Month: August 2018

Proverbs 9.1-6, John 6.51-58 

Twelfth Sunday after Trinity, 19 August 2018

Austwick, Clapham, Eldroth

 

A bishop of the Church of South India described how a Hindu friend came frequently to his church. On one occasion he came forward at the Eucharist. The bishop, somewhat startled, gave him the elements and later sought him out to explain what communion meant. A few weeks later, the man came back and again presented himself at the altar. With some misgivings, the bishop again gave him bread and wine, but afterwards asked, ‘Did you not understand what I said? To share this meal you have to be committed to the Lord Jesus Christ. You are a Hindu. You have not made that commitment.’ To which the Hindu replied, ‘When I read your scriptures, I find that the Jews did not have to stop being Jews to love and follow Jesus. Why do I have to stop being a Hindu?’ The force of the question was, for the bishop, revelatory. [1] 

What that question revealed was a deep wisdom which had been hidden from the bishop up until  that point. 

“Wisdom has built her house,” the proverb says. We really should drop in on her more often. We have a lot to gain if we can begin to feel at home with her. 

For wisdom is one of the three ways we express our biblical religion. There is the way of the priest, the way of the prophet, and the way of the wise. 

Priestly religion is about worship, the glorious things and the trivial things. It aims to be sublime, but doesn’t always rise above the ritual. Priestly religion is about services in sacred places. It happens in sanctuaries and at altars. Priestly people know the difference between their cassocks and their their hassocks, their liturgies and their lectionaries. 

Priestly literature tells you how to do things properly. The priestly rules of the Old Testament told the people what to do in the tabernacle; our own priestly codes like the Prayer Book, for example, and Canon Law, regulate what we should do in church. 

Prophetic religion challenges priestly religion. “I hate, I despise your feasts,” says God in Amos 5.21. Prophetic religion stands on platforms in public places. It “speaks out” about what God has done, what he is doing and – even more scarily – what he will do. Prophets challenge the status quo. “You have heard it said…” Jesus often began his prophecies. “But I say to you….”  

Wisdom religion, by contrast, is not interested in services, nor does it dwell on the acts of God in history. Wisdom religion is about misbehaving children and mischievous gossip. It’s about chronic illness and how to cope with it. It’s about keeping your temper and keeping to time. It’s about the perils of making money and the joys of making love. 

Wisdom religion is about everyday life. It is about how to keep going. Wisdom religion is more obviously and immediately relevant to the concerns of ordinary people than priestly religion or prophetic religion. Yet it tends to get left out of the life of the Church. 

Church life concentrates on the practice of priestly religion and prophetic religion. Its main business is worship and proclaiming the acts of God to save and judge. This is important business, of course, the business of eternal life, but it does seem to be very short on advice about how to cope with the kids. 

The great books of the Wisdom tradition are Proverbs, Job, the Song of Songs, and Ecclesiastes. This week’s Old Testament reading is from Proverbs. It’s there because the clever compilers of our lectionary spotted a connection with the Gospel reading. 

“Eat my bread! Drink my wine!” says Wisdom. Which backs up Jesus’s invitation in the Gospel, with its hints of the eucharist: “He who eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life.” There is a connection, of course, but we must take these words about wisdom on their own terms rather than just using them to back up Christian claims.

“Lay aside immaturity, and live, and walk in the way of insight.’ says Wisdom. There are four good reasons for spending time with the Bible’s wisdom books and the religion they promote. 

First, wisdom religion connects our everyday duties with the life of faith. Living faithfully is as much about not festering in bed all day as about being saved. 

Secondly, wisdom religion focuses on human relationships – on getting on with other people – as much as on getting right with God, though that is important, too. 

Thirdly, wisdom religion draws on our experience rather than something ‘out there’ which is revealed to us. It appeals to what we share as human beings, not to the confessions that divide us. 

People of all faiths want to know how look after their children and how to live with their neighbours. Our reading urges us “to walk in the way of understanding”. That is something we can do together, whatever our belief-systems. That’s what the bishop and his Hindu friend discovered. 

Fourthly – and here’s a very relevant reason – wisdom religion questions the way we educate ourselves and our children. Today’s junior schools teach children how to pass exams. Today’s business schools teach adults how to make money. They do not teach them how to be wise. 

