4^th Sunday after Trinity

St Mary’s Barnes, 8 am

Luke 10.25-37

If you had to sum up the essence of religion in two sentences, I wonder what you would say? We know what Jesus said: love God with all that you are and love your neighbour as yourself. Both these directives appear in the Old Testament (Deuteronomy 6.5 and Leviticus 19.18) but separately. The New Testament is the earliest  evidence we have of them being linked. It may have been Jesus who first put the two together, or rabbis in his time, as reflected in today’s gospel, where Jesus affirms the answer of the religious teacher who was questioning him.

In any case there we have the essence of the matter, as we are reminded at the beginning of the 8 am service every Sunday. We are to love God with every fibre of our being, with heart and soul and strength and mind; and our neighbour as ourself.

Then the teacher asks: ‘ But who is my neighbour?’ and in reply Jesus  gives one of the most famous stories in history, the parable of the good Samaritan. The  crucial point to note is that Jesus does not answer the question. Instead  he asks a different question. The first question was the wrong one. It implied that that you could draw a line  and say this group of people, say, fellow Israelites were neighbours, and others, say gentiles were not. You had obligations to some but not others. So Jesus asked a different question: Who acted as a neighbour? Instead of being an interesting theoretical question it becomes an existential one, a summons to personal responsibility. Am I acting as a neighbour to those who have a claim on my attention?

We are to love that person as ourselves. If we were in that situation how would I want to be treated. We put ourselves in their shoes. So we have the golden rule, common to a number of religions and religious texts and also found in the teaching of Jesus: treat others as you would want them to treat you. (Mathew 7. 12 and Luke 6. 31)

The modern world likes to affirm the second directive about loving our neighbour   and set aside the first about loving God. And the New Testament is indeed clear that we cannot love God if we don’t love our neighbour. But the two are closely linked in a way the world does not like to recognise. First any attempt to love God with all that we are carries with it the need to love our neighbour as a daily bench mark. Secondly, it can bring home to us how we might be failing in this regard and thirdly it can motivate and strengthen us to do better. We often fail as Christians but we know we need to fail again and fail better, to echo Samuel Beckett. And in this process God is with us all the way.  

Sunday after Ascension

St Mary’s. 10 am

As you came to church this morning you probably heard our bells ringing. Bells have been rung in churches for some 1500 years and we are fortunate at St Mary’s in having a very fine set of  eight, one of them that dates from the time of Queen Elizabeth 1^st. Bells ring to summon people to church, to toll a death or funeral and to celebrate some great occasion. The most famous lines on bells come from Tennyson’s poem In Memoriam with its theme ‘Ring out the old, ring in the new’. Each verse begins with an old evil we want to get rid of and the new we want to ring in

Ring out the grief that saps the mind
   For those that here we see no more;

Ring out the want, the care, the sin,
   The faithless coldness of the times;

Ring out false pride in place and blood,
   The civic slander and the spite;
   Ring in the love of truth and right,
Ring in the common love of good.

Ring in the valiant man and free,
   The larger heart, the kindlier hand;
   Ring out the darkness of the land,
Ring in the Christ that is to be.

‘Ring out the old, ring in the new’. The word ‘New’ resonates for Christians. We talk about a new covenant, a new binding agreement between God and humanity. We refer to the second part of the bible as the New Testament. In the Eucharist we will hear the words of Jesus at the Last Supper. ‘This is my blood of the New Covenant.’ All this is thought of as a new creation. So when the bells ring it is to celebrate this newness. Not just the spring time of the year but the spring time of the spirit. Bells call us to lift up our hearts in delight.

Today’s Gospel takes us to the heart of what is new and why we should delight in it. In the passage we heard Jesus is praying. What is interesting first of all is that he prays not just for his immediate followers but for us centuries later. As he says:

I ask not only on behalf of these but also on behalf of those who believe in me through their word, ²¹ that they may all be one. As you, Father, are in me and I am in you, may they also be in us.

