How to live in wartime?

Here is the sermon I shared during Morning Praise at St Mary's Runwell this morning:

How to live in wartime? That is essentially the guidance that Jesus gives his disciples in the teachings recorded for us in Luke 21. 5-19. He was talking about a very specific conflict that would affect his disciples in the near future and which occurred in AD70 when the Roman army attacked Jerusalem and destroyed the temple there. When this happened, as Jesus prophesied, “not a single stone here will be left in its place; every one will be thrown down.”

The result of this conflict was twofold; the Jewish faith refocused its community life, teaching and worship around the synagogue (a pattern of faithful living which continues to this day); and Christianity, forced to abandon its early focus on the authority of the church in Jerusalem, stepped up its missionary encounter with the wider world to become a world religion. Both results are relevant to Jesus’ teaching here because the essence of his teaching comes in verse 19 when he says to “stand firm” in your faith.

The conflict he describes and prophesies will, he says, be an opportunity for his disciples to tell the Good News, if they stand firm: “Countries will fight each other; kingdoms will attack one another … you will be arrested and persecuted; you will be handed over to be tried in synagogues and be put in prison; you will be brought before kings and rulers for my sake. This will be your chance to tell the Good News.” (Luke 21. 10-13) 

That is what Jesus looks for from his followers in wartime and he promises his support and enabling in doing so: “Make up your minds beforehand not to worry about how you will defend yourselves, because I will give you such words and wisdom that none of your enemies will be able to refute or contradict what you say.” The situations in which we are called to do this change throughout history but what is unchanging is the call to tell the Good News, as here, in situations of military defeat, but also in times of victory, while the outcome is uncertain, and in times of peace.

On Remembrance Sunday we remember particular examples of telling the Good News in and through the wartime experiences which are within our cultural memory, most notably soldiers who fought and died in order to win peace within Europe such as Harry Patch, who was the last surviving British soldier to have fought in the trenches of the First World War. Patch, in the moment when he came face to face with a German soldier, recalled the story of Moses descending from Mount Sinai with the Ten Commandments, including "Thou shalt not kill", and could not bring himself to kill the German shooting him in the shoulder, above the knee, and in the ankle. Patch said, "I had about five seconds to make the decision. I brought him down, but I didn't kill him." 

We can also think of: civilians living through the Blitz and caring for neighbours while accepting the simple lifestyle imposed by rationing; Archbishop William Temple setting out an Anglican social theology and a vision for what would come to constitute a just post-war society in ‘Christianity and the Social Order’; and Bishop George Bell assisting refugees, arguing against the blanket-bombing of German cities and encouraging the role of the Church in the reconstruction of Europe after the war.

The German pastor, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who took part in the plot to assassinate Hitler, was one of those who saw most clearly what was actually at stake in World War II, when he wrote at the beginning of the war: “Christians in Germany will face the terrible alternative of either willing the defeat of their nation in order that Christian civilisation may survive, or willing the victory of their nation and thereby destroying our civilisation.”

Our situation is different again, meaning that the ways in which we are called to stand firm and tell the Good News are also different. In our time, the battle is one of ideas, a battle which is explained well by the French philosopher Jean Luc Nancy:

“1968 led to a process of transformation that amounted to adapting society to something that was leaving it behind: a new techno-political-economic world. This adaptation has had many negative effects. It unleashed the spirit of consumerism and ... completed the destruction of the frameworks, or references, of religious and emancipatory politics ... The resulting society has fewer foundations that it did before 1968.”

In this changed and changing world, where, in the West, we are no longer part of a civilization which seeks to be built primarily on Christian principles, many people want to mount rear guard actions to retain as much of what they perceive to be the past as possible. So, for example, some seek to fight for a mythic mono-cultural white Britain which never actually existed, while others seek to maintain the privileges that Christians have enjoyed in this country in the past instead of accepting the justice of the equality of faiths which is now enshrined in the law of the land.

The situation in which we find ourselves now equates to that of the Jews and Jewish Christians after the destruction of the Temple in AD70. Then there was no going back and Jesus sought to prepare his disciples for that reality. Instead of calling for rear guard actions to preserve as much of what had been as possible, Jesus sought to prepare and enable his disciples to go out into their changed and changing world and tell the Good News by standing firm in their faith. This remains the call of God on our lives and it is a task which requires the same bravery and courage as was shown by the Early Church in its missionary activity and as continues to be shown by serving men and women in conflict situations around the world today.

Jesus gives us the same marching orders that he gave to his first disciples: “Make up your minds beforehand not to worry about how you will defend yourselves, because I will give you such words and wisdom that none of your enemies will be able to refute or contradict what you say.” We are to trust that Jesus, through his Spirit, will inspire and enable what we are to do and say in this changed and changing world (as happened for Harry Patch). Nancy argues that we should respond to our new techno-political-economic world: “not with politics or economics but with thinking, with imagination, with what I call worship: a relationship to the infinite. We must stop believing that economic measures or political models can respond to what is happening. What is happening ... is the spirit of the world being transformed.”

