Belonging

Ephesians 2:11–22 and Mark 6: 30–34:  53–56

A sermon by Maggie Prisk

Sunday 22nd July 2012

What goes around, comes around. History repeats itself. There is nothing new under the sun.

Over the last couple of weeks I have heard several discussions on the radio around the subject of circumcision. Periodically this matter is raised and aired whether on religious, moral, ethical or medical grounds however the latest focus appears to have arisen because the medical authorities (not the government) in Germany have decided that the practice of circumcision should be banned except for where there is a medical necessity for the procedure to be carried out. Naturally the Jews and Muslims are up in arms because it is so much part of their religious heritage. The practice clearly still has the ability to cause division and controversy.

Unlike many of Paul's letters, the epistle to the Ephesians seems to be more general in its approach rather than being written to address a particular issue or issues. Neither does it appear to have been written in response to questions which the young churches have posed to Paul to get his view of. And since I am neither of the Jewish or Muslim faith nor a man I do not intend to dwell on the ins and outs, rights or wrongs of the circumcision debate. However it gives us an opportunity to consider the 'reality of our unity in Christ'.

The pious Jews of Jesus' and Paul's day 'considered all non-Jews ceremonially unclean. They thought of themselves as pure and clean because of their national heritage and religious ceremonies'. The very familiar story told by Jesus of the 'Good Samaritan' is a good illustration of this point of view. The fact that Paul is addressing this issue suggests that it has given rise to divisions amongst the Christian communities to whom Paul is writing. He is very concerned that they should live together in unity having all been made alive in Christ because as he points out at the start of this chapter all were 'dead in their transgressions', Jews and Gentiles alike.

Circumcision was given to Abraham as a sign of the covenant relationship between God and his special people. When Abraham first circumcised all the men in his household, Isaac had not been conceived never mind born and Isaac was the promised son, the start of a whole new nation. It appears that the practice had slipped because at the beginning of the Book of Joshua it states that all those who left Egypt had been circumcised but all who had been born during the wanderings in the desert had not. The act of circumcision both in Abraham's story and the event recorded in Joshua are reflections of new beginnings. The old has gone, the new has come. In fact in the story of Joshua this is made quite clear because all those whom God said would not see the promised land as a result of the disobedience, had died in the dessert, these men that Joshua addresses were the new generation, a new start, a new beginning. The same is true for the Christians of Paul's time, through Christ whether they were from the Jewish faith or Gentiles, all who had become believers were part of the new beginning.

As so often is the case, when something is new, fresh and exciting people set aside their differences for the project, adventure or cause, but as things settle down the old prejudices begin to surface and when insecurities creep in then divisions come more and more to the fore. Instead of individuals pulling together for the good of the whole they begin to focus on their differences with the result that dissent and discord take over. Relationships, bands, businesses, sports teams - the list goes on and on, high profile break ups and splits, the the world watches as accusations are thrown around and what had been a successful union begins to disintegrate and pull itself apart. Paul doesn't want that; for the sake of the gospel he wants all believers to work together as witnesses to God's saving grace through the death of Jesus Christ.

In my wallet I have a number of loyalty cards. Cards which if I use them in a certain place will give me something back. I have a Costa coffee club card which gives me points every time I buy a drink in one of their cafes. I have a card from Marks and Spencer which gives me a free greetings card whenever I have buy six and and have the card stamped. I have Tesco club and Nectar cards on my key ring. Belonging is very important to most of us. For some it may only be wearing the colours of the football team you support. For others it might be a particular way of dressing which shows they are part of the group. Some go further by getting a tattoo or other identification as a more permanent reminder of belonging. Then there are those who go to the extreme of showing they belong by undertaking a task and sadly for those wanting to become a member of a gang it could involve attacking someone who has nothing to do with the group. To be accepted is part of who we are.

You have had a busy hectic week, you're exhausted and someone suggests you go away for a long relaxing weekend. Sounds idyllic doesn't it? The disciples were well and truly ready for a rest, they have lots to tell and they want time alone with Jesus to relate to him what happened when he sent them out but no sooner have the set out for their well deserved break when they arrive they realise that the people have got their first both times. But Jesus had 'compassion on them'. The people were looking to this young teacher to give them guidance and more importantly to heal their sick. They recognise their needs and are looking to Jesus to meet them. If the disciples had had their way they would have been sent back to where they came from but that's not Jesus' way. Jesus ministry is not only 'spiritual', (the story of his feeding a huge crowd sits in between the two parts of Mark chapter 6 we read this morning), he 'ministers to their every need, touching every part of their lives, accepting them, healing them, teaching them'. And is not just to individuals, when he arrives in Gennesaret the whole community has come out to work together to bring their sick to be healed.

