SERMON 118 - SUNDAY 27 MAY 2018

Sermon delivered at the Roman Catholic Chapel, Whaddon, Wiltshire on Sunday 27 May 2018

Psalm 104: 1-10; Ezekiel 1; Revelation 4

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

Today is Trinity Sunday, the day, characteristically, when many priests hand over the preaching of the sermon to newer members of the clergy or lay ministers – like a baptism of fire!  Never an easy task to preach the Trinity and especially this evening when the two main readings we had, one from Ezekiel and one from Revelation, are so full of allegory and symbolism which most of us find hard to understand let alone follow. My immediate instinct was to grab the nearest summary or concordance I could find and draft my sermon around it – then I thought again and decided before doing so I should first of all try and understand its meaning from my own reading and interpretation of the descriptions used in the passages.

Ezekiel itself is very descriptive with its whirring wheels and flying angels and description of what can only be described as God in all his glory – which is really something quite indescribable.  I think that is why we have such trouble in interpreting Ezekiel’s vision in terms we can understand today.

I have even heard the vision described in more modern literature as an illustration or narrative of aliens coming down from another planet in their spaceship – works of fiction themselves such as “Chariot of the Gods” by Erich von Daniken.  To us, visitations from aliens is something which most of us cannot believe in but there again, who is to say that such visions of the glory of God cannot arise today.

Revelation 4 gives us a description of a similar event – the Heavens opening up to reveal God in all his glory seated on his throne of gold in Heaven.  The two narratives are quite similar and the whole of the book of Revelation is concerned with the vision or dream which the aged John had whilst exiled on the Greek island of Patmos.

Modern day visions such as this are, however, not so uncommon as we might think and there are numerous examples of people experiencing the glory of God in dreams and visions. 

We have just finished that glorious period of the church’s calendar which celebrates Jesus’s Resurrection, Ascension and then Pentecost when the gift of the Holy Spirit was bestowed upon all of Jesus’s disciples and gift brought with it its own gifts and fruits so that everyone, yes everyone including you and me, who follows Jesus would have the Holy Spirit freely available to carry on Jesus’s works and ministry when he was on Earth in human form.  As Teresa of Avila says “we are now the hands, feet and eyes of Christ” – through us, with and by and through the Holy Spirit alone can healing and ministry continue here.

But the Holy Spirit was not a new creation out of the New Testament.  The Spirit, like Jesus the Son has existed for all time.  We read in the very first few sentences of our bible – Genesis 1 – that the Spirit moved across the face of the yet to be formed Earth; we read numerous examples of where the Holy Spirit has been given to specific individuals to carry out God’s work – Moses, Elijah, Elisha, Saul, David, Jonah, Ezekiel, Isaiah, Jeremiah and so on and in some cases where it has been removed – Saul for example.  Specific people to do specific tasks to bring god’s people back in line with God’s vision and hope for his people.

Finally he had to send his only son, Jesus, but unlike the prophets of the Old Testament, as we know Jesus left us the Holy Spirit for ourselves with a means of direct communication with the God for forgiveness without priestly intervention and the  gifts and fruits revealed at Pentecost.

The Holy Spirit is truly a mystical and supernatural phenomena.  It is God’s direct power handed down to us for his greater love and glory.

On Pentecost Sunday I, together with 1,500 other people, was in the cathedral for an amazing service of celebration.  Suspended from the roof were hundreds of white paper folded doves – symbols of the Holy Spirit as it descended upon Christ at his baptism and of peace.  Similar folded paper doves I am sure you have noticed have appeared in the windows of many shops in the centre of the city – as though they have flown out of the cathedral (sent by God) and settled amongst those secular symbols of commerce – into the every day world outside of the church.  Symbols of Hope, Peace and Love – a stirring of the Holy Spirit I am sure – a feeling of Spiritual Healing for a city that has suffered much in these last few weeks. We should never under-estimate the power of God’s healing through this wonderful Spirit. 

God speaks to us continually – through visions and words which we hear in our inner self (and very occasionally externally) ; through the products of his creation – the trees and shrubs, flowers and plants, the birds singing their song – singing as they were created to do; through other people.  When we pray we need also to spend time listening for God’s word to us.

