Have you ever stopped and taken a few moments to consider just what a horrible place the world seems to be coming? By that, I mean just how really  horrible people seem to be coming towards one another? Just think about it for a moment now. It can’t have escaped many people’s notice that, at the moment, there are two high profile libel cases going on; cases which have resulted from celebrities insulting one another in public. I’m sure we’ve probably all noticed too that we now have politicians who seem to be less interested in making good policies than in also trading insults and looking for scandal about one another, less concerned with political campaigning than in smear campaigning. Then, of course, we have the woke brigade with their cancel culture, a group which, to all intents and purposes, are setting out to ostracise anyone doesn’t share their views; not only to treat anyone who doesn’t agree with them as an outcast themselves, but to bully others in to doing the same. And this is to say nothing of what’s happening in Ukraine at the moment.

As we look at the world we live in, and especially the increasingly belligerent,  intolerant, and even malevolent way that people treat each other, it would be very easy to despair of the world and its people. But then, every so often, something comes along to give us some hope that perhaps things are not quite so bad as they might seem because not everybody is so bad as people can often seem to be. And I came across just such a thing during the last week.

I came across it speaking to a bereaved family in preparation for a funeral, and I found it in the story of their parents. Mum, whose funeral I’d been asked to take, was born in Germany in the 1920s and she’d lived the whole of her teenaged years during the Second World War. During that war she’d seen her hometown of Hamburg virtually destroyed by allied air raids, and over 200,000 of her fellow Hamburgers (and yes, that is what they’re called) killed or wounded in those air raids. Nevertheless, after the war, she moved to England and came to live in Oldham where she met her husband to be. He was Ukrainian. He’d also lived through the Second World war and had also seen some terrible things, including the cold-blooded murder of some members of his family by German soldiers. And as I listened to this story I thought just what a really rather wonderful story it was. Not in terms of their wartime experiences , but in terms of how these two people were able to put those things behind them and rebuild their lives.

At a human level, it’s the story of a young German girl coming to live in a country whose armed forces had destroyed her hometown and killed and wounded so many of its citizens, her fellow citizens, and of a man meeting, falling in love with, and marrying a young woman whose compatriots had murdered some of his family. It’s a wonderful story of forgiveness and reconciliation. It’s a story of two people who were able to let go of the past and go on with their lives, and because of that, to find love and happiness with and amongst people who’d once been their deadly enemies.

I think this is such a wonderful story because it shows us just what can happen between people. It shows what can happen if people are willing to let go of the past and look to the future. It shows what can happen if people are willing to accept others for what they are, rather than to blame them for what’s gone before and for what their ancestors did. It shows what can happen if people are willing to accept others for what they are rather than insisting that others think and speak and act as they do. But this isn’t just a story about what can happen between people if they can do these things, it’s a story about what did happen between two people when they did do these things and so it’s a story that’s full of hope. And it’s a story that should resonate with us, as Christians, because we’re called to be people who do these things. We’re called to be people who don’t keep score of wrongs or harbour grudges. We’re called to be people who are forgiving and who always look for reconciliation between people. And we’re called to be people who love others, no matter who or what they are.

Unfortunately though, and as I’m sure we all know, people who call themselves ‘Christians’ don’t always act like this, in the way they should. We know that’s true, and we can’t even say it’s something that’s happened in more recent times. We might think that people have become more horrible and intolerant in recent years, and are becoming increasingly so, but this has been a problem in the Church from it’s very earliest years.

In the reading from the Act of the Apostles at St Mark’s this morning (which was the reading from Acts at St Gabriel’s on Wednesday morning too), we read about a dispute between the party known as the ‘Judaisers’ and Ss Paul and Barnabas. The Judaisers were a group of early Christians who thought that the Jewish law had to be enforced and that no one could be saved, and by extension be part of the Church, unless they obeyed the law. But Paul and Barnabas, who’d actually done the work of evangelising the new Gentile converts to Christianity, were having none of this and so, in the end, the problem was taken to the apostles in the Jerusalem Church.

