Recent Sermons

28 July 2024 - Rosi Bartlett, Parish Assistant

Ninth Sunday after Trinity

Ezekiel 18.20b-23

Psalm 51.1-11

1 Timothy 1.12-16

Luke 7.36-50

“Trespassers will be forgiven”

When the wicked man turneth away from his sin, and doeth that which is lawful and right, he shall save his soul alive.

I feel chills every time I hear this exhortation from Ezekiel, as found in the 1662 Book of Common Prayer. It is incisive and commanding, but also poetic, offering hope to everyone who hears it. This verse encourages us to bring our sins to God, without fear of being rejected, no matter who we are or what we have done.

The men who compiled the Book of Common Prayer included this verse because it reminds us of our sinfulness and wickedness. This can clash with our own sense of self. We often assume that we are good people. After all, we try to be kind, and we might even donate money to charity or volunteer our free time. How can we be bad people? But owning our wickedness and sinfulness is actually helpful. We need to be realistic about our own sins in order to grow spiritually.

We live in a world where we are encouraged to accept every aspect of our selves without reflecting on right and wrong. Consider the popular phrase, “if you can’t handle me at my worst, you don’t deserve me at my best”. We are in a cultural moment where self-acceptance – which is a good thing – means being unable to self-reflect or accept even a tiny amount of criticism.

At the same time, accepting other people who admit their mistakes is also unfashionable. Although so-called cancel culture can be helpful, especially when it is used to hold powerful people to account, it doesn’t allow much room for error. People who admit to past prejudices, but have reflected on them and turned away from them, can be shunned just as much as people who refuse to do this work. We are encouraged to accept our wrongdoings, rather than change our ways, because the popular zeitgeist lacks the framework for absolution and forgiveness that we find in the Christian faith.

Christians have often accused the 1st century Pharisees of being unwilling to forgive others. We tend to imagine the Pharisees as sanctimonious legalists, who allied themselves with power, and forced everyone to abide by pointless rules just for the sake of following dead and hollow traditions. This image has fuelled Christian misunderstandings of the Jewish faith, which prioritises chesed (a Hebrew word meaning “lovingkindness”) just as much as the 613 laws which religious Jews seek to live by. As Christians, it can be tempting to assume that Simon the Pharisee in today’s Gospel reading condemned the sinful woman who anointed Jesus because he preferred useless and pointless laws rather than the way of forgiveness.

But this answer is too simple.

In 1st century Palestine, there were a number of conflicting Jewish groups. Two of the most influential were the Pharisees and Sadducees, and both groups are portrayed in the Gospels. The Sadducees were priests who prioritised Temple sacrifices as the best way to worship God. The Sadducees were also rich and powerful aristocrats who collaborated with the occupying Roman forces. Pause The Pharisees, on the other hand, were a little bit more down-to-earth. They believed that personal purity, prayer, and learning was more important to holiness than whether your dad happened to be a priest. The Pharisees were mostly middle-class and were supported by ordinary people. They greatly treasured the Jewish prophetic tradition – which the Sadducees rejected – because the Jewish prophetic tradition centres the poor and dispossessed over the rich and powerful.

This is why Simon the Pharisee questions Jesus’s status as a prophet. For Simon, Jesus only has authority insofar that he is a prophet or teacher. If Jesus is neither, he has no authority, and Simon can simply ignore him. Simon questions Jesus’s prophetic ministry, because Jesus allowed himself to be anointed by a sinful woman, and the Pharisees valued holiness. Unlike the Sadducees, the Pharisees were less connected to Temple worship. They had begun to imagine what Judaism would be like without the Temple and its ritual sacrifices. Perhaps their moral codes and purity laws were strict because (unlike the Sadducees) they couldn’t rely solely on sacrifices for atonement, and had to avoid sinning in the first place.

And Jesus worried the Pharisees, not because he was opposed to the them, but because Jesus’s teachings reflected Pharisaic theology. Jesus believed in the resurrection of the dead. He was a rabbi. He championed the cause of the poor. He often attended synagogues, which were founded by the Pharisees. And at least one of Jesus’s sermons mirrors a set of teachings about Pharisees found in a Jewish text called the Talmud. Jesus doesn’t attack the Pharisees’ principles – just how they apply their principles.

