<![CDATA[St Matthew's Westminster - Sermons]]>Fri, 18 May 2012 10:26:48 +0000Weebly<![CDATA[An Easter Sermon (Revd Dr Jackie Cameron) ]]>Wed, 18 Apr 2012 16:22:51 +0000http://www.stmw.org/2/post/2012/04/an-easter-sermon-revd-dr-jackie-cameron.html‘Men of Galilee, why are you standing around looking at the sky?’
Acts 1. 6-14

Laudabo Nomen Domini

It had certainly been a strange couple of months…actually, it had been a strange couple of years, but it had been just a few weeks since Jesus’ arrest, crucifixion, and burial, followed by the disciples’ flight to their upper room hideout and then the women’s unbelievable message:  ‘He is alive.   He is risen.   We have seen him.’  And soon the men saw him too…
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? 
]]><![CDATA[You are here to kneel where prayer where has been valid (Martin Draper)]]>Sat, 01 Oct 2011 08:00:00 +0000http://www.stmw.org/2/post/2011/10/you-are-here-to-kneel-where-prayer-where-has-been-valid-martin-draper.htmlPicture
Photograph © Toby York, 2011
Sermon for a Solemn Requiem for the Revd Prebendary Gerard Irvine (1920-2011).  Preached on Saturday 1st October 2011 at St Matthew’s Westminster

‘You are here to kneel where prayer has been valid.’ 
Little Gidding I. 45-46, by T. S. Eliot

You will not be surprised, I’m sure, if I tell you that this sermon has been for me the source of, not inconsiderable, anguish. And that anguish is still there today, in spite of the sense of pride and privilege that I feel in the knowledge that Gerard himself, albeit posthumously, has requested that I preach it.
Picture
Photograph © Toby York, 2011

Firstly, my anguish stems from the fact that I am quite certain that I have already preached Gerard’s funeral sermon: at the Solemn celebration of his sixty years of priestly ministry five years ago, with the added advantage, on that great occasion, that he was sitting in the sanctuary to hear it. What more, I think, with a metaphorical wringing of the hands, can I possibly say?

But more importantly, having read the obituaries in the national press, I have felt a certain frustration that they did not capture the Gerard Irvine I have known and loved for more than thirty years. Though I am grateful, I should say, to the writer of the one in The Times, for imparting the helpful and illuminating detail – unknown to me until I read it – that Gerard’s first language was, in fact, Urdu.

So, if the obituaries, by others who have known Gerard probably for considerably longer than I have, do not for me reflect the essence of who he was and is, there is a high probability that many of you will say the same of what I attempt this morning. 

Well enough self-indulgence and on with the task! 

What, ultimately, is this esse of Father Gerard Irvine of which I speak and from which all else flows?

We have the answer to that, I think, in the phrase ‘Gerard Irvine, priest’ which is how he will be described from now on in this church, and – I’m sure – in many others, when his name is included in the prayer for the departed every 13th January and on All Souls’ Day.

More than anyone else I have ever known, Gerard was, as we say, ‘fully a priest’. Stories of his celebrating crypto-masses from about the age of two onwards apart, priesthood seems to have come naturally to him, so that its consecration through the sacrament of holy orders must always have seemed a foregone conclusion. These days, many clergy slip out that piece of white plastic from their black shirts before they get on a bus or a train, and we carefully side-step the ‘what do you do?’ question in the company of strangers because we would rather they did not pigeon-hole us before they get to know us. Gerard showed absolutely no diffidence with regard to his priesthood. It’s not that he always wore clerical dress: he didn’t. But it really made no difference. He was – is – a priest wherever he went and whatever he said and did.

It is because he is ‘fully a priest’ – which in Gerard’s case is completely coterminous with the phrase ‘fully a human being’ – that we all know and love him. It was as a priest that his friendships and ministry stretched so far and wide. And it is his way of being so fully a priest that explains not, as some obituaries seemed to suggest, why he knew so many famous people (even, in one case, putting pictures of some of them in what was supposed to be Gerard’s obituary), but rather why so many famous people came to know Gerard and to treasure his friendship and priestly ministry.

So what was so special about Gerard Irvine, priest?

I am going to use that text, and indeed the lines which come immediately before it, from the last of T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets, as a sort of peg on which to hang what I have to say. These are the words which Rosemary has chosen for the memorial marking the place in this building where Gerard’s mortal remains have been placed.

She couldn’t have picked a more appropriate poem. Gerard loved and admired Eliot’s work and knew him from his ministry in Soho, where both were prominent in the St Anne’s Society. And ‘fire’ and ‘dust and ashes’ are such major images in the Four Quartets, that it is especially fitting that they should be quoted in a building which has itself been ‘baptized with fire’ and in which Gerard’s ashes have been interred.

But Rosemary was wise not to have included the words immediately before ‘you are here to kneel’. Firstly, because there would have been too many for his friends and family to remember and quote accurately, but secondly, because I think Gerard wouldn’t have quite approved.

Gerard ‘didn’t quite approve’ of being required in Tom Driberg’s testamentary wishes to preach, not a eulogy, but an exposition of the seven deadly sins at his funeral mass at St Mary’s, Bourne Street. So he didn’t: instead he turned each sin around – having, first given it a ‘Tom rating’ – and preached on its corresponding virtue.

Which is what I am going to do with the words immediately before my text, because thus treated, they help me, at least, to say a little about Gerard’s priestly ministry.

‘You are not here to verify,
Instruct yourself, or inform curiosity
Or carry report. You are here to kneel
Where prayer has been valid.’                                                        (Little Gidding, I. 43-46)

‘You are not here’, Eliot says – and by ‘here’, he probably means both the actual time and place of his visit to Little Gidding, and ‘here’ in an existential sense – ‘to verify’ or ‘to instruct yourself.’

Gerard couldn’t possibly have agreed with that, at least not in the wider sense. He was a thoroughly Anglican priest and knew that intellectual rigour was intended to be one the pillars of our particular tradition. 

Concern that the Catholic religion should appeal to the intellect as well as to the heart was one of the reasons why Fr Patrick McCloughlin (the Vicar of St Thomas', Regent Street – another church ‘burned with fire’) and Fr Gilbert Shaw (the Vicar of St Anne’s, Soho) founded the St Anne’s Society, and it was in this world that Gerard began his London ministry. Its members included Eliot, Charles Williams, C. S. Lewis, Agatha Christie and Rose Macaulay as well as Dorothy Sayers who was Churchwarden of St Thomas’s. John Betjeman, Iris Murdoch, David Cecil and others all contributed at one time or another and Gerard Irvine, priest, became lifelong friends with them all. 

Indeed, according to the scholar Barbara Reynolds, Fr Chantry-Pigg in Macauley’s The Towers of Trebizond is a combination of those three Soho clergy, for such a character must, surely, be bigger than any one priest? In Take away the camel and all is revealed, she quotes an animated theological discussion in Gerard’s rooms, at which Dorothy Sayers and Gerard’s brother James were also present, in support of her claim that Aunt Dot was, in fact Sayers herself.

All this Gerard took with him throughout his later ministry. It didn’t matter whether the setting was a post-war housing estate near London airport in the nineteen-fifties or the Bohemian café culture of Earl’s Court in the sixties or the social mix of this parish in the seventies and eighties or Brighton in his retirement. Those Cranford teenagers found themselves listening to Iris Murdoch and being taken to the theatre in the West End: Irma La Douce was their first outing, followed by the then completely novel experience for them of a meal in a restaurant.  And Gerard was still bringing groups of teenagers up to London from St Michael’s, Brighton forty years later. 

The magazine at St Cuthbert’s, Philbeach Gardens was more like a literary and social review than a parish magazine. It could – and did – contain a new poem by John Betjeman or Stevie Smith and there were positive, balanced reviews by Gerard himself of John Robinson’s Honest to God, the same author’s The New Reformation and Harvey Cox’s The Secular City. Entire issues were devoted to T. S. Eliot (to mark his death), Earl’s Court artists and the drug L.S.D. It all sounds more like St James’s, Piccadilly twenty years later, except that, where Gerard was Vicar, people also queued to make their confessions, and the discussion of social and theological issues at open house Sunday tea concluded with Solemn Evensong and Benediction.

