Thought for Trinity 16

On Thursday over 500 clergy of the Diocese of London gathered for a days study summit in Church House Westminster. The Archbishop of Canterbury gave the opening key note address and in the afternoon Tim Keller spoke about his experience as a church leader. He is an extraordinary person who took the job of leading the Redeemer church in New York city and growing the church from 50 to over 5,000 in a few years.

He spoke about the nature of church being a community that should be identifiable as “contrasting, serving, unifying, lay launching, suffering and prophetic.”

In this mornings gospel we observe Jesus with his disciples and in the few verses we see these “marks” of the church as identified by Tim Keller.

Jesus is of course trying to get the disciples to understand that as they journey towards Jerusalem what awaits him, and of course those who will ultimately follow him, is suffering. The reality of this suffering is of course contrasting to the popular held ideas current in first century Jewish messianic hope and expectation. Jesus is having this conversation as part of his teaching and training of those whom he has called and will soon send out into the world to continue his work. This need and desire to teach his disciples is required as part of “lay launching”, and of course what he is suggesting to the disciples is prophetic for his suffering will come to shape all that follows in the life of the church.

And what is the reaction of the disciples? they cannot bear to hear these words of Jesus. They exhibit the all to familiar behavior of those who have followed in their footsteps up to the present day, division rather than unity, an attitude of self-serving and self absorbed behaviour. They get themselves into a bother about who is the greatest amongst themselves. It is threatening the unity of Christ’s followers, that most important mark of the church referred to by Tim Keller and prayed for by Jesus himself. The arguments within the church today over issues of gender and sexuality are a sign of a church more interested in serving itself than the world in which it is called share the Good News.

We are living during a time of a passionate and fearful argument in the life of our own church. Some have left the church, others are talking about schism, and many fear that those watching our behaviour are shaking their heads in bewilderment. But what we don't recognize is that most of us argue the way the disciples did. We are so certain we are right that we stand ready to condemn those who disagree with us. We want to be "the greatest." In this kind of argument, love rarely enters, no matter what words we use to the contrary.

Sex has become the predominant verbal occupation of the day. Whether in discussion of sin or in the context of sanctioned blessing, sex has become the central issue of not just the world but of the church. This episode in Mark cries out for us to notice a bitter irony, to see that while Jesus is telling us about his death and suffering, we are arguing like the disciples amongst ourselves.

What Jesus does next is to take a child and remind us in our own time of the need to welcome those around us as we would a child. “Whoever welcomes one such child in my name welcomes me, and whoever welcomes me welcomes not me but the one who sent me.” Verse 37

We cannot of course welcome anyone, let alone a precious child, if we are only concerned with our own selves and being right in all we say and do within the church. 

Congratulations to Scott on his baptism

Scott was baptised at St John's Church on Sunday the 9th of September. We have just received these pictures which we share with the joy of welcoming Scott in to the Christian Church and his family back once again to St John's. It was a wonderful day and thank you to Fr Simon for making this liturgy so special for everyone present

Thought for Trinity 15

If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake, and for the sake of the gospel, will save it.

Mark 7: 34-5

Today our lectionary brings us to the point in Mark's gospel where Jesus turns his face towards Jerusalem, where he will be arrested and killed. At precisely this point in the gospel Jesus is recognised by Peter for who he is - the Messiah, the Christ - and the implications of following Jesus are made crystal clear. The path of Christ is the path that Jesus himself follows, a path of suffering and self-renunciation.

What should we make of this; does God want us to suffer? Is there something good about suffering; is it something we should seek out? Of course not. Sometimes in the history of the Church, unhealthy and masochistic spiritualities have seemed to suggest otherwise. Against these, the gospel is quite clear: God calls us to a fullness and richness of life, as John's gospel has it "to have life, and have it abundantly".

The problem is not with God, but with a world that has a hard time living life in its fullness. That life, after all, is a life of love, and love is a frightening thing. Love involves vulnerability, an opening up of ourselves, and the ending of our fantasies of self-sufficiency and control. And that can be extremely threatening. As a consequence, when we see love, we are constantly in danger of responding not by welcoming it, but by hitting out.

The world hits with its most deadly spite by crucifying Jesus. Those who follow him can't expect to be free from similar reactions. At various times and places the Church has been persecuted. Now, it is absurd - in spite of the efforts of some prominent Christians to the contrary - to claim that the Church in contemporary Britain is in any way persecuted. None the less, we may sometimes be given a hard time for being Christians. We may sometimes give ourselves a hard time for being Christians: at war with ourselves, there are parts of us that prefer that old way of cold invulnerability to the way of love.

Either way, what is going on here is the tension between the reality of God's redemption and the persistence of sin, of the refusal of love. Herbert McCabe put it like this: "if you don't love you will die, if you do love, they will kill you".

We are called to love. We may not be killed, but no authentic life of love will be free from trouble. And yet there is no other way we can be genuinely fulfilled. So, by God's grace, we persist, in the hope that the final victory of love over death, that hard won joy of Easter, may be ours.

Come and get it!

Like the look of these?

These, professionally made and profoundly yummy, cakes were on sale at our Coffee Morning yesterday.

