Christmas Sermon 2022

(Isaiah 9.2-7; Titus 2.11-14; Luke 2.1-20)

How do we celebrate Christmas? Straight away I want to say that Christmas is to be celebrated with joy and hope! “Christ is born again!” “Christ is born today!” That’s God’s love come into the world - and when we ask how God shows himself to us, we find that it’s in the form of a baby. That’s a message that has been proclaimed for two thousand years. And “Christ is born for us.”

At the same time Christmas is a marker in the way we live - a marker in our lives. We might find that we measure out time by our celebration of Christmas - the meetings with people we see only once a year, the time we spend with those we those we love and cherish most. And that’s why these last three years have been so hard with all the restrictions of the pandemic. Still hard for so many people. I was talking to someone yesterday who had made all her plans for having the family together but then her father-in-law was taken into hospital and palliative care. “You can visit him, can’t you?” I asked. But the answer was “no” - not because of Covid, but the hospital was locked down because of an outbreak of Norovirus. So many other causes for concern in our world still. So many people to hold in our hearts.

Christmas-time is a marker in the songs we sing too. Age-old carols, of course, but other songs which ask us just how we make sense of life. My ear-worm at the moment is George Michael singing Wham’s Christmas hit, Last Christmas:

Last Christmas I gave you my heart
But the very next day you gave it away
This year, to save me from tears
I'll give it to someone special

And then he repeats the verse - several times! Christmas is about love and finding love, but how will we build on it?

Last Christmas I gave you my heart
But the very next day you gave it away…

Is this a song of despair? Or a hope that love may be rekindled? A sort of pop version of O love that wilt not let me go?

Another Christmas perennial is John Lennon’s Merry Christmas (War is over). The man who imagined a world made better if only there were no religion, nevertheless asked,

So this is Christmas
And what have you done?
Another year over
And a new one just begun

“Another year over…” What have we done?

Trying to get myself organised for Christmas I’ve been having to pinch myself to think of how we’d celebrated Christmas before these last three years. Last year, I remember, we were singing carols in our churches - but wearing masks, and we had to limit the number of people who could come to services. The year before… and I don’t really want to think about it! Just last year at this time the Omicron variant of Coronavirus was emerging as an unknown quantity. The year before there were all sorts of rules as to how many people you could meet on Christmas Day - and you had to factor in all the other people they might have met. I said to my older son that I was afraid the maths might mean that when he arrived we would have to stay outside to see each other in the garden - but then he didn’t make it back to the north-east anyway because the area he lives in was locked down all together!

So we pray that this Christmas might be a time when things are better and stay better. Better for us at least…

But we know they’re far from better for so many people elsewhere in the world. I found it hard to believe that in today’s world one nation could threaten another, invade it and think it could annex its territory with impunity. But we’ve seen exactly that in the vicious invasion of Ukraine by Russia, in the continuing misery its government and armed forces seek to inflict. Not only there… A regime based on the wrong sort of religion continues its tyranny in Iran; another deprives women and girls of still more rights and freedoms in Afghanistan; repression remains a characteristic of government in China - and when it loosens its grip there is a real risk of chaos. And elsewhere in the world - largely unreported - millions of people have their lives and livelihoods threatened by starvation and climate change.

Sorry this sounds so gloomy. John Lennon sang, “War is over / If you want it…” but it seems so many people don’t want it.

But there is hope. Whether or not we want it, Christ is present with us - God has come into our human frame in all its complexities and contradictions. As Thomas Merton wrote:

Into this world, this demented inn, in which there is absolutely no room for him at all, Christ has come uninvited. But because he cannot be at home in it, because he is out of place in it, and yet he must be in it, his place is with those others who do not belong, who are rejected by power, because they are regarded as weak, those who are discredited, who are denied the status of persons, tortured, exterminated. With those for whom there is no room, Christ is present in this world.

There was no room for Christ’s birth in the inn. But a place was found for him where he could be laid in a manger. A place might be found for him in our hearts.

Outside the entrance to the church of St. Martin-in-the-Fields, overlooking Trafalgar Square, the birth of Christ is depicted by a sculpture of the newly born Jesus, carved from a massive block of stone - the baby emerges from the rock, the child’s umbilical cord is still attached. This is God’s son born as any one of us. One of the clergy said that one morning, when he came to open up the church, he found a homeless man asleep in a foetal position, on top of the rock, his body curled around the body of the Christ-child. When he woke up the man said, “I was trying to keep him warm.”

The greatly-loved carol, In the bleak midwinter, has the line, “What can I give him poor as I am?” And the reply, “If I were a shepherd, I would bring a lamb.” That poor homeless man was trying to do his part - and at the same time, finding shelter. What can we give? What dare we hope to receive?

And so this is Christmas
I hope you have fun
The near and the dear one
The old and the young

A very merry Christmas
And a happy New Year
Let's hope it's a good one
Without any fear

Yet not only a hope based on what we and other people may or may not do. A very real hope. As our readings from scripture remind us today:

The grace of God has appeared, bringing salvation to all…

and

The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light;

those who lived in a land of deep darkness – on them light has shined.

May that hope, made real in the Christ-child, be born once more for all to see!

 

 

Christmas at St. Cuthbert's & St. John's

 

Advent Faith and the realities of life

 Advent 3         Year A        Eucharist – 11.xii.2022

(Isaiah 35.1-10; James 5.7-10; Matthew 11.2-11)

I’m in the middle of taking a series of school assemblies. My starter question in the schools I’ve been visiting has been, “What do you need to help you get ready for Christmas?” Helpfully last Thursday morning, nearly all the children in Benfieldside School were wearing Christmas jumpers - so that was a start! And at home they are putting up the decorations, getting out the lights. They might be thinking about present lists - not just what they can get, but what they can give. A few have been writing Christmas cards. It’s helpful to get them to talk about these things because it works as a checklist for me, and I realise quite how far behind I am in my preparations. When I got to the question, “Who’s put their tree up?” nearly every hand in the assembly hall went up.

In that I’m failing… though St. Cuthbert’s has (at least) two trees dressed and lit when I last looked, and St. John’s is proudly displaying the tree in its garden to all who pass by on the A68.

