Category: Sermons

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The Gift of the Church

Readings: Acts 5:27-32; Psalm 150; Revelation 1:4-8; John 20:19-31

The Sanhedrin! Even the name sounds intimidating. One can imagine a row of austere, displeased faces, probably seated on thrones or a podium, certainly higher up, in ornate clothing, with ornate headdresses, peering down at these upstarts, Peter and his gang.

This was the Jewish legislative and judicial assembly. It met in the Temple in Jerusalem, in the Hall of Hewn Stones. It wasn’t disbanded until 425. It wasn’t so long ago that Peter and the other apostles had been beholden to such people, had owed them allegiance.

But now the situation seems decidedly unfriendly. The apostles “were brought in”. They were “made to appear”, in order to “be questioned”. They were informed in no uncertain terms that they had not being doing what they had been told. This small community was challenging the established order!

I wonder how Peter felt as he confronted them. Was he trembling at the knees? Was there a quaver in his voice? Did he feel belittled? Or was he so full of the recent experiences that he had cast all caution to the wind?

He says some things that must have sounded truly shocking. We must obey God over human beings (i.e. not you). He refers to Jesus, this man from Nazareth who had just been raised from the dead, they couldn’t find his body – “whom you killed by hanging him on a cross”. That’s a pretty direct accusation. He has been exalted so that he might bring Israel to repentance. The great House of Israel, of whom I’m sure the Sanhedrin felt like the legitimate representatives, the only ones qualified to discuss such matters. Not only that, but also to forgive their sins. They must have been reminded of the paralyzed man who was let down through the roof, so that Jesus could heal him (Lk 5:17-26). When Jesus told the man his sins were forgiven, there were murmurings among the Pharisees and teachers of the law sitting nearby. To indicate his authority, Jesus then told the paralyzed man to stand up and walk, which he promptly did, shocking them even further.

Peter ends with a reference to the Holy Spirit, “whom God has given to those who obey him”. That doesn’t sound as if it includes the Sanhedrin.

The whole of their world has been shaken, just as the foundations of the earth were shaken at the Crucifixion. Don’t we need something like that to waken us spiritually? I didn’t learn to drive until I was 48. My grandmother didn’t learn to drive until she was fifty, and I wanted to follow in her footsteps. So, I cadged lifts or walked everywhere for thirty years! I was the fourth child, and I think my father was a little exhausted of taking his children out for driving lessons. Anyway, I was more interested in books.

It took me until I came to Bulgaria to learn to drive, and I’m very glad I waited. My instructor, Mr Gujev, really woke me up. He made me realize that I wasn’t in an armchair, watching a film with popcorn, but I was in control of a machine that could kill people. He made me into a very responsible driver. One time, we were on Tsarigradsko Shose in the east of Sofia, driving towards the centre, and he told me to go up to fifty. I was quite happy going at 35, thank you very much, so he pushed his hand down on my right knee and forced the car to go faster. I was petrified initially, but then I began to enjoy it.

Isn’t that how it is with new experiences? To begin with, we’re reluctant, but then, with a guiding hand, we realize there are lessons to be learnt, boundaries to be pushed, and we’re often grateful afterwards. We realize that we have grown.

These men and women have certainly grown as a result of their allegiance to the Nazarene, the one who calls himself “the Alpha and the Omega” in John’s Book of Revelation. The appellation appears three times (also in 21:6 and 22:13), though it’s never quite clear if it refers to God the Trinity or to Jesus Christ.

The name “Alpha and Omega” refers to the first and last letters of the Greek alphabet. He is the beginning and the end. He is the white space behind the language of matter. There is not a time when he was not, to refute the Arian view that Jesus was created.

In our culture, we are very keen on straight lines. We use them to package things. We use them to parcel out land, to create borders. The ego in English is a straight line: I. As is the number we teach our children to count from: 1. The line separates. It is a wall or a tower and liable to fall down.

I can see three ways to escape the line. We can make reference to a third point and form a triangle (a pyramid, which is much more stable). We can delete the line, draw another line through it. This forms a cross, but a cross is also a plus-sign (the meaning of losing your life in order to find it – Mt 16:25). And we can breathe air into the line, open it out – as when you breathe air into a plastic bag or inflate a balloon – and form a circle, in effect counting down from 1 to 0. The triangle, the cross/plus-sign, and the circle.

These three symbols, if you can picture them, spell the name of God in Revelation, Alpha and Omega (A+O). The triangle closely resembles a capital A. Then you have the plus-sign and the letter O. This is the spiritual meaning of the name – it is a call to escape our individuality, our selfishness, and to place ourselves in God’s service, which is the fullness of life.