The Early Church saw the spirit of the world transformed by God as they stood firm in their faith and told the Good News. That is how we are called live in wartime - in the battle of ideas or clash of civilizations which we now face - to stand firm in our faith and tell the good news. The challenge of this passage is whether we can do and see that within our changed and changing world.

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Talking Heads - Life During Wartime. 

In the time between times

Here is my sermon from this morning's Sung Eucharist at St Anne's Lutheran Church:

We live in the time between the times. That may sound like the opening sentence in a science fiction novel but it is also an important truth for us to understand in this time of Advent when we prepare to remember Christ’s first coming and look forward to Christ’s second coming.

The things that Jesus did in his ministry on earth - healing people physically, emotionally and spiritually, forgiving sins, including the excluded and raising the dead - were the beginnings of the rule and reign of God on earth. In Jesus’ ministry we see “the signs, the dawning, the budding of the … kingdom” of God. The first coming of Jesus was a demonstration of what the kingdom of God is and will become.

I say “will become” because history is moving towards a climax with the second coming of Jesus when the kingdom of God will be fully realised on earth and, as the book of Revelation tells us, there will be no more death, no more grief or crying or pain.

So the Bible speaks about there being two ages, this age and the age to come. Through Jesus, the kingdom of God has broken into this age and when Jesus returns the age to come will begin when the kingdom of God will come on earth as it is in heaven.

Therefore, we live in the time between the first and second comings of Jesus. In the time between the times, we see signs of God’s kingdom on earth but are still waiting for the full realisation of that kingdom and we are therefore in a similar position to that of John the Baptist (John 1: 6-8, 19-28)..

John lived in the time before Jesus began his ministry and spent his life looking out for and pointing people towards Jesus. Therefore, John can give us ideas about the way in which we should live as we look out for and point people towards the kingdom of God and Jesus’ second coming.

The first thing that we can see from John’s witness is that we should point people to Jesus and not to ourselves. In verses 19-21, John is asked whether he is the Messiah, Elijah, or the Prophet. Each time he answers, “I am not”. John’s “I am not” is in deliberate contrast to Jesus who, throughout, this Gospel says, “I am” because I AM is actually the name of God - I AM WHO I AM (the name that God used of himself when he spoke to Moses from the burning bush).

Archbishop William Temple wrote that John is here giving us an example for our own witness because he is saying, “Never mind who I am; listen to what I say and look at the person that I point you towards.” If ever our witness begins to be about ourselves or to make ourselves very prominent something is going wrong with it. It is not ourselves but our witness for which we want to claim attention. As Paul writes, “We preach not ourselves but Christ Jesus as Lord, and ourselves as your servants for Jesus’ sake.” In this time between the times, our lives and our words need to point others away from ourselves and towards Jesus.

Next, John describes himself and his role by quoting from the prophet Isaiah: “I am the voice of someone shouting in the desert; Make a straight path for the Lord to travel.” John is quoting the beginning of Isaiah 40 which says:

“A voice cries out, “Prepare in the wilderness a road for the Lord! Clear the way in the desert for our God! Fill every valley; level every mountain. The hills will become a plain, and the rough country will be made smooth. Then the glory of the Lord will be revealed and all mankind will see it. The Lord himself has promised this.”

John was in the wilderness which was also the place where the Israelites had been before they entered the Promised Land. The wilderness is the place of waiting, of preparation, for the promise of God to be fulfilled. John’s job in this place of preparation sounds like a major building project - fill every valley, level every mountain, make the hills a plain and the rough country smooth. And when this has been done then the glory of the Lord will be seen by everyone. So, John’s job was to call people to remove barriers to all people everywhere seeing Jesus for themselves.

The task that God had given to the Jewish people was to be a light to the Gentiles, to reveal the glory of God to all people. Jerusalem and its Temple was supposed to become a place to which the nations would stream to learn from God. Instead the Temple became a symbol of Jewish identity with all sorts of people excluded from worship at the Temple unless they conformed to the detailed requirements of the Mosaic Law. The Temple and the worship in it actually prevented the free access to God’s word that God wanted to see for people of all nations. Therefore, John is calling for all those barriers to God to be removed and torn down so that people can clearly see the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ.

In the time between the times we need to do the same. To identify those things in our society that prevent people from seeing Jesus and call for their removal. I’m thinking, for example, of the consumerism and individualism in our society that lead people to live as though all that matters is themselves and their own pleasure. A few years ago an American ambassador to UN food agencies in Rome found a novel way to do that this week by consigning most of his black tie evening guests to a freezing tent with only rice to eat. Tony Hall invited guests at his walled residence to pick a card from a hat and, while those who drew one card were ushered inside for a candlelit meal, he joined the unlucky others outside. By doing this he gave people a shock demonstration of what it is like for the 60 per cent of the world’s 6 billion people who struggle to eat. Hall told his Times interviewer that he was prompted in his quest to bring world hunger to people’s attention both by what he has seen firsthand in Ethiopia and by Isaiah 58.6, where God says: “The kind of fasting I want is this: Remove the chains of oppression and the yoke of injustice, and let the oppressed go free.”

