No league tables for sin

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

Do you remember the story Jesus told of the Pharisee and tax collector praying in the synagogue (Luke 18. 9-14)? The Pharisee prayed, ‘God, I thank you that I am not like other people: thieves, rogues, adulterers, or even like this tax collector’. The tax collector prayed, ‘God, be merciful to me, a sinner!’ Jesus said that it was this man that went down to his home justified, rather than the other. The prayer of the tax collector opened him up to reality – the reality of who he really was – while the prayer of the Pharisee was an exercise in unreality because it was designed to make him look better than he was by comparison with others.

In today's Gospel reading (Luke 13: 1-9), something similar is happening as the story told to Jesus about the Galileans was supposed to demonstrate that their sins had been particularly bad. The belief, at the time, was that bad ends or outcomes were equated to severity of sin. This carried over into experiences in life perceived to be particularly difficult, such as disability. People attempted to identify the particular sin in someone's life that had resulted in the disability, as when Jesus was asked whether it was a man's own sin or that of his parents that had caused the blindness experienced by a man who met Jesus (John 9. 1-12). Jesus said that his blindness was nothing to do with sin at all.

These stories show the extent to which we can come to think of God as a kind of old-fashioned headteacher keeping a record of our sins on a chalkboard and marking some sins as particularly reprehensible and, therefore, deserving of greater punishment. Sometimes we think of God in this way because, like the Pharisee, we want to say ‘I'm alright, Jack!’ meaning it's other people that are the problem and, sometimes, we do it because, like those in the other two stories, we want to identify particular sins done by particular people as being particularly bad.

Jesus is having none of it. God doesn't keep league tables for sins, the challenges we face in life are not punishments inflicted on us by God for particular sins, and we all are sinners. The fact that we are all sinners is the fundamental reality that we need to face and all attempts to grade sins are simply distractions and deflections from facing that core reality.

Lent is an annual opportunity to reflect on that reality. That's why, on Ash Wednesday, at the beginning of Lent, the sign of the cross is marked on our foreheads and we are told to turn away from sin and be faithful to Christ. The prayers and practices of Lent exist to open us to reality. Their words of penitence urge us to face the truth about our sins and their impact on others.

We receive the sign of the cross because it is the sign of God's enduring love for us, despite our sin which nails his Son to the cross. It is because God's love for us is deeper than the effects of sin that we can turn to him and know forgiveness and live changed lives.

That is the point of the parable that Jesus tells in response to those who come to tell him about the Galileans. In the story, the vineyard owner wants to get rid of the fig tree which is not bearing fruit, but the gardener says to give it another chance.

The imagery of trees and fruit was regularly used by Jesus in his teaching. His followers are chosen and appointed to bear fruit, so fruitfulness is the overall aim and he tells and enacts parables of fig trees which don’t bear fruit being given further opportunities to become fruitful.

So, God is the one in this story wanting to give the barren tree a new opportunity to flourish. That is what Jesus wants for our lives and what he endured the cross to show; there are no depths to which God will not go to enable us to turn from our sins and be faithful to him. And that means, too, that there is no league table of sins with some being worse than others. We are all sinners and are all in need of the second chances that God provides to turn from our sin.

How do we do this? Like the fig tree which if it doesn’t bear figs is not being fruitful in the way it was created to be, so we need to become authentically the people that God created us to be. David Runcorn argues that if “we define sin solely in terms of wrong actions or thoughts, we trivialise it [and] our diagnosis does not go deep enough.” He says that the Pharisees trivialised sin in this way by being pedantically obsessed “with external standards of behaviour” and that that is why “Jesus furiously castigated and mocked the religion of his day.”

Runcorn says that “who we are always comes before what we do” and that “our choices, desires and actions … always flow from our sense of personal identity.” This means that “our deepest need is not primarily to stop doing or saying bad things” because the power and significance of sin “lies not so much in what we are doing or saying, but in who we think we are.” Real sin, Runcorn argues, is insisting on being what we are not; the desire for a life other than the one God intended human beings to live.

We can, of course, make the decision to live the life that God intended human beings to life at any point and at any time in our lives, but, I wonder, how we are using this Lent to reflect on our own sinfulness, rather than that of others, and also are making this Lent a time to turn back to God and be faithful to Christ. May that be our intent and activity this Lent and always. Amen.

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Andrew King - Could Ye Not Watch With Me One Hour.

Talking the talk and walking the walk

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

If we say that someone talks the talk but does not walk the walk, we mean that they do not act in a way that agrees with the things they say.

In politics, Dan Hodges has written, “there are a multitude of forgivable sins. Cheat on your wife. Lie about your record. Stab your colleague in the back. Lie with your colleague’s back-stabbing wife. The voters will tut, shake their heads, and move on. But there is one offence for which there is no pardon. Never, ever, under any circumstances, get caught preaching one thing at the public while practising another. Incompetence, duplicity, arrogance – each one hurts. Hypocrisy kills.”

Consistency also applies in business. William C. Taylor, author of Practically Radical: Not-So-Crazy Ways to Transform Your Company, Shake Up Your Industry, and Challenge Yourself, has written that, “One of the most ubiquitous aphorisms in business is that the best leaders understand the need to “walk the talk” — that is, their behavior and day-to-day actions have to match the aspirations they have for their colleagues and organization.”

