ST MARGARET OF SCOTLAND

16^TH November 2014

Readings:

Proverbs 31: 10-31

Matthew 13: 44-46

Revd Andrew Bain

She seeks wool and flax and works with willing hands. She rises while it is still night, considers a field and buys it, girds her arms with strength, makes her arms strong, plants a vineyard, opens her hand to the poor, makes linen garments and sells them.

It’s enough to make you feel exhausted just listening to it. This is the Old Testament view of the Good Wife, otherwise known as superwoman. Sort of Nigella Lawson, Charlie Dimmock and Mother Theresa all rolled in to one. But in fact if you look beneath that breathtaking to-do list what you see is the Bible saying: this is the creativity, the energy that just overflows if you seek wisdom and love.

This is what you look like if you seek the Pearl of great price above all else. Our two readings have always been chosen for St Margaret’s Day because that’s what people saw in her. She lived up to her own name – Margaret means “Pearl”. Born a princess, heir to an earthly kingdom, nevertheless she knew the kingdom that really matters, namely the one that grows secretly in the heart – the one that’s worth giving up anything else in order to possess it and be possessed by it.

I still have my copy of the Ladybird book of saints from primary school days, which shows Margaret arriving at Dunfermline to be met by her future husband, Malcolm Canmore (his name unflatteringly meaning “big head”), Malcolm in my picture looking a bit like a young Howard Keel, and Margaret both regal and demure. I suspect the truth was something different. Margaret probably fell off her tiny ship, green with seasickness having battled up the North Sea coast for days, only to be confronted by a husband who possibly made her heart sink: this rough and ready king of a very rough and ready kingdom. One writer describes Malcolm as a fiery Celtic ruffian who when Margaret first met him, when her ship was blown on to the Northumbrian coast, he was busy sacking the Saxon church at Wearmouth and slaughtering everyone, young and old alike.

So really you couldn’t have blamed Margaret if she’d just given up the ghost at this point. Because Malcolm and Scotland were definitely Plan B. Margaret, a Saxon princess from the court of the King of Hungary, had been destined for return to the English court for a far more gracious life than anything Scotland had to offer. Only a certain William of Normandy, and an arrow in the eye for Harold, got in the way of all that. Life didn’t work out. The glittering prize was snatched from her hands by that unsympathetic thing we call life, so here she is making the best of second best.

Only Margaret clearly didn’t see it that way. Margaret embraced her new husband, her new country and her new life not as if they were some cheap consolation prize but as the joy of her heart. This man, this country, this life was the field wherein lay, for her, the pearl of great price. What a lesson. Can you or I believe that the place we land up, those regions of the spirit or of our emotions that we never planned on visiting – these are our precious field? Just scrape away some mud and there is the pearl of great price.

So here’s an astonishing thing that maybe one of the first and most outstanding figures of our history was a woman, a foreigner, someone who never planned on being here at all; and yet she’s perhaps one of the first of our famous figures whose personality you can almost feel. She is Proverbs woman, beyond a doubt. I like to think of her as our Grace Kelly – bringing into the grim circumstances of a dark and violent Scotland just a touch of stardust, a bit of Hollywood.

But more than that Margaret brought faith. Some today question whether the Roman version she brought with her finished off the last remains of a Celtic Christianity people sometimes idealise. But the Church needed the organising energy of Proverbs woman, needed that discipline which is the grit in the oyster that forms the pearl. Christianity is a tough, sinewy, get your sleeves rolled up kind of religion every bit as much as it’s a faith of contemplation and prayer – maybe more so – and Margaret understood that. And my Ladybird book of saints picks up at least one thread of that. Margaret feeding and washing poor children who came daily to her castle door. Margaret reading gospel stories to her children, and especially her son, David, who would be king and saint in his turn, founder of all those monasteries that would for centuries be our schools and hospitals, centres of light and learning.

Not a bad record for someone who never aimed to be here at all. Malcolm probably felt he was the luckiest man alive: Many women have done excellently, but you surpass them all. She knew that you can find your Pearl anywhere, when things don’t work out, when you’re not where you want to be. Dig and you’ll find it.