So, it’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas. Or is it? In a sermon workshop the other day, someone said, “Advent is a time for people who hate Christmas.” So we have to be careful about what we say. Should we be holding back saying, “Don’t try to get there too quickly?” After the last nearly three years of pandemic restrictions, people really do want to get on and celebrate. But at the same time as we do our best to get into the Christmas mood, there are realities to face. The first Christmas didn’t start off that happily for Mary and Joseph. There would be presents for them - later - from the Wise Men. But first there was a birth away from home, away from their families and without proper shelter. I was taking part in a sermon workshop the other day, led by Sam Wells, the Vicar of St. Martin-in-the Fields in London. He pointed out that the couple themselves were living in the aftermath of nearly having broken up over Mary’s unplanned pregnancy. What’s it going to be like for many families in this time of bitter cold and escalating prices when so many are having to choose between heating and eating? What’s it like when you can’t really afford either, but you’re wanting to buy all the presents on your children’s Santa list - the presents that you yourself want to buy?

I don’t really want to keep on with this theme. Advent is not to be about grimness - and certainly Christmas isn’t. As someone I know pointed out, this 3^rd Sunday of Advent is Gaudete Sunday, so it’s about joy! It gets the name Gaudete from the verse of Scripture with which today’s service traditionally begins: “Rejoice in the Lord always, and again I say rejoice.” Someone else pointed out, “the problem with Christians is that so often they don’t look that redeemed.” Christians who look miserable… St. James in today’s New Testament reading has to warn the readers of the letter he wrote to them, “Beloved, do not grumble against one another…” Cheer up!

But we can’t escape the realities. If only we could follow the suggestion that we “give half the presents but double the love.”

Seeing God’s love put into effect is something we need for every day… The prophet Isaiah writes for a people who lose their nationhood, defeated in war and so many of them carried into exile in Babylon. Their plight cannot be denied, but the prophet affirms that there is hope and there will be restoration. The wilderness is a reality, but “the desert shall rejoice and blossom.” There are those who know that their hands are weak and their knees feeble, but they will be strengthened. And God will ransom his people, and bring them back to what is truly theirs. The whole of that 35^th chapter of Isaiah is something we can meditate on when we are feeling down or depressed.

Being a Christian is about living in faith and hope through the bad days as well as the good days. Sam Wells points out that there’s a very real question which every Christian has to face: “If Jesus has changed everything, why does everything look so much the same?” For us now it might be, “why can’t I pay my heating bill?” Or if we’re more fortunate look at the plight of other people and ask, “why are things in such a state that they can’t pay their heating bill?” Or, “why did the person I love get sick… why did he or she die and leave me feeling like this?” Just believing in Jesus won’t fix things. But I would want to say that believing in Jesus might give us a concern for justice, and that might be a start in making things better.

John the Baptist, in today’s Gospel reading, finds himself face to face with realities, questioning and doubt. John has proclaimed Jesus to be the Messiah, called on people to repent, warned of the judgment of God’s Kingdom. But now he finds himself locked up in prison, the victim of King Herod’s anger. And from his cell he sends his message to Jesus: “Are you the one who is to come, or are we to wait for another?” Has John got it right in putting his faith in Jesus, or has the project failed?

To which Jesus responds: 

Go and tell John what you hear and see: the blind receive their sight, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the poor have good news brought to them. And blessed is anyone who takes no offence at me. 

We don’t know if John will ever receive that message. But the message for us is to look for the signs of God’s Kingdom. How can they be brought about? Our role is to live God’s future in the here and now.

God’s future is the promise the prophet Isaiah holds out to his people even as they face defeat by the Babylonians and the loss of their nationhood. Despite all appearances there is an abundance in God’s provision to which we need to remain open. The message of the poet Thomas Traherne might be distilled to the more prosaic, “Don’t dwell on asking why my life is so miserable - but glorify God that you have a life at all.”

What can sustain you when you feel up against it? When you’re cold, think of the needs of others.

What keeps the people of Ukraine going when its Russian neighbour seeks to destroy its infrastructure, when the entire city of Odessa is totally lacking in power - and so many other parts of that country?

What’s it like for the people of Somalia, whose people starve because of climate change, crop failure and war - and how can we act to make things better for them?

We need to take our experience into a sense of solidarity with other people. In the grimness of life today, it’s not enough that we can make ourselves warm and content - if that’s all we want, we will remain cold to the experience of other people.

The German Jesuit priest, Alfred Delp, wrote from his imprisonment by the Nazis:

I see Advent this year with greater intensity and anticipation than ever before. Walking up and down in my cell, three paces this way and three paces that way, with my hands in irons and ahead of me an uncertain fate, I have a new and different understanding of God’s promise of redemption and release. 

There would be no release for Alfred Delp, but there was a real sense of freedom within his confinement because of the faith he knew.

The Lutheran pastor, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, was imprisoned at the same time - and I often go back to his words: 

For a Christian there is nothing peculiarly difficult about Christmas in a prison cell. I daresay it will have more meaning and be observed with greater sincerity here in this prison than in places where all that survives of the feast is its name. That misery, suffering, poverty, loneliness, helplessness and guilt look very different to the eyes of God from what they do to [human beings], that God should come down to the very place which [people] usually abhor, that Christ was born in a stable because there was no room for him in the inn -- these are things which prisoners can understand better than anyone else.  For the prisoner the Christmas story is glad tidings in a very real sense. 

There are no text book answers to the problem of suffering in the world. But we can look for ways in which faith has been lived out in the darkest of times, freedom found in the harshness of captivity.

Let me end with a final quotation from Thomas Merton as he wrote of an experience which transformed him in his sense of God’s care for all people: 

In Louisville, at the corner of Fourth and Walnut (the junction of two streets), in the centre of the shopping district, I was suddenly overwhelmed with the realization that I loved all these people, that they were mine and I theirs, that we could not be alien to one another even though we were total strangers.… I suddenly saw the secret beauty of their hearts, the depths of their hearts where neither sin nor desire nor self-knowledge can reach, the core of their reality, the person that each one is in God’s eyes. If only they could all see themselves as they really are. If only we could see each other that way all the time. There would be no more war, no more hatred, no more cruelty, no more greed.

Remembrance Day time for reflection and prayer from St Cuthbert's chu...

