Fr Richard Coles

From the letter to the Philippians: for many live as enemies of the cross of Christ.

In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.

A week or two ago on Ash Wednesday we met here in church to mark the beginning of Lent. Before the service we burned last year’s Palm Crosses, distributed and blessed on Palm Sunday, in last year’s Lent, and with the ash the priest made the sign of the cross on our foreheads with the words, remember you are dust and to dust you shall return. We left in silence, out into the street bearing the sign of the cross, turned the corner, wiped the ashy smudge from the foreheads, and went out to dinner.

It is the Anglican way, partly reflecting, I guess, a reluctance to make a show of one’s faith, to look silly, or the odd one out; for many live as enemies of the Cross of Christ.

It is, after all, an instrument of torture and death, and Lent reminds us that on the Cross our Lord and Saviour suffered and died. Do we need reminding? Just look around this church and count how many depictions of the Crucified Christ we offer for your consideration.

And yet, over the centuries, and in the course of our lives, the Cross has become familiar, domesticated; indeed, for many people it’s become a sign of its opposite, something anodyne, even cosy. So to be called to reflect again on its purpose as the instrument of Christ’s death makes us uncomfortable. Especially when we’ve gathered here not only to share the bread and wine of the Eucharist but to welcome India, at the beginning of her life, into the family of the Church?

Well, we don’t often have baptisms in Lent, and perhaps that’s because we sense that the mood of the season is out of tune with the mood of the sacrament; widow’s weeds clash with christening robes. But when we look at the baptism service it seems to have more in common with Ash Wednesday than we might at first expect.

In a moment, as deacon of the mass, I will mark the sign of the cross on India’s forehead, not in ash, but in oil, holy oil, blessed by the bishop in the cathedral on Maundy Thursday, the eve of the commemoration of Christ’s death on the Cross. And I will say Christ claims you for his own, receive the sign of the Cross. Is it, then, a badge, a mark of membership? Yes, but it is more than that, more than a statement of affiliation, like the Tufty Club; or even of belief, like the pound sign for Eurosceptics. It is a sign that we share in Christ’s death.

Uncomfortable again? Is it that same discomfort we’ll feel in a moment when we we’re gathered at the font and the celebrant prays, We thank thee, Father, for the water of baptism. In it we are buried with Christ in his death: a cold wind blows across the water’s surface – Ash Wednesday.

A bit of editing called for perhaps? We’ve edited the marriage service, after all, which used to speak of men’s carnal lusts and appetites, compared the ushers to brute beasts that have no understanding, and recommended itself as a means of avoiding fornication; you could almost see the orange blossom wilting.

In the new, edited, marriage service that’s all gone; instead we’re obliged to speak of ‘the delight and tenderness of sexual union’, which I find no less embarrassing, and usually pretend to cough at that bit and move on.

Well there are worse things than a Curate’s embarrassment – selling a baptism short for example – which we would if we lost sight, at the beginning of our lives, of their end.

Perhaps it is not just the character of the baptismal service, the christening of a child, that makes those reminders of mortality feel so jarring; it is also because as a culture we are no longer on terms with death. Twenty five per cent of my grandmother’s twelve brothers and sisters didn’t make it to adulthood – Spanish flu, ruptured appendix, failure to thrive – and every household in her childhood had a drawer full of black crepe (well-used). Death was not something awaiting us, finally, in the antiseptic impersonal environment of a hospital, but was a regular knocker at the door. She grew up with all the elaborate Victorian paraphernalia of death, full-mourning, half-mourning, black bombazine, weeping willows, and in her lifetime it all but disappeared, in proportion with the rise in life expectancy, enduring today only in Undertakers’ Parlours and the East End of London. Even the word ‘death’ seems to have become unsayable – have you noticed how more and more people prefer the euphemism ‘passed away’, an expression oddly resurrected from Victorian piety for use in world which grows every day more secular.

