Signs of the kingdom now and nearby

Here's the sermon that I shared at St Andrew's Wickford this morning:

In our Gospel reading (Luke 21. 25-36), Jesus talks about signs that the kingdom of God is near which are not always seen or noticed.

There is a condition called presbyopia that relates to this. Presbyopia is when your eyes gradually lose the ability to see things clearly up close. It is a normal part of aging. In fact, the term “presbyopia” comes from a Greek word which means “old eye.” You may start to notice presbyopia shortly after age 40. You will probably find that you hold reading materials farther away in order to see them clearly.

What happens is that your clear lens sits inside the eye behind your coloured iris. It changes shape to focus light onto the retina so you can see. When you are young, the lens is soft and flexible, easily changing shape. This lets you focus on objects both close-up and far away. After age 40, the lens becomes more rigid. It cannot change shape as easily. This makes it harder to read, thread a needle, or do other close-up tasks.

There is no way to stop or reverse the normal aging process that causes presbyopia. However, presbyopia can be corrected with eyeglasses, contact lenses, medication, or surgery.

This condition means that we see things close up better when we see with the eyes of a child. Jesus spoke about our needing to become like little children in order to see the kingdom of God. A Catholic nun who was also an artist called Sister Corita Kent has described the way in which children look and learn:

“Ask [a] child to come from the front of the house to the back and closely observe her small journey. It will be full of pauses, circling, touching and picking up in order to smell, shake, taste, rub, and scrape. The child’s eyes won’t leave the ground, and every piece of paper, every scrap, every object along the path will be a new discovery.

It does not matter that his is all familiar territory – the same house, the same rug and chair. To the child, the journey of this particular day, with its special light and sound, has never been made before. So the child treats the situation with the open curiosity and attention that it deserves.

The child is quite right.”

The central premise of this parable — that the kingdom is near, now — is a promise that the church needs to here regularly. Watch for the signs, Jesus says, and you will see that your redemption is drawing near, and indeed is already near.

"The Greek word here is engizo, a verb which expresses the immanence, the “coming nearness” of someone or something." So, here, "in this unusual parable and its visualization of this vital New Testament idea of “nearness,” we find the imperative of the gospel, its life-giving assurance — the Kingdom is not far off; it is not waiting; it is not an undiscovered country; it is right here in Jesus, the Son of Man, and in his proclamation. This is the good news: the kingdom of heaven has come near."

So, what is it that we’re missing, what is it that is close by, near to us, that we’re overlooking? Luke has already answered that question for us near the beginning of his Gospel. In Luke 4, we read of Jesus going to the synagogue in Nazareth, being given the scroll, reading words from Isaiah, then sitting down and saying ‘Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.’

The words he read are his manifesto and the signs that the kingdom of God is near:

‘The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,
because he has anointed me
to bring good news to the poor.
He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives
and recovery of sight to the blind,
to let the oppressed go free,
to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favour.’

So whenever and wherever we see good news brought to the poor, release proclaimed for captive, recovery of sight for those who are blind and freedom brought to those who are oppressed then we are seeing the kingdom of God coming near.

That is what we are to look out for. That is what can often be seen nearby but which is missed when we, as the Church so often has done, look for the coming kingdom in the far distant future instead of the here and now.

'The kingdom is directly related to Jesus himself. The king is present with us, so the kingdom is near.' 'In Jesus, God was beginning to reign on earth in a new way, in fulfilment of Old Testament prophecy. Under God’s sovereign authority, righteousness will triumph over injustice and multifaceted peace will fill the earth.

Through Christ, you and I can live today under the reign of God today, however incompletely. When we seek God’s agenda for our lives, when we live for his purposes and glory, when we bow before him in worship, we are experiencing the kingdom of God, in anticipation of that day when all the earth will flourish under the glorious reign of God.'

'God's kingdom is all around you. There's nowhere you go that God doesn't reign. You either choose to recognize the truthfulness of that and live accordingly, or you choose to live in rebellion, rejecting the truth. If you choose the latter, you will find that your life doesn't go quite the way God intended. We're meant to recognize that the reign of God is all around us and to live accordingly.'

As we have seen, 'the knowledge that God's kingdom is all around us is not meant to lead us to ignore the world, saying, "None of the problems in the world really matter, because I live in the kingdom of God." Instead, it's meant to compel us to try to help this world look more like the kingdom of God. We live in rebellion, and the world lives in rebellion, so we see a lot of things in our world that are broken and reflective of our brokenness. But we pray: "Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven."' In teaching us to pray this prayer, Jesus is encouraging us to see with the eyes of a child and to see what is nearby and close up, his kingdom in our lives and our world.

This is our Advent task to look with the eyes of a child for the kingdom of God nearby now, remembering that advent means arrival and that the incarnation involved God moving into our neighbourhood as a child.

