Luke: story is why we have churches

Window in north aisle

This week a report was published on how we care for ourchurch buildings.  The Church of England is responsible for nearly 16,000 buildings covering every community in the country.  Of these 78% are listed grade I or II, the remaining 22% are not.  Around 57% of our buildings are in rural areas, though only 17% of the population lives there; 31% are in suburban areas catering for 58% of the total population. Urban areas only account for 12% of the church buildings covering 25% of the population.  It doesn’t take much thinking to realize that we have a mismatch between where people are and where the church buildings are.  Given the number of listed buildings there is a burden many communities are struggling with.  The report offered all sorts of suggestions which will no doubt be studied and assessed.

Church buildings have a number of purposes.  Their primary one is to provide a place for the congregation that gathers to meet to pray, worship and retell the story of Jesus Christ.  That is something to hold on to and be clear about.  Without that all we have is a shell, which may carry a long story of a locality’s history and hold many associations deeply held, but is just an elaborate shed.  Having a role in various churches, which vary from a world-ranking cathedral, a grade 1 listed parish church and a simple brick built mission hall, I can clearly see great potential for them and am very fond of them.  What matters here, though, is not the grandeur of the place, but what takes place inside it.  We are not an ecclesiastical version of the National Trust.  For me the most important question is how does gathering here, or there, help us to worship, reimagine the story of Jesus Christ and share that story in what we say and do?  How does it provide a place of hospitality so that those who visit or call in, for whatever purpose, are touched by grace and the loving embrace of God?  If it doesn’t help with these things, then it is an expensive distraction and fosters delusion.

Today we are celebrating St Luke, after whom one of the gospels is named and so is one of the churches in this parish.  You can see his image around the church, in the windows and around the pulpit.  Luke was a physician, described by Paul as the beloved physician.  There are passages in Acts when he is present and this is shown by the style suddenly changing from the third person to that of an eye witness; the ‘we’ passages, where he says ‘we did this’ or ‘we went to this place’.  A bit of biblical detective work led to Luke being identified as the author of Acts and given the similarities with Luke’s gospel, he was identified as the author of that one too.  There are writings from early centuries that name him as the author.  Apart from that, we don’t know much more about him.

What we do have is his gospel and this comes from the pen of a storyteller.  Luke tells stories and uses them to excite our imaginations and expand our horizons.  Like a modern biographer, he knows that he needs to give some back story, so he creates an elaborate introduction telling the story of John the Baptist, Mary and Joseph, Elizabeth, and the bizarre journey from Nazareth to Bethlehem for Jesus’ birth to satisfy a weird Roman poll tax.  It’s an unlikely story but it carries so many layers.  We cannot know how much he made up to reflect Old Testament stories, using metaphor to tell his central story, and how much happened like that.  But the metaphor is powerful and insightful.  We are given homeless travellers refused hospitality but shown mercy by an innkeeper.  The first to recognize Jesus are not the powerful and wise, but humble shepherds in a field.  Luke gives us Candlemas and that wonderful tale of two elderly people waxing lyrical about this child, how he will be the light for all people.  When we want to know who our neighbour is Luke tells a story about that Good Samaritan that not only expands our charity to embrace anyone in need, it also challenges us with who the most caring is, the hero of the piece being a despised Samaritan.

In a pictorial age, Luke is the gospel that is probably the easiest to access.  It provides the subjects for many of the illustrations in [our] windows: Pentecost in the vestry, The Annunciation and Mary visiting Elizabeth by the font, Angels on the hillside announcing to shepherds and the lost child in the temple in the Lady Chapel.  The Easter scene in the East window in the Lady Chapel reflects the version in Luke.  Our windows are not exclusively based on Luke, but Luke tells stories that expand in the mind and we see them around us.

In my radical moments I wonder what the church would be like if we didn’t have our 16,000 buildings, 78% of them listed.  If we came to that day, we would be left with the stories that inspire faith.  Like all good stories, those in Luke enable us to place ourselves in the story itself and imagine what it means to follow Jesus today.  But what is that story?

