I Believe, part 3

Part Three comes with another confession, as well as the opener! I wrote much of the substance of this talk for Greenbelt Arts Festival a few years back, then adapted it for a previous series of Creed talks in the Papworth Team Ministry and for an evensong at Emmanuel College Cambridge (MP3 of that talk here). So, this talk is based on previously published talks, though it has been amended for this set of talks (which took a few hours in itself :-) )

Lent 2009: The Apostle’s Creed

Session 3

I believe in Jesus part 1

I have to begin with a confession – that this evening is probably the reason I wanted to do this series of talks on the Creed in the first place. Tonight’s thoughts come under the general theme of ‘Incarnational Theology’ – and it is Incarnational Theology that made me truly fall in love with Theology in the first place! It was in studying the early Creeds and particularly why the Church said what it did about Jesus, that I really began to grasp the depth and the meaning of that sometimes glibly bandied about phrase ‘I believe in Jesus’. I should warn you though that this might mean that tonight I might do even more speaking than last week, as I have so very much to say!

Bearing in mind my thoughts in the first week of our series, I don’t want tonight’s presentation to be an academic exercise – it is important to ask whenever we find ourselves in theogical debate or discussion ‘what difference does this make to my own walk of faith, and what does it say about the faith we share?’ The things I am going to say, and that will hopefully be a part of your discussions, have changed my own perspective on faith, and have (I feel) enhance my faith and bound me more to the life and witness of the Church I serve. There are some ‘big’ theological ideas in tonight’s subject and I will try not to get lost in my own enthusiasm for the subject and start disappearing off into a theological world of my own.

So what is our subject for this evening? Well again I have taken just a few lines from the Creed and want to look into these. In fact I have just taken the one concept for tonight (next week’s will have much more to range around) and I do want to focus on this strange, peculiar, uniquely Christian belief we have in ‘The Incarnation’

I believe in Jesus Christ, his only Son,

our Lord,

who was conceived by the Holy Spirit,

born of the Virgin Mary…,

It would be easy with the part of the Creed that I am covering this evening to be distracted and talk about whether the Virgin birth really happened. In the same way that last week it would have been easy to simply recite the arguments for and against a literal interpretation of a six-day creation story. Now whilst it is a fascinating argument, I am not sure that going off into such realms will really advance us on our journey of faith here this evening.

Though the assumption of human form, enfleshed through the human nature of Mary and enlivened by the Holy Spirit of God is an important part of the theology of Jesus being both God and Human, it is an explanation, rather than part of the core theological concerns of the Creed. I don’t want to disappear into talking about what some do and do not believe, but in the spirit of the Creed to talk about what we as Christians are claiming when me make these statements in the Creed and to talk about what we do believe. And again, following on from my thoughts of the past two weeks, there is something about the impact that knowing Jesus as both God and human that I want to draw out, to think in terms of ‘what difference does this make to me? To the Church? To the world?

If we, as Christians, claim to know Jesus, how much of that knowledge is (to be frank) ‘made up’ – by ourselves, by the Churches we are a part of, by a lack of understanding of what the Church believes. IF we want to know Jesus better, then I think we need to know what we believe about him….

By many people’s standards Jesus was a failed teacher with a disastrously short ministry and a life ending with a fiasco. Yet those who had shared Jesus life for three or so years had no problem at all expressing both the human and divine side of him. There was something more that they had to express, and their talk of ‘resurrection’ added something beyond normal comprehension to their message.

Sometimes these early Christians struggled with the words they had, sometimes they took over words being used for something else and sometimes they made up new ones. As this understanding was passed on the most important thing that was passed on what that Jesus was absolutely and completely human, and at the same time utterly and completely divine. He was God made flesh. Hence St Paul in Philippians talking of Jesus writes down a hymn that had probably been in circulation for a while

“who being in very nature God

he did not consider equality with God something to be grasped

but made himself nothing

taking the very nature of a servant

and being found in human form

humbled himself and became obedient to death

even death on a cross’.

And so we’re off. This becomes the first problem. The educated Romans, Greeks and Jews who heard this message could not believe that a God would really go through this. So the logic dictated that Jesus wasn’t really human. Or that he was much more divine than human. So Jesus only seemed to be human.

St Paul himself encountered this 1 Cor 1:23 explains that ‘Christ crucified’ is ‘a stumbling block to the Jews and folly to Gentiles’. Many thinkers in the Jewish world thought Jesus could not have been divine because he suffered and Gentiles whose thought was based on Greek philosophy said that Jesus could not have suffered because he was divine.

For those who like to read up on heretics one of the most strident on this was Clement of Alexandria. His Christ had no physical passions, neither digested nor excreted, had no need to eat (sustained by Divine power). The only reason he did seem to eat was (says Clement) to confound those who might have thought we wasn’t human. (Clement obviously knew otherwise….)

In order to think a bit about what we do believe, perhaps it would help to think about what we don’t believe. After all, the finely honed truths to which we hold were hammered out upon the Anvil of heresy! So lets consider a few heresies – and if nothing else this may prove an interesting diversion…

Marcion: who believed that God of the Old Testament and the New were different, opposing Gods. His was an anti-Jewish Christianity which dismissed any kind of continuity with the Jewish faith. It is partly due to his influence that the idea of a canon of scripture appeared – so that Christians could not pick and choose as they wished!

Which point brings me somewhere which offers a springboard into our own thoughts and a chance to talk to each other for a minute. As we managed last week to arrange ourselves very quickly into small groups here rather than wandering off to find other rooms I would like you, in groups of five or six, to think about this…

What is your favourite bit of the Bible…? Simple enough, but lets also lead into whether there any bits of Scripture you find difficult, or would prefer to do without?

I asked you to talk about that because I think it is important to remember that when it comes to Scripture we can’t pick and choose what we like, or rather we shouldn’t! There are bits of the Bible that make my hair curl with the violence and bloodthirstiness of it, or the blatant sexism, or the lack of understanding. These parts have something to teach us, and should cause us to ask whether all of Scripture is ‘right’ – eg is it good to smash the heads of our enemies children against rocks as Psalm 137v9 says – or whether we have as much to learn from the parts of scripture that are obviously the author trying to find God in the midst of pain, anger, desolation and lonliness… Do we learn, with God’s grace, as much through what is wrong in scripture, as much as what is right! And by right and wrong I mean in terms of a certain type of morality, or cultural expression rather than making a value judgement about what is ‘true’ or ‘false’… That is a discussion for another time!

I think this question about Scripture is an important one too as it begs questions about how we approach our faith – and whether we cherry pick the bits we like, or whether we – to a certain point – submit ourselves to the discipline of faith, and particularly to the discipline of the Creed – as was the original intent in adopting Credal statements in the Church.

But moving on, and going back – to continue with our roll of shame – the list of heretics against which our Creeds were formed. Having mentioned Marcion and his dismissal of anything Old Testament, there were some others the Church felt it necessary to exclude as heretics!

Montanus: who believed that the Holy Spirit was the only bit to be concerned about. He considered himself to be a spirit filled prophet, and some considered him to be the Spirit incarnate. He was rapidly kicked out – an early example of getting rid of the extremists.