For us, as individuals and for our culture, death may have been banished to the edges of our experience, but sooner or later, inevitably, we will become expert in it, through the loss of others, and finally the loss of ourselves. If, as Benjamin Franklin observed, it is the only inevitable thing (along with taxes), don’t we, at the very least, need to come to terms with it (for it will certainly come to terms with us)? And I don’t mean by this a sort of golden sunset – angel’s feathers falling to the sound of Dvorak’s New World symphony – or a melodrama – black-cowled figures wielding scythes – or an evasion – I have just gone into the next room. I mean the blunt fact of death, so difficult to face with equanimity, no matter how theologically well-equipped, how pious, how serenely composed we like to think we may be. Not existing is literally unthinkable, and like all living, feeling creatures, we dread extinction; it’s hardwired into our brains, a fundamental strategy for survival, the selfish gene being its selfish self.

And yet this selfish gene, which provides us with our dread of death, is also, paradoxically, death’s executor. Last week there were a number of reports in the papers about breakthroughs in our understanding of how this works, how we age and die. It’s the focus of intense research and debate at the moment, and according to one school of thought, it’s pre-programmed, part of the design.

Today marks the 50^th anniversary of the discovery of DNA – hence the cover image on the service booklet this morning – like the cross it is a more than a symbol, for in its double helix our fortune and fate is written. Who we will be, our virtues and vices, the curl of our hair, and the rate of its loss; the loss of our teeth, our marbles, and our lives. It’s a bit like built-in obsolescence in a washing machine, the future failure of the spin cycle engineered in so we’ll have to go and buy replacements and keep the world economy, or at least Peter Jones, in business.

The difference between your Zanussi and your DNA is that no-one knows why our obsolescence is built in. We know how we age, we don’t know why we age, and before we get too beguiled by the promise of the former, maybe we should reflect a bit on the latter.

Gene therapy, we are told, promises greatly extended life-expectancy, already double that of our not too distant ancestors (and not too distant neighbours) thanks to healthier lifestyles and cleverer medicine (for those, of course, who can afford them). You and I may reasonably expect to be playing golf into our nineties – India, however, and her peers, may get well into triple figures before the accumulation of cellular wear and tear annuls their club membership.

The prospect of a hundred and fifty candles on a birthday cake fills some with relief; but others, I suspect, dread it. Not because the thought of getting through more hips than a centipede is unappealing – if these therapies work then our cells will continue to renew themselves – but because the sheer weight of a hundred and fifty years of life could so easily be more burden than bonus. Janacek, the greatest composer of the twentieth century… arguably… Janacek’s opera The Makropoulos Case dramatises such a fate, of a woman, Emilia Marty, living beyond her span thanks to a life-extending potion: but it is a life of dreary uniformity, without risk or savour or pleasure. We love parties, she discovers, because they end.

We know how we die, we don’t know why we die? But our lives are not our own, we are not the authors of our own stories, deciding our beginnings and our ends. What we really are is beyond us utterly, created by God in the fathomless mystery of his image, redeemed in the fathomless grace of his love; our futures and our fates not a matter of genetic snakes and ladders, but signed with his cross, transforming the body of our humiliation that it may be conformed to the body of his glory.

Fr Nick Mercer

Glory, Postmodernity & Transfiguration

“Now Peter and his companions were weighed down with sleep; but since they had stayed awake, they saw his glory” Luke 9.32

It was a residential Board of Trustees meeting in midsummer, and my first mistake was to suggest that we held the after lunch session out on the lawn.

My second mistake was deciding not just to sit on the grass, but to lie down on the grass. And the third was when I thought ‘I’ll just close my eyes, but I’ll still be able to concentrate’.

I might just have got away with this had I not: one – been Chairman of the Board; and two - started snoring.

We’ve all had those situations where we are desperately struggling to stay awake – I’ve been with some of you at Glyndebourne after the dinner interval!

We would not have had this account of the Transfiguration of our Lord in the Gospels, if the disciples had succumbed to sleep.

And as they reflected on it after the resurrection and ascension of Jesus, they realised what they had seen

· They saw Moses the lawgiver and Christ as the fulfilment of the Law.

· They saw Elijah the chief of prophets and Christ as the One to whom all the prophets pointed.

