Redeeming the Time – Ephesians 5.15–20

I don’t know whether you remember the 1998 film Saving Private Ryan. The film is takes place during the Normandy landings. Three brothers have all been killed within days of each other. One brother remains alive, private James Francis Ryan, but is declared missing in action. In a bid not to send a fourth, horrendous telegram to a grieving mother, Captain John Miller, played by Tom Hanks, and seven men are sent on a rescue mission to save Private Ryan. In their attempt to bring Ryan home, most of the men are killed, and finally Captain Miller himself, having just blown up a bridge, is mortally wounded. As he lies against a truck, covered in blood and dirt, with the chaos of war all around him, and he whispers something in Ryan’s ear, ‘James… earn this. Earn it’. 

The letter to the Ephesians is written by an elderly apostle, imprisoned for his faith, to a young church. They are, you might say, Paul’s last words to church he loved greatly. In his letter, he reminds them of the enormous privilege it is to be a Christian and he reminds them that their privileged life is the direct result of the sacrificial death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. As he closes his letter, he says, ‘In view of all this, live a different kind of life. He almost says, ‘Earn this, earn it.’

The lives we are to lead as Christians are lives which recognise both the privilege of being a child of God, and realise the price at which our adoption came, and remembering this to live lives characterised by carefulness and wisdom. Paul doesn’t hand us another set of laws detailing precisely what we should and shouldn’t do. He doesn’t want us to behave like infants, who need to have instructions from their parents for the smallest of tasks, and he doesn’t lock us into the ethical standards of his day, even though there will be some principles which are true for all time. Paul asks us to think carefully about the way we live. ‘Be careful how you live’ he says, not ‘be careful, because God is watching and if you put a foot wrong he is going to get you’. Be careful in gratitude for the great gift God has given us. We are to take our Christian life, our growth as disciples of Jesus, and our witness to the world with the utmost seriousness.

But it’s quite possible to be serious about religion in a rather unpleasant way. We can be religious bores. Go to any Church of England theological college and start a conversation on a theological topic, and you will find several people who will talk and talk and talk about it until you can take no more. You’ll wish you’d never started the conversastion. I may have even been like that myself! That’s one unpleasant way of taking religion very seriously. You could also be a serious Christian by being a person who never enjoys life: the Lord and Lady Whiteadder of Guildford, spending your time sitting on a spike for added discomfort. You might refuse all enjoyment of life and never even think of mixing with people outside the church. You couldn’t argue that this kind of person takes religion seriously! But it’s not an attractive way of life. We might be very serious about ourselves and our own religious opinions, lacking  the humility that says, ‘I am human like everyone else, and have been and can be mistaken’. Religious seriousness can lead us to claim a sort of infallibility for our ideas, and an arrogance towards those who think differently.

I don’t think Paul wants us to take the Christian life seriously in these ways. We don’t honour Jesus by becoming holier than thou know-it-alls. We don’t honour the God who created the universe by refusing to enjoy the world he has made. Neither do we ‘live in love as Christ loved us’ (Ephesians 5.2) if we despise the very people he loves. Being serious about our faith shouldn't lead us to being horrible obsessive, pedantic human beings. Rather, taking religion seriously will mean that our lives will be focussed on God, his gospel of love and forgiveness and his kingdom of justice and peace.

The God focussed life, Paul tells us, is one which makes the most of the time, or redeems the time as an older translation of the Bible put it. We are to understand how precious time is, and actively seek out every opportunity to discern God’s will and put it into practice. To show us what this kind of attitude which makes the most of the time looks like, Paul gives us an example to avoid and an example to follow.

So here we are, at the bit we all focus on. Drunkenness. We are to avoid a way of life which looks like drunkenness. Paul isn’t a first century temperance preacher, the Billy Sunday of ancient Asia Minor. He has no issue with drinking per se. In fact, I don’t think this really has much to do with alcohol, though I’m sure Paul wouldn’t have approved of Christians getting legless. In this passage, Paul is more concerned with the general character of our lives, not with specific behaviour. We all know that one way to loose focus, to loose control, to let time flit away, is to have a few too many drinks. After too much to drink, time slips by, the moments, the hours, the days merge into one. It becomes harder to act wisely, to make good judgements. If you are drunk, it is next to impossible to make a difference for good in the lives of those around us.

Instead, our lives should be ‘filled with the Spirit’,  thankful, brimming over with songs of gratitude to God for all that he has done for  us. We are to receive every day, hour and minute as a gift from God to be used for the good of the world and for his glory. The way to make the most of the time is to make our lives acts of worship to God. There’s an elderly woman that I visit. She has suffered some mental deterioration in her old age, and can’t remember very much these days, but every time I see her she always says ‘Every day I say to myself, ‘Count your blessings, name them one by one, It never will surprise me what the Lord has done.’ Because he’s been so good to me.’ She has taken Paul’s advice seriously. Even now, in the evening of her life, she holds on to the goodness of God and thanks him with songs of joy. Don’t let the moments slip by, but accept them as a gift from God, opportunities for good.

‘James… earn this. Earn it’ – really and truly, Private Ryan could never earn what had been given to him. None of us deserve even one life given to save us. What he could do was live every second from then on remembering how precious his life truly was. It had been purchased at enormous cost. It was more precious than diamonds. How should we treat something that valuable? With great love and care, with thankfulness for the gift, and generosity with the riches entrusted to us.

Wisdom from St Augustine

Here are some wise words from St Augustine on prayer, written to a Roman noble woman called Anicia Faltonia Proba, who was also a friend of John Chrysostom.

In order to obtainin this true blessed life, He who is Himself the True Blessed Life has taught us to pray. We do not have to pray with many words, as if our being heard depended upon the fluency with which we express ourselves, because we are praying to One who, as the Lord tells us, knows what things we have need of before we ask Him (Matthew 6.7-8). It may seem surprising that, although He has forbidden much speaking, He who knows what we need before we ask Him has exhorted us to ‘always to pray and not to faint’… giving us the example of a widow, who, desiring to have justice done against her adversary, by her persevering entreaties persuaded an unjust judge to listen to her. He was not moved because of justice or mercy, but overcome by her tiresome persistence. In this he teaches us how much more certainly the Lord God (who is merciful and just), hears our prayers to him… To teach us the same thing, Jesus also said ‘ask, and you shall receive; seek, and you shall find; knock, and it shall be opened unto you: for every one that asks receives; and he that seeks finds; and to him that knocks it shall be opened.’… Why this should be necessary, since God knows what we need before we ask Him, might perplex us. But we should understand that the Lord our God wants us to ask not to be informed of our wishes (for nothing can be hidden from Him), but that by our asking, desire might deepen in us, and through our desire God prepares us to receive what He wishes to bestow. His gifts are very great, but our capacity to receive them is small and meagre. That is why Scripture says, ‘open your hearts and do not share the lot of unbelievers.’ For, in proportion to the simplicity of our faith, the firmness of our hope, and the ardour of our desire, will we more fully receive that which is immensely great; which eye has not seen, for it is not colour; which the ear has not heard, for it is not sound; and which has not entered into the heart of man, for the heart of man must enter it.

Letter 130.VIII.xv, xvi, xvii

Freely you have received

I opened my pay slip the other day, and out of the envelope fell a piece of paper informing me of the revised Church of England parochial fees. For those of you who aren't CofE clergy, parochial fees are the charges the church makes for certain special services, e.g. weddings, funerals and associated things like the reading of the banns of marriage.

I initially ignored the piece of paper (I ignore most pieces of paper which come my way), but my wife read it and pointed out some peculiarities. I decided to pay closer attention to the document, and as I did I flew into a holy rage. It felt all wrong to me. I am supposed to be a minister for all parishioners. I am housed and paid to free up my time so that I can, among other things, provide this kind of pastoral support to anyone who needs it, whether the are a member of the congregation or not, whether they can afford the fee or not!

