Thinking allowed

Last Sunday after Trinity: 26 October 2025

on Sunday, 26 October 2025 at 8.13 pm by Simon Kershaw
categorised as sermon

Read­ings: Joel 2.23–32; Psalm 65; 2 Timothy 4.6–8, 16–18; Luke 18.9–14

‘The tax-col­lect­or, stand­ing far off,
would not even look up to heaven,
but was beat­ing his breast and saying,
“God, be mer­ci­ful to me, a sinner!” ’

In the name of the Fath­er and of the Son and of the Holy Spir­it. Amen.

Back in the 1670s, when Charles II was king,
the heir to the throne was his broth­er James.
An Itali­an prin­cess, Mary of Modena,
was chosen to be his wife,
a Roman Cath­ol­ic, like James.
But it seems that the pope was opposed to the marriage,
so they sought the help of Car­din­al Barberini
and he per­suaded them to marry immediately.
It would be, he advised,
“less dif­fi­cult to obtain for­give­ness for it after it was done,
than per­mis­sion for doing it”.¹

Car­din­al Barber­in­i’s advice
has become some­thing of a proverb,
espe­cially in recent years, has­n’t it?
It’s easi­er to ask for­give­ness (after the event)
than to get per­mis­sion (before).

And the tax col­lect­or in today’s gos­pel reading
cer­tainly seems to have his eye on for­give­ness, does­n’t he?

So what are we to make of this?

Jesus is telling a story about two characters,
one a Phar­isee, and the oth­er – a tax-collector.
Now if you’ve been hearing
bible read­ings and ser­mons for some time
you’ve prob­ably already got some ideas,
some preconceptions,
about Phar­isees, and about tax-col­lect­ors.

Phar­isees –
well, they’re always arguing with Jesus, aren’t they?
And full of them­selves and their strict rules.
And as for tax-collectors,
I sup­pose we know instinctively
that they’re not par­tic­u­larly nice people,
don’t we?
After all, who likes the taxman
even in our own society?
Most of us prob­ably think we pay
at least a bit too much tax,
and the taxman
– not to men­tion Chan­cel­lors of the Exchequer –
often seems to be try­ing to take a bit more.
(But per­haps I’ll leave a dis­cus­sion of
the Brit­ish tax sys­tem for anoth­er occasion!
Back to first-cen­tury Judea.)

We can see in the gospels
that Jesus does seem to have
some­thing of a soft spot for tax collectors.
We read about Levi or Matthew
being taken from the tax office to be a disciple,
and about little Zac­chaeus climb­ing a tree
to see and hear Jesus,
and then host­ing a ban­quet for him.

These are per­haps typical
of the atti­tudes we might bring
to a dis­cus­sion of this parable.
But they are not, I suggest,
what Jesus’s imme­di­ate hear­ers would have thought.
Most likely they would have con­sidered a Pharisee
to be a par­agon of virtue,
instruc­ted in the law,
the bib­lic­al law,
someone to be esteemed and copied.

And as for a tax-collector …
well, it wasn’t just that he took people’s money;
no, the real prob­lem with tax collectors
was that they were col­lab­or­at­ors,
col­lab­or­at­ors with the Romans,
the hated occupy­ing power.
If we think what the atti­tude was
to Nazi col­lab­or­at­ors dur­ing the War, say in France –
after the War many were lynched,
killed by the mob or executed by the state.
That per­haps gives us an idea
of what the Judeans and Galileans listen­ing to Jesus
might have thought about tax collectors!

And yet Jesus, in this parable,
says it is the tax col­lect­or who is closer to God.

Now, we’re com­ing towards the end
of a three-year cycle of bible readings
at our Sunday morn­ing services,
and over that three years we have heard
a lot of Jesus’s parables.
And one thing that comes across to me
is Jesus’s skill at using just a few words
to con­jure up in our imagination
a situ­ation and some characters –
and then to turn it all on its head
and shock his listen­ers with a sur­pris­ing outcome.
It’s one of his favour­ite devices,
a favour­ite way of teach­ing and telling stories.
And I’m sure he preached this way
in part to get his hear­ers to think for themselves.

And Jesus delights in chal­len­ging stereotypes,
both pos­it­ive ste­reo­types and neg­at­ive stereotypes.
So, a couple of weeks ago
we heard about the Samar­it­an leper,
a hated foreigner,
who was healed.
And in this read­ing today
it is the godly Phar­isee who is roundly criticised,
and the hated tax collector
of whom Jesus speaks approvingly.
You can almost hear people in the crowd
mut­ter­ing to one another
“What does he mean?
How can a tax col­lect­or, an enemy col­lab­or­at­or, be good?”

And if we look care­fully at the pas­sage in the gospel,
then one of the inter­est­ing things
is that actu­ally Jesus does not con­demn the Pharisee
for the things that he says he has done,
for his self-dis­cip­line and his charity.
He doesn’t con­demn the Phar­isee for that;
and nor does he con­done the tax collector
for what he has done either.
Now in almost the next epis­ode in Luke’s gospel,
we learn about anoth­er tax col­lect­or, Zacchaeus.
And Zac­chaeus, hear­ing Jesus’s teaching,
declares that he will return over­pay­ments with interest,
and give away half what he has to the poor.
But there is noth­ing like that here.
Jesus keeps this story
short, sharp and pointed.

Because today’s parable
is not primar­ily about
the eth­ics of either the Phar­isee or the tax collector,
but about their attitudes:
their atti­tudes to themselves,
their atti­tudes to others,
and their atti­tudes, above all, to God.

Per­haps one of the key words we heard
was when Jesus says that
the tax col­lect­or returned home … “jus­ti­fied”.
“Jus­ti­fied”.
What on earth is that about?
Well, “being jus­ti­fied” and “jus­ti­fic­a­tion”
are words that carry a lot of theo­lo­gic­al baggage.
They cause debate and divi­sion among Christians
and between sec­tions of the Church.
But ulti­mately it’s about being fit and worthy,
being made fit and worthy,
fit and worthy to stand in the pres­ence of the Almighty.

What Jesus seems to be saying
is that we do not earn that justification
by what we do.
Now, don’t get me wrong.
Else­where in the gospels,
Jesus spends a long time
teach­ing about right behaviour,
about caring for others,
about look­ing after the weak and the poor
and all who are in need,
regard­less of who they are
or where they have come from,
or soci­ety’s atti­tude towards them —
the poor, the hungry, the homeless,
the sick or disabled,
the pris­on­er, the refugee,
the oppressed and the shunned.

That work is very clearly a gos­pel imperative,
and Jesus makes it abund­antly clear
that in help­ing those in need
we are help­ing … Jesus,
we are help­ing … God.

Instead, in today’s reading,
Jesus reminds us
that in order to come close to God
we need to acknowledge
that we … are not gods,
that we … are not in con­trol of the world:
that we need to stop and to be honest.
To be hon­est with my-self.
To con­front my own faults, my own issues.

In the story,
the Phar­isee’s problem
is that rather than recog­nising his own faults,
he prefers to see him­self as bet­ter than someone else.
The tax col­lect­or, on the oth­er hand,
does not com­pare him­self to others,
but humbly recognises
that he has not done the right things.
And it is that recognition
which should be the start of a jour­ney for him,
and which should be the start of a jour­ney for each of us.
Per­haps the epis­ode of the tax col­lect­or Zacchaeus,
just a few verses later,
indic­ates what should fol­low that ini­tial recog­ni­tion of fault –
a whole new way of life …
new life in the king­dom of God.

[short pause]

And a final thought or conundrum
for us to consider.
I won­der if you have spotted
the “Catch 22” in the parable.
Have you?
It’s all too easy, isn’t it,
to find ourselves thinking
“I thank you that I am not like … that Pharisee”?
Because when we do that
then we are being just like the Phar­isee in the par­able, aren’t we?

“God, be mer­ci­ful to me, a sinner!”

0 Comments

Trinity 16: 5 October 2025

on Monday, 6 October 2025 at 9.22 am by Simon Kershaw
categorised as sermon

Read­ings: Lam­ent­a­tions 1.1–6; Psalm 137; 2 Timothy 1.1–14; Luke 17.5–10.

In the name of the Fath­er and of the Son and of the Holy Spir­it. Amen.

“We are worth­less slaves;
we have done only what we ought to have done!”
Some words from Jesus in the gos­pel read­ing we have just heard.

Well I was in Lon­don dur­ing the week,
and I happened to be walk­ing from
West­min­ster Abbey to Lam­beth Palace,
when I spot­ted an inter­est­ing monument
on the Embank­ment at Millbank
that I’d nev­er noticed before.
It’s a 19th-cen­tury fountain,
a big covered drink­ing fountain,
dec­or­ated with poly­chro­mat­ic brick or stone,
and it’s called, as I discovered,
the Bux­ton Memorial.