Finally, John is questioned about the reason why he baptised people. John’s baptism was one of “repentance for the forgiveness of sins”. Those who were baptised by John were people who agreed with him that the people of Israel had lost their way and were not fulfilling God’s plan for their nation. John’s baptism prepared them to recognise Jesus who would faithfully carry out God’s plan for the salvation of all peoples. In the time between the times we need to do the same, to call people away from our society’s obsession with consuming more and more goods in order to bolster our own fragile egos and help people turn towards Jesus’ way of giving to others in order to see signs in our day of the kingdom of God.

Like John the Baptist we live in a time of preparation for the coming of something greater than what we know. Like him, we need to point people, not to ourselves, but to Jesus. Like him, we need to call for the removal of all barriers to people seeing Jesus for themselves. And like him, we need to help people repent for lives and a society that ignores God’s purpose and plan for our lives and turn back to God. As we learn from John, like him, we can create signs in our time of that something greater for which we wait. We can create signs of the kingdom of God which is here now but which will fully come when Jesus comes again.

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Kings College Choir - Coventry Carol.

Ministry and withdrawal, ministry and moving out

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

There are two patterns to the ministry of Jesus in these verses (Luke 4. 38 - 44) and we will do well to take note of them in relation to our own lives and ministries.

The first pattern that we see in this story is the balance been ministry and spirituality. The first few verses of the story describe an intense period of ministry. Jesus returns from the synagogue where he has just healed a man to find that Simon’s mother-in-law is unwell. He heals her and then spends the evening healing and delivering many others. We know how busy and exhausted we can often feel through the ministry we do in our workplaces, homes, community and here at St Martin’s. We can imagine how Jesus would have felt following his day of ministry.

In the morning, everyone is again looking for Jesus but he is nowhere to be found. Long before daylight he had got up, left the town and gone to a lonely place where he could pray. In order to pray effectively and well to needed to get away from the demands of ministry and away from his disciples. He needed to be alone with God in order to recharge his batteries for further ministry and that was Jesus’ pattern throughout his ministry; active mission combined with withdrawal for prayer and recuperation.

This needs to be our pattern too. The busyness of ministry here at St Martin’s and in our weekday lives cannot be sustained if it is not fed by regular times of withdrawal for prayer and recuperation. The two are clearly separated in Jesus’ live and ministry and he is prepared to disappoint people, as in this story, in order to ensure that he has the times of prayer and recuperation that he needs in our to sustain his active ministry. This is why we prioritise prayer and spirituality here at St Martin’s, with our range of services, times of contemplative prayer, opportunities for compassionate action, and annual retreats. It is why we have introduced a time of prayer ministry after the 10.00am service on Sundays. It is also one of the reasons why those of us in the staff team may not always be around in the building, because we too need that time and space for prayer and recuperation.

The second pattern that we find in this story is that of ministry and moving on. Jesus has this time of active ministry in Capernaum and then he moves on to preach in the other villages around this town and indeed across the whole of Galilee. The people don’t want him to go. The disciples tell Jesus that everyone is looking for him. They want more of what he has already given them. But he refuses them and moves on to preach to others.

There are two aspects to the pattern of Jesus’ ministry here. First, is his concern for all to hear. That is why he has come, he says, that he should bring God’s message to all. We need that same motivation. The message of salvation cannot stay wrapped up inside this building or our congregation but must go out from here. That is the why St Martin’s has always been a place that has created new initiatives. These initiatives show that Christians have something to say and something to contribute to the concerns that people have and, ultimately, that what we have to say and show is the love of God for all. It is vital that the message and the love of God does not stay cooped up in here but is expressed out there in our community.

That also needs to happen for our own growth and development. We grow as Christians not by staying where we are and being ministered to but by getting up and following in Jesus’ footsteps ourselves; by becoming active ministers of the Gospel ourselves. That is why Jesus constantly challenges his hearers to take up their cross and follow him. William Temple famously said, “The Church is the only society that exists for the benefit of those who are not its members.” What he meant is that the Church is not about us members getting our needs and wants satisfied; it is instead about equipping and motivating us, the members, to bless others in the love of Christ. That is what Jesus sought to achieve by moving from town to town, village to village and challenging his disciples to travel with him.

We need to mirror these patterns of ministry and withdrawal, ministry and moving out in our lives and our Church. That is why St Martin’s seeks to be a society that exists for the benefit of those who are not its members. As we follow Christ, we cannot simply be about getting our needs and wants satisfied but need to be about being equipped by God through times of prayer and recuperation to be signs of Christ outside of this building, outside of our congregation, out where it makes a difference, out in our community and workplaces.

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Taize - Wait For The Lord.

How to live in wartime?

