Up close with the neighbours - Knights Chamber

I had the opportunity to climb up the scaffolding around the Knights Chamber this afternoon and got up close and personal with the statues and other features I usually only see from the ground.

The view wasn't bad from up there too.

Meanwhile, serious work is taking place inside The Knights Chamber and The new Education and Visitors Centre.

A Cloud of Glory and A Cloud of Shame

This week we have remembered two clouds: a cloud of glory and a cloud of shame.  The cloud of glory came on Thursday when the church calendar remembered the Transfiguration.  This is the story in the gospels when Jesus takes a few close companions up the mountain and while he is praying he is transfigured, they see beyond the outer appearance to the inner glory of God within.  It is couched in all sorts of imagery which is reminiscent of Moses’ encounters with God on his mountainside: face and clothes shining, and there is a cloud from which God speaks (Luke 9:28-36).  We were given a cloud of glory, a symbol of mystery, awe and wonder.  In this moment of transfiguration on the mountainside, we are invited to enter into the cloud of mystery with the disciples and see something of the fullness of God’s glory revealed in Jesus Christ. 

But history has given us a darker cloud on 6^th August too.  Thursday was also the 70^th anniversary of the dropping of the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima.  A few days later, 70 years ago today, a second bomb was dropped on Nagasaki.  It is estimated that 129,000 people died in those raids and many, many more suffered life-changing injuries, the consequences still seen today.  When I mentioned this in various places and services on Thursday and Friday I was struck by the response.  It wasn't a particularly representative sample but there was an audible revulsion and sense of horror that these bombs had been used.  The awesome destructive power triggered a sense that they must never be used again.  I found this interesting given there had been debates back at the General Election about Trident.  This group, at least, have a strong feeling that these weapons are evil and it is unthinkable to think of using them, let alone to do so, knowing what we now know.  I’ve heard military strategists refer to Trident as yesterday’s solution to yesterday’s problems.  But the technology cannot be uninvented, so we have had to live in an age with a weapon no sane person would dream of using.  And an insane one wouldn’t be deterred by knowing others have it.

Speaking in a radio broadcast 70 years ago today, the US President, Harry S Truman said:

“I realize the tragic significance of the atomic bomb ... It is an awful responsibility which has come to us ... We thank God that it has come to us, instead of to our enemies; and we pray that He may guide us to use it in His ways and for His purposes.”

That is a heady mix of facing the stark reality of what they have done while thinking God thinks this is OK.  I don’t think there are purposes that can be linked to God that justify the use of such weapons.  They are dreamed up from evil intent and fail the test of just war theory: they are not proportionate and noncombatants are not protected.

So we have today two clouds, one of glory and one of shame.  How do we allow the former to remove the latter?  Our readings gave us some clues that are worth heeding.

Firstly, our gospel reading has been working through, over these last few weeks, the long passage in John’s gospel where Jesus feeds 5,000 people with very meagre provisions and then teaches about himself as the true bread, the bread of life.  And we heard the third section today (John 6:35, 41-51); there will more over the next two weeks.  It has Eucharistic overtones to it; John does not give the Last Supper in his gospel.  This is as close as he gets to expounding a theology of Communion.  John doesn’t give us the Transfiguration either, but this teaching is close to it.  Referring to Jesus as the bread of life, he requires us to look more deeply into who he is, into who he brings to be among us.  John is after all the gospel that begins with a long prologue expounding that ‘in the beginning was the Word’ and that Word came among us ‘full of grace and truth’.  The bread of life is Christ among us, inspiring, nourishing with his grace, with his love, with his transforming presence.  To understand what that means to counter clouds of shame, the glory revealed gives a new commandment to love, brings forgiveness and reconciliation, comes to save not condemn.  This is a radical new way; radical because it takes us back to the fundamental principles revealed in the Bible, often overlooked or forgotten, but they are there.

