Gradually ascending

Sermon for Ascension Day

What are graduation ceremonies for?

These days, not only do we graduate from university, but we also graduate from school. Even primary schools are now holding graduation ceremonies. Is it right?

[PAUSE]

Graduation really means the next step we take. At Mass, we hear the Gradual being sung following the epistle and before the Alleluias for the Gospel. The reason is that the Gradual is sung on the step of the lectern. Graduation is about the next step. At primary school, a child graduates to secondary school. Some secondary school pupils graduate to university. And a university student graduates to… well, to what?

Ah! There’s the rub!

In little graduations, it’s clear where you’re going – to secondary school or, perhaps, to university. That might be scary and life-changing, but at least there is some certainty somewhere to look. It’s that final graduation, from secondary school or university that you realise that graduation has a sharp edge – where are you going now?

A graduation ceremony celebrates the past years and their achievements. All the regalia, the pomp and circumstance, even the bit of paper you get given – all of these are about the past. Your qualifications are all about what you once achieved and not what you’re going to achieve next. They show what you were once capable of but not what you will do next.

[PAUSE]

It’s the same pattern with the prophet Elisha as he realises that his master Elijah is gone. He is in despair. He tears his clothes and laments because suddenly, after witnessing Elijah’s graduation to heaven, he, too, has graduated to uncertainty. Yet, he is given a link to the past in the mantle he receives from Elijah as he leaves for heaven. That link to the past shows that God has given him the blessings that he gave his servant Elijah and that there is some continuity. Elisha’s discipleship is not nothing – it means a great deal. Elisha’s time as a disciple allows him to take what he has been given and move forward with it.

[PAUSE]

Likewise, we see the Disciples gazing up into Heaven as Jesus ascends. Our Lord may be ascending, but it is the Disciples who are graduating. They stand in joy and rejoicing despite the Ascension but there is always the moment of “what do we do now?” Our Lord’s teaching is superlative and points the way of living but it is not enough. The do not yet have that link with their discipleship to take away with them into their ministries across the world. Our Lord has not given them anything of his like a mantle to carry with them. Are the Disciples to rely only upon their experience and achievement? If they are, then they are like the rest of us who graduate who rely only upon a piece of paper declaring our exam results to convince others of our capabilities.

If Our Lord’s teaching was enough then the story would end here. There would be no real point to the Crucifixion and Resurrection for us. They would only have happened for the Disciples and their edification. Yet, the Cross and Resurrection are precisely what the world needs to know about. The Cross and Resurrection are as much for us as for the Disciples. Yet we cannot experience either save only as facts of History. There needs to be more to it. If this graduation is to mean anything, we need something real to take away with us into the future to bring that reality to the world.

[PAUSE]

The Lord graduates into Heaven, but the Disciples have another graduation to go before they are let loose on the world. They will be given something to take with them which connects them with their past discipleship and their life with the Lord. They will be given something on which they can fall back in times of stress and will yet carry them forward in their lives.

We, too, always face an uncertain future however we carry always with us, not just the teaching of Christ but also His continued presence in our lives. We are always connected to safety no matter what this world throws at us or does to us. Our graduation in Christ always comes with an unbreakable link, not just to the past, present and future, but beyond Space and Time. Even with Christ ascended into heaven, we are never alone.

Promises promises

Sermon for the Fifth Sunday after Easter

How do you make a promise?

A promise is a statement about the future and saying now what will happen. If you promise to make Mum breakfast in bed tomorrow, then you are saying that tomorrow morning Mum will be tucking into tea, toast and a full English. A promise is a way of giving someone certainty about the unknown future.

… and we know promises can be broken.

[PAUSE]

How do you break a promise?

Breaking a promise is easy. All it takes is for what you say will happen not to happen. All it takes is for the toaster, frying pan and teapot to remain unused tomorrow morning.

Or, you could break the promise by just bringing up a cup of tea and half a slice of toast and say, “here you are! Breakfast in bed!” Of course, it’s true that this is indeed breakfast in bed but clearly it isn’t what Mum was expecting.