The importance of the Bible’s wisdom tradition is that it takes the demands of daily life as seriously as the great matters of worship and salvation. Not that we have to go agree with everything the wisdom writers say. For instance, Proverbs 22.15, “Iniquity is bound up in the heart of the child, but the cane will thrash it out of him” – a little harsh, perhaps. 

But if our sharing of the bread and wine of Jesus teaches us of the love God has for us, then our sharing in the bread and wine of wisdom will teach us how to live in the light of that love in our everyday lives. Here’s an invitation for you. Why not spend some time with the Bible’s books of wisdom?

 

 

Notes 

This talk is substantially John Pridmore’s commentary, What’s right with Wisdom, Church Times, 18 August 2006. An earlier version, Proverbs 9 – Wisdom’s house, I preached in Liverpool, 2006.

[1] Elizabeth Templeton, in Growing Hope: Daily readings. 

James 1.14-27, Mark 7.1-23

Fourteenth Sunday after Trinity, 2 September 2018, Eldroth

 

A friend of mine was recently priested in the Church of England. On the first Sunday he went to celebrate communion in his church, he encountered an odd tradition. Preparing him in advance, his vicar said that what would happen was this: as he made ready the bread and wine the server would offer him a bowl of water with which to wash his hands. He wasn’t to accept this – instead, what he should do was hold his hands up and shake his head, as if to say, ‘no, thanks’. 

What a strange tradition. It turns out it started decades ago when a vicar used to wash his hands at that point in the service, but when his successor came along he didn’t want to do that – so he went like that. Instead of asking the server to stop offering the water, that odd, meaningless ritual began. And it’s carried on ever since. 

It’s always good to question our traditions and rituals. Those things we regard as ‘orthodox’. The things we keep on doing simply because we’ve always done them that way. Well, that way may no longer speak to people’s hearts, that way may no longer be God’s way, if it ever has been. 

As followers of Christ we have every right to question our church leaders on the traditions we maintain. Because Jesus was always asking questions of those who upheld the traditions of his day. Jesus didn’t want God’s people to miss the point and get themselves so wrapped up in the letter of human laws, that they let their hearts shrink from the spirit of the perfect law of God. 

So in today’s gospel we find Jesus in conflict with the traditionalists of his day. Over the issue of ritual cleanliness. In brief, if you didn’t wash properly, wash yourself, and wash the utensils you used around food, then you were unclean, defiled. You won’t find this law in the scriptures. It was one of many which the religious gatekeepers had created through their own interpretation of the scriptures, and imposed on the people of the day. 

It was a simple enough law to keep if you lived and worked close to a good water supply, like in the temple courts, government offices, royal palaces. If you were comfortably off, well-plumbed-in. But what if you worked out in the fields all day, or if you were a builder up on the rooftops, a plumber down the drains? It was impossible to arrange a pretty ritual wash up before your hard-worked-for food breaks in any of those places. 

The law established by tradition condemned such folk as unclean, defiled. Jesus wouldn’t wear that. Jesus condemned this man-made law. Jesus said, it’s not what goes into a person that makes them unclean – he’s talking about food here – it’s what comes out. 

He’s saying, it’s not important whether you obey purity rules or not, what’s important is what comes out of your heart. If your heart’s full of badness then that’s where pollution begins. It’s a bad heart that makes you unclean. It’s a bad heart that defiles you. Let’s be frank: it’s a bad heart that imposes bad laws on other people.

Now, the spirit of our age is quite Christlike. Because today, people question those institutions which uphold tradition. Our society has a critical spirit, which keenly seeks out hypocrisy: in the government, in the church, in media, in royalty… 

Some of this may be mischief-making. But it’s no bad thing to keep check of what’s at the heart of our institutions. For how can a government be trustworthy if at its heart is deception and protectionism? How can a church be loving if at its heart it’s concealing child abuse? 

These are Christlike questions to ask. And it is our challenge and our gift to embrace them, to take a long hard look at ourselves and ask whether our precious traditions are what Jesus called the traditions of men, in contrast to the loving laws of God.