Now I am not so naive as to imagine that there should be no charge associated with any service which the church provides. I understand, for example, that there is a legal administrative aspect to the solemnization of matrimony. Clergy have to maintain and store legal records etc. But surely, this should never be more than you would get charged by a registry office? The local registry office currently charges between £100 and £250 depending on the day of the week (it's cheeper still if you go for smaller room). The new CofE fees charge £381, adding over a hundred pounds to the most expensive option in a Surrey registry office. Don't we want to encourage people to get married in church? Why on earth does the CofE go to the trouble (and expense) of 'The Weddings Project' to encourage people to marry in church when we then go and raise the fees?! OK, the church bit is likely to be the least expensive part of a bride and groom's 'big day'. But that is not really the point. To me it looks distinctly like the church is profiteering from marriage. When people accuse the church of being obsessed with material wealth, I now have one less reason to disagree with them. The church a worshiper of filthy lucre? Guilty as charged. 

Whilst I understand that some fee is necessary for weddings, in the area of funerals, I have no praise whatsoever for the Church of England. Why on earth are we charging for funerals at all? I feel very strongly about this. Every minister that I have ever spoken to has told me of the enormous privilege of taking a funeral. It is the final dignity we can afford to a fellow human being. It is a way of accompanying surviving friends and relatives through their grief and witnessing to the gospel of Jesus, the resurrection and the life. Why, Oh why are we charging people for this? And why is the charge £160? This is shameful. Visiting a council flat to comfort a widow who has just lost her husband of sixty years and helping her prepare to say a final farewell... and then charging her £160!

Less outrageous, though equally astonishing is the proportion of the fees which goes to the Diocesan Board of Finance. Take a funeral at a crematorium with no service in church. Of the £160 fee – £29 goes to the PCC and £131 goes to the DBF. Why does such a large proportion go to the DBF? I am sure they will argue that it is used as a contribution to clergy stipends. But in my diocese, it is made quite clear that churches are supposed to cover the full cost of ministry through the parish share. If the PCC already pays the DBF for their minister's stipend and housing through their parish share, why do they pay again by giving over 80% of the fee for a funeral to the diocese? The diocese shouldn't need this money. The PCC have the strongest claim to it, and even there, I think the morality of charging people for funerals is dubious.

I have a proposal. I would love clergy to organise themselves into something like a trade union, whose members refuse to charge for funerals. The establishment can stamp down on this if there are just a few clergy who refuse payment, but if thousands of ministers refuse to charge for funerals, what is the worst that can happen? They aren't going to sack us all!

To be or not to be... a lectionary preacher?

OK, so for a long time I've had beef with the lectionary. I've tried to express this to my friends in the past, and have never got too exercised about it (at least, I don't think I have), but the lectionary over the last couple of weeks has really got my goat.

So this is the problem. Last Sunday (22 July 2012) the lectionary gospel was Mark 6.30-34, 53-56. I have a problem with the lectionary filleting texts at the best of times, but this was a particularly egregious example. Mark 6.30-34 is the introduction to the miracle of the feeding of the five thousand (note, the miracle itself is rather clumsily excised from the lectionary for the day). After the feeding miracle, Jesus makes his disciples get into the boat so he can pray by himself. The next morning, Jesus walks towards the disciples who are struggling on the lake. Jesus gets into the boat, the storm stops and they pass safely to Ganessaret, which is where we pick up the reading with 6.53-56 with Jesus healing the sick. So to make the reading shorter the lectionary compilers (a) rip out the really interesting stuff (feeding miracle and walking on water) and make it a reading just about Jesus' compassion and healing people. (b) splice two lake journeys into one. Journey one (6.32) leads to the feeding of the five thousand. Journey two (6.45) leads to the walking on the water and only then to the healings at Ganessaret. It might sound like I am being pedantic, but this does real violence to the story! The upshot of all this was that I decided to preach on Ephesians 2 instead.

This week matters are made much, much worse. For those who don't know, this year of the three year lectionary cycle (year B) is 'The Year of Mark'. You would be forgiven for not knowing this because, at every available opportunity the lectionary compilers ditch Mark and go for John. Admittedly John doesn't have a year of his own (which in itself makes the basic premise of the lectionary problematic), but why on earth would the lectionary compilers choose to substitute a Johanine for a Markan text this week? The text from John which they choose is John 6.1-21, which is... the feeding of the five thousand! They pick the account of a miracle which every evangelist, including Mark, records and to add insult to injury, this is part of the material they removed from the previous week's reading from Mark! Come on! Presumably they think John tells it better. I can kind of forgive (though I don't understand or condone) the wholesale abandonment of Mark's gospel over the easter season. But the last couple of weeks take the biscuit. The lectionary really makes a dog's dinner of biblical narrative.

So that is my particular beef with the lectionary at the moment. But there are also more systemic problems:

• The lectionary is inherently lop-sided. The format prescribes three readings. One from a collection of 39 books, another from a collection of 23 books, and a third from a collection of 4 books. It should be pretty obvious how this is naturally going to lead to a lack of balance. Is it any wonder that there are so many latter day marcionites in the church given that we give 30% of reading time to over 70% (by word count) of the bible? This is particularly glaring when the preacher has got it in their head that one should only really ever preach from the gospel reading (something I hear rather too often). I don't know where this idea came from. I'm pretty sure that it doesn't lead to a happy place.

• Because the lectionary is lop-sided in the way described above, it has to leave out large swathes of the Old Testament, just take a look at the big master lectionary for the CofE (for this comparison I am referring to the 'Semi-Continuous' track one). Leviticus, Numbers, Judges, Song of Songs, Lamentations, Joel, Jonah, Habakkuk, Zephaniah, Haggai and Malachi all appear only once each in the three year lectionary cycle. 1&2 Chronicles, Ezra, Ecclesiasties, Daniel, Obadiah, Nahum and Zechariah don't appear at all. All in all, Isaiah does the best out of all Old Testament writings, making an appearance on 31 Sundays. Genesis is next with 20 appearances, followed by Jeremiah with 14 and Exodus with 13. Every other book appears less than ten times over the three year cycle. I just find this breathtaking. If, as I suspect, large numbers of Christians are only really reading the Bible in the context of the Sunday liturgy, they are getting a tiny fraction of the Old Testament simply because the lectionary arbitrarily allocated 30% of reading time to it. I've heard people extolling the virtues of the lectionary because it takes you through the bible in three years... it doesn't.

• Yes, there is the gospel related 'track two' as an option for the Old Testament reading for Sundays after Pentecost, but this just plays with a solution to the problem. Of the underrepresented books, in year A, Amos, Zechariah, Jonah, Micah and Zephaniah get a single look in, the bulk of the readings are from Isaiah. In year B, Job appears twice as does Numbers, Joshua gets one reading Daniel gets his only two appearances and Amos is read another couple of times. In year C, Ecclesiastes gets another reading, as do Habakkuk and Malachi, Amos gets another two readings. The bulk of the gospel related Old Testament readings come from already well represented books. Even so, to get through the thematic and semi-continuous tracks turns the three year lectionary into a six year lectionary. The imbalance still remains. 

• The readings are often completely unrelated. Trying to discern a common theme within the readings for a given Sunday more often than not leads to a major headache. Besides, if you do manage to hold the readings together with chewing gum and rubber bands, don't you kind of end up preaching the thoughts of the lectionary compilers? The response made by some preachers is to not preach on any of the texts, opting to preach on their favourite topic, you know, the one they have preached on a thousand times before. The response which most sane preachers make to this is to just preach one of the texts. The obvious question which this approach poses is, 'why on earth do we have the other two readings!?' If they are in no way related to each other, and consequently in no way related to the theme of the liturgy (and we should all try and discern a theme in good liturgy planning, right?) then why have them? Don't they just clutter the liturgy. Why not just have one?

My fear is that for those whose reading of scripture is almost entirely on a Sunday through the lectionary, the bible becomes at best a collection of wise vignettes, at worst a confusing jumble of incoherent stories. In fact the worst possible result of this fruit salad approach to bible reading is that scripture becomes completely irrelevant both to the liturgy and to the people of God. Don't get me wrong, In principle I love the idea of the whole church, as much as possible, reading the bible together. A common calendar is a great way to achieve this. But, seriously, is this our best attempt? Rant over.

The Mystery of Yourselves

I was asked to write a short article on the eucharist/spirituality/embodiment for a local christian spirituality magazine. Here is my attempt.

