They all have their own story:

4711 is the house number where the cologne was first made. Shalimar means “Temple of Love” in Sanskrit. Dunhill for Men was created at a time when wealthy men began to buy and drive automobiles. Blue Grass was inspired by a field of grass with flowers at Elizabeth Arden’s home, and the aroma of Beyond Paradise tries to transport the wearer to the Garden of Eden with its fruit trees.

If a lady is going out she usually dresses in fine clothes, puts on make-up and has her hair done. So she can project a certain visual image. When she wears perfume, she becomes not only a feast for the eyes but also for the nose.

Depending on the kind of perfume we wear, we convey a message, such as: ‘come closer, I want to get to know you better’, ‘I want to show you how elegant I am’, or even ‘later I want to wear only perfume and nothing else’. Perfume then becomes like a gateway into another world, and opens new dimensions. 

In Jesus time wine and fragrant oils were used for cleansing and as medicines, like in the story of the Good Samaritan. Perfumes, oils and resins were also used to embalm a body after death. This was seen as necessary to preserve it so that the person could go on into a new life after death.

We heard two stories today. At first glance they seem to have no connection with each other. Looking at them more carefully, they have several elements in common: A meal, water, for giving life to a barren place, and perfumed oil instead of water for cleansing and personal care. Another shared element is that in both instances they are an instrument for God to create a new people.

Both stories begin with a meal. The Old Testament only hints at the Passover Meal, but this is how the Exodus of the Israelites begins.

This is the time where the blood of an unblemished lamb is presented to the angel of death on the doorposts of the Hebrew houses.

This is the sign of recognition and freedom. Now the Jews can leave Egypt and begin a better and independent life in another country.

This is the time when they also start the journey into becoming God’s own people.

Jesus is at the brink of another life too, and he becomes the sign for the freedom of those who are, or will be, his disciples.

From New Testament times until today many individuals, and groups of people, suffer like the Hebrew people did.

They may be different from everyone else for obvious reasons, such as physical disability.

They may be excluded from certain life choices and opportunities because of material poverty or lack of education.

They may be different because of life experiences which have left inner scars, and which set them apart from others.

In Jesus’ time this may mean leading a lifestyle that does not fit in with being a respectable Jerusalem citizen, such as being a tax collector for the hated Romans, or earning a living as a prostitute.

Mary uses her hair to dry Jesus’ feet. Normally no decent woman will unbind her hair in public, or apply it in such an intimate way, touching the body of a man. This was totally shocking and could be looked at in different ways. She may be seen either as an immoral and socially unacceptable woman, or as having a very special relationship with Jesus.

Mary honours him by becoming his slave, but this service is the task of someone of lower rank. She cleanses and tends to Jesus’ feet in a way that goes beyond a servant’s job, and becomes an act of incredibly generous love. 

This kind of love is sacrificial in more ways than one.

Becoming someone’s servant is never easy because it is a very vulnerable position. Mary uses the very best and most expensive perfume available for embalming, and so becomes an illustration of love.

This is the love Jesus gratefully received from her, and the love that he offers by giving up his life for all people.

The passage in Isaiah speaks of wild beasts honouring God, but in the Old Testament wild animals were not particularly respected. Jackals lived on carrion and therefore were unclean, but Isaiah allows them to be part of an environment that worships the holy majesty of God.

In a similar way this woman is elevated and given a special place in this story, although she could be considered sinful by the way she is seen to behave here, according to the traditions of ancient Israel.
But Jesus accepts and even praises what Mary has done for him. She has prepared him for burial, and thus for meeting his Father in Heaven.

In both stories, like in all good tales, we find obstacles too.

In the Old Testament it is the Egyptians who try and hinder God’s plan, but God still leads his people out of this situation into a new environment.

In the New Testament story the comment of Judas tries to distract from the beautiful and humble service Mary with her ointment did for Jesus, but he is told to leave her alone.

Jesus knows that this will be the final leisurely meal they have together, so the act of being anointed, or washed, with fragrant oil is for him like a gateway. Now his mind can turn towards Jerusalem and what will happen there. Soon he will go through the agony of being flogged, mocked and crucified.

This was more than two thousand years ago. How does that help us now?

We are probably all looking for gateways out of situations which trouble us in our life. Of course we can run away from them, or we can face them.