So, from the Pharisees’ point of view, a new teacher has come to prominence. This teacher agrees with most Pharisaic teachings, and also supports the poor and dispossessed. He would seem like a natural ally to the Pharisees. But this teacher is less concerned with purity, which is how the Pharisees express their love for God. And because this new, popular teacher is associating himself with sinners and drunkards, he might lead the Jewish people away from purity, and into sin.

But Jesus, perhaps, knew that the Temple sacrifices were not the only way to atone for sin. Because the Temple sacrifices foreshadowed a greater mystery, and a much fuller atonement than the blood of animals could ever achieve.

Saint Paul knew this. When he was a Pharisee, in order to remain in friendship with God, Saint Paul stringently avoided sin. Perhaps this is why he violently persecuted the early Church, because his zeal was the only way he could guarantee friendship with God. But after he had accepted Jesus, and been cleansed in the waters of baptism, Saint Paul was able to be more honest about his sins. He could speak openly and freely about his past – that he was a blasphemer, a persecutor, and a man of violence – because his sins are no longer what defines him. Because, in Jesus, Saint Paul’s sins have been removed from him, as far as the east is from the west.

And we, as Christians, can and should also name our sins when we confess them. At each celebration of the Eucharist, we are called to remember our sins in the silence of our hearts. And many people choose to confess privately as well, to name their sins in the presence of a priest. In both of these contexts, once we have named our sins, God’s forgiveness is declared over us in the words of absolution. Unlike the Pharisees and Saint Paul before his conversion, we don’t have to pretend that we don’t sin, or try to be sinless in our own strength. Because of Jesus, our sins can be atoned for. And we can acknowledge our sins, and know that our trespasses have been forgiven.

So, as we continue to reflect upon the Lord’s Prayer, let us pray for boldness to acknowledge and confess our sins, and for certainty in our hearts that we have been forgiven. Amen.

21 July 2024 - Revd. Katherine Price

St. Mary Magdalene

Song of Songs 3:1-4

Psalm 42:1-10

2 Corinthians 5:14-17

John 20:1-2;11-18

“Woman, why are you weeping?”

Where would you look for the love of your life? On Tinder, maybe? Down the pub?

Maybe at Deanery synod? Well, it has been known to work for some people!

Our readings today are about looking for love. This Gospel story from the Gospel of John is most familiar as the reading for Easter Sunday. On that day, our focus is on the resurrection and the message that Mary brings back to the disciples: I have seen the Lord.

But today our focus is on Mary and her searching for the Lord. And so alongside this account from the Gospel of John  we hear this old testament reading from the song of solomon or song of songs. And quite clearly this has influenced how John is telling this story – he’s not quite going the full Dan Brown and making Mary Magdalene into Jesus’ wife! But he is casting her in the role of the woman in the Song of Solomon.

This song, or this poem, is a love story about a man and a woman but it has made its way into holy scripture because it is also traditionally seen as an allegory or a parable  about the longing of the soul for God and so for us – as those who love Jesus and who seek him – the story of Mary Magdalene also has something to teach us. 

And so the first thing to say is that, if we want to find Jesus, we need to get up and go and look for him! The woman in the Song of Songs does not find her lover by lying on her bed dreaming of him or by calling out to him but only when she gets up and goes out into the city, whilst it is still dark, braving the comments of the sentinels.

In the same way, we are told that Mary Magdalene sets out for the tomb early in the morning while it is still dark. She is not deterred by the obstacles that lie ahead – by finding her way there in the dark, or by the stone she knows will be at the entrance to the tomb or indeed by the potential dangers that await the friend of a man lately executed. The love of Christ urges her on.

In the same way, the soul that seeks Christ will not find him purely in mental speculation and private prayer nor by waiting for the right time, for the convenient moment, for the time when we can see clearly. If we want to find Jesus we need to actually get up and make that effort, right now. And Mary gives us another good example here, in that when she arrives at the empty tomb her first instinct is to go and tell the others – to seek the support of the church in her search for Jesus. But she also has another, less helpful instinct. In her distress, she jumps to the wrong conclusion: If Jesus’ body is not there then somebody else – ‘they’ – has moved him. She straight away assumes that there is an ‘us’ and ‘them’.

