Among the members of my family is a lady who has a great liking for jewellery. Rings on each finger, earrings, bracelets, necklaces, she wears them all, and all at the same time. At one time she used to wear 3 different necklaces together. Now, you might think there’s nothing so unusual about that but the three necklaces she wore were all religious symbols. There was a six-pointed Star of David, a crucifix, and a cross. These symbols are often seen as having particular meaning. The Star of David is a symbol of Judaism. The crucifix is often seen as a symbol of Catholic Christianity. And the cross is often seen as a symbol of Reformed Christianity, or in common understanding, Protestant Christianity.

I remember one occasion, during a family night out, someone looking at these necklaces, then pointing to them and saying to the lady in question,

“Can’t you make your mind up?”

The lady glanced down at her necklaces, looked at me with one of those ‘Are you going to hit him or shall I’ kind of looks, and then looked the person who’d asked the question with a rather withering look and said in an equally withering tone,

“I’m a Christian, but you can’t have this,” slightly raising the cross,

“without this.” And lifted the crucifix.

“And you can’t have either without this.” And lifted up the Star of David.

“But this is the most important.” And lifted up the crucifix again.

After a few seconds, the other person asked,

“So are you Catholic then?”

To which the lady giving the same looks all round again, answered, in the same tone,

“No, I’m Church of England but this” and lifted up the crucifix again, “is more important than that because the man on it is more important than that.”

That is a true story, and it happened quite a long time ago now, well before I’d even offered myself for ordination, but I’ve always remembered it. I’ve remembered it because of the look on the lady’s face, both the way she looked at me and at the person who’d asked the questions. I’ve remembered it because it was a spontaneous yet brilliant answer, the kind of answer that proves Jesus’ words. That we’re interrogated about our faith,

“…do not worry about what to say or how to say it. At that time you will be given what to say, for it will not be you speaking, but the Spirit of your Father speaking through you.”

And I’ve remembered it because it also shows just how mixed-up people can be about faith and religion. How they can miss what’s really important about faith because they don’t look any further into it than what’s in front of them. How they can make assumptions about faith based on their own knowledge and understanding, which is very often only limited knowledge and understanding, and even on their prejudices. And about how people can make damning statements about the faith of others based on their own prejudices and lack of understanding.

When we speak about our faith, we mustn’t ever lose sight of the fact that it is the Christian faith. It’s called the Christian faith, or Christianity, because it’s a faith based on Jesus Christ; the clue is in the name. And so Jesus Christ must be the ground and centre of our faith. Without Jesus there is no such thing as the Christian faith and if we side-line Jesus in any way, if we make other people in the story as important or more important than Jesus, whilst we might still have a faith, it won’t be a truly Christian faith. And this morning’s Gospel shows that centrality of Jesus Christ in our faith.

The Gospel begins by telling us that Jesus’ ministry begins after John had been arrested. Later in the Gospel, Jesus calls his first disciples. And so we see Jesus in the centre of the proclamation of the Good News of the kingdom – first John, who prepared the way for Jesus, then Jesus himself, who proclaimed the kingdom, then the disciples, who followed Jesus and continued to proclaim the kingdom after Jesus had returned to the Father. And whenever we think about our faith, we always have to remember this order. There were those who came before Jesus, those who prepared for the coming of Jesus, and there are those who come after Jesus, his followers, those who carry on Jesus’ work through time. But both those who came before and those who come after, point to Jesus who is the centre of our faith. Or at least that’s what should happen.

It’s a sad fact, but a fact nonetheless, that much of the division in the Church, is caused because people don’t keep Jesus at the centre of our faith. There are those who put too much emphasis on those who came before Jesus, and unfortunately, that’s often centred on the Blessed Virgin Mary. There’s no doubting Mary’s importance in the story of our salvation; she was the one chosen by God to be the mother of his Son, the mother of Jesus, our Lord and Saviour and the ground of our faith. But some people in the Church would like to see Mary much more highly exalted than she is already.

