Month: November 2022

Romans 15.4-13, Matthew 3.1-12

The Second Sunday of Advent, 4 December 2022, Eldroth, Clapham

When he was Mayor of Jerusalem, Nir Barkat liked to tell visitors that once a week, two thirds of the planet wakes up thinking about that city. [1]

He’s alluding to how important Jerusalem is to all the followers of Judaism, Christianity and Islam. To each of us that city is a focus of devotion, a great symbol of the faith. It is where historic actions have taken place which have shaped us; it is where prayers are said each day in temple, church and mosque, which define us. 

And just to the east of Jerusalem runs another great symbol of The Holy Land: the River Jordan. This morning we’ve sung ‘On Jordan’s banks the Baptist’s cry announces that the Lord is nigh’. One of the great Jordan hymns, it draws our eyes towards that riverbank where John announces the coming of the longed-for saviour, and entreats the watching people to prepare themselves for the Lord’s coming, to make his paths straight by repenting and bearing good fruit worthy of that repentance. They signified their surrender to this change of direction by wading into the swirling river to be baptised by the Prophet, just as Jesus himself did, when his time came.

The Jordan has great meaning for Jewish people, for crossing it was the final stage of the Israelites’ epic journey from slavery in Egypt to freedom in the Promised Land. And because it represents freedom and release for captive people the River Jordan features in many songs of the African-American slaves, like ‘Old Man River’ where you can hear Paul Robeson sing, 

Let me go away from the Mississippi

Let me go away from the white man boss;

Show me that stream called the river Jordan

That’s the old stream that I long to cross. [2]

And in some spirituals crossing the Jordan represents that final crossing over, from earth to heaven, as in ‘Swing Low, Sweet Chariot’:

I looked over Jordan, and what did I see

Coming for to carry me home?

A band of angels coming after me,

Coming for to carry me home. [3]

Because of the baptism of Jesus, royal couples use water from the Jordan to baptise their children: as William and Catherine, Prince and Princess of Wales, did their eldest, Prince George.[4]

So the River Jordan is a symbolic dividing line, a crossing place between slavery and freedom, earth and heaven, apostasy and faith. 

Today, the River Jordan lends its name to two of the great territories in the area: Jordan, of course, and the West Bank of the Palestinian Territories; and it forms a dividing line between them – as it also separates Israel from Jordon, and Israel from Syria, further north. 

In that conflicted region, the Jordan itself has become a victim of the people’s hostilities. In 1964 Israel completed its largest water project, the National Water Carrier. Diverting water from Lake Tiberias to Israel’s coastal plains and southern desert, it has caused the flow of the Jordan River to be reduced to just 2% of its historic flow, from 1.3 billion cubic metres per year to only 20 or 30 million cubic metres per year as of 2010. [5] At Bethabara, the place where Jesus is said to have been baptised by John, the River Jordan now runs low, a muddy brown. [6]

Water quality has also deteriorated sharply, with high levels of salinity and pollution from agricultural fertiliser and untreated wastewater upstream in Israel and the West Bank. [7]

Israel’s diversion of water provokes tensions between Israel, Syria and Jordan. It was a key cause of the Six-Day War in 1967. And water is one of the most crucial battlegrounds in today’s Israeli-Palestinian conflict where almost 80 percent of the region’s mountain aquifer is located under the West Bank. Although this aquifer is the sole water source for West Bank residents, Israel takes 83 per cent of it to benefit Israeli cities and its settlements, leaving West Bank Palestinians the remaining 17 percent. Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians in the West Bank and virtually all Palestinians in Gaza thus receive water irregularly and in limited amounts. According to the UN, some 180 Palestinian communities in rural areas in the occupied West Bank have no access to running water. [8]

When we think about the land of the Jordan River today we may be troubled by the conflict between the peoples of Israel and Palestine. In all its complexity at times it seems it will be  impossible to resolve.

