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Second Sunday of Advent December 2024

By Katherine Price (Vicar)

He will refine them like gold and silver until they present offerings pleasing to the Lord.

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

Some people are really difficult to buy presents for! I mean what do you give the God who literally has everything? When we’re children, presents are the fun bit of Christmas. And maybe when we have children, it gets fun again, as long as their tastes aren’t too expensive! But as we get older, the whole gifting thing can become a bit stressful. Will they like it? Do we know each other and each other’s tastes as well as we think we do? Very often the answer is no: my sister and I are still giving each other the things we would each have liked the last time we lived together which is now about twenty years ago! So this passage from Malachi is giving us a Christmas day nightmare: Our offering to God is not “pleasing to the Lord, as in former years.” We do not know our heavenly Father as well as we think we do. He doesn’t like what we’ve got him.

In our Advent sequence, today, the second Sunday in Advent, represents the Prophets. Next Sunday we will look specifically at John the Baptist who also features today, as the culmination of that Old Testament prophetic tradition, but today is prophets and prophecy in general. And, if you recall Frances talking last week about the four ‘last things’, death, judgment, heaven and hell that makes today also the day for judgment! Those two themes go together Because the prophets of the old testament are, a lot of the time, being very judgy – telling us where we are going wrong. That’s not all they do; Today is also a day to remember the promises of God and his blessings. But a lot of prophecy is about where we are going wrong and where we will end up if we keep on in that direction.

All of our readings today reflect this theme of our imperfection and our need for change. We are reminded today that our life with God is not just about our salvation, our once-for-all redemption in Jesus Christ but also involves an ongoing process of refinement, of purifying, of repentance, of learning, of crooked ways being straightened out and rough edges knocked off. It feels right now as if everyone and everything is under judgment. Just in the last week in the news we’ve had the scandal involving Gregg Wallace, the BBC cookery presenter; and we’ve got an enquiry going on into the murders committed by the nurse Lucy Letby and how that was not spotted and stopped sooner. Over the course of 2024 every single national institution in this country - the NHS, the Post Office, the BBC, Ofsted, the Police, local government, obviously the Church of England – every one has been exposed and judged for some major failing. “There is nothing hidden that will not be brought to light” – it feels as though nobody, no organisation, nobody in a position of trust or authority has lived up to what was expected of them.

I think Christmas is also a time which shines a light into our lives and particularly into our family lives, our domestic lives. And that can be a warm cosy firelight or it can be a very uncomfortable harsh searchlight. Christmas is an intense time – we’re maybe spending more time with our family than usual, probably spending more money, maybe drinking more. And what that reveals may be something beautiful: neglected relationships being renewed and rekindled around our quirky old family Christmas traditions and new families building new traditions of their own. But this season can also bring to the surface those tensions and resentments – family feuds, fallings out, trips to A&E! And it can be a really lonely time for many people.

The light of Christmas might show up what is missing in our lives especially for those who are bereaved, or recently separated, or estranged from family. We see the contrast between the ‘perfect’ Christmas which exists in our memory or our imagination or in the supermarket Christmas adverts and the reality of our bleak midwinter.

The light of Christmas can cast a dark shadow. This is what Malachi warns us of. The God whom you seek will suddenly come into his temple – and he will come like a refining fire. The coming of Jesus at Christmas is the fulfilment of everything we have been waiting for but the power of his presence, the light of his truth shining into our fallen lives, is going to be like fire, like lye, burning away the dross and revealing who we truly are. We aren’t talking here about the kind of cleansing that involves putting on a facemask and steaming in the bath. This is more the kind where you roll up your sleeves and put on your yellow gloves and clean the oven, really scour off all the burned bits: that’s what it’s going to take to make our lives ready
to present as an offering worthy to God.

