Joy and Commandments: Chalk and Cheese?

 Preached at Croydon Minster on the Sixth Sunday of Eastertide: Gospel reading John 15.9-17

‘If you keep my commandments, you will abide in my love…I have said these things to you this so that my joy may be in you, and your joy may be complete.’ (John 11.10a,11)

 

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There are some things that go really well together. For example, ‘Love and marriage, they go together like a horse and carriage’, as the old song puts it.

 

And some things just don’t: chalk and cheese, being an obvious one.

 

There are two words in today’s gospel reading that seem to be more in the ‘chalk and cheese’ category and they are ‘joy’ and ‘commandment’:

 

I have said these things to you this so that my joy may be in you, and your joy may be complete. (John 11.11)

 

And;

 

If you keep my commandments, you will abide in my love. (John 15.10a)

 

Joy. That little word sounds so spontaneous, free, uncomplicated, fun.

 

Commandment. That longer word sounds stifling, dutiful, heavy, dull.

 

Joy and commandment sound at odds, yet Jesus weaves them together and brings them into close proximity.

 

They are not poles apart, but are twin poles that, held together, enable us to share in the life of the Father and to bear fruit.

 

This is recognised and articulated in one of the Eucharistic Prayers of the Church which says,

 

It is indeed right,

it is our duty and our joy,

at all times and in all places

to give you thanks and praise,

holy Father, heavenly King,

almighty and eternal God,

through Jesus Christ your Son our Lord.

 

Sometimes people think the Old Testament is all about commandments and the New Testament all about joy.

 

There certainly are plenty of commandments in the Old Testament, but there are commandments in the New Testament too: ‘I give you a New Commandment’ says Jesus, ‘love one another as I have loved you’ (John 15.12) and ‘Do this in remembrance of me’ (Luke 22.19; 1 Corinthians 11.24, 25): that’s a command!

 

And the Old Testament ‘does’ joy too. In the psalms for example ‘You show me the path of life. In your presence is the fullness of joy: in your right hand are pleasures for evermore’ (Psalm 16.11) and in the prophet Isaiah, ‘With joy you will draw water from the wells of salvation’ (Isaiah 12.3). Psalm 98 sung today is a psalm infused with joy, people breaking into music making and singing, and the whole creation sounding out with joy filled praise.

 

So how do joy and commandment sit together, given that both belong to the Christian life?

 

First, let’s acknowledge that ‘joy’ can be problematic for some: it can sound vacuous and vapid or bland and naïve, glossing over pain. Christian tradition and experience show, in a deep and sustained way, that joy can bubble up even in some of the darkest times. Joy is profoundly life-giving, directing our sight towards hope and trust in God to navigate through pain.

 

There is a proper ordering of joy and commandment, and that is through love: ‘I am giving you these commandments so that you may love one another’ (John 15.17).

 

Love it is that frames joy and commandment and holds them together.

 

Joy-without-love is self-satisfaction, self-amusement, self-gratification; joy-with-love is generous, infectious and life-giving to self and others.

 

Commandment-without-love is harsh and unbending; commandment-with-love gives shape, purpose and endurance to bring abundance of life.

 

Love without joy will run out of steam; love without commandment will collapse.

 

So then, may we be people of joy, shaped by life-giving commandments and journey deeper into the love that brings us together with Christ in the communion of Our Father and the Holy Spirit, the Lord and Giver of Life.

Move on from the weather: worship; pray; love.

A sermon preached at Croydon Minster on the Ninth Sunday after Trinity (18 August 2019). Reading: Jeremiah 23.23-29; Luke 12.49-56.

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I don’t know about you, but just about every conversation I have had recently has begun with the major topic of the day – not Brexit, not Trump, not even England’s performance in the cricket or the return of the Premier League  – but, yes, the weather!

And haven’t we had a great deal to talk about: unseasonal deluges and, only a few weeks ago, a heat wave and record temperatures.

Of course, the weather has become a rather more serious business than it used to be because of the related climate issues that it highlights.

That said conversation about the weather is often a distraction. An item on BBC Radio 5 last week explored how when we talk about the weather it is often a social nicety before a proper conversation; but it can also be a way of avoiding a deeper conversation altogether. Certainly inhabitants of the British Isles have plenty of weather related topics of conversation.

In this morning’s gospel reading Jesus rails against superficial conversations about the weather and dodging the questions that go deeper.

