Bible Readings: Isaiah 12.2-6; Philippians 4.4-7; Luke 3.7-18

My sermons throughout Advent have reflected on poetry, and this Sunday I’d like us to dwell on the poem, or song, of Gaudete: It’s a sacred Christmas Carol, thought to have been composed in the 16^th Century. An English translation is below. The name ‘Gaudete’ in Latin means ‘Rejoice!’ – and is addressed in the plural. It’s a calling to us, as the Church body, to celebrate.

(You may ask, why are we celebrating Jesus’ birth before Christmas day has arrived? Well, this Sunday is a little grace –it’s like the pause as you climb a hill and discover a bench half-way up. Or the mid-morning snack, when you’ve had a busy morning but lunch is still far off. A moment to remind us what this season of Advent-preparation is leading up to.)

Guadete

Rejoice, rejoice!

Christ is born

Of the Virgin Mary –

Rejoice!

 

The time of grace has come—

What we have wished for;

Songs of joy

Let us give back faithfully.

 

God has become man,

With nature marvelling,

The world has been renewed

By the reigning Christ.

The closed gate of Ezekiel

Is passed through,

Whence the light is risen;

Salvation has been found.

 

Therefore, let our assembly

Now sing in brightness

Let it bless the Lord:

Greetings to our King.

There’s something ancient and powerful which is captured in the way this song is sung. The repetition of “Guadete! Guadete!” is like a heartbeat. Whatever ideas or images come up, the song brings us back to that heartbeat. Giving strength.

This week I’ve felt busy – visiting three schools in our parish, and having one visit church, as well as our usual Foodbank and Toddler Group. At times I’ve felt a bit stressed and there are moments when I just needed to be ‘grounded’ again. Do you know what I mean?

Sometimes you just need to pick up the phone to a friend, just to hear their voice, or talk things through with a brother or sister in Christ. To recharge and re-centre.

Well, that repeating refrain grounds the song for me. Whatever else Christmas might be about for you – Christ is born and we can wrap both hands around that and hold on to that truth with joy. Whether Christmas for you is full of happy family and friends,
or the pain of missing loved ones and family disagreements.
The lovely surprises of gifts and food,
or the long cold nights.  – We have been given a gift that many generations longed for but did not know: Christ the Lord.

It can be easy for us to take Jesus for granted, especially those of us like me who grew up in the Church. I’ve always lived in the knowledge that God walks with us through Jesus. When I’ve felt guilty or had low self-esteem, I was told that Jesus loves me and forgives me, and over time this has begun to sink in, especially as I got to know Him.

Throughout this song there is a recognition that Jesus was long waited for. In the second stanza, there’s the line “The time of grace has come— What we have wished for”. This line puts me in mind of the Old Testament Prophets who longed so much for the promised Messiah. To make the world right and bring healing and light.

The calling to rejoice – expressed so insistently by Saint Paul in the Philippians passage – is made possible because God has come close in Jesus. There’s something life changing to celebrate here!

As we sit with this medieval song, I wonder what we might take away for the week ahead.

I wonder if it speaks to you of the mystery of the incarnation. I love the obscure phrase “The closed gate of Ezekiel is passed through” come and ask me about it over coffee. I had to do some digging to uncover that one.

Like the repeated refrain, “Gaudete! Gaudete!” I wonder what grounds you at this time of year. What helps you to focus on keeping Advent special, and preparing your heart to receive Jesus afresh?

I commend to you the carol service tonight, as we sit in darkness and yet hear of the arrival of the Light of the World. Hearing the old familiar carols sung always stirs me. The timelessness of God connects with the timelessness of those songs.

It may be that you’re finding your diary is a bit too busy at this time of year. Buying the Christmas presents and arranging to visit people, and finishing work for the year well… Can you carve out time to go for a walk so you can walk-and-talk with God in prayer? It’s when things get really busy when it’s more important than ever to pause and pray.

For others, the run up to Christmas can be too quiet. Too much time and loneliness. Know that God sees you. Might time be turned into prayer? Perhaps spend some time re-read the Gospel accounts of Jesus’ birth and pondering the mystery.

As I make time to reflect on poems this Advent, more than anything else I am moved by the way words can evoke feelings and nostalgia which make me feel small, but also remind me how much greater God is than we can ever know. Like being in the countryside and looking up and seeing all the stars: God is loving and comes to lead us out of darkness and into the light. The light of a thousand stars.

Gaudete! People rejoice! Our God comes. Amen.

Readings

Ezekiel 34:11-16, 20-24; Psalm 95:1-7; Ephesians 1:15-23; Matthew 25:31-46

Sermon by Reader Christopher Ward

May I speak in the name of Almighty God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Amen.

This Sunday is a very important Sunday in the Church calendar. It is the last Sunday of the Church year. And we stand on the cusp of Advent, that season of hope and anticipation.

And just as we celebrate the secular New Year’s Eve, so I think it entirely proper that we also celebrate our spiritual New Year. And what better way to do than to prayerfully reflect on the divinity of Christ, the universal and eternal King. And that divinity and kingship can I think be summed up in just seventeen words, the seventeen very familiar words from the Authorised Version with which John opens his Gospel, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.”

Just as we do at the end of the calendar year in a secular sense, the turning of the Church year is perhaps an appropriate time for a spiritual look back. We can give thanks for all the good things that God has brought into our lives over the past year, acknowledge the times when we may have strayed from Him or ignored Him, and reflect on lessons learned.

I also want this morning to spend a little time on one aspect of kingship which has been a recurrent theme in our readings over the last couple of weeks, and which naturally leads us on into Advent. And that theme is judgement. Kings judge, and we are familiar with this in the secular context in the name of the largest division in the High Court, the King’s Bench Division.

Last week we heard from the prophet Zephaniah, who graphically described how the Lord would search Jerusalem with lamps and “punish the people who rest complacently on their dregs” . In the Gospel reading , in which Jesus is painting one picture of what the kingdom of heaven will be like when the Apocalypse comes, we heard the parable of the Talents, and of the differing judgements of the master on the three slaves to whom he entrusted his money.