It com­mem­or­ates a num­ber of Mem­bers of Parliament
who led the 19th-cen­tury campaigns
first
to abol­ish the slave trade
and then
to abol­ish slavery itself.

And our gos­pel read­ing today
presents us with an “inter­est­ing” situation,
don’t you agree?
In that second half, Jesus talks about slaves,
and per­haps you found it a bit uncomfortable.

So, hands up if the idea of slavery
makes you uncomfortable –
the idea … of being a slave,
the idea … of own­ing slaves,
the idea … of trad­ing slaves.
Slaves – that’s … oth­er human beings.

Most of us here – with a few exceptions –
prob­ably don’t con­sider ourselves
to have any dir­ect link with slavery –
we aren’t des­cen­ded from slaves,
and we prob­ably aren’t descended
from slave-own­ers either,
though of course
we might still have benefitted
from insti­tu­tions and investments
that derive from slavery.

I guess there are one or two excep­tions among us,
and plenty of oth­ers in our town
and else­where around us,
and we can­’t talk about slavery
without being sens­it­ive to that
and to the impact it has had
on our friends and their families.
I’m sure that that per­son­al stake makes a difference
to how today’s gos­pel read­ing is heard,
and speak­ing for myself
per­haps I find it too easy
not to worry that much about it.

Nor should we for­get that there are people in this country,
prob­ably people here in St Ives,
who are involved in “mod­ern slavery”:
people who are exploited and kept in bondage;
people who exploit oth­ers and keep them in bondage.

Hav­ing said all that, however,
I want to make two quick points – about Jesus.
First, let’s be abso­lutely clear:
there is no indic­a­tion at all
from any­thing we read in the New Testament
that Jesus or his family
or any of his imme­di­ate associates
ever owned slaves.
There are no slaves at his birth in Bethlehem,
and no slaves tend­ing to him in the gospels.
When Jesus vis­its his friends Mary and Martha,
it is fam­ously Martha
who is busy with domest­ic chores,
not a slave.

And the second point
is that Jesus isn’t set­ting out
to over­turn the insti­tu­tion of slavery
as it exis­ted in the ancient Medi­ter­ranean world –
not in the short term anyway.
That was for later generations –
though he clearly envisaged
a dif­fer­ent way of treat­ing everyone,
regard­less of wheth­er they were slave or free.

So what are we to make of all this?

Well yes­ter­day
I was licensed by the bishop
to be a lay reader,
a licensed lay minister
in this parish.
And being a min­is­ter is also about being a servant.
You see, the word min­is­ter comes to us from Latin
and its first use was in the second century
to refer to dea­cons.

That’s because the word dea­con
comes from the Greek word διάκονος²,
which simply means “ser­vant”,
per­haps espe­cially someone
who waits at table.
It wasn’t long before “min­is­ter”
came to be used of all clergy –
not just dea­cons, but priests and bish­ops too,
(even archbishops-designate)
and also of the less­er orders
such as sub-dea­cons and readers,
all of whom are servants …
ser­vants of God.

And Jesus makes this point sev­er­al times, doesn’t he?
In one of the week­day readings
from Morn­ing Pray­er last week,³
Jesus reminds his disciples
that the rulers of the Gentiles
lord it over them
and that the great ones of the Gen­tiles are tyrants.
But his dis­ciples, Jesus says,
his dis­ciples are to be ser­vants;
and he mixes the lan­guage of ser­vants and slaves
say­ing that
“who­ever wishes to become great among you
must be your ser­vant⁴,
and who­ever wishes to be first among you
must be slave⁵ of all”.⁶

This same story appears also in Luke’s gos­pel⁷
only there it has an extra punchline –
“who is great­er,” asks Jesus,
“the one who is at the table
or the one who serves?
Is it not,” Jesus says, “is it not the one at the table?
But I,” he answers him­self, “I
am among you as one who serves”.
And there’s a ver­sion in John’s gos­pel too⁸.
There Jesus concludes
by telling the disciples
that just as he has served them,
they are to serve one another.

Just as he has served them,
they are to serve one another.

So let’s come back
to the words in today’s gos­pel reading:
“We are worth­less slaves;
we have done only what we ought to have done!”
In our context,
in the twenty-first century,
we might well see Jesus’s words
as a little harsh,
and for some
a pain­ful reminder
of the slave trade.

But let’s para­phrase those words a bit;
how about this?
“Our role as Christians,
as fol­low­ers of Jesus and his teaching,
our role is to serve others,
to look after others,
to help others.
That’s what God asks us to do.”

We may be able to serve a lot;
or we may only have the capa­city at the moment
to serve a little;
or maybe right now
we are among the ones who need to be served.

But it is this humble ser­vice to others
which is at the heart of Jesus’s message
of com­pas­sion and recon­cili­ation.
It is the role of ordained ministers
(even of an archbishop-designate);
it is the role of licensed lay ministers;
it is the role of all of us who hear the words of Jesus.
To serve … God;
to serve … each other;
to serve … the whole of creation.

Because we stand today at a crossroads.
Of course, we stand each day at a crossroads,
the junc­tion between the past and the future;
the past behind us,
known, or partly known;
the future before us, largely unknown.
For me, right now,
that cross­roads is defined by
my licens­ing yes­ter­day in the Cathedral,
my licens­ing as a lay minister
to serve in this parish.
But we each of us stand at a crossroads.
We don’t know what the future will bring,
indi­vidu­ally or collectively,
for us or for our parish.
But what we do know is that
every day
Jesus calls us, each one of us,
to serve.
To serve one another,
to serve our community,
to serve the world.

So, finally once again:
“We are worth­less slaves;
we have done only what we ought to have done!”

Now Jesus is prone to hyperbole.
He loves to exag­ger­ate for effect,
to grab attention.
And we can see that here.
Some­times we need sup­port and affirmation.
At oth­er times we need tak­ing down
a peg or two.
(Well I do anyway.)
But Jesus’s mes­sage is
a call to serve.
I am, he says, among you as one who serves.

So in the days ahead
I invite you
to take a few moments to think about
what you can do to serve;
what we as fol­low­ers of Jesus
indi­vidu­ally and collectively
can do to serve:
to serve God’s world
and to serve God’s people,
to serve them here in St Ives.

Amen.

Note: at the end of this ser­vice it was announced that the Vicar would be leav­ing in Janu­ary. Some of the “unknown future” text was writ­ten with this in mind.

 

0 Comments

Holy Cross Day (with baptism): 14 September 2025

on Sunday, 14 September 2025 at 9.05 pm by Simon Kershaw
categorised as sermon

Read­ings: Num­bers 21.4–9; Psalm 22.23–28; Phil­ip­pi­ans 2.6–11; John 3.13–17

Have you noticed
how fly­ing flags
has become so pop­u­lar this summer?
Even if you haven’t seen any yourself,
well, it’s been all over the papers and the tv news,
hasn’t it?

Here in St Ives there are flags
flut­ter­ing from lamp-posts in the town centre,
and plenty more adorn­ing bed­room windows.
If you go fur­ther afield
you’ll see them strung along bridges across the motorway
and so on.
Or you might have seen more than a few flags
being car­ried through the middle of Lon­don yesterday.

And of course
they’re not fly­ing just any old flag are they?
They’re either fly­ing the Uni­on Jack,
or per­haps more likely
the flag that’s part of the Uni­on Jack –
the flag of St George.

I’m sure we can all pic­ture that flag:
the white back­ground with a red cross on it.

So, I want to think for a minute –
what does that cross mean?
What does it represent?

Well, one place where you’ll find quite a lot of crosses
is here in this church.
There’s a really big cross,
right up there.
Take a look!
It’s per­haps the most prom­in­ent feature
of the inside of the building.
Because the cross is the primary sym­bol of Christianity.
So much so that it has its own spe­cial day each year –
Holy Cross Day,
cel­eb­rated year after year on the 14th of September.

Today!

And yet it’s a strange thing to celebrate,
if you think about it.
After all, the cross is an instrument
of tor­ture and death –
that’s what’s going on up there, isn’t it? –
and a sim­il­ar sym­bol in our own soci­ety might be
a hang­man’s noose perhaps.
Don’t you think it’s rather shock­ing to cel­eb­rate that?
It cer­tainly ought to be shocking;
it ought to bring us up with a start.

The cross is a sym­bol of the death of Jesus.

And the death of Jesus
is an event of supreme significance.
You see, when Jesus died on that cross,
he died (just as he had lived),
pro­claim­ing … forgiveness,
pro­claim­ing … reconciliation,
pro­claim­ing … God’s love for everyone.