Jesus comes at Christmas as prophet, and as fulfilment of prophecy, but he comes also because prophecy has failed. God has sent messenger after messenger and the message has not got through – so in the end he comes himself, ‘not to condemn the world but to save it’: Not to tell people yet again where we’re going wrong – that never gets you very far – but to show them a different way. The incarnation is a judgment on us – because in Jesus we see what we could be, and we see how very far we have fallen short. But in the incarnation God is also doing something new, setting us an example to follow. Jesus is the Father’s gift to his people but he is also the perfect offering of humanity to the Father – the offering that we too can be part of.

I don’t know about you but I like to open my smallest present last. In this Gospel passage I really like the way these grand names are piled up –Emperor Tiberius, Pontius Pilate, Herod, Philip, Lysanias, Annas and Caiaphas Each with their titles and honours… And the word of the Lord came to none of them, But to John son of Zechariah In the wilderness, far way from the palaces of power. The gift that God is giving The ultimate, most special gift of his own self does not come in a grand package But small and hidden in a tiny child in a manger surrounded by the animals And heralded by the voice crying out in the wilderness. After this year and all the things I’ve talked about, it is really easy to be cynical; It is easy for judgment to become a counsel of despair. We can lose sight of the magic of Christmas because we are looking at the big things – war, corruption, poverty. But we know that God has not hidden himself in the big things, But in the little things – the things sometimes too small for any but a child to see.

So this year I invite you to allow God to scour away our self-righteousness and self-delusion, our pomposity, our judgment of others, all the burned-on accretions of age and cynicism to receive with the wonder of childhood the gift of the God who comes as a little child. Amen

 10 November 2024

By Katherine Price (Vicar)

Christ did not enter a mere copy of the sanctuary.

Earlier this year, we marked the eightieth anniversary of the D-Day landings.
But those landings were only the beginning of a long and often brutal operation to re-take France from the occupying Nazi forces.
In the city of St Malo – the port where today the cross-channel ferries come in to Brittany –
What we commemorate as the ‘liberation’ of the city is remembered by the Maloins as one of the darkest times in the city’s history. I was there earlier this year, and when I’m on holiday I like to read a book with some connection to the place, So I was reading ‘all the light we cannot see’ –
you might’ve seen it recently as a netflix series - and this story is set during the occupation and liberation of St Malo.

If I hadn’t read that book I would never have realised that the ancient walled town I was staying in
was almost entirely reconstructed after the war. St Malo’s citizens lost 85% of their historic city in 1944 destroyed not by the Germans but mostly by the Americans, who were coming to rescue them.
Amongst so many other things, The people of St Malo had lost their past, their physical connection to their history. Other cities were also destroyed and were rebuilt in a new way – we think in this country of Coventry, and its remarkable cathedral. But the mayor and people of St Malo chose to painstakingly rebuild the original city, using the original stones.

When we gather each year on Remembrance Sunday we are no longer sharing a personal remembrance – we cannot reminisce together about our wartime experiences as former generations might have done. We are not simply repeating or copying something from year to year. Rather, what we are doing is ‘rebuilding’, reinventing, creating from our history something which is both new and old and most importantly, which meets the needs of our present generation and our future.

In our Gospel reading, Jesus is calling his disciples… Specifically, he is calling young, working men.
When I hear, on this day, of fishermen dropping their work and going to follow and to become part of something bigger I immediately think of the many young men of Grimsby – where I used to work – a fishing port – The young men who signed up straight away at the outbreak of war in 1914 – And other young men like them across the country – Seeking adventure, sharing friendship, wanting to be part of something. Although the leaders who called them – unlike Jesus – Were all too willing to shed ‘blood that was not their own’. And I wonder what there is for those young men now? For those lads who are looking to be part of something?

Well, we’ve seen one answer to that this week in the United States of America: Donald Trump won a majority across the board but he was particularly popular with young, working class men. People like Andrew and Simon-Peter, and James, and John, in Smallsville Gallilee, who wanted something more from their lives than catching fish for the next thirty years – or in Peter’s case mostly failing to catch fish! That may be kind of a horrifying thought but maybe it’s also kind of a hopeful thought. People still want to belong. People still want to follow someone who seems to have something better to offer them. It’s just that most of those who invite us to follow them are not very much like Jesus.