⁵⁴ Jesus also said to the crowds, ‘When you see a cloud rising in the west, you immediately say, “It is going to rain”; and so it happens. ⁵⁵And when you see the south wind blowing, you say, “There will be scorching heat”; and it happens. ⁵⁶You hypocrites! You know how to interpret the appearance of earth and sky, but why do you not know how to interpret the present time?

We read some signs, usually meteorological ones, and ignore the ones that point to the heart of things.

There are huge questions here: how do we interpret the ‘present time’? What are the signs of the present time that we should be noticing?

Let’s just remind ourselves that the gospel passage began with stark words that still have the capacity to shock: Jesus speaks of fire coming to earth; of stress; of division; of setting people against one another.

We can set this alongside words of John the Baptist, our patron saint, (who denies being the Messiah) and says: ‘one who is more powerful than I is coming…He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire’. (Luke 3.16b) Or in Jeremiah: ‘Is not my word like fire, says the LORD, and like a hammer that breaks a rock in pieces?’ (Jeremiah 23.29)

But what of this division that Jesus says he has come to bring?

There is a great shaking up going on: disruption and turmoil. This is not ‘gentle Jesus, meek and mild’.

Jesus, like the prophets before him, is presenting a direct question in dramatic terms. The question is ‘what are the relationships that are most precious to you, and what do they look like?’

Is it your biological relationships? Is it the people you identify with because of race, class, political outlook, religious belief? Or is it the person who is different, disturbing or disfigured?

Taking discipleship seriously, being a follower of Jesus Christ, means we have to face those questions if we are to play a part in heralding the coming Kingdom of God.

This present time sees divisions based on suspicion, oppression, rampant nationalism, supremacism, casual racism, greed. Our time sees people left behind because of an inability to find a home in ‘mainstream’ society, unable to live life to the full because of anxiety about debt, housing or having a meaningful job. That’s true globally, nationally and locally.

How do we interpret all that?

Allegiance first to Jesus Christ means we see all our relationships in a different way. Jesus is clearly not about smashing up our precious relationships with those whom we love, but he is saying that the love we share for our family should spill out beyond and not be restricted just to them. As he says in regard to his own nearest and dearest, ‘My mother and my brother [and my sister] are those who hear the word of God and do it.’ (Luke 8.21)

Doesn’t all that move us away from talking about the weather?

Jesus, like the prophets, disrupts and shakes us up. That is deeply uncomfortable, but it is the beginning of turning our hearts back to the LORD and his Kingdom.

The Kingdom of God and the renewed creation is a Kingdom ‘of righteousness and peace and joy in the Holy Spirit' (Romans 14.17) says St Paul.

And we know that the Holy Spirit is not the spirit of division and enmity, but rather of binding men, women and children of all 'tribes and peoples and languages' around the throne of God (Revelation 7.9).

From the disruption and division of which Jesus speaks emerges - like gold from a crucible - the precious, foundational essentials of life in the Spirit.

So how do we respond?

We worship. We pray. We love

We worship. As followers of Jesus Christ we patiently gather in worship at the altar of God where we find that we are brothers and sisters of one another, and of the saints who have gone before us, especially when we are of different tribes, peoples and languages. Our worship, echoing the worship of heaven, models the relationships where love spills out to all around us and a symphony of praise swirls to the throne of grace.

We pray. Not to avoid the realities of the world but to be instruments of transformation, being open in prayer to be transformed by Christ, so that we can live as those who read and interpret our present time and act in Christ’s healing and reconciling name.

We love. We love when we are loved. Love is always transformative; transforming relationships, situations and ourselves. And, as St Paul reminds us, when all is shaken up, divided and stripped away, God’s love never ends (1 Corinthians 13.8a).

The message today: move on from the weather: worship; pray; love.

'You stand on holy ground' A sermon for Trinity Sunday

First preached as a sermon at Croydon Minster on Trinity Sunday 2019

‘You stand on holy ground’ (Exodus 3.5)

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Tonight’s readings (Exodus 3.1-15; John 3.1-17) present us with the mystery of God: God in wind and flame, and yet also a God found in silence and indefinable.

God as mystery; God in history; God through love.

Wind and flame evokes our celebration of Pentecost last week.

Then we recalled the coming of the Holy Spirit, a Person of the Trinity, who is the fullness of God, without denying the divinity of the Father and the Son, who comes in mighty rushing wind and tongues of flame.

Today we celebrate the Holy Trinity, a celebration of the Unity and the fullness of God, a fullness and plenitude that spills into our lives and is made known in encounter-in-love with Father, Son and Holy Spirit.

