This talk was given on Shrove Tuesday 21 Feb 2012, at All Hallows on the Wall, in the city of London. We read: 1 Kings 19. 8-13; The Way It Is by William Stafford

It’s Shrove Tuesday, Mardi Gras, Fat Tuesday,  the last day before Lent. Personally, I have no pattern for Lent. Some years I do something, or don’t do something, but other times it passes me by. Comes from being brought up in a non-conformist church, where times and seasons are not so ingrained. But now, as a born-again Anglican I’m learning to live with and feed off the rhythms of a seasonal church year.
   And I’m looking forward to this Lent, because there’s some work I want to do on myself – the equivalent of hauling myself out of the water into dry dock and scraping off the barnacles.
   We used to have a boat, or at least a third of one. She was a 21-foot Westerly Jouster, pretty much a plastic tub, called slightly pretentiously, Lapin Blanc – white rabbit.       
   We used to take her out of the River Medway every winter and scrape off all the accretions below the water line. What happened as you scraped off the paint, was that you revealed all the previous, successive layers of paint. You got this mixture of colours which revealed the boat’s history, strata, layers of its life. And then by repainting, add a new layer.  It was a kind of Lenten activity
   I can see where this is going. If I’m not careful this is going to turn into one of those joke vicare talks where I find myself asking you: “Have you examined your bottom recently?”    Let’s turn our attention to Elijah.  In our reading, he is in trouble. He has taken on King Ahab and his stereotypically wicked wife Jezebel, with their introduction of pagan practices. Jezebel has sworn to have Elijah killed and, feeling isolated, alone, and afraid for his life, Elijah fled for the wilderness.
   As is the biblical pattern he was gone for 40 days and 40 nights – 40 is the symbolic number for testing, and preparation. See Noah, the children of Israel, Jesus’ temptation and so on…
   Elijah has lost his way. He keeps asking himself, God seems to be prompting him, “What are you doing Elijah?” Hiding, is essentially the answer.
   But Elijah has been directed not to any old wilderness setting, but to Mount Horeb, the site where the law had been delivered to Moses. This is a place of significance, where God comes to meet his people. Elijah is told to stand on the mountain, because God is on his way. Fascinating phrase used here: “The Lord will pass by.” Will this be like a fly-past or a drive-by? Elijah stands there, waiting to see how God will manifest him or herself. The wind comes, , splitting mountings and breaking rocks, but God is not in the wind. And after the wind, the earthquake, and then the fire. God is apparently absent in all three.
   Then comes silence – a quiet so palpable, so evident, that it is described as “the sound of sheer silence”. And, in this moment, as Elijah stands at the mouth of his cave, his face wrapped in a shawl, he begins, as our poet William Stafford, might put it, to pick up the threads of his life. Elijah discovers that he is not isolated as he thinks. Not only does God reveal his presence and company, but that Elijah has at least 7,000 allies in Israel and that there is a young man Elisha, who is ready to continue over his task.
   It’s often very difficult for us to see our lives, to find a vantage point. We’re so involved in dealing with stuff, with handling what life throws us, with what  William Stafford calls, “the way it is”. But I found that his take on the complicated, shifting variegated, woven life we have resonates with me. Stuff happens: to quote the poem: “Tragedies happen; people get hurt / or die; and you suffer and get old. / Nothing you do can stop time’s unfolding.”
   And it’s very easy like Elijah, to get lost, or to lose perspective. o hide. Maybe that’s when a season like Lent can be useful. It gives us a nudge to stand back from all this turmoil and the wind and the earthquake and the fire.
   Like I said at the beginning, I’m, figuratively at least,  sort of going to examine my bottom. I’m not inviting you to do the same. But you might like to meet God on a mountain or your choice of sacred place; maybe simply take time to be quiet, to pick up the thread you’re following; or perhaps try to find a thread that’s your own; and find out where it might lead…

The Way it is William Stafford

There’s a thread you follow. It goes among
things that change.  But it doesn’t change.
People wonder about what you are pursuing.
You have to explain about the thread.
But it is hard for others to see.
While you hold it you can’t get lost.
Tragedies happen; people get hurt
or die; and you suffer and get old.
Nothing you do can stop time’s unfolding.
You don’t ever let go of the thread.

This talk was given at All Hallows on the Wall, London  Wall, City of London on Tuesday, 7 February 2012. We read I Drew a Line... by Toon Tellegen, and John 8. 1-11

I sometimes get really frustrated by the stories in the Gospels. They just don’t tell you what you want to know. Was Jesus any good as a carpenter? When Jesus grilled the fish, after he rose again, did he add dill? But just occasionally you get one like the woman caught in adultery, which gives you both intense drama, and a fascinating bit of detail.