Jesus gave one condition for following him: Repent and believe the good news. In other words, we can rebuild a better future but only by dealing honestly with the past and having hope for the future. Making peace with one another, and making peace with our past is so often about how we choose to remember and what we choose to forget. November is a season of remembrance in the UK; as well as Remembrance Sunday today and Armistice Day tomorrow, we had all saints and all souls earlier in the month, and last week we ‘remember remembered’ the fifth of November Gunpowder treason and plot!

But do we commemorate it as the survival of our parliament and our constitutional monarchy against terrorism? Or do we risk reopening old wounds and the uncomfortable legacy of anti-catholic persecution in this country? I often think about the way we talk about things being ‘catholic’ or ‘protestant’ in this church, and are we careful enough about that history of religious division and persecution?

Or is the fifth of November now just “firework night” –we remember the date but forget the meaning
and just enjoy the fireworks together? Is the ‘forgetting’ part of the healing? I spent Monday evening at an ecumenical celebration in London – we were celebrating friendship between Anglicans and Methodists – there were Roman Catholics there as well – we shouldn’t underestimate just how extraordinary it is that we have got where we are today from where we have been at times in the past.

Today for the the first time the Remembrance Sunday service in Belfast will be attended by a politician from Sinn Feinn, the Northern Irish First Minister. That is a really powerful illustration that remembrance is not just about the past; it is not just something we replay or repeat or re-enact year on year. It is an invitation to build something new If we can repent and believe in good news.

Amen.

BIBLE SUNDAY 27 October 2024

By David Richardson (Licensed Preacher)

Isaiah 55.1-11 || Psalm 19.7-11 || 2 Timothy 3.14-4.5 || John 5:36-47

Last month Clare and I went to Iceland - I should point out that other supermarkets are available. Actually we went to the beautiful country of Iceland – and having got up close to the recent lava flows there, I’ve been reading about volcanoes.

One of the articles I read connected with thoughts I was having about Bible Sunday. It was about the Klamath, an indigenous American people living in what is now Oregon, who tell marvellous stories about a time when a giant volcano (Mount Mazama) towered over their land. Where the volcano once stood there is now a Crater Lake and geologists have determined with remarkable precision that the eruption which removed Mount Mazama, happened 7,600 years ago. So the tales about the volcano that the Klamath tell their children are the product of a storytelling tradition stretching back at least 8 thousand years.

Surely the telling of stories lies at the heart of what it is to be human. And If you want a 1200 year old story telling tradition from closer to home, think of King Alfred, who we celebrated yesterday and who’s Great British Bake Off disaster is a tale still told.

In his book Sapiens, Yuval Noah Harari argues that when, two million years ago, several kinds of human roamed the Earth, it was the emergence of storytelling that allowed Homo Sapiens to transfer knowledge and skills, create a sense of shared purpose, and
become the planet’s dominant species.

But what Harari fails to ask is where that extraordinary spark of narrative creativity came from. What were the origins of that imaginative energy that gives man and womankind the ability - more than that, the compulsion - to relate thoughts and experiences in stories, to pass them around communities and down through generations?

Well, we have a story to help us understand that mystery – And it’s one we all know. In Genesis God says, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness”. And what is Adam’s immediate use of that divine like-ness, his God-like knowledge? Well after he has clothed himself, his second act is to tell a story. It’s a short story – in fact just a sentence. When God asks, "Have you eaten from the tree from which I commanded you not to eat?" Adam tells him that "The woman you put here with me, she gave me some fruit from the tree, and I ate it." So actually not so much telling a story – rather (as my grandchildren would say) telling tales.

I think it’s a bit early in my preaching career to tackle the fraught question of whether Adam’s first words sowed the seeds of misogyny in Judaeo-Christian thinking. For now, let’s focus not on what Adam says but the fact that he has the God-given power to say it. That the divine spark that Adam, Eve and all of us possess brings with it the capacity and indeed the irresistible urge to capture and interpret - events, concepts, ideas and emotions in stories, stories which like Genesis itself, echo through the generations, and carry meaning through millennia.