We are here to instruct ourselves and to verify, if we are to take seriously our intellectual capacities, and Gerard knew more than anyone that that means facing up to our doubts and also to the sometimes incoherent, if not downright absurd, elements of our faith. Sitting next to him at an induction in a neighbouring parish, I remember his rendering of the hymn Sweet Sacrament Divine. ‘There in thine ear all trustfully, we tell our tale of misery’ he sang heartily, and then found time to squeeze in the remark, ‘this is ridiculous, the Blessed Sacrament hasn’t got an ear!’ before continuing, nevertheless, to bellow out the rest of the hymn.

‘You are not here to inform curiosity or carry report’.  

Picture
Photograph © Toby York, 2011
Gerard took infinite delight in both. And the curiouser, as Alice would say, the better. Actually, I can tell you that he didn’t much care for Little Gidding, at least not in its nineteen-eighties reincarnation. We went there on pilgrimage once and it all seemed rather humourless and austere. But then we continued to Olney where John Newton and the inspired, but completely mad, poet William Cowper wrote their eighteenth century hymns. That was much more to our liking: ‘Can a woman’s tender care, cease towards the child she bare?’ we sang, and Gerard loved it. 

Gerard loved ‘curiosity’ for itself alone. Once, when we were talking about those problematic questions we’d jolly well like answered if we got to heaven, he came up with ‘Who was the man in the iron mask?’  He had a special penchant for the dotty and the weird, precisely because he didn’t take himself too seriously. 

And he loved to share it all with others. Though I don’t remember him at all as someone who ‘dropped names’, if he did ‘carry report’ or mention people he knew, it was usually because there was a funny story attached and he wanted to tell it.  And it was just as likely to be about a member of the Upper House who was a couple of jewels short of a coronet than about a well-known artist or literary or political figure.

I have, perhaps, been unfair on Eliot, given the words that follow and which are the ones on Gerard’s memorial. Eliot was certainly not the sort of Christian who had no doubts, or who thought wrestling with the intellectual integrity of the Catholic faith did not matter. So, when he says, ‘you are here to kneel where prayer has been valid’ he is really talking in the sense of ‘when all is said and done.’ And in this he is surely right, just as it is equally right that these words should form Gerard’s memorial in this church: for they perfectly illustrate his ministry here.

Gerard spent more than forty percent of his full-time work as a priest as Vicar of this parish, and the rebuilding of the church after the fire crowned his ministry. When he arrived here, he will have recognised it as a place where, indeed, prayer has been valid. Prayer permeates the walls of St Matthew’s, just like the incense which hangs about in it after services. And Gerard was faithful to that tradition, while also gently opening the eyes and hearts of the congregation to contemporary liturgical renewal.

He was faithful indeed, ‘repeating’ those ‘acts of faith and love’ Charles Wesley talks about in the hymn we have just sung. Listen to these words from Father Richard Buckingham’s address at Gerard’s Funeral Mass:

‘I remember once, going through a common curate’s moan about what I believed and how much, and what about doubts and the rest. Gerard, with a simplicity distilled from years in the confessional and at the altar, said “Just remember, the true mark of faith is simple faithfulness.”’

And that is the Gerard most of us here remember with infinite gratitude. Wherever he was a priest when he first crossed your path – whether it was outside the sometimes rarefied word of London religion in Knowle or the Potteries, or in and around any of the places I have already mentioned – he will have remained faithful to you as a priest and a friend. He will have enriched your life because he was so life-affirming in the broadest sense; he will have assured you of God’s unfailing faithfulness to you; and he will have encouraged you, in your halting faith, to remain faithful to Him in your own particular way. 

But, of course, in his own faithfulness to God here, to that great treasury of offered prayer he added his own. I don’t know how many masses he said or sang (sort of) here, or how many Offices, including those of the Roman Breviary which he said in addition to Matins and Evensong, he recited upstairs in the Comper Chapel, but over more than seventeen years it must have been many thousands.  I’m not saying he spent hours at it: Sunday Matins at 9.30am – which Gerard insisted on as a statutory public service – was always well over by a quarter to ten, even using the Prayer Book psalms for the day, because he always got in the whole of his verse of the psalm or canticle while you were taking a breath at the end of yours, with the result that God was incessantly bombarded with a garbled duet by Cranmer and Coverdale.

But prayer, as Eliot says, is ‘more than an order of words’ and Gerard understood that the Holy Spirit transforms all our efforts, however feeble, into powerful intercession ‘in sighs too deep for words.’ (cf Romans 8. 26). Likewise, countless holy places throughout the world can be ‘Little Gidding.’ More particularly, this building can be ‘the still point of the turning world’ if we will let it.  For, as he, for many years, knelt faithfully here where others had prayed before him, we too can now kneel where his prayer has been valid.

© Martin Draper, 2011
]]><![CDATA[Who do you say that I am? (Andrew Crawford)]]>Sat, 20 Aug 2011 08:00:00 +0000http://www.stmw.org/2/post/2011/08/who-do-you-say-that-i-am.htmlSermon for the 20th of August, 2011, 9th Sunday after Trinity.  
Readings: Isaiah 51. 1-6, Romans 12.1-8, Matthew 16.13-20.

Who do you say that I am? Now you don’t have to answer that question, in fact I’m a bit fearful of what you might say. When I started thinking about this sermon a couple of weeks ago, that question rolled round in my mind time and again. As we’ve just heard, Jesus asked this to his disciples-“Who do you say that I am?” It seems a bit of an odd question to ask to friends, people you’ve spent any length of time with, as Jesus did to his disciples. 

When I was on the top deck of the bus last week, again thinking about this gospel passage, I was thinking to myself that I could do with some inspiration to get this sermon off the starting blocks and at least a paragraph written.  Unfortunately inspiration doesn’t come in little packets available to buy.  It’s all good and well that Isaac Newton got his inspiration for gravity from watching apples fall, and James Watt was inspired to build a steam engine by watching his grandmother’s kettle, but nothing was working for me. 

Fortunately, a couple got on the bus and sat in the seat behind, and I was able to over-hear bits of their conversation.  Nothing riveting or earth-shattering, but she turned to him and said about something “why don’t you ask?” And I thought, that’s what I’ll do.  I decided to ask a selection of friends that question that Jesus asked, and sent 4 text messages from my phone that simply said “Who do you say that I am?” I sent it to four friends, two male and two female just to keep things equal, four people whom I have known for fourteen years or more. Four people I was at primary or secondary school with, and even college with two of them.  One scientist, one history masters student, one council administrator, and a farmer.  And now I’m certain that at least three of them think that I’ve fallen out of my tree completely.  Only the farmer friend replied with an answer without questioning my question, and told me “you are you, you always have been and you always will be.”  A fairly simple assessment, but right nonetheless, I am me. The scientist didn’t understand the question and didn’t provide any further answer, but that is getting into the realms of another debate.  If you have any curiosity about the other replies, we can talk afterwards, but I’m sure that you can imagine the dialogues that took place.  It made one thing certain, that it is a difficult question to answer when you are faced with it.  Who do you say that I am?

This is just one little bit of a controversial part of the gospel.  In one bible commentary that I was reading, it said that “This passage is one of the storm-centres of New Testament interpretation.” And I am inclined to believe it. After Jesus asks the question, who do you say that I am, Peter gives him the answer, “you are the messiah, the son of the living God.”  We can only imagine that Peter was like my farmer friend, and gave a reply without questioning or not understanding the question, despite the difficulties of it.  There are so many things that Peter could have said, some of which might have been very similar to the replies I got.  A crack-pot, a lunatic, liar, a carpenter, a really nice fellow that wanders about teaching people.  But no, Peter went straight in for “the Messiah, the son of the living God.” Peter is the first person to realise who Jesus actually is. The son of God. 

