As many of you will know, the Church’s year is divided into seasons which mark various times and events in the story of our salvation and of Jesus’ life and ministry. One of the ways we mark the various seasons is by changing the colour of the vestments, altar frontals and pulpit and lectern falls we use in church. We use the colour purple, for example, to indicate our sorrow for sin during the penitential seasons of Advent and Lent. We use white for celebratory seasons such as Easter and Christmas, and to show the special celebratory nature of Easter Day and Christmas Day, we might use gold vestments and decorations. We also use colours to mark particular days, such as red for Pentecost or for martyrs, white for saints or blue for the Blessed Virgin Mary. For most of the year though, we use green, and this is used to denote what the Church refers to as ‘Ordinary Time’. Ordinary Time, which is sometimes also called the ‘Green Season’, is the time of the Church’s year when we’re celebrating our salvation and our Lord’s life and ministry in general terms rather than celebrating any part of those things or event in them in particular. Today, although it’s not the last Sunday in Ordinary Time, is the last Sunday of the year when we will use green vestments and decorations. Next Sunday we will use white to mark the feast day or festival of Christ the King and then Ordinary Time for this year will come to an end and we will change to purple and start a new   Church year as the season of Advent begins.

Despite the impression people may have from the Advent calendars they see in shops, the season of Advent doesn’t necessarily start on 1^st December. Advent always begins four Sundays before Christmas Day. Neither is Advent about eating a piece of chocolate every day before Christmas Day. Advent is the time of the Church’s year when we prepare to celebrate the Incarnation of the Son of God, the coming into the world of our Lord and Saviour, Jesus Christ. So, in the Church’s readings during Advent, we hear about the prophets who foretold his birth, we hear about John the Baptist who was sent to prepare the way for the Lord, and we hear the story of the Annunciation when the archangel announced to Mary that she was to be the mother of the Lord. Whatever the readings during Advent are though, the theme that runs throughout the season, the Advent motif, is the call to be awake, to stay alert and watch, so that we will be ready to meet the Lord when he comes. And, as we come towards the end of Ordinary Time, we see something of that Advent motif breaking into our readings today.

In our reading from 1 Thessalonians, St Paul tells us that the ‘Day of the Lord’ will come suddenly and without warning, at a time when we least expect it. And, because no one will be able to escape from the Lord on that day, we’re urged to be the ‘children of the light’ and ‘of the day’ that we’re called to be, so that the Day of the Lord may not ‘surprise’ or ‘overtake us like a thief’ and St Paul tells us that to do this we must not ‘fall asleep’ or to ‘go on sleeping’ as other people do, but to ‘stay awake and sober’.

To be the people we’re called to be as children of the light and of the day, of course, means to be good disciples of Christ, and this is what St Paul is urging us to be in this reading. And in urging us not to sleep, but to stay awake and sober he’s telling us that to be the good disciples we’re called to be, we have to ready, at all times, to do what Jesus told us to do, to be about the Lord’s work. And this links to the Gospel, and the parable of the talents.

For us, today, a talent is an ability or skill, but that’s not what the word meant in Jesus’ day. To be honest, we’re not really quite sure exactly what Jesus was referring to by ‘talent’ in this parable because, in biblical times, a talent could either have been a weight or a unit of currency. As a weight, usually of gold or silver, it’s thought a talent was the equivalent of 33kg of 72lbs. As currency, a talent was the equivalent of 6,000 denarii. So, given that Jesus’ speaks of 1 denarius as the wage for one day’s labour, 1 talent was what a labourer could expect to earn in 16 years of work. But, whichever of these Jesus meant, he was taking about large amounts, even when he spoke about the servant who was given one talent. And when it comes to the meaning of the parable, we can quite easily substitute our understanding of the word ‘talent’ for what it meant in Jesus’ day, without changing the meaning.