The story that Luke tells is that God has a purpose in creating and that the coming of Jesus Christ is the fullest revealing of that purpose.  God has been at work before him and in him.  He sets this story in the Roman world and rather than the rich and powerful, he moves the focus to a poor outpost of the empire, known for breeding troublemakers.  It is a story of wonderful deeds, powerful teaching and there is intrigue with plots and betrayal.  Reading it for the first time it is not clear how this will end.  Guiding the teaching and the deeds is the unshakable faith that this is God’s world, we are his and life only has meaning when lived to his praise and glory; nothing else is to have priority for us.   The plot to kill Jesus leads to his execution by crucifixion, a shameful humiliation, surely a sign of rejection and defeat.  But the twist in the tale is the resurrection and this becomes its validation.  Luke gives us the journey to Emmaus, where how this had to be is explained and Jesus is recognized in the breaking of the bread.  The journey of faith is an accompanied journey and it is gathered round the table together that Jesus shows himself to us and his presence is made known.

The story continues in Acts where Luke tells of how this good news story spread.  Boundaries were expanded from being a faith for Jews to one for all people.  Missionary journeys showed how it captured imaginations around the world and a movement began.  Martyrdoms, self-giving, opposition and the struggle to convert hearts are set forth.  But through it all Luke carries a deep hope and faith that this gospel is from God and of God.  It will therefore prevail, whatever difficulties come, even persecution and death.  Because it is founded on such a strong foundation we do not need to rely on stone buildings for fortification.  This faith sets hearts ablaze and that is what changes the world.  It is the reason these church buildings were put in place and so it alone is the reason they continue – without it they have no purpose.

Celebrating Luke reminds us that the only way for our church buildings to continue, indeed to have a reason to continue, is for them to be houses of storytelling.  It is only by telling and retelling the story of God in Jesus Christ and igniting imaginations with this life changing good news that there is any hope for ancient stones and more recent ones.  His gospel sets out for us the life changing good news of Jesus Christ which is the purpose behind everything we aim to do.

Sermon preached at Peterborough Parish Church, Sunday 18th October 2015 

Light of faith lived: Edith Cavell

Edith Cavell's Lamp

Near the church of St Martin-in-the-Fields in London, just off Trafalgar Square, stands a memorial to an English nurse.  At the base are the words

“Patriotism is not enough.  I must have no hatred or bitterness towards anyone.”

Edith Cavell was executed by the German army 100 years ago tomorrow (12^th October).  She was shot at 7.00am by firing squad at Tir national shooting range in Schaerbeek, Belgium.  Her crime was harbouring Allied soldiers and helping them escape.  Belgium was under German occupation during WW1 and any Allied soldiers in need of care hid in the woods.  Any found were either shipped off to prison camps or shot.  So those who came to Edith’s hospital for treatment needed medical care, hiding and also help to escape.  That brought her into contact with the resistance and clandestine activity.  Her hospital regularly searched, she was betrayed by an entrapment sting. 

The night before she was executed she wrote final letters and was visited by the priest from the Anglican church where she worshipped.  As she spoke with him she uttered those famous words, recorded on her memorial, except there was a bit more to them.  What she actually said was:

“I have no fear nor shrinking; I have seen death so often that it is not strange or fearful to me…  But this I would say, standing as I do in view of God and eternity I realize that patriotism is not enough.  I must have no hatred or bitterness towards anyone.”

Those words often missed out about ‘standing in view of God and eternity’ matter enormously, because it was her faith that inspired her in her work and it was her faith that provided tremendous comfort and perspective as she faced her own death having seen so many others die.

She had been reading Thomas a Kempis’ ‘The Imitation of Christ’, that great 15^th century spiritual classic.  It has in it passages that speak of improvement.  One passage in the chapter entitled ‘On considering one’s death’ says poignantly

“What is the use of a long life when we show so little improvement?…  Always be ready; live in such a way that death can never find you unprepared.”

He gives practical advice on dealing with the failings of others and being patient, as we ourselves expect others to be patient with us: for as we pray ‘forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us’!

She showed great compassion, treating the wounded of whatever side.  Her hospital flew the Red Cross’ flag and she told her nurses: “Any wounded soldier must be treated, friend or foe.  Each man is a son, husband or father.”  For each was equal at the point of need.  Her compassion, her rejection of hatred and bitterness sprung from her profound faith.