We talk about Christ’s body a great deal in church. ‘The church is the body of Christ’ we say. At Christmas we talk about the divine person of God the Son, assuming to himself a whole and complete (body and soul) human nature. The word became flesh – the bodiless was embodied. In holy week we talk about the psychological, emotional and physical anguish and ultimately the death which the embodied God underwent on behalf of sinful humanity. And on Easter day, we tell of the glorious body, revivified in the most extraordinary way, giving life and hope to all. Our talk of ‘the body of Christ’ of course, is not limited to the great festivals of the church year; every week we talk endlessly about Christ’s body and blood in the eucharist. However you look at it, christianity is and always has been a religion which is obsessed, in a good way, with bodies. So why is it that, when we speak of ‘spirituality’ (itself a concept which doesn’t sit easily within the christian interest in embodiment), our thinking and practice in relation to the body takes a radical turn for the worse? We start talking about ‘detachment’, silence and the god within, in ways which sounds more platonic than christian.

Now I’m not one to underplay, or for that matter to undervalue the significance of platonism (particularly neoplatonism) on the development of Christian theology. Some of the most creative and enduring attempts at proclaiming the Christian gospel have come about through an innovative appropriation of some platonic ideas. There are, however, limits beyond which such assimilation begins to erode basic christian belief, and therefore should be resisted.

The negative effects of platonic anti-materialism on christianity aren’t merely theoretical; they are deeply rooted in the psyche of most parishes, and they are most clearly seen when ‘church’ (however that is conceived) is turned into a form of escape from the ‘world’. How many times have you walked into a church building and seen a notice advising you to leave the world behind and enter into the beautiful, spiritual peace which the building affords? I am not surprised that many christians tend to think of spirituality as a kind of escapism; the way we ‘perform’ the liturgy in churches is largely responsible for this. Despite the best efforts of the liturgical movement, worship in most churches remains something which is done on behalf of the people, a sacred moment which we observe and to a certain extent are drawn into, but which has scant reference or relevance to the lives we live outside of the church building, and relatively little effect on them. Too often we go to church on Sunday to leave the world behind us, to get a glimpse of a world beyond, and then to go back home to wait for next weeks spiritual shot in the arm.

It is a great pity that for many christians, religious escapism finds its apex in the celebration of the eucharist. Yves Congar once noted that the Roman church (and I think it would be fair to make a similar observation of the Church of England, particularly in its more Roman instantiations) has attempted over many centuries to re-create within the eucharistic liturgy a ritual somewhat alike that performed by the Levitical priesthood [Congar, Y., ‘Where Does “Sacred” Fit into a Christian Worldview’ At the Heart of Christian Worship, Liturgical Press, 2010]. We make a certain class of people (the priests) ‘holy’ and give them special titles and clothes to wear; the priests perform a mysterious rite in which they conjure the presence of God out of material elements, the supernatural annihilating the natural; we make certain buildings ‘sacred spaces’, and whisper pious words in them; we even make certain parts of those special buildings more sacred than others. Like the Levitical code, the church is constantly trying to isolate the pure from the impure, the sacred from the profane.

In the same article Congar notes how the revolutionary teaching of Jesus removed the sacred/profane distinction by making all things sacred: so all days are to be Sabbaths to the Lord, on which good is done, people are healed and the oppressed are liberated; all places (not just Jerusalem or Mount Gerazim) are sacred, and worthy sites for worship. Jesus resisted every attempt to localise holiness in shrines by declaring all things holy. To use Rob Bell’s phrase, ‘everything is spiritual’. For a follower of Jesus, ‘sanctity’ or ‘spirituality’ cannot be achieved by withdrawal from the world. To remain true to the Genius of its founder Christianity should never be a religion where certain things or places are made holier than others; it must be a religion where the entirety of life is understood as holy and, therefore, is a fitting offering to the God of all creation.

In the story the eucharist tells, and in the manner of its telling we should hear a constant reminder of the holiness of all things. In the eucharist we proclaim the holiness of the ordinary, bread and wine, symbols of our lives presented to God as a living sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving. As St Augustine said,

"If you are the body of Christ and His members, it is the mystery of yourselves that is laid upon the altar. It is the mystery of yourselves that you receive. It is to what you are that you say ‘Amen’. For you will hear ‘The body of Christ’, and you will reply ‘Amen’" (Sermon 272)

The eucharist rejoices in materiality and sees it as a fitting vehicle for the divine. The eucharist tells us that ‘spirituality’ is something that shouldn’t be confined to the ‘holy moments’ we manufacture to escape from a threatening world. You could almost say that the radical gospel proclaimed in the eucharist calls into question the entire category of ‘spirituality’ as something distinct from the rest of life.

Revelation 3.1-6: Hear What what the Spirit says to the church

A sermon preached at Exeter College, Oxford 6 May 2012.

“At Helms Gate, before the mouth of the Deep, there was a heel of rock thrust outward by the   

northern cliff. There upon it’s spur stood high walls of ancient stone, and within them was a lofty 

tower. Men said that in far-off days of the glory of Gondor the sea kings had built here this fastness 

with the hands of giants. The Hornburg it was called, for a trumpet sounded upon the tower echoed    

in the Deep behind, as if armies long-forgotten were issuing to war from the caves beneath the hills.    

A wall, too, the men of old had made from the Hornburg to the southern cliff, barring the entrance to 

the gorge. Beneath it, by a wide culvert the Deeping-stream passed out.”

The Hornburg at Helm’s Deep was impregnable. Everyone knew it. Helm Hammerhand made the fastness famous, and according to Theoden, it would “never fall while men defended it”. There would be no safer place for the people of Rohan to face the onslought of Saruman’s Uruk Hai hordes. Theodan trusted the history of Helm’s Deep so much that he was oblivious to the culvert.

“Even as they spoke there came a blare of trumpets. Then there was a crash and a flash of flame and 

smoke. The waters of the Deeping-stream poured out hissing and foaming: they were choked no 

longer, a gaping hole was blasted in the wall, a host of dark shapes poured in. ‘The devilry of 

Saruman!’ cried Aragorn. ‘They have crept in the culvert again, while we talked, and they have lit 

the fire of Orthanc beneath our feet.”

Confidence in former glory never exempts us from vigilance. Had Theoden realised this, the Deeping wall might not have been breached. Had the city of Sardis realised this, they wouldn’t have had their supposedly invincible fortress with walls rising seamlessly from a thousand foot precipice scaled by enemy troops who opened the city gates to the armies of Cyrus. And had the church of Sardis realised this, they may not have had this rather scathing letter written to them.

The church of Sardis looked alive, it had a good reputation in the city, their religion was respectable, they faced no outward preassure like the other churches you read of in the second and third chapters of Revelation. We don’t read about any heresy. No specifics of immoral behaviour. No persecution, only good will and friendliness from their fellow Sardisians. To the casual observer, the church of Sardis was a picture of good health. 

Throughout the history of the Christianity, theologians have tried to define what the essential observable characteristics of the true church are: Being in communion with a particular bishop; Apostolic Succession; The true preaching of the word, rightly administering the sacraments and the faithful exercise of discipline. All of these have been advanced as observable, objective indicators of being part of the ‘one, holy, catholic and apostolic church’. We play the same sort of games today. I’m sure you’ve heard people judge a church on the basis of its music, or whether they prophecy and speak in tongues. You may have heard people judge whether a minister is a ‘proper’ priest on the basis of the clothes she wears, which direction she faces when presiding at the eucharist or whether she holds her hands at the correct angle during the eucharistic prayer. I don’t doubt that all of these things are important, at least to some people. But when we consider the words of the risen Christ to the church of Sardis, we don’t find a criticism of the lack of reverence and order in worship, or a failure to use the charismatic gifts, or even a failure in doctrinal standards.

The church of Sardis had a reputation for being alive, but really only had the vestiges of living religion. There was a conflict between the impression they made and the spirit at their heart. The Sardisian church gives us the archetype of nominal christianity. Exterior correctness and respectability, but inside, the church was dying fast.

