Selected Sermons

Sermon for the Deddington Deanery Service

‘The Wonder of the Word’,  a service held at St Mary’s Bloxham on Trinity Sunday, 19 June 2011, to mark The Year of the Book, the 400th anniversary of the King James Bible.

The readings for the service were Exodus 1.8-22, read in the King James Version, and Luke 13:10-17, read in the New Revised Standard Version.
We have heard in the lessons two great masterpieces of biblical storytelling, in two fine translations, the King James and the NRSV – two stories for our own time, as much as for the times in which they were first told. 
So much is packed into such a small space in that Exodus story of the two midwives confronting the pharaoh.  When I retold it some years ago in a children’s Bible I was writing, it took me over three pages to unpack its treasures, its horror and suspense, the extraordinary courage of the midwives, their equally remarkable faith, and their humour.  For at the heart of the story lies a joke, though we have to get back to the original Hebrew to grasp it.  Its setting could hardly be darker: two extremely vulnerable women, Shiphrah and Puah, are in the throne room of a pharaoh bent on genocide.  He has absolute authority, and is counted divine by his people.  His is the most powerful nation on earth, and he holds its power in his own person.  He is ruthless.  He is paranoid.  He has ordered Shiphrah and Puah to become his agents of death, to wear the uniforms of SS guards beneath their midwives garb.  He has ordered them to kill every boy baby born to the Israelites in their slave camps.  His orders must be obeyed, but Shiphrah and Puah have consistently defied him.  ‘They did not as the king of Egypt commanded them, but saved the men children alive’ (Exodus 1.17 in the King James – curious phrase that, ‘men children’).  But the pharaohs of this world always have their spies and informants.  So this particular pharaoh gets to hear of Shiphrah’s and Puah’s disobedience.  He summons them once more, and there they stand before him, guilty as charged, and we, the hearers of the story, can see no way out for them.  Surely, they won’t get out of the palace alive.
At this point in the story the last thing we expect is a joke, but that’s what we get.  ‘Well, Your Royal-Ever-So-Divine-Highness,’ Shiphrah begins, ‘it’s like this.  These Israelite women, they’re not like your refined Egyptian ladies, sir.  The Egyptian mothers have such an hard time of it, sir, but those Hebrews, they’re like animals, they just drop ‘em.  They come so quick, their babies, we never get there on time.  We rush round as fast as we can, when we’re called for, but we never get there on time, do we Puah?’  ‘Never,’ says Puah.  ‘The husband comes to the door and says, “You’re too late.  She’s had it already.”  So there’s nothing we can do, sir.’
A lot of that is packed into a single Hebrew word in Exodus 1.19, hayot (the h is pronounced like ch in loch), which the King James translates as ‘lively’.  Given the context we might translate it ‘bursting with life’.   But hayot sounds almost the same as a common Hebrew word, hayyot, which means ‘animals’.  So the original hearers of this story, knowing their Hebrew, would have heard the midwives tell the pharaoh a sexist joke, and a racist one, too – the Hebrew women are hardly human; they are more like animals.  And that appeals to this pharaoh, as surely they know it will, these two wise women.  It works!  The pharaoh believes them . . . and gives up using midwives for his dirty work.
‘The last shall be first and the first last.’  The most powerful man on earth is duped by two midwives.  How do they do it?  The story tells us they ‘feared God’.  Shiphrah and Puah then have found God, who like them is a giver of life, not death, a God who, like them, delivers – delivers people from oppression and brings them to freedom, as they deliver women from the pain and anguish of labour, and give them their babies, crying with their first breaths.  Because they have found God, and God has found them, because in the language of the story they ‘fear’ God, they can confront the pharaoh without fear.  Call the pharaoh Hitler, Stalin, or Ratko Mladic, and you begin to get the measure of their courage, their faith and their selflessness.  These two Egyptian women are among the greatest heroines of the Bible, among its greatest saints.  Let their story be told in Damascus, in Tripoli, in Khartoum, in Jerusalem and in Gaza. 
Our second reading takes us from a pharaoh’s palace to a synagogue in a Galilean village, perhaps not even a building, but a space where the people of the village gathered for worship on the Sabbath.  Whenever I hear the story of the woman bent over and made to stand up straight, I think of my first visit to St Petersburg in Russia, still Leningrad then, in 1991.  Communism had just collapsed, and there was almost nothing in the shops, virtually no traffic in the pot-holed streets.  What we did see were little old women dressed all in black and bent double.  Survivors of the siege, one of my daughters explained.  They had survived on so little food, they had come to suffer from terrible osteoporosis. 
Jesus, stranger to that particular synagogue congregation, at once sees that bent woman in its midst and calls her over.  She finds herself centre stage, staring as she always does at the ground, unable to look him in the eye . . . until he takes her in his arms and she finds herself standing in the presence of God, standing tall and straight, head held high, honoured as she has never been honoured before, declared publicly ‘a daughter of Abraham’.  No-one else in the Bible is called that, unless you count one woman in the one of the books of the Apocrypha.  She is the faithful Jew in this story in Luke, and she puts the leader of the synagogue to great shame, showing up his narrow, pinched religion for what it is, a faith that leads him to turn his back on her when she’s just been healed and talk to the crowd, a faith that prevents him from entering into her new-found joy.  Let’s face it he should be dancing the tango with her, out of the synagogue and down the village street!
Two wonderful stories, heart-warming, inspiring, challenging stories, one for the Old Testament, one from the New, that put women centre stage.  But here’s the rub: there are not nearly enough stories like that in our Bibles.  The books of the Bible were largely composed by men (perhaps Ruth and the Song of Songs came from women), and they look at the world, even at God’s world, through men’s eyes and think with men’s minds.  The stories of women go largely untold, and when they do appear, they are over far too soon.  We never hear of Shiphrah and Puah again, though their story leads straight into the birth of Moses and we hear an awful lot about him.  The woman made to stand tall in Luke 13, able to look her God in the eye for the first time in eighteen years, appears nowhere else.  Did she become a follower of Jesus?  Surely she did.  Perhaps she was there at the cross, among ‘the women who had followed him from Galilee’ (Luke 23.49). 
When the translators of the King James Bible brought their work to such splendid completion, they had applied to the original Hebrew and Greek text the best scholarship that Britain could muster at the time (including the scholarship of the 1560 Geneva Bible, of which there is a fine copy displayed in front of the altar).   They opened the doors of academia wide and brought out its treasures for Christian congregations to enjoy.  Their gift has come down to us now, together with more contemporary translations, such as the Revised Standard Version, or the New Revised Standard Version, which also come out of meticulous, well-founded scholarship, and which also, like the King James, try to keep as close to the original Hebrew or Greek as they can.  And yet I am concerned.  For in many ways it seems now that the walls round academic biblical scholarship are very high, too high for most people, most Christians, to see over.  What concerns me even more is that it is sometimes the Church that has built and still is building these walls – a Church that pretends the Bible cannot be wrong; that pretends the Bible speaks with one voice, when it never does, not on a matter of any importance; that pretends that when we hear a passage from one of the Gospels, we are always listening to an exact record of what Jesus said and did; that sometimes even pretends that the stunning poetic prose of Genesis 1 is to be taken literally; a Church that allows the God of the massacre of the men, women and children and all their animals at Jericho in Joshua 6 to go unchallenged – at least Mladic’s men only killed the men and boys at Srebrenica –  and even applauds him when in the Gospels he threatens those who turn against him with agonizing torture for all eternity - we cannot, we must not speak of God like that anymore; a Church that often (thank God!) speaks of and works for the empowerment of women, yet too seldom points out how patriarchal its Scriptures are. 
In this the Year of the Book we need to look back and celebrate the scholarship of the makers of the King James Bible, but we need also to look forward, to a more intelligent use of the Bible and to a greater cooperation between the Church and scholarship.  Above all, in this Year of the Book, we must not turn the Bible into God.   That, as the Bible itself reminds us, is idolatry.  God is far greater than the Bible, as we well know when the Bible brings us into her presence.  In the end, as we know when we find God and swim out into the ocean of her love, she is beyond all telling and all imagining.  In the end on this Trinity Sunday of all days, God shuts our mouths, for all words fail, even those couched in the finest early seventeenth century English prose.
Trevor Dennis
Notes: 
1.  I am indebted to Rabbi Jonathan Magonet who wrote a splendid piece on the story of Shiphrah and Puah in his book Bible Lives, and revealed the joke buried in it (page 7 of his book).
2. I refer to the midwives as being Egyptians.  The King James in Exodus 1.15, and the NRSV, too, call them ‘the Hebrew midwives’, but the Hebrew text is ambiguous, and could mean the midwives who delivered the Hebrew women.  In their speech to the pharaoh Shiprah and Puah imply that they have also delivered Egyptian women, and the circumstances of the story make it very hard to think of Hebrew women doing that.  So it is easier to suppose they were Egyptian – which makes their actions even more astonishing, of course.
3. My children’s Bible is called The Book of Books.