The new commandment to love, the radical way of love and peace, challenges us to look around and see beyond outer appearances to the inner glory within each person, to see the gift and blessing that we are to one another and are to be to one another, and the world.  If we serve Christ in those we meet, as an unknown guest, then we see his glory in them too and that should change how we behave, because they too are beloved children of God, heirs of grace and the reason for his coming; meeting them is to stand on holy ground.  Christ came to draw us into the heart of God, that we may become divine, to quote an ancient writer.  There is within each of us the seed of glory.  Our life is special coming as it does from the desire of God’s will and purpose.  That should affect us.  The divine devotion at the Transfiguration changes how we see one another as well.

The reading from Ephesians (4:25-5:2) gave a list of virtues to replace vices.  Falsehood replaced by truth, making no room for evil intent when angry, honesty to replace theft, using our words to build up rather than breed hatred, putting away bitterness and wrangling and being kind to one another instead.  Beneath all of this, holding it up, is the appeal to be imitators of God, living in love as Christ has loved us and gave himself for us.  The way of self-giving, gracious love is to triumph over hatred and death.  The cloud of glory is to triumph over the cloud of shame.

When there are threats, whether that is violence or hostile words and bullying, a fight or flight response is triggered within us.  Self preservation wants to find safety and that might mean running for cover or making a stand where we either survive or are overcome.  There are plenty of passages in the Bible where protecting and entering the struggle to overcome oppression is taken for granted.  This is why we have a theory of Just War; a desire to limit when violence begets violence.  But even if a violent response is assumed or required, it is not a place to stop.  And it is not to be the first response either.  There is a better way and when we seek to be a follower of the Way of Jesus we learn that love overcomes hatred and the tools used for weapons are turned into implements to feed, to bring life rather than death.  Love triggers a very different response.

When Jesus says that he is the bread of life feeding on him, following him, being filled with the grace that was within him and displayed on the mountainside at the Transfiguration, changes how we are to behave if we are to honour the glory within.  The cloud of glory is to dominate and drive away the cloud of shame.

Sermon preached at Peterborough Parish Church, Sunday 9th August 2015

Longing for the bread of life has consequences for justice

There are a couple of characters, advertising a 118 directory enquiries service, who pop up during programmes on ITV and have spoof conversations with actors in old films.  One of these involves a man talking on a pay phone about bread and it is clear that what he means is money.  Bread is the staple of life, a basic foodstuff and its slang link with money is that money buys the basics to keep us alive.  We can’t survive without it.  I think people who have large reserves in the bank have difficulty knowing what it’s like to live hand-to-mouth.  In fact if you find that you have more salary than month you don’t really know what it’s like to have more month than salary where you have used up your cash long before the next payday.  Living hand-to-mouth, or even worse not having enough, is very difficult to understand for those of us who have a cushion to fall back on, however small.

The more I look into money and the more I understand about how it works the more I realize that it doesn’t really exist.  Our financial system has long since ceased to be linked to anything tangible like gold or trading chickens.  It is based on promissory notes, the perception of a market that a trading system is stable and will continue to produce a very complex network of transactions that keep the illusion going.  There are some goods in the background but there is an awful lot that is illusory.  If the trust in those promises is shaken then the system becomes unstable and can unravel.  We have seen what that can look like in Greece and our own banking crisis.  Money is a very fickle and unstable place to rest our ultimate hopes.  To borrow a phrase from the gospel reading, it is a bread that perishes.  In our financial system money exists because we say it does.  As soon as we think it might not, like the cartoon character Wiley E Coyote, we plummet into a dust ball at the base of the cliff.