The flames of our first reading speak of the mystery of God to be encountered and yet not touched. Moses encounters the fullness of God, the One who speaks and says ‘I am who I am’.

Moses is told to remove his sandals for he stands on holy ground. The sense of the holiness of God is palpable in this encounter. In it too is the full presence of God. The Father, the source of all, speaks: ‘I am’.

The flames point us to the Holy Spirit, the voice that speaks of the redemption and deliverance of Israel places the Son, the Eternal Word, Jesus Christ as the heart of this, before his incarnation. Herein is the Trinity: Father, Son and Spirit.

The wind of our second reading, blowing where it will, speaks of God who is beyond our grasping, beyond holding on to, beyond categories that we understand.

Nicodemus encounters Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ is not concept, Jesus Christ is a person, a human being, yet the fullness of God is pleased to dwell in him.

A most beautiful icon captures this divinity and humanity in Jesus Christ. It shows the Blessed Virgin Mary bearing Jesus in the midst of the flames of the Burning Bush: neither his divinity nor humanity is compromised or consumed in who he is.

We see that describing God (who cannot be described), describing God as Trinity states the Unity of God, and the Diversity of God.

How can we describe mystery? How can we describe love? We can describe its impact, we can use the most beautiful and evocative of language, but that language quickly runs out.

That’s why there is a strand of theology known as apophatic, or negative, theology, which acknowledges that as soon as we start speaking of God we become tongue tied.

The language of Trinity guards how we speak of God, constantly checking and restraining our fantasises and projections onto God. The Book of Common Prayer contains the Creed of St Athanasius. It is a dense, but rich, account of the Trinity and guards any language we put on God at every turn.

When we speak of God we have intellectually to remove the sandals from our feet, not because our minds don’t matter, but because ultimately our quest to search out God, to measure, categorise, handle, label God is fruitless. We move from mind to heart: comprehension to apprehension.

This is how we journey into the Mystery of God.

As the Letter to the Hebrews puts it: ‘You have not come to something that can be touched, a blazing fire, and darkness, and gloom, and the sound of a trumpet, and a voice whose words make the hearers beg that not another word be spoken… but you have come to the city of the Living God (Hebrews 12. 18, 19, 22)

The Trinity roots us in the life of the Divine, and that’s what we celebrate today: God as mystery; God in history; God in love.

Love-shaped Church

First preached as a sermon at Croydon Minster on the Fifth Sunday of Eastertide. The readings were Acts of the Apostles 11.1-18; John 13.31-35

‘I give you a new commandment, that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you should love one another’ John 13.34

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Love beyond distinction; love beyond discrimination: boundless love.

What is the Gospel, what is the church, when everything is stripped away? Surely it is love beyond distinction; love beyond discrimination: boundless love. St Paul says ‘faith, hope and love endure, these three; and the greatest of these is love’ (1 Corinthians 13.13).

This is expressed in the new commandment that Jesus gives to his disciples and, by extension, to us. This new commandment is called in Latin, the Mandatum Novum, which is where we get the word ‘Maundy’ from, as in Maundy Thursday.

This new commandment lies at the heart of the Maundy Thursday liturgy. Flowing from that commandment and the Last Supper is Christ’s action of loving service, washing his disciples’ feet, demonstrating that it is in acts of loving service that we see the deepest revelation of love.

The remarkable Jean Vanier, who has very recently died – and may God grant him eternal rest – embodied this loving service. He founded the L’Arche communities in which people with disabilities of body and mind live, with those we call able, in communities of mutual support. Out of his obedience to the new commandment, and his deep love for the church and scriptures, he exemplified the Gospel imperative to love. Today L’Arche communities around the world live out the command to love one another.

Reflecting on our gospel passage, in his remarkable book Drawn into the Mystery of Jesus through the Gospel of John, Vanier writes:

Peter, Judas and the ‘beloved disciple’: three men who react in different ways to Jesus’ love.

Judas rejects and fears love. He pushes Jesus away.

Peter cannot understand Jesus. He loves Jesus but wants to do things his own way.

The beloved disciple surrenders to Jesus’ love and becomes his intimate friend.

These three attitudes are in each one of us at different moments of our lives.[1]

What an accurate summary of how Judas, Peter and John respond - or not - to love. And how searing and honest to observe that we are each prone to all three in our lives: rejection and fear of love, lack of comprehension of love and the embracing of giving and receiving love.