It is a way of believing, and when we believe, we receive. The Holy Spirit, in the reading from Acts, “whom God has given to those who obey him”. “Life in his name”, in the reading from John. “Eternal life”, in the post-Communion prayer we will hear in a moment.

Jesus says to Thomas, “Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed.” He is referring to us, the Church across the ages. He breathed on them and said, “Receive the Holy Spirit.” This verse might be taken to support the inclusion of the filioque clause in the Creed, to say that the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father and from the Son. But this is not the Orthodox view. This clause was included after the Creed was composed in the fourth century, and it was included unilaterally, at the Third Council of Toledo in 589, not by the Church as a whole.

I believe that Jesus here is offering the disciples the Holy Spirit (“whom God has given to those who obey him”), so that they can forgive others their sins, just as a priest does in the absolution. This doesn’t mean that the Holy Spirit proceeds from him, simply that the Holy Spirit is in his gift, and I think we would be very wrong to go against the authority of such an important theologian as Gregory of Nazianzus, who contributed to the writing of the Creed at the Council of Constantinople in 381.

Christ is the Word. The Holy Spirit is breath. Breath is in the Word, but it comes from the lungs of the speaker.

Do you see how Peter and the other apostles have filled Jerusalem with their teaching? This, despite the fear they felt of the Jewish leaders, which caused them to lock the doors. It is the Holy Spirit that releases us from our fear, that delivers us from the death of sin and enables us to put away the leaven of malice and wickedness. That, and participation in Communion, where we receive the body of Christ and his blood – “him who loves us and has freed us from our sins by his blood”, as it says in Revelation.

Along with Thomas, the doubting one (and who hasn’t doubted? It is a part of faith), we should count ourselves blessed for these gifts – the body and blood of Christ in the Eucharist, the institution of which we celebrated only ten days ago, and the reception of the Holy Spirit, which the Church marks at Pentecost. This is a time of giving, like the air we breathe, the food we eat, the blossoming of spring, not a time to count the cost. Christ has already done that for us when he went to the Cross.

We are language – breath, water, and flesh. Our purpose is to have meaning. We are words on a page, living in eternity. Our job is to believe, so that the Holy Spirit can work through us and we can be imbued with meaning.

Jonathan Dunne, www.stonesofithaca.com

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Ash Wednesday

Readings: Joel 2:1-2, 12-17; Psalm 51:1-18; 2 Corinthians 5:20-6:10; Matthew 6:1-6, 16-21

Sometimes, when I take my dog for a walk, he lingers behind, locating scents that only he can smell, and I wander ahead. He likes to come running after me and, like a good rugby player, to make a feint and dodge me just as he reaches me. It is a joy to see his ears flapping in the wind. But there are times when I turn around that he has disappeared, and I call to him. Has he followed some female? A golden retriever, perhaps? I stand, wondering whether I should retrace my steps, go looking for him. And then I realize, as I face forwards, that he is only five feet away, not behind me anymore, but by my side, discovering a new scent. I don’t know what the locals must make of me, this strange Englishman calling out to a dog that is right beside him. When I look back at the landscape behind me, it is as if he is invisible. He is unseen.

This is how we are to perform acts of charity, according to today’s reading from Matthew. When we give to the needy, when we pray, when we fast, we are to do it in secret and our Father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward us. We are not to seek the praise of those around us. We are to do it for our Father, who is unseen.

Lent is a strange journey from glory to glory. Let us not forget the previous Sunday’s reading was about Jesus’ transfiguration on Mount Tabor, when he appeared alongside Moses and Elijah, the Old Testament law and prophets, and shone dazzlingly white. But as we are reminded, this is not a moment you can hold onto. Peter was mistaken, Luke tells us (Lk 9:33), when he suggested building shelters for the three of them. They had to go on from there – Jesus to the Cross, but ultimately to the Resurrection and Emmaus, where he accompanies us on the road; Peter to Rome; James and John to their places, not the least of which was for John to write his Gospel. If they had stayed behind to witness to one event, to try to grasp water, none of this would have happened.

We also are on this journey. Joel tells us that “the day of the Lord is coming”, but it is not a day full of wonder, as we might expect, it is “a day of darkness and gloom, a day of clouds and blackness”. We are to “rend our heart”. As the Psalmist says in Psalm 51, “a broken and contrite heart, you, God, will not despise”.

We express our repentance. We are sorry that things are not how they should be. People suffer, are ill, are exploited. Others lord it over them. The journey as expressed in Psalm 51, a very important psalm which is part of Orthodox Morning Prayer (except that there it is numbered Psalm 50), goes from being “sinful at birth” to purity of heart.