There are those who call her the Mediatrix of all graces and think all Christians should do likewise. This refers to an understanding that Mary mediates divine grace, God’s goodness and gifts to us, from the side of his throne in heaven. The obvious objection to this is that Christ is our mediator and our advocate, but those who hold Mary to be Mediatrix place her  between us and Christ, to use a business analogy, Jesus is the supplier of graces, but Mary is the distributor of those graces. Now this is clearly not Scriptural and even Pope Francis, in 2019, said that we should not got lost in such foolishness. 

But there are those who, in addition to Mediatrix, would also have Mary as Co-Redemptrix, or Co-Redeemer. By this they don’t mean that Mary is equal to Christ in his role as Redeemer of the world but rather that, through being his mother, her faith and obedience, and as Mother of the Church, she co-operates with Christ in his redemption of the world to a greater extent than all others. But the clear meaning of the prefix ‘co’ implies equality doesn’t it? And so when people begin to go down these avenues, whilst they might not mean to go so far, people will inevitably misunderstand what they mean and go further than the proposers intended. And before we know where we are, in popular thought at least, we end up in a murky world where we’re not really sure who is at the centre, is it Jesus, or is it Mary?

And of course, those who disagree with this exaltation of Mary can go completely the opposite way in response. I met and spoke to a lady just this last week who is vehemently anti-Mary. A lady who said there should be no statues or pictures of Mary anywhere in any churches because, and I quote, “Mary has nothing to do with it.”

When I pointed out that, as Jesus’ mother and so the source of his humanity, Mary has quite a lot to do with it, the reply was,

“That doesn’t matter. SHE has nothing to do with it.”

I wonder what Pope Francis would say about that, because that also is clearly unscriptural and clearly and undeniably, foolishness.

But if attempts to exalt Mary ever more highly have the potential to shift our focus away from Jesus and too much towards those who came before him, what that vehement anti-Mary attitude also clearly and undeniably shows is how we can shift our focus away from Jesus and too much towards those who come after him. In other words, towards the traditions of men that we usually refer to as denominations of the Church.

The clear fact of the matter is, that if those who’ve come after Christ had always kept him at the centre of all things, we wouldn’t have different denominations of the Church; there would be one Church, as Christ intended there to be. Because what is the cause of our divisions other than those who exalt their own teaching and their own ways above the ways of Christ?

I mentioned a few moments ago about the meaning of the prefix ‘co’ and the potential for that to be misunderstood when applied to the proposed Marian title ‘Co-Redemptrix’. But so many arguments and divisions in the Church have been caused by such simple misunderstandings. One person interprets a word in one way, another person interprets it differently. They argue about it and, because they’re both so pig-headed and stubbornly pedantic they fall out and go their separate ways. It’s happened in the Church, and it’s caused divisions in the Church, major divisions that persist to this day. The Great Schism of 1054, the formal split between the Catholic West and the Orthodox East, was caused by arguments about whether the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son, as the West argued, or simply from the Father, as the East argued. About whether unleavened bread should be used at the Eucharist, as the West does, or leavened, as the East does. And about who is in charge of the Church, does Rome have universal authority, as the West believed, or does Constantinople have equal authority, as the East believed? And these arguments were made worse because the West spoke and wrote Latin and the East spoke and wrote Greek. Mutual ex-communications, insults and accusations of heresy followed, each side blamed the other, the Church split along Western and Eastern lines and is still split in that way today.

But if we try to look at these things impartially and objectively, isn’t the real root cause nothing more than human pride, a ‘we’re right and you’re wrong mentality’, a refusal to back down or compromise, and anger and hatred because of all that? And yet didn’t Jesus say we shouldn’t ‘Lord it’ over one another, but be humble and loving and forgiving? And, if we look at these things in this way how can we see them other than a shifting of Christ from the centre of our faith and putting our own traditions there in Christ’s place?

Think about in this way, how often have we in the Church’s history and do we still today talk about the Catholic faith, the Orthodox faith and the Protestant faith, as though these were completely different faiths? But aren’t we all supposed to be of the same faith? And isn’t that called the Christian faith?

