Tag: sermon

Easter Sunday morning thoughts

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My churches aren’t in the habit of having Easter vigil services, so the 8am on Easter morning is the first time in the Benefice that we light a paschal candle and roll away the stone from the Easter garden’s tomb.

On Easter Eve this year I was at home, and browsing twitter – I wasn’t sure how to feel about the numerous tweets from people returning from evening services proclaiming ‘Christ is risen!’ and ‘Alleluia’ – it almost felt like ‘spoilers’ for the liturgy in which I’d be taking part in the morning.

I told the 8am congregation this – we’d said the Easter Anthems, we’d lit our paschal candle, and in the sermon I reflected that as a vicar I ‘do’ Easter many times on Easter day.  No one service can be argued to be the moment of resurrection – the 8am doesn’t have priority as the real Easter because it’s earlier, and nor does the 10.30am because there are more people there.

In the end I found the fact of multiple Easters more helpful and more theologically profound than confusing, because it’s a model that’s truer to the Biblical accounts that we read in the gospels.  On the very first Easter, there must have been a ‘real’ moment of resurrection – the moment when Jesus stopped being dead and started being alive again.  But nobody witnessed it.  I love the fact that in a church with no Easter vigil, we sleep through the resurrection, just as the first disciples did, and then each of us comes, one by one or two by two, or in larger groups, and has our own ‘moment’ of realisation of the new life of Christ.

For Mary in John 20, the moment of resurrection is not when Jesus comes to life, it’s when he cuts through her grief and speaks her name. For the disciples in the upper room, it’s not when Jesus comes to life, it’s when he walks through the locked door of their fear and breathes his peace on them. For Thomas, it’s a week later, when Jesus touches away his doubt and by his wounds he gains his faith.  For the disciples at Emmaus it’s the moment when Jesus breaks the bread, and for Peter it’s the offer (in John 21) of a threefold commitment to balance his threefold denial.

None of these resurrection stories take place at the very moment of the resurrection, they are all afterwards, by varying degrees – perhaps only by minutes in Mary’s case, but for the others it’s hours, maybe days before the resurrection becomes real for them.

And this is still happening now.  The resurrection was a historical moment, but the very fact that it went unwitnessed at the very moment it took place means that each encounter with the risen Christ today is just as potent as the encounters that the disciples experienced. We did not miss out for the fact that we are living almost 2000 years after the event, for it is fresh every Easter, every Sunday, potentially every moment of every day. For every moment could be the moment when we will find that Christ has spoken into our grief, or walked through the locked door of our fear, or touched our doubt into faith…..

So, happy Easter!  Not just today, but tomorrow, and the next day – whenever something enables you to grasp the new life that God offers us in the risen Christ.

 

Epiphany

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There have been interesting things in the night sky.

I don’t know if it’s my imagination, but Jupiter seems brighter every time I look at it (and if you’re not sure where to look, find Orion’s belt, and then look left and slightly up – Jupiter is the really bright one).

And then there’s the International Space Station, which you can track here.  The best viewing for us was Christmas Eve, around 6pm, when it would have been fairly easy to convince even my skeptical children that it was St Nicholas’ sleigh they were seeing moving across the night sky.   We still have a few more opportunities to see the ISS this month, so do follow the link above and see for yourself and give the astronauts a wave.

We don’t know what the wise men’s star actually was.

Halley’s comet was visible around 12BC, but in those days people were terrified of comets – they were seen as bringers of doom, and would never have been understood as a portent of good news.

It might have been Jupiter and Venus in conjunction, possibly also with a bright star such as Regulus just behind them, all merging together to appear, to the naked eye, as one massive, bright star. 

Or, it could have been a star in our neighbouring Andromeda galaxy exploding into a supernova – that would have appeared as a sudden, new bright star int he sky.

Or perhaps God laid on something special, just for those wise men, because he wanted to make sure they knew about the birth of Jesus, and he knew that the stars were where they looked for wisdom and meaning.  God has a long and honourable history of not hiding – in fact 0f revealing himself in precisely those ways that will ensure that we can find him if we have a will to do so.  Athanasius’ great work ‘Contra Gentiles’ is a long and enthusiastic account of what essentially amounts to a divine ambush – wherever we focus our gaze, that it where God will find a way to become recognisable.

The wonderful thing is that God chooses to do so.  He lit the touchpaper for the big bang and set the universe into motion, and yet still cared enough to make sure that when Jesus was born, three random stargazers from a faraway land got to hear about it.

And that’s the whole point with the incarnation, isn’t it?  The miracle that God, the creator of everything, would come and be part of his creation. It’s been described as trying to put the whole national grid through one light bulb, and it’s OK if we can’t quite get our head around that, because that’s also the point.

We don’t have to be able to grasp the whole thing – the massive, indescribable, all-consuming power and love of God. Because in Jesus God showed us everything we need to know in a way that we can relate to.