Celtic Christianity would have a problem with the phrase “sinful at birth”. In their view, we are intrinsically good, just as the creation around us is good, and what we have to do is rediscover the sacredness within. But the journey is the same. To “be reconciled to God”.

I like to think of it in terms of language. The I, the ego, is a straight line, a kind of barrier. This word, I, sounds the same as the organ of sight, eye, and if we rotate the line by ninety degrees, indeed it looks like a closed eye.

So, we breathe air into the line and make a circle, the letter O. We open it out. “O” can be an expression of realization – “Oh!”. We become aware of God’s presence in our lives. It can also be an exclamation of repentance – “Oh!”

This realization, and repentance, is what opens our spiritual eyes and enables us to reach spiritual maturity. “God made him who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.” This is the doctrine of theosis, deification. St Athanasius of Alexandria wrote in his work “On the Incarnation” that “God became man so that man might become God”. He wrote this in 318, as a young deacon, before going on to help draft the first version of the Creed at Nicaea in 325. He also came up with the first listing of canonical New Testament books.

God became man so that we might become gods – gods by grace, not by nature – so that we might inherit eternal life, enter the land of paradox where truth resides. We are “genuine, yet regarded as impostors; known, yet regarded as unknown; dying, and yet we live on; beaten, and yet not killed; sorrowful, yet always rejoicing; poor, yet making many rich; having nothing, and yet possessing everything”.

It is this recognition – realization, repentance, return, it doesn’t matter – that enables us to fix our eyes, open now, on heaven. And this, for me, is the most important line in today’s readings, the line that we can take with us through Lent: “Where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.” We have rediscovered God, come to a realization, but there is a change in us. We do not return to the Garden of Eden, we do not try to hold onto the moment of the Transfiguration, to store it in a shelter or on film. We return to a state of innocence – a lack of willingness to do harm – but this time with knowledge. We must pass through the stage of physical knowledge in order to reach spiritual maturity, not only because it enables us to have children and so to be co-participants in the creation of man, but also because it teaches us what it is to hurt and not to want to inflict hurt on others.

Lent is a journey of endurance – troubles and hardships, yes, but also truthful speech and sincere love. We are poor, yet making many rich; having nothing, and yet possessing everything. Deep inside us is a flame that, like the disciples of St Brigid or the inhabitants of the Hebrides, we must keep burning through the long winter’s night in the expectation that it will blaze up in the morning.

Jonathan Dunne, www.stonesofithaca.com

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The Nonduality of Christ

Readings: Isaiah 6:8-13; Psalm 138; 1 Corinthians 15:1-11; Luke 5:1-11

The Creed, which we will recite in a moment, the Church’s Symbol of Faith, was the result of two ecumenical councils in the fourth century, the first at Nicaea in modern Turkey, and the second at Constantinople, the capital of the Eastern Roman Empire. Right belief, what the Church believes, took more than three hundred years to be written down. It was not a given. That is, it had to be defended, fought for, and there were several viewpoints, later declared heresies when they were seen to be inaccurate, that threatened the integrity of the early Church.

One of these is that Christ didn’t really become human, didn’t really suffer on the Cross, he only had the appearance of being human. This heresy was known as Docetism, from the Greek dokeĩn, meaning “to seem”. He only seemed to be human. On the other side of the coin, there was the false belief that Jesus was just a man – a very good man, to be sure, a man who reached an unusual stage of spiritual enlightenment that made him appear more advanced than others and become so spiritually advanced that God adopted him. This heresy was known as Ebionism.

These heresies – and there were others – served to force the early Church to delineate its beliefs. It took seven ecumenical councils in all – the first and last of which were at Nicaea in 325 and 787 – to establish what the Church believed. It seems that certain people could just not accept the idea that Christ might be both fully divine and fully human. And even when they did, there were those who claimed that he was fully divine and fully human in one nature. This is the Christological doctrine known as Miaphysitism, which is held by the Oriental Orthodox Churches and is the root of the far earlier schism between Eastern Orthodox and Oriental Orthodox (six long centuries before the Great Schism between Catholic and Orthodox).

So, belief is not so easy. We find it hard to accept that Christ can be fully divine and fully human, and yet be one person. Either he isn’t really God or human, or his two natures must be subsumed into one. It seems we are unhappy with what we take to be some kind of contradiction – if he is fully divine, then he cannot also be human. He has to be one or the other.

I would suggest that this inability or unwillingness to marry seeming opposites is still very much alive and well today, in the twenty-first century. And this lack of ability to see unity in difference can be dangerous.