Amen.  

---

The Propers for the 3rd Sunday in Ordinary Time (Epiphany 3) can be viewed here.

According to the Roman Catholic way of marking the Church’s year, today is the Second Sunday of Ordinary Time, in other words, the second Sunday in the Church’s year when we’re neither celebrating a particular feast day, nor are we in a specific season of the Church’s year. The Church of England, on the other hand, regards the time between the Epiphany of the Lord until the Presentation of the Lord at Candlemas, to be the season of Epiphany and so, in the Anglican Church, today is the Second Sunday of Epiphany. And I must say that, in my opinion, this is one of those occasions when the Church of England has got it right.

The word ‘epiphany’, as we know, means revelation, and as we go through this time between Epiphany and Candlemas, our Sunday Gospel readings are about various revelations of Jesus’ identity, so this time is one when we’re very much concerned with revelation and coming to understand just who Jesus really is. On the Day of Epiphany itself, Jesus is revealed as King, God and Saviour of the nations. In the story of his baptism, Jesus is revealed as the Messiah and Son of God. And in our Gospel this morning, in which St John alludes to Jesus’ Baptism, Jesus is revealed to be the Lamb of God, the one who takes away the sin of the world, and the Chosen One of God. But in this morning’s readings we also see another side of this season of revelation, a side that speaks to us about what we are called to reveal to others about Christ.

In the Book of the Prophet Isaiah, we find four passages that we know as Songs of the Servant, songs that describe the Messiah. This morning’s reading from Isaiah is part of the Second Song of the Servant and in it we read that the Messiah (who is the personification of Israel) will glorify the Father. To glorify someone really means to say something good about them, so what Isaiah is saying here is that the Messiah is the one who will reveal the Father; first to Israel, but not only to Israel because, Isaiah goes on to prophecy that the Lord has said,

“I will make you as a light for the nations,
    that my salvation may reach to the end of the earth.”

So this is a prophecy that the Jewish Messiah will also be the Gentiles’ Christ, which is a prophecy we see fulfilled in part, in the coming of the Wise Men on the feast of Epiphany itself.

But Jesus said that his followers, his disciples, are also to be lights in the world didn’t he. And he also gave his disciples a commission to take his teachings and commandments to all nations. So Jesus called and then commissioned his disciples to carry on the work that the Father had sent him to do.

A disciple, as I’m sure we all know, is a follower and in our case, as Christians, we’re called to be followers of Christ’s teaching and example. So we’re all Christ’s disciples. An apostle, on the other hand, is an authorised messenger, someone who’s sent out to pass on a message on behalf of the one who wants the message to be delivered and heard. So, as lights of the world, called to proclaim and spread the Gospel, we’re also Christ’s apostles.

But if we’re going to take a message to someone, we obviously have to know what that message is. And if we’re going to pass on a message accurately, we have to pay close attention to the message before we pass it on; we have to know exactly what the one who’s sent us out with the message wants us to pass on. We could say that we have to make sure that we follow the instructions of the one who’s sent us so that we know not only the words of the message but the meaning of the message too, the intention behind the message we’ve be asked to pass on. So we have to be followers before we can be messengers or, to put it another way, we have to be disciples before we can be apostles. And if we’re going to be good, faithful apostles, we have to be good, faithful disciples first. But what does it mean to be good, faithful disciples so that we can be good, faithful apostles? I think this morning’s Psalm can give us a few helpful pointers.

It must be said that this Psalm, Psalm 40, or 39 depending on how you want to number them, isn’t the most straightforward to understand. It seems to be split into two distinct parts, and that’s led some people think that this was originally two psalms that somehow became joined together as one. Through Jewish eyes, the part we read today is a song of thanksgiving to the Lord for deliverance, either of an individual Israelite, or the nation, that was interpreted by the early Church as a messianic prophecy. But however we read it, it can help us to understand what it means to be a good disciple.

