St Michael & All Angels 2018

Genesis 28:10-17 and Revelation 12:7-12 and John 1:47-51

A confession: I do not like ladders. There are ladders that rise through several floors of the Minster tower to the flagpole on the very top, from where I imagine there is a view. But I have no desire to ascend and see it for myself. Whenever there are lightbulbs that need replacing in this building, Gordon the caretaker climbs the ladder, while I hold its base secure. That way, if Gordon should fall, we both get broken. I understand that this is called Health & Safety.

Ladders feature in two of our three readings this morning. The first concerns Jacob. Later on, many years from now he will wrestle all night long with God and receive a new name. As ‘Israel’ he will join the ranks of the patriarchs and become the father of the people of Israel, those descendants promised to his own grandfather, Abraham. But for now, Jacob is a young man, alone in the world, running for his life. Fear and exhaustion wrestle within him, and at the point where exhaustion wins, he takes a rock for a pillow and sleeps beneath the stars. And in a dream, he sees what he had failed to notice awake, a ladder reaching up to the heavens. And all night long the angels of God were ascending and descending it.

The word translated angel also means messenger or ambassador. These, then, are those beings carrying messages to (ascending) and from (descending) God. But they are more than a glorified postal service. These are representatives, with their own God-given power and authority on earth and in the heavens. This is, as Jacob realises, both the household of God and the gateway between two worlds. And there is a homeless man, sleeping rough, at the epicentre of it all.

And there, Yahweh, the god who had wandered with Jacob’s father and grandfather, promised to wander with him too, far from home and back again. And to raise from him a family that would spread out to the west and the east and the north and the south, and back again. So, from this gate of heaven we see movement out and back operating on both a vertical dimension and a horizontal dimension. Not just angels but also human beings, appointed to be messengers and ambassadors, carrying blessing. Oh, and by the way, what that horizontal dimension looks like for us as Durham Diocese is that ‘from the Tyne to the Tees and the dales to the sea’ [that is, to the north, and south, and west, and east] [we are sent to be] ‘blessing our communities, for the transformation of us all’.

Our second reading came from Revelation, from another dream of heaven and earth connected, given to an old man called John, who, as a young man, had been one of the first people to follow Jesus. As with Jacob, his eyes are opened; and he is shown the spiritual reality of war in heaven. Michael and his angels warring against Satan and his angels. Those heavenly hosts faithful to Yahweh, and those in rebellion against Yahweh. There is no ladder as such here, but the image comes to mind of ancient warfare, of a besieging army raising ladders against a city’s walls and the defending army on the parapets, pushing the ladders away. And Satan is thrown down, falls to the earth, and all his angels with him.

As in our first reading, there is both an angelic aspect and a human aspect to what is going on. The angels fight, while the faithful humans participate by the word of their testimony, countering the accusations of the Satan by proclaiming that, in Jesus, the saving power and reign of God has been re-established on earth.

The day Jesus met Nathanael, he told him that, like the run-away Jacob, he would see for himself the angels of God ascending and descending. But here, again, Nathanael is not called to a passive role. Rather, he is called to follow Jesus, and to be sent out into the world by him. (The first thing Jesus does is bring Nathanael back home, to his hometown of Cana, to attend a wedding. It is almost as if it were a down-payment, a promise that wherever we wander together, I am with you and will keep you, and will bring you back home.)

Today we mark the Feast of St Michael and All Angels — or, at least, all faithful angels. And, as many of you will know, this Minster church is dedicated to St Michael and All Angels. Along with Gabriel and very few others, Michael is an unusual saint, in that he is an angelic being and not a human being. But in recognising his affinity with men and women, perhaps we are encouraged to recognise our affinity with the angels, for we, too, are called to be messengers and ambassadors, bringing the concerns of the war-ravaged world before God and the hope of salvation — that is, of the victory of Jesus (the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world) over evil — to all peoples.

How might we respond to what we have heard? Let me suggest four different ways we might do so.

First, a visual aid: as you wait to receive the bread and wine, or a blessing, and after you have done so, why not gaze upon the East Window, with its depiction of Michael defeating the dragon, and of the angels surrounding the throne of heaven where Jesus is seated, and allow yourself to be caught-up in the worship-life of heaven?

Second, a thresh-hold to cross: how would the homeless men and women sleeping in the Minster doorways know that they have not simply found a stone pillow for the night, but stumbled-upon the house of God and the gate of heaven? (Please note: we need an agreed community response to this question, not a haphazard one.)