It’s clear from the parable that, whatever we have been given by the Lord, we’re expected to use it in his service. If we do, we’ll be rewarded by the Lord when he returns. If we don’t use what the Lord has given us, we can’t expect any reward when he returns. It’s made clear in the parable too, that whatever we do for the Lord is enough, so long as it’s commensurate with what we’ve been given, because the reward for the servant who was given two talents and made two more was the same as for the servant who’d been given five talents and made five more. And, when we consider what a talent meant in Jesus’ day, it’s also clear from the parable that whatever we’ve been given by the Lord, is more than enough, even if it’s only one talent.

There’s no doubt that we all have talents of one sort or another that we’re called to use in the Lord’s service and could use in the Lord’s service. What we have to do is make sure that we do use them, and use them in the right way, because if we don’t, then we might as well simply bury them in the ground for all the good they’re going to do us on the day when the Lord calls us to give an account of what we’ve done with the talents he entrusted to us.

I’m sure we all do try to use our talents in the right way but, because we don’t know when the Lord will return, or at least when we’ll be called from this life to meet him and give that account of what we’ve done with our talents, we have a tendency not to use them in the way we should as often as we could. I don’t think our problem is so much towards wickedness, of deliberately burying our talents in the ground by not using them, but of laziness. We let opportunities to use our talents in the Lord’s service slip by because we’d rather do something else instead. We perhaps think we can afford to do that because we’ll always have another opportunity to use our talents in the Lord’s service, forgetting the warning that the Lord will come suddenly, without warning and at a time when we least expect him. We miss opportunities to use our talents for the Lord because we don’t take to heart that Advent call to stay awake to be alert and watch and so we’re not ready to meet the Lord, whether that be when we meet him face to face, or when we meet him in other people.

That happens in so many ways. One, perhaps rather amusing, incidence of this I remember very well happened when a parish priest I know gave notice of the Christmas Carol service in the parish, only to be told by almost the entire female section of the choir that there couldn’t be a Carol Service on that date because they wanted to go and see The Chippendales, a group of what we might call exotic male dancers, who were performing locally on that night. And when the parish priest suggested that the ladies of the choir might be getting their priorities a bit mixed up, they replied that he could always change the Carol Service to another night. One wonders what the ladies of the choir would have said had the Lord asked them to give an account of how they’d used their talents, that night!

That is just one example of disciples of Christ failing to use their talents in his service because they wanted to do something else instead, and thought it didn’t really matter because they could always use their talents in his service another time. But there are so many ways in which we all do this. How many times have people not come to church to worship the Lord on a Sunday or on some major festival of the Church because they wanted to watch a football match or the continuation of a story in a soap opera on the TV, or because they wanted to go out socialising? How many times have PCC members, for example, missed meetings for the same reasons? How many times have Christians not helped someone when they could have done, or not helped as much as they could have done because they were too busy with their own affairs or with enjoying themselves and have put those things first?

Christians very often do these kinds of things, even though we’re warned repeatedly through the Scriptures, not to do them. And, in my experience, Christians often do these things because of what might be called laziness; they can’t be bothered to do what they know they should have done because they think they’ll always get another chance to do it. So, if they didn’t go to church well, they can always go next Sunday, and they can go to that festival of the Church, next time. If they missed a meeting well, they’ll find out what went on anyway, and they can always go to the next meeting. If they didn’t help that person or that cause, they might feel a bit guilty, but not too much, because there’ll always be another person to help and another cause to contribute to. But if the coronavirus, the lockdowns and the restrictions on our lives we’ve gone through this year, and are still going through, have done anything, they’ve surely reminded us of the fact that we can’t take tomorrow for granted. They’ve reminded us that we can’t fail to do what we should do now simply because we think we can do it another time. They’ve reminded us that there isn’t always a next time and so, hopefully, they’ve reminded us that we need to do what we should, whenever we can, while we still can.

