Thinking allowed

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.

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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.

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Stations of the Cross

on Friday, 4 March 2022 at 3.59 pm by Simon Kershaw
categorised as liturgical texts, liturgy, reflection

Sta­tions of the Cross is a tra­di­tion­al devo­tion for Lent, and espe­cially for Holy Week. It ori­gin­ated in Jer­sualem, where pil­grims would lit­er­ally walk along the route from the centre of the city to the tra­di­tion­al place of Christ’s exe­cu­tion, stop­ping en route to recall vari­ous incid­ents recor­ded in the gos­pels, or else­where in the tra­di­tion. The num­ber and names of the sta­tions were later codi­fied at four­teen (to which a fif­teenth sta­tion of the Resur­rec­tion was added in more recent times). Many sets of words and pray­ers have been writ­ten to acccom­pany the walk. I com­piled this par­tic­u­lar set for an ecu­men­ic­al ser­vice in my home par­ish, and sub­sequently pub­lished them on the Think­ing Anglic­ans blog. It envis­ages a scen­ario in which some of those who par­ti­cip­ated in or wit­nessed the ori­gin­al events are gathered to remem­ber what happened on that day.

1. Pil­ate con­demns Jesus to death
2. Jesus takes up his cross
3. Jesus falls the first time
4. Jesus meets his mother
5. Simon helps Jesus carry the cross
6. Veron­ica wipes the face of Jesus
7. Jesus falls the second time
8. Jesus speaks to the women of Jerusalem
9. Jesus falls the third time
10. Jesus is stripped of his garments
11. Jesus is nailed to the cross
12. Jesus dies on the cross
13. Jesus is taken down from the cross
14. Jesus is placed in the tomb
15. Jesus is risen

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the tree of knowledge of good and evil

on Sunday, 13 February 2005 at 2.05 pm by Simon Kershaw
categorised as reflection

This Sunday’s read­ings include part of chapter 3 of the book of Gen­es­is, the cent­ral story of the fall, in which Adam and Eve are temp­ted to eat the fruit of the tree of know­ledge of good and evil, planted in the centre of the Garden of Eden, and which God has for­bid­den them to eat.

The con­sequence of this is that the couple are expelled from Eden, and they will die.

What are we to make of this?

The key to our under­stand­ing this today is per­haps in the words ‘know­ledge of good and evil’. Our human ancest­ors, at some point in their evol­u­tion, developed enough con­scious­ness to become self-aware. This is a fun­da­ment­al human trait — to be aware of your­self, and to be aware of oth­er people and real­ize that they too are self-aware. Per­haps this real­iz­a­tion, this con­scious­ness, went hand in hand with the devel­op­ment of lan­guage, the devel­op­ment of com­mu­nic­a­tion with fel­low humans. And con­scious­ness and the recog­ni­tion of oth­ers leads to con­science — the recog­ni­tion of good and evil, as the writers of the Gen­es­is story put it. Humans had eaten of the fruit of the tree, and there was no going back.

And along with this self-aware­ness must have come the real­iz­a­tion that things die: that oth­er creatures die, that oth­er humans die; and even­tu­ally the real­iz­a­tion that each of us will die too — the real­iz­a­tion of our own mortality.

Like the writer of Gen­es­is chapter 3 we can under­stand the link between this high level of con­scious­ness, or self-aware­ness, and death. The writer of Gen­es­is puts the story in myth­ic lan­guage, lan­guage that all can under­stand. He (most prob­ably it was a ‘he’ or sev­er­al ‘he’s) starts from the inno­cence in which we assume the non-con­scious to live: the inno­cence where one does not have to make mor­al choices and the inno­cence in which one’s own life is the centre of the world, indeed the only thing that makes the world, the inno­cence in which one has no idea that one’s life is finite. And he points out that self-aware­ness leads inev­it­ably to a loss of that inno­cence which cul­min­ates in the know­ledge of our own impend­ing death.

And in this myth­ic lan­guage we too can grasp at the truth, that in our self-aware­ness we do things that we know to be wrong, and in our know­ledge of our own mor­tal­ity, we live in dark­ness and fear, fail­ing to reach the great heights of cre­ativ­ity and light of which we should be capable.