It is only two weeks since this year’s Week of Prayer for Christian Unity ended. Most of us have forgotten about it by now. It’s a nice idea, but impractical. Those people over there are never going to agree to it, and I’m certainly not going to change my position. There is some hope that Christians on both sides of the divide are going to be able to agree on a unified date for Easter, though most of us would be hard pushed to state simply how the two dates are arrived at (something about a spring moon).

Yes, but how does God see this? How does he see his followers, some saying the liturgy, others singing it, some with white walls, others with frescoes, some crossing themselves from left to right, others from right to left? Does he say, “You’re right, you’re in; you’re wrong, go back to the beginning”? Or does he weigh up the intentions of the heart, the faithfulness shown sometimes over years by ordinary Christians? I know what I would do in his position.

One of my favourite TV series is Battlestar Galactica, about a group of humans, reduced in number, who are attacked by the machines that they themselves have made, known as Cylons. After an attack on their capital, Caprica, the humans are almost wiped out. Only a few ships manage to escape the holocaust and they are then condemned to wander space, jumping from one set of coordinates to another, as they endeavour to dodge the Cylon menace. Their ultimate quest is for Earth, a planet – a dream, Admiral Bill Adama calls it – where they can finally settle down and breathe fresh air.

The humans regard Cylons as machines. They have a visceral hatred towards them. They refer to them as “it”, not “he” or “she”, and do not believe that they have any real feelings.

And yet it is apparent that they do. Even when they lose the ability to resurrect, something that set them apart from their human counterparts, they are still willing to sacrifice themselves for the greater good. And it is only in tandem with their now Cylon allies that the humans, what is left of them, finally make it down to Earth. One of the Cylons is Bill Adama’s closest friend and colleague, Colonel Tigh. But they overcome their differences, their different makeup, because their friendship is too strong.

I sometimes think in the Churches we see each other as humans and Cylons. We cannot accept that both black and white exist. Those on the other side, who do not believe the same as I do – or do not express their belief in the selfsame way – it is as if they are machines. We never attend each other’s services. It is the same with nationalities. When I am in England, I am shocked by how much people hate Russians – people who have never actually met a Russian or set foot in Moscow.

I am afraid that this continued entrenchment is good for business. I am also afraid that it is not good for our souls. How can we possibly be one body if we are constantly wanting to cut each other off?

There is a strand of Christianity known as Celtic Christianity, Christianity that spread to the north of England, in particular the Kingdom of Northumbria, from the small island of Iona in Scotland. It is linked very closely to the names of such saints as Aidan and Cuthbert (the latter’s bones were the reason for the founding of the city of Durham, the city was literally founded on his remains).

In an afterword to Michael Mitton’s book Restoring the Woven Cord: Strands of Celtic Christianity for the Church Today, Ray Simpson, the founding guardian of the Community of Aidan and Hilda, talks of “an act of unity with Jesus in various focal places”. He goes on to say:

I make an act of unity with Jesus in scripture (the Evangelical strand) and in Holy Communion (the Sacramental strand); in the poor (the Justice strand) and in the deep heart’s core (the Mystical strand); in the spiritual shepherds (the Catholic strand) and in the Living Tradition (the Orthodox strand); in nature (the Creation strand) and in the group process (the Community strand). These acts of unity do not require me to be unfaithful to anything I have learnt of Jesus.

This is a wonderful statement of faith. Different, yes, but I’m not your enemy. Before we condemn the others, should we not get to know them first? Should we not attend their services? My father liked to say, if it was left to the common people, there would be no wars. How much of human conflict could be settled by a bottle of brandy instead of a bullet? The truth must be defended. It is not subject to my whim. But there is room for all of us in heaven, and I do not believe that the Jesus who spoke so tenderly and fiercely to the Samaritan woman at the well, a double outcast (not only was she a Samaritan, but she had been married five times, she was an outcast to her own community), will reject the person who gets down on their knees, takes responsibility for their mistakes, and tries to do better.

Christ is one person, two natures. He became human so that we might become gods, not through our own efforts, but by the action of grace. He became human so that he could translate us into the language of eternity, a language we have yet to learn to speak.

Amen.

Jonathan Dunne, www.stonesofithaca.com

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Baptism of Christ

Readings: Isaiah 43:1-7; Psalm 29; Acts 8:14-17; Luke 3:15-17, 21-22

We all speak. That is, we produce sounds with our mouths. After the service, we will gather around the coffee machine and do this. We will discuss the week’s events and thrash out the finer details of this sermon. We will express opinions and hopes and desires. We will enquire after friends. And we will leave, having shared fellowship.

How strange it would be if we all gathered in the entrance hall and didn’t say anything! If we stood in each other’s company with our mouths closed. We might raise our eyebrows or wiggle our ears, but no further communication would be permitted. Eventually someone would snort or yawn, and the spell would be broken. We would laugh and launch into a discussion.