Laurel Court, Peterborough Cathedral Cloister

It therefore seems fitting that the memorial we have to her in this cathedral is not just the tablet paid for by her colleagues and friends from Laurel Court School in our cloister, where she had been a pupil teacher in 1886, but her lamp hanging above it, given to us in 2009.  The light is the light of faith lived, that placed its hope on God and ‘standing in view of God and eternity’ was conscious not to hate or be consumed by bitterness.

The gospel reading this morning had a man anxious to live a life improved and validating of his faith (Mark 10:17-31).  Keeping rules and ticking the right boxes, showing that measurables have been achieved and met – don’t lie, steal, murder…; outward discipline is not on its own the point.  The one thing this man lacked was a heart that stood in view of God and eternity and was ready.  Possessions distract us and distract us from emptiness within.  Keeping rules can do the same.  Yes we devise rules to help us learn and to give us boundaries that help us be virtuous, or at least limit the damage we might otherwise do, but they are not a substitute for a heart that is content and at peace.  If the rules are just and true, and that is itself a massive question, then a heart that is filled with that justice and truth will instinctively behave in a way that is life-givng and therefore blesses.  So the injunction to go and sell all you have exposes straight away that the man was not living in a state of readiness for death; that was not standing in view of God and eternity.

Possessions, then as now, were seen as a sign of blessing, as validating a life.  The established view was that God showed his favour in bestowing riches and good things.  Bad things came because of God’s displeasure.  Thus we get passages that ask who sinned, the blind man or his parents.  Jesus moves beyond such shallow and transitory badges; indeed he turns them upside down.  Cash is to be given away.  The very signs of blessing shunned and rejected.  Poverty is held up over riches.

How hard these lessons are to learn, now as then.  We have inherited such great wealth from the past: buildings which glorify; craftsmen’s art and music’s measure sublimely combined.  As we pray, far from being stripped back to be prepared for our death, or standing in view of God and eternity, we can be very firmly locked in the temporal.  The grandeur of this place must come with this spiritual health warning.  That which should point beyond, from temporal to eternal, to be ready to let go of everything, even life itself, can actually serve the complete opposite.  Those of us who live and work here daily have to be careful we don’t take all of these surroundings too seriously less they corrupt the soul, distort our vision and distract us from the view of God and eternity.  It is hard for the rich to enter the Kingdom of God.  Those whose sofas are well cushioned, and nests soft, have a harder task in reaching beyond those distractions.

The reality check here is provided by the firm hope in the Kingdom of God.  It grows within us if we let it and it comes to a heart that stands utterly dependent on God.  Whenever I go on retreat, I like to kneel in a simple chapel, in simple clothes (I don’t have an elaborate wardrobe), without status, except that of a child of God, focused on the stillness that comes from being touched by the silence of eternity and at one with the one who is the source and goal of our existence.  I fully understand St Cuthbert praying in the waves of the sea, and the holy sites on wind swept hillsides or cliff edges. There is a challenge to find that in more urban areas, but it is possible, away from the padding and all that would make us think we are no more than material things.  There is no other hope, certainly not in money, elaborate surroundings or trappings.  The question is often not can your faith survive outside of this great place, but can it survive in it!  If it struggles outside, it will certainly struggle inside where the distractions are so great.

Memorial, Peterborough Cathedral

For Edith Cavell faith found its fullest expression in serving those in need.  In that she found hope renewed, not diminished, and in facing death eternity was clearer.  The man in our gospel reading addressed Jesus as ‘good teacher’.  The reply reminded him that God alone is good.  When the priest told Edith Cavell on the night before her execution that she would be remembered as a martyr she rejected it, saying she was ‘just a nurse who tried to do her duty’.  Do not get distracted by hopes of glory and fame, by the comfort of riches, but viewing God and eternity, having a purity of heart totally focused on God, counts for more.

Sermon preached in Peterborough Cathedral, Sunday 11th October 2015 

Food for All - Wednesday at One

This half term we are looking at seven signs in John’s Gospel, through which Jesus reveals who he is.  Over the last three weeks we’ve had Jesus making himself known in the changing of water into wine (John 2:1-11), the healing of the young son of the royal official (John 4:46-54) and last week the healing of the man at the Pool of Bethzatha (John 5:1-18).  Today we have Jesus feeding a crowd on a hillside, which leads to a long piece of teaching in John’s Gospel, chapter 6, about Jesus being the bread of life and how we need to feed on him.

