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.

This morning is one of those days when the readings in the Missal are not the same as the C of E readings. The only reading, in fact, that is the same is the Gospel, and even that, only in part. The Gospel reading in the Missal today is about the great commandments to love God and love our neighbour, but in the C of E readings, we have another 6 verses of the Gospel in which Jesus speaks about the relationship between the Messiah and king David. And so this morning I’ve decided to use the longer Gospel reading at both St Mark’s and St Gabriel’s because I think what Jesus says in those extra verses is a useful commentary on what it means to live out the two great commandments.

There’s no doubt that one of the greatest heroes of ancient Israel was king David. We know that David wasn’t the first king that Israel had, that was Saul, but he was certainly seen as the greatest king they’d ever had. According to the Scriptures, David was the first king of Israel to rule in Jerusalem. He was a great warrior who defeated and subjugated many of Israel’s enemies. And he was a skilled musician, the “sweet singer of Israel” as he’s called in 2 Samuel, who wrote many of the Psalms that we still read and that are loved by so many people today. As well as that, it was prophesied that David’s line, his family, would reign forever and so it was believed that the Messiah would be a descendant of David.

And so, as David’s reign was looked on as a ‘golden age’ of ancient Israel, it’s no surprise that the common belief among the Jews was that the coming of the Messiah would mark the beginning of a new golden age for Israel, and that the Messiah would be just like David. He’d be a warrior king who’d defeat Israel’s enemies, restore the kingdom of Israel and rule over it from Jerusalem, just as David had done. So the Messiah would be the Son of David in more ways than one; he’d be of David’s line biologically speaking, and he’d be a chip off the old block too.

Once we understand that this was the common belief amongst the Jews of Jesus’ day, we can perhaps begin to understand how radical, how disturbing perhaps, Jesus’ words were when he argued that the Messiah couldn’t be David’s son but rather, the Messiah was David’s Lord.

What Jesus was saying was that, far from the Messiah being just like David, a chip off the old block, he was superior to David. 

The implication of that is that, contrary to popular belief and understanding, the coming of the Messiah wasn’t going to mark the beginning of a new golden age, that was going to be like the golden age of king David, but the beginning of something different under a king who wasn’t like David; the beginning of something better because it would be ruled over by a king who was greater than David. And the fact that Jesus said this immediately after his conversation about the greatest commandments, suggests that the two things are linked. That the superiority of the Messiah over David, has something to do with these two great commandments.

Jesus links the commandments by saying that they are alike. So, to love God with all your heart and soul and mind, is like loving your neighbour as yourself, and in fact we believe that one of the very best ways to show our love of God is to do as he asks and love our neighbours too, and ideally, to love them as much as we love ourselves. And this is one way in which we see that the Messiah is greater than David, and the Messiah’s kingdom is greater than David’s kingdom.

As we read David’s story in the Scriptures, there’s no reason to doubt David’s love for God, and we see his love for God expressed in the words of the psalms David wrote. But something else that becomes quite clear as we read and think about David’s story, is that he didn’t love his neighbours anywhere near as much as he loved himself.

Much of what we read about David in the Scriptures is written in an apologetic style ; it’s written as though David’s actions were being defended, and you don’t usually write in that way unless there’s something in a persons actions that needs to be defended. And there is quite a lot in David’s story that needs defending.

We read that David fell out of favour with king Saul because Saul was jealous of David, and afraid that he wanted the throne for himself. The story denies this of course, but the fact that David managed to get an oath of loyalty from the king’s own son, Jonathan, while the king was still living, suggests that Saul’s fears weren’t totally without foundation. We read about David’s time in exile from Jerusalem and we find that he served Israel’s enemies. The story tells us that David never actually raised his hand against Saul and Israel during this time, but he certainly used it for political, and financial manoeuvring on his own behalf. He was possibly a mercenary and certainly led what we might call a band of armed terrorists during this time. The story tells us that David took no part in the battle at Mount Gilboa when Saul and three of his sons, including David’s beloved friend Jonathan, were killed and so he’s absolved of any involvement in their deaths; but he didn’t do anything to help or to try and prevent their deaths either, and he certainly exploited the situation for his own benefit because within a few days he became king of Judah. The story also tells us that David had no involvement in the assassinations of Abner and Ish-bosheth that cleared his path to the throne of Israel, but the apologetic nature of the story suggests that there was at least a suspicion that he had. And perhaps the most shameful of all his antics are found in the story of David and Bathsheba. For those who aren’t familiar with the story, David watches a married woman, Bathsheba, bathing and he likes what he sees. So he has her brought to him and duly impregnates her. Then, to cover up what he’s done, he calls Bathsheba’s husband, Uriah, home from battle in the hope that Uriah will sleep with his wife and think the child is his own. But then, when that doesn’t work out in the way David wants and expects, he arranges for Uriah to be killed in battle and then marries the now widowed, Bathsheba, so that no one will be any the wiser about his shenanigans.