Jesus in his life and ministry
had told his listeners
that what he called “the king­dom of God” was at hand –
the abil­ity to live without hate, without selfishness,
but with love and compassion.
For those we agree with, yes –
and also towards those we don’t.

Because for­give­ness and compassion
are the mes­sage of the Cross,
of Jesus on the Cross.
Jesus’s mes­sage isn’t about condemnation –
what was that line
in today’s gos­pel reading?
“God did not send [Jesus] into the world
to con­demn the world,
but in order that the world might be saved through him.”

For­give­ness and compassion.

We know that for­give­ness and compassion
aren’t always easy.
But Jesus on the Cross teaches us
that for­give­ness and compassion
are the way to end … hatred,
the way to end poverty,
the way to end violence.
And even, yes,
even the way to end the polit­ic­al assassinations
and school shoot­ings that we see in the news.
For­give­ness and compassion.

The mes­sage of the Cross,
embod­ied in that red cross
on the flag of St George and the Uni­on Jack,
is one of rad­ic­al inclu­sion and rad­ic­al hospitality.
It lives “in the words we choose,
the causes we defend,
the way we treat one anoth­er.”⁹
Wouldn’t it be wonderful
to think that this is the message
that is shared by those
who are put­ting up flags in our streets?

Or do they want it to symbolize …
exclusion?

But back to Jesus:

in his death on the Cross
Jesus brought that king­dom, God’s king­dom, into being.
Now some­times you’ll see a cross
with the fig­ure of Jesus
not naked and suffering,
but in roy­al robes and crowned –
Jesus Christ,
“lif­ted up” (as our gos­pel read­ing just said)
lif­ted up and reign­ing from the cross.

That image is a theo­lo­gic­al state­ment of course,
and it reminds us that his suf­fer­ing and death lead …
to the hope of resur­rec­tion and new life,
a new life where we are able
to set aside
the powers and tempta­tions that lie all around us
and even with­in us,
the things that make us selfish –
and instead to live,
here, now,
in God’s king­dom of good­ness and love.

You see,
God invites each one of us,
you and me,
to make that choice,
that per­son­al commitment,
to try and live that new life.

And that leads me on …

Because
we are also here today
to cel­eb­rate, to cel­eb­rate a baptism,
the bap­tism of little N.
And a bap­tism is always an occa­sion for celebration.
When it’s a baby being baptized
it’s a won­der­ful opportunity
to cel­eb­rate the birth of that new life,
a new child into a family,
and I’m sure N’s fam­ily
are def­in­itely going to have
that cel­eb­ra­tion a bit later.
We all love a party and we all love a baby!

And of course bap­tism is so much more
than an excuse for a party.

You see,
at bap­tism we enter a new life
as we become a mem­ber of the Church,
a mem­ber … of God’s family.
First, the per­son being bap­tized makes some promises.
Or if it’s a baby or small child like N today,
the par­ents and godparents
make these prom­ises on N’s behalf.
They prom­ise to try and live in God’s way,
rather than the way of the world:

to try and live in love and hope
and to reject the influ­ences and ideas
that want so hard
to drag us back to the world we know so well,
the world of selfish­ness, envy and jealousy,
pre­ju­dice and hate.

And the cross plays a sig­ni­fic­ant part in the bap­tism service.
We’ll see in a few moments
that Fr Mark will trace a small cross on N’s fore­head,
anoint­ing her with oil,
and then invite her par­ents and godparents
to trace that cross on her forehead
with their own thumbs too.

Because
all Chris­ti­ans are marked with the Cross.
Or per­haps I should put that the oth­er way round:
the Cross marks us.
The Cross marks us out
as people who try –
people who try … to fol­low Jesus,
who was lov­ing and compassionate.
And who cared for every person,
espe­cially for those in need.
N, if your par­ents and godparents
remem­ber and teach you that,
then you’ll be doing okay.

A new life is a won­der­ful thing.
And a new Christian,
a new mem­ber of the Church,
is a won­der­ful thing too.
I pray N
that as you grow
you will be full of love and compassion,
someone in whom all can see
the true mark of the Cross.

Amen.

0 Comments

St Peter and St Paul: 29 June 2025

on Sunday, 29 June 2025 at 5.22 pm by Simon Kershaw
categorised as sermon

Read­ings: Acts 12.1–11; Psalm 125; 2 Timothy 4.6–8, 17, 18; Mat­thew 16.13–19

May the words of my mouth
and the med­it­a­tion of my heart
be accept­able in your sight, O Lord.

I won­der if you’ve ever been to Rome.

It’s some­where I’ve been sev­er­al times,
and one of the things I have done each trip
is vis­it the Vatican
and climb up the dome of the great basilica there.

It’s a bit of a slog,
some 500 steps to the top,
but when you get up there
you are rewarded
with some won­der­ful pan­or­amic views across the city.

And you can also access the gallery
that runs around inside the dome.
From there
you get some really impress­ive views of the interi­or.

One thing you can see close up, for example,
is a Lat­in inscription
that runs full-circle around the dome.
In giant let­ter­ing it begins: “Tu es Petrus …”.
I’ll come back to these words in a moment.

But first
– if you’re not too bothered about the height –
per­haps you can look straight down.
It’s a rather dizzy­ing couple of hun­dred feet
but there beneath you
is the high altar,
with its great bal­dachino or can­opy by Bernini.

And right in front of that altar
there’s a semi-circle of steps
lead­ing fur­ther down,
down beneath the floor of the church.

Now these steps aren’t access­ible to the public.
But if you could go down them,
and under the high altar,
you’d find yourself
stand­ing among the remains
of an ancient Roman cemetery.

Because those steps take you down
to the site of the tomb of St Peter.
Of course, the church we see today
was com­pletely rebuilt
some 4 or 500 years ago,
in the flam­boy­ant baroque style.
But they rebuilt it
on exactly the same site
as the pre­vi­ous church,
with the high altar
in exactly the same place as before.

That first church had been built
over a thou­sand years earlier,
in the 300s,
as soon as Chris­tian­ity had been legalized.
It was built
– with con­sid­er­able difficulty –
right on top of this ancient Roman cemetery;
and awkwardly,
on the side of a hill;

Cross sec­tions through St Peter’s. [From The Tombs of St Peter and St Paul, by Engle­bert Kirschbaum, 1959]

Interi­or elev­a­tion of St Peter’s show­ing also the floor level of the Con­stantini­an basilica, and the nec­ro­pol­is or buri­al area beneath. [From The Nec­ro­pol­is under St Peter’s Basilica in the Vat­ic­an, by Pietro Zander, 2009]

all care­fully positioned
so that the high altar
was dir­ectly over
one par­tic­u­lar tomb^*.

And next to this cemetery
there had been an arena,
the Cir­cus of Nero,
and that’s where many early Christians
had been put to death,
accused by Nero
of caus­ing the great fire of Rome.

Peter him­self was among those executed,
said to have been crucified
– cru­ci­fied upside-down accord­ing to tradition.
Paul was a Roman cit­izen though,
so he was spared crucifixion
– he was beheaded
(and buried)
else­where in the city.
Oth­er Chris­ti­ans were roun­ded up
and put to death in the arena:
torn apart by wild beasts,
or forced to fight to the death as gladiators,
burned alive,
or killed in some oth­er bar­bar­ic Roman spectacle.

And it is
this first great persecution
– the mar­tyr­dom of Peter and Paul and many others –
that we are remem­ber­ing today.
It is those mar­tyrs, Peter, Paul and the others,
that we commemorate
and hold in great honour.

It was prob­ably around the year 64,
so just 30 years or thereabouts
after Jesus had walked around Galilee
and come to Caesarea Philippi.

And we heard a bit about that
in today’s gos­pel reading.
Peter,
Simon Peter,
at Caesarea Philippi
acclaim­ing Jesus as the Messiah.
You can sort of ima­gine him blurt­ing it out, can­’t you?
The first per­son to put into words
what he, and per­haps others,
had been thinking.

And Jesus recog­nizes the leap that Simon Peter has made.

This is when Jesus gives him the nickname:
“Rock”, which of course is what “Peter” means.
“You are the rock,”
he says to him
– “you are Peter”.
Remem­ber that inscrip­tion around the dome at the Vatican?
This is the verse that it quotes, in Latin:
“Tu es Pet­rus”, “you are Peter”.

And in the 30 years or so
since that moment at Caesarea Philippi,
first Peter, the rock, and then Paul
had built the early church
from tiny beginnings
to some­thing that was start­ing to be noticed
– even in the heart of the Roman Empire.

Because these Chris­ti­ans were a bit different
from your every­day Roman.
They did­n’t join in things
that good Romans were sup­posed to do,
like … sac­ri­fi­cing at the temples,
or con­sid­er­ing the emper­or to be a god.
And although a few of them were wealthy,
many were slaves or ex-slaves
or very def­in­itely among the poor and oppressed.

