Fourth Sunday of Epiphany 2019

Nehemiah 8:1-3, 5-6, 8-10 and I Corinthians 12:12-31a and Luke 4:14-21

It is so good to be with you today. As many of you will know, I am being sent out from here to offer half of my time, for the next two years, to the neighbouring parish of St Nicholas’. And while I am still often around the Minster during the week, at present I am not here with you three Sundays out of four. And that is the cost of partnership for the sake of the gospel, for, while it is a joy to be with the saints at Barnes, and despite all your grievous faults, I do miss you. And I do hope that many of you will be able to join me at St Nicholas’ this evening, as I am formally commissioned.

I want to highlight two texts for us today, if I may. From our Old Testament reading, ‘the joy of the Lord is your strength’, and from our reading from the Gospel, ‘to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favour’. The joy of the Lord is your strength; and, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favour.

And I would like to tell you a story. Some of you know that Jo and I run. We regularly do parkrun on a Saturday morning—for those who don’t know, parkrun is now an international movement where people get together to take part in a free, weekly, timed five-kilometre run/jog/walk. We’re also members of one of the local running clubs, Sunderland Strollers, and we run with them a couple of evenings a week.

Anyway, Friday is our day off together, and recently we’ve dropped the boys off at school and gone for a ten-kilometre run. One of our favourite routes is a loop from Seaburn to Souter lighthouse and back again, along the England Coast Path. Last week Jo realised that we weren’t aware of the wind at our back, assisting us, as we ran north; but that we were aware of the wind in our face, resisting us, as we turned around and headed back south. And she wondered how often we are oblivious to the Holy Spirit carrying us along, quite pleased with how our lives are going without any help; only to wonder where God is when things aren’t plain sailing?

We’ve all known times when we find ourselves asking, “Why is life such a struggle, Lord?” It might be a struggle because we are running away from God. Or it might not. It might simply be because the wind blows, and there is often turbulence in our experience of life: in our families and friendships, in our finances, in our work.

But having the wind in our face is, at least, always an invitation to be aware of God’s Spirit. To shift from asking, “Why isn’t God in this with me?” to asking, “Where is God in this?” And not only in this, but also, “Where else is God in my life, and I have been unaware?” That’s what repentance is: to turn around, and look out on a different perspective. Like getting to the lighthouse and turning around and having a view of Sunderland that was there all along, behind us.

Sometimes everything is going well because the wind of God’s Spirit is carrying us along. And sometimes circumstances are against us, but God still gives us the breath we need to carry on, to keep going—strength renewed, joy in hardship. Joy is not dependent on circumstances, but given to help us overcome circumstances.

The year of the Lord’s favour may well mean the wind is at our back more than in our face; but it doesn’t mean that the wind won’t blow in our face.

The wind in our face when the Minster is repeatedly vandalised; when we have our asylum-claim rejected; when we must deal with aging bodies breaking down. The wind in our face when our children are struggling at school; when the human need on our doorstep seems overwhelming.

‘If one member suffers, all suffer together with it…’

And the wind at our back—the joy, the favour—when we can count thirteen different nationalities worshipping together at the Minster; when our asylum-appeal is successful; when opportunities we thought had passed us by come back to us. The wind at our back when our children succeed; when lives are touched and made whole by love.

‘…if one member is honoured, all rejoice together with it.’

We’re still in the Season of Epiphany. Of moments when a light comes on in a dark house. Where joy surprises us in the midst of despair, and fires our bones and fills our lungs with air. Where we experience the Lord’s favour, God come alongside us and making all the difference in the world—release from our captivity—for those whose eyes are opened. May we be such people.

Amen.

Third Sunday of Epiphany 2019

Isaiah 62:1-5 and I Corinthians 12:1-11 and John 2:1-11

‘You shall no more be termed Forsaken, and your land shall no more be termed Desolate; but you shall be called My Delight Is In Her, and your land Married; for the Lord delights in you, and your land shall be married.’

‘To each one is given the manifestation of the Spirit for the common good.’

‘When the wine gave out, the mother of Jesus said to him, “They have no wine.”’

At the end of the service last Sunday a couple approached me with a request. After thirty-three years of marriage, a ring had been lost, and replaced, and they came asking that the new ring be blessed before it was put on. And, of course, I was glad to do so, there and then, standing in front of the altar in the presence of God. There is, of course, nothing magical about either a ring or a blessing: the original ring was not lost because the blessing invoked upon the couple on their wedding day had worn off, or been broken. But rings are given and received as a sign of the marriage; and God’s blessing is invoked that they “may be a symbol of unending love and faithfulness, to remind them [the couple] of the vow and covenant which they have made this [or, on that] day through Jesus Christ our Lord.” Wedding rings, then, are first a sign of God’s unending love and faithfulness, we are invited into, to experience for ourselves.