Investors in People argue that “Everybody needs someone to look up to in the workplace. They want role models. This may seem like a daunting responsibility for a manager or employer, but it needn't be. It's largely just a matter of what we call ‘walking the talk’” and leading by example. “A manager's behaviour has an impact on everyone around them, and an effective manager is one who inspires their team by showing the way with their own actions.”

So, if we say that someone talks the talk but does not walk the walk, we mean that they do not act in a way that agrees with the things they say. The phrase “if you’re going to talk the talk, you’ve got to walk the walk” is a modern version of old sayings like “actions speak louder than words” and “practice what you preach.” Another early form of the expression was “walk it like you talk it.” Many people now condense this to “walk the talk.”

All these are essentially versions of James 1. 22, “be doers of the word, and not merely hearers” (James 1.19-27). If we are hearers of the word and not doers, we are like those who look at themselves in a mirror and immediately forget what they were like. “A first century mirror was not the silvered glass one without which no bathroom is complete today. It was beaten bronze and gave a fuzzy image. If you wanted to be sure your face was not dirty a quick glance was not sufficient. You would need to peer intently, work out what was required, then go and find some clean water to do something about it. The same is true of the way we react to encountering God. The real blessing of the Christian faith does not lie in listening to sermons or reciting liturgies, but in dwelling on what is true until it transforms what we do. A genuine encounter with Jesus provokes action.”

The action it produces is “care for orphans and widows in their distress.” Jesus said, in the Parable of the sheep and goats (Matthew 25.31-46), that God’s judgement on us will be based on our actions; giving food to the hungry, drink to the thirsty, welcoming the stranger, clothing the naked and visiting those in prison. These actions are to be the end result of our faith. If our looking deeply into God’s word does not result in our doing these things, our faith is not genuine and we are not walking the walk as Christians.

Too often we live life, James says, like people who look in the mirror and then immediately forget what we are actually like. The confession which precedes our Eucharist is our weekly opportunity to acknowledge the reality that we often talk the talk without walking the walk. It is our opportunity to turn away from insincerity and to seek the consistency in our faith to which James calls here. “Be doers of the word, and not merely hearers who deceive themselves.”

God’s vision for human beings is that we become holy servants. But this is not something that we can do by ourselves. It is something that happens together with God. It is God who has provided the mirror and God who has come into our world to show us in Jesus what living as a holy servant looks like. We see in Jesus’ life what that way of being human looks like in practice. But more than that, in Jesus, God is reaching out to us to show us that we are loved by him and that he sees our potential for change and for beauty.

In Jesus’ story of the Prodigal Son (Luke 15. 11-32), the son rejects his identity as a child of his Father and leaves home to waste his life. Finally, when he is eating the food of pigs the son looks in the mirror to see himself as he actually is and decides to return home to his father and ask to become one of his servants. But the Father rejoices at his return and welcomes him home as the son he has always been although for a time he rejected that identity. This is a story about us and God. We reject our rightful identity as children of God living as holy servants. We forget what we really look like in the mirror and live as we choose. But when we come to see ourselves as we truly are and return to God we are welcomed as God’s children with all of our potential for becoming the people that he wants us to be.

David Runcorn has said that “the deepest awakening of all is to the discovery that we are loved with a wild, prodigal love – without condition.” We are then able to become those who love God with all their being and who love their neighbours as ourselves, because God has first loved us.

James says that if we look closely at ourselves in the mirror of God’s perfect law, paying attention and knowing ourselves to be sinners loved by God then we will go on to become the holy servants that God intended all human beings to become. May it be so for each one of us. Amen

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A mirror in which to see ourselves as we really are

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

“Do you like American music?” That’s a question that one of my favourite bands, the Violent Femmes, ask in a song which as you might expect is called American Music. American music is songs that derive from the ancient ballads of mountain music. Songs, as Bob Dylan has said, that come from legends, Bibles and plagues and that are concerned with mystery and death. The Violent Femmes say that yes, they like American music because it is like an ugly lake that reminds them of themselves.

It might seem a strange reason to give for liking a style of music but it is pertinent to today’s reading from James which says that we need mirrors in which to see ourselves as we really are. Too often we live life, James says, like people who look in the mirror and then immediately forget what we are actually like. Music can be one mirror in which we can sometimes be brought up short and see ourselves as we really are but James says that the best mirror for us is God’s perfect law.

Our NT and Gospel readings today are to do with God’s Law, the commands that God gave to the people of Israel and that are recorded for us in what we now call the Old Testament (Mark 7: 1 - 8, 14 & 15, 21 – 23 & James 1: 17 – end). How can that Law be like a mirror to our lives?

The Law shows us two things. First, it shows us what sin is and that we are sinful people. Paul says in both his letters to the Romans and Galatians that the purpose of the Law is to show what wrongdoing is and, by that, to let us know that we are sinners. This is because the standard set in the Law is the standard of God’s holiness and glory and we all fall short of that. Jesus says in the Sermon on the Mount that whoever disobeys even the least important commandment and teaches others to do the same will be least in the Kingdom of Heaven and James says that whoever breaks one commandment is guilty of breaking them all. The standard set is God’s perfection and we all fall short. We see that in the Gospel reading in that the Pharisees who accuse the disciples of sin are shown by Jesus to be guilty of sin themselves.

But if this is all that we see in the mirror of God’s Law then it is profoundly distressing and depressing. If this is all then the mirror of God’s Law is like the ugly lake that the Violent Femmes say that American music is; something in which all you can see is your own ugliness reflected.