Rogation

29th May 2011

Rogation Sunday was kept 100s of years before Harvest Festivals. It was when the whole community went out to beat the bounds of the parish, and to bless the crops in the fields. My spell checker doesn’t know the word Rogation. Rogation means Asking. The nearest similar word that comes to mind is ‘interrogation’ - my spell-checker knows that one - interrogation is asking questions, usually aggressively. At Rogationtide we ask God to bless the crops, and I’ve been particularly conscious over the past weeks that the crops and our gardens need, and still need, rain. Was the 3/4” of rain on Thursday an answer to the prayers of farmers? Is rain the answer to prayer? There was a drought in the Mid-West of the US. The whole farming community came together to pray for rain. Just one small girl went along to the prayer meeting with an umbrella.
On Countryfile last Sunday Adam Hansen was showing us his wheat crop not far from here. I didn’t know that ears of wheat are mostly borne on tillers, the side shoots of the plant. His tillers were not in good shape. On radio another farmer was saying that his tillers were dried up. Wikipedia says: ‘Tillering rates are heavily influenced by soil water status.’ The farmer on the radio agreed that the fields do look nice and green now. Later on the effects of drought would become obvious, unless there was plentiful rain soon.
When I visited farmers down the Rift Valley in Ethiopia, they talked of the green famine. The mountains looked attractively green, though the rains had failed yet again. Why had the rains failed? It was difficult to convince the farmers that the rains had failed because of their fuel crisis. They needed simply to keep their families fed from one harvest until the next. They needed convincing that they should divert some of their time and depleted energy to replace the trees that had been felled so as to provide fuel for cooking - in the towns as well as countryside. The rains failed because the forests used to cool the climate and encourage rainfall. Denuded hills also meant dried up springs. When it did rain, there were no trees to stop flooding and no tree roots to stop soil erosion. And if you are thinking that is all their problem, remote from us, an article in the Indeoendent on Tuesday about the Chelsea Flower Show was urging us to garden, because gardens help control extremes of hot and cold, especially in towns, and they help prevent flooding by absorbing rainwater which would otherwise overload drainage systems.
Just as we were complaining about the lack of rain, ten days ago the lesson at Morning Prayer was the passage from Deuteronomy which John read. 11:11: The land you are crossing the Jordan to take possession of is a land of mountains and valleys that drinks rain from heaven. 13~15 So if you faithfully obey the commands I am giving you today—to love the LORD your God and to serve him with all your heart and with all your soul— then I will send rain on your land in its season, both autumn and spring rains, so that you may gather in your grain, new wine and olive oil. I will provide grass in the fields for your cattle, and you will eat and be satisfied.
What are we to make of that? Is that true? Is the lack of rain today because we are failing to obey the Lord’s commands? If lack of rain in Ethiopia is a failure to go with the grain of nature, breaking the link between trees and climate, have we done so too? and are we doing so still? I remember a Dutch guest who came with the choir from Best. We walked to Daeda’s Wood and he enthused about it. He told us that the name Holland came from Holtzland - the wooded land, but now Holland is the woodless land. England too was covered in forests. The word ‘forest’ comes from Latin Foris Stare. It referred to what ‘stood beyond’. It was woods which stood beyond the human settlements. That’s why they were called 'forests'. The woods in England have been cleared to feed the population, just as they have in Ethiopia. Thus we break the natural laws of the created world.
News last Thursday too from Brazil and Ecuador. In Brazil the laws protecting the rainforests are being relaxed. José, a green activist, had predicted he would be murdered for criticising deforestation by local ranchers. He and his wife were shot, and his ear was cut off by the hit squad to prove he was dead to those who paid them.
In Ecuador more than a third of the people live in poverty. There is $7bn worth of oil beneath 4000 sq.miles of lush rainforest. Ecuador asked the rest of the world to find half the value of the oil so as to preserve the rainforest, feed their people and keep 400m. tonnes of CO2 out of the atmosphere. Will the rest of the world find the money? Or will the Daily Mail win the argument? Will the volume of government aid promised 41 years ago by all the nations at the UN General Assembly fail to be delivered?
Is rain the answer to prayer? or is the answer more complex? There has been a shift in human ideas. At first we believed that God controlled the weather. Then human beings discarded God and thought they were in control of the natural world, and could do what they liked with it. Volcanic ash clouds are a salutary reminder that we are not in control. We are learning the hard way that our survival is inextricably tied up with the health of the natural world and accepting the limits of this single fragile planet. In that sense if we faithfully obey the commands God set before us to love him and serve him with all our heart, soul, mind and strength, then we will eat and be satisfied - and so too will our children and children’s children.

Christopher Hall

Sermon for Harvest Evensongs, Barford St Michael and Deddington

Deut 26.1-11; John 6.25-35

Jesus said to them, ‘I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me will never be thirsty, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty.’

I am not sure whether I am sufficiently able to give a harvest sermon. Last week I was given the dubious honour of auctioning off Hempton’s harvest produce after their evensong, and it quickly became apparent that I wasn’t altogether certain about the difference between marrows, courgettes, and cucumbers. I’m still not entirely sure if I’m honest. I put it down to growing up in Surrey, where food was just there in Waitrose.

And it’s probably true to say that the clergy nowadays generally aren’t that knowledgeable about the land like they used to be (those halcyon days when they owned most of it…). When historians discuss the decline in churchgoing and Christian belief since the eighteenth century, a lot of people think that when farmers stopped relying upon God for good weather, good crops and healthy livestock, the church in the countryside was in serious trouble. This approach has not altogether disappeared. Even as recently as 1960, priests in the south-west of France were being asked to bless corn and say masses for sick pigs. And even in Deddington, I was surprised to hear these sort of practices continue: George Fenemore told me only the other day that he asked the Vicar not so long ago to bless one of his new combine-harvesters. By contrast, however, he did joke that this would almost certainly bring total calamity upon the workings of the machine. But, in all seriousness, the agricultural revolution transformed the way farmers thought about religion and the land, partly because farmers soon realized that chemicals were invariably more effective for increasing crop yield than the village priest’s prayers. There’s an account of a farmer in France in the late nineteenth century telling his local priest,

‘Monsieur le curé, I’ve tried everything. I’ve had masses said and got no profit from them. I’ve bought chemicals and they worked. I’ll stick to the better merchandise.’

Tonight I want to ask the question: do we still need God at harvest? And in a revolutionary departure from the three-point sermon, I’m going to suggest two ways in which we might have good reason to continue trusting in God in the countryside.

And the first is that, whatever else we might say about the land in our modern age, at the end of the day we receive it as a gift. Our reading from Deuteronomy talks of the Israelites coming into the land that God has given them as their inheritance. But, throughout the Bible, one should be in no doubt that, to use our introductory verse tonight, ‘the earth is the Lord’s and the fullness thereof’ (Ps 24.1). Think back to Genesis 1. God says to man and woman, made in his image, ‘Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it…I have given you every plant yielding seed that is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree with seed in its fruit; you shall have them for food.’ Humans are to have dominion, are to be God’s stewards of his creation, but – quite crucially – creation itself is in God’s gift, it is the LORD’s. We plant seeds, we harvest, we eat, we multiply. But we all do this, the Bible repeatedly tells us, because of God’s generosity and loving-kindness.

Artificial fertilizer does not in the end remove this command to be good stewards of God’s creation; to lovingly tend that which he has given us. That is why in our reading from Deuteronomy, the Israelites are commanded to give the first fruits of the ground to the LORD in his holy dwelling place, as a reminder that they lived in the land of milk and honey not as an inalienable right, but because God himself had brought them into the land. To recognize the Creator, the giver of all good gifts, is to recognize that we live and move and have our being not because it is our right, not because we have been clever enough to develop fertilizers and tractors, but primarily because God has entrusted the gift of his creation to us. And what’s more we should celebrate this fact. The Law also tells the Israelites that, having made their offering to the LORD their God, ‘together with the Levites and the aliens who reside among you, you shall celebrate with all the bounty that the LORD your God has given to you and to your house.’

What we do here today, and in our harvest festivals year after year, is a continuation of that command: proclaiming that no celebration of our year is complete without recognizing and giving thanks to our Creator and Sustainer for all his good gifts.

My second point is far less cheery, and probably suggests that the curate is entering a period of Seasonal Affective Disorder. But I want to ask, What do we ultimately get from all our toil, on the land, in our offices, or wherever we work? Many of us, farmers or regular workers, will feel at the moment that, at best, we’re just getting by. It won’t just be farming that will feel the pain in the coming years, either. With VAT set to rise to twenty per cent, and severe public spending cuts on the horizon, many British families will soon begin to feel the pinch if they haven’t already. And, of course, our economic struggles are really nothing compared to many other nations across the world. Only last month the rising cost of bread in Mozambique led to fierce protests and clashes that left thirteen dead.

Part of the response to these crises are, of course, sustainable farming, fairer markets, and a less gluttonous West. Part of it is, however, goes a bit deeper, and suggests something more difficult about what it means to be human: and that is that the sweat and grind of our everyday life is inescapable To quote a part of the Bible not regularly heard at harvest, God tells Adam in Genesis 3 as he sends him and his fruit-loving wife out of Eden: ‘cursed is the ground because of you…in toil you shall eat of it all the days of your life’ (Gen 3.17). And much later in the Bible, the author of Ecclesiastes in his usual perky way, writes, ‘What do mortals get from all the strain with which they toil under the sun? For all their days are full of pain, and their work is a vexation; even at night their minds do not rest. This also is meaningless.’ And although we give thanks today for a reasonably good harvest and food to eat, shelter over our heads, the working year can nonetheless for many of us feel deeply unrewarding, and, dare I say it, meaningless: endless toil, and for what, Ecclesiastes ask, except to return to the dust? I would add at this point that I enjoy my job.

But that yearning for a life free from toil was no less in the hearts of those men and women who sat on the Galilean hillside listening to Jesus all those years ago. They come in search of this teaching that offers meaning and hope in a life of drudgery and toil. We, with them, can only imagine what it must have been like to be there with Him, not least when our Lord breaks bread and shares fish, so that five thousand eat from a few loaves. To be in Jesus’s company that day was to be spared the toil and labour of human existence; food was readily available to the Galilean crowds, and they saw it as a sign that the Messiah has arrived: like the manna from heaven, here they see a new Moses. Like the food made miraculously available to Elijah, they see here a new prophet, the coming of the new age, and they want more of it. They chase Jesus, trying to make him a king. Would we not be the same? It would be like David Cameron this week, standing up on the Tory conference platform and offering free food, free housing, free public services. Who could say no?

But to this crowd Jesus tells them, quite bluntly, ‘You are looking for me, not because you saw signs, but because you ate your fill of the loaves. Do not work for the food that perishes, but for the food that endures for eternal life.’  The crowd is befuddled; bread that lasts forever! The true bread from heaven! ‘Sir,’ they say, ‘give us this bread always’. To their pleading, Jesus comes back with this astonishing reply: ‘I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me will never be hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty.’ His reply is in some ways beyond fair trade, sustainable food supplies and good harvests, good though those things are, and it touches not just our bank accounts, but the very core of our being: our deep longing for a bread that endures; for a wealth that is satisfying, and a way of life that begs for nothing. To these people, from farmers with crops yielding plenty to City financiers delighting themselves with complex fiscal equations, Jesus lays the challenge starkly before us: don’t work for that which perishes, chasing after earthly satisfaction, but work for the food which endures for eternal life.