Because it was often among
the poor and the oppressed
that Peter and Paul
and others
preached the good news of the king­dom of God.
“Blessed are the poor, the hungry,
the sick, the persecuted”
Jesus had said
– that’s def­in­itely good news when you are poor and oppressed.

Per­haps this mes­sage of hope
(and – dare I say it? –
social revolution?)
was already caus­ing a stir in Roman society.
There must have been some­thing they were doing
that attrac­ted the atten­tion of the rul­ing class
– of the Emper­or Nero,
when he was look­ing for someone to blame
for that dis­astrous fire.

And I won­der to what extent
this mes­sage of hope
– and social revolution –
can still cause a stir in our mod­ern society.
Or have we made it so bland,
or so other-worldly,
that it simply does­n’t impinge
on the thoughts of our fel­low citizens?
Most of them have not just giv­en up believing,
they have even giv­en up dis­be­liev­ing
– they just don’t care.

But as Christians
it is our job to care.

Peter and Paul,
as we have heard,
were mar­tyrs,
a Greek word mean­ing wit­nesses.
In their life
and
by their death
they and oth­ers were witnesses:
wit­nesses to the recon­cil­ing love of God,
wit­nesses to the good news
of the rule of God that Jesus had proclaimed.

And just like Peter, just like Paul,
we too are witnesses.
We are God’s witnesses
here in St Ives in 2025.
We are the ones
tasked with rep­res­ent­ing God –
rep­res­ent­ing God
to the world in which we live.
We are the ones
who are called to bear witness
to what God has done in our lives.
To bear witness
to what Jesus means in our lives.

Now I trust and hope that none of us
will be called to bear witness
in the face of per­se­cu­tion and viol­ent death.
So we will not be martyrs
in the way that the word is used nowadays.
We will not be mar­tyrs like Peter and Paul.
But we can be God’s witnesses
among our friends and family,
our acquaint­ances and colleagues,
and those we meet.
Does that sound a daunt­ing task?
Well, maybe it does, yes!
So, let’s start with something
any of us can do.

Let’s think for a moment.

Do you have a ready answer
when someone asks
what do you do on a Sunday morning?
Do you have a ready answer
when someone asks why do you go to church?
Do you have a ready answer
if someone asks you about Jesus?

If I’m hon­est, I’m not sure I do.
So my chal­lenge to each one of us is this:
find time this week to spend a few minutes
con­sid­er­ing how you would answer those questions
– in just a short sen­tence or two.
How you might answer those questions
in a way that encour­ages engage­ment and fur­ther interest.

And little by little,
per­son by person,
we will,
like Peter and Paul
and all the saints before us,
help to build God’s kingdom
here on earth
as it is in heaven.

Amen.

---

* This is a slight over-sim­pli­fic­a­tion. In the first Church, as ori­gin­ally built under Con­stantine, the tomb was vis­ible. It was Gregory the Great (in about 594) who raised the floor of the sanc­tu­ary by sev­er­al feet and placed the altar over the tomb. That altar was at a level sev­er­al feet below the floor of the rebuilt basilica that we see today.

 

 

 

0 Comments

Ascension Day: 29 May 2025

on Friday, 30 May 2025 at 11.14 am by Simon Kershaw
categorised as sermon

Read­ings: Acts 1.1–11; Daniel 7.9–14; Psalm 47; Eph­esians 1.15–23; Luke 24.44–53

May the words of my mouth and the med­it­a­tion of my heart
be accept­able in your sight, O Lord.

Did you ever watch I, Claudi­us?
Or per­haps you’ve read the books?
I sup­pose I was about 15 when I first read them,
shortly before the BBC made that won­der­ful adaptation.
Remem­ber – Derek Jac­obi in the title role,
and a host of oth­er stars?
I well recall our Lat­in teach­er back then
telling us that the books were so good
that occa­sion­ally he would forget
wheth­er some incid­ent was actu­ally historical
or had instead been inven­ted by the author, Robert Graves.
And cer­tainly Graves did include
a host of real his­tor­ic­al inform­a­tion in the books.

For example, Graves relates
that a few weeks after the emper­or Augus­tus died in AD 14,
the Roman Sen­ate declared him to be divine.
They built an offi­cial state temple,
and spe­cial coins were minted
show­ing the emper­or being car­ried up to heaven,
per­haps in a chariot,
accom­pan­ied by wing’d figures.

So you see there’s some history
of great rulers being declared gods
when they died
or even whilst still alive.

And a few years after Augustus,
around AD 40,
the emper­or Caligula declared him­self a god.
Claudi­us was next,
declared divine imme­di­ately he died in 54.
Even his neph­ew, the infam­ous Nero
who ruled until 68,
was wor­shipped as part of the divine imper­i­al family.

I’ve men­tioned these dates,
not to try and give a his­tory lesson
– there’s no exam later –
but because they remind us
that this is exactly the time
when the events of the New Test­a­ment took place
and when much of it was written.
This is the context
in which Jesus was first pro­claimed by Christians
as the Son of God,
and described as being taken up into heaven.
We might well won­der what the rela­tion­ship is
between the descrip­tions of Jesus’s ascension
and the tra­di­tion of emper­ors and others
taken up to a pagan heaven.

Let’s think about what we heard earli­er in our readings.

The Old Test­a­ment les­son from Daniel draws on traditions
sev­er­al hun­dred years before those Roman emperors,
Claudi­us and Co.
It’s a vis­ion of a human figure
“com­ing with the clouds of heaven”,
com­ing to the throne of God and receiv­ing etern­al kingship.
Clearly Jesus’s ascen­sion sits in this tradition.

And we also had two accounts of that Ascen­sion of Jesus.
Our ser­vice began with the open­ing words of the Acts of the Apostles.
It’s rather the defin­it­ive account,
the one we think of when the Ascen­sion is mentioned.

And our gos­pel read­ing had the ascen­sion story again,
this time from the very end of Luke.
Did you notice any dif­fer­ences between these two –
one from Acts and one from the gos­pel accord­ing to Luke?

Did you?
Because they aren’t quite the same.

In the gospel
the Ascen­sion hap­pens at the end of East­er Day itself,
but in Acts it’s forty days later,
just as today is forty days after East­er Day –
remem­ber I said it’s the Acts account we gen­er­ally recall?
And it’s only in Acts that
“two men in white robes” appear
and explain to the dis­ciples what’s happened,
telling them Jesus will return in the same way.

Now don’t for­get Claudi­us and those oth­er emperors.
I’ve sug­ges­ted that the New Test­a­ment descrip­tions of Jesus’s ascension
have a parallel
in the con­tem­por­ary Roman emper­ors being declared divine.
But at the time, of course,
the stor­ies of emper­ors were much bet­ter known
than the story of Jesus.

Whatever it was that the dis­ciples witnessed,
what they are doing is assert­ing a cult
that is a rival to the offi­cial cult of the Roman state.
A cult, a reli­gion, in which their leader
mys­tic­ally ascends into the heav­ens in recog­ni­tion that he is divine.
And of course the dis­ciples, the early Christians,
assert that it is their story which is true,
and that the divin­ity of the emper­ors is bogus.
They use the well-known stor­ies about emperors
to pro­claim the truth about Jesus.

So what is it that they are try­ing to say?

Let’s con­sider two import­ant things.

First
these early Chris­ti­ans were abso­lutely con­vinced that Jesus was divine.
They hadn’t yet worked out the theo­lo­gic­al details,
but there’s no doubt that they had become con­vinced it was true.
They want the world to hear about Jesus;
and
they want the world to hear
that Jesus is divine.

And secondly:
what do the pas­sages say?
“you will be my wit­nesses in Jer­u­s­alem …  to the ends of the earth”
(that’s Jesus in Acts)
and “repent­ance and for­give­ness of sins is to be proclaimed …
to all nations, begin­ning from Jerusalem”
(that’s from Luke).
And this is surely the key les­son for us.
You’ve heard me say it before
and I make no apo­logy for say­ing it again.
The task that Jesus gives his disciples
is to tell every­one the good news about the king­dom of God.
We are to tell people about our hope:
hope in the recon­cili­ation that is God’s love –
hope in recon­cili­ation with God the creator
and
recon­cili­ation with God’s cre­ation, with all our fel­low creatures.

Recon­cili­ation with God the creator
and recon­cili­ation with our fel­low creatures.

What does that mean in prac­tice? What can we each do?