   Here we have this woman, dragged before the equivalent of the Taliban, and then used as a human example to test Jesus’ judgment. The narrative doesn’t say very much, but it’s rich in possibilities. This poor woman is humiliated three times over. Not only has she been caught in flagrante, but she is paraded for ritual judgement, and then placed before Jesus as some kind of object lesson. And all the while, she is terrified that she will die.
   The scribes and the Pharisees have her bang to rights, of course. They have chapter and verse: chapter 22 verse 24 of Deuteronomy, to be precise. Someone – Moses and/or God, apparently – has drawn a line in the sand.
   It’s an interesting phrase “drawing a line in the sand”. We take it to mean, “That’s it, and no further”. It’s the equivalent of setting something in stone, which is a bit ironic, seeing that drawing a line in the sand is: one, a freehand gesture; and, two, something which is very vulnerable to change.  The wind can blow it away, or it can be wiped out with the drag of a foot.
   There are vital lines being drawn in this story. There is a contrast here between stone and sand. The Pharisees have stone tablets on their side, and are prepared to reinforce the hard-and-fast rules with the rocks that they are, at least figuratively, holding ready in their hands.
   But Jesus refuses to see this as an object lesson – case law. He sees this as a human dilemma. We have to remember that Mediterranean culture in Jesus’ time was an honour/shame society, where appearance and status were everything. If you got a skin disease, or lost your sight, or were disgraced in some way, you ceased to exist. If you were a man, you might claw your honour back, but if you were a disgraced woman, you were history. Such was the case for this woman – she was an object of shame and degradation, paraded for public condemnation and contempt.
   We know nothing of her background. But the story sets our imagination to work. We all know people who’ve had affairs. I’m not about to condone unfaithfulness, but we know that there’s always a back story – unhappiness, loneliness, disregard, a longing for love, just as much there may be selfishness, cruelty and appetite. This complexity, I believe, is what Jesus saw. This human mess of desire, desperation, pain, anguish, bad judgement, and wrongdoing
   Maybe that’s why he took so long to say anything about it – writing in the dust, we don’t know what. Except that we do know as we read in the Dutch poet Toon Tellegen’s words, he “drew another line”.
   Effectively, Jesus drew another line in the sand. He didn’t try to get the woman off on a technicality; he challenged the judges to cross-examine their own hearts. He took a big risk, and suggested that what was going on here was human and circumstantial. But maybe the difference is that his line in the sand was much more like a line in the sand really should be – something provisional. He was saying, “take a look at this woman, take a look at yourselves”
   With the  stark, immovable consequences of  regulation, the scribes and authorities were condemned to personal violence, and the woman was condemned to death. But Jesus provided both protagonists in this story, with a chance to start over. “I drew a line:/ this far, and no further,  /never will I go further than this. / When I went further, / I drew a line, / and then another line.”
   I believe that Jesus, as we see in this incident, inspires us – challenges us – in every generation, to re-draw the lines, the maps, in the light of our knowledge, our experience, our response to God’s presence in us. And, in the spirit of Jesus Christ, we draw our lines in the sand, in response to a deep and real understanding of what it is to be a human being, here and now.

I drew a line… Toon Tellegen

I drew a line:
this far, and no further,
never will I go further than this.

When I went further,
I drew a line,
and then another line.

The sun was shining
and everywhere I saw people,
hurried and serious,
and everyone was drawing a line,
everyone went further.

This talk was given on Tues 31 Jan 2012 at All Hallows on the Wall, in the City of London. We read John 6. 27-35 and All Bread by Margaret Atwood (see below).

Bread is a wonderful thing. Just think of the amazing number of different shapes and forms it comes in. Crusty French sticks all airy in the middle. Soft warm naan bread, pitta, pizza, damp white slices, ideal for a bacon sarnie, sweet brioche, and more….
   I was brought up on crusty white loaves. My mum would buy a large loaf practically every day. Me and my two brothers would fight to get the crust, especially when it was still warm from the bakery. I’ve never understood that habit of diving into a packet of sliced bread underneath the crust, you’re just ignoring the most interesting bit.
   Bread is a staple for many people in many parts of the world. No wonder, then, that it’s become a huge symbol and metaphor. It stands for something elemental, and essential. Bread comes out of an organic process of life and death, the seed goes into the ground and dies. It is reborn as wheat, then cut down, and grain is ground into flour. Then yeast brings it alive once more – a symbol of rising – as the goodness of the grain is released in the making and baking. We eat, and excrete and it returns to the earth. It’s a life-cycle.
   As Margaret Atwood says in All Bread, bread is made from the earth, from dirt. If you’ve ever done any gardening, you’ll know that, close up, the earth, is made up of decayed and rotted vegetation and animal life – dirt which, to quote Attwood again, “flows through the stems, into the grain, into the arm”, and provides strength.
   “Bread is the staff of life”, the saying goes. This phrase has no origin that I can find out, but the nearest you seem get is a passage from the book of Ezekiel in the Old Testament which says that God will punish the faithless people of Jerusalem by “breaking the staff of bread”. There’s a bread recipe in Ezekiel too – worth a try if you ever get the time.
   In our reading, Jesus called himself “the bread of life”. In him we find the earthy, sustaining nutrition that feeds, that fuels our lives. In this passage Jesus about how through the provision of manna in the wilderness God became bread for the Israelites. In the prayer at holy communion, we ask: “May this bread become for us the body of Christ?” We eat Jesus, we absorb him, he becomes part of who we are and what we do. And this is not simply some private moment – though I think taking the bread and wine is perhaps the most intimate piece of ritual we do – it is essentially shared. One of the lines of the Eucharist I hold most dear is when we declare, in words borrowed from Paul’s letter to the Corinthians: “Though we are many, we are one body, because we all share in one bread”.
   This is built into our home and working lives. I must have bored you with this before. But you only have to take the word ‘company’. it means sharing bread – from the Latin cum (‘with’); and panis, (‘bread’). So a companion is someone you share bread with. The company you work for is a group that eats together, or maybe it should.
   It is no wonder that what Jesus left us was a meal, based on one that he shared with his friends, an enduring symbol of companionship. We are bound up together simultaneously in this delicious, crusty, earthy, and spiritual, life-affirming habit. And not only are we drawn together with one another when we eat bread, we also become, to coin a phrase, friends of the earth, part of God’s elemental, sacred cycle.
Margaret Atwood says it like this:
Lift these ashes into your mouth, your blood.
To know what you devour is to consecrate it, almost.
All bread must be broken
So it can be shared.
Together, we eat this earth.