So, this harvest, with fertilizers aplenty, and a way of life that really begs for nothing, there are two good reasons to continue trusting in the God: firstly, we have all this because God has entrusted it to us, and we rightly give him thanks today. But, secondly, even if modernity has delivered the clergy from saying masses for your pigs, the toil and meaningless labour of life is no less apparent to many; in a period when many, both in the city and in the countryside are starving for a wisdom and way of life that offers meaning and hope, we offer them a food that satisfies: Jesus Christ, the bread of life, who says ‘This is the work of God, that you believe in him who sent me.’ (Jn 6.29)

Dan

Sermon for Hempton and Deddington - 19 September 2010

“For this I was appointed a herald and an apostle.” 1 Timothy 2.7a

On this day, one hundred and eighty-five years ago, a young priest arrives in Deddington from Oxford. He comes to dine at the Vicarage with the illustrious Richard Greaves, whose fiery Calvinistic preaching filled this church week after week, with people flocking from the region and the University to hear one of the most celebrated preachers of the day. This young clergyman comes to Deddington, however, not merely for supper with Greaves, but to make a speech at a gathering of the Church Missionary Society. Very likely in this very space before us, he rises before the assembly to make what he records in his diary as his first ever speech. Neither the Churchpeople of Deddington, nor the Vicar, could ever have imagined that the man that stood before them would in due course become one of the most controversial men of his century. They would have been roundly flabberghasted had you told them that almost two hundred years later the same man would come to be beatified by the Bishop of Rome in a park near Birmingham. The young clergyman of which I speak is, of course, John Henry Newman: academic, leader of the Oxford Movement, infamous convert to Rome, cardinal and very probably the greatest English religious thinker since Hooker.

Now, why, you may ask, do you wish to devote our Sunday sermon to thinking about a man chiefly famous for rejecting the sound teaching and authority of the Church of England? What has Newman to teach us today, here in 2010? Well, a lot I think can be learnt from the speech that Newman made to Deddingtonians all those years ago, and it relates well to our epistle reading today from 1 Timothy. Newman comes to Deddington to talk to the Church Missionary Society, and in his speech he explores the question: Why spread the good news of Jesus Christ? Why do all of you, Newman asks, want to give money to a mission agency and its work overseas? And, in our time, we might comparably ask, Why should we surrender our hard-earned savings for a youth worker, for overseas aid, for the diocesan share, for the ongoing existence of this church itself?

And why indeed? The necessity of religion is far from obvious to many people nowadays. So often now you’ll encounter the person who says, ‘I know how to live a good life, I’m very spiritual, I’m kind and generous, I don’t need to be told at Church Sunday after Sunday how to live my life’. It’s very hard to know what to say to such people, many of whom are searching in their own way, on their own terms, for truth and meaning in their lives. Only last weekend I was reading that illustrious journal, the Sunday Times ‘Style’ magazine, which profiled Julia Roberts in her upcoming appearance in the film Eat Pray Love which is released this week. It’s based upon the book of the same name and it’s about a woman who, unhappy in her marriage and encountering a sort of existential crisis, leaves her husband and sets off round the world in search of personal and spiritual fulfillment. Like many books and films of its type, we are told that spiritual fulfillment comes primarily through eating organic food, yoga, and getting in touch with the Inner You. I obviously caricature this sort of New Age paperback, and I’m a great fan of organic meat, but we can’t ignore the fact that books like Eat Pray Love are bestsellers…and no doubt the film adaptation will make an awful lot of money to help Julia Roberts in her ongoing quest for spiritual enlightenment. But the point remains, if the search for fulfilment is now comparable to finding a good bargain on eBay, how does the Church respond?

Well, you may be surprised to hear that things were not altogether different in 1825. When Newman stands before the people of Deddington, he speaks about those people who are able to talk eloquently about the principles of morality and duty towards one’s neighbours, but who shy away for explicit language about Christ and salvation. Their view, Newman claimed, was but ‘partial and defective’. ‘We turn our backs’ he tells them, ‘to the sun of righteousness, then think we see without its light’: if you’re born in the light of Christianity, in a Christian nation say, Newman reckoned, you don’t know what darkness is, and so often end up confusing the benefits of Christian community with the gospel itself. To all those people who had pitched up in Deddington to hear why the CMS should reach out to the Indian subcontinent or the Southern Cape, Newman turns it round on them. What is your reason for being a Church? Why do you do what you do? Is it for community? Is it for fellowship? Is it as an offering of hospitality and service to each other?

Let us return to our Epistle today. Paul writes to Timothy instructing his community how to pray, and reinforcing his message by saying that he himself has been appointed as a herald, as one who is sent to the Gentiles “in faith and in truth”. Why is he sent and for what purpose? The preceding verses read quite bluntly:

“For there is one God; there is also one mediator between God and humankind, Christ Jesus, himself human, who gave himself as a ransom for many. For this reason I was appointed as a herald and an apostle.” (vv.5-6)

Community, hospitality, service to one another, visiting the sick: all these are essential, and good. Indeed our Lord commands that we should do these things until he returns in glory (Mt 25). But, ultimately, Newman and Paul suggest, it is Christ whom we proclaim. Underneath our civic duty, underneath the swell of goodwill and hospitality, underneath the ritual of our daily liturgy a healthy church will make manifest in its speech and in its practice that earth-shattering truth: that God sends his Son to die upon a cross as a ransom for many, to free us from our sin and brokenness. In Jesus, we are brought back to God, and share an intimacy with God which itself is but a foretaste of that which we shall enjoy in His new creation. It is this truth about who we are – not equality legislation, not a weekly yoga session, nor even a mature appreciation of art and good literature – that guarantees dignity, purpose, and hope for humanity in a cynical and tired society. Here is where we find our value in the sight of God: loved immeasurably, being changed from glory into glory in the likeness of Christ. This truth we must cherish in Word and Sacrament and this truth we must proclaim even if, like Paul and Silas in Thessalonica, we are accused of ‘turning the world upside down’ (Acts 17.6)

I’m going to leave the final words to Blessed John Henry Newman taken from his Deddington speech:

“[The] flame [of the gospel] has now been lit 1800 years, and thus the tradition of many hands and the succession of many generations is come down to us. And we should feel it a sacred gift and precious deposit which is to be by us transmitted pure and healthy to our posterity. And not only pure, but stronger and more vigorous and more widely extended. It is but a timorous and unbelieving policy, to hide the light of life under a bushel, as if every gust of wind would put it out instead of setting it up that it may profit the whole family of  man. Whoever heard of a quiet and inactive flame? We but poorly guard the honour and welfare of religion while we keep on the defensive, instead of offering it to every people, nation, and language…in forwarding the cause of Missions we at once promote our own spiritual welfare and that of the heathen – our hearts are opened – our feelings excited – our views enlarged – our minds warmed – We bless and our blessed – we water and are watered”.

May we who come now to receive our Lord’s body and blood, treasure that sacred gift of our salvation, and hold the flame of the gospel aloft in our own generation. Amen.

Dan

Unrevealed until its season - Deddington 12th September 2010

On the day of the Healing Service on Iona in June I found Stephen Raw the graphic artist on his knees in the Macleod Centre. He was wielding a craft knife freehand on a large sheet of blue vinyl. What he was doing was unrevealed until he stripped away letters to reveal the word ‘Unrevealed’. What that was for was unrevealed until we gathered for the healing service in the Abbey that evening to be met by this banner hanging over the crossing with the words ‘until its season’ on its other side. What that was about was unrevealed until we sang the hymn we have just sung and the last but one line in each verse. After the service I asked Stephen what was to happen to his work of art. ‘Bin it’ he said. I said: ‘If no-one else wants it, we’ll take it back to Deddington.’ So thanks to Ross [and to George] here it is and here we are.
The first verse of the hymn speaks of the transformations in nature. A caterpillar can never have any idea of life as a butterfly, nor a larva of being a dragonfly. Do you remember the Ugly Duckling, Danny Kaye’s song: There once was an ugly duckling With feathers all stubby and brown And the other birds in so many words said Quack! Get out of town. And he went with a quack and a waddle and a quack In a flurry of eiderdown. ‘Unrevealed until its season’: the next spring he was told what he was: Me a swan? Ah, go on!
‘Unrevealed until its season’ sums up the life of faith. We can never be sure of the future which God alone can see. Sue Childs read from the Letter to Jewish Christians, verses from the chapter which lists the people of faith from the Old Testament. Their experience illustrates that ‘faith is being sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not see’.
To follow that reading I was unclear what gospel passage to use. I didn’t see how the Gospel set for today in the lectionary fitted our theme: the stories of the lost coin and lost sheep, which St Luke follows with the story of the lost son. Then Olivia pointed out that the woman and the shepherd had faith that they would find what they had lost. We tend to put the emphasis on the happy ending of the stories, but those endings were ‘unrevealed until their season which God alone could see.’ Yet the faithful perseverance of the woman and the shepherd in keeping on looking for the lost is just as important as the happy endings finally revealed.
The story of the Lost Son is usually called the Prodigal Son; it illustrates the same message. The father, who had been so prodigal with his assets, never gave up hope that his profligate son would return. He was always on the look out for his return. That story tells us just as much about the nature of God as about human perseverance, indeed it is more about God. God never gives up hope on us, never despairs that we will at last respond to his prodigal love. That too is Unrevealed until its season.
Such is faith: faith is being sure of what we hope for however unsure we may feel, and certain of what we do not see, even though we cannot be wholly certain of what God alone can see. And isn’t that the faith we bring to a service of healing? - the healing of broken bodies, hurt minds and wounded hearts but  also the healing of divided communities and nations, and the healing of the earth itself. All have their place alongside the hurts and divisions within ourselves. Everyone brings to this service particular people, places and situations as a focus for God’s acceptance and love. We bring them in faith even though the outcome is ‘unrevealed until their season which God alone can see.’
Let’s look back on the recent history of the world. Many of us prayed and campaigned to put an end to the policy of Mutually Assured Destruction during the Cold War, with its threat to end the world. Just 21 years ago it seemed impossible that the Berlin Wall would fall. For years that was ‘unrevealed until its season which God alone could see.’ Many of us prayed and campaigned to put an end to the policy of Apartheid in South Africa. We could hardly believe it when Nelson Mandela walked free in 1990. That too was ‘unrevealed until its season which God alone could see.’ In 1993 Martin Dent and Bill Peters shared their vision of a campaign to cancel Third World debt for the millennium. My own response to Bill Peters was sceptical. Seven years later 14000 Jubilee 2000 Fair Trade rainbow scarves passed through Deddington. A pile of debt was cancelled, but the result was ‘unrevealed until its season which God alone could see.’
So this morning let us bring particular people, places and situations as our focus for God’s acceptance and healing love. Let us bring the intractable talks for peace between Israel and Palestine. Let us bring the challenges of climate change, and those already suffering in Pakistan, Niger and elsewhere from extremes of weather. Let us bring the challenges facing farmers to feed the world, made even harder as the climate changes. We bring them in faith though the outcomes are ‘unrevealed until their season which God alone can see.’ In the silence of our hearts we bring the names of those who need our prayers, and to each and for each and for everyone we will say together:
Spirit of the Living God, present with us now,
Enter you, body, mind and spirit,
And heal you of all that harms you
In Jesus’ name.