So, we pray: Grant us, Lord God, a vision of your world as your love would have it: a world where the weak are protected, and none go hungry or poor; a world where the riches of creation are shared, and everyone can enjoy them; a world where different races and cultures live in harmony and mutual respect; a world where peace is built with justice, and justice is guided by love. Give us the inspiration and courage to build it, through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

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The Innocence Mission - Cloud To Cloud. 

Harry Clarke and An Túr Gloine at St Eunan's Cathedral

'The 19th century Catholic revival in England influenced a renewed interest in the Gothic style and in the use of stained glass, while the Celtic revival in Ireland (19th/20th centuries) ushered in an interest in Celtic culture to be deployed, inter alia, in the visual arts. The languid mood and undulating lines of Art Nouveau also proved influential.

Harry Clarke (1889-1931) born in Dublin, is one of the finest exponents of stained glass design. Experimental and controversial at times, he received commissions from both the Catholic church and the Church of Ireland as well as for secular projects. Examples of his work are installed in buildings in Ireland, England, America and Australia. He was also an illustrator of books ...

he brought an imaginative and magical interpretation to the depiction of both religious and secular themes. His colours are varied and rich (variants of ruby reds and deep blues proliferate) and induce a kaleidoscopic interchange of colour and light. The luminous and shifting nature of his deployment of light contributes to the ‘becoming’ of his stained glass works. The composition of his panels can at times be crowded but more often he retains a harmonising integrity of lines, shapes, colours and forms to exquisite effect.'

There are decorative clerestory windows by him in St Eunan’s Cathedral, Letterkenny, as well as wall paintings. The Cathedral also has the finest collection of An Túr Gloine Stained Glass windows in Ireland.

The Cathedral has: 'windows to the transepts by Michael Healy (1873-1941) dated 1910-11 (five-light window depicting the Convention of Druceatt, St. Helena window, and the SS Dallan and Conan Maol window), work by Alfred Ernest Child (1869-1939) depicting St. Finan and St. Moibhi, work by Beatrice Elvery\Lady Glenavy (1881-1970) depicting St. Columbanus and St. Gall, work by Catherine O’Brien depicting St. Columba, work by Ethel Rhind (1878-1952) depicting St. Charles Borromeo, and work by Richard Joseph King (1907-74). Perhaps of most importance is the series of ten stained glass windows at clerestory level (dated 1928) by the celebrated artist Harry Clarke (1889-1931) who was also responsible for two wall paintings at this cathedral.'

'In the summer of 1928 Harry visited St. Eunan’s Cathedral in Letterkenny to inspect the area allocated for ten two-light clerestory windows. In July he sent several sketches for the Letterkenny project to the Bishop of Raphoe, Reverend William MacNeely.

Harry was awarded the commission in August. Despite Harry’s ill-health and his stay at the sanatorium in Davos, Switzerland, for most of 1929, the Letterkenny windows were completed by November 1929 (Bowe: 1994). Cut pieces of slab glass in diamond shapes were used to create each of the Letterkenny windows. Although similar in design, every window is unique.'

His wall paintings are located in Our Lady's Altar at the back of the cathedral's main altar. A painting of one angel was only uncovered and restored in 2012.

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U2 - A Sort Of Homecoming.

Church Times - Art review: Matthew Krishanu: The Bough Breaks (Camden Arts Centre)

My latest exhibition review for Church Times is on The Bough Breaks: Matthew Krishanu at Camden Art Centre:

'Krishanu shows us the world from the perspective of a child and asks us to pay attention as the child does. Accordingly, we see the vastness of the world around us, whether its foreground expanses or the complex climbing frame of banyan trees or the immense depth of pools, rivers, and oceans. In the adult world of human beings, we are often at the back of crowds looking through beings like trees in a forest, or looking up because we cannot look through.'

See also my latest Art Diary for Artlyst for more on this exhibition and my review of Everyday Heroes for more on Matthew Krishanu.

Other of my pieces for Church Times can be found here. My writing for ArtWay can be found here. My pieces for Artlyst are here, those for Seen & Unseen are here, and those for Art+Christianity are here.

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The Innocence Mission - Beginning The World.

Come as a child

Here is the reflection I shared in today's Eucharist at St Andrew's Wickford:

The poem called ‘Song of Childhood’ by Peter Handke which features in the film Wings of Desire captures, for me, something of the openness of childhood when the world lies open before us and we encounter it without cynicism or prior knowledge. The big questions of life are in front of us but we have yet found answers or the pretence that we can know all the answers.

In the poem the child has retained that openness to life and existence as she or he has grown but in our gospel reading (Matthew 11. 25-30) today we hear of people who have not. When Jesus speaks about the wise and the intelligent, he is speaking of those who think they already have knowledge of what God wants. They are those who cannot receive the new thing that God wants to give because they think they already know all there is to know. As a result, they are closed off to what God wants to share.