All Bread, Margaret Atwood

All bread is made of wood,
Cow dung, packed brown moss,
The bodies of dead animals,
The teeth and backbones, what is left after the ravens.
This dirt flows through the stems,
Into the grain, into the arm
Nine strokes of the axe. Skin from a tree.
Good water, which is the first gift.

Four hours.
Live burial under a moist cloth, a sliver dish.
A row of white famine bellies
Swollen and taut in the oven.
Lungfuls of warm breath, stopped, in the heat, from an old sun.

Good bread has the salt taste of your hands,
After nine strokes of the axe.
The salt taste of your mouth.
It smells of its own small death,
Of the deaths before and after

Lift these ashes into your mouth, your blood.
To know what you devour is to consecrate it, almost.
All bread must be broken
So it can be shared.
Together, we eat this earth.

This talk was given at All Hallows on the Wall, City of London on 24 Jan 2012. We read Genesis 18. 1-16 and Funny by Anna Kamienska (see below).

 In March, I’m heading for a birthday party in Cranleigh, in Surrey. It’s for my mum, who’s 90. If three blokes turned up at her Barratt bungalow and told her she was about to have  a baby, she’d tell them they were having a laugh. It’s a ludicrous idea.
  But then, after my dad died, when they were both 73, if three blokes had turned up and told her that she’d get married again at the age of 75, and that in her 90^th year, she’d also be celebrating the 15^th wedding anniversary, she would have fallen about. But is fact she and her second husband Charlie are still laughing.
  It’s a curious story this one in Genesis. Our reading began, “The Lord appeared to Abraham by the oaks of Mamre, as he sat at the entrance to his tent, in the heat of the day.” Fair enough. But it continues: “He looked up and saw three men standing near him.”  God? Three men? How does that work. This is, of course, when I pick up a copy of the famous Rublev icon and demonstrate how it’s the Holy Trinity who’ve popped in on Abraham for a beef sandwich. Well, maybe…
   Anyway, Abraham makes them welcome, and the comedy begins. For a start, the 100-year-old Abraham decides to give his 90 year-old wife instructions on how to make bread, like a TV chef. “Quick, take three measures of choice flour, knead it…” As if she’s never made bread before. Sarah’s already laughing… if she’s not swearing. Then the heavenly visitors tell Abraham to tell his wife that she’s going to have a baby. Cue the most famous chuckle in the Bible. “Sarah laughed”. How ridiculous. As the passage says: “it had ceased to be with Sarah after the manner of women. So Sarah laughed to herself, saying, "After I have grown old, and my husband is old, shall I have pleasure?” Sounds like they might have given up on sex as well.
   In fact, this isn’t news to Abraham, who’d been told the news of the impending birth by God a year before. He’d fallen flat on his face laughing then, too. 
      Sarah laughed again, when the baby actually arrived. But this time the laugh was on the other side of her face. It was less hollow, more rounded – rich and full of wonder. She said, "God has brought laughter for me; everyone who hears will laugh with me." In naming her son Isaac there was a recognition that God saw the joke too. Isaac means “God laughs.”

   In the Bible, God appears to people at different points in their life and in different guises. Sarah’s grandson Jacob was to find himself wrestled to the ground by a stranger in the middle of the night. And, as he merged from the bout, limping, he is told that he had been fighting God. God appeared to Moses as a burning bush, as a pillar of fire, a cloud of smoke. Sometimes there are messengers: ravens dreams, voices, an earthquake, a breeze, a silence.
   The writer Gerard Hughes famously talked of a “God of surprises”. In my experience, that’s true. I don’t think I believe God intervenes in our lives in specific, interfering sorts of way: “OK you can have a baby, you can find love, you can get a job, you can have cancer”.  But that’s not to say that God does not turn up at our front door with good news and bad, that he isn’t involved in all we are and all we do.
   There’s nothing predictable. Life is paradoxical, hilarious, ironic. If you didn’t laugh you’d probably cry. We couldn’t afford our old house in Crouch End, so the people we were buying it from, dropped the price and then lent us the money to buy it. I bought a horse, and committed myself to years of expense, so all my work promptly dried up.
   Anna Kamienska catches this. Being human, being a child of God, is  “being held prisoner by your skin / while reaching infinity… being a needle of frost  / and a handful of heat … being hopelessly uncertain / and helplessly hopeful … it's dying without love / it's loving through death
    God may turn up at your door like a Jehova’s Witness, or you may feel God in your waters. People who end up in strange jobs and locations, with strange bedfellows often say that God has a sense of humour. Life’s funny, as Anna Kamienska’s bird says, but God’s probably not joking.