However by the time Paul was writing his letters to the Ephesians both Jewish and Gentile Christians have become divided by the issue of circumcision. Part of the covenant relationship these believers were to demonstrate to others was 'the divine riches of God's grace' to those who did not believe. Yet again on our television screens and in newspapers are pictures of men, women and children fleeing from their homes and countries as a result of famine or war, searching for somewhere to live. 'What refugees want above all, assuming they are not able to return to their homeland is to be accepted into a new community where they can rebuild their lives and their families'. Nearly two years ago my nephew married a young Canadian woman. For the year after their marriage he waited, having provided masses of information, for his citizenship to come through, until it did he couldn't leave the country without the penalty of beginning the process all over again. Now he was not a refugee but in many ways it is the same, he has been accepted into a new community. The relief felt in my sister's family when he got both his citizenship and his work permit was immense, for refugees too getting their passports is the sign that they have been accepted.

Paul wants the Christians to work together, for there to be unity. He wants the Gentiles to recognise that they have hope because of Jesus' death and resurrection, they have been received into God's family not because a ritual has taken place but because of the love and grace of God. He wants the Jewish believers to accept their right to be God's special people but not because they have been circumcised but like the Gentiles they too were lost and in need of the saving, healing power of Christ's death and resurrection. This was the new beginning, the new start, the 'creating of a new humanity which is radically different from both groups and open to all'. The issue of circumcision was dividing the fledgling church and possibly putting off others who might be in need of God's mercy, healing and acceptance. God has accepted both Jew and Gentile, 'they are all citizens of God's people and members of God's household'.

Abraham and the nation of which he was the founder had a covenant with God their side of this agreement was to be a blessing to all nations. The challenge for us today is to 'work in the power of the Spirit, both to break down social and ethnic barriers within the church, and to encourage those currently outside God's people to become part of his new creation'. The cross means nothing if divisions persist whatever their origins, the cross also means 'peace between believers and peace with God, in a community where God himself dwells'. We like the Israelites are to be a blessing to others and divisions will hinder that, we are all members of God's household and part of his new humanity which lives together in unity.

Victims

Mark 6. 14-29

A sermon by The Reverend Wendy Carey

Sunday 15th July 2012

‘Have you been injured by an accident that was not your fault?’ Or ‘Have you been mis-sold insurance in connection with a loan from a Bank?’ If so, you are a victim. And being a victim today, appears to call for one of two things – anger, or compensation, or perhaps both.

Over many years of work in prisons I have thought a great deal about victims. When I was often asked to speak outside the prison of my work as a Chaplain, a common comment was to chide me that in showing so much concern for convicted prisoners, I was failing to be aware of, and respectful to, the needs of victims. This was a rather simplistic comment, as it failed to recognise that dealing with the needs and the motivation of current prisoners was an effective way of ensuring that the number of future victims of crime was reduced. But a more compelling reason that the comment is too simple, is that a community of criminal offenders is likely to contain a much greater proportion of victims of crime, than does the general population. The matter is complex. Being a victim of crime, can never excuse or support becoming an offender, a perpetrator of crime, but it can go a long way to explain the matter, and that is a first step towards a solution.

These thoughts were prompted by reading our Gospel passage for today, St. Mark’s account of the beheading of John the Baptist, following the conspiracy of Herod and Herodias and her daughter. At first glance, this story seems quite simple, we have a victim, John the Baptist, and we have three perpetrators of varying culpability, Herod, Herodias, and her daughter, Salome. Surely this is a straightforward story of good and evil. But wait a minute, think again about Salome, is there not a case for viewing her as in some ways a victim as well? Is she a victim of the subservient role of young unmarried women at this time? Is she a victim of Herodias’ implacable hatred and desire for revenge? Is she simply a victim of poor parenting, and the lack of what has sometimes been called a moral compass? And what of her mother? Is she purely a perpetrator of crime, or is she a victim of circumstance, or treatment by others. Is Herod her victim, or she his?

If we think deeply about any situation, small and personal, or global and of major significance, we will see this complex web of perpetrators and victims. Court cases and judicial enquiries devote themselves to searching out whose fault lies at the bottom of any issue, but searching for such an answer may be just too simple. In a situation where journalists feel the need to tap phone calls and hack into emails, is there no recognition of the culpability of a society which loves to read a bit of scandal or gossip, and in general doesn’t much care how it is gathered, until the chance arises to become sanctimonious.