I think there’s something inspiring in the fact that the oldest remaining building in Edinburgh is Margaret’s chapel. It’s tiny and how it hasn’t been swept away by the ravages of our violent history and countless sieges, heaven alone knows. It’s vulnerable and unimposing, but it has clung to that great rock for almost a thousand years, just like Margaret clung to Christ. At the heart of the city, that amazing, busy, industrious woman’s place of prayer and the source of her strength still stands.

So this is her message for all of us: however your life events, your history may buffet you, cling to the rock that is Christ; and wherever you find yourself dig for the pearl of great price. Amen.

REMEMBRANCE SUNDAY

9^TH November 2014

Revd Andrew Bain

Readings:

Amos 5: 18-24

Matthew 25: 1-13

When you go home, tell them of us and say: For your tomorrow, we gave our today.

When I was a boy at school, Remembrance Day was one of the most important in our school calendar. We were all trooped off to Palmerston Place Church for a service, then solemnly led back into school past the great bronze war memorial in the entrance hall with the names of all the boys who’d died in two world wars and flanked by two cadets who stood with heads bowed and arms reversed. A piper played the Floors o’ the Forest. We were left in no doubt that this was a very significant day.

I suppose one of the main things we felt was a sense of history. We were remembering boys not much older than ourselves, many of whom – certainly in the First World War – were turned into instant officers with a life expectancy measured in weeks or less. But we were also a generation for whom the Second World War was even nearer. The comics we read were full of it, as were our games – running around Corstorphine Woods playing “Japs and Commandos”, with Tommy guns. This was before the phrase political correctness had even been thought of. But more seriously, our parents still bore the scars of a conflict that had ended only ten years before we were born.

For them remembering wasn’t about history at all. My father and his two brothers and his sister were all called up in 1939, and one of those brothers would never return. One uncle spent the entire war in Japanese captivity and never recovered. The whole family, none of whom had ever been further than an annual summer holiday in Aberdour, were suddenly scattered across the world. And that experience you could replicate across the entire nation and indeed across so many countries, so many real people, real families, just torn apart by the horrors of war.

So this isn’t history, it’s a deep and abiding wounding of the human spirit. And there probably isn’t a family here that hasn’t been touched by that shadow. My father couldn’t watch the annual Festival of Remembrance without tears in his eyes,  especially that part where the poppies fall onto the shoulders of today’s young service men and women.

Today’s reading from Amos is a cry from the heart of God through the lips of his prophet to turn from the ways of violence. Don’t bring me your songs and your sacrifices: Let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream. And the Gospel has the same urgency: Stay awake! One of the best of many new books on the First World War is called “The Sleepwalkers” because it tells how the so-called leaders of the world almost sleep-walked into evil, through pride and brinksmanship, each never thinking that the other would take that final step beyond the point of no return. It’s said all that’s necessary for evil to flourish is for good people to do nothing. But the Prince of Peace, the bridegroom, is always coming and his kingdom demands that we stay awake. Peace has to be worked for with every fibre of our being.

The Remembrance services of my school days did seem, in some ways, to be about history and rows upon rows of faceless names on war memorials. Today’s young dead have young, happy faces we see on television. They have valiant young widows whose pain and pride we actually get to listen to, in a way we never did before. Afghanistan may be a world away, but the pain of it breaks into our consciousness every day – and it should.

Because the sacrifices others make in our name should deeply question us. Just as the Cross questions us – this is the greatest love, so will I take up my share of the Cross and follow? Will I stay awake? Young people are dying in my name – whatever my views on the conflicts now going on – so, what am I doing to make a world where war no longer consumes the lives of young and old? After the First World War, there was much talk of homes fit for heroes and a country renewed for people who’d given and suffered so much – much of which turned to ashes as we know. But that doesn’t mean that that instinct of hope was wrong. Because here’s where the Christian way of seeing has to be different, never cynical, always hopeful.