Jesus says that those able to receive are like children. They are not worldly wise or information wise and, as a result, they are open to what is new and what is revealed. This is how we need to be if we are to receive what God has revealed to us in Jesus.

Tom Wright says this: “Jesus had come to know his father the way a son does: not by studying books about him, but by living in his presence, listening for his voice, and learning from him as an apprentice does from a master, by watching and imitating. And he was now discovering that the wise and learned were getting nowhere, and that the ‘little people’ – the poor, the sinners, the tax collectors, ordinary folk – were discovering more of God, simply by following him, Jesus, than the learned specialists who declared that what he was doing didn’t fit with their complicated theories.”

Sister Corita Kent has described the way in which children look and learn:

“Ask [a] child to come from the front of the house to the back and closely observe her small journey. It will be full of pauses, circling, touching and picking up in order to smell, shake, taste, rub, and scrape. The child’s eyes won’t leave the ground, and every piece of paper, every scrap, every object along the path will be a new discovery.

It does not matter that his is all familiar territory – the same house, the same rug and chair. To the child, the journey of this particular day, with its special light and sound, has never been made before. So the child treats the situation with the open curiosity and attention that it deserves.

The child is quite right.”

Sister Corita went on to argue that through practice adults can learn once again to see as children do. She suggested that the kind slow looking practised by children, like prayer and art, enables us to view life without being distracted and allows us to put all our attention on a special area for a time. When we slow ourselves and focus our attention in this way we begin to receive what the world around has to show us; we notice things that others don’t and come to see that ordinary things are wondrous. The art historian John Ruskin claimed that the power of seeing in this way is ‘the teaching of all things,’ and that ‘To see clearly is poetry, prophecy, and religion – all in one.’

This is a form of prayer taking us to a place and space full of delight and wonder; prayer, poetry and prophecy. Children naturally see this through the attention that they pay to the world around them, until we, as adults, teach them otherwise. Like the poet Thomas Traherne, we need to unlearn the dirty devices of this world in order to become, as it were, a little child again that we may enter into the Kingdom of God.

Unless you come,
come as a child,
not grasping but trusting,
not arrogantly but humbly,
not resisting but accepting,
not feebly but vigorously,
not giving but receiving,
not self-centred but God-centred,
not teaching but feeding,
not gaining life but losing life,
not leaving but returning,
not closed, but open.

Unless you come,
come as a child,
you cannot enter
the kingdom of God.

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Van Morrison - Song Of Being A Child.

Free from lies and enslavements

Here's the reflection I shared this evening at Evensong in St Catherine's Wickford:

In this passage (John 8.31-38,48-59) we are given two definitions of what it means to be free. Jesus gives these two definitions to people who were living under Roman rule and where, therefore, a conquered and oppressed people.

The first definition is about living a life in which we are free from entanglements of lies because we know the truth. An article in ‘Psychology Today’ states that “when it comes to the core challenges of adult life—career, money, sexual identity and marriage—fooling yourself can have devastating consequences.”

The article continues: “In each of these domains—think of them as the four horsemen of self-deception—we face situations that require us to make difficult decisions in the face of doubt and uncertainty. The result is anxiety and a strong temptation to hide from the truth. “People keep secrets from themselves because to acknowledge the information would be extremely anxiety-producing,” says New York City psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Gail Saltz. Self-deception and worry reinforce each other, making it harder and harder to face the facts.”

The way out of this situation is to know and accept the truth about ourselves – “accepting our flaws alongside our strengths” as that “provides a bulwark against excessive self-deception” as also “does coming to peace with our own internal contradictions and learning to withstand difficult feelings, such as doubt and fear.” Acknowledging the truth about ourselves sets us free from anxiety, free to leave in peace with ourselves.

Jesus spoke this truth to people who were living a lie. The people say to him: “We are descendants of Abraham and have never been slaves to anyone. What do you mean by saying, ‘You will be made free’?” Yet, they are people living under the rule of an invading power – the Roman Empire - so are not free. Jesus’ challenge to know the truth about themselves and be set free through that knowledge is, therefore, particularly pertinent to them. In what ways are we also hiding from the truth about ourselves?

The second definition is to do with sin. Jesus identifies sin here with enslavement; in other words, some other power or force that controls us. Such a power could be external, as with the occupying Roman Empire, or it could be internal, as with the kind of lies about ourselves we have been considering which come to define who we are and how we act. The Bible speaks about love of money and various kinds of addictions in those terms and uses the idea of idolatry to describe such forces or powers that come to control us and compromising the freedom that we find in God.