It’s easy to break a promise and it’s hard to keep one.

What does God promise us?

We know he makes promises for Our Lady herself sings, “he remembering His mercy hath holpen His servant Israel as He promised to our forefathers, Abraham and his seed forever.” We can also see that God promises:

A long life in the land which He gives us.

His aid in battle.

Strength to the weary.

Protection from enemies.

Does God keep promises?

[PAUSE]

And perhaps, in viewing God’s promises of help we start asking “where was God when…?”

Where was God when the Jewish people were being persecuted by Hitler, by Western Governments and by not a small number of Christians? That doesn’t sound like God helping His servant Israel. That sounds like abandonment to the forces of darkness.

It’s true that the Bible paints a picture of the failures of the people of Israel to obey God and the Bible is full of descriptions of atrocities, and all of those atrocities occur because of human sin. If God makes us promises and then we go out of our way to make those promises invalid, then we can’t always blame God for what happens. If Mum gets up before us tomorrow morning, then we simply can’t make her breakfast in bed.

We human beings are very good about making statements about the future fall flat. We are very good at making promises null and void. What we also forget is that God is not exactly constrained to Time as we are. All of our promises are about the future but God is beyond past, present and future. He can even see things which could have been. When we look at God’s promises, we have to see in them His love for us throughout our whole lives. We have to recognise that we don’t know what might have been any more than knowing what will be. When God says that He will protect us, we have to read into that the ways He has already protected us from something worse.

A promise from God can’t be about the future because He has no future filled with uncertainty and doubt, nor has He a past filled with forgetting and misremembering but He has always a present filled with perfect knowledge of how things are and might be. A promise from God is a statement of what is beyond our understanding. It is because God’s promises go beyond our understanding that we are to learn to trust God in the dark times of our lives because we do not know what the alternatives really are.

What we do have is a clear demonstration of God’s power.

[PAUSE]

In Our Lord Jesus Christ, we apparently see someone forsaken by God on the Cross. We see in Christ, someone for whom God seems to break His promise. We see in Christ God’s will apparently thwarted.

And then we see the Resurrection.

We see God’s promise come true in a way that we can’t possibly have expected. We see God’s faithfulness go beyond our pitiful understandings of Time and Space in the wounds on the hands of Our Risen Lord and it puts us to silence. Time and Space, Life and Death are all putty in God’s hands.

In times of persecution and pain, horror and Holocaust, we simply cannot see what is going on. At our lowest ebb, God is there regardless whether our faith in Him fails us or not. Even when His promises appear to fail will they prove to have succeeded in a greater way than we had thought possible.

Let us pray for our labours for God to be fruitful, and God will promise that they will be, and in ways beyond our thinking.

Remembering the Future

Sermon for the fourth Sunday after Easter

Ah! The Good old days! Do you remember them? When life was simpler, people were more polite and you got proper food. When things didn’t break and, if they did, you could repair them yourself with a bit of wire and some duct tape. When the Church was full and priests taught good sense and things were done properly. Ah the Good old days!

Were they really that good? Has the world really got worse or does it just seem to have got worse?

Is modern technology to blame? Are modern attitudes to blame?

[PAUSE]

As they wander the wilderness, the Israelites often complain that what they had in Egypt was better than the life that they have now. Apparently, there was more food and drink in Egypt; they had homes and a sense of permanence; they had work to do and were too tired to be bored. Their present wandering in this vast expanse of nothing makes them put on their rose-tinted spectacles for Egypt. But why aren’t they looking forward to the land that the Lord Our God promises them? This land flowing with milk and honey? Why get all nostalgic about a life of slavery rather than live in the hope of a wonderful future?

