Sermons

Readings

Old Testament – Genesis 1:1–25

In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth, the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep, while a wind from God swept over the face of the waters. Then God said, ‘Let there be light’; and there was light. And God saw that the light was good; and God separated the light from the darkness. God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And there was evening and there was morning, the first day.

And God said, ‘Let there be a dome in the midst of the waters, and let it separate the waters from the waters.’ So God made the dome and separated the waters that were under the dome from the waters that were above the dome. And it was so. God called the dome Sky. And there was evening and there was morning, the second day.

And God said, ‘Let the waters under the sky be gathered together into one place, and let the dry land appear.’ And it was so. God called the dry land Earth, and the waters that were gathered together he called Seas. And God saw that it was good.

Then God said, ‘Let the earth put forth vegetation: plants yielding seed, and fruit trees of every kind on earth that bear fruit with the seed in it.’ And it was so. The earth brought forth vegetation: plants yielding seed of every kind, and trees of every kind bearing fruit with the seed in it. And God saw that it was good. And there was evening and there was morning, the third day.

And God said, ‘Let there be lights in the dome of the sky to separate the day from the night; and let them be for signs and for seasons and for days and years, and let them be lights in the dome of the sky to give light upon the earth.’ And it was so. God made the two great lights—the greater light to rule the day and the lesser light to rule the night—and the stars. God set them in the dome of the sky to give light upon the earth, to rule over the day and over the night, and to separate the light from the darkness. And God saw that it was good. And there was evening and there was morning, the fourth day.

And God said, ‘Let the waters bring forth swarms of living creatures, and let birds fly above the earth across the dome of the sky.’ So God created the great sea monsters and every living creature that moves, of every kind, with which the waters swarm, and every winged bird of every kind. And God saw that it was good. God blessed them, saying, ‘Be fruitful and multiply and fill the waters in the seas, and let birds multiply on the earth.’ And there was evening and there was morning, the fifth day.

And God said, ‘Let the earth bring forth living creatures of every kind: cattle and creeping things and wild animals of the earth of every kind.’ And it was so. God made the wild animals of the earth of every kind, and the cattle of every kind, and everything that creeps upon the ground of every kind. And God saw that it was good.

Epistle – Revelation 3:14–22

‘And to the angel of the church in Laodicea write: The words of the Amen, the faithful and true witness, the origin of God’s creation: ‘I know your works; you are neither cold nor hot. I wish that you were either cold or hot. So, because you are lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I am about to spit you out of my mouth. For you say, “I am rich, I have prospered, and I need nothing.” You do not realize that you are wretched, pitiable, poor, blind, and naked. Therefore I counsel you to buy from me gold refined by fire so that you may be rich; and white robes to clothe you and to keep the shame of your nakedness from being seen; and salve to anoint your eyes so that you may see. I reprove and discipline those whom I love. Be earnest, therefore, and repent. Listen! I am standing at the door, knocking; if you hear my voice and open the door, I will come in to you and eat with you, and you with me. To the one who conquers I will give a place with me on my throne, just as I myself conquered and sat down with my Father on his throne. Let anyone who has an ear listen to what the Spirit is saying to the churches.’

Gospel – John 1:1–5

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being. What has come into being in him was life, and the life was the light of all people. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it.

Sunday, Creationtide 1

We have a new liturgy today – all that means is that we have a new set of words for worship. The pattern remains the same, but our focus is just a bit different, because we have turned to Creation as the symbol through which we understand God approaches us.

As befits the beginning of such a season, our lessons this morning deal with the beginnings of the world. We have the creation story from Genesis. And we have heard from the first chapter of the gospel of St John. However, we have heard from St John the Divine’s book of Revelations as well.

The verse through which all of my thoughts this morning make their way is –

to the angel of the church in Laodicea write: The words of the Amen, the faithful and true witness, the origin of God’s creation

This verse stands everything we know on its head. The two creation stories we read have to be reconceived through “The Amen” which is “the origin of God’s creation”.

What do I mean by that? Well, I am not too sure. So let’s try to explore this together.

What is creation? Normally, we say that creation is everything around us, the world and everything that is in or on the earth, the skies and the sun and the stars, just as the Genesis reading says. The scientists among us would give a different story, theirs would be “the Big Bang”. The liberal theologians would say that the Genesis story needs to be interpreted in a way that leads to the very truth that the gospel reading exposes,

All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being.

Whether this is factually or metaphorically true is to be debated, but I want to race to “The Amen” in our third reading which is ‘the origin of God’s creation’. But what is that Amen?

We all know that Amen is a Hebrew word which acts as a rousing affirmation of what has just been said – “So be it!” When the word ‘Amen’ is pronounced it announces a radically clear endorsement of a statement.

How can something which is a conclusion be an origin? How can The Amen be the beginning of everything? This is the paradox of creationtide. We are assembled concentrating on the world and we have already said, “so be it!” Like the whole book of the apocalypse of St John, there are puzzles galore when we look at our place in creation, when we realise just how intimately we are bound up in our environment. But Amen makes sense if we think of creation as the world in which we live and move and have our being, doesn’t it?

I like the German word “Umwelt” to understand environment. They mean the same, but if we parse the word we come up with two parts – “Welt” means the same as the English “world”, and “um” is a word that means “what surrounds”. But I have always had the feeling that “um” is more than merely surrounding. It comes from reading the philosopher who speaks of the Umwelt, as being-in-the-world. This is being-there in a very vague but sensationally very specific way. We can be fully aware and authentic or we can be unconscious of our environment. We can either be a very aware human being or a rock, in tune with everything around us or just a lump without any care towards anything surrounding the space and time we inhabit.

The philosopher asks us to make demands of ourselves, in a way a rock would never do. And so I can understand how The Amen can be “the origin of God’s creation.”

We all know creation is not something like that stone we don’t want to be. Creation is that mysterious “Umwelt” which we enter when we are self-aware, when we are “mindful” to use a very recent trope to make sense of creation.

We need to be aware of creation today just as much as people were aware of the environment millennia ago. When Jesus walked the earth, he was so much more aware of his environment. He spoke in parables and metaphors. His language was full of symbols. And we are only now just catching up with his self awareness. He spoke about the fields and the people in ways that opened up meaning for everyone.

His miracles even called into question the laws of physics in order to serve the purpose of ushering in the Kingdom of God. Amen, we say to that, don’t we? Doesn’t it make sense that The Amen is the origin of God’s creation? We make that radically clear endorsement of ourselves when we proclaim “Let there be …” just like Genesis tells us how God created.

But hold on – creation is not something finite and finished, something completed for all time, is it? Creation is process. And the philosopher has a whole system of process as well. So creation is a living nexus of relationships. And if we follow the thinking of the philosopher, we have to be conscious of that world in which we have been thrown.

Since we find ourselves here in life, with all the complexities entailed, there is moral duty thrust upon us, never mind the care we need to use. Ethics is a way of being in the world. This philosophical enterprise of judging whether we have acted for the best is part and parcel of the complexities of living.

Creation is that process of living with, caring for, being within, everything around us, whether stones or people just like us. Creation is about our moral stance in the world. The Amen demands that of us. The Amen which radically affirms is most definitely the origin.

To call upon the philosopher again just briefly – I am sure you have heard that there are four causes, but I only want to introduce two here today, the first cause and the final cause. These causes relate to how we understand anything, the first means how something comes to be and the final cause means how something comes to complete fruition, its end-point, its, as the French would say, “raison d’etre”. Creation is about these two causes, isn’t it?

Creation is not something done once for all as we normally understand the Genesis story. Creation is not just this stone which seems to have nothing more than its being in itself. Creation is the for something else. Creation is what human being is all about. Homo faciens, the tool-maker, is the encapsulation of creation. There is a purpose to that stone when we are there with it, when we understand our environment.

Human being has to be there, involved, and at one. This is a moral being in the world, not just a physical attendance. There has to be intention to life and there it gets “complicated”. Creation is the where of complexities which the philosopher is so intent on getting to the bottom of, when we say, “We knew that already.” That “So be it!” acknowledges our unconscious understanding of what we come to know about the story we already knew. That may be how to get to grips with the paradox of The Amen as the origin of God’s creation.

Amen, Amen, and yet again I say, Amen.

Collect

O God, the protector of all who trust in you, without whom nothing is strong, nothing is holy: increase and multiply upon us your mercy; that with you as our ruler and guide we may so pass through things temporal that we lose not our hold on things eternal; grant this, heavenly Father, for our Lord Jesus Christ’s sake, who is alive and reigns with you, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever.

or

Gracious Father, by the obedience of Jesus you brought salvation to our wayward world: draw us into harmony with your will, that we may find all things restored in him, our Saviour Jesus Christ.

Post Communion

Eternal God, comfort of the afflicted and healer of the broken, you have fed us at the table of life and hope: teach us the ways of gentleness and peace, that all the world may acknowledge the kingdom of your Son Jesus Christ our Lord.

Readings

Old Testament – Amos 7.7–17

This is what he showed me: the Lord was standing beside a wall built with a plumb-line, with a plumb-line in his hand. And the Lord said to me, ‘Amos, what do you see?’ And I said, ‘A plumb-line.’ Then the Lord said,

‘See, I am setting a plumb-line

in the midst of my people Israel;

I will never again pass them by;

the high places of Isaac shall be made desolate,

and the sanctuaries of Israel shall be laid waste,

and I will rise against the house of Jeroboam with the sword.’

Then Amaziah, the priest of Bethel, sent to King Jeroboam of Israel, saying, ‘Amos has conspired against you in the very centre of the house of Israel; the land is not able to bear all his words. For thus Amos has said,

“Jeroboam shall die by the sword,

   and Israel must go into exile

   away from his land.” ’

And Amaziah said to Amos, ‘O seer, go, flee away to the land of Judah, earn your bread there, and prophesy there; but never again prophesy at Bethel, for it is the king’s sanctuary, and it is a temple of the kingdom.’

Then Amos answered Amaziah, ‘I am no prophet, nor a prophet’s son; but I am a herdsman, and a dresser of sycomore trees, and the Lord took me from following the flock, and the Lord said to me, “Go, prophesy to my people Israel.”

‘Now therefore hear the word of the Lord.

You say, “Do not prophesy against Israel,

and do not preach against the house of Isaac.”

Therefore, thus says the Lord:

“Your wife shall become a prostitute in the city,

and your sons and your daughters shall fall by the sword,

and your land shall be parcelled out by line;

you yourself shall die in an unclean land,

and Israel shall surely go into exile away from its land.” ’

Psalm 82

1    God has taken his stand in the council of heaven; ♦
in the midst of the gods he gives judgement:

2    ‘How long will you judge unjustly ♦
and show such favour to the wicked?

3    ‘You were to judge the weak and the orphan; ♦
defend the right of the humble and needy;

4    ‘Rescue the weak and the poor; ♦
deliver them from the hand of the wicked.

5    ‘They have no knowledge or wisdom; they walk on still in darkness: ♦
all the foundations of the earth are shaken.

6    ‘Therefore I say that though you are gods ♦
and all of you children of the Most High,

7    ‘Nevertheless, you shall die like mortals ♦
and fall like one of their princes.’

8    Arise, O God and judge the earth, ♦
for it is you that shall take all nations for your possession.

Epistle – Colossians 1.1–14

Paul, an apostle of Christ Jesus by the will of God, and Timothy our brother. To the saints and faithful brothers and sisters in Christ in Colossae. Grace to you and peace from God our Father.

In our prayers for you we always thank God, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, for we have heard of your faith in Christ Jesus and of the love that you have for all the saints, because of the hope laid up for you in heaven. You have heard of this hope before in the word of the truth, the gospel that has come to you. Just as it is bearing fruit and growing in the whole world, so it has been bearing fruit among yourselves from the day you heard it and truly comprehended the grace of God. This you learned from Epaphras, our beloved fellow-servant. He is a faithful minister of Christ on your behalf, and he has made known to us your love in the Spirit.

For this reason, since the day we heard it, we have not ceased praying for you and asking that you may be filled with the knowledge of God’s will in all spiritual wisdom and understanding, so that you 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. 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 the light. He has rescued us from the power of darkness and transferred us into the kingdom of his beloved Son, in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins.