Today we heard a passage from the prophet Ezekiel in which God describes how he will seek out his sheep and care for them. The image of God as a shepherd is of course a familiar Old Testament image, as is the image of the people of Israel as sheep. And Ezekiel paints a rosy picture of the life that God has in mind for his faithful sheep. But not all his gathered sheep will enjoy that life because, once gathered, the sheep – in reality the people of Israel – will be judged by God. And while the outlook for those who are injured and weak is good, the outlook for the fat and strong, the ones that have prospered by abusing their fellows, is not.

And there is a similar message in our Gospel reading. Jesus is describing what will happen at the Apocalypse, when all the nations will be gathered before him. He will then separate people into ‘sheep’ at his right hand, those blessed by God and who will inherit His kingdom, and ‘goats’ at his left hand, those consigned to the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels. As we say when we recite the Creed – He will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead.

Now this is a passage which has always fascinated me, because it leaves both the sheep and the goats in a state of confusion. Neither group can understand why they have been classified as they are. Jesus explains: his judgement is based on how people treated him when he was in need. However, both camps are still confused, because neither has any recollection of ever encountering Jesus in such a situation. Jesus then previews the answer that God will give on Judgement Day: just as they did do it, or did not do it, as the case may be, to the least of those who are members of Jesus’ family, they did, or did not, do it to Jesus himself. In other words, it is in our service to each other that we serve Jesus our spiritual King.

Buried in that deceptively simple answer is, I think, a very tough call for each of us. Can we know for certain whether we are getting it right? Judging by our Gospel passage today, and the genuine confusion in the minds of both the sheep and the goats, I suspect that the answer is probably ‘no’.

I still remember an incident in my own life from many, many years ago. Our next door neighbour was having the tarmac replaced on his front drive. A single workman did the job, and there was something very odd about him. He was delivered daily from the back of a van, not the passenger seat. Even a friendly greeting seemed to cause him a problem. It was only some years later, when the proprietor of a business in the area that resurfaced drives was convicted on multiple counts of abuse of workers over a long period that I realised that this workman was probably a victim of what we now call modern slavery. And I had completely missed this.

But I have confidence that our God is a merciful God, who will judge kindly. But the fact remains that he will judge each one of us, and that mercy, if granted, follows judgement; it does not substitute for it.

Finally, I would like to come back to another New Year tradition: New Year’s resolutions. There is surely no reason why these cannot be associated with the spiritual New Year, just as they are with the secular? In chapter 22 of  his Gospel, Matthew recounts  how the Pharisees sought to trick Jesus by asking him which was the greatest commandment in the law. Jesus’ response can be summarised as first and foremost to love God wholeheartedly and second to love one’s neighbour as oneself. So my own Resolution is to strive with renewed energy to do both. The first is no more than Christ the eternal King deserves, and the second may, and I stress may, see me at God’s right hand on Judgement Day. At least, I hope and pray that it will!

Amen

Readings

Acts 2:14a, 22-32; Psalm 16; 1 Peter 1:3-9; John 20:19-31

Sermon by Reader Christopher Ward

May I speak in the name of Almighty God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Amen.

One of the words that comes into my mind when I look back at the spiritual events of the last couple of weeks, and indeed further back, is ‘transformation’. A fortnight ago, on Palm Sunday, we recalled Jesus’ triumphal entry into Jerusalem. By Good Friday, we were contemplating a broken body, hanging lifeless from a Cross. And last Sunday, Easter Sunday, we joyfully celebrated Jesus’ resurrection. That’s quite a lot of transformations!

But there are also transformations within this church, and one that I first noticed last Sunday has given me a lot of cause for thought. It’s still here, and it is within the beautiful floral arrangement by the font that was created by Wendy and Kim. So what is so special about it?

The first thing is that, at its heart, is a cross. I cannot recall when I last saw a decorated cross, let alone one as lavishly decorated as this one. Crosses are normally bare, sometimes with a figure of Jesus hanging on them. The opening lines of that familiar Good Friday hymn, The Old Rugged Cross, put the traditional image of the Cross so eloquently, “on a hill far away stood an old rugged cross, the emblem of suffering and shame”. We don’t normally adorn emblems of suffering and shame.

The second thing is the provenance of the cross, because it is not just any old cross. It is in fact the cross that, throughout Lent, stood in the chancel, where our paschal candle now stands, the light of Christ replacing the emblem of suffering and shame – again, quite a transformation!

But that crude, simple, cross was itself the result of a transformation, because it was made from the wood of the Christmas tree that, from Advent to Candlemas, stood close to where that decoration now stands. So that cross, which started its life in our church as a thing of beauty, is once again restored to that state. For me, that provides a powerful echo of the journey from that helpless baby in the manger, through death on the Cross, to the Risen Lord.

I often think that, with our focus on events Sunday by Sunday, we don’t always have the opportunity to reflect as much as we might on the broad sweep of events. Last Sunday, we joyfully celebrated the resurrection of our Lord. This Sunday, as we begin to travel forward in the Easter season, is perhaps an opportune moment to reflect on the journey along which the wood of that cross has been our constant companion. It was with us in Advent, when we awaited the birth of Christ and it remained with us as we celebrated his revelation to the world in the Epiphany; it was with us in Lent, as we journeyed towards the Crucifixion; and it is with us now, as we celebrate the risen Christ.

And it also reminds us of what lies at the heart of our spiritual journey of the last few months. The words on the inscription at the base of the arrangement, which are taken from John’s Gospel and were also at the base of the unadorned cross in the chancel, tell us that God so loved the world that he gave his only son, so that everyone who has faith in him may not perish but have eternal life[1]. That is a transformation of truly cosmic significance! In other words, that arrangement at the back of the church encapsulates for us the overarching power of God’s love for all humanity.

Our readings today also echo the theme of transformation. The passage we heard from Acts is part of Peter’s address to the crowd at Pentecost. A more confident, eloquent and powerful assertion of Jesus as the Messiah is difficult to imagine. The Peter of whom Jesus said, “Get thee behind me, Satan”[2] is long gone; the frightened figure cowering in the courtyard of the Temple following Jesus’ arrest and who three times denied that he knew Jesus is also long gone. Peter is transformed.

