Sermon: Fifth Sunday of Easter, 2nd May 2021

Over the past few weeks, our news media seems to have been concerned with perhaps 3 main stories. One is, of course, the ongoing coronavirus pandemic, which is understandable given the scale of the pandemic and the effect on people throughout the world it’s had and continues to have. Another thing we’ve heard a lot about in recent weeks is political scandal, and whether that’s who paid for Boris Johnson’s flat, or Keir Starmer being thrown out of a pub, political scandal is always in the news. The third major strand of news in recent weeks has been the European Football Super League. Why that should be more newsworthy than Russia, America and China facing-off in various parts of the world is something of a mystery to me I must admit but then, unlike me, many people do seem to agree with the ex-Liverpool FC manager Bill Shankley that football is more important than life and death.  But amongst all this, one item of news that seems to have slipped under the radar, is the death, last month, of Hans Küng.

I don’t know how many of you have heard of Hans Küng, or have read any of his works but he was, I think, one of the great figures of the Church from the second half of the 20th Century onwards, and one the Church should have paid far more attention to than it did or has. Küng was a Swiss RC priest, but his main claim to fame was as a theologian and author. He was one of the main theological advisors, and the youngest, behind the Second Vatican Council of 1962-65 as a result of which, the RC Church acknowledged for the first time that other denominations of the Church are Christian Churches, albeit Churches which, in their eyes, are in error.

And that reflects something of Hans Küng’s own beliefs. His passion was for Church unity, in fact he called disunity in the Church a scandal and a disgrace which should never have happened. But, unlike the mainstream of Roman Catholic thought, he believed that everyone, all Churches, were to blame for disunity. So, whilst he believed that the RC Church was the true, original Body of Christ, he also believed that the RC Church was in error too, and so, equally guilty of causing, deepening and perpetuating disunity in the Church. 

Küng set these ideas out in a book published in 1968 called The Church. That was a book he dedicated to the then Archbishop of Canterbury, Michael Ramsey and he hoped that his book would form the basis of reconciliation between the Church of England and the RC Church that would lead to full communion between the Churches. But we know that didn’t happen and the RC Church were none too pleased about some of the things Küng had written in his book and he was called to explain himself. 3 years later, he published another book called Infallible? in which he called into question the doctrine of papal infallibility. That eventually led the Church to stripping Küng of his license to teach in the Catholic faculty at Tübibgen University where he was professor of theology. Küng called this his experience of the Inquisition, although the university actually got round the problem by forming a new faculty of ecumenical theology that was outside the Church’s jurisdiction and Küng carried on as professor of theology at Tübibgen until he retired in the late 1990s.

In addition to his belief that the RC Church was also in error, perhaps what really ruffled the Church’s feathers was Küng’s understanding of what needed to happen for Church unity to become a reality. The mainstream RC stance at the time was that other Churches had to change and conform to RC doctrine and practice if unity was to be possible. But Küng’s belief was that all the Churches had to change to make unity a reality. He said that Church unity wasn’t a matter of one Church submitting to another or being absorbed into another, but a matter of all Churches submitting to Christ and becoming absorbed into him.

And it was Küng’s belief that, as the Churches did this and grew closer to Christ, they would automatically grow closer to each other and become more united. And that is an understanding that, I think, flows readily from the image of Jesus as the vine and his disciples as the branches that we read in this morning’s Gospel.

The image of the Church as a great vine or tree is a very common one. Christ is the vine, or the trunk, and we, his disciples who make up the various Churches are the branches. But there is a problem with this image if we look at a vine or tree, or at most plants. Because, as we look at a plant, whatever it is, what we see is a main stem, or trunk from which the branches grow, and through which the branches draw their nourishment. But, as we look, we notice that, as the branches grow, they grow outward, away from the stem. And from the big branches there grow smaller branches. From the smaller branches there grow still smaller branches and so on, each branch growing further away from the main stem and becoming smaller as they do so. We also know that we can take cuttings from plants, we can remove them completely from the main stem but, if we plant them, of perhaps graft them into another plant, they’ll still grow even though they’re no longer connected to the stem that originally gave them life.

And isn’t that exactly what we see in the Church? It’s perhaps an oversimplification, but originally, there was the vine, Christ, and one branch, the Church. About 1,000 years ago, the branch split into 2 main branches which we know as the Catholic West and the Orthodox East. 500 years ago, the Western branch split into what became known as the RC Church and the Reformed or Protestant branches of the Church. Our own branch, the Anglican Church grew from somewhere in between these two branches. The Methodist branch of the Church grew from the Anglican branch and then itself split into many other branches. In fact, today, there are 80 independent Churches all calling themselves ‘Methodists’.  And so it has and still goes on.