Understanding what love is all about is Peter’s challenge, and is it something picked up on in the reading from the Acts of the Apostles.

This is Peter’s ‘now I get it’ moment. In that slightly bizarre and unsettling vision Peter comes to a ‘penny drop’ moment: he fully understands now that ‘God shows no partiality’ (Acts 10.34).

God’s love is love beyond distinction, love beyond discrimination; boundless love.

And Peter asks, ‘who was I that I could hinder God’?

The task of the Church is to work with the movements of the Spirit, and not to go against.

Peter, representative of authority in the church, understands that any that varieties of service, structures and tradition, what has been handed on to us, is the scaffold that supports our proclamation of the message of God’s love.

The washing of feet by Jesus embodies the command to love: what of the feet to be washed around us? What does it mean to be the parish church of this local community and a Minster at the ancient heart of Croydon?

In a parish that has a local government ward with the highest percentage of young adults in any ward of London, that has the third highest incidence of mental health issues, that has areas in the bottom 5% of deprivation index, that is ethnically and religiously very mixed, that has high levels of loneliness and isolation, that has many complex lives: what does loving service look like?

In the light of all that is on our doorstep how do we respond without partiality and with the loving service of Christ?

From these two readings this morning we can see that the church is to be characterised by love: love of God and love for one another, and that loving service flows from that love.

Love is a resource we will never run out of and the more we give it away the more we receive it. That is true in our personal lives and true for the church. Be lavish in sharing love, and be ready to receive much.

All this helps inform our coming Vision Day as we reflect on who we are as a church so that we may 1) proclaim the Good News of the Kingdom, 2) teach, baptise and nurture new believers, 3) respond to human need by loving service, 4) seek to transform the unjust structures of society, to challenge violence of every kind and to pursue peace and reconciliation and 5) to strive to safeguard the integrity of creation and sustain and renew the life of the earth.

Three figures personify the characteristics of the church for us to keep in mind: Mary, Peter and John.

Mary is radically obedient to God: saying ‘yes’ to God’s will; giving her humanity to the service of the Kingdom; pointing constantly to Christ; patiently standing at the foot of the cross; anticipating the coming Holy Spirit. May we be a Marian church.

Peter, the Rock, is entrusted with authority in the church: given of the keys of the kingdom; forgiving and releasing; shepherding and, with Christ, laying down his life for the sheep; connecting the apostolic church in her mission of love into the whole world. May we be a Petrine church.

John, the Beloved Disciple, is the Apostle of the Love of God: nestling in the love of Jesus; telling us that ‘those who live in love live in God and God lives in them’; passing on to us Jesus’ new commandment that we love one another as Christ has loved us. May we be a Johannine church.

In that way we become a Christ-shaped church, attentive to God, connected in mission and filled with love.

Almighty God,

throughout the ages

you have blessed our church

with your presence and love:

Help us to cherish

all that you are doing in our midst,

that as young and old, women and men,

we may embrace your future with hope,

serve our parish

and sing your praises

now, and to all eternity.

Through Jesus Christ,

our risen and ascended Lord.

Amen.

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[1] Jean Vanier, Drawn into the Mystery of Jesus through the Gospel of John (DLT: 2004) p. 240.

Imposters yet true - Seeking my true self in Lent

A sermon preached at Guildford Cathedral on Ash Wednesday. Readings 2 Corinthians 5.20b-6.10 and John 8.1-11.

‘We are treated as imposters, and yet are true’ (2 Corinthians 6.8)

+ In nomine Patris…

I have recently been reading a fascinating book about narcissism.[1] In it the psychologist authors describe the features of narcissism in individuals, including Narcissistic Personality Disorder (NPD), and narcissism in society.

The term ‘narcissism’ derives from the Greek mythical figure Narcissus who set out, a bit like us all, looking for someone to love. The beautiful nymph Echo fell in love with him and repeated his every word, but he rejected her and she faded away. Narcissus kept on looking for love and companionship, and one day, as he gazed into a pool, he saw the face that he would fall in love with: his own! He was so engrossed in his own beauty that he was stuck by the pool, lost the will to live and died.

In contemporary terms a narcissist is someone who thinks that they are superior to everyone else -  ability, status, good looks, intelligence and creativity - even if they’re actually not. Narcissism is corrosive for individuals.