In essence, that is the meaning of the Advent call to stay awake, stay alert and watch for the Lord. The Advent call is to be on the lookout for ways and opportunities to use our talents in the Lord’s service and, when we see them, to make the most of them, in full awareness that we might not get another chance. It’s a call, and a warning, that breaks into our readings today and one that we’ll be reminded of throughout the season of Advent. We all know the secular custom of making New Year’s resolutions. Advent marks the start of the Church’s New Year so let’s make obedience to the Advent call one that we resolve to make and keep so that, when we meet Lord, we’ll be able to give a good account of what we’ve done with whatever talents we’ve been given.

Amen.

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You will find the Propers for the 33rd Sunday of Ordinary Time (2 before Advent) here.

Today, as I’m sure you all know, is Remembrance Sunday. It’s the day we set aside each year to remember those who’ve died in defence of this country in times of war, and to give thanks for their sacrifice. And it’s right that we should do that. If it weren’t for their sacrifice, who knows what kind of place our nation would be today? If it wasn’t for their sacrifice, we might live under a dictatorship, in a police state in which there was no real freedom of speech, expression or action. We might live in a nation in which our ethnicity, faith, political opinion or even our physical characteristics were, quite literally, a matter of life and death. It’s from becoming this kind of nation, and to try to free other nations from this kind of existence, that our servicemen and women have laid down their lives in war, and so we should be thankful to them and remember them. But as we remember those who’ve laid down their lives in time of war on this Remembrance Sunday, today is perhaps also a day to wonder just how many more lives will need to be lost in the future, until human beings finally learn their lesson and make war a thing we can only know about and learn about from the pages of history books.  

There is a saying, which I’m sure many of you will have heard, which goes, ‘The first lesson of history, is that people never learn the lessons of history’. And, as we read and watch the news, and see the state of the world we live in today, isn’t the truth of that saying clear to see? As we hear about China flexing her muscles in the South China Sea and South East Asia, in direct opposition to the USA, aren’t we reminded of the situation in the 1930s and 40s when another far eastern power, Japan, acted in a similar way? As we hear about China making land-grabs in surrounding countries, in India and Nepal, aren’t we reminded of the way Nazi Germany acted in Europe in the 1930s?  

And I don’t know about you, but as I’ve been reading about and watching events in the USA in recent times, I’ve sometimes wondered if I’ve been reading and watching a programme about the USA in the early 21^st Century, or a documentary about Germany in the 1930s. When we read and hear about armed militias wandering the streets, often with at least the tacit approval of the head of state, doesn’t that remind us of the SA, the Nazi Stormtroopers in 1930s Germany?  When we hear a head of state calling for journalists who criticise him to be sacked, and publications and broadcasters who criticise him to be closed down, doesn’t that remind us of the Nazi censorship and suppression of the free press? When we hear a head of state who openly demonises those who oppose him politically, and speaks of an Afro-American/left-wing conspiracy against not just him, but the nation itself, doesn’t that remind us of what the Nazis called the Jewish/Bolshevik conspiracy against Germany and the German people? And when we see a democratically elected head of state, using his power of office to try to interfere with free elections and subvert the very democratic process by which he was elected, and his politically party colluding in their leader’s nefarious activity, aren’t we reminded that this is exactly what Adolf Hitler and the Nazis did in Germany in the 1930s? It’s looking increasingly likely that these shenanigans will not affect the result of the US presidential election, and that a new head of state will be elected. Nevertheless, as things stand at the moment, the person responsible for all this has won about 48% of the popular vote; well over 70 million people have still voted for him. And so it really does seem that people never learn the lessons of history.

In one sense that’s perhaps more difficult to understand now than it was in the past because, through the internet, people today have a vast amount of information, quite literally, at their fingertips. And so people today ought to be much better informed than they ever have been in the past. That means that there’s no real excuse for not being aware of the lessons of history and people can’t really claim ignorance of what’s happened in the past as an excuse for repeating the mistakes of history. And whilst knowing more doesn’t make us more intelligent than people were in the past, it doesn’t make us any less intelligent either. So, on the whole, people today are much better informed than those who lived in bygone days were, and there’s no reason that people today should be less intelligent than people in bygone days were. So why do people continually repeat the same mistakes? Why do they never learn the lessons of history? Why can we not stop doing the things that lead to war so that we can draw a line under war, and the names on our war memorials once and for all? The answer perhaps, is that people lack what the Scriptures call ‘wisdom’.

