Taking the Christ out of Christmas?

Is that how you find it? I've been getting a bit impatient with the complaining emails that have been coming my way the past few weeks, and yesterday seemed to be the last straw.

It began then with Harry Foster and Stewart Blake from Wideopen sharing this poem with me and an awful lot of people in their address books.

Twas the month before Christmas
When all through our land,
Not a Christian was praying
Nor taking a stand.
See the PC Police had taken away
The reason for Christmas - no one could say.
The children were told by their schools not to sing
About Shepherds and Wise Men and Angels and things.
It might hurt people's feelings, the teachers would say
December 25th is just a ' Holiday '.
Yet the shoppers were ready with cash, checks and credit
Pushing folks down to the floor just to get it!
CDs from Madonna, an X BOX, an I-Pod
Something was changing, something quite odd!
Retailers promoted Ramadan and Kwanzaa
In hopes to sell books by Franken & Fonda.
As Targets were hanging their trees upside down
At Lowe's the word Christmas - was no where to be found.
At K-Mart and Staples and Penny's and Sears
You won't hear the word Christmas; it won't touch your ears.
Inclusive, sensitive, Di-ver-si-ty
Are words that were used to intimidate me.
Now Daschle, Now Darden, Now Sharpton, Wolf Blitzen
On Boxer, on Rather, on Kerry, on Clinton !
At the top of the Senate, there arose such a clatter
To eliminate Jesus, in all public matter.
And we spoke not a word, as they took away our faith
Forbidden to speak of salvation and grace
The true Gift of Christmas was exchanged and discarded
The reason for the season, stopped before it started.
So as you celebrate 'Winter Break' under your 'Dream Tree'
Sipping your Starbucks, listen to me.
Choose your words carefully, choose what you say
Shout MERRY CHRISTMAS ,
not Happy Holiday !
Please, all Christians join together and
wish everyone you meet
MERRY CHRISTMAS
Christ is The Reason' for the Christ-mas Season!

If you agree please forward, if not, simply delete

Sorry - I should have just followed the instructions of the last line. Instead, I rashly pressed "Reply to all" and sent the following message: -

The line "At K-Mart and Staples and Penny's and Sears gives the game away really doesn’t it?"

We are being bombarded with emails about a perceived problem the other side of the Atlantic – probably from a rather insecure wing of the Church.

I’ve not met anyone who’s wished me a happy holiday rather than merry Christmas!My grandson seems to have been having a busy time with the (state) school nativity play.When my church made an effort recently to get local schools in to share the Christmas story with them (in an imaginative way – see http://christmasjourney.org.uk/ ) they nearly all responded positively.

I’m afraid the people who succumb to these email viruses (and it’s not the first I’ve received: hence my growing impatience) are living in a different world from mine.I am not perceiving the injustices and marginalisation that they appear to be suffering - or is it even enjoying?

Is it too harsh to suggest that they get a life?

John

PS Apologies too for hitting Reply All. Following email etiquette and using bcc really would be better

.

My colleague Philip Gray from Wideopen and Ponteland didn't quite agree, and sent the following thoughts earlier this morning: -

Hi John

Having just enjoyed the winter festival play at the local school, that I can publicly abuse the name of God but not allah, that a bible can be torn up in the name of art, but not a koran. Hmmm I might at least have an idea where our cousins are coming from.

There again I might forget that because of our national foolishness the red cross ban christmas displays so as not to upset anyone, and councils are banning overtly Christmas light displays.

Perhaps we could start a discussion of how people feel about this issue?

Philip

So there we are. The discussion is started. What do you think??

"Los 33"

From an illustrated sermon preached on Advent Sunday 2010 by Ray Anglesea at Denewell Avenue United Reformed Church, Gateshead.

It is probably the most famous sentence in the world this year. Six words and one number have been replicated on T-shirts, flags and mugs, texted and e-mailed around the world. It has been presented to presidents, prime ministers and even the Queen. It was the sentence written on a scrap of paper, put in a plastic bag and attached to a drill that – 17 days after they went missing –– reached the miners trapped half a mile beneath northern Chile’s Atacama desert. “Estamos bien en el refugio los 33” it read. We are well in the refuge – the 33.” So wrote Jose Ricardo Ojeda Vidal, the miner who scribbled the message in big red letters, the tidings that brought great joy to Chile. One Chilean television commentator compared the message to the first words in the Bible – “it is a beautiful, perfect sentence,” he said.

The rescue of the 33 Chilean miners is an irresistible subject for an Advent preacher. Being drawn up steadily through a long tube from the depths of the earth....... from the dark and the heat, the hunger and isolation....... into the light...... the freedom and the relief...... and the embraces of loving families and friends...... and the frenzy of excited news teams.......... are a simple illustration of what we mean by salvation. The Chilean miners were carried from what looked like hell to a condition as near to heaven as can be seen on earth. They were saved by the exercise of wisdom, that is, the skill of the technicians, the patience of the drillers and compassion of the medical workers. They were saved by grace alone. They were hardly able to do anything for themselves except endure long enough for the rescuing probe to break through to them. They were sustained in their entombment by faith and hope, by the practice of their religion, by their reciting of morning and evening prayer with the 33 bibles that would later reach them in their chamber-like dungeons, and the unbroken resilience of their own souls. Whether they will have stories to tell that are of interest, we shall no doubt see as their memories of the ordeal are pumped by the press. The first of several books – Under the Earth: The 33 Miners that Moved the World – is about to be published. The first television re-enactment will be broadcast in December. It was recently revealed that Brad Pitt’s Hollywood company is currently in talks to buy the film rights to the story. The smooth transition from miner to global superstar may soon be realised.

(Talking about smooth transitions and miners, superstars ands as an aside, it was surprising to discover that the future Queen of England, Prince William’s fiancé, Katherine’s great grandfather was a Geordie miner working in the pits in Hetton le Hole, mines owned by the Queen Mother’s family. From Pit to Palace: what an astonishing journey for the Middleton family!)