My suggestion to you this Bible Sunday is that this story-telling urge is God-given, that scripture is evidence of God, working with and within mankind through his Spirit. That the Bible is a cornerstone of faith not only in what it says, but in the very fact that it exists as a created work, demonstrating the dynamic connection between God and man.

And while an orthodox position is that the Bible comprises the work of 35 or 36 authors, surely, given what we know about oral tradition, it actually represents the accumulated endeavour of thousands of human beings, through whom the words we now read have passed in oral or written form, shaped and reshaped as men and women have pursued a deeper understanding of God. I want to suggest that the Bible is the product of a
sharing in God’s creative energy; that the creation of scripture is in and of itself sacramental, and that this book is physical evidence of the divine presence. The Bible offers a multi-dimensional reading experience – of cultural and military history, poetry, law-making and social policy, theological treatise, letters, and even, in the book of Revelation a phantasmagorical allegory that gives Tolkien a run for his money!

And it is, as we know full of linguistic beauty. Think of the glorious language of the Psalms, or of Isaiah, or of Paul’s letters and it is clear that God has given us not only an urge to tell stories, but an ability to weave the music of language to maximise their impact on the listener.

The great seventeenth century poet John Donne certainly believes this. He sees man’s capacity to provoke thought and emotion through creative language (what he – and Shakespeare - would probably have called wit) as being a direct reflection of the nature of God.
In his Devotions on Emergent Occasions he writes: “My God, thou art a direct God… a God that wouldst be understood literally and according to the plain sense of all that thou sayest… but thou art also (Lord, I intend it to thy glory), thou art a figurative, a metaphorical God too; a God in whose words there is such a height of figures, such voyages, such peregrinations to fetch remote and precious metaphors, such extensions, such spreadings, such curtains of allegories, such third heavens of hyperboles, so harmonious elocutions…such things in thy words, as while all profane authors seem of the seed of the serpent that creeps, thou art the Dove that flies.”

Wow! Here is Donne firing up all six cylinders of his linguistic power to describe God as Poet! And if you find Donne’s words too flowery, consider today’s reading from Isaiah, where God speaks directly of the power of language: “so shall my word be that goes out from my mouth; it shall not return to me empty, but it shall accomplish that which I purpose, and shall succeed in the thing for which I sent it.” There is much beauty in God’s word, but he makes clear that the beauty has a purpose – it is designed to have impact, to effect change.

Which brings us to the greatest storyteller in Scripture. Who tells perhaps the simplest tales with the most powerful, life-changing meaning. I mean of course Our Lord Jesus Christ. I confess that I sometimes find Christ’s personality enigmatic. But, some features of his character are crystal clear and one of these is his brilliance as a story teller. Jesus has a deep knowledge of the millennia of storytelling that form the Old Testament Indeed, he knows himself to be present in that ancient narrative which underpins the new story of our salvation. In today’s gospel Jesus says “if you believed Moses you
would believe me, for he wrote of me” And Luke tells us that “Beginning with Moses and all the Prophets, He explained to them what was said in all the Scriptures concerning himself”.

But while Christ has a unique understanding of the awesome cosmic narrative of Man’s salvation (being Himself at its heart), He chooses to speak not in complex metaphysics but in simple parables. “This was to fulfil what was spoken by the prophet: “I will open my mouth in parables; I will utter what has been hidden since the foundation of the world.”

For me even the titles of the those 41 stories have emotional resonance: The Salt of the Earth, The Lamp Under a Bowl, The Wise and Foolish Builders, New Cloth on an Old Coat, New Wine in Old Wineskins, The Two Debtors, The Friend at Midnight and so on. Anyone who seeks to communicate knows that to do so simply, without pretentiousness is the hardest thing - and I have probably failed in that respect this morning! But in His parables Christ accomplishes this constantly and, it seems to me, intuitively. And he achieves this, I would contend, not only as a reflection of his Godhead but as a
product of His humanity, blessed as we human beings are with the gifts of imagination and creativity.