The complexity and interweaving of cause and effect, victims and perpetrators is bewildering, and almost inexplicable. But it can be, and is explained by a word we shall use several times in this and in most of our worship. It is, on the whole, an unfashionable word, but it lies at the heart of our Christian understanding. The word is sin. I suppose very few preachers set out to preach about sin in our times, but today you can go home and report that the sermon was about sin.

This evening, at St Mary’s church Bletchley, eight people, teenagers and adults, from the Parish of St. Frideswide, Water Eaton, where I now minister, will be confirmed. They will confirm the promises made by themselves, or on their behalf at Baptism:
‘Do you repent of your sins?’
‘I repent of my sins’.

Our Confirmation candidates have been preparing together using the ‘Start!’ course, led by two lay people. One young teenager had not been baptised, so last Monday evening at her baptism, I asked her that question: ‘Do you repent of your sins?’ How can one explain and help a young person to understand what is being asked? One way would be to point to this complicated and interminable web of victims and offenders, stretching back through time, to a root cause that can be explained by the word sin. Janet Morley wrote a collect for the readings that centre on the story of the Fall of humanity in Genesis chapter three. She writes: ‘Holy God, we are born into a world tissued and structured by sin....’ So where do we find an answer?

Before I began to write this sermon, I looked up the word Victim in the dictionary. Its earliest use in English is in the late 15th Century, denoting a creature killed as a religious sacrifice. So here we are, taken straight back to those words of a much used Good Friday hymn, whether or not you agree in detail with its account of Jesus’ sacrifice:

There was no other good enough to pay the price of sin
He only could unlock the gate of heaven, and let us in.

And here it is, the answer to our questions about how we untangle and begin to cleanse that unending trail of victim and perpetrator, of accusation and counter accusation that so besets our life as a community. Jesus, the ultimate Victim takes upon himself in crucifixion the sins of the whole world. Soon we shall recall again Jesus words at the Last Supper: ‘this is my blood of the new covenant which is shed for you for the forgiveness of sin’.

One of the most worthwhile things we can do for one another is to begin to break the unending chain of sin, of victim and offender, of action and reaction, of offence and response: ‘he hit me, so I had to hit him back’ that begins in the playground, and can continue into, and even dominate our adult life. Supporting those who decide to stop this chain of action and reaction, by absorbing the hurt rather than passing it on, is one of the most vital and the most privileged tasks of the Prison Chaplain. It is in the conscious decision not to pass on the hurt, not to create more victims, that we ourselves can become Christlike. But we cannot do this alone.

And that is precisely why in Baptism, in Confirmation, and in the Sacrament of the Lord’s Supper, we turn to Christ, the Victim, and the Victor.

So we pray Janet Morley’s prayer:

Holy God, we are born into a world
tissued and structured by sin.
When we proclaim our innocence,
and seek to accuse each other,
give us the grace to know that we are naked;
that we may cry out to you alone, through Jesus Christ, Amen

Cup Glory!

Stories Revisited, by The Reverend David Moore 

A chance conversation with an MK Dons supporter re the ‘religious’ parallels in football and the onset of the European Championships quickened me to recall the occasion when I was interviewed on the (then) Radio 4 Friday PM programme on the eve of the Cup Final. The trouble is that I cannot be sure, 32 years later, what is fact and what is creative memory.

Fact or fiction here it is.

In 1980 West Ham won the FA Cup for the second time in six years, (some facts are easy to remember) beating Arsenal. At the time I was minister at Bow Road Methodist Church which is situated on the main road into the City from East London.

At the time my son Tim was 15 and hoping to study graphic art. We went to the Semi-Final, which was played at Aston Villa, and on the way home made plans to use the large church notice board at Bow to celebrate this success. Within two days this very large notice board was painted in claret and blue quarters and carried the words:

O HAPPY DAY WHEN WEST HAM BRING THE CUP THIS WAY AGAIN

and the artwork included the FA Cup and crossed hammers of West Ham.

We only managed one ticket which my Tim used. The eve of the final arrived and the excitement was increasing in the Moore household. On that Friday morning a phone call came from the BBC with a request for an interview saying they wanted a light-hearted but sharp comment for the PM programme that afternoon. The reporter knew nothing at all about sport, his area of expertise being European economic issues.