Gospel – Luke 10.25–37

A lawyer stood up to test Jesus. ‘Teacher,’ he said, ‘what must I do to inherit eternal life?’ He said to him, ‘What is written in the law? What do you read there?’ He answered, ‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength, and with all your mind; and your neighbour as yourself.’ And he said to him, ‘You have given the right answer; do this, and you will live.’

But wanting to justify himself, he asked Jesus, ‘And who is my neighbour?’ Jesus replied, ‘A man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho, and fell into the hands of robbers, who stripped him, beat him, and went away, leaving him half dead. Now by chance a priest was going down that road; and when he saw him, he passed by on the other side. So likewise a Levite, when he came to the place and saw him, passed by on the other side. But a Samaritan while travelling came near him; and when he saw him, he was moved with pity. He went to him and bandaged his wounds, having poured oil and wine on them. Then he put him on his own animal, brought him to an inn, and took care of him. The next day he took out two denarii, gave them to the innkeeper, and said, “Take care of him; and when I come back, I will repay you whatever more you spend.”

‘Which of these three, do you think, was a neighbour to the man who fell into the hands of the robbers?’ He said, ‘The one who showed him mercy.’ Jesus said to him, ‘Go and do likewise.’

Sermon on Sunday, Trinity 4

Who has not heard of the Good Samaritan? This parable from the Gospel of Luke is one that is known throughout the world. It raises all those delicate matters of social attitudes and philosophical differences of opinion. It highlights the animosity of groups, one against the other – those “normal” prejudices communities hold towards strangers (whatever that strange is: color, smell, straight, crooked). Samaritans and Jews were at odds with each other – it was deep-seated, nothing trivial, essentially it was at the heart of Judaism. They would have nothing to do with each other. You could say it was a hatred. This attitude sullied any relationship between the two communities, and between individuals.

Don’t we all act with a certain bias? I get upset with my brother and so I may not behave with unfettered affection for him. With others, I may just ignore something which should have called forth an act of kindness. This  brings to mind last week’s reading, doesn’t it? I may not have borne my neighbour’s burden as required by the law of Christ. Paul’s exhortation and Jesus’ parable speak to the same point. Our moral compass must point to the care of the other person whoever it may be – and wherever we are.

The other person can be the bogey man of childhood stories, or the criminal from the news, or even politicians on the current affairs programs. That other person may just be someone I don’t know, or some acquaintance the cut of whose jib I may not like. It could be like the big-enders from “Gulliver’s Travels”, those people who eat eggs differently from me and mine. The divergence of behaviours can come from all sorts of sources, but they are at the heart of our fear of the other. I remember a science fiction story where the characters picked out sashes from a sack and had to behave as a pack with all the others who wore the same colour sash. Regularly the sashes were placed into the sack again and everyone delved in to choose their new team. It was completely random whose team you ended up on, but you had to play the part completely – to the death. This prejudice – the colour of the sash – could change each time one dipped his or her hand in the sack. Prejudice and bias does seem to be random.

That science fiction story puts all prejudice into perspective, I think. Our partiality is founded upon the specious. It may not be the colour of my sash, but the length of my beard or the after-shave I wear. – However, when I cannot bear another’s burden, something is wrong. In other words, I do not love as Christ commands. If something stands between me and an act of charity, that something is a prejudice which must be eradicated.

This is where soul-searching begins, when we realise there is something wrong, either in myself or in the world around me. How do we correct mistaken attitudes? I said that love must be the gauge by which we judge something. If something makes me act not out of love, there can be no order in the world in which I dwell. Love begins with compassion and its heat intensifies from the warmth of passion, Christ’s passion, the cross.

Let’s look a little more closely at the parable.

Jesus replied, ‘A man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho, and fell into the hands of robbers, who stripped him, beat him, and went away, leaving him half dead. … when the Samaritan saw him, he was moved with pity. He went to him and bandaged his wounds, having poured oil and wine on them. Then he put him on his own animal, brought him to an inn, and took care of him.

Hands play a big part in this story. A man fell into the hands of robbers and then was rescued by the hands-on care of someone that man would normally despise, someone who bathed his wounds and bandaged them, placed this nearly dead man on his beast and then even invested the equivalent of two days’ wages for his care and promised even more. Everything that happened is “at the hands” of people, people who would beat a man to death, a person who would bear that nearly dead man to a place of safety and then into the hands of a paid servant, an innkeeper. So I have to ask, “What do we allow our hand to do for others? What do our hands do for others?”

Whether it is the touch of kindness or the grasping of desire, heat is exchanged. When we clasp hands in the exchange of the peace, we feel it, don’t we? Everyone wonders why my hands are so cool – a warm heart, I say – but hands make us aware of the other’s reality because we feel their presence in the heat of their touch. None more so than when we hold our beloved in our arms – our partners, wives, husbands or children. When I touch my beloved, their warmth awakens me to their actual presence and, I hope, they become aware of me.

What happens when there is no warmth there? What is wrong with me when my touch is so very cold that the other person must remark about my cold hands? Is this a sign that there is something wrong with me? Do I really care for the other when they can shrink away from my cold hands?

These questions are not literal – they are asking something quite different from the words they use. The doctor’s stethoscope – always cold to the touch – does go to something quite different than what is happening on the surface. The doctor is listening for something invisible.

And so are we when we ask about the coldness of hands. We are rooting out something that should not be there – a prejudice of some sort. Something is wrong in our relation with the world because the warmth of love is missing. While I assure you that my heart is warm, you may wonder why my hand is so cold when I offer you the peace of the Lord. It is a painful reality for all of us when we wonder whether those cold hands actually reveal a warm heart. We all want to believe that love lies behind those our hands, don’t we? There is a doubt that must be winkled out and exposed as to what it is prejudice, and so we can recover that innocence which puts us right with the world.

Let’s look at it in another way. We have been experiencing high temperatures lately, when we feel those cool hands, when we shake each other’s hands, we should feel them as offering us respite from the heat. Those cool hands envelop us in a cool shadow on a warm day, like wings which cover us as a hen cares for her brood. We all know those images, don’t we?

I have been exercised lately by the earliest recorded saying in western philosophy, it is called the Anaximander fragment. There are two words which call into question just what philosophy is all about. Anaximander is quoted and ‘he says what he says “with [these] more poetic terms.”’ Since when does a philosopher speak poetically? Perhaps we need to go back to Anaximander and reassess just how we use language – that it encompasses meaning in so many ways. Then if we think about this parable of The Good Samaritan, perhaps we should speak with our hands more often, by offering the hand of friendship or a sign of the peace of the Lord. We need to handle everyone with care. Whether our hands are experienced as hot or cold, we should always extend to bear each other’s burdens.

Amen

Collect

Almighty God, you have broken the tyranny of sin and have sent the Spirit of your Son into our hearts whereby we call you Father: give us grace to dedicate our freedom to your service, that we and all creation may be brought to the glorious liberty of the children of God; through Jesus Christ your Son our Lord, who is alive and reigns with you, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever.

or

God our saviour, look on this wounded world in pity and in power; hold us fast to your promises of peace won for us by your Son, our Saviour Jesus Christ.

Post Communion

O God, whose beauty is beyond our imagining and whose power we cannot comprehend: show us your glory as far as we can grasp it, and shield us from knowing more than we can bear until we may look upon you without fear; through Jesus Christ our Saviour.

Readings

Old Testament – 2 Kings 5.1–14

Naaman, commander of the army of the king of Aram, was a great man and in high favour with his master, because by him the Lord had given victory to Aram. The man, though a mighty warrior, suffered from leprosy. Now the Arameans on one of their raids had taken a young girl captive from the land of Israel, and she served Naaman’s wife. She said to her mistress, ‘If only my lord were with the prophet who is in Samaria! He would cure him of his leprosy.’ So Naaman went in and told his lord just what the girl from the land of Israel had said. And the king of Aram said, ‘Go then, and I will send along a letter to the king of Israel.’

He went, taking with him ten talents of silver, six thousand shekels of gold, and ten sets of garments. He brought the letter to the king of Israel, which read, ‘When this letter reaches you, know that I have sent to you my servant Naaman, that you may cure him of his leprosy.’ When the king of Israel read the letter, he tore his clothes and said, ‘Am I God, to give death or life, that this man sends word to me to cure a man of his leprosy? Just look and see how he is trying to pick a quarrel with me.’

But when Elisha the man of God heard that the king of Israel had torn his clothes, he sent a message to the king, ‘Why have you torn your clothes? Let him come to me, that he may learn that there is a prophet in Israel.’ So Naaman came with his horses and chariots, and halted at the entrance of Elisha’s house. Elisha sent a messenger to him, saying, ‘Go, wash in the Jordan seven times, and your flesh shall be restored and you shall be clean.’ But Naaman became angry and went away, saying, ‘I thought that for me he would surely come out, and stand and call on the name of the Lord his God, and would wave his hand over the spot, and cure the leprosy! Are not Abana and Pharpar, the rivers of Damascus, better than all the waters of Israel? Could I not wash in them, and be clean?’ He turned and went away in a rage. But his servants approached and said to him, ‘Father, if the prophet had commanded you to do something difficult, would you not have done it? How much more, when all he said to you was, “Wash, and be clean”?’ So he went down and immersed himself seven times in the Jordan, according to the word of the man of God; his flesh was restored like the flesh of a young boy, and he was clean.

Psalm

1    I will exalt you, O Lord, because you have raised me up ♦
and have not let my foes triumph over me.

2    O Lord my God, I cried out to you ♦
and you have healed me.

3    You brought me up, O Lord, from the dead; ♦
you restored me to life from among those that go down to the Pit.

4    Sing to the Lord, you servants of his; ♦
give thanks to his holy name.

5    For his wrath endures but the twinkling of an eye, his favour for a lifetime. ♦
Heaviness may endure for a night, but joy comes in the morning.

6    In my prosperity I said, ‘I shall never be moved. ♦
You, Lord, of your goodness, have made my hill so strong.’

7    Then you hid your face from me ♦
and I was utterly dismayed.

8    To you, O Lord, I cried; ♦
to the Lord I made my supplication:

9    ‘What profit is there in my blood, if I go down to the Pit? ♦
Will the dust praise you or declare your faithfulness?

10  ‘Hear, O Lord, and have mercy upon me; ♦
O Lord, be my helper.’

11    You have turned my mourning into dancing; ♦
you have put off my sackcloth and girded me with gladness;

12    Therefore my heart sings to you without ceasing; ♦
O Lord my God, I will give you thanks for ever.

Epistle – Galatians 6.[1–6] 7–16

[My friends, if anyone is detected in a transgression, you who have received the Spirit should restore such a one in a spirit of gentleness. Take care that you yourselves are not tempted. Bear one another’s burdens, and in this way you will fulfil the law of Christ. For if those who are nothing think they are something, they deceive themselves. All must test their own work; then that work, rather than their neighbour’s work, will become a cause for pride. For all must carry their own loads.

Those who are taught the word must share in all good things with their teacher.]

Do not be deceived; God is not mocked, for you reap whatever you sow. If you sow to your own flesh, you will reap corruption from the flesh; but if you sow to the Spirit, you will reap eternal life from the Spirit. So let us not grow weary in doing what is right, for we will reap at harvest time, if we do not give up. So then, whenever we have an opportunity, let us work for the good of all, and especially for those of the family of faith.

See what large letters I make when I am writing in my own hand! It is those who want to make a good showing in the flesh that try to compel you to be circumcised – only that they may not be persecuted for the cross of Christ. Even the circumcised do not themselves obey the law, but they want you to be circumcised so that they may boast about your flesh. May I never boast of anything except the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, by which the world has been crucified to me, and I to the world. For neither circumcision nor uncircumcision is anything; but a new creation is everything! As for those who will follow this rule – peace be upon them, and mercy, and upon the Israel of God.