And yet…. A river can act as both a static boundary and a dynamic flow.  If a river is a symbolic crossing place from one side to another, then it is also the unifying presence which connects each side to the other. If it is a dividing line then it also has the properties to combine opposite sides together. A river’s water has the capacity to dissolve and hold in solution all the soluble substances of the lands through which it flows. [9]

Can there, after all, be reconciliation in the land through which the Jordan flows?

You may know Robert Cohen, husband of Revd Anne Russell, until recently rector of Bentham.  Reflecting on this question from his own experience he has said,

I have lived my Jewish life in the fall-out of two of the most seismic events in all of Jewish history – the Holocaust and the creation of the State of Israel. I hear in the Palestinian story echoes of my own people’s history. There will always be important differences and distinctions. But… there are enough resonances, enough notes, rhythms and phrases that my ears are alive to because they sound depressingly familiar. What does it mean to be displaced and dispersed? To be migrants and refugees? To be contained in a ghetto? To have your movement restricted? Your opportunities in life curtailed? To be told that political and social acceptance means forgetting your history and your heritage? To be denied autonomy and self-determination? To be abandoned by the world? For your suffering to count for nothing? These are the resonances I cannot help but hear when I listen to Palestinians. [10]

When a Jewish person listens to Palestinians then there is hope of reconciliation in the land of the Jordan River. Thankfully there are many such Jewish – Palestinian conversations taking place today. [11]

Remember when a Jewish person called Paul began to listen to Gentiles, he found hope that all could have the joy and peace in believing which until then only his Jewish brethren had known. 

‘May God grant you to live in harmony with one another, so that together you may with one voice glorify the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ,’ he wrote to the fellowship in Rome.

Our Advent calling might be to pray and work for harmony in the land of the Jordan; so that more and more of its peoples may cross over from distrust to understanding, going with the flow of the River of Life set in motion by the Creator God of the Muslims, the Christians and the Jews.

 

Notes

[1] Bono, Surrender: 40 Songs, One Story. A memoir. p.513.

[2] Wikipedia: Ol’ Man River; Genius.com: Paul Robeson, Ol’ Man River Lyrics.

[3] Wikipedia: Swing Low, Sweet Chariot.

[4] Wikipedia: Jordan River: Symbolism.

[5] Eyal Weizman, Hollow Land: Israel’s Architecture of Occupation, p.19; Wikipedia: Jordan River; Wikipedia: National Water Carrier of Israel.

[6] Bono, Surrender: 40 Songs, One Story. A memoir. p.509.

[7] Eyal Weizman, Hollow Land: Israel’s Architecture of Occupation, p.19.

[8] Eyal Weizman, Hollow Land: Israel’s Architecture of Occupation, p.19; Wikipedia: Jordan River; Amnesty International, The Occupation of Water. 29 November 2017.

[9] James Joyce, Ulysses, ‘What in water did Bloom… admire?’ passage.

[10] Robert Cohen, A Jewish Reflection on Palestinian Solidarity. Amos Trust, 30 November 2021.

[11] One example being the Parents Circle – Families Forum (PCFF), a joint Israeli-Palestinian organisation of over 600 bereaved Palestinians and Israeli families ‘identifying with a call to prevent bereavement , to promote dialogue,  tolerance, reconciliation and peace.’

Colossians 1.11-20, Luke 23.33-43

Christ the King, 20 November 2022, Austwick, Clapham

You would expect a king to be born in a palace, on soft white sheets, attended by doctors, nurses and courtiers, and to a great fanfare of public announcements; but He was born in a barn in the cold of the night with only some animals for company, while the unknowing, uncaring world passed by outside.

You would expect a king to be born of noble parentage; but His was an ordinary family, his mother a young country girl, and his father, a tradesman.

You would expect a king to be educated in the most elite schools: but He sought out his own learning, in the temple, at the feet of the religious elders.

You’d expect a young ruler to go on to an army college to complete his training in military style leadership; but this One served his time among the unrecognised crowds, learning to feed the hungry ones, to heal the broken ones, to comfort those in need.

