Thinking allowed

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!

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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

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The Transfiguration: 6 August 2023

on Monday, 7 August 2023 at 12.00 pm by Simon Kershaw
categorised as sermon

Read­ings: Daniel 7.9,10,13,14; Psalm 97; 2 Peter 1.16–19; Luke 9.28–36

I don’t know about you, but I’m not much of a film-buff and I don’t often go to the cinema,
per­haps only once, maybe twice, a year, if that.

But I went to the cinema last weekend.

So, there are two big films on right now,
one that I’ll just gloss over as mostly pink
and anoth­er that I can say is some­what grey.

Now I expect my three-year old granddaughter
would love to watch the pink one,
but it was the some­what-grey film that Kar­en and I went to see.

It’s a story – a true story – set dur­ing the Second World War,
with a bunch of sci­ent­ists racing to work out how to build a new weapon.
And not just any new weapon, but a new kind of weapon,
a weapon that will unleash untold power.

And just as they’re about to explode the very first test at Los Alamos
– a moment of high drama –
the hero, Robert Oppen­heimer, remem­bers an earli­er conversation
(in the film it’s) with a chap called Albert Einstein,
a con­ver­sa­tion about an import­ant question –
what’s the worst that might hap­pen in the test?

Well, comes the reply, it could set off a chain reaction,
a chain reac­tion that might ignite the whole atmosphere,
a chain reac­tion that might con­sume and des­troy all the earth.

They don’t think that’s very likely, but it is possible.

(And I think you’ll agree that is rather a big down­side to any decision.)

So of course they pro­ceed with the test.

There’s a small start­ing explosion,
and then a great shin­ing, blind­ing, white light
and then a massive fireball
as the chain reac­tion in a small lump of urani­um causes an explo­sion of unpar­alleled ferocity
and then
a great boom­ing sound, the shock­wave of the explosion.

The test is a suc­cess. Oh, and the earth isn’t des­troyed either.

And so – a few weeks later – on the 6th of August, 1945,
their new bomb is dropped on the Japan­ese city of Hiro-shima.
And just a few days later anoth­er atom­ic bomb is dropped on Nagasaki.

As many as 200,000 people –
men, women, children,
mostly civilians –
were killed,
and many more suffered lifelong injury from radi­ation sickness.
Japan sur­rendered, bring­ing the Second World War to an end.

Light and sound – sig­ni­fy­ing death and destruc­tion and con­flict on an unpre­ced­en­ted scale.

It’s a true story, and today, today is the 6th of August,
today is the 78th anniversary of that first atom­ic bomb at Hiro-shima.
It’s a day when the world remem­bers those killed,
those injured,
[[those whose lives were affected,
the destruc­tion wrought ]]
by those two life-des­troy­ing atom­ic bombs.

And
when we all hope and pray that it won’t hap­pen again.

 

But the 6th of August is also a day that the Church has cel­eb­rated as a holy day
for hun­dreds and hun­dreds of years.

We heard the story in our gos­pel read­ing from Luke this morning.

Jesus and some of his dis­ciples climb up a hill,
and there the dis­ciples see Jesus trans­figured –
shin­ing white with bril­liant dazzling light,
and they hear a great boom­ing voice.

“This is my Son, listen to him.”

Now, I’m not going to try and explain what happened,
or try to second-guess what the dis­ciples “really” saw and heard.
But the effects of this light and this sound
are very dif­fer­ent from the destruc­tion caused by the light and sound at Hiro-shima.

This light and this sound have a mean­ing totally dif­fer­ent from that of the atom­ic bomb.

And as a res­ult, the dis­ciples under­stand that Jesus’s mes­sage comes from God.

“This is my Son, listen to him.”

Rather than death and destruc­tion and conflict,
this bright light signifies
life and heal­ing and peace.

That’s the life-giv­ing mes­sage that Jesus brings,
the life-giv­ing mes­sage that Jesus brings from God.

That God wants us to have life in all its fulness,
to live in love, and to care for one another
in the good times, yes –
and, even more so, when the going gets tough.

God wants us
– as Jesus says else­where in the gospels –
to feed the hungry,
to shel­ter the home­less and the refugee,
to care for the sick and the needy,
to lift up the oppressed,
to for­give and be recon­ciled with those who have wronged us.

“This is my Son, listen to him.”

It’s the mes­sage that God, in Jesus,
saves us from the chain reaction
of hate and wrong-doing and death,
the chain reac­tion that leads to ever more hate and wrong-doing and death.
God in Jesus offers us an alternative,
an altern­at­ive chain reac­tion of hope and caring and forgiveness.

“This is my Son, listen to him.”

It’s not an easy way out, though.

Caring and recon­cili­ation can be costly too,
as we see up there, above me,
with Jesus put to death on the Cross.

Because not every­one appre­ci­ates caring,
not every­one appre­ci­ates it when people stand up for others,
not every­one appre­ci­ates it when people look for reconciliation.

But Jesus’s mes­sage is that this way is God’s way.

And in the Trans­fig­ur­a­tion, in Luke’s story that we heard earlier,
[[and also Peter in his let­ter that we heard too,]]
the dis­ciples real­ize that Jesus’s mes­sage is God’s message.

“This is my Son, listen to him.”

And they do their best,
after Jesus’s death and resurrection,
to pass his story on to their successors,
and – and here’s the import­ant bit –
not just to tell the story,
but to live as the com­munity of people
who try to do those things.

 

And it’s into this com­munity that we have come today
to see C_ baptized.
This is the com­munity of people – here in this church in St Ives –
who are the fol­low­ers of Jesus,
the successors,
(many hun­dreds of years later, with oth­ers here and around the world)
the suc­cessors of Jesus’s own disciples –
a life-giv­ing, life-enhan­cing chain reaction.

Now, of course, we’re human, and we get things wrong.
We aren’t perfect
and we don’t always agree
and we don’t always look after one anoth­er as we should.

But we are that community,
that is what the Church is,
that is what the Church tries to be;
and we are com­mit­ted to jour­ney­ing together
and try­ing to under­stand and to live as that community,
the com­munity of Jesus’s followers.

And so – today – we wel­come C_ into this community.

Now, it’s a two-way thing, C_.

For your part,
you will affirm the import­ance to you of Jesus and his message,
and the import­ance in your life of the divine, of God,
and the import­ance in your life of this com­munity of faith and pray­er and worship.

And we, the mem­bers of that community,
we will affirm our sup­port for you as you make this step.
We will jour­ney together:
we will learn from you
as you learn from us.
We will do things together
to share the good news that Jesus shared with his disciples,
and to care for those among us and around us who are in need.

And we will do it all with God’s help.

We’ll have fun together
and sad times together.
If we are hon­est, we know that some­times we might even get cross with each other.
But we know that that’s because we each care,
and that, in Jesus, through Jesus,
there is always for­give­ness and reconciliation.

And if that sounds a bit like a family,
well, that’s because the Chris­ti­an com­munity, the Chris­ti­an Church,
is like a family.

It doesn’t replace the fam­ily that we live with.
But it is a new fam­ily, God’s family,
that we each become part of at our baptism.

And it is into God’s fam­ily, C_, God’s life-enhan­cing family,
that we are now going to wel­come you.

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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