Gospel – Luke 10.1–11, 16–20

After this the Lord appointed seventy others and sent them on ahead of him in pairs to every town and place where he himself intended to go. He said to them, ‘The harvest is plentiful, but the labourers are few; therefore ask the Lord of the harvest to send out labourers into his harvest. Go on your way. See, I am sending you out like lambs into the midst of wolves. Carry no purse, no bag, no sandals; and greet no one on the road. Whatever house you enter, first say, “Peace to this house!” And if anyone is there who shares in peace, your peace will rest on that person; but if not, it will return to you. Remain in the same house, eating and drinking whatever they provide, for the labourer deserves to be paid. Do not move about from house to house. Whenever you enter a town and its people welcome you, eat what is set before you; cure the sick who are there, and say to them, “The kingdom of God has come near to you.” But whenever you enter a town and they do not welcome you, go out into its streets and say, “Even the dust of your town that clings to our feet, we wipe off in protest against you. Yet know this: the kingdom of God has come near.”

‘Whoever listens to you listens to me, and whoever rejects you rejects me, and whoever rejects me rejects the one who sent me.’

The seventy returned with joy, saying, ‘Lord, in your name even the demons submit to us!’ He said to them, ‘I watched Satan fall from heaven like a flash of lightning. See, I have given you authority to tread on snakes and scorpions, and over all the power of the enemy; and nothing will hurt you. Nevertheless, do not rejoice at this, that the spirits submit to you, but rejoice that your names are written in heaven.’

Sermon on Sunday, Trinity 3

What do you say when you catch someone out? Are you sarcastic or bitter? Do you berate those persons about their failures? – Or – would you say something like:

My friends, if anyone is detected in a transgression, you who have received the Spirit, should restore such a one in a spirit of gentleness.

So Paul writes to the Galatians. He goes on to say, “Take care that you yourselves are not tempted.” Has anyone ever said such a thing to you? Do we give way to that wicked temptation all too easily? Do I let my bile rise when I come across a mistake and lambaste the poor fellow who already may be feeling bad about this “sin”? Imagine that person standing in front of you – there you are with the transgressor before you, you see such embarrassment and contrition in front of you, do you still wale into that hapless individual and vent your fury because of your own feelings? Have you succumbed to such a temptation and let rip because others have done that to you?

Such things do happen, don’t they? I know that I have behaved pretty badly from time to time, and I haven’t remembered or heard these words of Paul in those moments. So, afterwards, what happens? Do any of us at all regret that loss of control?

Is life only all about catching other people out? Paul doesn’t think so, does he? “Bear one another’s burdens, and in this way you will fulfil the law of Christ.” Any transgression can be remedied and everyone is better off, especially when there is this corporate responsibility – when we share each other’s burdens. When we all try to do what is right, we become merciful and fulfil the law of Christ. We live in charity with one another.

That is a very different way of behaving compared to our everyday, what could be called our ‘default’, position in the world. Don’t we normally let the blame fall on the guilty party and pile on more and more recrimination? We see this all the time in government all over the world and even on our own streets where ‘road rage’ used to be the thing, but now we see this same anger on the so-called ‘social’ media. We have all been there, haven’t we? When we are driving down the motorway or pushing our trolley in the supermarket, we might get cut off – “What did you do that for?” we ask silently to ourselves, or perhaps under our breath. Yet there are people who say it out loudly and embarrass everyone all around them. That is now what happens on social media, I am told. And who knows where that may lead?

That underlying rage is in the world, but it is more dangerous now – knives are being carried and such rage could result in an assault or – even more terrifying – murder. That would not be the case, if all of us were kind and forbearing with each other, that attitude which should lead us to bear one another’s burdens.

A few weeks ago I spoke about our prayer life. I considered it the point from which we act in the whole of our lives, I said that faith was not some black hole into which everything disappears. No, I thought faith is the sun which is forever shining in the whole of our lives. We live out of our faith, into the world. Faith emits life in all its fullness, and that faith propels us into such a visible life.

I realise that is a paradox – everyone else says faith or religion is totally “a private matter”, but that only became so since the Victorian period, that age of double standards and contradiction, when private and public never quite agreed – like every period of history when hypocrisy is so very visible – if we examine the contradiction of what is accepted as the normality of the crowd.

On the contrary, we here in the one, holy, catholic and apostolic Church find that religion has always been a public thing. That teacher of mine, whom I like to quote, says that religion is out there in public where the myths, symbols and rituals of faith are revealed in everyday behaviour. Of course the link can be tenuous nowadays, since we no longer ken the stories of the bible, and since we no longer gather together as communities with shared stories. We no longer see signs of meaning in the everyday, yet extraordinary, things around us. An example of this forgetfulness is the biblical desperation of the cry from the core of my being, my heart exclaims “My God, my God …” This has become the trite “OMG” which children in the schoolyard shout out. These youngsters exclaim these letters without understanding anything beyond those letters they have heard their parents say. Those letters, ‘O M G’, do not come anywhere near anyone’s heart, do they? When we people of faith utter the words of that psalm, “My God! My God …”, our hearts are about to break because of such pain tearing at them. It is then, at that point, we learn about the “bearing of one another’s burdens”

We try to lift up the other’s heart gently. We ensure the wholeness of that other person’s life with gentleness? I want to say that we do heed this exhortation from Paul – even if it does come from an epoch of history so very different from our own. The same idea has occurred in our own time, hasn’t it? We all acclaimed what care in the community could do. The government set up this programme and we all agreed with the principle, didn’t we? We all do contend that we should care for our neighbours in their distress as community. This is bearing one another’s burdens on a grand scale, when society takes up the cause of each other’s burdens, whether physical, mental or spiritual. Care in the community only happens if there is a common ground, a shared story of where we find ourselves in life. The Church used to be the locus for that participation, where neighbours shared the peace (however grudgingly) in worship because it is in peace that no one would be overburdened.

However, Paul goes further when he writes,

All must test their own work; then that work, rather than their neighbour’s work, will become a cause for pride. For all must carry their own loads.

While we bear one another’s loads, Paul counsels that we are supposed to look at our own work – not our neighbours’. We must be our own harshest critics pondering just how well we do for others. Doesn’t someone somewhere talk about the futility of the unexamined life? – One of the most wonderful things to come out of daily self-examination is the judgement that we might have been productive throughout the day just past, as we call to mind what we have done. That critical self-awareness defends us from temptation, that temptation against which Paul warned us at the beginning of our reading this morning. When we reflect on our activity, we realise just how full – or empty – our day has been. We see just how well we have borne our own burdens and how graciously we have lifted the other’s.

On Radio3 a University of Pennsylvania study was quoted. They studied the effects of kindness, and concluded that it benefited all. The presenter concurred and that kindness is not a commodity to be hoarded but a blessing to be shared. We could say that kindness is our own way of sharing the burdens of life when we love our neighbour.

Amen

Collect

Almighty and everlasting God, you have given us, your servants, grace, by the confession of a true faith, to acknowledge the glory of the eternal Trinity and in the power of the divine majesty to worship the Unity: keep us steadfast in this faith, that we may evermore be defended from all adversities; through Jesus Christ your Son our Lord, who is alive and reigns with you, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever.

or

Holy God, faithful and unchanging: enlarge our minds with the knowledge of your truth, and draw us more deeply into the mystery of your love, that we may truly worship you, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever.

Post Communion

Almighty and eternal God,you have revealed yourself as Father, Son and Holy Spirit, and live and reign in the perfect unity of love: hold us firm in this faith, that we may know you in all your ways and evermore rejoice in your eternal glory, who are three Persons yet one God, now and for ever.

Readings

Old Testament – Proverbs 8.1–4, 22–31

Does not wisdom call, and does not understanding raise her voice? On the heights, beside the way, at the crossroads she takes her stand; beside the gates in front of the town, at the entrance of the portals she cries out: ‘To you, O people, I call, and my cry is to all that live. The Lord created me at the beginning of his work, the first of his acts of long ago. Ages ago I was set up, at the first, before the beginning of the earth. When there were no depths I was brought forth, when there were no springs abounding with water. Before the mountains had been shaped, before the hills, I was brought forth – when he had not yet made earth and fields, or the world’s first bits of soil.

When he established the heavens, I was there, when he drew a circle on the face of the deep, when he made firm the skies above, when he established the fountains of the deep, when he assigned to the sea its limit, so that the waters might not transgress his command, when he marked out the foundations of the earth, then I was beside him, like a master worker; and I was daily his delight, rejoicing before him always, rejoicing in his inhabited world and delighting in the human race.

Psalm

1    O Lord our governor, ♦
how glorious is your name in all the world!

2    Your majesty above the heavens is praised ♦
out of the mouths of babes at the breast.

3    You have founded a stronghold against your foes, ♦
that you might still the enemy and the avenger.

4    When I consider your heavens, the work of your fingers, ♦
the moon and the stars that you have ordained,

5    What is man, that you should be mindful of him; ♦
the son of man, that you should seek him out?

6    You have made him little lower than the angels ♦
and crown him with glory and honour.

7    You have given him dominion over the works of your hands ♦
and put all things under his feet,

8    All sheep and oxen, ♦
even the wild beasts of the field,

9    The birds of the air, the fish of the sea ♦
and whatsoever moves in the paths of the sea.

10    O Lord our governor, ♦
how glorious is your name in all the world!

Epistle – Romans 5.1–5

Therefore, since we are justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have obtained access to this grace in which we stand; and we boast in our hope of sharing the glory of God. And not only that, but we also boast in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not disappoint us, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us.

Gospel – John 16.12–15

‘I still have many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now. When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth; for he will not speak on his own, but will speak whatever he hears, and he will declare to you the things that are to come. He will glorify me, because he will take what is mine and declare it to you. All that the Father has is mine. For this reason I said that he will take what is mine and declare it to you.

hymn 146 Holy, holy, holy, Lord God Almighty

hymn 138 Come, Holy Ghost, our souls inspire

hymn 295 Let all mortal flesh

hymn 484 The church’s one foundation

Sermon on Trinity Sunday

For many, this Sunday is one of the most important feast days of the one, holy, catholic and apostolic Church – it celebrates the creed’s formula of the image of God as Trinity – God the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. As some of you may know, we should be reciting the Athanasian Creed, which you will find in the BCP and Common Worship. – But we won’t, because it is repetitive, and, more probably, because it is so very long, and we don’t do long nowadays anywhere, do we? However, it is profound in a very poetic way.

Wikipedia says about this creed:

The Athanasian Creed – also called the Quicunque Vult (or Quicumque Vult), which is both its Latin name and its opening words, meaning “Whosoever wishes” – is a Christian statement of belief focussed on Trinitarian doctrine and Christology. … The Athanasian Creed has been used in public worship less frequently, with the exception of Trinity Sunday. However, part of it can be found as an “Authorized Affirmation of Faith”… . Despite falling out of liturgical use, the creed’s influence on current Protestant understanding of trinitarian doctrine is clear.

Let’s take our inspiration this morning from this poetic profession, and try to imagine our God here and now.

How can we do this? Our lives are so very prosaic – quite simply, they are not full of poetic moment. We do not partake of the heroic, or the divine, ordinarily, do we? – I have not had a mystical encounter with the source of all being, even the love I show my wife has become, after all these years, very predictable and usual. – What about you? Has your vision opened up vistas of heaven and forced your hand to the good thing in everything you do? Is the infinite a very part of our quite finite and restricted lives here and now? What drives us to act?

My friend, the philosopher, speaks about language and how the poetic is the source of speech and the most profound expression of philosophy, and I might add life itself. Let’s look a little at the Athanasian Creed. Here is how it starts out –

Whosoever will be saved, before all things it is necessary that he hold the catholic faith. Which faith unless every one do keep whole and undefiled, without doubt he shall perish everlastingly. And the catholic faith is this: that we worship one God in Trinity, and Trinity in Unity; neither confounding the Persons, nor dividing the Essence.

We don’t talk like this in our everyday dealings, do we? We don’t talk about salvation or our worship based on that faith. This creed speaks of huge concepts fully outside our usual topics of conversation – we shy away from talking about our God, whether Trinity or Unity, and even the scholars might be guilty of confounding the Persons of the Trinity and not completely unifying the Essence of God.

We don’t have profound discussions with the butcher, the baker or the candlestick maker about the foundations of faith, do we? But, if you believe some of the stories from history, around the time the Roman Empire became christian, everyone was happy to talk about how the world was turned upside down by Constantine and the empire’s conversion to christianity. One scholar relates that when people went to the baker, they would gladly engage in a theological debate as they bought their bread.