I did something very similar just the other day: When I got up on Friday morning and read the news of a major IT outage affecting computer systems across the world my question was, is it Russia or is it China? When of course it was not a conspiracy but a mistake one poor software engineer – or probably by now, former software engineer – having the worst of bad days at work. But I had assumed that ‘they’ had done it, whoever ‘they’ were. And in the same way when Mary doesn’t find Jesus, she blames other people for ‘taking him away’.

Yet unlike the male disciples – and here we have a part of the story which has been cut from our reading today –  she stays at the garden when they hurry off again. She isn’t there to do anything, so far as we are told; she simply remains there weeping, in her grief and in her confusion. I guess maybe John is reflecting some gender stereotypes here in that the men go off to try and do something about the situation – without actually understanding what the situation is – whereas the woman remains with her feelings. 

Now I don’t know whether this is really a male/female thing. But I do think that we often find ourselves, in our faith, in a place like Mary in this story: we are looking for Jesus but we have found more questions than answers it feels as though he is far away and maybe we blame others.

Nobody can really ‘take God away from us but maybe in our desire to find answers rather than having to live with uncertainty, one of the answers we come up with is, that it’s someone or something else’s fault. And that anger gets in the way between us and God. Mary is so fixated on this idea of what has happened - that there is some ‘they’ to blame for it - that she barely registers that the men she is speaking to are angels. And even when she sees Jesus she doesn’t see what is right in front of her. She is too focused on fixing this problem: find the body, take it away.

But then she is asked a question, Why are you weeping? The angels ask her, Jesus himself asks her. Why are you weeping? What’s the matter? This is very characteristic of Jesus, that he approaches us with a question. There is something very powerful about being asked the right question. This isn’t just ‘cheer up love’, or ‘you okay?’ Why are you weeping? Why are you sad?

It’s very significant in the history of Christianity that the first apostle to announce the resurrection is a woman – and a weeping woman. There was yet another article this past week about women with common major gynaecological disorders going undiagnosed for years – and I know women this has happened to, who are living with serious consequences – because people don’t listen when they say that they are suffering. How often do women in pain get asked the right question, and how often do people stay quiet to listen to the answer? Here we are listening to the voice of Mary’s suffering. And what does she say? – they have taken away my Lord. She affirms her faith: even now, now that he is apparently defeated and dead, he is still her Lord. In giving voice to what hurts, she also gives voice to what matters. it is in listening to the voice of our own sorrows and especially the voices of others who are suffering that we begin to find Jesus.

Mary! He says. Rabbouni! And they fall into each others arms… Except no. There is a crucial difference between the lovers in the Song of Solomon and Mary’s encounter with Jesus in the garden. The bride in the song says that she holds on to her beloved and will not let him go. But Mary Magdalene must let him go – ‘do not hold on to me’. The bride takes her bridegroom home to her mother’s house; Jesus, our bridegroom, will take Mary, will take all of us, to his father’s home in heaven. But it is not yet time for that: First the Magdalene must go and take word to ‘his brothers’. She cannot cling on to him and keep him for herself. She must let him go, and share his love and her joy with them. Because our relationship with Jesus is not like a romantic partnership insofar as it is not exclusive: The searching of the soul for God is never just our own private business, but always also a question of what we owe to others. It is not enough to find God: We have to be able to act on that by sharing him with others.

St Paul says that if we truly love God then we no longer live for ourselves alone. Two thousand years later, we live in a rather commitment-phobic society – we are all too busy, we have too many competing priorities, to remember to put God first but the quest of the soul for God is not just something we owe ourselves, or that we owe to God but also that we owe to one another: To ‘show up’, as Mary did, even when it was dark –

And to stay, to stick with it, to stick with God – even in our doubt and confusion, even when we are weeping and feel that he is far away because it may be through our weeping and our watching that God will call us to be an instrument of good news to others. Amen.