As creatures made in God’s image we all share these gifts - the capacity to tell stories from our own lives, to communicate our hopes and fears, our experiences and emotions - in stories that may then be interpreted and developed, through telling and retelling. Perhaps you will have an opportunity to tell a story or two about your own life, your own feelings, to those you spend time with in the coming week? If you do, I would say that you will be doing the work of the Kingdom.

And finally, here’s an exercise you might like to try as a follow-on from Bible Sunday. It’s based on a picture that I have loved ever since I started reading Charles Dickens. It was painted by Robert William Buss on hearing of Dickens' death in June 1870. It is called Dickens's Dream, and now hangs in the Charles Dickens Museum in London. In it we see author dozing at his desk and swirling around his head the myriad of characters and stories that he created. I will leave copies of it under the altar, in case you would like to take one home as a reminder. It is a testimony to the God given storytelling power of humanity in one of its greatest exponents.

My suggestion is this. Take your Bible and don’t open it, but simply visualise as you look at it your favourite characters and stories from its pages. When you relax and free your imagination which images rise up to hover around you? Maybe make a few notes of the stories that call out to you, then open your Bible and look them up.

But however you spend the week ahead be assured that God is with you. For this book tells us so. Amen

HARVEST 6 October 2024

By Revd Dr Frances Caroe (Curate)

Joel 2.21-27 || Psalm 128 || 1 Timothy 6.6-10 || Matthew 6.25-33

It is hard to celebrate the harvest these days.

'The Lord has poured down for you abundant rain,' says the prophet Joel. But September 2024 was the wettest month ever recorded in Oxfordshire. This year's harvest was bad, but next year's harvest is already under threat.

'Do not worry about what you will eat or what you will drink,' says Christ. But the fragility of our food supply was exposed only four years ago, when supermarket shelves were emptied by nothing but panic.

'Look at the birds of the air,' says Christ again. But the all-species index of British birds is down 15% since 1970, a figure which masks far greater declines in some areas -- 60%, for example, in the farmland birds that surround us here in Wantage.

And finally, the psalmist cries, 'Peace be upon Israel!' But tomorrow marks the one-year anniversary of the Hamas attack on the State of Israel, which began the latest cycle of conflict in that region. What's more, last week, the 30 September, marked the second year since Russia declared its annexation of four Ukrainian oblasts. All this reminds us that so much conflict, so much death, takes place because of land: who owns it, who tills it, who may eat of its fruits.

Even here, whilst we may celebrate the harvest today in our donations, our Harvest Lunch, and our services, nearly one quarter of English school pupils are eligible for free school meals -- in other words, one in four English children are deemed to be at risk of not having enough to eat. We're doing slightly better than that average here in Wantage. Here, it's only one in five children.

On top of all which, most of are increasingly divorced from the need to celebrate the harvest that our forebears once felt. When almost everyone had a hand in food production, not least in the harvesting itself, almost everyone was personally aware of the work that had been done to put food on the table. Moreover, when food production was genuinely uncertain, and a bad harvest meant that some of us would surely starve, to celebrate whatever was brought in was a natural response. But now, many of us are hazy about how, exactly, our food reaches our plates; and in this country, at least, famine has been largely unknown for over a hundred years. So, many of us do not truly understand what it is that we are celebrating today.

But famine does still happen in the world. And that famine happens anywhere, now that stockpiling and advances in food production mean that we could avoid it if we wished, means that famine anywhere is no longer the consequence of misfortune, but the consequence of human activity: of greed, of war, of inaction, of injustice -- in short, of sin.

It is hard to celebrate the harvest these days.

***

Our scripture today talks about how to respond to God's blessings, and it speaks in terms of consequences. Not, importantly, of conditions -- God does not say, 'If you do this, then I shall do that.' Where is the love, the mercy in that? No, God and God's good creation is striving to bless us, if only we will heed God's word.