It is easy to see how The Church of England is particularly susceptible to the threat of nominal religion. We are the established church. We have a dignified, ancient and rich tradition of worship. Our theologians have a reputation for being subtle, nuanced and intellectually rigorous. Our bishops are part of the national legislature. The Church of England epitomizes respectability. If Professor Dawkins were to go to a Christmas Carol service at any church, I’m sure it would be CofE… probably an Oxford college Chapel. The Christianity of the establishment is particularly prone to death from respectability, to mistaking heritage and reputation for health, but is by no means unique in this. We aren’t the only church which has this culvert in the Deeping wall. Any church which prides itself on its spiritual inheritance or its present achievements  whilst simultaneously failing to pay attention to its inner life runs the same risk. 

The nineteenth-century Danish priest and philosopher Søren Kierkegaard was well aware of this and wrote about it at length. You can read his thoughts in The Attack Upon Christendom. He looked at his own church, where the crowd and the congregation, the state and the church had become almost indistinguishable and was filled with rage. He felt that the only correct response was to attack ‘Christendom’ for what it had done to the church. It had robbed her of her vitality, of her inward life, of the sense of holy scandal that he felt the Christian gospel ought elicit from the world. “The human race”, he writes, “in the course of time has taken the liberty of softening and softening Christianity until at last we have contrived to make it exactly the opposite of what it is in the New Testament” (Fatherland  39). To some, Kierkegaard seemed to be anti-church, but he was only motivated by love for the church. He he wasn’t particularly interested in changing the specifics of church practice, rather, he wanted to change the spirit in which the church practiced its religion. All the observable features of the church were sound, but there was something missing, something lackluster about its practice of religion.

But there was still hope for Sardis. There were some for whom faith was still alive and not a matter of mere formality. Whilst something remained, there was hope that this something could be strengthened. Whilst there is still life there is time for the church to wake up, still time for it to repent. The letter to the Church of Sardis opens with a reminder of the Church’s true nature – it is like a light held in the had of Christ. The church is sustained by Jesus Christ, the living one, our life depends on him. Perhaps above all, the urgent need is to listen and discern. This is the advice given in each of the seven letters we read in the first part of the book of Revelation: “Let anyone who has an ear listen to what the Spirit is saying to the churches.” The church always must be a listening community, a community which deliberately listens for what the Spirit says, and deliberately places itself under the Lord’s training. The call the church receives in every generation is to reform, not so much by tinkering with the externals of church life, even though the externals will need reformation, but by recovering its inner vitality.

1 Corinthians 11.17–34: Discerning the Body

About a month ago, Caroline and I went on holiday to Sorrento. We had a wonderful time and, rather predictably, we spent much our holiday working our way around Roman archaeological sites. We did the obvious trips to Pompei and Herculaneum, and spent hours wandering around their streets. But we also went to some less well known places: the Villa di Poppaea in Oplontis, rumoured to have been the house of Nero’s infamous second wife, Poppaea Sabina. We went to a large farmhouse in the middle of a housing estate in Boscoreal, and we went to two beautiful villas in Stabia, which were a lot further away from the train station than the guide book had led us to believe! As we wandered round the remarkably preserved ruins of homes, destroyed when Vesuvius erupted in 79AD, you could almost feel what life would have been like to live in a Roman villa in the first century.

Now why on earth am I telling you about my holiday this year? I’m telling you because it is to these domestic settings that we are transported when we read Paul’s account of how the Corinthian church celebrated the Eucharist. It’s important to remember that in the very earliest days of the church, there were no church buildings in which people worshipped. All christians would have worshipped in the private homes of the wealthier members of the church. Another thing to remember is that, whilst we are used to receiving the eucharist as a tiny amount of bread (which looks and tastes nothing like bread) and a tiny sip of wine, in the first century the eucharist would have taken place within a dinner party. It would have been a complete meal.

Now when you remember these two things, the domestic setting and the dinner party, it becomes easier to understand why Paul was so unhappy with what was happening in the eucharist at the Corinthian Churches. The homes of the wealthy Corinthian christians would have had a dining room called a triclinium in which about nine to twelve people could have comfortably reclined around a table. It seems the wealthy Corinthian christians were inviting their well-off friends to sit and eat with them in the triclinium, where they were eating lots of sumptuous food and drinking lots of wine. But the poorer people, who weren’t as popular with the wealthy, were being left to eat in the atrium, a large entrance lobby which could seat about thirty to forty people. The rich were gorging themselves, while the poor were getting a few scraps of food and drink, scarcely enough to stave off their hunger. Imagine something a bit like the divide between first and second class on a transatlantic flight. In one: champagne, smoked salmon and other delicacies, something resmbling a bed rather than a chair, and a foot massage (you can tell I’ve never travelled first class). In the other, a soggy sandwich and a warm glass of orange juice and three inches of leg room, if you’re lucky. The poor Christians were being treated as the scum of the earth, as second class, by people who were supposed to be their brothers and sisters.

Paul’s problem with the Corinthian eucharist wasn’t that they weren’t getting the ritual or the liturgy right, or that they didn’t believe in the ‘real presence’. Yes, Paul does say that ‘all who eat and drink without discerning the body, eat and drink judgement on themselves’ (v. 29), but this cannot mean ‘perceiving the real presence of Jesus in the bread and wine’, that would run against everything Paul has been saying to this point. He’s been talking about how christians treat each other, not about eucharistic theology. For Paul, discerning the body means recognising the church as the body of christ (as he often calls it, cf. 1Cor. 10.16–17, 12.12–31). His problem was that by humiliating the poorer members of the community, the richer members had both failed to understand what the eucharist was really all about, and had desecrated Christ’s body, the church. All the liturgy and ritual, and reverencing the real presence in the world can’t make up for this basic failure! 

So what is the eucharist all about? Paul reminds them by retelling the story of the Last supper, so that they could see through the current situation back to foundation of the eucharist, to the Lord of the Supper himself. Paul reminds them of the magnitude of the gift which Jesus gives: a new covenant, a new community, created at the greatest cost by Christ’s death for us. The old order was one in which people were divided, where the walls separating one group from another stood firm and high. But in the community of the new covenant, the walls have been torn down, ‘Jews and gentiles, slaves and free’ (12.13) are all part of the same body. So sharing the common meal is for Paul a kind of acted parable, declaring the unity and equality of all the members Christ’s body, the church. ‘Although we are many’, he says earlier in 1 Corinthians ‘we are one body, because we all share one bread’ (1Cor. 10.17). Just as baptism makes us part of the one body of Christ, the eucharist sustains us in the unity of that one body.

So, as we finish, what can we learn from the problems Paul addresses here? We don’t celebrate the Lord’s Supper like this any more, in someone’s home at a dinner party, and it doesn’t feel like there are class ranks in this church. So can we learn anything? Well, it would be a terrible sermon if we couldn’t, so I’m going to say, ‘yes we can’.

If the eucharist is about sustaining the unity of the body of Christ – unity with Jesus, the churches head, and unity between us, the members of the body –  if the eucharist broadcasts to the world the radical equality of God’s new community, in which the barriers between human beings have been torn down, we should really make sure that we don’t start erecting those barriers again! Whatever background someone comes from, the church should be the place where all stand as equals in God’s family, united in the life of Christ which we share. Absolutely no one should be excluded. Perhaps the question we should ask ourselves regularly is this: ‘who are the people we would rather didn’t come to our eucharist? Who are the people we would like to keep away?’ The noisy? The smelly? The ignorant? The bigoted? The liberals? The Trendies? The ‘happy-clappies’? The ‘moldy oldies’? Do we only want a church where we find ‘people like us’? Or do we want one that welcomes everyone who God is calling? The new covenant was established by the infinitely wealthy one, pouring out his own life for his lowly, grubby, ignorant, bigoted, loudmouthed, unpleasant, dearly beloved friends. If that is what we’re really remembering in the eucharist, what should our church look like? If the all-holy one invites us to his table, who are we to exclude people from ours?

This is my body

I'm writing a magazine article on the relationship between the eucharist and our embodiment. This is quite long, but if anyone feels like reading it and also feels moved to comment, I would love to hear what you have to say and maybe discuss it a bit here. This comes from Austin Farrer's 'Said or Sung'. It is the transcript of an address delivered at the Eucharistic Congress at the Albert Hall in 1958 – That might provide some needed context!