Third, a compass to wander with: how might we re-orient ourselves towards God in the days we are scattered, sent-out to be a blessing? Here, I’d like to suggest a simple meditative prayer, prayed silently in rhythm with our breath. As you inhale, pray ‘house of God’ and as you exhale, ‘gate of heaven’: [inhaling] ‘house of God’ [exhaling] ‘gate of heaven’ [inhaling] ‘house of God’ [exhaling] ‘gate of heaven’. Prayerfully turn the words over and over, imagining yourself received by God with each inhale and sent out into the world by God with each exhale.

Fourth, testimonies to hear: our Iranian sisters and brothers have fled home in search of a place to rebuild their lives. What have they discovered about God, on this spot in the middle of Sunderland, and in other even less likely spaces? What might we learn from them? It was an incredible privilege to witness twenty-four people confirm their desire to follow Jesus on Thursday evening just gone. God has sent them to us, but, what messages has God sent them with, that we need to hear?

You have each been given a summary of these possible responses. Please take it away with you, engage with the responses, on your own or in your households, as we live-out our calling to be shaped into the likeness of Jesus Christ in the footsteps of St Michael and All Angels. Amen.

Seventeenth Sunday after Trinity 2018

James 3:13-4:3, 7-8a and Mark 9:30-37

My youngest son is really enjoying Science at school at the moment. The other day, he came home and was telling me all about experiments they had been doing using Universal Indicator. When a green liquid Universal Indicator was added to other liquids of unknown pH value, that liquid turned green if it was neutral (pH 7); yellow or orange if mildly acidic (pH 6-3) and red if strongly acidic (pH <3); blue if mildly alkaline (pH 8-11) and purple if strongly alkaline (pH >11).

It was a joy to see him so enthused about growing in understanding. But alongside understanding, my prayer for my children is that they grow in wisdom. The Old Testament book of Proverbs tells us that wisdom is essential in order to be righteous, that is, in order to act justly, to habitually do the morally right thing even in complex situations or circumstances where we are put under pressure to do what is morally wrong but expedient. But in our day, where morality is robustly contested, and ethical codes are slippery, it can be hard to know whether someone is wise or merely knowledgeable.

James gives us an indicator for the presence of wisdom, and that indicator measures gentleness. The more gentleness a person shows, the wiser they are. A polymath with a razor-sharp wit that cuts others down and puts them in their place is a knowledgeable fool.

Gentleness is under-rated, over-looked, easily dismissed; but it is as essential for our flourishing as good soil and light rain and the warmth of the sun are for plants to grow. Wherever it is recognised, its quality is understood to be strength expressed with love. That is why James describes true wisdom as being ‘willing to yield’: it takes great strength, and love, to not always need to be right, to not have to have the final word.

Perhaps that is why Jesus has a child placed in the middle of the disciples, like a lamb among wolves, and then takes it up in his arms. The gentleness — the strength and love — of God disarming whatever brilliant credentials the disciples had for taking centre-stage. May we also be taken up in his arms today, and learn to be gentle, and so be found wise.

Evensong, Sixteenth Sunday after Trinity 2018

Exodus 18:13-26 and Matthew 7:1-14

At first glance, Jethro’s instruction to Moses to appoint judges and Jesus’ injunction ‘Do not judge’ appear to be opposed; but I want to suggest that they are, in fact, in agreement, on the importance of giving everyone a fair hearing.

Moses is carrying the unsustainable burden of arbitrating in every dispute among the people. Jethro counsels him to identify able men of good character, and appoint them as officers over thousands, hundreds, fifties and tens. I have regularly heard it suggested that they were appointed on the basis of differing levels of competence; but I am no longer convinced by this: they are all [to be] able. I think it more likely that they were chosen from their ‘structural’ peers within the existing structure of family, clan, and tribal groups, and that this had more to do with a shared load. If you think about it, the overwhelming majority of disputes can be settled within minutes; but if you have to judge these for too big a group, you’d never get anything else done. Then there are the kinds of disputes where you can hear two or three in a morning: less common, meaning you can have oversight of a larger group. Then there are those disputes that can take several days to weigh: a small minority, again even across an even larger group. And there are the most serious disputes, that need to be dealt with, and seen to be dealt with, publicly and at the highest levels. But with Moses fielding all those little disputes as well as the big ones, the system doesn’t work for anyone. Jethro understands not only that the load must be shared, but that the distributed wisdom of the people enables it to be shared.