David may well have been one of the greatest heroes of ancient Israel. He may well have been regarded as Israel’s greatest king. The time he ruled over may well have been regarded as a golden age for ancient Israel. He may well have had a great love for God, and the psalms suggest that he did. But one area in which David did appear to be sadly lacking, was in love of his neighbour and his story, even in the apologetic way it’s written in the Scriptures, is ample testimony to that.

And so, whilst Jesus, the Messiah, may well have been related to David biologically speaking, he was certainly no son of David in terms of character or behaviour: he was in no way a chip off the old block. He was better than David, greater than David and he was David’s Lord. And, of course, Jesus, the Messiah, is our Lord too.

The question we have to ask ourselves is whose sons and daughters are we going to be? As Christians, we call God our Father and so we must regard ourselves as God’s sons and daughters. But having said that, do we take after God our Father, are we chips off the old block in that respect? We can’t see God, of course, but Jesus said that to have seen him is to have seen the Father and so we know what we have to do to take after him, to be chips off that old block; we have to be like Jesus. That means we have to love God will all our hearts and souls and minds, and we have to love our neighbours as much as we love ourselves.

I’m sure that none of us fail in that respect to the extent that David seems to have done. But I’m also sure that none of us are as good at loving our neighbours as we should be as sons and daughters of God. We don’t, and probably never will, get the opportunity to indulge in the same plots and schemes that David did. But we can fail to love our neighbour in the same kinds of ways that David did. We will probably never be able to plot and scheme against a king, or queen, or government, to usurp their position and authority; but do we try to elevate ourselves over others in other ways, and plot and scheme to bring that about? We will probably never be in a position to exploit political turmoil and problems to our own advantage; but do we try to exploit other situations to our own advantage, regardless of the consequences for others who may be involved? I’m sure none of us would ever think of letting someone die so that we could benefit from their death in some way; but do we always do what we can to help others when helping them might mean that we have to put what we want on hold for a while? I’m sure none of us would ever want to be involved in assassinations; but do we ever assassinate people’s character through our words against or about them? Do we ever deliberately kill their hopes and aspirations because we don’t agree with what they want, regardless of the rights and wrongs of the situation?

Do we ever assassinate and kill people in these ways for no other reason than that we simply don’t like them, or because we like someone else more? I hope none of us have ever been or will ever be in a situation like the triangle of David, Bathsheba and Uriah; but how many times have we all done things we know we shouldn’t have and then lied and schemed or tried to blame someone else, to cover up what we’ve done?

If we really want to be sons and daughters of God our Father, we have to love God with all our hearts and souls and minds, but we can’t truly do that unless we can love our neighbours as much as we love ourselves. It’s not easy because it means we can’t do what often comes so naturally to us and put ourselves first, but we have to at least try to do it.

Jesus said that he couldn’t be the son of David because he was David’s Lord, and he was certainly no son of David’s in terms of his character and behaviour. Jesus is though, God’s Son, and in terms of character and action, he is just like God, his Father and ours. And he is our Lord too. So if we’re going to be chips off anyone’s old block, let’s at least try to make it his.

Amen.

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You will find the Propers for the 30th Sunday of Ordinary Time (Trinity 20) here.