Believers were happy to take up the cudgels on behalf of the faith, in an intellectual struggle to “keep us steadfast in this faith, that we may evermore be defended from all adversities”. This hope of our Collect was something very real in the lives of people in the Empire – Roman or British – but what about today? What hope do we have? Are we ever happy to explore our hope with, or expose it to, the world?

Last week we started to chat about my talk together – it became a lively conversation, much like what I imagine those debates with the baker must have been so long ago. We were not scared of confronting the big topics which religion presents to us for reflection and discussion, all because we worshipped together.

A scholar once said that creedal formulations have always been based on the life of prayer. Our prayer life – which we share together in public worship – does speak to the acceptance of Trinity, doesn’t it? Didn’t “Blessed be the Father the Son and the Holy Spirit” just call forth our response, “Blessed be God for ever” at the start of our morning prayer together? The Trinity is the foundation of the church of England’s life. Throughout our worship we acknowledge the Trinity. After all, don’t we repeat “Glory to the Father and to the Son and to the Holy Spirit; as it was in the beginning is now and shall be for ever. Amen” all the way through our worship services?

Our prayer life influences our thinking about everything, doesn’t it? If we take a triumphalist view of the faith, won’t we have dreams of empire? – Our Victorian ancestors certainly did. – If we have a servant view of Christ, won’t we behave in a very different manner? Our understanding of service will come forward in our attitude towards others, in all of our actions. So, won’t our theology reflect this as well?

Faith is not a little black box into which we secrete our fundamental intention toward life, the universe and everything. Things don’t find their way into the realm of faith never to emerge again. No, I would say faith actually binds everything in our lives together. We don’t understand friendship without understanding that most elusive Other, the Divine. Friendship is based on the most profound love possible, that love we have for the divine in our lives – and that love of God for us informs how we love one another and manifest friendship.

The Trinity is a subject for discussion, which we should enjoy, just as we enjoyed our discussion of Pentecost last week over coffee. We need to have that free exchange of ideas just as they did centuries ago. We may still be confused about the object of our faith, but we should not be disheartened and silent. Although I don’t know how to express what Trinity means in language that is clear for “21st century schizoid man,” to quote King Crimson, I should still try to make it something my friends and neighbours might take seriously. I should make it easier for people to understand what the unity of God is when I speak or demonstrate christian love.

We read that Jesus gave us a promise that all will be revealed, when he said, “‘I still have many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now. When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth…’” Jesus declares there are a lot of things we don’t know. We are awaiting Jesus Christ coming into the world again, just as the disciples and St Paul expected all to be revealed. Jesus promised the Spirit would come, just as we celebrated last week. In my weakened state as a human being, I await that coming of truth into the world as, I am sure, you do.

Amen

Collect

God, who as at this time taught the hearts of your faithful people by sending to them the light of your Holy Spirit: grant us by the same Spirit to have a right judgement in all things and evermore to rejoice in his holy comfort; through the merits of Christ Jesus our Saviour, who is alive and reigns with you, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever.

or

Holy Spirit, sent by the Father, ignite in us your holy fire; strengthen your children with the gift of faith, revive your Church with the breath of love, and renew the face of the earth, through Jesus Christ our Lord.

Post Communion

Faithful God, who fulfilled the promises of Easter by sending us your Holy Spirit and opening to every race and nation the way of life eternal: open our lips by your Spirit, that every tongue may tell of your glory; through Jesus Christ our Lord.

Readings

Acts 2.1–21

When the day of Pentecost had come, they were all together in one place. And suddenly from heaven there came a sound like the rush of a violent wind, and it filled the entire house where they were sitting. Divided tongues, as of fire, appeared among them, and a tongue rested on each of them. All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other languages, as the Spirit gave them ability.

Now there were devout Jews from every nation under heaven living in Jerusalem. And at this sound the crowd gathered and was bewildered, because each one heard them speaking in the native language of each. Amazed and astonished, they asked, ‘Are not all these who are speaking Galileans? And how is it that we hear, each of us, in our own native language? Parthians, Medes, Elamites, and residents of Mesopotamia, Judea and Cappadocia, Pontus and Asia, Phrygia and Pamphylia, Egypt and the parts of Libya belonging to Cyrene, and visitors from Rome, both Jews and proselytes, Cretans and Arabs—in our own languages we hear them speaking about God’s deeds of power.’ All were amazed and perplexed, saying to one another, ‘What does this mean?’ But others sneered and said, ‘They are filled with new wine.’

But Peter, standing with the eleven, raised his voice and addressed them: ‘Men of Judea and all who live in Jerusalem, let this be known to you, and listen to what I say. Indeed, these are not drunk, as you suppose, for it is only nine o’clock in the morning. No, this is what was spoken through the prophet Joel:

“In the last days it will be, God declares,

that I will pour out my Spirit upon all flesh,

and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy,

and your young men shall see visions,

and your old men shall dream dreams.

Even upon my slaves, both men and women,

in those days I will pour out my Spirit;
and they shall prophesy.

And I will show portents in the heaven above

and signs on the earth below,

blood, and fire, and smoky mist.

The sun shall be turned to darkness

and the moon to blood,

before the coming of the Lord’s great and glorious day.

Then everyone who calls on the name of the Lord

shall be saved.”

Gospel – John 14.8–17 [25–27]

Philip said to him, ‘Lord, show us the Father, and we will be satisfied.’ Jesus said to him, ‘Have I been with you all this time, Philip, and you still do not know me? Whoever has seen me has seen the Father. How can you say, “Show us the Father”? Do you not believe that I am in the Father and the Father is in me? The words that I say to you I do not speak on my own; but the Father who dwells in me does his works. Believe me that I am in the Father and the Father is in me; but if you do not, then believe me because of the works themselves. Very truly, I tell you, the one who believes in me will also do the works that I do and, in fact, will do greater works than these, because I am going to the Father. I will do whatever you ask in my name, so that the Father may be glorified in the Son. If in my name you ask me for anything, I will do it.

‘If you love me, you will keep my commandments. 16And I will ask the Father, and he will give you another Advocate, to be with you for ever. This is the Spirit of truth, whom the world cannot receive, because it neither sees him nor knows him. You know him, because he abides with you, and he will be in you.

[‘I have said these things to you while I am still with you. But the Advocate, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, will teach you everything, and remind you of all that I have said to you. Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you. I do not give to you as the world gives. Do not let your hearts be troubled, and do not let them be afraid.]

hymn 136 – Rejoice, the year upon its way

hymn 137 – Come down, O Love divine

hymn 138 – Come, Holy Ghost our souls inspire

hymn 349 – Come, let us join our cheerful songs

Sermon on Pentecost (WhitSunday)

Here we are at WhitSun, Pentecost. Many call today the birthday of the one, holy, catholic and apostolic Church.

What do you do on your own birthday – or what about your beloved’s birthday, your wife’ or husband’ or your son’ or daughter’s birthday? Some of my acquaintances get dressed in their best and take the day off so that they can do something different – if only a day out with the family, or if you are young, a special meal somewhere nice.

But that is it, isn’t it? We just have one day, perhaps a few drinks and then the year begins again. We repeat the same old dull year all over again. No change for the next 364 days. We haven’t changed the world in any way on our birthday. However, isn’t Pentecost something so very different from the very mundane birthday celebrations we usually  have? Imagine this happening on your birthday –

suddenly from heaven there came a sound like the rush of a violent wind, and it filled the entire house where they were sitting. Divided tongues, as of fire, appeared among them, and a tongue rested on each of them.

Nothing like this has ever happened on my birthday! What about yours? No great, rushing, violent wind sounds in our hearing when we take our loved ones out on our special birthday outing. But it did happen at the birth of the Church, just as we recall it each year on this day, the day we read this chapter from the Acts of the Apostles.

Do we stand “amazed and astonished” like all those foreigners who heard those poor, ignorant fishermen speaking in so many languages, and they listened as if they were being directly addressed in their own mother tongue? Do the people speaking within these four walls speak to their contemporaries with that force of meaning and import? Or do we consider this preachers’ ramblings meaningless chatter? Are we startled by what we hear? Do we comment on the situation as those in Jerusalem did so many centuries ago?

All were amazed and perplexed, saying to one another, ‘What does this mean?’ But others sneered and said, ‘They are filled with new wine.’

Are we amazed by the words we hear? I know that I perplex many with my rantings. Do any or you ask, “What does this mean?” when we leave church – or even over coffee after worship? Do we ever delve any deeper into what we hear anywhere, not just in Church? What is the significance of a politician’s words or anything else we hear? Do we ever look into the meaning of the simple conversations we have day by day? Do we delve into why someone said something to us, which may signify something portentous. And so do we ask, “What does all this mean”?

We may not get what the other person is saying, but I don’t think we are as cynical as those who sneered about those poor fishermen when they accused them of being drunk at such an early hour of the day. Shouldn’t we be able to say, whenever we speak with someone – anyone at all

‘how is it that we hear, each of us, in our own native language? Parthians, Medes, Elamites, and residents of Mesopotamia, Judea and Cappadocia, Pontus and Asia, Phrygia and Pamphylia, Egypt and the parts of Libya belonging to Cyrene, and visitors from Rome, both Jews and proselytes, Cretans and Arabs – in our own languages we hear them speaking about God’s deeds of power.’

Never mind the foreigner amongst us, do we speak in a way that our neighbour gets enthusiastic about what we say to them? Do the members of our family hear something very important as we speak with them about life, the universe and everything? Don’t we all wonder whether anyone ever hears us speaking about important matters?

The philosopher has always wondered at the power of language, pondering just how meaning is conveyed through phonemes and syllables, through the power of the word delivered with a voice. Ultimately, that is all I have – I only have my voice to deliver to you what I understand to be powerful and important in my life, just as those words the fishermen pronounced proclaimed God’s deeds of power.

Isn’t it strange that every year we listen to this story of the coming of the Holy Spirit onto those men so long ago? Why? My teacher would explain that we want this to happen today. We want to live out that primordial event of salvation in our own lives right now.

By reciting this origin history we are trying to make it a very real event in our own lives. We are opening ourselves to that fundamental reality the early church proclaimed as its beginnings, that perfect time of origin, which connected them with the resurrected Jesus, that time when the divine was immediately part of their own lives. Don’t we want the same thing? Don’t we want that deed of power and meaning to be part of our own lives? How do I address those “Parthians, Medes [and] Elamites” and anyone else who may be visiting me from faraway places where my mother tongue is unknown? Do I speak louder and louder because no one can speak to me in my own language (as that familiar trope about the English in foreign parts has it)?

Or, more hopefully, do I rely entirely on the gift of tongues – hoping that my seemingly random sounds actually do mean something to somebody else? Or do I have to hope that other people have the gift of interpretation so that they can understand my gabbling?

When we in the Church repeat the story of the day of Pentecost, we want to have a lively birthday celebration. We call to mind so much more than a judgemental thought about ignorant fishermen being drunk so early in the morning (however true that might be of those fishermen from so long ago or even fishermen nowadays).

This story of Pentecost brings together so many strands of the christian message, that salvation had come into the world in Jesus, that his promise of a comforter – the Holy Spirit – was fulfilled, and the Church is filled with the gift of tongues (known and unknown) as well as the gift of interpretation. All things have conspired to culminate on this day, the celebration of Pentecost when the disciples spoke about the deeds of God’s power directly to strangers in their midst. Aren’t we hoping to do the same today, with whomever we meet?

Don’t we want to be as happy as those so-called inebriated fishermen? Their joy has come to the surface, just as ours should. – We have all seen something new which we want to share with everyone of our acquaintance. This is the joy of communication, when language – the gift of tongues and interpretation together – when language expresses our experience of life in all its fullness, an experience we want to share with everyone we meet, just like that drunken fisherman on the corner who sings his joy to all the world.

Amen

Collect

O God the King of glory, you have exalted your only Son Jesus Christ with great triumph to your kingdom in heaven: we beseech you, leave us not comfortless, but send your Holy Spirit to strengthen us and exalt us to the place where our Saviour Christ is gone before, who is alive and reigns with you, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever.

or

Risen, ascended Lord, as we rejoice at your triumph, fill your Church on earth with power and compassion, that all who are estranged by sin may find forgiveness and know your peace, to the glory of God the Father.