Remembrance Day - time for reflection and prayer from the churchyard and memorials of St. Cuthbert's Church, Shotley Bridge.

We'll meet in person at 10.30am in St. Cuthbert's Church and at 4pm in St. John's Church, Castleside. A warm welcome in both churches!

One Bride for Seven Brothers

 

Homily for the 3^rd Sunday before Advent: 

Eucharist – 6.xi.2022

(Job 19.23-27a; Luke 20.27-38)

The story we’ve just heard for our Gospel reading is a hard one - and intentionally so. That’s often the case with the parables of Jesus. But this time it’s the Sadducees, one of the religious parties in first century Palestine, trying to catch Jesus out. The Sadducees were distinguished from other Jewish groups such as the Pharisees by the fact that they didn’t believe in any form of life after death. We have only one life, they said. This is it. And so to make their point they try out Jesus with this question about a woman whose husband dies, leaving no children. She is observant of the Jewish Law, and so she goes on to marry his brother, but he dies… and so on until she has married all seven brothers of the family in turn. Not “Seven brides for seven brothers” - as the 1950s musical set in 19^th century backwoods Oregon put it - but one bride for seven brothers! The Sadducees are making fun of people who say they believe in a life beyond the grave. If she’s married all seven brothers, then whose wife is she going to be in the next life? They’re not interested in the answer. They just want to put Jesus on the spot.

What we need to say straightaway is that when we talk about the Christian approach to death and a life to come, it’s not just a matter of theory and religious argument. It might be for those Sadducees who come to Jesus with a test case in their desire to dispute his views on the resurrection – they want an opinion from him, and preferably one that will score them a point over the Pharisees. But the case of the woman whose husbands had all died one after another is more than merely an issue to debate. What about the grief that such a woman would feel - which anyone feels at the loss of a loved one? What about the care and sympathy that should be the human response? What about the expectations of a culture that says that she ought to go on marrying one brother after another until there are none left? Aren’t these the issues we need to deal with – and don’t they say something more profound about our faith in God and response to him?.. More profound than theorising over an other-worldly issue without any attention to what we know about this life?

The Sadducees in today’s Gospel take an approach which is called a reductio ad absurdam. They want the whole scenario to appear preposterous because they mock the idea that there can be any life beyond this one. And Jesus is not one for falling into their trap. Theirs is a false premise. Marriage is about what we do in this life. The resurrection from the dead, and the new life we may hope for, is something else.

What you can say about today’s Gospel passage is that you might at least feel the poignancy that the story has - something that goes beyond a theological fiction dreamt up by the Sadducees. At root there is the human issue: the young woman who loses a husband. That it happens in the story seven times is theological point-scoring. But the truth is to be found in the suffering and loss which she would know were it to happen just once. Beyond the arguing over theological issues about the Resurrection of the dead and first century Jewish marriage practices, the real issue is about taking seriously our humanity. And every life lost says something about our humanity and its diminishment. Christians need to be facing questions of life and death, not because we have answers, but because we have a God whose nature and purpose are revealed in the man, Jesus Christ. God is himself at the heart of our humanity, because he comes to us in Jesus.

I was thinking about this the other day when I was in Durham Cathedral. I don’t know if I’d noticed before the memorial stone to David Jenkins, former Bishop of Durham. But I certainly saw it last weekend and I pointed it out to the people I was with. The inscription engraved on it is a version of some of his most memorable words - at least memorable to me - and they’re words we can live by. David Jenkins used to say that the Gospel could be reduced to one sentence in which the only word of more than one syllable was “Jesus”: “God is as he is in Jesus, and so there is hope.”

Questions of life and death and the hope of what is to come are the subject of today’s Bible readings. Job can affirm, “I know that my Redeemer lives” and “in my flesh shall I see God.” Paul tells the Christians at Thessalonica that the calling of the Christian is first to get on with living life in this world before making rash assumptions about God’s plans for a world to come. And Jesus makes the point that hope in a new life with God is more than a matter of religious argument.

I found myself thinking about another priest with whom I worked at the time David Jenkins was our bishop. John Hammersley was never impressed by the theological arguments people might pick with each other, and still less by easy solutions. He was radical in his thinking, but most importantly he saw that our questioning needs to be taken into our prayer. Hope was the point for both John Hammersley and David Jenkins, and a real hope because God is involved with his creation. Life and death are more than a theory which needs a lot of argument or someone to pontificate. That’s the way the Sadducees act when they come to Jesus, theorising about the seven-times-widowed woman, but leaving precious little space for God or humanity. I’m afraid we can all too often miss the point of our faith. I remember John Hammersley declaring, “where there’s death there’s hope.” He meant that we need to die to all that holds us back from God – because that’s the only way we shall truly find the way to life.

John Hammersley died too young, but he published the fruits of his prayer in a series of writings he called “Psalms of Life.” This is one he called, “A Nunc Dimittis,” words which are in themselves a leave-taking:

I am no longer my own, but yours

    your goodness helps my faith grow stronger.

You give us all you have, and all you are

    all that we have and are, you take and bless.

So, God, I offer you my life

    I freely give all to you, for everything comes from you.

 

 

Sunday Homily from St. Cuthbert's & St. John's

 Trinity 18 (Proper 24) – Eucharist – 16.x.2022

(Genesis 32.22-31; 2 Timothy 3.14-4.5; Luke 18.1-8)

I know I’ve said before that I once met a priest at a meeting where we had to introduce ourselves  - and he started off by telling us his name and parish… before adding “and I took the Archbishop of Canterbury to court 28 times.” Actually it might not have been exactly 28 times - it might have been more and might have been less. But it was a lot of times. The issue was this priest’s opposition to the ordination of women. He felt so strongly over the matter that he kept taking out lawsuits to try to halt the Church as it made its way rather slowly to ordain the first women priests in the 1990s. He had qualified as a lawyer himself so perhaps this kept his court costs down. It must have cost the Church of England hundreds of thousands of pounds to defend its side. In the end the judges got fed up with him and he was ruled a “vexatious litigant,” so that he could no longer bring legal actions - at least of that nature. Nevertheless, since then his parish has gone to court with an extremely tenuous case in an attempt to lay claim to some land outside its boundaries. I wasn’t surprised to find he was still Vicar - nor that the case was thrown out. And still more recently he’s been to court to argue against having to retire from his parish at the mandatory age of 70 - just last month the judges have ruled that he has no case to argue. He’s now 72. He has no job. He says he has no money. But I wonder if he’ll ever give up?