The end of the Chilean news-story is palatable and neat, yet the near tragedy in Chile and the tragic loss of New Zealand miners is food for more sober Advent thoughts. Like the Chilean miners we wait in silence in the subterranean vaults and entombment of our lives for the liberating light of Christ to bring us salvation, to bring us hope, to bring us truth, to bring us joy in believing, to make us human. The Christian story of Christ’s freeing and emancipating activity is foretold, I would like to think, in big red letters by our ancestral fathers and mothers of the faith, the advent prophets, the patriarchs and matriarchs and those elusive and enigmatic angels. The long expected Christ child will bring hope, justice and peace – our first Advent candle was blessed this morning as a symbol of hope. What that hope must feel like is something akin to what the Burmese people must be feeling and experiencing right now with the release of the heroic Nobel Peace laureate, Aung San Suu Kyi, surely a beacon of hope, a source of inspiration, a liberating saviour?

The 1st Sunday in Advent is the beginning of the church year, the coming liturgical journey that explores through Matthew’s gospel the surprising ancient story and meaning of salvation. Advent has the longest night of the year and the darkest days: Advent with its traditional heavy, sombre themes of death, judgement, heaven and hell is about the coming of that light, the coming of the Lord to his people, the coming of a loved one with all the joy and excitement that that coming brings. But while we wait for that light in the middle of the darkest night of the year we wait in stillness; a time to discover God’s presence in darkness. As my favourite Welsh poet, the priest R S Thomas said in one of his poems entitled “Kneeling” I read earlier this morning – “the meaning is in the waiting.” To wait patiently and positively like some of the Biblical characters who had to wait upon God is something alien to our culture of immediacy. But waiting is an essential part of our journey with God. Waiting is often vital for the proper unfolding of God’s plan for our lives. Advent is that time of the year when we can wait, often in darkness. It is a time of quiet reflection, a time of stillness, a time to stay awake, to watch and wait for that free gift, for a new experience of God’s grace, for that light of Christ.

There is a story told of a man who bought a special gift for his wife. It was a musical box that played a tune when you opened it, but it was different because it also glowed in the dark. It was meant to be seen when the days were dark and dull. As it was a present, he kept it the box hidden away and wrapped up. At last he produced it one dark evening and his wife unwrapped it with great excitement. They turned the light off, but then it could not be seen. It did not glow in the dark, and they were disappointed. Perhaps it was broken. They put the lights back on and discovered a label inside the box that said, “If you want me to shine all night, keep me in the sun all day.” There was nothing wrong with the box, and once they had left it in the sunlight, it glowed in the dark. In the same way if we are to be the lights in the world, we must spend each day absorbing the light of Christ.

So as we wait in the darkness of the season for that light to come, we notice the darkness of the world, the darkness of the church, as we open our hearts to that darkness. We remember in prayer the families of the Catholic victims indiscriminately slaughtered in the Church in Baghdad on All Saints Day, we remember the loss of military and civilian life in Afghanistan, the flood victims in Pakistan, the unemployed in our region. In the early morning darkness I light cathedral candles to remember those who are sick and who need God’s loving healing touch. As a Christian I feel more and more a stranger in my own land, in a dark and turbulent culture. Once it was considered that some of the greatest achievements and ambitions of human social history, such as the abolition of slavery and the provision of universal education or free health care had their origins in a religious Christian impulse. Ian Hislop salutes the visionary heroes of those who fixed broken Victorian Britain in a new BBC part television programme entitled “The age of the Do-Gooders.” Yet sadly this is not the image of “do-good” religion that many recognise in this past century or even this past decade. As Lord Blair of Boughton, the former Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police stated in the 2010 Theos annual lecture in central London last week, “Many secular voices now argue and think that all religions are a force of evil in today’s world.” We are, it would seem, part of a relentless undertow of what poet Matthew Arnold famously called the sea of faith’s “melancholy, long, withdrawing roar.” We in the church this Advent Sunday are strangers to our contemporaries, who neither understand nor care what Christian faith has to say to the world. We are indeed people in a strange land. We are exiles.

As well as the darkness in our world and in the church we notice the darkness in our own lives and personal struggles and wait as that Old Testament Hebrew prophet Malachi put it for “The son of man to come with healing in its wings,” I saw that quote in a beautiful stained glass window in St Oswin’s Church, Wylam last week when my colleague and I took a frosty river footpath walk up the Tyne valley. Yet we know that in the darkness, in all those places of darkness, God is still present, already present. From our stories, from tradition, from liturgy – that, as the psalmist says, “Even the darkness is not dark to you, for the night is as bright as the day, for darkness is as light to you.” Even at a close friend’s father’s humanist funeral last week which I attended I can’t believe the deceased was lovingly released into a darkness and nothingness, a place without God. And so in the darkness we wait for the coming of the Light of the world to again accompany us on our journey. He will bring his strength to our weakness, he will dispel our fears with his presence, he will open our closed-circuit mind, we will rest in his presence. God is ever with us.

In his diary for 1922 Shackleton writes of his Antarctic expedition: “When I look back on those days, with all their anxiety and peril, I cannot doubt that our party was divinely guided both over snowfield and across storm-swept sea......I know that during that long racking march of thirty-six hours over unnamed mountains and glaciers of Southern Georgia it seemed to me we were not three but four. I said nothing to my companions on the point but afterwards Worsley said to me, “Boss, I had a curious feeling in the march that there was another person with us.”

But there are wider implications of this heart-warming story of the Chilean miners. All this happened to poor people, in a horrible industry, typical of the labourers in so many parts of the globe who carry out in awful conditions the gigantic pillage and often waste of the earth’s resources, century by century, enabling the wealthy, sophisticated and elaborate world in which we, who are probably more fortunate, to live. But theirs is a dangerous career as we remember this week those miners who have lost their lives in New Zealand. They illustrate for us that the world we are caught up in from childhood to grave is sustained by great suffering, is often cruel and heartless, and is usually far less merciful to the afflicted than it was to those Chilean miners we have watched these last months. We like stories with such neat happy endings, because we want to believe the world is not as cruel and indifferent as we fear. The decision not to give in to despair at the cruelty of the world is a serious one. Too often it is a sentimental decision, a preference to pretend that things are not as bad as they look, or an escapist fantasy about all things being for the best. Our Christian response to the real pain and frustration of the world is that the world is as we find it – for whatever reason you may wish to put forward. But it is not a world without God, even if at times it may seem we live as exiles, like the exodus people “in a strange land”. The Lord is here, down the mine with us, already near to us: “in him we live and move and have our being”. In whatever hole we are in, even at the verge of death – even in death itself – he is there. Nothing can separate us from him except our own blindness and hardness.