Here is the sermon that I preached at St Vedast-alias-Foster this morning:

How to live in wartime? That is essentially the guidance that Jesus gives his disciples in the teachings recorded for us in Mark 13. In the light of the horrific events in Paris on Friday, it is particularly pertinent to us today.

Jesus was talking about a very specific conflict that would affect his disciples in the near future and which occurred in AD70 when the Roman army attacked Jerusalem and destroyed the temple there. When this happened, as Jesus prophesied, “Not one stone will be left here upon another; all will be thrown down.”

The result of this conflict was twofold; the Jewish faith refocused its community life, teaching and worship around the synagogue (a pattern of faithful living which continues to this day); and Christianity, forced to abandon its early focus on the authority of the church in Jerusalem, stepped up its missionary encounter with the wider world to become a world religion. Both results are relevant to Jesus’ teaching here because the essence of his teaching comes in verse 13 when he says “the good news must … be proclaimed to all nations.”

The conflict he describes and prophesies will, he says, be an opportunity for his disciples to tell the Good News, if they stand firm: “nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom; there will be earthquakes in various places; there will be famines … As for yourselves, beware; for they will hand you over to councils; and you will be beaten in synagogues; and you will stand before governors and kings because of me, as a testimony to them.” (Mark 13. 8 & 9)

That is what Jesus looks for from his followers in wartime and he promises his support and enabling in doing so: “When they bring you to trial and hand you over, do not worry beforehand about what you are to say; but say whatever is given you at that time, for it is not you who speak, but the Holy Spirit.” The situations in which we are called to do this change throughout history but what is unchanging is the call to tell the Good News, as here, in situations of military defeat, but also in times of victory, while the outcome is uncertain, and in times of peace.

In the past week of Remembrance we will have recalled particular examples of telling the Good News in and through the wartime experiences which are within our cultural memory, most notably soldiers who fought and died in order to win peace within Europe such as Harry Patch, who was the last surviving British soldier to have fought in the trenches of the First World War. Patch, in the moment when he came face to face with a German soldier, recalled the story of Moses descending from Mount Sinai with the Ten Commandments, including "Thou shalt not kill", and could not bring himself to kill the German shooting him in the shoulder, above the knee, and in the ankle. Patch said, "I had about five seconds to make the decision. I brought him down, but I didn't kill him." We can also think of: civilians living through the Blitz and caring for neighbours while accepting the simple lifestyle imposed by rationing; Archbishop William Temple setting out an Anglican social theology and a vision for what would come to constitute a just post-war society in ‘Christianity and the Social Order’; and Bishop George Bell assisting refugees, arguing against the blanket-bombing of German cities and encouraging the role of the Church in the reconstruction of Europe after the war.

The German pastor, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who took part in the plot to assassinate Hitler, was one of those who saw most clearly what was actually at stake in World War II, when he wrote at the beginning of the war: “Christians in Germany will face the terrible alternative of either willing the defeat of their nation in order that Christian civilisation may survive, or willing the victory of their nation and thereby destroying our civilisation.”

Our situation is different again, meaning that the ways in which we are called to stand firm and tell the Good News are also different. In our time, the battle is one of ideas, a battle which is explained well by the French philosopher Jean Luc Nancy: “1968 led to a process of transformation that amounted to adapting society to something that was leaving it behind: a new techno-political-economic world. This adaptation has had many negative effects. It unleashed the spirit of consumerism and ... completed the destruction of the frameworks, or references, of religious and emancipatory politics ... The resulting society has fewer foundations that it did before 1968. But society today is beginning to understand that a world and a civilization are disappearing and it has entered a change of the same magnitude as the shift from antiquity to the middle ages.”

In this changed and changing world, where, in the West, we are no longer part of a civilization which seeks to be built primarily on Christian principles, many people want to mount rear guard actions to retain as much of what they perceive to be the past as possible. So, for example, some seek to fight for a mythic mono-cultural white Britain which never actually existed while others seek to maintain the privileges that Christians have enjoyed in this country in the past instead of accepting the justice of the equality of faiths which is now enshrined in the law of the land.

The situation in which we find ourselves now equates to that of the Jews and Jewish Christians after the destruction of the Temple in AD70. Then there was no going back and Jesus sought to prepare his disciples for that reality. Instead of calling for rear guard actions to preserve as much of what had been as possible, Jesus sought to prepare and enable his disciples to go out into their changed and changing world and tell the Good News by standing firm in their faith. This remains the call of God on our lives and it is a task which requires the same bravery and courage as was shown by the Early Church in its missionary activity and as continues to be shown by serving men and women in conflict situations around the world today.

Jesus gives us the same marching orders that he gave to his first disciples: “When they bring you to trial and hand you over, do not worry beforehand about what you are to say; but say whatever is given you at that time, for it is not you who speak, but the Holy Spirit.” We are to trust that Jesus, through his Spirit, will inspire and enable what we are to do and say in this changed and changing world (as happened for Harry Patch).