You would expect a king to circulate among those born with the advantage of inherited wealth and status, the famous and the rich; but His closest companions were those who eked out a precarious living in and around the backwater towns of Galilee. [1]

Why call Jesus a king? It’s hardly a term he applied to himself. Think of the many times when his disciples or his detractors tried to pin that title on him and he repelled them, and how insistently he rejected Pilate’s probing attempts to get him to associate himself with the kingdoms of this world. 

Why call Jesus a king when everything we know about his life demonstrates that he was the anti-king, a humble man with the least autocratic tendencies imaginable? 

St Paul doesn’t call Jesus a king. He calls him ‘the image of the invisible God,’ for Jesus the man  shows us what the unseen God is like.

So it is surely intentional of God to take on physical form in the shape of a Judean village carpenter’s son at a time of Roman occupation. 

It’s surely intentional of God to model a form of leadership based not on mastery but on servanthood, a style of mission in which his students grow in skill and confidence as the Teacher progressively gives his power away to them. 

It’s surely intentional of God to challenge, at every opportunity, the haughtiness of the self-conceited religious and ruling elite – to challenge them, without malice or aggression, but rather with compassion, and with grace. 

It’s surely intentional of God to have persisted in disputing the credibility of these kings of the world by showing and telling them how His kingdom was of another order altogether. 

The conflict which Jesus stirred up by doing this inevitably led to the cross. He battled the kings of the world armed with weapons that they could not match: forgiveness, grace, humour and love. The consequence was his crucifixion. In ways the kings of the world could not fathom, his crucifixion was his victory.

For the cross – ‘the blood of his cross’, writes St Paul – was God’s means of bringing peace into a troubled universe. The cross – ‘the blood of his cross’ – was God’s means of reconciling earth and heaven. 

For from the cross emerged the resurrection, making Jesus ‘the firstborn from the dead’. 

And from the resurrection followed the ascension, marking a new beginning for all creation. 

Why call Jesus a king? It’s an imperfect term but it nevertheless helps us find a way to proclaim his universal sovereignty, to celebrate how his ascension revealed him to be Lord of earth and heaven. [2]

Now the kings of the world sit on thrones; they govern dominions like nations, colonies or corporations. The kings of the world rule through fear or force or power of influence. They are the powers-that-be, visible and invisible. They are Charles III; they are Elon Musk; they are Putin; they are the NHS; they are Shell Oil.

And St Paul teaches that all these thrones and dominions and rulers and powers have been created through Christ and for Christ. 

Yes, the Lord of earth and heaven, as the creator of all things, is the One who brought all these powers to birth. The kings of the world are his children, created in love, created for good, made to please and serve his good purposes.

And if the powers are created good, then although they may have fallen, these powers can be redeemed. [3]

For the Lord of earth and heaven, the One we call our King, is the One through whom God ‘was pleased to reconcile to himself all things’.

The Lord of earth and heaven has a mission to reunite all creatures of a divided world, to reconnect the estranged, to harmonise the discordant, to synthesise the divergent, to put wrongs to right and to heal the broken earth.

In a chaotic world which seems at times to be spinning off its axis, ’He himself is before all things, and in him all things hold together’.

His kingdom of love, joy and peace is unlike any we’ve seen or can otherwise imagine. But it is the truest active force at work in the universe, a force which can propel us from a place of despair to a place of hope, a force which can transform our inertia into fruitful good works.

And without a doubt, that’s why – today – our hearts are stirred up to call Jesus our King. [4]

 

Notes

[1] The opening section of this talk is based on my children’s poem Jesus – a funny sort of king.

[2] Common Worship: Times and Seasons: All Saints to Advent: Introduction to the Season.