14th July 2024 - Revd. Katherine Price

Exodus 16.4-5;15-18

Psalm 85:8-13

Philippians 4:10-13

John 6:1-14

Give us this day our daily bread

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

Several years ago I was privileged to spend some time in Romania including a few days in a monastery in the mountains where we made our own food, milked our own cows, and kept an eye out for wolves and bears! When we pray, ‘give us this day our daily bread’ I think that’s the kind of simple, holy life that comes to mind: Living day to day, having enough Being content with the bare necessities of life.

Except that, in the rural areas of Romania bread is not a staple food. I grew to love mamaliga, Romanian polenta, which in the convent we were eating every day. But one of the nuns who had grown up on a farm, living that simple kind of life, said to me that she kind of hated mamaliga. What she really loved was bread. For her, bread was not basic, it was something special. 

We think of bread as the boring bit, as a vehicle, more often than not, for something more interesting and flavourful whether that’s jam, or cheese and pickle, or smashed avocado. So when we pray, give us this day our daily bread we think the same: this is a very simple prayer, literally our bread-and-butter prayer. When we think about prayer, this is the most straightforward kind of praying we can think of: asking God to give us something we need. We might even be feeling some relief at this point in our sermon series after we have been considering rather more elevated and abstract clauses

about the kingdom, about heaven, to have arrived at the line we can all easily understand!

But there is no such thing as an ordinary loaf of bread. Our readings today draw an obvious parallel between Jesus and Moses. Moses – or rather God acting with Moses – feeds the people with manna in the wilderness, and Jesus feeds them with bread. But there are two very important differences between these two stories. Firstly, bread is not manna. It doesn’t fall from heaven fully formed like a microwave ready-meal. As a staple food, compared with say potatoes or rice, bread is actually quite sophisticated. Think about the steps involved, the ploughing, the harvesting, grinding the grain, kneading the dough, waiting for it to rise, baking it in an oven… And in a society without preservatives, doing it all again the next day.

Secondly, Jesus does not feed the five thousand with ‘just enough’. In the story about Moses the miracle is that they have exactly enough – not too much and not too little. This is a parable for us about God’s grace: that we can’t get more than anyone else just by working more or harder or longer. But the miracle of the Feeding of the Five Thousand is not that they have ‘just enough’ but that they have ‘way too much’ – there is plenty left over. So this is not ‘daily’ bread, if by ‘daily’ we mean only enough for the day. In fact, this word we translate as ‘daily’ Means something slightly more complicated than that. Christians have been praying this prayer – have been praying it daily – ever since Jesus taught it to his disciples, but by the time it’s been passed around between several different languages we have lost something of what Jesus was originally saying, what kind of bread, exactly, he wanted us to pray for.

The meaning of this word, which we translate ‘daily’ could mean bread for today. Bread for tomorrow. Necessary. Lasting. Neverending. Abundant. Royal rations. Spiritual. More than essential. Even ‘supersubstantial’ – whatever that means! But one of its most likely meanings is  “give us this day the bread of tomorrow.”

If we look back at the old testament story of the manna, There are two parts to what God is doing here. The first is that he gives the people what they need to eat each day no more and no less. But there is a second part to God’s instructions about the manna. On five days of the week, he gives them only what they need but on the sixth day he gives them extra: Food for today and also food for the sabbath. Give us today the food of the sabbath. That starts to sound a lot like two lines we’ve already heard: Thy kingdom come, thy will be done On earth as it is in heaven. Give us here and now the food of the world that is to come.

In this gospel story, the voices of the disciples are our voices. The voices of the world we know.  Where can we buy bread? How much will it cost? What is this, amongst so many? These are the practicalities which dominate this life.  How do we apportion limited resources? Where is the money going to come from? But that is not the way of the kingdom. God’s grace is never ‘just enough’  But always abundantly more than we can imagine.

But there is another way in which this bread with which Jesus feeds the five thousand is not like the manna with which Moses feeds his crowds in the wilderness. This food does not come down from heaven. It comes from a little boy. A little child – Jesus has already told us that it is to such as these that the kingdom belongs. This, then, is the kingdom breaking in, Not from above but from below, from within. Here is God not simply raining down blessings from on high but co-operating with our efforts and contribution – however meagre they may be.