We can also trust that he will give us surprising allies to stand alongside us as we speak. For example, at the very same time that Christianity has come under severe attack from the New Atheists, such as Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens, we find Radical Atheists such as Simon Critchley arguing that “to jettison [religious] traditions in the name of some kind of scientific rationality is simply philistine and counter-productive” and Slavoj Žižek stating that as a radical leftist he thinks “Christianity is too precious a thing to leave to conservative fundamentalists.”

The crucifixion, the resurrection and the Holy Spirit, Žižek argues, should be read as God trusting us by leaving his mission in the hands of a community which can be free of both liberal egotism and Christian fundamentalism; an argument which has clear synergies with what we have seen Jesus saying to his disciples in this passage.

Nancy argues that we should respond to our new techno-political-economic world: “not with politics or economics but with thinking, with imagination, with what I call worship: a relationship to the infinite. We must stop believing that economic measures or political models can respond to what is happening. What is happening ... is the spirit of the world being transformed.”

The Early Church saw the spirit of the world transformed by God as they stood firm in their faith and told the Good News. That is how we are called live in wartime - in the battle of ideas or clash of civilizations which we now face - to stand firm in our faith and tell the good news. The challenge of this passage is whether we can do and see that within our changed and changing world.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Talking Heads - Life During Wartime.

In the time between times

We live in the time between the times. That may sound like the opening sentence in a science fiction novel but it is also an important truth for us to understand in this time of Advent when we prepare to remember Christ’s first coming and look forward to Christ’s second coming.

The things that Jesus did in his ministry on earth - healing people physically, emotionally and spiritually, forgiving sins, including the excluded and raising the dead - were the beginnings of the rule and reign of God on earth. In Jesus’ ministry we see “the signs, the dawning, the budding of the … kingdom” of God. The first coming of Jesus was a demonstration of what the kingdom of God is and will become.

I say “will become” because history is moving towards a climax with the second coming of Jesus when the kingdom of God will be fully realised on earth and, as the book of Revelation tells us, there will be no more death, no more grief or crying or pain.

So the Bible speaks about there being two ages, this age and the age to come. Through Jesus, the kingdom of God has broken into this age and when Jesus returns the age to come will begin when the kingdom of God will come on earth as it is in heaven.

Therefore, we live in the time between the first and second comings of Jesus. In the time between the times, we see signs of God’s kingdom on earth but are still waiting for the full realisation of that kingdom and we are therefore in a similar position to that of John the Baptist (John 1: 6-8, 19-28).

John lived in the time before Jesus began his ministry and spent his life looking out for and pointing people towards Jesus. Therefore, John can give us ideas about the way in which we should live as we look out for and point people towards the kingdom of God and Jesus’ second coming.

The first thing that we can see from John’s witness is that we should point people to Jesus and not to ourselves. In verses 19-21, John is asked whether he is the Messiah, Elijah, or the Prophet. Each time he answers, “I am not”. John’s “I am not” is in deliberate contrast to Jesus who, throughout, this Gospel says, “I am” because I AM is actually the name of God - I AM WHO I AM (the name that God used of himself when he spoke to Moses from the burning bush).

Archbishop William Temple wrote that John is here giving us an example for our own witness because he is saying, “Never mind who I am; listen to what I say and look at the person that I point you towards.” If ever our witness begins to be to ourselves or to make ourselves very prominent something is going wrong with it. It is not ourselves but our witness for which we want to claim attention. As Paul writes, “We preach not ourselves but Christ Jesus as Lord, and ourselves as your servants for Jesus’ sake.” In this time between the times, our lives and our words need to point others away from ourselves and towards Jesus.

Next, John describes himself and his role by quoting from the prophet Isaiah: “I am the voice of someone shouting in the desert; Make a straight path for the Lord to travel.” John is quoting the beginning of Isaiah 40 which says:

“A voice cries out, “Prepare in the wilderness a road for the Lord! Clear the way in the desert for our God! Fill every valley; level every mountain. The hills will become a plain, and the rough country will be made smooth. Then the glory of the Lord will be revealed and all mankind will see it. The Lord himself has promised this.”

John was in the wilderness which was also the place where the Israelites had been before they entered the Promised Land. The wilderness is the place of waiting, of preparation, for the promise of God to be fulfilled. John’s job in this place of preparation sounds like a major building project - fill every valley, level every mountain, make the hills a plain and the rough country smooth. And when this has been done then the glory of the Lord will be seen by everyone. So, John’s job was to call people to remove barriers to all people everywhere seeing Jesus for themselves.

The task that God had given to the Jewish people was to be a light to the Gentiles, to reveal the glory of God to all people. Jerusalem and its Temple was supposed to become a place to which the nations would stream to learn from God. Instead the Temple became a symbol of Jewish identity with all sorts of people excluded from worship at the Temple unless they conformed to the detailed requirements of the Mosaic Law. The Temple and the worship in it actually prevented the free access to God’s word that God wanted to see for people of all nations. Therefore, John is calling for all those barriers to God to be removed and torn down so that people can clearly see the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ.