In a moment of silence I ask you to think of a time when you have received a vision or word from God – perhaps you can’t directly recall any clear time – and that is okay – but I am sure there is a time when you felt amazingly happy and alive.  Perhaps at the birth of a child, that moment you first fell in love, the most beautiful sunset you have ever seen, a clear starlit night and so on. That will almost certainly have been a time when God was active in your life and almost certainly had a hand in what made you happy. 

Iraneus wrote “The Glory of God is a human being fully alive”. When you are feeling fully alive then that is a time when God’s glory is being revealed to you.  Perhaps not through whirring wheels and flashes of light as for Ezekiel, or the Heavens opening up as for John, but simply in the wonders of his creation.

May the Peace and Glory of the living God, Father , Son and Holy Spirit be revealed to you each and every day.

Amen          

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SERMON 117 - SUNDAY 13 MAY 2018

Sermon delivered at All Saints’ Church, Whiteparish, Wiltshire on Sunday 13 May 2018

Psalm 147; Isaiah 61; Luke 4:14-21

If I had been given a pound for every time somebody has said to me:

 “I don’t get the Old Testament with its God of wrath and smiting.  It has no relevance to my belief in the God of Love of the New Testament - so I don’t bother to read it”,

then I would be extremely wealthy and could probably fund the replacement of the bells here in Whiteparish!   It is a well-known fact that preachers generally tend to use, as the subject for their sermons, either the Gospels or the Letters of Paul. Even then there can be confusion between the Gospels – especially between John’s Gospel and the three synoptic ones; but this evening, the importance of having a knowledge of both the Old and New Testament has been highlighted in hearing the words of the Old Testament prophet Isaiah spoken again by Jesus in Luke’s Gospel and we are again reminded of Jesus’s own words in Matthew 5:17 where he says

"Don't misunderstand why I have come. I did not come to abolish the law of Moses or the writings of the prophets. No, I came to accomplish their purpose.”

We sometimes overlook the fact that during the time of Jesus’s ministry with us here on Earth there was no New Testament. The Gospel’s themselves were not written until many decades after Jesus’s death and indeed did not come into being until after the Pauline letters.  That is why we hear our readings in the chronological order we do – Old Testament reading, Epistle reading and finally Gospel reading even though the Gospel’s precede the Epistles in the bible itself.  Jesus was a great reader of the scriptures even from an early age and used the Psalms frequently as prayers.  Indeed, the psalter was the early Christians’ prayer book and even today, as we have sung this evening, form an important part of the church’s liturgy throughout the world. Did you know, for instance, that Verse 1 of Psalm 110 appears 25 times and Verse 4 appears five times?  The most quoted Psalm in the New Testament.

The Psalms play another important part in our modern day liturgy. The lectionary, you will find,  places each psalm as a comment on or as complementary to the first reading – which this evening was Isaiah 61.  Psalm 147 which we sang together has the words, in modern day English –

“Praise the LORD!  How good it is to sing the praises to our God, how pleasant and fitting it is to praise him!  The LORD builds up Jerusalem, he gathers the exiles of Israel, he heals the broken-hearted and binds up their wound” (Psalm 147:1-3)

which echoes the very beginning of Isaiah 61 – “He has sent me to bind up the broken-hearted” (Isaiah 61:1).

Such is the power of the connectivity of scripture throughout the Old Testament and into the New.

Isaiah 61, which Christians throughout the world believe is a direct prophesy of the coming of Jesus, is probably one of the most beautiful passages in the whole bible in the way in which it proclaims the Good News, the Gospel and is a wonderful message of hope in a time of despair.  As may be gathered by the reference in Psalm 147, Isaiah is writing during the period of the Exile when many Jews were in complete and utter despair having been involuntarily removed from their homeland and their sacred temple.   Isaiah tells them that their deliverance is at hand and that they can look forward to a time of great rejoicing just as Psalm 147, written some 400 years earlier declares:

“The LORD strengthens the bars of your gates and blesses the people within you; He grants peace to your borders and satisfies you with the finest wheat.”(Psalm 147:13-14)

It’s an amazing piece of liberation theology of the type which caught on so well in South America in the 1960s.  It reads poetically but it also has a stinging political message too – it is a call to action which we can read into our modern day world with its oppressive regimes and poverty. It is a call to us Christians to proclaim God’s love and compassion to those who believe and follow Christ.