What makes this situation worse, is that these branches shoot and grow because those who found them, tend to think that the branch of the Church they grew from is in error. They think that the branch they grew from has lost its connection with the stem, with Christ the vine. And so they try to grow in a different direction which they believe will bring them closer to the vine. What can make matters even worse is that these branches of the Church can start to believe and act as though they’re the branch which has the closest and most direct connection to the vine, perhaps even that theirs is the only branch that is connected to the vine at all. This seems to have been the pre-Vatican 2 RC understanding, that the RC Church was the only true Church, the only branch that was really part of the vine of Christ. But the RC Church can’t be singled out for adopting that kind of attitude. In one parish I served in, ourselves, the Anglicans, and the Roman Catholics, were effectively excluded from the Churches Together group in the area when a new Baptist minister took over its leadership and refused to include us in any communications or invite us to any events because, and I quote, “Roman Catholics are not real Christians and you’re too close to them.”

It must be said that this situation has existed for a long time and the Church has suffered from people with this kind of attitude throughout its history. In the early Church when the Church was far less divided than it is now and, in effect, the Church could speak with one voice, small branches which wanted to grow in their own way were usually asked to return to the main branch of the Church and only if they didn’t, were they denounced as heretics. Often, because it was obvious that these small branches had separated from the main branch of the Church, they died out. But over the years, the Church has become more divided. The number of small branches of the Church has grown and grown and now the Church can’t speak with one voice.

This in fact is one of the main problems with the doctrine of papal infallibility. In principle, the Pope can only make an infallible statement when he speaks for the whole Church because then he speaks with the authority of the whole Church. But in practice, the Pope doesn’t speak for the whole Church and so he can never speak with the authority of the whole Church.

And it’s this lack of the Church’s ability to speak with one authoritative voice that makes Hans Küng’s words so powerful and so worthy of our attention and respect. Ultimately, there is only one authority in the Church, and it is the vine himself, Jesus Christ. And so, if we want to be connected to the vine, either as individual Christians or as a Church, we need to be connected to Christ. We need, as the saying goes, to be rooted in Christ, to be grafted into Christ, and to draw our nourishment from Christ so that we can grow from him and in him. We need to make sure that we’re not growing and drawing our nourishment from some distant branch of the vine that’s grown far removed from the vine himself, and the way to do that is to make sure that we grow closer to Christ.

Hans Küng said that division in the Church was a scandal and a disgrace that should never have happened. His words echo the words of the Church Fathers, those Christians who were closest in time to Jesus and the Apostles. For the Fathers, disunity in the Church, schism, was the worst of all sins because it was caused by a failure of Christians to do the very thing they’re called to do above all else, it was caused by a failure of Christians to love one another. 

The closer we are to Christ, the less likely it is that we’ll fail to love one another and so the less likely it is that Christians will fall out with one another to the extent that it will lead to divisions and disunity in the Church. And the closer we are to Christ, the more likely we’ll be to remember and take to heart his prayer that his Church, and we must always remember that it is his Church and not ours, that his Church will be one. Perhaps then, there will be enough people in the branches of the Church who share Hans Küng’s passion and desire for Church unity to bring it closer to the reality, not only that Hans Küng wanted it to be, but that Christ, our vine, intended it to be.

Amen. 

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

Sermon: St Mark’s Day, Sunday 25th April 2021

This icon of St. Mark the Evangelist is found at St. Mark Parish in Phoenix. (Ambria Hammel/CATHOLIC SUN)

Today, as we know, is the feast day of St Mark, the patron of this church and parish, and we’re here tonight to give thanks for his life and example. But, having said that, there’s not a great deal that we actually know about Mark’s life, and what we believe about him, is based largely on tradition rather than hard historical evidence.

St Mark may have been the young man who fled naked from Gethsemane on the night of Jesus’ arrest. None of the other evangelists mention this and there’s seems very little point in mentioning it, so it’s sometimes seen as perhaps a little autobiographical insert by the author. If that was St Mark, then he must have been one of Jesus’ earliest disciples. St Mark is also often identified as the Mark, or John Mark, we read about in the Scriptures, and so we believe that he was a cousin of St Barnabas, that he accompanied St Paul on his first missionary journey, and later he made missionary journeys with his cousin, Barnabas, and was with St Paul again, when Paul was imprisoned in Rome. It’s believed that St Mark was St Peter’s interpreter and that the Gospel he wrote is based on St Peter’s teaching and witness in Rome. Church tradition also credits St Mark with founding the Church in Alexandria in Egypt. And that’s about it as far as St Mark’s life goes but, of course, his great claim to fame, and his greatest influence in the Church, is that he is the author of the Gospel that bears his name, which was almost certainly the first of the Gospels to be written. 