Was the widow who kept nagging at the judge in Jesus’ parable vexatious? She kept going back to court until finally she got her way. What is she doing? - and I wonder how she managed to do it. These days civil courts of law seem to be there largely for people who can afford to use them. If you’re a millionaire you can go to court and keep appealing regardless of the justice of your case, because you’ll probably find a legal argument or loophole somewhere along the line. Look at those high-profile divorce cases where millions of pounds are at stake - or other instances where powerful people bring cases to court because they don’t like what their critics say about them. Keep going back and you might just wear down your opponents - or at least they might run out of money to pay their lawyers before you’ve run out of different levels of the court system to appeal your case. People who take out libel actions in the courts are almost always rich people who have the resources to do it. People who take out injunctions to stop people hearing details of their lives or doubtful actions are the people who have the cash to go to a lawyer in the first place. That’s how it is now. I imagine it was much the same in the time of Jesus.

So there’s a serious point to the parable we hear in today’s Gospel reading. The widow in the story is a poor woman. We have to assume that she has right on her side. The problem for her is how she might get justice. She keeps going back to the judge… not because she is a pain in the neck, not because she is argumentative, not because she wants to make money at someone else’s expense, but because she wants what is right. She knows that the odds are stacked against her. The judge himself doesn’t seem to care for what is right or wrong. We’re told that he “neither feared God nor had respect for people.” But she keeps going back to him until in the end she wears him down. And the outcome is not that he gives in and makes a ruling like those who simply have money and influence might want… He gives in and grants her justice. The poor woman with right on her side makes the rich judge - who couldn’t care less - see what justice demands.

We need to remember that parables are not there merely to be explained. They’re there for the impact they make on those who hear them. This one begs the question, where is justice to be found? What is the integrity of those who administer the Law? Are the odds stacked against the poor? Does the legal system favour those who have the money to keep going back with more and more specious arguments? How remote is the whole system from ordinary people? I wonder how the widow in the story even gets near to the judge to plead with him. She can gain access to him for the sake of telling the story - but could she do so in real life? - or would she be more like that character in another parable, the poor man, Lazarus, lying with festering wounds at the rich man’s gate and never even noticed by him?

This is not just about the legal system either. It’s about the sort of society we want to live in. Is there justice in terms of access to health and social care? - or is it a lottery depending on where you live, on being able to argue for your rights, or in having the money to buy your way in? Are our children equitably served by our schools and the wider education system? - are young people from poorer families put off from trying to get into Higher Education by the fees and other costs they will face? And how do we treat those who are unemployed or suffering from disabilities when they find themselves sanctioned or deprived of benefits through delays in Universal Credit, or told they should be able to work by people who are quite unqualified to assess their true health? How can politicians argue that poor people should have to take their share of the pain in government cuts when already they can barely make ends meet? - how much can the less well-off be expected to give up?

This is not the time for politicking - but I think we have to see that the Gospel has political implications. The quest of the widow for justice in today’s parable isn’t just a fiction that doesn’t touch us. It begs the question what does justice require now? Only if we ask that question can we be serious about seeking justice from God - about expecting that he will hear our prayers… because what are we going to pray for?

If the parable has a single point it’s simply to say that Jesus is making a comparison between an unjust judge who finally gets worn down to do what is right, and a righteous God who is always on our side. If the poor widow finally gets her way by her pleading, then we should be ready to call on God - and keep asking because he hears our prayers. It may not always seem that way. But that is the message we can take away from the story.

That’s the message in our first reading from the Book of Genesis too. Jacob is on a journey back to his homeland. He’s fallen out with his father-in-law. He’s cheated his brother Esau out of his birthright. He can’t know what reception he’ll get when he gets back home. And suddenly he finds himself on his own. Then a stranger appears during the night - and without any explanation, without any apparent conversation, they get into a fight. And they wrestle all night until daybreak. The stranger strikes Jacob with a disabling blow, but still Jacob won’t let go. Only if the stranger blesses Jacob will he release his grip on him, he says. The stranger gives the blessing - and part of the blessing is to give Jacob a new name: he calls him “Israel,” literally, “He has struggled with God.” We never discover the stranger’s name - but then we realise how Moses hears from the Burning Bush a voice which gives no name for God except “I am who I am.” Jacob had had a vision of a ladder between earth and heaven on which the angels had ascended and descended. Now he recognises how God has come face to face with him. And Jacob has held on. There’s no clear way forward for Jacob, except we’re told that he can now continue on his way limping because of the blow to his hip. It’s a reminder to us that we can hold on in all our struggles and find it’s God we are wrestling with, discover that it’s God who is holding us - and though we might limp on feebly, we find that life is changed because God travels on with us.

Back to the Gospel reading for today…

“There was a judge who neither feared God nor had respect for his people.” This is the worst sort of person there could be in Jesus’ book. Because when Jesus sums up the Law he says,

The first commandment is this:

‘Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God is the only Lord. 

You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart,

with all your soul, and with all your mind,

and with all your strength.’ 

 

The second is this: ‘Love your neighbour as yourself.’ 

There is no other commandment greater than these.

On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.

So fear that God who is to be loved - hold on to him, as already he holds us. Show that you love your neighbours by seeking justice for them. That’s the Law - and it’s free for all.

Eucharist with a commemoration of St. Edward the Confessor

Live-streamed Eucharist on a midweek morning with a commemoration of St. Edward the Confessor, and with particular prayers for his successor, our new King Charles, and those who make decisions of government - the Revd. Martin Jackson presides in St. Cuthbert's Church, Shotley Bridge.

Rich Man, Poor Man

 

Trinity 15 (Proper 21) Year C  25.ix.2022 Eucharist

Amos 6.1a,4-7; 1 Timothy 6.6-19; Luke 16.19-31.

There’s no doubt that the Church - and the Church of England in particular - has gained a lot of attention during the last couple of weeks, and we should acknowledge the privilege it has been for us to do so much in leading the Nation in its mourning for her late Majesty, Queen Elizabeth II. Our bishops have themselves written to thank clergy and people of the churches in our diocese for all that we’ve been able to do with special services and prayers, with acts of commemoration and with Books of Condolence.