In our end is our beginning,
In our time, infinity,
In our doubt, there is believing,
In our Life, eternity.
In our death, a resurrection,
At the last a victory,
Unrevealed until its season
Something God alone can see.

Christopher Hall

Sermon for the Blessed Virgin Mary, 15th August 2010

SS Peter and Paul, Deddington; S. John, Hempton

“He has brought down the powerful from their thrones,
and lifted up the lowly.” Luke 1.52

‘After coming into contact with a religious man,’ Friedrich Nietzsche wrote in his book The Antichrist, ‘I always feel that I must wash my hands’. It was Nietzsche’s belief that Christianity was for slaves and the downtrodden, not for the strong, virile European man seeking to overcome these religious strangleholds upon society. Worse, he felt, Christianity seems to encourage and celebrate weakness, humility, and forgiveness. Nietzsche was pretty shocking for his time, but his words echo those of many down the ages. From its first appearance on the fringes of the Roman Empire, it was noted by political leaders that this peculiar band of God-botherers who proclaimed a Jewish man as Lord seemed to attract in particular, women, and worse widows, the poor and slaves.

Now I find all this talk of weakness and humility quite disturbing as I took holy orders in the Church by law Established convinced that, from my reading of Trollope and Austen, I would be immediately swept up in a whirl of society balls, command the village rabble like the local squire, and instruct the masses on a weekly basis as the local defender of Crown and Church. Well, to my immense shock, it seems that the number of balls in country houses to which I am invited is, well, somewhat limited, that people for some reason don’t seem to take my word as gospel truth in the Co-Op, and while a Barford coffee morning offers much in the way of social engagement it doesn’t quite offer the rural glamour of Sense and Sensibility. Indeed, the more I go about my work the greater the sense that I will never be an Austen clergyman, or indeed get to take up my seat in the House of Lords in due course. As Christians slide ever further away from the cultural and political centres of local and national life, perhaps we are all rather doomed to accept Nietzsche’s belief that at its heart, Christianity, is ultimately for the weak and the outcast.

Well, I am pleased to tell you this crisis of vocation that I’ve had to endure in the Vicar’s absence found its remedy not in an invitation to a manor house summer ball, but – you’ll be surprised to hear – in our gospel reading. Today, you will realize, we remember the Blessed Virgin Mary, the mother of Jesus and long-term victim of a Reformation smear campaign that results in Anglicans always being rather embarrassed to talk about her for fear of someone ending up on a stake in the village square being gently roasted by the flames. And our Gospel reading today is that song most beloved of the English choral tradition, the Magnificat: My soul doth magnify the Lord and my spirit rejoiceth in God my Saviour. The words are immensely cosy - aren’t they? - conjuring up deeply comforting memories of choral evensong by wintry candlelight in a high-vaulted English cathedral: lovely, someone bring me a sherry. And yet, as familiar as these words are to us, they’re more radical than Arthur Scargill on a bad day. Think about it: here’s a girl of about fourteen from an unremarkable town in Galilee, who’s been told by an archangel that her offspring will ‘reign over the house of Jacob forever, and of his kingdom there will be no end’ (Lk 1.33). The mother of David’s successor is not to be found in one of the resplendent palaces built by Herod, nor is she a prominent figure in Jerusalem society, but the God of Israel chooses a humble peasant-girl in a country backwater to fulfil his purposes for Israel and all creation. By the standards of the political and religious hierarchy, this girl is powerless, she is weak, she is in social terms, unnoticeable.

But, this is the same God who loves and redeems a nation of slaves in Egypt, bringing down the waves upon proud Pharaoh’s armies. This is the same God who chooses as king over Israel a shepherd boy from the Bethlehem hills. This is the same God who strikes down proud kings and unjust rulers. The same God whose purposes are worked through women, like Sarah and Hannah, thought to be barren; through a nation in exile; and now, here in the life of this humble peasant-girl in an unremarkable town in the north. Mary’s song echoes that of Hannah herself having discovered that she will give birth to Samuel. ‘He has shown strength with his arm; he has scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts. He has brought down the powerful from their thrones, and lifted up the lowly; he has filled the hungry with good things, and sent the rich away empty…’ (Lk 1.51-53)

God, with reckless abandon, deliberately seems to choose the weak to shame the proud: he chooses Israel, he chooses Mary. This is the God who, ultimately, works his salvation not in triumph and power like the gods of Babylon, Rome and Greece, but in total weakness and abandonment on a cross, even death itself. With Samuel looking at the eldest son of Jesse, we hear those words ‘The Lord does not see as mortals see; they look on the outward appearance, but the Lord looks to the heart.’ (I Sam. 16.7). So when that mustached old German philosopher tells us that Christianity is for the weak, the outcast, and the widow, is he not then absolutely right?

To Nietzsche, Mary proclaims that mystery that runs through creation itself: that the weaker we become, the stronger does God become present within us. Mary shows us that to join in the life of God, we must become humble, we must revel in our weakness and let go of our pride, for it is there that God will make his purposes known if we open our hearts and wills to him. It’s not easy to explain how this bizarre truth might be worked out in our daily life, both as individuals and as a community: what it means for our relationships, for politics, for our worship. Where would I end?

But if there is one clear truth that arises from it for us today, I think it is: that there is no need for us to fear being powerless. Those times when we feel acutely weak: whether as a result of sickness, poverty, of someone having beaten us into the ground with years of unpleasant comments, of not being the beautiful, rich, successful person that Hello! magazine would like me to be. As a church, it probably requires us not to fret over the loss of power in the upper echelons of English society. Rather, joining in the word of God we must seek out the weak and the lost in our families, in our communities, in our nation and across the world; those whom God promises to raise up in spirit and in truth. It is this mystical truth, displayed so magnificently in the life of Mary, that we commit ourselves to every week around this table. We show that our power lies not in diktats, dogma or political influence – the sort of thing treasured by the clergy in Trollope and Austen - but by committing ourselves to the lamb who was slain; in broken bread and wine outpoured.

I’m going to end with another continental philosopher, but of a quite different mindset. In 1848, as Europe was caught in the middle of political turmoil, and with troops on the border, Søren Kierkegaard had a conversion of sorts, and he wrote a very moving piece entitled ‘The Joy of It – That the Weaker Thou Dost Become, the Stronger Does God Become in Thee’. Here is a small section:

“The worshipper is the weak man; so he must appear to all the others, and this is the humiliating part. He is entirely weak; he is not able like others to make resolutions for a long life, no, he is entirely weak; he is scarcely able to make a resolution for the morrow without adding, ‘If God will’. He is not able to rely defiantly upon his own strength, his talents, his gifts, his influence , he is not able to utter proud words about all he is able to do – for he is able to do nothing at all. This is the humiliating part. But inwardly what bliss! For this weakness of his is a love-secret with God, it is worship. The weaker he becomes, the more genuinely he can pray; and the more genuinely he prays, the weaker he becomes – and the more blissful.” (Christian Discourses, 137)

May we with Mary, and all the saints know that love-secret with God, and share in that blissful, if slightly mad, truth that the weaker we are, the stronger does God become within us. Amen.

Daniel

Trinity 9 – Sermon for Evensong, Deddington

In April 1906, in a tumbledown shack on Azusa Street in Los Angeles, a small group of Christians began meeting to pray and worship. Within a month of this ramshackle outfit opening its doors, up to 1500 people could be seen regularly trying to cram into what was a tiny space. In the Californian heat, with flies filling the room, thousands poured in around the clock to experience one of the most famous Christian revivals in modern history. Its congregation had the sort of diversity that rivalled Pentecost itself: men, women, children, white, black, Hispanic, Asian, rich, poor, illiterate and educated. A reporter of the time writes about the goings-on:

…they cry and make howling noises all day and into the night. They run, jump, shake all over, shout to the top of their voice, spin around in circles, fall out on the sawdust blanketed floor jerking, kicking and rolling all over it. Some of them pass out and do not move for hours as though they were dead. These people appear to be mad, mentally deranged or under a spell. They claim to be filled with the Spirit…

And you thought our First Sunday services were bad! What really marked out the ecstasy of the worshippers at Azusa Street was their ability to speak in tongues. I don’t know how many of you have ever witnessed someone doing this. It’s the sort of thing that tends to happen more often in the Free Churches than in the Church of England, but if you go into any charismatic church on any given Sunday, you may well hear the soothing babble of someone speaking in tongues: a sort of strange utterance of nonsensical words which many believe to be the language of angels. Those churches and people who speak in tongues look back to the event of Pentecost when the Holy Spirit was poured out on the disciples, enabling them to speak in a variety of different languages. Pentecostalism, which is by far the most rapidly growing movement in Christianity today, looks back to those events in Jerusalem two thousand years ago, and to Azusa Street, which many intrepret as the decisive moment in the Holy Spirit’s breaking-out of ecclesiastical straightjackets in modern times.

Well, what do we make of all this rather unseemly behaviour, both in Asuza Street a century ago, and perhaps more closer to home in those churches we know that have been influenced by the Charismatic Movement? Well, we have to be very cautious in saying where God the Holy Spirit is present and where he is not, and I know many people who find speaking in tongues exhilarating, and a sign of God’s closeness to them. And, as we heard in our second reading tonight, things were little different for the Corinthian church. This was a community that, on the surface, appeared to be abundantly blessed with signs of God’s favour: healings, miracles and speaking in tongues. But, from what we can gather from Paul’s words to them in his first epistle, these gifts were becoming a cause of division. Our reading today follows on from that glorious account of love in 1 Corinthians 13: ‘If I speak in the tongues of mortals and of angels, but do not have love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal’. You can sort of read into the situation that people were using their ability to speak in tongues to make themselves feel superior to others in the community, a sort of spiritual one-upmanship. It was always clear, however, that speaking in tongues should be for building up other people. ‘For those who speak in a tongue,’ wrote Paul, ‘do not speak to other people for their upbuilding and encouragement and consolation…if in a tongue you utter speech that is not intelligible, how will anyone know what is being said?’ Rather, says St Paul you either need someone who can interpret what is being said by those speaking in tongues, or we must speak to each other ‘with some revelation, or knowledge, or prophecy, or teaching.’ That is, if you’re going to speak in tongues, it must be for the benefit and up-building of all those around us. If you are muttering senseless words into the air, it is the only the air that receives them; what does this mysterious utterance offer the rest of us? ‘So,’ St Paul tells them, ‘since you are eager for spiritual gifts, strive to excel in them for building up the church’, recognizing that there are many gifts, ‘but the same Spirit’ (12.4). ‘To each is given the manifestation of the Spirit for the common good’, he says in chapter 12.