Gnostics: These were perhaps the most insidious heretics in and around the early Church. claiming that matter was inherently evil. There was no one Gnostic philosophy, but broadly speaking they had a philosophy that separated spirit and matter, claiming that matter was evil. Matter only came into being as some kind of fall from perfection. Human beings were alienated from their true being as Spirit by the material world. But only some humans were potentially able to be freed from this, those who were superior (the pneumatics) – naturally this group was made up of Gnostics. It was these who were able to attain salvation through growth in knowledge, particularly arcane knowledge known only to a few. Those of you who are keen sect-watchers may recognise certain tendencies there which are shared by groups such as the Knights Templar of the 14th Century… the foundation of most of the twaddle around the DaVinci code. This kind of Gnostic knowledge seems also be the foundation of Scientology, though instead of being Pneumatics we, or at least some of us, are actually sort of re-incarnated Aliens… But enough of that, moving on…

Arians: Not big blond people who thought they should lead the world. Again there is no one movement of ‘arianism’ but it’s a title that brings together a number of schools of thought. Nominally led by Bishop Arius they believed that the logos was a creation of the Father, who was not ‘Father son and spirit’ but God who created a unique human being with a logos ‘just for the job’ of coming to earth. Arius was quite firmly trodden on by the Church, as he seemed to distract from the eternal nature of the word as offered in St John’s Gospel.

Appollinarius: He claimed that Jesus was different to the rest of us, with a different type of humanity. The flesh and soul of Jesus are separate, the soul, the controlling agent of Christ, is the logos, distinct and separate from the body which is Jesus. In this way the body just becomes a vessel to carry around the world.

In the most extreme kind of thinking the logos (the word of God) which is Christ, takes on human form like a costume (for the sci-fi fanatics like me there are no end the possibilities for parallels here, an Edgar suit for those who’ve seen Men In Black’ or the Aliens in Dr Who who wear outers suits but underneath are rather ugly flatulent creatures) and fails to become fully human. The man Jesus thereby serves as a front for the deity but is not God made man.

But why is it so important for God to be Incarnate? To be made flesh. To be conceived by the Holy Spirit, born of the Virgin Mary? And why such a crucial part of this creed?!

Now that’s your next question. In conversation with someone yesterday I was asked ‘well I believe this to be true, that Jesus was God and human – surely that’s a given’. This is true, but have we really thought about what that means, and more so (and I know I am repeating myself but this is worth it). WHY is it important for God to be Incarnate? Not just theoretically, but in the life of the Church, and in my own life?

The early Church was convinced that Jesus was (and is) a unique person – exactly what God would look like if he became human. This revealed something about God’s absolute commitment to humanity and also made it possible for us to become God-like. The death of the real, physical Jesus was also the means through which God healed the rift between God and humanity, and if he was only pretending to be God then surely our salvation is only a pretence. Gregory Nazienzan (end of 4th Century) said ‘…what has not been assumed, has not been healed.’ It was only through the reality of God becoming human in Jesus that the reality of salvation was made possible.

For the early Christians this was the crunch issue. In some way God had completely taken human form and thereby had changed reality, making it possible for humanity to share life with God at a deeper level than ever before.

Now, you may have seen the adverts on TV for shampoo or cosmetics where someone looks at the camera in a kind of knowing way and says ‘this si the science bit’. Well, this is the theology bit!

The first Christians wanted to make these things clear:

That God is eternal and unchanging. Always of the same nature and substance.

That the Word (Logos) exists within this eternal unchanging God and remains God at all times.

YET They wanted to maintain that

Jesus was God Incarnate Not just taking the appearance of flesh, but becoming human.

This meant that they wanted to stress the uniqueness of human nature alongside the

uniqueness of the Divine nature.

So Jesus was described as being two hypostaseis – two substances or two Ousia, two natures. This is often summed up in the term ‘the hypostatic union’. These natures are so perfectly fused that there is one prosopon/persona, one concrete reality that is Jesus.

Lets put it another way, there are two major ways of looking at this whole subject – Christology from above and from below (no fancy names for these)

From above (also called ‘descending’ or ‘salvation’ Christology) Christ is stressed as the incarnate word, God in human form. Through God assuming, not absorbing, human form humanity is raised to a new level of dignity, a new fuller humanity is made possible. Hence Jesus is not something ‘more than human’ (as docetics, Gnostics and a few others might maintain) but he is ‘more human’. Hence, perhaps his preferred title for himself ‘Son of Man’ or ‘human one’. In this way human beings become fully human as they are restored to a relationship to God.

The second form is ‘From below’ – ascending Christologies. Christ is seen as a human being in history who made real the kingdom of God and worked towards its coming in fullness. This kind of understanding is tied up with the Quest for the Historical Jesus I mentioned just now. Jesus example is that of living and teaching the kingdom, and thereby his life draws us up to Abba the father and makes real the fullness of God. The primary focus, though, is his earthly life leading to a greater understanding of the divine life (hence ascending).

Well, for me neither of these seem adequate and we need to take both of them on to have a full approach. And this strikes me as so much of the method of Christianity. In Christology especially there is so much to grasp that we must take on board the historical development, the Scriptural basis and our own faith in order to come to a fuller knowledge of who Christ is and what he has achieved.

And this is what the earliest fighting was about in the Church. Various individuals popped up with their own concerns and disagreements. These heresies and more all offered a challenge to a Christian faith, which was inclusive, that claimed God was one God, always the same, that this God had, in Christ, become human and thereby had identified with the material world and embraced it, and had made it possible for all people to know and be more like God. Many of our greatest thinkers in the Church, the Early Church Fathers and others set about refuting those things which were contrary to the understanding passed on by the first Christians, the work of such theologians culminates in our creedal statements, both the Apostle’s (as it is traditionally known) and Nicene creed. Of course the particular part we want to consider is this:

I believe in Jesus Christ, his only Son, our Lord, who was conceived by the Holy Spirit,

born of the Virgin Mary,

Why is all this important I ask again? Well it so often impacts on the Church of today, we have forgotten our roots and so often forget who it is we follow and why he is unique and special. If we fail to grasp exactly what it is that the Church spent so many centuries coming to grips with then we perhaps fail to grasp exactly what our faith can be about.

Orthodox Christian Faith has always maintained that Jesus is exactly as we are, but without sin. He felt as we do, he suffered, he laughed, he ate and drank, he got tired, he made mistakes, he learnt, he got angry etc etc. He suffered and he died. Yet at the same time there was something about him, and this was made clear after and due to the resurrection, that he was God. Not just like God, not just inspired by, but actually God. It is this God who understands exactly what it is to be human and this human being that is an expression of God to us.

If Christ is fully human, then he really does understand exactly what its like to be us, not in a detached and clinical sense, but in a true, earthy and real sense.

If he is fully divine Jesus offers us the hope of eternity straight from God. He offers us the chance for an intimate relationship with a God who is truly involved in and engaged with the world.

We are called to be Christ-like, and through God’s spirit we can be so. We strive for perfection, therefore, not thinking that we are bound to fail but that if we are called by God we know it is possible for us to be perfect like Christ. FOR HE WAS EXACTLY LIKE US – YET WITHOUT SIN. I think that so many Christians start by saying I can’t be like Jesus because he was special. Yes he was, but only in the same way that we can be special, say the teaching of the early Christians, those who knew Jesus, and those who knew them..