[PAUSE]

It’s something we humans do because we have that rather odd ability to remember the past but not know the future. In the future, there is always the possibility of disappointment rather than hope whereas the past has happened and nothing can be done about it. We get all rose-tinted about the past and fearful of the future because the past is the one place where we can find some happy memories which can’t be dashed. The trouble is that we forget something quite important: the past and the future are connected by the present. They can’t really be separated.

We may lament about the way people are now, but it is because of how we were back in the day that people are how they are now. The flaws in our society, in the world and the Church have their beginnings in our happy, care-free past. Our society is broken now because it was broken then. Adam sinned and so we all have to deal with the consequences of that sin throughout time.

 In focussing on some “Golden Age” we can often make an idol of the past. We can worship a memory and seek to make our futures fit that memory. The fact of the matter is that the past is gone and cannot be reclaimed. Our Society will not go back to how it was in the 1950s, and neither will the Church. If we worship how the Church was in the “Good old days” then we are not worshipping an Eternal God.

[PAUSE]

Does that mean that the Church needs to update itself? Does it need to throw out organs and bring in praise-bands? Does it need to jettison lecterns in favour of interactive whiteboards?  Does it need to update its teaching to make it relevant to today?

No. That’s the other idol: the worship of being modern, the worship of progress.

Being a Traditional Christian doesn’t mean being stuck in the past: it means carrying the past with us into our present and into the future. We don’t live in the past – we live with the past, warts’n’all.

God is Faithful and Eternal. The same promises that He makes to Moses and the Israelites He makes to us. Our worship of Him must reflect that, for God has predestined His Church for Eternity. We are to stand shoulder to shoulder with all Christians of the past and the Christians yet to come and worship the same One God in Three Persons in a way that we can all recognise and cherish. The only way we can bring the past into the present is by being faithful to what the Eternal God has always taught us. To do otherwise is to make an idol of the god of the age.

The Israelites are always making idols to worship because they hate the instability of not knowing. They remember their past and idolise that. They remember the jewels and wealth that they bring with them, so they idolise them. They remember that the happy times in slavery to Egypt are better than the miserable times of freedom in the wilderness, so they idolise them. Their memory of the past is just as fallible as their expectations of the future and so their idols perish with them in the dust.

[PAUSE]

Our Masses look old. They use old words, old rituals, old ceremonies. This is because they are participating in that Eternal Sacrifice which we first encountered in our past on Maundy Thursday and yet we see glimpses of it in the Old Testament and see it in a future prophesied by St John. We must not idolise our locations in space or in time, but rather seek to be faithful to God. We might worry about the future, and this is right, but our fidelity to God as He has always been will ensure that we will have a glorious future with the same God Who always has been. That’s the benefit of Eternity – there is no time to idolise.

Following a sneeze into Eternity

Sermon for the third Sunday after Easter

Atishoo! And you say…?

Why?

Why do we say, “bless you” when someone sneezes?

Clearly, we hear the sneeze and one thing we don’t want is for the one who sneezes to be unwell. A cold can be miserable, but there are other, more serious things a sneeze can signify. We don’t want people to suffer, so we say, “bless you!”

We also hear Dick Dastardly exclaim, “curses!” when he has failed, yet again, to catch the pigeon. Whom or what is he cursing, and why? If he is cursing the pigeon, then what he wants is ill-fortune to befall that pigeon… perhaps a falling anvil or a large black ball emblazoned with the word “BOMB”.

“Bless” and “curse” are very much part of our vocabulary, but how does a Christian understand what they are?

[PAUSE]

We see Balak call upon the prophet Balaam to curse the Israelites. Clearly, this is of great importance to Balak because he wants victory over the Israelites in battle. He says to Balaam, “he whom thou blessest is blessed, and he whom thou cursest is cursed.” What we can understand from this is that for Balaam, blessing is more than wishing good-fortune and cursing is more than wishing ill-fortune. If Balak is right, Balaam’s blessing will make good fortune happen and his cursing will make bad-fortune happen. Balak seems to think Balaam is some kind of magician who can command God. Both Balak and Balaam soon realise that God cannot be commanded to bring about good or bad fortune, but rather He and He alone will determine who is blessed. Balaam finds himself blessing the Israelites rather than cursing them because God will not have His people cursed!