What a remarkable idea-the mutual indwelling of God and humanity. God living in us and we living in God. ‘As you, Father, are in me and I am in you, may ‘When we look at the sky and reflect on the outer edges of space expanding faster than the speed of light the mind boggles to think of the creator of all this. The human mind cannot get round the immensity of it all. But God as Augustine said, is closer to us than our own heart beat, our own breathing. The universal intimacy of God, that is the new thing.

Fish dwell in the ocean, birds soar in the sky, we live  and breathe in air. So it is with us and God.  He is our spiritual environment, our   milieu, our natural medium. Not apart from the material, physical world for God meets us in and through all things. We dwell in God.

And God dwells in us. Deeper than our churning thoughts, deeper than our deepest desires and fears, there is a still pool, a pool of stillness. There God waits for us as we wait on him. As the psalmist says.  Truly my Soul waits still   on you O God.

Dwelling in the God who dwells in us. Why do we dare to make this astounding claim? Because this was the heart of Jesus’s life, one which we said he wanted to impart to us. He lived out his life as one in whom God his Father dwelt, and in whom he dwelt and he wanted to reproduce this in us. He said this would bring about a profound unity which the world would see. This unity is not first of all at the horizontal level, though it is reflected there. It is the unity we share as a result of God dwelling in us and we in him. As Jesus in the Gospel went on to say

The glory that you have given me I have given them, so that they may be one, as we are one, ²³ I in them and you in me, that they may become completely one, so that the world may know that you have sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me. 

This is the new thing: the intimate relationship of God and humanity in Christ, which we are invited to reproduce and replicate in ourselves. This how Julian of Norwich put it in the 14^th century

We ought to rejoice greatly that God dwells in our soul, and we ought to rejoice much more greatly that our soul dwells in God. Our soul is made to be God’s dwelling place, and the dwelling place of the soul is God, who is not made. And it is an exalted understanding to see and to know inwardly that God, who is our maker, dwells in our soul; and it is a more exalted understanding to see and to know that our soul, which is made, dwells in God’s substance; and through this substance-God-we are what we are. (Revelations of Divine Love, ch. 54; p.120)

So God is not just an incomprehensible  immensity but an intimacy. This is an intimacy, that encourages us to  bring before God what is on our heart and mind, what matters to us, what we might not share with anyone else. This is not an indulgence and is not for therapy, though there well may be a healing effect. It is simply being open to the ground of our being and the goal of our longing that his good purpose might be set free to work in us and through us.

So it is that at the Eucharist in what is traditionally called ‘The prayer of humble access’ before receiving Holy Communion we pray that we may so receive the body and blood of Christ ‘that we may ever dwell in him and he in us.’ What could be simpler and what more profound.

Church Service in connection with Barbara Pym

St Gabriel’s, Pimlico, Thursday 1^st May 2025

In Crampton Hodnet Miss Doggett and Miss Morrow are waiting to go out.

‘Have you got my smelling salts’ Miss Doggett asked. ‘Give them to me. I may need them.’

‘Here you are, said Miss Morrow’. ‘Would it perhaps be better if  I didn’t come?’

‘Of course you must come’, said Miss Doggett sharply. ‘Your being there will make no difference one way or the other.’

Miss Morrow walked meekly along by Miss Doggett’s side, a comforting neutral thing without form or sex. There was something so restful in being somebody whose presence made no different one way or the other.[1]

In this vignette we meet a familiar theme richly and various displayed in the novels. A women who allows herself to be pushed around, used by others, treated as a doormat. Sometimes they are indeed ‘Excellent Women’ but one of the reasons that they are so excellent is their willingness to do jobs men are reluctant to undertake themselves. The handsome Rocky Napier, for example, in Excellent Woman  takes it for granted that his neighbour  Mildred Lathbury will arrange for his furniture to be packed and moved to his new home. And she goes along with this and a great deal more besides.

The indignation that initial readers of her novels will have felt at this treatment, is even more marked in our time. We want people to believe in themselves and assert their personality. We regard low self esteem as unhealthy. We want the diffident to be more defiant, the self-effacing to be more assertive.