Last natter spot! Have you ever consider the possibility of being perfect? Instead of believing that we are too sinful to succeed, would it not be more appropriate, and indeed world changing to see ourselves as too redeemed to fail?

In conclusion, I believe that if we are constantly pushing Jesus' divinity then we will miss out on what he achieved as a human being, if we just see him as a human being (albeit divinely inspired) we will lose out on all that he achieved for us through being God made flesh. It is only in taking the issues the early church spent so much time on seriously that we can understand just how much God can make of us, as brothers and sisters of Christ, fellow heirs. And then we can get to grips with being, in Christ, who God really wants us to be – fully human.

So I believe in Jesus Christ, his only Son, our Lord,

who was conceived by the Holy Spirit,

born of the Virgin Mary,

But that’s not the end of the story, and we will hear more next week. Amen

A Sermon for Lent 3

This week's sermon - and yes, some of you will have read some of this before as it is a rewrite from a few years back! No point in letting my old jokes go to waste...

Lent 3 (2009) Year B RCL Principal

Exodus 20.1-17

1 Corinthians 1.18-25

John 2.13-22

Angry Christians

I have an excuse this morning to tell my favourite nun joke, the excuse being the readings for today, I hope you will make the connection, otherwise this is just a blatant excuse to tell a joke at the start of the sermon….

Two nuns are driving through Transylvania when a vampire jumps on the car. The nun whose driving turns to her companion and says ‘what do I do?’ the second nun says ‘show him your cross, sister’ so she hops out of the car and shouts at the vampire ‘get off my bonnet you stupid idiot’…

Now, at the risk of delving too deeply into my deeply odd sense of humour, one of the reasons I think I find this funny is because, in common with most people, I don’t think of nuns as angry people, in fact I guess most people think that nuns, monks and even (so I’m told) Clergy don’t get angry because they are ‘holy people’ and Christian’s – holy people- don’t get angry. Or aren’t meant to get angry!

But if we think about that for even just a moment we will realise how daft such a statement is. Of course we get angry – it’s a part of human nature. We are not religious robots who don’t feel what everyone else feels, we go through all the things that everybody else goes through – loss, hurt, happiness, heartbreak. Surely we feel what everyone else does.

There is an impression that people have of the Church being something to do with ‘unreality’ – that it is slightly detached from the day to day, divorced from the normal stuff of life, somehow unaffected by the world. Of course this is not true. Unfortunately we as Christians seem to have perpetuated this myth – there is a certain brand of ‘bloodless Christianity’ which seems to divorce our faith from the world we share. How often do we get angry for the gospel? Or weep for a world that is without God? Or laugh with the joy that God feels when he sees the beauty of his creation?

Anger seems a part, a sometimes regrettable but integral part, of human nature. And it often comes as a shock to see that even Jesus was involved in conflict, he could succumb to violent behaviour –as in our Gospel story for today.

Jesus today breaks from the inadequate ‘gentle, meek and mild’ mould that we have forced him into and challenges us to both look at who he is again and to look at our own expressions of faith.

At first sight, the Bible message seems to be very clear: at all costs, resolve your conflicts by peaceful means. "Blessed are the peace-makers," said Jesus in the sermon on the mount. And the idea of peace is at the heart of Christianity. "The peace of the Lord be always with you," we say in this communion service, and we exchange a sign of the peace. And many services end with: "The peace of God which passes all understanding, keep your hearts and minds in the knowledge and love of God and of his Son, Jesus Christ our Lord…" It seems peace, and especially God's peace is extremely important to us. So surely we who are made in his image should strive to emulate his ways in our lives, and seek above all else for peace with each other.

In Luke's version of today's gospel reading of the cleansing of the temple, we hear that when Jesus came in sight of Jerusalem, he wept over it and said: "If only you had known….the way that leads to peace!"

But his very next act, according to St. Luke, is one of considerable anger and even violence. Jesus went into the temple and began driving out the traders. He overturned the tables of the merchants, and according to today's reading from John's gospel, made a whip for the very purpose of driving out the money-changers. Considerable violence. No wonder they hated him and sought to crucify him. And this act, according to John – the version we heard today, took place at the very beginning of Jesus' ministry, although all the other gospel writers place this incident much later, as the events which sparked off the first Easter.

So on the one hand we have a picture of Jesus, and a message in the gospels which seem to speak of peace. On the other hand we have an example of Jesus’ anger at the misuse of the temple and profiteering from faith in God.

How are we supposed to handle this contradiction?

Perhaps the answer is something to do with striving after peace whenever possible, but not peace at any cost. Integrity seems to be very important. There are occasions when we need to confront evil, even if it means being violent. Many people believe the policy of appeasement just prior to the second world war was wrong. And in the end, it seems violence was necessary to stop the terrible evil which occurred.

Perhaps as Christians we've become afraid of conflict because it's so difficult to handle. We've become "awfully nice" people, but maybe the price, to some extent, has been our integrity. The world speaks with a smooth tongue. And perhaps we in the Church have persuaded ourselves that polite niceness is Christianity.

But throughout history, God's prophets have been rarely smooth or comfortable. Like God himself, they've often been angry, and sometimes even violent in their confrontation of evil. Again, although Jesus is the Prince of Peace, he also said: "Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth; I have not come to bring peace, but a sword." (Matt. 10:34)

Faith and love are not ‘soft’ concepts. They are hard edged, powerful, dangerous. Christian faith is a faith that speaks out against injustice, against poverty, against oppression. It is a faith that often sides with the powerless against the powerful, a faith that demands action. And the love which we as Christians are called to exhibit and live by is not a soppy, romantic vision of love, but of a love which is bound up in God’s power, God’s absolute loathing of sin, God’s fierce gentleness. There are times when that love and that faith will cause us to resist wrongdoing, to act with strength and conviction, to follow the strong Christian Tradition which speaks of God’s refusal to stand by when injustice is perpetrated.

The Christian life is not easy, and should not be wishy-washy or mediocre, it is a life to be lived with energy, passion and an unwillingness to compromise, a life filled with the Holy Spirit who is described on the day of Pentecost as like tongues of fire and a rushing wind.

We are called to a passionate faith, one that doesn’t allow the evil of sin to flourish but combats it. A faith that is tied up with all it means to be human, anger, hope, fear, love, all the messy emotions of life. Jesus himself felt these things, from weeping at the fate of Jerusalem to the joy of friendship and of sharing God’s kingdom.

We too, like Christ, are called to live lives filled with passion and with the zeal for God which made him dangerous, and world changing.

I Believe, part 2

As promised, the text of last night's talk...

There are a couple of spots where the grammar might not be all that it should, so if there is anything hard to understand it's likely to be my writing rather than your reading that is at fault, apologies, I hope it makes sense overall....

Lent 2009: The Apostle’s Creed

Session 2

I believe in God

I believe in God, the Father almighty,

creator of heaven and earth.

I hope those of you who were here have recovered from last week’s excursion as we grappled with some major philosophical concepts and theological idea in our short time together. I realise that a lot of last week’s session involved me talking to you and leaving you with lots of ideas and questions which there wasn’t a huge amount of space to discuss, so I will encourage you to interact a little more this week – make the most of it though, it may not happen again….