[3] ‘The Powers are good. The Powers are fallen. The Powers must be redeemed.’ Walter Wink, Engaging the Powers: Discernment and Resistance in a World of Domination. p.3

2 Thessalonians 3.6-13, Luke 21.5-19

Remembrance Sunday, 13 November 2022

Austwick, Clapham, Keasden

Lest we forget, Christianity was born out of conflict, having its origins in the first century Jewish-Roman wars which ended in the siege of Jerusalem and the destruction of its Temple, which Jesus forewarns in our gospel reading today.

Reading the signs of his times and seeing this conflict coming, Jesus told his followers to expect wars: ‘Nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom’, he said. Expect conflict to come, and be prepared to face it.

And Jesus warned them how this coming conflict would impact those who took a stand for righteousness: ‘You will be betrayed,’ he said. ‘You will be hated by all because of my name.’

Be prepared to be involved in conflict, and be ready to face the consequences of doing the right thing.

But Jesus also reassured them that they shouldn’t be scared of these things. ‘Not a hair of your head will perish,’ he said. ‘By your endurance you will gain your souls.’ 

Be assured that if you are trying to live faithfully in a time of conflict, you’ll be protected, you’ll be sustained.

What does it mean to live faithfully in a time of conflict? Today we remember those who endured at a time of war. By ‘endured’ I don’t necessarily mean ‘survived’. For today we solemnly remember those who died in World Wars One and Two. What I do mean by ‘endured’ is that these people kept their integrity by embracing the call to struggle, to suffer, even to die, for what they felt was right. 

I think it’s fair to say that they were driven by their enduring faith – whether in God, or their country, or their companions in arms; 

And that they were driven by their enduring hope – that their actions would lead to a better world, a more peaceful and just world; 

And that they were driven by their enduring love – for God, maybe, or for their country, their companions, perhaps especially for their loved ones back home whose safety they fought to secure. 

Our gathering here shows that whether these people lost their lives on the battlefield, or have since passed on, or still survive today, their faith, hope and love endure, and continue to command our attention and respect. Perhaps our being here also means that we’re prepared to learn from them something about what it means to to live faithfully through our times of conflict today. 

In these days of political upheaval, economic distress, and wars in Europe, Asia, Africa, South America, at this moment of climate despair, it is far easier to see struggle, tragedy and suffering than it is to find signs of faith, hope and love. So many people are worried about their futures, so many are shutting down or lashing out as a consequence.

Where Paul writes, ‘Anyone unwilling to work should not eat’, here, we see hardworking people still struggling to put food on their table in this broken, brutally unequal economy we have made. 

Where the Psalmist sees ‘the rivers clap their hands and the hills ring out together before the Lord’, we find nature now struggling to survive in this polluted overheating world we have shaped.

And where Jesus says, ‘Beware that you are not led astray,’ we struggle to hear the voices of truth, wisdom, and goodness to guide us through the dissonance of our fractured public conversations.

Living faithfully means expecting conflict to come, and being prepared to face it.

It means being involved in conflict, ready to take the consequences of doing the right thing.

It means enduring all of this, in faith of being protected and sustained.

This week, you may have seen the previously unpublished photographs taken on Kristallnacht, the ‘Night of Broken Glass’ in November 1938 when mobs of Germans and Austrians attacked, looted and burned Jewish shops and homes, destroyed synagogues, killed Jews and sent thousands more to concentration camps. ‘One picture shows a crowd of smiling, well-dressed middle-aged German men and women standing casually as a Nazi officer smashes a storefront window. In another, brownshirts carry heaps of Jewish books, presumably for burning. Another image shows a Nazi officer splashing petrol on the pews of a synagogue before it is set alight.’ [2]

Contemplating these awful pictures revived in me an understanding of what motivated ordinary people to enlist to fight in World War Two. As they saw the evil in the mistreatment of the Jews, they became prepared to do the right thing and join the struggle to overcome that evil, prepared to face whatever consequences came their way. 