A few years ago, when I was a vicar in a different place, some members of the choir were positively militant about the hymn we have just sung.  ‘Guide me, O thou great…’ well that is where the problem came – should it be ‘Redeemer’ or ‘Jehovah’. Most modern hymnbooks render the word ‘Redeemer’.  A number of the choir were adamant that it should be ‘Jehovah’ and would bellow it out loudly whenever the hymn was sung.  It was a good-natured dispute, one of those bits of gentle banter, but nonetheless passionately held.

I decided to go for a knock down, definitive answer to the question.  A friend of mine lives in Wales, near where the children’s series ‘Ivor the Engine’ was set, and not only learnt Welsh but teaches it.  (I take my hat off to her.)  I got in touch and asked if she could look in a Welsh hymn book in her local church and translate the hymn.  This would surely give the final and definitive answer.  The result turned out to be something of an eye opener.  In short it is neither ‘Redeemer’ nor ‘Jehovah’!  The English version is a very free translation of the original Welsh hymn because the strict translation doesn’t give the right number of syllables to fit the tune.

My friend translated the first line as ‘Lord, guide me through the desert’.  No mention of Jehovah or Redeemer!  The key word would appear to be ‘Lord’, so we’re looking for an appropriate substitute.

As I say most hymn books prefer to use the word ‘Redeemer’ today because ‘Jehovah’ is a hybrid of two words, the Hebrew name for God Yahweh, or Jahveh, and the word for Lord, Adonai.  The combination arises through a tradition which arose around 300 BC of regarding the name of God as being so holy that it shouldn’t be mentioned.  To get round this the respectful ‘Lord’ (Adonai) was used instead, and that is reflected in many English translations.  Hebrew doesn’t use vowels as letters, just annotations to indicate where they need to be placed, so we get YHWH and JHVH respectively.  Take the vowels of Adonai and mix with JHVH and we get Jahovaih, the hybrid from which Jehovah is a corruption.  So while Jehovah carries the echoes of the original word for Lord, it is a mixed up word that doesn’t really exist.  Some regard it as inappropriate for this reason.  It has to be acknowledged that the author accepted ‘Jehovah’ when his hymn was translated into English.

Redeemer, on the other hand, doesn’t mean Lord, it just has the right number of syllables to fit the tune.  It does however give a New Testament flavour and refers directly to Jesus Christ as Lord.  He is the one who sorts out the consequences of our sin and need for redemption.  In that respect use of Redeemer does give us ‘Lord’ with a purpose.  So on balance I think I would go for Redeemer rather than Jehovah.

Now Lord with a purpose is what we get in our reading about Jesus feeding the crowd of 5,000 with a small boy’s picnic (John 6:1-14).  It is part of a much longer sequence of teaching which ends with Jesus describing himself, in one of the great ‘I am’ sayings in John’s Gospel as the ‘bread of life’, the bread from heaven, to use the term in that hymn (v35-38).  This story has very strong Eucharistic allusions to it.   John doesn’t give an account of the Last Supper or the institution of Holy Communion. Instead he gives us this long passage in which he sets out his Eucharistic theology and because of the setting expands our horizons beyond liturgy and churchy settings.  Jesus takes the bread, gives thanks, breaks it and distributes it.  Those are the four actions of a Eucharistic celebration identified by the great scholar of liturgy, Dom Gregory Dix, in his seminal work ‘The Shape of the Liturgy’.  We take the bread, we give thanks, we break it and we share it out.  This is not just a service but it is how the church is to be, how we as believers are to be.  We are taken, called, gathered into a community that needs to feed on Christ.  We give thanks, we celebrate the gift that is Christ, that is one another, that is the life that he gives us, that is his saving love in his life, death and resurrection.  We are broken, fragile and vulnerable, injured and in need of our pride to be broken so that in humility we can celebrate and grow, be useful and serve.  We are sent out, shared, given a job to feed others – physically and spiritually.  It has to be said, John doesn’t say ‘break’, but it is implied otherwise how could everyone eat.