In the time between the times we need to do the same. To identify those things in our society that prevent people from seeing Jesus and call for their removal. I’m thinking, for example, of the consumerism and individualism in our society that lead people to live as though all that matters is themselves and their own pleasure. A few years ago an American ambassador to UN food agencies in Rome found a novel way to do that this week by consigning most of his black tie evening guests to a freezing tent with only rice to eat. Tony Hall invited guests at his walled residence to pick a card from a hat and, while those who drew one card were ushered inside for a candlelit meal, he joined the unlucky others outside. By doing this he gave people a shock demonstration of what it is like for the 60% of the world’s 6 billion people who struggle to eat.  Hall told his Times interviewer that he was prompted in his quest to bring world hunger to people’s attention both by what he has seen firsthand in Ethiopia and by Isaiah 58.6, where God says: “The kind of fasting I want is this: Remove the chains of oppression and the yoke of injustice, and let the oppressed go free.”

Finally, John is questioned about the reason why he baptises people. John’s baptism was one of “repentance for the forgiveness of sins”. Those who were baptised by John were people who agreed with him that the people of Israel had lost their way and were not fulfilling God’s plan for their nation. John’s baptism prepared them to recognise Jesus who would faithfully carry out God’s plan for the salvation of all peoples. In the time between the times we need to do the same, to call people away from our society’s obsession with consuming more and more goods in order to bolster our own fragile egos and help people turn towards Jesus’ way of giving to others in order to see signs in our day of the kingdom of God.

Like John the Baptist we live in a time of preparation for the coming of something greater than what we know. Like him, we need to point people, not to ourselves, but to Jesus. Like him, we need to call for the removal of all barriers to people seeing Jesus for themselves. And like him, we need to help people repent for lives and a society that ignores God’s purpose and plan for our lives and turn back to God. As we learn from John, like him, we can create signs in our time of that something greater for which we wait. We can create signs of the kingdom of God which is here now but which will fully come when Jesus comes again.

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Florence + the Machine - What The Water Gave Me.

Prayer - Thanksgiving

Three prayers collaging lines from the likes of Anselm, Karl Barth and William Temple, among others:

O Lord God our Father. You are the light that can never be put out; and now you give us a light that shall drive away all darkness. You are love without coldness, and you have given us such warmth in our hearts that we can love all when we meet. You are the life that defies death, and have opened up for us the way that leads to eternal life. Blessed are you, O Lord our God, in the light that shines in the darkness and which has never been extinguished. Blessed are you, O Lord our God, in the light that shines in the face of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, and which reveals your glory. Blessed are you, O Lord our God, in the light of the Holy Spirit which inflames our hearts and inspires our worship. Blessed are you, O Lord our God, Now and for ever. Amen.

Thank you, Jesus, for a mother’s unfailing love, for her unstinting devotion and steadfastness, for her wisdom and support, and for always ‘being there’ in times of happiness and stress. Thank you for love and forbearance, for laughter enjoyed and sorrow shared. Thank you, Jesus, for the comfort of a close friend; for the sharing of life and our deepest selves along the Way. Thank you for peace given to each other sincerely, and received beautifully; for open arms in which the love of God shone. Help us remember your gifts and be glad to give you praise; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

O Lord our God, from whom neither life nor death can separate us from those who trust in your love, and whose love holds in its embrace your children in this world and in the next, so unite us to yourself, that in fellowship with you we may be always united to our loved ones whether here or there. So give us courage, constancy and hope. May we so know and love you that we rejoice in you and if we may not do so fully in this life, let us go steadily on to the day when we come to that fullness. None of us is a great Christian; we are all humble and ordinary. But your grace is enough for us. Let the knowledge of you increase in us here, and there let it come to its fullness. Let your love grow in us here, and there let it be fulfilled, so that here our joy may be in a great hope, and there in full reality. Amen.

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U2 - Magnificent.

Vision of God's reordering of the world

Along with many others in the Diocese of Chelmsford, I've been looking forward to the arrival of the new Bishop of Chelmsford, Stephen Cottrell. His inaugural sermon and other materials introducing him to the Diocese illustrate why we are excited about the possibilities for the Diocese under his leadership:

"God has called us to build the kingdom of his love where a new humanity is revealed and made available. And, if I can borrow for a moment the phrase of the hour, the ‘Big Society’ was always our idea first. It is this vision of God's new community and God’s reordering of the world that brought me into the Church in the first place; and it is this vision that sustains me. And it is this - and this only - that we will joyfully seek and celebrate together while I am your bishop ...

Jesus says that his Church must be ‘salt’ and ‘light’. And let me remind you that here salt does not mean you are supposed to be like the little sprinkling over your chips to make them taste a bit nicer. It is preservative. This is what Jesus means; like a piece of salted cod - you stop it from rotting. This is what Jesus longs his Church to be: a household of peace and joy where true and lasting values are held, taught and celebrated.