In that gospel reading Jesus was a little irritated with the people’s cupboard love (John 6:24-35).  They also seem to be a bit dim.  He has just fed 5,000 of them with very little more than a small boy’s lunch and they have the cheek to ask him what signs he will do to prove himself.  Rustling up a meal for 5,000 with a few slices of bread and some fish fingers seems pretty impressive to me.  Leaving that aside, he sees through their Teletubby ‘again, again’ call.  His response is for them to look more deeply into what is going on.  His call is not for a free lunch to fill their stomachs for one day, conjured up out of very little, but for aspirations and striving for a higher purpose.  Who are we, who are you, what is the point and is there an ultimate goal which gives life its purpose and point beyond the day-to-day?  Clearly Jesus’ answer is that there is and we find it in all that we see in him and the life and hope he brings.  We need to read the story to the end to find out exactly where that leads in the cross and resurrection.  Hope here means having confidence in what that means.  But there is in this story, in this conversation following the feeding, a hint that the sustenance of life can itself reveal the gift that is life and the grace that gives rise to it.

The irony here is that once we start to look into the purpose and point, the bread that endures, we find that how we share the daily bread, the cash, the fruit of our financial scheming, comes under the spotlight too.  Justice is how we live out the truth that we believe and the Christian truth will never be content with an ‘I’m alright, you don’t count’ approach.  If we want to know what that means this week’s news gave a few examples to be going on with.

We have seen yet more images of desperate migrants climbing over fences in the pursuit of  a new life and border controls stretched to cope.  I hope that leads us to ask where these people are coming from and how we can respond with humanity and compassion.  It is complex, not least because mixed in with desperation there is trafficking and corruption.  We have to make sure that services can cope and asylum and residency applications need proper assessment, indeed need to be processed in the first place.  This is not an easy problem to solve and will involve cooperation across Europe and probably further afield.

By one of those strange coincidences those who are being trafficked were also in our minds this week because on Thursday we remembered William Wilberforce in our church calendar.  He strove with others to end the slave trade 200 years ago.  Sadly there are new forms and on Friday new sanctions came into force.  People find ways in each generation to display their inhumanity. 

More directly linked with bread, with money, the living wage debates continue.  Our government in their budget has taken the living wage branding, which is currently £7.85 per hour (£9.15 in London), and applied the term to an increased minimum wage, which in April will be just £7.20.  It doesn’t take a maths genius to work out that is a cut.  And what is more it won’t apply to those under 25.  Wages need to be set at a fair minimum otherwise the tax payer ends up subsidizing the true cost through benefits.  Responsible employers know their workers need to be properly paid.  It is also not the job of the tax system to increase off-shore tax haven profits by picking up the bill through benefits.  These benefits have themselves just been cut, so I foresee some big problems ahead for the poorest.  The living wage brand is now a confused term because it has been applied to different things, they are not the same, so I think we now need to talk about a living income.  A living income is the just sharing of bread which springs from being committed to pursuing the bread which does not perish.

Behind all of this is an amazing generosity.  It is the generosity that brings life into being and sustains it.  But it sustains it with a purpose and that purpose lies in the eternal giver, the source and goal of everything that there is, God.  When we long for the bread of life that does not perish, we long for the hope that is our life and which is truth.  When truth is lived it is justice and that brings hope for everyone, especially the poor.  If our bread, our financial system is to have any semblance of hope for the poor, which is written on the foundation stones of the Kingdom of God, then it must bring justice, fairness.

Jesus’ redirecting the crowd’s attention away from a free lunch to the bread of life, of hope that does not perish, should not be mistaken for a shallow don’t worry about food.  It is a warning not to devote our energies to storing up riches which are of no lasting value.  Money, rich bounty are tools for a purpose.  The bread which does not perish is fundamentally linked with the purposes of God and those require the hungry to be fed, the homeless sheltered, the sick visited and healed, the oppressed set free and good news to be lived in all its forms.  That should sound familiar because it is the passage of Isaiah that Jesus read in the Synagogue at the beginning of his ministry.  It was his manifesto announcement (Luke 4:16-21).  The spiritual hope has some very physical consequences.  The physical likewise has spiritual roots too.

Come to Christ the living bread and you will be amazed how this banquet feeds you and everyone else.  Longing for the bread of life has consequences for justice.