Every Sunday we stand at the foot of the Cross, witnessing the death of a young man; but we also, and even more so, stand by the empty tomb, met by a young man transformed, whose first word to us is: Peace, (don’t be afraid). Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Can tribulation or peril, or nakedness or sword, or 21st century terrorism, or anything else? No, because in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us.

The best, the very best way we can honour the young Jesus and the even younger dead of today is by not giving in to despair. In a dark world we’re to keep our lamps lit and be ready to welcome the Prince of Peace every day – indeed, whenever we pray: “your kingdom come, Lord”. We owe that to the children whose Dads – and Mums - aren’t coming home and to the young men and women returning with such terrible wounds. That’s why our Peace Pole is almost an act of defiance. No matter what today’s news may bring, we will honour the hope our young have died for time and again, and we will put their hope right in front of our church, in the very heart of this busy community, so that what they died for is always before our eyes: May peace prevail on earth. Amen.

When you go home, tell them of us and say: For your tomorrow, we gave our today.

ALL SAINTS

2^ND November 2014

Readings:

Revelation 7: 9-17

Matthew 5: 1-12

Revd Andrew Bain

One of the things I like about saints is their sheer variety. There’s no sort of one size fits all way of being a saint. At Holy Trinity I worked with a team member one of whose duties was to compile a list of saints to be commemorated at our Wednesday service. This could result in my turning up of a morning to find that I was celebrating, for example, the feast of Sts Boris and Gleb. Who? Boris and Gleb were Ukrainian princes, considered martyrs by the Orthodox church, having died by the command of one Sviatapolk the Accursed (not a nice man by all accounts) – Gleb we’re told, having his throat cut by his own cook.

Now you may well ask, who needs to know that at 9.15 on a Sunday morning a thousand years on, or at any time. But these commemorations are an invitation to join in that great cavalcade that streams through those gates of pearl – all those whom Jesus calls blessed and invites us to be one of them. And it’s like they call back to us over their shoulders: Come and join us. Join the pilgrimage. Put your feet in the footsteps of the Man of Galilee.

A few years ago I saw a film of the art critic, Brian Sewell making the pilgrimage to the shrine of St James, Santiago de Compostela. He aimed to end up in that amazing cathedral famous for its huge hanging censer, the one that takes a whole team of beefy men to swing it from one side of the cathedral to the other and which Pope John Paul memorably watched almost as if he was at Wimbledon. But Brian’s pilgrimage was extraordinary. Much of it done in a Mercedes, be it said, but nevertheless he made an amazing journey. Not just to the shrine of the saint, but meeting saints along the way, and indeed making a journey in his own heart.

At Lourdes his aesthetic soul was appalled by all the tackiness of the shops with their holy trinkets: Luminous blessed Virgins; holographic pictures of Jesus that show him crucified if you hold them one way and risen if you tilt them the other; or wind-up holy grottoes that play the Lourdes hymn. But still he could see beyond that to the faith of all the people with broken bodies or minds who find their way there and the compassion of all the helpers there to care for them (like the Duchess of Kent who after her conversion to become a Roman Catholic went to Lourdes as a helper and was happy to clean loos).

Lourdes is a place of joy. It’s a place where one peasant girl, Bernadette, met another peasant girl, Our Lady, and had an encounter that literally opened up a well of healing and joy for millions. So it’s a place of a love and a faith so alive it makes saints. It’s a place for going beyond yourself, which is what saints do.

By the time Brian Sewell reached Compostella he was beginning to see this. The pilgrim route is punctuated by amazing buildings and shrines, but far more moving than any architecture was the experience of meeting so many people travelling with joy. At journey’s end you see him, his mind not much changed intellectually about Christianity, but his heart reached and touched to a depth that truly astonished him.

The saints say to you: Get on the pilgrim way. You don’t have to physically go anywhere to follow the saints. Brother Laurence, author of The Practice of the Presence of God, worked in his monastery kitchen for 15 years and he says: "The time of business does not with me differ from the time of prayer; and in the noise and clutter of my kitchen, while several persons are at the same time calling for different things, I possess God in as great tranquillity as if I were upon my knees at the Blessed Sacrament."