And later next month we shall discover that into one of the poorest occupied communities of 1st century Palestine, a child is born, to an unlikely young virgin and a faithful loving forgotten hero-of-a-husband, in the town of their great King, in a borrowed shed, where the child is laid in fresh straw amongst the poverty of the dirt and mess of a cowshed- cum- cave, a draughty stable with an open door. The world for that couple was as they found it, hard, difficult, occupied..... they were later to become migrants in another country..... their family story did not have, at least in human terms, a happy ending. But nestling in Mary’s arms was a baby that was destined to transform the world.

The Good news we preach this Advent-tide is that because of this birth we are right not to yield to the darkness, the despair and the cruelty of the world, to the economic and political injustices, to ceaseless news of war and bloodshed. We are right to hope and trust, as the miners hoped and trusted in that dark underground tomb that they would be delivered somehow. But we dare to go further. With the tragic deaths of the 29 New Zealand miners fresh in our minds this week we would also want to say that even if the Chilean miners had not been saved; even if they had died far underground, either through the indifference of the authorities, or the failure of the project, they would have been right to hope and trust. But where, as so often happens, humanity fails, God is present. And God hears and is faithful, even where according to human reasoning, there is no salvation.

Into the darkness of our world, our church and our lives this Advent-tide we invite Jesus Christ, the Light of the world. We ask him to renew our faith, to be present in our darkness, in our waiting, as we prepare our hearts again to celebrate the good news of his coming amongst us.

Amen

Revd Ray Anglesea is a self supporting minister working in local church partnerships across the Northern Synod

The Great Cloud of Witnesses: Hebrews 12 v1-2

From a sermon preached at Roker URC,Sunderland

Reformation Sunday, 31 October 2010

Welsh clerics and I share a favourite Saint - Saint Pyr. Pyr was a Welsh abbot from the sixth century who founded a monastery on Caldy Island, Pembrokeshire, in West Wales. What I find so amusing about St Pyr is the way he died. It wasn't a glorious martyrdom, burnt at the stake, a beheading, a long and painful death or anything like that. The hagiography simply records that one year while celebrating Easter and the joy of the resurrection with his brethren Abbot Pyr drank an excessive quantity of mead, and on his way back to his cell tripped into the monastery well and drowned. Poor Pyr! Yet what I find so impressive and remarkable about the death of the Abbott is that nobody in the Celtic church thought any the worse of Pyr for this. They just remembered his loving kindness and gentleness, and his hard work in building up the monastery on Caldy Island. And so they duly put him into the calendar of Saints, but for the life of me I don’t know his feast day. I like to think it comes round at the end of August to coincide with the harvest of barley and hops and the annual Durham Beer Festival. Alas the Catholic Cistercian brothers who now occupy the Anglican Benedictine abbey built on the island no longer brew their own mead, they have transferred the sales of liquor to more challenging retail sales of bottled perfumes, chocolate and shortbread. Far more sensible!I suppose it says something about me, but I find I get as much support and encouragement from the faults of the saints as from their virtues. Take St Jerome for example. Jerome, the most learned of the fathers of the Western Church (he is the patron saint of librarians) was a brilliant linguist, fluent in Latin and Greek, and a theologian to be reckoned with, and they made him a saint mainly for doing the first decent translation of the Bible – the Vulgate. In the sixteenth century the great Council of Trent pronounced Jerome's Bible – The Vulgate - the authentic authoritative Latin text of the Catholic Church. But nobody could imagine Jerome was a nice man. If you read some of his letters to his contemporaries you'll find that for sheer egotism, gossip and venom St Jerome has few rivals. Yet I can't help finding this a cause not of sadness but joy. I suppose I feel it leaves me in with a chance? Talking of chance, Ann Widdecombe is urging viewers to invoke St Jude, patron saint of hopeless or lost causes, to help her stay in Strictly Come Dancing. Apparently, the former minister appeals to St Jude each time she dances.

When it comes to St Margaret of Antioch, the names sake of a parish church in Durham, built in the mid 12th century and this year celebrates its 850 anniversary, so little is known about the Saint that it is rather hard to find fault. She was alleged to have killed a number of demons disguised as dragons. Though I suppose one might at least argue that her habit of killing and bursting dragons was environmentally unfriendly and she was a danger to wild life; clearly not somebody Chris Packham and Kate Humble would want to interview on BBC2s natural history programme Autumnwatch. And it’s no different with our modern saints. Take Mother Teresa of Calcutta, revered by the late Malcolm Muggeridge in his book Something beautiful for God. One of her former nuns was writing about what an aggressive, domineering old woman she was. I can well believe it. I’ve noticed that quite often people who achieve real good in this world, in the synod and in the cathedral where I work are rather aggressive and domineering; they have to be to fight for what they know is right. But of course that’s not the point. What made Mother Teresa a saint wasn’t that she was a nice, cuddly, Hollywood-type of nun, heaven forbid a Woopi Goldberg Sister Act lookalike, but probably the fact that she was a feisty old biddy with a bit of an ego problem - but one who was determined to show the dregs of Calcutta something of the mercy God had shown her. Talking of ego problems, and a little aside here, I have discovered that some of the Bishops of Durham had serious working relationships with their often notorious Deans, not that they could ever be considered Saintly material, but I do hope the former Bishop of Durham, Tom Wright, will leave his brain to theological research. The irascible and controversial Bishop Henley Henson for example, came into the public eye in 1892 after an outburst at a diocesan conference in which he referred to dissenting Protestant churches as “emissaries of Satan!” As Bishop during the Great Depression, Henson preached at court and lunching afterwards at Buckingham Palace, King George V happened to ask his granddaughter Princess Elizabeth what she had liked best at the zoo on their visit the previous day. “The rhinobottomus” she replied. Henson at once said: “Thank you, my dear Princess for giving me such a word which so adequately describes my Dean.” When a lady asked him at a dinner party if he had seen the play “Pigs in Clover,” he replied: “No, but I have seen the Dean of Durham is bed.” Meow! Meow! .....Poor Dean James Weldon! Or take Martin Luther King. He’s one of my great Christian heroes of all time. I took his book “Strength to Love” along with my 8 gramophone records to my desert island, Mombasa, when I worked in East Africa in the early 70s. He did more than anyone for racial peace and justice, his message has empowered the oppressed all over the world and his sermons and speeches are so moving and compelling that I don’t doubt Christ was speaking through that man as through a loudspeaker. But at the same time, if you read accounts of Martin Luther King’s private life, it seems he had so many extra-marital affairs you wonder he ever found strength to climb into a pulpit!