Post Communion

Eternal God, giver of love and power, your Son Jesus Christ has sent us into all the world to preach the gospel of his kingdom: confirm us in this mission, and help us to live the good news we proclaim; through Jesus Christ our Lord.

Readings

Acts – 16.16–34

One day, as we were going to the place of prayer, we met a slave-girl who had a spirit of divination and brought her owners a great deal of money by fortune-telling. While she followed Paul and us, she would cry out, ‘These men are slaves of the Most High God, who proclaim to you a way of salvation.’ She kept doing this for many days. But Paul, very much annoyed, turned and said to the spirit, ‘I order you in the name of Jesus Christ to come out of her.’ And it came out that very hour.

But when her owners saw that their hope of making money was gone, they seized Paul and Silas and dragged them into the market-place before the authorities. When they had brought them before the magistrates, they said, ‘These men are disturbing our city; they are Jews and are advocating customs that are not lawful for us as Romans to adopt or observe.’ The crowd joined in attacking them, and the magistrates had them stripped of their clothing and ordered them to be beaten with rods. After they had given them a severe flogging, they threw them into prison and ordered the jailer to keep them securely. Following these instructions, he put them in the innermost cell and fastened their feet in the stocks.

About midnight Paul and Silas were praying and singing hymns to God, and the prisoners were listening to them. Suddenly there was an earthquake, so violent that the foundations of the prison were shaken; and immediately all the doors were opened and everyone’s chains were unfastened. When the jailer woke up and saw the prison doors wide open, he drew his sword and was about to kill himself, since he supposed that the prisoners had escaped. But Paul shouted in a loud voice, ‘Do not harm yourself, for we are all here.’ The jailer called for lights, and rushing in, he fell down trembling before Paul and Silas. Then he brought them outside and said, ‘Sirs, what must I do to be saved?’ They answered, ‘Believe on the Lord Jesus, and you will be saved, you and your household.’ They spoke the word of the Lord to him and to all who were in his house. At the same hour of the night he took them and washed their wounds; then he and his entire family were baptized without delay. He brought them up into the house and set food before them; and he and his entire household rejoiced that he had become a believer in God.

Gospel – John 17.20–26

‘I ask not only on behalf of these, but also on behalf of those who will believe in me through their word, that they may all be one. As you, Father, are in me and I am in you, may they also be in us, so that the world may believe that you have sent me. The glory that you have given me I have given them, so that they may be one, as we are one, I in them and you in me, that they may become completely one, so that the world may know that you have sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me. Father, I desire that those also, whom you have given me, may be with me where I am, to see my glory, which you have given me because you loved me before the foundation of the world.

‘Righteous Father, the world does not know you, but I know you; and these know that you have sent me. I made your name known to them, and I will make it known, so that the love with which you have loved me may be in them, and I in them.’

Sermon on Sunday after Ascension

Here we are in the Easter period celebrating the Sunday after the Ascension, and yet the text from John comes the darkest time of Jesus’ life on earth, the text comes from the Passion Narrative. In particular, it is found in the Farewell Discourse which is a part of the Last Supper, when Jesus was preparing his disciples. – Jesus was telling them that he was about to go away to his death, a death he anticipated. This speech is full of difficult theological and philosophical concepts – the most tricky is that indwelling of Jesus and God in one another. Let’s begin with a seemingly simple question, How are people “one”? – How can Jesus pray that everyone who believes will participate in the unity which Jesus declares to exist between him and God the Father? Then there is another question, how can Jesus who is about to depart and God the Father in heaven be part of any believer’s being in the world? This is a paradox, isn’t it? This is the life of faith.

For one person to be a part of another is very strange. It is not part of one’s life ordinarily. That one person melts into another is a unique experience. It may be something we have experienced once in our lives, but we may not have, and so many may live a life of profound isolation.

This notion of indwelling, I think, is very much part of our concept of love. We should start our reflections this morning at that point. How does the beloved become a part of our lives? Half a century ago, that hippie generation, those love children, were most prominent in society – they were argued with, and they were argued about, by everyone. However, there was a very definite movement in many circles to explore the theme of love and how our behaviour shows our love. Psychologists such as Eric Fromm wrote about this complex subject, and philosophers were not slow to investigate what they would call “intersubjectivity”. All of them were trying to understand how one person’s life intersects profoundly with another’s so that we might express that relationship as a unity. However we go about exploring this indwelling, Jesus started us all thinking about it in this passage, didn’t he?

When I say that I love my wife, how do I make her mine? “How do I love thee? / Let me count the ways,” the poet exclaims. I suppose there are infinite ways to show how one loves another, both positive and negative. The negative ways of behaviour have been in the media and it has played itself out with our interest in “safe-guarding” within so many organisations, the church being most prominent among them. We all know there are many sorts of coercive behaviour which constrain the other in a relationship. I force that person into what I consider “my life”. For instance, I might not allow my wife her own spending money, or I keep her at home without contact with anyone else. In each case, I isolate her and so her life and mine are “one” in a very negative way. Erich Fromm wrote about this ‘escape from freedom’, which is what the coercive relationship does for both parties – each of them is dependent on the other to define their place in the world. They have forsaken freedom for that strictly defined relationship of interdependence and reduction of self to that coercion alone. There is no freedom to do something unexpected, is there? We are not free as birds to fly where we will when we are in a coercive relationship. We are caged somehow.

Everyone is afraid of freedom in many ways. In that fear we do not take responsibility for our own actions. We are not confident in our choices, in deciding whether this or that is the best course of action. Rather we would listen to the chattering crowd – in the person of the coercive partner – as it presses in around us, letting our personal resolve dissolve before the onslaught of the noise of that crowd. We all know the mumbling of “Rhubarb, rhubarb” of the extras on the stage set of our lives, a sound which merely distracts, if we try to listen to it. Our attention is diverted to something which has no moral authority over us. We run away from the freedom such an ethical self-control actually gives us. We run away from ourselves, and our own decisions for truth and justice. This escape from that freedom to choose, weakens our resolve and isolates us. Consequently, I would suggest, we do not love our neighbours in the way the golden rule bids us. We do not treat others as we would wish to be treated. And so we treat ourselves in so many negative ways – from merely eating too much to actively harming ourselves. There are so many examples and they are recognised as such, so much so, that there are warnings before many television programs which say, “There are scenes which may be distressing” because of some wretched example of humanity’s inhumanity.

Enough of this negativity! What about the positive path on which we are free to love? Surely there is something we can talk about which sets us on that way!

Yes, there is, but it is not as exciting as all those stories about which we are warned on television. The excitement of the crime drama makes a love story something insignificant. Real men, they say, don’t read “rom-coms” – why not? I ask. They say Chic-lit is frothy and insignificant – but so is a book like ‘Pride and Prejudice’. There is no action, no daring-do for the hero to engage in. Mr Darcy would be a different man, were he to be in uniform and about to be ordered into battle. Horatio Hornblower would have been a completely different character were there no warfare in which his character was displayed. – Whether manly heroic behaviour or the feminine excess of emotions, human character is revealed (and I think in both we can find love expressed) in the indwelling of the other in the space of the heart. In that place the one, holy, catholic and apostolic Church is to be discovered, where we learn about a friendship founded on love profound, that love which is undemanding but gives utterly. The Church is the community where truth is spoken with love. But, more importantly, what is said is listened to, and heard with, love – without ego interfering with the other’s life choices.

Here we are in the positive way of freedom. We no longer worry about ourselves in any petty way. We are anxious to live profoundly with one another, in a way that our lives become intertwined because of that indwelling of another within our conscience, a sharing of life so deep the crowd in its interference cannot comprehend just what two people can give to each other. We know that when we dwell within one another there can be no deception or intrigue, nothing deflects. There can only be openness and true character – I would say that the truly heroic, ultimately caring life which Jesus Christ bequeathed us through the Easter event reveals that paradox of true life, a life forsaken yet resurrected in Jesus Christ.

Amen

The Palm Reading – Luke 19.28–40

He went on ahead, going up to Jerusalem.

When he had come near Bethphage and Bethany, at the place called the Mount of Olives, he sent two of the disciples, saying, ‘Go into the village ahead of you, and as you enter it you will find tied there a colt that has never been ridden. Untie it and bring it here. If anyone asks you, “Why are you untying it?” just say this: “The Lord needs it.” ’ So those who were sent departed and found it as he had told them. As they were untying the colt, its owners asked them, ‘Why are you untying the colt?’ They said, ‘The Lord needs it.’ Then they brought it to Jesus; and after throwing their cloaks on the colt, they set Jesus on it. As he rode along, people kept spreading their cloaks on the road. As he was now approaching the path down from the Mount of Olives, the whole multitude of the disciples began to praise God joyfully with a loud voice for all the deeds of power that they had seen, saying,

‘Blessed is the king who comes in the name of the Lord!

Peace in heaven, and glory in the highest heaven!’

Some of the Pharisees in the crowd said to him, ‘Teacher, order your disciples to stop.’ He answered, ‘I tell you, if these were silent, the stones would shout out.’

Collect

Almighty and everlasting God, who in your tender love towards the human race sent your Son our Saviour Jesus Christ to take upon him our flesh and to suffer death upon the cross: grant that we may follow the example of his patience and humility, and also be made partakers of his resurrection; through Jesus Christ your Son our Lord, who is alive and reigns with you, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever.

or

True and humble king, hailed by the crowd as Messiah: grant us the faith to know you and love you, that we may be found beside you on the way of the cross, which is the path of glory.

Readings

Old Testament – Zechariah 9.9-12

Rejoice greatly, O daughter Zion!

   Shout aloud, O daughter Jerusalem!

Lo, your king comes to you;

   triumphant and victorious is he,

humble and riding on a donkey,

   on a colt, the foal of a donkey.

He will cut off the chariot fro Ephraim

   and the warhorse from Jerusalem;

and the battle-bow shall be cut off,

   and he shall command peace to the nations;

his dominion shall be from sea to sea,

   and from the River to the ends of the earth.

As for you also, because of the blood of my covenant with you,

   I will set your prisoners free from the waterless pit.

Return to your stronghold, O prisoners of hope;

   today I declare that I will restore to you double.

Psalm 62

Refrain: Wait on God alone in stillness, O my soul.

1    On God alone my soul in stillness waits; ♦
from him comes my salvation.

2    He alone is my rock and my salvation, ♦
my stronghold, so that I shall never be shaken.

3    How long will all of you assail me to destroy me, ♦
as you would a tottering wall or a leaning fence?

4    They plot only to thrust me down from my place of honour; lies are their chief delight; ♦
they bless with their mouth, but in their heart they curse.

5    Wait on God alone in stillness, O my soul; ♦
for in him is my hope.

6    He alone is my rock and my salvation, ♦
my stronghold, so that I shall not be shaken.

Refrain: Wait on God alone in stillness, O my soul.

7    In God is my strength and my glory; ♦
God is my strong rock; in him is my refuge.

8    Put your trust in him always, my people; ♦
pour out your hearts before him, for God is our refuge.

9    The peoples are but a breath, the whole human race a deceit; ♦
on the scales they are altogether lighter than air.

10    Put no trust in oppression; in robbery take no empty pride; ♦
though wealth increase, set not your heart upon it.

11    God spoke once, and twice have I heard the same, ♦
that power belongs to God.

12    Steadfast love belongs to you, O Lord, ♦
for you repay everyone according to their deeds.

Refrain: Wait on God alone in stillness, O my soul.

    O God, teach us to seek security, not in money or theft, not in human ambition or malice,not in our own ability or power, but in you, the only God,
our rock and our salvation.

Gospel – Luke 23.1–49

Then the assembly rose as a body and brought Jesus before Pilate. They began to accuse him, saying, ‘We found this man perverting our nation, forbidding us to pay taxes to the emperor, and saying that he himself is the Messiah, a king.’ Then Pilate asked him, ‘Are you the king of the Jews?’ He answered, ‘You say so.’ Then Pilate said to the chief priests and the crowds, ‘I find no basis for an accusation against this man.’ But they were insistent and said, ‘He stirs up the people by teaching throughout all Judea, from Galilee where he began even to this place.’