It is very hard and takes a lot of courage to face death, sin and failure at the best of times. It would be much harder if we had to face them alone. Instead we can look to Jesus for the support we need when we need it.

Since we are God’s new people, bound together by the love of Christ who died for us, we also have the support of each other. Through the gateway of Christ’s death and resurrection we shall become a new people, again and again. Amen.

The novelist Ernest Hemingway reckoned that his greatest story consisted in its entirety of just 6 words: “For Sale. Baby shoes. Never worn.“

Thus he unknowingly issued a challenge that continues to inspire many generations later.  A 2012 author won with the oblique: No taxidermist loved his daughter more

Then there’s the intriguing: See that shadow? It’s not yours.

Or how about the social commentary: The modern fairytale: frog; snog; sprog

Alexander McCall Smith contributed: Humorous book. Critic died laughing. Sued.

I rather like the potential behind this: Megan’s baby. John’s surname. Jim’s eyes.

Actually, the opening 6 words of the Book of Genesis are pretty impressive: IN THE BEGINNING WAS THE WORD….

A good story – whether 6 words or 90,000 - draws us in, almost against our will, plants a picture deep into our mind and, unbidden, starts to add detail, to tell a wider story. Such is the power of literature. 

It’s a little over 12 months since Fr Gerard Irvine’s Memorial Service was held in this church. Gerard was Vicar for some 17 years including the 1980s restoration after the fire. 

Previously, in a brief period as Vicar of St Anne’s Soho, he’d introduced a parish magazine that would often include a new Betjeman poem or a review of new books, religious or secular. He was well-known for Sunday open-house teas with the most eclectic cross-section of people with discussion that flowed seamlessly into Evensong and when he eventually arrived at St Matthew's he continued those soirees. That probably went no small way to paving the Ministry of Hospitality for which St Matthew's continues to be, dare I say, the toast of many travel-weary across the world. 

Gerard had an extraordinary gift for curiosity and exploration and for the unexpected: Harold Macmillan’s brother Arthur for example found himself at afternoon tea with a group of Japanese topless dancers. And Prince Leopold of Loewenstein - after his wife’s funeral in this building - remarked “Never could the Christian message of Life Everlasting which Gerard Irvine chanted in clear, almost triumphant, tones as he walked ahead of the procession along the sunlit path, have rung more true.”

Those tea-soaked discussions often drew famous writers of the time exploring the interplay between great literature, storytelling and faith.  TS Eliot was a frequent participant and his words from Little Gidding are inscribed as Gerard’s testament: 

“You are here to kneel
Where prayer has been valid.”

CS Lewis; Agatha Christie; Rose Macaulay; Dorothy Sayers; John Betjeman; Iris Murdoch – all took part.  And at some point in their writings most introduced a character or an idea based around those soirees. 

And it’s the literary side of Gerard’s ministry that I want stay with on this anniversary. Gerard had noticed something significant – the importance of the dialogue between literature and faith. We continue that by having our own Writer-in-Residence, Jonathan Aitken. Jonathan’s books, ranging from the Psalms to William Wilberforce and John Newton, remind us that the great figures of the past were not only themselves motivated by their Christian faith but also have lessons to teach us about ours today. 

We still live in a society where the pre-eminent mode of communication is storytelling. Listen to the conversations going on around you on the Tube, in the coffee shop, over the dinner table. Consider that cinema attendance is at an all-time high. Television drama is thriving. And with the advent of Kindle and its progeny there’s even resurgence in the printed word. Admittedly, 50 Shades of Grey is never likely to enter history as a work of literary genius alongside the Brontes, Austen or Shakespeare. But the allure of story is surely undiminished. 

So it’s no surprise that literature is enriched (some would say – riddled) with a rich vein of the religious. From the classic stories of Trollope (male and female) and Dickens, through the popular TV comedies of All Gas & Gaiters; Dawn French’s Vicar of Dibley and the contemporary Rev, not to mention profoundly moving films such as Of Gods and Men.

Even the ubiquitous X-Factor or Britain’s Got Talent can’t attract viewers solely on an actual performance and must tell the stories of the lives behind the performances. 

So in future years we’re planning to keep alive that rich tradition of storytelling between literature and faith by an annual Gerard Irvine Literary Festival. Its shape is still a little indistinct but 2013 might well include a Westminster Mystery Play performed around the Parish; a talk and then question-and-answer session with a well-known writer and a workshop for local residents to pen stories. 