And of course here in the cradle of Christianity we are surrounded with the memory of three of the northern regions greatest Saxon saints Aidan, Hild and Cuthbert. Only Oswald died as a martyr; yet all of them truly laid down their lives for the sake of Christ. They brooked no compromises when it came to giving everything to this project of embracing and living Christianity and seeing it planted, rooted and established across England. Not only that, but this outpouring of vision and energy was an expression of a civilisation at the height of its achievements, as witness the books and artifacts from Northumbria's golden age of the 7th and 8th centuries, some of them in the Cathedral at Durham. The peoples of the North East do not honour our northern saints because of ancient Northumbria, however favoured we are to live in this beautiful region with its ‘passionate places, passionate people' as the strap-line puts it. That would be to fall into the trap of nostalgia. The saints I have mentioned, and the many others of the Saxon era whom Bede names, and buried in the Galilee chapel at the Cathedral speak with their own authentic voice about the central values of the Christian faith not only as a set of beliefs but as a lived experience forged in the vicissitudes of ordinary life.I have amusingly mentioned some saints to illustrate the fact that saintliness is not the same as perfection, which belongs only to God. Amongst the canonized saints, we can now add the 1st Australian saint, Mary MacKillop, a Melbourne-born nun who worked with needy children, and recently canonised with other saints in St Peter's Square in front of some 50,000 people. Pope Benedict declared on the 17th October 2010 that these new saints "throughout the Church (they) be honoured devoutly among all the saints".The saints are chosen not because they were perfect all-rounders, but because they had one outstanding gift or virtue which shone through them so brightly that the people who knew them couldn't help feeling, "God really is in this person." And it's important for us to remember this, because not many of us are good all-rounders either. Most of us are pretty mediocre in general, and probably all of us have some extremely dusty corners which we'd rather not have inspected. But all of us also have some particular gift through which God can be seen, and which is, if you like, is our special potential for saintliness.That's why scripture calls all of us saints, not only the ones the Church has canonized. St Paul often addressed his letters to "the saints at Ephesus", "the saints at Corinth" and so on. He was certainly under no illusion that they were perfect, since half the time he's telling them what a useless, good for nothing lot they are. BUT he still calls them saints, holy to the Lord, because Christ has counted us all holy, and given us all some gift that we can contribute to the whole body of his Church.

So it’s mistake to treat the saints as if they were perfect. And in my reformed catholic and liberal way of thinking might I suggest perhaps this morning add another radical thought - it's an even worse mistake to treat them as if they were dead (please don’t mention this or write to the synod moderator).Too often when we talk about the saints you get the impression that they are just historical figures, dead heroes from long ago. But that's not what we mean when we from time to time recite the creed and say - “we believe in the Communion of Saints.” You can't have communion with historical figures who are dead and gone. Communion is a here and now experience, a relationship, not with dead people but with living brothers and sisters in the family of God.
And how can you have communion without communication? You can't commune with somebody you don't talk to, and the communion of saints simply means the saints are there to talk to. Come and sit with me in the shrine of St Cuthbert at the Cathedral and see how many people are praying/talking with/to our Northern Saint.

It's a very good tradition, sadly neglected now, to choose a name saint or a patron saint, not only as an example but as a friend to talk to, a brother or sister in Christ whose prayers you can ask. Mother Theresa of Calcutta took her name from the young child, St Thérèse of Lisieux, the 19th-century French Roman Catholic Carmelite nun whose relics were brought to England and Wales last year for a national pilgrimage. Edith Piaff was known to have a photograph of St Thérèse by her bedside and the late Princess of Wales was reported to have often lit a candle in her memory. During the unprecedented month-long tour of England and Wales of the relics of this young saint it is estimated that some 150,000 people visited her reliquary, some 100,000 candles were lit and 50,000 pink roses left for the saint Catholics know as "the little flower of Jesus". In Ireland, three-quarters of the overall population turned out to see her remains – that’s nearly 4 million people! All this in an age when we do not go to church! And talking of recent events in the Roman Catholic Church, you may remember Deacon Jack Sullivan, whose cure from a serious debility of the spine in 2001 was accepted by the Pope as a miracle resulting from John Henry Newman’s intercession, a fact mentioned at the beatification of Cardinal John Newman recently. Cardinal Newman was beatified by Pope Benedict at Crofton Park, on his recent September state visit to Britain.Within the Body of Christ we are all one, whether we happen to be this side of the grave or beyond. As the hymn says, we have "friends on earth and friends above," as another hymn states we are all lead by that “kindly light.” We can talk to the saints and can pray for all the departed, and we can be sure they pray for us. If you really believe in the resurrection, death doesn't count, and down the centuries countless Christians have drawn immense support from a living sense of friendship, a fellowship with the saints, friends and family who have gone before.

And if people try to tell you that bothering with saints is superstitious, or idolatry, or just for Roman Catholics, I hope you'll tell them it's nothing of the kind. It simply follows from our faith that in Christ, death can't divide, we are members of one another whether here or beyond. That's why in some churches we have pictures, stained glass, icons of saints in church, and how many URC chuches have taken their name form St Andrew or St George, just around the corner we have a St Bede URC! It's really just the same as having photographs of friends and relatives on earth. We don't worship the photo, but it helps us by reminding us there's someone there who loves us and cares for us. It's the same in Church. We don't worship saints or pray to them in the same sense as we pray to God. But it’s good to know they are there, that they do care for us, and that we can ask for their prayers just as we ask for our friend's prayers on earth.

Whether we can see them or not, we are surrounded in this life by the saints - all those who were made members of his body by baptism, all who have conquered death in him, and who, because they are in him, still live, and live forever. And they - wonder of wonders - are part of us and we of them.