When Pilate heard this, he asked whether the man was a Galilean. And when he learned that he was under Herod’s jurisdiction, he sent him off to Herod, who was himself in Jerusalem at that time. When Herod saw Jesus, he was very glad, for he had been wanting to see him for a long time, because he had heard about him and was hoping to see him perform some sign. He questioned him at some length, but Jesus gave him no answer. The chief priests and the scribes stood by, vehemently accusing him. Even Herod with his soldiers treated him with contempt and mocked him; then he put an elegant robe on him, and sent him back to Pilate. That same day Herod and Pilate became friends with each other; before this they had been enemies.

Pilate then called together the chief priests, the leaders, and the people, and said to them, ‘You brought me this man as one who was perverting the people; and here I have examined him in your presence and have not found this man guilty of any of your charges against him. Neither has Herod, for he sent him back to us. Indeed, he has done nothing to deserve death. I will therefore have him flogged and release him.’

Then they all shouted out together, ‘Away with this fellow! Release Barabbas for us!’ (This was a man who had been put in prison for an insurrection that had taken place in the city, and for murder.) Pilate, wanting to release Jesus, addressed them again; but they kept shouting, ‘Crucify, crucify him!’ A third time he said to them, ‘Why, what evil has he done? I have found in him no ground for the sentence of death; I will therefore have him flogged and then release him.’ But they kept urgently demanding with loud shouts that he should be crucified; and their voices prevailed. So Pilate gave his verdict that their demand should be granted. He released the man they asked for, the one who had been put in prison for insurrection and murder, and he handed Jesus over as they wished.

As they led him away, they seized a man, Simon of Cyrene, who was coming from the country, and they laid the cross on him, and made him carry it behind Jesus. A great number of the people followed him, and among them were women who were beating their breasts and wailing for him. But Jesus turned to them and said, ‘Daughters of Jerusalem, do not weep for me, but weep for yourselves and for your children. For the days are surely coming when they will say, “Blessed are the barren, and the wombs that never bore, and the breasts that never nursed.” Then they will begin to say to the mountains, “Fall on us”; and to the hills, “Cover us.” For if they do this when the wood is green, what will happen when it is dry?’

Two others also, who were criminals, were led away to be put to death with him. When they came to the place that is called The Skull, they crucified Jesus there with the criminals, one on his right and one on his left. [[ Then Jesus said, ‘Father, forgive them; for they do not know what they are doing.’]] And they cast lots to divide his clothing. And the people stood by, watching; but the leaders scoffed at him, saying, ‘He saved others; let him save himself if he is the Messiah of God, his chosen one!’ The soldiers also mocked him, coming up and offering him sour wine, and saying, ‘If you are the King of the Jews, save yourself!’ There was also an inscription over him, ‘This is the King of the Jews.’

One of the criminals who were hanged there kept deriding him and saying, ‘Are you not the Messiah? Save yourself and us!’ But the other rebuked him, saying, ‘Do you not fear God, since you are under the same sentence of condemnation? And we indeed have been condemned justly, for we are getting what we deserve for our deeds, but this man has done nothing wrong.’ Then he said, ‘Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom.’ He replied, ‘Truly I tell you, today you will be with me in Paradise.’

It was now about noon, and darkness came over the whole land until three in the afternoon, while the sun’s light failed; and the curtain of the temple was torn in two. Then Jesus, crying with a loud voice, said, ‘Father, into your hands I commend my spirit.’ Having said this, he breathed his last. When the centurion saw what had taken place, he praised God and said, ‘Certainly this man was innocent.’ And when all the crowds who had gathered there for this spectacle saw what had taken place, they returned home, beating their breasts. But all his acquaintances, including the women who had followed him from Galilee, stood at a distance, watching these things.

hymns

511    Ride on, ride on in majesty

90    O sacred head sore wounded

93    Were you there?

89    O dearest Lord

Sermon on Palm Sunday

Today is Palm Sunday, I think it has a rather strange character. What we read as our primary lesson is the passion of the Lord, what he experienced in Jerusalem, after he entered the city on that borrowed donkey, after the crowds had rejoiced greatly, after they strew his way with palms and cloaks. They made a way fit for a king, their king, who is blessed because he comes in the name of the Lord. We re-enact this most significant event of Jesus’ life today. We stand by the wayside waving our palms with exultation and joy. We are the people who crowd the wayfares into the centre of the world, Jerusalem.

But Jesus made his own way into that city when the crowd disappeared. It became a solitary journey,  a way that was full of sorrow, bitter, acquainted with grief. People did not stand with him in the name of the Lord. Even Peter lost all courage when asked whether he was one of them from Galilee who were with Jesus, didn’t he? Would we stand tall and proclaim our allegiance to the Lord when the great panoply of the state requires an answer to the question of leadership?

I ask this as we stand in the midst of a trade war, in the midst of invasion of allied countries, in the midst of the destruction of homes and human rights. All of this is happening throughout the world, and we say nothing. We don’t even say to our closest neighbour, “Let us love one another.” Why, sometimes we don’t even confess love within out own families!

Does what is happening today tell us anything about the suffering of Jesus at the centre of the world, at Jerusalem, which we remember during Lent and especially during Passiontide?

However, today we stand with the crowd waving our palms even throwing our cloaks before the Lord as we read the Palm Sunday Reading. We sing hymns of joy as we greet the Lord riding on a donkey into Jerusalem. “Ride on, ride on in majesty!”

We rejoice in our Lord today, remembering how Jesus accepted the adulation of the people crowding the way into Jerusalem at the Passover. We are doing the same, aren’t we? When we come to church here today – I know that my heart rises when we sing of “the triumphs now begin o’er captive death and conquered sin.” I am eager to proclaim “the Father on his sapphire throne awaits his own anointed Son.” I too hope to join the saints praising God, in triune splendour – Father, Son and Holy Spirit. That crystal sea, the pure light, the choirs exulting in praise of what is holy – these images compel me to continue.

However, although we proclaim Jesus as Lord, riding in triumph to Jerusalem and his last Passover meal, we have to remember that there are more elements of the story to live through. The story of Holy Week, when we enter Jerusalem to pray with Jesus in the Garden. We expect to have our feet washed, to be stripped of sin as we strip the altar of its decoration, to stand naked before heaven and earth praying that we will be forgiven our frailty in this world as we stand before the cross on Friday.

This is the week of the passion of Jesus Christ our Lord – and it begins with us waving our flags, our palms, as he passes by to endure mocking and scourging and ultimately his own death on an instrument of torture, with his mother standing at the foot of his cross, inconsolable, but taken in by his beloved friend.

These events are inconceivable for us today, but we try to make them real by reading the stories every year, and reminding ourselves of them week by week when we celebrate Eucharist. This is the paradox of our faith. We celebrate the Lord’s incarnation and entry into our lives, as we joined in Christmass festivities. Now we sorrowfully re-enact the Last Supper in our Maundy Thursday rites and shall call it to mind with that shared Seder meal in Lower Cam. The Passover of the Lord is re-lived every year through liturgy – and foreshadowed every week in every Eucharist.

The Protestant tradition does not re-live the events, but it reflects on the events as significant for us here and now. We do not ritually participate in that archetypal meal. Rather we remember everything and apply the significance of events far away in the past to our lives here and now.

Life in the twenty-first century does not take liturgy and ritual seriously, except when it signifies something radically wrong in a person’s behaviour. – We have all watched those cop shows, haven’t we?

Ritual behaviour is seen as aberrant behaviour among “modern man”. This is at odds fundamentally with what the scholar calls “religious man”. Religious participate in ritual wholeheartedly, sometimes even becoming the gods worshipped. At least that is what my professor claimed as the heart of archaic religion. Religion brings the sacred into contact with the profane in order to transform the world from dead matter into numinously charged reality. Far from being neutral or even negative, ritual activity changes the very mundane into positively valued items with which the hero–god dealt with the world in which we live and move and have our being. This is what we say about Jesus and the gospel story, isn’t it?

We stand here waving our palms remembering Jesus our Saviour. We imagine ourselves in Jerusalem at the Paschal event charged to the highest of excitement gladly welcoming Jesus into the city – our city. We sometimes lose ourselves in worship, and we may be there minutes or hours – it doesn’t matter, because we are fully engaged in the event which we re-enact. We are transported to see Jesus right there. Jesus is within a hand’s breadth to the religious imagination. We understand the positive power of the Passion story as we proclaim the reality of faith, as we proclaim with the crowd, “Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord.”

Amen

Customising WordPress

I once before took to the stage at the Cheltenham WordPress Meetup. At that time, my presentation was about making a child theme.

I spoke about the mechanics and all the possibilities a child theme might open up for the customiser. Some technical considerations were brought into view, but now I am speaking about customising a very different type of WordPress

Now we have the Gutenberg or Full Site Editor. This development has complicated WordPress even more (dare I say dirtied the output?), because of the extra code which the new editing tool adds.

I am not a developer – I do not use the command line, though I do like my very old html editor and delve into stylesheets and the html which make up a WordPress published page.

As many of you know I entered the WordPress realm because of a job I have had since 2010. I now update pages and publish post items from time to time for that customer.

This job came about because of my experience of electronic typesetting and database publishing, which began in the early 90’s and makes working in WordPress very comfortable, since I see it as basically a database publishing exercise – one which I say should be completed “elegantly” as my physicist
friends used to say – because elegant meant simple and clean.

My use of WordPress

I use WordPress as my everyday workhorse in my “office”. I can keep my own information in tables of the database, and have integrated these new tables into my instance of WordPress, just as many of the well-known plugins do. I have done this as a page not a plugin however.

We have to admit WordPress is a powerful database publishing solution. In my office WordPress I have set up simple book-keeping pages with spreadsheet-type outputs – simple sums. I keep my contacts in WordPress, whether full information on my customers, or merely the name of a supplier. This WordPress database can hold all the information I require for my simple business.

If I wanted to, I could publish this WordPress instance to pages on my public website so that I could use a smart phone to keep everything up to date. But, as I am a bit of a luddite and spend most of my time digging in gardens, I don’t do that. – After all, my phone may drop into the ditch I am digging and I could be out a £1000 electronic gizmo.

Now how do we do all of these customising things we do – do we rely on plugins or do we create new page types? This is the question which started off this presentation. At one of the most recent Meetup’s this question was asked and it stirred me to action – action which ended up with me standing here before you. The new editor helps set up pages within the site, a much easier way of doing this task rather than doing it somewhere else and importing the code onto the site in the right place.

Many ways to skin a cat

In my prepress days, the DTP program I used allowed many ways to do the same thing. In other words there were many ways to skin a cat. The same thing happens with php html and css. We can do the same things with different techniques.

We need to bear this in mind because WordPress can be used in many different ways to produce a page. I even toyed with using WordPress to make this presentation, but I fell at the first hurdle.

So I am using a combination of different techniques. As I have said there are many ways to use WordPress and to skin those virtual cats – sorry, I mean sites – with which we all have to deal. But the first thing we need to realise is this – WordPress is very simple.

Making use of WordPress

The paradigm WordPress uses is that of a simple database publishing program.

PHP gives us the material from our data store, html is the structured output of the material and css makes it all very pretty.

Gutenberg deals with how everything is presented, and this is where WordPress becomes very complicated. The new block editor allows us to style just about any part of the block as you all know from Elliott’s recent performance on this stage.

WordPress output has become very complicated, as you find out by using control+U in your browser. (Sorry, I am an inveterate PC man, but we can have that MAC-PC debate over a pint some time.) Or you can use the Inspector.

A post on SitePoint is apt here. An HTML structure gives us our content once we dig it out from the database which is at the heart of WordPress. See this SitePoint Newsletter post Learning html is the best investment I ever id

CSS selectors and html concatenated classes complicate things. They also allow us to beautify the site. – AT A COST.

Complicated

There are many classes introduced by the WordPress programmers which often make it very difficult to create custom css stylesheets. (In my darker moments I think, “Is this maybe the reason the block editor was introduced?”)