James encourages believers to ‘look intently into the perfect law that gives freedom,’ the law of Jesus – a way of relating to God and neighbour which looks at the heart of a person, not at how they relate to what is written in the statute books or how human society judges them. James entreats us to hear this teaching and act on it – to keep asking ourselves, do the rules that we follow reflect the loving commands of God, or are they closer to the crushing traditions of men? 

The everyday people of Jesus’ day who didn’t wash their hands in the ‘proper’ way were condemned as unclean, defiled by those who weren’t bothered enough to try to understand why. 

It’s a little like the way our society condemns the homeless or the prisoner as unclean and impure without seeking to understand the complex reasons why they got in that position; condemning  without caring to try to help them rebuild their lives, to work for their rehabilitation for their good and for the good of society.

Just like Jesus’ opponents all those years ago there are still issues about those who eat food differently to ourselves. Although our British palate has broadened significantly in recent years so we’re far more positive about food from other countries than ever before, now another sort of tradition is developing: a kind of food snobbery whereby if we’re not operating at Masterchef-level in our kitchens we feel a little chastened, if we can’t offer visitors a choice of a dozen kinds of latte then we’re embarrassed. This food snobbery, this new-fangled tradition of man: I see it in people’s eyes when I tell them my stepson works at McDonalds.

And then there are the ambulance-chasers, the PPI specialists, those keen to help us sue the NHS.  When we depend on laws, and unwritten rules and regulations, it feels like trust has broken down between people, that we are failing to understand and value each other at a human level. This is a litigious society, shackled by our law books; a judgemental society, shallow in relationships. [2]

I could go on. I think the point’s been made. In the light of all this, here is Jesus inviting us to discover what God’s perfect law of love and freedom means in every circumstance, in every relationship; here is James challenging us to be bold enough to bury those old and harmful rules which – in the light of God’s law of love – no longer apply, and to live generously towards others. 

 

Notes 

[1] This is a rewrite of Mark 7 – What defiles a person? preached in Devon in 2012, and previously in Wavertree, in 2003.  

[2] Giles Fraser, The Military Ethical Complex, talk at Greenbelt 2012.

From the Inside Out: Reimagining Mission, Recreating the World. Ryan Kuja, Cascade Books

There are countless books critiquing Christian mission's historic complicity in the impositions of colonial empire; and other more recent writings bringing that critique into the present day, redefining empire as neoliberalism's global reach. Ryan Kuja follows this pattern, using the terms McMission and 'empire lite' in discussing North American Christianity's embrace of the prevailing culture and the sometimes subtle ways this works its way into missionary and aid projects. 

But Ryan Kuja goes beyond the usual parameters of these familiar arguments in seeking a way to reimagine mission, to create a world where the distance between missionary and those on the receiving end of mission, is diminished. Daring to suggest that the missionary themselves may be the one in most need of healing, of receiving good news, Kuja meditates in the area of the missionary's motivation for doing mission: raising uncomfortable questions for the sake of liberating wholeness. 

This makes his book challenging, but important reading for anyone following a call in Christian mission. Quoting Kathleen O'Connor, Kuja writes, 

The poverty of the Majority World is palpable. It largely resides out in the open where all can see it. But this poverty, and the people who dwell in its midst, does not pretend that it isn’t there. This pain cannot be abjured. Unlike the suffering of the West, no one denies it. In North America, our sense of despair “masquerades under a guise of well-being so persuasive as to deceive the wearers of the masks themselves.”

What secures the reader's attention and provokes an empathic response is that Kuja shares deeply his own sufferings and denials, and how they played a central part in both shaping his missionary activities and ultimately causing them to burn out in mental breakdown. Kuja is generous in sharing his story for the space it opens up for the reader to interrogate our own stories. Better still, and a constant throughout this engaging book, he celebrates how a God who is always making things new, finds a way for re-creation in all our stories.

"I glimpse a promise that despite the presence of brokenness, disease, and death, all things are being reconciled, restored, and reborn." Mission unites us with others with whom we are called to learn this together.

 

 

 

‘Putting away all falsehood, let us speak the truth to our neighbours, for we are members of one another.’ Christian speech is not just neighbourly in a soft way. It is a way of talking about all others which recognises that however different we may be in terms of culture, we are all equally valued and loved, upheld by God. With so many malign, corrupting voices in our ears all the time we need to check our influences constantly, as we train ourselves to learn to talk this way. But what a difference we each make in the world when we do.