I was intrigued whilst doing some research for this evening’s talk to read a reformed theologian’s reflections on the same themes as I have covered so far, and have discovered we don’t share a similar viewpoint. For this reformed theologian, belief is all about each individual and his relationship with God, and the point of a creed is so that we make intellectual assent to the propositions of faith. I am not sure this chap has read much about the early Church or the formation of the creeds, though I suspect he might be in grave doubt of my own ‘soundness’ were he to encounter my reflections anyway!

So we move on, and in an effort to break you all in gently lets do a little word association. Actually I only want you to associate with one word…. God…

What is your response, what is your immediate reaction to the word ‘God’.

The one thing

Whatever answers, whatever associations we have with the word, the concept of ‘God’ we realise that all language is inadequate in describing the Divine. All of our words and philosophies and theologies are nothing but provisional. They are what we have to work with until fuller knowledge comes along.

In fact the only definitive thing we can say about God is that God is wholly other. That God is beyond our words, our conception, our understanding, our wisdom (such as it is), our selves. God is beyond all definition.

And yet… In the Creeds of the Church, in our Scriptures, in our prayers, our liturgy, our books, our everyday talk, even (every now and then) in sermons we boldly profess who and what we believe God to be. The opening statement of the Apostle’s Creed, which we have said together this evening doesn’t just say I believe in God, but something about who he is, and the relationship he has with us.

Actually I want to pause for a moment and say that I, in common with most of us, use masculine pronouns when talking about God. I’m not actually terribly happy with that, but its what we have to work with. I’m not happy because, as I said last week, I think the words we use have power, they sink into us, they form our understandings and opinions. I think that due to the English language and traditional expression of God as ‘him’ we do often have a skewed understanding of God. Whatever we say about God we cannot say that God is defined by gender as human beings are. Within God there may be some traits which we might consider as relating to gender because Genesis says that human beings are in the image of God as male and female. I find that referring to God as male often causes an unconscious perception of God as male, this combined with our regular use of images such as Father (more on that in a moment), king, warrior etc means that we often limit our own understanding of God by defining God in this way.

I could talk even more on this, but will leave you to do some more discussion on that in a moment. First of all I want to make my first real point

We have no right to define God. Our words are inadequate, our language cannot begin to express an accurate concept of God. Yet we do. Why?

Because, as Christians we believe that God has in some way revealed him/herself to us. Sorry I am going to revert to him again as it is clumsy to do otherwise…I hope I made my point just now!

John of Damascus wrote in the eighth century:

“Neither men nor the celestial powers nor the cherubim and seraphin can know God, other than in his revelations. By nature he is above being and therefore above knowledge.”

And yet God has chosen to reveal himself to us. God allows us to speak of his nature and attributes using clumsy human language. God has shown something of his nature to us, in scripture, in the revelation through the created world, in human interaction and love, and especially through Jesus Christ – but more on that next week. God has made himself known to us.

The first break….!

This may well be a good time to take a momentary break and get you to talk amongst yourselves. Just for a moment I want you to think not about lots of questions, as I gave last week, but you have about three minutes each on how you feel God reveals himself to you, or times you have felt the knowledge or presence of God. When, where, or why have you known God?

Anyone want to share?

I used to know a Parishioner, a one time churchwarden of mine in Cambridgeshire. He was one of the last Lancaster pilots surviving until his death at the end of last year. A fascinating man, with a breadth of experience and a deep faith he often said to me that he had a profound sense of God when he was flying. There was something about being up there in the clouds that gave him a glimpse of God, a feeling of God being with him. I am sure that many of us have such feelings, moments, instants even, when things seem to all fit together and God, for a second seems very real. Students of Religion call these ‘numinous experiences’. I like to think of them as glimpses of God.

The Creed itself!

As Christians we do believe that God has made himself known. Not just in a sort of conceptual or abstract manner, not just as a sort of floaty, ethereal ‘thing’ but that through action in history and revelation to human beings we have some apprehension of God. In some way, God has made himself known in ways we can understand.

It is important to note that the Creed doesn’t make airy-fairy statements or ‘might’ statements. There’s no ‘we believe there might be a God, and he might be a bit like this or that’. The Creed is bold enough to pronounce ‘I believe in God, the Father almighty, maker of heaven and earth’

This isn’t just ‘ I believe in a God, but that this relationship with God has some definition. Belief not so much as a statement of fact but a statement of meaning, of being given meaning by our relationship with this God.

What do you mean vicar? I hear you think!? In making this opening statement we are declaring something about ourselves in relationship to God. I believe, and whether we go with last week’s theory about belief meaning holding close, trusting, rather than just intellectual theorising we are placing ourselves against, or next to, or under God.

The Father

Oh dear, you may be thinking, last week we only got through two words. This week we seem to have added only two more. When do we actually get into talking about the content of the Creed itself. Well here we are….

Obviously, one of the most striking statements in these opening words is that God is referred to as Father. Now we are used to that idea, but for many ancient philosophers, and even plenty of modern ones, the whole idea that humanity could be in a relationship to the Divine that mirrors the relationship between a parent and a child is simply beyond comprehension. Yet this is how scripture reveals God to us, indeed when Jesus teaches his disciples to pray he says to go into their rooms and say ‘father’. And he refers to our and your heavenly father on a number of occasions. This idea of a relationship to God wasn’t unique to Jesus, in the contemporary Judaism of the time there were rabbis whose writings remain and references to whose writings we still have records of who were encouraging faithful Jews to relate to God in such bold terms.

Intimacy

Something perhaps that might assist us in understanding the importance of this concept of ‘Father’ is to think in terms not of the ‘Pater Familias’ of the roman household where Father was responsible for running the household, and his word was law but of the more intimate model of near Eastern parenting. This is, at least stereotypically, a passionate, involved model, where mother is in partnership and the household is a shared responsibility. In Jesus expression of God’s fatherhood, and particularly on the occasions where he says ‘Abba’ – there is a closeness to the relationship of God to humanity.

We use ‘father’ in the creed as a kind of shorthand, it expresses a relationship with God that is one of dependence, trust, love, support. Even more so, to look at the wider documents of Christian and Jewish scripture God is referred to in many intimate ways, a mother hen, a shepherd who cares for his sheep, even a lover. If we take the expression of God’s fatherhood in the Creed as part of this rich tradition of analogy and familial imagery from scripture then in proclaiming God as Father we are again stating our love for and closeness to him. To go back to an earlier theme, it is entirely appropriate, as Biblical writers and Christian thinkers, mystics and poets have through hundreds of years, to use Mother and even Lover as expressions of our devotion to God and indeed God’s devotion to us… The danger of over-stressing ‘Father’ as our primary expression of our relationship to God is that again we confine ourselves to gender specific terms, and terms which may have positive and negative connotations for us. The expression of God’s fatherhood is much more about an expression of ideal fatherhood, or parenthood – giving, sacrificial, loving and intimate. I believe we should be bold in exploring other, biblical, models of relating to God, and remember that ‘Father’ carries within it other layers of meaning beyond stating that God is either male or constrained by cultural models of fatherhood.

Another break

Time for a little discussion, what good and bad feelings might the image of father, or indeed other expressions of God’s nature, have for you.