And in our Gospel reading, we heard the story of Thomas, and his reaction to the news that other disciples had actually seen the risen Lord, a week before, in the evening following their discovery of the empty tomb. But Thomas was I think a rationalist. Jesus had been very publicly crucified and everyone knew that this had only one outcome: certain death. The idea that Jesus had appeared as if from nowhere within a locked room was also completely illogical.  But I think it noteworthy that Thomas did not simply reject this apparently crazy idea, he simply wanted hard evidence before he could himself actually believe. As we heard in our Gospel reading, Jesus once again appeared to the disciples in that room a week later, when Thomas was present, and Thomas received the proof that he craved. Thomas was transformed, exclaiming, “My Lord and my God”.

But the story does not end there. By Jesus’ death and resurrection, we too can be transformed, as promised by the message under the decorated cross by the font. In his Gospel John writes, as we heard today, that the particular signs recorded in his Gospel are but a selection of those which Jesus performed in the presence of his disciples. Those which are included in his Gospel, John tells us, were included for a very specific reason: that we may come to believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that through believing may have life in his name.

Let us pray for the faith to sustain such a wonderful transformation!

Amen

[1] John 3:16

[1] Matthew 16:23; Mark 8:33; Luke 4:8.

Sermon by By Reverend Matt Harbage

Readings:
John 20.19-end
Acts 5.27-35

“May you come to believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that through believing you may have life in his name.”

May I speak in the name of God, who is Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Amen.

I really enjoy a good sci-fi film. Definitely in my top 5 is The Matrix. It’s something of a classic, with Keanu Reeves, and Lawrence Fishburne, set in a dystopian world where artificially intelligent machines have taken over the world. Keanu Reeves’ character, Neo, is rescued by Morpheus who tries to help him understand that the world (as Neo knew it) was an illusion. Morpheus takes Neo to the top of a skyscraper and says to him:

“You have to let it all go Neo: Fear, doubt and disbelief. Free your mind.”

And at that, Morpheus launches himself into an impossible jump, off the building and lands safely on another skyscraper a block away. The look on Neo’s face is brilliant as he sees the impossible become possible.

I think sci-fi can be a gift to our Christian faith, because it’s a way of exercising and expanding our imaginations. We all know a film is fiction. But the activity of expanding our minds might just help us get a glimpse of the infinitely supreme God who made us, loves us and became one of us in Jesus Christ.

We need to free our minds, just as those first disciples had their minds radically freed by their encounters with Jesus.

I want us to know something like that too: I want us to have encounters with Jesus. I want us to be blown away like Thomas was when he saw the resurrected Jesus and cried out: “My lord and my God!”

I want, in the words of Morpheus,
“to let it all go: Fear, doubt and disbelief. Free your mind.”

Fear. Doubt. And Disbelief. Let’s consider Doubt.

Doubting Thomas is a favourite apostle for many, especially Indians! We don’t know a lot about him, but we know he doubted,

“The other disciples told him, ‘We have seen the Lord.’ But he said to them, ‘Unless I see the mark of the nails in his hands…I will not believe.’”

And I suspect you and I would have doubted too if we’d missed Jesus’ first appearance back from the dead. When Thomas eventually sees Jesus in the flesh, Jesus said to him, ‘Have you believed because you have seen me? Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe.

Jesus, here in our Gospel this morning, is calling out to us across the centuries: We may not see him in the flesh, and yet we are called to have faith – faith that God the Father raised Him from the Dead, and will one day raise us from the Dead too.

We may not see Jesus in the flesh, but the evidence of his RISEN life is all around us: in the church community of which we are part. In the beauty of creation. In the gift of the Holy Spirit.

I pray we might eagerly seek God’s Spirit; allowing the Spirit to speak to our hearts as the Spirit did to those saints, whose lives inspire us across the ages.

Thomas does not just doubt though. His legacy to us is also captured in his words when he finally saw the Risen Jesus,

 “My Lord and my God!”

This is a most profound theological claim: That Jesus Christ, the man whom Thomas and the other disciples had been following, is in fact none other than God himself, God in human form. This declaration propels Thomas into someone whom we should imitate: to have our doubts dispelled by Jesus and to proclaim our faith to others. The legacy of Thomas encourages us not to tiptoe around our doubts, but instead to be honest about them and to proclaim theological truth, with joy and freedom.

Finding the right place for doubt in our faith puts me in mind of maths tuition. I used to support teenagers with their maths, and often what I would find first would be fear. They wouldn’t want to engage because they wouldn’t want to get anything wrong, or they feared being overwhelmed and confused.

So a big part of tuition was to build confidence. It was in a sense to remove some doubt, but then, once confidence had started to be built, I would introduce some healthy doubt as I encouraged the children to check their answers. To doubt their answers, but to have faith too, that they were on the right track.

 In more usual terms, our Christian faith – like Thomas’ declaration, should be joyful and bold, confident and strong while also being humble, gentle, and with a loving sense of curiosity as we deepen our relationship with our Lord and our God.

I wonder how you might cultivate a loving sense of curiosity in your relationship with God.

“You have to let it all go Neo: Fear, doubt and disbelief. Free your mind.”

As we build confidence in the resurrected Lord Jesus, we put doubt and fear in their rightful places.

The legacy of the Pharisees as we heard in our First Reading this morning reminds us of how fear can dominate our relationship with God. Although a people who desired to be close to God, the Pharisees were more concerned about the letter of the law than the Spirit of the Law. I wonder if they couldn’t let go their fear of making mistakes. Rather than trusting in God and holding on to that loving curiosity, they seemed to decide that following the Rules was the main thing.

The Pharisees show us that God wants a relationship with us far more than he wants us to be legalistic, obeying the law simply out of fear of getting it wrong.

 I think God wants us free our minds, and free our hearts and free our souls. He wants love to grow, and trust to grow, for this world and the next.

As we gather in a moment around the great feast of God’s love in the Eucharist, may we truly recognise the risen lord Jesus in the Bread which becomes His Body,
and as we consume his life, may our hearts whisper with Thomas – joyfully and confidently: “My Lord, and My God.”

Amen.

The Second Sunday Before Lent

Sermon by By Christopher Ward

Readings:
Genesis 2: 4b-9, 15-25
Psalm 65
Revelations 4
Luke 8:22-25

May I speak in the name of Almighty God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Amen.