Funny Anna Kamienska

What's it like to be a human
the bird asked

I myself don't know
it's being held prisoner by your skin
while reaching infinity
being a captive of your scrap of time
while touching eternity
being hopelessly uncertain
and helplessly hopeful
being a needle of frost
and a handful of heat
breathing in the air
and choking wordlessly
it's being on fire
with a nest made of ashes
eating bread
while filling up on hunger
it's dying without love
it's loving through death

That's funny said the bird
and flew effortlessly up into the air

I took a decent Christmas break in God's county, Suffolk, and this is the first lunchtime talk of 2012. Given at All Hallows on the Wall in the City of London on Tues 17 Jan. We read John 3. 1-10, where Jesus tells Nicodemus that he needs to be born again, and the poem Variation on a Theme by Rilke  by Denise Levertov (see below).

The first time I said this, I felt a bit like Peter denying Christ before the cock crowed. Someone asked me, “Are you a born again Christian?” And I said, “no”.
   Having been brought up to believe that it was important at every opportunity to nail my Christian colours to the mast, and not, in Paul’s words, “to be ashamed of the Gospel of Christ”, I found this uncomfortable. Uncomfortable, but necessary. Because I know that when people ask you if you’re a born again Christian, they’re mostly not asking you if you are a follower of Christ, they’re – more or less – asking you if you’d vote Republican, and are in league with the Tea Party. Because being “born again” is understood as a package, which personally, I don’t subscribe to. And I don’t want to be boxed in.
   The phrase “born again” comes from the King James Bible, and later versions talk about being “born from above”, which may be more accurate, but doesn’t have the same resonance, that’s why we had the traditional reading today. And of course, this passage has been used many times as a call to conversion. Fair enough.
   But I don’t believe that’s the only way of reading this. This is a reported conversation between Jesus and the Pharisee Nicodemus. Jesus is telling him that his priorities are wrong – it’s what he tells Pharisees all the time: “you’re obsessed with religious observance, not with inner transformation”. “You’re a master of Israel and you don’t know that?”
   So what do we take from this? Jesus says “no one can see the kingdom of God without being born of water and Spirit”. I don’t think he’s talking about baptism, but the cleansing, renewing activity of the Holy Spirit. Then Jesus mixes his metaphors. I’m liking this. Next time the sub editors at work take me to task for this, I can tell them I have biblical precedent. Jesus goes on to talk about the Spirit being like the unpredictable and invisible wind, which you can only see by its effect.
   So, as ever, with Jesus you have nuanced, poetic, slightly enigmatic, multi-layered statements, none of which are finally tied down, but all of which are fascinating.
   For today, I’m sticking with the idea of being born again. I find it helpful to think about being born again every day. Every morning gives me the chance to start over. It’s not a matter of the past being the past, and to be forgotten, but there is an element of being given a clean sheet of paper. Did you notice? I mixed metaphors there … me and Jesus, we’re just like that.
   I popped out of the womb this morning and I’ll pop out again tomorrow. You might say that I’m still waking up with all the history of previous days, which need to be dealt with. That’s true. But if being born again means anything, maybe it’s to do with changing the place from where we stand to look at it. Washing your face, or standing under the shower (or whatever it is you do), and stepping outside to be rinsed by wind – it’s about starting all over again. Not even babies are born without history. They’re not blank slates. Their DNA is written, they are born into a family and a culture and a locality.
   But it’s still new. As Denise Levertov says in Variation on a Theme by Rilke, every new day confronts us, appoints us, as if we are knighted. It challenges us, granting us “an honour and a task”. She mixes her metaphors too, talking of the way in which “The day's blow / rang out, metallic or it was I, a bell awakened”. It’s as if, when the alarm goes off, as we surface into a new day, we get the chance to breathe in the Spirit, look around – a tad blearily perhaps – but with a sense that our “whole self” is “saying and singing what it knew: I can”.

Variation on a Theme by Rilke Denise Levertov

A certain day became a presence to me;
there it was, confronting me – a sky, air light:
a being. And before it started to descend
from the height of noon, it leaned over

and struck my shoulder as if with
the flat of a sword, granting me
honor and a task. The day's blow
rang out, metallic or it was I, a bell awakened,
and what I heard was my whole self
saying and singing what it knew: I can.

This talk was given at All Hallows on the Wall in the City of London, on 13 Dec 2011. We read Woman to Child Judith Wright, and Luke 1.26-34

There are four words in the English language which a woman can say that is calculated to strike terror into a man’s heart. “I’m having a baby”. Though, of course, these same four words can also bring about an explosion of joy.
  I’m having a baby means: nothing will ever be the same again. Another human being comes into your life, with whom you have – in my experience at least – a bond so deep that it defies reason. Once a child comes along, you’re gone. They’re part of who you are. For ever.
   Through a very ordinary, everyday process, that’s happened millions upon millions of times, a freshly minted human being takes his or her place on planet earth. In stark biological terms, there’s nothing miraculous about this at all. It’s called reproduction. But in human terms it’s an occasion of profound mystery and wonder.
   When a child is in its mother’s womb, and even once it’s born, we have very little idea of how she or he will turn out. That nine months is a period of intense speculation, anxiety even. OK, soon, if we can’t already, we’ll be able to tell what diseases they might be prone to, but we won’t be able to tell who they are going to be.
   We’ve just read that classic text from Luke, “The Annunciation”, the subject of a thousand paintings. In a way, it’s the classic Advent text – the announcement by the angel Gabriel sentences Mary to a nine month period of waiting, wondering who she has inside her, and how this is going to turn out.