It means liv­ing at love and peace
with our fam­ily and our neighbours,
not get­ting into dis­putes, not bear­ing grudges
– “for­give us our sins as we for­give those who sin against us” –
and this applies to every aspect of our lives:

to per­son­al conflict,
to loc­al and region­al conflict,
to inter­na­tion­al conflict.
And it applies to issues of social justice as well:
to equit­ably shar­ing the bounty of this world –
food, hous­ing, healthcare,
fair employ­ment and fair wages,
end­ing unjust discrimination.
And to our stew­ard­ship of the world that we are called to live in.
It isn’t always easy, is it?
But all this flows directly
from Jesus’s mes­sage of love and reconciliation.

This is Jesus’s mani­festo of com­pas­sion­ate love.

What any one of us can do
may be quite limited,
but it isn’t zero.
In our per­son­al lives,
in our sup­port for char­it­ies, for campaigns,
in how we shop,
how we vote or sup­port polit­ic­al parties,
in how we speak and how we act,
we each of us make
a small but sig­ni­fic­ant impact.

And one final thought.
We’re not alone.
Church is the com­munity of people com­mit­ted to doing this together.
Here should be the primary community
where we care for each other,
and where we are strengthened for that ser­vice in the world,
strengthened by each other
and strengthened by our belief
in the God who loves and reconciles.
Col­lect­ively we help advance the king­dom of God,
where God’s love and com­pas­sion are shared with all,
and peace and justice flow like a river.

Amen.

0 Comments

4 before Lent: 9 February 2025

on Monday, 10 February 2025 at 11.07 am by Simon Kershaw
categorised as sermon

Read­ings: Isai­ah 6.1–8 [9–13]; Psalm 138; 1 Cor­inthi­ans 15.1–11; Luke 5.1–11

May the words of my mouth and the med­it­a­tion of my heart
be accept­able in your sight, O Lord.

Over the last few weeks,
since the start of January,
we’ve been listen­ing each Sunday
to stor­ies about the begin­ning of Jesus’s ministry.
How Jesus was bap­tized by John the Baptist;
and about the wed­ding at Cana,
where ordin­ary water was turned into abund­ance –
an abund­ance of the best pos­sible wine.
We heard how Jesus came to Nazareth
and him­self read the passage
where Isai­ah foresees
good news for the poor and the oppressed,
for the blind and the captive.

And today we have Jesus
gath­er­ing his first disciples.

In Luke’s account,
which is what we are mostly read­ing this year,
this is the first time Andrew, James and John have appeared,
though Simon Peter gets
a teensy men­tion in the pre­vi­ous chapter.
And yet they do exactly what Jesus says.

What’s going on?

Luke does­n’t really tell us,
but we can get a hint from John’s gospel.
You see, John tells us
that Andrew was a dis­ciple of John the Baptist;
that when Jesus was baptized
John the Baptist poin­ted him out to Andrew,
and Andrew then went and fetched his broth­er Simon Peter
and intro­duced him to Jesus.
Anoth­er dis­ciple with Andrew is not named,
but it is tra­di­tion­ally thought to have been John –
that’s the same John who was one of the fishermen
in today’s story,
the broth­er of James.

So it seems Jesus already knew these four fishermen,
Andrew and Simon Peter, James and John.
But they had not yet begun to travel around with Jesus.
What changed?

Well,
what changed
was that John the Baptist had been arres­ted by Herod
and was now a cap­tive in Herod’s dungeons,
where he would soon be executed.
Can you ima­gine what it must have been like
for those who had flocked to hear him preach
and become his disciples?
It must have been a dark and dif­fi­cult time, mustn’t it?
Well, the gos­pels don’t tell us anything
about what happened to John the Baptist’s followers
when he was arrested –
but it’s easy to ima­gine, I think, that they all ran away,
away from the danger that they too
might be iden­ti­fied with his movement
and his cri­ti­cism of Herod.
Away from the danger
that they too might be arres­ted and per­haps put to death.
That they ran away
back to the anonym­ity of their homes
and their fam­il­ies and their every­day jobs.

And that’s where we find
Andrew and Simon Peter, James and John –
back in their fam­ily busi­nesses of catch­ing fish
and no doubt try­ing to keep a low profile.

And then – Jesus comes back too.

Per­haps he’s real­ized that his time has arrived:
that with John the Baptist silenced
it is his turn to pro­claim the word of God,
to pro­claim the good news about the king­dom of God.
And already people are listen­ing to him:
Luke, in our read­ing today,
says “the crowd was press­ing in on him”.
Why?
Luke tells us they wanted “to hear the word of God” –
Jesus preach­ing about the king­dom of God.

And in this mêlée,
there right in front of Jesus
are some people he knows:
Andrew and Simon Peter, James and John.
Was he look­ing for them?
Or did he just come across them?
What he saw though was an opportunity
to stop the crowd press­ing in on him
and to con­tin­ue to teach from the safety of a boat,
pre­sum­ably just out in the shallows.

And then
they put down their nets
and catch fish –
fish in great abund­ance,
fish almost bey­ond their capa­city to bring to shore.

And this mira­cu­lous catch of fish
provided the per­fect opportunity
for Jesus … to tell a joke.
To me that’s one of the things
that comes across so strongly
in the gos­pel stor­ies about Jesus.
He was just the most won­der­ful speaker –
a really skilled orator.
Jesus knows when to tell a story and when to argue;
he knows when to cross-ques­tion and when to debate;
and he knows how to use
exag­ger­a­tion and sar­casm and humor­ous one-liners
to great effect.

And that’s what he does here, isn’t it?
“Yes, you can carry on catch­ing dead fish,” he says,
“or you can come with me and we’ll fish for liv­ing people.”

Of course it’s not just a one-liner –
the punch­line to the teach­ing about the king­dom of God
they have just heard him deliver,
or the punch­line to the great catch of fish
they have some­how just man­aged to land.
No, it’s not just a one-liner,
it’s also a proph­ecy, isn’t it?
Because we know that’s exactly what these fishermen,
these ordin­ary people,
will become.

They start right here
becom­ing Jesus’s first disciples.
They will fin­ish,
bey­ond the end of Luke’s book,
bring­ing in a mira­cu­lous catch of people,
fol­low­ers of Jesus in great abund­ance.
They were frightened fishermen
who had run away
when John the Baptist had been arrested,
and they would do so again when Jesus is arrested.
And yet
Jesus inspired them and nur­tured them
and gave them what it takes
to be catch­ers of people,
mira­cu­lously so,
fear­lessly pro­claim­ing the king­dom of God’s abund­ant love.

Here we see the very first steps of that journey,
Jesus gath­er­ing together
this group of John the Baptist’s disciples,
who become the core of Jesus’s own disciples.
And it’s a jour­ney that has continued
down the ages and across the world,
right down to us,
to you and to me,
here today in this place
far from the shores of the Sea of Galilee.

Because it is our respons­ib­il­ity now.
We are the dis­ciples sit­ting on
– if you like –
the beach.
We are the disciples
who have heard Jesus’s mes­sage about the king­dom of God –
where the hungry are fed and the home­less housed,
the sick nursed and the stranger cared for,
the oppressed and the per­se­cuted set free,
and where peace and reconciliation
replace bit­ter­ness and war.

And our job,
our job is to share this good news,
to live as people who believe this good news
and to invite our friends and our neighbours
to come and live it
and to share in its great abund­ance.

Thanks be to God.

 

0 Comments

Harvest Thanksgiving: 6 October 2024

on Sunday, 6 October 2024 at 3.55 pm by Simon Kershaw
categorised as sermon

Read­ings: Joel 2.21–27; Psalm 126; 1 Timothy 6.6–10; Mat­thew 6.25–33

May the words of my mouth and the med­it­a­tion of my heart
be accept­able in your sight, O Lord.

Har­vest Festival.
Do you remem­ber cel­eb­rat­ing Har­vest Fest­iv­al as a child?

I can recall as a young school­boy what a big occa­sion it was.
We’d line up in class,
and then our cro­codiles would march down to the vil­lage church,
half a mile away,
each clutch­ing a bag of apples or tin of baked beans
or some­thing else that our moth­ers had giv­en us to take.
We’d sing one or two har­vest hymns
and depos­it our produce.
The rect­or would say a few words and some prayers,
and then we’d traipse back to school.

It’s a memory of quite a long time ago,
over half a cen­tury for me,
and obvi­ously made a bit of an impres­sion on the young Simon.
But what I can say is that
I didn’t really make much of a con­nec­tion with real life.

I mean, “Fair waved the golden corn”
didn’t seem to have very much to do
with buy­ing food from the butcher
or the green­gro­cer or fishmonger –
let alone from the supermarkets
that were just begin­ning to appear in our town.

Not until I was a good deal older did I begin to understand.

And there’s a clue to help us understand
on the front of today’s ser­vice booklet.