Then comes the controversial part.  Jesus knows the importance of what Peter has been the first person on earth to realise.  And from this one man, he knows what will grow.  Jesus appears to tell Peter that on this rock he will build his Church and give him the keys of heaven.  It is from this statement that the Roman Catholic Church has the foundation of the position and authority of the Pope and of the Church.  It is, I’m sure, the source of much debate, and one I don’t wish to be drawn too deeply into.  The whole topic is open to debate, scrutiny and interpretation.  

One of the set forms of prayer we use in morning or evening prayer goes something like “we thank you God for giving us powers of imagination and thought to search into your law and your word.” For that I am thankful. Today’s letter to the Romans, tells us not to be conformed to this world, but to be transformed by renewing our minds so that we may discern the will of God, possibly discern the word of God.  That means we all can look at the words of Jesus and discover our interpretation.  Over the last couple of weeks, I’ve discovered many different interpretations in what I’ve been reading, and it seems to do with word meanings, and even in some cases, the placement of a comma.  One interpretation, the book I was reading said simply “Augustine took it to mean the rock was Jesus himself.” As in, You are Peter, comma, and on this rock, me, I shall build my Church. I assumed the Augustine in question was our own Saint Augustine, but I haven’t been able to clarify that.

Another way to think of the rock is Peter’s faith.  He is the first person on earth to realise and say that Jesus is the son of God.  Peter is the first of many to have that faith, and on that rock that is faith, Jesus would build his Church.  These are all good ways to think of it, but there are yet more! The interpretation I liked the best I found when I was reading my copy of The Daily Study Bible by William Barclay.   The interpretation I found there is the idea that Peter himself is not the rock on which the Church is founded.  That rock is God. Peter is the first stone of the whole Church.  He is the first person, as I’ve said, to discover who Jesus was and see in him the Son of the living God.  Peter was the first member of the Church, and as the first member, the whole church is built on him.  This links back to our reading in Isaiah, “look to the rock from which you were hewn, look to Abraham your father and Sarah who bore you.”  In Jewish thought, the Rabbis applied the term rock to Abraham.  Abraham was the rock that the nation and the purpose of God was built on. Now we’ve moved to the rock on which the Church is built. 

Having never studied any formal theology myself, I’m sure with my own reading this last couple of weeks, I’ve only scratched the surface of what is available and that there are many more ways to interpret today’s message. I began to feel as though I’ve read so much around this, I was starting to become like Winnie the Pooh, “ a bear of little brain and big words bother me.”  But one thing seems clear.  When Jesus asks “Who do you say that I am?” he is not just asking the disciples.  That question is asked of us as well.  Who do we say that Jesus is? Who do I say that he is?!  I can only tell you here today who I think Jesus is to me. What I am to him remains to be seen.  Jesus to me, is someone of whom I have always been aware.  Aware of, but not always connected with.  As a child, I was aware of this Jesus man through lessons and prayers at school, assemblies and hymn practice.  And that was about it.  One childhood conversation I had with my grandmother, I asked her “Why do we call it good Friday?” I was about nine I think, and she was the godliest woman I could think of to ask.  “Because it is the day they crucified our Lord,” was her answer.  “But why is that good,” I continued.  “Because of the good that came from that day to the world,” was her reply, and I was satisfied with that.  

A few years later, which is in fact a few years ago, I came across this Jesus man again.  In a room on my own at the end of a ward in Hartlepool hospital, in the dark hours of the night, I met Jesus God.  I asked, and he came to me.  And like Peter, over time I realised who he was and of what he was capable.  And I was given faith.  The thing is, I am not a huge great starting block like Peter.  We are all rocks that are hewn with faith, to fit together in the edifice of Christ’s Church.  Peter was the first one, and we are some of the many that have come along since, and will come along after us to slot together a build Christ’s church.  We are reminded in today’s reading from Romans, that as in one body we have many members, and not all the members have the same function.  To stay with the idea of building and rock, we have our parts to play, and to use the idea of a church building, once our rock has been hewn, some of us may be part of the wall, or the floor, or a lintel, beam or pillar, but we take our place in Christ’s Church.  

The difference now is, I come to this Church building with you, to meet with Jesus.  Instead of waiting for him to come to me in a hospital room, I hope to meet him today at this altar with this Church, this gathering of people as a spiritual body, to meet with Jesus in broken bread and wine outpoured, to hopefully be nourished, strengthened and inspired by him, so that we may go out from here, and meet with others who might hear the word, and in turn be another rock of faith in the edifice of Christ’s Church.  
]]><![CDATA[The Trinity is more than a theological concept (Andreas Wenzel)]]>Mon, 20 Jun 2011 16:48:04 +0000http://www.stmw.org/2/post/2011/06/the-trinity-is-more-than-a-theological-concept-andreas-wenzel.htmlTonight I will send a postcard to my university teacher in Systematic Theology at Halle University in Germany.  I might choose a postcard showing Rublev’s so called icon of the Trinity, just because I was advised by a priest not to mention this all too famous icon this morning because everyone mentions it on Trinity Sunday.  I will write this postcard because I remember him telling us, send me a postcard whenever you really preach a sermon on the Trinity, and today I am doing just that.  For my professor the Trinity was just a hybrid concept, a theological construct.  He couldn’t see how the doctrine of the Trinity could connect with any experience of the Christian faith.

And my professor is in good company.  Pope Alexander II in the 11th century refused a petition for a special feast for the Trinity on the grounds that such a feast was not necessary in the Church, which daily honoured the Holy Trinity anyway in its liturgy.  It was not till 1334 that what we celebrate today, Trinity Sunday, became an official celebration in the Church. 

And there is another reason why the Trinity doesn’t seem to fit with our Christian experience.  Trinity Sunday is no commemoration of any event in Christ’s life like the Nativity, the Passion or the Resurrection.  This is the only feast in the Christian year celebrating a doctrine.

The Trinity is a theological concept, that is right.  But it is not outside of experience.  In fact, it is all about experience.  I therefore invite you to follow me in going through the readings we heard this morning.  What do they have in common?  Are there connections between the readings which might help us to understand what we mean when we say we believe in the Holy Trinity, as we shortly shall in the Creed?

The first scene: The reading from the prophet Isaiah leads us to a significant turning point in the history of Israel.  A whole era comes to an end with this reading.  Israel was in exile, in Babylon.  The exile was the ultimate catastrophe for Israel, a people whose God lived in the temple in Jerusalem, whose holy house was destroyed and profaned by heathens.  They said: “By the rivers of Babylon – there we sat down and there we wept when we remembered Zion.  On the willows there we hung up our harps. (...) How could we sing the Lord’s song in a foreign land?” (Ps 137.1-2;4)  And that was the point: How could they sing to the Lord in a foreign land?  Their whole religion, the whole system of institutionalized worship had fallen to bits.  Just imagine what it would be like for us: Westminster Abbey in ruins, no Archbishop of Canterbury, no priests, no Eucharist. – 

For the people of Israel it felt like it was all over.  But actually, it wasn’t the end.  It was the prophet Isaiah who realized that God manifests himself in history, in everything that happens on the earth, in every place, in every time.  God was not to be found only in Jerusalem.  And so the people of Israel were not lost at all.  What looked like the end, was actually a new beginning.  And so Isaiah could sing out with joy: Comfort, O comfort my people, says your God.” (Isaiah 40.1).  He understood that God was not only the God of Israel, but the God who rules the whole earth, who can reveal his mighty acts however he chooses.  This is the birth of monotheism in the history of religion.  God was God over all the earth and over every nation and people. 

This idea was so powerful and overwhelming that Isaiah couldn’t but praise God for his infinite power and wisdom.  And so he asks these rhetorical questions in the reading: “Who has measured the waters in the hollow of his hand and marked off the heavens with a span, enclosed the dust of the earth in a measure, and weighed the mountains in scales and the hills in a balance?  Who has directed the spirit of the Lord, or as his counsellor has instructed him?  Whom did he consult for his enlightenment, and who taught him the path of justice?” (Isaiah 40.12-14a). 

Isaiah saw that no one could advise this almighty God, who was everywhere.  No one and no thing is like God who created the universe and in comparison with whom every nation and every continent are just a drop from a bucket, like dust on the scales. “Have you not known?  Have you not heard?  The Lord is the everlasting God, the Creator of the ends of the earth.  He does not faint or grow weary; his understanding is unsearchable.” (Isaiah 40.28).