What then of Jesus? Jesus pro­claims to us the king­dom of God in which is life in all its abund­ance. In this king­dom we are freed from fear of death to live life, a life in which we can make mor­al choices, a life in which we are not con­sumed with jeal­ousy or with bit­ter­ness towards oth­ers, but a life in the light, a life of cre­ativ­ity. The apostle Paul wrote, ‘As in Adam all die, so in Christ shall all be made alive.’ (1 Cor­inthi­ans 15.22.)

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from the shrine of St Peter

on Thursday, 22 January 2004 at 10.27 pm by Simon Kershaw
categorised as reflection

If this is Thursday, this must be the Vat­ic­an! Today we vis­ited the Vat­ic­an Museum, the Sis­tine Chapel, and the Basilica of St Peter. Jonath­an Board­man, chap­lain of All Saints, the Anglic­an church in Rome, gave us a tour of some of the prin­cip­al works in the museum, and talked about the paint­ings in the Sis­tine Chapel. Although I have been in the Chapel twice before, this was the first time since the major res­tor­a­tion of the Michelan­gelo fres­coes. It was also the first time I had really con­sidered the over­all scheme of the dec­or­a­tion: the ceil­ing depict­ing scenes from the Cre­ation to the Flood; the pairs of pic­tures on the side walls by a num­ber of earli­er artists (Old and New Test­a­ment scenes in pairs, where the OT scene is in some way a ‘type’ for the NT one oppos­ite it); and, of course, the Last Judge­ment on the ‘east’ wall. Here we see Peter and Paul as the strong men of Christ, sport­ing their per­fect, resur­rec­ted, bod­ies (or at least, as Jonath­an later noted, per­fect in the eyes of Michelan­gelo; we might not all envis­age our per­fec­ted bod­ies as those of East Ger­man athletes!).

And then to the Basilica of St Peter. The vast­ness of this build­ing nev­er ceases to amaze. I remem­ber vis­it­ing as a school­boy in 1973. Our guide asked a fel­low pupil to walk over to one of the columns and touch the carving of a dove that seemed a few feet off the floor. As he got near­er we real­ized that far from hav­ing to reach down to it, he could not in fact reach it by stretch­ing up. The per­fect scale of the build­ing had con­fused our senses. On the oth­er hand, you do have to won­der what the fish­er­man from the Sea of Galilee might have made of all this splend­our and pomp.

This is a place where the claims of the bish­ops of Rome are most evid­ent, from the ‘Tu es Pet­rus’ mosa­ic in massive let­ters writ­ten around the base of the dome, to the monu­ments recall­ing pap­al declar­a­tions such as the ‘immacu­late con­cep­tion’, and above all the gran­di­ose memori­als to a swathe of popes in the main basilica. These expli­citly pro­claim the primacy and uni­ver­sal imme­di­ate jur­is­dic­tion of the see of Rome. As an Anglic­an, I find it very easy to chal­lenge the show of pride and opu­lance, and the claims to power that these build­ings and memori­als present (whilst not for­get­ting that my own church has its own grand build­ings, monu­ments and claims).

As a con­trast to all the show it is a wel­come change to des­cend to the crypt. Here you stand more or less at the level of the basilica built in the time of Con­stantine in the first half of the fourth cen­tury. Imme­di­ately beneath the dome and the high altar (with its great bal­dachino designed by Bern­ini, and forged from bronze taken from the Pan­theon of ancient Rome) stands the tomb of St Peter. Not his actu­al tomb, I think, which lies anoth­er level down, not access­ible to the gen­er­al pub­lic, but a shrine to the saint, non­ethe­less. This is the place to stand and give thanks for the life of Simon son of Jonah, to whom Christ gave the nick­name ‘Ceph­as’ or ‘rock’ (‘pet­ros’ in Greek), and to pray — espe­cially at this time, in the middle of the Week of Pray­er for Chris­ti­an Unity — for the unity of the Church, uni­on amongst Anglic­ans and uni­on with our oth­er sep­ar­ated broth­ers and sis­ters, and espe­cially in this place, uni­on with the see of Rome, with the suc­cessors of St Peter.