As we read;

…some men came down from Judea and were teaching the brothers, “Unless you are circumcised according to the custom of Moses, you cannot be saved.” And after Paul and Barnabas had no small dissension and debate with them, Paul and Barnabas and some of the others were appointed to go up to Jerusalem to the apostles and the elders about this question.

And in the end, and after ‘much debate’ the Church decided that Gentile converts to Christianity shouldn’t have to obey the law of Moses. They decided that, as God had clearly given the Holy Spirit to the Gentiles when they hadn’t been keeping the law, they, the human element of the Church, it’s people, had no right to insist that they must keep it.

If we boil this argument down to its essence, what is it but an argument about the kind of things that I’ve spoken about this morning? What is it but an argument caused by intolerance of people’s differences and belligerence based on that intolerance ? We keep the law and you don’t, so we’re right and you’re wrong. God gave the law to us not to you, so we’re his people and you’re not. If you want to be part of our Church, you have to do what we do and do what we say. And what was the Judaisers attempt to exclude people from the Church unless they did what they told them to do other than a 1^st Century version of a cancel culture?

But in the end it was the Church who put an end to this argument. It was the Church who showed tolerance of those who didn’t keep the law of Moses, and we have to remember that at this time the Church was simply a group within Judaism. It was the Church who showed tolerance to those non-Jews who wanted to come to the Lord Jesus and follow him. It was the Church who was willing to put the past distinction between Jew and Gentile behind them and look to the future. It was the Church who wanted to reconcile these two peoples and bring them together, in mutual love, into a marriage, the marriage of Christ and his Church.

When I say though, that it was the Church who put an end to this argument, what I really mean is that the Church put an and to this specific argument that we read about in the Acts of the Apostles because, as we all know, these arguments still go on and still plague the Church today and sadly, it’s the Church herself, through her people, who causes and perpetuates them.

We all know these arguments and we’ve all heard them; are you Catholic or a Protestant? Are you High Church or Low Church? Are you in favour of women priests or against them? 

And if you’re not in agreement with the one asking the question you’re quite likely to find yourself ostracised, sent to Coventry, cancelled, because of it. When I first came to this diocese, for example, at the first Deanery Synod meeting I went to, I was introduced by another priest to one of his Deanery Synod reps. I offered my hand in friendship, as people usually do, and in response I got a rather cold stare and then the person in question turned to the other priest and said, ‘Before I shake his hand, is he one of us or one of the other lot?’ With that, I put my hand down. I looked at the other priest, he looked at me, the other person looked at both of us in turn and then turned his back on me. I really don’t know what that was all about because I don’t know what he meant by the ‘other lot’. But if that’s how his lot treat people in the Church who don’t agree with them in some way, I rather hope I am one of the ‘other lot’ because I really wouldn’t want to be part of any lot who treated other people in such an appalling way.

It’s very sad that things like this go on in the Church and between people who call themselves ‘Christians’ but it does. It shouldn’t though. The story I heard a few days ago about that German lady and her Ukrainian husband is a story about how things should be, and could be, if only people could be willing to let go of the past and to be more tolerant of each other and their differences. I said it was a story of hope, not because it’s a story about what can happen but because it’s a story of what did happen between two people. This is the hope that the Church is called to bring to the world. The hope that there is a better way, the hope that people can let go of the past and look to the future, the hope that people can be tolerant of each other and of our differences, the hope that people can be reconciled to one another through mutual forgiveness of past wrongs, the hope that people can live together in mutual love. That’s the hope we’re called to give the world but it’s a hope we can’t give to the world unless we can do those things ourselves and show those things in our own lives.

The world might be coming a horrible place filled with people who are quite happy to be horrible towards one another, but we’re not called to be like that, and we don’t have to be. We are in the world, but we’re called to be not of the world. So let’s give the world some hope by doing all we can to not be part of the horrible way that so many people in the world treat one another.

Amen.  

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The Propers for the 6th Sunday of Easter can be viewed here.