But the stylesheet seems to have been broken up now with Gutenberg. The use of a child theme had once simplified customisation of css because you just added the selectors and their modifications into the child theme’s stylesheet which takes precedence according to the rules of the Cascade. And you added your new selectors there as well. However, with the new editor, I am a little lost.

I think we should consider our paradigm a bit more because if we simplify WordPress’s methods, I am sure that the difficulty of letting the naive user, like me, loose with the full site editor shouldn’t be a problem, because we could find all the problems quite simply.

Most users only want to change how things look. Colours, sizes and different fonts – these are the things they want to customise. – They don’t want to be “developers”. – Pretty backgrounds. Bells and whistles bolted on top are what the ordinary user wants to change. The naive user does not want to get involved with WordPress programming.

Or have I got that wrong? Do users really want to get into php and database development? You have to answer that question, which may be entirely different to my reply.

An appraisal of WordPress

I would like to make make a descriptive appraisal of WordPress. There are wonderful points and some rather dubious practices within this extraordinary content management system of ours.

First of all, WordPress is backward compatible. This is a great benefit for developers and ordinary users. We can employ old themes within full site editing. Having said that, we need to rethink our use of this publishing paradigm.

I believe the K.I.S.S. mantra should be heeded. As Richard Bell pointed out a couple of meetings ago the simple php–html–css model which spawned WordPress has become very complicated, and necessarily so – that complication, however, is under the hood – a place the general user of WordPress on the internet does not want to look, because he or she says, all the bells and whistles usually work as expected on the surface – right out of the box
– after that famous five minute install.

For the user – not the developer – the model needs to be simplified. We should be able to find the complete stylesheet again, a stylesheet which controls the complete look of the site. It is not beyond the wit of programmers to use CSS properly for a whole site and to make it accessible.

I had been trying to do some simple css styling of a test page. I wanted to make the background a certain colour like green and the main content background white. Could I find the css selector? No, I could not do so immediately, and I skinned the cat another way – using the border style property. This worked well on the desktop version, but did not appear well on the mobile display. I think the selectors have become very complicated and don’t necessarily select easily – at least for me. Here I think the KISS mantra should be fundamental when we design our pages. I can understand the complication of WordPress html-css, but I don’t think it is always warranted.

In pursuit of simplicity and the elegance some coders pursue, I think the use of Repeatable Blocks is excellent, but they should create a class of HTML entities which are styled and the selectors placed in the stylesheet.

A corollary to these repeatable blocks is that Ad hoc Blocks (users’ blocks which are never repeated) should become styled inline, not hidden away somewhere difficult to find.

The simpler html–css model would make it easier to rationalise a website stylistically. You programmers could even let us, your naive users, loose in the full site editor without any fear. After all, if we messed it up badly, all of us should be able to find our mistakes and problems easily.

To conclude then –

This naive user learned about stylesheets in the print publication world as an electronic typesetter. The stylesheet is where the user works with WordPress. Let’s make it simple for everyone.

I am an innocent who has come to this table to share my experience with the hope that I might be able to make our experience less painful. Now it is over to you to talk about the current iteration of WordPress.

Some discussion points

• The creation of a new theme is seemingly impossible. WP at present places new elements in the database, not in the stylesheet. The php-html-css paradigm has been broken. Couldn’t we return to it? This came up in a discussion between some developers last month.
• Are we bolting too much onto the simple paradigm? Do we want a website to do too much – “conversion” is not the right term to use for fooling someone into buying something from your web site. We could use all of the javascript, the new css programmable properties, and so many other things in a way that is closer to the older and simpler paradigm of php–html–css.
• I was looking at the notion of “content” in my html editor. I found that usingp.mycontent::before
  {
  content : “this is my content”;
  }

  we could get closer to a fixed content and so emulate the repeatable blocks of the new editor. But that is just one way of looking at it.

  We need to get back to the simple standards as we have done in the past. After all, as those as long in the tooth as I am know, we don’t have to do MS Internet Explorer hacks any more, do we?

Collect

Almighty God, whose Son Jesus Christ fasted forty days in the wilderness, and was tempted as we are, yet without sin: give us grace to discipline ourselves in obedience to your Spirit; and, as you know our weakness, so may we know your power to save; through Jesus Christ your Son our Lord, who is alive and reigns with you, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever.

or

Heavenly Father, your Son battled with the powers of darkness, and grew closer to you in the desert: help us to use these days to grow in wisdom and prayer that we may witness to your saving love in Jesus Christ our Lord.

Post Communion

Lord God, you have renewed us with the living bread from heaven; by it you nourish our faith, increase our hope, and strengthen our love: teach us always to hunger for him who is the true and living bread, and enable us to live by every word that proceeds from out of your mouth; through Jesus Christ our Lord.

Readings

Old Testament – Deuteronomy 26.1–11

Moses said to all Israel: When you have come into the land that the Lord your God is giving you as an inheritance to possess, and you possess it, and settle in it, you shall take some of the first of all the fruit of the ground, which you harvest from the land that the Lord your God is giving you, and you shall put it in a basket and go to the place that the Lord your God will choose as a dwelling for his name. You shall go to the priest who is in office at that time, and say to him, ‘Today I declare to the Lord your God that I have come into the land that the Lord swore to our ancestors to give us.’ When the priest takes the basket from your hand and sets it down before the altar of the Lord your God, you shall make this response before the Lord your God: ‘A wandering Aramean was my ancestor; he went down into Egypt and lived there as an alien, few in number, and there he became a great nation, mighty and populous. When the Egyptians treated us harshly and afflicted us, by imposing hard labour on us, 7we cried to the Lord, the God of our ancestors; the Lord heard our voice and saw our affliction, our toil, and our oppression. The Lord brought us out of Egypt with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm, with a terrifying display of power, and with signs and wonders; and he brought us into this place and gave us this land, a land flowing with milk and honey. So now I bring the first of the fruit of the ground that you, O Lord, have given me.’ You shall set it down before the Lord your God and bow down before the Lord your God. Then you, together with the Levites and the aliens who reside among you, shall celebrate with all the bounty that the Lord your God has given to you and to your house.

Psalm 91.1–2, 9–16

1    Whoever dwells in the shelter of the Most High ♦
and abides under the shadow of the Almighty,

2    Shall say to the Lord, ‘My refuge and my stronghold, ♦
my God, in whom I put my trust.’

9    Because you have made the Lord your refuge ♦
and the Most High your stronghold,

10    There shall no evil happen to you, ♦
neither shall any plague come near your tent.

11    For he shall give his angels charge over you, ♦
to keep you in all your ways.

12    They shall bear you in their hands, ♦
lest you dash your foot against a stone.

13    You shall tread upon the lion and adder; ♦
the young lion and the serpent you shall trample underfoot.

14    Because they have set their love upon me, therefore will I deliver them; ♦
I will lift them up, because they know my name.

15    They will call upon me and I will answer them; ♦
I am with them in trouble, I will deliver them and bring them to honour.

16    With long life will I satisfy them ♦
and show them my salvation.

Epistle – Romans 10.8b–13

But what does it say?

‘The word is near you,
on your lips and in your heart’

(that is, the word of faith that we proclaim); because if you confess with your lips that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved. For one believes with the heart and so is justified, and one confesses with the mouth and so is saved. The scripture says, ‘No one who believes in him will be put to shame.’ For there is no distinction between Jew and Greek; the same Lord is Lord of all and is generous to all who call on him. For, ‘Everyone who calls on the name of the Lord shall be saved.’

Gospel – Luke 4.1–13

Jesus, full of the Holy Spirit, returned from the Jordan and was led by the Spirit in the wilderness, where for forty days he was tempted by the devil. He ate nothing at all during those days, and when they were over, he was famished. The devil said to him, ‘If you are the Son of God, command this stone to become a loaf of bread.’ Jesus answered him, ‘It is written, “One does not live by bread alone.” ’

Then the devil led him up and showed him in an instant all the kingdoms of the world. And the devil said to him, ‘To you I will give their glory and all this authority; for it has been given over to me, and I give it to anyone I please. If you, then, will worship me, it will all be yours.’ Jesus answered him, ‘It is written,

“Worship the Lord your God, and serve only him.” ’

Then the devil took him to Jerusalem, and placed him on the pinnacle of the temple, saying to him, ‘If you are the Son of God, throw yourself down from here, for it is written,

“He will command his angels concerning you, to protect you”,

and

“On their hands they will bear you up,
so that you will not dash your foot against a stone.”

Jesus answered him, ‘It is said, “Do not put the Lord your God to the test.” ’ When the devil had finished every test, he departed from him until an opportune time.

Sermon on First Sunday of Lent

You may know that I enjoy mystery novels even more than my more academic and historical reading. One fictional character I find very engaging is Cadfael, a monk from the pen of Ellis Peters. I think you have all seen him on the small screen. I found a resumé of the characters which started my thinking for today’s ramblings.

Abbot Radulfus [is] the median, the ideal abbot, with whom Cadfael has a deep empathy and understanding. Both [prior] Robert and [the former abbot] Heribert also serve to show the cloistered and worldly perils, respectively, that Cadfael balances through his "constant war of conscience". Peters shows Cadfael at the heart of healthy, fulfilling monastic life, which may be flawed by its humanity but is well-intentioned. It is Cadfael, the fulcrum, who helps to maintain the health and perspective that overcomes crises of justice that arise from within and without the community. It may be argued that Peters creates him as a version of St Benedict’s vision of holy fellowship and service. (from Wikipedia, Cadfael)

I looked up Cadfael because I read another novel recently, one by Richard Coles, which began with a quotation from The Rule of St Benedict.

And so we are going to establish a school for the service of the Lord. In founding it we hope to introduce nothing harsh or burdensome. But if a certain strictness results from the dictates of equity for the amendment of vices or the preservation of charity, do not be at once dismayed and fly from the way of salvation, whose entrance cannot but be narrow. For as we advance in the religious life and in faith, our hearts expand and we run the way of God’s commandments with unspeakable sweetness of love. Thus, never departing from His school, but persevering in the monastery according to His teaching until death, we may by patience share in the sufferings of Christ and deserve to have a share also in His kingdom.

This description of a monastery as a school, when I read it along with the description of Cadfael in mind, sent me down the track of considering just what the religious life is. The monk who is separated from “the world” – that world in which we secular people live – this monk has a very intense life, surrounded only by others who have taken up that particuliar life, bound together with the vows of chastity, poverty and obedience. They chose that life of love and discipline, a life that leads to a full faith.

When I studied, I took a course about western monasticism. We looked at The Rule because it was the aim, the ideal, of all religious communities. It describes of a life of moderation, in which all help each other to share in that reflection of heaven upon earth, where love defines how people behave with each other. Benedict did not want to introduce anything “harsh or burdensome”. It is a life of quiet, there are no raised voices – but when voices do rise it is an emergency, or only demanded by the liturgy, when voices sing the praise of God.

Ora et labora. That is “the motto of the Benedictine order, signifying the importance of balancing spiritual devotion in prayer (ora) with physical labour (labora) in daily life.” (Wikipedia) All western monasticism is based on it. Every order is founded on The Rule – even those very radically different orders which say they won’t change because there is no deviation from The Rule in their way of life. They follow Benedict even if their order has its own peculiarities – for instance that silent order where there is no speech at all.

Richard Coles’ main character realises that whether you live in a secluded community or in the rough and tumble of “the world” you have to choose. For the monk it is the consistent choice of The Rule, a rule which fosters life in all its fullness, a rule which is set in a community which has only one goal, that of salvation for all. Those of us who have not chosen The Rule have to negotiate individual choices made by the people around us – and those choices may not be mutually beneficial, in fact they may be inimical to each other, becoming the cause of wars between nations or the disputes between groups in a community or even the arguments in the midst of families themselves. We might even think that personality problems signify the pull of one thing or another in an individual’s life.

The notion of choice, what the theologians call “free will”, is central to life. It is especially important in today’s political climate. Choice is central to everything we do – where we send our children to school, whether we take the bus or the car, who our doctor should be, everything has become a matter of our own personal choice.

We choose to act in particular ways – there is always a moment of selecting one thing over another. That moment is what the religious life is all about. Whether we have chosen “the cowl” or “the world”, we have to make that selection consistently, or else there is something radically wrong with the world in which we live and move and have our being. That free choice is the point on which our world ultimately rests. We must discern what that point is and we have to know that that point is where our religious sensibilities ground us.

