Posted by stpauls on August 29, 2010 under Sermons | 
[This sermon was written and delivered by The Reverend Dr. Yazeed Said at Choral Evensong, August 29, 2010.]
Sometime ago, I came across a passage that refers to early saints in the Byzantine period in Jerusalem in an article by John Wilkinson – former dean of St. George’s College, Jerusalem, in the 1970s. He writes about how a reputation of holiness in monastic traditions was gained by the monks and nuns in Palestine after Constantine’s conversion. He says
“the desert of Judea to the east of Jerusalem became a school of monks whose nationalities were Latins, Persians, Indians, Ethiopians and Armenians. Since they were out in the desert, the monks sometimes had great influence over Bedouin tribes, and St. Euthymius, one of the greatest Armenian monks, converted Peter Aspebet, an Arab exiled from Persia, and had him made bishop of his tribe.”
Now guess what the diocese was called “the Camp” – That is your kind of diocese.
Now of course we all know that all humanity is in fact called to “the Camp” of Jesus. We all believe and trust as we confess in this place that we are part of Jesus’ camp too, and that is not just because of the costumes that we like to wear. We celebrate here, by means of divine worship, our call to be part of the Camp of Jesus. During my time here, our celebrations were often interrupted by sumptuous dinners. And it is worthwhile reminding the puritans – supposing any to have penetrated the usually secure defences of St. Paul’s – that if there is to be any true association between these two forms of celebration, divine worship and eating, as, in the Christian and indeed other traditions there very properly is, then not only the worship, but also the food, the dress and the costumes, need to be worthy of a feast.
However, there could occur a momentary misgiving, conceivably of a puritanical sort, when we come to hear the beatitudes from the sermon on the mount, the subject of our second lesson this evening, when, we hear how – to use words from Hebrews – the poor, the pious, the righteous and others are “commended by their faith.”
You will be glad to know that I did not research too much into the matter, as others may do when discharging this responsibility of preaching. But, I am also reminded of another famous list of names found at the beginning of Matthew’s Gospel, which tells the ancestry of Jesus Christ. Matthew’s genealogy could be a consolation to us here, for I presume that those who are here this evening could hardly have worse fortune, on the score of ancestors, than Jesus did. Matthew counted few worthies, but otherwise a collection of what could be considered rapists, adulterers, murderers and traitors. This of course only shows that you do not have to have a good lineage after all to turn out saintly at the end.
Our celebration today is of course a ritual and formal affair of thanksgiving, but formal and ritual as it may be, there is no reason why it should lack honesty. There is indeed a danger of religious celebration, which is at once exaggerated in piety but yet empty-headed as if we need the reassurance of a past, that exceeds morally any reasonable standard we would aspire to today. The Church is, no doubt, ordinarily sinful now. It does not need to represent itself as having been perfect before. I am not obviously saying these things inappropriately, but just to remind ourselves a bit of why we are here, why we pray, and indeed what it means to be a member of “the camp of Jesus,” if you wish. There are those who would think of the necessity of moral probity that assures us of saintly award and membership in the body of Jesus.
But, the Beatitudes it seems to me are pointing in another direction. They are not simply rules for living the moral life as much as they are a reminder of what it means to be honest, to know where you stand, and to know how you go about doing your mission as a church. There are those around us who feel they cannot rely on anything, and the things that they have accomplished for themselves in life do not really provide them with any meaning any more.
But, Jesus, says: “blest are the poor in spirit, theirs is the kingdom.” There are those who are in great amount of grief and loss and do not know where to look and where to turn; they feel lonely and lost; but Jesus says: “blest are those who mourn, they shall be comforted.” There are those among us who think that they can no longer offer much, they are no longer capable of doing much, and who do not have high hopes of the immediate future; and Jesus says: “blest are the meek, they shall inherit the earth.” There are angry people around us, who do not like to see the injustices done to so many in our society, and in the world at large, but try to carry grudges even against the perpetrators of injustice, and Jesus says: “blest are the merciful and the peacemakers; the merciful shall find mercy, and the peacemakers will be called children of God.”
Jesus turns to the crowd, and turns to us, and he says where are you in all of this? And trying to be honest about where you are, what you are and look inside yourselves is when we begin to be good stewards of the Gospel, when we begin to do our mission well. When we question ourselves like this, the question opens up for others to see where we are, and to ask the same question for themselves. In all the difficult situations that people find themselves in our world today, the question will always remain: If this is where we find ourselves. If this is where we are, and what we are, then is there anyone around who knows, understands and accepts us and gives us a future? The more we close our lives and defend it from failure and claim moral probity, the less room there is for us even to ask whether there is any who really cares for us. We end up without the need of anyone else and God becomes limited to our own man-made temples.
Is there anyone who cares for us, in whom we find our future? That is the question of your mission here. And the answer that we carry is yes … all the promises of God are held by the “yes” of Jesus Christ. He is to be found where we are found. Where the poor in spirit, the meek, the mourners, the merciful, and hungry for justice, there he is too. But, when we share that answer to the world around us, we do so with the knowledge that Jesus is already there to be uncovered. We are not simply adding him ourselves, and there is something for us to learn about Jesus from those who are listening to us too, because we never get it all fully right ourselves, and we are hungry ourselves to have a word of hope from others, a word that teaches us more about who Jesus is and where he is to be found. Our mission is never a one-way line; it is always a two-way reciprocal line with a challenge turning back at us to enlarge our hearts.
It is the relationship that makes us what we are, because ultimately the holy God we serve and love, the holy God who comes among us in sacrifice and gift in Jesus, is a God of relation, Father, Son and Holy Spirit. And we, in a very distant way, reflect something of that, as we grow in faith we are drawn more deeply into that relationship. And this relationship calls us to ask the question, which this Church has been good at asking: “who has been forgotten?” This is what you stand for.
Just like Mary reminds us in the Magnificat: God has remembered his mercy and has sought out the forgotten. And to seek the forgotten is to renew our compassion and service in our society; but, this can only be done when we get to know where the roots of human beauty and dignity are to be found. And the knowledge of the roots of human beauty and dignity grows on the soil of contemplation, visible in celebration as we do even now, and even in the face of danger, terror and death we never cease from that trust and confidence. We come together to pray, to be mindful and feel ourselves into the perspective of Christ in the power of the Holy Spirit, that our remembering might be a sign of God’s remembering for the lost in the wilderness of our world. A life of service, contemplation, celebration and seeking the lost and forgotten … Here is a mission and a challenge for all of us.
Posted by stpauls on under Sermons |
[This sermon was written and delivered by The Reverend Dr. Yazeed Said on August 29, 2010, Fourteenth Sunday after Pentecost.]