Something that’s very important to us in the Church, and in life generally, is tradition. Tradition is a set of customs and practices, or beliefs, that are passed on from generation to generation. And so traditions are a way that we can maintain our link with the past, whether that’s our own ancestors through family traditions, our history and heritage through cultural traditions, or indeed with the faith of those who’ve gone before us in the Church, through our Christian traditions. And as a way of maintaining our links with the past, traditions are very important to us in the Church because, as the former Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, once said, if we don’t remain linked to the past through our traditions, we run the risk of the Church disintegrating into a ‘pluralist mess’ in which anything goes and nothing is sacred.

Having said that though, traditions aren’t always so set in stone as we might think. When I was an ordinand at the College of the Resurrection at Mirfield, for example, something that was of great importance both to the monastic community there, and the college, was tradition. In fact, if anyone asked why things were done there in the way they were, the only answer anyone ever got was, because it’s ‘the Mirfield Way’. But, as an assistant sacristan and then senior sacristan at the college, I worked very closely with the community in preparing for worship, setting up the church, rehearsing altar servers and so on. And through doing that, what I discovered was that much of the ‘Mirfield Way’ was simply, as near as anyone could remember, the way it was done last time. So tradition, whilst it is linked to the past and does help us to maintain our connection to and continuity with the past, isn’t set in stone; traditions can, and do, change. And another good example of that is Harvest Thanksgiving.

Giving thanks for the harvest goes back to pre-Christian, pagan times but, like many pagan festivals, it was ‘Christianised’ and taken over by the Church. As a Christian festival, certainly in this country, it goes back at least to the Anglo-Saxon Lammas (lit. loaf- mass) Day celebrations of the early English Church. But, even though harvest thanksgiving celebrations in the Church do go back so far, Harvest Thanksgiving, as we know it, only dates back to the 1850’s. So Harvest Thanksgiving, as we know it, is a fairly recent tradition of the Church in England, and even so, it’s still changed from what it once was.

One thing that’s changed is the name – we used to call it the Harvest Festival, and I can remember, and I’m sure many of you can too, when the Harvest Festival was one of the biggest and most important celebrations in a church’s year. People used to spend weeks preparing for it. They used to bake loaves especially for it, that would go on display at the Harvest Festival. People would spend days decorating the church for it (and then very often much longer arguing and falling out about whose display went where and whose display was best). And the church would be full of fresh produce, fruit, vegetables as well as the harvest loaves. And then, after the Harvest Festival, all the food from the displays and the food that had been brought as gifts on the day would be sorted into parcels and taken out to people in the parish who were thought to be in need of it. And very often there’d be arguments about that too, not least from those who didn’t get anything, but who thought they were just as deserving, if not more deserving than some who did. (And if you ever wondered why some clergy really don’t like Harvest Thanksgiving, it’s because of these arguments and the trouble it caused in the church and the parish that they’d then have to sort out.)

These days, that doesn’t happen so much because, in most places, Harvest Thanksgiving is a much smaller affair than it used to be. Churches aren’t decorated in the way they once were so there’s no reason for people to argue about that. Most of the gifts that people bring to the Harvest Thanksgiving service now are in cans or packets; people don’t bring so much fresh produce these days and so we don’t get the comments about people’s gifts we once did. I’m sure you’ve heard them; I hope you haven’t used them:

“Look at the state of those apples (or bananas or whatever it might have been) that such and such has brought. You can’t give those to anyone. The only thing they’re fit for is the bin!”

We don’t get that because, rather than going to individuals, the harvest gifts now tend to go to food banks, who don’t want fresh produce these days, so there’s no reason to argue about who gets what either.

So, whilst giving thanks for the harvest is a tradition of the Church that dates back a long time, the way it’s celebrated has changed over the years. The Harvest Thanksgiving services we have today maintain a tradition and a link with those who’ve worshipped God in this way in the past, but the fact that we can do that whilst at the same time make changes to the way we celebrate Harvest Thanksgiving, shows that being faithful to our traditions, doesn’t mean that we have to do things the same way for ever.

We can make changes and, at the same time, still be traditional.  Some changes, in fact, can be good, and can actually improve on the tradition. The way we celebrate Harvest Thanksgiving now causes far fewer arguments than having a Harvest Festival used to. And the simple fact that instead of calling it a Harvest Festival, as we used to, we now call it Harvest Thanksgiving is a good change too because that reminds us of what our harvest celebration is really all about; it’s about giving thanks to God, not just for the food we eat, but for all his grace and goodness towards us.