– from my talk today (and having read The Death of Truth by Michiko Kakutani: "an impassioned critique of the West’s retreat from reason." … ‘The Death of Truth is destined to become the defining treatise of our age’ David Grann… recommended.)

Ephesians 4.25-5.2, John 6.35; 41-51 

Eleventh Sunday after Trinity, 12 August 2018, Austwick 

 

Putting away all falsehood, let us speak the truth to our neighbours,

for we are members of one another.

How are we to speak as Christians today? How do we get to the truth and represent it in the way we talk to others? For we’re living through times where truth is being challenged, and there are strong social pressures on us to imitate those who manipulate or deny truth. 

Among all the various protests around the world in recent times, one notable event was the March for Science, a celebration and affirmation of science at a time where, to quote Michael Gove, people ‘have had enough of experts’. Last year’s inaugural march drew tens of thousands of people to Washington DC, 10,000 to London and over a million more across 200 cities worldwide, reinforcing a sense among scientists that their work is being sidelined, and that their particular claim to the truth is losing influence. [1] 

Mike MacFerrin, a glaciologist in Greenland, gives an example of why this loss of truthfulness is important, in this case in relation to climate change. “People in Kangerlussuaq have a reason to care,” he says. “A bridge partly washed out in 2012, due to runoff from the ice sheet. I liken the attacks on science to turning off the headlights. We’re driving fast and people don’t want to see what’s coming up. Scientists – we’re the headlights.” [2]

In the society depicted in George Orwell’s novel 1984 the word ‘science’ is banished, because the objective reality it represents threatens the power of Big Brother to determine what truth is. [3] When we hear people parroting those who lie in plain sight in denial of painstakingly-researched truths, shouldn’t we Christians stand with the scientists in empathy and affirmation?

Putting away all falsehood, let us speak the truth to our neighbours,

for we are members of one another.

In recent times objective truth has been devalued by so-called postmodernism, wherein everything is considered to be subjective, socially constructed; in other words where you have your truth and I have mine, and, whilst they may be irreconcilable, both are equally valid. Postmodernism has been helpful in exposing the limitations of conventional ways of seeing the world and in usefully challenging oppressive established powers. But the idea that everything is relative can be pushed so far that it begins to make truthfulness irrelevant. So when an incoming president can promote himself by saying that the crowds at his inauguration were the “largest audience” ever, in defiance of all photographic evidence to the contrary, we see postmodernism twisted into an abuse of power. Men in the position of Trump and Putin tell these sorts of lies “to assert power over truth itself.” As one writer has noted, “Putin’s power lies in being able to say what he wants, regardless of the facts. He is president of his country and king of reality.” [4]

In the face of all this, what is the Christian’s task? Are we in the business of the child in the story of the Emperor’s New Clothes, who dares to cry out, “But he isn’t wearing anything at all!”? [5]

In the gospels we find that Jesus was often occupied in speaking truth to power. In the gospel of John we find him expressing his impatience with the complaints and weasel-words of religious leaders of a repressive system who can’t see him for who he is, “… the Word of God, the Son of the Father, the agent, messenger and apostle of the Father.” [6]

We also often find Jesus speaking truth to the powerless – the crowds following him looking for another magic trick, or healing, or free lunch – challenging them to see that only the bread of life can truly and completely satisfy their physical, spiritual, and emotional hunger. 

Truth is, that “The union with God that Jesus makes available makes anything else seem wholly inferior, unnecessary and unsatisfying.” [7] The short-lived fads of every other passing healer or teacher, president or priest cannot compare with the life of everlasting satisfaction Jesus brings. 

Paul entreats us,”Be imitators of God, as beloved children, and live in love as Christ loved us.” [8] Don’t imitate polarising presidents and knee-jerk politicians. Don’t imitate shrill editorials which play on your fears and anxiety. Don’t imitate anyone who preaches hatred. Imitate God – speak as you live – in love. Paul fleshes out for us what our speaking Jesus’ truth will sound like.

