18th November 2007
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‘When you hear of wars and insurrections, do not be terrified….’ [Luke 21.9]

But we are terrified.  Not exactly gibbering with fear at the state of our poor old world – but profoundly worried. 

Wherever we look, we see big trouble.  The Middle East seems locked in hopeless conflict, different people all claiming the same little parcels of land.  In Africa, open war vies with AIDS and famine.  In many parts of the world, human rights don’t seem to count for much.  Europe feels besieged by economic migrants. 

Everyone wants the atom bomb – and some seem prepared to use it.  Global warming is happening faster than anyone predicted.  There are more people in the world than we can cope with.  We wonder if these problems can ever be solved.  How could we not be worried?

Every religion offers security, one way or other.  Pray to God, and he will hear you.  Serve God, and he will protect you.  Disobey God, and he will abandon you.  Something like this seems central to almost every religion.

It’s certainly true of ancient Judaism.  The Old Testament is one long story of obedience and disobedience.  When things went wrong for the Jews, they came to see their plight as the result of disobedience.  They had only to return to God, and he would put things right again.

To some extent, Christians have inherited this attitude; but there’s another strand in Christianity that contradicts it.  We were reminded of this on All Saints Sunday, when we heard Luke’s version of the Beatitudes.  There, Jesus says, ‘Blessed are you when people hate you, and when they exclude you, revile you, and defame you on account of the Son of Man.  Rejoice on that day and leap for joy … for that is what their ancestors did to the prophets.’ [Luke 6.22-23]  In other words, if things go wrong for you, it may actually be a sign that you are on the right path!

At the heart of the Gospel is Jesus’ command to love God and neighbour.  That command wasn’t new.  It was central to Judaism a thousand years before Jesus.  What was new was Jesus’ explicit teaching that, while love is what really matters – the one thing that really can change people and situations – there is no guarantee that it will change them.  Love your neighbour – but your neighbour may turn and rend you.  That’s what happened on Good Friday. 

Loving our neighbours may be what God wants – may be the best thing we can possibly do; but there is no certainty that doing this will keep us ‘safe’.  Those who follow Jesus may be crucified.  But the fact is, there isn’t any fool-proof recipe for safety in this world. 

We can still choose – to love, or not to love.  We can act in ways that increase or decrease the likelihood of security.  I recently quoted the historian Barbara Tuchman’s definition of folly.  Here it is again: seeing you’re on a course that will lead to disaster, and not deviating. 

We don’t have far to look for examples of folly.  There’s fresh news every day of global warming, of nations treating each other in ways that greatly diminish the hope of peace.  Every day, we see people treating others with contempt, or indifference, or cruelty, or arrogance – and then wonder at the consequences. 

Can’t they see what they’re doing?

I’ve just read that present insecurities are making Americans more conservative, in both politics and religion.  Well, that’s as may be.  It wouldn’t surprise me.  It’s that age-old impulse to ‘return to the Lord’ in the hope that he will have pity on us, and solve all our problems. 

But I’m more and more doubtful that this posture of helplessness is what God wants.  To me, it suggests a dog that knows it’s been bad, and lies on its back, paws in the air, whimpering – hoping to be loved, rather than whipped. 

I imagine God feeling pretty exasperated.  ‘Oh, get up!’ I hear him say.  ‘Stop expecting me to do everything for you.  Haven’t you learned by now that I have given you real freedom?  I’ve given you a big share of responsibility for the world.  I’ve done it on purpose.  Your job is to learn how to love each other, not just to be comfortable, basking in the knowledge that I love you.  Of course Ilove you; but I want you to grow up!  I want you to learn how to love, just as I do.’

It’s a bit bold to put words into God’s mouth; but this is how I see it.  I admit it=s often hard to love our neighbours.  There are people we just don=t like.  There are some we’re afraid of, and some we won’t ever understand.  And – there are just so many of them! 

There’s a little book called A Short Treatise on the Great Virtues by a professor at the Sorbonne, Andre Comte-Sponville.   He=s an atheist.  He writes with elegance, common sense, and (I think) wisdom.  He agrees that the rule ‘Love your neighbour as yourself’ is the best possible rule there could ever be.  In an ideal world, love would govern all our actions, inform all our decisions.

But we don=t live in an ideal world.  Because Comte-Sponville wants to help people do the best they can, he looks at virtues less impressive than love itself, but a lot easier to achieve.  He begins with politeness, admitting that it’s scarcely even a virtue.  He says, ‘There is more to life than good manners; politeness is not morality.  Yet it is not nothing.  Politeness paves the way for great things.’ [p. 14]  Other virtues include Justice, Compassion, Generosity, Mercy, Humility, Tolerance, Purity, Gentleness.  These are all worth cultivating.  They aren’t quite love; but they are still valuable, not least when our ability to love falters. 

We may not always love as God loves us; but we can treat people in ways that approximate to how we would treat them, if we loved them.  This isn’t hypocrisy.  It is more like apprenticeship.

Our culture tends to see love as an emotion over which we have little control.  We’re either ‘in love’, or we’re not.  But Christians know this isn’t so.  Love is more than an emotion.  It’s a way of treating people.  It can be willed, cultivated, practised, learned. 

Christ-like love doesn’t come naturally.  We don’t find it easy to love our enemies, or (sometimes) even our friends!  But if we try to love our neighbours as ourselves – all of them – we will find (as with most things) that we get better at it. 

Christ-like loving requires thoughtful reflection.  It requires self-examination, imagination, courage, risk, the discipline of our emotions.  Yet we can=t do it by mere effort.  To show Christ-like love, we need the ‘help and comfort’ of the Holy Spirit.  And yet such love is possible; and it’s what we’re meant to be about as members of Christ’s Body, the Church. 

We may not have security in this world.  We may not achieve peace in our time.  But the Christian hope is not, after all, a hope for an easy, trouble-free life, but hope that we can live so close to Christ that, through us, his love is made real to the world – and God’s Kingdom comes.

Harvest 2007
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Giving thanks for the harvest used to be simple.  The earth produces good things.  We all need food.  Most of us, here in the West, have enough to eat.  It seems simple – and right – to thank God for arranging things so well.

Perhaps our thanks don’t have the same urgency as those of people struggling to grow food to survive.  If there was a real chance we’d go hungry if the harvest failed, our thanks this morning might be more fervent!  Of course, lots of people don’t have enough to eat.  Remembering them might make us more grateful.  Yet, for me at least, giving thanks for the harvest isn’t simple.  Let me try and explain why.

When I was a child in America, people spoke of ‘exploiting’ natural resources as a praiseworthy thing to do.  The earth was full of riches just waiting to used for the general good.  If the people who exploited them made a profit – well, why not?  They were doing something that would benefit many people.  Everybody was a winner!

The population of the United States was then two thirds what it is today.  Even now, the density of population in America is much less than here in Britain.  I remember reading that there are, on average, some 450 people per square mile in Britain.  In the United States, there are still just two!