However, integrally linked to those women who allow themselves to be used, or treated as nothing, is their observant eye. They see what is going on. They notice the absurd struggles for position or status or superiority. They see it, expose it for what it is, and get us to laugh at it.

Hazel Holt wrote of Barbara Pym that

She had always had a strong personal faith and going to church had been a regular and natural part of her life at school and Oswestry..St Oswald’s in  Oswestry  had been fairly High Church  but St Gabriel’s was definitely ‘spikier’ and Barbara found increased pleasure  in the increased ritual and all that that implied..(it)..provided richness indeed  to someone with an observant ironical eye.’[2] 

So we can imagine her here in the late 1940’s looking around with that observant ironical eye and now, with eye purified and heart  enlarged  by the Eternal  Compassion perhaps enjoying this occasion with us even more.

Irony relies on a  contrast between how things seem and how they are in reality. Those who assume they are somehow superior to others because of class or education or some other reason are shown up in all their absurdity. True values are seen to lie elsewhere often present in thy shy, the unnoticed, those who don’t count.

Irony is fundamental to the Christian Gospel. Perhaps the most striking example is the mocking of Christ before his trial. He is dressed in a robe and mocked as a false king. But the story is written up by people who know he is King, not just of a country but the universe.

 Then classically we have the words of St Paul:

 Where is the wise? where is the scribe? where is the disputer of this world? hath not God made foolish the wisdom of this world?

 Because the foolishness of God is wiser than men; and the weakness of God is stronger than men.

Paul then makes the same point in relation to the church at Corinth-no doubt a small world, much like the congregations  described in Barbara Pym’s novels:

 For ye see your calling, brethren, how that not many wise men after the flesh, not many mighty, not many noble, are called:

 But God hath chosen the foolish things of the world to confound the wise; and God hath chosen the weak things of the world to confound the things which are mighty;

But if this alternative stance on the world, this ironical eye is not to be just another way of asserting superiority over others then the  eye must itself be without illusion. It must be self aware about the authorial voice and not set it on a commanding pedestal.  Paul had this  self  awareness. He wrote ‘I came to you without any pretension to eloquence or wisdom in declaring the truth about God…I came before you in weakness, in fear in great trepidation’. He also had a disability of some kind.

But this this recognition  of himself as how others saw him-someone who was no great shakes either in person or as an orator-  was liberating. It was liberating because it was a humility rooted in a deeper sense that he was valued, that he mattered. It reflected  a profound  confidence in his own being and his message .

‘There was something so restful in being somebody whose presence made no different one way or the other.’ Said Miss Morrow to herself

As my opening dialogue indicated there is an extraordinary liberation in Barbara Pym’s women when they accept that in the eyes of the world they are a nobody, a nothing. It frees them from the attempts they see all around them of people trying to dominate, control or put others down and it frees them to observe with ironic eyes those attempts to do just that. And if they don’t  quite have the confidence of St Paul they have their moments.

In Some Tame Gazelle there is a wedding at which  Belinda is offered champagne and when she says she is not really used to drinking it Agatha says in her usual crushing way ‘Aren’t you?’ and this made Belinda  contrast the confident Agatha with her own diffident self. She reflects to herself

Poised and well dressed, used to drinking champagne, the daughter of a bishop and the wife of an archdeacon-that was Agatha Hoccleve. It was Belinda Bede who was the pathetic one and it was so much easier to bear the burden of ones own pathos than that of somebody else. Indeed perhaps the very recognition of it in oneself  meant that it didn’t really exist.  Belinda took a rather large sip of champagne and looked round the hall with renewed courage’ [3]

‘The very recognition of it, herself as a pathetic one, in the eyes of others ‘meant that it didn’t really exist’. To live without pretensions and delusions of grandeur, in humility as oneself, she finds enormously liberating.

So today we give thanks for the novels of Barbara Pym, for her observant ironic eye showing up the absurdities of our lives, the foibles and incongruities; for revealing the  illusions and hinting at the reality We give thanks for the irony which reflects in its human way the Divine Irony whose foolishness if wiser than human cleverness and whose weakness is stronger human domination.

