or what ever purity these days is in. This modern-day Donatism affects people of all-stripes. There are liberal Donatists and there are conservative Donatists. The incivility of our public discourse is a manifestation of this modern-day Donatism. People treat others with whom they differ not just as people who they think are wrong, but as abominations that can be abused. It’s a relentless search for those two long words orthodoxy and orthopraxis, we must not only believe in the right things 9orthodoxy) we must be purer than pure in what we do (orthopraxis).

Now, if we should be concerned about the Church, we should be troubled by the ways in which Donatism is affecting it. Sadly, the Donatism in the Church often mirrors the modern-day Donatism in the broader culture. Christians simply adopt the rhetoric of the broader culture and then use it in their fights against other Christians. Name a hot-button issue, even the choice of the new Archbishop of Canterbury, and you will find a group people claiming that unless you agree with them you are corrupting the faith and the Church, and that either you should leave, or they will in search of a purer, more doctrinally correct, more liturgically correct, more politically correct, more you-name-it correct church. 

It seems to be everywhere these days. It’s in our broader culture, it’s in our churches, and, God help us, it’s in our souls. It’s everywhere, perhaps, because it’s a manifestation of human sinfulness. As St Paul tells us, we have all sinned and fallen short of the glory of God. It’s the sin that wants to point out the speck in our neighbour’s eye and ignore the log in our own. It is the human tendency to put ourselves in the place of God, to be the judges of good and evil, of who’s in and who’s out.

Remember, Our Lord had to deal with a similar issue in his day. The Pharisees thought that Our Lord and his followers would somehow catch evil by eating with sinners and tax collectors. But Our Lord said that you’ve got it wrong. Our Lord doesn’t get corrupted by coming into contact with sinners: rather, sinners get healed by coming into contact with him.

So, our Gospel today tells us, “Jesus told this parable to some who trusted in themselves that they were righteous and regarded others with contempt.” It’s the parable of the Pharisee and the tax collector.

So, Our Lord then tells the story of the Gospel today, the Pharisee giving a progress report to God on how well he has done, and the tax collector seeing his sins and asking for mercy.

The surprise ending of the story is that the Pharisee, who gives a wonderful performance in the temple, goes home empty. He came asking nothing of God; and he goes home getting nothing from God. The tax collector, despicable fellow that he is, shows up empty-handed asking for God’s mercy; and goes home justified, that is, in right relationship with God. In other words, both were orthodox, as they were worshipping in the Temple, but only the tax collector was othopraxical, reflecting on how he acted.

Donatists always go home empty. They are so sure of their holiness and purity that they don’t think they need anything from God. Perhaps the only thing they might ask is if God could keep the tax collectors, the impure, at a safe distance so they don’t get infected.

Tax collectors and sinners paradoxically go home full. All of us have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God. When we come into God’s presence not trying to puff ourselves up by putting everyone else down, but with an honest and humble acknowledgment of our emptiness, God fills us with his love and forgiveness.

The Church’s answer to our Donatism then and always is the good news of God’s love for us in Jesus Christ. None of us, none of us, is worthy or deserving of God’s grace and mercy. Our Anglicanism, our liberalism, our conservativism, our environmentalism, our vegetarianism, our good works, our acts of piety, our love of cute puppies will not get us into heaven. We have all sinned and fallen short of the glory of God. The Good News is that while we were yet sinners, God sent his Son Jesus Christ who through his life, death, and resurrection has made us acceptable in God’s sight and through his holiness has made us holy and acceptable in him. My purity or goodness, your purity or goodness, human purity and goodness have nothing to do with it. It is all about God’s choice, God’s good pleasure, God’s grace freely bestowed on us, through the death and resurrection of Christ by which we have received forgiveness.

This, my fellow Donatists, is good news. We have no purity or holiness apart from the grace, love, and mercy of God. Now, how we respond to this good news ought to make a difference in our lives. In gratitude for the free gift of God’s grace, we ought to lead better lives, good lives, indeed, holy lives. Now if that should sound like a paradox, it’s because it is. It is the paradox Martin Luther describes when he says we are simultaneously sinners and justified, sinful and righteous at the same time. It is the paradox that we are utterly dependent on the forgiveness and grace of God, and that we are also called to a devout and holy life. But the Church, in its wisdom, has said that the call to a holy life ought not to lead to Donatism, the tendency in flawed human beings to purge and purify, to cut others off, and to retreat into enclosed communities of the ideologically pure.

All are one in Christ Jesus our Lord: Jews, Gentiles, Evangelicals, Anglo-Catholics, Greens, Port supporters; even modern-day Donatists. In Christ, we have redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of our sins, according to the riches of his grace that he lavishes upon all of us. My purity, your purity, the Church’s purity has nothing to do with it. And for that, we say, thanks be to God.