You can be a saint in the kitchen. And you can be a saint in the lion’s den of worldly power if that’s where God takes you. Like Sir Nicholas Winton, aged 105, honoured this week for rescuing nearly 700 children from Nazi occupied Czechosovalia in the kindertransport.

Ukrainian princes and peasant girls, kitchen saints and unsung wartime heroes, we need them all – we need us all - and they say to us: join in the pilgrimage of saints, even if the travelling’s in your heart; be open to being reshaped and turned upside down and emptied until you know truly the joy of the blessed who see God. Amen.

Pentecost 19

19^th October 2014

“Give to God what belongs to God...”

Revd Andrew Bain

Readings:

Isaiah 45: 1-7 – I am the God of Israel, who summons you by name

Matthew 22: 15-22 – Give to Caesar what belongs to Caesar

“When the chief priests and Pharisees had heard the parables, they realised that Jesus was speaking about them”.

Just imagine you’ve been described as wicked vineyard tenants who kill the owner’s son; ungrateful wedding guests who don’t show up to the most gracious invitation ever. Who would want to be the baddy in the stories this young preacher is just enthralling the people with? The scribes and Pharisees aren’t used to being typecast as anything other than admirable. So they respond by acting out the very behaviour for which they’ve just been condemned. They set a trap for the owner’s son. The final trap will need thirty pieces of silver and a disillusioned Judas. For now this is only a verbal trap, but the clever Pharisees, they think it’s a killer. “Get out of this one”, is what they’re thinking.

The search for the killer question is something we’ve got very used to in our media age. We’ve watched politicians squirm under the relentless fire of Jeremy Paxman, almost skewering some hapless minister with a question he can’t or won’t answer. In our recent pre-referendum debates we saw the same tactic at work with each side looking for that knock-down question that just shows your opponent unable or unwilling to tell the truth the questioner wants to hear – although, in fact, this kind of question has little or no interest in truth. It’s just a weapon.

 Matthew couldn’t make Jesus’ questioners any slimier if he tried: “Teacher, we know that you are sincere and teach the truth of God”. This unctuous approach, nakedly trying to catch Jesus off-guard, doesn’t just paint them as that snake in the grass tempter who shows up regularly for Jesus (as in the wilderness – even the Devil can quote scripture); it also shows that behind their weasel words there’s something else. There’s the fear, just a grain of it, that maybe this Jesus just might be the owner’s son, the expected One. It’s only a suspicion, but it’s one they’re determined to stamp on, because if he is, then the game’s up. They’ve a lot to lose.

So in their minds this is a lose/lose situation for Jesus. If he says: Withhold your taxes; don’t pay money to this heathen occupying power, then the wrath of Rome will soon be down on his head (and they’ll make sure of that) and he’ll alienate all the poor quiet folks who only want a quiet life because life’s hard enough already – they know what revolutions cost people like themselves, and it’s always in blood. But if he says: Pay the taxes, be good, dutiful citizens of the Empire, then the zealots, who want him to use his popularity to raise an army and throw the Romans out – never mind all this “Consider the lilies” stuff – they’re going to give up on him and look elsewhere for their Messiah.

It’s a killer question. It’s a great question. They must have been rubbing their hands with glee. But Jesus subverts it totally. Because their question focused totally on this Caesar, the fearsome emperor who has the power of life or death over everyone. But suddenly Jesus brings up God. They didn’t see that coming. This is the God of Isaiah for whom even kings and emperors, even Cyrus of Persia (the Caesar of his day) are in his hands. And in a heartbeat this ground of a killer question in which they had so much confidence just slips from beneath their feet.

These questioners are supposed to be experts in the faith, but Jesus, this preacher from some backwater village in Galilee, has outdone and undone them all. “This is Caesar’s face, isn’t it – so give him what’s his. But what about what you give to God?”

So, having arrived incensed because they and those who sent them know where they fit into these stories of Jesus, and they don’t like it one bit, now they’re trapped again in a role which hasn’t been written for them by Jesus, but which they’ve chosen for themselves. The ungrateful tenants, the guests who spurn their Lord’s invitation, they’re now shown up again as threadbare, unworthy heirs of the Covenant. They’ve missed the mark again, got themselves exactly where they wouldn’t want to be and shouldn’t be.