When we look at the night sky we see the tiny pinpricks of light and we know they are giant balls of flaming gas, some of them many times more powerful than our own sun – and we can’t even look on our own sun without damaging our eyes.  We look on Jesus and we see God is a way that we can handle – his love is God’s love, but shown to us in a way that lets us look on it, touch it, feel it.

When we look up into the night sky (and it’s a wonderful thing to do in these long nights and dark days) may we see both the majesty of God and his infinite creation and the wonderful way in which he reaches out to meet us where we are.

From Psalm 8:
When I look at your heavens, the work of your hands, the moon and the stars that you have set in their place; what are human beings that you even notice them, that you care for them?  Yet you have made them a little lower than the angels, and crowned them with glory and honour. 

Midnight

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A sermon for midnight mass.

Last night, with still six sermons left to write, I found myself remembering that whatever I do or fail to do, whatever I say or don’t say from the pulpit, Christmas will still happen. Christ is still come among us. God is still with us. Christmas itself does not happen because of me. In fact, at this rate, it is more likely to happen despite me.

I’d be the first person to point out that the whole of the Christmas story depends on the compliance of the key players: Mary has to say yes, Joseph has to support her; the Shepherds have to listen to the angels and summon the enthusiasm to leave their flocks and visit the new baby; the magi have to notice the star and then take the risk of following it….

But to turn that around, isn’t the miracle that it all happened at all?  If God’s son was to be born on earth, there would have been far easier ways.  A different place, a different time. A less ad hoc plan. In fact, it almost seems as if the Christmas story happened despite all the things that could have, or did, go wrong.

Christ was born:

Despite Mary and Joseph not being married yet,  and the risk that both of them took to go along with the plan…

Despite the fact that they had to travel miles to go and register themselves for tax…

Despite the fact that with the Romans in charge, being born a Jew was a serious disadvantage in the first place…

Despite all the inns being full and the new parents and child having to sleep in a stable…

Despite Herod’s unspeakable act of rage and fear and jealousy as he tried to root out and kill the baby Jesus…

Despite all this, the incarnation happened. Christ was born. God came into his own world, became subject to its dangers, and ‘pitched his tent among our own’.

The Christmas story is a remarkable tale of how the purposes of God triumph over circumstance, over sin, over inconvenience, over hardship, over sheer improbability…  It was time for the Saviour of the World to come. And come he did, despite everything.

It’s a story that delicately balances the overwhelming loving purposes of God for the world, and the way that he draws us into that loving plan, giving his people crucial parts to play, and directing the action, but allowing and encouraging them to improvise and rewriting the script to take account of each twist and turn, and to allow for the weakness of those he has chosen for his starring roles.

Perhaps the key (at least a key, for me) in all these ‘despites’ is that perfection is not the aim. There is one thing that absolutely has to happen in the story: Jesus has to be born. Everything else was window dressing.  Yes, a house would have been nice rather than a stable, and yes, it would have been nice to do without the long journey. These things would have made the whole thing more comfortable.  But despite most things going wrong, Jesus was born. Christ came into the world. Emmanuel – God with us.

Seeing the story in that light made me question again my own priorities this Christmas. Was I, in fact, worrying about the window dressing, the things that would make everything feel good, and forgetting the one thing that mattered above all else? Where was the real presence of Jesus Christ in all that I am doing at Christmas, or had it got a bit lost in all the photocopying of service sheets, last-minute writing of sermons, singing of descants, guilt at not having done a great deal on the domestic front recently, and everything else.  You may all, of course, be paragons of organisation and domestic bless, everything ordered and precise, and all relationship healthy and happy, nothing at all to mar a perfect day.  If that’s you, that’s great, well done!  But I suspect you’re in the minority!

So that’s what I want to share with you tonight. You can have a Christmas in which everything goes wrong. And yet that same Christmas can be everything it needs to be if the one thing that really matters is in place. I’ve had to work out all over again – as I do every Christmas – what that one thing is, or it’ll get lost under all my attempts to get everything right, and then under all my flapping and worrying about having got so many things wrong or failed to do them at all. Christmas has such a lead-up and so much expectation that anything short of perfection can feel like failure.

God knew that the world he had made was – and still is – in a mess, and he knew that he was coming into one of the messiest, most difficult, and most imperfect times and places in that world. That’s where and when he chose to come, because the light shines most brightly in the dark.

So tonight, I invite you to work out what’s most important. Find your answer in a reading: it might be, ‘The Word became flesh and dwelt among us’ or ‘The light shines in the darkness and the darkness has not overcome it’; find it in a carol: it might be ‘The hopes and fears of all the years are met in thee tonight’ or ‘be bear me Lord Jesus, I ask thee to stay’; find it in a moment’s silence; find it in seeing a loved one you’ve not seen for ages, or in the greeting of a stranger; or find it in a prayer, in a sigh…. Whatever else you do, and however hard to decide to try to make everything perfect this Christmas, remember that the Christmas story is one in which almost everything that could go wrong, did go wrong, and yet it changed the world, because it was the moment that God came to us and stayed with us, and he is with us still – and that depends not on us, but on God.