Based on a sermon by Fr Joseph Pagano of the College of Transfiguration in Grahamstown, South Africa.

Persistence – 19 October, 2025

We can all sympathise with the the persistent widow in the Gospel reading today. If you should have ever to deal with an insurance company or a government agency, or in some cases even a child’s school or a hospital or the justice system, you might know how it feels to wonder if anyone is listening or responding to your needs. Let alone being stuck on a phone waiting, waiting waiting, to get through to a real voice. I was stuck in a queue in a hospital last Friday trying to get information, and I had a good lesson in patience, especially when I found out I was in the wrong queue. I was quite proud of my patience, then blew it all when I went home and could not open a childproof bottle of pills for the cat.

We all experience the micro-aggressions of bureaucracy, but sometimes our needs are serious and the experience of feeling unheard in the middle of an emotional or desperate situation can be devastating. There is a famous Greek myth about a man called Sisyphus: struggling to lift a heavy weight up a mountain, and just when he has thought he has reached the top, it rolls all the way back down and he is forced to start at the beginning again. More often than not, it is our persistence, our unwillingness to let things go by, our unwillingness to lose hope, that eventually leads to success.

It isn’t always comfortable to keep advocating for what we need, and of course, it would be much easier if everyone with the authority or capability to do so would help, but at the end of the day, our constant reminders, our relentlessness, make a big difference in getting the job done. Like the persistent widow in the Gospel, if we keep making our case, we may eventually get a response: even if only because the people in charge are so annoyed that they just want to get us off their backs.

History is full of people whose success can be directly attributed to their persistence. Tradition claims that Colonel Sanders of Kentucky Fried Chicken tried to sell his chicken recipe 1,007 times before it was eventually picked up. More heroic figures like William Wilberforce, Gandhi, or Nelson Mandela sought justice and social change through careful, thoughtful, bold persistence. William Wilberforce tried bringing the abolition of the slave trade in the British Empire for twenty years in parliament, and only succeeded a week before his death. If any of these figures had gotten tired or burnt out and had given up, which likely crossed their minds from time to time, the world would be a very different place. The pursuit of justice requires perseverance; the ability of individuals and communities to persist in seeking justice can change the world.

In the parable, the widow eventually gets what she wants even from this judge who, in his own words, had “no fear of God and no respect for anyone.” To be a widow in the ancient Near East was to be among the most vulnerable of society. As a widow, this woman would have had no advocate, no social standing upon which to plead her case. She was helpless in the deepest sense of the term. All she had was her will to persist; to not give up; to demand that someone listen to her. Sometimes, when we are most vulnerable, when we have the least to lose, we are also most likely to be bold. Despite the widow’s marginalised status in society, she exhibited great strength.

The unrighteous judge eventually does what is right, but only because this nagging woman has made him feel trapped. He does not respond out of a changed heart. Very often social change is like this, too. The ongoing discussion about the indigenous voice in parliament is part of a long conversation about Colonialism and our responsibility about the poverty of our Aboriginal neighbours to this day. It’s just part of a long journey, another step in finding equality and justice that s not finished.

Achieving justice is sometimes easier than changing the heart of a society. There is hope in getting justice, but there’s always more work to do. We don’t know what kind of justice the widow in this parable sought, but we can imagine that whatever social circumstances led her to be treated unfairly did not immediately disappear at the judge’s ruling.

The Gospel assures us that God is not like the unrighteous judge. God does not respond to our needs only when we have pestered so much that it would be easier to just give in. The Gospel says that God will vindicate us. or bring us justice, “quickly.” So, how does God bring justice? How does God respond to our prayers? God did not settle a court case for this woman. God did not end slavery in the British Empire, blackbirding in Queensland, colonialism in India or apartheid in South Africa.

That’s our work. It’s our job to persist, to advocate for ourselves when we feel helpless; to advocate for others when they are the most vulnerable. God’s justice is much more comprehensive than what can be achieved through legislation or courts. The Gospel promises us that God will respond to our prayers much faster than the unjust systems of society. If even an unrighteous judge can be merciful in the face of a persistent woman, then how much more merciful is God who loves us and created us and knows every inch of our being?

The promises of God in Scripture are hard to grapple with. When justice in society comes so slowly and is often so limited, how can we believe that God is at work, providing us with unbounded love, mercy, and speedy vindication? Where do we see that? God’s vindication is not necessarily courtroom justice or even change in society, though God is with us in those struggles. We believe in a God who came to be with us and suffered alongside humanity. Our Lord himself experienced injustice at the hands of a government that neither feared God nor regarded man. We believe in a God who is always at work, changing hearts and minds, transforming lives, bringing the dead to life, turning the normal systems and power structures on their head. making the weak strong and the vulnerable powerful and giving resounding voice to those who have been ignored for too long. Just listen to the words of Mary in the Magnificat!