He described the location of the interview and described the Church notice board. Then turning to me he asked how the Arsenal supporters in the congregation felt about the notice board. Without any serious thought I replied “there are no Arsenal supporters as we have already excommunicated them”. I recall the look of complete surprise on his face! He then asked if we prayed for West Ham and my reply was that I had no need to do so as they were already in the Final! He followed that with “you give me the impression that West Ham is your religion.” “Oh it is”, I said, “West Ham is my local religion and Christianity is my life style”. At this his jaw dropped and his eyes opened wide!

I was then asked how a sport could be a religion. I think my explanation included: sport is like opera and indeed popular music contains the whole drama of human existence - the fall, the struggle to overcome heartbreak and exhilaration - relegation/promotion - death/resurrection. Seeing his defence crumbling I got into my stride and invited listeners to consider the role music (vocals) plays, and how supporters in effect engage in chanting which is, in its own way, akin to antiphonal chants. Then there were the songs ‘owned’ by local teams which were both their battle cry and call to worship. I spoke of Shakespeare’s ‘Harry, England and St George’ and how this emotion was replicated all over the world before football matches. At Liverpool it is You’ll Never Walk Alone and at West Ham it is Blowing Bubbles.

It seemed to me that any activity provoking such loyalty is dipping into the hidden reaches of human emotion, loyalty, identity, significance and hope - the very stuff of religion.

The conversation concluded with a request that I send a message to a loyal West Ham supporter - a Vicar, who not only lived in Highbury (home of Arsenal) but whose wife and daughters supported the Gunners. My reply was for him to remember the story of Daniel in the lions’ den and to keep his chin up!

Post Script

The following week the Chairman of the NE London Methodist District (the person to whom I was accountable) was inundated with letters of complaint, demanding I be sacked! Clearly I had hit a nerve, further confirmation that in the sentiments of Bill Shankly, the legendary manager of Liverpool, soccer is far more important than life or death.

It may also be noted that football (as with most sports) springs out of a complex set of factors - ability of raw intelligence, spatial awareness, creativity, imagination, intelligence and a willingness to put oneself ‘on the line’. There is a lot of stuff you may associate with Jesus!

The day after the match (Sunday) the West Ham Team passed the Church in an open-topped bus. We had ended the service early and the congregation gathered on the roof balcony applauding the Team and Bubbles music came from the bell tower!

On the back of all this I was invited to the Victory Banquet - but the less said about that the better!

To my mind the many of the superficial and hidden elements of our public and private passions are part and parcel of the stuff we offer up in worship week by week - but the preachers never seem to pick I’m For Ever Blowing Bubbles!

Christ is Risen - he is Risen indeed.

A sermon preached at Wolverton 

 The Reverend David Moore 

 Easter Day 2012

Christ is Risen - he is Risen indeed. How do we make sense of such words in our world today. How do we take these words into ourselves not as comfort but as awful, disturbing 'truth'? How do we avoid using these words as some kind of spiritual shower gel which make us feel nice and sleek about our faith?

Last week I had a mailshot from a Christian Charity. This appeal leaflet, speaking of a child, led with these words:

She went into hospital with cancer in her leg
and came out with Jesus in her heart.

So, appalled with these words, I immediately deposited the appeal into the recycling bin!

I am still trying to come to grips with why I reacted so strongly to this form of advertising. I think it was something far deeper than the fact that it was cheap, insensitive, exploitative.

Meanwhile, the very same day I noticed a news item in the MK Citizen - Over the Rainbow in honor of Harry. This is a story of unimaginable grief, loss, struggle, survival and self belief. A story which, for me, captures the essence of Easter Day, as did another story a few days later in the Guardian.

Listen to these words by John Norgrove, the father of Linda Norgrove:

In 2010 our daughter Linda, an aid worker, was abducted in eastern Afghanistan. She subsequently died during a rescue attempt by US Special Forces, killed by a US grenade. We refuse to apportion blame to the Taliban or the soldiers, preferring to start a charitable foundation to help women and children affected by war.

Three stories - the first overtly religious, the other ones not. For me the stories without reference to religion are immeasurably closer to the Good Friday/Easter story. For me Easter Day means loss without defeat!

Harry and Jessica Mould were twins, they lived on Greenleys and a few years ago I baptised them at Stony Stratford Methodist Church. I have such lovely photos of each twin giving me a kiss following that service. It was a remarkably beautiful occasion.