Now the people of the Asuza Street back in 1906 believed that speaking in tongues was the sign that showed that you had been baptized in the Spirit. Unless you were able to rattle out these strange languages, God was not within you. That, I think, seems totally contrary to what Paul writes here in 1 Corinthians. We are one body with many members, with many gifts, and we must offer all of them in service of each other, and of our Lord. They cannot be a means of saying, ‘I’m in with God, you’re not’, which sadly is the case for many charismatic churches both in this country and across the world. There too, being able to speak in tongues becomes the sole mark of the Christian. If you can’t make these sounds, many believe, then you hav not been baptized with the Spirit. Nothing, I believe, could be further from a biblical understanding of spiritual gifts.

But what does this all mean for us? Of all the new things I have experienced since joining this church, I’ve yet to hear any of you speaking in tongues during evensong, or BCP Communion, or a coffee morning, though I’m willing to be corrected! (so long as, St Paul tells us, there’s someone to interpret your speech). Well, I don’t think we need to go to the length of miracles, prophecy and speaking in tongues to take serious note of what St Paul writes to this zealous young band of Christians in Corinth. We all have spiritual gifts. In baptism, we have poured on us the Spirit and we become a sign of God’s new creation in those waters. Each and every one of us offers something for the building-up of Christ’s Kingdom on earth. It may be prayerful wisdom, a gift of service and hospitality; it might be your passion for trade justice or the relief of the poor and the outcast; or, indeed, it might even be the gift of leadership, healing or prophecy. Some of you look skeptical, but I’ve seen it among. You’re a remarkably gifted bunch of people, praise God!

But the danger lurks for us, as it lurked for those Corinthians, as it lurks for the whole of God’s church: do our gifts build others up? Do we use what have been given in service? Or do we, like the Corinthians, sometimes use our own gifts to look down upon others, to make ourselves feel superior, or in control? We can all think of those casual conversational sideswipes that have bruised us. (‘Oh well, you wouldn’t understand this, it’s far too complex theologically’; ‘well, this is what God wants, and you just simply don’t understand!’ ‘no, no, no, Spanish polyphony is the only way to worship God,  you would know that if you had any sort of musical taste’). I’m particularly guilty of the last one, I confess…we’ve all heard them, and we’ve all been put in our place rather firmly by such comments. And, indeed, we’ve all made those sorts of comments ourselves, to make ourselves feel secure or safe in our position.

We might not be speaking in tongues, but our gifts can at times become a source of division. And it’s interesting, isn’t it, that in Los Angeles back in 1906, what started as a thrilling and remarkable outbreak of God’s Holy Spirit, perhaps, soon ended up in a matter of years in a power struggle, division, and eventually, total collapse. What had been a sign of God’s kingdom, all these different ethnic groups that had come together in that little shack, had soon all splintered into different churches where the Hispanics or the African-Americans could worship by themselves.

So the challenge lies before us, and maybe there are three questions we can ask ourselves tonight and over the coming week in our prayers and reading of the Bible: 1. What gift have I been blessed with? How has God equipped me to serve him day by day: in my workplace, in this church, in my community? 2. Am I using that gift to serve others, to build up this community, or is does it become a source of division? That’s trickier, and ask God the Holy Spirit in prayer and in confession to show you. We all do it. I do it. But we sometimes need a health-check in that respect. 3. Do I affirm other people’s gifts in this church, in my family, in this community? Do I look day by day to build others up in the service of Christ? I know to many it probably sounds horribly American, and I am, like many Englishmen, inherently cynical and fail to praise people enough, but I don’t think we can really get away with it reading through 1 Corinthians. St Paul has given us some pretty serious homework this week. Here those words of his again:

…since you are eager for spiritual gifts, strive to excel in them for the building up of the church…

 
Daniel

Sermon for Deddington, Trinity 6, 2010 (11th July)

Deut 30.99-14; Luke 10.25-37

‘Which of these three, do you think, was a neighbour to the man who fell into the hands of the robbers?’ He said, ‘The one who showed him mercy.’ Jesus said to him, ‘Go and do likewise.’

On the 18th April this year a man was brutally stabbed on a street in New York. Hugo Tale-Yax, a 31-year old Guatemalan man, had gone to the aid of another woman who was being attacked by man in a green short-sleeve shirt. Hugo Tale-Yax was then himself stabbed in the chest several times by this woman’s assailant, and he falls face down onto the pavement. Don’t worry; I’m not going to begin all my sermons here with homicide. And  - what’s new? - you may also think, this is the Queens district in New York. Murders here are two a-penny. Well what shocked New Yorkers, and what should shock us, is perhaps not so much the attack itself, but what happened after this ‘Good Samaritan’, if you like, fell to the ground. CCTV early that morning captures this man lying on the ground, bleeding to death. Then, shockingly, a whole range of different people walk straight by Tale-Yax, but failing to stop. At one point two men come out from a side building and stand around him, apparently discussing him; one of these men - and perhaps here is the greatest indictment of our digital dystopia - is visible taking a picture of the victim with his mobile phone. Later on, a passerby does stop and lifts Tale-Yax's head and shakes him, then lifts his arm up, as if to see if he is alive. The passerby then turns and walks away. It took more than an hour after the victim collapsed before someone rang 911.

This particularly unpleasant story I tell you not just to give you nightmares, but to show how our modern lifestyles often lead to our alienation from each other. New York, in particular, with its grid layout, towering sky-scrapers, brash drivers, and relentless movement and noise can be dehumanizing as much as it is exhilarating. In this sort of environment, are lives can quickly become paralyzed by fear. Fearing the unknown other: the mentally unstable, the murderer, teenagers who’ve drunk too much White Lightning, we set up walls around ourselves in public space, and isolate ourselves from our surrounding community. We are fearful to talk to our neighbour on the bus, the Underground, or in our warehouse-sized supermarkets. If we want social nourishment, many now turn to their iPhones where, with Facebook ready at hand, we can make ourselves feel safe and loved by accessing our digital social networks.

This is all very well, you might say, but you’re talking about urban life. But it doesn’t take much for our whole attitude to our surrounding community to slip into this cycle of fear and alienation. I wonder how fear has affected the psychology of Northumbrians and Cumbrians as a result of recent events. Think of those men and women locked in their homes earlier this week in Rothbury as the police searched for Raoul Moat. It doesn’t take much – perhaps even just one unpleasant comment or a bit of antisocial behaviour on a street – to make us want to retreat and find shelter.

What is interesting for us today, though, and what I think is probably at the heart of Jesus’s teaching this morning, is how religion can reinforce rather than challenge our fear of the other. Jesus presents us with a stereotypical bit of violence. A man is mugged: stripped, beaten and chucked into the gutter. And he presents this rather gruesome image in reply to a question from a lawyer, who wants to know what he needs to do to inherit eternal life. How can he be sure that he’s alright with God? How can he make himself safe? Well, Jesus says, do what the law tells you: ‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your soul, with all your strength, and will all your mind; and love your neighbour as yourself.’ But the lawyer wants to justify himself, Luke tells us. He wants confirmation from Jesus that he’s ticking all the right boxes. He wants to feel alright with the world, with himself, with God, by his obedience to the religious commandment. Jesus as he so often does, turns the question upside down. He gives us an example of how religion, rather than enabling us to love one another, can in fact end up giving us reason to ignore the other. It can blind us yet further to our neighbour, can actually increase our isolation from one another. Seeing this man in the road, the priest and the Levite are both anxious to keep the purity laws. If either of them goes anywhere near a dead man, they will be ritually polluted and unable to perform their religious duties. But by keeping their eyes fixed on their religious duties, they become blind to genuine human need. Instead, it is the Samaritan man, the one excluded from society, the one disdained by the religious hierarchy, the one well outside the boundaries of religious purity, he is the one who shows mercy. He is the one who fulfils the law, who loves his neighbour as himself.

So, what might this mean for us? Well part of it is summed in my own job description that was read out to me last week at my ordination. It is to ‘search out the poor and weak, the sick and lonely and those who are oppressed and powerless, reaching into the forgotten corners of the world, that the love of God may be made visible.’ It’s a pretty daunting set of duties, but it’s by no means the sole preserve of the deacon, and the liturgy makes that clear. Our reading today suggests that as each one of us follows Jesus we are called to deepen that love of our neighbour, to set aside all those barriers we put up between ourselves and the other, religion included. It’s not easy. I’m actually rather shy and find meeting new people quite difficult; you picked a stupid profession, you might say. But God gives us the courage to reach out to those people we find difficult. Very often this week, fear has made me reluctant to talk to people I wouldn’t normally talk to, in shops, on the street. Now I’ve found the good people of Deddington to be enormously friendly and there’s a lot of goodwill towards the Church. Let there be no mistake about that. But, if like me, you’re somewhat shy, ask God to give you courage. He really does give it, and His Spirit will be at work in those conversations you have.

This charming bit of social advice is all to say that being church is not primarily about making ourselves feel safe in the world, safe in here behind these thick walls. Following Jesus is about letting the love of God be known in word and deed, to have those awkward conversations, to reach out to that man in the ditch; to let the world know that there is no reason to fear; God is with us and loves us more than we could possibly know. Perhaps as we come up to Communion now, to receive Him who gave himself for us, we might ponder who in our lives we our ignoring on the other side of the road. Maybe someone in our own family; maybe someone on our street or in the pub? Where is God calling you and me to be this week? Ask God the Holy Spirit to show you, and ask Him for courage.

A prayer of Henry Alford:

O God, who hast commanded us to be perfect, as thou our Father in heaven art perfect: Put into our hearts, we pray thee, a continual desire to obey thy holy will. Teach us day by day what thou wouldest have us to do, and give us courage and strength to fulfil the same. May we never, from love of ease, decline the path which thou pointest out, nor, for fear of shame, turn away from it. We ask it for the honour of Jesus Christ our Saviour. Amen.

