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.

Head in the Chapel, Feet Outside

A few weeks ago I went to Canterbury for a conference marking the 800^th anniversary of the issuing of Magna Carta in 1215.  I never studied Magna Carta at school, so I have had to read up on it and it has caught my imagination.  While I was there I took the opportunity to see the grave of Archbishop Stephen Langton, who was influential in it coming to fruition.  His grave is not easy to find, hidden in a chapel in the south transept.  Langton was a scholar, who was part of a school of thought in Paris that was involved in disseminating ideas about what it means to be a good king, what just rule should look like.  He drew on his biblical study of the prophets calling kings to account.  He was also familiar with charters of earlier kings which set out rights and responsibilities for good government.  Langton was instrumental in mediating between King John and the barons in bringing the king to see that the charter had to be issued.  His thinking is reflected in it.

Stephen Langton’s tomb is interesting because of a twist of history.  Originally occupying the central position in the Chapel of St Michael in Canterbury Cathedral it got moved because a wealthy woman wanted the spot for her tomb, so Langton was moved under the altar.  The East Wall was rebuilt and the chapel shortened bizarrely leaving his head in the chapel and his feet poking through the wall outside.  You can see this in the two pictures on the back of the service sheet.  Having your head in the chapel and your feet outside is a good model of this church’s ministry in the heart of this city centre.  It is a good model for a church named after John the Baptist and also in this anniversary year for Magna Carta and we think about the church’s influence on it.

A lot has been said about Magna Carta over the last few weeks, not all of it accurate.  It is important because it is a marker on the long journey to democracy, but it is not a very democratic document, not exactly the charter of liberties people credit it with.  What it did establish was that the king was subject to the law and that taxes should only be levied with the agreement of what became parliament.  Justice is bigger than the individual monarch or ruler, bigger than whoever happens to be in power at a given time.  As a charter, the 1215 Magna Carta was abandoned within months, but it came back and became an important bargaining chip for the young King Henry III and his advisors when wanting to persuade the barons to fall in with him rather than the French prince who was after the throne.  It was revised to remove the difficult bits and the fourth edition, issued in 1225, is the one that really sets the tone for the future.  As a principle it proved inspirational around the world, not least for the American Bill of Rights.

In negotiating Magna Carta, Archbishop Langton knew how to keep his powder dry until the moment was right.  He kept his distance formally from earlier charters, though he may well have provided much of the thinking and encouragement for it.  He struck decisively just before Runnymede, getting protection for the church set out clearly.  Although this had already been agreed in a charter the previous year, he was skillful in how he brought it in.  He is a good example of how to do politics.  He knew what he wanted, he had a vision of what good government should look like, and he knew to keep his cool until the time was right.  He had his head in the chapel and his feet outside.  The Church of England can learn a lot when engaging in politics.

Having our head in the chapel means that we put prayer and reflection on life and faith as our number one priority.  It takes precedence over everything else, and it shapes how we approach everything else.  It sets our agenda.  But it does not exist in a fantasy world.  Our feet are to be outside, where life is real and where it makes a difference.  Anyone who thinks the church shouldn’t be involved in politics hasn’t read the bible.  They don’t understand what it means to be named after John the Baptist, who was hardly silent on calling rulers to account for their actions and abuses of power.  John the Baptist proclaimed the Kingdom of God and was not afraid to say uncomfortable things to miscreant rulers.  Those who want churches to be quiet usually don’t like what they are saying, which it has to be said is not a view that David Cameron has taken.  He is happy if he disagrees to say so and then the onus is on those who challenge him to come up with the arguments to back up whatever campaign they are launching.

Many of the issues that we face today are actually very difficult circles to square.  For some things there are no easy answers.  How Europe should respond to boatloads of migrants crossing stretches of water is not straightforward.  We can begin though by remembering that they are people who are desperate and have made incredible journeys in the pursuit of a new life away from horrors unbearable.  We have been reminded again what comes of what some of those horrors are with the events in Tunisia and France.  Many have been trafficked, some even phoning for help from inside a lorry outside our city.  The root cause of their migrating lies in the countries they leave.  Many of the ethical issues that we face today don’t lend themselves to easy soundbites, which makes communicating difficult in a media dominated age.  We saw this with the mitochondrial DNA debates earlier in the year.  Anyone who aims to speak on behalf of the church needs to work on how they are going to present their case, what the person who led my media training a number of years ago termed as ‘the Sun-reader’s headline’.  Having our feet outside means we have to do a great deal of research before commenting and the communicating needs to be clear what we see  the central issue as being, finding an accessible way in.  It doesn’t mean we shouldn’t comment but making sure we have something valid to say and that it is said clearly matters enormously.  And we won’t have anything distinctive to say unless it stems from a faith that is rooted on prayerful reflection; head in the chapel and feet outside.

These last few days have seen some atrocious acts and it is natural to feel nervous.  One danger is to blame all religious people for violence and want a ‘neutral’ world.  That is a delusion.  There is no such thing as neutral, nothing comes values free.  When we proclaim justice we base this on what we see as being true, right, how things should be.  That is always based on an underlying belief about who we are, who you are and how we should live.  If our faith doesn’t give us that it is in the words of the Epistle to James useless.  Faith without works is dead. But works without a faith, without a guiding philosophy, is routeless and directionless.  It floats free.  Faith that is true will be just, will be honouring and will be life-giving; it will bless.

Sitting, as this church does, in the middle of the city square we have a special vocation to proclaim faith as the inspiration for life; that blesses and proclaims justice.  We are called to follow John the Baptist in prophetical witness that calls to follow God, prepares for his Kingdom.  We are called to have our head in the chapel and our feet outside.

Sermon preached in Peterborough Parish Church, Sunday 28th June 2015

How to build a tiltyard

As part of the 2015 Heritage Festival, a tiltyard is being built in front of Peterborough Cathedral.  It will host jousts over the weekend, billed as the first in a city centre for 500 years.  It promises to be a spectacular show.

It has been interesting to watch the tiltyard being created over the last 24 hours, so below is a pictorial guide to how to build one.