And that’s a thought that should maybe make us not too judgemental about these messengers of the Pharisees. Because missing the mark, finding that you’re acting the wrong part in the story, speaking the wrong lines, putting your hopes in the wrong things, making the bad choice – well, I never do that, or do I?

But of course I do. I reject the invitation to the wedding banquet whenever I refuse God’s invitation to give him the gift of my trust and obedience. When I choose to take someone down rather than build them up, speak unkindly about someone; when I withhold forgiveness in spite of the fact that God’s forgiven me countless times; whenever maybe I choose to sit in darkness even when I can hear him calling me. You know, I’ll give to Caesar because I have to. As the tax adverts say threateningly nowadays: “We know where you live”. I’ll do what the world expects or what makes me look good.

But the Lord of the universe to whom I owe everything never coerces me in any way at all – ever. He just sends invitations, beautiful gilt-edged invitations, to join the banquet of life with Jesus joyfully, generously, holding nothing back. I don’t have to act out these miserable lines that Matthew writes, which could be for any of us, to be always the one who refuses, the one who sends apologies and won’t join in. We can re-write the script. And next time an invitation comes – an invitation that in some way says “Choose life” – we can, this time, say “Yes”, or as Jesus puts it: Give to God what belongs to God. And we know that means everything. Amen.

PENTECOST 16

Sunday 28^th September 2014

“Two Sons”

Peter Davey

Readings:

Philippians 2: 1-13

Matthew 21: 23-32

Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus.

Our Gospel reading this morning from Matthew contains one of those little stories of Jesus that are so deceptively simple. A father has two sons and he says to the first son, “Go and work in the vineyard son”. And the son says “No, dad, I have better things to do!”, but then he goes away and does work in the vineyard. The father says to the second son, “Go and work in the vineyard son”. And the son says, “Yes, dad, of course”, but then goes away and doesn’t work in the vineyard. Which one of the 2 did the father’s will? They say, “The first”. And then Jesus puts in the punchline, “Believe me, prostitutes and dishonest tax-collectors will enter the Kingdom of Heaven before you!”

Now Jesus was directing this story to the Jewish elders and authorities in the Temple in Jerusalem, but let us not kid ourselves. In 21st Century Dunbar, this story of Jesus is directed towards us and all Church goers. So what do we understand by this story?

Well it seems to me that the first son represents those people in our community  who, for various reasons, are on the edge of society. In Dunbar we might think of drug dealers, vandals, prostitutes or thieves. Such people know that they are not honest and upright citizens and they don’t even pretend to be. The second son however represents those people who see themselves as good citizens who try and live lives according to the values they were taught as children and particularly those who are trying to be good Christians. These people try their best to live honest lies adhering to the moral code they were taught by their parents or by the church or what they read in the Bible. To be honest, I think most of us fit into the second son category. These two sons are very much like the two sons in another famous parable of Jesus; that of the Prodigal Son. The first son is the one that takes his share of his father’s inheritance and goes away and spends it all on drink, drugs and women. And then, when it all goes horribly wrong, he realises what a complete fool he has been and returns to his father to beg his forgiveness. The second son in that story is the one who stayed at home and did his duty, but when his prodigal brother returned he resented his father’s generosity and love for his brother saying, I have been here doing my duty all these years and you never threw a party for me!”    In this story Jesus is saying that you are better off being a prodigal and then recognising yourself as hopeless, rather than trying to live a good life and being self-righteous. The point Jesus is trying to make is that entering the Kingdom of Heaven is about dying to self and becoming like a child, relying totally on the love and forgiveness of the Father. The reason prostitutes and tax-collectors enter the kingdom first is that they are more likely to acknowledge their unworthiness while the so called good people think they can rely on their good deeds to get them into the Kingdom.