In a moment we will come to the table of the Lord We will come to be fed by the ‘bread of the day to come’ – To receive not just the food that will sustain us day to day in this life But the ‘bread of heaven’ that will feed us for the kingdom. But before we receive bread from God We first bring our bread to God,  Just as that little boy did two thousand years ago. That’s why the offertory is such a central part of the liturgy, of the service – And why it shouldn’t be overshadowed by a collection of money! Because in this bread and wine we are offering to God ourselves,  the product of our work and of our co-operation as a society that we may be transformed on earth as in heaven. Amen

16 June 2024 Third Sunday after Trinity

by James Clarke, Parish Assistant

Zechariah 14.9, 16-21

Psalm 47

Romans 14.13-19

Luke 17.20-26

Thy Kingdom come…

What is or where is the kingdom that we pray for every day? Jesus tells us it is like treasure hidden in a field or a merchant in search of pearls. He even compares it to yeast, a grain of mustard or a fisherman’s net.

The subject of the kingdom has long been discussed by theologians, questioned by scholars and pondered by disciples like you and I. Theories presented include Heaven being the Kingdom of God or the Church as the kingdom here on earth. The kingdom has been used as a way of describing ethics, a call to social action.  Some might say it is a metaphor for the role of God in one’s own heart. Or is it just God’s sovereign rule?

The ancient Greek meaning for kingdom meant the spiritual realm over which God reigns as king. However, in Aramaic it referred not to a geographical area, but to the activity of the King himself.

So where does this leave us? What is the kingdom? Can we define the kingdom?

From Genesis to Revelation, one of the main aims of the Bible is to share news of the kingdom. You could argue that most of scripture is constructed around this thematic framework, with many other themes orbiting around it. By hearing and reading scripture we get to experience and learn more about the kingdom. We get to participate in Christ the King’s power, to hear how he uses that power over the people, and all in place we call the kingdom of God.

Jesus was rather cryptic about how he shared the kingdom with others. For example, in today's Gospel reading, we heard how He answered the Pharisee by saying “The kingdom of God is not coming with things that can be observed”. So to use professor in New Testament and Biblical studies Patrick Shriener's way of describing the kingdom; “The Kingdom is the King’s power over the King’s people in the King’s place”.

In recent times, I have particularly enjoyed reading the gospels through the lenses of Place, Power and People to build an understanding of the kingdom. Exploring with these three words in mind, I’ve got to experience the vastness and intimacy of the kingdom. 

Starting with Matthew and just to confuse those less familiar with scripture, Matthew refers to the kingdom of heaven instead of the kingdom of God. This is thought to be out of respect to the jewish audience Matthew wrote for because they revered the Lord’s name, hence the use of Heaven, not God. There are contrasts made between heaven and earth, especially in Matthew 6 where Jesus juxtaposes the values of the kingdom of earth with those of the kingdom of heaven. We are told not to store up treasure that rusts and decays on earth, but to store treasure in heaven; placing spiritual richness above material wealth. This is followed by one of my favourite verses “Wherever your treasure is, there the desires of your heart will also be”. Here we have the heavenly kingdom and the earthly kingdom and Jesus unites these realms in his ministry through the incarnation.

Try reading the gospel of Mark through the power lens. Mark emphasises the power and authority of Christ Jesus from the opening line. We are told that Jesus is the Son of God. Just as Adam was made in the image of God to rule and shape the earth, so too is Jesus, completing Adam’s unfinished task. The authority of our Lord is further documented at Jesus’ baptism and at the transfiguration, where a voice from above claims Jesus as the Son of Man. Even the unclean spirits Jesus crosses paths with are said to acknowledge His Kingship and bow down before Him. Similar to Matthew, Mark speaks of the good news that “the kingdom of God is at hand” and it arrives in the person and power of Jesus. Jesus is the King who acts for the Father upon earth. As we read Mark’s gospel we get to hear how Jesus demonstrated, even in his early ministry, the authority he had on earth. Jesus exercised His power over nature in calming storms, commanding demons to leave possessed men, healing sick women and raising a young girl back to life. But of course these miracles were just a sign of things to come, for Jesus’ greatest moment, His resurrection, was to be the pinnacle in His authority and power.