Holy, Holy Holy – all the saints adore thee! The saints are all around us. As the 16th century poet, Edmund Spencer says in his poem Faire is the Heaven which I read earlier and which I conclude:- Faire is the heaven where happy soules have place
In full enjoyment of felicitie;
Whence they do still behold the glorious face
Of the Divine, Eternall Majestie;Fairer than all the rest which there appeare
Though all their beauties joynd together were;
How then can mortal tongue hope to expresse
The image of such endlesse perfectnesse?
The Great Cloud of WitnessesAmenRevd Ray Anglesea is a self supporting minister working across the Northern Synod

Spending Review Cuts

“You cannot serve God and mammon” - Matthew 6:24

(From an illustrated sermon preached by Ray Anglesea at West End United Reformed Church, Newcastle upon Tyne, 17^th October 2010)

As the 7:23 pulled out of Durham railway station bound for Glasgow a couple of weeks ago I heard the guard announce “that because of cuts and staff shortages there would be no trolley service in standard class accommodation. National Express fully apologises for this inconvenience.” A few miles up the track a further announcement was made. “Because of staff shortages,” the guard said “there has been no opportunity to place seat reservation tickets in the carriages.” In a final announcement the guard went on to apologise to first class passengers that, again, “because of staff shortages they were doing the best they could to serve breakfast and requested customers to remain patient.” Was it I thought, as the train sped on through Chester le Street, a hunch, a foretaste, a premonition of the outcome of the spending review cuts that will be announced this coming Wednesday 20th October, as the nation is forced to tighten its belt to the tune of £120 billion pounds? For let us make no mistake. Next Wednesday billions of pounds will be wiped out of the public sector budget, social services, education, transport, libraries, parks, police, health service, and the military. Job losses will be profound: Whitehall veterans have already hinted that the Coalition Government cuts will be much, much deeper than anything implemented by the Iron Lady and Sir Geoffrey Howe.

But that is small comfort to the North East. The board room of the regional development agency One North East is not a fun place to be at the moment. Chancellor George Osborne’s has told One North East to take £33m out of its budget, in advance of its abolition in 2012. Paul Callaghan, the Chairman of One North East, stated that such a cut would lead to up to 3000 job losses and 700 businesses starved of investment opportunities.

Let us remind ourselves. These financial cut backs and job losses are a result of what began in 2007; American funds, exposed to subprime mortgages, snowballed into one of the worst financial crises in modern history – a near death experience of the global economy. The financial crisis here in Britain was taken to the brink. Titans of the banking industry bit the dust. Some British banks were partially nationalised with hundreds of billions of pounds of taxpayer’s money put on the line. Our own Northern Rock plc, the first bank in 150 years to suffer a bank run was taken into public ownership in 2008. As the recession bit harder the value of houses dropped by one sixth; the value of shares dropped by almost one third. High Street stores like Woolworths, MFI and Zavvi, went out of business. In the last 3 years tens of thousands of people worldwide have lost their jobs and it is said hundreds of thousands more will do so. On 17 September 2008, very shortly after the demise of Lehman Brothers, HBOS's – Halifax/Bank of Scotland shares fell 17% and to cut a long story short HBOS joined the Lloyds banking group in January 2009.

You may not know but the Bank of Scotland one of the worlds’ oldest banks and the first private bank to issue paper money. Inaugurated by the merchants of Edinburgh, they had heard from John Knox who had heard it from John Calvin in Geneva that lending money at interest was no longer a sin against God. Sadly, the irony today is that The Bank of Scotland collapsed because it was laden with debt. Weird devices for making money out of money, invented by university trained economists, enabled in this by government lawmakers, deregulated money on their advice. And as a result, in this country, and in the US, for the last 30 years money has been the master. As Jesus said – and as we have seen in the financial meltdown since Lehmann Brothers collapsed, the tragic effects has been that millions of ordinary people have lost their jobs, their homes, and millions of others going hungry because of the high price of food - you cannot serve God and money. The high price of food had difficult international consequences for nine of our young northern synod members and their leaders. After a frightening series of food street riots in the capital Maputo the young students cut short their visit to Mozambique; they were escorted out of the nation’s capital, a safe route to Johannesburg and a flight home.

You cannot serve two masters says Jesus in this morning gospel reading. You cannot serve God: you cannot serve mammon. Money is not just a poor sovereign. As a sovereign it replaces God and undermines the laws of God; it multiplies debt and bondage so that it destroys communities, families, homes, livelihoods and ultimately the earth itself. And yet today we have made it possible for ourselves to worship God and mammon.

Three year later after the financial meltdown the world has moved on. Today, without doubt, two of the most powerful forces in our interconnected globalised world are religion and money – leading Christian economists like Huw Pym and Larry Elliot, economic editor of the Guardian, have been saying for some time that theological and ethical approaches to economics are no longer marginal but are now central to the thinking and understanding of the current crises.

And yet it is quite striking that in the gospel parables Jesus more than once uses the world of economics as a framework for his stories – the parable of the talents, the dishonest steward, and the lost coin. Like farming, like family relationships, like the tensions of public political life economic relations have something to say to us about how we see our humanity in the context of God’s action. Money is after all a metaphor alongside other things as to how we see our relationship to God and God to us. But this financial crisis which has brought about this week’s spending cuts is about more than money. It is also about morality.

Morality was a word that was to resonate and reverberate on Saturday 4th March 1933 when President Frankland Roosevelt gave his inaugural presidential address. America, the world’s biggest economy had just started the slow ascent from the bottom of an economic abyss after the Wall Street Crash in 1929 that saw a quarter of the working population jobless. Roosevelt said “America was facing not just an economic but a moral crisis,” and he provided an almost biblical damnation of the excesses that had sent the stock market rise to heady heights in the boom years of the late 20’s. “Practices of the unscrupulous money changers stand indicted in the court of public opinion,” the new president said “rejected by the hearts and minds of men.” As Jesus said - You cannot serve God and mammon.

Almost 77 years later another president found an echo of the Roosevelt era when he outlined plans to reform Wall Street following another profound shock to the financial system. It took a year after his inaugural address at a White House press conference on 21 January 2010 for Barak Obama to thunder out his words of condemnation. As Jesus said - You cannot serve God and mammon.

At a European conference in 2006 another aspiring world statesmen Tory leader David Cameron said “there is more to life than making money,” arguing that improving people's happiness is a key challenge for politicians. It's time we admitted that there's more to life than money, and it's time we focused not just on GDP, but on GWB - general well-being," he said. "Well-being can't be measured by money or traded in markets. And as Baroness Warsi, chairperson of the Conservative Party, this administration, unlike the previous one “does God.” Well we shall see! Jesus said – You cannot serve God and mammon.