We worship a God, Jesus Christ, whom we call the Word. This is how John the Evangelist refers to him at the start of his Gospel: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” And we read in chapter 1 of the Book of Genesis that the world was spoken into being. Each paragraph begins, “And God said.” “Let there be light.” “Let there be a dome in the midst of the waters.” “Let the dry land appear.” Etc.

And yet we pay very little attention to speech. This is unusual since I would say that Christianity is a religion of the Word and its ritual is based on the action of speaking. The first thing we do when we speak is breathe out. It is impossible – I think! – to speak as you are breathing in. So, the first element of speech is BREATH. Breath is represented in the alphabet by my favourite letter, the letter “h”.

Then we add voice to our breath and produce the vowel sounds. Think of a baby. A baby is a student of phonetics. It opens its mouth (hopefully not at three in the morning) and adds voice to its breath, producing vowel sounds that may range from an “oo!” to a long, drawn-out “ah!”. But it will generally not produce consonants because consonants involve blocking the flow of air with the lips or tongue and this is more difficult.

A vowel sound is what the doctor asks you to make when they want to examine your throat: “ah!” “A” is the most open vowel there is, so it involves opening your mouth to its greatest extent. It is what we do when we sing. The longer you hold a vowel sound, the more saliva will collect in your mouth, and you will have to swallow. This is because vowels are like water. It is as if a river was flowing through the canyon of our mouths. So, the second element of speech is WATER.

When we obstruct the flow of air with the lips or the tongue, we produce the consonants. Perhaps the easiest consonant to pronounce is the letter “m”. This involves pressing the lips together. “M”. And this is often the first consonant a baby will produce, when it says, “Mama”.

Since the consonants are produced by blocking the flow of air with our lips or tongue, we might say that the third element of speech is FLESH. So, we have BREATH (the letter “h”), WATER (the vowels), and FLESH (the consonants). The three elements of speech, which we practise unknowingly, as when we change gears in a car.

This is how I would analyze the action of speaking: breath, water, and flesh. In chapter 2 of the Book of Genesis, there is a second creation account, which involves the creation of man. In verses 6-7, it reads as follows:

A stream would rise from the earth, and water the whole face of the ground – then the Lord God formed man from the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and the man became a living being.

Gen 2:6-7 (NRSV)

Most of us, I suspect, would regard speech as the agent of creation as a kind of metaphor, but I think this is exactly what happened. Nowhere in the first two chapters of Genesis does it say that God made the world with his hands, like a potter fashioning clay. It says that he spoke. All through the first two chapters, we read that God said. And the three elements of speech – breath, water, and flesh – are clearly present here: God “breathed into his nostrils the breath of life”, “a stream would rise from the earth, and water the whole face of the ground”, God “formed man from the dust of the ground”. We read later in Genesis 3:19, “You are dust, and to dust you shall return.” This refers to our material body.

We find the same emphasis on the power of speech in Psalm 29: “The voice of the Lord is powerful… The voice of the Lord breaks the cedars… The voice of the Lord strikes with flashes of lightning… The voice of the Lord twists the oaks and strips the forests bare…” That’s pretty impressive – to do all of that only with words. It doesn’t say that God did these things with his hands, and this is a constant in Christian texts and prayers.

We are not able to produce matter with our mouths, but with our words we can have a material effect on our surroundings. We can make someone happy by saying something nice to them. We can make someone cry by saying something hurtful. We can order someone to be killed. Or we can issue a pardon. Our words can be recorded and can influence future generations or even the course of history.

After the creation of man, man – the Hebrew word is “Adam” – is given a task. He is not asked to make the creatures – that is God’s undertaking. He is asked to name them. To apply a word to that particular creature. This occurs in Genesis 2:19-20. Most of us are not in the habit of adding words to the dictionary, of coming up with a name for a horse or a squirrel. But we do name our children, and names are important. They may not fix a child’s destiny, but they do, to some extent, determine their character. There is a Bulgarian name, Milen, which comes from the Bulgarian word for “kind”, mil, and I have noticed that many people called Milen are kind in person. It is as if they live up to their name.

A child is named at their baptism. The priest takes a bundle of flesh and douses their head with water three times, invoking the Holy Spirit. But hang on a minute! Aren’t those the three elements of speech – breath (the Holy Spirit), water (the water of the font), and flesh (the tiny baby)?

In effect, in the sacrament of Holy Baptism, a child is being made into a word of God – not the Word (that is Christ), but they are being called to be Christ-like, to reject the devil.