It’s also bad for society. The book I’ve been reading says is that through narcissism we become phony:

We have phony rich people (with interest-only mortgages and piles of debt), phony beauty (with plastic surgery and cosmetic procedures), phony athletes (with performance-enhancing drugs), phony celebrities (via reality TV and YouTube), phony genius students (with grade inflation), a phony national economy ($11 trillion of government debt)… and phony friends (with the social networking explosion).[2]

Clearly not everyone is a narcissist and whilst there are damaging features of society it’s not thoroughly rotten. But to sketch out the extreme helps us to situate our own self-regard, or lack of, in the context of Ash Wednesday and this beautiful season of Lent.

Lent takes us back to a pool, but not one where we gaze longingly upon our own image but upon the face of Jesus Christ. In the baptismal pool Jesus calls to us lovingly: he is the one who loves us before we even seek the love that only he can give. His love draws us into the love of the eternal Trinity. Lent is a time when his call to us and claim upon our love is renewed and heard afresh, lest he becomes to us like Echo was to Narcissus.

That call to Christ’s love on Ash Wednesday, and in Lent, is back to that first love - in its joy-filled disciplines - where we attend to body, mind and spirit: for our body, in disciplines around self-denial and fasting; for our minds, being stretched through reading and pondering; for our spirits, through re-engaging in our life of prayer.

Lent, which begins today, is the time of the Church year that invites us away from our phony selves and takes us back to who we truly are. We construct much of our own identities and want others, and ourselves, to believe it. The greatest danger is when we ourselves believe the myths about ourselves.

It’s not just about being narcissists and believing ourselves to be all-important, invincible and at the centre. All too often we believe the negative narrative of ourselves, summed up in phrases like, ‘I’m not really very good at this’ or we feel ourselves to be a fraud, on the brink of being exposed as useless, inadequate or unlovable. As Bernard of Clairvaux warned, in the 12^th century, ‘Sorrow for sin is indeed necessary, but it should not involve endless self-preoccupation. You dwell also on the glad remembrance of the loving kindness of God’.

Ash Wednesday holds before us the phoniness of our lives – the over-exalted and over-negative bits -and places upon us, literally, and ‘in your face’ the reality of where we come from and who we are. It encourages us to dwell on the ‘glad remembrance of the loving kindness of God’

As the cross is marked in ash on your head you hear these words, ‘Remember you are dust, and to dust you shall return. Turn away from sin and be faithful to Christ’. In the face of all we construct about ourselves and our identity - unrealistically good or unrealistically bad - we are reminded of our mortality, that we will die. We are not immortal, but turning away from sin and being faithful to Christ is the starting point and destination of finding ourselves, our loves and passions: Christ loved us first; we can find our assurance and identity in that love, a love that sees beyond self-preoccupation, either in the form of over-inflated egos or self-deprecation, and sees us as we are and as we can be.

This is the Christ who judges without retribution and with mercy. ‘Miserere me, Domine’ - Have mercy on me, O Lord - is not, for us, a desperate plea but, because of Christ, a confident declaration. This is in complete contrast to the crowd that gathered in judgement to stone the woman caught in adultery. They could not bear the threat that she represented to their sensibilities and supposed perfection: something that they could not claim, as became apparent.  They were acting narcissistically and saw no need for mercy. Rather than live with her less-than-perfection they would rather lynch her than forgive her.

In the face of their rampant and violent perfectionism Jesus wrote in the dust of the ground. We are dust, we are less than perfect; but therein lies God’s mercy and capacity, in Christ, to raise us up from the dust, breathe new life into our nostrils and form and re-form us in his image and likeness. Christ writes his love and life into our hearts: destination, Easter.

Is that possible? Can he do it? Surely, we say, I am a phony Christian, I am a phony person, my life a sham, I am an imposter waiting to be found out, just daring to call myself a Christian.

As sons and daughters of God we might well feel like imposters, and yet, Paul reminds us, we are true. As he says elsewhere this is possible because, ‘it is not I who live, but Christ who lives in me’ (Galatians 2.20)

If nothing else this Lent, be assured that you are no imposter but as you seek to be faithful, to grow in holiness and to follow Christ you will be more truly yourself and more deeply human than the judgements, distortions and phoniness of the world can conceive.

That cross of ash marks you out as more yourself and not less; that you are someone who gazes into the face of Jesus Christ and knows that you are precious, valued and forgiven beyond measure simply because you are.

God loves you.

© Andrew Bishop 2016

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[1] Jean M. Twenge & W. Keith Campbell The Narcissism Epidemic: Living in the Age of Entitlement, (New York: Simon & Schuster).

[2] Twenge & Campbell, 4 .