David Runcorn argues that if “we define sin solely in terms of wrong actions or thoughts, we trivialise it [and] our diagnosis does not go deep enough.” He says that the Pharisees trivialised sin in this way by being pedantically obsessed “with external standards of behaviour” and that that is why “Jesus furiously castigated and mocked the religion of his day.”

Runcorn says that “who we are always comes before what we do” and that “our choices, desires and actions … always flow from our sense of personal identity.” This means that “our deepest need is not primarily to stop doing or saying bad things” because the power and significance of sin “lies not so much in what we are doing or saying, but in who we think we are.” Real sin, Runcorn argues, is insisting on being what we are not; the desire for a life other than the one God intended human beings to live. As James puts it, looking in the mirror and then forgetting who we are by being the people we want to be, not the people God wants us to be.

God wants us to be different from the sinful people that we are and so in the mirror of God’s Law we can also see all that God thinks we can be and longs for us to become. James summarises it by saying that “what God the Father considers to be pure and genuine religion is this; to take care of widows and orphans in their suffering and to keep oneself from being corrupted by the world.” God’s vision for human beings is that we become holy servants.

But this is not something that we can do by ourselves. It is something that happens together with God. It is God who has provided the mirror and God who has come into our world to show us in Jesus what living as a holy servant looks like. We see in Jesus’ life what that way of being human looks like in practice. But more than that, in Jesus, God is reaching out to us to show us that we are loved by him and that he sees our potential for change and for beauty. In Jesus’ story of the Prodigal Son, the son rejects his identity as a child of his Father and leaves home to waste his life. Finally, when he is eating the food of pigs the son looks in the mirror to see himself as he actually is and decides to return home to his father and ask to become one of his servants. But the Father rejoices at his return and welcomes him home as the son he has always been although for a time he rejected that identity. This is a story about us and God. We reject our rightful identity as children of God living as holy servants. We forget what we really look like in the mirror and live as we choose. But when we come to see ourselves as we truly are and return to God we are welcomed as God’s children with all of our potential for becoming the people that he wants us to be.

David Runcorn says that “the deepest awakening of all is to the discovery that we are loved with a wild, prodigal love – without condition.” We are then able to become all that God’s Law says we can be – those who love God with all their being and who love their neighbours as ourselves – because God has first loved us.

When I go away on holiday one of the things I like to do is to visit art galleries in the area where I am staying. One of the artists that I found out about when staying in the Vendée was Charles Milcendeau.

Milcendeau grew up in the Northern Vendée at a village called Soullans surrounded by marshes. He was the son of the innkeeper at Soullans but his artistic talents took him to Paris to study in the same class as Georges Rouault and Henri Matisse. Rouault went on to generally be reckoned as the greatest religious artist of the Twentieth Century while Matisse (together with Picasso) was one of the greatest artists per se of that century. Both Rouault and Matisse came to prominence through the Fauve movement which used strong, emotional colours in paintings at the same time as the Expressionists in Germany were doing the same.

Milcendeau would have had the opportunity to have gone in the same direction as his friends but he chose not to. Instead, inspired by Dutch and Flemish art, he returned to his own people, to the Northern Vendée to paint the people of the marsh. His painting of the flagellation of Christ still hangs in his home Church at Soullans and is one of the first paintings in which he modelled the figures in the painting on local people. This painting, which I went to see, is therefore a major milestone in his journey towards his art in which he shows a sustained and loving attention to a poor and unregarded community. His masterpieces not only capture the physical and cultural settings of his day but bring alive to us today the characters and personalities of the ordinary and unregarded people that he painted. To do this he had to pay attention not just to what those people looked like but also to what they were like and then identify how to convey what they were like as he painted what they looked like. Doing this involved sustained and loving attention to them as people.

Milcendeau’s story seems like a parable to me because his encounter with Christ (in the painting of the flagellation) leads on to him showing a sustained and loving attention to others in his paintings.

It maybe that for Milcendeau painting the people around him as the crowd abusing Jesus was his way of looking in the mirror and seeing himself for what he was; a sinner, an abuser of God. But he was also painting Jesus enduring that abuse in order to show God’s love for those who abuse him. After encountering Jesus in this way in his painting his life purpose clarified and he spent his life paying loving attention to his poor and disregarded community in his paintings of their lives and characters.

James says that if we look closely at ourselves in the mirror of God’s perfect law, paying attention and knowing ourselves to be sinners loved by God then we will go on to become the holy servants that God intended all human beings to become. May it be so for each one of us. Amen

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Violent Femmes - American Music.

The dance of love

Here's the sermon I preached at St Mary's Runwell this morning at our joint service for Trinity Sunday:

I wonder whether those of you who are Strictly Come Dancing fans have a particular stand-out moment from the 19 series since 2004. Looking online the Top 10 Strictly moments are either those which provided comedy value - such as Ed Balls doing “Gangnam Style” or Ann Widdecombe being dragged across the floor – or those in which celebrity and dancer best combine – such as Jill Halfpenny’s Jive with her partner Dan in the final of Series 2, which was the first dance to that point to score a perfect 10.

Explaining the idea of the Trinity - three persons, one God - has always been a challenge to priests and preachers. The shamrock is one favourite illustration - three leaves, one stem - as is water - two parts hydrogen and one part oxygen forming one entity which can be a liquid, a solid and a gas.