And what happens in the sacrament of Holy Communion? The priest takes the bread, the fruit of the earth, and the wine, which is a liquid like water, and consecrates them by the invocation of the Holy Spirit. Again, the three elements of breath, water, and flesh are present. We find all three elements in bread, which is made from a dough of flour and water and has air in it.

And what about the first creation account in Genesis, where we read that the waters were separated from the waters and the sky was created, then the waters under the sky were gathered together into one place and the dry land appeared. Aren’t these again the three elements of speech – breath (the sky), water, and flesh (the dry land)?

I would suggest that speech is central to an understanding of the world around us and our place in it. It can effect change, it can bring people to their senses. It can give meaning, as when we take our child and name him or her.

When we are baptized, as Jesus was by John the Baptist in the River Jordan, we have a choice. We can choose what kind of people we want to be. We can decide on the words we will use, on the actions we will take, whether to tell the truth or lie, whether to help others or steal.

We are a word of God. We can choose to be wheat or chaff. We can choose whether to please God or to turn away from him. According to our life, so our definition will be. And this is why we need to cling to the name of Jesus, to think only of him, so that in our earthly pilgrimage we become as much like him as possible. We are made in God’s image, now we must become like him.

Come, Lord Jesus! Amen.

Jonathan Dunne, www.stonesofithaca.com

Photo caption: Letters make good staging posts. Saints Cyril and Methodius, the brothers from Thessaloniki who wrote the Cyrillic alphabet, outside the National Library in Sofia, Bulgaria.

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3rd Sunday of Advent

Readings: Zephaniah 3:14-20; Isaiah 12:2-6; Philippians 4:4-7; Luke 3:7-18

The Book of the Prophet Zephaniah was written in the early part of the reign of King Josiah, between 635 and 625 BC. The name Zephaniah means “the Lord has hidden” or “defended by God” and it is thought he was related to an earlier king of Judah, Hezekiah. Most of the three chapters that make up this short book of the Bible are devoted to God’s judgement of human wickedness, but the compilers of the lectionary have taken pity and provided the short passage at the end of the book, which deals with final blessings, in which a remnant of the people of Israel remains humble and is saved.

So it is a book of warning: refrain from your wilful sinning, or else! In this sense, Zephaniah has a lot in common with the last of the prophets, John the Baptist, who also warned the social elite to refrain from their wickedness and hypocrisy. Both prophets were voices in the wilderness, calling for social justice and pure minds, a plea that was just as ignored then as it is today.

In Zephaniah’s time, the cult of other deities – false gods, idols – has developed in Jerusalem. He warns of God’s impending wrath, which will come with the destruction of Jerusalem at the hands of the Babylonian army fifty years later, in 586. This led to the Babylonian captivity, when large numbers of Judeans were forcibly relocated to Babylonia. This exile is later referenced in Psalm 137, “By the rivers of Babylon we sat and wept when we remembered Zion”, memorably turned into a song by Boney M.

So the warning goes unheeded. The Book of Zephaniah is often regarded as a reversal of the creation story in Genesis, chapter 1. After the wonderful creation of God’s world, order is now to give way to disorder and destruction. This reminds me of the second law of thermodynamics, which states that as energy is transferred or transformed, more and more of it is wasted. Entropy, the gradual decline into disorder, is inevitable.

I have observed this. After you start something new, there seems to be a period of grace, a honeymoon period, when everything goes swimmingly and the earth appears to be a paradise. But then little by little things start to go wrong, difficulties arise that need fixing, a noisy neighbour moves in upstairs, the car breaks down, someone falls sick. Sometimes the obstacles to a peaceful existence pile up and they can appear insurmountable. Life on earth may not seem so desirable, as the aches and pains increase. But this is clearly a stage of human existence and, as such, we must understand it.

Clearly we are meant to be tested. The people of Zephaniah’s time must have felt that order as they knew it was falling apart all around them, as idol worshippers proliferated, forming a tide that King Josiah was unable to hold back. They are not the only ones. Those who trod the path to Babylon, condemned to exile, must have felt that God had abandoned them, just as the monks of Lindisfarne in 793 AD must have been dismayed when the Viking raiders arrived in their ships to pillage and plunder and a reduced group of the faithful – the remnant of Israel – plodded around the kingdom of Northumbria with their precious cargo, the incorrupt body of St Cuthbert, until founding the city of Durham and building a church to house the relics more than two hundred years later. Exiles are not short.

And clearly we are not meant to view life on earth as our final destination. We will be forced to move on. The Durham-born author Benjamin Myers has a wonderful book called Cuddy, in which he puts himself in the minds of that retinue of faithful followers who accompanied Cuthbert’s body on its exile from Lindisfarne. He describes this pilgrimage, this forced march, as follows:

Walking and thinking

         praying and fasting;

         the endless act of

         facing yourself.[1]

So perhaps this is a time for home truths, for facing up to ourselves and stretching our limits, the limits of what we believe to be possible.