“My people have changed their glory for something that does not profit,” we heard in the book of Jeremiah. The people of Israel have gone after worthless things. The sense of drama in the Old Testament is always pointing to how the people of Israel not just put themselves as the centre of the stage of their own drama, but that even God in this drama ends up occasionally being excluded or standing in a suitably subordinate and decorative position whether in the shape of the golden calf or Baal.
“Those who handle the law did not know me; the rulers transgressed against me; the prophets prophesied by Baal, and went after things that do not profit.” The people of Israel are not content to know where they stand: “a plentiful land to eat its fruit and its good things” as a gift, but they are eager to sort out things for themselves without God – a bit like our secular modern world. We want to dictate what happens on the dramatic stage of our lives. The people of God have been given a task, and it is a dramatic and essential one, that of being a light to lighten the nations. But, the nagging suspicion remains: what if this is not quite as important as it looks? And so, whilst we are at it and as a matter of pure interest – why can’t we just dig our own cisterns?
But, God in Jeremiah tells us that without the immediate help of God to pull the people up short here, the cisterns are cracked and cannot contain water, the people have become worthless themselves and have gone for things that do not profit. And the same applies to us, if the definitions are not provided for us we have to provide our own solutions to the problems that come around our way. Or, in the language of the Gospel of today, we can come to the banquet meal and sit at the places of honour. We can without too much difficulty construct an eminently satisfying scenario for our world in which other people ought to sit at places determined in accordance to our needs. The truth is that we no less gleefully than the people of Israel in Jeremiah or the guests at the dinner in the gospel position ourselves in the centre, and insist that the reality of those around us depends upon our good pleasure, and we become the centre of attention, not God. Similarly, today, priests, doctors, and teachers have an important role to play; but they all find it hard to avoid their own revision of their environment. But, as they used to say in England, priests spend a lot of energy giving perfect answers to questions that no one is asking.
Sooner, or later, as is the case with our modern culture today, we will come to face the fact that there are other people around us who will not accept what we have designed for them. They will not accept our dictating, in as much as we will not accept their dictating. They might even come to tell us that our own seat is not the seat of honour in the front. We will face resistance, the resistance of the difference of each one of us. We may pigeonhole people as those who deserve and those who do not. We even may pigeonhole God as simply a figment of our imagination. But, we have not yet started the process of learning. Where is glory to be found? “My people have changed their glory for something that does not profit.”
One of the ironies of the gospel story today is that it shows how people are solitary individuals when they are in the company of others at a meal. The guests who come to the meal discover that they are not the centre of the gathering; they are left solitary. They discover solitude in the midst of being in the community. But, it is only when we discover this solitary character of our lives and accept it, can we begin to be serious about our humanity. When our egoism is checked and questioned, we begin to see ourselves in perspective. The question is will we allow this distancing, this solitude, to be the space where we grow in God and the space of our true freedom.
The people of Israel in Jeremiah we are told have become worthless themselves. To be worthwhile is to find that space where we can grow in God. That is when we start realizing that our individualism is a measure of our uniqueness too, and in his infinite humility, God works with this freedom of each and every one of us. The vocation of the People of Israel is not that they should obliterate themselves in God, however much it might have felt like that. God calls them to be more, not less, themselves. The Holy Spirit calls us to be more not less ourselves, the bearers of our names.
On the other hand, however enlivening this may sound, we need to constantly remember that there are no clear codes for us to follow when it comes to cooperating with God. Cooperating with God means always being aware of his presence and sit at the back seats of the banquet meal, so that he may help us know ourselves. Our following of Christ demands, both in the Gospel of today and in the letter to the Hebrews, willingness to receive God’s call without ambitions or preconceptions. The writer to the Hebrews gives some practical instructions in this way:
“Let mutual love continue. Do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers, for by doing that some have entertained angels without knowing it”
Where is our glory to be found? It is in sacrifice and self-giving. Look at your neighbour and there you will see glory. The compassion is not simply about mere nice feelings to those around us. It is the outpouring of yourself: “Remember those who are in prison, as though you were in prison with them; those who are being tortured, as though you yourselves were being tortured.” And this means that our individual uniqueness is not an exclusive self-assertion. The hard part comes when we learn not only to cooperate with God, but also with our neighbours; learning how to be free together, and not as solitary individuals, without preconception and manipulation, just as we can only see the glory of God properly not in his omnipotent majesty, but in the overwhelming endless love in his act of self-giving at the cross.
The image we have from our readings, especially from Hebrews today is not of solitary individuals competing for their different ways, but voices of harmony, collaborating to produce a rich but subtle consistency. When we celebrate Holy Communion, we are putting ourselves into that everlasting movement of Jesus towards the Father. That is what we are here to pray for; that this Church will always be held in the everlasting divine movement of Father, Son and Holy Spirit. We all fall short and at times get things dramatically wrong. But, Jesus Christ we are told today remains the same yesterday, today and forever. If that is true, glory will dwell in this Church day after day to that same vision of joy and of giving. Through Christ, we will continually stand here and offer our sacrifice of praise.
Posted by stpauls on August 22, 2010 under Sermons |
[This sermon was written and delivered by The Reverend Dr. Yazeed Said on August 22, 2010, Thirteenth Sunday after Pentecost.]
I think that some of you will have had the chance to visit the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, and perhaps, those who have might have been disappointed. For the new visitor, it looks an appalling mess. It would be rather difficult to miss the dark side of the place, with a clear history of bitter factional strife in the Church between the Franciscan friars and the other ancient monastic orders of the Orthodox Church who have kept the place from ancient times, to the extent that in the eighteenth century, it took a Muslim keeper of the keys to be able under Ottoman provisions to restore order and maintain a kind of status quo where all can do their business happily. However, even this gets challenged from time to time, as we hear on the news!
For many visitors, the Church is not a splendid artistic triumph of God’s grace. There are several levels of chapels, little caves, and strange corners built into and around the rock on which the Cross stood. This is in addition to the memories of political bloodshed surrounding the city. In other words, if you go to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre today, you will not come to say what the writer to the Hebrews is describing in today’s second lesson: “the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem, and … innumerable angels in festal gathering.”
It certainly is not the angelic heavenly Jerusalem. The cross is to be seen in Jerusalem in a place where the Church of God and the people of God have betrayed Christ. The Cross is to be seen where God is not to be seen; but seen in the history of those suffering and oppressed by those who call themselves the people of God – of all religions.
What do we make of this? How do we come to acknowledge holiness in this?