Today’s Lectionary passages read rather like a cross between Dante’s Inferno and a graphic novel! We have fire, pestilence, earthquake, famine (and that’s just the Gospel!). We have unprecedented distress and the awakening of the dead who sleep in the dust (Daniel); even the writer of Hebrews has to remind us to persevere in the face of unparalleled discouragement!  

I suppose the theme is of Hope in the face of whatever may befall us, however difficult the circumstances, however illogical faith might feel to be. And in the midst of these passages there shines a story, an image – strikingly familiar to Jesus’ listeners: that of the High Priest in the Jerusalem Temple. 

At the heart of that Temple lay The Holy of Holies, the very dwelling place of God, a place so holy that no-one other than the High Priest might enter it – and only then once a year. It was veiled off from the rest of humanity by a massive curtain. Jesus at his death tore this curtain apart and now takes our hand, each of us, and walks us directly into The Holy of Holies, the presence of God. With clean conscience & pure body. No intermediary. Simply a companion. 

But this is no longer a solitary activity; it’s a community one. We are a people in community. That community exists to help support us, to be the symbol of Jesus’ presence. And within that same community we have a ministry of encouragement to one another from which we - and they - can draw strength to overcome. 

Interestingly, in those readings we have most of the classic themes of storytelling: ordinary people on a quest during which they must face extraordinary obstacles; just when all seems lost, along comes someone whose actions encourage that ordinary person to an extraordinary effort so that the obstacle is overcome, the goal achieved and the community can celebrate together.     

So ultimately I couldn’t resist the challenge to distil the 3 passages into 6 words to take us into the coming week: Hope unswervingly. Meet together. Encourage others.

But I think I’m probably trumped by a line from today’s Post-Communion Prayer: “You give substance to our hope”…

To the One who does indeed give substance to our hope and is able to do infinitely more than we could ever imagine or desire, to Him be glory, power and dominion, now and forever. Amen.  

I am grateful to all of you for making me go to Rome to prepare for this sermon. I had to go twice and each time I happened to be presented to the Pope. How interesting that I remembered him but that he did not appear to recognise me! This was quite incidental to my having to be in Rome to visit the church of San Luigi dei francesi close to the Piazza Navona. The church houses several Caravaggio paintings.

Caravaggio could well be the kind of resident artist well-suited to St Matthew’s. He travelled widely, like Father Philip. He mixed with a very wide group of friends, just like the congregation of St Matthew’s does. I shall stop there, I think, while the going is good.   I am particularly fond of the Caravaggio painting The Call of Matthew which was my roman homework. Accompanied by Peter, Jesus bursts into the dark room of the counting house bearing a miraculous light about him and points to the seated Matthew as the sign of his call. Matthew points to himself as if to say, ‘Do you mean me?’ Matthew’s companions either do not notice Jesus’s appearing or are ambivalent to him. Matthew, the unlikely one, is chosen; and there is no time to tarry. Jesus is already poised to turn and return to the wider world. He wants Matthew to follow him out into the world right away.

Caravaggio’s style was startlingly naturalistic compared to what had gone before in popular art, and, indeed, compared to other Mannerist painting. Part of the trouble the artist courted was that he used ordinary people as his subjects. The religious establishment was deeply affronted that he used the same young courtesan as a model not only for Mary Magdalene but also for the Blessed Virgin in his Flight into Egypt. The God who calls Matthew and each of us is the God who has not only made the natural world of flesh and blood and stone and dirt, but loves it enough to have been made flesh within it and so shows us what the fullness of life is. He does the opposite of protect himself and invites us to see him in the most unlikely faces. 

The Incarnation is the proper starting point for us as we rejoice to be Catholic Christians as Anglicans. God has entered the fabric of the world in such a complete way that we do not only live seven sacraments but relish a world full of sacramental signs of grace and glory. We do not deny the pernicious reality of sin and the privation of goodness; but we celebrate more the contagious nature of the Incarnation which fuels our passion for God’s world, our engagement with the public square and our radical support for the environment, for peace and for justice for the poor. Our thorough-going sacramentality is what infuses our whole life and provides the character and force of our thanksgiving.