It is a well-known passage to us today and it would have been extremely well known to Jews back at the time of their Roman occupation; promises of liberty to the captives, good news to the oppressed, oil of gladness instead of ashes, the building up of ruins – a reference to the restoration of the Temple – and above all a declaration that the LORD GOD – YAHWEH – will cause righteousness and praise to spring up before all nations.

In our reading from Luke we find Jesus back in his home town of Nazareth – in the local synagogue – the Jewish place of learnin;  (synagogues then, as today, are as much places of learning through scripture as places for worship).  I think I know how he probably felt – all eyes were upon him, the local carpenter’s son  - because this morning I was back in my old church in Winterslow, amongst former fellow members of the congregation, taking a full service there for the first time since I was licensed wondering what sort of reaction I would get after such a long absence and conscious that I was preaching to former fellow congregants.

A wonderful portrayal of the moment Jesus steps up to take the reading is seen in the epic film series “Jesus of Nazareth” which whether you like it or not is a wonderful moment in the film, when Jesus, after reading this particular passage from Isaiah declares that in the hearing of all present the prophesy of Isaiah had been fulfilled. In effect Jesus is saying the time of healing, the time of binding up of wounds, the time for rejoicing is at hand as foretold by both the psalms and the prophets for Jesus, the Messiah has come.

Little wonder then the local people thought him to be either mad or bad – either out of his mind or a blasphemer.  I wonder how we would feel if somebody well known in this church suddenly declared that they were the returned Christ!  

The great thing is that looking retrospectively through the lens of the New Testament, following Jesus’s Resurrection and Ascension, we know the wonderful truth of that statement. In a few days’ time we will celebrate Pentecost when the Apostles received the Holy Spirit as promised by Jesus.

As disciples of Christ and with the aid and power of the Holy Spirit we are expected to continue the work of Jesus as foretold by Isaiah – “bind up the broken-hearted, proclaim freedom for the captives – and that includes captives to addiction and other other habits which keep people away from God; comfort those who mourn, preach the good news to the poor”.  The Kingdom of God is here if we recognise it through the Spirit.  We are its ambassadors, we are Jesus’s disciples. In the words of Teresa of Avila (1515-1582):

Christ Has No Body

Christ has no body but yours,

No hands, no feet on earth but yours,
Yours are the eyes with which he looks
Compassion on this world,
Yours are the feet with which he walks to do good,
Yours are the hands, with which he blesses all the world.
Yours are the hands, yours are the feet,
Yours are the eyes, you are his body.
Christ has no body now but yours,
No hands, no feet on earth but yours,
Yours are the eyes with which he looks
compassion on this world.
Christ has no body now on earth but yours.

I think we ignore the Old Testament at our peril. It is so full of rich prophesies and stories many of which confirm and affirm the faith we profess as Christians. Let us profess that faith not just in reciting the Creed but in our daily life and actions.

Amen

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SERMON 116 - SUNDAY 13 MAY 2018

Talk delivered at All Saints’ Church, Winterslow, Wiltshire on Sunday 13 May 2018

Luke 15:11-32 (The Parable of the Lost Son)

“He looked around him.  The rooms were dark and dingy.  The smell of sweaty bodies hung in the air. Young women came and went – some older and well worn, others as young as twelve.  Here in the depths of Bangkok sex tourists arrived and departed having had their entertainment.  The sex industry was booming and he had been very much part of it.  He had left his small village on the Malaysian border to come here to seek his fortune after leaving his Christian family.  His father had brought him up in a Christian environment yet he found it all boring and decided to head for the fleshpots of the capital to seek excitement and fortune. Things had gone very well to start with. He had run a lucrative prostitution establishment, a go-go bar, but had become further embroiled in the crime of dealing in opium which had, at first, brought him more riches but he had later run foul of the bigger dealers and in particular the Chinese Triads as time went on and things went very sour. He had found himself getting involved in the trafficking of girls as young as nine. His enemies, in an attempt to get rid of him, had labelled him a police informer and he had had to hide away.  Things went from bad to worse and he found himself having to live in squalor right in the heart of the seediest part of Bangkok where he now found himself.

“Looking back he longed to be back with his family in his little boring village on the Malaysian border. He remembered his father’s words as he had left for Bangkok, ‘there is always a place here for you’; but surely that invitation was a thing of the past. Word of his notoriety in Bangkok had seeped back to the village – he knew this. He was a disgrace to the village, to his family and to his father in particular. He was a pariah – a sad failure who had deserted his family, done and been involved in all sorts of sinful activities and turned his back on his father’s religion, and thereby his own Christian upbringing.