The first settlers from Europe saw the North American continent as an inexhaustible cornucopia of good things.  However much they ‘exploited’ its resources, there would always be plenty.  The idea of running out seemed impossible.  Only now are some people starting to get nervous.

But those who attend to the latest information cannot fail to see that natural resources are running short.  Whether or not human activity is causing climate change, this is happening.  Agriculture is encroaching on the earth’s remaining woodlands, essential to the balance of oxygen and carbon dioxide.  Each year, farmers and loggers destroy further huge areas of forest in the Amazon, South West Asia, and elsewhere.  A new coal-fired power station opens in China every fortnight.

People are doing these things to meet the needs of world population, increasing faster than we can quite comprehend.  More than twenty years ago, population crossed a threshold.  The number of people currently alive exceeded the total of all those who had ever lived before.  In the last twenty years, world population has more than doubled.

When the human family was much smaller, it could afford to treat the earth as a treasure house to be plundered without restraint.  Today, that attitude is unsustainable – even suicidal.  The scientist James Lovelock describes the situation as akin to that of a huge oil tanker steaming through dense fog.  Suddenly, the fog lifts.  The captain sees a rocky coastline just half a mile ahead. 

Lovelock says that, so far, our response to the crisis of resources and climate change is like the skipper ordering the tanker’s engines back to half speed.  Yet, even if the engines went to full speed in reverse, there is no chance of stopping or even turning the tanker before it runs aground.

People like Harvest Thanksgiving.  It feels reassuring.  We come to church and sing the familiar hymns, and we expect to be told that a kindly Creator is looking after us – that all is well.  But it isn’t – and it seems to me nearly blasphemous to pretend that it is.

We live in a world where many people, both in the richer West and the poorer South and East, hope for – indeed, expect – a future where lots more of the world’s population will enjoy the kind of plenty that people like us enjoy now.  But rising population and finite resources together mean that this is simply impossible.  The longer we pretend it is possible, the worse the crisis will be for everyone, just a few years hence.

In Genesis, we read of God giving responsibility for his world into human hands.  Many individuals are responsible in their consumption of food and fuel and other resources.  But collectively, the human family is not acting responsibly.  It isn’t that we’re been selfish, or greedy, or vicious.  We just haven’t thought hard enough about the consequences of our attitudes and our actions.

The historian Barbara Tuchman defines ‘folly’ as seeing that you’re on a course that leads to disaster, and not deviating from it. She cites many historical cases of such folly which did lead to disaster – disaster caused by otherwise intelligent people who should have known better.

I think people like James Lovelock are right.  The human race is on a disaster course with regard to the planet.  If we don’t change, radically and quickly, we may all starve.  Even if we pull back just a little, to soothe our consciences, we will still provoke disaster.

I cannot guess how we might change our ancient habits fast enough to make a real difference.  There may have to be a cataclysm to create the political will to act on a global scale – something like the drowning of Bangladesh, no part of which is more than three feet above sea level.

There’s nothing wrong with our Harvest Festival.  It is entirely right to thank God for the good things we enjoy.  As Jesus said, our heavenly Father knows we need these things.  But Jesus also said we shouldn’t make these things – what in the West we would call our ‘standard of living’ – our first priority.  ‘Seek ye first the Kingdom of God, and his righteousness.’

Seeking the Kingdom is not escapism.  It doesn’t mean turning away from the practical challenges we face.  But it does include the charge to treat every human being as God’s beloved child.  For Christians, there cannot be great chunks of the world’s population that somehow don’t count.  And just as we don’t want to starve, or drown, or freeze, or kill the planet for our great-grandchildren, so we must seek thewell-being of all people with the same urgency as we seek our own.

I fear it’s beyond argument that this implies a lower standard of living for us all.  If we want to survive, we cannot expect to go on heating our homes to twenty degrees, eating asparagus in January, and destroying irreplaceable rain forests for hardwood timber to make garden furniture.  We must tighten our belts – and learn afresh that caring for other people, treating our planet responsibly, brings more satisfaction than compulsive shopping.  Virtue has become necessity.  There is nowhere to hide.

‘All good things around us are sent from heaven above.’  So runs the familiar Harvest hymn. 

And it’s true; but those good things are not without limit.  Be grateful, by all means.  Give thanks.  But, before it’s too late, pray and work that humanity may learn to exercise more intelligent corporate stewardship of the planet God has given us – the only one we will ever have.

Sermon Preached by the Archbishop of York
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125th ANNIVERSARY OF THE

 DIOCESE OF NEWCASTLE

NEWCASTLE CATHEDRAL 

ST JAMES’ DAY 2007

Readings: 2 Corinthians 4.7-15
         Matthew 20.20-28

125 years ago today a preacher stood in the pulpit of Durham Cathedral.  This was his text:

‘Are you able to drink the cup that I am about to drink?’  They said to him, ‘We are able’.

What a blockbuster of a text.  It’s one to make congregations sit up.  And clergy. 

The occasion was the Consecration of the first Bishop of Newcastle, the Right Reverend Dr Roland Wilberforce. 

The unsuspecting burghers of Newcastle, dressed in their finery for that splendid occasion, along with bishops from many parts of the country and clergy from here and elsewhere, might have been hoping for something a bit more soothing than that disturbing question, addressed by Jesus to James and his brother John:

‘Are you able to drink the cup that I am about to drink?’
Are you willing to share in Christ’s suffering (drink the cup), accept the role of a servant, and give your life for the relief (ransom) of others from their separation from the God of love and from each other?
Sorry.  We can’t pic‘n mix the bits of the Gospel we like and avoid the rest. 
That preacher did the right thing.  The Consecration took place on St James’ Day.  Today is St James’ Day.  I have the same texts.

James and John were two tough fishermen like their father, Zebedee.  They were so compulsive, quarrelsome and quick-tempered that they were nicknamed ‘sons of thunder’. 
Not meek and mild, but often putting their foot in it and causing rows among the other disciples.  They were highly competitive.  Today they might have been candidates for Sir Alan Sugar’s Apprentice. 

Why not?  A disciple is a kind of apprentice: one who learns through the example of a master craftsman – and gets it wrong some of the time.

James and John could get it spectacularly wrong.  They looked on the other disciples the way the Magpies regard the Black Cats. 

They knew they should be in the Champions League, but didn’t want to share it. 

They wanted seats in the Directors’ Box of the Kingdom of Heaven. 

They thought Jesus would provide them.  The Gospel according to Mark says they put in the request themselves. 
Matthew is a bit more circumspect: he says it was their mother who asked!  Either way Jesus saw through it and replied to them:

‘Are you able to drink the cup that I am about to drink?’ 

They said to him, ‘We are able’.

The cost of a seat in heaven is far beyond the pocket of any human being.  Places are allocated by God.  They cost him dear.  Christ gave his life as a ransom so that all disciples could join him there.

That was the ‘cup’ that Jesus was about to drink. 
The cup is an important image used throughout the Bible.

In the Old Testament ‘the cup’ is a container for both suffering and happiness.  At every Passover meal, a cup of wine was left on the table in readiness for the return of the prophet Elijah. 

