Weekly Online Sermon
Deconstructing the Trinity – Trinity Sunday 2023
Trinity Sunday is often a time when preachers feel they need to reach out for props, to demonstrate in some way the nature of the Trinity. But ultimately all these attempts, however well-intentioned, are doomed to failure because all they can do is scratch the surface – to show a model that is essentially structural and functional. Any representation, whether they use 2d pictures or 3d items, will have edges, boundaries and limits whilst attempting to explain something that is boundless, limitless and ultimately inexplicable.
So perhaps a little like Marc Antony who said to the crowd
‘….lend me your ears; I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him.’….
I am here not to acclaim the Trinity so much as to…well not bury….but certainly to deconstruct…..
Truth need not be factual – Pentecost Sunday 2023
The American New Testament scholar and Theologian Marcus Borg once encountered an American Indian holy man who shared his people’s creation story by starting with the following words:
‘I don’t know if it happened exactly this way, but I know that this story is true’.
For it is vital to understand that the Bible contains much that is truthful, wise and insightful – and some of it may also happen to be factual. With the stress on ‘some’ and ‘may’. For the measure of the value of scripture is not whether things happened exactly the way they are told, but whether the story conveys truth.
A strange kind of glory – 7th Sunday of Easter 2023
There is a word that recurs six times in today’s short gospel reading in one form or another – glory, glorify, glorified. At first sight, this can sound almost vainglorious, imperious and patrician language. The sort of language that might belong in an imperial court, with flattery, pomp and fanfare, elaborate ceremonial with golden and bejewelled gorgeous raiment.
And indeed we can be tempted to act in such ways in the church itself, for there is always a part of us, against which Jesus warned, that wishes to get back to the awe and wonder, and power, so loved by the Saduccess and their spectacular, if bloodthirsty, Temple ritual. Or we can revert to insisting on strict observance of scriptural rules and taboos of the Pharisees, that actually only serve to constrain and imprison us, denying and thwarting Jesus’ promise of life in all its fullness.
But the Gospels and the witness of Jesus are not always as they seem.
Jesus lived and died a Jew – 6th Sunday of Easter 2023
Throughout history the reading of John’s Passion as a dramatic performance on Good Friday in Church and public passion plays has caused immense harm to Jewish communities, synagogues have been attacked and Jewish people abused and killed. It has been used by unscrupulous rabble-rousers and leaders to create a febrile and toxic atmosphere of ‘us and them’, friend and enemy, insider and outsider. And since then innumerable daily prejudices, countless pogroms, and the bitter black shadow of the Holocaust.
He worshipped regularly in the synagogue, preached from the Hebrew scriptures and with Jewish symbols and metaphors, he celebrated Jewish festivals, went on pilgrimage to the Jewish Temple in Jerusalem and was ministered to by Jewish priests.
He was born, lived, taught and died – a Jew. So what is the legacy of John?
Room for everyone – 5th Sunday of Easter 2023
There are those for whom religion must be exclusive and excluding for them to see it as real; it must define both who is in, and who is out, in order to be valid. They will have a strong sense of rules that must be obeyed and punishments that must be meted out for infractions. For such a way of thinking, love may be conditional, forgiveness contingent, and acceptance circumscribed and reserved to those deemed worthy. Religion is thereby seen as offering structure, order and freedom from the uncertainties of life. But what if divine love is boundless, and forgiveness is freely and unreservedly given? What if the divine nature is paradoxical, boundless, indefinable, unimaginable, incomparable, surpassing and transcending any limitations that our psyches might like to impose?
What if scripture means far more than our preconceptions might like to imagine?
What is a good shepherd? – 4th Sunday of Easter 2023
Part of the human tragedy is that those who seek to lead us are so often ill-fitted to the task. Using a pastoral model of his time, Jesus highlights the difference between those leaders who are selfless, self-giving, courageous and principled, and those who only see opportunities for self-aggrandisement and personal gain. It is bad enough when those in business or politics turn out to have feet of clay, sad but unsurprising. How much more tragic when religious leaders use prayer to mask systemic injustice and prejudice.
Seeing with new eyes – 3rd Sunday of Easter 2023
Luke is a highly accomplished storyteller. Within today’s tale of the road to Emmaus he weaves strands of the past, the experiences of the disciples at the time, and the new understandings that later occurred to the Christian community, of which he was a part, almost a generation later. And so, in our own turn we seek, not only to recover some of the wisdom he sought to pass on, but also to discover new insights and intuitions for our own time and circumstances. For meaning and purpose in scripture are always unfolding, changing, adapting – that is why it is a living witness rather than text enshrined and confined.
Finding meaning in suffering – 2nd Sunday of Easter
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow once wrote: ‘Into each life some rain must fall’
It speaks of a human truth, a great truth that all of the great religions recognize – after all it was Buddha who taught – ‘Life is suffering’. And in the Gospel of John, Jesus says: ‘In this world you will have troubles’.
There is no dishonour in suffering, nothing to reprove ourselves for, all of us will live through times of hardship and of pain many times in our lives – there is no way we can avoid it.
In today’s reading from Acts – a reading that according to the Church Lectionary must be given on this Sunday following Easter, Peter reassures his listeners. That we shall endure, we shall persevere and we will overcome, that we might even come to discover meaning in the suffering.