Jesus, to, is concerned that everyone should get a fair hearing. That as a community, we hear, and see, one another. There are always at least two sides to every story; even if both sides are not equally right or to be upheld; even if one or both needs to be challenged. We naturally see other people’s blind spots; but the thing about our own bind spots is that we are blind to them. Our vision is all too easily distorted, and especially when we are fired-up with zeal; when we unwittingly find ourselves turning into dogs, taking an aggressive stance; or swine, trampling the very thing we claim to value under foot.

We live in days when such advice needs to be taken to heart; when we are, collectively, losing the discipline of hearing and seeing our neighbour; encouraged, instead, to jump to judgement. The cycle of judging others harshly, and finding ourselves judged just as harshly, needs breaking. And the way to break it is to stand back and ask our neighbour to tell us what they see in us. What they see in our eyes. Listening in order to better be able to remove the log, not to justify its presence. It might make for uncomfortable listening; but, in the long run, it will be for all our good.

Jesus continues, keep on asking, searching, knocking, until you take possession of what God has in store for us. In everything do to others as you would have them do to you — which summarises the whole of the law and the prophets, the revelation and commitment to justice. Enter the narrow gate into the hard road that leads to life, not the wide gate into the easy road that leads to destruction — our own, and that of others. These are not a random collection of unrelated sayings. They are incredibly pertinent words of wisdom, to enable us to see clearly in an age of misdirection, and to hear rightly in times of disorienting noise. In a post-truth age, where fake news has become a virtue, and tweeting — or retweeting without fact-checking first — is easy, let us hold to the words of eternal life. Amen.

Fourteenth Sunday after Trinity 2018

Deuteronomy 4:1-2, 6-9 and James 1:17-27 and Mark 7:1-8, 14-15, 21-23

On Thursday, Jo and the kids and I took the train to London to see the West End production of HAMILTON. HAMILTON is a musical about several of the Founding Fathers of the United States of America. It is a story about ideas, and identity. The first half is concerned with differing ideas about whether the thirteen states should continue to be a British colony or fight for their independence. The second half is concerned with competing ideas as to whether the newly-independent states should be essentially autonomous or be forged into a nation with a strong centralised government. At every point, the outcome is in the balance; the way forward, an experiment in what it means to be a good, a just, society. Oh, and by the way, I cannot recommend it highly enough.

Our readings today are also all concerned with what it means to be society worth living for. The first, from Deuteronomy, is set when the Israelites had been liberated from over 400 years of Egyptian ownership. But the question now is, what comes next? God gives them a legal framework, more, a constitutional framework guaranteeing freedom; and Moses prepares them to move on without him, to enter and occupy their promised land, by urging them not to forget their founding constitution: to make it known to the generations to come after them. It is, essentially, a matter of justice. And the Jewish law really is an embodiment of justice, not only as understood in its day, but that has stood the test of time.

The law is summarised in the Ten Words, or Commandments. They begin by warning against idolatry, the taking of something good and placing it on a pedestal: still relevant today, in a world full of idolatry, including the promise of salvation in the political left or right. Our contemporary idolatry includes humanism, the belief that humans are infallible, causing us to bay for the blood of anyone who lets the side down. We see the cost of that idolatry when the learning-journals junior doctors are meant to keep in order to help them become better doctors are used as evidence against them in their being struck off for making a mistake, paralysing many such doctors with fear. Another example would be neo-liberalism, the belief that salvation is to be found in the free market, through competition. But the free market is a god that enslaves and devours us all, bringing everything crashing down.

The Ten Words go on to attend to rest — we are not machines; to safeguard respect for and care of the elderly; to pursue the embodiment of loving your neighbour; and the essential importance of truth-telling — so relevant in our Age that has made a virtue of ‘post-truth’ relativism. And as this law is worked out in practice, we discover that it takes in sexual abuse — so relevant to our times of #metoo and #churchtoo and the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse (IICSA). We discover that it takes in public health and diet. We discover that it takes in the demolishing of sub-standard housing and the rehoming of people in adequate housing — still relevant down-wind of Grenfell. I could go on and on.

Some Christians speak of this law as if it needed to be swept away. But Jesus himself unambiguously stated that he had come not to abolish the law, but to fulfil it. And in our second reading this morning, Jesus’ brother James writes that this law is perfect, the law of liberty, and encourages his hearers to look into it deeply and often, for there we see reflected for us our identity in the world. Like Moses, James urges us not to forget that identity, but to live out in practice what it means to be a good, a just, society.