But in our gospel story Jesus says that the 2nd son says he will work in the vineyard but then doesn’t do so. This is because what Jesus means by working in the vineyard is bearing the fruit of love and compassion in our lives like that of his own life but such a life is impossible without the Spirit. That is why the very righteous Pharasee and Temple leader nicodemus was told by Jesus that “he must be born again of the Spirit”. For only the Spirit of Christ in us will allow us to bear the fruit of love and compassion. Our own self is incapable of doing it and we have to get it out of the way, to die,  and let the Spirit of Christ abide in us. But first of all we must recognise our utter hopelessness  to truly love our neighbour and then we can allow Christ to live in us.

Now you might be sitting there and thinking, “Ah yes, but it is all very well for you to stand there and say these things, but aren’t you also one of those in the category of the second son?”, and you would be right! I was brought up as a Christian and live a reasonably upright and moral life. I go to church on Sundays and do good deeds from time to time. It is for each one of us to meditate on this parable of Jesus and decide if we are indeed one of the self-righteous ones that Jesus is so critical of. This is where Paul’s words in the epistle are so helpful. He writes, Do nothing from selfish ambition or conceit but in humility regard others as better than yourselves. Let each of you look not to your own interests but to the interests of others. Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus”. Each one of us has to reflect on whether we do have the mind of Jesus, and every day surrender ourselves to the Spirit of Christ and allow him to live in us and love through us. No amount of reading or studying will transform our minds into the mind of Christ. Only the Spirit can do that. As Cardinal Newman puts it in the prayer I love so much, “Jesus, flood my soul with your Spirit and Life. Penetrate and possess my whole being so utterly that all my life may only be a radiance of yours.” This transformation is a long process and we have to work it out for ourselves. 

In the epistle Paul puts it this way, “Work out your own salvation in fear and trembling. For it is God who is at work in you enabling you both to will and to work for his good pleasure”.

So let us, through contemplation and in the privacy of our own hearts, allow the Spirit to transform our minds into the mind of Christ so that our thoughts, words and actions may be those of Christ Jesus born from love and compassion. The good news is that Jesus tells us in his parables that once we recognise that all our efforts to be good and righteous are useless and we too come to the father for forgiveness, the Father is waiting to welcome us into the Kingdom.  

HARVEST SUNDAY

“The Fruits of the Spirit”

A sermon for Harvest

and our first Sunday after the Referendum

Revd Andrew Bain

There are all kinds of harvests, and harvest is an image Jesus uses when he wants to concentrate people’s minds on some critical moment, a “now” moment, a moment of choice and decision. The harvest is ready – God’s people are waiting for good news – but the labourers are few. Wheat and tares, let them both grow together until that day when only the Lord of the Harvest can separate bad from good. The parables of Jesus are full of references to seeds and harvests, the very essence of life for people whose lives depended on them.

But what Jesus is saying is: ask yourself, what’s the harvest of your life going to be? Will we be the seed that falls in good soil and produces a hundredfold, or the seed that gets choked by the weeds and the cares of this world? Will we be the seed that dies to itself and so bears much fruit, or the mustard seed that, tiny as it is, grows into a great tree and the birds of the air make their nests in its branches?

There’s even a kind of warning parable with a rather bad-tempered vineyard owner who has a fig tree that yields no figs. Judgement is close. Root it up, he says. Why should it use up the ground? But the vine-dresser, who is Jesus, implores the owner for time – another year in which to nurture the tree, to water its roots and care for it. Just wait, he says: this tree will bear fruit – you’ll see.

And I guess that’s God’s faith in us. On a day when we come to give thanks for the fruits of the earth, he says to us: And these are the fruits I see in you, and expect in you. He knows what we’re capable of which is why he never gives up on us. At the end of the parable of the sower:

And as for that in the good soil, they are those who, hearing the word, hold it fast in an honest and good heart, and bring forth fruit with patience.

In this momentous week, with all its possibilities for divisiveness and rancour, this possibility of fruitfulness for good that we really are capable of is something truly to be thankful for. We can be thankful that the fruits of our history and our way of life made a referendum possible at all. Because it’s the struggles of our ancestors that put such a possibility into our hands. In many ways the Christian contribution to society has been to demand of each generation a better harvest, a better life, and for more than just the few or the rich or the powerful: Think of William Wilberforce and emancipation of slaves; Elizabeth Fry and prison reform; the Christian friendly societies which became the trades unions; more recently the civil rights movement in the USA (Martin Luther King and his “I have a dream!”) and  the struggle against apartheid, and so on and on through the generations.