But now with the pageantry and ceremonial done - and let’s acknowledge just how much that was the meticulous work of royal households and the armed services - we continue to face the question, what do Christians have that they can say about things that are really important? What is really important - in the sense of important not simply on special occasions such as the death of a Sovereign after 70 years of devoted service, but important every day? What is at the heart of what we can all be doing every day which is at the heart of our Christian calling, and which makes a real difference to people where they are?

And before I get on to saying what today’s Gospel reading tells us about this, I think I want to say that at the heart of our calling as a Church is simply to be here for people in their need. To be ready to respond to people in sorrow: both our churches know real grief at this time through the loss of members and our feeling for their loved ones. And response doesn’t require that we are ordained or wear special clothes or have special permission to take particular services. It’s simply about being with people, knowing their need, being the people we are for them.

It's not first of all about being religious - though I think it is about our Christian response. Notice that in today’s Gospel, Jesus is speaking yet again to the Pharisees - the people who in first century Palestine did so much to generate the religious heat, who wanted to set the agenda, and basically to have things their way. To them Jesus says, “You’re missing the point.” And not just that but “You’re missing the person.” His parable is about two men, one rich and one poor, and you might ask, “What’s that got to do with me?” Ask most people whether they’re rich or poor, and I guess they’d say, “I’m comfortably off” - at least until recently, when nearly all of us started to feel the impact of rising energy prices and the cost of food in the shops. You might moan about the mortgage, you might worry about the state of your savings, but you knew you weren’t poor. At the same time few of us could call ourselves rich. So we’re neither rich nor poor.

But we shouldn’t avoid the message of the parable of the rich man and the poor man. Jesus tells parables to put the people who hear them on the spot. The parables are in the Gospels because they should put us on the spot. The question is, do we recognise ourselves somewhere in the story?

This parable has come to be called the story of Dives and Lazarus. In fact only the poor man, Lazarus, is given a name in the Gospel. The rich man became known later as Dives, but that is simply the Latin word for “rich.” He doesn’t get a name in the telling of the story. And this might seem surprising. Because if you look in the newspapers or magazines, it’s the rich celebrities whose names we know, while the poor are largely anonymous - the victims of floods, refugees, people in some developing country or another, unknown millions whose lives are torn by war and injustice, faces we glimpse fleetingly on a television screen, but whose names we don’t get or forget.

Some time ago in a piece of writing I’ve kept, John Pridmore, made the point that we should know the poor - and probably do. The rich man might think he doesn’t know any poor people - and simply fails to see Lazarus. But, writes this retired parish priest of no particular prosperity,

I knew Lazarus. He slept on our doorstep when we lived on the corner of Trafalgar Square. Our doorstep was narrow and steep, and he had to curl up awkwardly. He looked like a sack. I could have done more for him. I could have given him a blanket, or directed him to a night-shelter. Better still, I could have invited him in for a bath and a meal. But usually I just stepped over him.

Lazarus always had a dog with him, perhaps to lick his sores. When I had a great deal of shopping, I would ask him to move. Generally he did - though I recollect his once saying: “Why should I, you public-school dick-head [I’d probably better not say what he called him!]?” Lazarus certainly looked as if he could have done with a few of the crumbs which fell from the table at which I feasted sumptuously every day.

We need to ask ourselves, where do we know Lazarus? Is it that woman who still sells “The Big Issue” in Middle Street after all those years? - the one we hurry past? There’s plenty more people like that in Newcastle. Last week I walked past a man who was groaning on the ground outside a bank in Durham - and offered a prayer of thanks that someone else was crouched down to help him. And in two weeks’ time we’ll be asking you to bring harvest offerings to feed some of our many homeless people through the work of the People’s Kitchen. I’ve been struck by seeing some of the poor people who live on the streets of cities where I’ve stayed like Rome. There in the centre of the city - as we went back to our en suite accommodation near the Piazza Navona - we’d see in mid-evening homeless people who’d bundled themselves up with their possessions into the doorways of the narrow streets. And first thing each morning, the crippled man on his trolley setting up his begging pitch outside the Pantheon.  Opulence and poverty side by side, tourist and refugee, well-robed clerics and ragged vagrants.

 

In this morning’s parable it’s the poor man who has the name, Lazarus. That’s the sign of his real dignity. He’s known to God - as we are - as we recognise when we give someone a Christian name at Baptism. Although Lazarus gets ignored all his life, remains unseen and anonymous to the rich man at whose door he sits, it’s him who is taken after his death to sit at the side of Abraham. Now it’s the rich man who finds himself unknown - divided from being immersed in the love of God by “a great chasm.” That rich man - who has treated the poor as being anonymous, who simply hasn’t seen them in their need - (he) now finds out what it means to be “unknown.”

 

That rich man could be you - it could be me. Where do you put yourself in the picture? - where are you in this story of the response Jesus wants to be given to the needy?

 

On Tuesday of this week the Church commemorates St. Vincent de Paul, a French priest, who was active throughout the first half of the 17^th Century. He was an able intelligent man, ordained at the early age of 20, and he could have lived comfortably tickling the fancies of the faithful rich. But instead he came to recognise the needs of the poor and the underdog. He found himself working with prisoners who were going to be sent to the galleys where they would be chained to oars - to do hard labour by rowing the ships of the French Navy. And he recognised them as individuals. He founded a Congregation of priests who would join him in working with and for the poor, and they came to be known as Lazarists - specifically they went out to respond to the needs of “Lazarus” in the people amongst whom they lived. St. Vincent’s work flourished. He founded a religious order for women, the Sisters of Charity, the first religious sisters to be allowed out of the cloister, so that they could work with the poor. And millions of lay people have been inspired by his work. Today the Society of St. Vincent de Paul is, I think, the largest lay Roman Catholic organisation, and its members seek to put into practical effect the message St. Vincent preached - the message he found in today’s parable.