   Gabriel says: “Do not be afraid, Mary, for you have found favour with God. And now, you will conceive in your womb and bear a son, and you will name him Jesus. He will be great, and will be called the Son of the Most High, and the Lord God will give to him the throne of his ancestor David. He will reign over the house of Jacob for ever, and of his kingdom there will be no end.” No pressure, then… No wonder Mary, in bewilderment, responds, “How can this be?
   The Australian writer Judith Wright’s poem, Woman to Child, isn’t, as far as I know, about Mary, but it is about birth. It’s also about the organic and mystical rootedness that is absorbed in the process of gestation and birth, any birth.
“You who were darkness warmed my flesh
where out of darkness rose the seed.
Then all a world I made in me;
all the world you hear and see
hung upon my dreaming blood.

There moved the multitudinous stars,
and coloured birds and fishes moved.
There swam the sliding continents.
All time lay rolled in me…”
   It resonated for me with the idea of Mary carrying this child who, whether she knew it or not, was going to change the world for ever. Of course, as I mentioned earlier, all births – the arrival of any human being – tilts the earth, sends a ripple that goes on for ever. But this birth, of all births, changed history and the way we look at the world.
   I can’t explain the mystery and miracle of Jesus, except to talk about the way in which he was wholly transparent to God. The goodness of a compassionate, loving, suffering God was incandescent in him. As it says in John’s Gospel: “the Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father’s only son, full of grace and truth… From his fullness we have all received, grace upon grace. The law indeed was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ.” “Grace and truth”. The second century writer and thinker Irenaeus said: “The glory of God is a human being fully alive.” That does it for me. This is what we see in the life of Jesus, what we celebrate at Christmas. That is what we call the incarnation, the embodiment of God. The human face of God. God with us.
   And it all started with a pregnancy, a child who was nurtured and nourished in Mary’s womb. And it’s this earthiness, that, for me, is important to remember at Christmas – “the Word became flesh and lived among us”. Jesus had a mother, who brought him into the world. Her job was done, but it was not over”
“I wither and you break from me;
yet though you dance in living light
I am the earth, I am the root,
I am the stem that fed the fruit,
the link that joins you to the night”

As Mary asks: “How can this be?”

Woman to Child Judith Wright

You who were darkness warmed my flesh
where out of darkness rose the seed.
Then all a world I made in me;
all the world you hear and see
hung upon my dreaming blood.

There moved the multitudinous stars,
and coloured birds and fishes moved.
There swam the sliding continents.
All time lay rolled in me, and sense,
and love that knew not its beloved.

O node and focus of the world;
I hold you deep within that well
you shall escape and not escape-
that mirrors still your sleeping shape;
that nurtures still your crescent cell.

I wither and you break from me;
yet though you dance in living light
I am the earth, I am the root,
I am the stem that fed the fruit,
the link that joins you to the night

This is a talk given at All Hallows on the Wall in the City of London 6 Dec 2011. We read Table by Edip Cansever, and Matt 22. 23-33

I’m a big fan of Masterchef. I love the way that Gregg Wallace (he’s the short round one) attacks a pudding. His eyes light up with glee. And when he puts a forkful of something melting and gooey into his mouth, his eyes close in ecstasy. “Oh, mate!” he sighs. That was one great big chocolate kiss!”.
   In fact what I like about Masterchef, apart from all the cooking tips you pick, up is the way that Wallace and Terode taste food. They don’t sip, or get a little morsel on the end of a teaspoon. They take a decent forkful of everything on the plate and shove it in. They have gusto, appetite. Michelle Roux Jr, the judge in the current Masterchef the Professionals series, always looks slightly more pained, but I’m being pedantic.
   The Sadducees, in our reading, were something of a contrast. At the risk of telling you stuff you already know, they were a sect, or tradition within Judaism at the time of Christ. They were part of the upper echelons of the society, and had religious and political leadership roles to play, including the priesthood. It doesn’t seem that they were a different denomination to the Pharisees, they were all religious Jews but differed in interpretation – a bit like Evangelicals and Anglo Catholics within the Church of England. One of their distinctives was that, unlike the Pharisees,  they didn’t believe in an afterlife, or an ultimate resurrection of the dead.
   So, quite why they were asking Jesus Jesuitical questions about  who would marry whom in heaven is a bit of strange. Well it isn’t that odd, I suppose, since they weren’t really asking a question, they were simply trying to point out that the afterlife didn’t make logical sense. If a woman had been married to seven different men, who would be her husband in heaven, they asked. “See, now get out of that one, why don’t ya?” It’s not a question they actually want an answer to.
   Jesus, understandably subverts the question. He often seems irritated by these kind of quibbles. Instead, as he often does, he goes for the big picture. “Have you not read what was said to you by God, ‘I am the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob’? He is God not of the dead, but of the living.”
   “He is God not of the dead, but of the living.”  “Forget all this speculation, all these rhetorical questions,” he seems to be saying. Get on with living. So many denominational issues and factional struggles within the church are fixated on stuff that’s unimportant: Who wears what, when, and what happens to bread when you bless it, and who’s allowed to bless it in the first place; for whom, and how, and why did Jesus die; Yes, God loves us all, equally, but for goodness sake don’t let me near a priest who’s gay or a woman.
   “Get a life.” In fact, I think that, in essence, is what Jesus is saying to the Sadducees, and the rest of us. Jesus of Nazareth encourages us to have an appetite for life, to attack it  with gusto. To relish it like Gregg Wallace relishes rhubarb and custard. The poet Edip Cansever is Turkish, and Table evokes a Mediterranean scene, as the man puts his entire life on the table. All the things he values, not just objects: “He put there the light that came in through the window,/Sounds of a bicycle, sound of a spinning wheel./The softness of bread and weather he put there./On the table the man put/Things that happened in his mind./What he wanted to do in life, /He put that there./Those he loved, those he didn't love,/The man put them on the table too.”
   I love the idea that we bring our entire life to the table. That is the example and teaching of Jesus. It’s all there in it’s variegated deliciousness. Sweet, savoury, piquant, creamy, crunchy, salty, chewy and tender. “He reached out and placed on the table endlessness./So many days he had wanted to drink a beer!/He put on the table the pouring of that beer./He placed there his sleep and his wakefulness;/His hunger and his fullness he placed there.”
   “She had an appetite for life.” It’s not a bad epitaph. Get a life. Bon appétit.