So, it seems to be that blessing is tied in with good fortune and cursing with ill-fortune. That seems to sort it out, doesn’t it? Or does it? There is a problem.

[PAUSE]

How can we wish God good fortune or ill-fortune? Every day, Christians say, “Blessed be the Lord God of Israel” and, in the midst of his terrible torments, Job’s wife tells him to “curse God and die.” God is blessed daily and, most horribly, He is cursed daily but how does this affect His fortunes? It can’t, surely?

The word “bless” is certainly rooted in our understanding of good fortune. Properly speaking “blessed” does mean “happy” and the word “happy” is rooted in fortune, too. It’s the same “hap” in happy as in “mishap” and “happening”. The Latin word for “blessed” is “Benedictus” which literally means “spoken well of”. To the Ancient Mind, to bless someone means to speak well of them, commend them, wish them happiness, and desire to succeed. When we bless someone, we want to see them succeed and grow and flourish. When we curse someone, we want to see them fail, wither and die.

God does not flourish because He is perfect and He certainly cannot wither. In Christ Jesus, we see God Dead AND, crucially, God Alive. On Good Friday, we see Sin, the World and the Devil throw all their curses on God: Our Lord bears the full weight of all Evil upon His shoulders on the Cross. He is cursed for us as He hangs on the tree. Yet, we see all this cursing utterly nullified in His resurrection.

[PAUSE]

Perhaps this explains to us how the Lord can call blessed those who are hungry, who mourn, the down-trodden and oppressed, because their misfortune is fleeting. We may see Job sitting upon his dung heap together with all those like him in the world, but we also see their cursed lives utterly enmeshed with Christ Jesus’ life. Those who suffer for God’s sake are blessed not because of good fortune, but because God desires their flourishing. He and only He can put that flourishing to good effect. We can say the words, but any word that God speaks makes things happen. It is at His Word that Light comes forth from the Darkness. It is at His Word that we truly receive His Body and Blood in the Sacrament of the Altar transformed from a little bread and a little wine. It is at His Word that goodness happens. When our priests pronounce the blessing, we can be sure that we receive from God something more wonderful than any happiness this world can give us. In blessing us, God shows that Good Fortune and Misfortune in this world are utterly and beautifully irrelevant to our flourishing in His arms.

In blessing things such as a rosary or church linen, God gives them a practical significance by which we can know His presence with us, again going beyond the fortunes of this world.

[PAUSE]

And when we bless God?

Ah! When we bless God, we are declaring something very wonderful. We are declaring our love for God and seeking to make real in our lives those words from the Lord’s Prayer, “Hallowed be Thy Name. Thy Kingdom come. Thy Will be done on earth as it is in Heaven.” Of course, if we really want to bless God, then we need to work to hallow His name and do His will as He commands it. Doing the will of God will allow our lives to speak, “blessed be the Name of the Lord from this Time forth forevermore.” And all Creation will join with us in that word, “Amen!”

Death by Clear Decisions

I looked a while back at the latest attempt to remove provision for Traditionalists in the Church in Wales. The vote on this private members bill took place last week and the motion was decisively defeated. According to Anglican Ink, the vote was 19 for, 63 against and 20 abstentions. What is most interesting is that, of the six bishops of Wales, two were absent, two abstained and two were in favour of the motion. This means that NO bishops voted against the motion at all.

Why was the motion defeated? It seems strange because, like the CofE, the CiW has made a clear decision to ordain women as bishops and yet it wants to embrace those who deny this decision. It does mean that Traditionalists can “live and fight another day”. According to Rev George Conger, “Archdeacon Jackson responded that her intentions had been misunderstood. She did not want to drive out traditionalists but merely wanted them to conform to her understanding of doctrine and discipline.”