My favourite image, though, is not of the form of the Trinity but of its dynamism and dynamic. That image is of a dance as the Greek word for the relationship of Father, Son and Holy Spirit - perichoresis - means ‘to dance around one another in relationship’ ('peri meaning around, and choreio to dance' - Touching the Sacred, Chris Thorpe and Jake Lever, Canterbury Press). As those who have danced with others regularly or those who have watched Strictly will know, dance partners interact “within a rhythm which remains the same but in a continuous variety of movements.” At its best, you have people totally in tune with one another for the period of that dance.

This is what the united relationship of Father, Son and Holy Spirit is thought to be in the Christian faith and it means that at the very heart of God is a dynamic relationship in which a constant exchange of love is underway. That exchange has been called it the dance of love.

At several points in John’s Gospel, we hear Jesus speaking about his relationship with God the Father and with God the Holy Spirit. When he speaks in this way it is as though Jesus is pulling back the veil which prevents us from seeing God and giving us, thereby, a glimpse of God as Trinity. He says in John 16: 5-15 that God the Spirit takes what belongs to God the Son and declares it to us. All that belongs to God the Son, he says, also belongs to God the Father. So, all that Jesus has belongs equally to the Spirit and the Father. Therefore, we have a picture of God the Father giving to God the Son who gives to God the Holy Spirit who gives to us. What is being pictured is an exchange of love.

Stephen Verney explored this idea in several of his books (e.g. The Dance of Love, Stephen Verney, Fount): “The Son can do nothing of himself”, he wrote, “but only what he sees the Father doing” (5. 19). That is one side of the equation (of this so-called equality) – the emptiness of the Son. He looks, and what he sees his Father doing, that he does; he listens, and what he hears his Father saying, that he says. The other side of the equation – of the choreography – is the generosity of the Father. “The Father loves the Son, and reveals to him everything which he is doing” (5. 20), and furthermore, he gives him authority to do “out of himself” all that the Father does, and can never cease to do because it flows “out of himself”. In that dance of love between them, says Jesus, “I and the Father are one.” The Son cries, “Abba! Father!” and the Father cries “my beloved Son”, and the love which leaps between them is Holy Spirit – the Spirit of God, God himself, for God is Spirit and God is Love.”

This is the relationship of love at the heart of the Godhead where love is constantly being shared and exchanged between Father, Son and Holy Spirit. It is out of this relationship of love that Jesus comes into our world to open up a way for us to participate in the relationship of love that is constantly being shared between Father, Son and Spirit.

That is the incredible truth that Jesus’ words reveal to us. The Spirit takes what belongs to Father, Son and Spirit and gives it to us. We are invited in to the relationship of love which exists in the Godhead. Verney says that the eternal dance of the Trinity in heaven is reflected in the creation and we are invited to join in. Our relationship with God means that we are always being invited to be drawn further into this constant, eternal exchange or dance of love. Jesus describes this when he says that he is in the Father and the Father in him. He then extends that same relationship to others too - I am in you and you are in me. To really know love, Christianity suggests, we must be drawn into the dance of love which Father, Son and Holy Spirit share and which is at the very heart of God.

We are familiar with the idea that God’s love for us is shown in Jesus’ sacrifice of himself for us by becoming human and then dying for us on the cross. We are less familiar with the idea that we can be part of the constant exchange of love in God of which we have been speaking and which Jesus’ once-for-all sacrifice enables us to experience. If we live in God, we live in love and love lives in us. We become included in the constant exchange of love which exists in the Godhead and are, therefore, constantly loved no matter what else is going on in our lives. The dance of love is the glory in God’s heart, the pattern by which we are loved and the pattern by which we are called to live.

God intends to embrace all creation within the fellowship of the Three. God’s mission is to form communities that reflect and embody the life of the Trinity by living in love and having love live in us.

“What the world needs more than anything else is communities of trust and support and love that show what kind of life is possible when we believe that God is sovereign, when we place our trust and security there. We need people and communities that believe in the power of God, that believe in the role of the church, and that are content to live through no other power than the means of grace God has given us.” (Sam Wells)

So, within the Holy Trinity, we strive, as David Runcorn has described, to be a dancing community of divine poverty. Each eternally, joyfully, dispossessing ourselves; emptying, pouring ourselves out to the favour and glory of the other. Nothing claimed, demanded or grasped; living and knowing each other in the simple ecstasy of giving, which is the unity and community of the Triune God (D. Runcorn, Choice, Desire and the Will of God, SPCK).

Let us pray: Triune God, in the dance of your love we see your nature as utter relationship. Your three persons gaze in mutual attention, relish each other in deep delight and work together in true partnership. Make your church a community across time and space that enjoys the gift of your life and imitates the wonder of your glory, until we all come into your presence and gaze upon your glory, God in three persons, blessed Trinity. Amen.

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Maddy Prior - Lord Of The Dance.

Revelation: fixed and unchanging or dynamic and evolving

Here's my reflection from today's Eucharist at St Martin-in-the-Fields:

The letter to the Ephesians (Ephesians 3. 2 - 12) speaks of a revelation from God which was based on the work of Jesus but the understanding of which developed after Jesus’ ascension. The eternal purpose that was carried out in Christ Jesus our Lord is that we all now have access to God in boldness and confidence and the realisation which followed Christ’s ascension was that this access applied to the Gentiles as well as the Jews and was therefore for all people everywhere.

This revelation began when the apostle Peter was told in a dream to eat food forbidden in Torah and then went into the house of a Gentile and saw the Spirit of God fall on outsiders. Writing about this incident David Runcorn asks where was Peter to go biblically to explain this? What began with this incident went beyond the received revelation as long understood; something very new was going on and we shouldn’t underestimate how disturbing this would have been.