You see, the Church actu­ally calls this
not “Har­vest Fest­iv­al” but “Har­vest Thanks­giv­ing”.

Not “Har­vest Fest­iv­al” but “Har­vest Thanks­giv­ing”.

What’s in a word, you might ask?
Well, quite a lot perhaps.

You see, rather than celebrating
our own clev­erness and skill
and the things that we’ve made at a fest­iv­al,
what we are doing is giv­ing thanks:
giv­ing thanks for the good things that enable us to have …
(well) life.

At har­vest that’s par­tic­u­larly thanks that we have food –
enough food for the com­ing year so we will not starve.
And thanks that for us
that’s actu­ally a pretty remote possibility
– at least I hope it’s pretty remote –
but coupled with concern
that for many around the world
(and indeed in our own country)
not-enough-food is a very real prospect.

And that’s where I think our read­ings this morn­ing are tak­ing us.
In the Old Test­a­ment, Joel reminds his hearers
that God provided for the anim­als of the field
and for the trees bear­ing fruit.
And sim­il­arly for his people God will provide plenty.
And Jesus in the gos­pel reading
makes a sim­il­ar point, does­n’t he?
That God provides for the birds of the air
and for the flowers of the field.
And, Jesus says, in God’s king­dom we too will be provided for.

Jesus tells his hearers
‘Do not worry, say­ing, “What will we eat?”
or “What will we drink?”
or “What will we wear?” ’
Instead, Jesus’s instruc­tion, as we heard this morn­ing. is this:
‘Strive first for the king­dom of God and his righteousness,
and all these things will be giv­en to you as well.’

How does that work, do you think?
How will we be provided for?

I think it comes back to thankfulness
and to remem­ber­ing how the king­dom of God works.

So here’s a little exer­cise for us all …
You’ll remem­ber that in the gospels
Jesus tells us that the king­dom of God is near, it’s at hand.
I want us to think a little about that.
When, I won­der, do you think
we come closest to liv­ing in God’s kingdom?

Do you ever think about that?
Let’s just take a few moments to con­sider it now:
When do you think we come closest to liv­ing in God’s kingdom?

You might want to think about this on your own,
or you might want to turn to the per­son next to you
and share ideas.

When do you think we come closest
to liv­ing in the king­dom of God?

… [[pause for a few brief moments, per­haps 10 seconds;
if people start talk­ing to each oth­er give them a bit longer]]

Okay, how did you do?
Now you can find out
wheth­er your thoughts are any­thing like mine!
Because I reck­on there’s actu­ally quite a simple answer –
though I’m not say­ing it’s neces­sar­ily easy to put into practice!

In the gos­pels Jesus tells us
that we approach being in God’s kingdom …
whenev­er we do God’s will –
when we do God’s will here on earth as it is done in heaven

And that means shar­ing the things that God has giv­en us:
shar­ing our food,
shar­ing our wealth,
shar­ing our skills and our knowledge,
shar­ing our time and our energy.
And shar­ing God’s peace.

Of the good things that God has giv­en us
we give back the first fruits.
As God is gen­er­ous to us,
so we have the opportunity
to be gen­er­ous with all that we have.

In God’s king­dom, you see,
every­one bene­fits from generosity –
from God’s gen­er­os­ity to all creation …
and from our gen­er­os­ity to one another.

Jesus calls us to con­sider what we can give –
what we can give back to God,
and what we can give to one another.

So, as we give thanks today at harvest,
we do well to remember
that God calls us to share
the good­ness, the bounty,
that we have been given.

That’s not just good food,
but also things like peace and security,
hous­ing and per­son­al dignity.

This year in St Ives,
Fath­er Mark and Cal­lum have been helping
some of our loc­al schools and oth­er organizations
give thanks at harvest
and to bring gifts that will go to the St Ives foodbank.
For their gen­er­os­ity we can be very grateful.

And we too:
as we bring our gifts
and lay them before God at the altar,
as we give our time and our tal­ents and our wealth,
we are shar­ing God’s love
with some of those in our community
who des­per­ately need it.
And as we love our neigh­bours who are in need,
as we are gen­er­ous to them,
so too we are lov­ing Jesus.

Because – make no mistake –
It is when we serve the least of these
our broth­ers and sisters …
it is then that we serve Jesus.

It is then that we come near to the king­dom of God.

Thanks be to God.

0 Comments

Trinity 7: 14 July 2024

on Wednesday, 17 July 2024 at 8.46 am by Simon Kershaw
categorised as sermon

Read­ings: 2 Samuel 6.1–5, 12b-19; Psalm 24; Eph­esians 1.3–14; Mark 6.14–29

May the words of my mouth and the med­it­a­tion of my heart be accept­able in your sight, O Lord.

When I came to pre­pare this ser­mon, two themes stood out.

First, John the Baptist and my “rela­tion­ship” with him.
I’ll come back to that in a moment.

The oth­er theme from our read­ings is …

Well … it’s dancing!

Dav­id dan­cing before the Ark;
Salome dan­cing before Herod.

Now it’s a bit of a co-incidence
that they are paired here together:
we’ve been hear­ing the story of David
over the last few weeks,
and we just hap­pen to arrive at this episode
as the gos­pel gets to this inter­lude in Jesus’s ministry.

But I expect lots of you watch tv pro­grammes about dancing –
Strictly Come Dan­cing anyone?
So per­haps you’re ima­gin­ing Dav­id and Salome
as celebrity con­test­ants in Strictly.
There’s Dav­id, king of Israel,
stripped down to a “lin­en ephod”
whatever that is,
but it def­in­itely sounds a bit scanty doesn’t it?
Dan­cing, ooh, the quick­step, perhaps.

And the prin­cess from Galilee, Salome,
(though she is called Hero­di­as
in our bible trans­la­tion this morning) –
young and attractive,
dan­cing some­thing a bit raunchy, a tango, maybe.
In pop­u­lar mod­ern culture
it’s the dance of the sev­en veils,
though that was only inven­ted by the writer Oscar Wilde –
the bib­lic­al text lacks the eroticism
which we might ima­gine into the story.

As for David,
the eph­od that he wore was a priestly garment –
knee-length, open at the sides, belted at the waist –
per­haps a bit like the vestment
that a dea­con some­times wears, a dalmatic.

But back to John the Baptist.
I have, as I men­tioned, a bit of a his­tory with John.
It’s get­ting on for 40 years since Kar­en and I moved here –
and when not serving, I’ve usu­ally sat some­where over there:
right by Comper’s statue of John the Baptist.
But long before that,
from when I was born,
I went to a church ded­ic­ated to John the Baptist:
I was a choir­boy and then a server,
and I was formed as a young Christian.

Now that church was a great Vic­tori­an barn of a place,
big­ger than here.
And one fea­ture I remem­ber vividly
was a set of three big win­dows at the east end,
behind and above the altar.

In the lower part of each window
there’s a scene from the story of John the Baptist,
and above each of them a par­al­lel scene
from the story of Jesus.
So the left win­dow depicts the Nativ­ity of Jesus,
a manger with a shep­herd and wor­ship­ping angels,
while below are scenes from Luke’s account of John’s birth.

And the bot­tom of the centre window
shows the story we have heard today.
There is Salome dancing –
fully and demurely robed I hasten to add.
There is John
kneel­ing before the exe­cu­tion­er wield­ing his sword.
There is a man open­ing a door,
pre­sum­ably bring­ing in the head of John,
though that hor­ror isn’t shown.

So, why do the win­dows pair these scenes?

Well John was an import­ant fig­ure to the gos­pel writers,
and all four of them include him in their stories.
He’d been the major fig­ure in what we might call
a reli­gious revival,
and crowds had flocked to see him,
a bit like some Billy Gra­ham rally perhaps.
Among them came Jesus.
Are the gos­pel writers a little embar­rassed about this?
About Jesus being bap­tized by John?
About Jesus per­haps play­ing second fiddle to John?
They want us to understand
that from their point of view,
from our point of view,
John was pre­par­ing the way for Jesus.

The first read­ers and hear­ers of Mark’s account
must have included people
who had been fol­low­ers of John,
who per­haps had come out to the Jordan and been baptized,
but maybe had had little involve­ment with Jesus.
The gos­pel writer wants these people to see
that Jesus is con­tinu­ing John’s proclamation:
repent­ance and new life.

But Jesus brings a new twist to the proclamation.
John had preached repentance
as pre­par­a­tion for the arrival of God’s kingdom.
But Jesus pro­claims that God’s king­dom has arrived already,
here, now:
Jesus’s fol­low­ers – you and me –
can repent
and move from the ways of this world
and live instead in the king­dom of God,
where the hungry and poor,
the troubled and the dispossessed
are lif­ted up
and people are reconciled
with each oth­er and with God.