Isaiah himself plays with this idea of God communicating in himself, with himself.  And this connects so well with our understanding of the Trinity, where we see that this almighty God, who is everywhere, is a God in relationship – he himself was the Counsellor who directed his Spirit when he created all things through his everlasting Word.

The second scene is just as exciting as the first one.  Our gospel reading today comes  from the very end of St Matthew’s gospel.  And just like the first reading from Isaiah, this one from St Matthew marks a great turning point in the history of Israel.  We come to the end of Jesus’s ministry on earth.  After all that his disciples have been through together with him, they now have to realize that Jesus is actually going away.  He is leaving them, even though he has only just conquered death through the Resurrection.

I imagine that the disciples must have felt desolate.  The one they had followed so enthusiastically, the one they loved so much, would no longer be with them.  All their hope had gone.  How could they possibly keep faith in a God who acts like this.  It’s just like it was for the Israelites in exile: For the disciples, this feels like it’s the end.  But … it wasn’t. 

What happens here is something utterly remarkable.  The risen Jesus gathers his disciples for the last time on a mountain and teaches them something completely unexpected, something completely new: You don’t need my physical presence on earth to follow me.   - go, and make disciples of all nations.  His invitation to live in communion with God, in his spirit of love, lives on.  His invitation to discipleship, lives on.  And with all the authority of heaven and earth, of the creator God, Jesus says to them: go and baptize the nations in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.  And remember that I am with you always, even to the end of time.  Even though you don’t see me, I am with you.

And saying that, Jesus reveals that he is part of this everlasting God who also revealed himself to Isaiah.  The Church later expressed this experience in the idea of the Holy Trinity – God as Father, Son and Holy Spirit.
At this point Paul’s second letter to the Corinthians that we heard read becomes interesting.  Just before he ends his letter he writes: “Test yourselves. Do you not realize that Jesus Christ is in you?” (2 Corinthians 13.5).  Jesus is in his disciples, in all who were baptized in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.  We are the body of Christ, all together.  And so the Trinity is embodied in the people of God. The presence of Christ does not depend on his physical presence.

Therefore the Trinity is very much about experience!  Wherever we come together and live community, where we relate to one another we are to make room for God’s Spirit. And that happens as we learned in the readings when we let our own convictions go, as hurtful as it may be.  We must not remain stuck to ourselves but see God and Christ embodied in those we meet to live in the Spirit of God.

And now we can perhaps see how our readings today connect:  The God Isaiah experienced as not bound to any place or time is the same God who reveals himself in Jesus Christ, whose presence is not bound to a particular body at a particular time.  And to understand that, to worship God in the Spirit and in truth, we have to let go of our own expectations.  Isaiah only understood this unlimited and eternal Spirit of God because of the end of the cult in Jerusalem.  And Matthew understood the presence of this unlimited and eternal Spirit only because of the end of the physical presence of Jesus.  Both Matthew and Isaiah help us to understand we have to let go to make room for the Spirit. And in the end we have to let ourselves go to be part of the kingdom. 

And then we can prepare to be Christlike to one another – to our friends, family, colleagues – to those who irritate us and those we can’t understand.  Then we can be ready to meet Him at any time and in any place.  It is then that the Incarnate Word is again realised in our midst, and we can create room for the Spirit that sets our hearts on fire for the God who comes.  

And so let us say together the Grace: The Grace of our Lord Jesus Christ and the love of God and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with us all evermore. Amen.
]]><![CDATA[Epiphany 3 | Of Gods and Men (Fr Peter Hyson)]]>Sun, 23 Jan 2011 08:00:00 +0000http://www.stmw.org/2/post/2011/01/of-gods-and-men-fr-peter-hyson.html  Isaiah 9: 1-4         1 Cor 1: 10-18     Matt 4: 120-23   

To the surprise of many, a religious film (or rather, a film with a clear religious topic) won one of the top awards at the 2010 Cannes Film Festival. It was a surprise because the common wisdom is that religion not only doesn’t get an audience (the primary function of film-making) but worse, it stands a high chance of courting the kind of controversy that kills rather than builds attendance. Set that film in the limited confines of a monastery populated with 7 celibate and mainly elderly men and little opportunity for car chases, love interest or condemnatory behaviour – I’d love to have seen the faces when the producers first tried to pitch that one! Nevertheless – it got made. And the result is the beautifully-filmed and emotionally-charged “Of Gods And Men”.

Based on true events, it tells the story of 7 austere French Cistercian monks serving a small village in the Atlas Mountains of Algeria. Their vows of strict poverty and service have won the sometimes-grudging respect of their Muslim hosts. Their ability to identify with their lives and beliefs – and even to quote the Koran when threatened by a band of Muslim extremists on Christmas Eve – enables their survival. But it is survival in a time of mounting tension and growing hostility, caught between the Algerian Government only too well aware of French repression and the forces of militant Islam determined to win compliance. That these events took place only 15 years ago only heightens the shock.

Early on in the film, their leader tells them they will soon need to choose between fleeing to safety and staying - with the probability of death. The bulk of the film then follows each man’s personal struggle with faith, conscience, duty and service as the harsh shadow of potential martyrdom looms ever darker over them.

And it begins to climax in an extraordinary scene reminiscent of the Last Supper as the monks share a meal of bread and wine to the soundtrack of Swan Lake, the camera panning the table and zooming in as each monk struggles with his different dilemmas and uncertainties and then registers as each reaches his decision, resolved where his commitment lies.


The theme may be dark. But the film is not. It follows the monks in a comforting landscape going about their rituals of prayer and singing, running medical clinics virtually bereft of medicines. Its theme concerns the point at which we’re called to face up to the implications of our commitment. It’s often moments of crisis that precipitate that call, that challenge. (For Jesus, in today’s readings, it was the arrest of John the Baptist.)

Without those challenges, our commitment may become pale, insipid, lifeless, the garden that has not endured the frost of winter in order to bring forth the strong new growth of spring. 

Of course, few of us will be called to face the extraordinary challenges of those French monks. But their stories - and our Bible readings for today - do give us some insights for our own commitment.

Isaiah, for example, talks about there being no more gloom for the people who walk in darkness – they’ve seen a ‘great light’. The monks in the film are certainly no longer gloomy after that final sharing of bread and wine. They shine with an inner light – not of joy or celebration – but of quiet certainty that they have committed to what they’re called to be and do. It’s that commitment to God that reveals the great light to them. And it’s the light that enables them to make that commitment.

It’s not that this great light transforms their outward circumstances or takes away their present or future tribulation. The film is quite clear: this illumination touches each one differently, in their different struggles. Each must make their own decision about what commitment means to each one of them. And it will be different. The commonality, the communion, comes by each allowing the others to make their own decision and then respecting that decision and living alongside it. 

Which is all very well in a film – even one based on a true events. But is there a wider message?

Well of course I’m going to say’ yes’: why else would I describe it at length in what is, after all, a sermon and not a film review! And to do so, let’s return briefly to today’s Readings. What these monks were learning to do is to live together, really live together, by allowing each the freedom to make their own decision and then respecting it, even if it’s not one that they personally would have made or even agreed with. This is not something that can be decided by a majority vote (or even a coalition). If only it were that easy!

No, each monk has to wrestle with his own conscience, his own belief, his own understanding of the gospel and the call of Christ. But also his own fears, his own insecurities, his own prejudices.

This isn’t about each one forcing himself into a mould, THE image of Christ. Being in the image of Christ isn’t like forcing ourselves into an ill-fitting dress or suit or hammering our personality into a set form of behaviours and attitudes. It’s about recognising and accepting the WHOLE of who we are so that the Light of Christ shines within the totality of who we are. “The people walking in darkness have seen a great light…”

Only when each has done this individually can they examine this corporately. For commitment is intrinsically and irrevocably personal. It’s much easier to hide behind the will of the majority, to pass responsibility on to someone or everyone else. But ultimately that just won’t do. It is MY commitment, personally won, cherished, nurtured, guarded and acted out.