Daniel

Bishop of Oxford,  15th May 2010

THE POWER OF MUSIC IN WORSHIP AND THANKSGIVING

I'm delighted to be with you to celebrate the life and achievements of Maurice Frost, for 37 years Vicar of Deddington and an eminent authority on hymns. There are some here who remember him, 50 years on from the publication of his Historical Companion to Hymns Ancient and Modern, though there are none here who remember the first publication of Hymns Ancient and Modern itself, 150 years ago. (Or if there are they may not be feeling very well.) Dr. Frost was a scholar, but he was also enthusiastically committed to his own parish church choir. So how good it is to have choirs with us this weekend as diverse as from St George's Windsor, the parish church here, the choir of the Church of the Resurrection, Mafeking, and the choir of Jonkoping, Sweden. Treats in all directions.

What choirs do is priceless. They sing the truth about God. They carry hearts and minds to God. They do as Paul says in tonight's reading from Ephesians – they 'sing psalms and hymns and spiritual songs… singing and making melody to the Lord…and giving thanks to God the Father.' Music is so often what people remember about a service. How often do people go out of church humming the sermon? They should of course, but that's another matter. They go out humming the music.

Of course sometimes the music overpowers the words and we're not too sure what we're actually singing. Sir Thomas Beecham is supposed to have stopped a rehearsal of the Messiah, saying, 'When we sing 'all we like sheep have gone astray' might we please have a little more regret and a little less satisfaction?' Even choirmasters can forget what they're saying. One choirmaster said to the trebles, 'Now, don't forget, when the tenors reach 'the gates of hell' you come in.'

So, thank you to our choirs, for what you do, all of you, week after week, month after month. You help with the most important thing in the world – you help to bring people into the presence of God. Because music has that power, and hymns in particular shape the faith of worshippers far more than they realise. I think many people know their hymns better than they know their Bible. And it's hymns that people remember, and often turn to in time of need.

When I was Bishop of Jarrow in the diocese of Durham I took a centenary service in memory of a pit disaster in a mining village called Stanley. 159 men had been killed in two huge explosions. 26 other men found they were still alive but completely cut off in an air pocket 800 feet below ground. In that total darkness one young man, a strong Methodist, started to sing 'Lead kindly light amid the encircling gloom, lead thou me on. The night is dark and I am far from home, lead thou me on.' The hymn was taken up by another man, a Salvation Army member, and then by another, and then another, until they were all singing strongly, pitting their faith against their fear in the terrible darkness. Fourteen hours later they were rescued.

So we sing our hymns – Methodists, Salvationists, Anglicans, Lutherans, Roman Catholics, Baptists, all of us. Hymns draw us together across time, space and denomination. Wherever we gather, we sing. One Easter in Durham I'd been celebrating the festival with due Anglican splendour on the day itself, but the following week I was celebrating communion under a solitary tree in the middle of the Sinai desert with fourteen pilgrims, six camels and four bemused Bedouin tribesmen. But we sang 'Thine be the glory' as if we were still in the cathedral. This was our identity; this was our God.

And Dr Frost knew this. He knew the power of music, and hymns in particular, to give substance and shape to people's faith. The Bible is full of references to singing God's praise, not just saying it. We've heard in our readings psalm 96, 'O sing to the Lord a new song, sing to the Lord all the earth. Sing to the Lord, bless his name, tell of his salvation from day to day.' And in the second reading, 'Be filled with the Spirit as you sing psalms and hymns and spiritual songs to the Lord,' - and then Paul adds, - 'giving thanks to God the Father at all times and for everything.'

Now that's interesting. There's a very strong link between singing and thanksgiving. When life is wonderful and England win the Ashes and Newcastle get back into the Premiership, don't you want to sing? Well, I do! When we fall in love or experience something simply beautiful, don't we say that our hearts 'sing within us'? Singing and thanksgiving are very closely related.

The great cellist Pablo Casals knew that. He once said, 'For the past 80 years I've started every day in the same way. It's not a mechanical routine but something essential to my daily life. I go to the piano and play two preludes and fugues by Bach. I can't think of doing otherwise. It's a sort of benediction on the house. But that's not its only meaning for me. It's a rediscovery of the world of which I have the joy of being a part. It fills me with the awareness of the wonder of life, with a feeling of the incredible marvel of being a human being.' There was a man who knew that thankfulness for the gift of life is often best expressed in music.

In that reading from Ephesians, Paul invites us to make music in order to 'give thanks to God the Father at all times and for everything'. That's why we sing so much in church. It's a wonderful vehicle for giving thanks. It enables us to focus our grateful response to life, with all its amazing richness and diversity, as we look to the One who gives us this fantastic experience, layer upon layer of it, day after day, pressed down, shaken together, running over, as Jesus says in the gospels.

We need such opportunities to be thankful, because the danger is that we're becoming a society very much at odds with itself, a cross and angry society. Going back to the Sinai desert for a moment, when I went trekking for a week we were told we had to drink 6 litres of water a day. And the first sign that we weren't drinking enough would be that we would get grumpy. That got me thinking. W're an angry society; people get cross with each other for the smallest of reasons. Road rage, people smouldering, just waiting to blow their top. People going to court at the drop of a hat. And the reason is, I believe, that we're spiritually dehydrated, as a society, we're desperately short of living water.

And one of the best answers to that is to be thankful instead. It's easy if we try. And music helps us. People don't come out of concerts scowling. People don't listen to a CD in order to get cross. People  don't come out of worship angry – unless the vicar's sermon was really dire (not here of course!). Music helps us to be thankful. As we used to sing at Matins (and as this great choir from St George's Windsor doubtless still sings), 'Come, let us sing to the Lord, let us make a joyful noise to the rock of our salvation.'

I'm so glad we have with us this weekend the choir from the Church of the Resurrection in Mafeking in our link diocese of Kimberley and Kuruman. I was in the diocese three weeks ago visiting some of the projects we support. 1000 people a day are dying of AIDS in South Africa; one in five adults are infected. We went to a project outside Kuruman called Valley of Hope where monthly food parcels are prepared for families affected by HIV/AIDS. They have a sewing circle to make clothes for orphaned children. They run six football teams for local kids too. And we went to one of the allotments they've started to grow the healthy food that's part of the regime to save lives when people have HIV. And as we arrived at one of the allotments the women were singing and dancing in celebration of our coming. It was such a lovely welcome! Thanksgiving and song in the midst of poverty and tragedy. Music is a healer.

And the parish of the Resurrection at Mafeking clearly does work like this in the Tsogo Day Centre for pre-school children infected or affected by HIV/AIDS. I bet they sing there too! Singing and smiling is part of African faith.

So we see what Dr Frost was a part of. The great tradition of faith by which believers 'sing psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing and making melody to the Lord, giving thanks to God the Father at all times and for everything.' This music, which Dr Frost so carefully researched and recorded, is a life-giver to the Church. It brings people into the presence of God; it enables them to give thanks; it heals the bruised and broken.

As the old Jewish proverb says, 'He who sings, prays twice.' Singing is like praying twice over. So let's enjoy it. Let it come from a full heart, and be directed to God, not to each other for merely human praise.

But if you reach the gates of hell – don't go in!

Bishop John
 

Canon Christopher Hall, Hempton 2nd May 2010

Nowadays we may not fully appreciate the significance of what Peter did when he baptised the Gentile Cornelius. To do so was then totally against the centuries-old traditions of God’s chosen people. They then understood God’s will and teaching to be that Gentiles were unclean - untouchable. God had shown Peter in his vision that he was not to call unclean those whom God had made. Jews even today are still forbidden to eat certain animals - those said to be not kosher. So Orthodox Jews will never eat with Gentiles, because they will not know where the food has been. (In Salford we lived between Orthodox Jewish neighbours so we know about that.) Peter not only went into a Gentile home, where he would receive hospitality, he went so far as to baptise a Gentile for the first time, because he recognised that God had already given to Cornelius the gift of the same Spirit which the very first Christians were given. It caused a furore, but the Church has grown immeasurably as a result. He opened the door of the Church to welcome even us, who are also Gentiles.

There was a similar furore when the first Anglican woman was ordained. You probably know that it was my father who ordained Florence Li Tim-Oi a priest. The Church Times branded him a 'Bishop in Insurrection'. He did so because he recognised that God had already given to her the gift of priesthood. He did so even though what he did was all against the centuries-old tradition of the worldwide church, and up till then its understanding of God’s will. He resisted the temptation to rename her Cornelia. For centuries, to our shame, Christians, even theologians, have considered women unclean, supposedly defiled by menstrual bleeding and even childbirth. (Orthodox Jews and Muslims still rate women 2nd class.) We are not to call unclean those whom God has made. The Church is now immeasurably enriched by the priestly ministry of women. There are about 2500 women priests in the Church of England, but still we wait for those women to be considered no longer second-class, so that it becomes possible for them to made bishops.

But maybe we can appreciate what the furore was like when Cornelius was baptised and Tim-Oi priested. You may remember the furore when in 2003 Bishop Richard wanted Jeffrey John to be Bishop of Reading, and again when Gene Robinson, an openly gay man, became Bishop of New Hampshire. Those who selected Jeffery John recognised that God had given him the gifts of a bishop, even though to consecrate him would have been all against the tradition of the worldwide church up to that time, and its received understanding of God’s will. If he truly had episcopal gifts, who were the consecrating Archbishop and the Bishop of Oxford to deny what God had already done ?  Homosexual practice is widely considered to be defiling. Yet who is to say that the vision Peter had is not still true? Maybe God again wishes to enrich his Church - through the priestly and episcopal ministry of those who share Jeffery and Gene’s orientation - like Mary Glasspool whom last year the diocese of Los Angeles elected as their assistant bishop?

Gay and lesbian people don’t choose to be so. That’s just the way they are. Whatever some verses in the Bible say, for the Church now not to welcome them into all levels of its membership and ministry would be just the same as if it were to decide to exclude all left-handed people. They too have been discriminated against in the past. Hence the meaning we still give to the word ‘sinister’ - which means left-handed in Latin. Left-handed children were subjected to what is now called Reparative Therapy, and suffered deeply as a result. After I had suggested this parallel in a sermon 7 years ago, an elderly woman came up to me holding out her left-hand, remembering how her hand was beaten for using it. I have been surprised how often people recognise this parallel with the way homosexuals are treated; homosexuals are also often subjected to Reparative Therapy. Even a Canadian Chinese priest and his wife, whom I expected to be shocked by my suggested parallel, readily and wholly agreed.