Peter and the leaders of the church in Jerusalem proceeded in vulnerable obedience under the compelling guidance of the Spirit. What they began to realise was that God was creating a community based on radically new belonging and identity in Christ, one that is yet to be fully revealed – neither Jew nor Gentile, slave nor free, male nor female. This was the revelation which came to the apostle Paul and on which he based his mission and teaching. It is this revelation that underpins our reading from the letter to the Ephesians.

David Runcorn notes that this means that an unfolding revelation is evident within the scriptures. This is important in today’s Church because many of the issues on which there is division or debate come down to the extent to which the revelation of God’s will for us in Jesus is fixed and unchanging or is dynamic and evolving.

Those who argue that the traditional teaching of the Church cannot be changed because it is based on an unchanging revelation from God have opposed the remarriage of divorcees, the ordination of women priests and bishops and currently oppose the inclusion and marriage of those in same-sex relationships. Those who argue that there is an evolving and developing revelation as God continues to speak and act in contemporary society are driven back to the scriptures to review whether past cultural understandings have obscured aspects of the original texts which can then lead us into new understandings of God’s revelation. In relation, for example, to the ordination of women, this meant that we recovered an awareness that women were among those called by Jesus to be his disciples and women were to be found as leaders within the Early Church. As a result, our understanding of the necessity for women to be ordained changed leading, in time, to the ordination within the Church of England of women as priests and bishops.

If we think about these processes in relation to a practice like that of slavery, we see that this understanding of a developing and unfolding revelation of God is accepted in practice by most, if not all, Christians. Slavery was an established practice throughout ancient cultures, including the Roman Empire in which the Early Church was established and grew. Slavery is mentioned in the New Testament but is not condemned and no call to free slaves and eradicate slavery is to be found therein. Slavery continued essentially unquestioned until the 18th century when the campaign for its abolition began. The Church was one of many institutions in society that was involved in the Slave Trade and which resisted the Abolition Movement. However, the Abolitionist’s re-examination of scripture focused attention on the freeing of slaves in The Exodus and St Paul’s support of the slave Onesimus as indicating an understanding of God’s acceptance of all that militated against the maintenance of slavery. This understanding of scripture has become widely accepted in the Church, despite being the reverse of earlier, and therefore traditional, teachings.

This process of change began with the revelation spoken about in today’s Epistle that all have access to God in boldness and confidence and the realisation that this access applies to Gentiles as well as Jews. This revelation is, in essence, one of inclusion that, as Paul states there is no distinction - not Jew nor Gentile, slave nor free, male nor female – that prevents human beings from having access to God in boldness and confidence. Our Epistle is, therefore, about both the unfolding revelation of God’s will and purpose in our own day and time and the inclusive nature of God’s embrace of humanity through Jesus Christ. Those who seek inclusion in the face of traditional Church teaching are true to those revelations and, therefore, true to scripture.

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Peter Case - Words In Red.

The Dance of Love: Living the prayer of Jesus

Here is the sermon that I preached at St Martin-in-the-Fields today:

If you knew you had roughly eighteen hours to live and could use that time to talk and pray with your nearest and dearest, I wonder what you would say and do? It is likely that whatever you did and said in that time it would all be to do with what was of central importance to your life and thought.

That was the situation in which Jesus found himself in the hours before his crucifixion and we know that he used that time to share acted parables and key messages with his disciples, as well as to pray. His prayer at that time, a part of which forms today’s Gospel reading (John 17. 20 - 26), was for the unity of his current and future disciples – that they might be one. So, why was unity of such central importance to Jesus’ thinking and praying at that most significant moment in his life - the time of his death? If we can answer that question, we can reach into the very heart of Jesus’ being and thinking.

When Jesus prayed that his followers might all be one, he prayed this on the basis that his followers might be in God as he is in the Father and the Father is in him. He was praying that we, who follow in his footsteps, would experience the same oneness with God and each other that he enjoys with God, his Father. In essence, his prayer is that we will experience unity, because unity is what is at the very heart of God.

The Greek Fathers called the relationship of Father, Son and Holy Spirit perichoresis, which “means ‘to dance around one another in relationship’, … peri meaning around, and choreio to dance” (Touching the Sacred, Chris Thorpe and Jake Lever, Canterbury Press). Stephen Verney, a former Bishop of Repton, explored this idea in several of his books (e.g. The Dance of Love, Fount) writing about “the dance of love of the Trinity in which they give place to each other.” “This is the glory revealed in Jesus, as the Father and the Son give authority to each other in mutual interdependence, and as the creator and the creation interpenetrate each other.” Similarly, David Runcorn has described “the Holy Trinity as a dancing community of divine poverty. Each eternally, joyfully, dispossessing themselves; emptying, pouring themselves out to the favour and glory of the other. Nothing claimed, demanded or grasped. They live and know each other in the simple ecstasy of giving” (Choice, Desire and the Will of God, SPCK). At the heart of the Godhead is a relationship of love where love is constantly being shared and exchanged between Father, Son and Holy Spirit and this exchange or dance of love holds them together in unity.

Verney goes on to say that the eternal dance of the Trinity in heaven is reflected in creation and we are invited to join in because it was out of that relationship of love at the heart of the Godhead that Jesus came into our world to open up a way for us to participate in the eternal dance of love constantly shared between Father, Son and Spirit. We are familiar with the idea that God’s love for us is shown in Jesus’ sacrifice of himself for us by becoming human and then dying for us on the cross. We are, perhaps, less familiar with the idea that we can be part of the constant exchange of love in God of which we have been speaking and which Jesus’ once-for-all sacrifice of himself enables us to experience. If we live in God, we live in love and love lives in us. We become included in the constant exchange of love which exists in the Godhead and are, therefore, constantly loved no matter what else is going on in our lives.