So the monks illustrate what St Paul was talking about in his First Letter to the Corinthian Christians and his criticism of their party spirit: I follow Paul; I follow Cephas; I follow Peter Akinola; I follow the Pope… This was not the testing of personal ideas in the cauldron of collegiality, it was the ducking of personal responsibility behind the coat tails of a false collectivity.

So what does this mean for us, for me, in the cold darkness of a winter’s Monday morning in London? How does my commitment to my calling illuminate that? How does it illuminate my relationship with God; my family; my church; my work?

St Matthew’s can provide the safe space, the encouragement, the sanctuary and the crucible.  We have services, home groups, study groups, pilgrimages, Lent courses, coffee mornings… And that does require commitment to maintain.

But ultimately, we can only answer that for ourselves. Like the monks, we may test and explore that in collegiality and community, but ultimately it’s a personal journey, a personal commitment to letting the Light of Christ illuminate each part of my life so that it guides me in my commitment. Whatever that might be. Wherever it might lead. Whatever the cost.

It’s a truly daunting prospect.


Immediately after our sharing of the Bread and Wine today we’ll hear these words:

Jesus Christ is the Light of the World. May your people - illumined by word and sacraments - shine with the radiance of his glory, that he may be known, worshipped and obeyed to the ends of the earth; AMEN


]]><![CDATA[Trinity 21 | We are frail imperfect people (Fr Nick Adams)]]>Sun, 24 Oct 2010 08:00:00 +0000http://www.stmw.org/2/post/2010/10/we-are-frail-imperfect-people.htmlLuke 18. 9-14

Well, it’s very good to be with you this morning – and I’d like to thank Fr. Philip and Fr. Peter for inviting me.

For those of you who don’t know, I was here at St. Matthew’s between October 2004 until August 2005, working as a pastoral assistant – and like so many pa’s, before or since, spending a year here was a way of taking those few vital steps along that road to full time ministry.

So here I am, 6 years later suited and booted – a Priest in the Church of England.

And of course, I got married here in 2007 to my darling wife, Helen, who also was very much part and parcel of the St. Matthew’s community.

So it’s great to be here and my heart is full of gratitude for the many wonderful things this place has given me.

However, I hate to break the news, St. Matthew’s, particularly for a pastoral assistant, isn’t wonderful all the time.
In fact a refrain that still rings in my ears to this day and puts me into a cold sweat even now is the phrase:
“That’ll be a job for a pastoral assistant.”

The word ‘job’ is an interesting word in this context for it usually denotes an unpleasant chore or task that nobody else wants to do.

Somebody in the school, for example, reports that a child has been sick all over the classroom floor - can somebody come and clear it up?

That’ll be a job for a pastoral assistant!

A certain dog, “Benji”, God rest his canine soul, used to leave little parcels overnight on the house carpets –oh my goodness, who is going to clear that up?

That’ll be a job for a pastoral assistant!

It’s 1am on a Saturday morning and one of the houseguests has forgotten the code to the door. Who’s going to roll out of bed and let them in?

That’ll be a job for pastoral assistant!

You get the picture.
But, I suppose, one way of spiritualising these rather unpleasant tasks is to say they are small exercises in humility.

Being humble and developing that servant heart is at the centre of the pastoral assistant’s ministry, indeed at the centre of all ministry.

So, I guess I have Fr. Philip and St. Matthews to thank for giving me so many (so, so many) opportunities to learn this vital discipline for priestly ministry!

Therefore it is my pleasure to preach on the following text this morning. These are from the lips of Jesus (Luke Chapter 18.14)

“I tell you this man went down to his home justified rather than the other, for all who exalt themselves will be humbled, but all who humble themselves will be exalted.”

Shall I go home now?

But joking aside – Jesus tells us a parable and asks us to consider who stands as righteous before The Lord.
Two men go to the temple to offer their prayers.
One is a Pharisee, the other a tax collector.

Now, if we have been Christians for some time we have been taught, possibly conditioned into responding in a certain way. 

Who is the bad guy in this parable?

Automatically we point the finger at the Pharisee, it’s so obvious isn’t it?
We loathe his self- righteousness and his arrogance.
He’s so pompous and puffed up, we right him off in an instant.
He has become the pantomime villain, the crowd love to boo and hiss at.

The tax collector, on the other hand, is the hero, the humble repentant sinner. Contrite and beaten down by his own feelings of unworthiness, we feel sympathy for him.
He’s the underdog.  And we do like an underdog.
Cue a huge cheer and round of applause.

Although this is essentially the right way to view this parable we need to be aware of two things:

The first is that our response to this parable is in the opposite way it was intended. – For all intents and purposes it was the Pharisee that was the good guy not the tax collector – and it is this assumption that Jesus wants to expose in the mind of his hearers.

The text tells us that Jesus told this parable “to some who trusted in themselves that they were righteous and regarded others with contempt.”

The other thing is that we need to be careful that we don’t condemn the Pharisee out of hand for we would be as guilty as he is as we share in his refrain of “Oh, I am glad I am not like him”

I suspect that each of us sway between the two types in this parable –

Between our quest for virtue and approval as seen in The Pharisee and then the truth telling that needs to happen when we inevitably fail as seen in the Tax Collector.

The fact of the matter is we need compassion and understanding for both of these characters, for own sake.

In the eyes of many the Pharisee is a “righteous” man. It is just that he is so driven by zeal that he has lost touch with his fellow man and ultimately lost touched with God.

He stands by himself praying in a self-congratulatory way, urging God it seems, to pat him on the back.
“I fast twice a week; I give a tenth of my income,” he proudly declares.

And to give him his dues, that is more than the law required.
Jews are required to fast for one day a year – on the ‘day of atonement’ – but this guy does it twice a week.

He gives a tenth of all of his income when he is only required to give a tenth from part of his income.

So this man’s not only righteous, his super-righteous and so he stands by himself in a league all of his own.
Is it any wonder that he operates at a distance from the tax collector, and from anyone else for that matter?

So he proud boast is: “God I thank you that I am not like other people…”
(other people – being sinners)

And that point you could cheerfully throttle this man.
His in- your-face self-superiority gets our hackles up.
But if we look past the arrogance we have to give the Pharisee some credit.
He is quite rare - a dedicated committed man who has worked hard to get to where he is, and quite frankly, we could with more people like him.

Pharisees make good stewards and deacons.
They often do the hard work and contribute more than their fair share.
But most important of all, Pharisees were devoted to God and righteousness.
Their faults arose from over-striving for holiness.
However, their zeal was often misguided - but at least they had zeal in their desire to please God.
They could never be accused of being lazy or apathetic.

If we are honest, each and everyone one of us look for approval, usually from authority figures: Parents, teachers, our boss at work, perhaps even our local vicar.
And handled correctly there is nothing wrong with that – it is all part and parcel of being human.

But when it becomes competitive, when all our striving is about been seen to do the good thing, when we promote ourselves and demote others we begin to lose contact with some very vital.

It is as if we lose our humanity and sacrifice our very souls on the altar of this striving to be perfect, trying to be better than anyone else. And its through this process that we are in danger of becoming an inauthentic version of ourselves.

The tax collector might well be considered as “scum” the kind of guy who would sell his own daughter into slavery – who quite rightly is held in contempt to those around.

But what he offers to God in his prayers is that vital piece of the jigsaw, that authenticity that leads him to be justified rather than the Pharisee.

In the tax collector we see a man stripped of all self -deception who is able to speak the truth about himself and recognises the need for mercy from his God.

So in light of this, what does God require of us?

Well, to put it simply, the courage to be ourselves and to be honest.
To reveal who were are, warts and all, knowing that we fall into the arms of an all-loving and all merciful God.

Like the Pharisee it is good to strive to be better, to roll your sleeves up and aim for excellence in all that one does – but in the process we must not lose contact with the essential truth of our existence – that we are frail, imperfect people constantly in need of God’s mercy and forgiveness.