In verses 6 -8 of the Psalm, we read,

In sacrifice and offering you have not delighted,

but you have given me an open ear.
Burnt offering and sin offering

you have not required.
Then I said, “Behold, I have come;
in the scroll of the book it is written of me:
I delight to do your will, O my God;
your law is within my heart.” 

What we read here is the prioritising of listening to the Lord and of offering our lives to the Lord through obedience to his will over ritual sacrifices and offerings.

These verses also suggest that delighting to do God’s will, making that our priority and our joy, comes from being so conversant with God’s words, through listening so attentively to them, that they become our own words. In other words, if you’ll pardon the pun, we become so steeped in God’s words that his ways become our ways. And in the Psalm, this leads to the proclamation of God’s ways to others;

I have told the glad news of deliverance
in the great congregation;
behold, I have not restrained my lips,
as you know, O Lord.
I have not hidden your deliverance within my heart;
I have spoken of your faithfulness and your salvation;
I have not concealed your steadfast love and your faithfulness
from the great congregation.

So what we can see in this psalm is good, faithful discipleship leading to good, faithful apostleship. And it’s important that we go get our discipleship right first before we attempt to go about the business of being apostles. Because if we’re poor disciples, if we don’t listen properly to the words of the Lord and if we don’t at least try to live out his commandments to the best of our ability, how can we pass his words and commandments on to others? If we don’t know what the Lord said, how can we tell others what he said? If we don’t try to live out the things the Lord taught, how can we ask, let alone encourage others to do that? And if we don’t know that Lord’s words mean and don’t apply them to ourselves by trying to live out his commandments, but then try to proclaim these things to others, what kind of message, what kind of Gospel are we really passing on? I think it’s only a matter of logic and common sense that if we try to proclaim a Gospel we don’t understand and don’t at least try to live out, we’ll pass on a distorted version of the Lord’s message and give people a distorted idea of what it means to be a Christian. Poor, unfaithful disciples can only, ever, make for poor, unfaithful apostles.

And yet isn’t this what we so often see? Because what are our arguments about denomination and tradition other than arguments between people who are putting their own ideas about ritual before the words and ways of the Lord? And don’t the people who do this, quite openly and knowingly, pass on their ideas about these things as the truth, as the message and even as the Gospel? But aren’t the people who do this ignoring the Lord’s words about love and forgiveness and unity and encouraging others to do the same? 

How many people believe that they’re Christians simply because they come to Church?

And how many people like this pay little, if any, attention to the Lord’s words and ways either when they’re in church or in their daily lives? How many people have we met who are like this but who think they’re so much better than other people who go to church? People who say things like,

‘Oh, I don’t go to a parish church, I go to the cathedral.’

And

‘WE don’t just have a vicar; OUR vicar is a canon.’

What is this but spiritual pride, the very first sin which Jesus himself implicitly warns us about in the first Beatitude and so often condemned in the scribes and Pharisees? What kind of distorted version of the Lord’s message do these people pass on to those who hear and see them and the way they speak and act?

How many people deliberately distort the words of the Lord, or ‘re-interpret’ them so that they make the Lord say what they want the Lord to say? But aren’t those who do this making their words and their ways the Lord’s rather than making the Lord’s words and ways theirs, as good, faithful disciples should? What kind of distorted version of the Lord’s message are these people passing on to others? In fact, doesn’t the Church we belong to seem to be in danger of following this way as a Church? Doesn’t the Church we belong to seem, as a Church, to be in danger of re-interpreting the Lord’s message in the light of world, rather than taking the light of the Lord’s own message to the world? What kind of Christ do those who do all these things, and many others that are in keeping with neither the Lord’s words nor his ways, really reveal to the world? And if the Christ who’s being revealed to the world is not the Christ who came into the world to save it, how can any of this be to the glory of God?

As Christians, we’re called to shine as lights in the world and to proclaim the Gospel to all nations, to all people. So in this season of Epiphany, this season of revelation of Christ to the nations, lets try to remember that the Christ we reveal to the world will be the Christ who’s words and ways live in our hearts. If we have a distorted image of Christ and his words and ways in our hearts, that’s the distorted image of Christ we’ll proclaim and reveal to the world. We’re called to be Christ’s disciples so that we can be his apostles. So let’s be good and faithful disciples, followers who listen to his words and obey his commandments, so that we can be good and faithful apostles who carry and deliver his message, and his message alone, to the world.