There’s a true story that comes from the sinking of the Titanic. A frightened woman found her place in a lifeboat that was about to be lowered into the raging North Atlantic. She suddenly thought of something she needed, so she asked permission to return to her stateroom before they cast off. She was granted three minutes or they would have to leave without her. She ran across the deck that was already slanted at a dangerous angle. She raced through the gambling room with all the money that had rolled to one side, ankle deep. She came to her stateroom and quickly pushed aside her diamond rings and expensive bracelets and necklaces as she reached to the shelf above her bed and grabbed three small oranges. She quickly found her way back to the lifeboat and got in. Now that seems incredible because thirty minutes earlier she would not have chosen a crate of oranges over even the smallest diamond. But death had boarded the Titanic. One blast of its awful breath had transformed all values. Instantaneously, priceless things had become worthless. Worthless things had become priceless. And in that moment she preferred three small oranges to a crate of diamonds.

No one can serve two masters; Jesus tells us, for he will either hate the one and love the other, or be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and wealth, or ‘Mammon’. The verb serve means literally ‘be the slave of', showing that what really matters here is what motivates us and drives us. Jesus had eyes to see, and he saw how some people allowed themselves to become driven to the point of enslavement by their attempts to amass wealth, to extend security, so that this became the very centre of their energy and purpose. In fact, in setting their eyes on all this, they failed to see.

But what economic editors can see is that we are now in the end game of an old economic paradigm, an old economic model. Britain is at a historic turning point. Next Wednesday’s the implementation of the spending cuts review will be the biggest social change in this country. How as individuals and as a church are we going to respond to these changes – as the Evangelical Alliance have already commented “Is there life beyond debt? For after all George Osborne’s heavily loaded and highly communal phrase says it all – we are all in this together!

These turbulent times of approaching austerity will undoubtedly leave an indelible mark on our economic and social landscape. Of course we firmly believe that the Bible is outspoken on issues of poverty and injustice. We must be prepared to demonstrate that our faith is in God, not in the false gods of mammon of this age; I believe the church is uniquely positioned to help people who are in debt, have lost their jobs or are otherwise struggling with their finances. When we meet a new person, one of the first questions we ask is: "What do you do for a living?" From my own experience I know that my worth was wrapped up in planning career and is bound up in my self-supporting ministry. Our jobs becomes our identity - who we are! What we do becomes what we value! When we lose a job or are faced with a career change, we often feel we've lost our worth.

For a loss of a job is one of the greatest trials we can endure; the effects of job loss are often long lasting. This is largely due to the fact that society trains us to identify ourselves by how we provide for our family. A job loss can certainly lead to the loss of one's identity, which can result in the loss of a purpose in life. Without a purpose in life, we tend to feel as if we are no longer in control. These are natural and ordinary feelings.

With this loss of identify, the financial loss too has to be assessed. A family has to cope with less income and many families in the coming months will be facing this problem. Applying for unemployment compensation can be emotionally devastating for some people; I personally couldn’t cope with the prospect of “signing on.” Job loss can create an atmosphere of negative despair and a defeatist attitude among many individuals; so I would have to say evading this attitude is vital for Christians and non-Christians alike. When negative attitudes sink into one’s life, they are often difficult to remove.

Job loss has obvious immediate results. But the most damaging effect of a job loss is the slippery slope it generates. The situation can and often does go from bad to worse.

By combining the conviction that motivates our action with the resources and organisations already established, we as a church can develop its engagement to bring vital aid to those who will be in greatest need following the announcements to be made next Wednesday. “We must take care of those in need,” was the Archbishop of Canterbury’s New Year Message this year. “Our hearts will be in a very bad way if they are focused only on the state of our finances. They’ll be healthy if they’re capable of turning outwards - looking at the real treasure that is our fellow human beings.”

It doesn’t matter the reasons why people have lost their jobs. It doesn’t matter if it is their fault or somebody else’s fault or nobody’s fault at all. God cares for everybody and so we must care for everybody. There will be people in need because of the economic crisis – even in the community here in West End. We must be prepared to help them. Those who have lost their jobs – those who have lost their savings. Those who find that their pensions are not worth what they were or should be.

For those who are suffering job loss or will suffer a future job loss I can't offer you a resume, preparation advice or interviewing techniques, but I can assure you that God may have a better idea than anything you've ever considered before. Remember always that God cares about the situation we find ourselves in - sometimes running out of one’s own resources is a good time to turn to God for answers. When we come to God we may find that my worth is not to be found in me, in my job, and what I was capable of doing, but in God and what He saw in me and what He wants to do through me. In His eyes, our worth is not just about our accomplishments. In fact, it is often not about me/us at all! It is comforting to know that our significance, our economic worth neither began nor ended with our careers. Even though our careers may be done, a whole new world awaits us as we look for God's new direction.

Prayer

God, our companion in the wilderness, who led your people to new tasks in a new land, help us find new tasks and new purposes in a world of unemployment, early retirement and redundancy, that we too may find opportunities to labour and at the end to rest and see that it is good, through Jesus Christ our Lord, whose work was to proclaim your kingdom.

Amen

Revd Ray Anglesea is a self supporting minister working in the Northern Synod

Knox and Benedict

From an illustrated sermon preached by Ray Angelsea at Denewell Avenue United Reformed Church, Gateshead - 12-September-2010

Psalm 132

Ephesians 4 v1-6

John 17 v11b-23

The Daily Record, one of Scotland’s leading newspapers stated last month that a John Knox lookalike is to welcome the Pope on his state visit to Scotland this coming week. Apparently an actor has been hired by the Catholic Church to play the leader of Scotland's Protestant Reformation in a pageant of the country's historical figures. John Knox will be one of 25 characters including Mary Queen of Scots, Bonnie Prince Charlie, William Wallace, St Andrew, Robert the Bruce, Eric Liddell, St Ninian, St Margaret, St Columba and Alexander Fleming to parade in front of the pontiff's Pope-mobile on Princes Street, Edinburgh, during his state visit. You may remember from your history lessons that John Knox was a Scottish clergyman who led the Protestant Reformation in Scotland. The Reformation Parliament of 1560 repudiated the pope's authority, forbade the celebration of the Mass and approved a Protestant Confession of Faith. He is considered to be the father and founder of the Presbyterian denomination.