Sadly, Harry unexpectedly died in March 2009 when he was five. A while later Jessica had a new baby brother, whom I also baptised. The inquiries into Harry’s death dragged on for two years, revolving around issues of medical negligence. The inquest was only finalised in December 2011.

Harry’s Rainbow is a charity set up by Harry’s parents to raise awareness of child bereavement, to raise funds, and provide support for bereaved children. There is a gentle, colourful, friendly website which is, in its own way, a marker for our times as to how to handle issues of life and death. ... for me a genuine Easter sign!

In the last 20 years within the UK hundreds of charities have been founded offering support and practical resources to families confronted by untimely death. Think no further than the many responses to British deaths in Afghanistan.

The Christian Movement came into being in response to a tragic loss and, like the Mould and Norgrove families, and countless others, found ways of turning great loss into a movement of thanksgiving and support.

Some of you will know how deeply I have been influenced, indeed captivated, by the life, witness and writings of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who himself met an untimely death at the hands of Hitler.

It is with family members such as Odette Mould and John Norgrove and with all families mourning unexpected and untimely death we turn to the New Testament and the Easter story.

One of the most profound strands in Bonhoeffer’s teaching was that God called us to live as if he did not exist - the most profound point of Christian believing is found in learning to ‘live a life of faith without God and for God’.

What we have in the Easter story are human beings, like you and me, writing their story of loss and survival and for them it is spun around the events which followed the untimely death of Jesus, their dearest friend.

The way of remembering which we encounter in the New Testament has nothing in common with what might be called ‘the British stiff upper lip’ approach to life. What those first Christians seemed to do was continue practising the art of godliness as portrayed in Jesus who was gone from them. That was a project not without difficulty as the New Testament letters make clear.

Over the centuries, followers in that way have at times drifted further away from the core of the Jesus story but through it all the world has been gifted with some of greatest music, painting and sculpture, inspiring poets, composers, dancers, storytellers who through imaginative action reached beyond what they knew to what they now hoped for.

People deal with life and its grief in many ways - by being stoical, quietly bearing the pain whilst feeding the best they can on the story of resurrection.

Fifty-nine years ago - I was 16. I had done moderately badly at school, excelling most in sport and disobedience! I had, through family, become attached to the Methodist Church and generally got involved in things. The minister of this large Methodist Church in Bath organised an Open Air service on a Council estate, on a summer Sunday afternoon to publicise the fact that a new Church was to be built in that community.

The minister was Charles Clarke who strode ahead of us across a large grassed area surrounded by houses. I had no idea what was going on. Oh I wished I had not gone! I was racked to the core with adolescent embarrassment, longing beyond words to be somewhere else. Then he asked us to sing! I could have died! Many years later I began to recognise something far deeper was going on which I can now best describe like this - my embarrassed journey across that uneven green was like having a deep furrow ploughed across my heart, a furrow which has been producing crop after crop after crop for 59 years.

Like those first disciples, I had grasped just a smidgeon of the Jesus story and fortunately I had room within myself to accommodate it.

Easter Day is discovering death is not the end. Christ is risen - here - in me. How? No idea! Why? After 50 years I am still trying to work it out!

I would encourage you to visit the Harry’s Rainbow website. It contains some of the best practical pastoral advice on bereavement I have ever seen. And it is a pleasure.

And a Post Script - more from the John Norgrove article:

Last week we travelled to Kabul and Jalalabad to meet Linda’s friends and our Afghan-based volunteers. We visited the children’s medical house, where families from rural areas are accommodated while their kids undergo operations. We saw a fantastic Afghan children’s circus - it was great to see kids singing and dancing so carefree, escaping the battle-scarred neighborhoods where razor wire tops every wall. We also visited a refuge where women on the run from murderous families, acid attack and others can receive respite and care.

Now does that not echo in you something of the lightness of touch in the resurrection appearance as told of people on the Emmaus Road.

The story of Easter is for the living not the dead - it tells us grief and bereavement need not have the final word. Is that not good news?

For Holy Week

Holy Saturday

The Reverend John Bradley 

How can we live when the Son of God is dead?
How can he reign, crown of thorns upon his head?
Then in Upper Room; Now in borrowed tomb!
Dark Calvary, where in agony he bled.

Yet it was he who gave us life; Our hope reborn through bitter strife.
He even prayed forgiveness for those guilty of condemning to agony their Saviour.

What can we sing after poetry has died?
Our heads hang down; all solutions have been tried.
He had given us hope; Now, how can we cope?
Is there a dawning when death will be defied?