Amen.

---

The Propers for the 2nd Sunday (Epiphany 2) can be viewed here.

The story of Jesus’ baptism is a very important one. The fact that it’s in the Gospels at all, and all 4 Gospels at that, tells us just how important it is. Because, if we think about it, it would probably have been easier for the evangelists not to mention it at all. They were concerned with showing Jesus to be the Messiah, Immanuel, the Son of God, so it would have been much more convenient for them to have been able to ignore a story which shows Jesus submitting to John’s authority by going to be baptised by him. But the fact that the evangelists did include it in the Gospels tells us two things. One is that Jesus was baptised by John and that this was so well-known that they couldn’t ignore it. And the other is that it must have been too important an event to be left out of the story of Jesus’ life and ministry.

And it is a very important part of the story. It’s important because it marks the public revelation of Jesus as God’s Son, and it marks the beginning of Jesus’ public ministry, or at least the beginning of Jesus’ final preparation for his public ministry because after his baptism there was only his 40 days in the wilderness to go through before he began to proclaim the kingdom and choose his disciples. But having said how important the story of Jesus’ baptism is, we also have to say that it’s a very problematic story, and not just because it shows Jesus submitting to John.

The real problem with the story of Jesus’ baptism is why? Why was Jesus baptised? John himself didn’t understand this and asked what amounts to the same question, as we read this morning:

John would have prevented him, saying, “I need to be baptized by you, and do you come to me?” 

And really, Jesus’ answer simply compounds the difficulty in answering this question:

 “Let it be so now, for thus it is fitting for us to fulfil all righteousness.” 

Righteousness is doing what’s right and good in God’s eyes and so Jesus’ answer tells us that baptism by John was something that was good and right in God’s eyes. But John’s baptism was a baptism for repentance in preparation for the coming of the Messiah, and repentance implies sin. Repentance is about turning over a new leaf. It’s about feeling sorrow for sin, doing something to make amends for sin, and then making a determined effort not to sin again. But Jesus wasn’t a sinner, he was, quite literally, righteousness personified, so why did he need to be baptised in repentance for sin? In what sense did the baptism of the sinless Son of God fulfil all righteousness?

Some people have tried to answer this by using a passage from 2 Corinthians where St Paul says,

For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.

But it was on the Cross that Jesus became sin, where he took on to himself the sins of the world, not at his baptism, so this still doesn’t really answer the question of why Jesus submitted to a baptism of repentance for sin in order to fulfil all righteousness. In fact, no one has ever been able to find a completely satisfactory answer to this question but perhaps as good a way as any to answer it, or at least to approach it, is to view it in the way we tend to look at infant baptism today. 

In the Creeds of the Church we say that we believe in baptism for the forgiveness of sin, and in the baptism service itself, we speak about the baptised being cleansed from sin. That makes perfectly good sense if we’re baptising older children or adults but, as we know, the custom of most Churches is to baptise infants, babies; but what sin does a baby need to be cleansed from? What sins has a baby committed?

Traditionally, the answer to this question is that they need to be cleansed from the stain of original sin, that sin which all human beings inherit at their conception as a result of the original sin which Adam committed in Eden. In fact this is why infant baptism has become the norm in most Churches because it was long believed that all human beings share the guilt of Adam’s original sin and that, should they die before being baptised, they would die in sin and couldn’t enter heaven. So, in days gone by when infant mortality was so high, people wanted their children baptised as soon as possible after they were born. And so infant baptism became the norm of the Church; I was less than 2 months old when I was baptised and I’m sure something similar could be said for many of you too. But this understanding of original sin is based on a mistranslation of Scripture.