Earlier in the same chapter from Hebrews, holiness appears as something terrifying and dangerous: “a blazing fire, and darkness, and gloom, and a tempest, and the sound of a trumpet, and a voice whose words made the hearers beg that not another word be spoken to them.” The writer is reminding his readers how God descends to speak to his people on Mount Sinai, and no one should come near. “Indeed, so terrifying was the sight that Moses said, ‘I tremble with fear.’”
Not many people would like this image of holiness.
But, the writer to the Hebrews then moves to speak about a different holiness for today. He says that you (and that is you!) have come into an abundant overflowing that is overwhelming in its variety with more people than you can ever count, living and departed. You have come to a kind of holiness that involves the fellowship of all creation. This is what you step into when you step into the fellowship of Christ.
And so, to step into the Church, or indeed into St. Paul’s Church today, is not to come to a scary and frightening place. And I hear you say that surely St. Paul’s cannot be a scary and frightening place. It is coming into a fellowship of harmony (really?) with trained and untrained voices singing praises and acknowledging glory in the infinite company of all God’s creation. But, the truth of the matter is that there are people who do come to St. Paul’s and feel strange and scared too. New comers, for instance, who have no idea what to do when they are in here, might feel a bit self-conscious about what they do and whether they are to be spotted or not. The legions of masses outside who do not come to Church probably think that all that we do and say is rather bizarre and eccentric; and for many it is all rather frightening indeed.
But, if the writer to the Hebrews is true that we have come to the harmony of all creation, then there is no one who is dispensable in the fellowship. We all need everyone (even the conservatives among us!) for our holiness to be complete and reflection of the glory of God to be made manifest. No one is complete without the others. Holiness is not bound to a place, for the holiness of our God is not to be found in earthly temples. And yet, we still say that Jerusalem is holy, with all its terrible history. But, we do so, not because holiness is bound to it, but because there is seen the victory of God’s vulnerable faithfulness over the atrocities that political and religious arrogance inflict on God and his children.
Jeremiah is a prophet, as we heard in our first lesson, not because he is this accomplished mature adult, but because in his vulnerable youth (”I am a boy,” he says), God reveals his faithfulness in the midst of the people’s imperfection and disloyalty. You are holy; St. Paul’s is holy; not because it is a gathering of the well-behaved, but because we celebrate the victory of grace in the coming together of strangers and sinners who seem to trust one another enough so that they even join in repentance and common singing, expressing our deep unity in Jesus, who is described in our second lesson, as the mediator of the new covenant.
God endures our refusal of him and meets it with the gift of himself; that is why we find holiness. And so Jesus, as we heard in the gospel today, when he comes to face the indignant righteous leader of the synagogue, who does not like it that Jesus cured on the Sabbath, puts a challenge to him that is a challenge to the idea of what it means to be holy, to be kosher. It is a challenge to the alien and frightening. Why can I not heal a human being when you can water your donkey or ox? Jesus cuts through that and says “my presence is a presence of abundance, when humanity is restored to its true image.”
The people in the outside and the margins; those who are literally incapable of discharging their human potential are drawn in and made welcome; for the abundance of the fellowship is for the weak as well as for the strong and both need each other.
More importantly, it is good to remember that it is not only strangers among us who feel frightened but it might be also one of us here now, one who is considered an established member of the community. Some of us are bound to ask: “Do I really matter?” “Is my voice really going to be heard?” “I have just had all these difficulties in my personal life and people might be questioning whether I am any more important in this Church?” There are many anxieties among us flowing in.
But, if we are to keep our vision in line with the fellowship of all God’s creation, we do have to let go of some of our ways and habits we cling to in order to defend ourselves. Then, once we do let go of such habits, we also discover that there is still something quite properly frightening about the holiness of God. Because, God’s unconditional love reflects our own selfishness, our true image, which we would rather not see, and our idleness, as it has with the leader of the synagogue in today’s gospel.
The abundant holiness that we are celebrating is still a frightening holiness indeed. But, we shall still rejoice and be glad, because as we respond to the invitation: “the gifts of God for the people of God,” we are not saying that we are holy enough to deserve them, but more that these are the gifts that make us holy and that unite us with the harmony of creation, with Jesus, the mediator of the new covenant, the eternal Son of the Father, poured out for us in the power of the Holy Spirit, making us together with all of God’s creation singing: “Holy, Holy, Holy is the Lord God the almighty. The whole earth is full of your glory.” Amen.
Posted by stpauls on August 15, 2010 under Sermons |
[This sermon was written and delivered by The Reverend Dr. Yazeed Said on August 15, 2010, Twelfth Sunday after Pentecost.]
She is singing, praising, and magnifying in response to the news delivered to her about the one she is to bear. She came to realise this is not her resource, her decision, but God’s insistent generosity, who carries her, as she comes to carry him. She is, in the words from Isaiah, clothed with the garment of salvation and the robe of righteousness. She, who has been on the verge of her society, has been changed forever. The other women in her surroundings with equal surprising pregnancies recognized her. It is as if she and the other women of her society are plotting conspiracies of hope. But, this was not at an easy cost.
The men around her are questioning her legitimacy, even her spouse was for a moment embarrassed. But, she was singing with confidence that God was not just another male, who was fulfilling his fantasies through her body. He has scattered the proud in their conceit, and brought down the powerful. She has come to realize that this is not just something about her, this something more than her, something with authority that will make a difference to her, and to more than her, though she would not have known what this would mean when it all comes out in the world. She is to bear someone who is very deeply of her, her flesh and blood, depending on her; but she knows that this is not her. This is a path full of confusions too. How can she walk it?
Yet, she is singing and magnifying because she realises that God has looked with favour on her, he has clothed her with salvation. And what God wants her to be is the fulfilment of her humanity, even if this means living through wounded and difficult times in her society. God, after all, does not seem to be a God familiar to those who speak most easily of God. She would be constantly changing and learning throughout her life with this child, who is utterly intimate to her, and utterly different. She knew that the company of this child would not cancel out the difficulties of the world in which she lived. She will still know some tears. But, something is different still; a process through which the distancing between God, women and men will be bridged, and women and men and God will be able to talk to one another differently with no fear or violence.
That is why God is acting in her, as Paul reminded us in the letter to the Galatians today; we will be heirs and children who call God Abba, Father. Similarly, she has come to realize that she has changed. Generations will call her blessed; she has been inhabited by grace, by a call, a gift. “The Almighty has done great things for me.” He has not abhorred me like you do. The gift of her child will be for her what it will be for all of us, a promise, food, drink, and judgment. But, her patience and her trust in giving her flesh and blood to this child make her stand distinctively. Her intimacy and access to her Son is what is offered to all of us no doubt, but hers is a unique shade of that love. After all, God is never just a general reality for human beings, but is a special reality for each one of us. And given this unique intimacy with the Word of God, the Church today celebrated since early days, her share in the victory of her Son’s resurrection, just in as much as we share in that victory too.