Thus, today's passage from Joel comes after a call to repentance, which we hear on Ash Wednesday: 'Yet even now, says the Lord, return to me with all your heart, with fasting, with weeping, with mourning; rend your hearts and not your clothing.' When we act in accordance with God's will, or repent when we catch ourselves not so doing, we become able to receive God's blessings, which God is always pouring out for us.

A little example -- will you harvest wheat, if you don't plant it? God does not curse you if you don't plant it, but you won't be blessed with a harvest. However, if you do plant it, then shoots will spring up from the earth and a harvest will form in the head. This is what I mean when I say that God, and God's good creation, is always striving to bless us, if only we will listen.

Will hoverflies and bees not pollinate our crops, without our lifting our finger, if we do but let them, and do not kill them off?

Will there not be food in the shops and on our tables, if we do not panic-buy and hoard it from others?

Will there not be peace, if we do not prepare for war?

Today's passage from 1 Timothy describes a Christian approach to living in the world. 'If we have food and clothing' -- if we have food and clothing -- 'we will be content. But the rich...' The problem in this world is never scarcity. There is no scarcity in God's economy. The problem is our hoarding of God's abundance, of God's blessings: of wealth, of land, and of its fruits.

***

How do we, as Christians, respond? Obviously this is beyond the individual. It's beyond billionaires, beyond governments, beyond multinational corporations -- to say nothing of those who are only victims in all this, victims of others' greed, without any wealth or power of their own. That's because this is fundamentally a problem of human nature -- or, rather, of human un-nature -- that is, of sin; of which we are all (in the end) victims.

But -- Jesus comes not only to save us when we cannot save ourselves, he also invites us to anticipate the Kingdom in our own lives. And so, if we are blessed -- if we are blessed -- let us be content with our blessings; not eager for greater riches, not falling into the temptation to grasp for more or to hoard. And let none of us worry about having, but worry only about being: 'striving first for the kingdom of God and his righteousness'; as a consequence of which, our harvests may truly be blessings, and our celebrations of them without restraint.

MICHAELMAS (St Michael & All Angels) 29 September 2024

by Revd. Katherine Price

Genesis 28.10-17 || Psalm 103.19-end || Revelation 12.7-12 || John 1.47-end

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

On the roof of the royal chapel, at the palace of Versailles there are thirty-two angels. They don’t of course look like angels as they are described in the Bible but the way that most of us expect angels to look: cute little cherubs with big wings, covered in gold, each made from one-and-a-half tons of lead.

Versailles is where the French Royal Family lived before the Revolution. You might have seen it on the olympics coverage over the Summer as it was one of the venues in Paris. And if you’ve seen the film Marie Antoinette with Kirsten Dunst You might remember that the day at court would start with everybody crowding into the king’s bedchamber to watch him being woken up and washed and dressed all of course with great ceremony and splendour! If anybody wanted to leave the king's presence they couldn’t just turn around and walk out of the room: they had to walk backwards all the way with tiny little steps. All of this splendour surrounding the king’s majesty was reinforced by the building itself: To get to the throne room, you pass through a series of rooms each one grander than the last so that by the time you come into the presence of the king you are well and truly intimidated… I’ve known managers who set up their offices in the same way!

Angels are if you like the courtiers of heaven in traditional accounts of who they are and what they do they stand around God’s throne, waiting on him and doing his will. And just as there is a hierarchy in a palace from the grandest duke to the lowest lackey all decked out in their appropriate attire so, in traditional ‘angelology’ – yes, there is a subject called ‘angelology’ – There is a hierarchy of angels: Seraphim, cherubim, archangels – we’ve all heard of those – But also thrones, dominions, principalities, virtues, powers… Look out for a list of them when we sing the hymn after communion!

‘Rank on rank the host of heaven’ – The heavenly hosts from the Field Marshal St Michael himself down to the lowliest non-commissioned cherub: Each one rung on a ladder with God at the top and us at the bottom.

There is both something beautiful and something fundamentally sad and wrong about that vision of heaven. The beauty of this vision – the ranks of angels all worshipping around the throne – is that it’s a vision of order, of harmony, of obedience everything and everyone being where they should be, with God right at the centre.