A speaker to an unfamiliar audience has to take a risk. He has to assume that his interest in the matter he discusses is shared by his hearers. In the present case my anxiety on this head is not great. For surely you feel the curiosity I feel when I consider that moment in which our Saviour said, 'This is my body.' How could Peter, John and the rest have understood him at all? They could not, anyhow, understand him altogether; why, the Holy Ghost came down presently at Pentecost for this very purpose, to give them, after the event, the understanding they had lacked; and to lead them into all truth, about the sacraments as well as about other divine things. But even at that moment, sitting at the Supper, they must have understood something. It was not our Saviour's way to talk with his friends in a language they could make nothing of; and least of all, in the night before he died. They cannot have been quite bewildered to hear him call the bread his body; even though his own living body sat there amongst them, holding the bread in his bodily hands, and calling it his body with a bodily tongue; even though in the next moment, Jesus ate a crumb of what he had called his body, putting his body into his body. That, you might think, was utterly confusing for his companions; and I do not deny that it was mysterious; but it was not so bewildering for them as it would be for us, and this is the reason - they had certain ways of thinking about their daily food, which have become less familiar nowadays.

I will ask you, then, to think for a moment about this old-world attitude to bread. Not that there is really anything old-world, or difficult, or unnatural about it, once we get round to thinking of it. We, surely, can say two things about our food, both equally true. First, food is a sort of fuel, which keeps us running; we turn it into warmth and energy; we burn it up in living; we can say, for short, that food is life. But in the second place, food is body-building; it is not merely consumed, or used by the body, it becomes the body. No doubt a small portion of matter came to us from the bodies of our mothers, but however much or little it was, it has long ago been replace. Every particle of what we now are has come to us from our diet; unless it has come from sunlight, or from the air. But roughly or picturesquely speaking, our food is our body. Food is body, then, and food is life, both equally and not more than the other; both ways of speaking are in the Bible; both, indeed, are applied to the Sacrament. the sixth chapter of S. John tells us that the flesh of the Son of Man nourishes us for eternal life; and it is familiar enough with us to think of the Sacrament as life, or sustenance. The other thought is not so familiar nowadays – I mean, the thought that food is body. But this is the way we need to think, if we are to understand what happened at the Supper.

If a Jew blessed his food - that is, if he said grace for it – and added, before eating it, 'This is my body,' his friends would not have been altogether surprised. They would have wondered, if anything, why he bothered to say it. It was his body, of course – his body to be; not actually his body, as anyone could see; he would need to digest it first. But it was already consecrated to be his body, because he had first said grace for it; and if he liked to call it his body, well, perhaps he could. 'Blessed be thou, O Lord, King of the World, who bringest bread out of the earth' was the old Jewish grace. When the Jew had blessed God in such words for his bread, he reckoned he had hallowed it for its proper use. Bread that is blessed is to eaten, it is to be the eater's body. God has given it for that purpose. 

Grace before meat is an important Christian action; by saying grace we acknowledge a divine gift, and no less a gift than the renewal of our bodily being, bestowed on us by the hand that made us. Every meal renews the wonder of our creation, all eating is a natural sacrament. In our morning prayers, we take our life again afresh from the hands of God, to use as he has chosen. And in our daily meals we receive our very existence, our physical being, the stuff of ourselves from God, to use according to his will. So Christ taught his disciples to look to heaven for their daily bread, and to receive it at their Father's hands; even though man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God. What Jesus taught, he practiced, and the supreme example of grace-before-meals is that of Jesus at the Supper. He takes the food from his Father's hand, to be his body; he rises from the table, he goes and does with that body what his Father desires. and what is that? He offers it on the cross for his Father's honour, and for our salvation.

I have been talking as though Jesus, at the Supper, had said grace for himself alone. And he did say grace for himself; but not for himself alone. He said grace for the company; and to make the fact more evident, it was his duty to crumble the loaf for which grace had been said, and pass the pieces round; everyone present must eat a crumb of the one blessed bread. Now if the blessed bread of a lonely eater is his body, the blessed bread of a whole company is their body, the body of them all; by eating the one loaf, they have their common existence from a common stock.

Think of the family of Christian children, sitting round the table. They are all, in Bible language, the issue of their parents' loins; but besides this, they have constantly, year in and year out, built their bodies up from the one food their father earned them, and their mother prepared for them. So we Christians are all one family at the table of our Heavenly Father. S. Paul does not think he is saying anything remarkable to the Corinthians, but quite a matter of course, when he says: Since the loaf is one, we many partakers are one body; for we all partake the one loaf. He is indeed expressing an idea ages and ages older than the Christian sacrament – the immemorial bond of common food. Those who build their bodies from one loaf are one body; just as those who draw their being from common parents are one blood.

Jesus, then, said grace for the company. But if so, why did not he say 'This is the body of us all' when he had blessed the bread? Why did he say, 'This is my body, which is for you'? The point is not merely that they share a body, but that the body which they share is his. Once again, the ideas of that ancient world would help the disciples to understand him. If friends feasted together who were equals, the bond of bread accepted equally – they were all one body, all members one of another, to quote S. Paul again. But suppose an ordinary citizen went to dine with a great man, a prince, a king? Then he could say: 'This is the royal food, made ready to become the king's body; it has been blessed to be his flesh. And I, a common man, am privileged to share it, to be one body with my lord.' It was in this way the people of God thought of the temple-sacrifices, where the Lord of the banquet was divine. They were privileged to come to the table of God Almighty. they could not think that he actually ate any part of the feast; that would be gross, heathenish and absurd. But they did think that God, of his loving-kindness, had appointed the altar to act as his deputy, or representative. God was graciously pleased to receive what the altar flames devoured, though he had no need of such offerings; and so, in eating the rest of the victim, his people had a sort of table-fellowship with their creator. 'Look at old Israel,' says S. paul. 'Do not those who eat the sacrifices come into communion with the altar?' But that God would push that altar aside, and take its place, that God would come to them in human flesh, to sit at their table, and give them a share in his body – there was a mercy, and a condescension of God, for which they dared not hope. Yet here, at the Supper, was Jesus saying: 'This is my body, which is for you.'

He says it now, rather than at any previous feast, because now he has to leave them; and before he goes, he wishes to join them with himself by the covenant of bread. Ah, but do the disciples understand the nature of the bond? Jesus has blessed his food, to be the body he will offer in his sacrifice; do they know that they are committed to membership of such a body as that? A body flogged, broken, crucified – see, he crumbles the loaf before their eyes. Do they perceive the new meaning in the ancient custom, the breaking of the bread? Are they willing to be parts of such a body, are they willing that his body, with its sacrificial destiny, should be theirs? The disciples were not yet fully willing, but they came to be, and so we all must; for if we do not want to be given and surrendered to God, why touch religion at all? By partaking of the sacrificial body, we are to be made capable of sacrifice, taken up, as we are, into the sacrificial being of Christ.

Let us return to our starting point, and see what we have accomplished. We wanted to explain how the disciples could have seen any meaning in the words, 'This is my body.' And we have seen that there was plenty there for them to understand. Messiah, their heavenly king, has blessed the bread, to be his body. He is going to die for them, but he first gives them a share in his body, by the fellowship of bread.

I wonder, now, what you think about this line of interpretation. If I were sitting where you sit, and hearing such ideas for the first time, what should I think? 'This Oxford man,' I should say, 'has overdone it. He has explained too much. He set out to explain the disciples' thoughts, but has ended up explaining away the Master's action. it seems there was nothing in it, after all Christ was saying grace in the Jewish way, and pointing a Jewish moral about the grace he said. Everything was as natural as could be.' That is the sort of objection I should feel, and that is the sort of objection which, I dare say, you do feel. What are we to say in reply?

'Everything was as natural as could be.' Suppose it was, what is there in that to disturb us? Who expects Jesus to be unnatural? What more natural, more human, more sweet, that Jesus in Mary's lap, or sucking at her breast? But he is no less Son of God for that; Son of God, conceived of the Holy Ghost, and not by natural generation. All Jesus' acts are natural and kind; nothing could be more human, yet there is a fathomless depth in them, a meaning inexhaustible and divine. For he who does these things is not man only, but God. it is so with the Super. The words of Jesus are human, and they are divine; natural, but all the more supernatural for their naturalness.