Richard Harries

[1] Barbara Pym, Crampton Hodnet, Grafton, 1986, p.159/60

[2] Hazel Holt, A Lot to Ask: a life of Barbara Pym, Sphere 1990, p.150/1

[3] Some Tame Gazelle, Granada, 1981,p.249

Fourth Sunday before Lent

St Mary’s, Barnes, 10 am

1 Corinthians 15.1-11: Luke 5.1-11

It is very understandable if you are  feeling somewhat disillusioned by the Church of England at the moment. The resignation of the Archbishop of Canterbury and pressure on the Archbishop of York to do so, for safeguarding failures, plus the resignation of the Bishop of Liverpool has badly damaged us. So too has the continuing split in the church over gay relationships. So perhaps the first thing to be said is that from the first the church has been a flawed institution. You have only to read the letters in the New Testament to see that it too was a church which had its quarrels, wrong doers and failures. The point is that the church, made up of human beings, is flawed and our claim is not that we are perfect, or necessarily  better than others, but that despite our frailty and flaws we are held in the love of God. Whatever our faults Christ holds us to himself and will continue to do so, in this life and beyond. But as Paul says we have this treasure in earthen vessels.

Then there is an even more serious reason for concern than current failures in the leadership and that is the kind of society in which we are living. It is a society in which most people have no time for the church and in which the majority of young people say they have no religion. We are a minority in a society which is indifferent or hostile to the Christian faith. So where, as we prepare to receive a new Rector can we take some encouragement?

First, as some distinguished historians have pointed out in recent years, Larry Siedentop and Tom Holland for example, what we most cherish about Western civilisation is due to the Christian faith. At the heart of our society still is the principle that every individual matters and is of equal value and worth. That did not just come out of the blue. It is the historical legacy of the New Testament built into our laws and institutions. From the first this conviction was expressed in looking after the weak, sick and poor. When in the fourth century the pagan Julian became emperor and tried to turn the empire back to paganism he admitted he had nothing to offer that compared with the care which the church offered to widows, orphans and the sick. It is that concern for the vulnerable that lead Christians over the centuries to found hospitals and in recent years to pioneer good palliative care.

Our concern for the individual in our society is a result of the Christian witness that in the eyes of God we are all of equal value and worth. This poses a question to our society. If it abandons the foundation of our values, if we cut their roos,  what is it going to put in its place?

Secondly we can take heart from the heroic witness of Christians down the ages, and indeed in other parts of the church today. Almost every day in the church calendar we remember some saint or martyr. Last week for example we remember Anskar, the 9^th century missionary to Denmark and Sweden, Gilbert the founder of the only English religious order in the 12^th century and the martyrs of Japan in the 16^th. As a result of the mission of St Francis Xavier at that time there were several thousand baptised Christians but the political rulers turned against them and 26 men and women were mutilated then crucified near Nagasaki. It was this kind of heroism that enabled the Christian faith to capture the heart and mind of the Roman world in the first three centuries. Entirely peacefully, without any positions of power, despite successive fierce persecutions, the church made its way until in 312 the Emperor Constantine himself was converted. These are not just examples to us of those who lived and died for their faith, they live with us in the Communion of Saints, the mystical body of Christ that unites heaven and earth.

Thirdly and above all we can take strength and joy in our wonderful  Christian faith that we share. There was a time when people took it for granted, it was just part of the culture. Now this is no longer the case we can see more clearly what an amazing, glorious thing it is that we believe. When T. S. Eliot was converted to the Christianity in 1927  he welcomed the new hostile situation in which Christians now found themselves, for he thought  it released the Christian faith from what had burdened it since the 18^th century, namely being a badge of respectability for the English middle classes. We can now prize and exult in Christian truth  for its own glorious sake. We can stand and say the creed with all the exaltation of a national anthem before a rugby match.

This life is not a tale of sound and fury signifying nothing. There is a meaning and purpose behind it, which we can discover.  There is a wise and good purpose at the heart of the universe. This wise and good purpose has been made known to us in the people of the Hebrew scriptures culminating in the person of Jesus, crucified, risen, glorified and present through his Spirit in our hearts.