Whether motivated by a pure desire to protect an oppressed minority, or by a fear that, ‘if they’ve come for the Jews already, they may come for us next’, the effect was the same: ‘concentrated on the value, the rightness, the truth of the work itself’, they mobilised in hope. [3]

The truth about those we remember today, is that they worked for the hope of a better world. When they set out on their struggle they could not know how things would turn out. In the case of the Allies in WW2 we know that their hope was justified, and so their memory offers hope to those who share their vision today. Those who are determined to be not idle in the face of the conflicts of life, but who will take up the struggle for protecting the innocents, the oppressed minorities; the agitators for justice who, regardless of what might happen to them, ‘will not weary in doing what is right.’

The earliest Christians were punished for refusing to take up arms for the empire; and the Christian peace tradition is sustained today by nonviolent activists like Daniel Berrigan with his firm belief in ‘the total inability of violence to change anything for the better.’ [4]

Other Christians through the centuries have embraced the idea of ‘just war’ and taken up arms  believing that whilst war may not be good, it may be the only way to restore justice.

However we view these things, whatever our instincts on war and nonviolent action, the warriors and the peacemakers of old together call us to live faithfully, and in our own time of conflict to involve ourselves in doing what is right, being prepared to embrace both the trouble and the hope that this will bring.

 

 

Notes 

[1] A rewrite of Being a Christian in a time of war, preached in Croxteth, 2004, which in turn draws on my talk on Remembrance at the Blue Coat School, Wavertree, 2003. 

[2] Associated Press, Unseen Kristallnacht photos published 84 years after Nazi pogrom. Guardian, 9 November 2022.

[3] ‘Do not depend on the hope of results. When you are doing the sort of work you have taken on, essentially an apostolic work, you may have to face the fact that your work will be apparently worthless and even achieve no result at all, if not perhaps results opposite to what you expect. As you get used to this idea, you start more and more to concentrate not on the results but on the value, the rightness, the truth of the work itself.’ —Thomas Merton, The Hidden Ground of Love: The Letters of Thomas Merton on Religious Experience and Social Concerns.

[4] Daniel Berrigan, Faith, Resistance, and the Future: Daniel Berrigan’s Challenge to Catholic Social Thought.

2 Thessalonians 2.1-5, 13-17, Luke 20:27-38 

The Third Sunday before Advent, 6 November 2022

Eldroth, Clapham

This is a time of year for remembering. A time which raises for us all, questions of life and death. Questions like: what do we really believe happens after death? 

Some would say that those who have died, have completely, absolutely, irreversibly forever gone. Others may say that the dead are at peace – but what does that really mean? You may believe that those who have died are now in an afterlife, in a new home, where one day we might rejoin them.

Our understanding of death reflects the way we think about God, and ourselves. And so it affects the way we behave in life. 

In our gospel today Jesus had a debate with his fellow-seekers the Sadducees, who denied the resurrection. They believed that, if there really were a resurrection, then God would have told Moses about it, and Moses would have put it into the books of the law. But Moses didn’t put it into the books of the law, so they reckoned that God mustn’t have told him anything about this matter, and this means that there is no resurrection. 

As evidence that there was no resurrection they cited a law in Deuteronomy which set out that, if a married man died without children, then it fell to his brother to take that man’s widow as his wife so as to beget a child for his late brother, to keep the dead man’s name going in the family line. 

This law existed exactly because these people didn’t believe in a life-after-death; so, being full of anxiety about finding some way of overcoming death they decided that the only way to do that was by having children. To secure their blessing in the land of the living they had to make sure they had descendants. This is why the man who died without children needed his brother to get for him the share in posterity that he couldn’t get for himself. 

The Sadducees liked to prove their point by telling that ingenious little story of seven brothers who died before having children, each passing the wife on to the next like a used car. 

But Jesus is not impressed by their clever argument. He surprises them by saying that those who rise from the dead do not get married – because they are like angels. They are the children of God; they are the children of the resurrection. 