Table Edip Cansever

A man filled with the gladness of living
Put his keys on the table,
Put flowers in a copper bowl there.
He put his eggs and milk on the table.
He put there the light that came in through the window,
Sounds of a bicycle, sound of a spinning wheel.
The softness of bread and weather he put there.
On the table the man put
Things that happened in his mind.
What he wanted to do in life,

Three times three make nine:
The man put nine on the table.
He was next to the window next to the sky;

Now that's what I call a table!
It didn't complain at all about the load.
It wobbled once or twice, then stood firm.
The man kept piling things on.

A talk given at All Hallows on the Wall, the City of London on 29 Nov 2011. We read a section from  AD by RS Thomas, and Matthew 21:12-19 

The excitement of the standoff between the Occupy camp and St Paul’s helped drag out an old question that I thought we’d seen the back of last century: “What would Jesus do?” In the 1990s, everyone was wearing the wristbands, and you may remember, it gave rise to other, allied,  satirical questions like: “What would Jesus drive?” and “Who would Jesus bomb?”

   The question has been somewhat derided, because the people who tend to ask it, are often looking for a cut-and-dried certifiable answer, in words of one syllable. But the fact is, there’s rarely an answer to this question that’s concise enough to fit on a tweet.
   Nonetheless, I don’t think it’s an entirely daft question. It’s certainly something that I’ve asked myself on more than one occasion. It’s a useful internal discussion starter. But it is a bit hypothetical.
   A friend of mine is the proud owner of the new iPhone 4S, which, as you may have seen from the ads, will obey verbal instructions. It will also answer certain questions. And, as you can imagine with the makers of Mac, sometimes these answers can be quite knowing. For instance, my friend asked his phone: “What is the meaning of life?” It replied: I’m not sure. Let me write a very long play in which nothing happens.”
   Yesterday, I asked him to ask his phone what Jesus would do. it replied with another question, “I’m sorry, I don’t understand, what would Jesus do?” The iPhone 4S is probably right: “What would Jesus do?” is essentially a rhetorical question.  The reason for this is that Jesus was not someone who’s behaviour is predictable. In the  debate about St Paul’s and the Occupy camp, people wanted an answer to the question because they wanted Jesus to take sides.
   The example which kept raising it’s head was this one in today’s reading. The suggestion was that, at St Paul’s, the money-men had once again taken over the Temple. In the debate over St Paul’s people seemed to want to determine whether Jesus was inside with the clergy or outside with the protesters. The American activist Jim Wallis visited the site and said the camp provided a “space for prophetic witness” which the Church “should long for. He said: “The unique thing about the Christian faith is the incarnation: in Jesus Christ, God hits the streets. This is incarnation.”
   OK. But you could also argue that St Paul’s as it did during World War II, was a symbol of the endurance of faith against in the face of trial. That it provides an actual and symbolic place of sanctuary, where people could bring their trials, and sorrows. That, with the St Paul’s Institute run by Giles Fraser, that it created space for debate and challenge about the values on which our city is based. The debate continues.
   What we know about Jesus of Nazareth was that he spent time with those who had power, and with those who had none. He touched people with skin disease and washed people’s feet. But he could be short and apparently dismissive with his blood relations, and his friends, and now and again, would simply disappear. He could embrace a small child, but take a whip to the tradesmen in the temple. And you had to watch out of you were a fig tree.
   Jesus was a prophet, a truth-teller. And there is a long tradition of prophets in the Hebrew scriptures acting out their prophecies in public spaces. It was a cross between street theatre and performance art. The prophet Ezekiel built a small installation modelled on the city of Jerusalem and lay on one side looking at it for 390 days. And you think conceptual art's weird…
   When Jesus strode into the temple, this wasn’t a hissy fit. He very deliberately wanted to draw the public's attention to corruption and elitism. And he wanted to provoke the religious establishment. It's not that Jesus wasn't angry about what was happening in the Temple, but what he did was focus his anger on making a change.
   Jesus was, and is, an enigma. RS Thomas’s poem is talking about God as Father, and the way that this metaphor threatens “to domesticate an enigma”. Asking the question “what would Jesus do, risks the same. Thomas is presented with two faces, / that of a flower opening / and of a fist contracting / like the gripping of ice.”, he says. “You speak to me with two / voices, one thundering / on the ear's drum, the other / one mistakeable for silence.
   We can’t domesticate God. We can’t domesticate Jesus either. “Mild and dire, / Now and absent, like us but / wholly other – which side / of you am I to believe?” asks Thomas. What would Jesus do? Answers on a postcard. Or a placard? 