Most of all, we hold together our understanding of the Mass with our joy that the Church is itself a defining sacrament of the kingdom. We agree with Austin Farrar that Jesus was determined that he was not going to succumb to a kind of Protestant physical absentee-ism. On the night that he was betrayed he took bread and wine at supper with his friends and consecrated these elements to be his body and his precious blood. Although he knew that he would die and then rise to be glorified, he was clear that he would not remove his body from the world. He looked at his friends and made them his body: he made the Church to be the living sacrament through history as his body in the world. Christ is crucified, risen and glorified but not absent: the great High Priest who intercedes at the right hand of the Father not only has room on his throne for all his friends; he is also among us now in the power of the Spirit creating and re-creating us as his priestly people.

By now you might be asking yourself when is he going to say anything new? Well, I don’t have to because this is the Catholic faith into which we have been called since the apostolic age. This is what defines our Church which remains wholly catholic while celebrating the constant theme of reform and renewal. Part of the genius of that expectation of reform and renewal is an in-built suspicion of anything which Bishop Gore described as ‘the original freedom and largeness of the Christian religion’. Some of us may be told that we are not proper Catholics because we are yearning for the full inclusion of women in all three orders of the sacred ministry. We are a rainbow collection of Catholic Anglicans here tonight and because we respect the integrity of people we love who cannot rejoice over the ordination of women, we have been hesitant to deny the claim that Catholicism has one definition and only a male and Mediterranean trajectory. We live in a Church dominated by a frantic orthodoxy which finds it hard to distinguish between prophetic challenge of a society which is in desperate need of the gospel of Jesus on the one hand; and the grumpy claim to privilege and power. This is a kind of farrago of despair. If our broken history tells us anything it is that no one has been saved by cruelty. We need boldly to proclaim a generous orthodoxy which sets out to re-indigenise the gospel through grace and love. This is at the heart of the initiative named Catholic Future which Fr Philip and Fr Alan Moses have taken to foster confidence in vocation to the priesthood and in the ministry of our larger catholic parishes. Already this is attracting attention and support from around the country, including from many of us the bishops.

In 1909, Bishop Gore wrote an open letter to his clergy in Oxford. He was writing in the context of a loss of confidence in the Church of England and a loss of vigour in holding together divergent opinions. He wrote of the special vocation of the Church of England to stand clear of the constant intensification of papal autocracy on the one hand and the disintegration of mainstream Protestant creeds on the other. The Church’s purpose is to provide witness to “a Catholicism which is stable and in undoubted continuity with the whole movement of the Church in history…At the same time it allows its members and officers the greatest possible freedom to move and think and act for themselves.” In 1925, in a book entitled The Anglo-Catholic Movement Today, written in the heady days of the Anglo-Catholic congresses, he wrote: “…the chief object of anyone who loves to call himself Catholic must be to keep catholic teaching as complete and free from one-sided-ness as possible, and in this completeness to make it prevail and permeate the whole church.”

I quote Bishop Gore because it is on his shoulders and the shoulders of other luminaries of the Catholic movement that we stand. At every turn they proclaimed the catholic character of the whole church and not just a tribal element within it. Moreover, it was a life and character not determined by obedience to Rome or the Greeks, but by what he calls “the large spirit of the New Testament” and the judgement of Christ on the relative importance of things. As the Church of England, we must recover our special vocation which has become enfeebled.

I find this deeply encouraging. I believe that we share a desire joyfully to reclaim the ground for a loyal and faithful expression of the Catholic character of the whole Church which embraces the reality of women as bishops. Gore was very clear that every province of the Catholic Church has the freedom to govern its life and to contribute faithfully to the life of the whole. When we do ordain women as bishops, reception of this matter will be over for the Church of England for we shall have done what we are called to do. We do then, however, contribute to the reception of this ministry in the whole Catholic Church which may take centuries or could happen in a generation. This is a matter of witness, experience and prayer.