 

St. Vincent de Paul wrote these words,

 

We should not judge the poor by their clothes and their outward appearance nor by their mental capacity, since they are often ignorant and uncouth. On the contrary, if you consider the poor in the light of faith, then you will see that they take the place of God the Son, who chose to be poor. Indeed, in his passion, having lost even the appearance of man, foolishness to the Gentiles, and a scandal to the Jews, he showed he was to preach the Gospel to the poor in these words: ‘He has sent me to preach good news to the poor.’ Therefore we should be of the same mind and should imitate what Christ did, caring for the poor, consoling them, helping them and guiding them.

 

And we can start wherever there is need. The parable is about a rich man and a poor man - and we may think we’re neither. But the point is that to many  other people we are rich; when it comes to helping a needy person we can take the place of the rich man. And the poor are not only those who are materially destitute - it’s anyone whose need is there to be addressed. As for those who really are rich, do they really need tax cuts and the lifting of the cap on bankers’ bonuses? Perhaps members of our new Government could read this Gospel parable and think again?

 

Mother Teresa of Calcutta wrote once of a big conference on poverty which she’d attended, and how the people who talked so much about food and hunger would leave the conference venue in Bombay and ignore the beggars. Right outside the door she found a man who was dying, and took him to one of the homes she had set up - and where he died, while others talked:

 

I never look at the masses as my responsibility. I look at the individual. I can only love one person at a time. I can feed only one person at a time. I picked up one person. Maybe if I hadn’t picked up that one person I wouldn’t have picked up 42,000. The whole work is only a drop in the ocean. But if I didn’t put that drop in, the ocean would be one drop less. Same thing for you. Same thing in your family.

 

Requiem Eucharist for Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II

Requiem Eucharist for Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II with prayers for our new King - the Revd. Martin Jackson presides in St. Cuthbert's Church, Shotley Bridge.

Kingship and Shepherding

 Trinity 13 - Year C – Eucharist – 11.ix.2022 

Following the death of HM Queen Elizabeth II 

(Exodus 32.7-14; 1 Timothy 1.12-17; Luke 15.1-10)

Each of the two churches in which I serve has two windows depicting the same subjects – windows which I love and which we should all take note of. One is a window depicting Christ enthroned in majesty – it’s Christ the King, the central window behind the altar in St. John’s Church and high up surmounting all the other windows in the west wall of St. Cuthbert’s Church. The other window is of Christ the Good Shepherd. It’s the window nearest to the pulpit in St. John’s Church. In St. Cuthbert’s it’s the central panel of our great east window behind the High Altar. I could simply ask you to look at these windows, ask why they are there and why they are placed where they are. What do they say to us? What do they say to you?

We’re in the midst of a period of national mourning following the death of Her Majesty the Queen. It’s a time of sorrow, but also yesterday we had the solemn celebration of the Proclamation of our new monarch, His Majesty King Charles III. Sorrow goes together with new hopes and expectation. We have a new Government as well, a new Prime Minister entering into office only two days before the reign of our new King began. Politicians get a bad press, often deservedly, and whatever they do people will argue over. That’s why it’s good that we have a Head of State – the King, and before him, the Queen – who can lead the nation in a way that is beyond political wrangling and controversy. Monarch and Prime Minister, Head of State and Head of Government, both need our prayers. But it’s the Crown – King or Queen – who can unite the people of our nation.

That’s why it’s good that each of our churches has its window of Christ the King – what does it mean to call him that? And good that each points us to Christ the Good Shepherd also – the one who cares for the flock, who calls us his people.

So much of the news coverage following the Queen’s death has been about the encounters which individual people have had with the Queen. I said at the time of her Platinum Jubilee that 45 years after it happened I still find myself most moved by the occasion I saw her in my home town of Hartlepool – not in the distance with the dignitaries and crowds as she opened the Civic Centre; but as she drove out through one of the poorest and most deprived estates, and stopped her car to open her window and take from a little girl a ragged posy of flowers that she’d picked. We’re touched most profoundly when someone reaches out to us. And this was the nation’s monarch reaching out to a little child who was sobbing because her parents had told her not to be so stupid as to think she could give those flowers to the Queen. She’d noticed this small child and she stopped her limousine and slowed the royal progress.

Yesterday’s Proclamation of the new King was very much about ceremony and protocol. They’re important because they make things happen – and we see that they have happened. So it can be all the more telling when something disrupts the protocol. I still remember hearing the surgeon, David Nott, speak of a meeting he had with the Queen. He’s a senior vascular surgeon, but for years he has given his time to work as a doctor in the most war-torn and needy countries. He’d been working in Aleppo in the midst of all the violence inflicted upon the residents of that city by the Syrian regime. It left him traumatised and his mental health had suffered. When he came home he received a letter inviting him to meet the Queen for lunch at Buckingham Palace. In his words:

So I did, and of course it was only a week after I'd come back from this carnage, and the contrast between the carnage and the beauty of Buckingham Palace was just a bit too much for me to cope with.

And then not only that, sitting next to the Queen was something I couldn't cope with, I really couldn't.

I suddenly was unable to speak, I didn't know what to say to her, it was very difficult. I felt I just wanted to get out. I wanted to run.

And she was very nice and she understood this.

She looked at me quizzically and touched my hand. She then had a quiet word with one of the courtiers, who pointed to a silver box in front of her. I watched as she opened the box, which was full of biscuits. ‘These are for the dogs,’ she said, breaking one of the biscuits in two and giving me half. We fed the biscuits to the corgis under the table, and for the rest of lunch she took the lead and chatted about her dogs, how many she had, what their names were, how old they were. All the while we were stroking and petting them, and my anxiety and distress drained away.

‘There,’ the Queen said. ‘That’s so much better than talking, isn’t it?’

It was quite remarkable. I felt like she was like my mother and of course she's the mother of the nation and she looked on me as someone who needed help immediately.

With the image of Christ the King we need that reminder that he is also the Good Shepherd, the one who is prepared to leave the flock to seek out the single lost sheep. 99 sheep would be enough, but he goes out of his way to find the one which has gone astray. Jesus is the one who can sit at fine meals with the lawyers and religious leaders, but who also has a place for the tax-collectors: ‘This fellow welcomes sinners and eats with them.’ This Jesus has a place for us.