Given Knox’s background I find it odd and amusingly ironic that that a lookalike character should be paraded in front of Pope Benedict. It was not just that John Knox led the reforms that separated Scotland from Rome; John Knox did not have a lot of nice things to say about the Pontiff. This year is the 450^th anniversary of the Scottish Reformation. The changes which came about in sixteenth century Scotland were, of course, not isolated, but greatly influenced by what was happening in other countries, in England, and Luther’s Germany, and Calvin’s Geneva; nor were they purely religious changes, but intimately interwoven with political, economic, and personal ambitions and preferences, crucially the desire for alliance with a Protestant England in preference to an alliance, and possible union, with Catholic France. The reformation was therefore first and foremost about Scotland’s national religious settlement; it heralded a new era of peace and friendship with England; and it also guaranteed Scotland’s independence as a nation state.

Within Scotland’s political community today there have been accusations that this year's 450th anniversary has been ignored by the Scottish Government. Rumblings of discontent seem to range from sensitivity to the Pope’s visit to the seemingly secularization of the nation, consideration for other faith traditions, and just apathy to the anniversary. Or, as one writer stated “the Scottish Reformation left a trail of violence, vandalism and destruction from which Scotland’s heritage has never recovered, and which is possibly the real reason why authorities cannot touch the 450th anniversary of the Reformation with a rather long barge-pole.”

As we have seen on television and read in the press in the last few days there is in some quarter’s opposition to the Pope’s visit. Recent surveys suggest that 79% of the British public remain apathetic about the state tour. On the streets of Durham I have seen billboards in the Millennium Square and posters on lamp posts displaying anti-papal bigotry. A man wearing a purple T shirt with white letters which read "No Hope in the Pope" is to be seen handing out flyers to passerby's. Ireland’s Orange Order too has protested about the visit; the Free Presbyterian Scottish Church described the decision to bestow a state visit status on the occasion as "particularly offensive". Stonewall an organisation which works for justice for gay and lesbians also object to the pope’s visit. Not surprisingly the Pope is not the organisation’s best friend. Stonewall wish to bring to the attention of the public that Cardinal Newman, soon to be beatified, although not gay on the basis of sexual practice, had, allegedly, clear homosexual sensibilities. He insisted on being buried with his friend Ambrose St John. You can imagine the displeasure from the gay community when his body was exhumed some years ago after lying beside his friend for over 100 years.

But amongst the pope-mania there are some Catholics who view the impending visit also with some disquiet. Not all Catholics are exactly over the moon about having the hard-line Cardinal Ratzinger as the leader of their Church. Sexual abuse, women rights, HIV, IVF fertility treatment, promoting Latin masses, birth control are just some of the headline and breaking news issues facing the Catholic Church under his leadership. In a letter dated 8^th September to The Times a Catholic correspondent stated that “the pronouncements of this papacy have been characterised by a depressing series of attempts to resuscitate a number of hopelessly anachronistic and irrelevant attitudes, which many of us had fondly imagined were long since securely interred in the mausoleum of Church embarrassments.” When the Cardinal succeeded Pope John Paul II one American Roman Catholic complained, “it is like electing Rumsfeld after George Bush".

And then there is the inevitable objection to the cost of the State visit. The Sun newspaper estimates the cost to the tax payer will be in excess of £12 million pounds.

How as Reformed people in a Reforming Church can we understand and value this complex history, the religious violence and imbalances of the past? How do we view the Pope’s visit this coming week? How do we look to the future of our own church in the third millennium? But most importantly how do we move towards that unity which Christ prayed for and which we heard about in our illustrated gospel reading this morning?

Let’s deal with our past history first.
In a service broadcast to mark the 450 anniversary of the Scottish Reformation on Radio 4 last month from St Giles’s Cathedral, Edinburgh, the preacher, the minister, the Very Reverend Gilleasbuig Macmillan, quoted the novelist L P Hartley who wrote, ‘The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.’ Alongside Hartley we may think of T S Eliot’s idea that “time future is contained in time past.” John Knox and his reformers in their day were looking to the past as they tried to chart a new future. John Knox looked back across almost exactly one thousand years from that other giant of Scottish Christianity, Columba; the same Bible was read, the same psalms sung, the same Creed confessed, and the same sacraments of Holy Baptism and Holy Communion celebrated and administered. More importantly, Columba and Knox both tried to be faithful disciples of Jesus Christ. Jesus too saw himself as being true to his people’s past, taking the insights of the Hebrew scriptures and letting them offer signals and guidance for the way forward; and when his followers wrote about his significance it is not surprising that they used ideas and imagery from centuries earlier to give verbal testimony to the impact of his life and death upon them.

So from our past this morning I should like to give thanks for the place of the Bible in our Reformed tradition, and in the life of the church - its poetry, its wisdom, the ways in which its language influenced the speaking, arguing, debating, writing of our reformed leaders, generations of sermon-tasters, rich symphonic imagery of the mind. Remembering the quote – the past is a foreign country they do things differently there – I would like to make a plea that any form of Christianity ought to have an element of the Catholic and an element of the Reformed or Protestant. For out of that pick and mix unity we can cherish the pre-Reformation church and its post-Reformation successor. Our response to our past is therefore not fixed, but mobile. That is the nature of living faith, organic religion.

How do we view the Pope’s visit to our nation this coming week?
Having read some of the soundings on the Pope’s visit in the press this week my view is that it is very important that church leaders in the Anglican, Catholic and Free Church tradition take the opportunity to show that their agreements are far more profound than their differences. We espouse a similar sort of theology: rooted in the legacy of Columbus, Augustine and the recovery of authentic Patristic, the High Medieval and Reformed traditions. The visit this coming week is, I believe, of crucial importance because Christianity in general and Catholicism in particular are under increasing attack in so-called secular Britain.

A Vatican spokesman, trying to set the stage for the papal visit, said that from Rome Britain seemed a very secular society. But is this true? The Medieval and Reformation periods are often characterised as ages of great faith. Certainly, individuals and communities did die for their beliefs. However, today’s general scale of apathy and antipathy should not be underestimated. After all the celebrated eleventh century monk, William of Malmesbury complained that the aristocracy rarely attended mass, and even the more pious heard it at home, ‘but in their bedchambers, lying in the arms of their wives’. At least they heard mass though; according to one scholar, ‘substantial sections of thirteenth century society - especially the poor – hardly attended church at all’. No change there then.