In the New Testament, at the Last Supper, it was probably that cup which Jesus took, saying, “This is my cup of blood.  Take it and drink.”

In the Garden of Gethsemane, where he prayed in agony, you recall he said, “Father, if you are willing, remove this cup from me; yet, not my will but yours be done.”(Lk 22:42).  
Then when he was arrested, Peter took a sword and tried to kill a soldier, Jesus told him to put the sword back into its sheath, and then asked again, “Am I not to drink the cup that the Father has given me?”(John 18:11).

So the image of the cup is important.  It’s an image of life and suffering and death.

So, James and John, you want the best seats?  ‘Are you able to drink the cup that I am about to drink?’  In other words, do you realise what you are letting yourselves in for? 

They said to him, ‘We are able’.

What a humbling, fantastic, dedicated answer. 
The quarrelsome pair, for all their faults, were genuine apprentice-Christians.  Their discipleship was much more than ambition and competition.  They really wanted to be like Jesus.  And they wanted to be with Jesus.
The world has more than enough people who want to win at all costs.  There has never been a shortage of would-be dictators.  Fame-seekers are ten-a-penny. 
Anyone who dreams of a place at the top should learn a lesson from the baboon: the higher up the tree it goes, the more we can see its less attractive parts: its bottom!

Apprentice-disciples are harder to come by.  They keep close to Jesus so they can learn by what they see and experience.    
For Jesus is not an object to be understood but a mystery to be loved.   And His Body, the Church, is not an organisation to be explained and managed but a living organism to participate in and thereby be transfigured from glory to glory.

If you want to share my life, Jesus says, become a servant of humanity. 
That’s a challenge to every politician, every business tycoon… every bishop.  You are called to serve.  The higher the position, the greater the call to service.

It’s a challenge to all of us.  Forget the status.  Remember the vocation.   Remember the calling to “Come and follow me”.

“We are able”, said James and John.

James was to become the first apostle to become a martyr.  That was his cup.
My brothers and sisters, we have family members across the world today who are drinking the cup of suffering for their faith.  Have a look on the internet for Christian Solidarity Worldwide. 
Use their website as a spur to prayer: thanksgiving for Christian steadfastness in times of danger, intercession for our persecuted brothers and sisters.

It will tell you that Christian schoolgirls have been beheaded in Indonesia.

It will tell you that in Malaysia, Roman Catholic Irene Fernandez is in prison for exposing human rights abuses.

The Christian Solidarity Worldwide website will take you to Sudan, where Malong, a boy of 12, was kidnapped by raiders who descended on his village, burning houses and seizing cattle, property and people.
“I was forced to be a Muslim, and when I eventually returned to my home area, I had to re-learn my own language,” he said.

These are our brothers and sisters.  With them we belong to the Communion of Saints, along with St James and all those children, women and men whose ‘cup’ has overflowed with suffering.
The Christian cup also overflows with God’s goodness and mercy. 

We tend to prefer that.  Of course.  It would be daft to court disaster.  Enjoy God’s blessings, bask in them, show them off, share them, be thankful for them – “count them one by one”.  You are allowed to complain to God when things go wrong only if you praise Him as much when things go well.  As a Christian, your cup may sometimes be half-full, it will never be half-empty.

God has blessed the Diocese of Newcastle even before it was a diocese, with a wonderful history.  Lindisfarne and Banburgh belong to you; Aidan, Oswald, Hilda and Cuthbert are among your spiritual ancestors. 

This diocese was launched on a tide of success and expansion.  By 1882 coal mining and shipbuilding were major industries, fortunes were being made by chemical and salt production and much of Britain’s glass was made here.  The population of Newcastle trebled in 60 years.  Between here and the borders fine farmland was helping to support a hungry population.  Workers needed to quench their thirst, so someone invented Newcastle Brown Ale!   Newcay broon, as the locals call it.

You might say the cup was pretty full.

But the history of the last 1¼ centuries has also known terrible deprivation.  Industries collapsed, unemployment was rife. 
The North-East has borne the brunt of slumps over and over again.

Yet Northern grit and humour have survived.

On my first visit to this Cathedral Church, a year ago, a gentleman said to me, “Why did London get the Millennium dome and the Eye, called the ‘London Eye’.  
If Birmingham got it, it would have sounded better: The Brummie Eye!   But if it came to Newcastle it would have been better still.    It would be the ‘Why Aye Eye’.”

One hundred and twenty five years old, eh?  You don’t look 125. 
So let’s lift a cup to the next 125 years. 
Let’s make this Eucharist our thanksgiving for the past and our dedication for the future, by God’s grace.  Let those wonderful words of a former Secretary-General of the United Nations, Dag Hammarskjöld, ring in all our ears.  

He died in a crash in 1981 while flying to Ndola, Northern Zimbabwe, to negotiate a cease-fire between the United Nations and Katanga forces in Congo.   He wrote:

“The night is drawing nigh.   For all that has been, ‘Thanks’.   For all that shall be, ‘Yes’”

‘Are you able to drink the cup that I am about to drink?’  They said to him,

‘We are able’!   That is:  We will follow you in your foot-steps – in demonstrating, explaining and offering your new life to all.

And our message is not ourselves, but Jesus Christ as Lord.  
Helping others to catch a glimpse of God in the face of Jesus Christ.   Love is the great revealer:  Jesus is known to his people; the Father is manifest in the flesh.   Jesus is the Saviour who is also King and Lord of Lords.   He invites us to participate in his death and resurrection which sets us free from sin and death.  
And we are given a ministry of telling others to become friends of Jesus.   “Beggars telling other beggars where we have found bread”.

This ministry gives us courage to carry it out, so that we don’t deceive or falsify.  

And as we reflect the glory of Christ through demonstrating the Gospel, the good news of God in Jesus Christ, we become slaves of those who receive the message.   “Servants of Jesus Christ”.
The power to let the good news of God to shine on every area of human activity is from God, but the human instruments or vessels are fragile as clay jars.  
[Smash the clay jar – inside it is a medallion used for the campaign to abolish the slave trade – “Am I not a Man and a Brother” –Bishop Martin would you please pick it up and keep it on behalf of the Diocese].

The Apostle Paul in our Epistle reading recalls the constant opposition and persecution, recalling the Cross of Jesus where death is overcome by the resurrection life, which vindicates and renews the life of God’s faithful messengers.
Yes! The treasure of the Gospel is in clay jars – you and I – in order to show that the power belongs to God.  
But you and I must carry the good news.   Knowing very well that the person who fetches the water is the person most likely to break the pot.   Nevertheless, the water of life we must fetch and share it with others.

You know the story of a father who had three sons and seventeen camels.   In his will he left a half of his seventeen camels to his elder son.   One-third to his second son; and one-ninth to his youngest son.   The father died and the children  attempted to divide the camels according to their father’s will.   They had great difficulty in dividing 17 camels into one-half, a third and one-ninth.