And wedding rings are a symbol of unending love and faithfulness not only to the finger on which it is placed, or the body of which that finger is a part, or the hand of the other body that placed the ring on the finger—two bodies now joined-together as one—but a symbol of unending love and faithfulness to the whole body of Christ, the church; and to the wider community. Not everyone marries; but every life is touched by marriages, and is meant to be blessed by the encounter.

The average cost of a wedding in the UK in 2018 was £30,355 (when my wife and I married, twenty-two years ago, we bought our first home for £30,500). That’s just on the day itself, with two-thirds of couples going over their budget or not having one. Here in the north east, the average is closer to £17.5K, but then, we are one of the poorest regions in the country, with the lowest wages.

In addition to the wedding, increasingly, couples are having stag and hen years, a series of weekend events, local, national, and somewhere on the continent, in which their friends are expected to take part, at their own expense; and then those friends are asked to contribute to the cost of a honeymoon. Moreover, this is a reciprocal social indebtedness—those invited to your stag/hen do must invite you to theirs.

And while it has long been tradition that the parents of the bride make a significant contribution to the cost of the wedding, that is now likely to involve re-mortgaging their own home, at a point where they might have expected to be mortgage-free and looking to focus their savings on their own retirement needs.

This has a massive financial impact, and debt significantly compromises our capacity to cope with other challenges, including those challenges that are common to life. But alongside this, contemporary weddings have an enormous emotional impact. The wedding becomes the focus of energy, of planning, the thing that gives purpose, for at least two years (often more) in pursuit of the perfect fairy tale. This places huge strain on relationships: I often note that the first casualty of a wedding is the friendship between the bride and the chief bridesmaid. And when the Big Day passes, it has a long tail, a period of emotional exhaustion that mirrors the anticipation (that is, if the wedding was two years in the planning, the emotional aftermath of reality biting lasts two years). I’ve known marriages not make it through that aftermath.

Marriage, according to the Church, ‘enriches society and strengthens community’ (from the Preface to the Marriage Service). But current wedding custom does the exact opposite, dragging couples, their friends and families into debt, and diminishing their resilience. I am committed to marriage. Weddings make me cry.

All this needs to be set against the backdrop of the rise in people in work needing to access food banks; and the economic impact of exiting the EU, which even the most ardent Brexiteers—who believe the cost worthwhile in the long run—recognise will have a negative economic impact in the short-to-medium term.

And yet, people still believe in marriage; and I still believe that marriage ‘is a gift of God in creation through which husband and wife may know the grace of God’ (the Preface, again). I’m not judging people for how they choose to go about getting married; but I grieve that they have been aggressively, consistently marketed lies, things they don’t need, that won’t make them happy. And I believe there is a better way.

If ever there were Isaiah days, a people termed Forsaken and a land termed Desolate, that God longs to transform so that those people are called My Delight Is In Her, and their land Married, we are living in them. If ever there were Cana days, sisters and brothers, we are living in them.

Weddings are still moments where God’s glory might be revealed, as God’s children step up to bless their neighbours. Up and down the country, there are congregations exploring how they might join in. Some have discovered among themselves the necessary gifts to offer couples a wedding package that is cut-price without being poor quality. Then again, other congregations have discovered among themselves the experience and gift to be able to offer debt advice in their community. Both could be seen as examples of identifying jars of water to hand, and changing them to the very best wine. I’m not suggesting that we do this, or that, here—they might not be quite what God has gifted us for and is calling us to do. I am suggesting that we prayerfully consider what our response might be to the word of God spoken through Isaiah and Paul and John, not only in their day but to us in ours.

But the starting-point, and sustaining principle, is not what we do at all. For sooner or later, our resources run out, again and again. Unless we are regularly encountering the living God, the person of Jesus who, by his Spirit, is in our midst as we come together to worship, then the time comes for us to make our excuses and drift away home. Jesus is here. But, like the steward, are we oblivious? Or, like the servants, are we attentive? And, like the first disciples, is our belief enlivened by his glory?

Second Sunday of Epiphany 2019: Baptism of Christ

Isaiah 43:1-7 and Acts 8:14-17 and Luke 3:15-17, 21-22

God’s primary concern, as revealed in scripture from start to finish, is the creation, the formation, of a people for his glory. A community who will reflect God’s nature—loving justice and mercy—who may enjoy God’s presence with them, and through whom many other peoples might be blessed. Though God calls men and women by name, it is never into a private, individualistic, relationship; but to be part of a people, called by his name.