When the prophets were granted visions of heaven and of angels they understood it to be a glimpse of the true and hidden reality. It was a reminder to them, and to us, that God is ultimately in control  and that the world is good and beautifully made even when it looks as though all is chaos and nothing makes any sense at all. That is why we try to reflect something of this order and harmony in our worship especially when we sing together the ‘sanctus’ – holy holy holy – the song of the angels around the throne. It is our prayer – your will be done on earth as it is in heaven.

But this vision of heaven goes wrong if we forget the words that God says to Jacob under the ladder of angels: “I am with you wherever you go” – If we forget that we are more likely to meet an angel in the wilderness than high up on a palace roof covered in gold.

In the years before Jesus’ birth people felt as though God was very far away; he was on his throne in heaven – absolutely holy, absolutely perfect and we were on earth - beneath his feet and maybe beneath his notice. And that is when people became very interested in angels. Angels have turned up throughout the Bible

But it’s really in these few generations before Jesus that angels become really fascinating. People want to know their names – Gabriel, Michael, Raphael, Uriel – All of the names end in ‘el’ meaning ‘God’, because the Angels belong to God and serve God. And it’s in this period that we first get stories about fallen angels, about the devil and his angels being cast out of heaven. You might be surprised to learn, that’s not in the mainstream Old Testament bible! 

One of the things that the Sadduccees and the Pharisees argued about is that the Pharisees believed in angels – they believed that God could speak to people through dreams, through visions, and through angels. So angels were messengers, they were go-betweens they were a way that ordinary worshippers might hope to have some communication with this very distant very great very high and holy God in the same way that in the court of Versailles you might hope to catch the eye of a footman who would catch the eye of a chamberlain who might take a message to the king… 

This encounter in our Gospel between Jesus and Nathaniel is about as far from the throne room of Versailles as you can possibly get. Nathaniel is face to face with his king – ‘you are the king of Israel!’ he says. And yet he has not just walked through a dozen gilded state rooms, he has not handed his calling card to a doorman, he has not bowed low to the floor. In fact, he’s just insulted Jesus by badmouthing his hometown.

In Jesus Christ, this whole great hierarchy – this ladder with its different rungs and ranks – is totally collapsed. Because if this ladder reaches from earth to heaven, from human beings to God himself, Jesus is both ends at once. He is the ladder, all by himself. In Jesus the man, we meet God the Son, right there, face to face, just as God once walked in the garden with Adam and Eve before we put all this distance between us.

The vision of angels should not remind us just of God’s extraordinary holiness but also of his intimate and active involvement in every moment of our human lives. The vision of heaven which is given to John the Divine in the book of Revelation is not still and peaceful and restful but dynamic, full of movement, full of conflict. There is war in heaven. The angels are, first and foremost, the ‘hosts of heaven’ – the heavenly armies. But if the vision of heaven is not the vision of ‘somewhere else’ but of ‘how things really are’ that means we too are part of a cosmic war, and what we do here in earth matters. So we should not be surprised if it sometimes seems that we – The church, Christian communities – Are more rather than less vulnerable to temptation, to division, to sin and to schism – to all the assaults of evil - than those who are, as it were, non-combattants in the heavenly struggle.

In this vision of war in heaven it is not really the angels who win the battle - or rather, the angels do not win alone. Rather, we are told that it is “our comrades”, the members of the church on earth, who have won the victory. And they have conquered not by violence, not by force but by “the blood of the lamb, by the word of their testimony” and by their own self-sacrifice. In this topsy-turvy mirror-image world we see as heaven it is by choosing words rather than violence that we strike a blow against the enemy; by enduring suffering, when it cannot be avoided, that we defend ourselves; by choosing forgiveness rather than vengeance, that we strengthen ourselves for the fight. And in this topsy-turvy world of heaven the one who is high and mighty on his throne surrounded by rank on rank of angels is also the one standing right beside us and whispering in our ear, “I am with you and will keep you wherever you go.”

Amen.