So they went to consult a wise old man.   He said, very simple.    I will lend you my camel – it will be the eighteenth and you can each get what your father wanted you to have.    Bingo!  A half of 18 is 9; a third of 18 is 6; a ninth of 18 is 2 – making a total of 17.     The wise old man then took away his camel.
  
Be that eighteenth camel that removes all shackles and nurtures growth.

The remarkable thing about the eighteenth camel is that it’s volunteered and responds willingly.   To be a servant in the Church of God, you too are volunteered.  

The call is addressed to those people who are not expecting to be invited – and not those who have become their own good cause!  The Church of Jesus Christ is a community where earning your place is not on offer – buying your way in isn’t an option.
In all my ministry I have been volunteered and invariably been carried along screaming.  
From chaplaincies, incumbencies, General Synod, endless committees, Bishop for Stepney, Stephen Lawrence Inquiry, Damilola Taylor Murder Review, Bishop for the Diocese of Birmingham and Archbishop of York.   Others have volunteered me.

As Bishop Frank Weston of Zanzibar said in 1923:

“You have your Holy Communion, you have your altars …now go out into the highways and byways and look for Jesus in the ragged and the naked, the oppressed and the sweated, and in those who have lost hope and those who are struggling to make good.  
Look for Jesus in them; and when you find him, gird yourselves with his towel of fellowship and wash his feet in the person of his brothers and sisters.”

Please will you stand.

Will you please say to the person on your left and on your right,
“Now that you know you are that eighteenth camel, start behaving like one.”

And if you forget, I will be back.  

Birth of John the Baptist – 2007
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Yet another anti-God book was published last week: God is Not Great: the case against religion, by Christopher Hitchens. The reviews I’ve read suggest it’s even weaker than Richard Dawkins’ recent book The God Delusion. Like Dawkins’ book, it asserts (rather than argues) that secularism is the only intelligent, moral, healthy way to a full and rewarding life.

This morning, I want to challenge just one aspect of that assumption.

Most people experience a sense of inadequacy from time to time. We all experience guilt and shame (whether justified or not). We all want things we haven’t got, and we may have things – a body, a personality, a history – that we’d rather not have. We look at other people. Many appear happier, more fulfilled, more relaxed, than we are.

We start to think, if only we were free from the traditions and rules we’ve grown up with, we too might feel happy and fulfilled. We begin to wonder if religion is more of a problem than a solution. Secularism, with its lack of religious sanctions, starts to look quite attractive.

Those who have grown up with religion usually feel the pull of secularism at some time or other. Some feel it all their lives. But what of those (and they are many) who have grown up with no religion? I guess they feel exactly the same disquietudes that we do – inadequacy, guilt, fear, and so forth. Yet in a society where secular assumptions are so strong, they are likely to view religion as an added complication they can well do without.

So secularism can seem attractive to religious and non-religious alike. It can look like the road to freedom. ‘If only I can become (or can remain) untrammelled by all that religion stuff, I’ll have a better chance of being the person I want to be. I’d make my own decisions, live with my own mistakes. I wouldn’t have to consult an imaginary God about anything.’

What is the goal behind this impulse? What (if you will) is the secular idea of ‘salvation’? I don’t want to follow Richard Dawkins’ bad example, and set up unrepresentative straw men it’s all too easy to knock down; but I think the secularists’ idea of salvation is – learning to feel good about yourself: comfortable with the way things are, at ease with the world as it is.

We know there is dreadful poverty in our world. There is war, and injustice, and cruelty. The secularist thinks these things are bad, not because God says so, but because we decide they are bad. But secularists also tend to say that these problems are so big that we cannot be held to account for them. We can try to address them, as far as we are able; but they aren’t something we need feel too guilty about.

In practice, I fear, this works out as follows. We start to battle with life’s problems, but we get tired. We gradually decide that these larger issues are not, after all, our problem. Our job must surely be to make the most of life for ourselves. Little by little, we start to close our eyes and ears – and hearts – to the hurts of humanity, and try only to heal our own.

But then – by lucky (the secularist’s interpretation) – or by divine grace (the religious perspective) – we hear a growl. What is it? Who is it? It’s the perennial voice of John the Baptist, heard somewhere (in one form or another) in every generation. That voice challenges us to see ourselves in a larger context. It reminds us that we cannot live in comfy isolation. We can never say, ‘I am not my brother’s keeper.’

I remember a brilliant surgeon, some thirty-five years ago, famous for his work with children. He worked fifteen hours a day – sometimes, seven days a week. He loved it. He knew he was an asset to society. He came to Church, but refused to join in the confession. He did not believe he was a miserable sinner; and would not say those words.

I felt then that he was wrong, but today I have a better idea why. That’s because I have more experience of my own capacity for self-deception. We may occasionally fool the world; we can almost always fool ourselves. We say, ‘I know I’m not really bad.’ We see ourselves, not as others see us, but as we would like them to see us. Alas, we succeed! We know we make mistakes, but we rarely say, from the depth of our heart, ‘I have chosen to sin.’

Yet, as the BCP puts it, ‘If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves.’ The greatest saints knew what failures they were, compared with Jesus Christ. They know there might be some health in us, but not much! But saints have the courage to face this hard reality.

John the Baptist demanded that people face facts. From the clarity of a life pared down to absolute simplicity, he could see the depth of people’s self-deception. His challenged that self-deception – or rather, he helped people challenge it for themselves, and repent.

The secular wisdom of our age seems to say, ‘Feel good about yourself. That’s much as you can hope for. Accept yourself – like yourself – as you are, and you’ll achieve all you can.’ The voice of the Baptist thunders, ‘No! You can do more than that! Much more! But you won’t do it until you accept that, here and now, all is not right! Until you can see just how much you deceive yourself, until you face up to reality as it is, you won’t move forward.’

The Gospels tell us that God accepts us as we are. Jesus accepted Matthew, and Zachaeus, and Mary Magdalene, and the woman taken in adultery, and the woman at the well of Samaria, and countless others – but, in every case, he challenged them to change. God does accept us as we are, but he is never content with us as we are.

The Baptist demands that we own the pretences and deceptions we practice. And in fact, much of our community life, as well as our personal life, is based on pretence and deception.

If, both as individuals and as a society, we decide to heed the Baptist’s cry, we must also accept the pain of the surgeon’s knife, which hurts to heal. To move forward, some aspects of our present reality simply have to go.

The modern claim that religion enslaves people, while secularism sets them free, is (I believe) a dangerous myth. Secularists deceive themselves just as easily as religious people! Indeed, self-deception is a universal human mechanism for coping with unpleasant realities – an unfortunate mechanism, because it ultimately makes things worse, not better.

The Baptist calls us to reject the straight-jacket of self-deception. If we refuse to see the gap between who we are, and who we might be, then (to quote again from the BCP) ‘we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us.’

Hear the Baptist’s cry! Hear it, wherever it comes from: the pages of Scripture; the voice in the public square; the cry of the disposed and marginalised; the whisper of your dearest friend. Dare to see yourself as you actually are. Measure yourself by the stature of Christ.