And there’s a second mes­sage from today’s gospel.

Fol­low­ing Jesus isn’t always easy.

It can be hard to lift up the lowly
and be recon­ciled with others,
and some­times oth­ers don’t want to be reconciled,
some­times people don’t want the lowly lif­ted up,
per­haps because they like to have people to lord it over
or to exploit.
Some­times there are hard consequences.

Cer­tainly there are hard con­sequences for John –
that’s the story we have heard today:
John is con­demned and executed by Herod.
And soon Jesus in his turn
will be con­demned and executed
on the orders of Pon­ti­us Pilate
and with the con­niv­ance of this same Herod –
and of oth­ers who are challenged
by the idea of God’s rule, God’s kingdom.
In death, as in life,
John is the fore­run­ner of Jesus.

And this is what can be seen
in the middle win­dow at my old church:
above the pan­el with the behead­ing of John,
we see the Crucifixion.
Jesus pays the ulti­mate price of love and reconciliation,
put to death by the Roman governor
on charges brought by the Temple leadership,
a con­spir­acy between the rulers of this world
to attempt to defeat … love.

And there’s one more win­dow to look at.
The third win­dow at my child­hood church
reminds us of one more thing.
It shows, in the bot­tom, the end of today’s story:
John’s dis­ciples come and carry away his body
and place it in a tomb.
It is the end for John.

But the upper sec­tion of the window
shows a very dif­fer­ent scene.
The fol­low-up to the death of Jesus
is the empty tomb,
the burst­ing from the grave,
the defeat of death.
The tri­umph of hope.
That is to go bey­ond the story we have heard today, with the mes­sage of Jesus:
Love con­quers all.

You see,
John had proclaimed
that the end of the world was coming,
and people needed to repent.
And John had been killed and buried.

Jesus, though, pro­claims some­thing new:
not the end of the world,
but the end of the age,
and a new age
where God’s will is done on earth as it is in heaven.
And Jesus too is killed and bur­ied … and …
rises to new life.

And that’s what we see in the last of the windows,
that sim­il­ar­ity-and-dif­fer­ence between John and Jesus.
John bur­ied; Jesus resurrected –
resur­rec­ted to new life,
life in the new age where God’s will is done.

As we heard Paul remind us in his let­ter to the Ephesians –
Jesus’s death on the Cross
recon­ciles us to God and also to one another.
And Jesus’s resur­rec­tion brings us
to share in life in God’s kingdom.
Right here and now.

So,
unlike John, we are Jesus’s fol­low­ers.
But, like John,
our role does include pre­par­ing the way for Jesus:
pre­par­ing the way for Jesus
in the hearts and lives of those around us.
John’s life – and John’s death –
remind us that this might not be easy
but the example he sets
is one of bold­ness in telling the truth
and in pro­claim­ing the gospel,
the good news that, in Jesus,
the king­dom of God is among us.

Let us each con­sider this week
how we might begin
to pre­pare the way to Jesus
for just one person.

Amen.

0 Comments

Easter 2: 7 April 2024

on Sunday, 7 April 2024 at 4.04 pm by Simon Kershaw
categorised as sermon

Read­ings: Acts 4.32–35; Psalm 133; 1 John 1.1 – 2.2; John 20.19–31

Alle­lu­ia! Christ is risen!

Foot­ball – are you a foot­ball fan?
I know some of you are, even if you do sup­port odd teams.
And per­haps, like me,
you sit and watch Match of the Day every Sat­urday night.
There was a game on the pro­gramme a week ago,
and the high­lights of the first half were very brief –
almost noth­ing to show.
But the second half was very different:
full of action as the two teams
(Shef­field United and Fulham)
shared six goals in a thrill­ing 3‑all draw.
It had been, the com­ment­at­ors and pun­dits noted,
a real game of two halves.

“A game of two halves” is some­thing of a foot­ball cliché –
and it’s also a good sum­mary of our gos­pel read­ing this morning.

We heard how, in the first half,
Jesus appeared to the disciples,
on the even­ing of the first East­er Day.
But Thomas wasn’t there,
and he didn’t believe the oth­ers when they told him;
no, he wanted to see for himself.

And Thomas wasn’t afraid of express­ing his doubts.
Their teach­er dead and bur­ied – and now alive again?
“Well, I’ll believe that when I see it!”
And you know what?
I reck­on that’d be the reac­tion of most of us.

And a week later we get the second half:
Jesus appears again and says,
“Here I am; you didn’t believe it was me;
well look, here are my wounds;
go on, touch them.”

And you may have noticed that the gos­pel doesn’t say
that Thomas did touch Jesus
or put his hand in the spear-wound on Jesus’s side.
No!
When he sees that Jesus is present
Thomas’s doubt is overcome
and he imme­di­ately exclaims
“My Lord – my God!”

Alle­lu­ia! Christ is risen!

Here are our two halves:
in the first half Thomas doubts Jesus;
and in the second half Thomas recog­nizes Jesus.

So, first, Thomas doubts Jesus.

I don’t know about you,
but I find that believ­ing in Jesus still leaves room for doubt.
Hav­ing doubts doesn’t mean that faith is lacking.
Doubt is a nat­ur­al aspect of our faith.
It is nat­ur­al to question,
to think,
to wrestle with uncertainties,
and to seek understanding.
Doubt can deep­en our faith rather than weak­en it.

That’s because doubt isn’t the oppos­ite of faith:
doubt is the com­pan­ion of faith,
the oth­er side of the same coin.
My faith in Jesus isn’t about certainty;
it’s about trust.

Faith in Jesus,
belief in Jesus,
means that we place our trust in him.
That’s the prom­ise that was made at our baptism –
“do you believe and trust in God,
Fath­er, Son and Holy Spirit?”

And trust is about hav­ing con­fid­ence in someone,
pla­cing our reli­ance on them,
know­ing that they will always be there,
there to help us.
Ulti­mately, Thomas did place his trust in Jesus.
And when we believe and trust in Jesus
we too know we can rely on him,
even when we doubt.
And we can know that what Jesus says is trustworthy.

Alle­lu­ia! Christ is risen!

And after the doubt, what does Thomas do?
He recog­nizes Jesus.

Recog­niz­ing people is one of the fun­da­ment­al things
that we do as human beings.
Thomas recog­nized Jesus,
and we too have the oppor­tun­ity to recog­nize Jesus,
to recog­nize the pres­ence of Jesus.

And although there are a num­ber of such occasions,
I want to sug­gest just a couple of times and places
when we can par­tic­u­larly recog­nize that Jesus is with us.

So one place we might find Jesus
is when we read the bible,
and espe­cially when we read the four gos­pels that tell Jesus’s story.

When we tell the story of Jesus,
when we tell the stor­ies about Jesus,
when we tell the stor­ies that Jesus told –
then some­how Jesus is present with us in the telling.

And fore­most among those occasions
is when we gath­er on a Sunday morning
and hear some of that story read,
some of that story proclaimed.

It’s a bit of the ser­vice we mark with spe­cial solemnity:
we stand (if we are able),
we sing “Alle­lu­ia” as an acclamation,
we carry the gos­pel book in procession
and turn to face the reader,
we burn incense and sol­emnly cense the book,
and we make a sign of the cross.
The book is lif­ted high for every­one to see.

All these little signs point to the import­ance of this moment –
that as we hear the story of Jesus,
the story Jesus told,
then still Jesus is alive here among us,
as he was when his first hearers,
people like Thomas,
gathered around him on the hillside,
or beside the lake,
in the mar­ket place,
or at dinner,
and he spoke to them.

Alle­lu­ia! Christ is risen!

And anoth­er oppor­tun­ity for us to recog­nize the pres­ence of Jesus
is also here in this service.
We recog­nize the pres­ence of Jesus
as we break bread together.

Now “break­ing bread” is a turn of phrase,
an idiom.
It’s not just about lit­er­ally break­ing bread,
it’s the whole action of shar­ing a meal together.
And that’s what we are doing here.
Yes, okay, it’s become a sym­bol­ic meal –
a small piece of bread and a sip of wine –
but it is a meal that we share together,
a meal that we share because Jesus him­self told us to.
And told us to remem­ber him as we share it.

And as we share that meal,
as we break bread together
and remem­ber that Jesus died for us,
then we recog­nize that Jesus is here among us –
just as he was with Thomas and the oth­er disciples
when he broke bread and shared sup­per with them.

Alle­lu­ia! Christ is risen!

And Jesus tells us
that when we min­is­ter to those in need,
we are min­is­ter­ing to him:

• The home­less, the hungry, the destitute
• The refugee, the for­eign­er in our midst
• The abused or oppressed
• The sick, the lonely, the depressed,
  those suf­fer­ing from men­tal illness
• People we don’t like, people we’re sus­pi­cious of
• And … I’m sure you can think of oth­ers to add to this list.