The thing about Advent is….

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Jesus is coming - look busy

The thing about Advent is…

…that the readings tend to make it feel rather more about the second coming of Jesus than the first coming; there is more apocalypse than incarnation.  Great! At least all the judgement and warnings are a useful antidote to the Christmas Cheer that seems to begin as soon as Remembrance is over.  But how many of us are sufficiently self-controlled and self-motivated that we can do without any kind of oversight and accountability? Many of us need the promise of reward or the threat of punishment if we are give of our best, and I know that I’m among those who have signed off from twitter for a couple of hours in order to get something important done, by telling all my twitter followers to check up on me and ask me when I come back online whether I actually finished what I was supposed to have done.  The Holman Hunt painting of Jesus, standing at the door and knocking, can feel like both a promise and a threat, and the caption that many have added (as I have) may be more of a realistic statement about our own inability to motivate ourselves than we’d like to think.  The question, ‘if Jesus were to come again right now, would he be delighted with how I am spending my time and energy and gifts?’ will always be an interesting and challenging one. What we do during Advent, and Christmas that matter, although it may be different from usual, must still keep the integrity of who we are and not be at odds with what we do the rest of the time.

The thing about Advent is…

…that we still live in a state of longing and yearning; the old access card adverts encouraged us to ‘take the waiting out of wanting’ and countless sermons since have encouraged us to put it back again. But the truth is that the world is very, very aware of the fact that we are waiting, and yearning and wanting in so very many ways.  Those who sit in darkness long for light, those who are hungry long to be fed, many who are struggling financially long for the security of paid employment.  And those who are in debt long for a day – which must seem as if it will never come – when their debts will be cleared, when all payments have been made, when they finally own the things they’ve bought.  There is a lot of waiting and a lot of wanting, and a lot of yearning around. And that’s even before you factor in the years of faithful prayer for peace, for justice, for our common humanity and accountability to one another to win in the eternal battle with greed, self-centredness, and fear.  We are living in a world that longs for things to be renewed, healed, and transformed, and no amount of credit and quick fixes replace the hard work of striving, praying, urging, speaking out, and doing the work of renewal that God desires for us.

The thing about Advent is…

…that at the start of the church’s year we look back as well as forward. We remember with thanksgiving, with repentance, with awe and respect, with questions and doubt and with diligence on all the time before the incarnation: the prophets, the kings and queens, and the patriarchs and matriarchs all have their own place within the huge, overarching story of salvation, and our own place in that story is but a tiny  moment: our own stories are part-written, part-unknown, just as the world’s story is part-written, part-unknown.  We can look at the stories of the past and see in them – even the awful bits and the ugly bits – the patient purposes of God unfolding. We may look at our own lives and see no such pattern, yet we must continue to grasp the truth that we are part of God’s plan for the salvation of the world just as are any of the people we celebrate and revere from our faith’s heritage.

The thing about Advent is…

…that it only makes sense as a season of preparation for something more. Advent is always under threat from an early Christmas, but it is also under threat from a Christmas that has become less than it should be.  The momentous prophetic words that we’ll hear over the next few weeks only make sense if we celebrate Christmas in a way that honours their hope for the breadth and depth and height and scope of God’s love in Christ – and that’s whether we’re anticipating the annual celebration of his incarnation or the promise of his final coming among us to renew the earth at the end of all things.

 

The Kingdom of heaven is like this: a chocolatier created a box of chocolates…

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A random thought on Luke 14.7-14

And Jesus told this parable. The Kingdom of Heaven is like this: A chocolatier invented a variety of chocolates, and made them in his factory, and he called the collection, “Roses”.  He invited his friends round to try his creation, and offered them the box of delicious treats – but they did not know that he himself was the chocolatier. His friends all chose the strawberry cremes and the purple ones with the caramel and the hazelnut, and when they were gone they chose the tangy orange creme and the golden barrel.

Eventually all that was left were the plain country fudges. The man kept offering the box of chocolates to his friends, but they declined, saying, “Country fudge is not interesting, I don’t know why they bother putting them in the box, because nobody likes them.”

So the man said goodbye to his friends, for it was late.  He then gathered up the country fudges that had been rejected, and put them in a special bowl reserved for only the finest chocolates, and poured himself a glass of Bailey’s, and settled down on his comfy sofa to read his favourite book.  And as he read, he ate every single country fudge, and found them all to be delightful – and he would know, because, after all, he was the master chocolatier.

For surely the first shall be last, and the last shall be first. But it is when the first and last come together in a box that the true breadth and depth and height of the Kingdom of God and Love of God are made known – for in transit to the eternal feast the contents may settle, and one never knows when the box is opened on the latter day which of the many and delicious flavours will have risen to the top.

Amen.