Reading about Cadfael and studying The Rule of St Benedict will help us to discover how we can be authentic in our relations with other people. When we read about dubious characters, or see them on screen, don’t we get scared off behaving in those ways? Don’t we begin to see that the noble way of the good for its own sake is the only way to act? The actions of the wicked character in a novel remind us that we can be held culpable of the very same actions which we condemn as they unfold on the page as we read about them or on the screen as we watch them. We realise that no one is completely innocent when it comes to misdeeds, are they?

Benedict was right when he reminds us that “a certain strictness results from the dictates of equity for the amendment of vices or the preservation of charity.” Don’t parents do this for their children? They constrain their children in their love to keep them safe. Don’t we in our working lives also feel the constraint of the HSE and our bosses and other workers? Don’t we conform to safety rules for the sake of good order, a “certain strictness” for the sake of the “preservation of charity”?

These Rules may be Common Law, Health and Safety, or those of Benedict. We follow them because ultimately they allow us to live out our love for one another. “As we advance in the religious life and in faith, our hearts expand and we run the way of God’s commandments with unspeakable sweetness of love.” As we go on in life that constricting red tape disintegrates and we are absolutely free to act for the sake of the other person.

I have come to the conclusion that the religious life is a reflection of how we live in the world and Lent can be the real expression of that reality. I would venture to say that we should stand with “Cadfael at the heart of healthy, fulfilling life”. If we realise that, whether in our out of the cloister, we are all living in that “school for the service of the Lord”, a school in which we all really do want to live, even if we might have forgotten the fundamental choice of love we made long ago. Let us use Lent to remember, and resolve ourselves to, that choice of love.

Amen

Collect

Almighty God, you have created the heavens and the earth and made us in your own image: teach us to discern your hand in all your works and your likeness in all your children; through Jesus Christ your Son our Lord, who with you and the Holy Spirit reigns supreme over all things, now and for ever.

or

Almighty God, give us reverence for all creation and respect for every person, that we may mirror your likeness in Jesus Christ our Lord.

Post Communion

God our creator, by your gift the tree of life was set at the heart of the earthly paradise, and the bread of life at the heart of your Church: may we who have been nourished at your table on earth be transformed by the glory of the Saviour’s cross and enjoy the delights of eternity; through Jesus Christ our Lord.

Readings

Old Testament – Genesis 2.4b–9, 15–end

In the day that the Lord God made the earth and the heavens, when no plant of the field was yet in the earth and no herb of the field had yet sprung up—for the Lord God had not caused it to rain upon the earth, and there was no one to till the ground; but a stream would rise from the earth, and water the whole face of the ground— then the Lord God formed man from the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and the man became a living being. And the Lord God planted a garden in Eden, in the east; and there he put the man whom he had formed. Out of the ground the Lord God made to grow every tree that is pleasant to the sight and good for food, the tree of life also in the midst of the garden, and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.

The Lord God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to till it and keep it. And the Lord God commanded the man, ‘You may freely eat of every tree of the garden; but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall die.’

Then the Lord God said, ‘It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him a helper as his partner.’ So out of the ground the Lord God formed every animal of the field and every bird of the air, and brought them to the man to see what he would call them; and whatever the man called each living creature, that was its name. The man gave names to all cattle, and to the birds of the air, and to every animal of the field; but for the man there was not found a helper as his partner. So the Lord God caused a deep sleep to fall upon the man, and he slept; then he took one of his ribs and closed up its place with flesh. And the rib that the Lord God had taken from the man he made into a woman and brought her to the man. Then the man said,

‘This at last is bone of my bones
and flesh of my flesh;
this one shall be called Woman,
for out of Man this one was taken.’

Therefore a man leaves his father and his mother and clings to his wife, and they become one flesh. And the man and his wife were both naked, and were not ashamed.

Psalm

1    Praise is due to you, O God, in Zion; ♦
to you that answer prayer shall vows be paid.

2    To you shall all flesh come to confess their sins; ♦
when our misdeeds prevail against us, you will purge them away.

3    Happy are they whom you choose and draw to your courts to dwell there. ♦
We shall be satisfied with the blessings of your house, even of your holy temple.

4    With wonders you will answer us in your righteousness, O God of our salvation, ♦
O hope of all the ends of the earth and of the farthest seas.

5    In your strength you set fast the mountains ♦
and are girded about with might.

6    You still the raging of the seas, ♦
the roaring of their waves and the clamour of the peoples.

7    Those who dwell at the ends of the earth tremble at your marvels; ♦
the gates of the morning and evening sing your praise.

8    You visit the earth and water it; ♦
you make it very plenteous.

9    The river of God is full of water; ♦
you prepare grain for your people, for so you provide for the earth.

10    You drench the furrows and smooth out the ridges; ♦
you soften the ground with showers and bless its increase.

11    You crown the year with your goodness, ♦
and your paths overflow with plenty.

12    May the pastures of the wilderness flow with goodness ♦
and the hills be girded with joy.

13    May the meadows be clothed with flocks of sheep ♦
and the valleys stand so thick with corn that they shall laugh and sing.

Epistle – Revelation 4

I looked, and there in heaven a door stood open! And the first voice, which I had heard speaking to me like a trumpet, said, ‘Come up here, and I will show you what must take place after this.’ At once I was in the spirit, and there in heaven stood a throne, with one seated on the throne! And the one seated there looks like jasper and cornelian, and around the throne is a rainbow that looks like an emerald. Around the throne are twenty-four thrones, and seated on the thrones are twenty-four elders, dressed in white robes, with golden crowns on their heads. Coming from the throne are flashes of lightning, and rumblings and peals of thunder, and in front of the throne burn seven flaming torches, which are the seven spirits of God; and in front of the throne there is something like a sea of glass, like crystal.

Around the throne, and on each side of the throne, are four living creatures, full of eyes in front and behind: the first living creature like a lion, the second living creature like an ox, the third living creature with a face like a human face, and the fourth living creature like a flying eagle. And the four living creatures, each of them with six wings, are full of eyes all around and inside. Day and night without ceasing they sing,

‘Holy, holy, holy,
the Lord God the Almighty,
who was and is and is to come.’

And whenever the living creatures give glory and honour and thanks to the one who is seated on the throne, who lives for ever and ever, the twenty-four elders fall before the one who is seated on the throne and worship the one who lives for ever and ever; they cast their crowns before the throne, singing,

‘You are worthy, our Lord and God,
to receive glory and honour and power,
for you created all things,
and by your will they existed and were created.’

Gospel – Luke 8.22–25

One day he got into a boat with his disciples, and he said to them, ‘Let us go across to the other side of the lake.’ So they put out, and while they were sailing he fell asleep. A gale swept down on the lake, and the boat was filling with water, and they were in danger. They went to him and woke him up, shouting, ‘Master, Master, we are perishing!’ And he woke up and rebuked the wind and the raging waves; they ceased, and there was a calm. He said to them, ‘Where is your faith?’ They were afraid and amazed, and said to one another, ‘Who then is this, that he commands even the winds and the water, and they obey him?’

Sermon on Second Sunday before Lent

A few weeks ago we heard about the events at the lake of Gennesaret, when the fishermen were called as disciples after they had hauled in the catch which almost overwhelmed their boats. This week we are back on the water. Today we hear about the storm which threatened to drown them all. We know about those gales, don’t we? When everything is upset, when the normal is overturned and we have to struggle through hell to the other side, we call out “We are perishing” in our despair.

But to whom do we call? Social influencers whom we have never seen, whose words drift by ethereally on our phones, who have no idea of the danger we perceive? We call out to these savants hoping for a solution to our impossible muddle of danger – we call out for aid and succour. “Whence cometh my help” we cry out with the psalmist because we feel we are perishing.

Again we are on the deep waters of life, begging for help. We are about to spill into the deep and, because we don’t think we can swim, we panic in the midst of chaos.

But, on the contrary, I am certain that we can make our way in these deep waters. We have an example of calm, don’t we? We have just read about a fellow who slept through such a storm which threatened destruction to so many. He just stood up and rebuked the chaos. He must have said, “Be still!”

They were afraid and amazed, and said to one another, ‘Who then is this, that he commands even the winds and the water, and they obey him?’

We are like that crowd in wonder. But I think we could do this as well, couldn’t we? We fear and are bewildered about everything which befalls us – we don’t understand this fellow’s power to calm the storms of the most tortured soul.

When we hear that other command, “Do not fear!”, we don’t have to fear. We should take courage and live through the event. We must listen to that voice and take heart. If we do this in the depths of our despair, we would understand that we can make it through everything. We might even have a faith, a belief that we can live in hope.

Some have gone through a terrible journey of life and yet they tell us a story of life in all its fullness. They are the heroes of legend and we praise them, don’t we?

Who can make it through the wicked evil of the hero’s quest? I would say, those heroes who are stilled and work through, with care, the vicissitudes confronting them. They have not panicked in the face of difficulty.

They calmly walk through the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune to emerge from the chaos of their epic journey to find themselves at home again, like Odysseus when he reveals himself to Penelope. He might have used his sword on all of her suitors but I think he eventually becomes the man at peace by his hearth. That pacific picture is what must inform us. The end of the quiet life with the beloved should inspire us to carry on with the fight against chaotic evil at every moment.

Jesus calls to us to have faith, to take courage, never to fear. He calls to the blessed in the beatitudes teaching from the precarious position of the boat, a boat which symbolises the precarious position of everyone afloat on the sea of troubles. I think Jesus teaches about the calm of faith by sleeping in the boat during that outrageous storm, that storm which threw everyone into disarray. “They” called to him and revealed the character of the crowd, tossed this way and that in what they saw as chaos because they did not know that they could stand up against the storm blowing against them.

There in a corner of the boat lay the solution to all their fear of that moment. They had to call upon the solution. They had to rouse Jesus from slumber. When Jesus stood up, he spoke up against the perceived chaos. “Be still!” he said and that “Be still,” calms everything, especially our jangling nerves. I suggest we look to a solution far beyond the immediate, beyond the everyday perception of the crowd’s solution to any of our problems.

I would suggest we look to those invisible goods which belong to all, if we would but reach out to grasp them. They are there with us as we panic about everything. When the disciples feared for their lives, they called out “We are perishing!” – and so do we. We call out to God in those times of desperate fear, when we are at the edge. Don’t we now say “OMG”? In our anxiety, however, we do not take stock of our selves to find that reserve of calm, just as the disciples in that boat in the storm do not look to Jesus hidden away in sleep in the corner.

Our salvation lies hidden in our lives. We may not even recognise it as we panic in existential anxiety. We have to listen to the voice of Jesus as he commands, “Be still!” If that voice “commands even the winds and the water, and they obey him,” what can that voice do for us? What benefits can we receive if we were to listen?

Imagine if we were to listen and obey this command, “Do not fear!” What a different life would be ours if we turned away from the panic of the crowd and heard the voice of our heart! Jesus speaks to us in that stillness.

That is the miracle we all long for, isn’t it? But we get sucked along with the crowd. We don’t listen to the voice of our conscience. Rather we listen to the chattering confusion of the masses. We would rather speak about the weather to keep matters of moment at bay. We don’t want to think long and hard about that silence at the core of our being, that silence which challenges the crowd’s noisiness.

There in the corner lies our salvation. In the midst of our panic it lies sleeping. If only we would waken it, if we were to listen to that silent commanding voice, we would not panic – we would enjoy life in all its fullness, that life we pervert because we are too greedy to share with anyone, that life we silence in our existential anxiety as we listen only to the crowd’s distracting noise.

Let us not fear the silence of those corners where salvation sleeps unconcerned about the distractions of storms, the high winds of panic, the overwhelming seas, those nets full of struggling fish, the slings and arrows of humankind’s struggling with each other. Let us share the gift of life in all its fullness, the gift we all have in its abundance if we were to listen to its silent call, the call of loving friend and enemy alike. It is a commanding call, if we were to hear that still small voice of fearless calm, which “commands even the winds and the water, and they obey him.” Were we to listen to such a voice, that calm would be ours as well, so that we shall share life in all its fullness through loving care.

Amen