Now, just before I turn to the Gospel passage, let me return for a moment to HAMILTON. Its creator, Lin-Manuel Miranda, has described it as ‘a story of America then described by America now’. He saw, paralleled in the unlikely life of Alexander Hamilton, the complicated and unlikely lives of many Americans today. In response, he crafted a hip-hop retelling of history, hip-hop being a form of ‘writing about your struggle, and writing about it so well that you transcend your struggle’. And then a multi-cultural cast tells the story.

And that same process, I would suggest, is going on with Mark’s gospel. Mark is recording Peter’s memoirs, depicting the life of Jesus. But Mark is writing for a revolutionary community in Rome, Christians come together from Jewish and Gentile cultural backgrounds, trying to work out what the church should look like, what their identity ought to be.

The passage we heard read today describes an episode, the clash of two very different ideas concerning how the Jews ought to construct and protect their distinctive identity, in the context of military occupation by the global super power. But it also resonates with the same challenges the house churches in Rome were wrestling with, at the very heart of the Empire. Unfortunately, the Lectionary skips over those verses, but you can look them up for yourself later. All that said, let us turn to our passage from Mark.

The presenting issue is that Jesus’ disciples are eating without washing their hands. We’re not talking about the way your mother used to send you back from the table to go wash your hands when you’d come in from playing in the dirt outside. This is not a hygiene issue. The group challenging Jesus here were particularly concerned that it was possible to offend against God’s law even without knowing it. You sit down to eat bread, but you cannot know for certain the provenance of that bread. You cannot know for certain that the grain wasn’t harvested on the Sabbath, the day of rest. You cannot know for certain that the family who sold you the grain observed the Sabbath. Observant though you were, you might be inadvertently both flouting the Constitution and condoning other people bringing the Constitution into disrepute. And so, this particular party had come up with a million and one ways to make sure that they remained, by means of ritual, inside the law. A kind of legal loophole, as it were. Not to get around the law, but to stay within it.

Except, as we have seen, the heart of the law, the purpose of the law, was embodied justice. And these brilliant men had got themselves so caught up in their words that they were paralysed to act justly. In fighting-talk dripping with irony, in more verses the Lectionary skipped over, Jesus points out that they work so hard to keep the law that they break it. In contrast, Jesus was not so much concerned with the theory of the law, as with its outworking. Jesus regularly got his hands dirty, so to speak, rolling up his sleeves and laying his hands on the sick and the dead, restoring health and life. And here, Jesus brings us back to the law he came to fulfil, listing what it looks like to set the law of liberty aside. It isn’t good. When we do so, we defile both ourselves and others. As James puts it, we forget ourselves, we forget our identity.

What does this mean for us, today? Permit me to offer some initial thoughts to stimulate our thinking.

First, we are called to be a community that embodies justice, a people who model what it means to be a good, a just, society to the rest of the world. Moreover, we are called to do so confidently, not timidly. May be today some of us need to ask God for boldness.

Second, we need to recognise that we don’t always live up to that. We aren’t better at this than our ancestors, who also failed many times to live up to the ideal, but who didn’t give up. We need to examine our hearts regularly and repent where the Holy Spirit convicts us. Of what is the Holy Spirit convicting us today — whether personally; as families; or collectively?

Third, we live in a time of complicated interwoven stories and an age of competing ideas concerning how we ought to live; and, yes, in such a context we will lose our distinctive identity if we forget to tell our story, over and over again, refusing to forget, determined to pass the world we are called to create on to our children. We have done some of that Tuesday by Tuesday through August: how might we build on that moving forward? How will we include our children in our pursuit of a just society?

Fourth, how we eat and who we eat with is a justice issue. One that goes far beyond standing side by side to eat the bread of life and drink from the cup of salvation. It takes in projects such as the community gardens at St Peter’s and in Hendon that some of our congregation are involved in. It takes in the Community Kitchen that has just started here (to begin with) once a month, offering meals for whatever people are able to give as a contribution, and teaching basic kitchen skills. It takes in inviting strangers into our homes and to our tables, so that strangers are transformed into friends, into family. I commend these things to you, in whatever capacity you can support them. This is very much what it looks like to recognise that God has brought us together in this place to be an experiment in what it means to be a good, a just, society … and in response, to get our hands dirty, and be known for it.