And light. We are supposed to be light; light that shines in the darkness. Light that reveals the way. Light that dispels fear. Jesus says that we, his people, are supposed to be ‘a city set on a hill ’ receiving and radiating the light of Christ.

So, brothers and sisters, who are we - gathered in the midst of this Cathedral today; this motley band of muddled and broken humanity? We are the inheritors of a great vocation. We are the ones who are called to share the light of Christ today and shine with that light in our own lives.

This is what Basil Jellicoe did in the slums of London. This is what William Temple taught. This is what countless Christian people are doing every day in the diocese. And it is to this that we recommit ourselves: nothing less than the beauty of the Gospel and the building of God’s kingdom here."

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The Alarm - Presence of Love.

Good News in the battle of ideas

March past following the Civic Remembrance Service at the Ilford War Memorial

How to live in wartime? That is essentially the guidance that Jesus gives his disciples in the teachings recorded for us in Luke 21. 5-19.

He was talking about a very specific conflict that would affect his disciples in the near future and which occurred in AD70 when the Roman army attacked Jerusalem and destroyed the temple there. When this happened, as Jesus prophesied, “not a single stone here will be left in its place; every one will be thrown down.”

The result of this conflict was twofold; the Jewish faith refocused its community life, teaching and worship around the synagogue (a pattern of faithful living which continues to this day); and Christianity, forced to abandon its early focus on the authority of the church in Jerusalem, stepped up its missionary encounter with the wider world to become a world religion. Both results are relevant to Jesus’ teaching here because the essence of his teaching comes in verse 19 when he says to “stand firm” in your faith.

The conflict he describes and prophesies will, he says, be an opportunity for his disciples to tell the Good News, if they stand firm:

“Countries will fight each other; kingdoms will attack one another. There will be terrible earthquakes, famines, and plagues everywhere; there will be strange and terrifying things coming from the sky. Before all these things take place, however, you will be arrested and persecuted; you will be handed over to be tried in synagogues and be put in prison; you will be brought before kings and rulers for my sake. This will be your chance to tell the Good News.” (Luke 21. 10-13)

That is what Jesus looks for from his followers in wartime and he promises his support and enabling in doing so: “Make up your minds beforehand not to worry about how you will defend yourselves, because I will give you such words and wisdom that none of your enemies will be able to refute or contradict what you say.”

The situations in which we are called to do this change throughout history but what is unchanging is the call to tell the Good News, as here, in situations of military defeat, but also in times of victory, while the outcome is uncertain, and in times of peace.

On Remembrance Sunday we remember particular examples of telling the Good News in and through the wartime experiences which are within our cultural memory most notably soldiers who fought and died in order to win peace within Europe such as Harry Patch, the last surviving British soldier to have fought in the trenches of the First World War. Patch, in the moment when he came face to face with a German soldier, recalled the story of Moses descending from Mount Sinai with the Ten Commandments, including "Thou shalt not kill", and could not bring himself to kill the German shooting him in the shoulder, above the knee, and in the ankle. Patch said, "I had about five seconds to make the decision. I brought him down, but I didn't kill him." We can also think of: civilians living through the Blitz and caring for neighbours while accepting the simple lifestyle imposed by rationing; Archbishop William Temple setting out an Anglican social theology and a vision for what would come to constitute a just post-war society in ‘Christianity and the Social Order’; and Bishop George Bell assisting refugees, arguing against the blanket-bombing of German cities and encouraging the role of the Church in the reconstruction of Europe after the war.

The German pastor, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who took part in the plot to assassinate Hitler, was one of those who saw most clearly what was actually at stake in World War II, when he wrote at the beginning of the war:

“Christians in Germany will face the terrible alternative of either willing the defeat of their nation in order that Christian civilisation may survive, or willing the victory of their nation and thereby destroying our civilisation.”

Our situation is different again, meaning that the ways in which we are called to stand firm and tell the Good News are also different. In our time, the battle is one of ideas, a battle which is explained well by the French philosopher Jean Luc Nancy:

“1968 led to a process of transformation that amounted to adapting society to something that was leaving it behind: a new techno-political-economic world. This adaptation has had many negative effects. It unleashed the spirit of consumerism and ... completed the destruction of the frameworks, or references, of religious and emancipatory politics ... The resulting society has fewer foundations that it did before 1968. But society today is beginning to understand that a world and a civilization are disappearing and it has entered a change of the same magnitude as the shift from antiquity to the middle ages.”

In this changed and changing world, where, in the West, we are no longer part of a civilization which seeks to be built primarily on Christian principles, many people want to mount rear guard actions to retain as much of what they perceive to be the past as possible. So, for example, some seek to fight for a mythic mono-cultural white Britain which never actually existed while others seek to maintain the privileges that Christians have enjoyed in this country in the past instead of accepting the justice of the equality of faiths which is now enshrined in the law of the land.