(Download for a high-quality image.)

The Sunday before Lent - The Transfiguration

Mark 9. 2-9

A sermon by the Reverend David Moore

The Bible is jam-packed with truly remarkable stories and we ruin them by believing that they are literally true. Not for a second am I suggesting they are untrue, but I am saying - truth is more ethereal, more elusive, more wonderful, more life-giving than any form of certainty.

Today it is story time! Three stories that have crossed my path, or have been my path, showed me the wonder of the uncertainty of truth. I start with my friend Tom, a vicar from South London - four or five times a year we have a day out together in London. The pattern is always the same - exhibition in the morning, pub lunch, exhibition in the afternoon and then the bookshops.

Last November it was Tate Modern - the Gerhard Richter exhibition. This was my first exposure to the work of this artist. My immediate reaction was muted, cautious, uncertain, but bit by bit his painting unbuttoned my resistance, opening my eyes and mind to things new.

Many of his paintings had a hard-to-define quality - he seemed to paint as if the subject was just out of focus and this irritated me, that is, until I was confronted by a painting of his wife as a young woman. She was full-frontal naked walking down the stairs towards the viewer. This painting had the same ‘out of focus’ element which stopped her being seen as a sex object and affirmed her simply as a statement of fact - this was a woman walking down the stairs!

I continued through the rooms of the exhibition, seeing more slightly ‘out-of-focus’ paintings, and then I am confronted with ten sheets or so of glass - 3m x 2m x 25cm. They were vertical, leaning against the wall and arranged so that the gap between each piece of glass was the same at the base but the gap at the top gradually became narrower.

I approached this installation from the side. My first reaction was to sniff and make an unrepeatable comment under my breath! Then I stood in front of these panes of glass! Looking straight through them to the wall behind - but then my eyes readjusted from the wall to my own reflection which seemed to come from the middle of these standing sheets - and I too was slightly out of focus, I too was somehow being placed beyond being caricatured.

Now my mind is buzzing - the nature of light, reflection, refraction, the definition of refraction, the mystery of seeing and being seen! Now my head is full of other stuff - the words of Jesus ‘I am the light of the world’. For me, that refracted light, as in Richter’s paintings, of seeing certainty less clearly, started to remove the male dominance of God - by definition God cannot be male. Is this the confusion/conversation those disciples grappled with on that transfiguration mountain with Jesus?

I will not ask for a show of hands of those who have not taken a good look at the carvings at the back of the church. I drove to Nottingham to get these for the Holocaust Memorial Service and also visit friends near Wakefield and to visit the new Hepworth Museum and then the Yorkshire Sculpture Park, where yet another transfiguration occurred.

We were at the Sculpture Park the day before a huge exhibition by Jaume Plensa finished - how lucky we were. I can only tell you a bit.

There were two heads made of fine wire, facing each other. These were probably 4 meters high - set on a large sloping lawn. We walked up and around the lawn, viewing the heads from 100 yards. As we walked, the heads appeared to move around to follow us. I just could not believe what was happening!

Because it was possible to see through the wire, wherever you were, you could see the trees beyond but you could at one and the same time see the eyes, nose and ears and your brain did the rest ... reconfiguring the disparate facts to make the face. Light-sight-brain within each of us continually battling for comprehension. Now, that really lit me up! Literal trans-figure-ation.

Next we entered the underground galleries which were linked to the outside by a glazed corridor. Along this corridor hung 4 inch metal letters, one above the other - dozens and dozens of vertical sentences - moving slightly as they were touched, played with or walked through; the sunlight reflecting off the aluminum letters. Each string of letters was a phrase or sentence from the Song of Solomon. The movement of the letters was reflecting also the movement, the tussle of the mind in comprehension. Transfiguration indeed.

There’s more!

Entering the first underground gallery, still filled with the excitement of that metallic waterfall outside, everyone was immediately stunned into silence. A half-lit room with 15 alabaster heads, each 6 feet tall. My mouth was dry with what I can only name as adoration and wonder. Was it the size, shape, the colour, the dim light - whatever it was communicated ‘the other’.

The next gallery only allowed 15 people at a time. A large room, again dim golden glowing lighting, and a circle of 5-foot brass gongs, each gong with a large mallet with a fabric head.

Strangers making music, each isolated within their own world of wonder and listening. Listening to unique sounds, freshly made, then disappearing like a blown out match, but with a trace of mmmmh on the air. Occasionally all that wonder triggered over-enthusiasm and some poor soul was mortified by a boom! Strangers intimately cooperating with the sound - sound the twin once removed of sight.