And then – repent! Not just emotionally, but in the way you organise your life. That’s the one sure way to become what you already are: a beloved child of God, a citizen in training for the Kingdom of Heaven, a co-inheritor with Christ of eternal life.

ASCENSION DAY 2007
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We’re in the middle of something tremendous! It’s a rare privilege to have Peter King and his colleagues performing in the Cathedral. To have them premiering a new Jazz Mass with our own choir (of whom we are justly proud) is very special indeed.

Music – at least good music, well performed – moves us deeply. Yet in this 21st century, in our western culture, we get hung up on ‘meaning’ – that is, on specific cognitive meaning. When we say, ‘This symbol means the number 2,’ or ‘The word ‘green’ means a particular colour,’ we feel we’ve said something very precise.

But what do we mean by ‘green’? The word embraces a whole range of colours. The colour of what we’re actually looking at depends on the amount of light on it, on the colours in the particular context, even on our health. What we call ‘green’ may be very hard to define, especially if the exact shade lies toward the blue or yellow end of the colour spectrum.

People often dispute what colour something is. What they’re disputing, of course, is not the reality of what they see, but whether the word they are using embraces that particular experience. Words are a lot cruder than we often assume. They are really only pointers.

When we seek words to describe and communicate things less physical, more abstract, it gets harder. The statement ‘She feels sad’ may give us a clue about what somebody seems to be experiencing, but it doesn’t actually describe that feeling with any accuracy. The word ‘sad’ is only a kind of shorthand for a whole range of experiences - experiences we ourselves have had, and so can recognise. But the word itself is pretty rough and ready.

Music communicates quite differently. It’s much more direct. The sound of a trumpet or saxophone, the notes or the rhythm of a particular piece – these don’t ‘describe’ anything.

Yet music communicate things like feelings very directly. It stimulates a different part of the brain than that used for language. Music doesn’t rely on cognitive reference. It makes us actually feel things, here and now.

But again – do you feel what I feel? Maybe – or maybe not! It’s impossible to say, any more than we can be sure that what you see as ‘green’ is just what I see.

Nevertheless, there’s a lot of common ground. Most people will feel exalted, rather than depressed, by the Hallelujah Chorus – unless, of course, the performance gets in the way of the music. (That can be a bigger problem than you might think. Brahms insisted on playing the piano part at the premiere of all his new works. The critics learned to wait for the second performance – played by somebody else – to assess what a new piece was actually like.)

Why do we have music in Church at all? You might just as well ask, Why do we have words? I would answer that by saying we’re here (in the first place) to remember and to celebrate what God has already done for us, in and through Jesus Christ. In doing that, we recognise what God is doing now, and we learn to see our own lives in a larger context.

The Ascension of Jesus forty days after Easter is a wonderfully neat ‘rounding off’ of the account of the Resurrection - but it only appears in St Luke’s Gospel. It’s part of Luke’s way of telling the Easter story. ‘While he was blessing them, he withdrew from them and was carried up into heaven.’ [24.51]

But that’s not a journalistic description, let alone scientific description, of what happened. It’s more an account of what it felt like – and of what Luke thought it all meant for those with faith to see. Furthermore, Luke’s words can easily be misunderstood. They seem to say that Jesus went away. Luke’s intention was probably quite the reverse – an assurance that, although we can’t see him physically any more, Jesus is still with us! The Ascension is Luke’s equivalent of Matthew saying, at the end of his Gospel, that Jesus would be with the disciples always, to the end of time.

Neither Matthew nor Luke is giving us a scientific proposition, or even a description of something science cannot yet describe, but might one day. They’re attempting to put into words something for which words are quite inadequate – an experience of the risen Christ that encompasses a whole spectrum of facts, feelings, hopes and possibilities.

When it comes to communication, we sometimes think that words are all we have. But there’s music! And while music can’t ‘describe’ things (I myself have never found those 19th century ‘tone poems’ convincing as stories, however good the music is) – music can express a great deal that words can not express.

As Peter King’s Jazz Mass unfolds tonight, I suggest that you try to hold your experience of the music side by side in your minds with Luke’s story of the Ascension. Note any lateral connections that may occur – but don’t try to ask what they mean. Just experience them – and rejoice! That’s what worship is about. The time for analysis or pondering is later. For the moment, just allow yourself to be taken up into the experience.

We need both words and music. Yet even together, they cannot express the full richness of our experience. That experience arises out of a reality so deep we can only call it ‘God’. We try to understand; but in the end, we can only kneel and adore, recognising that the reality we are trying to apprehend has reached out and grasped us – in love.

To the God who is in and behind all things, who raised Jesus from the dead, and who opens to us the way of eternal life, be honour and glory, now and forever. Amen.

Easter IV – 2007
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Jesus, who died, is alive. That’s the Easter message. That’s the heart of the Gospel, the Good News. Nobody can prove it. No one can explain it, or even say what happened.

What is life? How did it come about in the first place? Was it mere chance – the accidental coming together of particular temperatures, chemicals, the effects of sunlight, radiation from outer space? Is there an infinite number of universes, of which ours just happens to have conditions that make life possible?

Many scientists – though not all – insist that you don’t need God to ‘explain’ the universe. I agree – if by ‘explain’ you mean ‘describe how things we observe actually work’. But I think we can still say – with integrity – ‘God created the universe’. Saying that doesn’t say anything about how he did it, or does it. Whether you want to say this will depend, not on what you deduce from science, but on what you believe about the character of the universe.

Is the miracle of love an argument for a loving creator? I think it is – but that’s something science can neither prove nor disprove. But if God is behind the whole business of creation, could he not do something new in raising Jesus from death?

The resurrection is not something Jesus did. It is something God did.

Holy Week is what Jesus did – his provocative entry into Jerusalem as a king; the havoc he caused in the temple by wrecking the tables of the money-changers; the Last Supper, his gift of the Eucharist and the related ‘new commandment’ to love one another in the way he showed us; and his quiet acceptance of arrest, torture, and death.

All that is Jesus’s achievement. It’s the achievement of unconditional love meeting ordinary life, and not wavering. The meeting was tense, the outcome uncertain. But love proved stronger than sin or rejection. Jesus died on the cross; but love did not. All this is Jesus’s achievement. As he said, ‘It is accomplished.’

Then – he was dead. He could not raise himself. To do so would imply a denial of his humanity. Human beings do not have the power to rise from death. And when in God came to share our humanity in Jesus of Nazareth, he embraced this limitation.

We Christians see Jesus as God’s Son, speaking and acting with a Son’s knowledge of his Father. We also believe Jesus was one of us – genuinely, unambiguously human. He experienced love and hurt, hunger and pain, joy and frustration, just as we do. He experienced fear.

Jesus’ cry from the cross is a cry of desolation: ‘My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?’ That’s not serene – a calm acceptance of death. Jesus knew he was about to die; and, like every other human being, he was afraid.