Statistical surveys continually support the thesis that Britain is a place where the vast majority of the population continues to affirm their belief in God, but then proceed to do little about it. Without doubt we live in a spiritually confused culture; the Bishop of Oxford writing in his new book “Living Jesus” quotes Liam Gallagher of the rock group Oasis who once said in an interview, “I don’t pray and I don’t go to church but I am intrigued by it, I’m into the idea that there could be a God and aliens and incarnation and some geezer years ago turned water into wine; I don’t believe when you die, you die.” I think many were be sympathetic to that statement. Church attendance figures remain stubbornly low and, as is likely, the attendance at the Pope’s masses. Secularism, I would want to suggest is not a modern malaise, but is rather a typical feature of western societies down the ages. Granted, there have been periods of revival when church attendance has peaked and that is perhaps none of the aims of the Pope’s visit, to boost the morale of the troops. But the basic and innate disposition is one of believing without belonging; of relating to the church, and valuing its presence and beliefs - yet without necessarily sharing them. Or, as one wit puts it, ‘I cannot consider myself to be a pillar of the church, for I never go. But I am a buttress – insofar as I support it from the outside’. - My view is that God hasn't gone away - he just isn't where we thought he was.

But it is heartening that there has been a show of solidarity from our leaders before the arrival of the Pope, albeit in the fight back against Stephen Hawking’s assertion that science leaves no role for God in the creation of the universe. Professor Hawking’s book The Grand Design was published a few days ago to coincide with the Pope’s visit to Britain.

I am happy to say that some of my dearest friends are Catholics; we enjoy our differences and our unity in our friendship. I also would wish to say and recognise too that Catholics play a very important role in British cultural and political life. And I hope in an odd sort of way that the Beatification of Cardinal Newman may be seen as a sign of unity; for now he belongs to both Catholic and Protestant Anglicanism.

Finally in our search for church unity how do we as a church and a denomination move forward in this 3 millennium?

I have just finished reading the Chief Rabbi, Jonathan Sacks new book “The Dignity of Difference.” In it he makes a plea for toleration in an age of religious extremism. He writes about the rising crescendo of ethnic tensions, and the use of religious justification for acts of terror. Allied to weapons of mass destruction, extremist religious attitudes threaten the very security of life on earth. The Chief Rabbi writes, “We must learn to feel enlarged, not threatened by difference.” As we have heard on the news a Florida evangelical pastor Terry Jones in an attitude that reeks of tribal religion has backed down from a mass torching of the Koran after international outrage and condemnation. The basic teachings of Christ enjoin us to love our enemies, to bless those who persecute us. Love alone transforms hatred. The kind of hatred Pastor Jones advocates never breeds anything but more hatred.

We as a small denomination, founded on the tradition of our reforming fathers and mothers would I am sure want to support Dr Sack’s view: and as reforming Christian people we would also wish to say, in line with our reforming fathers, that we believe that genuine faith is committed to the search for truth wherever it comes from. God invites us to do our believing in ways appropriate to the 21^st century, reminding ourselves that we never have absolute certainty, only God is infallible. Any religion which imagines it has a monopoly of truth is dangerous – and as a non stipendiary minister working in the community as you have heard me say so many times – the Gospel is that God so loved the world, not that God so loved the church – we have to stop retreating from the giant social issues of the day into the pygmy world of private piety and the comfort zone and security of our denominational walls.

With the arrival of the Pope Benedict XVI this week let us remind ourselves as Christian people of three truths that John Knox and Pope Benedict have in common, truths which we share and which unite us – both men in different ages and different cultures claim a gospel mandate for their attitudes, though their proof texts are very different.

The three truths are taken from Ian C Bradley’s new book Grace, Order, Openness and Diversity – Reclaiming Liberal Theology.

1. Together we affirm in Jesus’ life, teaching, death and resurrection God’s limitless love for all humanity in this life and the next.
2. Together we affirm the dynamic action of God’s Holy Spirit in dispersing this divine love throughout the world
3. Together we affirm the beneficial insights of biblical, literary and historical criticism for our understanding of Scripture and Tradition.

Finally, let us remind ourselves as Christians in this historic week is that the way we behave toward one another and toward other people is the fullest expression of what we believe.

God has given us only one world in which to live together.

Amen

Revd Ray Anglesea

Northern Synod in Mozambique - Postscript

As John has put on the web site, we arrived back safe and sound in Newcastle, at lunch time on Saturday 4^th September.

The journey back was exciting but in reality uneventful. The streets of Maputo were very quiet and clear with very little transport and few people on the move. The Colonel and team who escorted us made sure that we got across the border into South Africa when the relief in the group was tangible and grins were very apparent. As we drove to Johannesburg the views including a spectacular sunset were great. We were disappointed not to see any safari kinds of animals.

We booked in at the airport with no problem and had most people’s usual food - cheeseburger and chips. This was enjoyed before catching the night flight. On this people slept or watched films. In the morning a quick hop up to Newcastle, the finding of bags and the gathering of folk’s souvenirs from whichever cases they had been stashed in took place before we went out.

There it was great to be greeted by families, John from the Synod, Jane Rowell (URC International Secretary) and Richard Mortimer (URC Deputy General Secretary) who had worked so hard to ensure our safety, keep our families informed and to get us home. We will never know how much energy this took but we are very grateful.

Although the trip ended unexpectedly it was still amazing. Here are one or two comments from participants arising out of their immediate reflections – more will be added as we prepare to share the trip with folk at the Synod meeting on Saturday October 16^th.

• From Matthew: ‘Mozambique is a beautiful country with wonderful people who show their feelings for their church and their spirituality in a more open way than we do.’
  
• From Lucy and Emma: ‘We are grateful to see the different culture and what others experience in their daily lives. God is love in its greatest form and this visit certainly proved this to us. An absolutely beautifully and hospitable country, memories and people we will never forget.’
  
• From Rowena: The love and warmth of friendship from the leadership of the Presbyterian Church of Mozambique is an inspiration and witness to the unity Christ has already given us. I hope and pray this partnership will continue to grow and enrich us.’