According to Paul, truthful Christian speech can never be neutral. It will cause us to acknowledge our fears and anger, but will help us find ways to lay them down; it will help us recognise our shortcomings, and to make recompense. Christian speech will be full of grace, kindness, tender-heartedness and forgiveness. And above all, it will build neighbourliness and love for others.

Christian truthful talking is far from the evil talk, the angry, manipulative speech we hear around us daily. Far from being malicious and slanderous it is rooted in empathy and builds community.

This is how the previous president of the Unites States described his way of Christian speaking:

My faith is one that admits some doubt, that says that I believe in Jesus Christ and I believe in God, but I also recognise … I may not always be right, that God doesn’t speak to me alone, and that the only way that I could live effectively with people who have different beliefs and different faiths is if we have a civil society that is, in fact, civil. [9]

‘Putting away all falsehood, let us speak the truth to our neighbours, for we are members of one another.’ Christian speech is not just neighbourly in a soft way. It is a way of talking about all others which recognises that however different we may be in terms of culture, we are all equally valued and loved, upheld by God. With so many malign, corrupting voices in our ears all the time we need to check our influences constantly, as we train ourselves to learn to talk this way. But what a difference we each make in the world when we do.

 

Notes

[1] Michiko Kakutani, The Death of Truth. p.38-39. Stephen Buranyi, On the March for Science, LRB Blog, 16 April 2018.

[2] Kakutani, The Death of Truth. p.39. Marchers around the world tell us why they’re taking to the streets for science. Science, 13 April 2017.

[3] Kakutani, The Death of Truth. p.37.

[4] Kakutani, The Death of Truth. p.96

[5] Wikipedia: The Emperor’s New Clothes.

[6] John Fenton, Finding The Way Through John. p.144.

[7] Fenton, Finding The Way Through John. p.144.

[8] Ephesians 5.1-2.

[9] Barack Obama, The Keyes-Obama Debates: Africans and African Americans.

 

 

Sometimes we just can’t get enough of wanting a thing and then when we get it – we find we don’t want it any more….

…The crowd with its famished craving wants more and more feeding with healings and miracles and food. They want a sign like the manna in the wilderness to keep them fed until the hunger rises again. But Jesus wants them to understand that the bread that he gives is the bread that satisfies.

Jesus said to [the crowds], 'I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me will never be hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty.’ The only food which will cure our famished craving is the food he offers. Jesus invites us to consider that to become fully human, fulfilled in our life, we need to find our fullness in him. What truly enables us to be fully formed, mature people is this: having faith in the One who is the ground of our Being. …

– from my talk today, The bread of life is no fad diet – it’s all the nutrition we’ll ever need.

Ephesians 4.1-16, John 6.24-35

Tenth Sunday after Trinity, 5 August 2018

Eldroth, Keasden

 

Sometimes we just can’t get enough of wanting a thing and then when we get it – we find we don’t want it any more.

You know the feeling – when for ages you’ve been obsessing about getting yourself something that you’ve seen other people have, that you’re convinced you really really need – whether that’s a book or a bottle of wine, or a new variety of hair restorer, or of hair remover, or a car or a pet rabbit… whatever, there’s always that odd moment, often just a short time after the card reader has pinged your transaction at the till, or the package arrives in the post, that odd moment when, holding that item in your hands, you feel deflated – as you realise that what you’ve just got you don’t want any more because you’ve seen someone with something else that looks better. And so it goes on.

This driven desire to shop for that one item which will satisfy us – and having purchased that, to find ourselves hungry all of a sudden to shop for something else: there’s a phrase to describe this relentless hunger: it is ‘a famished craving’.

It’s not just about objects either – it can be about people. Consider our celebrity obsession. There’s that drivenness which crowds have to look for the next celebrity, to celebrate them, to elevate them, to consecrate them, and then, after a while to grow bored with them, to drop them, and move on to another. 