And Jesus, the Son of God, died. But God did not die; and God had not finished. He waited until there could be no doubt that Jesus was truly dead. Then he acted. Just as in the Gospel story of Jesus and Lazarus, God said, ‘Come forth!’ – and Jesus, who died, was alive.

But with what kind of life? The same as before? An extension of the life Jesus had already had into an indefinite future?

All the evidence of what the earliest Christians believed says, ‘No.’ They were certain that Jesus was alive. They saw him, spoke with him, ate with him, touched him. They were not imagining it. Here was the Teacher they knew, marked by the nails and spear. It was the same person. He was ‘alive’ – but different.

Mary, who knew him so well, didn’t recognize him in the garden – not till he spoke her name. The disciples on the Emmaus road spent a whole afternoon with him, not guessing who it was. Only when he took bread, blessed it, broke it and gave it to them did they see – and in that instant of recognition, he was gone. He came and went in the most mysterious way. Locked doors meant nothing to him. He was not the same, though he was somehow the Jesus they had known.

What had happened? A new act creation. Is this what St Paul meant by ‘the first fruits of the dead’? The raising of Jesus is the beginning of something absolutely new. That’s why we celebrate the resurrection, rather than just remember it.

Jesus did not simply say, ‘I’ve done my work, delivered my message, and now I’m returning to my Father. Carry on!’ If he had done that, then – even if his humanity was real for those few years on earth – he would seem to have laid it aside when he returned to heaven. The Incarnation would have been something temporary.

The risen Christ carries the wounds of the passion. Jesus is alive, but in a new way; and he carries his humanity – our humanity – with him. The Incarnation is not temporary, but permanent. The 5th century document known as the Athanasian Creed says of Jesus, the second Person of the Trinity, that ‘although he be God and Man: yet he is not two, but one Christ; One, not by conversion of the Godhead into flesh: but by taking of the Manhood into God.’

We can share Christ’s resurrection by following his way: the way of obedience to God – service to neighbour; unstinting, uncalculating, unconditional love; steady forgiveness. Easter is God’s pledge that the way of Jesus leads beyond the Cross to new kind of life. Jesus is the first. To embrace divine love in all its costliness leads to a new kind of life we cannot really comprehend; but we can do it.

We can’t get our minds round it. Yet, little by little, as the Resurrection begins to colour the way we see the world, and what we observe of the world finds more and more resonance with the Resurrection, we gradually, find a voice – not to explain, but to celebrate. Whatever we understand or don’t understand, we can still join the response of all God’s people to this unimaginable manifestation of his love and mercy.

Even in our darkest moments, we can celebrate Easter. The old Russian Kontakion puts it like this: ‘All we go down to the dust, and weeping o’er the grave, we make our song: Alleluia! Alleluia! Alleluia!’

This response is not, anti-scientific, or obscurantist. It is no more – and no less – than a way of engaging with the world which is life-affirming, life-enhancing – literally, life-giving. This is the Easter faith. Let us rejoice and be glad in it.

LENT III 2007 – ST NICHOLAS, GOSFORTH
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‘Nathaniel said to Philip, “Can anything good come from Nazareth?” Philip said to him, “Come and see.”’ [John 1.26]

This interchange between Philip and Nathaniel sounds pretty familiar. It ‘rings bells’ with my own life. For sometimes I’m Philip – and sometimes, Nathaniel.

As Philip, I may want to share something exciting with somebody who’s not willing to hear about it. When I was a curate, I would rush to see my vicar, bursting with some idea I thought had enormous mileage. He – perhaps wisely, but certainly crushingly – would lean back in his chair, place his fingertips together, and say in a pained tone, ‘But Robert: these are English people.’ Shades of the meeting between Bilbo and Gandalf at the beginning of Tolkien’s book The Hobbit. Bilbo, you may recall, says sharply to Gandalf, ‘We don’t want any adventures here, thank you very much. Nasty, disturbing things! Make you late for dinner!’

But sometimes, I’m Nathaniel. I hear myself saying, ‘No, I really do not want to go on holiday to [wherever it is]. I’ve never been there; but nothing I’ve heard about it endears the idea to me one little bit. I think it’s a really bad suggestion. Try and think of something else.’ Or I might think – even if I don’t say it out loud – ‘I don’t want to read the book you have just lent me. I can’t bear goopy historical novels. I do not intend to waste my time with this.’

The fact is, most people resist anything new if it seems likely to challenge their personal comfort – or their comfortable assumptions.

Lent is surely about getting closer to God, doing what we can to bring the Kingdom of God closer to realisation. That, and not self-punishment, is the purpose of Lenten discipline. Tonight’s second lesson makes me wonder (for the thousandth time), ‘Isn’t the sharing of ideas and visions – the sharing of enthusiasm – essential to the Christian project?’

But people’s enthusiasms can be tricky. They can be mind-blowingly enlivening, or mind-bogglingly deadening. We all know both sorts. In the eighteenth century, enthusiasm was deeply suspect. That wasn’t surprising, after the religious and civil conflicts of the previous two centuries. People were fed up with enthusiasm. They wanted peace, not more excitement.

You probably know the encounter between Joseph Butler, Bishop of Durham, and John Wesley, very active in and around Newcastle – then in the Durham diocese. Butler snubbed Wesley with one of the most spectacular put-downs ever recorded. ‘It is a horrid thing, sir, to pretend to special dispensations of the Holy Ghost – a very horrid thing!’ No enthusiasm here, thank you very much! Nasty, disturbing thing. Mere posturing! Spoils the digestion. Go away!

I wonder if the Church of England, just at the moment, is more like Nathaniel than Philip. The American philosopher Henry David Thoreau once said, ‘The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.’ I wonder if the mass of Anglicans, at this moment in our long history, don’t live lives of quiet depression. Clergy and laity are more discouraged than they often admit. It’s assumed they are discouraged about the institutional decline of the Church. I’ve come to think that this decline – clearly seen in numbers of communicants, confirmations and baptisms – is only a symptom of something deeper.

That something deeper is hard to quantify, but I think it’s to do with people not recognising that their basic spiritual hunger could be satisfied by anything the Church has to offer. The spiritual hunger is real. It manifests itself in various ways. Go into any big bookshop. There’s an astonishing range of publications designed to meet this need. Most of them have little to do with ‘religion’ as we know it. Listen to what people say – at least, in relatively unguarded moments – about where they see the gaps in their lives, what they really yearn for: meaning, purpose, a sense that they actually matter within a larger context than their own little groove. These are the things people have always yearned for….

Why don’t people recognise that these needs are precisely what the Church is here to supply? For various reasons. The Church, in the past, has often behaved like the worst sort of bully. People don’t want to be bullied. The Church has put great emphasis on believing particular doctrines, rather than freedom to explore truth and meaning. The Church often tells newcomers that they are welcome, but they must sit and be quiet – or that, in effect, they must leave their brains at the door.

Some people, of course, are happy to be treated like this; but most of the population have the sense to see that becoming infantilised is not the way to find security. I myself am glad that many people don’t want to abandon their freedom in their search a fuller humanity.