We hear something about wisdom in our readings this morning and the parable of the wise and foolish bridesmaids that we read in the Gospel, tell us something about what the Scriptures mean by ‘wisdom’. There’s no suggestion in the parable that the foolish bridesmaids didn’t know what to do when they went to meet the groom because they took their lamps with them, and they had oil in their lamps. So they weren’t lacking in knowledge. But they didn’t think about what would happen if the groom was delayed. The wise bridesmaids, on the other hand, did think about what to do in that situation. So the foolish bridesmaids weren’t foolish because they didn’t know what to do, but because they didn’t do the right thing. The wise bridesmaids had no more knowledge than the others, they were wise simply because they did the right thing. So scriptural wisdom isn’t really about intelligence, it’s not a measure of how much we know or how clever we are. Scriptural wisdom is a quality rather than a measure. It’s a quality of knowing the right thing to do.

The Scriptures tell us that the beginning of wisdom is the fear of the Lord, and by that they mean reverence for God and his ways. So the person who has wisdom and shows wisdom is the one who knows and does the Godly thing in any given situation. For us, in the Church, we could say that wisdom is about knowing what the Christian thing to do in any situation is and doing it. And, of course, Christ told us that the two most important of God’s ways, are to love God with all our hearts and souls and minds, and to love our neighbour as ourselves. Knowing these things and doing them leads to wisdom, and the Scriptures tell us that wisdom itself leads to justice, mercy, love and peace. How very different that is to the ways that human beings have usually taken throughout history. Rather than the way of wisdom, people, very often thinking that they know better than anyone else, have followed the way of pride and selfishness that’s so often led to injustice, hatred, vengeance and conflict. How much happier, safer and more peaceful a place could the world have been, and might be, if only people had a little less pride in their own importance and intelligence, less arrogance about their own ideas and opinions, and a little more humility and wisdom.

But sadly, it seems that, rather than ‘wise up’ as the saying goes, people prefer to follow their own ways and repeat the mistakes of the past over and over and over again. And so, over the years, the members of our armed forces have been called upon time and again to take up arms, to fight, to suffer and to die in defence of their freedom and ours, their homes and ours, and their loved ones and ours. And as they’ve done so, the list of names on our war memorials has continued to grow ever longer as more and more members of our armed forces have been called upon to make that ultimate sacrifice and pay the ultimate price for the world’s lack of wisdom and humanity’s failure to learn its lesson.

Two years ago, in 2018, we marked the 100^th anniversary of the end of the First World War, a war that was so unlike any war that had ever happened before, and goodness knows there had been more than enough of them, but a war so much more terrible in its scale and in the death and destruction it caused, that it became known as the Great War. At one time it was thought that it would be the war to end all wars because surely, after such a war as that, no one would ever want to go to war again. Sadly, we now know that wasn’t the case. The First World War was merely the precursor to an even more bloody, and destructive, Second World War which ended 75 years ago, this year.   

The Great War has now passed from living memory and in the not too distant future, the Second World War will too. But let’s hope and pray that the sacrifice of those who fought and suffered and died in those, and so many other wars, will never pass from our collective memory. Let’s hope and pray that their sacrifice will always be remembered and that through that, the people of the world may finally learn their lesson and become just a little bit wiser. Perhaps then we could pay the greatest tribute possible to those who gave so much in time of war and say that it was through them and their sacrifice, that the world finally learned enough wisdom to do things differently. Perhaps then, the peace they fought and suffered and died for could finally, and lastingly, be ours and we could draw a line under the very last name that we would ever have to carve on our war memorials.