When any pious Jew blesses his food – or when any of us blesses his – we may consecrate it to be our body, we cannot make it our body. Only God does that, the God, that is, of nature. Our creator, whose will gave us this bodily being, brings to pass by process of nature the transformation  of bread into body, after we have eaten the bread. If any of us calls his food his body, he means his 'body-to-be,' anticipating the action of God, which will make it so. It is otherwise when Christ blesses bread, and declares it his body; for then the voice that speaks is the Word that made the world. It is the Creator who blesses, when Christ blesses bread. Creation, we remember, is itself a blessing. As God makes each thing, we read, he sees it to be good; he blesses his living creatures, that they might increase and multiply. We are what we are by the blessing of God; we join our wills with his when we bless him for making us what we are. At the Summer, the Eternal Son joins his will with the Eternal Father, blessing him who gives the bread to be his body. The blessing is creative and almighty. He says it is his body, and it is his body, by appointment of the will no creature can resist. It is his body for every sacramental purpose, for communion and sacrifice, on the altar and in the tabernacle, on the palms and in the mouths of sinful men.

What is it, then? the age-old bond of common bread, and the custom of grace before meat, are the natural foundations on which Christ has built; and a scene of touching human simplicity, of jewish household piety, becomes the sacramental mystery of our redemption. When we feed on this bread, we do not merely stock our bodies with the same stuff as Jesus used for stocking his. The bread is his body now, it is on him we feed; and this is it that unites us. If, in our Christian being, you and I are one, it is because we have nothing as Christians but what we draw from Christ. Each of us has little human knowledge about most of the others who sit with us in this hall; but we are all one body, being partakers of that one bread.

(Austin Farrer, Said or Sung, 125–131)

To Will as God Wills

Some more words from Traherne:

O the nobility of Divine Friendship! Are not all His treasures yours, and yours His? Is not your very Soul and Body His: is not His life and felicity yours: is not His desire yours? Is not His will yours? And if His will be yours, the accomplishment of it is yours, and the end of all is your perfection. You are infinitely rich as He is: being pleased in everything as He is. And if His will be yours, yours is His. For you will what He willeth, which is to be truly wise and good and holy. And when you delight in the same reasons that moved Him to will, you will know it. He willed the Creation, not only that He might Appear but Be: wherein is seated the mystery of the eternal generation of His Son. Do you will as He did, and you shall be glorious as He. He willed the happiness of men and angels not only that He might appear, but be good and wise and glorious. And He willed it with such an infinite desire, that He is infinitely good: infinitely good in Himself, and infinitely blessed in them. Do you will the happiness of men and angels as He did, and you shall be good and infinitely blessed as He is. All their happiness shall be your happiness as it is His. He willed the glory of all ages, and the government and welfare of all kingdoms , and the felicity also of the highest Cherubims. Do you extend your Will like Him and you shall be great as He is , and concerned and happy in all these. He willed the redemption of mankind, and therefore is His son Jesus Christ an infinite treasure. Unless you will it too, He will be no treasure to you. Verily you ought to will these things so ardently that God Himself should be therefore  your joy because He willed them. Your will ought to be united to His in all places of His dominion. Were you not born to have communion with Him? And that cannot be without this heavenly union. Which when it is what it ought is Divine and infinite. You are God's joy for willing what He willeth. He loves to see you good and blessed. And will not you love to see Him good? Verily, if ever you would enjoy God you must enjoy His goodness: All His goodness to all His hosts in Heaven and Earth. And when you do so, you are the universal heir of God and all things. God is yours and the whole world. You are His, and you are all; or in all, and with all.

(Traherne, Centuries of Meditations, first Century number 53)

The New Song

For those who have reached (or are about to reach) the end of term, I thought you might appreciate this, from Austin Farrer.

We notice that late in the summer term noises and confused cries, for which no reasonable cause can be assigned, are apt to trouble the midnight air. A friend of mine who lives in a College off Radcliffe Square lay awake against his will, hearing without much pleasure 'the shout of them that triumph, the song of them that feast'. Before he made another attempt at composing himself to sleep, he thought he would refresh himself with a taste of the coolness outside; he dressed, and walked into the square. The sound of riot had suddenly stopped; it was quite dark, and perfectly still; and a pair of nightingales in Exeter College garden were singing their hearts out. His own heart turned over in his breast. the performance, indeed was not new; we have heard nightingales before; and nightingales have been singing the same song since long before mankind got the wit to enjoy them. Yet thought there is nothing fresh for them to sing, they sing freshly, their singing is their life, they are not putting on a stale record. And it is a stale ear in my human head that cannot feel the freshness, or yield to the magic of it.

'Sing unto the Lord a new song',  says the old Psalmist, for God's most strange love is insulted by a stale adoration. And yet the newness will not be in the song, since there is nothing new to sing; but in the singers, to whom God may perpetually grant a newness of heart, in voicing his praise. Our tired imaginations see eternal sameness in the chanting of heavenly spirits; and yet, says St John, they sing a new song in honour of a wonder that will never grow old. For as God in the cradle is a wonder on earth, which angels celebrate, and shepherds adore; so man on the celestial throne is a marvel in heaven, which those heavenly eyes can never cease to drink in with amazement.

Salvation is all or nothing. God's other works are subject to his hand; his human creatures, to whom he has given a particle of his own spirit, he saves by uniting with his own everlastingness. There is no comfortable half-way house for us to abide in, midway suspended between God and the created world. It is the mercy of God to make us sharers in his own sovereign life, and this he does by uniquely and personally uniting the manhood of Jesus to his own being, and then associating us with that manhood of Christ. The heart and focus of humanity is there with God; and when we lift up our hearts, and put them with the Lord, we recollect what we are, and where we truly belong. Kings have always been credited, whether superstitiously or in mere ceremony, with a shadow of godhead. The substance is Christ's alone: his is the royal will by which we can live, for it is one with the will that made us; his purpose is the purpose of our being. The wonder of it never stales.

And so it is always a new song in heaven, with which we on earth can join, that the Lamb was slain, and has redeemed us to God by his blood out of every kindred and tongue, every people and nation, and made us unto our God kings and priests, by our association with that royal right, and with that redeeming sacrifice.

(Farrer, The Brink of Mystery, 107-108)

Ben Witherington III - Women and the Ministry Part Two

Women and the Ministry Part Two

Here is the second part!

Ben Witherington III - Women in Ministry Part One

Women in Ministry Part One

Watched these this morning. I think Ben Witherington argues really persuasively (as persuasively as you can in seven minutes) for reading the trajectories of the New Testament: In the world of the New Testament Church "... everything was geared to a male centered kind of world. So when you're looking at the New Testament and what it says about women and their roles... what you need to look for is not primarily affirmations that women were part of a man's world... what you need to look for is trajectories of change and difference."

After this I'll also post the second video, which deals more specifically with the ministry of women in the New Testament.

What a world would this be, were everything beloved as it ought to be!

Some wise words from Thomas Traherne, the seventeenth century Anglican priest and metaphysical poet.

Suppose a river, or a drop of water, an apple or a sand, an ear of wheat or a herb: God knoweth infinite excellencies in it more than we: He seeth how it relateth to angels and men; how it proceedeth from the most perfect Lover to the most perfectly Beloved; how it representeth all His attributes; how it conduceth in its place by the best of means to the best of ends: and for this cause it cannot be beloved too much. God the Author and God the End is to be beloved in it; Angels and Men are to be beloved in it; and it is highly to be esteemed for all their sakes. O what a treasure is every sand when truly understood! Who can love anything that God has made too much? His infinite goodness and wisdom and power are in it. What a world would this be, were everything beloved as it ought to be!
(Traherne, Centuries of Meditations, Second Century, number 67)

1 Corinthians 3.1–17 – Real Church: Real Spirituality

We have preaching a series on 1 Corinthians at St Nic's at the moment. Here is my offering on the first seventeen verses of chapter three.