Well, the forces that drive our weather must have had one eye on the Lectionary this week, I think! Not once, but twice, with Storm Dudley followed by Storm Eunice, ferocious gales have swept down upon us just as they did on Jesus and his disciples as they sought to cross the sea of Galilee. I understand that sudden squalls of the type described by Luke in our reading today are not unusual in the Sea of Galilee because the steep sided valleys of the area can channel and intensify the winds. In fact, I had a similar experience in the wake of Storm Dudley on Thursday as I walked along New Oxford Street towards Tottenham Court Road Underground station. As I approached Centre Point, I was suddenly hit by great gusts of wind as it funnelled round that building. It was certainly a bit of a shock, and I can easily imagine how much more frightening it must have been when the squall hit that small boat that day in the open water.

I will come back to the events of our Gospel reading, and some lessons they might have for us, but before I do so, I would like to reflect briefly on one theme which I think runs through each of our readings today, and that is the power of God.  We didn’t hear the passage from Genesis, but it refers to part of the Creation story, including the creation of Man and Woman. The psalmist highlights several facets of God’s power, including his power to blot out sin; making fast the mountains; stilling the roaring seas; and creating the conditions in which crops will flourish. In our passage from Revelations, we hear of John’s inaugural vision of heaven, the magnificence and grandeur of which is an implicit recognition of the power of God. The passage is rich in symbolism, with the throne symbolising God’s authority over all things in heaven; and the precious stones – jasper, cornelian and emerald – symbols of God’s splendour, a facet of his power. And the twenty four elders and the four living creatures – the six-winged seraphs of the hymn Let all mortal flesh keep silence[1] – continually acknowledge the power of the Lord. And in our Gospel reading, after the storm is stilled, the disciples’ question to one another, “Who is this, that he commands even the waves and the water, and they obey him?” points to one with miraculous powers, far beyond the powers of any human.

The story of how Jesus calmed the storm and challenged the disciples over their apparent lack of faith that they would be kept safe, told in our Gospel reading today, appears also in each of the other synoptic Gospels[2], albeit with subtle differences between the three versions. The core features, however, are the same. Jesus and his disciples cast off in a boat; Jesus goes to sleep; a substantial storm blows up; and the disciples, fearing for their lives, wake Jesus in a state of some panic, who then calms the waves. In Luke’s version, after he has calmed the sea, Jesus then poses to them a deceptively simple question, “Where is your faith?” and they “afraid and amazed” then ask each other, “Who then is this, that he commands even the winds and the waves, and they obey him?”

Jesus’ stilling of the waves will have had a profound impact on the disciples. It was a sign of Jesus’ power over ‘the deep’, for people at that time very much the ultimate symbol of chaos, and the home of the mythological sea-monster creature Rahab, and thus of forces alien to God. Psalm 89[3] describes this in these terms, “Lord God of Hosts, who is like you?  Your strength and faithfulness are all around you. You rule the raging of the sea, calming the turmoil of its waves. You crushed and slew the monster Rahab, and scattered your enemies with your strong arm.” And it is worth bearing in mind that, earlier in the same chapter of Luke, Jesus had told his disciples, when they sought an explanation of the parable of the sower that he had preached to them and a large crowd of others,[4] “it has been granted to you to know the secrets of the Kingdom of God; but the others have only parables, so that they may look but see nothing, and hear but understand nothing.”[5] I am not surprised that they were both afraid and amazed – here was God revealed to them in Jesus!

But what might this passage be saying to us today? Perhaps we see it as an allegorical battle of our God over the forces of evil, in which our God triumphs. But what of the question Jesus posed to his disciples in the aftermath of the storm, “Where is your faith?”. In this case, the disciples’ lives were clearly in imminent danger from the waves swamping the boat, and their actions were those of the desperate. But I find it significant that Jesus did not pose a question relating to the specific circumstances, such as, “Did you think I would let you drown?”: he actually posed a question couched in general terms, “Where is your faith?”

I think Jesus was intending to send to his disciples a much wider message than one relating to the perilous situation in which they found themselves. God is not there for us just in times of physical or spiritual danger, a sort of celestial emergency service who helps us out when we are in a tight corner. No, God’s guidance, support and thus power is just as invaluable in guiding our day to day lives as it is for us when we face a crisis, as the disciples did on that storm-tossed boat. In fact, Jesus’ question goes to the heart of our relationship with him – as Paul wrote to the Galatians, “It is through faith that you are all sons of God in union with Christ Jesus”[6] And we have heard today of the power within which this brings us.

So today, with Lent nearly upon us, as Fr Matt reminded it in this week’s message, I would like to invite you to ask yourself the question that Jesus posed to his disciples after he had stilled the storm, “Where is your faith?” and to join me in reflecting on it, as part of your Lenten devotions. Why? Because the answer lies at the very heart of our relationship with our God of power and might, the restoration, strengthening and renewal of which is central to our Lenten observance.

[1] Based on the Liturgy of St James

[2] Matthew 8:23-27; Mark 4:35-41

[3] Psalm 89:8-10

[4] Luke 8:5-8

[5] Luke 8:10

[6] Galatians 3:26

Beatitudes

Sermon by By Reverend Matt Harbage

Readings:
Jeremiah 17.5-10
Psalm 1
1 Corinthians 15.12-20
Luke 6.17-26

Last week, when books were fish, we were reflecting together on the calling of the first disciples. They were fishermen, called to be fishers of men – to seek out people who would respond to Jesus’ radical call to draw close to God.

Jesus in today’s Gospel is teaching those fishermen. He’s describing the signs of the kingdom of God, and telling them – and us – how we might feel, if we are in the right place under God’s direction.

Just a quick show of hands, who has heard of the Sermon on the Mount?

The sermon on the mount (which is recorded in Matthew’s Gospel) summarizes a great deal of Jesus’ teachings. And this reading, from Luke’s Gospel sounds very much like the Sermon on the Mount, only it’s a bit different.

For example, we hear that Jesus came down to stand “on a level place” to address the people in Luke’s version. He’s literally surrounded by the crowd, and he’s healing everyone he touches as he looks up and speaks to his disciples.

It’s probably the same moment that Matthew describes, but Jesus here says less, and yet more, as along with the Blessings he declares the Sorrowful Laments[1] too:

“Woe to you who are rich. To those who are full. Woe to those who are laughing now.”