In Caravaggio’s painting, Jesus is poised to lead Matthew out into the world to be a witness to the transformation he wants to bring to everyone. We know from the gospel that Matthew gets over his ‘Who Me?’ moment and follows the one who says ‘Your sins are forgiven. Go in peace.’ We have to get over our self-deprecation and proclaim a generous Catholicism which relentlessly proclaims the Catholic character of the whole Church. It must be an inclusive  Catholicism which desires the highest degree of communion with other Catholic Anglicans whom we treasure and with whom we share our Catholic formation and the practice of Catholic approaches to mission and evangelism. We proclaim a theologically and spiritually rigorous Catholicism which is less defined by the delights of ceremonial than by the authentic call of the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist. This call is issued to Christians whose holy life is shaped by the experience of God’s forgiveness in the sacrament of reconciliation. The greatest Catholic privilege is to grow daily in the character of Christ as we adore him in the Blessed Sacrament and serve him in the poor and outcast, just as Bishop Frank Weston learned here as a curate and applied in his ministry as a missionary bishop.

All of this is in our grasp by the grace and power of God. At a very liminal time for Christianity when it was not clear what would follow Late Antiquity, an altar book was assembled which drew on a range of sources. It became known as the Gelasian Sacramentary and one of its collects expresses our hope.

O God of unchangeable power and eternal light,
look favourably on your whole Church,
that wonderful and sacred mystery,
and by the tranquil operation of your perpetual providence
carry out the work of our salvation:
and let the whole world feel and see
that things which were cast down are being raised up
and things which had grown old are being made new
and that all things are returning to perfection 
through him from whom they took their origin,
even Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

Ok, I’m joking. Kind of. I can sense the fear emanating from Fr Philip, I bet he’s wishing he had checked over my sermon now. But don’t worry, I’m not going to talk about church politics or why one side is better than another, but I am going to address the culture we create for ourselves as Christians, and indeed prompted by today’s readings I feel I would be leaving a conspicuous hole in my sermon if I didn’t address how we should be in the body of the Anglican Church. But it will be positive and edifying because I am taking as my theme the nicest and most generic of all Christian topics: love. Although, surprisingly it is something we get wrong all too often.
See the Christian concept of love is not just about making lots of affirming noises when someone “difficult” is talking to us, nor is it about loving our enemies, or living in wonderful unity despite our differences, though it can be all of the above.  Being loving is not always what we want it to be, and neither is it always what we expect it to be. And it seems in the history of the church it never has been what we expected it to be. In Acts it says: 
“While Peter was still speaking, the Holy Spirit fell upon all who heard the word. The circumcised believers who had come with Peter were astounded that the gift of the Holy Spirit had been poured out even on the Gentiles, for they heard them speaking in tongues and extolling God.”
In the reading from acts we see that love goes down an entirely new route that the early Christians were not expecting. The passage is part of a narrative about a Roman soldier who invites the apostle Peter to his home to eat and give the message of Jesus Christ. Now, at first this doesn’t seem to be a big deal to us, we are used to hearing stories of apostles and evangelists endlessly wandering around the middle east and Mediterranean, telling all sorts of people about God, that is what apostles do, it’s their job. However, up until this point in the story of the church, the effort had always been put into telling other Jews about Jesus, they preached in Synagogues and taught in the homes of Jews scattered around the Greco-Roman empire. 
The apostles themselves had grown up in a culture that actively separated itself from gentile culture around them. As God’s holy chosen people they had to distinguish themselves from unholy and unclean people - they had to eat different food, they had to mark their bodies through circumcision, and something that is particularly highlighted here is that they even had to avoid visiting the homes of non-Jews.  So Peter would have been shocked and confused at God’s sudden plan to go the household of a gentile, in fact a soldier of the oppressive Roman empire. And Peter does go and eat with him and talks with his household. This seems entirely the wrong thing to do. 
This is even more surprising when we think this is Peter, the original nerd of the New Testament, the goody-two-shoes who tried to impress Jesus the most, and who put in every effort to keep to the Jewish law, and tried to get everything right. And here he is, going into a home he shouldn’t, and associating with those he shouldn’t. Yet as a result of this, for the very first time, God gives his Holy Spirit to the gentiles and welcomes them into his church. 
For the law abiding and righteous Jewish-Christians this is not what they expected and it is not what they set out to do. The move to welcome gentiles could have been damaging to the apostle’s cause, it may have damaged relations with the traditionalists and it would have certainly hardened the Jewish community to Christianity further. But the point is that everything about their faith changed with Jesus, no group is off-limits to God’s love anymore, and that love is not subject to cultural trends. We see here that the most loving thing to do is not what always appears to be the “right” thing to do. 
Back in the present I think this situation still applies to us. I think as Christians we have developed a culture of fear for ourselves. Some parts of the church seem scared that we will lose the depth of our faith and respect for God and his church by making it informal, frivolous, fast food for the soul. Another side is terrified that the church will die because of its taste for indulging in liturgy and history. Then even more parts of the church talk about militant secularism, fear of being purged from public spheres and our usual places of influence in an historically Christian country. We are terrified that society will carry on and leave us behind as an irrelevant institution of the past, and that worries us not because we have a nagging doubt that we might actually be irrelevant, it worries us because we know we have something worth saying that might be lost.
But my rather annoying advice to those scared sections of the church is this; don’t worry about it. Simple as that. Don’t worry about it because of what it says in the second reading: 
“Everyone who believes that Jesus is the Christ has been born of God, and everyone who loves the parent loves the child... For the love of God is this, that we obey his commandments. And his commandments are not burdensome, for whatever is born of God conquers the world.”
See, John’s letter tells us simply if we are God’s children, then God’s love will conquer the world, love will always win. After all, we do believe that this is God’s world and he is almighty. Also in the Gospel it says: 
“No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends. You are my friends if you do what I command you.”