Almighty

It is easy, though, to get stuck on the image of God as Father, and stressing the intimacy of our relationship to God is an important redressing of the balance, or imbalance, of much Christian teaching over the past couple of centuries, and beyond maybe. But it is not the whole picture, and the Creed contains within itself a kind of internal balancing mechanism. Again, it is just one word….Almighty. Yet in the Greek text it comes attached to the proclamation of God as father Πιστεύω εἰς ΘΕΟΝ ΠΑΤΕΡΑ, παντοκράτορα or for you Latin scholars Credo in Deum Patrem omnipotentem. The two words are linked with the proclamation of God as – Patera pantakratora and Patrem omnipotentem.

Alongside the intimacy of our relationship with God as Father, we are called to remember the God that we believe in, the God to whom we hold close, is also a God of power, might, majesty and splendour. He is God Almighty.

I think that often we lose sight in the Church of the need to hold these ideas in tension. God loves us and embraces us – that is the message of many contemporary reflections in poetry and song. Yet at the same time God is awesome, powerful beyond our imagining, frightening, disturbing, life changing and earth shaking. We must hold both these understandings together – of, technically speaking, God’s immanence and God’s transcendence – of God being alongside us and God being beyond us. This should in fact be a creative tension – as so many parts of faith have the potential to be, not a good thing for those of us who prefer a more systematic theological world, but my experience is that life doesn’t often conform to our own constructed reality! Or our preferences.

A quick break

I just want to give you a minute to chat to the person next to you – about what your experience of this tension is, or about your inclinations with regards to how you address/think of God.

The home stretch

We come now to what I think some might think is the crunch, and in my original notes for this session was the focus of my talk for tonight. We are really going for it now as I want to reflect for a few minutes on ‘Creator of Heaven and Earth’

A lot of ink has been spilled and a lot of hot air has been expelled over the whole creation and evolution argument. And I don’t want to contribute to the debate – though I am happy to do so in another place. For tonight I just want to reflect on what this Creed says is important, that we acknowledge God to be creator.

For those with faith I think that it’s not a great leap to say that we believe God is the creator. I suspect that even the most scientific minded Christian would feel able to say that God was involved in the creation. It seems that most of the arguments that go on are about the mechanism of creation – and the fear that to say that perhaps the world wasn’t created in six days, to deny the literal truth of the story of creation is somehow to start on the slippery slope of liberalism and loss of true faith.

Twaddle.

A quick look at Genesis chapters 1 & 2 will soon reveal that there are two differing accounts of the creation, two seemingly contradictory accounts, with the familiar six day plus day off order in Chapter 1v1 to Chapter 2v3, then an unspecified timescale for an order that begins with a garden and people and gradually fills up from there.

It doesn’t deny the authenticity of scripture or it’s inspired nature to say that it may not be trying to give a literal account of something. My faith does not hang on the fact of the literal truth of scripture, but on the deeper truth of God’s inspiration through scripture.

Now that’s a whole evening in itself right there and I don’t want to go into it too much.

I will say though that the structure of the opening chapters of Genesis, and the way in which the first creation account contains a repeated refrain ‘evening and morning came and God saw that it was good’ suggests a poetic or hymnal contruction with the desire to inspire devotion rather than a concern to lay down the fact exactly as they occurred. People are welcome to disagree with that later, but I don’t really think it would help to go in to that here and now…

What is important, though, is that this statement of believing in God as author of creation, as the prime mover, the uncreated one who created from nothing (however that was done, big bangs, six days, whatever) is making a statement again about the power of God and of the fact that we should be in awe of God, and also making a statement about our relationship to the created order.

In saying ‘I believe in, trust and live in a relationship to the creator of heaven and earth’ we are saying that we have a part within that created order, that we are integrated into the plans and purposes of that God. This has, I believe, implications for our care and stewardship of this world, for our attitude to others within the world, for our own feeling of place and purpose for our lives. These implications are not for me to spell out word for word here this evening, but to say that in reconsidering our relationship to the created order we should reconsider the way in which we live our lives.

Closing Thoughts

So we’ve actually got around to considering some of the content of the creed this week! I hope that, as I said last week, some of the things I have said, and that you have discussed, have inspired some thoughts about how we live our lives as God’s people, as those who declare our shared faith in a God who reveals himself to the world and calls us to live in a way which makes real our common desire to know and love God and to serve him in one another.

I Believe, part 1

Lent 2009: The Apostle’s Creed

Session 1

I believe

Congratulations on making it to the first of our talks for this Lenten period as we grapple with the Apostle’s Creed. As it was my suggestion that we follow this series over these five weeks it is also my responsibility to say why I think, or even ‘I believe’, this is a good idea, and what I hope will happen over this next few weeks, before I get on with talking about what we are doing when we say ‘I believe…’ particularly when we consider this creed that we will be looking and saying together over the coming weeks…

Motivation…

I’ll come clean and say that the reason we are looking at this document over the coming weeks is because I think that on the whole very few of us really think about what we are doing when we stand up together and say the Creeds. Week by week we reel off either the Apostle’s Creed – our subject of study and the version used in morning and evening prayer; or the Nicene Creed – a longer document used at Holy Communion started with the early Church council of Nicea in 325 a.d. The Creed was formally adopted at the Council of Chalcedon in 451 a.d

The Apostle’s Creed has been attributed to the twelve apostles, each contributing one of the twelve articles which make up the Creed under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost. This is a rather fanciful story and those who study these things believe the roots of the Creed to be in a first or second century statement of faith called the ‘Old Roman symbol’ and was influenced by the Nicene Creed. The earliest potential record we have of the Apostle’s creed is a reference in a document of 390 which refers to the ‘Apostle’s symbol’ but some theologians date the Creed to as late as the fifth century.

We don’t have a definitive date or place or origin of this Creed, but we do know something of the purpose of having a Creed.

Actually to take a step back as I just said the Creed was referred to as a ‘symbol’ which is described as indicium, i.e. a token or password by which Christians might recognize each other, and collatio, that is to say an offering made up of separate contributions. In other words the Creed was about togetherness – it showed that Christians were united in a certain understanding of the nature of God as Father, Son and Holy Spirit which in itself from the work of a body of scholars or apostles within the Church itself.

And that is where I want to start, really, in thinking about the Creed. In choosing the Apostle’s creed for brevity (to be honest it was easier to fit in five sessions on this on than the Nicene) we come up against one common misconception with the very first words – I believe.

The first point!

This primary misconception is firstly that the creed is about me and my belief. I don’t mean me – I mean the individual – that it is about taking on a certain approach to faith for myself. Actually this couldn’t really be further from the purpose of the Creed which was not to authenticate the individual’s own personal approach to religion but to align and draw together the body of Christ under one umbrella of faith in which all are a part. To this extent the Creed is as much about belonging as believing. It is about submitting to the discipline of faith, and saying that this is faith of the Church and I am a part of this.

In saying ‘I believe’ at the start of this creed – rather than the ‘we believe’ which is rather more obvious at the start of the Nicene Creed – we are submitting to, aligning with and including ourselves in the Church which bears and seeks to proclaim the truth of Jesus Christ. It is not an exercise in individualism, and those who put together this Creed and the early Christians who shared in its proclamation wouldn’t even have understood the idea of individual belief in the way that we do today.

The second point!