In the words of Paul Simon, we could respond to this by saying ‘So beautiful or so what’. It’s all very well picturing a beautiful dance at the heart of the Trinity but what difference does that make to us or anyone else?

Firstly, it says to us that we are 100% loved by God, surrounded by and filled by love, and that the more we experience of God, the more we can come to know love for ourselves. I wonder, do we allow the reality that we are accepted and loved by God to seep into the depths of our being where it can and will address our insecurities and anxieties? Do we know this for ourselves? Do we accept it for ourselves? Because ultimately our deepest need is to know with absolute confidence that we are loved and that is what is assured for us through the sacrifice of Jesus and the dance of love which is the Trinity.

Second, we see that love involves the continual giving and receiving of affirmation and authority. The dance of love is not a solo with the spotlight firmly fixed on an individual who garners all the glory for his or herself. It’s not even a picture of the kind of intuitive interaction which we see in ballroom dancing and which has been popularised on TV by ‘Strictly Come Dancing’. We are talking here of reciprocal love or giving which cannot be manipulated by ego, because the gift always moves beyond the reach of the one who first gives it. That is one of the reasons why it is so important that God is Trinity, three persons who are also one.

Lewis Hyde notes in his book called ‘The Gift’ that when giving is reciprocal: "The gift moves in a circle, and two people do not make much of a circle. Two points establish a line, but a circle lies in a plane and needs at least three points.” It is only “When the gift moves in a circle [that] its motion is beyond the control of the personal ego, and so each bearer must be a part of the group and each donation is an act of social faith.” That is what we see in the Trinity and what we are called to replicate in our own relationships. “The Dance of Love,” Verney writes, “is the glory in God’s heart, but it is also the pattern which is reflected in everything he has created.” The more we live according to God’s pattern for life, the more we know in our lives the love and unity of the Trinity itself.

In his prayer Jesus makes a contrast between giving which can be controlled by personal ego or one pair of gift partners and giving which is genuinely reciprocal. He states that the world does not know his Righteous Father and, earlier in the prayer, that the world hates his disciples because they do not belong to the world, just as he does not belong to the world.

When Jesus uses this language of separation in John’s Gospel between his disciples and the world, Verney suggests that he is speaking about two different levels or orders to reality. What he means by this are different patterns of society, each with a different centre or ruling power. In the first, “the ruling principle is the dictator ME, my ego-centric ego, and the pattern of society is people competing with, manipulating and trying to control each other.” In the second, “the ruling principle is the Spirit of Love, and the pattern of society is one of compassion – people giving to each other what they really are, and accepting what others are, recognising their differences, and sharing their vulnerability.” Runcorn puts it like this, “the life of God is non-possessive, non-competitive, humbly attentive to the interests of the other, united in love and vision.” To be God-like, “is not to be grasping” and so “Jesus pours himself out ‘precisely because’ he is God from God.”

These two orders or patterns for society are at war with each other and we are caught up in the struggle that results. Choosing our side in this struggle is a key question for us as human beings, the question being “so urgent that our survival depends on finding the answer.” Verney writes that: “we can see in our world order the terrible consequences of our ego-centricity. We have projected it into our institutions, where it has swollen up into a positive force of evil. Human beings have set up prison camps where they torture each other for pleasure. We are all imprisoned together, in a system of competing nation states, on the edge of a catastrophe which could destroy all life on our planet.”

I was reminded of these words when reading a recent interview that Neil McGregor gave to The Observer. In this interview he made some typically insightful contributions to the current debate about the EU referendum based on research for his book ‘Germany: Memories of a Nation’. He said, for example, that: “German people see the whole purpose of a political leader is to make successful alliances. The proper use of sovereignty is all about pooling it to achieve your aims. The British idea that you should entirely do these things on your own and try to assume total control over your environment is unthinkable.”

Similarly, President Obama suggested, during his recent visit to Europe, that “the people of Europe … are more secure and more prosperous because we stood together for the ideals we share.” As a Guardian article commenting on this speech noted this message runs counter to Europe’s growing populism; “the self-glorification of national egos, the distrust towards outsiders, and the reflex of putting up walls or closing down borders.”

In the UK we are at the very heart of this discussion as the last few years have seen us engaging in considerable political debate about the benefits of collaboration versus independence. From 2010 – 2015 we had our most recent experience of coalition government and, for all the complications inherent in coalitions, many would see that period as preferable to the licence that a majority Conservative Government has had to pursue austerity cuts on those with the least influence and political power in our society. In 2014 Scots voted narrowly to remain part of the United Kingdom rather than choosing independence and this year we are asked vote on essentially the same issue but in relation to the European Union.

Jesus’ focus on unity at the time of his death and the dance of love within the Trinity which is the basis for that focus, would suggest that, as his followers, we should favour collaboration, coalition, alliances and unions over independence, in the way that Neil suggests the German people have come to do. Yet we know, too, that a focus on unity at all costs also can silence voices of dissent and conscience and that power can accrue in unhelpful or unaccountable ways the larger or all-embracing an organisation or union may be.