Amen.

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You will find the Propers for the 32nd Sunday of Ordinary Time (3 before Advent) here.

1st November 2020

I’m sure it can’t have escaped anyone’s attention that this year is the 75^th anniversary of the end of the Second World War. Over the last six years of course, we’ve had the 75^th anniversary of the events of that war and they’ve been marked by special commemorations and remembrance services as the anniversaries have come along. Last year’s commemoration of the 75^th anniversary of the D Day Landings is just one example of that. Had circumstances been more normal than they are, I’m sure that this year would have seen many similar things taking place to mark the anniversary of the events of the last year of the Second World War, leading up to the anniversary of the end of the war. But, of course, circumstances have been very far from normal this year and so any commemorative events that were planned have had to be very much scaled down, if they’ve been able to take place at all, and next Sunday’s Remembrance Sunday parades and commemorations will be very different, and much smaller, to those we’re used to.

Nevertheless, we’ve still been able to watch TV programmes about the Second World War. There are always lots of those to watch in any year but this year, because of the anniversary of the end of the war, there have been even more than usual. I don’t know about you but, I’m interested in history, so I find programmes like these, very interesting. But, having said that, I do think that the vast majority of them give a very limited picture of the events they show. They only tell a very small part of the story of the events they show. And they do that because, on the whole, they tend to speak about great events and the people, great people we might say, who were involved in causing those events, in planning them and trying to control them.

So, in these programmes we hear about political situations and the politicians involved in them. We don’t hear so much about how the politics and the decisions of politicians affected the everyday lives of the ordinary people who lived through those times. And when we hear about battles, we hear about battle plans about how the battles unfolded and about the generals and field marshals who planned the battles and gave the orders. We don’t hear so much about the troops who actually had to fight the battles.

So, for example, these programmes will say things like, ‘Mussolini brokered a deal which Hitler, Chamberlain and Daladier signed to allow Germany to annex the Sudetenland’: we don’t hear much about the Czechs who weren’t even at the meeting when their lands were being discussed and given away. We hear things like, ‘Hitler invaded Poland’: actually, he didn’t, Hitler was in Berlin when German troops invaded Poland but we don’t hear so much about them, and even less about the Polish troops who tried to defend their homeland against them.

And it’s the same when we hear about battles. Then we hear things like, ‘Montgomery defeated Rommel and won the Battle of El Alamein’. Well, they were the men in charge, they were the ones who made the plans and gave the orders, so in one sense that statement is right, but surely the real ones who did the winning, and losing, were the soldiers who did the fighting and dying? But we don’t hear anywhere near as much about them as we do about those who were in charge, who made the plans and gave the orders.

Now, I’m not criticising Montgomery, very far from it, I’m simply saying this: Field Marshall Bernard Law Montgomery, 1^st Viscount Montgomery of Alamein, Knight of the Garter, Knight Grand Cross of the Order of the Bath, winner of the DSO, member of the Privy Council, to name just a few of his titles and honours, is famous for commanding men in war. Most people here will, I’m sure, have heard of him. But how many of you have heard of Charlie Baker or Jack Baker, or Fred Sidebottom, or Alec Ward? Those were all either members of my family or family friends who fought under Montgomery during the Second World War. You’ve probably never heard of any of them. But where would Montgomery have been without them, and tens, or hundreds of thousands, like them? If it weren’t for them, we’d have probably never heard of Montgomery either. And the same could be said of any commander, on any side, in any war. And it can be said too of the war that Church has been fighting for the last 2,000 years.

Our commander in chief of course, is Jesus; he’s the one who, ultimately, gives the orders in the Church (or at least he should be and if we’re not following his orders but someone else’s instead, we’ve got something very, very wrong and have ended up on the wrong side in the war). But there are also, in the Church, those who are there to remind us of who’s side we’re on and to make sure that we do follow Jesus’ orders. We might say that these people are next in the chain of command, and these are the people whom we often call, the saints.