Having made that statement about a shared approach to faith, I now want to think about our understanding of what it means to say I believe and then to follow that with a whole lot a thoughts about the nature of God and the Christian life. In order to do this I want to consider the ideas behind the words ‘Faith’ and ‘Belief’. Two words of common currency in the Christian world, and indeed the world of Religion and Philosophy. Two very important words, often used, but used with a whole load of sub-texts, particularly in the Church. Perhaps you say the Creed week by week without ever thinking about what you are doing, or like a number of Christians, including clergy, I know, say some bits of it with your fingers crossed (at least mentally) – because you are expected to subscribe intellectually to a whole raft of ideas, some of which you might not feel completely happy about.

So, I want us all to think about this whole faith and belief thing again, to consider what we mean when we say ‘I or We believe’ or when we say ‘I have faith in x or y’

I should say, though, what the rest of this talk (or any of the talks in this series) will not do –

• it will not tell you how you can have faith
• it will not explain the deeper mysteries of faith, and prove the existence of God once and for all
• it will not set out what you are and are not allowed to believe and still call yourself a Christian

What I do want to do is think about these words, their meaning, and how looking at and thinking about them again can add to the richness of our own experience of God and relationship to our (for want of a better word) faith.

We use the word ‘belief’ all of the time in our expression of what it means to be a Christian. If we really think about it, though, we should soon move on to considering ‘what is it to actually believe that x is the case’ closely followed by the question ‘what difference does this make to the way I think, act, feel and live my life.’ Are we willing to ask these questions – because if we do we might find the answers strange or difficult? But, to examine the meaning of these words ‘faith and belief’ is first of all to bring to our attention the importance of these words.

Words have power in us, they give form and meaning to ideas, emotions, hope. To be willing to subject the meaning of something to scrutiny is to be willing to open ourselves to a new meaningfulness in ourselves, and to make possible a new richness in our use of language, and to allow it to sink deeper into our consciousness and our souls.

Meaning and change

So, as we think about meaning lets take the essay writer’s favourite opening gambit and look at the dictionary definition. The little Oxford dictionary talks of belief as:

“Trust, confidence; acceptances as true or existing, what is believed.”

Whilst faith is defined as

“Trust, belief in religious doctrine or divine truth; religion; loyalty, fidelity; confidence.”

These are typical definitions and reflect a common approach to the study of faith and belief – that is, the concern is to examine what intellectual assertions one can make about the nature of faith/belief and what effect this has on those who claim to have faith. A lot of the study I’ve done on faith and belief relates to what can be known empirically, what can be measured about these things. It tends to relate this to religious structures, symbols, doctrines, and traditions, or to a study of the language used by believers and how that language relates to the world outside.

Now I’m not saying that these definitions are wrong in any way. It’s just they reflect a contemporary understanding of ideas of faith and belief. It’s very much a modernistic, mechanistic way of seeing the world, a rational, post-enlightenment way of viewing the world. In a way it’s a kind of scientific study of ideas, trying to reduce them to a basic level at which they can be measured.

Of course this is very much a most enlightenment view, and our world – at least western society – has lost faith in the post-enlightenment world-view (but that’s a whole new seminar and one which I wouldn’t want to unleash on such an unsuspecting and generous audience as yourselves, at the risk of watching your brains ooze out of your ears as I get more and more obscure). Suffice to say that in our current world we are finding that people want definitions that reflect more than the scientific, more than the rational, something that embraces mystery, that is more open ended, that takes our experiences into account and offers something for us to hold on to.

I do acknowledge that words change their meanings over time, for instance, in Elizabethan times ‘indifference’ meant without prejudice and fair, now it means that one doesn’t really care. Which is why the compilers of Common Worship changed the prayers in the Book of Common Prayer from ‘rightly and indifferently minister justice’ to ‘rightly and impartially minister justice’ As for the ideas of what faith and belief are, if their meaning was inconsequential then it wouldn’t matter, but it does, because we use them frequently and because we claim that they are meaningful to the extent of being life-changing…

A Start

If I had a penny for each time someone, non-Christian and Christian, has said that ‘I wish I believed what you did’ or ‘I wish I had your faith’ to me over the last twenty years I’d be, well, at least a couple of pounds better off by now. I think I know what they meant, but at the same time the words become swapped around, confused, and lose meaning by being used interchangeably. It’s as if faith and belief come a single package, and the two are indistinguishable. But I don’t think they are – and I’m pretty sure most people don’t actually think they are either.

Basically, most people in the Church would talk about ‘belief’ as some kind of intellectual assent to certain doctrinal statements – a kind of ‘apprehension of the facts’ which when gathered together creates Christian belief. Like a Creed – for most of us, it’s a set of ‘beliefs’ that we claim to have mentally assimilated (to a greater or lesser extent) and which we affirm.

Faith is considered by many philosophers as a ‘quality’ – not entirely definable, not something that can be contained, held within any kind of narrative or logical description, but based within a relationship, something on a deeper level than the intellect – at the same time, though, faith is something less than ‘knowledge’ – when I say have faith that x is the case I am saying that I don’t know that this is so, but that I expect this to be so. So when someone says ‘I have faith in God’ – they are making a statement of hope, of an engagement with a deeper reality, maybe a statement based on a profound and affective experience, but not a statement concerned with empirical observation and rational knowledge, as such.

Belief is often considered subject to faith – one has to ‘have faith’ in order to believe. If I have a Christian Faith, for instance, I can buy into what Christians claim to believe – stuff about Jesus being God, about Virgin Births, about resurrection. It all comes as a package after I decide that this is what I am going to believe.

This division between Faith and belief, as (in the most simplistic terms faith- spiritual and emotional, belief – intellectual and rational) such an approach, though popular, is too easy, too rationalistic, too narrow. It doesn’t take into account where the words come from, and this is what I hope might make us think differently.

Faith reconsidered.

Faith is what makes everything else possible. It is the state of being in relationship to God, to the divine. Faith is the response of the person to God. It is intimate, it is personal. St Augustine said “Lord, you have made us for yourself, and our hearts are restless until they find their rest in you.” I think this is quite a good way to think of faith, a relationship, perhaps unnamed, a search for God.

Faith is that root, that grounding which opens us up to the possibility of God.

Which leads us on to consider the real crux of our subject for tonight (though don’t for a minute think I’ve finished with faith!) Belief!

Be-leif

The idea of intellectually coming to terms with doctrinal propositions was alien to the first Christians, and indeed to the Greek philosophers who were so influential on the formation of the Creeds and expressions of faith of the early Church. To them faith and belief were one and the same, they were expressions of a relationship with God, and for the Christian a reflection of a dynamic relationship with Jesus Christ through God’s Holy Spirit.

There is only one Creedal statement in the whole of the New Testament. Only one thing that has a similar format to the idea of Creeds as we refer to them now, It can be found in the letter to the Romans Chapter 10 verse 9, St Paul writes there:

“If you confess with your lips that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart He was raised from the dead, you shall be saved”

But it wasn’t belief as we express it today. In it’s origin the idea of believing is not doctrinal, not intellectual, but relational. To believe was to cherish, to relate to, to hold fast to something that was valuable. It wasn’t to argue about it’s rationality, it wasn’t to justify something philosophically or in theological terms, belief was about trust, about intimacy. And here is why I think this is so important:

The word belief comes from an old English route. It literally means to ‘hold something close’ to ‘be Leif’ to something. Instead of claiming something to be objectively true one would take something close to them, they would draw it into their heart and cling to it. It was an emotional response, a response of the soul.