When it was first translated into Latin, Romans 5:12 was translated so that it referred to Adam ‘in whom all sinned’, implying that all people are sinners simply because they’re of Adam’s race, because they’re human beings. In other words, all people, simply by virtue of their conception as human beings, share the guilt of Adam’s original sin and need to be baptised to be cleansed of this sin, even if they’re too young to have sinned personally. But a more accurate translation of Romans 5:12 reads that sin and death entered the world through Adam, and so to all people, in so much as, or because, all sinned. In other words, people suffer the consequences of Adam’s original sin because it’s through him that sin entered the world, but they don’t share the guilt of Adam’s sin. Human beings are sinners, not because they’re Adam’s descendants, but because they all sin, personally.

This takes away the necessity of infant baptism. That doesn’t mean to say it’s wrong to baptise infants, just that we have to look at infant baptism in a different way. Instead of seeing it as necessary to remove the stain and guilt of original sin, we can look at it as a washing away of an old way of life; the washing away of a way of life in which children are condemned to repeat the mistakes, and sins, of their forebears, so that they can embark on a new way of life; one that’s lived according to the teaching and example of Christ. And this is reflected in the baptism service we use for today. Whilst the service for adults and older children, those old enough to answer for themselves, still speaks about repentance and forgiveness, the service for infants speaks less about these things and much more about dying to sin and rising to new life in Christ.

Baptism is a liminal moment in a person’s life. It’s a moment, a point in a person’s life when they change, when they move from one state of being to another. It’s a time when they leave behind the way of the world and begin a new life following the way of Christ. That’s true of everyone who’s baptised, regardless of their age. The older people are when they’re baptised, the more they have to leave behind because they’ve been following the way of the world, the sinful way of the world, for longer than someone who’s younger. When a baby, someone who’s too young to know the way of the world, is baptised, they have nothing to leave behind so, hopefully and ideally, their whole life will be lived in the way of Christ. We know that doesn’t happen but that’s our fault because who do children learn the sinful ways of the world from if it’s not us? So the intention of baptism is that it is this liminal moment, the point in a person’s life when the old ways are washed away and left behind so that they can move on to a new way, Christ’s way. And this is how we can look at the baptism of Jesus and make sense of it.

John was sent by God to prepare the way for the Messiah. He did that through a baptism of repentance for sin. The intention behind John’s baptism is that, before baptism, people weren’t ready for the coming of the Messiah, after baptism, they were ready for his coming. It was a liminal moment, a point in people’s lives when they moved from being of what we call the Old Covenant to being prepared for the coming of the New Covenant. As God had sent John to do this, it was all part of God’s plan for the salvation of the world. And so being baptised by John was the righteous thing to do, it was what God required of people. Jesus, being sinless, may not have needed a baptism of repentance because he had nothing to repent for, but he was of the Old Covenant, he was born a Jew.

In the Letter to the Hebrews we read the Jesus,

…had to be made like his brothers in every respect, so that he might become a merciful and faithful high priest in the service of God, to make propitiation for the sins of the people. 

So what could be more fitting for him to do than fulfil all righteousness under the Old Covenant by doing what God required his brothers to do in preparation for the coming of the New Covenant? What could be more fitting than for Jesus to go through this liminal moment himself, a point in time when he became ready, not for the Messiah, but to be the Messiah? A point in time when he moved from being a private person, living under the Old Covenant, to being a public figure ready to proclaim and usher in a new age under the New Covenant?

If we look at the story of Jesus’ baptism in this way, we can see why, in spite of its difficulties, the evangelists felt it was a story they had to tell. It’s a story that confirms the divine providence of John’s baptism. It’s a story that teaches us something about baptism as a liminal moment in our lives, a point in our lives when we leave behind an old way of life to begin a new way of life. And perhaps above all, it teaches us something about Jesus himself because it’s a story that  shows him both in his humanity and his divinity. It’s a story that shows Jesus’ humanity because it shows him to be completely like everyone else, as someone required to do what God required all people to do. And it shows Jesus divinity too as he is revealed to be God’s own beloved Son, openly declared by the voice of his heavenly Father.

Amen. 

---

The Propers for The Baptism of the Lord can be viewed here.