· They heard the voice of Almighty God, reiterating Christ’s Baptismal affirmation that this was his beloved Son and that they should listen to him.

· And they saw the Shekinah cloud, a theophany of the God of glory, and the reflection of that glory in the face of their teacher, Jesus the Messiah.

There’s a little Jewish joke here as well - a sort of pun. Blink and you miss it.

The Hebrew word for ‘glory’, ‘kabod’, was the word for weight, heaviness, gravitas. Here the disciples are weighed down with sleep, Luke tells us, but they remained awake and so were weighed down with glory.

One of my fellow students at theological college was good at everything. And he knew it. So nobody liked him very much. So there was much Schadenfreude when he was rusticated for a term for driving a mini car through the front doors of the college.

He was good at Hebrew of course as well, so someone pinned a large notice above his door with the single word in Hebrew: Ichabod - the glory has departed.

It was the name given to Eli’s grandson Ichabod, who was born just after a particularly crushing defeat by the Philistines who also stole the Ark of the Covenant which represented the glory of God – atheme running through all the readings and prayers today.

[In fact it’s a rather tragic story that the Jewish writer turns into another little joke at the end.

“And it came to pass, when the messenger made mention of the ark of God, that Eli fell from off the seat backward by the side of the gate, and his neck brake, and he died: for he was an old man, and heavy.” (I Sam 4)

So the grandson, born at the same time is called Ichabod, the glory has departed - the Ark of the Covenant has been carried off. But it could mean, the heavy one has departed - the fat man has died!]

Ichabod might be a suitable epitaph for the last 25 years: postmodernity as we are coming to call this period of history.

There’s much spiritual interest but little spiritual depth or weight. Believe but don’t belong. (70% of people claim to be Church of England – they believe, but they don’t belong to our congregations in any meaningful sense.)

Postmodernity describes, not so much a movement, as a mood in contemporary society. It is image with attitude; inner emptiness covered up by all the good things money can buy. Tesco ergo sum - I shop, therefore I am. Retail therapy doesn’t give meaning, but it makes me feel better!

The loneliness and ennui is eased by friendships and music, sex, alcohol and other drugs; and lots of idle humour.Veni, vidi, velcro - I came, I saw, I stuck around. Try and think of an advert that doesn’t use humour.

And one of the characteristics of postmodernity, is that it denies transcendence. So there is little focus to all that spirituality around, and indeed often a denial that there is any objective ‘other’ - the transcendent God of Glory. Spirituality is seen as something purely internal, subjective and personal.

Because of this absent substantiator in postmodern society; an absence of the One who gives weight to human existence, there is a lack of solidness in society, of glory, of weight.

We are in danger of becoming all surface and image.

Let’s go back to our Gospel – the transfiguration of Jesus.

As Jesus goes down the mountain with the disciples, he speaks to them of his impending suffering and of his resurrection. And he has already told them, although they do not understand, that his Passion will be the greatest display of God’s glory. That’s why we read this Gospel passage always on the last Sunday before Lent.

We celebrate this Mass to the Glory of God. As we bring the gifts of the world at the offertory - our bread and wine and money - so we celebrate God’s glory in all he has given to us.

And as we lift up our Lord’s broken body, so we celebrate his victory over death and the glorious hope he has given us.

It is hard to celebrate the glory of God when we are suffering, in body mind or spirit; or watching those whom we love suffer. Yet as we look at the suffering of God in Christ, and remember that we will share in his resurrection glory, then even suffering and death become part of the path to glory.

The Westminster Catechism reminds us that “The chief end of man is to glorify God and to enjoy him for ever.”

Secular drowsiness, the stupor and busyness of 21st century life, must not rob us of seeing God’s glory and delighting in his creation. Part of the reason for the disciplines of Lent is to keep ourselves spiritually awake and alert.

And here at the mass, as Christ is present in another Transfiguration, not with Moses and Elijah, but with bread and wine; here is weight and depth in an increasingly light and shallow culture. Let us be awake to the presence of the Glory of God.