A different view of the Cross – Easter Sunday 2023
For a long time, I would argue for far too long a time, the Cross has often been associated less with Jesus’ act of love and more with notions of punishment, merciless judgement and condemnation. Lent is filled with words such as guilt, punishment, payment of a debt, crime, judgement, anger, blood sacrifice.
Do you beat your children, or do you at least threaten to beat them? Moreover if they look like they might misbehave do you threaten them with the kind of pain and suffering that is endless, relentless and unendurable? Of course not. And yet there is the distinct danger that we can still teach that this is the kind of God that the Church asks us to believe in and that we should love Jesus, we should praise Jesus, we should thank Jesus because he has spared us from all that, like a brave and loyal friend or brother and sister, he has taken the beating that was rightly ours. But there is another way to consider Christ’s sacrifice on the Cross, another way to regard the love of God, and another way to examine our flawed humanity.
Becoming a new person – Palm Sunday 2023
If any word sums up Palm Sunday and its consequences it would be ‘fickle’. Jesus rides into Jerusalem on a donkey, and is hailed by the people with cries of ‘Hosanna to the Son of David! But, we are told, it took just a week for crowds in the same city to call for his execution. And so Palm Sunday confronts us with on the fickleness of human nature and our need for repentance. But ‘repentence’ truly defined is not just expressing a sense of regret or cloaking oneself in the mantle of shame – as if that were the end, the objective. For the Greek word used in the scripture is ‘metanoia’, which conveys far more than merely regret – and instead conveys the commitment to spiritual conversion – to change one’s heart and one’s life – to become a new person.
Ultimate healing and love – Passion Sunday 2023
In the account of the raising of Lazarus of Bethany, we see the most dramatic of Jesus’ miracles – the ultimate healing and restoration of life and hope when all hope is lost.
But as John is dismissive of the naïve literalism of Nicodemus and the Samaritan woman, and at times the disciples, so surely we cannot, should not, belittle this profound, poetic, carefully crafted text, redolent with images and myths from the ancient Hebrew past, by distorting, trivialising and constraining it within the narrow confines of literal fact. The truth is simply greater than that.
The love of a mother – Mothering Sunday 2023
Despite all the hype and commercial sentimentalism we should remember where the inspiration for Mothering Sunday has come from – what this day stands for – what it means. For let us remember what motherhood truly is. It is one of the hardest and most responsible jobs of all. Perhaps we fail to recognise its true value because so much of the time is taken up with seemingly menial tasks. For in those small acts, and a million more besides, a child learns at first hand the Christ-like nature of self-giving love.
That is why Mothering Sunday should not just be a time when we give a card with a naff poem and a few flowers. Instead we should truly reflect on the love and devotion, the hope and the worry, the hard work and the simple joys, the soaring delight and desperate heartache, the fear and the heroism of motherhood.
Where are our limits? – 3rd Sunday of Lent
Today’s gospel has two people encounter each other in the heat of the day, who would never normally speak. They were divided by culture, religion, taboos of purity, gender and morality. The misunderstandings and confusions are many, as they initially speak at complete cross-purposes; and yet, over time understanding, even some sense of communion is reached, boundaries are crossed, distance narrowed, barriers are breached.
Normally a Jewish Rabbi and a Samaritan woman would never speak, and particularly so when her own community considered her disreputable, to be shunned, a virtual outcast. To John’s listeners at the time a surprising, even shocking tale, as their own misunderstandings play into the unfolding encounter.
Are there parallels and lessons to be drawn in our own time – do we set limits to our own understanding and compassion?
Where does the wind blow? | 2nd Sunday of Lent 2023
One of the greatest contributions of Judaism to the world, among many others; the realisation that the divine is not fragmented, as the ancients supposed, either into spirits that inhabit the world, or into giant superhuman champions such as the Gods of Olympus. Instead, the divine, that which lies beneath, yet also beyond all reality, that which is greater than, more than, both above all and yet within all, is essentially one eternal unity, one unifying reality.
In the same way that the Old Testament story of Abraham serves as the example of unconditional acceptance and commitment, in today’s gospel Nicodemus provides an example of those who, however well-meaning, hold something back, who partially understand and only partially commit.
Nevertheless, John reports that Jesus attempts to build on Nicodemus’ partial understanding by asking him to look with fresh eyes, with a mind open and receptive, he is asking him to allow himself to be surprised. By the same token, can we trust, commit and take the leap of faith, can we allow ourselves and our lives to be changed, to be blown where the wind will take us?
Are we Adam and Eve? | First Sunday of Lent 2023
The story of Adam and Eve runs right through all the readings for today. It is partially a story about temptation, knowing what we are supposed to do, how we often know what the right thing to do would be and how all too often we can fail to carry it through.
It is supremely difficult to reach back into the minds of generations long past; impossible to know how those who first wrote down the story understood it, all those thousands of years ago, and little easier to grasp how successive generations have interpreted the story until quite recently.
But like many stories that we heard as a child, when we become adults it is well to see if the stories, wise and insightful in many ways, need to be re-interpreted, and understood in a different light.
How can we avoid regrets? – Transfiguration Sunday
Those who care for patients who are dying often notice a great similarity in the regrets that people express. Bronnie Ware, an Australian palliative caregiver, was so moved by the clarity of vision that people can gain at the end of their lives, and how we might learn from their wisdom, that she started a blog that was read by millions, which became a book called ‘The Top Five Regrets of the Dying’.
As she said, “common themes surfaced again and again.” So what lessons can we learn for our own lives, before it is too late – and might this this relate to the life and witness of Jesus?