As I was working on my Sermon, I realised that what we have in these readings from 1 Corinthians is a description of the real church. Not the church we fantasize about, not the church that we would like to see, but the church as it is, with all its messiness and fighting and trouble. What strikes me about the letter’s Paul wrote to the Corinthian church is that, despite all its problems, you could not deny that this church was alive. These Christians, as Paul says in our reading, are God’s temple, with his spirit living in them. Isn’t that strange, the most vibrant church in the New Testament, the church you could best describe as ‘alive’, is a church which is so full of problems. Perhaps this shouldn't surprise me, life isn’t smooth, and living things always face problems. You don’t, after all, get any trouble from the residents of a grave yard. Real, living Churches always face difficulties, it’s part of the growing pains of the children of God. And the church of Corinth was no stranger to this. We don’t see a perfect church in this letter, but we do see a real church, a church whose problems we are familiar with. And in this letter we also find an Apostle who, like a mother, wants to feed and nurture these young christians, to help them grow up into maturity in Jesus.

And so we come to this morning’s reading, which I think could be given the title, ‘Real Church: Real Spirituality’. Notice the first words of the reading, “And so, brothers and sisters, I could not speak to you as spiritual people, but rather as people of the flesh, as infants in Christ” (1 Corinthians 3.1). The Corinthian Christians were very proud of their Spirituality. In fact they were quite critical of Paul for not being spiritual enough (2 Corinthians 12)! They were quite convinced that they were the real deal when it came to matters of the Spirit and that everyone else was, well, the opposite,  fleshly. But Paul immediately turns their own elitist way of thinking about spirituality back on them. They think they are Spiritually mature, but in reality they are babies, so immature that they can scarcely be called spiritual. Paul wasn’t known for pulling his punches, but that is just down right insulting, isn’t it? How can Paul say that about the poor Corinthians? You might even start to feel sorry for them.

The answer is that Paul knows a secret about the spiritual life. He knows that true spirituality bears fruit: Love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control, he says in another of his letters (Galatians 5.22–23). But when he looks at the Corinthian church he sees the complete opposite. He sees jealousy and quarreling. They are Christians and of course every Christian has been given the gift of the Spirit by Christ. But the Corinthians were behaving as though they hadn’t received Christ’s gift. The fruit of their lives was telling a different story to the words that were coming from their mouths.

What makes matters more serious is that their ‘jealousy and quarreling’ wasn’t about trivial things. I get quite jealous of people who have the must have clergy gadget, the ipad, but this isn’t the kind of jealousy Paul has in mid. They weren’t jealous about each others cars or houses or jobs. In fact, it’s probably better to translate jealousy as ‘zeal’. The Corinthians were religiously zealous. They were keen on promoting their strongly held religious opinions, and it was this which caused their quarrels. They were quarreling over religion, and don’t we know the pain of that! There were factions in the congregation, and they each had their favourite religious teacher: Paul, Apollos, Peter, and then there were the really conceited ones who claimed to only have Christ as their teacher. And division into religious parties wasn’t just fanboyishness, they were asking really serious theological questions: How should we grasp God’s wisdom? How can we avoid worshipping idols? How should the Spirit be manifested in worship? These are important questions to ask… and these were the sorts of questions which were taring the Corinthian church apart. As long as their zeal for their favourite teacher or their theological hobbyhorse were causing quarreling and disunity, they were living as though they had never known the spirit, as though they had never become Christians.

So what does it mean for the church to be spiritual? According to Paul it means to live without rivalry and disunity and quarreling. Paul says that the way to have real spirituality, the way to be spiritually mature is to stop fighting. The real measure of spiritual maturity is seen in the unity and peace of the Christian community.

I don’t think it’s too hard to see spiritual elitism in our own lives. We might get ‘into’ a particular spiritual writer, I’m a fan of Eugene Peterson, but it could be John Main, or Richard Rohr, or Ignatius of Loyola or St Francis of Assissi or Thomas Aquinas or Junlian of Norwich or whoever. Perhaps we start to think that this person we find inspiring has all the answers and that nothing else quite hits the mark. Or I might have a particular way of praying which I think is really neat. So why should you bother with anything else? Right? After all anyone who doesn’t pray how I pray, or worship as I worship is really missing out! You’d have to be foolish to not want to do things differently! It might be that I think I am the one with the correct doctrine or that I am a proper catholic or whatever. But whatever standards we set up to prove that we are the real deal, the genuineness of my spirituality will be seen in one thing and one thing alone: do I live in love and peace with my brothers and sisters?

So how do we live in unity and peace in the church? The first thing Paul does is to remind us what we already are in God’s eyes. The church is God’s garden (3.5–9), God’s building (3.10–15) and God’s temple (3.16–17). The church is God’s prized possession. He couldn’t love the church (the real church, as it is with all its messiness) more. We don’t need to engage in spiritual one-upmanship or elitism, trying to prove that we are better than the rest, because God already loves us all just as we are.  The second thing he does is to remind us that the church belongs to God, and not to us. We are given tasks to do in the life of the church: we are to sow and to water; we are to put brick on brick. But ultimately, the garden, the building and the temple belong to God. ‘Paul planted, Apollos watered, but God gave the growth’ (3.6). How do we move beyond divisions in the church? By realising that we are all working to the same end. By realising that we are co-workers and that final responsibility for growth doesn’t lie with us, but with the God we serve.

Despite our differences of emphasis, despite the different ways feel God’s presence with us, despite the external differences of practice between this church and other churches, one thing can truly be said, we are all co-workers, planters and waterers of God’s Garden, brick layers in God’s building. True spiritual maturity isn’t evidenced by our rigorous spiritual practices, or by our detailed knowledge of spiritual writers. It isn’t found in our orthodoxy, or in the correctness of our particular form of worship. True spiritual maturity is found the church living at peace, it is found in serving God and serving one another.

John 15.9–17 – On Being God's Friends

Preached at Guildford United Reformed Church, Sunday, May 20 2012

One of the greatest crimes of which popular culture is guilty is the emaciation of love. Hollywood, Mills and Boon and a thousand thousand love songs have reduced love to the merely romantic; to an obsession with emotional or erotic hungers being satiated. Given the evacuation of meaning and depth from our understanding of love, Jesus’ command to love one another as he has loved us might seem strange. We know it must be important. We may even suspect that it has something to do with self-sacrifice, but beyond that we tend to be quite clueless. Our conception of love tends to be obsessed our needs being met, love for many has indeed become what Antoin de la Salle once called egoisme a deux, a quid pro quo for the satisfying of our need to be adored.

So in a world where the very idea of love has become bland, the question this text provokes is, what precisely is the love which ought to characterise the Christian community? How does Jesus want us to love one another? 

The first thing that we notice about this love is that we have an example to follow, we are to love in the manner in which we have been loved by the Lord. God is Love, John tells us elsewhere, but by this he does not mean that God is a seething mass of inner emotional turmoil. God’s love doesn’t emotionally respond in an all too human manner to the loveliness of the beloved. God doesn’t love us because he needs to love us. God is eternally happy in himself. He is the transcendent perfection from which all creaturely love flows. God is pre-eminently love. The love with which God loves us, therefore, depends neither on a deficiency in the lover which needs to be compensated for, nor a worthiness in the beloved which compels adoration. We are loved simply because God chooses in his goodness to do so. God loves us because he wills to love us.

And so the love we are to show is to correspond, albeit in an imperfect manner, to God’s love. Our love for one another is not, in this sense primarily emotional. When we are presented with the imperative to love one another we are not being commanded to whip ourselves into an emotional frenzy. The type of love that should characterise the Christian community is not a love that depends on feeling love for the other. Jesus isn’t commanding us to get doe eyed with our neighbour. It is a decisive and active love. A love which responds to the other out of the sheer goodness of loving, out of our desire to be perfect as our heavenly Father is perfect. And so, just as our love is not to be the result of an unmet need in us, which would make it little more than a form of self love, neither is it based on the loveliness of the beloved. It may be, after all, that we are called to love many people that ordinarily we would sooner shun than welcome as brothers and sisters. But love we must, impartially and bountifully. We are to love one another as we have been loved.