“Now Peter and his companions were weighed down with sleep; but since they had stayed awake, they saw his glory” Luke 9.32

Normally the lives of Prime Ministers and middle aged mothers of six from Portslade rarely, if ever, intersect. Last week they did, poignantly, and the papers have been full of it ever since. Late one night, from an unsleeping No 10, one of the former wrote a letter to one of the latter, the mother of a twenty year old Grenadier guardsman killed in Afghanistan. It was intended as an expression of condolence, but it failed to provide much comfort for Mrs Jacqui Janes. Mr Bown’s unlovely handwriting - more like footwriting - failed to impress, and his misspelling of her son’s name added insult to injury. She contacted The Sun and within twenty-four hours a faux pas became a debacle. The Prime Minster got wind of the Sun’s story and phoned Mrs Janes to apologise. She taped the phone call. The Sun put it on its website, but if it was intended to make us feel less sympathetic towards Mr Brown for me, at least, it had the opposite effect. Mr Brown the public figure is not always easy to warm to, and his defensive responses to Mrs Janes’ forgivably angry accusations had a touch of the PMQs about them; but I was actually rather impressed that the Prime Minister takes time to write personal notes of condolence to the families of service men and women killed on active service. That this effort looked clumsy I’m sure is a reflection of the sincerity of the writer and the lateness of the hour rather than any complacency about the human cost of war. I certainly find it more impressive than another letter of condolence written by Mr Blair during the invasion of Iraq, which concluded with a peroration justifying his decision to take us to war. In such circumstances, I think I’d prefer breast-beating to tub-thumping.

But on reflection that letter too, better phrased but just as clumsy as Mr Brown’s, suggests that even in the thick of events and within the security-cordoned enclaves of government, those who command our forces falter when confronted with the reality of the loss of sons and fathers and brothers and partners and friends. Mr Blair, so smooth and judicious, and Mr Brown, so cautious and strained, admit as much in their different ways, and so maybe our sympathies might engage not only with the predicament of the casualties and their families, but by the predicament of their commanders also. There’s something about that pasty writing, that clotted prose, those clumsy corrections, that tells us something of the isolation, the anxiety, the sheer weight of responsibility that Mr Brown and others like him have to bear.

Fr Richard Coles, Curate

I wanna tell you a story…

It is not often Max Bygraves intrudes into my waking thoughts (though his version of Deck of Cards was the soundtrack to many a nightmare). However, lately I keep hearing in my mind’s ear his catchphrase, I wanna tell you a story. It began when I got into a discussion about Christianity’s persistence in our culture and imagination, rooted, someone thought, in the stories the tradition preserves. Even if we don’t go to church, or believe a word of what the preacher preaches, we know the story of the Good Samaritan, the Flood, the Creation, the Nativity, and as long as they are current, something of our culture’s Christian character endures.  All religions have their stories, especially those which originated in oral culture, and even in ours, in which Scripture is primary, stories precede texts. The Gospels, for example, preserve material that was in circulation before anything was written down - stories about Jesus and his teachings - and scholars have shown that far from being unreliable, like Chinese Whispers, this material was very carefully passed from person to person and community to community. Perhaps what makes a good story, its power to lodge itself and endure in the memory, individual and collective.

Mindful of this, an Anglican priest in the United States developed a system for teaching children the essentials of the Bible and of the Christian faith through storytelling. It developed into what we today call Godly Play, and it has been so successful both in the US and in the UK that we have resolved to start using it here. Instead of a sermon, children and young people (and it is fascinating to see how compelling adults find it too) gather around a rug on which a storyteller uses a few props and an artfully constructed narrative to tell a story from the Bible. It sounds like nothing special, but when you see it done properly it is extraordinarily effective, capturing the children’s attention in a way sermons or addresses can’t, offering a way into Christian faith that is refreshingly different from the old Sunday School methods that many of us endured when we were young. Our Family Service, at nine on Sunday mornings, has been growing, bringing the next generation of Christians into the Church. We want to do everything we can to encourage their growth and nurture, so today, Sunday October 11^th, Godly Play comes to Knightsbridge. We do hope you will come along to the Family Service when you can find out what the story is all about.

Fr Richard Coles, Curate