The Church is often quite bad at genuine ‘friendliness’. Most congregations consider themselves friendly. Very few, in may experience, are really open or welcoming towards newcomers. They either smile but remain closed and cliquish, or pounce on newcomers and try to make them fit some preconceived mould.

Again, the Church often does worship quite badly. Thanks to the media, recording and other kinds of modern communication, people today expect high standards in music, in presentation, in ‘theatre’.

Much Anglican worship is amateur, slipshod, ill-prepared, not thought through. Happily, St Nicholas Gosforth does better than many parishes in this respect.

But behind all this, we Anglicans (like most other ‘mainstream’ Christians) have simply not found effective mechanisms for celebrating and deepening and expressing our own faith in a way that is serious, persistent, and genuinely open to influences both old and new. Until we can do that for ourselves, I don’t believe we will be able to offer others the things they’re looking for. People who like old-fashioned language, or organ music, or some other outward aspect of our inheritance may be attracted from time to time; but we will not be an obvious source of spiritual nourishment for the nation as a whole.

Doing the same old things, but louder, won’t help. Fiddling with our music or worship – providing gimmicks – won’t help. Nothing will help which does not cost a great deal in terms of the steady reorientation of our own souls. We must learn to be enthusiasts – not puerile hobbyists, bounding up and down with uncritical tyggerish enthusiasm, but people committed to exploration and change, seeking maturity, not comfort. We must seek steady growth in understanding. We must try to live as citizens of God’s Kingdom, here and now.

Of course we won’t achieve that goal this side of heaven; but remember the words of our Lord: Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also. No one will recognise that we have treasure worth sharing, if they perceive our hearts to be shallow, or cold, or weak.

So don’t be afraid. Don’t be cynical. Don’t be a Nathaniel. After Jesus told him he saw him under the fig tree, Nathaniel – cynical as he was – cried out (I imagine, in awe-struck tones), ‘Rabbi! You are the Son of God! You are the King of Israel!’ And Jesus replied (in tomes I imagine as both amused and challenging), ‘You will see greater things than this….’ And so, if we open our eyes, will we.

Don’t be afraid. Don’t be depressed. Don’t retreat. But open yourself up to explore the things that matter; and you will find a lot of fellow travellers.

EPIPHANY IV – 2007 – 1 Corinthians 13
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Frederick the Great’s father, Frederick William of Prussia, was ‘at least half mad’. He suffered from various diseases, and from the lack of restraint which accompanies absolute power.

One day, as he walked through the streets of Postsdam, he saw a man running away. The king ordered him to stop, and demanded to know why he was running away. The man said he was afraid. Not surprising, given Frederick’s ferocious reputation. ‘Afraid?’ shrieked the king. ‘Afraid? But you’re supposed to love me!’ Lifting his cane, he rained blow after blow upon the hapless subject, screaming, ‘Love me, scum! Love me! Love me!’

I don’t think this is quite what Paul had in mind when he commended love to the Corinthians! Yet the story highlights a real difficulty we face today, as we seek to proclaim the Good News.

We read in our Bibles that ‘God is love’. We believe – as John Wesley put it – that Love is both God’s nature and his name. We understand Jesus’ birth, and also his death, as Good News, because, in these events, we see that God – the timeless creator of all that has been, is now, or ever shall be – this infinite, timeless God actually loves us, mere mortals that we are.

We read the Gospel accounts of Jesus’ ministry on earth. We hear his teaching (as old as Judaism) that we should love God with all our heart and mind and soul and strength, and our neighbours as ourselves. This, we accept, is the way to find our true selves, to become what God hopes we will be. So we give our allegiance to Jesus, ‘whose service is perfect freedom’. We enter what Paul called ‘the glorious liberty of the children of God.’

It goes without saying that we want to pass our faith on to our children. We want them to share the freedom, the joy and sense of purpose, which we experience as members of Christ’s Body, the Church. We want to teach them about the love of God. But what is the best way to do this?

I have just been reading about how Christianity was taught to children in the past. Much of that teaching was – frankly – horrific, both in content and in method. St Augustine saw all humanity as totally depraved. Children were thus not innocent. They just weren’t strong enough yet to commit actual sins. John Wesley’s mother, Susannah, started beating her children from the age of eight months, ‘to break their spirit’. She also taught them, from an early age, to cry quietly!

I know times change, and with them, people’s expectations of what is ‘proper’ or ‘normal’. But, if God’s very nature, as well as his name, is Love – if Christianity is really about entering into freedom and joy, both here and hereafter – then I’m not surprised that centuries of teaching the Gospel in ways that completely contradict its goodness have produced mistrust of the institutional Church. And people do mistrust the Church in modern Britain.

Things are, perhaps, slightly better than they were when I was ordained. Back in the 1970s, lots of middleaged people had been taught Christianity with the rod – at least as a threat. Quite understandably, they felt rebellious. Today, most middle-aged people have not been taught the faith at all. Their rebellion is less intense, because it’s less personal. Nevertheless, centuries of religious bullying have left a residue of suspicion against religious authority. People who value their freedom tend to give the Church a wide berth.

What is a child, anyway? A miniature adult? A potential adult? Or another kind of being altogether – one with the potential to become an adult, but only through proper training and formation?

Christian history contains a range of answers to these questions. St Augustine believed children inherited Adam’s guilt physically. That was why they were utterly depraved. Western Christianity usually followed Augustine’s lead, seeing children as rebellious, sinful, selfish – needing restraint as much as education. Hence the terrible emphasis on ‘breaking the child’s will.’

Just because past Christians believed something sincerely doesn’t mean they got it right – any more than we get everything right. Yet there has always been an urge to ‘get it right’. People often assumed that, if they didn’t get it right, they’d be turned away at the Last Judgement – denied entry to Heaven, and possibly sent to Hell. Fear gave urgency to the wish to teach children the ‘true’ faith (however understood) – using whatever methods were deemed necessary. Better that children should suffer now, than perish everlastingly!

I myself have come to believe that this approach to teaching is deeply heretical – as well as repulsive! It is heretical, because it denies the generosity of God (about which the Bible is so consistently eloquent). It also assumes, quite arrogantly, that human beings can understand eternal truth well enough to condemn those who doubt our own attempts to formulate it.

As if mere words could ever express the infinite love and mercy of God!

Words are far more fragile, far more imprecise, than we think. Yes, they are useful. Without words, we could not communicate much that forms the fabric of our daily life. But, as both artists and scientists tell us in their different ways, it can be well nigh impossible to find words that express – acurately and unambigously – even the things we see and hear, let alone the deeper things.

Trying to teach Christianity to children, or anyone else, merely by insisting on understanding particular words exactly as we do is (I believe) impossible. It’s also counter-productive.

Yes, there’s a heritage we want to pass on. But look at the Gospels! They contain stories, not propositions! God’s grace is not denied to those who don’t know the ‘correct’ formulas, or think ‘correct’ thoughts. That’s what the scribes and Pharisees demanded – and what Jesus rejected.