These coffee mornings happen every month at St Matthias. We hope to see you at the next one!

Congratulations to Anthea

Anthea Chinyama whose is a member of St. John's congregation and attending st Mary's high school in Hendon got 6 A* in her GCSE results. Well done you make us all proud

September - the month of the Holy Cross

"Faithful Cross above all other,

One and only noble tree,

None in foliage, none in blossom,

none in fruit thy peer may be.

Sweetest wood and sweetest iron,

sweetest weight was hung on thee."

Office hymn for Passiontide

On Friday we will celebrate the feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross, usually known just as "Holy Cross Day". And the whole month of September is traditionally associated with devotion to the Cross.

The idea of devotion to the Cross should strike us as strange. Crucifixion was a barbaric form of torture. How on earth can Christians justify our focus on the image of the crucifix? Our churches and other buildings are full of depictions of a man bleeding to death on a crude piece of wood. We walk the Stations of the Cross and sing hymns like the one quoted above, which not only remember the crucifixion, but celebrate it. Doesn't this show that we have a warped view of the world?

A growing number of people draw that conclusion. How should we reply?

I think two things can and should be said.

First, in displaying our crucifixes and walking the Way of the Cross we are refusing to look away from human suffering. We live in a world that increasingly turns from suffering human beings, confining them to the international news reports and the hospital wards, talking about them euphemistically as 'collateral damage', and pushing them to the margins of political debate. In drawing attention again and again to the suffering of the most perfectly human person ever to have lived, Christians are engaged in a perpetual protest against this. We cannot pretend there is no genuine suffering: our liturgy and devotion reminds us constantly that there is.

But we don't just think about the Cross, we celebrate it. Isn't this the point at which we've crossed a line, and become unhealthily morbid?



No. And this is the second thing that can be said. Without denying for one second that the Cross is a symbol of human evil - here we have the political execution of an innocent man, the Son of God - we see at Calvary also the triumph of divine good. Contrary to the claims of some forms of Christianity, God did not actively will the Cross. God, who is perfectly good, does not will evil. The Cross is the work of human beings. The divine Word lived a human life, a life wholly of love, and our response was to kill him. God's response was to turn that low-point of human wrongdoing into a victory. The defeat of the Cross becomes the high-point of self-offering. The decisive 'no' of human beings to God becomes the 'yes' of God, louder and more insistent than our 'no', to the very human beings who killed his Son. This loving response is revealed in the Resurrection.

There is nothing glib or triumphalist about any of this. The suffering of Good Friday was real and horrific, nothing undoes that. But through it all, a painful victory is won by the insistent power of divine Love. And there's an ongoing message here: our defeats, our failures, our lows, the seeming senselessness and frequent cruelty of human life, whether collective or individual, can become the very means by which that life is transformed.

The literary critic Terry Eagleton has described Christianity as a form of 'tragic humanism', valuing humanity but realising that its flourishing comes at a terrible price. That, I think, is the message of Holy Cross Day. We Christians are neither trite upbeat optimists nor grim pessimists. We live in hope, but realise that our hope exists alongside a brokenness which is almost unbearable. And rather than ignoring that brokenness, our hope is precisely in the possibility of its being transfigured. A similar point was made by Leonard Cohen,

There's a crack in everything,

that's how the light gets in.

Thought for Trinity 14

There is something shocking about today's Gospel reading. Jesus has gone to Tyre to get some space from the crowds and to 'reboot' after healing, calming storms, feeding the 5000 and arguing with the authorities. Maybe the woman caught him off guard, but there is no doubt that he reacts to her as a 1st Century Jewish man would, by rejecting and insulting her.

One of the really tough things to get our heads around as Christians is this idea that Jesus was both 100% God and 100% Man as is set out in the Creed. Part of being human is learning. Jesus learnt to walk and talk - just as we did. He also learns more about what it means to be God from this woman. Her reaction to his replaying of old prejudices is not to argue with him, or challenge his human preconceptions but reminds him that there is more than enough love and grace in God to go around! 

The challenge here in this Gospel passage is the reminder that we all have preconceptions that make us deaf to hear God in others. At the heart of God is an inclusive love that invites all in and can shine through all as God decides - not as human preconceptions allow!

If you want to think more about this, take a look at this short Bible Study by Dr Evie Vernon, a Jamaican theologian. It finishes with this poem that casts the gentile woman as a Jamaican woman reflecting on the experience of the encounter.  

Let us hear the words of the foreign woman:

Who you calling Dawg?
Yes, you, preacher man.

I hear you is a healer,
So I push me way through this crowd
Of laughing, taunting men
Who see all like me as dirt;
Bitch and foreign bitch to boot

I snarl and growl me way through
I don’t mind them
I would do anything for me daughter

I force me way to you
And tell you me need
And you look on me and call me ‘Dawg.’

I bark right back,
“An Dawg an all eat the scrapses
from Massa table”

And you look me in the eye
An you laugh and say
“You right. You daughter heal.”

An is true.
And I thank you
and I follow you.

But I still don’t understand
Why you had was to call we “dawg.”
But I glad you tell me I right
Before de crowd of dem.