So this is a Gospel issue. It is about assuring ourselves and them that no-one is not accepted by the God of Love as they are. In 2003 the House of Bishops in Minneapolis voted 2 to 1 in favour of Gene Robinson, and the voices of Bishops were gently raised to sing the Latin chorus Ubi caritas et amor, ubi caritas Deus ibi est. [Where there is charity and love, there is God.]

In his closing sermon at that General Convention the Presiding Bishop Frank Grsiwold said this: “What does it mean to be saved, but to be drawn out of our little worlds of self-preoccupation, and placed in the open space of God’s transfiguring and all transforming love? And how does this happen? It happens because life accosts us; circumstances force themselves upon us and we are obliged to leave the security of our various Egypts, our states of certitude that are often forms of bondage – and launch out into the wilderness with no clear sense of destination. All we know is that we are being led by a pillar of fire by night and a pillar of cloud by day. And yet, in the wilderness, manna appears, a gift is given, love descends – supplying hope and giving courage, as well as the strength to journey on.”

You may have heard me say before that the Bible speaks to us of the God who never changes - he keeps on going ahead of us and leading us into deeper and wider truth.

Rev. James Brogden - 26th September 1849

THE DUTY OF ENQUIRING AFTER GOD.

If you would like the see the original click here.

A SERMON I PREACHED IN THE PARISH CHURCH OF DEDDINGTON, OXON,

On Wednesday, the 26th day of September, 1849:

BEING THE DAY APPOINTED BY THE LORD BISHOP OF OXFORD, FOR SOLEMN HUMILIATION, THROUGHOUT THE DIOCESE, ON ACCOUNT OF THE EXISTING PESTILENCE.

BY THE REV. JAMES BROGDEN, M.A.,

Of Trinity College, Cambridge, And Vicar Of Deddington.

DEDDINGTON : PRINTED AND PUBLISHED BY J. S. HIRON, MARKET PLACE. 1849.

TO THE HONOURABLE AND VERY REVEREND THE DEAN OF WINDSOR,

THROUGH WHOSE KINDNESS THE AUTHOR WAS PREFERRED TO THE VICARAGE OF DEDDINGTON,

THIS SERMON IS INSCRIBED, WITH RESPECTFUL ESTEEM, AND AFFECTIONATE REGARD.

Deddington,

16th October, 1849.

A SERMON.

LXXVIII PSALM, 34.

When He Slew Them, Then They Sought Him: And They Returned And Enquired Early After God.

God's dealings with his chosen people, even from the time of their coming out of Egypt, to the days of David, are recorded in this beautiful Psalm. Hear my law, Oh my people, incline your ears unto the words of my mouth,a commenced the history of God's covenant with the children of Israel, which he commanded them to teach their children, that they might put their trust in God, and not forget the works of God, but keep his commandments}' The sacred narrative proceeds to declare the marvellous things that he did in the sight of their forefathers; How He divided the sea, and let them go through. How in the day .time He led them with a cloud, and all the night through with the light of fire. How He brought waters out of the stony rock, so that it gushed out like the rivers : yet for all this, They sinned yet more and more against Him, and put not their trust in His help. How when they ate angels food, for He rained down manna upon them for to eat," that for all this they sinned yet more, and believed not His wondrous works. Therefore their days did He consume in vanity: and their years in trouble. When He slew them, they sought Him, and turned them early and enquired after God.d

This, my brethren, is a sad record of a sinful nation : but it is not confined to them alone. Its application should reach ourselves : because we have been indulgently dealt with, and we have been as deeply ungrateful, for the manifold mercies and protecting Providence of Almighty God.

Threatened a short time ago, especially in a sister Island of this Empire, with famine; hearing among ourselves continually the strong cryings of the poor and needy; and blessed at present with a most abundant Harvest, what is our ingratitude ? Why ! it resembles that of those who did eat, and were well filled, but while the meat was yet in their mouths, the heavy wrath of God came upon them, and slew the wealthiest of them: yea, and smote down the chosen men that were in Israel."

Let us then endeavour to enquire into this particular ensample, written for our admonition, that when he slew them, they sought him, and turned them early, and enquired after God.

The fear of death, may reasonably claim, even among the blinded heathen, a seeking after God. We know, from St. Paul's record, that it did so; for although not blessed with the light of Revelation, the invisible things of God, from the creation of the world, were discerned by them, in the contemplation of his glorious works, and in the enjoyment of those blessings and benefits, which then seemed so freely scattered over the universe, by the bountiful hand of nature.8 They could see clearly God's goodness at harvest time. They were reminded of His power when wind and storm fulfilled his word. There was nothing on earth, which they could pick up, that did not afford them gleanings of the Heavenly wisdom of a Divine Creator. There was nothing, in thought, which they could contrive, no temple or monument of human imaginations which they could erect, that was not subservient to the Master builder, and a bowing down, in adoration, before the Grand Architect of the Universe. For in Him, we live and move and have our being; and as certain also of their own poets have said, we are also His offspring? If therefore the Jews, when He slew them, sought Him ; if blinded heathens turned them early and raised an Altar to the unknown Godj what deep guilt do we incur, who own the name of Christ, and do yet, during an almost unexampled Pestilence, refrain from seeking the Throne of Mercy with strong crying and tears?

Noah and his family, in the ark, were saved from perishing by water : and the same Almighty and Everlasting God led the children of Israel safely through the Red Sea, figuring thereby, the Christian Covenant, into which we are admitted, by Holy Baptism, in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost.1

Though fed by manna in the Wilderness, the Jews were never permitted to enjoy, at that time, in the Holy Communion," a much more Heavenly and Spiritual food; the Body and Blood, Sacramentally taken, of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ. Though God caused the east wind to blow under Heaven, and through His power he brought in the south-west wind, yet the sweet and refreshing gales of his Holy Spirit had not yet so widely diffused themselves in Christian Consolations, as on the day of Pentecost. Though he rained flesh, no cloven tongues, like as of fire, had as yet descended upon earth to proclaim the wonderful works of God." And the Holy Spirit had not then come down, in the likeness of a dove, saying, this is my beloved Son in whom I am well pleased. But still we have the record, for our admonition, as Christians, concerning blinded Heathens, and disobedient Jews; that when He slew them, they sought Him, and turned them early, and enquired after God. What a fearful contrast it will afford, and what a dreadful issue in the day of Judgment, if we shall be found, less humble, less repentant, less trustful, less earnestly prayerful, less feeling " after God," and finding " Him," than they; it will be more tolerable for Tyre and Sidon, and for Sodom and Gomorrah, at that day, than for ourselves. " Wisdom crieth without; she uttereth her voice in the streets: She crieth in the chief place of concourse, in the openings of the gates : in the city she uttereth her words, saying," " Because I have called, and ye refused; I have stretched out my hand, and no man regarded; But ye have set at nought all my counsel, and would none of my reproof: I also will laugh at your calamity; I will mock when your fear cometh ; When your fear cometh as desolation, and your destruction cometh as a whirlwind; when distress and anguish cometh upon you. Then shall they call upon me, but I will not answer;  Acts ii. 3—11.

they shall seek me early, but they shall not find me : For that they hated knowledge, and did not choose the fear of the Lord : They would none of my counsel: they despised all my reproof. Therefore shall they eat of the fruit of their own way, and be filled with their own devices. For the turning away of the simple shall slay them, and the prosperity of fools shall destroy them. But whoso hearkeneth unto me shall dwell safely, and shall be quiet from fear of evil."

First then, let us ever remember that to relieve the sorrows of nations or of individuals, no method is so dutiful or so prevailing as fervent prayer? for all human means are surpassed by the efficacy of a penitent's appeal to the Throne of mercy. Humbled under the mighty hand of God, minislied and brought low,q and calling out of the depths' of his distress unto the Lord, he may say with truth, when I was weak then was I strong ; when I was in drouble, I called upon the Lord and he heard me.'

This is fully proved throughout all Holy Scripture, from the time that the Lord had respect unto Abel and to his offering even unto our own days.'

But this fact is perhaps more conspicuously plain in the history of that rebellious people the Jews. God's punishments ever followed their sins," and His mercies were never withheld on their repentance." His blessings were richly showered down upon their faith and obedience," so that as in the case of Abraham, they appear as numerous in Holy Scripture as the sands of the sea, or as the stars of Heaven.

Whether we take for instance the sins and repentance of David, and of the great city of Nineveh :x the plagues which were stayed on the intercession of Moses, Aaron, Phinehas, and David :' the idolatry and humiliation of the wicked king Ahab :z the protection vouchsafed to the good kings Hezekiah and Josiah :" the parabl3 of the prodigal who arose and went mito his father :b the affectionate sorrow of her who washed our blessed Lord's feet with tears and wiped them with her hair :c or even the penitence of the thief upon the cross :d—yet in all these cases we shall find the same result recorded, and as arising from the same cause. They had each taken the right and only means, appointed by Divine command, for obtaining mercy. They believed in the assurances of the Holy Psalmist that the sacrifices of God are a broken Spirit.' They obeyed God's voice as revealed by the Prophet Joel. Therefore also now, saith the Lord, turn ye even to me with all your heart, and with fasting, and with weeping, and with mourning : and rend your heart, and not your garments, and turn unto the Lord your God: for He is gracious and merciful, slow to anger, and of great kindness, and repenteth Him of the evil.1 They felt as Jonah did in humiliation and prayer, when my soul fainted within me, I remembered the Lord, and my prayer came in unto Thee into Thy Holy Templet

These are a few convincing reasons, my Brethren, taken out of Holy Scripture, to prove to you, why we ought, humbly, to assemble ourselves together, and pray to God this day.