How was it that the experiences we long for in prayer and meditation were so readily available without tuition or authorisation? Complete strangers were sufficiently uninhibited to join in. Once again my heart and soul were ablaze, transfiguration in the gloom of a ‘cave’. We have our golden ‘gong’ but how do we truly authorise each other to fully participate, imagine in ways which produce in our souls our fresh loaves of insight?

One last story: The last Thursday evening in January, here, was the Milton Keynes Holocaust Day Memorial Service with a range of participants. As always, the contribution from Leon School was outstanding. Each year pupils from the school visit Auschwitz and two of them made a presentation here. I won’t go into what they said, but as always they stole my heart and I want to testify why this is so.

These unprepossessing young people were transformed from the normal ‘insignificance’ of their daily lives by having the opportunity, for once in their lives, to be dealing with primary sources - more than books, more than teachers - as important as they are. These youngsters had been, looked, thought and prepared an absolutely riveting presentation. In their heads they had gone beyond books, beyond photographs, beyond tuition - they, as it were, by their visit, by their conversation, by their shock, by their friendship had been up the mountain - they may not know the words or the story but they knew the wonder and confusion of transfiguration.

Of course I realise that all of this is so powerful to me because I was young once, I was a bit of a misfit, an under-performer at school, an outsider who became gripped by a story and, as a result, have for almost 60 years wrestled with that story of Jesus and it did, and still is transfiguring me. A brief journey sideways!

Butterflies get all their living from the flowers. You often think they are resting, but they are really getting their food - sipping honey from thousands of blossoms. But they did not always do this. Once they could not fly at all, and wore very dark coats, and crawled on the ground.

After a while their coats burst open, all down the back, and they came out in dresses of quaker grey. Then these poor, creeping things went to work and spun little silken cords, strong enough to hold them, and swung off from the under part of some leaf into the air; there they swung for more than a week, rocked to and fro by the wind, just as if they were going to sleep. Then a sudden crack in the light grey coat aroused them, and they began to get their sleepy eyes open, and look about. Such beautiful golden wings as they saw, all bordered with black and yellow, and covered all over with the tiniest feathers, only you could not see them with your naked eye. In a very short time the sun and the gentle winds dried up these beautiful wings and taught them how to use them. Off they went, over the tallest trees, to join the rest of the family, who had been transformed just as wonderfully as they were!

How could they believe their senses when they found that all this beauty really belonged to them? The transformation from a worm-like creature into the splendour of a butterfly is one of nature’s greatest wonders. Or as Jesus put it - you must be born again!

Transfiguration does occur - turning young kids, or older people into more than they can imagine - and for me art is doing that all the time! We celebrate the transfiguration of Jesus not because we know it is true from being in the Bible but because it is connects with the truth in our lives.

David Moore is a retired Methodist minister, a sculptor and member of the Church of Christ the Cornerstone.

2nd before Lent: The Reverend John Bradley

A sermon by the Reverend John Bradley

Colossians 1.15-20                    John 1.1-14

Only thirty years after Jesus of Nazareth had been tortured to death on the cross, a despised fate reserved for the lowest criminals in the Roman Empire, his followers were making the most extraordinary claims about who he was. It wasn’t just that he had cheated his executioners and come back to life again. It was that he, the man with whom they had trodden the dusty lanes of Galilee, was no less than the one who makes the universe hold together.

Today when we hear of experiments in the Large Hadron Collider coming nearer to detecting the Higgs Boson particle (if such a thing really exists), those of us who are not quantum physicists can only stand back in amazement at science beyond our understanding. Someone has nicknamed it the ‘God particle’ since without it, in the moments after the Big Bang, the primal elements would have simply dispersed into the void rather than be attracted into the first matter.

When Paul wrote his letter to the Colossians he wasn’t telling them about astrophysics or quantum mechanics but he was affirming something very important about power. At that time most people thought that the greatest power on earth was the Roman Emperor. That’s certainly what Caesar thought. As a personal affirmation of civilisation and the peace and security which Rome had brought to its empire, the Pax Romana, a man would simply say ‘Caesar is Lord.’ It meant paying taxes, and nobody likes having to do that, but it also meant safety and security without the danger of some local chieftain deciding that he needed his tribute too. But instead of ‘Caesar is Lord’, Paul was teaching the Christians to affirm that Jesus is Lord.