Sermon preached in Peterborough Cathedral, Sunday 2nd August 2015

Everything is gift

There are one or two key themes in the Bible and how we see everything rests on these key concepts.  For the Archbishop of Canterbury, one of these is reconciliation and he has made this one of his priorities for his tenure in office.  Christ came to reconcile us to God and to one another.  He brings peace and in that peace we live peace.  Justin Welby wants us to live this reconciling love and his hope is that focusing on this will change the church and affect the world.  To my mind he is right.

Behind this is another key idea, which I think is foundational.  It is that of gift, of grace.  Everything is gift.  We only exist because God chose to make it happen as a gift, out of his generous love.  We see how exceptional life is through the various space explorations.  There is a probe around Pluto at the moment and it has sent back spectacular images.  Journalists are fascinated with whether they will find signs of life.  They may, they may not, but the more we see of these planets and other orbiting masses, the more remarkable and incredible we see our planet to be with its ability to enable life to emerge and to support it.  That there is something rather than nothing is incredible and the result of gift.

There is a prayer used in Morning Prayer that reminds us that the night is passed and the day lies open before us, and we rejoice in the gift of this new day.  It seems to be very popular to ridicule politicians who own up to having a faith in God.  Tim Fallon, the new leader of the Liberal Democrats, has been on the receiving end of this recently.  Having faith means that you are someone who believes in gift and is thankful for that gift.  Out of this gift a great deal flows, but the opposite of it is to believe that life is random and ultimately pointless.  All sorts can flow from that, but at its core it is not very hopeful. I feel sorry for the sneerers.

Our readings were full of gift and grace. The story of Elisha feeding 100 people (2 Kings 4:42-44) prefigured Jesus’ feeding of the 5,000, which we heard about in our gospel reading.  The clear message about Jesus is that not only can he tick the box of performing wonders, he does it and some – not 100 hungry people, but 5,000 are fed (John 6:1-21).  He takes the meagre provisions of a small boy’s lunch and turns them into a banquet.  The gift of the God who makes everything out of nothing is that there is no situation that cannot be transformed by gift, by grace, being let loose.

The reading from Ephesians (3:14-21) was a beautiful song of praise and thanksgiving to God praying for strength in our inner being, that Christ may so dwell in our hearts, that we will be rooted and grounded in love.  This love will fill us with nothing less than the fullness of God, accomplishing abundantly far more than we can ask or imagine.  This all comes from gift, from grace, pouring, flowing from God.  It is generosity which cannot stay contained or shut inside.  It has to flow and it changes us; it changes everything.  It becomes the reconciliation where that is needed, it becomes the life that blesses, it refreshes with energy and new life, it is the opening for evangelism and mission.

I think a lot of people are quite frightened by the words evangelism and mission.  They have become buzzwords but they can conjure up all sorts of different things depending on what you have seen those labels attached to.  And around the city centre we see some pretty bad examples of shouting and aggressive behaviour in the name of evangelism and mission.  It is a turn off.  But at its root sharing the faith that inspires us and gives us hope is really rather simple.  It involves making friends and being friendly.  We meet people; treat them with the love and value which everyone deserves by virtue of being a fellow beloved child of God.  They too are the fruit of gift and grace.  And as we get to know them the faith that is the focus of who we are shines through and can be shared.  It can be as simple as asking if they think life is fundamentally pointless or has a point.  That point lies with God who doesn’t stay aloof, but meets us, supremely in everything we see in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.  In trying to be more like him we become one of his disciples and meet each week to be renewed in grace, as we share together in bread and wine, coffee and Jaffa cakes.  The last two don’t appear in the Bible, but they should.  What could be a better sign of gift and grace than a small chocolate covered sponge cake with jam inside it!  May be clotted cream and scone…

None of this is rocket science, but it can prove to be quite elusive.  How doe we fare here?  When people come through the doors, do we greet them with the love and value they deserve as fellow fruit of God’s gift and grace?  Do we treat one another like that?  If we are really honest about this, we will find that there are times when we do.  There is generous caring; there is welcome and acceptance.  But there are also times when we don’t manage it.  We do have a reputation of not always being a happy place.  That’s not good.  We have to turn down the volume on the grumps and bad temper and turn it up on the grace, on the love, on the remembering that the person in front of us is a fellow beloved child of God.