What is Jesus saying? He’s being descriptive, not being prescriptive (that is, telling us what to do). To be blessed by God you do not have to walk around poor, hungry and weeping. Our Sunday worship should be marked by Eucharist: which means “Thanksgiving” – Gratefulness and joy!

Jesus is not saying you are never to have riches, or to feast, or to laugh!

But rather, as Fr Gregory Boyle puts it[2], Jesus is helping us understand the geography of the Kingdom of God. Jesus is telling us where to stand: You’re in the right place if you are with the poor and on the side of compassion.

Jesus tells us where we ought not to stand too, if we wish to participate in the Kingdom. Perhaps in one sentence it’s this:

The Kingdom of God has come to DISTURB the comfortable & COMFORT the disturbed.

It might sound obvious, but in our world today we should not feel too comfortable. We must not simply accept the reality of knife crime. Of male violence against women. Of our Prime Minister lying to the public. We must never be comfortable while there is racism in every layer of our society, and even in the church.

WOE to those who are comfortable. Who stand looking at the world disconnected from their God-given compassion. For those whose wealth has insulated them from the pain of the world and so has also insulated themselves from what God is doing in the world. WOE to them.

But for those who are disturbed, for those who are riddled with anxiety for their tomorrow, weighed down by stress or fear there are BLESSINGS.

For those who are hungry for justice, for those who weep. You will be filled to overflowing. You will laugh! You will see the coming of God’s salvation. The promise of Resurrection which St Paul powerfully and logically articulated: That just as Jesus died and rose again, so shall we.

That “good news” is for you.

If we get that, then Jesus’ teachings, as he moves around Galilee and Israel, healing and preaching have something else important to tell us too: The Kingdom of God has arrived now.

It starts now. The disturbing of the comfortable has begun. The comforting of the disturbed is underway and it is in his Church, however imperfectly, where we are called to live out our calling and like the first disciples, to take part in what Jesus is doing.

The kingdom of God is at work wherever God’s will is being done, anywhere justice is secured and compassion celebrated. Its geography is bigger than the Church to be sure, but we are called to be the messengers of the Kingdom and play our part.

I want to end by offering my own version of the beatitudes. I wonder if you were to write your own version, what you think Jesus might say to us today. What are the words of comfort and hope?

 Blessed are the poor.

Blessed are the poor, for the kingdom of God belongs to them. Blessed are they who feel rung out and empty. Blessed are those who feel like they have nothing to offer. Blessed are those who feel overwhelmed by their jobs, or by family pressures. Blessed are those who reach out to God because they are drowning. You are of heaven and the Lord blesses you.

Blessed are those who hunger and thirst, for they will be filled. Blessed are those who know independence is a myth. Blessed are those who acknowledge their needs of shelter, food, friendship and worth. Blessed are those who feel invisible – for they are those with whom Jesus chose to surround himself. Blessed are they who know there has to be more than this. Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, who do not accept racism, sexism, or violence of any kind. Blessed are those who reject war. You are of heaven and the Lord blesses you.

Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted. Blessed are those who have seen death up close. Blessed are they who have buried their loved ones, for whom tears are as real as an ocean. Blessed are they who have loved enough to know what loss feels like. Blessed are they who can’t fall apart because they have to keep it together for everyone else. Blessed are they who lost their job and felt like they lost their worth. Blessed are those who mourn. You are of heaven and the Lord blesses you.[3]

May you be built up.

May the bread of life give you strength to face the pain of the world without flinching. May the cup of salvation gladden your heart at the work God is doing.

May you be sent out into the world to share Jesus’ message to the poor like us, the hungry, the weeping, the vulnerable, those who know they need salvation that comes from the saviour who died and rose again for the life of the world.

May you be blessed. Amen.

[1] Laments (consequences) rather than active curses. https://www.uchennabiblia.com/is-woe-a-curse/

[2] (a man who through his work intervening with gangs knows something of the blessings and sorrows of this world)

[3] Adapted from https://mucknellabbey.org.uk/21st-century-beatitudes/

Epiphany 2 (2022)

Sermon by By Reverend Matt Harbage

Readings:
Isaiah 62.1-5
Psalm 36.5-10
1 Corinthians 12.1-11
John 2.1-11

Lord God, “I just want to be part of your Symphony”:

May I speak in your name: Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Amen.

I wonder if you know the song, “Symphony” by Clean Bandit & Zara Larsson. It was number #1 in the pop charts a few years ago. It’s a moving song about a relationship, and I think, captures the heart of our scripture readings this morning.

So, if you’ll allow me, I want to play you the first minute of that song.

And as you listen, you might like to imagine the wedding celebration Jesus was at:

A wedding with song, and dance and lots of people.

A wedding, where the music & celebration almost stopped dead, as the wine ran out.

But Jesus, moving to his own beat and rhythm, demonstrates that God knows how to give Good Gifts:

And gives not just any wine – but the best wine, and over a hundred and twenty gallons of the stuff –a gift not just for the happy couple, but for the common good of the whole village as they share in the celebration.

What a picture of abundance and joy!

And can you imagine the disciples, looking on at this miracle, and realising that Jesus wanted them to be part of his great symphony?

Let’s play the music.

“I just want to be part of your symphony!” – That is the cry of my heart, as I think of Jesus and his invitation to discipleship: for us to follow him and play our part in what he is doing.

The Gospel tells us that after seeing this miracle the first disciples were blown away as they see Jesus’ glory revealed.

But there is something subtly important in this account of Jesus’ first miracle turning water into wine: Why did Jesus only reveal the miracle to a few of those present? He could have jumped up onto a table and transformed the water into the abundant wine before their eyes – declaring: “I am the Messiah!”

Surely that would have revealed his glory in an even more powerful way, and had everyone walking – or dancing – out the door with him?

Instead, Jesus chooses to invest personally in a small group of men and women.

Jesus was creating an orchestra. A group, who would learn from him what God’s rhythm sounds like, how to move, and think and live and play, and then this group might pass it on to others.

As we read through the New Testament and beyond, those first apostles eventually become the church which grew and blossomed, becoming a whole family of faithful communities across the world.

WE are the inheritors of those first believers. Founded in New Southgate almost 150 years ago.