The Colossians were part of the Greek-speaking world where, apart from the pantheon of various deities who behaved like characters in a soap opera, the idea of God was defined negatively. God is what we are not. We are aware of limits to our power but God has no limits; God is omnipotent. We know there are limits to what we know but God knows everything; God is omniscient. However fast we travel, we can only be in one place at a time but God can be everywhere all the time; God is omnipresent. We only live for a time and then die but God lives forever; God is eternal. I don’t think the Greeks speculated about what God eats but if they did, they probably would have concluded that God is omnivorous! One problem with this theoretical ‘God of the omni-s’ is that he is always distant from us. To be approached by such a God would be as terrifying as coming near to a black hole or a supernova.

Paul came to the question of who God is from a completely different starting point. The Hebrew understanding of God was not a philosophical construct like that of the Greeks. The God of Israel reveals himself through history. This is why one of the earliest Hebrew creeds, recorded in our Bibles in Deuteronomy 26, is not about what God is like but about what God has done. The God of Israel can still be terrifying and it is significant that whenever God’s angels appear to mortals, their first words are usually “Don’t be afraid!”

But something essential both to Paul and to the writer of the Fourth Gospel is that it is of the nature of God to reveal himself, to enable us to know him in ways that we can understand. According to Luke, when Paul went to Athens he found people offering worship to ‘the unknown god.’ There has been much speculation about what this was and no archaeological remains to confirm such a shrine but Luke takes it to be Paul’s starting point for engaging with the Greek philosophers. It might have been a popular catch-all insurance in which worshippers were saying to the various deities “I didn’t miss you out; when I offered incense at the altar of the unknown god, it was for you!” But another idea from further away fascinates me. After Alexander the Great conquered the Persian Empire, his land stretched from Greece as far as the Indus valley which is today in Pakistan but had been the birth place of what today we call Hinduism. Within the Hindu scriptures, the Vedas, there is the idea that the highest concept of God is Nirguna Brahma – the unknowable God, the God of whom we can say absolutely nothing, not even whether or not such a God exists! Indeed, Nirguna Brahma is beyond existence and non-existence. So was the deity worshipped in Athens not just unknown but unknowable?

The writer of the Fourth Gospel was quite sure that God is knowable and that he chooses to make himself known to us in ways that we can understand. Our understanding will always be far less than the reality of who God is but that does not mean that it is deceptive. God reveals to us true truth, public truth, not just ‘oh that may be true for you, dear’ truth! In the beginning was the Word, God’s self expression, and everything which came to be owes its existence to the Word. The ultimate question is not a scientific one but it is philosophical or theological. The question is why is there something rather than nothing and the answer given by our readings today is God. But God did not wind the universe up like a clockwork toy and then go off to do something else. The Word became human flesh like yours and mine and so ‘set up his tent’ among us. So Charles Wesley wrote

He laid His glory by, He wrapped Him in our clay;
Unmarked by human eye, the latent Godhead lay;
Infant of days He here became, and bore the mild Immanuel’s Name.  

Our God contracted to a span, incomprehensibly made Man. 

Here is the power of Christ the Lord, the total opposite of the power of Caesar the Lord or any of his modern would-be equivalents. In Jesus Christ, God reveals his power not in spectacular acts of vengeance on his enemies but in radical powerlessness. Instead of being born in the luxury of a royal palace, he is born in an ordinary peasant home. Some shepherds are told ‘this shall be the sign for you… a baby wrapped in swaddling bands and laying in a manger, just like their babies would be and just unlike the babies of the rich and powerful. Then he grew up in an obscure town at the edge of the Empire, far from the corridors of power. When he began his public work those he called to be close to him were ordinary common workmen, not the greatest brains or the wiliest politicians available. When 5,000 men, miraculously well-fed with bread and fish, were longing to make him their political leader, he refused. Instead he took the powerless route, the ignoble way, and set his face steadfastly towards Jerusalem knowing all that must happen to him there.

We shall soon be in Lent when we will again follow our Master in his journey to the Cross. Be prepared to be turned upside down. As Martin Luther once said,

“Only the weak shall be strong; only the humble exalted; only the empty filled; only nothing shall be something.” 

410 Creator of the earth and skies
263 O Lord of every shining constellation
398 Christ triumphant, every reigning
584 Thanks to God, whose Word was spoken

Self-revealing God, beyond our understanding yet nearer than our closest breath, show us how to live as creatures made in your image and bring your grace to its goal in our weakness. Amen.