The Jerusalem tradition speaks of her falling asleep on Mount Zion, where there is a Church today called Dormition Abbey, cared for by German Benedictine monks. Falling asleep is the language of the early church for those who die: “falling asleep in the Lord.” She calls the disciples to gather around her, and an Eastern Orthodox hymn, which was put to beautiful music by John Taverner, has her say: “O ye Apostles gather here from the ends of the earth, bury my body in Gethsemane, and thou my child and my God, receive my soul.”
The feast has been recognized liturgically since the fifth century, and the story has it that all the apostles came except for Thomas who was late three days; but, as he had with the Risen Lord, he wanted to go and see her tomb, where she was laid. But, when the tomb was opened, she was not there.
Whatever we want to make of that tradition, it remains based on the trust and confidence that we have in the Resurrection of Mary’s Son. It is a spark of recognition for all of us, as a story of each Christian who is called and frightened by the Word of God, which we learn to give to the world around us.
She was obedient, because she realised that that is where her salvation lies, her whole health. She could have said “No.” But, she provides a challenge to the assumption that we and God are competing entities fighting for space against each other. In the immediacy of her flesh and blood, she lives what we all face something of, and that is God’s desire. We must all discover how to say “Yes” to it, acknowledging that God’s desire is bound up with our own desire.
Mary is often depicted as the Queen. Today, if that should mean anything for us, it would have to mean that, like Mary, we should allow ourselves to be interrupted by God, so that all that we try to put between God and ourselves, and all the walls we try to build between our neighbours and ourselves are torn down. She reminds us that we tend to put a huge amount of energy into avoiding the reality of God, because we do not like to be interrupted. The Church is resentful too of being interrupted. It is easier to manage the Church than to manage God, we can all agree. But, our eyes are turned from the real matters of the world that need our attention, and we should resist whatever it is in us or in the Church that pushes back divine and human longing, always ready to receive the Word, which comes as flesh and speech and bread in the lives of women and men, and “who has cast down the mighty from their thrones, and has lifted up the lowly.” Come let us receive him.
Posted by stpauls on August 8, 2010 under Sermons |
[This sermon was written and delivered by The Reverend Dr. Yazeed Said on August 8, 2010, Eleventh Sunday after Pentecost.]
Our readings this morning pull the imagination in two directions. We have Abraham’s faith longing and waiting for God’s promise in the letter to the Hebrews, whilst Isaiah proclaims God’s judgment on his people saying, “Trample my courts no more… Your new moons and your appointed festivals my soul hates.” In the Gospel, Jesus speaks of the moment of recognising the coming of the Son of Man in an unexpected way. It is as if we are given to think that the coming of the Son of Man is the moment when the idols we build for ourselves will fall and shatter, revealing the ambiguity of our religious identity just as was the case with people of God in the Old Testament. On the one hand, we are, like Abraham, longing and hungry for God’s promise, because you and I long and hunger to be given a word of love; we know that there are things we cannot just do for ourselves, like knowing that we are loved. We need an “other” to tell us that. But, whilst we long to hear something, we have also collectively denied the possibility of hearing something from beyond our culture, we deny God, and we therefore become human beings who do not communicate with one another.
Here lies the moral failure of our age.
While we yearn to hear words to affirm us, we end up projecting on to the void that we have created the voice that we like to hear only. We generate simply an echo of the fact that we are all right and that really we have never fallen from grace with God and really there is no such a thing as original sin. But, when we do not hear a voice from beyond us, and do all the talking ourselves, we are doomed to a paralysing anxiety, burdened with the danger of illusion and the making of idols, which meet our needs.
On Friday, as I was walking on Haro Street, I overheard, to my dismay, a conversation in my back, of a young boy telling an older girl how his mother is finishing her PhD, and feeling happy after all the hard work that she has done. I was shocked when the older girl told the boy that his mother must feel rather strange given that, in her words, it is considered “retarded” these days to spend times with books!
The Israelites offer sacrifices, and God in the prophecy of Isaiah is saying: “what to me is the multitude of your sacrifices? says the LORD; I have had enough of burnt offerings of rams and the fat of fed beasts; I do not delight in the blood of bulls, or of lambs, or of goats.” And Jesus warns in the Gospel: “where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.” Our task as human beings is not, like the girl seems to assume above, to relate to the world as our possession, which we can fashion and understand with unaided human thinking, but to let ourselves be given the proper sense by the real treasure and that is the call of God. In Isaiah, God is simply saying, the idols that we make to meet our needs cannot set us free, cannot give us a new and assured reality.
Jesus in the Gospel is calling us to be vigilant and expectant, like the people of Israel were called to be, because we cannot make God. We have to be surprised and led if we are to be kept from idolatry. On the one hand, “Do not be afraid,” says Jesus; “it is the Father’s good pleasure to give you the kingdom,” it is an encouragement for us to remember that hope in things unseen is a joyful expectancy. But, at the same time, like Abraham, we are to acknowledge our poverty, knowing that we cannot provide life for ourselves, a poverty that stands with helplessness when faced with the tragedies of our world today, especially when we remember the tragedies of the twentieth century when human beings thought that they could bring about peace without God, and what a tragedy that was in the face of the Holocaust, and the massacres that carry us up to the present day.
But, we are here celebrating this joyful expectancy in Holy Communion because there has been a Word, which has unexpectedly interrupted the world and revealed the difference between the God whom we expect and the God who actually comes, the God who does not come to satisfy our illusions or our stylishness, but shatters our idols before his truth; for as Isaiah put it, our idols have become a burden on God. The Word that has been spoken has made us who we are today. But, “You do not know the hour of the coming of the Son of Man.” We do not know how this form of liberation we have from God will continue in the future. We are constantly giving thanks for something that is not of our own making, a newness that we can never imagine, yet that which transforms our lives.
This is what we have when we listen to the story of Israel in the Old Testament, and the story of Jesus in the New Testament. We are always as if on the eve of the coming of the Son of Man, knowing that he is with us now even in the Eucharist, but not knowing what it will be, and living constantly within this tension, so that every time we come to receive him in this Eucharist, we receive him as a truly new thing, not simply a pious cliché. What Isaiah is warning against, and what Abraham lives out is the knowledge that God remains God and that our deepest longing for God and the reality of God itself are so immeasurably different, and they can only come together through grace. Otherwise, we would be alone, with void and anxiety that destroy our humanity.