 Today’s first reading is one of the most important in the whole New Testament. In it Paul says ‘I passed on to you what was passed on to me’ These are technical words for passing on a tradition, and what this indicates is that we have here a message that goes back to the very first days of the church. As he wrote:

For I handed on to you as of first importance what I in turn had received: that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures ⁴ and that he was buried and that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the scriptures ⁵ and that he appeared to Cephas, then to the twelve. ⁶ Then he appeared to more than five hundred brothers and sisters at one time, most of whom are still alive, though some have died.^[b] 7 Then he appeared to James, then to all the apostles. ⁸ Last of all, as to one untimely born, he appeared also to me. ⁹ For I am the least of the apostles, unfit to be called an apostle, because I persecuted the church of God. ¹⁰ But by the grace of God I am what I am, and his grace toward me has not been in vain.

Every day the news shock us with some terrible story, another knife killing, another massacre, another accident. It is into this world of strife and sorrow that God comes in the person of Jesus, and in him crucified, risen, glorified   the  back of evil has been  broken, the sting of death overcome  and life opened out to eternity.

The treasure we have is a staggering, mind blowing truth,  an amazing story to tell, one whose overriding importance can and ought to shock us into seeing everything differently. It is indeed good news in a suffering world. We have the treasure in earthen vessels, ourselves, but we have treasure.

At the moment wider society does not want listen. We are like Peter in today’s Gospel who when told to put out into the deep replied that they had been out fishing all night and caught nothing. But then he did do what Jesus asked and found his nets overflowing with a large catch. One of the reasons that the church remembered that story is that it is not just about fishing but about the mission of the church. We can feel we have got nowhere, made no impact. But still we are urged to put out into the deep again, into the deep of God. And who knows, God in his own good time or out of time may once again fill the church with his people. Our vocation is to remain faithful whether the times are propitious or unpropitious. Our time is a difficult one, the culture is unsympathetic but this should all the more should drive us back to cherish the amazing glorious truth that has touched us. At the heart of the universe is a wise and loving power who in Christ has come close to us and who now stirs in our hearts. His grace is daily available to help us grow in love for him and one another and in this way prepare us for the bliss of an eternal life that surpasses anything we can imagine.

St Mary’s, Barnes, 8 am

Today’s gospel for the Feast of the Presentation of Christ in the Temple is one of the loveliest in the New Testament. In accordance with Jewish custom Mary and Joseph bring Jesus to the temple in Jerusalem. Waiting there is devout Simeon who recognises Jesus to be the longed for Messiah who will bring in God’s new age. Simeon now feels  ready to depart this life and utters what we call the Nunc Dimittis, which is said at evening prayer every day. ‘Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace for my eyes have seen thy salvation.’ You may also know that T. S. Eliot wrote a moving poem on this story, ‘A song for Simeon’.

But there is another character in the scene who has been less noticed. Anna, described as a person who had been married for 7 years and then lived as a widow until she was 84. She too recognised in Jesus the one they had been longing for.

As Christians we are in some was in a similar position to Simeon and Anna. Like them we too are longing for God’s new age. As day by day we learn of yet more human suffering we pray more ardently  ‘Your kingdom come, your will be done on earth as in heaven.’ Yet at the same time like Simon and Anna we believe that in some deep and irreversible sense God’s Kingdom has already come in Christ. In Christ crucified, risen, glorified and present in our hearts through the Holy Spirit, God already reigns, his rule has begun. So while we continue to long and pray for a different, better world, we can know within ourselves and in our own lives, the present reality of that kingdom.

For most of us this will not be in anything dramatic, just present in the ordinary little things of life. To live conscious of God in and through all thing, to bring our daily duties, burdens and pleasures into that presence, is from time to time to know there is something we should do, and in doing of it we find a special peace. As in stillness we rest in God, wait on God and look to God we may find ourselves prompted or led in some particular way. To respond is to find blessing, and in that blessing Chrit’s kingdom has indeed come in us and will one day transfigure the world.