Remember, I beseech you, not only the duty of diligent prayer, and the conditions of a prevailing prayer ; but also the return of mercy, which may be hoped for, after that Holy exercise, during the dreadful Pestilence with which this country is now visited.h

For if we follow the example, recorded in the words of the Text, of those, who when He slew them, then they sought Him, and they returned and enquired early after God; we have these comfortable words of Holy Scripture, suited to this occasion, for admonition and support:—" Call upon me in the day of trouble, I will deliver thee, and thou shall glorify me.' They shall call upon my Name, and I will hear them, I will say it is my people, and they shall say the Lord is my God.k Because thine heart was tender, and thou hast humbled thyself before the Lord, when thou heardest what I spake against this place, and against the inhabitants thereof, that they should become a desolation and a curse, and hast rent thy clothes, and wept before me; I also have heard thee, saith the Lord.1 I have heard thy prayer, I have seen thy tears.TM For thus saith the High and Lofty One that inhabited eternity, whose Name is Holy, I dwell in the high and Holy place, with him also that is of a contrite and humble spirit, to revive the heart of the contrite ones, for I will not contend for ever, neither will I be always wroth." Who is a God like unto Thee, that pardoneth iniquity, and passeth by the transgression of the remnant of His heritage ? He retaineth not His anger for ever, because He delighteth in mercy.0 Therefore turn thou to thy God: keep mercy and judgment, and wait on thy God continually. Come, and let us return unto the Lord : for He hath torn, and He will heal us; he hath smitten, and he will bind us up."p

From this recital of events, connected with the Text, we learn, the true cause of all man's trouble; that it consists in sin and unbelief :—the fittest method for him to endeavour to avert Divine punishment—Repentance, Faith, Prayer, reading of God's Word, and use of Holy Sacraments : as well as the only source of relief to which he can in affliction, with hope, ever faithfully apply— the Omnipotence of God, revealed to him in mercy.

These grounds of Consolation have been more fully traced out, and enlarged upon by me, because I ought, at this time especially, to endeavour to build upon a right foundation; and when we are all of us so mournfully called upon to take heed to our ways, to set our houses in order, and apply our hearts unto wisdom :it is my duty to fix, if possible, your repentance and faith, not with enticing words of man's wisdom, not upon the perishable sand of mere worldly thoughts and wishes, but upon a stedfast and serious remembrance, that God is your Rock, and the High God your Redeemer; upon firm reliance on the sole merits of a Holy and merciful Saviour, who has purchased our redemption by the inestimable price of His incorruptible Blood. \

Warnings of God's power, are generally, if attended to, the harbingers of His goodness and compassion, for whom the Lord loveth, He chasteneth, and scourgeth every son whom He receiveth? While a heedless neglect of His manifold blessings, ends as usually, in their being withdrawn.'

While we depend upon ourselves; while we think that the skill of the man of science may free us from all difficulties; or the sanctity of the devotee may claim superior merit as worthy of all praise and honour, and of its own reward j some may take pride, in what is called an enlightened age ; and some may thank God, with Pharisaical self-assurance, that they are not as other men are.% But when we trust thoroughly in God, and acknowledge as we ought, our own feebleness and sin, then it is, and then Alone, that we shall be in a right condition to feel the value of His corrections, and the blessings of His mercies: then we shall be bearing forth precious seed, when though going on our way weeping, we acknowledge that God is all in all; we shall reap in joy, and experience how gracious the Lord is, for His eyes are over the righteous : and His ears are open unto their prayers." We shall find that our submission to the Divine will, in time of trouble, has brought forth fruits meet for repentance; so that strengthened, and purified, by Heavenly influences, what was sown, a natural body, has been raised a Spiritual body."

But remember, I beseech you, the example proposed for our guidance, when He slew them, they sought Him, and turned them early, and enquired after God. All you see must turn early, all are to enquire after God. There can be no exemption, no plea to excuse diversion or division, in this case ; for the Divine Wisdom lias so ordered the course of human events, that the strong depends upon the weak, as much as the weak does on the strong: the rich is assisted by the poor, as the poor is by the rich : the wise is aided by the ignorant, as the ignorant by the wise: however divided into classes, or separated by seeming interests in life, or alienated by animosities, or estranged from that Christian love, which ought to exist, but which too often, unhappily waxes cold, through discordance in religious opinions : We have now a call for unity, in human suffering, from which none are exempt: from which it is impossible for any to escape, and which, it is to be hoped, may have a Spiritual influence to give us grace seriously to lay to heart, the great dangers we are in by our unhappy divisions: that as there is but one Body, and one Spirit, and one Hope of our calling, one Lord, one Faith, one Baptism, one God and Father of us all, so we may henceforth be of one heart, and of one soul, united in one Holy Bond of truth and peace, of faith and charity, and may with one mind and one mouth, glorify the Author and Giver of all good things, through Jesus Christ our Lord.

But it is not alone, during the time of trouble, that we should seek after God, we should turn to Him and seek after Him, at All times, and in All ways, throughout every period of existence, from the cradle to the grave. And what guidance can we have for this search after God, so sure, as Holy Scripture ; and those truthloving, enlightening, and consoling religious ordinances and devout prayers, so carefully provided for our comfort, and growth in grace, by our Spiritual Mother, the Church of England ?—She teaches us to turn to Him early, in the Sacrament of Infant Baptism, from " the world, the flesh and the Devil," that we may be received into Christ's Holy Catholic Church, and " being stedfast in faith, joyful through Hope, and rooted in Charity, we may so pass the waves of this troublesome world, that finally we may come to the land of everlasting life." She exhorts us, never to neglect, our covenanted obligations, but to remember always, throughout our lives, that " Baptism doth represent unto us, our profession, which is to follow the Example of our Saviour Christ, and to be made like unto Him, that as He died and rose again for us, so should we, who are baptized, die from sin, and rise again unto righteousness, continually mortifying all our evil and corrupt affections, and daily proceeding in all virtue and godliness of living." She trains us up in ways of practical piety ; of habitual holiness; and daily devotion. Only consider the full brevity; the deep plainness; the comely simplicity of expression, which runs through the whole contexture of Her venerable forms of Prayer:—How exact they are ; and yet how comprehensive : how so judiciously contrived, that " the wisest may exercise at once, their knowledge and devotion ; while the most ignorant may pray with the understanding." For " Prayer is the peace of our spirit; it is the stillness of our thoughts ; the evenness of recollection ; the seat of meditation ; the rest of our cares, and the calm of our Tempest." " It is the issue of a quiet mind—of untroubled thoughts. Prayer is the daughter of Charity, and the sister of Meekness; it is an action of likeness to the Holy Ghost; it is an imitation of the Holy Jesus, and a conformity to God.""

Through the Prayers of our Church, we have hope, that Christ may dwell in our hearts through faith ; that we may continue the children of God for ever, " and daily increase in His Holy Spirit more and more until we come to His everlasting Kingdom.'*

And above all we are exhorted to pray in " the susceptation and communication of the Holy Sacrament;" and never to allow, as too many do, the cares of the world, and the engagements of our riper years to lead us astray, from Holy Communion, when so lovingly called and bidden by God Himself; for this is not turning to, but turning away from, God, in not shewing the Lord's death till He come?

Remember the fate of those, who refused the Feast in the Gospel; because they had bought a farm, or would try their yokes of oxen, or because they were married. Little indeed did their feigned excuses avail before God ; they were counted unworthy of the Heavenly Feast: and the same sore punishment may still hang over those, who wilfully abstain from the Lord's Table. When can our prayers be more Holy, than when they commemorate " the Sacrifice of the death of Christ, and the Benefits which we receive thereby ;"z for Christ by that Sacrifice reconciled God and the world. There we are, after a secret and mysterious manner, made one with Christ; there we enjoy the comfortable words of our Saviour, for the consolation of all, who truly turn to Him, Come unto Me, all ye that travail and are heavy laden, and I will refresh you,* and although we be imworthy, through our manifold sins, to offer any sacrifice, yet we are permitted, if we " truly and earnestly repent us of our sins; and are in love and charity with our neighbours;" to beseech God, to accept " our bounden duty and service; not weighing our merits, but pardoning our offences, through Jesus Christ our Lord."

I have thus endeavoured to explain, how we may seek, and how we ought to seek, after God, at All times:—by Repentance, r 1 Cor. xi. 26. « Church Catechism. » Matt. xi. 28.

Faith, and Obedience;—by Christian Hope and fervent Charity among ourselves ;—and by turning to Him, for help, in time of need, as the " Lord of all Power and Might." By diligent study of His Holy Word ;—by earnest, heartfelt prayer ;—by the right use of Holy Sacraments, ordained by Christ Himself; for they are " effectual signs of grace, and God's good will towards us, by which He doth work invisibly in us, and doth not only quicken, but also strengthen and confirm our faith in Him."b By steadfast adherence to all the ordinances of that pure aud Apostolical Branch of the Universal Church—the Church of England. And that, especially, in the dark seasons of affliction, we may hope from the record of Scripture History, that God will, as heretofore, declare His " Almighty power most chiefly in shewing mercy and pity," towards all who truly turn to Him : so that those, who take refuge in the Sanctuaky, to approach the Mercy Seat; who, sanctify the congregation, and gather the children, and those that suck the breasts' of their Spiritual Mother; will be protected by Divine Providence:—and trusting, with the faith of Abraham, in the Blood of the Everlasting Covenant; will, like Noah, remain safe in the Ark, unharmed, nay even spiritually warned and improved, by the desolation which now ravages around them.

Let us then, while our danger constrains us, cry mightily unto God.d Let small and great stand in awe of Him," and endeavour to avoid the fury of His wrath. Let us fly to the mercy seat, while we may have access to it; and cleave steadfastly to the Holy Place, till we obtain forgiveness. Let us beseech the Holy Jesus to wash us in His precious Blood, and offer up the incense of our imperfect prayers. Let us beseech him to look down, with Pity and Compassion, on our afflicted Brethren, and take away His plague from them, before they are consumed by means of His heavy Hand.1

Let their troubles, be ever in our sight, and their calamities, be considered as an earnest of our own : and let the united voices of the whole Nation cry mightily to God, for His patience and forbearance. Hear our Prayers O Lord; Hold not Thy peace at our tears. Lord what is our hope ? Truly our hope is even in Thee? " Father, if it be Thy good pleasure; let this cup pass from us: nevertheless not as we will but as Thou wilt." " But O Lord most Holy : O God most Mighty, O Holy and merciful Saviour; Thou most worthy Judge eternal, suffer us not, at our last hour, for any pains of death, to fall from Thee : deliver us not into the bitter pains of eternal death."' Spare us, Good Lord, spare Thy people, whom Thou hast redeemed with Thy most precious Blood, and be not angry with us for ever.

Enter not into judgment with Thy Servants, who are vile Earth, and miserable sinners ; but so turn Thine anger from us, who meekly acknowledge our vileness, and truly repent us of our faults, and so make haste to help us in this world, that we may ever live with Thee in the world to come ; through Jesus Christ our Lord.

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