Jesus’ orchestra isn’t just for a talented few. All are invited to join the party.

As Jesus himself told his disciples, before ascending into Heaven:

“Go therefore, and make disciples of all nations, baptising them in the name of the Father, and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you.”

All nations. Every person.

We here have got an essential part to play in God’s symphony. God chooses not to do his mission without us.

Great music is made up of a variety of instruments, with a variety of sounds, dynamics and flow. Our diversity is our strength.

At home, I love worshipping with a wide array of different kinds of music. Not just hymns, but modern worship songs – and I find God speaking to me through secular music too.

I think God loves creativity, and loves diversity.

And so it is with our church. We are all called to play our part: in openness, diversity, and fun! In new initiatives and sustaining our patterns of worship and prayer.

Jesus has handed on the baton to us. He calls us to continue his song: bringing God glory, by spreading peace, love and justice to the earth: in our workplaces, family life and church life.

He calls us to draw people – everyone – into his kingdom ensemble, and share life together.

On this January morning, if you are feeling tired, like you’ve “run out of wine”, take a moment to turn with me to our Epistle reading and the words of St Paul.

Because St Paul tells us that Jesus has given us a whole array of Spiritual Gifts. We don’t have to go it alone:

“To each is given [gifts,] the manifestation of the Spirit for the common good.”

The list Philip read for us includes the gifts of Wisdom, Knowledge, Faith, Healing, Prophecy, Miracles – and the list goes on.

Each of us here, Paul says, has been given gifts. Knowing most of you here today, I know personally that that is true. Some have the gift of faithful prayer, others the gift of practical service, still others the gift of thoughtful care.

We are invited to use our gifts to build up our community in harmony – in body, mind and soul – for the common good.

In fact, that term Paul uses: “the common good.”

Actually contains a Greek word:

sym-pher-ō                                       συμφέρω

Stay with me.                        sym-pher-ō is the word where we get our word “Symphony” from.

For Paul it means something like “to bring difference together for good”.

Isn’t that a powerful idea?

We are a church rooted in Jesus Christ.

We are made up of gifted, talented individuals who bring difference together for good.

So may we each discover the gifts we have been given,
May we praise God in our own special kind of harmony.

And may we grow together, celebrating that we are Part of God’s symphony.

Amen.

The Naming and Circumcision of Jesus

Sermon by By Christopher Ward

Readings:

Numbers 6:22-27
Psalm 8
Galatians 4:4-7
Luke 2:15-21

May I speak in the name of Almighty God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Amen.

Why does the Church celebrate the Naming and Circumcision of Jesus, a significant rite of passage for male Jewish babies, but nonetheless an event to which Luke devotes but a single purely factual sentence in his Gospel, in fact, little more than an aside? Luke sandwiches in this sentence between two other much more spectacular events – his account of the angels’ revelation of Jesus’ birth to the shepherds, and his account of the events surrounding Jesus’ Presentation in the Temple forty days after his birth, the event we commemorate at Candlemas.

To help answer this question, I want to pose another – what’s in a name? Often, the answer is ‘quite a lot’. Names are what identify us, and they often have a history behind them, perhaps family, perhaps where we came from, and sometimes to hide something.[1] My parents gave me three names, including one from each of my grandfathers. We gave each of our daughters a Welsh name, in recognition of Virginia’s Welsh heritage. And years ago, I knew a young man who had three names, the last of which was shared with, and in honour of, the family cat, Timothy!

Now let us imagine Mary and Joseph thinking about names for their new baby boy. We know that Mary and Joseph were both observant Jews; Luke tells us[2] that they used to go each year to Jerusalem for the Passover festival. So why might they not be thinking in terms of a classical Jewish name, such as Abraham, or Jacob, or David? The answer is, of course, in Luke’s Gospel:[3] at the time of her conception the angel that came from God told Mary to call ‘the holy child … Son of God’ by the name of Jesus.[4] And Mary, ever obedient to God duly gave her baby that name. So the name Jesus reflects the divinity of the child, as did the spectacular revelation of Jesus to the shepherds in the fields that night. We celebrate today the establishment of Jesus’ identity.

But Jesus on earth was also as human as you and I. He was born in precisely the same way as each of us, and he died just as we will all die one day. Jesus’ coming to earth was not like many a Boris Johnson visit to a factory, where in the inevitable photo-call he plays at being a worker. Jesus was indeed divine, but he was also as human as we are.

We only have to look at the miracles described in the Gospels to see evidence of Jesus’ divinity, but how much do we find in them about Jesus the person? The answer is, very little. Luke tells us[5] that Jesus lived in Nazareth with his parents and “grew big and strong and full of wisdom, and God’s favour was upon him”. He also tells us that Jesus was rather a naughty boy when he was twelve and slipped off to the Temple without telling them![6] But apart from that, we know precious little about him personally. So it is quite easy for us to overlook the fact that the Jesus who came to earth was as human as he was divine.

And I believe that it is important for us not to forget, and to value the humanity of Jesus just as much as we value his divinity. First and foremost, it is central to our hope of salvation that Jesus came to us as both human and divine: if he had not been fully human he could not have taken on the burden of our sins and if he had not been divine he could not have conquered them and set them aside. Second, as we look back on Advent, and our reflection on the Four Last Things – Death, Judgement, Heaven and Hell – we can have confidence that we will be judged by a Lord and Master whose nature it is not only to be merciful, but by a Lord and Master who also has personally experienced life on earth, and all the challenges and dilemmas it brings for us.

And I believe that this experience is important. Many years ago, a prominent political commentator on social policy accepted a challenge to live for a month solely on the income a healthy single man with no assets would receive from the State by way of social security. His response to the challenge led to a significant change of view. Experience counts.

And because it revolves around, and emphasises, the humanity of Jesus is one reason that I think the festival we celebrate today is so important. We see Jesus being treated in the same way as any other Jewish boy of his age, and we will see the same thing in four weeks time at Candlemas – Luke disposes of the ritual itself factually in much the same way as the Naming, but this time in three verses[7], before going on to describe at much greater length the recognition of the divine by Simeon and Anna.

So as we are inspired by the teachings of Jesus the Son of God, let’s not lose sight of what it means that he was born of Mary.