When you stand before, or over, the tomb of the lead­er of the Apostles, you are taken back to New Test­a­ment times, to the days 2000 years ago when Jesus walked beside the Sea of Galilee and called Simon, son of Jonah, to fol­low him, to the days when Simon Peter acclaimed Jesus as the Mes­si­ah, the Christ, dis­owned him, and was for­giv­en, to the days when he preached the resur­rec­tion of Christ in Jer­u­s­alem, and then through the east­ern Roman Empire, before end­ing up in Rome, to suf­fer and die as a wit­ness to the king­dom of God pro­claimed by the Jesus he had known. Here, in the crypt of the basilica, the pomp of the main church is for­got­ten — the roof is low, the walls are plain. Here are the simple tombs of many of the popes, placed close to where they believed Peter was bur­ied. Here it is pos­sible to for­get the grandeur that is just a few feet over your head, and to recov­er a simple spir­itu­al­ity, and the simple mes­sage at the heart of what Chris­ti­ans believe, and to which Chris­ti­ans down the ages have borne witness.

It is easy to say that the claims of Rome are mis­con­ceived and mis­un­der­stood, but even so I find myself not unwill­ing to allow a primacy of hon­our to this ancient see, effect­ively the only one remain­ing of the ancient pat­ri­arch­ates of Jer­u­s­alem (the see of James, the broth­er of Jesus), of Alex­an­dria, and of Anti­och, all three long since hav­ing lost their Chris­ti­an hin­ter­land. This primacy would not be the primacy of the main basilica, a primacy of marble and costly show, a primacy of uni­ver­sal jur­is­dic­tion or of infal­lible pro­nounce­ments; rather it would be like the crypt, plain and simple, unadorned, the ser­vant of all, exhib­it­ing mor­al strength, uncor­rup­ted per­son­al char­ac­ter, and the love of God the Fath­er and of the cre­ated world, preached by the car­penter of Nazareth.

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on the feast of St Agnes

on Wednesday, 21 January 2004 at 8.20 pm by Simon Kershaw
categorised as reflection

Today we vis­ited the church of Sant’Agnese fuori le Mura — St Agnes out­side the Walls. It’s the feast day of St Agnes, a young girl of 12 or 13, who was killed in Rome for her Chris­ti­an faith near the end of the per­se­cu­tion under the Emper­or Dio­cletian, around the year 304. This is the church where she is bur­ied, and a great ser­vice is held in this church on this her feast day.

At the start, two tiny (live) lambs, gar­landed and bedecked with flowers are car­ried into the church on trays and placed on the altar. They are blessed, and then, dur­ing the Glor­ia, car­ried out in pro­ces­sion, and away to a con­vent. When they are old enough to be shorn, their wool is woven into the pal­li­ums which the Pope gives to all Roman Cath­ol­ic Arch­bish­ops (as a sym­bol of their met­ro­pol­it­an jurisdiction).

Mar­garet Vis­s­er has writ­ten an inter­est­ing book about this church and the cult of St Agnes, The Geo­metry of Love (see it at Amazon UK, and there are some pic­tures on her web­site). After the ser­vice one of our group spot­ted Mar­garet Vis­s­er in the church and she was kind enough to come and talk to us about the church and the book.

Here we wor­shipped; here we prayed, at this place (as Eli­ot wrote about Little Gid­ding) where pray­er has been val­id; to stand and pray at the shrine of this young girl, mar­tyred for her faith 1700 years ago today; to stand and pray with this young girl and for this young girl, who sur­rendered her life rather than offer incense and pray­ers to pagan gods; to stand and pray with the count­less num­bers who down the cen­tur­ies have stood in this same place, before the tomb-chest of Agnes, and who have sim­il­arly offered their pray­ers — this is a mov­ing exper­i­ence, although one rather won­ders what she would have made of the great church and the great ser­vice held in her name, let alone the incense offered at the altar over her tomb!

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