Here, we stand as a community of love and worship held in response to the unexpected coming of unconditional love among us. And we can only come to see this love’s newness, if we acknowledge that we are indeed fallen human beings and therefore have an urge to idolatry. Our liturgy sets before us the richness of our belonging with beautiful hymns and actions, as we express our longing to be loved, judged and accepted. But, in another aspect, our liturgy is also pushing us back into the experience of Israel’s struggle with idolatry, showing the danger of religious belonging, when it becomes simply another alibi for self-reflection.
Here at St. Paul’s, having the innovative option of a labyrinth for contemplation is important, in as much as it is a way to remind some of the surprising ways in which God may come to us, pulling people back to the Christian story and the Church, whilst keeping those of us in the Church away from claiming idolatrous religious belonging to the community. Everything we use to worship him speaks of God, but nothing that we use reflects God at all. This is the ambiguity of our religious belonging. We are here to look for mystery, grace and freedom; but we do so in the unexpected fleshly human face of Jesus, the real new event in history. In that human face, our hunger is met, and we are renewed and our desire is fulfilled, but only in so far as we let God be God, who surprises us in the way he comes to us and the way he will come to us in the future.
Posted by stpauls on August 1, 2010 under Sermons |
[This sermon was written and delivered by The Reverend Dr. Yazeed Said on August 1, 2010, Tenth Sunday after Pentecost.]
I am aware that some of you are joining today the Pride Parade to create greater awareness that St. Paul’s is a place with an open door to all people. It is a place of prayer for all. And I suppose it is allowable on this day to say that this is a place where we pray, in the language of the old Book of Common Prayer, for “all sorts and conditions of men.” There are no particular patrons more privileged than others here, and if any man violates our grounds, he will be faced with the penalty of me baptising them (a joke). Such was the call of the Apostles in the first century, to baptize all people. And, ladies and gentlemen, if I cannot go back to the days of the Apostles, how can I call myself Conservative? But, the invitation to all in this place is also a bit of a loaded invitation. For, this is a place to seek prayer and holiness as the only way to find their true humanity. We tell all people to come and pray, come and learn what it means to be truly human that is only possible in a life with God.
And indeed, holiness is our call always, as the gospel of today is reminding us that we would be fools if we were not rich for God. In the parable today, the rich man worries that his work is a matter essentially of accomplishing and achieving more and more; how odd for him, when he comes to realize that he is not in control at the end of the day. When he has finished all he wanted to do, he has lost it. For the rich man, business is too familiar, and the plan is enthusiastically accomplished. But, his failure is in not letting the vision of God dominate the whole of his horizon.
There are also all sorts and conditions of men who are able to read and to know all the words in a book, but never quite know what the story is really all about. And there have been all sorts of Christians in the past who were very confident in what we they did and proclaimed, like the Catholics in the late Middle Ages, and the nineteenth century English Church. And today we have groups whom we call Fundamentalists. But, what about us clergy today, who get too worried about all the business of Church, and seek to make sure everything is running smoothly and perfectly, and suddenly we realise that we have been running around an empty hole? All have been confident that what they do is truly sharing God’s grace. They can be very impressive styles of leadership from a position of achievement. But, they have been going round an empty hole, because they have failed to keep God as the centre of their horizon, and relax for a change. Similarly, there are also Christians who are busy figuring out who is in and who is out (and for many, the gay community is not one of those who are in of course), people who are busy figuring who is all right and who is not, and those too have been running around an empty hole, and they too have not had their vision centred on God. For, if God is important, then everyone is important. Some seem to think that if God is important no one is important.
The amazing chapter from Hosea this morning stands as a corrective to this sort of attitude. God is loving and accepting of Israel despite its sins. God appears in Hosea like the undignified father rushing to meet his prodigal son, the one without dignity and without defence in the face of Christ crucified. And yet, we all, including those of us who call ourselves liberal or conservative, are busy defending our way of understanding God. We forget that God is less self-protected than ourselves. And what about the breakdown of order in the society around us, when we see so many broken lives and homeless lives, the real poor, the real marginalized who make us think about the fragility of our picture of ourselves as a liberal tolerant and settled society. We need to be reminded, and the reminding can be harsh at times, that our ideals and achievements in this so-called “liberal tolerant society” are breakable and fragile too, and the real poor around us are not simply those who are characterized through their sexuality, but whole human beings of all sorts and conditions.
The Church needs to wake up and work indeed, but not as we have been managing thus far, not by fulfilling controllable requirements that will succeed, but by giving up our sense of worry and anxiety, and struggling to keep the doors open and the community alive in God. And this open door is about seeking what Paul in Colossians today calls, the things that are above, where Christ is. If Jesus is the presence of God’s promise in our world, and if we, through our Baptism, share the same calling as Jesus, seeing in his light and with his eyes, then we need to remember that we are in “heaven” in the middle of the world’s life; we are given a share in God’s perspective on things, so that loving faithfulness may be made real and effective here and now. And second, this means that the way we relate to others and to things around us is through these eyes of heavenly hope and love and trust. It is as if they are part of the new heaven and new earth in which God’s purposes have been brought to completion. And this is not about a smooth program of religious achievements, but about keeping our eyes on God’s vulnerable openness to all of creation, seeing the vision of Christ above, the lamb who was slaughtered, and who meets us here at the altar; and this vision of God in the insulted face of Jesus should make us a bit more relaxed about our eagerness to tidy up the work of God and protect everything that we think is good and right.
Let us pray that we all, male or female, Greek or Jew, straight or gay, may come to the knowledge of this glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ and work for the transformation of our and every body’s lives around us and not be stuck with who and what we are as if that is what contains all goodness alone. Let us seek the things that are above.
Posted by stpauls on July 25, 2010 under Sermons |
[This sermon was written and delivered by The Reverend Dr. Yazeed Said on July 25, 2010, Ninth Sunday after Pentecost.]
Both of our first two readings reflect some sense of struggle and conflict, but also a word of hope. In Hosea, God is struggling with the unfaithful house of Israel. And it seems it is possible, just about, that God could be good enough to spare the house of Judah. Yet, at the end of the reading, we still have this verse in which we are told: “In the place where it was said to them, ‘You are not my people,’ it shall be said to them, ‘Children of the living God.’” This anticipates the amazing verse later in Hosea 11: 8-9: “how can I give you up, Ephraim? How can I hand you over, O Israel?…my heart recoils within me; my compassion grows warm and tender…For I am God and no mortal, the Holy One in your midst, and I will not come in wrath.” God is the way he is by giving away, forgiving, and loving, not by clinging and defending.