What more can we say? St. Paul, in his first letter to Timothy calls Jesus, “the King of the ages, immortal, invisible, the only God, to whom all honour and glory are due for ever and ever.” But he knows, as well, that this is a King who reaches out to us, who wants us to find our place among his people: “The saying is sure and worthy of full acceptance, that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners – of whom I am the foremost.”

That, says Jesus, is because “there will be more joy in heaven over one sinner who repents than over ninety-nine righteous persons who need no repentance.” And if we haven’t had an invitation to lunch at Buckingham Palace, then remember that in this Eucharist Jesus invites us to eat and drink with him at his table. The bread and wine we take to the altar are given back to us as his Body and his Blood. They’re given to us by the one who reaches out to the lost sheep, who welcomes sinners and eats with them.

Eucharist for the Birthday of the Blessed Virgin Mary - 8 September

The Revd Martin Jackson presides at this Eucharist from St. Cuthbert's Church, Shotley Bridge.

Parish Eucharists on Sunday 11 September are at 10.30am in St. Cuthbert's Church and at 4pm in St. John's Church, Castleside.

Eucharist from St Cuthbert's Church - Feast of the Curé d'Ars

Eucharist from St Cuthbert’s Church - the Revd Martin Jackson presides at a live-streamed celebration of the Feast of St. John Vianney, the Curé d'Ars.

And we warmly welcome you to Eucharists on Sunday 7th August at 9am in St. John's Church, Castleside and at 10.30am in St. Cuthbert's Church, Shotley Bridge.

How should I pray?

 Trinity 6 - Year C – Eucharist – 24.vii.2022 

(Genesis 18.20-32; Colossians 2.6-19; Luke 11.1-13)

Today’s Gospel reading addresses that most basic of questions: “How should I pray?” And Jesus gives two answers. The first is simply a prayer you can use… and it’s the Lord’s Prayer. The second answer is an encouragement to go on praying, be persistent just as you’d go on asking for something you really need.

 “How should I pray?” It’s a basic question for us as Christians, but it gets asked as well by people who might never call themselves “religious.” It comes when you feel that need to pray. It was brought home vividly to me as an undergraduate nearly 50 years ago, when a fellow student described a nightmare he’d had. He wouldn’t have described himself as religious. But he left a lasting impression on me. He’d try to wake up from his dream, and as he tried he found himself wanting to say the Lord’s Prayer, but he couldn’t remember the words. And part of the nightmare was whether he couldn’t actually remember the words or whether he couldn’t remember the words because he was in such a terrible state. How do you begin to pray? And the dream was right - you can make a start with the Lord’s Prayer… And that’s where he’d been overcome with fear, because the nightmare was that he couldn’t even make a start with that prayer.

You might think that praying the Lord’s Prayer is basic. It is! But I’m afraid we can’t rely on people to know it. I tell couples who want to produce an order of service for their wedding that we’ll be saying the Lord’s Prayer in its familiar traditional form. But then I have to advise them that they can’t count on people joining in unless they print it. When we get to the point of saying the Lord’s Prayer at funerals these days I suspect that many people are not joining in quite as confidently as we used to expect. At school assemblies I’m pretty sure that I can’t count on all the children to know it, and we live in a culture now where it’s pretty difficult to expect that we have the right to teach it. In any case - as I sometimes say at Baptisms - shouldn’t parents have taught it to their children before they get to school? I hope they will. We need to treat prayer as central to Christianity - and when Christians start praying, they start with the Lord’s Prayer.

Whether or not people in general today know the words of the Lord’s Prayer shouldn’t be a matter for recrimination with them. As Christians we need to start by asking, “how do I pray?” Do I take the time and trouble to pray? Do I pray every day? Do I even get round to saying the Lord’s Prayer sometime each day?

We need a desire for prayer. Jesus teaches the disciples to pray when one of them comes and asks to be taught. Do you want to pray in the first place? Why should you want to pray? The disciples want to learn how to pray because they’d seen other people pray. They knew that John the Baptist had taught his disciples how to pray - so now they want to learn how they should pray as disciples of Jesus. Is there something for us to learn there? What can we learn from other religions and the people who practise them? The psalms which we share in the Jewish scriptures say, “Seven times a day will I praise you, O Lord,” but how many Christians manage once? Against this we know that Muslims take seriously their call to prayer five times a day - they know what their faith requires and they act upon it. So perhaps we should ask, “teach me as a Christian to pray, even as I see my neighbours who happen to be Muslim pray!”

But there’s something more. It’s not just that the disciples see other people praying. They see Jesus pray. The disciple who asks, “Teach us to pray,” does so when he’s with Jesus – at a time when Jesus had gone, we’re told, to “a certain place” with the definite intention of praying. It’s when Jesus has finished praying that the disciple makes his request. That’s a reminder to us that to pray is to learn what it is to be Christ-like. Jesus prays, and we can pray and grow with him. By prayer we can grow to be like him. The first word of the prayer Jesus gives his disciples tells us that prayer is a shared calling with Jesus: “Father…” When we address God, we address him as Jesus addressed him. God is our Father, and Jesus is our brother in prayer.

 “Our Father…” We speak to God as a member of our own family - or rather we come each as a member of his family, and we come to him as the one we expect to listen to us. There’s a familiarity in the way we address God which distinguishes Christian prayer from that of other religions. Jesus uses the prayer, calls God his Father, and we are let in on the same terms. But then there’s that second phrase, “hallowed be thy name.” We’re invited to recognise the holiness of God. Prayer is not a matter to be taken for granted, and God is not to be taken for granted. If there’s one quality above all that is deficient in the life of the Church today it’s a sense of holiness. Religion is not just to cheer us up. It’s not about wielding our moral strictures wildly against people with whom we don’t agree. It’s not even about having faith in the face of adversity. It’s not about feeling “spiritual.” It is about a sense of the sacred. Unless we recognise a holiness which comes from God and to which we may aspire, we remain earth-bound and dragged down by the very issues which we need to address in our prayer.

Turning to prayer is not about being an escapist. “Thy kingdom come, thy will be done…” is to be our prayer. Prayer for the coming of the Kingdom is prayer that God’s will and purpose be revealed. His will and purpose are to be made real in the world which we inhabit here and now. We need to want what God wants, and prayer can show us the way. Prayer is not about God keeping us safe. Prayer entails confronting those issues which might seem to deny the reality of God’s power. Natural disaster, war, poverty, injustice. Widespread fear, violence, the millions of refugees fleeing their own countries. None of this is God’s will. When we address these things in prayer, then we know that we are beginning to look at the world with his eyes.