‘When you pass through the waters, I will be with you; and through the rivers, they shall not overwhelm you; when you walk through fire you shall not be burned, and the flame shall not consume you.’ (Isaiah 43:2) So the word of the Lord comes to us through the prophet Isaiah. We tend to hear these words, if at all, as metaphors for the things that are sent to try us, as promise between God and me that whatever I face, he is with me. But this is, at best, secondary meaning. The word of the Lord is addressed to the people of God, a particular people with a particular history and frame-of-reference in relation to waters and fire, rivers and flame.

First, when you pass through the waters, I will be with you; and through the rivers, they shall not overwhelm you. This to a people whose world is framed by this experience. The people God brought out of four-hundred-years of slavery passing through the Red Sea. The people God brought into the fulness of salvation, Abraham’s inheritance, passing through the river Jordan. Into the long-Promised Land, a territory that symbolically stretched from the Great Sea to the River; that is, from the Mediterranean—from where the Philistines had come, contesting the land—to the Euphrates—from where the Babylonians contested the land. As I was with your forefathers, so I will be with you; you shall not be overwhelmed. Even when you are swept away by the current, carried off into exile, even to the ends of the earth: I will bring you back.

Then, when you walk through fire you shall not be burned, and the flame shall not consume you. These words call to mind Genesis 22, a story of Abraham and Isaac. Now, here a technical interlude is required. We should note that the Hebrew word translated upper-case ‘God’—elohim—is plural in form, and also translated lower-case gods. The Hebrew scriptures do not present monotheism—the claim that there is only one God—so much as distinguish between one Creator God—‘maker of all that is, seen and unseen’ as the Nicene Creed puts it—and created spiritual beings; and call people from idolatry to monolatry, from the worship of creatures to the worship of the Creator. The created gods have names, such as the Canaanite god Moloch. The Creator God also has a name, revealed to Moses as Yahweh.

Long after Abraham and Isaac, when Moses told their descendants their story he did so like this: when Abraham was sojourning in the land Yahweh had promised to give to his descendants, a land in which the Canaanites lived, elohim told Abraham to take his son—the one through whom the promise would be fulfilled—and offer him as a burnt sacrifice on a mountaintop; but when the altar was made, and the boy bound, and the knife raised (for Abraham would not burn Isaac alive), the angel of Yahweh called out, intervened, provided a ram in Isaac’s place. Here, Yahweh discovered that Abraham trusted him more than he feared the gods. Here, Abraham learnt that Yahweh will provide. Here, the angel of Yahweh calls out a second time, to affirm and extend the earlier promises: Abraham’s offspring, as numerous as the stars in the sky and the sand on the shore, shall possess the gates of their enemies, and by them all the nations of the earth shall gain blessing.

Though it is highly unlikely that he wrote it down, at least in its final form, Moses taught this story to the offspring of Abraham, numerous as the stars in the desert sky, to prepare them to live lives faithful to Yahweh in the territory of Moloch, the god to whom the Canaanites sacrificed their first-born sons and daughters as burnt offerings, to plead his provision.

Such Canaanite practice sounds primitive and cruel to our ears. But many a son and daughter today are sacrificed to the gods of parental career or other fulfilment or of a toxic masculinity that refuses to embrace fatherhood; and we, too, need to be formed to live from a different imagination in the midst of such a society.

Cousin John declared that he baptised with water, but that Jesus would baptise with the Holy Spirit and with fire. In baptism we pass through the waters, without being overwhelmed, and flame, without being consumed. We offer ourselves up to God—or, in the case of many of us, we are offered up to God by our parents—only to be given back. No longer as an individual, but as part of a people. In other words, not only are we changed in this moment, but the whole community of the people of God is changed every time a baptism takes place. In this community-founding event, God continues to create, to form, to make; to re-create us, re-form us, re-make us.

As the candidate emerges from the baptismal font, these words are declared over them:

May God, who has received you by baptism into his Church,

pour upon you the riches of his grace,

that within the company of Christ’s pilgrim people

you may daily be renewed by his anointing Spirit,

and come to the inheritance of the saints in glory.

Amen.

It is all there: baptism into the people of God; who, together and down the millennia, experience God’s provision; follow the moving tabernacle of Christ’s presence in our midst; are made new day after day after day by the work of the Holy Spirit; and share a common inheritance, the very glory of God.

Water comes first, then fire. First, freedom from captivity (Red Sea) and freedom to be a blessing (river Jordan); then, the necessary provision to prove God faithful in every circumstance.