Amen

[1] For example, many Jews who fled from Nazi Germany to English-speaking countries Anglicised their names, often fearing otherwise becoming the target of anti-German feeling.

[2] Luke 2:41

[3] Luke 1:31 and 2:21

[4] Luke 1:35

[5] Luke 2:40

[6] Luke 2::41-50

[7] Luke 2:22-24

Bodily Resurrection

Sermon by Claire Betts

Readings: Acts 3.12-19, Luke 24.36-48 (Psalm 4, 1 John 3.1-7)

May the words of my mouth and the meditations of my heart be acceptable in your sight, O Lord, my strength and my Redeemer. Amen.

When Fr Matt asked me if I’d like to preach again, he actually offered me a choice of a couple of dates so I only have myself to blame in picking today’s extremely challenging topic of bodily resurrection! One of the things I’m really learning about sermons is that I approach the Gospel reading or the other readings from Scripture with lots of questions and after days of reading through writings from theologians I often end up with even more questions but it is always a fascinating experience!

Today’s Gospel is the sister reading to what Fr Guy preached about last week. Jesus has risen and is appearing in various places to various people. One of the preparations I like to do when I’m thinking about a sermon, is to look at the various representations of Gospel readings in Art and this week’s Luke reading was really tricky. Artists seem to want to show us lots of the other bits of this period – there’s a very famous Caravaggio in the National Gallery of the Supper at Emmaus and another of his in Berlin of doubting Thomas who we heard about last week but I had to really search to find the mundane act of Jesus eating fish in Luke’s Gospel. I found one in the end from the Cathedral in Siena in Italy. The different versions of the story, or different events in the time period, all give us the same message though: that Jesus had risen, not as a spirit or a ghost; but bodily. He tells his disciples to ‘touch me and see’ for themselves. He asks them for food and, while they are sitting round in a mixture of panic and wonder and disbelief, he eats some grilled fish. The Gospel tells us that they are ‘disbelieving’ but also that they were wondering ‘in their joy’ – it’s hard to comprehend but it is still Good News!

Jesus tells them that their task is to proclaim ‘repentance and forgiveness of sins in his name’ but also asks them why they are frightened and doubting. His two messages are that of belief and repentance. Repent and Believe. But what are we called to believe?

We say it every week in the Apostles Creed which we’ve been using in lockdown: “I believe in the resurrection of the body and the life everlasting. Amen.”

We believe in the resurrection, that we, like Christ, will rise again to live eternally with God.

Once you start thinking about it, the mechanics of it are really fascinating. The risen Jesus is the same but different. There are aspects of his risen self which are a continuation of his human experience – he still has his wounds and is ‘flesh and bones’ which he encourages the disciples to touch. But he is also changed, we know that this newly risen Jesus can appear and disappear in a way not possible for ordinary humans as he does in the upper room with the disciples and on the road to Emmaus.

So, if He has now what Paul calls a ‘celestial’ or heavenly body, does he still need to eat? He clearly can eat, He does it here and also presumably at the supper at Emmaus. Perhaps it is to comfort the disciples who fear they’re seeing a ghost; to demonstrate his physical reality. Maybe it’s just the continuity of his human nature again that is significant. He can still eat because he is really, bodily there.

St Paul has sometimes caused various controversies as his letters were meant for specific communities and are often taken out of context. It is sometimes argued that he taught only a resurrection of the spirit or soul and not the body. For example, in 1 Corinthians he says, “I tell you this, flesh and blood cannot enter the kingdom of God.” But to put that quotation in context, one of my favourite bits comes next:

“Lo! I tell you a mystery,” he says. “We shall not all sleep but we shall all be changed, in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet. For the trumpet will sound, and the dead will be raised imperishable, and this mortal nature must put on immortality. When the perishable puts on the imperishable, and the mortal puts on immortality, then shall come to pass the saying that is written: ‘Death is swallowed up in victory. Oh death, where is thy victory? Oh death, where is thy sting?’ “

We shall all be changed. Changed in our Resurrection. It can seem like quite a lot to take in. Alice in Wonderland famously said that sometimes she’d believed “as many as six impossible things before breakfast!” and I sometimes think that it can feel a bit that way but, as Christians, we agree that God is the omnipotent creator which is one I personally don’t find very challenging as there is so much in creation to be in awe of and we believe that Mary carried God as man in her virginal womb and Jesus was fully human and fully divine and died for our sins. Belief in bodily resurrection isn’t too much more to believe, as Paul says, “Lo! I tell you a mystery”. And the really joyful part is knowing that death has no sting because bodily resurrection applies to us too!

When we try and picture the Resurrection it can be easy to picture a medieval image with ladders going up and down and little devils with pots of boiling oil and pitchforks and graves opening. Medieval Historian, Caroline Walker Bynam, gathered together the metaphors used by medieval theologians trying to explain what would happen to our bodies which show how they also tried to help people understand it. They described it as being like:

The flowering of a dry tree after winter

The donning of new clothes

The rebuilding of a temple

The hatching of an egg

The smelting of ore from clay

The return of the Phoenix from its own ashes

The reassembling of broken pot shards

And, the one I like best, the reforging of a statue that has been melted down. I prefer that image to putting on new clothes or hatching an egg because in melting down and reforming a statue you are reshaping the same ingredients to a new form, not adding or taking away.

Like Christ, we will be us but us made new. Paul wrote to the Philippians that it ‘will transform our lowly bodies’.

The resurrection, eternal life, is not just about our souls. When we did our book club last year, we looked at a few of the Church Fathers from the early Church and, unsurprisingly, as it’s a big and difficult subject, they grappled with the idea of Resurrection a lot. Justin Martyr was really clear in the second century saying that, ‘a man is both soul and body and Christ has promised to raise both, just as his own body was raised.’ But then even the Fathers were back to the mechanics of it all. In the 1200s, Thomas Aquinas was worrying about all our hair trimmings and nail clippings that we’d cut off across our lives. Were they all added back on to our reconstituted bodies? But we wouldn’t have super long hair and talons because that would be ridiculous so they must be absorbed somehow. St Augustine spent a long while worrying about the age and size of our resurrected forms. How tall would we be? How heavy? And, if we’d died by being eaten by a bear or a giant fish, would God be able to gather our digested bits? My favourite discovery was the writings of St Gregory of Nyssa in the fourth century. He fretted that as ‘nature has made no part of the body useless’ and we wouldn’t need a lot of the functions in our resurrected form, would we still need all our organs? He was particularly hung up on the importance of his bowels. He records his teacher’s answer though. She told him that, ‘the truth about this is stored up in the hidden treasury of wisdom and will be disclosed at the time we are taught the mystery of the resurrection.’ Paul’s mystery again. We aren’t supposed to know the details, just have faith that it will happen.