The Church is called to scatter seeds of hope and justice in order to create a kingdom that looks more like the Kingdom of Jesus Christ.

But before that great work can even begin, there is the harvest of your own heart to tend, and Paul knows exactly the fruits that’ll build up the Kingdom and bring us the fullness of life Jesus promises. The fruits of the spirit: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, gentleness, faithfulness, self-control.

And to the Philippians he proposes a spiritual tending of the soul he guarantees leads to life: whatever is true, honourable, just, pure, pleasing, commendable, excellent, worthy of praise. He says: plant your minds with these things and you will have what you long for more than anything else: the harvest of peace. God’s Peace. We’re to fill our minds with these things, and our speaking too, I would say.

At the conclusion of a debate easily capable of rousing thoughts and feelings almost the polar opposites of the virtues I’ve just mentioned, the Christian presence is so needed to nurture and to heal. Taking the larger view, we’re reminded that here we have no abiding city but we seek that city which is above. Christians are resident aliens always. In the midst of the earthly kingdoms we find ourselves in, our calling is to bear fruit, lots of it, all the fruits Paul names. This is what transforms the kingdoms of this world. Christian people are always hopeful for what God still has in store for us (so a referendum really should be a beginning, not an ending), and Christian people are thankful – come, ye thankful people, come – thankful for a bounty of freedoms, and institutions and good people of all faiths or none who are clearly passionate about seeking the best for our country; a bounty of wonderful things about our life together, and far too easily taken for granted.

Yesterday afternoon I climbed to the top of Traprain Law to try and clear my head of all the jangle of stuff from this last week. From the summit there was a 360 degree view of a least three counties, from the place where our ancient forebears kept watch and said their prayers, and trusted in the seasons returning with their fruitfulness and their gift of life. I shared this view of blue sky and blue sea and stunningly beautiful countryside as far as the eye can see with about a dozen wild ponies who stood around me shaking their shaggy manes out of their eyes and no doubt wondering what I was doing there. No thoughts of politics and all the human storm and stress for them, nor for the swallows who darted and danced in the blue sky over my head. And the words of the psalmist came to me as a gift, as I took it all in: The earth is the Lord’s and the fullness thereof; the round world and they that dwell therein.

All things, and all of us, and all our hopes and dreams, and the fruits of our labours, and the fruits of the earth are held in God who gives not just all things, but his own very self. And as a sign and more than a sign of this he puts nothing less than himself into our hands today. The Bread of Life.  

So come, ye thankful people, come.

HOLY CROSS SUNDAY

14^th September 2014

“GOD SO LOVED THE WORLD”

Revd Andrew Bain

Readings:

Phil 2: 6-11 – Christ emptied himself, taking the form of a slave...

John 3: 13-17 – God so loved the world...

A number of years ago there was a great stushie about Mel Gibson’s film, “The Passion of the Christ”, which majored on the horror of the Cross, the crucifixion itself and the anguish and pain of it all. I have to confess I deliberately didn’t go to see it. Partly because I haven’t forgiven Mel Gibson for “Braveheart”(that isn’t a Referendum comment, by the way), but more seriously because his approach seemed both way too much and not remotely enough.

I say “too much” because showing us all that horror down to every gory detail misses the point, and because the meaning of the Cross in fact transcends all that – it belongs to everyone. If the Cross is only about the three hour anguish of the Man of Galilee, then frankly in the scales of human suffering – when you think of the anguish of families of hostages held by Islamic State under threat of beheading, and the sufferings of refugees now so many across the Middle East that they’ve stopped even telling us how many, and the Ebola virus claiming countless lives, well how much can we say about three hours on a Cross?