It is far more than a naming-ceremony to make granny happy. It is even more than the impulse to want God to bless your child, good though that is. Baptism changes everything. And though our baptism is a once-in-a-lifetime event, every baptism concerns us, plunges us once again through water and fire, emerging on the other side unharmed but utterly transformed, discovering again as for the first time that we are precious in God’s sight, and honoured, and loved.

Which begs the question, why do so many of our baptisms in the Church of England nowadays take place after the service, after the congregation have gone home?

Epiphany 2019

Isaiah 60:1-6 and Ephesians 3:1-12 and Matthew 2:1-12

Today is Epiphany. But like Christmas and Easter, Epiphany is not just a day; it is the beginning of a new season. It takes more than a day to immerse ourselves in the mystery of God-with-and-for-us. It takes time, real, lived time.

Though sketchy on detail, the story of the magi is well-enough known. A group, of unspecified number, of astrologers who had seen a star in the sky and interpreted it to mean the birth of the king of the Jews; and who had left all that was familiar and set out bearing gifts of gold and frankincense and myrrh to pay homage. How exotic they seem to us, with their belief that the universe is interwoven; that what takes place ‘out there,’ ‘beyond’ has a bearing on our lives, and vice versa. We no longer hold to such primitive ideas. If we did, we wouldn’t be facing a global climate-change crisis of our own making.

A caravan of camels, ships of the desert, navigating by starlight, feeling their way in the dark towards their hoped-for goal. Missing the mark. Unintentionally endangering the very treasure that they have set out for, at least on the surface. And on the surface, again, it is all so exotic. But beneath the surface, it is so very ordinary. For if an epiphany is a revelation of God-with-and-for-us, don’t such moments almost always happen by starlight? When we are arrested by a beauty that is commonplace and yet invisible as we go about our daily business, and on a hunch move through the darkness towards the light? Moments such as births, weddings, deaths, in which the day-to-day no longer makes adequate sense and we come, together with others, before God, in all our hopes and fears, and, beyond them all, in wonder?

What we might just discover in such moments of epiphany, in the light of a star shining in the dark, is that God comes searching in the dark for his lost children. For we are all lost, in our eternal preoccupations, our endless distractions. And God comes searching, to bring sons and daughters home. If I may be so bold, I might suggest that our Sunday morning congregation bears testimony to a people who need to hear the clarion call to lift up your hearts, a people who have been waiting in darkness for light to come and for sons and daughters to return from far away. No?

As I read through the lectionary for the season of Epiphany, patterns emerged. Across our Old Testament readings, the recurring theme of people being gathered together by the Lord. Across our readings from the New Testament Epistles, the theme of being members of one body. And across our readings from the Gospels, a series of moments in which, in the footsteps of the magi, people commonly experience epiphanies. Next Sunday, 13 January, the Baptism of Christ. The following Sunday, 20 January, the wedding at Cana. And at Candlemas, 3 February, Simeon looking forward to a peaceful death, not a fearful one. Births, marriages, and deaths. Baptisms, weddings, and funerals. Occasions where a star explodes in the sky and we are drawn towards, drawn into, the mystery of God-with-and-for-us.

Paul, writing to the saints in Ephesus, declares that ‘through the church the wisdom of God in its rich variety might now be made known’ before the gods of this world, as we participate in the mystery that is that, in Christ, we have access to God in boldness and confidence. That is some bold claim! And yet it is shown to be made not in vain, for even in our pluralist, post-Christendom age, where people no longer feel any compulsion to be at gathered church Sunday by Sunday, and bow down before the gods of driven-ness—in leisure and in technology, at work and play—even still, epiphanies are given, and women and men find themselves setting out in response. Setting out, not necessarily in boldness and confidence, but in the reflected, fickle, starlight of hope that God might look kindly on them and theirs. Setting out, empty-handed, not daring to believe that they have any gift to bring.

But here is the thing that has been entrusted to us: access to God in boldness and confidence. Access to God, who has come among us, to seek and to save, to liberate us from whatever god oppresses us, and to accept the gift of our lives, offered to his praise. This is what has been entrusted to us, to share with the world. Not as information, but as invitation. When our neighbours come to us, do we see them as gifted by God, as those who might help us to give voice to praise, as our hearts thrill and rejoice (Isaiah 60:5)? Or are we troubled by their coming, by the manner in which it disrupts our comfortable life? In the insincerity of our welcome, in the manipulation of our words, do we give them good reason to return to their own country by another road, avoiding returning to us?

This Epiphany, we shall take our time. You cannot rush in the dark.