And the influence of St Mark’s Gospel has been a great one. We believe that both St Matthew and St Luke used it as the basis and starting point for their own Gospels because they both contain all of St Mark’s stories, which they expanded on and added to, with stories that St Mark didn’t use. So, whichever of the synoptic Gospels, as these three are collectively known, we read, we are, in many cases, reading St Mark’s Gospel.

That’s the general influence of St Mark’s Gospel, but his Gospel has also had a great influence on individual Christians through the years. And I include myself among those individuals because, when I returned to the Church in my late teens, I was advised to read St Mark’s Gospel before I moved on to any of the others.

I must admit that I was told not to expect too much from St Mark’s Gospel because his Greek wasn’t very good, and his writing wasn’t up to much either. I’m sure that at least some of us here will have been told at school that, when you’re writing, you don’t string parts of your story together simply by putting the word ‘and’ in between them. I know I was. But St Mark does it constantly. As in this passage from chapter 1 of the Gospel:

‘Passing alongside the Sea of Galilee, he saw Simon and Andrew the brother of Simon casting a net into the sea, for they were fishermen. And Jesus said to them, “Follow me, and I will make you become fishers of men.” And immediately they left their nets and followed him. And going on a little farther, he saw James the son of Zebedee and John his brother, who were in their boat mending the nets. And immediately he called them, and they left their father Zebedee in the boat with the hired servants and followed him.

And they went into Capernaum, and immediately on the Sabbath he entered the synagogue and was teaching. And they were astonished at his teaching, for he taught them as one who had authority, and not as the scribes. And immediately there was in their synagogue a man with an unclean spirit. And he cried out, “What have you to do with us, Jesus of Nazareth? Have you come to destroy us? I know who you are—the Holy One of God.” But Jesus rebuked him, saying, “Be silent, and come out of him!” And the unclean spirit, convulsing him and crying out with a loud voice, came out of him.  And they were all amazed, so that they questioned among themselves, saying, “What is this? A new teaching with authority! He commands even the unclean spirits, and they obey him.” And at once his fame spread everywhere throughout all the surrounding region of Galilee.’

Something else that we notice in this passage from the Gospel is St Mark’s tendency to use words and phrases such as ‘immediately’ and ‘at once’. What that does, is keeps the story of Jesus’ ministry moving at a very fast pace and makes St Mark’s perhaps the most exciting of the Gospels to read. I certainly found that when I first read it. After what I’d been told about the Gospel, I must admit that I wasn’t quite sure what to expect from it when I started to read it for the first time. But once I’d started, I couldn’t stop reading and I read it through in one go. Having spoken to other people over the years, I’ve found that many others had the same experience of reading St Mark’s Gospel for the first time.

Something else I’ve found out over the years too, is that academically speaking, St Mark’s Greek wasn’t all that bad, and neither was his writing. In fact, St Mark’s style, if we can call it that, simply reflects popular storytelling of his day and we find it in the works of Homer, for example, which are regarded as classics of Greek literature. So St Mark was by no means a bad writer. His style might not be very good when we translate it into English, but in Greek, it’s a perfectly acceptable way of writing that was used to create a sense of urgency and excitement.

Something else we also notice in St Mark’s writing, is how the pace changes after Jesus enters Jerusalem. In Galilee, when Jesus is in full control of events, he moves around from place to place, very quickly. But, after he enters Jerusalem and opposition to him grows, the pace slows down dramatically. And when it comes to the final day of Jesus’ earthly life, it slows almost to a crawl that some people have likened to a death watch, a vigil kept with someone approaching death or awaiting execution.

So St Mark’s Gospel is far more than simply the basis of the longer and more detailed Gospels of St Matthew and St Luke. It’s a well thought out and well written portrayal of Jesus’ life and ministry that both set the scene for the later Gospels and has also inspired countless numbers of Christians since it was written almost 2000 years ago. It may lack some of the Gospel stories that we know and love, but that doesn’t mean St Mark’s Gospel is in any way inferior to the others. People remember stories and especially well told, exciting stories and St Mark wrote his version of Jesus’ story well and in an exciting way. So through the Gospel he wrote, St Mark’s also teaches us that we don’t have to know everything about Jesus to tell people about him and bring them to him. St Mark shows us that the way we tell what we do know about Jesus is just as important as how much we know about him.