“I tell you, this man went down to his home justified rather than the other; for all exalt themselves will be humbled, and all humble themselves will be exalted.”
]]><![CDATA[Patronal Festival 2010, Andrew Nunn]]>Tue, 21 Sep 2010 08:00:00 +0000http://www.stmw.org/2/post/2010/09/patronal-festival-2010-andrew-nunn.htmlYou can tell a lot about a person by the company they keep and you can tell even more about them by looking at those they call friends – just look at people’s Facebook pages! 

That’s why the Pharisees in today’s Gospel were so scandalised by what they saw.  Not only did they find that Jesus had called Matthew from the seat of custom, from his tax desk, to follow him, but then Jesus accepts an invitation from this new disciple to dine at his house along with Matthew’s friends – a whole bunch of tax collectors and sinners.

This hasn’t been a good month for tax collectors – the blunders in the calculation of tax affecting, so they tell us, six million of us, the reluctance of the head of the Inland Revenue to immediately say sorry – all of it has fuelled the way in which we regard those who today sit at the modern equivalent of the tax booth.  It can seem that nobody likes a taxman and as we keep this feast, your patronal festival, it appears that it’s ever been the case.  Matthew and his mates were hated.

But in order to understand the rather harsh reaction from the Pharisees, that makes our response to our tax collectors seem rather mild, you have to remember that Matthew and his colleagues were nothing like the present occupants of the post.

For a start off they most probably had to buy their way into the job.  This was a highly prized line of employment for those who wanted to make money – in fact getting the job was almost a license to print money.  Not only were you working for the Roman occupying force, collecting the taxes that they required to be collected, but you then had the opportunity to impose a heavy top up tax for yourself.

The tax collectors were collaborators and swindlers rolled into one – people who were willing to risk being ostracised as long as they were making money.  And of course coupled with all of this was the distance they put between themselves and their religion.  Doing the job meant mixing with the Romans and so becoming ritually unclean.

The tax collector was turning his back on nation, neighbour and God in order to line his own pocket.

The remarkable thing about Jesus is that no one for him is beyond the pail.  He always counts people in and it’s only people themselves who count themselves out. Prostitutes, adulterers, lepers, tax collectors, rich people, poor people, you and me – we’re all given the same chance by Jesus.  Some like the rich young man decide that they can’t accept what Jesus has to offer – he steps back - but most step forward when Jesus calls.

According to Mark and Luke’s Gospels the person we’re celebrating today was called Levi.  But in the Gospel that bears his name we use Matthew throughout.

Jesus is well known as being someone who gave others nicknames – Peter is the greatest and most obvious example of his accurate and at times ironic skill in this and it may be that ‘Matthew’ is just such a name.

The name Matthew in fact means ‘the gift of God’ and it may be that Jesus, recognising in the man a personality that was searching for riches, decided to reveal to him the nature of the love of God as free gift.  What Matthew encountered in Jesus was the richness of God’s mercy and the abundance of God’s goodness.

The writer of Proverbs had identified this already.  There we hear of the wisdom of God – ‘her income is better than silver, her revenue better than gold’.  More precious than jewels, beyond compare - this is what Jesus is revealing to Matthew as he calls him.

He’s been chasing something ephemeral; he’s lost everything in order to gain nothing.  He’s lost the respect of neighbour, lost his rightful place in the nation, in the synagogue, perhaps deep down he’s also lost his own sense of self respect – who can tell what misery lay at the heart of Matthew that enabled him to hear the call.

Because that’s what’s so incredible!  Matthew doesn’t wait, he doesn’t question – he simply gets up from where he’s been sitting and leaves it all behind.  The fishermen that Jesus called made sure that their boats and their nets were safely back on land and that they’d handed the whole lot over to a family member – then they followed.  But there was nothing for Matthew to hand over, nothing that he’d want to hand on, nothing of which he could be proud.

Later in the gospels the fishermen among the disciples would be found back in their boats and back with their nets.  But theirs was a respectable life, a real trade – Matthew never goes back to what he was doing in the past – he couldn’t go back.

Instead Jesus gives him more riches than he’s ever had.  He restores him and that’s what’s at the heart of the gospel and why this feast and why this church dedicated to Matthew are so important to us.  Jesus restores Matthew within the community, within his family, within the nation and he’s set right with God.  Matthew had by his own choices been excluded, Matthew because of the opinions of others had been excluded; Jesus though comes along and includes, draws him out of his exclusion and includes him. And deep down as well restoration, healing has taken place – Matthew has his own sense of self-respect, his own sense of worth, his own appreciation of real value restored, healed. 

And how do we know that?  - because he invites his friends along so that they can meet the man that has done all this.  The dinner which Jesus and his disciples attends, given in his honour by Matthew now rich with God’s gift of restoration, is an opportunity for these tax collectors and sinners reclining alongside Jesus, to experience the same.

Like many of the stories of call in the gospels this one is accompanied by an act of mission.  When Andrew was called he brought his brother with him, when Matthew was called he gathered his partners in crime for a dinner party so that they too could share in the gift of God – restoration, healing, inclusion.

And that’s why we come to this eucharist because we know that the gift of God is the greatest thing that we can have, something that makes the greatest difference in our lives. And when we know that for ourselves then we naturally want the same for our children, for family, friends and neighbours.

One of the greatest things that this church has to offer is the reputation that you have for generous hospitality, for a commitment to an inclusive gospel and for a living out of the mission of Jesus to include.  It’s a counter cultural mission for many in the church but that’s what you do, inviting people who haven’t known God’s generosity before, or who have forgotten just what it’s like, or think that there’s no place at the table for them to share with us, to be at the party, at the banquet – people who have been found and embraced by Jesus..

St Paul expresses it like this in the second reading ‘we do not proclaim ourselves, we proclaim Jesus Christ as Lord’.  With Matthew we’re evangelists, telling others about the truth of Jesus Christ, part of a church, when at its best, that’s constantly proclaiming the good news and calling people from where they are to where they should be, from the places that are destroying them, physically, mentally, morally to a place in which total restoration can take place.

We could debate who the equivalent of tax collectors are in our contemporary society.  Whoever they are it’s they whom Jesus wishes to sit down and break bread with – and whoever we are he wishes to break bread with us.

This Holy Eucharist that we celebrate is free gift – God’s gift to each one of us gathered here. All we’re asked to do is to come forward and receive – there’s no catch – there’s nothing else like this on offer in the world.  This is a unique place and a unique moment – God counts you in - only you can count yourself out!

© Andrew Nunn

]]><![CDATA[An Easter Sermon of St John Chrysostom (347-407)]]>Sun, 04 Apr 2010 08:00:00 +0000http://www.stmw.org/2/post/2010/04/an-easter-sermon-of-st-john-chrysostom-347-407.htmlAre there any who are devout lovers of God?
Let them enjoy this beautiful bright festival!

Are there any who are grateful servants?
Let them rejoice and enter into the joy of their Lord!

Are there any weary from fasting?
Let them now receive their due!

If any have toiled from the first hour,
let them receive their reward.

If any have come after the third hour,
let them with gratitude join in the feast!

Those who arrived after the sixth hour,
let them not doubt; for they shall not be short-changed.

Those who have tarried until the ninth hour,
let them not hesitate; but let them come too.

And those who arrived only at the eleventh hour,
let them not be afraid by reason of their delay.

For the Lord is gracious and receives the last even as the first.
The Lord gives rest to those who come at the eleventh hour,
even as to those who toiled from the beginning.

To one and all the Lord gives generously.
The Lord accepts the offering of every work.
The Lord honours every deed and commends their intention.

Let us all enter into the joy of the Lord!

First and last alike, receive your reward.
Rich and poor, rejoice together!

Conscientious and lazy, celebrate the day!
You who have kept the fast, and you who have not,
rejoice, this day, for the table is bountifully spread!

Feast royally, for the calf is fatted.
Let no one go away hungry.
Partake, all, of the banquet of faith.
Enjoy the bounty of the Lord's goodness!

Let no one grieve being poor,
for the universal reign has been revealed.

Let no one lament persistent failings,
for forgiveness has risen from the grave.

Let no one fear death,
for the death of our Saviour has set us free.


The Lord has destroyed death by enduring it.
The Lord vanquished hell when he descended into it.
The Lord put hell in turmoil even as it tasted of his flesh.