I once saw the Mum of a boy struggling with leukemia interviewed between the hymns on Songs of Praise and she just told it like it was and said, “Don’t talk to me about the Cross, I’ve been watching my son suffer for years.” So being overfocused on those three hours both insults people’s pain and it sells them desperately short.

For God so loved the world… And he loves the world so much that, like a true parent if you like, he can take our anger, our crying out at the sheer unfairness of things. Christopher Nolan, the Irish author who lived with cerebral palsy and died at the age of forty-three, describes a moment where the young disabled boy, Joseph, through whom he tells his own life story, has a moment of terrible despair and he rails against God in the crucified Christ.

A friend has taken him into Church. “What,” said Matthew, “Do you want to see the crucifix, Joseph?” He wheeled him over and there hanging up on the wall was a lifesize Christ crucified to a huge black cross. His pallid limp body sagged windswept and dead. Crowned with thorns, his grey face was streaked by caked blood, his wonderful eyes were turned vacantly upwards, his head fell backwards and his veins were taut in his throat. But Joseph was not seeing the sadness of the spectacle that day, his boy’s heart was broken and he knew who to blame. The bright angry eyes of the rebellious boy looked up at the great crucifix and swinging his left arm in a grand arc he made the two-finger sign at the dead Christ. He told God what he thought of him. He was furious still.

For Joseph this self-assertion before God is part of his spiritual journey, part of his growing up in faith, as it needs to be for all of us. Joseph loves the God he sometimes hates and that’s ok, and in the Eucharist he meets the crucified God in a special way, just as he is. One of Joseph’s problems is opening his mouth to receive the host when his uncontrolled reflexes keep his jaws jammed shut. “Once, when Joseph was in difficulty, the priest came up with a bold idea of his own – Hi Joseph, what were you doing in the Church yesterday? Were you riflin’ the poor box?

Joseph was so surprised by the accusation that his mouth fell open in astonishment. The priest immediately returned to prayer as he placed communion on the boy’s tongue. Such were Fr Flynn’s schemes, such his empathy that the boy became more and more relaxed over the years.

And so you see Joseph, no matter all the challenges he faces relaxing more and more into who he is and who he is with God. Nolan writes: “Communion served to join the silent boy with the silent God, and into his masked ear Joseph poured his mental whisperings, begging blessings to be showered on his faithful friends.”

Just this week I finished a book which is the most joyful stimulating response to the all atheism that’s been so popular recently. Francis Spufford writes with passion and nowhere more so than when he describes what’s happening on the Cross. “The doors of Jesus’ heart are wedged open wide, and in rushes the whole pestilential flood, the vile and roiling tide of human cruelties and failures and secrets. Let me take that from you, he is saying. Give that to me instead. Let me carry it. Let me be to blame instead. I am big enough. I am wide enough. I am not what you were told. I am not your king or your judge. I am the Father who longs for every last one of his children. I am the friend who will never leave you. I am the light behind the darkness. I am the shining your shame cannot extinguish. I am the ghost of love in the torture chamber. I am change and hope. I am the refining fire. I am the door where you thought there was only a wall. I am the earth that drinks up the bloodstain. I am gift without cost. I am. I am. I am. Before the foundations of the world, I am.”

I love this image of Jesus opening his heart universe wide to accept everything, for all of us for all time. All those things we know about ourselves but can scarcely even name to ourselves, our fears for a world of mind-numbing brutality, and even in this week our hopes and aspirations and anxieties for our own country’s future.

Francis Spufford makes the point. Our God isn’t born into some realm of timeless myth like the Gods of the Norse or the Romans or the Greeks. Our God took flesh in the reign of Caesar Augustus when Quirinius was governor of Syria, when everyone had to be registered to be taxed (not a referendum, but a census); and he died on a Cross when Pontius Pilate was Procurator of Judea. Our God comes in real time, in the time of nations and peoples, in the time of their hopes and their griefs. He comes in Joseph’s real time, the real time of a boy trapped in a body that won’t do what he wants. He comes in your real time and mine. He comes. And for you and for me, for Syria and Iraq, for Ukraine and Scotland, for all times and all places with one message ever the same: God so loves the world.