Paul’s struggling in Colossians is different: Here is the call to the Church to stay “rooted and built up in Christ and established in the faith…. see to it that no one takes you captive through philosophy and empty deceit… for in Christ you have come to fullness.” Paul is at pains proclaiming that Christ is not someone who simply did spectacularly well in the past. He is the one “in whom the fullness of deity dwells bodily.” Paul speaks of Jesus as the one who is opened to the horizon of God’s own nature. In him, we are renewed. In him, we were buried in baptism. In him, we are forgiven. In him, we have come to fullness of life.
So as always, listening to the story of God and his dealing with us in the Bible is a time when the questions are turned round upon us to put to us the basic questions of conversion (even if we do not call ourselves Evangelical with a capital E): “What is the form in which you think of yourself?” You may understand yourself as someone who retains their security and freedom. You have the liberty to establish yourselves freely and fence around your self so that you have everything you need, well anchored in secure fences. Yet, the Bible shares with us the story, both in Old and New Testaments, of one who does not cling to defence, but has risked his life into our hands, and what a risk that was! Reflecting how good human beings are; and despite it all he has forgiven us for it. Which is the way that you and I want to choose?
When we come to prayer, as we do now, we are defining ourselves differently. We pray, simply because we acknowledge that we are in need. The legions of people around who do not pray, are simply saying: we are not in need. We come to pray, because we have taken the risk of putting our lives in the hands of the living God. We have come to empty ourselves like Jesus has done, and make room for God.
The disciples come to Jesus asking: “Lord teach us to pray.” We should be glad to know that this is not just a modern question! And the bottom line is that to pray is about growing into the humanity that Christ shows us. And so, just as Jesus calls God “Father,” we too, are called to stand where Jesus is, and learn that we are daughters and sons of God. The implications of Paul’s words in Colossians is simply that Jesus made it possible for us to talk to God in a different way. In other letters, like in Romans 8 and Galatians 4, Paul says that it is the Spirit that makes us call God “Abba, Father.” So to pray “Our Father” is simply to allow the Spirit pray in us, and to let the prayer of Jesus be our prayer. “Our Father” expresses that clearly. We begin where Jesus stands and pray what Jesus prays. Everything that we say, when we acknowledge that God is Father, reflects our willingness to see the world as transparent to God: “May your kingdom come, your will be done.” May what God wants shine through in our world and shape what we are called to be. Only after that, do we go on asking for what we need. We need sustenance, daily bread, mercy and forgiveness; we ask to be steered away from the tests we are not strong enough to bear.
And when we come to pray and acknowledge our need and dependence on God, we are not simply embarrassing ourselves as many think in our society who do not pray. Rather, in acknowledging that we are not self-sufficient, we are standing in a place of dignity. Failure does not belong to those who pray, but to those who think that they are self-sufficient. Prayer, therefore, shows the arrogance of those who think that they are not in need, and presents to us the treasure that the needy fully possess. And this treasure is something that we receive as part of our dignity not only in creation, but also in the active life of our relationship with one another: the father to his son, as Jesus says in the gospel today; we to our neighbours, friends, and even strangers around us. Such is the dignity that we have received, to the extent that we cannot keep it to ourselves, and cannot preserve it at the expense of others. It is rather a reminder that we remain vulnerable people, and to pray the prayer of Jesus is also to remind ourselves of how we so often destructively defend ourselves against others. How can we ask for bread when we think too highly of our self-righteousness? How can we ask for forgiveness, when we do not forgive others?
We shall in a moment pray Jesus’ prayer, as we literally stand where Jesus stands with us at the altar, and in his presence. He invites us all. There is no room for grudges in him. But, his generous invitation to all of us is a bit of a loaded invitation. It makes us ask ourselves: “Who do we really trust? Ourselves, or God? Who do we want to be? People full of the life in abundance in God? Or grudging people worried all the time to defend ourselves, thinking that we are safe and secure on our own.” In fact, we are too busy defending ourselves, to the extent that we forget to live on our soil, the soil that we are so eager to defend. Our prayer anchored in the crucified and risen Christ is our only security, reflecting our pilgrimage from glory to glory, trusting in God’s victory over all that hurts his world. We are reclaimed and recreated every time we stand at the altar.
As Paul reminds us: “Do not let anyone disqualify you, insisting on self-abasement and worship of angels, dwelling on visions, puffed up without cause by a human way of thinking, and not holding fast to the head, from whom the whole body, nourished and held together by its ligaments and sinews, grows with a growth that is from God.” We came to be nourished and held by him at the altar.
Posted by stpauls on July 18, 2010 under Sermons |
[This sermon was written and delivered by The Reverend Dr. Yazeed Said on July 18, 2010, Eighth Sunday after Pentecost.]
This morning’s second reading from the letter to the Colossians gives the boldest and most unambiguous statement about what’s new and different about Jesus. Jesus is the one “in whom all fullness of the Godhead dwells bodily.” “You were once estranged,” says Paul to the Church in Colossae. But, now you are reconciled. And this reconciliation was not done by mere information sent to you. It was achieved at a cost, the cost of the cross in him who is “the image of the invisible God, the first born of all creation.” When all has been said and done by the Prophets, what appears to be at stake is that God is also interested in a personal relationship, which becomes manifest in Jesus. To know God really is a matter of relationship, a covenant between us and God: “he has now reconciled in his fleshly body through death, so as to present you holy and blameless and irreproachable before him, provided that you continue securely established and steadfast in the faith, without shifting from the hope promised by the gospel that you heard, which has been proclaimed to every creature under heaven.”
“Jesus is the first born of all creation,” says Paul. Yet, the eternal Son of God is not contained by the universe. He is the life giving principle of all reality (”in him was life,” said St. John’s gospel, 1:4). In other words, Paul is presenting to us in clear terms the paradox of the Christian faith. In the limited human life of Jesus in history, divine fullness is alive. In that little space of the babe of Bethlehem, there is fullness of life, the one “who fills all in all,” as Paul again said. He has reconciled all things to God by the cross we are reminded. The body that was tucked in the tomb was also God’s life. And before we respond with modern suspicion about the contradictory nature of such claims, let us remind ourselves that God remains totally unlike anything we can think about, totally different from the processes of human calculation, and this means that God can (not cannot be) be in relationship with us in a human life and death without ceasing to be God either. And what this means is that God’s way with us is not to overwhelm us with distant unapproachable majesty. Rather he lives his life in our limited space whilst still remaining the unimaginable God. That is how majestic he is. He speaks to us quiet words that call us to faith. His is a mellifluous Presence (I could not resist the use of the word mellifluous).