Many, if not all of you will have heard of the Norfolk village of Little Walsingham. Even if you’ve never visited the village, you may have heard of it because it’s a famous place of Christian pilgrimage. And if you haven’t heard of it for that reason, you’ll at least have heard or read about Walsingham in the Sunday notices in church or online when I’ve advertised our own parish pilgrimage to Walsingham.

Walsingham is the site of the most famous Marian shrine in England. It’s roots go back to the year 1061 and so it’s been a place of pilgrimage, in one form or another, for almost 1,000 years. Over those years, Walsingham has changed a great deal and many times. The Shrine began as a simple wooden house which was later incorporated into a larger stone building that was built to protect the original wooden house from the elements. Over the years the stone building was enlarged and eventually became a great Abbey that flourished until the dissolution of the monasteries under Henry VIII when it was closed and eventually, demolished. After that Walsingham fell into relative obscurity until pilgrimage there was revived by the vicar of Walsingham in 1922. The present Shrine Church was consecrated in 1938 but there have been many changes in Walsingham since then. I first went to Walsingham in 1993 and whilst the Shrine Church itself hasn’t changed since then, the grounds that surround it and the village of Little Walsingham itself certainly have, and those changes have affected pilgrimage to Walsingham. 

During the past week, I spent a few days in the East of England and, as I was in that part of the country, I visited Walsingham for a few hours. During my time there I chatted to a few of the villagers and one of the things we spoke about was the way things have changed in Walsingham over the years. We spoke about the fact that there’s no longer a Post Office in the village; about the number of shops and pubs that have closed; the number of tea shops and restaurants that have closed, and about the number of places offering accommodation that have closed. And there’s no doubt that some of these changes have had an adverse effect on pilgrimage to the Shrine.

One of the biggest events of the pilgrimage season in Walsingham is the National Pilgrimage that takes place in May each year. This year, because of the Queen’s Jubilee celebrations, the National Pilgrimage took place on the first Monday in May rather than the last, as it traditionally does. Amongst the people I spoke to in Walsingham about this year’s National Pilgrimage, was the landlord of one of the only two remaining pubs in the village.

He told me how much he’d been looking forward to this year’s National Pilgrimage. He thought that, after two years of Covid restrictions, there would be a big turnout this year. But, in the event, he said it was very quiet and very disappointing. The information he was given by the Shrine, was that only about 500 people came to Walsingham for the National Pilgrimage this year. You might think that 500 people for a church service is good; but when I tell you that for the first National Pilgrimage I went to in 1994, the congregation was about 5,000, I think you’ll understand how things have changed, and not for the better. One of the main reasons for this seems to be that because of the loss of guest accommodation in the village. A lot of people have stopped going to the National Pilgrimage because, for a lot of people, Walsingham is too far to go for just a few hours, and for those who are willing to make the National Pilgrimage a day trip, staying around for a few drinks is out of the question, which for a pub landlord is very disappointing indeed.

One of the things that pilgrims to Walsingham have often said to me over the years is that going to Walsingham is like stepping back in time to a much quieter and slower way of life. In many ways that’s true, but that doesn’t mean that Walsingham has never changed. It has changed, many times over the years, and it continues to change as the years go by. It’s changed for the better over the years, and it’s changed for the worse over the years. But then, we can’t really expect anything else can we because life itself is like that isn’t it?

Change is part and parcel of human life. We all change as we go through life, sometimes for the better, and sometimes for the worse. As we grow up, we tend to improve in terms of our physical and mental abilities, we can do more and do things better than we once could and, hopefully at least, we become more mature in our attitudes and wiser in our words and actions. But as we grow older, some of the changes we go through are not so good. Our physical abilities decline, what we could do in our teens and twenties, even our thirties, we probably can’t do in or past our forties or fifties. And as we grow older we tend to lose some of our mental sharpness too. Even if we’re spared such a terrible disease as dementia, we probably find it harder to learn new things as we get older than we did in our younger days.

And we don’t just change physically, the circumstances of our lives change too. Most of us live with our families when we’re young. Then, as we get older, we move away from home; we go to university, we get our own home, we get married, have children of our own who, in their turn, also move on and go their own way in life. And we change from being in education to being in employment. Most of us change jobs during our working life too.

