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.

Youth@Risk West Hendon

I have had an extraordinarily fulfilling day today - Sunday the 9th of September. I was not in church this Sunday because I was with a group of 39 amazing people being trained to work  as life coaches for young people at risk in West Hendon.
Each one of us had given up our weekend activities, family time, relaxing time, church time, weddings and Christenings and for one a birthday to be trained by Graham from Youth at Risk from Friday evening through until Sunday evening.
This is a new and very exciting project that is being piloted within Barnet in our parish on the West Hendon Estate whereby up to 39 young people who are at risk of making choices that will have a negative impact on their lives and life choices will be given the opportunity of weekly one to one support from volunteers within the community for a year. We were asked to identify one thing that we would take away with us from the weekends training and for me it is the fact that this amazing and talented group of people are prepared to commit themselves with passion to the lives of a group of young people whom they have never met and a community that I  am part of and love with a passion.
Youth at risk believes that all young people should have a worthwhile future no matter what has happened in the past or how difficult their current circumstances. "Underpinning their work with at risk young people is recognition of a crucial loss of trust and respect about young people and between young people. Trust and respect are crucial values for all communities to hold and share in order to support community cohesion and individual pro-socail development" ( Joseph Rowntree Foundation April 1999 Social Cohesion and Urban inclusion for Disadvantaged Neighbourhoods)
Please keep us, all of us, in your prayers over the next year as we begin this wonderful and extraordinary journey togther.
I will finish with the words of Marianne Williamson with which we began todays training:
Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won't feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine, as children do. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It's not just in some of us; it's in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.

by Marianne Williamson

from A Return To Love: Reflections on the Principles of A Course in Miracles

Peace and blessings Fr John

Picnic in Rushgrove Park

Congratulations to our two newest servers. Some of us met up after Mass and had lunch together. Take a look at some of our pics.....

Thoughts on Trinity 13

For it is from within, from the human heart, that evil intentions come: fornication, theft, murder, adultery, avarice, wickedness, deceit, licentiousness, envy, slander, pride, folly. All these evil things come from within, and they defile a person.

Mark 7:21-3

After a brief summer sojourn in chapter six of John's gospel, we're back with Mark for the rest of year, beginning with a passage that is more prone to be misconstrued than a celebrity's Twitter account.

Modern readers of the verses cited above, that is all of us, are likely to read Jesus' words in the following way: what really matters is what's inside, your thoughts, your intentions. Those are what make you good or bad. We might feel even more confident in this reading given what has happened already in chapter seven of Mark: Jesus has disputed with the scribes and Pharisees, criticising their hypocritical observance of the Law. Isn't what Jesus is saying here, we might ask, that religion is an inner thing, a matter of the heart, not a matter of what you do?

The problem with all this is that it makes Jesus too modern, too much like us - or at least some of us. Not only does the first century Palestinian Jew, on this account, have religious views which sound like they've come straight out of 16th century Germany, he also has ethical views that would fit nicely on a Radio 4 discussion programme. One of the most dreary commonplaces of contemporary thinking about right or wrong is that being good is very much an inner matter, primarily to do with intentions, conscience, thoughts, beliefs - that kind of thing. We can disagree about what to do, but we can both be right, because we are well motivated. Our hearts, as we say, are in the right place. You believe in bombing Iraq back into the Stone Age, I don't; but let's agree to differ, and accept that we both mean well. There's all sorts wrong with this view, as was summed up rather nicely by the Roman Catholic philosopher Elizabeth Anscombe, "Butler exalts conscience, but appears ignorant that a man’s conscience may tell him to do the vilest things."

Anyhow, this view is wrong. On the contrary, as a reading from the epistle of James set for today's Mass puts it: "be doers of the word, not merely hearers".

Thankfully, the Jesus of Mark's gospel is considerably better at ethics than your average radio pundit. Two things are going on in this part of chapter seven.

First, we have an insight into the debate about the observance of the Jewish Law, which was raging in the early Church, and would have been very much of the moment for the first hearers and readers of Mark. We get Mark's particular spin of Jesus' teaching. "Thus", we are told about Jesus' words in a verse the lectionary compilers neglected to include, "he declared all foods clean".

More relevantly for us, we have an attack on hypocrisy. And understanding this suggests a better way of thinking about right and wrong. The hypocrite is someone whose life lacks integrity, whose actions are inconsistent one with another. The hypocrite's life lacks shape and vision. Rather, he or she does on any given occasion the thing that best serves her interests. He or she will manipulate doctrines, religious or otherwise, to his or her own ends. The hypocrite might sometimes do what we would describe as 'the right thing', but it isn't being done as part of a life lived well. The hypocrite lacks the habit of doing the right thing. The hypocrite isn't someone for whom doing good is second nature.

An old fashioned word for the habits which make our lives good and characterised by integrity is 'virtues'. As human beings, let alone as Christians, we will only come to flourish through possessing virtues. And coming to possess them is no easy business. To use another old-fashioned turn-of-phrase, we need to form our characters. This can only happen in a community, through which we learn and interact with others, developing alongside one another, and learning the skills that make for good human living.

There are many such communities: families, community, and political groups. Sadly, our present society as a whole, based as it is around competition and profit, is not an example. Uniquely however, the Church is a community in which we are called grow in virtue not simply by our own efforts, but with the help of God's grace given to us in Jesus Christ. Through this grace, given to us above all in the sacraments, our weaknesses, our tendencies to shy away from virtue, can be overcome. More than that, we are called within the Church to possess new virtues - faith, hope, and love - the habits by which we share in the very life of God, by which we flourish as human beings in new ways, given to us as a sheer loving gift, and which foreshadow our eternal flourishing, our sharing in the vision of God.