This is “the mystery that has been hidden throughout the ages and generations but has now been revealed to his saints,” says St. Paul, adding that “God chose to make known how great…are the riches of the glory of this mystery, which is Christ in you, the hope of glory.” And the question that we have for us today is the question: “how do we get to experience the riches of the glory of this mystery? How do we get to know the transformative power of God in our lives in practical terms? And I think the answer begins with being, like God, very quiet. Stand still in order to allow him some room in our busy life. As we are faced with the fullness of God in the babe of Bethlehem, the tired wanderer of Galilee, the body on the cross, we have to look at ourselves hard and ask what it is that makes us clumsy and massive to go into the quiet small space where we meet God in Jesus Christ. For Amos the Prophet in our first reading, it is the wealth of the greedy and their constant search for security against the needs of the poor in the land. But, it may be our images of ourselves as more virtuous, or more correct and more godly than others, as is the case with Martha in the Gospel today.
When I read such texts, I often feel like they written yesterday. For our world and our Church are full of people, like us, who have puffed-up ideas, be they conservative or liberal, our pictures of ourselves and claims that what we believe is truer than others does make room to others and push God away. We do need to remember what Christ says to Martha. She is troubled with the load of things she needs to do, and it is as if Jesus is saying you need to shed your great load of anxiety and fear, and he might round the argument against us who live in the comfortable West: you need to shed the great load of your arrogant self-reliance, your noisy fear of enemies. Things have become so familiar and so boring for you here in the West. It is time for you to hear some strangers. It is time for you to see the need of the strangers around you, and find your good in their good, pursue justice and abandon your fantasies of controlling the world.
And when we have set all of this aside, we find that it is only at sitting at the feet of Jesus, that limited space, like Mary has done, that we will find room enough for all of us, when we will discover that sitting at the feet of Jesus in Galilee, or at the cross, we are in that small space, as Paul said to us today, presented as “holy and blameless and irreproachable before him,” sharing in the divine fullness of life and joy that God shares with us. Sitting at the feet of Jesus, we find the infinity of mercy and love. We do not need to strain our eyes to see a distant God; but a God whose fullness dwells in the quiet little spaces, which we are not small and simple enough to enter.
Posted by stpauls on July 11, 2010 under Sermons |
[This sermon was written and delivered by The Reverend Dr. Yazeed Said on July 11, 2010, Seventh Sunday after Pentecost.]
“Love God and love your neighbour as yourself” is one of those texts used so often that it has almost become stale and abstract. It is a common text for us today; it was a common text for Jesus’ contemporaries as we heard, and it is a common text for people of other faiths. A few years ago, some Muslim leaders issued a call to Christian leaders in the world, using this text as what they called “a common word between you and us.”
Yet, who of us really loves God? And clergy are no better I hasten to assure you. My late father once said to me when he learned to his disapproval that I intended to seek ordination in the Church: “priests, because they love no one, they imagine that they love God.” In my innocence at the time, I went and reported the matter to my parish priest, and said to him: “Do you know of anyone who is like this?” Desperately, he replied: “Yes, myself.” He was joking, I think.
After all what is loving God apart from following the law, doing the right things, having the right disposition, avoiding doing sinful things etc etc etc…? If that is what loving God is, then most of us don’t. And if we seek to confess this in public, everybody might be happy except for ourselves, miserable sinners. For the lawyer who comes to Jesus, love of God is a matter of law, loyal following, keeping within the rules. Any different personal interpretation will not fit his profession, indeed might be considered a blasphemy. You cannot love God in that sort of way, as if it is about the greedy possessive human love. Love of God for this lawyer is an attitude and not a feeling. We cannot expect it to make any difference in our lives.
In confronting the question with this lawyer, Jesus typically does not give back straightforward answers. He does not say, “Oh yeah, God is a good man; you should love him.” He gives a story that creates further questions, reflecting on how love of God and love of neighbour are so intrinsically united and cannot be thought of separately. Something more can be learned from our second reading today. Paul is writing to the Church in Colossae, which was established as we heard by a Colossian man called Epaphras, who from the letter to Philemon we learn was a prisoner with Paul in Rome. Paul encourages the Church there to persevere in the face of certain heresies. He tells them: “Epaphras has made known to us your love in the Spirit,” and then prays that they may lead lives worthy of the Lord fully pleasing to him, “as you bear fruit in every good work and as you grow in the knowledge of God.”
So after all, being faithful to God DOES mean some kind of transformation, some kind of change, some kind of life worthy of the Lord, not just simply saying you are okay just as you are. And that comes as a result of our love of God. In other words, our call to obedience is not simply doing the right things with some sort of abstract general devotion to God. It is the heart’s love and offering to God, which can only be expressed in minute details to everything that we do as we become aware of that prior love of God. And this is not simply a matter of abstract choice, which does not affect our feelings. Our choice of doing this comes because we like it. Being creatures, we cannot avoid being moved by what we are attracted to. We may talk about faith and love for hours, but the basic truth is that we are not moved towards God except by means of his attractiveness.
So Paul goes on to say:
“May you be made strong with all the strength that comes from his glorious power, and may you be prepared to endure everything with patience, while joyfully giving thanks to the Father, who has enabled you to share in the inheritance of the saints in light.”
We love God, simply because we like what we see in him. We do not say only God is good, but also God is beautiful. He is utterly worthwhile, deserving my whole life, and even my death for the confession of his name. If this choice does not involve our desire and gives us pleasure, it is no choice at all, and we will not solve it by giving lectures about faith. What God wishes for us, does for us, as Paul explains, is relevant to our fulfilment. It is what we seek and desire, but cannot achieve on our own. There is also an arrogant matter indeed about the lawyer who meets Jesus assuming that he learned the law, and that love of God and neighbour is all about this pure loyalty. If we say we love God with no thought or effects in the way we behave with our neighbours, or feelings, are we not also suggesting that we do not need God? For we are saying that we do not need rewards except for being told that our motives our pure. Whether we like it or not, love cannot be separated from acknowledging that we are dependent human beings, that we need to find in another, human or divine, human and divine, the happiness and fulfilment we cannot find in ourselves. We are made by an “other,” remember.