We seek heaven on earth. We are uncomfortable with the idea of discomfort. There is a wonderful collection of stories on the Church of England’s website at the moment, “Women of the Nativity” (cofe.io/WomenNativity), which focuses on the experiences of women such as Sarah, Abraham’s wife, and Mary. In the first story, Sarah grumbles and complains when she is forced to up sticks and leave her comfortable home in Ur, next to the Euphrates. In her experience, the Lord appearing to Abraham means nothing but disruption and dashed hopes. She talks about this God who keeps messing with her life. When Abraham’s younger brother dies, his father, Terah, announces that they are leaving. They trail across the desert for months and come to a place called Haran. When Terah himself dies, they continue to Canaan. Sarah talks about her laughter, which used to be spontaneous, but the older she gets, the more jaded it becomes. This is in stark contrast to the unfulfilled prophecies of Zephaniah – “Sing… shout aloud… Be glad and rejoice with all your heart” – a message that is repeated in Paul’s letter to the Philippians: “Rejoice in the Lord always.”

How many of us do this? How many of us “shout aloud and sing for joy”, as it says in the Canticle from Isaiah? Very few. That is because we are in exile, we haven’t arrived yet.

And now we come to the nub of the matter. As Sarah bemoans her fate, Abraham turns to her (in the imagined version by Paula Gooder) and tells her to “have patience”, to “have faith”. We are in the season of Advent. This also is a time of anticipation, of looking forward to events that have yet to happen. In this sense, perhaps the meaning of Advent is the closest to that of the lives we lead. The singing and rejoicing that they all seem to talk about haven’t happened yet. We are still on the way.

So we have a stark choice, like a path that forks before us. We can choose trust or we can succumb to its opposite, fear. I suspect most people’s faith is a combination of these two things. We would not be human if we didn’t feel a certain trepidation, especially when events seem to be spinning out of control. Where is this rejoicing, this singing for joy?

John the Baptist provides part of the answer. In today’s passage from Luke, he places great emphasis on bearing fruit and I have noticed that even in harsh circumstances, when the sun is beating down or the tent has a hole in it, it is still possible to bear fruit – if we put our mind to it. We need to do this, as well as avoiding the excesses John warns the tax collectors and Roman soldiers about.

When we put our trust in the Lord, we are tested, certainly. Every pilgrimage has its blisters. But can we see through the whirling storm to the calmness within? That is the question we must ask ourselves. What is our faith worth?

What touches me most about Zephaniah’s final epiphany is the way it will not just be us who are rejoicing, but God as well. “He will take great delight in you; in his love he will no longer rebuke you, but will rejoice over you with singing.” God will also be singing. We all long for that look of unconditional love, the love of a parent, of a father in the home. We don’t want to be a wandering people forever. But God’s word is true. Sarah conceived Isaac. Abraham became the father of a great nation. Mary gave birth to the Saviour while remaining a virgin. All the women in these stories – Sarah, Huldah, Abigail, Elizabeth… – show one quality in common: patience. They have often waited twenty or thirty years for the outcome they wished for to disentangle itself.

It is patience that makes what appears impossible to become possible in time.

Let us pray:

Almighty God,

purify our hearts and minds,

that when your Son Jesus Christ comes again as

judge and saviour

we may be ready to receive him,

who is our Lord and our God.

Amen.

Jonathan Dunne, www.stonesofithaca.com

[1] Benjamin Myers, Cuddy (London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2024), p. 111.

Posted on in Sermons

14th Sunday after Trinity

Readings: Song of Solomon 2.8-13; Psalm 45.1-2, 6-9; James 1.17-27;Mark 7.1-8, 14-15, 21-23

“Lattice” is a funny word. It sounds like “lettuce”. It is fitted to a window to stop people breaking and entering, but to let the wind pass. It is there to stop people seeing too much. A lattice is what is used by the women of the house in Nobel prize winner Naguib Mahfouz’s Cairo Trilogy, so that they can see without being seen, observe what is happening in the street without being observed themselves.

And yet in today’s passage from the Song of Solomon it is God, the beloved, who “stands behind our wall, gazes through the windows, peers through the lattice”. Isn’t a lattice precisely what we use to be seen by God – that is, we allow him a qualified view, the best parts of ourselves, the ones we’re prepared to share? We are much more reluctant to let him see us all, to let him see us in our nakedness, as a lover would, warts and all.