Here at St Martin’s we know how difficult and complex it can be to create and sustain a community that is both unified and inclusive. We also know how valuable it is to make the attempt and to grapple with the complexities. I know that I have been both impressed and impacted by the way in which St Martin’s grapples with these issues and realise that I need to make changes in my thinking and practice as a result. These issues and complexities are, of course, magnified when it comes to working them through in the context of a union of nations, as we can by being part of the EU.

Nevertheless, the dance of love at the heart of the Trinity and our participation in that dance, as God’s children, compels us, I think, to make that attempt within the communities, organisations and networks of which we are part; whether that is family, church, local community, nation or union of nations. In doing so, we come to know ourselves firstly as surrounded by and filled by the love which overflows from the Trinity, then understand that such love involves the continual giving and receiving of affirmation and authority as we seek to live in and through the dance of love in the complexities of human relationships, alliances, coalitions, collaborations and unions. Like the Holy Trinity, we strive to be a dancing community of divine poverty. Each eternally, joyfully, dispossessing themselves; emptying, pouring themselves out to the favour and glory of the other. Nothing claimed, demanded or grasped; living and knowing each other in the simple ecstasy of giving, which is the unity for which Jesus prayed.

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K.D. Lang - Jericho.

Rev: Holding a big mirror up to the Church

The current series of Rev continues, as it should, to provoke debate about the nature of ordained ministry and the state of the Church of England. Informed comment on the series so far can be found here and here.


In the comments to Angus Ritchie's Fulcrum piece, David Runcorn says, Rev "is certainly touching a church and particularly its clergy in a very personal and vulnerable way."


Ritchie and Runcorn have a significant debate about interpretations of 1 Corinthians 1. 25-28, with Ritchie arguing that:


"To focus only on whether we ‘mean well’ is to focus entirely on ourselves.  In a world where people hunger for meaning and hope (and in which increasing numbers at home as well as abroad hunger for food), the Gospel demands more than good intentions.  While we can all smile at Adam Smallbone’s antics, it would be a grave mistake to become sentimental about his ineffectiveness."


and


"It seems clear from St Paul’s own ministry and impact that what means by “God’s foolishness” and his “weakness” is not the kind of ineffectiveness which (I feel) Rev sentimentalises."


While Runcorn responds:


"The character of Adam Smallbone is found in the long honourable religious and dramatic tradition of the ‘fool’. As such he is a sign of contradiction. His vulnerabilities are ours. In his very weakness and clumsiness he is all our dilemmas, larger than life. That’s what fools are for."


and


"I do still wonder just how publically compelling a church that is sheep among wolves, common clay pots, weak and foolish to shame the wise etc can ever look in the midst of a society. There is something in these vocational descriptions that is surely intended to subvert cultural norms of power, status, impressiveness and credibility. There can be a certain attempt to be compelling to the world that is itself corrupting. I don’t see any way round it."


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The Frames - Dance The Devil Back Into His Hole.

The non-possessive life of God

Have you bought your Christmas presents yet? Are you someone who buys throughout the year or someone who buys at the last minute? Have you also made your list of gifts you would like to receive? Christmas is a time for giving and receiving. As Lewis Hyde writes in his book entitled ‘The Gift’, “The spirit of a gift is kept alive by its constant donation”: “a cardinal property of the gift: whatever we have been given is supposed to be given away again, not kept. Or, if it is kept, something of similar value should move on in its stead … You may keep your Christmas present, but it ceases to be a gift in the true sense unless you have given something else away.”

The greatest gifts though are those where no return is expected by the giver. The shoebox presents prepared as part of Operation Christmas Child are like that. Gifts are chosen, placed in a shoebox which is wrapped and then sent to needy children in Africa and Eastern Europe. Operation Christmas Child gives those who grow up in relative wealth the opportunity to participate in selfless giving and show compassion to others - irrespective of creed, colour, religion, sex or ethnicity of either the giver or the receiver.

The man who pioneered mass production of motor vehicles, Henry Ford, said that the most successful person would be the one who would fill the greatest need the best. On this basis Jesus Christ remains the greatest person who ever lived because He made the greatest sacrifice to fill the greatest need for the greatest number of people. The sheer thought that God would send His Son to die for mankind, is amazing: “For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whosoever believes in Him should not perish but have everlasting life” (John 3:16). 

 

David Runcorn writes that “the life of God is non-possessive, non-competitive, humbly attentive to the interests of the other, united in love and vision.” It is this that we see at Christmas as we celebrate the arrival of the greatest gift of all and it is also what we see at Easter as God’s greatest gift gives his own life for the sake of us all. Christmas is a time for giving and receiving gifts. May we, this Christmas, receive the greatest gift of all.

Here are the service/activities at St John's Seven Kings for Advent and Christmas:

 

December 2012

• Saturday 1^st Dec, 6.00pm, Tamil Carol Service
• Sunday 2^nd Dec, 10.00am, Advent Reflections Service - poems, readings and songs
• Sunday 2^nd Dec, 6.30pm, Advent Service at St Peter’s Aldborough Hatch - Seven Kings Fellowship of Churches
• Sunday 16^th Dec, 10.00am, All-age Christingle Service - a colourful service of music & light (collection for The Children’s Society)
• Sunday 16^th Dec, 6.30pm, Service of Nine Lessons and Carols by Candlelight - traditional carols and readings
• Tuesday 18^th Dec, 7.00pm, Carol singing around the Parish - wrap up warm. Collecting for Haven House Hospice
• Sunday 23^rd Dec, 6.30pm, Service of Nine Lessons and Carols at St Peter’s Aldborough Hatch
• Monday 24^th Dec (Christmas Eve), 5.00pm, All-age Nativity Service - dressing up & tree lighting - fun for all. Bring a present to leave under the tree for children helped by Barnados. Collection to Haven House Hospice.
• Monday 24^th Dec (Christmas Eve), 11.30pm, First Holy Communion of Christmas
• Tuesday 25^th Dec (Christmas Day), 8.00am, Holy Communion - Book of Common Prayer
• Tuesday 25^th Dec (Christmas Day), 10.00am, Christmas All-age Holy Communion - children, bring a gift you have received to show others
• Monday 31^st Dec (New Years Eve), 11.30pm, Watchnight Service - welcoming the New Year in prayer and reflection

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Bruce Cockburn - Cry Of A Tiny Baby.