Isaiah foretold this when he said,
"You, O Hell, were placed in turmoil when he encountering you below."


Hell was in turmoil having been eclipsed.
Hell was in turmoil having been mocked.
Hell was in turmoil having been destroyed.
Hell was in turmoil having been abolished.
Hell was in turmoil having been made captive.

Hell grasped a corpse, and met God.
Hell seized earth, and encountered heaven.
Hell took what it saw, and was overcome by what it could not see.

O death, where is your sting?
O hell, where is your victory?

Christ is risen, and you are cast down!
Christ is risen, and the demons are fallen!
Christ is risen, and the angels rejoice!
Christ is risen, and life is set free!
Christ is risen, and the tomb is emptied of its dead.

For Christ, having risen from the dead,
is become the first-fruits of those who have fallen asleep.

To Christ be glory and power forever and ever. Amen!
]]><![CDATA[Good Friday | The Liturgy of The Passion (Gregory Tucker)]]>Fri, 02 Apr 2010 15:50:27 +0000http://www.stmw.org/2/post/2010/04/good-friday-the-liturgy-of-the-passion-gregory-tucker.htmlWe adore you, O Christ, and we praise you,
because by your Holy Cross you have redeemed the world.

One of the most startling things about the Gospel according to St John is its attention to small details.  John gives by far the most accurate descriptions of time and place in any of the four canonical accounts of the life and death of Jesus.  Much of our speculative chronology for his life is derived from John’s obsession with recording the passing of the Jewish fasts and festivals, and Jesus’ strict observance of them.  And he frequently includes in his narrative those close observations which the other three Evangelists are unaware of, or choose to omit. 
One of the most striking of these details is the breaking of the legs of those who were crucified with Jesus that afternoon just outside the city walls, on what was far less a green hill far away, more a rocky outcrop very near indeed, on the poorer side of town.  The breaking of bones is a practice we know was common to both Roman and Carthaginian crucifixion methods, adding to the excruciating agony suffered by the convict but mercifully hastening their end, so it seems that this moment is historically credible.  Jesus’ legs were not broken – he had already died – his time on the cross was unusually short, his death hastened by the severe tortures he endured in the hours immediately preceding.

Another of these Johannine details is the offering of sour wine, vinegar, as it used to be translated, on a branch of hyssop.  It seems somewhat absurd in the context of the narrative of an unimaginably painful death lasting many hours, that an author should choose to remember the species of twig used for a stick.  The effect of taking that vinegar, even for the Christ who had managed to choke out ‘I am thirty’, cannot have been one of relief.  Remember, it’s about 30 degrees Celsius in Jerusalem at the moment, and Easter, the date of which is fixed by the equally-moveable Jewish Passover, is fairly early this year – it’s more than hot enough to lead to serious dehydration after hours of torture, and now, exposure to the heat of the day.  Rather, it seems that the sour wine would probably have made him gag, his writhing exacerbating the pain already caused by the nails which pierced him, and his gaping wounds.

It is, in fact, the details such as this which bring home the horrifying reality of crucifixion, a form of execution reserved for the lowest-ranking members of society, ‘foreigners’ – those who do not enjoy the privilege of Roman citizenship – and it is a statement of subjugation to the might of Imperial Rome, a symbol, as Bishop Tom Wright once described it, ‘with a clear and frightening meaning.’

Yet, for all the detail, we do not really understand.  That’s true on two levels.  At the more obvious level, few (if any) of us have any experience at all of that kind and degree of pain, and pray God, we never shall.  But our incomprehension is more acutely true at a deeper level.  Simply, our words fail us.  Language is totally inadequate to describe what happens on the Cross.  And not just our words, but all our modes of communication fail.  Meditation on the Passion of Christ has produced some of the most profound music and art ever brought forth from human creativity, but it is all as a blurred reproduction of a tiny corner of the canvas which is the divine reality in this moment.  All the song, the frescos and sculptures, all the poetry and music and mosaic of the human imagination, all together, gives us only a tiny glimpse of the meaning of the death of he who is the artist of all creation.

Good Friday, much like Easter itself, is really a silent, imageless day.  Our church is stripped of its furnishings; the sanctuary of the Temple is bear; the holy table, which is the symbol of the Body of Christ, the true altar of our salvation, is naked before us; the tabernacle, the Holy of Holies in which the Living Presence of God dwells with us, is empty.  Our church is a void.  The sacred liturgy which is the source and summit of our Christian life is pared down to stark simplicity.  All that we say and do is a poorly painted icon of the meaning of the Cross.  Even to gaze on the wood of the Cross itself, to venerate the image of our salvation, is to look upon a formless absence, the utter desolation that is the rejection by humankind of the God who dared to stoop to us in love.

Today, like Easter, is a day when the action happens off-stage.  The benefit of hindsight, the knowledge of the resurrection which is to come, affords us little more comfort than the first disciples must have had that Passover night.  We, like them, are left numb and wordless by the total defeat of Life itself – we are left to contemplate the gaping wound in God’s creation, the absence of Love itself.  And, we are complicit, like the disciples, like the Marys, in that wound.  For if we are to have any faith in the Incarnation, then yes, we are consubstantial with the Christ who suffers on the Cross, the God-Man whose death will accomplish the recapitulation of all things to God, but we are equally, if not more so, consubstantial with those who nailed him to the Tree.

All that we can do in the light of our participation in the Cross, is to contemplate the absence, the silence, and the darkness. We can only have faith that this will not be just another death of another low-life subject of the Roman regime; that he who stoops in love will by love conquer death.  We can only trust that, off-stage, God is working-out his purpose in Christ in this moment.  We can only believe that the details of the narrative, which seem to trivial and yet so real, mean something is happening, rather than nothing.

Our correct, indeed our only reaction, in the face of the death of Love itself, is sheer silence.  Our words, our images, our music, none of these can convey the overwhelming love which is the very life of God in Christ crucified, the love which covers all sins.  Our response must be to know God’s terrifying silence for ourselves: the silence out of which all creation comes into being, the silence of Isaac as he is bound for sacrifice, of Mary at the moment of the conception, of Jesus in the grave, of the empty tomb, of the life in God which awaits us.  And in the silence, we must allow ourselves to become one with Christ crucified, and in the silence of the life of the Holy Trinity, to become that love which is perfect self-giving.

We leave this liturgy in silence, not only out of reverence for the mystery and respect for the solemnity of the occasion, but because to speak, to attempt to express ourselves, will, at this moment, only cause us to diminish the startling reality of the Cross. 

We will soon be face to face with the image of Christ crucified.  It is an image which does not have words for us: it does not cry out or weep or moan as he did.  It is silent.  It is an image which cannot convey the horror of the scene, or the agony of the man.  It simply confronts us, in our space, in naked truth.  It does speak to us, but to our broken, disordered humanity, which longs to return to God.  It leaves us utterly barren, alone, unable to speak, completely without hope, in the silence of our own unworthiness….
]]><![CDATA[Maundy Thursday | Mass of The Last Supper (Gregory Tucker)]]>Thu, 01 Apr 2010 23:02:34 +0000http://www.stmw.org/2/post/2010/04/maundy-thursday-mass-of-the-last-supper-gregory-tucker.html'Union with Christ, then, belongs to those who have undergone all that the saviour has undergone…he who seeks to be united with him must therefore share with him in his flesh, partake of deification, and share in His death and resurrection.'  St Nicholas Kabasilas, The Life in Christ [1]
 
It is a well-known fact that Anglo-catholics love parties.  Many of us make all sorts of weird and wonderful commitments for Lent, no doubt inspired by sound Tractarian piety, sacrificing those things on which we gorge ourselves when nobody is looking, or indeed when they are, setting aside some of the luxuries of this life, to focus on
the fullness of life in Christ which awaits us.  For some it is chocolate, others cheese, for the more ascetically-inclined perhaps it is meat or dairy; but in Anglo-catholic presbyteries and households the world over, one thing rarely seems to feature on the list of Lenten prohibitions, and that is (no surprises) booze, for to sacrifice our booze requires us effectively to sacrifice our partying – our ‘cocktails and conversation’, if you like – and we Anglo-catholics do love to party.
 