The situation in which we find ourselves now equates to that of the Jews and Jewish Christians after the destruction of the Temple in AD70. Then there was no going back and Jesus sought to prepare his disciples for that reality. Instead of calling for rear guard actions to preserve as much of what had been as possible, Jesus sought to prepare and enable his disciples to go out into their changed and changing world and tell the Good News by standing firm in their faith. This remains the call of God on our lives and it is a task which requires the same bravery and courage as was shown by the Early Church in its missionary activity and as continues to be shown by serving men and women in conflict situations around the world today.

Jesus gives us the same marching orders that he gave to his first disciples: “Make up your minds beforehand not to worry about how you will defend yourselves, because I will give you such words and wisdom that none of your enemies will be able to refute or contradict what you say.” We are to trust that Jesus, through his Spirit, will inspire and enable what we are to do and say in this changed and changing world (as happened for Harry Patch).

We can also trust that he will give us surprising allies to stand alongside us as we speak. For example, at the very same time that Christianity has come under severe attack from the New Atheists, such as Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens, we find Radical Atheists such as Simon Critchley arguing that “to jettison [religious] traditions in the name of some kind of scientific rationality is simply philistine and counter-productive” and Slavoj Žižek stating that as a radical leftist he thinks “Christianity is too precious a thing to leave to conservative fundamentalists.”

The crucifixion, the resurrection and the Holy Spirit, Žižek argues, should be read as God trusting us by leaving his mission in the hands of a community which can be free of both liberal egotism and Christian fundamentalism; an argument which has clear synergies with what we have seen Jesus saying to his disciples in this passage.

Nancy argues that we should respond to our new techno-political-economic world:

“not with politics or economics but with thinking, with imagination, with what I call worship: a relationship to the infinite. We must stop believing that economic measures or political models can respond to what is happening. What is happening ... is the spirit of the world being transformed.”

The Early Church saw the spirit of the world transformed by God as they stood firm in their faith and told the Good News. That is how we are called live in wartime - in the battle of ideas or clash of civilizations which we now face - to stand firm in our faith and tell the good news. The challenge of this passage is whether we can do and see that within our changed and changing world.

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Talking Heads - Life During Wartime.

For the benefit of others

The tradition of celebrating a harvest festival in schools or churches as we know it today began fairly recently in historical terms when, in 1843, the Revd. Robert Hawker invited his Cornish parishioners to a special thanksgiving service at Morwenstow church. Celebrations of the harvest season, however, date back many hundreds of years and whole communities, over the centuries, have been united by the growing and harvesting of food.

As we celebrate our Harvest Festival at St Johns Seven Kings this month in 2009 we could ask ourselves what unites our community in Seven Kings today. Our first reaction may be sceptical and cynical; that our community is now so diverse and different that there is nothing that unites us. I talked at our Annual Parochial Church Meeting about population changes in our locality and the challenges that these pose to churches in this borough and some may have thought that I was reflecting a similar scepticism and cynicism about our community.

That could not be further from the way that I think about the challenges we face as church and community from the diversity in our borough. I think that it is part of our Christian witness to find and contribute to ways of uniting our diverse community and that to do this is a sign that the kingdom of God is for all peoples everywhere. Sometimes I hear people talk as though the Church community should come first and the wider community second. But that is to think like the world in which people consistently put themselves and their needs first. Instead the Church is to be, in the words of Archbishop William Temple, the one organisation that exists for the benefit of those who are not its members.

As we provide a venue for a wide range of community groups, as we host TASK meetings and contribute to the Seven Kings & Newbury Park Residents Association, as we deliver our own activities for the wider community, as we show care and interest to our neighbours and as we carry out our work tasks across London, we are regularly bringing different people and groups together in ways that would not otherwise be the case.

Our involvement in local campaigns for improved community facilities – library, park etc – is beginning to bear fruit. Attention is beginning to be paid to Seven Kings and its community in a way that was not previously the case. Local people and the local authority are more aware that this church and others are a key part of the local community both for the local facilities that we provide and the way in which we are able to bring people of different backgrounds and races together. We are seeking to build on this awareness with our plans to promote the Church Centre and its activities (Church and Community) more widely and to develop our garden area as a community garden.

We are aware too that aspects of what we are doing are controversial for some and have sought to find ways of talking about this and other controversial issues in the Church and community through our ‘Dealing with disagreement’ series (which has itself had a measure of controversy). We may not fully like or agree with this direction for St Johns – it may be different from and a challenge to what we have been used to – but we need to find ways of talking about this together, of supporting one another and the church as we move into a challenging and uncertain future, of continuing to seek and to find ways to unite our diverse community, and to do all this in the name of God who continues, as our text for 2009 reminds, to provide what we need even in challenging and uncertain times:

“The poor and needy search for water, but there is none; their tongues are parched with thirst. But I the LORD will answer them; I the God of Israel will not forsake them. I will make rivers flow on barren heights, and springs within the valleys, I will turn the desert into pools of water, and the parched ground into springs.” Isaiah 41. 17-18.

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Al Green: Simply Beautiful.