St Mark was the first of the evangelists, and the work of an evangelist is to proclaim the Gospel and bring people to Christ. That’s something St Mark has been doing for most of the past 2000 years and is still doing today.  We may not know very much about St Mark’s life, but we do know about the great influence he’s had, and continues to have on the Christian faith, on the Church and on individual Christians, through the Gospel he wrote.

He is worthy of our thanks and praise for that. He’s worthy that we should recognise his work for the Lord and remember him and praise him for that. He’s a worthy example to us and to all Christians of the proclamation of the Gospel that’s an essential part of our calling as Christians. For all reasons, St Mark is a worthy patron of this church and worthy of this feast day commemoration in his honour.

Amen.

The Propers for St Mark’s Day can be viewed here.

Sermon: Fourth Sunday of Easter, 25th April 2021

One of the great tendencies we have as human beings is to take things for granted. Sometimes, we have to do that because we couldn’t get through life, or even a day of life, unless we took things for granted. We take it for granted, for example, that the world isn’t going to end today, or tomorrow, or at any time in the near future. And it’s just as well that we take that for granted because could you imagine what life would be like if we thought that the world might end at any moment? We plan our futures and build our lives because we take it for granted that there is a future to plan for. We know that our individual lives will come to an end one day, but we take it for granted that our loved ones, especially our children and grandchildren if we have them, will still have a future even if we’re not here to share it with them. Can you imagine the quandary we’d be in if we didn’t take that for granted? What would be the point in making plans? What would be the point in saving for our future, or making a will for our loved ones’ futures? Who would we choose to spend our time with if we thought that each moment might be the last moment we could spend with anyone?

So life would be very difficult if we couldn’t take some things for granted. But we can also make life difficult by taking for granted things that we shouldn’t. And when it come to that, perhaps the very worst thing we can do is to take people for granted.

There’s a well-known song that says, ‘You always hurt the one you love’ and whilst it might not be true to say we always hurt them, it is very true to say that we can and do hurt the ones we love. Of course we can hurt people whom we don’t usually think of as loved ones, strangers, acquaintances, neighbours, colleagues, all sorts of people. But it is perhaps the ones we love whom we do hurt more than anyone else. In part, that’s because we spend more time with them than we do with anyone else, but it also happens because we can and do take those we love, and perhaps especially the love of those who love us, for granted. 

How many times, for example, have we decided to do something, or actually done something, thought for a moment about what someone else will think about it, or how it might affect them, and then just shrugged any doubts or concerns aside by thinking “Oh, they won’t mind” when, in fact, we don’t really know whether they’ll mind or not?

We know that happens because how many times have we been on the receiving end of that kind of thing?

How many times has someone we know and love, and trust, done something that’s affected us badly and we’ve simply said to them, “It’s OK: it doesn’t matter.” When it fact it’s not been OK, it has mattered, and we’ve been hurt and upset by what they’ve done?

So we know that we can hurt people by taking them for granted, and we often hurt those we love, and who love us, because we take them for granted. But we can actually be encouraged, in a sense, to take those we love for granted by the uncomplaining, forgiving way they respond to us when we’ve hurt them. And that is something we see in our relationship with God and with Jesus.

As Christians, we believe that God loves us unconditionally, that is, no matter what we do, God will still love us. God has shown this unconditional love for us by sending his Son into the world to lay down his life for us so that we can be saved from our sins and be raised to eternal life. But how do we respond to God’s love and Jesus’ sacrifice on the Cross? Isn’t it true that we tend to take these things for granted? Because, far from showing our appreciation for what God and Jesus have done for us by living the kind of lives Jesus taught us to live, isn’t it true that we simply go on sinning? And isn’t it true that when we go on sinning, we’re expecting God to forgive us again, and again, and again? And taking it for granted that God will forgive us again and again and again, and will always forgive us because he loves us and because Jesus died for us so that we can be forgiven? 

But, if we do take those things for granted then I think, in part at least, it’s the Church’s fault because of the way the Church tends to portray Jesus and the events of his life and ministry. We see that, for example in the words of a hymn that many Christians would regard as one of their favourites; My Song is Love Unknown.

My Song is Love Unknown is a very beautiful hymn, but in the fifth verse of the hymn, we find these words:

Yet cheerful he to suffering goes,
that he his foes from thence might free.