You show me two faces,
that of a flower opening
and of a fist contracting
like the gripping of ice.

You speak to me with two
voices, one thundering
on the ear's drum, the other
one mistakeable for silence.

Father, I said, domesticating
an enigma; and as though
To humour me you came.
But there are precipices

within you. Mild and dire,
Now and absent, like us but
wholly other – which side
of you am I to believe?

A talk given at All Hallows on the Wall, City of London on 22 Nov 2011
We read: : The Armful by Robert Frost; Matthew 19. 16-22

 In the church where I grew up in, the ten commandments were set up as a test no-one could pass. They simply existed to prove you were a sinner. In a strict religious household like ours, you could tick off  some of the boxes – like not having any other gods, or making graven images (that one never occurred to us for some reason). And the Sabbath was dead holy. Church three times a day, and no telly. Oh, and not killing – safe on that one. Stealing? I did once nick some sweets from Woolworths, but that was Billy Walker’s fault, really.
    But lying, coveting and respecting your mother and father? No, had to hold my hands up there. Failed the test. I was officially a sinner, destined for the fires of hell.
   What this attitude to the ten commandments did was to focus on failure. It was used a means to point out that, however good we thought we might be, we were ultimately sinners who needed God’s forgiveness. We needed to be saved. Wherever you were, whatever you did, the ten commandments were there to trip you up, and to tell you how far you had fallen short of God’s expectations for you. And it turned God, at best, into a figure who looked down on your failure with a disappointed shake of the head. Even if you kept nine out of ten, you’d still fail the test, and, with sadness, God would turn away. Nothing you could do would please him.
   And, it seems, even if you were perfect in everyway, as the man in today’s reading said he was, there was an extra hoop to jump through. In his case “go, sell your possessions, and give the money to the poor.” There’s always something else isn’t there? It’s a bit like those fairy tales, or the classic stories of antiquity where, to win the hand of the fair maiden, you had a string of impossible tasks to undertake.
  So, elsewhere, Jesus says: “You’ve heard it said you shall not murder, but I say if you are angry with a brother or sister, you are liable to judgement”.’ Oh for goodness sake! Talk about cranking up the level of difficulty. And then to make it worse, he adds. “You’ve heard it said, you shall not commit adultery, but I say that anyone who looks at a woman with lust has already committed adultery with her in his heart.” That’s it… Busted!
   What are we to do with the ten commandments? I don’t want to sound like I’m trying to create myself some wriggle room. Yes, they’re a foundational statement of morality, providing sound footings for any culture and community which wants to live in mutual respect and stability.
   But what Jesus is saying, and many Jewish teachers agree, is that we don’t live simply by the letter of the law. Morality and ethics aren’t just about living life from a list of prohibitions, it’s about what’s going on in our hearts, it’s being true to the spirit of the law.
   I don’t think, for instance, that Jesus is ultimately condemning you or me for getting angry with someone who’s done us wrong, or for feeling the sap rise when we see someone lovely walk by. It’s more a matter of recognising that actions come from the inside, and that we have to give ourselves health-checks to make sure that we’re not actually harbouring, or cultivating, destructive feelings of hate or lust which then spill over into actions.
   I was struck by Robert Frost’s poem and his description of the frustration and the ultimate failure of trying to trying to gather together a whole host of packages: “For every parcel I stoop down to seize / I lose some other off my arms and knees” It does sound a bit like trying to keep the ten commandments. You can’t quite keep hold of them all.
   I don’t actually read this incident with Jesus and the rich young man as an account of Jesus trying to add yet another burden to his impossible task. That was the trick that the Pharisees were fond of. No, Jesus’ challenge to the rich young man seemed to be to examine his heart – to ask himself what it was that really got him out of bed in the morning. What was it that ruled his life. What was it that he feared losing more than anything else. What would really make him lose his identity, his sense of who he was. To him it was his possessions and the security that gave him. For you or me it might be something different.

   As you know, Jesus was very big on losing things in order to find them – on being able to let go of things we cherish in order to risk growing up. In Robert Frost’s poem, he needed to give up trying to hold on to everything. “I had to drop the armful in the road / And try to stack them in a better load.”
   Not sure if there’s something, some preoccupation, some activity, some security blanket which I need to dispense with. I’m going to need to spend some time thinking about this.