How interesting. Ms Jackson seems quite clear that she wants conformity to her “understanding of doctrine and discipline” despite the fact that her church has chosen to reject the doctrine and understanding of the Catholic Faith. To give her the benefit of the doubt and, assuming that this whole motion was not a malicious attempt to rid the church of those who cannot in conscience hold to the innovation of ordaining women, we must assume that Ms Jackson was undergoing the same struggles as the Anglican Communion in question whether schism is worse than heresy or vice versa. Ms Jackson indeed does sound like her opponents. It’s perfectly true that, if the Traditionalists regained control over the Church then they would stop all female ordination. Ms Jackson has simply done the mutatis mutandis.

The rest of the Governing Body of the CiW obviously hold to the principle of heresy over schism. I’ve argued on this before  that heresy is already a schism and yet, the idea is that “love holds together two different integrities”. This, to my mind, isn’t the love that appears in I Cor xiii in which love rejoices in the truth but then, what do I, a misogynist schismatic, know?

So Traditionalists are saved? I notice today that three new bishops have been appointed in the CofE, all of them female. What Traditionalists now have to contend with is the creeping doubt in the validity of orders within their church. What happens if all six bishops in Wales are female or have been ordained by a woman? What if they don’t know or won’t be told? What provisions are there for their position? The Clear Decision does mean that there will be no obligation to divulge a clergyman’s ordination history just to satisfy Traditionalist consciences. The Clear Decision also means that Traditionalists will not be allowed positions of leadership within the Church. Indeed, to be a CofE Bishop, or CiW bishop, one simply has to toe the party line. This is why the Bishops all seem so similar, these days; nor will they seek to put their foot out of place with the management.

Given that the days of the Traditionalist in the Ci W are numbered, what Ms Jackson proposed was far kinder: a swift dispatch rather than the death by slow attrition which the Liberals propose. It changes nothing. Traditionalists are tolerated, not accepted. This is not flourishing: this is being allowed to die.

And it makes sense. The Church cannot exist with two “integrities”. There is either the will of God as revealed in Scripture, Tradition and Reason, or there is heresy. One integrity must be committing heresy and it is the Clear Decision of the CofE and the CiW that it is the Traditional position that is heretical. Of course, this begs the question, “when did the Traditional position become heretical?”

The Clear Decision has determined which of the two “integrities” is the correct one and this must mean that the other “integrity” cannot flourish. It puts the Church in a logically impossible position and, because human beings do make decisions based on logic, the weaker “integrity” must die. Except no-one in the CofE will let it die quickly. It must gently die out to show that it was the Gamaliel principle all along and to ratify the Clear Decision with facts of History.

But this puts the Traditionalist wing in a difficult position. If it allows itself to just die out, then it plays into the hands of the CiW: it ratifies the Clear Decision and demonstrates that its own “integrity” was not really an “integrity” at all. If it has any respect for its own “integrity” it must prefer Ms Jackson’s method of making a clean break, putting its neck on the block and allowing the axe to fall. If the Traditional Wing truly believes that it is following the Faith of God, then it simply cannot allow itself to die out. It must leave the CiW and the CofE in order to demonstrate to the world that God’s integrity is the only integrity and that is found in the Catholic Faith that the Anglican Church used to hold throughout its 2000 year old history (polemicists please note: the Church in England appeared very quickly, probably while the apostles were still alive).

So I re-iterate and urge all Traditionalists: let the CiW and the CofE have their way and leave. Don’t die within their walls because that’s their intention. This is the time for Exodus and a wandering in the wilderness where, like the Israelites, you will continue and flourish before you find the Promised Land. Why die in Egypt? Why languish in Babylon? Come out and live again! 

Telling Death how to feel

Sermon for the second Sunday after Easter

On 31^st August 1997, the United Kingdom loses its stiff upper lip. Waking to the realisation that Diana, Princess of Wales has died in the early hours, the Nation seems to erupt into a “national outpouring of grief”. Why? Most people have never met her. The Royal Family maintain a dignified silence until they are told to show some emotion by the population.