There are times when this is difficult, not least because some people make it hard to respond that way.  Like Harry Potter combatting the Dementors we have to conjure up our patronus, whatever reminds us of hope, grace and love so that we can be these.  Sometimes we are caught off guard, absorbed in another task, with challenges we have to get sorted and the request or comment comes at us what feels like sideways and there is a side-on collision that shunts us across the road like in a high speed car chase in a film.  How we respond in a crash may say quite a lot about us.  I have been involved in a head on collision and I didn’t get out and stab the person who smashed into me, like happened recently in West Sussex.  Few of us would.  It is an extreme response.  But there are degrees of aggression and degrees of crash.  If we find it hard to be gracious when there are sudden challenges then we may need help, at the most extreme with anger management, or it may be that public facing roles are not for us.

I’ve been the vicar of a church that had a lot of angry people in it and it was not pleasant at times and it was destructive of mission.  People looked and said if that is how Christians treat one another then you can count me out.  I went to a funeral tea in the early days in that parish and someone asked me if I’d met the witches yet.  When I looked puzzled she said ‘you’ll find out’.  Not a good reputation and it takes a lot to overcome it.  It can happen but only if the gift, the grace of God dwells in us so much that we are filled with the life and love of Christ. Without that we have no good news to share.  We are not good news to share.  We cannot be the agents of the reconciling love that we see and proclaim in Christ.  The Archbishop’s priority for reconciliation will only happen if it is rooted and grounded in grace, in gift, in love.

This church is not unique is struggling with this.  A lot do.  In fact I think our culture struggles with the realities of community.  Communities are made up of people who are different, have their joys and injuries, their raw nerves which if you wait long enough someone will find and irritate.  Community, in an age of individual consumer choice that sells the lie of designing your own life to tailor fit you, does not flow easily.  We need to work at it.  That work begins inside us.  It begins with seeking to be so filled with the grace and gift, the love and life of God in Christ, that we become people who honour, respect and value those we meet.  That becomes a moment of blessing for them and in the peace the gospel can be shared.  It can’t be shared without it and indeed won’t be.

So take away the reading sheet today and read the passage from Ephesians over and over again.  Pray it and ask God for the gift that is the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge and which can accomplish abundantly far more than we can ask or imagine. 

Sermon preached at Peterborough Parish Church, Sunday 26th July 2015

Women Bishops - Don't expect too much

Today in Canterbury Cathedral Rachel Treweek will be consecrated as the first female Diocesan Bishop in the Church of England - for Gloucester.  The total is currently at 6 and my prediction at the beginning of the year that there would be 5 has already been surpassed, I am pleased to say.  There are more vacancies where a woman nomination would be a very likely outcome.

The media seem to be very interested in these appointments, though the novelty factor is reducing and so it should.  This morning on the Today programme on Radio 4 Rachel Treweek was asked what difference women will make.  It's a difficult question to answer and I would urge caution in expecting too much of them.

I have worked with women colleagues in a variety of church settings and I have found that this enriched ministry through the breadth of experience and perspective it brought.  Quite simply their contribution is that they were women and not men and there are differences through differences of life experience which feed into decision making and approach.  These are beneficial.

The 'but' is that some of the women I have worked with have been outstanding and some have been okay-ish and some have been a walking disaster.  The same has been the case with the men I have worked with.  There is a distribution of abilities and competencies and we should not be surprised to find this amongst women and men equally.

So today I rejoice that the 'new normality' is taking shape.  But don't expect too much - some will be brilliant and some will not.  The overall effect though will be definitely blessing, life giving, through the balance and breadth of perspective that will flow.