And, you know, Jesus didn’t worry
wheth­er someone had paid their Temple taxes or not;
he didn’t worry wheth­er they were a woman or a man;
a slave or a slave-owner;
a faith­ful Jew or a Samaritan,
or even a cen­tur­i­on in the occupy­ing army.

Jesus bluntly tells us
that when we share God’s love
by min­is­ter­ing to someone in need
then we are min­is­ter­ing to him.
Here too we will find Jesus.

So I want to leave you with this thought for the week:

who will you recog­nize Jesus in?
Who will you min­is­ter to?
And who will you allow to min­is­ter to you?

Like Thomas,
may our encoun­ters with the ris­en Christ
trans­form us,
trans­form those around us,
and trans­form the world.

Alle­lu­ia! Christ is risen!

0 Comments

Advent 4: 24 December 2023

on Sunday, 24 December 2023 at 12.10 pm by Simon Kershaw
categorised as sermon

Read­ings: 2 Samuel 7.1–11, 16; Canticle: Mag­ni­ficat (Luke 1.46–55); Romans 16.25–27; Luke 1.26–38

“The angel Gab­ri­el was sent by God to a town in Galilee called Nazareth.”

In the name of …

Pre­quels.
Do you enjoy prequels?
Did you watch Endeav­our as a pre­quel to Morse?
Or per­haps The Phantom Men­ace and oth­ers as pre­quels to Star Wars?
And what about books?
As a teenager
I worked my way avidly through CS Forester’s Horn­blower novels,
read­ing them in story order,
and find­ing that all the earli­er books were writ­ten after the later ones.
The con­clu­sion of the story was already pre-determined –
Hornblower’s fail­ure to achieve this or that;
the death of … spoil­ers.
Much of this was fixed by throw-away lines in the later books that were already in print.

And today’s gos­pel read­ing is a sort of pre­quel as well.

What’s it a pre­quel to?
Well, we heard a couple of weeks ago
the start of the gos­pel accord­ing to Mark.
(Mark the evan­gel­ist, that is, not Mark the vicar.)
Mark’s account is very widely regarded as the first gos­pel to have been written,
and so there was a time,
a short time perhaps,
when it was the only gos­pel in existence.
Per­haps you can remem­ber from two weeks ago how it starts:

The begin­ning of the gos­pel [or: good news] of Jesus Christ, the Son of God[1]

and then it describes that beginning:
the preach­ing of John the Baptist,
and how Jesus arrives on the banks of the Jordan and is bap­tized by John.

So,
what was Jesus doing before the start of Mark’s account?
I think that’s a nat­ur­al ques­tion to ask.
And in the cul­ture of that time
it might not have been obvious
that he had been born,
or that he had grown from a baby to an adult man.

That’s a some­what bizarre thing to say, isn’t it? What do I mean?

Well,
ancient myth­o­logy is full of stor­ies that skip all that stuff.
Just one example
from the Roman poet Ovid,
who lived just a year or two ahead of Jesus and Luke.
His long verse col­lec­tion Meta­morph­oses includes such a tale –
how the immor­tal gods
Jupiter and Mercury
decided one day to pay a vis­it in dis­guise to the mor­tal world.
They are spurned by everyone
until they meet an impov­er­ished eld­erly couple,
Philem­on and Baucis,
who invite them in and cook them supper
from their own mea­gre resources,
and gradu­ally realize,
when the gob­lets of wine nev­er empty,
that their guests are divine.[2]

Now if you think this is far-fetched,
then have a look at the Acts of the Apostles, at chapter 14,
where in an echo of Ovid’s tale, Luke tells us that
Paul and Barn­a­bas are them­selves mis­taken for exactly the same two gods.[3]

So you can see perhaps
how the sud­den appear­ance of Jesus in the earli­est gos­pel account
as an adult acclaimed as God,
might also be open to misinterpretation.
That Jesus wasn’t really human,
but was a god in disguise.

Per­haps Luke was aware of speculation
about the ori­gin of Jesus and his early life,
but whatever the reason,
he gives us two whole chapters about Jesus
before get­ting to John bap­tiz­ing in the River Jordan
(where Mark had begun, remember?).

And here we are:
in the story it’s nine months before the birth of Jesus,
and Luke intro­duces us to Mary.
We don’t learn much about her though:
that she lives in Nazareth,
and is engaged to be married;
and via the angel that she is favoured by God,
and is related to Elizabeth,
who is her­self expect­ing a child –
that’s the boy who in adult­hood will become John the Baptist.
That’s pretty much all the story says about her.

And that’s because the story isn’t really about Mary.
It’s about Jesus.

The things that Mary says and does point us to Jesus.

The angel tells Mary she will have a son,
and that the Holy Spir­it will over­shad­ow her,
so that the child will be holy
and called “Son of God”.

Mary, then, will be the bear­er of God the Son,
and we can see our Old Test­a­ment read­ing as a par­al­lel to this.
King Dav­id wants to build a per­man­ent home for the ark of the Covenant,
the holi­est pos­ses­sion of the ancient Israel­ite people,
and regarded by them as the place where God dwelled.
But the proph­et Nath­an tells David
that it is not for him to build such a place,
that will come later;
but God will instead estab­lish David’s line for ever.
Two proph­ecies for the price of one!
First, because Luke traces Jesus’s own ances­try back to King David –
see­ing Jesus as ful­filling Nathan’s statement
that David’s line will reign for ever.
And secondly because
we have just heard how Mary will be the bear­er of God –
it is her womb that will house God: God the Son.

So what does Mary do?
In the verses imme­di­ately after our gos­pel reading
she legs it,
and seeks out her rel­at­ive Elizabeth.
And it is while she is with Elizabeth
that, Luke tells us, she praises God.
And earli­er in our ser­vice today,
we sang a ver­sion of the words Luke records:
“With Mary let my soul rejoice”.
(You might like to have the words in front of you now.)

This song, the Mag­ni­ficat, is not just a song of praise.
It’s also
a trail­er or teas­er for the story of Jesus,
for the story of Jesus’s mis­sion and teaching,
the story of Jesus’s pro­clam­a­tion of God’s kingdom,
God’s rule.

Because in the Mag­ni­ficat we can see par­al­lels with Jesus’s later teaching:

• In the syn­agogue at Naz­areth, for example, Jesus iden­ti­fies himself:
  “The Spir­it of the Lord is upon me;
  he has anoin­ted me to bring good news to the poor,
  release to the captives,
  recov­ery of sight to the blind,
  to let the oppressed go free.”[4]
• And in anoth­er place he teaches:
  “Blessed are you who are poor, [or] hungry, [or] who weep.
  But woe to you who are rich, you who are full,
  for you will be hungry.”[5]

These are the themes we have seen and sung in Mary’s Song,
and they are the themes that con­tin­ue through­out Jesus’s ministry:
lift­ing up the hungry and poor,
exalt­ing the humble and meek –
send­ing the rich away empty.
And in today’s gos­pel reading
we see them announced at the very start,
at the very moment that Jesus’s con­cep­tion is first revealed.
Even as Jesus is conceived
Luke tells us that this mes­sage is proclaimed.

So is Luke’s account a good prequel?
Well, it’s the pre­quel that
to much of society
is almost the only bit of the story they remember.
In that sense, yes, it’s a really good prequel.

And yet …

The world around us
is draw­ing to the end
of its annu­al orgy of extra­vag­ant spend­ing and extra­vag­ant consumption,
whilst all about we see:
poverty,
misery,
hatred,
war.
And though we shouldn’t begrudge people a bit of light and fun
and – above all – hope
in the midst of such difficulty,
nonetheless
our job,
our mission,
yours and mine,
is to make sure
that the rest of Jesus’s story is remembered too –
the pro­clam­a­tion of the good news that is the King­dom of God,
where the poor and the hungry,
the home­less and the refugee,
the war-ravaged –
all who suf­fer, the down­trod­den of society –
are raised up and satisfied,
and enemies are recon­ciled to each other.
And – our response should be to make that happen,
now, at Christ­mas time, yes – and also all year round.

Because all that is foreshadowed
in the news that we like Mary, heard today.

The good news
that the baby whose birth we are about to celebrate
saves us
and teaches us how to move
from lives gov­erned by the prince of this world
to lives gov­erned by the prince of peace.

Amen. Come, Lord Jesus.

 

[1] Mk 1.1 (NRSVAE)

[2] Ovid, Meta­morph­oses, Book VIII

[3] Acts 14.11, 12

[4] Lk 4.18,19 (NRSVAE)

[5] Lk 6.20–25 (NRSVAE), abbreviated

0 Comments