Have you ever been told how to feel? It isn’t nice is it?

[PAUSE]

People get most worked up about death even if it is the death of one that they have never met. We can understand the wife mourning her husband and vice versa, but why on earth should we become so overly emotionally invested in the passing of someone whom we barely knew?

We know that we must mourn with those who mourn, but that is because we are utterly concerned about the widow or the orphan. This does raise a question for the Christian. If we believe in the resurrection of the dead, why should the passing of people worry us?

[PAUSE]

In a world where the dead are not raised, we find people really bewailing their lot. We see people trying to stave off the inevitable by exercise, cosmetic surgery, planning on being frozen at the point of death, agonising over wills and the control over their memory. These people seem to think that they have some control over their lives’ end. If the dead are not raised, there is everything to fear.

Like the Israelites in the wilderness, people cry out that they are starving and dying when really they are missing the point. Without God to trust in, their fear of death becomes all-consuming. Yet the Israelites believe in God, don’t they?

They do. But they don’t trust Him.

God sends manna from heaven, an abundance quails, water springing from rock. There is no thanks. Once the spectre of death has been removed from them, they return to their godless ways… until the fact of death comes back into view, that is.

[PAUSE]

What many people don’t want to realise is that God is responsible for life and death. As our Creator, it is fundamentally His right to begin and end someone’s life at His choosing. This seems grossly unfair with the paralysed man begging for death and the mother grieving over the tiny body of her dead baby. The spectres of Aberfan, the Twin Towers and the Boxing Day Tsunami of 2004 haunt us, and we cry to God for His account of His behaviour. We call Him a murderer. We say that He has cheated someone out of their life. We say that He is pitiless for not ending the life of one in chronic pain.

All this is natural and right and proper, and God expects death to upset us. It even upsets Our Lord in the Garden of Gethsemane when He is faced with His agony of crucifixion. It does not change the fact: God, as the Creator, has the right to end our lives.

And yet…

God does not want to end life!

Watch Him feed the Israelites murmuring against Him in the wilderness.

Hear Him say to Israel in their captivity in Babylon, “Ho, every one that thirsteth, come ye to the waters, and he that hath no money; come ye, buy, and eat; yea, come, buy wine and milk without money and without price.”

Hear Him say to the Jewish rulers, “For as the Father raiseth up the dead, and quickeneth them; even so the Son quickeneth whom he will. For the Father judgeth no man, but hath committed all judgment unto the Son: That all men should honour the Son, even as they honour the Father. He that honoureth not the Son honoureth not the Father which hath sent him. Verily, verily, I say unto you, He that heareth my word, and believeth on him that sent me, hath everlasting life, and shall not come into condemnation; but is passed from death unto life.”

Watch Him set the example of dying and rising again so that “when this corruptible shall have put on incorruption, and this mortal shall have put on immortality, then shall be brought to pass the saying that is written, Death is swallowed up in victory.”

[PAUSE]

God has the right to bestow life and death. Yet, God does not want our death. Our death comes about from Humanity’s sinfulness. We are the ones that murder, willingly or unwillingly, not God. Our death comes as a consequence of the cumulative effect of all our sins. But God does something amazing: He gives us the opportunity to see death as the ending of sin in our lives. Those who die in the Love of God are not dead but rather alive to God beyond our understanding. What truly dies is all the effects of sin on our lives. Our death means our freedom and our joy in seeing Christ for all Eternity in True Life.

Yet when we mourn, we do so out of love, nothing less. The widow grieves for her husband because of her tender love, not because she is frightened of her own death. Those who die tragically are still held by God as part of the fabric of reality, even if they only take one breath on this earth. They still have the same opportunity of Eternal life as we do by embracing God.

We Christians are supposed to live and be alive, not shackled by a world that tells us that we must be frightened of death. We do not live life as a series of continual avoidances of death. We must live our lives for the One Who wants us alive with Him in Eternity.