So the early Christians would not have spent hours discussing spiritual laws, or debating the merits of one system of thought over another, instead they gathered to pray and sing and share bread and wine. They clung to the reality of what they believed, rather than discussing it. A trip through scripture was an adventure to see what God was saying, not to discuss whether x or y was true or could be explained.

To see belief in this way is to see the fact that the point of being a Christian was to relate to God and to the stories of Jesus and indeed to Jesus and the Spirit in a living and dynamic way.

If we can move beyond a mentality that simply tries to explain the Christian Faith as ‘facts’ that have to be adhered to then we can (to paraphrase) learn to love God with all of our heart, soul, strength and mind. Not just by over intellectualising and seeking to bludgeon searchers into having the ‘right beliefs’ in order to become a Christian.

I’m sure that most, if not all of us, would describe the basis of our faith as relational, it is about relating to a God who is infinite yet intimate. A God who seeks to be a part of our lives and who loves us and longs for us to love God as we are loved. Our preoccupation with doctrine and rationalism has obscured the original meaning of what to believe really is – we are called to hold fast to Christ, to be close to Christ, to know God personally, not only intellectually.

So our search for truth becomes, in essence, a search for God. We stop thinking in an objective, external way about ‘what truth is’ and realise that the truth of God is found in a human relationship with him. A relationship based on trust, love and searching on our part, and on the self-giving nature of God, on God’s part. Our ‘I believe’ is a commitment to that search.

The Example of Jesus

Something that might help us grasp this a little more is to look at what is said by St Paul in Galatians about Jesus’ faith. Actually the verse I want to refer to is Galatians 6.21 and the original thoughts about this come from Markus Barth which was published in the Heythrop Journal in 1969.

The NRSV translates the part of the verse I want to consider thus:

“15We ourselves are Jews by birth and not Gentile sinners 16 yet we know that a person is justified not by works of the law but through faith in Jesus.”

Barth, in a long and complicated discussion which would take a very long time to go through tells us that the phrase ‘justified not by works of the law but through faith in Jesus’ is better translated ‘through the faith of Jesus.’

A very inadequate summary goes like this:

For those of you who like New Testament (koine) Greek the argument revolves around the whether pistis (a Greek word translated faith/belief interchangeably in many New Testaments) is neither an objective nor a subjective genitive, but a specifically Pauline ‘mystical Genitive’ which is also called a ‘genitive of fellowship’ – under such an understanding Paul is making a point about what faith is and where it comes from. Also the word ek in Greek can be translated of, in and from. This means that the faith of Christ, with overtones of faith being from Christ is very possible. Further, it relates to the Old Testament concept of ‘faithfulness’ which Paul refers to frequently and reflects, like the letter to the Hebrews, the idea of Christ as ‘The Author and Perfecter of faith’. It his faith we seek to emulate, his relationship with God and his prayerful, dynamic, intimate fellowship that forms the basis of what belief is.

In other words, the idea that Christians should base their faith on doctrines about Jesus (which we call ‘believing in Christ’) is not an adequate understanding of what faith is. To use the terms I’ve been using so far, Christians tend to believe thing about Jesus and base our faith around concepts about Jesus. What Barth argues is that we need to look more at what Jesus believed and buy into that.

If we are justified, if we are in a relationship with God because of Jesus, says Barth, it is because of his faith, which we share. If you think about that for a moment it’s quite pivotal. We are justified, says Paul, not by our faith in Christ, but by having Christ’s faith. This does not seek to negate the need to know about Christ, but calls us as Christians to seek to know Christ above all else, and to share his faith.

So our focus becomes not doctrine, but relationship.

When Jesus talked of God he didn’t talk about God in abstract intellectual terms, he talked about God and related to God as his heavenly father, he was in relationship to him.

Likewise in talking about the Holy Spirit he talked about the one who was a part of his life, and promised to all believers, the energetic, life giving spirit of God who inspires and conspires – meaning shares in breathing life – believers.

This isn’t new, though the way I’ve expressed it may seem different. It forms the basis of a new mentality, though – away from seeing ‘belief’ as a block of doctrine or facts that we have to somehow get our heads around and take on board. Instead the analogy of a journey, of progress and movement, of a pilgrimage becomes the best way of expressing this. On a pilgrimage it is as much the journey itself that is important as the end point, as much the mystery of the route as the destination, as much the discovery as the goal. If we can get away from being hide-bound to doctrine then we can start finding out what believing, what holding close, really means.

I believe

So in the context of our series what does it mean for us to say ‘I believe..’?

As we look over the next few weeks as this core document of the Christian faith I invite you again to consider not just the intellectual implications of all of our talks but to allow this to be a devotional series. So that when we find ourselves saying ‘I believe’ we are not making intellectual assent to certain doctrinal propositions, but acknowledging our relationship to a God who reveals himself to us, and devoting ourselves to loving and trusting him.

Some Extras

What I added at the end of the talk was:

This is not a call for anti-intellectualism, in fact I am sure that we need to consider again and again what it is we profess to hold dear to. My concern is that the Church has over-intellectualised our faith, rather than allowing it to be an experiential, engaged thing, and made it much more of an intellectual excercise. I hope that critical faculties are applied to faith, and i would certainly be worried if folk thought that what I had said was that we should 'check our brains at the door'!

Secondly, there are times when the Creed seeks to 'hold us' rather than us 'holding faith'. In times of doubt, darkness, fear, anxiety. In times when we struggle with Christian faith, the Creed serves to align us with the community of faith, to support and embrace us even when we might feel our faith is lacking or struggling. It is important to remember that, as we proclaim a faith which supports us as much as we buy into it!

Demystifying the Church

This is the first in a series of articles I am writing for the local Parishes Mag... Thought it might be worth sharing, a bit of an antidote to the usual Anglican mystique/obscurity* (*delete as appropriate)

Demystifying the Church
Part ye firste

Christian Faith is quite simple - Jesus said ‘follow me’ and that is what most of us try and do.

The Church, on the other hand, has had two thousand years or so to build up lots of traditions, practices and theology that exist alongside this simple message. The purpose of this ritual is not to confuse people or exclude them but to add depth and life and colour to our worship and to the way we do things. In this occasional column I will try and explain a little of what we do in the Church and why we do it, I hope it adds to our appreciation and enjoyment of Church services in our Mission Community! I was tempted to call this series ‘Church for Dummies’ but realise that most of us (myself included) may not have any idea why the Church does things a certain way, but have got used to things being that way ‘because that’s what we do’. This doesn’t make us dummies, so instead I am attempting to demystify what our Church does and why we do it.

You will notice if you came to Church in December that our Altar (the table at the front of the Church) and our Pulpit (where the minister stands for the sermon) have coloured cloths on them. The Vicar also wears a scarf for services called a stole which comes in different colours. From Advent Sunday until Christmas Eve the cloths are purple, and then they will be changed to white for Christmas until 2nd February when they are green, then back to purple from Ash Wednesday, white for Easter Day and so it goes on, this is because the Church uses certain colours to represent important parts of the Church year.

Green is the colour we have for much of the year, it reminds us of growth and life, that God is a part of the world we live in and is alive and around us in all things.