The Eucharist, the Communion, the Celebration of the Lord’s Supper, is not just a meal or act of remembrance – as important as this is – it is where we become the church.  What is more it is a model of what it means to be followers of Jesus.  We are to be Eucharistic people: called; blessed in thanksgiving, in gift; broken, prepared for sending; shared and sent out.  The calling is for all, not just for a few.  All who are baptized are called to follow the Master, the Lord with a purpose.  All are blessed as beloved gift and we are gift to one another as well as to the world.  All are broken and so in need of treating with tenderness and care, love and honour.  All need to recognize their brokenness with honesty and humility, with trust in the redeeming love.  And all are sent with a mission to be salt and light, to make a difference wherever they go, to be themselves signs of the blessing they have received.  We not only receive ‘food’ which is ‘for all’, we are to be ‘food for all’.

The Gospel of Jesus Christ breaks down whatever exclusive barriers and boundaries we care to erect and boy are we good erecting them.  The first disciples had to learn this with the commission to go beyond the Jewish community to embrace Gentiles.  One of the first miracles of the first Christian church was that it dumped Aramaic as the language of their faith in favour of Greek, the language of trade, common around the Mediterranean, more so than Latin, thanks to Alexander the Great.  The ‘for all’ in the title for this talk is written into the language of the New Testament.

But this food, what is it?  What does it mean to refer to Jesus as ‘bread’?  Well this is John’s Gospel and it began with his wonderful prologue, the hymn to the Word among us, full of grace and truth.  ‘In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God and the Word was God’ (John 1:1).  And it ends with the astounding affirmation that this Word became flesh and dwelt among us full of grace and truth (v14).  The bread of life is Christ among us, inspiring, nourishing with his grace, with his love, with his transforming presence.  To understand this more fully, he gives a new commandment later in the Gospel, to love, he 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: God is love and those who live in love, live in God and God lives in them, to quote the Epistle of James.

That new commandment to love, the radical way of love and peace, challenges us to look around us 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; they too are called, blessed, broken and sent.  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.

When Jesus describes himself as the bread of life, feeding on him, following him, being filled with the grace that was within him, changes how we are to behave if we are to honour the glory within him.  The feeding is also literal.  The hungry are fed, the blind receive sight, the lame walk, lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the poor have good news brought to them.  This was the answer Jesus gave when John the Baptist’s disciples asked him if he was the real the deal (Luke 7:18-23).  His calling card was good news to the poor and needy.  This is no mere aesthetic.

Which takes us back to the hymn I began with.  It has one reference to ‘Bread of heaven’ and being fed ‘till I want no more’.  The passage from John’s gospel has provision of food which more than satisfies, because the leftovers fill 12 baskets.  The hymn is also about pilgrimage through a barren land and being fed, sustained for the journey.  The sustenance that we need is the bread of life, the Word among us, the Christ who is the Way the Truth and the Life, who brings a new commandment to love.  The sustenance comes through the gift, the purpose, knowing that there is a point.  This seems to be particularly important at the moment.

The assisted dying bill debates brought out some competing convictions about how we see life.  It was a hard call when we look with compassion and understand the distress on both sides, the suffering and the desire for release balanced against protecting the vulnerable.  St Francis referred to Sister Death, who comes as a welcome guest.  But there was an editorial in the Independent newspaper which said “If you believe that all life comes from God, then it may be reasonable to argue that only God can take away what he created… the vast majority of the public do not go near a church and do not see their lives as some kind of gift that needs to be returned to sender.” (Monday 7^th September 2015)  Now there are assumptions there, but there is a view quite loudly proclaimed that there is no purpose or point to life.  It is contained within the parameters of what we see.  It has no source outside of random accident and so when it ends there is nothing.  It is a very empty and ultimately bleak view of existence.  When we celebrate Christ as the bread of life, the bread of heaven, feeding us for the journey, we proclaim that there is a point and that point lies with the eternal Word who was at the beginning and whom we see made flesh among us in Jesus Christ.  When we call him Lord, we affirm his redeeming purpose, redeeming from futility, from the brokenness and sinfulness of this fragile life, that everything is and comes from gift.

So on the mountainside, Jesus fed the crowd, physically and spiritually.  There was food for all, because he came their redeemer, and that redemption calls us, blesses us and prepares us to be sent out to feed others in their hunger for dinner as well as knowing there is a purpose to hold us through our pilgrimage to the goal of promise.

Wednesday at One Talk for Peterborough Cathedral, 30th September 2015