We don’t lose anything in death, we are made new but we are still us, like Justin Martyr said, God saves all of us and that is the Good News! Any one bit of us is not all of us. We are incomplete without our bodies. We are who we are because of our bodily selves, our minds, our memories and life experiences, our wills and our souls.

Thomas Aquinas taught that, like Christ, we would have bodies that were no longer limited by Earthly constructs of space and time. We would have no pain; we could move anywhere unrestrained by matter and also that we would be resplendently beautiful which is something to look forward to!

So Jesus’s two instructions were to Repent and Believe. Our other reading today that Chris read from Acts has Peter repeating Jesus’s message, ‘Repent and turn to God so your sins may be wiped out’. To repent isn’t just to say we’re sorry, it is to turn away from sin and turn towards God. To give our whole lives, our entire selves; body, mind and spirit to God. There’s another whole sermon in that which I’m sure Matt will come to in the coming weeks!

Be joyful today because God has told us a little of the mystery – as we repent and believe in Jesus Christ, we will come to share in His resurrection. Death will have no sting because it has been swallowed up in the victory of the resurrection and the life everlasting. Amen.

St John the Apostle and Evangelist

Sermon by Reverend Matt Harbage

Readings: Exodus 33.7-11a; Psalm 117; John 21.19-end

May I speak in the name of God: Father, Son and Holy Spirit.  Amen.

I hope you all enjoyed celebrating Christmas this week – in worship and at home. I hope like me you had some phone and Zoom chats with family and friends; shared some feasting and drinking, and got to see some of the ever-entertaining Christmas Specials on TV.

I love the tradition of giving and receiving gifts at Christmas. A wonderful link with Jesus being God’s gift to us. Echoing too the Gifts the wise men gave the baby which we celebrate at Epiphany. Our wise men, by the way, are currently over here – and are slowly travelling round the church in order to arrive on the 6th January at our crib.

I wonder if you were given any books this year. Catherine gave me a couple of geeky books about Artificial Intelligence and computers, which I’m looking forward to getting into.

But for a moment I want us to think about Holy Books. When it comes to the church, she received her Scriptures as a gift from God – the process of how the Bible came to be is a fascinating one. It was less a single ‘moment’ and more a process but I’ll save that for another time. The Books of the Bible have become canon: a word meaning ‘measuring stick’ – these books speak of who God is, and what he has done, and are trustworthy – so much so, all other texts are measured against the canon of Scripture, to see how helpful and true they are.

St John, whose feast we celebrate today, gave the church the gift of his Gospel. It’s a powerful and moving book of Jesus’ life: “the Word of God made flesh”. In church tradition, each of the four gospels has a creature associated with it and for John, it’s an eagle. Eagles soar, gracefully, high above the land. John’s writing is similarly graceful and poetic.

Jesus is the bread of life; the door of the sheepfold, and one metaphor John loves using throughout his biography of Jesus is contrasting light and darkness. In his opening words he says of Jesus,

“The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it.”

My brothers and sisters in Christ, as we move towards a new year 2021 – leaving 2020 behind (thank God) – let us imitate Christ by being lights in the darkness.

There’s an ancient proverb:

“It is better to light a candle than to curse the darkness”.

I think that phrase would get agreement both from God Himself and St John: God’s gift of Jesus – his own son, was God’s approach to transforming the darkness of our sin, through the giving of Jesus to be the light of the world.

Although I so wish it wasn’t the case, seeing the back of 2020 doesn’t mean there aren’t challenges up ahead – for the UK, the world, and for our families and friends. But perhaps whatever next year brings, we can remember that saying: “It’s better to light a candle than to curse the darkness”.

Just as birth of Jesus is the arrival of the light – Jesus told his disciples that they too were to be lights in dark places. Jesus in St Matthew’s Gospel says this:

“Just as a city on a hill cannot be hidden,… let your light shine before others in such a way that they may see your good works, and glorify your Father who is in heaven” (Matt 5)

This approach is countercultural, as it refuses to be cynical (all there are is shades of grey in the world) or defeatist (everything’s dark and bleak and always will be). Instead, it says, God is with us. In our world. God is here, and because he is the light, there must be light around if I look for it. What’s more, we have been given the gift of the Holy Spirit: the Light of Christ within us, so we too can bring light to dark places.

Sifting what we see and hear, to discern where God is at work, and what or who should be trusted, where the light is – is an important work of God and his people. It’s best done together.

I hope I’ve encouraged you to re-read John’s Gospel with its poetic and graceful language. Over the coming months of 2021 the Gospel passages we will be hearing in church will actually come mainly from Mark’s Gospel. His symbol is the winged lion – as he writes in a quick paced and punchy style, bringing out Jesus’ majesty and kingship. So if you do read John’s Gospel in the next few weeks, perhaps you can compare it to Mark’s as we journey through 2021 –

I like to imagine the four Gospels as being four mirrors, reflecting the one Son of God, Jesus Christ, but from different angles. Picking up on different events and encounters, helping to give us different insights and highlights.

St. John’s final words of his Gospel, are the words we heard earlier:

“there are also many other things that Jesus did; if every one of them were written down, I suppose that the world itself could not contain the books that would be written.”

John speaks of how incredible the light was: How wonderful and exciting Jesus was while on earth. But I have another theory as to what John meant by this last line. If we really believe the Spirit of Jesus lives on through his disciples, that means Jesus continues to be at work in the saints that came before us; and in our lives; and in the lives of the disciples who we are going to introduce-and-train-up in the faith.

So literally what St John says is true: The world itself could not contain all the joyful stories which Jesus has done, is doing and will do. The light of Christ continues to shine.

That really is Good News.

Amen.