It simply says in terrifyingly stark terms that we don’t have to fear loss, even loss of life, if we have love. So lets stop being so defensive. Because if we are defensive, then we are actually being regressive and showing a distinct lack of faith in God. You see love is always progressive and most importantly it is transformative, love will find new ways of making itself known and it will find a way forward. 
So what if lots of churches may replace a reredos with a projector screen? So what if we don’t have bishops making decisions for the country? So what if people who have been previously excluded want to celebrate traditional societal values? Whether we believe these are negative or positive changes, if they do happen, so what? God has never called us to be in places of privilege, so why be worried if we lose it?
Anglicans especially seem to have a penchant for worrying about the future of the church. See, one of the wonderful things about Anglicanism is it aims to be the middle way, it is the church of all the people in the land whether they respect us or not, and historically whether those people are battling it out at the Catholic or Protestant ends of the scale. However I do not believe that the middle way has to always be caught between two extremes and I don’t think as Anglicans we are called to be reactionary, always jumping to keep up with the developments in each camp. And it seems right now we are worried that the world has moved on, and we’ve tried to catch up a little too late. I believe if we are acting in the love of God, and if whatever is born of God conquers the world, then we should seek the middle way as an alternative, not as a compromise, or a method of catching up. We must seek the middle way as the way that is most loving, not the way that soothes the most fears. Otherwise fear becomes the foundation of our church, not love. 
Love will conquer and it will take us forward, we just don’t always know where we might end up. The world is changing, and it has always been changing, so have faith as God takes us into the unknown. Have faith in the love of God because we need nothing else to be a church. 

And, then, as the author of Acts put it, ‘He had shown himself alive to them after his Passion by many demonstrations: for forty days he had continued to appear to them and tell them about the Kingdom of God.   When he had been at table with them, he had told them not to leave Jerusalem, but to wait there for what the Father had promised.   ‘It is’ he had said ‘what you have heard me speak about: John baptized with water but you, not many days from now, will be baptized with the Holy Spirit.’’

I imagine that after the shock and despair of Jesus’ public execution and then the shock and joy of Jesus’ resurrection, they were probably just starting to dare to hope again—to begin to wonder again just what kind of impact Jesus would have on their lives and their future.

But note that during their shared meals and other encounters with the risen Jesus, Jesus was still trying to teach them about the kingdom of God—he was still trying to expand their vision of God’s kingdom…But even then, the focus of their hope went right back to their long-standing, familiar top concerns:  ‘Well, all this talk about the kingdom of God is very interesting, Jesus, but what about those Romans?   When is God going to get rid of them?   When will you restore Israel’s freedom?   After all, it certainly couldn’t possibly be the kingdom of God as long as they’re still in it…’ 

Jesus was trying to expand their vision of the kingdom of God—to draw them out of the merely familiar or habitual or even good but safe vision of the kingdom they cherished…and they were busy shrinking it right back down to an understandable and (in their minds) desirable size.   In fact, they were far more interested in who would be pushed out of God’s kingdom than they were in allowing Jesus to stretch their hopes and expand their vision of God’s workings in the world.   Far easier to go back to the familiar hopes…the well-loved dreams…the much-rehearsed visions of what the future ought to look like… 

Now, it’s not that their hopes were (necessarily) wrong… it’s just that they weren’t big enough.   It certainly was not (and is not) wrong to hope that an oppressed people would be freed…It wasn’t wrong to hope that Israel would be liberated from Roman occupation…but…if that was as far as their hopes extended, then their hopes were simply not big enough.