God is in the cries of the helpless. Imagine the widow in the parable going to the judge again and again to plead her case. The judge ignored her, but God was with her the whole time. God knew. God watched. God judged. God gave her courage. God gave her hope. God kept her persistent. As God can for each of us.

The hope that we have in God is not the same as the hope we have in society. Society will change; injustice will eventually end, but our hope in God is that God is with us through it all; that God hears us when we first cry out; that God’s love for us will give us the strength to persist; and that God’s justice will transform our lives and the hearts and minds of everyone in the whole world.

Contentment and Healing – 14 October

There are some awful whingers in the world. You probably have met a few as well: perhaps in the supermarket, when they carry on long and loud conversations that make you heartily glad you are not part of their family. If they are part of your family, you have my sympathy. People who feel they need to complain about everything and anything: the whinger.

Well today is a day to give thanks that Christians are not naturally whingers. Today’s gospel is all about giving thanks for what is given to us.

The ten lepers in the Gospel today all plead for healing, and Our Lord tells them to go and show themselves to the priests. In faith they turn and go, and on the way, they find themselves healed. But only one, a Samaritan, then turns back to give thanks to our Lord for the healing.

So, what’s the difference with this one. He not only finds that he is healed, but he sees it, and understands it, in other words he is converted, he gives thanks to God: he recognises God’s action in the healing. Our Lord then assures him that his faith has made him well, a slightly different word that implies saving as well as health.

The Samaritan is different in that he takes his healing to a different level – he reflects on it and is moved to give thanks. Not only is he physically changed, from a leper to a healthy person, but he is spiritually changed, he sees God in the healing and is moved to give thanks.

The other nine are still healed – but they have not spiritually changed. That is the difference.

It’s interesting that Our Lord says to the ten to go and show themselves to the priests, not priest. Is Our Lord seeing already that they are different beliefs: nine would go to the Jewish priest at the Temple and the Samaritan would go to his priest. But then consider what the Samaritan does: he does not choose his priest, but returns to Our Lord, seeing in him, his new priest. Also consider the fact of the healing of the ten. When they were all lepers, they lived together ignoring their differences. When healed they are restored to their religious differences: healing in the body exposes the fault lines of their religions. Yet the Samaritan is the only one who takes the healing in gratitude and gives thanks, seeing Our Lord as his new priest.

The Samaritan leper has become instead a model of the new faith in Christ – he is filled with the grace of thankfulness of what God has done. That is why the Gospel uses a different word here from when the leprosy left him: he is not only cleansed, but also healed and saved. He has had a double healing.

This is the point about having a sense of thankfulness and grace in our lives: it makes us different. We can, at times, obtain health, but we rarely obtain thankfulness for where we are. Yet thankfulness is the secret of contentment in life.

We have a dreadful need in our society to consume more and more. It’s a curse of creed that comes form a sense of inadequacy, a lack of contentment. We are not content within ourselves, and therefore we revert to rivalry with each other to show superiority. We therefore need the bigger car, the better house, whatever that helps who we are better. Yet we do this by discarding what we have already. We do this so easily because we do not give thanks for what we have already. We know that this system is unsustainable, yet we seem to be locked into this disease.

Obtaining a sense of thankfulness is the escape. When we find the presence of God is who we are and what we have, we find the contentment of peace. Not only that, but we also become more readily an instrument of God, able to do God’s will. We learn to be grateful for what we have and not obsessed by what we do not.

So, learning to give thanks is important, and we can teach ourselves this by prayer. One of the old simple ways of prayer that we are taught is to remember the letters ACTS: that is when we pray we should adore God in A, then confess our faults in confession in C, then give thanks to God for what we have received in T, and finally ask God in our supplications for what we need, in S. For thanking God is an important step before we can really work out what we need. If we don’t appreciate what we are given, how can we use whatever new gifts our Lord can give. Our God is a rather frugal God – he only gives his Son once for all, and tends to expect us to make good and durable use of the gifts we are given. We cannot do that, unless we appreciate them, and we can only do that by reflecting on what we have and learning to praise God for those gifts and continue to give thanks.

Another way to try and learn thankfulness is just simply giving thanks for something before you throw it out. Those good old shoes that served you years – why not give thanks to God before they are thrown into the bin? 

It’s a horrible thing to end up in life as a grumpy old thing, whinging and boring our friends and family. But that’s not how God wants us to be. We need to continually learn to give thanks for all the gifts we are given, the beauty and the friends and the life and our faith in Our Lord. We can do this if we remember to search and see the wonderful things the Lord has given to us every day and give thanks for those wonderful gifts.