With trepidation he wrote to his father along these lines –

Dear Father, I have disgraced you, the family and our village.  I remember well the words you said to me when I first left for Bangkok – “there is always a place for you here”.  I completely understand and accept if that is no longer the case but I realise now the mistakes I’ve made and would like to return.  I completely understand it if you never want to see me again and so I suggest the following.  On Saturday I will catch the train from Bangkok which passes through our village at around 6 pm. If you will accept me back then please tie a piece of cloth around the family’s po tree which backs on to the railway line just before the station and I will know that you will accept me back and will get off.  If I don’t see a piece of cloth I will stay on the train and never bother you ever again.

Saturday arrived and he boarded the train.  He felt very nervous, not quite sure what he would do if there was no piece of cloth on the tree.  Where would he go? What would he do if he stayed on the train? As the train got closer to his village his heart beat fast and the adrenalin was flowing.  He was scared, anxious.  He was feeling desperate.  His last hope.  A passenger sitting opposite him noticed his anxiety and asked him what was the problem.  He poured out his story and his fears about the po tree.  In the end he said to his fellow passenger ‘I just can’t look out.  I am so afraid? You can’t miss it – it’s the only po tree in the village by the railway.’  With that he buried his head in his hands.  His fellow travelling companion promised to look out for him. 

They nearer his village.  ‘What do you see?’, he asked, fearfully.  ‘Do you see a piece of cloth?’

His new companion responded – I see the tree but there is not a single piece of cloth on it – I can’t miss it though it’s covered from top to bottom with pieces of cloth.

At the station his father was there and embraced him.  “Whatever you do, wherever you are, you are my son and this is your home”

This story, which I have paraphrased here, appears in Floyd McClung’s book “Father Heart of God” and tells a true modern day version of the reading we had this morning – The Parable of the Lost Son.  I have to confess that every time I hear that story my eyes fill with tears.  The compassion and grace shown by the Father reminds us that we as the children of the Father God are always the subject of God’s compassion and grace. 

This morning as you came into church you should each have been given a small reproduction of Rembrandt’s famous painting of the Prodigal Son, the original of which currently hangs in the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg.  Please do take it away and use it as a bookmark in your bible – perhaps at the page containing Luke 15:11-32, as a reminder that whatever you’ve done, wherever you are, God will welcome you home with both arms.

Rembrandt’s painting is extremely interesting for a number of points.  We see the prodigal son without a robe, partially barefoot the other foot wearing a worn out sandal, bare-headed.  Looking on, in a red cloak is the elder brother – of whom more at a later date.  Something which I did not notice immediately, but which was pointed out to me when I read Henri Nouwen’s wonderful book “The Prodigal Son” (which I thoroughly recommend) is the fact that each of the father’s hands is different.  His left hand is firm and masculine – the fingers spread – a firm embrace welcoming him back whilst his right hand is more feminine with closed fingers – the embrace of compassion and love. We can speculate who the other figures in the painting represent and I leave it to you to study the painting at your leisure.

The story of the Lost Son has many different facets.  I wonder which character you associate with yourself?  Do you feel like the prodigal son – wanting to return to God’s loving embrace?  Do you feel like the elder brother – festering resentment because you have never left the father’s side yet this wayward brother of yours who seems to getting all the better treatment despite his wanderings?  Or do you feel like the father?  - feeling love and compassion even for those who might have treated you with contempt in the past.

Henri Nouwen, in his book recognised that throughout our lives we may find ourselves at any time identifying with any one of these three characters but in his view our Christian journey is to take us as closely as we can to the father figure; to be an encourager, a compassionate person whose life and actions are built on true love for our fellow humans.  This is the message of the bible.  This is the Christian message.

The Prodigal Son has an especial poignancy for me today.  I do feel back home here in Winterslow thanks to the love and compassion many of you have shown to me today and over the years since I moved away from this village. It is good to be back with you this morning.  I have worn the clothing of all three characters over the last four years and now my own prayer is to be as much like the father as God wishes me to be.  This morning, in a moment, we shall have a time of prayer.   As we do pray, think which character you might feel you are at this present moment – son, brother or father – and ask God to guide you as you grapple with the issues which surround you in that role at this present time.  Father God will hear your prayer just as the father in our story heard and understood his son’s plea to return home.

Amen

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