The second thing we realise about love from Jesus’ words to his disciples, is that his love for them is special kind of love. Not the love of a master to a favoured slave, but the love of a friend, of an equal. To be sure, this isn’t chummy friendship, or a facebook friendship, plentiful but often meaningless. We’re to obey his commands, and that isn’t something that I generally expect of my friends, at least, not those who I expect to hang onto! But it is still a friendship of equals. It is a friendship which sees the perfect love and goodness of the one who makes us his friends, and would no sooner disobey his loving commands than desert him as a friend. After all, Jesus too obeys his Father, and we don’t believe that this makes him the  Father’s subordinate. A great spiritual writer from the twelfth century, Richard of St Victor, when writing of the love between the persons of the Holy Trinity, tells us that the love of the Trinity must be a love between equals, because true love can never exist between a superior and subordinate. There would always be fear in the relationship, which we are told perfect love casts out. But how then, could God ever truly love us, if you can only ever truly love an equal? If ever there were an equality gap, it’s that between God and his creatures. A great philosopher once told a story which might help: There was a king who fell in love with a peasant girl. He loved her so much that he longed to be her husband and yet this seemed impossible to him. If he were to marry her and take her into his palace, the likelihood would be that she would feel unworthy or out of place by his side. Or that she might feel compelled out of fear of the king to love him. That she might always be aware of the one thing the king longed to forget, that he was a king and she a mere peasant, and that consequently she would forever remain unhappy. And since the king’s greatest desire was for the happiness of his beloved he couldn’t countenance causing her such pain. To elevate her by simply bringing her to his palace would have rendered her less happy than she would have been had she remained in obscurity, loved by an equal. The situation seemed impossible to him. How could he fulfil his desire to have this woman as his wife and, in so doing, to make her truly happy? The only solution of course, was for the king to put on the cloak of the beggar and go to the maiden and to woo her as an equal, in whose love she could be content.

God does not merely clothe himself in flesh as a deceit, to fool us into understanding him as our true friend, but becomes flesh and thereby make us his equals. The philosopher states that,


“…this is the unfathomable nature of love… [that it] desires equality with the beloved, not in jest, but in earnest and truth. And it is the omnipotence of the love which is so resolved that it is able to accomplish its purpose”  (Kierkegaard, Philosophical Fragments, 25)

That is the mystery at the heart of the Christian faith. God shows his love for us both in humbling himself and in raising us. He makes creatures his equals out of love for his creatures. What might it look like to live as people who are God’s friends?

I have two thoughts with which I conclude. First, to my clergy colleagues. If true love can only be shared between equals, between friends, can we ever truly love the congregation in which we minister if we see ourselves as the superior of the congregation? Can we love people who we might regard as our subordinates whose only task is to follow us? Jesus radically subverted these religious power games. He warned of those who “love to have the place of honour at banquets and the best seats in the synagogues, and to be greeted with respect in the market-places”. “But you”, Jesus says, “you are not to be called rabbi, for you have one teacher, and you are all brothers and sisters. And call no one your father on earth, for you have one Father—the one in heaven. Nor are you to be called teachers, for you have one teacher, the Messiah” (Mat. 23. 6–10). The temptation to be the superior of a religious community is always there. But God shows his love for his people in calling them friends, not servants. Are we, then, to make servants of his friends?

The second thought is for everyone here, clergy and laity. We are, I take it, people who are concerned with ecumenism, with building bridges of love, commitment and co-operation between different congregations of the Church. But we have to ask ourselves whether we can even begin to start to love one another as God loves us if we entertain the thought that our church might be superior to the church down the road, the church of our brother or sister. As an Anglican, preaching in a United Reformed Church, I am painfully aware of the historic hurts which led, not only to our initial separation, but then to centuries of Anglican superciliousness towards their non-conformist brothers and sisters.  I can only be sorry for this history, and hope that today we can avoid the same attitudes which betray that we just haven’t understood how radical God’s love, his declaration of friendship, really is! But alas, these attitudes are not confined to history. They are very present, and if you hang around in church circles long enough you are sure to hear them. It could be an Anglican belittling the non-Episcopal ministry of a Presbyterian or Methodist minister. It could be an evangelical feeling superior to a liberal because they don’t have the ‘true gospel’. Or it could be a liberal feeling superior to an evangelical, thinking that they are just a bunch of deluded fundamentalists who have noisy worship. And that is to say nothing of Anglo-Catholics! I see my own part in this ecclesiastical snobbery: Disdainfully looking at another congregation, looking down my nose at them because they get something ‘wrong’. Again, these are God’s friends, should they not be mine too? And if my friends, then they are surely my equals, and I should respectfully learn from them. 

God the Son, who exists from all eternity, from whom all things come, for whom all things exist, who is worshipped by angels, calls us his friends. What might the church look like if we were to really start believing that!

John 20.19–31 – The Church of Locked Doors

Try to think for a moment of all the things which might attract you to a Church. Good music? Friendliness? A particular style of worship? Interesting sermons?  Well, whatever you think makes a church an attractive proposition, I doubt any of you think ‘locked doors’, ‘panic’, ‘fear’. Surely any church which had those characteristics wouldn’t last long? But it’s to exactly this kind of church that Jesus comes in this morning’s gospel reading. We find a group of disciples locked in a room, terrified, perhaps thinking that they might stand accused of stealing Jesus’ body, perhaps fearing that they might very soon, quite literally have to follow their master in taking up their cross. This didn’t look like the kind of church that was going to set the world on fire.

But it’s into the midst of this frightened group that Jesus appears. The locked doors aren’t able to keep him out. And so there he is. How would the already terrified disciples feel? Perhaps they are a bit nervous about what Jesus would say to them. They’d already deserted Jesus when he was being tried and crucified. Now, even after Mary had told them that she had seen Jesus risen from the tomb, they aren’t rejoicing, but trembling. Into this trembling crowd Jesus doesn’t breath a word of condemnation, but says ‘peace be with you’. The peace Jesus speaks about here means much more than ‘don’t be afraid, don’t stress out’. Jesus pronounces the peace and forgiveness and the restoration of all things which God’s kingdom brings. The trembling church becomes the forgiven church. It also becomes the church which has its doubts addressed – Jesus shows them his wounds. And it also becomes the commissioned and gifted church – Jesus sends the church as the Father sent him and breathes the Holy Spirit into them so that the mission of God can be fulfilled. This church had absolutely nothing going for it, except that this was a church which Jesus had broken into and had chosen to be present with.

The church of locked doors – Maybe our doors aren’t physically shut and locked, but have we shut the doors in other ways? Are there ways in which we not only try to shut out a world which we feel is terrifying and hostile, but also, perhaps, try to shut out Jesus, who we feel ashamed of having let down? The church in the twenty-first century, including our congregation, looks in many ways a lot like the church of locked doors. What on earth has a church like this got going for it? Well, everything and nothing. Nothing, because, in truth, left to ourselves, we have very little to offer, and a huge task to do. Everything, because we are not left to ourselves. Perhaps the timid, cowering church is the closest thing to being a real church as we can ever get, because when we know how little we have to offer, we know that what we do offer genuinely comes from God.

There are lots of interesting things in this story, and lots of questions to ask. The real surprise for me, which I don’t think we often pick up on because we’re so obsessed with ‘Doubting Thomas’, is that the disciples only a week after Jesus had appeared to them, given them peace and pardon, breathed the Holy Spirit over them and commissioned them to take the good news to the word, are back in a locked room! And into this locked room Jesus comes again, and pronounces peace again, and addresses the disciples’ doubts again. When the disciples’ are afraid, Jesus grace increases. Jesus keeps returning to us, he keeps giving, that’s just the kind of God he is. There is nothing that we do which can ultimately shut him out.

But even though the doors we lock ourselves behind aren’t a barrier to Jesus coming to us, he doesn’t want us to stay locked up. He doesn’t even want us to just open the doors. He wants us to leave the building: “ As the Father has sent me, so I send you.” Jesus’ gift to us, his Spirit, is primarily given so that we can share the good news of Jesus with others. It’s impossible to talk about spirituality without talking about mission. This isn’t trendy modern CofE, here are some words from William Temple, one time Archbishop of Canterbury:

         “We must not expect the gift while we ignore the purpose. A Church which ceases to be             

           missionary will not be, and cannot rightly expect to be “Spiritual”.”  

           (Temple, Readings in St John’s Gospel, 386)

To move beyond being the church of the locked doors, to be able to do any good in the world, the earliest Christians needed Jesus with them. Jesus was with them breaking down the doors they had shut themselves behind, beckoning them outside, letting them know that they were loved and forgiven and that God had big plans for them, helping them to realise that it was God’s work they were engaged in and not theirs. The same is true for every Christian in every generation.