‘Men of Galilee, why are you standing around looking at the sky?’

I think there is a (perhaps) a small but significant difference between the brief portrayal of the Ascension at the end of Luke and the one at the beginning of Acts.   In Luke, we read that as Jesus was blessing the disciples, he disappeared from their view, and ‘they went back to Jerusalem full of joy; and they were continually in the Temple praising God.’  In Acts, they seem a bit frozen at first:

‘Men of Galilee, why are you standing around looking at the sky?’

‘Well, because when we turn around and go back into the city, we’ll still have a lot of unanswered questions…and Jesus won’t be with us in the same way…and well, we still do hope that God will get rid of the Romans, but it seems that Jesus wants us to hope and wait for something more…something bigger…and we’re not really sure what that is…or how we’ll know…’ (they knew…)

Now back to the twenty-first century…

My other vocation is medicine, and I work part-time as a hospice physician…and I can tell you that hope is a huge issue for us and for our patients and their loved ones.   We do tend to talk quite openly with people about death, and because of this, it’s not that uncommon for other medical professionals to say things like ‘oh, you hospice people—you just take away patients’ hope!’ I don’t actually think that’s true, and most of us feel that one of our most important tasks is to help people expand what they hope for.

Not surprisingly, if you ask most dying people what they hope for, the first thing they’ll say is ‘I want to be cured,’ or, ‘I want to wake up tomorrow and have the cancer be gone.’  I don’t think it’s our job to squash those hopes—I would probably want the very same thing.   And I don’t think there’s much point in pretending we don’t want something when we really do…

However, in hospice, we certainly do try to help people expand their hope—to try and imagine/identify other things they might hope for—even if they don’t get cured:  for example, 
‘I want to be remembered’ - ‘I want my children/spouse/partner/parents to be safe and cared for’ - ‘I want to be free of pain’ - ‘I want to be forgiven’ - ‘I want to be reconciled with my son/sister/father/friend/God’.

This can be a really life-changing (or eve life-giving) experience for people.


Unfortunately, not everyone is able to do it.   One example was Mr Martinez (not his real name) - a man in his mid-70’s who had end stage lung cancer.   It was not likely that he would live more than a few weeks.   And even though the oncologist had told Mr. M that he would not be getting any more chemotherapy (because it would just make him weaker), Mr. M simply would not hear that.   Every day, as the nurses and doctors came by his room, he’d ask, ‘when will I get my next chemotherapy?   I’m going to get better.   I’m getting stronger.’  Because the only thing he wanted was to be cured, he could not and would not imagine anything else that he might hope for.   And this caused a lot of problems…

He was getting weaker.   He was no longer able to get out of bed by himself or to bathe himself, but he refused to let additional helpers come into his house.   His wife was getting exhausted.   He and his daughters had had a troubled relationship and they wanted to start to get some closure on their relationship and to say good-bye to him, but he refused to have those conversations—because he was convinced he was getting better.  

Mr. M’s inability to expand his hope caused physical and emotional exhaustion for his family and also made their grieving harder after he died.   I also think it made his life smaller.   If he had been able to hope for more—to hope for and to work for reconciliation with his daughters, or to hope that his wife would get the help and care that she needed—even while he continued to hope for his own cure—a lot of peoples’ lives would have been a lot better.   But he simply could not do it.   He hoped for one thing and one thing only.   And a lot of people suffered as a result. 

Are our hopes too small?   Is our vision of God’s kingdom too small?   Too narrow?   Do we grasp particular hopes or specific visions too tightly and then become unable to receive something much bigger?  

Again, I am not trying to say that having specific or particular hopes is somehow bad or wrong.   It’s not.   It’s normal…we can’t help it, and if we never had particular hopes or particular desires or particular passions, we would never act—we’d still be standing around in a field looking at the sky.

But God calls us to relax our grip on our particular hopes—hopes for our lives, hopes for the Church, for the world, for God’s kingdom—God calls us to relax our grip on particular hopes—to be open to the divine unexpected—just enough so that we can receive more…imagine more…envision more…love more.

The question is…do we dare?