In the Gospels, God’s grace is poured out lavishly on all – as Jesus himself says, ‘on the righteous and the unrighteous’. That out-pouring is itself an invitation – not a command – to respond. Those who don’t respond are not punished, even though they ‘lose out’ on something big. Nowhere is there any hint that God, acts like Frederick William of Prussia: ‘Love me, scum! Love me! Love me!’ Whack! Whack! Whack!

The only way to change anyone is by loving them. You can never change someone’s mind, or their heart, or their loyalty, by hitting them. They may come to obey you out of fear; but obedience based on fear has no spiritual value, even if leads to apparently faultless behaviour.

God loves us. He hopes, not that we will be obedient slaves, but that we will learn to love as he does, without reference to merit, without any counting of the cost.

But God knows that love like his can never be commanded. It can only be freely given. Effective Christian education must therefore be based on love. I won’t say that children never need retraint. Those who want to hurt others need to be stopped. But the idea that a child’s will must be broken – that sin must be controlled by an obedience based on fear – this I firmly reject. I imagine most of you do, too.

But I don’t think the Church, as an institution, has quite rejected it – yet. Until we do so, firmly and unambiguously, we will find it hard to proclaim, as Good News, a God whose nature, as well as whose name, is Love.

CHRISTMAS I – 2006
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‘They found him in the temple, sitting among the teachers, listening to them and asking them questions....’ [Luke 2.46]

This picture of Jesus is attractive. It’s also ambiguous. Is Jesus being taught, or is he teaching the teachers? The answer must surely be – both. There’s a dialogue going on.

But who is this twelve-year-old Jesus? If he’s God, does he need to learn anything? The well-known carol seems to suggest he doesn’t: ‘Veiled in flesh the Godhead see’. Yet it doesn’t really work to see Jesus as a human ‘shell’ inhabited by the Ancient of Days.

When John, in the Prologue to his Gospel, says ‘the Word became flesh’, he is not implying an uneasy partnership between flesh and spirit, flesh and mind. The word John uses is ςὰρξ, which does mean ‘flesh’ more or less in our sense. By using that word, John was saying something very radical: that God – who is utterly ‘other’ – is somehow ‘here’ and ‘now’ in a very specific way. God wasn’t just with Jesus. He became Jesus.

Christians started to wrestle with this apparent conundrum. There were no clear answers. It was all simple enough if Jesus was an ordinary human being, or if he was God ‘in disguise’. But – how could he be both? How could eternity and temporality be united? It was like trying to say that something is both hot and cold, both here and there.

The debate generated a lot of heat, and drew in all kinds of people, including some of the best minds of the classical world. There might never have been any consensus if the Emperor Constantine hadn’t converted to Christianity in 312 – because he thought the Christian God gave him victory in the battle.

Constantine was amazed to discover how little Christian consensus there was. He wanted to know what to believe, and, whatever it was, he wanted everybody else to believe it, too – for the good of the body politic. (That’s Roman pragmatism for you!) Constantine summoned the bishops, and told them to agree.

The first try was a disaster. They were never going to agree! Constantine dissolved the council, and reconvened it at Nicaea, where he could chair it himself.

That council of 325 – the first great Ecumenical Council – finally produced the creed which we still say today (more or less). The bishops re-affirmed John’s statement that, in Jesus, God became man. But the word they used wasn’t ςὰρξ (flesh). It was ανθρὼπος (human being).

The English word ‘man’ is traditionally used both for ‘human being’ and ‘male human being’, but many languages have two words. German has Mensch for ‘human being’, and Mann for ‘male’. Latin has HOMO and VIR (from which we get ‘virility’). Greek has ανθρὼπος for ‘human being’, and ανὴρ for ‘male’. The Nicene Creed uses ανθρὼπος. What’s important is not that God became male in Jesus, but that he became human.

The mystery of the incarnation is not simple. A baby in a manger, yes; but when you start to explore the meaning of what happened, you’re very soon in deep water. One way to stay afloat is to engage in dialogue – with Christians and non-Christians, past and present.

Why does Luke include this vignette of the twelve-year-old Jesus in the Temple? (It’s always useful to ask why any of the Gospel writers includes anything, when so much of the story is left out.) I think Luke, by showing us Jesus in dialogue with others even from childhood, is commending dialogue as an excellent way to deepen our understanding.

What role does dialogue play in modern Christian life? I’m afraid answer is, ‘Not nearly enough!’ We’re familiar with confrontation. We see plenty of rivalry – between different ways of organising the church, different ways of studying scripture, and different moral conclusions, everyone insisting that they alone are right. But dialogue?

There is some dialogue at an academic level, but academics often live in water-tight compartments. There is less dialogue at the grass roots. We might join an ecumenical discussion group in Lent, or attend some conference or other; but such activities are largely self-selecting. We don’t like putting ourselves in the way of disagreement. We know, by experience, how unpleasant it can be!

But there’s no hint of unpleasantness in Luke’s account of Jesus’ dialogue with the teachers. They were ‘amazed at his understanding’ [Luke 2.47], but there is no suggestion that bitterness, or rivalry, or jealousy, made the dialogue difficult. Those factors would all complicate Jesus’ ministry later on; but here, we see nothing but mutual learning.

How can we use this model? How can we deepen our own faith through dialogue – without bitterness, or rivalry, or jealousy?

Let me make some suggestions. First, allow your curiosity real scope. Don’t be over-awed by the weight of learning accumulated over two thousand years. The Christian dialogue is far from over! It may look like the easy path to think that everything has already been worked out, and all we have to do is join the club; but that approach does little for our own faith. If our faith is going to make any difference, we’ve got to explore it. We’ve got to ask questions.

Next, be courageous. You’re probably not an expert in patristic philosophy or Greek irregular verbs, but you’re not stupid. Nobody’s going to think you’re stupid if you ask questions courageously! And remember: experts in Greek verbs may lack wisdom when it comes to understanding the larger picture. The most encyclopaedic knowledge is useless if you don’t seek for meaning.

What questions should we ask? Well, the basic ones. Adults often don’t ask them out loud; but children do! (Jesus, aged twelve, was there in the Temple out of sheer irrepressible curiosity.) “Where do we come from?” “What happens when we die?” “Why are we here?” “What’s it all for?” There are no easy, cutand- dried answers to these existential questions; but if we stop asking them, we somehow become less than human.

So – curiosity and courage are both required for dialogue. There’s one more essential thing: courtesy. Listen respectfully to others, as you would wish them to hear you with respect. Remember that agreement is not where we start from; and it’s not compulsory to end there, either! What is compulsory is courtesy, without which any dialogue becomes impossible.

I believe passionately that dialogue, in even modest amounts, can deepen our faith and understanding. I also think it attracts others. There are lots of people out there, hungry for this kind of conversation. Dialogue should be a real hallmark of the Church. It’s something we could do so easily – but so often, we don’t! But look at Jesus in the Temple – curious, courageous and courteous – both teaching and learning through genuine dialogue.

Let us pray for grace to follow his example. Amen.