One summer our country is in the grip of an Olympic obsession, and the next it’s a World Cup. A Welshman we never heard of before wins the Tour de France and suddenly we’re all flying the dragon. Who’s next? A prince marries a actress, which makes her a princess, but that’s always where the fairytale ends and the trouble begins for a woman suddenly in the full glare of the public eye. Our relentless hunger for celebrity,  our ‘famished craving’ for role models who might save us – it’s part of who we are. [1]

Then there is our own insatiable hunger to be fed, physically and emotionally, by gaining the attention of others. Those close to us who we rely on to help us feel fulfilled, those who we unhealthily depend on to do things for us, and who we then find ourselves asking to do even more. Or those who we keep doing things for in an endless cycle of hoping that will get us noticed and loved. Why else are we constantly checking our smartphones for messages, why else do we love getting ‘likes’ on Facebook, followers on Twitter, why else would we feel a frisson of delight when that famous playwright returns our greetings at the Street Fair? [2]

And so we find the crowds following Jesus wavering between being impressed with Jesus and getting bored, craving a new sign. They’d seen him heal the sick; but that wasn’t enough.  They were among the five thousand he fed, in an astonishing miracle, but still they wanted more. They revelled in reports of him having walked on the water of the lake. But still they kept coming, looking for another sign. 

The crowd with its famished craving wants more and more feeding with healings and miracles and food. They want a sign like the manna in the wilderness to keep them fed until the hunger rises again. But Jesus wants them to understand that the bread that he gives is the bread that satisfies. 

Jesus said to [the crowds], ‘I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me will never be hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty.’ [3] The only food which will cure our famished craving is the food he offers. Jesus invites us to consider that to become fully human, fulfilled in our life, we need to find our fullness in him. What truly enables us to be fully formed, mature people is this: having faith in the One who is the ground of our Being.

In his letter to the Ephesians Paul entreats us to become mature Christians – for that is how we we become fully human in Christ. Training ourselves to be rooted in an understanding that in God we can be truly who we are meant to be. Learning more and more about what that means through the practice of prayer, and study of the scriptures, so that we need no longer be ‘tossed to and fro and blown about by every wind of doctrine, by other people’s trickery and scheming’. [4] Practicing how to resist our famished cravings and instead to feed ourselves with the bread of life, learning to focus our desires on Jesus and on him alone, for only in him can we be satisfied.

The mature Christian is one who has moved away from unhealthy dependencies into healthy relationships with self and others based on a wholesome self-understanding and a confidence born from a healthy relationship with God, a relationship rooted in prayer, in Bible reading, in worship and in fellowship, and in acts of service and witness. This relationship we can help each other to develop – and if you are minded to want to do more in the way of prayer, study, witness and worship together in our fellowship here, then I’m keen to hear from you.

Some time back I visited Chester Zoo and put 20-pence into a set of scales which then told me that I weighed the same as a small dolphin. It could have been worse – at least it wasn’t a beached whale – but it was a wake-up call to get fit. And an analogy of my inner life too. I know that all too often my spiritual diet is unedifying, and that if only I could eat more of the bread of life I’d be filled, I’d be fulfilled, my cravings would fade and faith would make me whole. The bread of life is no fad diet – it’s all the nutrition we’ll ever need.

God help us all – whatever our maturity in years – to keep growing in our maturity in Christ, and to enjoy all that goes with it. God help us to keep encouraging each other in our growth to maturity in Christ. 

 

Notes 

Different versions of this sermon were previously preached in Devon, 2012 and Liverpool, 2009.

The ‘famished craving’ meme and the ‘bread of life’ discussion is adapted from Paul Nuechterlein’s Girardian Reflections on the Lectionary, PROPER 13, YEAR B which reference Gil Bailie’s audio tape series, ‘The Famished Craving: The Attention of Others, the Fascination for the Famous, and the Need for Faith’. This in turn reflects on T.S. Eliot’s poem ‘Gerontion’, in which which the poet writes, ‘And what [History] gives, gives with such supple confusions That the giving famishes the craving….’

[1] Plans to celebrate tour [de France] win by Geraint Thomas in Wales. BBC News, 30 July 2018. MEG-A JEALOUS This is Meghan Markle’s new official ‘occupation’… and we’re a bit jealous. The Sun, 24th May 2018.

[2] Alan Bennett has a home in Clapham, and yes, I admit I was chuffed when he spoke to me at the Clapham Street Fair the Saturday prior to this sermon being preached.

[3] John 6.35.

[4] Ephesians 4.13-14.