He is teaching that marrying and giving in marriage are normal things which happen in a world which is full of anxiety about overcoming death. But for those for whom death is not a reality, there is no anxiety about overcoming death; and for those people the reason for marriage, or for having children, is not about overcoming death. It is about celebrating life. 

Now you might understandably be thinking, what do I mean by ‘those for whom death is not a reality’. Surely death is a reality for everybody? The words of committal in the old Prayer Book Funeral Service seem to sum up well our usual state of being: ‘In the midst of life we are in death’, it says, and it seems we are, each of us people who are keenly affected by loss, continually bereaved.

Jesus quotes the book of Exodus where God tells Moses  ‘I am the God of Abraham, and the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob’ – three people who Moses understood to be dead at the time. Jesus is trying to help us to begin to understand that the power of God involves being completely and entirely alive, living without any reference to death. There is no death in God. God has nothing to do with death, and for that reason facts which are obvious to us, like Abraham, Isaac and Jacob having been long dead, simply do not exist for God. As Jesus says in Luke, ‘To God, all are alive’. To God, Abraham, Isaac and Jacob are alive. 

Let’s put this another way: we tend to think that ‘being alive’ means ‘not being dead’. We know we¹re alive because we¹re not dead. For God this is simply not the case. For God being alive has nothing to do with death. Jesus saw God as being radically alive, not mortal, not immortal, but a-mortal, in no way shaded by death. Those who started the dispute with him just couldn’t see God in this way, their whole way of seeing is distorted because it is stuck in a vision which flows from death to death, blind to God – who is the entirely death-less One.

Now, what would happen to us if only we really believed only in life! How would we then see ourselves and live towards others – all humans and non-humans with whom we share this earth? If we believed the good news that for God, death is something that is not, that ‘To God, all are alive’? If we lost our focus on death and became increasingly tuned-in to only believing only in life?

To overcome their anxiety about death, the Sadducees created marriage laws which protected their family line through generations. In our world those laws still exist, because those anxieties still exist, and have great influence on us, and can make us liable to get into relationships which might be harmful, for fear of being alone – forgetting that we are never alone with God; if we believed only in life then think how our relationships could be different. 

And in our world anxiety about death makes some people frightened of not being remembered, which drives them to do extreme and terrible things; the leaders of the nations are prone to fall into this trap, but so can we be in our own ways. If we believed only in life then think how our politics, and our behaviour towards others, the poor, outsiders and opponents, would be different. 

To reach this point of understanding, God’s perspective, can come with patient reflection and prayer. Whilst failing health and the ruptures of the world cause us to sleep restlessly believing that ’In the midst of life we are in death’, Jesus invites us to open our hearts to another movement active on this earth: to the equal and beautiful truth that also, ‘In the midst of death we are in life’.

‘In the midst of death we are in life’. Though we may feel ourselves to be surrounded by darkness Jesus wants us to lift up our eyes to the hills where the breaking light of the rising morning sun emerges as surely as at the dawn of creation, as surely as it will again tomorrow. In the midst of death’s darkness, the light of life moves towards us, seeking to embrace us; life in the form of the God who is God not of the dead, but of the living; for to him all are alive. 

We are like angels, Jesus tells us, because we are children of God. And so, as the Persian poet Rumi once asked, “You were born with wings, why prefer to crawl through life?”

So even on All Souls where our bereavements are real and raw; even today, there is a good news which can free us from our anxieties about death and draw us into a full, creative, liberated life. The good news that if we throw ourselves into the embrace of God who is only and all about life, then we will find our focus beginning to shift away from death’s anxieties and sorrows, towards life and the glorious art of living.

 

Notes 

This sermon is a rewrite of If only we believed only in life! To God all are alive, preached in Somerset, 2016, and To God all are alive, Croxteth, 2004. It borrows heavily from James Alison,  Raising Abel: The Recovery of the Eschatological Imagination, Chapter Two, as referenced in Paul Nuechterlein, Girardian Reflections on the Lectionary: All Saints Day C.