And saints often have had that kind of role in the Church. We regard the Apostles as saints. They’re the ones who received their orders, if you like, directly from Jesus, and who first took those orders into the world. The group of people whom we call the Church Fathers are regarded as saints. They’re the ones who received Jesus’ orders from the Apostles and who then passed them on through time to make sure that what the Church does and what Christians believe, is in keeping with what Jesus intended. We regard many Church leaders, people like bishops and the founders of monastic communities, as saints because through time they’ve tried to keep the Church faithful to Jesus orders. And we regard martyrs as saints too because they’re the ones who’ve lost their lives in the Church’s ongoing war against sin and evil.

The Church has been fighting this war for a long time, almost 2,000 years so, as you might expect, there are a lot of saints. The Church of England doesn’t have many saints of its own, so to speak, but it does recognise as saints those who were canonised before the Reformation, so there are a lot. The RC Church recognises about 10,000 people as saints. The Orthodox Churches recognise many more, about 23,000 people as saints. Some of those are recognised as saints by everyone, but some aren’t. So there are a lot of people whom the Church considers to be saints. But the numbers I’m talking about here number in the tens of thousands, and whilst that is a large number, it’s hardly the “great number that no one could count” that we heard about in this morning’s reading from the Book of Revelation, is it? So who are all these people who praise God in heaven? They must be saints, holy ones, but there are an innumerable number of them, far more than those whom the Church has canonised and calls saints. So who are they all?

The Scriptures tell us that a saint is a holy person, someone who’s dedicated their life to God and to Jesus. Some of these people we know, by name, but there are a countless number of others who’ve dedicated their lives to God and Jesus through the years, whose names we don’t know. These are the majority of those who stand before God’s throne in heaven, praising him. So one way to understand who these people are is to see this great number in heaven as the troops who’ve fought in the Church’s war against sin and evil. Those the Church regards as saints, whose names we know, will be among them, we could perhaps call those the officers. But there will be an innumerable number of others whose names we don’t know. And really, today, All Saints Day, is about them.

The saints we know by name, have their own day in the Church’s calendar; that’s when we remember them and their life and example. That’s when we remember and give thanks for the part they played in the Church’s war against sin and evil. That very often involved leading others. But those who were led and who carried out Jesus’ orders faithfully and to the best of their ability, are very often unknown to us, and they have no saints day of their own. So All Saints Day is the day when we remember and give thanks for their lives and example too. And it is very important that we do remember and give thanks for the lives and example, and sacrifice, of these unknown soldiers of the Church’s war, as well as of those more famous saints who’s names we do know.

Commanders in any war, are only remembered because they had troops who were willing to follow their orders, and it’s the same in the Church’s war too. If no one had been prepared to do what Jesus said, there would have been no Church in which to remember and carry out his orders. Later, if there had been no one willing to listen to the Apostles and carry out their orders, they’d have been forgotten because the Church would have died when they did. And so on through the Church’s history. The saints we know by name are only remembered because there have been countless others in the Church who’ve been just as willing to dedicate their lives to God and Jesus, but whose names we don’t remember.

And, if we’re going to be remembered in and by the Church, it will almost certainly be as amongst those countless others. It’s very unlikely that we’ll be remembered by name and be made saints of the Church in the way that the Apostles or Church Fathers have been, but we still have an important role to play in the Church’s war against sin and evil. If we can dedicate ourselves to God and Jesus and be saints, albeit unknown by name, we’ll help to make sure that there is a Church to continue the fight. We’ll help to make sure that Jesus’ orders are remembered and passed on. We’ll help to make sure that the lives and example of the saints are remembered too. And we’ll help to make sure that there is a Church in which we’ll be remembered, and in which people will give thanks for our lives and examples on All Saints Days to come when, God willing, we’ve gone to take up our place among the multitude praising God before his throne in heaven.

Amen.  

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You will find the Propers for All Saints here.