Jesus says that our primary identity, within which we are free from the control of others, is that of being a child of God. When other forces or powers control us, then our identity as God’s child is compromised and we experience separation from both God and the freedom that we find in God’s presence. In what ways do we experience enslavement in our lives? What are the factors or forces that control our behaviours and actions? 

Jesus is saying that when we know and affirm and make central to life our identity as a child of God, then self-deception and other internal or external controls fall away and we are free to become the people we were created by God to be. Fully realising that freedom involves a lifelong journey which reaches its culmination in heaven when we are finally and fully free to be the people we are in God’s presence and to enjoy others for who they are. In the challenges he poses to us through today’s Gospel reading, we are called to begin that process of self-discovery that is also God-discovery by seeking to free ourselves from lies and enslavements by inhabiting our true identity as children of God.

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The Call - What's Happened To You.

Satisfied by Mother God

Here's the Mothering Sunday piece I've prepared for this week's newsletter at St Martin-in-the-Fields:

One of the loveliest of the Psalms is 131, in which Israel is pictured as a weaned child resting in the arms of God, its mother.

This Psalm is special for three reasons. The first, is its humility and lack of pretension. Instead of being portrayed as a great nation, Israel self-identifies as a dependent child reliant on God for all its sustenance and security. ‘My heart is not lifted up, my eyes are not raised too high; I do not occupy myself with things too great and too marvellous for me.’ The Psalm recognises that the depths of God’s being and the complexities of life are such that, ultimately, we will not have all the answers to life, the universe and everything; so, must rest in trust.

Second, in the literature of a primarily Patriarchal society it is a source of wonder that God is sometimes imaged as female. This is one of those instances – there are others – and provides a basis for understanding God as both beyond gender yet able to be imaged through gender. It also acts as a challenge or encouragement to go beyond the relatively small number of occasions in which the Bible images God in this way by exploring this under-developed way of imaging God further. Mothering Sunday being an appropriate occasion to be reminded of the benefits of doing so.

Third, the Psalm opens up for us a particular avenue to rest, reflection and silence. In this Psalm the baby feeds on God so fully that it is satiated and satisfied and in that experience rests in silence. How often do we feed on the milk of God – her presence, her words, her actions – to the extent that we can, in that moment, take no more and lie still, trusting, satisfied, in the everlasting arms that always hold us whatever the great and marvellous things that surround us.

I wonder whether that is an experience of God you would like to enjoy this Mothering Sunday.

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11:59 - Psalm 115 To Thy Holy Name.

Come as a child

Here is the reflection I shared in today's Eucharist at St Martin-in-the-Fields:

The poem called ‘Song of Childhood’ by Peter Handke which features in the film Wings of Desire captures, for me, something of the openness of childhood when the world lies open before us and we encounter it without cynicism or prior knowledge. The big questions of life are in front of us but we have yet found answers or the pretence that we can know all the answers.

In the poem the child has retained that openness to life and existence as she or he has grown but in our gospel reading (Matthew 11. 25-30) today we hear of people who have not. When Jesus speaks about the wise and the intelligent, he is speaking of those who think they already have knowledge of what God wants. They are those who cannot receive the new thing that God wants to give because they think they already know all there is to know. As a result, they are closed off to what God wants to share.

Jesus says that those able to receive are like children. They are not worldly wise or information wise and, as a result, they are open to what is new and what is revealed. This is how we need to be if we are to receive what God has revealed to us in Jesus.

Tom Wright says this: “Jesus had come to know his father the way a son does: not by studying books about him, but by living in his presence, listening for his voice, and learning from him as an apprentice does from a master, by watching and imitating. And he was now discovering that the wise and learned were getting nowhere, and that the ‘little people’ – the poor, the sinners, the tax collectors, ordinary folk – were discovering more of God, simply by following him, Jesus, than the learned specialists who declared that what he was doing didn’t fit with their complicated theories.”

Sister Corita Kent has described the way in which children look and learn:

“Ask [a] child to come from the front of the house to the back and closely observe her small journey. It will be full of pauses, circling, touching and picking up in order to smell, shake, taste, rub, and scrape. The child’s eyes won’t leave the ground, and every piece of paper, every scrap, every object along the path will be a new discovery.

It does not matter that his is all familiar territory – the same house, the same rug and chair. To the child, the journey of this particular day, with its special light and sound, has never been made before. So the child treats the situation with the open curiosity and attention that it deserves.

The child is quite right.”

Unless you come,
come as a child,
not grasping but trusting,
not arrogantly but humbly,
not resisting but accepting,
not feebly but vigorously,
not giving but receiving,
not self-centred but God-centred,
not teaching but feeding,
not gaining life but losing life,
not leaving but returning,
not closed, but open.

Unless you come,
come as a child,
you cannot enter
the kingdom of God.

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Van Morrison - Song Of Being A Child.