Life lived as gift

Forty years after the Israelites had been freed from slavery in Egypt they stood on the brink of the Promised Land ready to cross over the River Jordan and live in the land that God had promised to them.

They were a people who had no land of their own. Their ancestors were wandering Arameans who had no land and who took their families to live in Egypt. In Egypt they had no land because they were slaves. Rescued by God, they wandered in the wilderness without a home for forty years before coming to the Promised Land.

The Promised Land was a gift to them from God and because this land which became their home was not actually theirs but God’s, so they were to give back to God out of thankfulness for all that they had been given. Their life and the land – everything that they had and were – was a gift from God and to show this when the arrived in the Promised Land they were to place in a basket the first part of each crop that they harvested and to offer it to God at the place of worship.

In our culture we no longer think like this. In our culture we tend to think that the things we have are ours because we have earned them. We may have bought the freehold on our home with money that we have earned though our own work, time and talents. The salary that we earn is paid into our bank account to do with as we choose because we were the ones who worked to earn that money. We no longer think of land, home, money and possessions as gifted to us because we think of them as earned by us.

This means that we think we can live independently. Our way of life in a market economy is based on quid pro quo, always getting something in exchange for what we give. We are then free to purchase commodities with no strings attached making our market economy impersonal and leaving us thinking we can pursue personal gain in total disregard for the community as a whole.

At the time that the Israelites lived in the Promised Land because they worked the land for a living they knew that their life did not depend solely on their own efforts. It was not enough that they worked to sow their crops in order that those crops grew. They knew that the soil was needed to nurture their seeds, that rain was needed to water those seeds, that sunshine was needed for the growth of those seeds. They knew that their life, their survival was not simply down to them. Life itself was a gift. Today we are disconnected from the land and from the natural cycle of the seasons and it is much harder for us to acknowledge that life is a gift.

When life is viewed as gift, we can give to others without expecting anything in return and this has the opposite effect of establishing and strengthening the relationships between us, connecting us one to the other. This kind of living recognises the delicate balance of interdependence and responsibility. It means an awareness of how we, as individuals, fit into the life of the whole. Living in this way – as part of a gift economy – develops a sense of interdependence, engenders attitudes of compassion and generosity, forces us to reappraise the way in which we think about and measure value, and reminds us of the interconnection of our lives to other human lives, to non-human lives, and to the non-living world.

When Jesus was tempted he too was in the wilderness and the temptations with which he was confronted were the same temptations to which our culture succumbs. Jesus was tempted to provide for his own material needs by turning stones into bread; he was tempted to gain prestige and celebrity for himself by throwing himself from the highest point of the Temple and surviving; and he was tempted to gain all the power and wealth of the world for himself.

In other words, he was tempted to live independently of God and refuse to view life as being God’s gift to him. Jesus rejected these temptations and, like the people of Israel leaving the wilderness for the Promised Land, continued to thank God for the gift of life by living his life as a means of thanking God for all his gifts to us. He did this through humility, service and finally death, not by a devilish seeking after power and status.

David Runcorn says that “the life of God is non-possessive, non-competitive, humbly attentive to the interests of the other, united in love and vision.” To be God-like, he writes, “is not to be grasping” and so “Jesus pours himself out ‘precisely because’ he is God from God.” The Biblical word for this is kenosis, the self-emptying of God. But Runcorn goes on to point out that this self-emptying or kenosis characterises every member of the Trinity and argues that Jesus’ incarnation “offers us a mysterious and astonishing vision”:

“the Holy Trinity as a dancing community of divine poverty. Each eternally, joyfully, dispossessing themselves; emptying, pouring themselves out to the favour and glory of the other. Nothing claimed, demanded or grasped. They live and know each other in the simple ecstasy of giving.”

Today, we have the opportunity to do the same; to reject the temptation to think of all that we have as our own, to view our lives and all that we have as a gift from God, and to participate in the dance of the Holy Trinity. When we do that, we are acting as stewards because stewards have the job of looking after something that belongs to someone else. As Christians, we are stewards of all that God has given to us – our life, our talents, our time, our money, our possessions, our family, our community, and the world in which we live.

The people of Israel gave the first part of their harvest to God. Giving back to God was the first thing on their agenda, their first consideration. We should each give, the Apostle Paul says, as we have decided, not with regret or out of a sense of duty; for God loves the one who gives gladly.

As they came to the worship place the Israelites reminded themselves that it was God who had rescued them and God who had given them the land he had promised. We should also remember that God has rescued each of us from sin and gifted us with time, talents, treasure, people and the world in which we live. Let us, as a result, view life as a gift and give back to God generously and joyfully.

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Marvin Gaye - God Is Love.