Tonight we celebrate once more, as we do daily in this church, the foretaste of that Anglo-catholic soirée par excellence – the heavenly banquet which is the reward of the faithful, where the canapés never run out, the cellar is never dry, the company simply divine.  Here tonight we feast on Christ himself, the Bread of Life; we slurp the new wine of the kingdom; we are spread liberally with full-fat grace.  Tonight we are united with Christ, as at every celebration of the Eucharist, as though for the first time – all that has been passes away, and we are renewed through his mercy, and restored to his Body.  This night, we start the long journey to Easter morning, which is full of all the emotional heights and depths of human existence, but we do not start with a sermon from Our Lord, instructions or some great fanfare, we start with a dinner party.
 
Last summer, I spent nearly eight weeks studying in Jerusalem, during which time I lived with some Jewish students.  We became great friends in that time, and shared a number of Shabbat dinners together.  The weekly Shabbat dinner, something akin to our ‘Sunday Roast’ tradition, bears some of the marks of ritual and symbolism which are central to the Seder meal, the first meal of the eight-day Feast of the Passover, the observance of which is commanded in the passage from the book of the Exodus which we just heard.  Sat as we were in a modern apartment block in the twenty-first century, sharing bread and wine and other kosher delicacies, it was easy to imagine what that Passover was like in Jerusalem with Our Lord and his friends.
 
When we celebrate this sacred meal in the fashion to which we are accustomed, it can be easy for us to forget the party which is its real setting.  We can easily isolate the Sacrament of Christ’s body and blood from the historical and universal event which is its proper locus.  We must recall the upper room, the glass and concrete tower block of modern Jerusalem, the party, the friends, and there find ourselves alive with Christ; and in the uniting with him in his body, find ourselves united to his whole being, undergoing all that the saviour undergoes, as the great sacramental mystic, St Nicholas Kabasilas wrote.  It is not enough to simply receive the Sacrament as an objective reality, the Body of Christ turned into some kind of ‘grace pill’, but in the receiving of the Sacrament, we must unite ourselves wholly to the life of Christ.
 
In this way the Sacrament, as the whole of the life of God With Us given to us, should be deeply unsettling; for the Life which is given to us, the Life whose Spirit dwells in the Church, and to which we are conformed, is not the life of a revelling care-free party-goer. The Christ who ever-lives in the sacraments, and supremely in this Sacrament of the Altar, is the Christ born in a cow shed in a back-water village, forced into exile as a refugee, pursued and persecuted by the religious establishment, executed under the Roman governor by popular demand.  The Christ of the Sacrament whom we worship as Eternal High Priest and King is the same Christ who feeds the hungry, who heals the sick, who comforts the sinner, who admonishes and exhorts, who wanders in the wilderness, who laughs at the wedding and weeps at the death of Lazarus.  It is this Christ to whom we are united in the Sacrament; this Christ whose life we share.
 
Union with Christ, then, belongs to those who have undergone all that the saviour has undergone… Kabasilas understood that the power of the sacraments lies in their ability to conform those who participate in them, as both recipient and conduit of grace, to Christ in a real union.  There is no religious legalism here, but all the informality of a party.  Through the sacraments, and daily in the Sacrament of the Eucharist, we are made to be one with this Christ, sharing in all that he has done for us, becoming not merely like him, but really him in his Body.  If we treat the sacraments as something separate from complete life in Christ, as some snack for the journey or points on a score-card with St Peter at the pearly gates, then we will fail to undergo all that Christ has undergone, we will fail to die his death with him and be raised to life in him, we will miss the point of the Incarnation, and reduce it to a distant memory of something we once heard about.
 
This union with Christ of which Kabasilas writes, and in which we participate in the Church through the sacraments and through the ordering of our lives at times such as this, is one which St Paul knew well.  He writes in his letters time and time again of the intimacy of his relationship with Christ, such that he is able to say that it is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me.[2]  Something of the oneness which Paul experienced with Christ comes through in that passage from 1 Corinthians read earlier, the passage which recalls the institution of the Eucharist, and is probably our earliest reference to it, written some time in the mid-50s AD; for he makes an extraordinary claim: I received from the Lord what I also handed on to you.  Of course, Paul never met Jesus in any every-day sense, yet he considered that he received the Eucharist from him.  The mystical union which Paul enjoyed with Christ was so real, that he could claim to have received the institution of the Eucharist personally, and has the authority to pass it on to his communities.  Paul had undergone all that the saviour had undergone through union with him: Paul was crucified with Jesus, alive again in him, living as him.
 
And that’s why the setting of the institution of the Eucharist in this liturgy, on this night, is so essential to remember.  The perpetual source of our unity in Christ, our participation in the Sacrament of the Altar, is set in a party-gone-wrong.  This Maundy Thursday night, a guest usurps the host; he who is ritually impure, contaminated by sinners, presumes to do something new at this Passover meal, taking the ancient meaning of the Exodus, God’s liberation of his people from captivity, translating it to himself; he who reclines at table as one amongst friends, though undoubtedly an unusually charismatic figure, stops the dinner party where it is, to perform an act of self-debasing service; Jesus, who is the Eternal Word of God among humans, taking upon himself the role of a servant, and washes the feet of his friends.
 
It must have been something of a scandal for Jesus to get down on the floor, and start washing their feet.  Feet are, after all, one of the most intimate parts of the body, at least in the Old Testament, where ragal (foot) is often used as a euphemism for the genitals.  Jesus was making two statements in his actions: one of humility in doing the duty of a domestic servant, presumably to the dishonouring horror of his host and certainly to the shock of his disciples, and one of great physical intimacy – nothing is beyond the touch of God.  But this behaviour also requires a surprising degree of humility and trust from that group gathered for the dinner in Jerusalem, and from those who participate in our liturgy tonight.  To offer oneself, the intimacy of our own physicality, to Christ, in order that he who is Lord over all creation may wash and wipe our feet, requires us to be like him, united to him.  In this sacramental moment, done in memory of him, like the Eucharist, we encounter Christ’s life wholly, and we are made to be one with him, sharing his flesh, and undergoing all that he has undergone.
 
The setting of that first Eucharist was a scandal.  The supper itself was scandalized by Jesus’ seizing the Exodus narrative and making it his own.  The dinner was brought to an abrupt halt by the scandal of the somewhat presumptuous guest taking it upon himself to wash the feet of his friends.  The Sacrament is a scandal to us in the proper sense of the Greek word which means a thing which makes us fall – it is nothing less than the broken body of the Christ who caused the upset at the dinner party, and whose whole life is united to ours as we undergo all that the Saviour has undergone.  The scandal of the Sacrament becomes ever more apparent to us in these days of the Great Triduum: right now, it’s all glorias, white vestments and light; soon it will mean abandonment, darkness, silence and tears.  As Christ prays in the Garden of Gethsemane, as the Sacrament waits for us on the Altar of Repose, this Church which is the visible sign of his Body, the sacrament of our community life together, is made desolate.  All that adorns it in beauty and reminds us of the heavenly banquet to come is seized; the table which is the symbol of Christ, the real altar of our salvation, is made naked before us, the sanctuary is abandoned to Death.
 
Maundy Thursday should cause us great discomfort, because it presents us with another one of those dichotomies which are at the heart of the Christian gospel.  Tonight we have all the joy of the party and all the emptiness of death.  In this Sacrament of the Eucharist we have a real foretaste of the heavenly banquet, a momentary glimpse of what life in Christ will be like; we are fed with the bread of life and the cup of salvation as we journey towards the Eternal City; and as we are ever-more conformed to him. But this life in Christ is not all gin and lace and canapés; it is affliction, abandonment, darkness and desolation; it is undergoing all that the saviour has undergone; it is the long, agonizing trudge through the filthy streets of the earthly Jerusalem, to the Cross of Calvary, which is the throne of Eternal Life.
 
[1] Kabasilas, N.  The Life in Christ.  Trans. C. de Catanzaro.  Crestwood, N.Y.: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press.  (1974).  2.1.
[2] Galatians 2.20.
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