As we celebrate this Harvest Thanksgiving though, some of the changes we’ve made remind us of the situation we’re all in at the moment. We’d struggle to take harvest gifts to individuals, even if we wanted to, because we’re not allowed to visit many of the people we’d take the gifts to. And so we’ve had to ask that no fresh produce at all is given today. The way the gifts have been given and received, being brought forward one at a time and left at the altar rail, rather than being given to myself and the servers as is the tradition. These things remind us that we’re in the midst of a pandemic. They remind us that we’ve all been forced to make many, great changes to our lives in the past year. And, as we think about those things, it reminds us too, that many people at this time despair of things ever going back to normal. For many people it seems as though the past, the life they used to know, has gone, forever. Many people think, and have said, that the world will never be the same again, that in a sense, this pandemic marks a break with the past, a break along the lines of what was before Covid-19 and what will be after Covid-19. And so, for many people, the idea of finding anything to be thankful for at this time, is strange and difficult.

There’s no doubt this is a difficult time, for all of us, but this is not the first pandemic to afflict the world.

The Black Death killed perhaps as many as 200 million people between 1346 and 1353, including, it’s thought, about half the entire population of Europe. But, although the world changed because of it, life went on, and there was no complete break with the past. The harvest thanksgiving celebrations of Lammas Day pre-date the Black Death, and although our Harvest Thanksgiving today is not the same as the Lammas Day celebrations of the early English Church, it has it’s roots in those celebrations and links us to the world before the Black Death and to the people who lived in that world.

The Spanish Flu, the influenza pandemic of 1918-20 is thought to have infected 500 million people and led to between 50 and 100 million deaths. But life went on and the pandemic didn’t cause a complete break with the past. In some parishes the Harvest Thanksgiving celebrations now are hardly changed from the Harvest Festivals of the 1850s. If we were able to sing hymns in church today, we’d be singing the same hymns people sang then, We Plough the Fields and Scatter; Come, Ye Thankful People, Come; To Thee, O Lord, Our Hearts We Raise; harvest hymns written or translated into English between 1844 and 1864. They all pre-date the Spanish Flu pandemic but the fact that we still sing them today shows that the flu pandemic of 1918-20 didn’t bring about a complete break with the past.

As terrible as the Covid-19 pandemic is, the two pandemics I’ve just mentioned were far, far worse. Of course, we don’t know how long the current pandemic will last or how many people will suffer or die in it, but these great pandemics in the past didn’t cause a complete break with what had gone before. They didn’t separate the world after from the world before. The two times and the two worlds were linked, at first through living memory, as all times are at first, and then through traditions as all times also are through history, and our Harvest Thanksgiving today is part of the proof of that. So whilst the current pandemic has caused changes and will no doubt cause more, it will not separate us from what has gone before and the life we knew before. The only way it can do that, is if we let it. And we won’t do that by changing what we do, we’ll only do that if we draw a line under what’s gone before and let our traditions die.

And even in the midst of this pandemic, we can still find reason to give thanks. We can still give thanks to God for the necessities of life, the air we breathe and for our food and drink. We can still give thanks to God for life itself and for the promise that, come what may, he will never abandon us, in life and in death, he will be with us. And whilst death and suffering do cause us great sorrow and pain, we can give thanks that, through our Lord Jesus Christ, God will be with us beyond death because we have his promise that life goes on beyond death. And perhaps, through the suffering and difficulties this pandemic has brought, people might learn to be a little more thankful generally. Thankful for the good things we had, and more appreciative of them when those good things return. More thankful for one another, for our families and friends and a bit more loving for it. More thankful for simple things like being able to walk into a shop and buy what we need when we need it. More thankful for all those who work to bring us those things and who spend their lives working to care and look after us, perhaps especially for all those who work in the health service. And perhaps too, people might take a moment to stop and think about life a little more, and when they do to remember that we, human beings, are not so clever, self-sufficient and all-powerful as we perhaps like to think we are. And, if we can do that, who knows, we might find that few more people become a little more thankful towards God, the giver of life and of all good things, too. 

Amen.

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You will find the Propers for Harvest Thanksgiving here.