And how does Jesus love the Father’s will? Not in fulfilling abstract commands of a dictator, but, in every situation and in every person that comes to him, and responding with wholeness of heart. The love of Jesus to his father is in seeing the need of the leper or the blind man, and today he tells the lawyer, by attending to the need of the stranger on the road between Jerusalem and Jericho. This is the love of God. It is seeing the situation, seeing the call of the father’s will in it and being drawn into response. The same applies to Amos who stands prophesying against the corruptions of his own people. “I am no prophet”, says Amos “or a prophet’s son; but I am a herdsman, and a dresser of sycamore trees.” Prophets arise, when there is a real, hungry openness for the truth, and the healing power of God, when there is a real hunger for the love of God.
The question for us here is where are the prophets in this land today? When I walk down the road, and spend half an hour on the street outside, I cannot see that there is love of neighbour all that often. And that is because there is no love of God. Perhaps things have to be really dark enough before the human hunger for God can be felt. A great deal of society outside is ready to forget the real problems that arise. There is a loss of a sense of dignity and identity, which drives people into downward spirals and without the company of trustworthy people the spirals intensify, and people begin to feel excluded and lost. Tackling the many problems that people face does not only imply providing them with short-term solutions; but, it is more about building the kind of capacity that equips people to regain control of their lives and see how life becomes worthwhile when we find how worthwhile God is. We stand here today to say here we have more than a prophet, who has satisfied all our hungers, in whom as Paul said “we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins.” Let our gaze be upon his beauty, and come let us receive him.
Posted by stpauls on July 4, 2010 under Sermons |
“I will seek the lost, and I will bring back the strayed, and I will bind up the injured, and I will strengthen the weak, but the fat and the strong I will destroy. I will feed them with justice” (Ezekiel 34: 16). So you better not be fat or strong.
I spent a good fair amount of visits as you may recall to the United States, trying to remind the Americans that Christianity is a late comer to these shores, and that Palestinian Christianity is where it all began; that is where I come of course. (Those of you who do not know me would have figured that out from my accent.) Especially in Texas, I had on a couple of occasions to remind some Bible-belt folks that we did not receive the Christian faith in Palestine from Dallas, and that Jesus was born in Bethlehem – remember that! On several occasions, I thought secretly to myself: there is no point in converting the Americans, if one can help it. But, now, here I am in Vancouver, celebrating Peter and Paul your patron, but suspecting that the hard work is again being done by someone else – albeit by an Americanized German: Fr. Markus Dünzkofer. I presume that you have not forgotten him.
The history of this great church, where plenty of hard work is unmistakably being done now is unmistakably an intriguing part of the beginnings of the Church in this relatively recent city of Vancouver. Do help yourselves to some brochures in the back and have a little read. Unlike the Church in England, which goes back a fair bit further in time, you did not have the pleasure and the excitement of burning heretics, of evil priests and bishops, the remarriage of divorcees, and the excommunication of charioteers, and such like remote issues. You have the more sober remembrance of the arrival of the Canadian Pacific Railway and their workers with some beginnings in Yaletown and later movement to the newly developed West End. The Church became a friendly place for many around, and a centre for the community on different levels.
A time came, however, when you thought that the Christian civilization of this community was coming to an end with the demographic changes around, and the movement of communities especially those well established families and their no-longer existing lovely homes, which were replaced with high rises. You thought the barbarian atheists were on their way in and nothing stood between the Church’s culture and disaster. But, few would doubt that there was a feeling of hope and a new beginning with the great incumbency of Fr. David Crawley, who made it clear that the Church cannot close the doors that Christ has opened widely to all, inviting the community around to come and be part of this great witness to the gospel’s stability in the midst of the uncertainties of this age.
There is nothing more apt to be celebrated today as we recall the two apostles Peter and Paul, two very different apostles, with different missions, who are both needed to fulfil the mission. “Feed my sheep,” said Jesus to Peter. He did not say argue with my sheep about the correct theological version. Feed my sheep. My sheep hunger for the truth, they hunger for a word of trust, and hope and love. Do not argue just get on with it.
But, Peter here is paying off for his threefold denial earlier, giving his threefold affirming of his love to Jesus. Like Peter, the Church that is us constantly lives between denial of Jesus and love of Jesus. We all chose with whom we belong. Surely with those whom we consider worthy, pure and respectable. We can say I have tried to be generous and tolerant to the unfortunate: to the whores and collaborators, the Jews, the Muslims, the blacks, the homosexuals and the handicapped, the mass of people who do not have my liberty. I am nice to them, and I deplore prejudice. So don’t embarrass me, really. Remember I am not one of them, and I cannot be held responsible for the bad taste of their suffering. You must remember that they haven’t had our advantages, and they are bound to be a little shrill. But, you and I can disagree in a civilised way. I am one of you, really; I am not with Jesus. The torchlight in Pilate’s court is making me sweat. I do not really know the man.
And then we have Paul, who in today’s letter to Timothy is exhorting his hearer to proclaim the message and do the work of an evangelist. But, he also reminds him that the Church, as with Peter, is the place where failure and sin and utter unpredictability is to be found. It is not the gathering of the righteous, but sinners, who have itching ears (check if your ears are itching), and who accumulate for themselves teachers to suit their own desires. God does not promise that we shall be protected from events and disasters, and that we shall be in control. But, he tells us that his promise and presence will remain untouched by events. And we have to learn this day by day, century by century. It is a story of cross and resurrection, which the apostles had to carry. We cannot tell how human sin will interrupt the work of God, because God does not force his gospel on anyone. But, equally we cannot tell when and how resurrection comes. In the darkness of failure, the cross is planed; he shares the dark and carries the cost. There is always a divine action working away. So Paul says: “be sober, endure suffering, carry out your ministry fully.” We do not know when the light will come, but we know that darkness will never extinguish it.
To look at the Church’s past, including this Church’s past, is never to look at a golden age, but to see this truth of the unending renewal with which comes the unending presence of the crucified and risen Lord. So when the Church flourishes, we give thanks. When our church struggles, we praise God for his faithfulness to us in our failure. And when, as often, we see both together, we know that our heart must be with God, who is greater than our success or our failure, who is simply there, given to us in Christ and the Holy Spirit.
Anglicans, not least in this diocese, are perplexed about mixed messages – messages of growth and new initiatives; but, also fears of division, not knowing where to look for unity. But, if we keep our gaze on God’s fidelity, a fidelity amply shown in the history we celebrate in this Church, we shall have something to say that is far more than our story, our successes, or our failures. We are commanded to speak of a God who restores his sheep as we heard in Ezekiel. We have no choice but to announce this, as Fr. Crawly and others have done. Peter meets the risen Christ, and, as we say at the Easter Vigil: In his hands, are all times and ages: in his hand, our past, present and future. He restores all things. Come let us receive him. Amen.