White is a celebration colour that we have at Christmas and Easter- the two most important celebrations of the Church year. It reminds us of light and life and happiness and purity – all part of Christian life. We also have white for weddings and baptisms and ordinations.

Purple is a serious colour that is called a penitential colour – it is the colour that is used for Advent (the lead up to Christmas) and Lent (before Easter) - it was the colour Jesus wore before he was crucified, and used to be the colour royalty wore. It reminds us of the suffering and death of Jesus, and so reminds us that we are often sinful and sorrowful. Clergy also wear purple for funerals.

Red is the colour we use to remind us of the fire of God’s Holy Spirit, which is a passionate colour. God can set us on fire with his love, we can be passionate about faith and about the God who loves us passionately. Red is also used to remind us of the blood of those who were willing to die for their faith, the martyrs of the Church – so we often use red for services when we remember saints of the Church.

So the colours in Church all have a meaning, we don’t just chose them at random but we have different colours through the year. Next time you are in Church you’ll see that we have one or other of these colours to remind us of one of the important parts of the Christian Faith.

Epiphany Sermon

Epiphany (2008)

Come to the king, whoever you are…

I don’t know if you remember the Christmas publicity campaign from a few years ago, one which caused some controversy at the time, but being broad minded myself I rather liked it. It had a cartoon picture of three outrageous faces with a caption which went something like this:
You’re in a stable, you’ve just given birth and now three kings have turned up with presents for the baby – talk about a bad hair day....

Of course, it’s trying to get us to think about the familiar story of the arrival of the wise men in a different way, which most of us who are responsible for preaching and teaching during our major Christian festivals are always trying to do! I think that, and the fact that ‘bad hair day’ is one of my favourite modern phrases, means that this ad really appealed to me, despite the fact that various green ink users in Tonbridge Wells got very excited about the whole campaign.

But as I have said often over this Christmas period, it is easy to forget the wonder of this story we know so well – familiarity seems to breed if not contempt at least a sort of numbness with regards to this amazing story. And the fact that we have a mish mash approach to the story with various elements from different Gospels mixed up together and the timescale of the arrival of the wise men’s arrival being less than clear means that we probably don’t enquire too deeply about this amazing event

It doesn’t help that we have layered meanings upon meanings on the text itself. First of all, despite the fact that I love the carol ‘we three kings’ as part of our worship there is no evidence that these were actually kings. Nor, unlike the suggestion in the carol, is there necessarily any deeper meaning to the gifts given... In fact I found this in the Jamieson, Fausset and Brown Commentary on the whole Bible of , 1871 this excellent passage:
That the gold was presented to the infant King in token of His royalty; the frankincense in token of His divinity, and the myrrh, of His sufferings; or that they were designed to express His divine and human natures; or that the prophetical, priestly, and kingly offices of Christ are to be seen in these gifts; or that they were the offerings of three individuals respectively, each of them kings, the very names of whom tradition has handed down—all these are, at the best, precarious suppositions. But that the feelings of these devout givers are to be seen in the richness of their gifts, and that the gold, at least, would be highly serviceable to the parents of the blessed Babe in their unexpected journey to Egypt and stay there—that much at least admits of no dispute.
To be honest, its just a good sing!

What is important is what we do know about the wise men, and that should be enough to fill us with a sense of wonder and surprise and indeed a sense of being challenged in our own attitude.

We begin by asking why this story is included here in Matthew’s Gospel – it isn’t found elsewhere in the New Testament, or referred to by any other source. For Matthew, the passionate Evangelist to the Jewish People, the one who believed in the kingship of Jesus, the King of the Jews, what is he saying to the Jewish people?

Well, lets start with what we know - we do know that the wise men, or Magi, were not Jewish – they came from the east, they were outsiders. They may have been astrologers, they certainly believed that the stars were worth studying and that signs of import could be found. In many ways they are beyond the pale, outside of the Jewish faith – it isn’t them who quote from the book of the prophet Micah, it is Herod’s advisers. By the time they arrive in Jerusalem they are lost and not quite sure where to go next….
Matthew, who is very Judeo-centred in his Gospel writing, seems to be both stepping outside of his usual boundaries of trying to get the message of who Jesus was to the Jewish people and yet at the same time is sending a message to his Jewish readers – that those outside of God’s chosen people were able to see that Jesus was king, that Jesus was the one prophesied as Messiah, the chosen one. These foreigners could see it, surely those of the Jewish faith who read the Gospel could see it to. It’s a challenge thrown down to the reader. This should make the faithful Jew think about whether they accept Jesus as king. If even those outside the faith can see, surely it would be obvious to those within.

So we find our first challenge. Have we seen the light of Christ? If so, how have we responded to it? Do we accept Christ as our King? And if so, how does this have an impact on our lives. I was listening to a sermon recently on the internet which I was guided to by Paul and Kath and was struck by one of the question asked at the start – what would the Church look like if we really did act as though Jesus were our king? If we lived by kingdom values in everything we did?

It’s a good thing to ask at the beginning of this new year? In what way can I as an individual live up to the values of the kingdom of God? What changes would I have to make to the way I live my life if I really acknowledge that Jesus Christ is the king of everything? Even more so – what changes should our Church be making if we truly want to make this an outpost of God’s Kingdom?

I see the Kingdom made real and am profoundly moved by seeing our Churches in action – by the concern of our pastoral teams to reach out to the communities, by the prayers and concern of our fellowships for the sick and those in need, the bereaved, those we are linked with in various mission agencies. The way our Churches in the five alive Mission Community are seeking to be at the heart of our villages is an inspiration to me and I consider it a huge privilege to be a minister in this place. It is what attracted me in my original contact with the parishes last July and is something that is still inspiring and overwhelming me on a daily basis – it is why I am happy to be back from holiday, in fact!

But we cannot rest on our laurels, there is still more to be done, and we need to ask again and again, how is Jesus made King in our Church? What can we offer? What should we be doing? That is our mission and our calling for this coming year, to consider again our ministry to our parishes and to ask where we need to move and, indeed, where we need to stand firm. But this is something we will all be doing and we will be talking about it in the coming weeks, months and, dare I say, years!

The second challenge from this reading springs from this first Challenge of making Christ our king in everything and from our reading for today. It comes from the wise men – the outsiders. Matthew, for all his Jewish identity and agenda, makes it clear that these outsiders have something to say, and that they respond to Christ in the most appropriate way. If there is one thing our Churches need to continue to do in order to grow in Kingdom values, it is to welcome the outsider and reach out to those beyond these walls.

It’s not a new message and I am moved to preach on it regularly. We exist as the Church to worship God and to proclaim Christ to the world. This means welcoming those who see things differently, allowing them to bring who they are and and what they have to offer, letting them ask questions, encouraging them to come in and to be a part of our Church family, showing the love of Christ to all, no matter how they look, or sound, or what they think. We are called to be a place of openness to outsiders, and to listen to them, and to allow them to challenge us.

As the outsiders came to worship Christ and proclaim him king, may we too be those who put Christ as the focus of our Church and our lives, and may we be open to God speaking in unexpected ways through unexpected people. May we be open to the values of the kingdom and live them in all we do and think and say. May 2009 be our year of kingdom values, or I should say, the start of considering again the values of the Kingdom of God.