We compartmentalize and are happy to show him the good stuff – the house we have constructed, the nicely pruned roses, the smartly trimmed lawn. We are even happier if our neighbours make complimentary remarks and this enhances our reputation. A wonderful neighbour, a worthy neighbour, a reputable neighbour. We might even have dropped a few coins in the tray of the beggar on the corner of our street.

Yes, but what about some of the darker stuff that is hidden behind the latticework which allows only a partial view (the way we would like to be seen)? James, in his letter, describes it as “all moral filth and the evil that is so prevalent”. Mark’s list, unfortunately, is longer: “sexual immorality, theft, murder, adultery, greed, malice, deceit, lewdness, envy, slander, arrogance and folly”. Mark describes these as evil thoughts that come from within, and he warns us that it is they that defile a person. Note that it is thoughts he cites, not words or actions.

I am in the habit of taking my dog for a walk two or three times a day. That is, he goes for three walks – I do two of them, three if my son is away. Most of the streets and parks around where we live I have become overly familiar with, and as Simi potters along, sniffing and pulling in certain directions, there is a limit to how much I can observe the scene and I fall to thinking. How many of my thoughts are “sexual immorality, theft, murder, adultery, greed, malice, deceit, lewdness, envy, slander, arrogance and folly”? Well, it depends what kind of day I’ve had. And what do we do about these thoughts that, if we are not careful, can lead to words and actions?

The first point to make is that we all have them. No human mind is as pure as the ivory that adorns kings’ palaces or as gleaming as gold from Ophir, a place from which gold was imported to the Middle East and which is said to have existed, though its location is uncertain.

I would say that the first way to counter thoughts that might lead to immoral behaviour or acts of revenge is to accept that they exist and then to ignore them.

Another way is to speak them aloud to a confessor. I am sorry that the sacrament of confession is so little used because I think it can be very helpful in the process of cleansing our souls. Perhaps we associate it too much with feeling guilty, with penance and punishment, but it needn’t be like this, if, as I said before, we accept that evil thoughts are common to us all and it is done in a spirit of communal love and non-judgementalism.

We can pray to God, cry out to the Lord for help, but in the heat of the moment, when lust or anger or hatred blinds our vision, this might not bring us the calm we seek.

We can surround ourselves with other believers. As it says in Psalm 133, “How very good and pleasant it is when kindred live together in unity!” We can look for a change of scene, avoid people or places that trigger temptation.

We can be grateful. It is very difficult to have evil thoughts when you are grateful. Thankfulness and hatred do not go hand in hand. We can respond with gentleness, adopt an attitude of lowliness in the light of Christ’s sacrifice and rejoice in the things that he has done.

It says in Proverbs, “The way of the wicked is an abomination to the Lord, but he loves the one who pursues righteousness.” We find the same message in today’s readings. In Psalm 45, “You love righteousness and hate wickedness.” In James, “human anger does not produce the righteousness that God desires.” This letter is traditionally attributed not to James the Apostle, the brother of John and son of Zebedee, but to James the Just, the brother of Jesus, who became leader of the Church in Jerusalem. James goes on to tell us that vanity is not the answer – looking at ourselves in the mirror – but piety, “looking intently into the perfect law that gives freedom”.

“Looking intently into the perfect law that gives freedom.” That is, a righteous way of life will free us from our passions. We think of freedom as getting what we want, as indulging the ego, but this will lead to frustration, isolation and a lack of bearing fruit. It is when we glimpse something greater than our own needs – which will be met anyway – that we can lay down the hatchet and begin to find peace.

So, we embrace righteousness. We make a conscious choice. We say to ourselves that this is the life that I choose in order to become the best version of myself, the best that I can be. True freedom is submission. The last will be first, and the first will be last. We must lose our life in order to find it. Christianity is full of paradox, which I take to be an indicator of truth.

That latticework is what hides our innermost thoughts. We try to prevent God from entering, or at least from seeing too much. It is as if a guest arrives unannounced and we rush around stuffing dirty clothes under the bed, dirty plates in the oven. We don’t have to do this. We can let him in. And when we do this, we will see that:

The winter is past;

the rains are over and gone.

Flowers appear on the earth;

the season of singing has come,

the cooing of doves

is heard in our land.

I would like to stress that this is a conscious choice “to keep oneself from being polluted by the world”. Of course, it’s not always possible. I normally find that my good intentions are thwarted after five minutes. But I also have the impression that if we declare this intention, God, who knows our weaknesses, will keep us from falling – if he sees a commitment on our part, a willingness to steer our lives in the right direction.

Let us pray:

God of constant mercy,

who sent your Son to save us:

remind us of your goodness,

increase your grace within us,

that our thankfulness may grow,

through Jesus Christ our Lord.

Amen.

Jonathan Dunne, www.stonesofithaca.com