And that’s only to make a start. We want to pray that we may see as God sees, but we need to start somewhere. Abraham’s prayer for the people of Sodom might seem to be fruitless, but perhaps he needs to do all that arguing with God so that he can understand the situation for the first time. And Jesus tells those who will listen that prayer at its most simple is about asking. “Ask, and it will be given to you; search, and you will find; knock, and the door will be opened for you.” Anyone who has had a cat knows something about this. The most frequently made request in any household with a cat is miaow. Invariably your cat will turn up on the wrong side of a door or window. And her miaow is a sort of prayer: let me in; let me out; feed me; brush me; stroke me. Jesus says that our prayers are answered in the way that you give in to the friend who bangs on your door in the middle of the night asking for help - even if you don’t want to, you’ll get up because of your friend’s sheer persistence. Cat owners know about that - don’t let them in the room they want to enter and they’ll tear up your carpet; don’t let them in or out at unearthly hours and they’ll keep you awake with their aptly named caterwauling. But while they demand your attention they might just have to learn that they can’t always get what they want. And so it is for us. It may not be that prayer will bring what you expected - but to find out you need to begin by asking, seeking and knocking at the door.

Very few of us manage to get our lives of prayer worked out as well as we might hope. That’s why some sort of structure helps. Someone just the other day was saying that the best practical reason for praying early in the morning is that if you don’t get your prayers started then you’ll probably find them squeezed out by everything else that comes up in the course of the day. 8.30a.m. is the time we’ve used for years whenever we have managed to have Morning Prayer in St. Cuthbert’s Church, and we’ve followed the prescribed Bible readings and a cycle of prayers to follow. For me one of the positive things to come out of the Pandemic has been the move to shared online prayer – wherever you are, you can join in with Durham Cathedral or St. Martin-in-the-Fields every weekday at 8.30am through their Facebook pages – and other times besides. Just turn up! Prayer depends not on our enthusiasms and whims but upon discipline, which involves the right use of time, a structure, content (Psalms, Bible readings, shared prayer), and - like Jesus in today’s Gospel - being “in a certain place.”

And always prayer should be more than we expect. Start out on the discipline of prayer and new elements of prayer emerge. Perhaps in our prayer as a congregation we need to do that. We expect prayer for the sick and the departed - quite rightly, though there are certain issues about what qualifies you for the sick list and how you get taken off it! But what about other areas of life? What about those for whom we don’t regularly pray: those who’ve been baptised here, those preparing for marriage or trying to get through or over a bad one… issues which it doesn’t occur to us have a place in our prayers.

There’s a lot there for any of us to address. But it all stems from the simple resolution to make a new start in prayer. And we can do that by taking seriously the invitation which Jesus makes to use that prayer he gives us, “Our Father”… and to ask, search and knock on the door.

Eucharist from St Cuthbert's Church

The Revd. Martin Jackson presides at the Eucharist in St. Cuthbert’s Church - with a midweek congregation and using readings for the Daily Eucharist, but we offer this also as our online service for Sunday 17 July.

And we reflect particularly on Jesus' invitation: ‘Come to me, all you who labour and are overburdened, and I will give you rest. Shoulder my yoke and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. Yes, my yoke is easy and my burden light.’

Living in the Abundance of God…

 

I’m writing just after the weekend in which we had a parish celebration marking the 40^th Anniversary of my ordination to the priesthood. I still feel rather overwhelmed. Thank you for so many greetings and good wishes, cards, messages and gifts. I was quite taken aback when I opened the envelope which was put into my hand at the end of the Eucharist and can only thank all who contributed for your generosity – as yet the very special gin remains unopened!

There was so much went into the preparations. Thanks to all who were involved in catering, setting up the marvellous exhibition (and finding the material used!), in cleaning, decorating and flower-arranging. And those amazing cakes! I’m honoured by the bell-ringers’ “Date Touch” with the 2022 changes on the bells. Speeches which left me lost for words. And for the service, thanks to organist and choir, and to our servers – back in action for the first time since the beginning of 2020, and ready to keep the clergy right!

The service was, of course, a Eucharist – not my offering but ours. It was tremendous to have so many people in church (and mixing afterwards). It might have been my 40^th anniversary of Ordination – but a priest is nothing without the people who make up the Church. The singing, the prayer and the sharing in Holy Communion tell of what it is to be the Body of Christ and the People of God. For many of us it was perhaps the biggest act of worship we’ve been involved in since before the pandemic.

And here, I think, was a reminder of the direction we might now take. For two and a half years we have had to scale things down and to distance ourselves – not least from each other. Things have got smaller and our expectations have been reduced. As at last we were able to do something on a bigger scale – both in worship and in the party that followed – here was a reminder that our faith should not be one characterised by scarcity but one which is lived in the knowledge of God’s abundant provision. Sam Wells, Vicar of St. Martin-in-the-Fields in London sums it up like this:

“God gives his people everything they need to worship him, be his friends, and eat with him.”

These are words to take to heart: God gives us everything we need; we have only to recognise the fact. I’ve just come from a planning meeting as we seek to re-launch Messy Church. Do we have the resources to do so? And I found myself quoting someone who said that a church which has the desire and faith to undertake a particular task already has in place at least 80% of what it needs. We might be conscious of things we lack, but the generosity of God and the celebration in which we can share tells us there is something more.

Stanley Hauerwas drew from what Sam Wells says when he spoke to seminarians training to be priests at Nashotah House, USA – and these are words which may speak to us all:

It is true that you will often find it hard to see any result from the work you have done. Even worse, you will sometimes see what you have worked hard to accomplish dismantled by those who come after you. But this is God’s work. It is work that is impossible to sustain if we do not trust in God’s determination to love us. God’s building is built of small acts of kindness and tenderness that are themselves all the results we should desire. For as Sam Wells suggests, God is a God of abundance who has given us all we need. We are not in a zero-sum game. Your life will not be wasted, because you have been made part of God’s abundance.

My thanks again for all you have shared with me as we travel together as God’s people.

Martin Jackson