How do we reconcile that image, of Jesus going to his death cheerfully, with his Agony in Gethsemane? We could say that Jesus went to his suffering resolutely, but cheerfully?

I think that gives the impression that Jesus was happy to die, or at least that he didn’t really mind dying for the sins of the world. And if we’re given the impression that Jesus didn’t mind dying for our sins, what encouragement are we given to truly appreciate his sacrifice? If we’re given the impression that it was no big deal for Jesus to die for our sake, what encouragement are we being given not to take what he did for granted? 

In fact, if we look at many images of Scriptural stories, what we see are images of serene people that really bear very little relation to way they’re described in the stories themselves. The Scriptures tell us that Jesus was in agony in Gethsemane, yet how many images of Jesus in the garden show him looking calm and serene, looking up to heaven while an angel hovers at his shoulder? The Scriptures tell us that when the Archangel Gabriel visited Mary to announce the birth of Jesus, Mary was terrified. But what do we see in images of this story? Not a young girl who’s terrified, but a young woman with a look of complete serenity about her. And, for me, one of the worst kind of examples of this kind of misrepresentation of reality is in the image of Jesus, The Good Shepherd.

We all know the traditional image of Jesus, The Good Shepherd. It’s a lovely pastoral image of Jesus, looking calm and serene, either holding a white lamb in his arms, or carrying on one his shoulders. But, if we compare that image with the image Jesus gives of The Good Shepherd in this morning’s Gospel, we see some striking differences. Jesus speaks about The Good Shepherd as someone who’s there to defend the sheep against wolves and who’s prepared to lay down his life for the sheep. We know that the life of a shepherd in Jesus’ time wasn’t an easy one. The shepherd lived outdoors with the sheep (we know that from the story of the shepherds in the fields around Bethlehem). The shepherd was expected to defend the sheep against predators, and there were lots of them. As well as wolves, there were lions, bears, foxes and jackals, birds of prey and snakes, and possibly leopards, cheetahs and hyenas too. And, as we know, many of these animals don’t hunt as individuals but in packs. So the shepherd’s life wasn’t an easy one and it could be very dangerous. In reality, a good shepherd may well have carried a lamb in his arms or on his shoulders, but he would have been a weather-beaten man who probably bore the scars of many encounters with predators.

And of course, the reality is, that Jesus would have been the same kind of man. Years on the road as an itinerant preacher, which is what he was, would no doubt have left him with a weather-beaten complexion. The kind of predators Jesus faced were human ones, but they were just as deadly as any other kind. And we know that Jesus fought with them, in fact, he went into their lair to save the sheep; to preach to and teach the lost sheep of Israel and to save them from these human predators. And, in the end, he laid down his life to save them, and to save us.

So, when we think of the kind of life a good shepherd led, and the life Jesus led, we get a very different image of The Good Shepherd than the one we’re usually given. Far from the serene figure, walking upright with a white lamb in his arms or on his shoulders, the true image of Jesus as The Good Shepherd is one of a shepherd who is bowed down under the weight of his load and staggering along the road. It’s an image of a shepherd who is bruised and beaten and bloodied from his battle with those who preyed on the sheep. And it’s an image of a shepherd who doesn’t carry a nice white lamb in his arms, nor on his shoulders, but one of a shepherd who carries the heavy wood of a cross on his shoulders. It’s not the image of a shepherd walking in the sun, in the countryside, but one of a shepherd who is actually in the process of laying down his life for the sheep as he walks the road to the place of crucifixion.

The traditional image of Jesus, The Good Shepherd, is a nice pastoral image. It does portray Jesus as the one who cares for us and seeks us out and finds us to bring us home when we’ve lost our way, but it’s not really in keeping with the image of The Good Shepherd Jesus gives in this morning’s Gospel. The traditional image of Jesus, The Good Shepherd might be nice and cosy, but because of that, it doesn’t really give us a true appreciation of just how costly God’s love for us and Jesus’ love for us was and is. And if we don’t appreciate the true cost of their love for us, we’ll always have a tendency to take it for granted.

We always have to remember that, although Jesus has now ascended back to his rightful place at God’s side in heaven, he was raised in his humanity. He still bore the scars of The Good Shepherd when he was raised from death and he carried those scars with him into heaven. They’re an eternal reminder in heaven of the cost of our salvation. So let’s not let our sanitised imagery of the story of our salvation cause us to lose sight of the harsh reality of how our salvation was won, nor the price Jesus paid for it. Let’s not take these things, nor God’s love for us nor Jesus’ love for us for granted but appreciate them and show our appreciation in lives that are increasingly free from sin.

Amen.

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