Then we change from working to being retired. And the world we live in changes and when it does, that affects and changes our lives too.

So we live in a constant state of change throughout our lives. And then there’s that final change that we all have to go through at the end of our earthly lives, that change from life to death. But I say that this is the final change of our earthly lives, and not simply the final change, quite deliberately, because as Christians we believe that this change from life to death isn’t the final change we have to go through. We believe that after our earthly lives have come to an end, we still haven’t come to the end of change. There’s still one more change that we have to go through before we can come to the end of change and that’s the change from death to eternal life.

Quite what that change will be like, we don’t know. The Scriptures do give us some clues but perhaps one of the reasons we find it so hard to imagine what eternal life will be like is because it will be a life without change. It will be a life that is unimaginably better than the life we have and know during our time on earth, even in the best of times we’ve ever known. As St Paul says in his First Letter to the Corinthians,

“What no eye has seen, nor ear heard, nor the heart of man imagined,
what God has prepared for those who love him”

But we have a saying don’t we, that ‘All good things must come to an end’? But eternal life with God will be better than any good thing we’ve ever known or can even imagine, and it won’t come to an end, ever.

It will be a life in which we live in the love that Jesus commanded his disciples to have for one another. I hope we all know what it is to love and be loved; I hope we all know how good that is and how good it feels. One of the problems with earthly love though is that, sometimes, it isn’t returned; the one we love doesn’t love us. Sometimes too, earthly love comes to an end. And we know how these things feel; they hurt, very deeply. But the kind of love that Jesus spoke about is always mutual, it’s always given and returned, and it never comes to an end.

One of the most painful changes we can go through in life is to lose someone we love, whether that’s because our love and relationship with them has come to an end, or when we’re parted by death. Again, that’s a pain I’m sure we all know and it’s one of the worst pains and changes we can go through in life. But once we’ve changed from death to eternal life with God, this is a pain and a change that we’ll never have to go through again. As this morning’s reading from the Book of Revelation tells us:

“Behold, the dwelling place of God is with man. He will dwell with them, and they will be his people, and God himself will be with them as their God.  He will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain any more, for the former things have passed away.”

The life that God promises to those who have faith in him is a life beyond our imagination. It’s a life better than the best times we’ve ever known on earth and a life in which those good times never come to an end because nothing ever changes, so there can never be any bad times, or even less good times. But of course, a promise is only as trustworthy as the one who makes it. So a very big part of our faith in God is that God himself is faithful, that God himself is unchanging and will keep his promise. I think this is something that’s summed up very well in the words of a hymn that we very often sing at funerals, during what is a time of great change during our earthly lives:

Change and decay in all around I see.
O Thou who changest not,
Abide with me. 

God promises to abide with us, always, but in return he asks us to abide with him. God promises to accept us if we can accept the way of life he showed us through his Son, Jesus Christ. One of the things that can make it so difficult for us to do that though is the changeability of human life; it can be difficult to abide with God, to be faithful to him and his Son, in the face of the bad things and through the bad times of human life. But we have God’s promise that he will abide with us through those bad times and if we can just bear with the bad things in life and abide with him through those times, he promises us a life in which there are no bad times, ever. A life good beyond our wildest dreams and a life in which nothing will ever change to take those good things away from us.

Amen. 

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The Propers for the 5th Sunday of Easter can be viewed here.

Entrance Antiphon

The earth is full of the goodness of the Lord;
by the word of the Lord the heavens were made, alleluia.

The Collect

Almighty God,
whose Son Jesus Christ is the resurrection and the life:
raise us, who trust in him,
from the death of sin to the life of righteousness,
that we may seek those things which are above,
where he reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit,
one God, now and for ever.

Amen.

The Readings

Missal (St Mark’s)        Acts 13:14, 43-52
                                   Psalm 100:1-3, 5
                                   Revelation 7:9, 14-17
                                   John 10:27-30

RCL (St Gabriel’s)         Acts 9:36-43
                                   Psalm 23
                                   Revelation 7:9-17
                                   John 10:22-30