Quiz night at St John

27 of us are here having our brains teased and taste buds stimulated as we raise money for Christian Aid. Here's a cryptic clue for you at home GESG- if you know the answer txt fr John with the before 9.00pm!!!

Reflections on Willesden

Our Assumptiontide celebrations at St Matthias were fabulous.

Readers of this blog will already have seen a picture from after our Solemn Mass on the evening of 15th August. This was followed by a party in the vicarage garden. I was responsible for taking the remains of this to the bottle bank the following morning, and can testify on that basis to the fulsomeness of the celebration!

All this jollity aside, our observance actually started a few days earlier with a walking pilgrimage to the shrine of Our Lady of Willesden.

A group of pilgrims set out by foot from St Matthias, crossed over the Edgware Road, walked round the Welsh Harp reservoir, through a nature reserve, and down through the streets of urban Neasden (including the North Circular Road) to St Mary's Church, where we had Mass and lunch.

At the time I was struck by one feature of my experience. Our pilgrimage led us from the quiet beauty of the nature reserve, lush and green in the height of mid-August, into the grimy bustle of a congested London high road. Precisely in order to make our pilgrimage, our holy journey, we had to leave peace, quiet, and nature - those things popularly associated with religious sensibility - and step out into the noisy concrete chaos of a 21st century city.

And there you have, in a metaphorical nutshell, a central claim of Christianity. God's Kingdom is not to be found in escaping from the realities of life. Rather, it is in the here-and-now - the world in which millions of people live and work, laugh and cry - that the Kingdom is growing. Here God is at work transfiguring the ordinary things of life. Here he is at work in us, wherever justice is done, wherever love is lived out. Religion, proper religion, does not involve escape from the world into some inner realm of peace. It involves transformation of the world, in all its dirty, confused, reality.

It was, of course, no bad thing to be reminded of this on a pilgrimage focused on Our Lady. She, as the guarantor of the Incarnation, is intimately associated in Christian thought with our belief that we are saved through the material world, rather than saved from the material world. In her Magnificat we hear echoed God's concern for the world we inhabit. In her Assumption we have a foretaste of that world as transformed.

That, then, is what I took away from Willesden. I'll end with some words from Fr Ken Leech:

The Assumption rejects the dualism of body and soul which still affects the Christian world: it is the whole person which is raised, just as it is the whole material creation which is to be transformed and share the freedom of the children of God (Rom.8).

Mary is thus the forerunner of the cosmic assumption of which Paul writes; she is the microcosm of the new and glorified creation. The dogma is part an assertion of the materialistic base of the Christian hope.

Happy birthday Isaac

Trinity 12 Reflection Sunday 26th August 2012

Thoughts for Trinity 12

Ephesians 6 verse 13

Therefore take up the whole armour ofGod, 

What is thearmour of God that Paul is referring to?

If I amtruthful this is an image that sits uncomfortably with me at the beginning ofthe 3^rd Christian Millennium that is already proving to be filledwith as much violence and warfare as the first two.  Swords and shields carried by those who claimto know all truth and claim to know the only way to salvation have caused somuch pain in the life of the world and within the church in its first twomillennium.

But thenagain I look around and see a world that is need of protection, millions inAfrica need protection from the evil of oppression, corruption violence, war,famine and displacement.

I Listenthose nearer home, to some of you sitting in church this morning, telling me ofyour struggles and battles, and I have been asked to pray for jobs, homes, afinancial blessing, faith in times of doubt, comfort in times of loss, peacewhen families are divided.

So maybe wedo need to clothe ourselves with the whole armour of God.

During the height of battleagainst the Apartheid  government inSouth Africa, Ted Koppel interviewed Bishop Desmond Tutu and asked if thesituation in South Africa was hopeless. “Of course it is hopeless from a humanpoint of view,” he said. But then he smiled and continued on. “But we believein the resurrection, and so we are prisoners of hope.”

That is what we become when weput on the full armor of God, prisoners of hope. In the life, death, andresurrection of Jesus we have been taken captive by a hope that will liberateus from all hopelessness. In putting on God’s armour, we become clothed with ahope that transcends fear, that transcends death, and allows us to be free inthe midst of pain, suffering and uncertainty. In dressing ourselves in thegarments of God, we find a protection that goes beyond the imagination offearful social policy, living with increased security measures and the like.

To put on God’s armor is torecognize that God has turned upside down our notions of power. For in God’skingdom, it is the weak who are strong, the lowly who are exalted. When we puton God’s armour we discover that our strength comes not in the sword but in theWord of God which fills and transforms us, renews us, and sustains us. When weput on the full armour of God, our hearts and are souls and our minds are freedfrom the power of evil and terror that fills our world today.

Thoughts on Trinity 11

Our Gospel reading for Sunday was the third in a series of four readings from John's Gospel on Jesus as the bread of life. We thought about how the reality of the real presence of God in the Eucharist is conected to the Incartantion - that God chose to be human to be the Emmanuel (God with us). The physcial reception and consumption of the body and blood of Christ is a deeply intimate act is which we are invited to touch and taste God and be nourished in order that we too might be Emmanuel to the world.

Feast of Assumption of the B.V.M

It was a wonderful evening with friends from across the deanery. Fr. William and Fr Steven, formerly on the staff, were with us as well as Fr Bob from St Olave Mitcham who preached.

Im getting so excited

Of course its Rome's big assumption today......but that is not why I am really getting excited.
A special visitor is coming to church tonight - No not Jesus he is always with us! - it is Fr William!

thoughts on Trinity 10

This Sunday we were challenged to live out our faith by showing compassion to those around us and praying for wisdom in our choices. Jesus is the bread of life and bread is a symbol of our compassion, this week world leaders met to address the needs of the hungry in the world, and wisdom, see the Hebrew scriptures Proverbs.