The Armful Robert Frost

For every parcel I stoop down to seize
I lose some other off my arms and knees,
And the whole pile is slipping, bottles, buns –
Extremes too hard to comprehend at once,
Yet nothing I should care to leave behind.
With all I have to hold with hand and mind
And heart, if need be, I will do my best
To keep their building balanced at my breast.
I crouch down to prevent them as they fall;
Then sit down in the middle of them all.
I had to drop the armful in the road
And try to stack them in a better load. 

A talk given at All Hallows on the Wall, Lonfon on Nov 15
We read: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood (extract), William Wordsworth; Matt 18. 1-6  

Some years ago, my wife and I wrote a sex book. For seven-year-olds. One of the  main reasons we wrote it was to keep our kids quiet. They'd be forever pestering us to answer the question, “Where do babies come from?”
   And, of course, they had a knack of asking it at the most awkward and inappropriate times. On the bus. In the checkout queue at Tescos. And when Grannie came round for tea. “Not now”, we'd whisper. “Tell you later.”
So in the end we wrote a book – with pictures – which explained everything. It was big in Germany for some reason… Our kids are now in their 30s, but they haven't had children of their own yet, and I'm beginning to wonder whether we might have left something out…
   The point is, one of the best things about children is the questions they ask. They're honest and sometimes brutal. “Why does she smell funny?” “Where’s his hair gone?” “Why can’t we go home now?” It's how they find out about the world.
   I grew up being told that when Jesus said we had to become like children, it meant we had to have a simple, child-like faith. In other words, you put your mind on the shelf and believed. But that’s not my experience of what kids are like. Nor is it my experience about what it means to be a follower of Jesus.
   Children are curious and demanding and frank. Alongside the embarrassing questions, they're also likely to ask some of the big ones: “What happens when you die?” “Who made God?” “Why are there so many poor people?”.
   Kids are physically inquisitive as well. Their curiosity knows no bounds. They want to get their hands in the cake mix, they want play with your iPhone, take the back off the radio, and eat the cow pat. “Let me have a go”, they’re saying. “I want to do that for myself.” They test things to destruction.
   And children are also often more visceral, more earthed than grownups. They’re hilariously fascinated by poo and wee, and burps and farts. If it hurts, they’ll cry, if it’s funny they’ll fall about laughing. If they’re bored they’ll walk away, or just drop off. How often have you wanted to do that?
   And the world they inhabit is open to all sorts of imaginative possibilities: imaginary friends with special dietary needs; scary creatures who live under the bed; princesses, swineherds; Gruffalos.
   And of course, children have anxieties and doubts too. They need love, attention. Touch
   But perhaps the finest quality children have is the abundant sense of wonder, and the ability to express it without irony or self-consciousness: at everything from the saltiness of the sea and the stickiness of mud. And what Jesus seems to be saying is that this questioning, this curiosity, this frankness, this earthiness this imaginative innocence – this wonder – is something we all need to hold on to. But we don’t always.
   This is Wordsworth’s experience: “There was a time when meadow, grove, and stream, / The earth, and every common sight, / To me did seem / Apparelled in celestial light, / The glory and the freshness of a dream…”
   But he adds, regretfully, “But yet I know, where'er I go, / That there hath past away a glory from the earth.”
   There hasn’t, of course. The earth hasn’t lost anything. It’s him. He’s lost, not quite his mojo, but at least some sense of child-like spirit. Wordsworth asks: “Whither is fled the visionary gleam? /Where is it now, the glory and the dream?”
   As grownups we need to recapture this child-likeness. Because: “trailing clouds of glory do we come / From God, who is our home: / Heaven lies about us in our infancy!”
   For some reason this weekend, I found myself humming a Kate Bush song, days before I discovered that this passage was in this week’s lectionary readings. it was “the man with the child in his eyes”. I’ve always thought it was a good line and now I think so even more so.
   We need to drop our guards more, lose our sense of cool. And that means letting loose the little kid that's inside. And looking through the child in our eyes.
  Shades of the prison-house begin to close / Upon the growing Boy, / But He beholds the light, and whence it flows, / He sees it in his joy;

Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood (extract) William Wordsworth

There was a time when meadow, grove, and stream,
The earth, and every common sight,
To me did seem
Apparelled in celestial light,
The glory and the freshness of a dream.
It is not now as it hath been of yore;--
Turn wheresoe'er I may,
By night or day,
The things which I have seen I now can see no more.

The Rainbow comes and goes,
And lovely is the Rose,
The Moon doth with delight
Look round her when the heavens are bare,
Waters on a starry night
Are beautiful and fair;
The sunshine is a glorious birth;
But yet I know, where'er I go,
That there hath past away a glory from the earth.

And the Babe leaps up on his Mother's arm:--
I hear, I hear, with joy I hear!
--But there's a Tree, of many, one,
A single Field which I have looked upon,
Both of them speak of something that is gone:
The Pansy at my feet
Doth the same tale repeat:
Whither is fled the visionary gleam?
Where is it now, the glory and the dream?

Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:
The Soul that rises with us, our life's Star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting,
And cometh from afar:
Not in entire forgetfulness,
And not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory do we come
From God, who is our home:
Heaven lies about us in our infancy!
Shades of the prison-house begin to close
Upon the growing Boy,
But He beholds the light, and whence it flows,
He sees it in his joy;