Try reading Luke through the people lens. In Luke chapter 4, having stood in the synagogue of His hometown, Jesus speaks for the people by quoting Isaiah. He says He will care for the poor, heal the brokenhearted, proclaim liberty to captives and the oppressed and will recover sight for the blind. Luke emphasises how Jesus helps the marginal, the rejected, the poor, the tax collectors, the sinners who repent, women, Samaritans and Gentiles demonstrating that the people of the King are those on the fringe. To those who believed in Jesus and repented, they were and we are people who can and will be saved to experience freedom. 

In the gospel of John, compared to the other three gospels, John barely mentions the term kingdom. What John does use are the words life and eternal. John states that the purpose of his gospel is that “you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in his name”. John presents life neither as an individualistic concept nor as merely a spiritual one. Jesus the Word made flesh, is Life. Although you might be quick to relegate life to the future, life in John seems to be a reality lived fully in the present but also oriented toward the future. To “have life” in Christ is to have it now- and for eternity.

So what does it mean when we pray “Thy Kingdom come” and when is the kingdom coming? The answer could be that it is partly present and partly future. It has come in the form of Jesus, but there is still more to come. Many of its blessings are here to be enjoyed now; but many of them are not yet here. Some of its power is available now but not all of it. To illustrate, not long after the resurrection, a line from Jesus and one I particularly like at the start of Acts is when Jesus addresses the impatient disciples. After they ask Him if He is to restore the kingdom to Israel, He says “It is not for you to know times or seasons which the Father has put in His own authority”. Instead they are told they will be given power through the Holy Spirit and to share the good news to the end of the earth. They were and we are Christ’s ambassadors, advocates and agents here on earth.

In reading scripture, we are reminded to stand firm in our faith and be prepared as people of God’s Kingdom… that we are to wait in anticipation for the second coming. After all, at each eucharistic service, our reply of “Christ has died. Christ is risen. Christ will come again” to “Great is the mystery of faith” demonstrates our hope for the present and the future. So until Thy Kingdom comes,  let’s embody the virtues of Jesus, follow the power of a living God and do His will on earth as it is in heaven. Amen.

9 June 2024 Second Sunday after Trinity

by Rosi Bartlett, Parish Assistant

Exodus 3.13-15

Psalm 138

Romans 8.14-17

Matthew 3.1-2, 7-17

"Our Father"

Let the words of my mouth and the meditations of all our hearts be acceptable in your sight, O Lord, our Rock and our Redeemer.

How many of us have watched Long Lost Family? For those of us who haven’t watched it, Long Lost Family is a TV programme, hosted by Nicky Campbell and Davina McCall, who trace people’s long-lost relatives. Most often, the people who use Nicky and Davina’s services were adopted at birth, and wish to track down their birth family, and perhaps even meet their biological parents for the first time since their adoption as babies.

Although it is now easier for adopted children to keep in touch with their birth parents, adoption is still absolute. When adoption papers are signed, parental responsibility for a child is transferred from their birth parents to their adoptive parents, who become their parents in every way except biologically. When it comes to inheritance, children who are adopted lose all rights to their birth parents’ estate, and can make claims to their adoptive parents’ estate, just like biological children can.

In some ways, this is similar to becoming a Christian.

When God created the Universe, he also created us, to be in full relationship with him. God created us in his own Image, which means that we all bear a resemblance to him. God created us to be like him and he created us to be his children. But because of our wrongdoing, which we call sin, we became separated from God. We still bore his Image, which can never be rubbed away. But God is Love, and as a people, we became unlovely, and unlovable, except by him who is Love in all its fullness. God created us to be his, but every day, we still choose to walk away from him, and to walk away from the path of Love. And when we choose to live in ways which are unloving, we cannot be in perfect communion with God, who is Love.

In the 11^th century, Saint Anselm, Archbishop of Canterbury, wrote a work called Cur Deus Homo or in English, Why Did God Become Human? Put more simply, the title to Saint Anselm’s work could just be: Why Jesus? Why did the Second Person of the Holy Trinity – why did God himself – become Incarnate in our world? Why did he choose to teach among us, to let us crucify him, and to rise again three days later? Jesus was absolutely and totally sinless, even though he was tempted by satan. But Jesus also chose to identify with us. Jesus became human through his Incarnation, but when he was baptised, Jesus chose to take on our sins, and our separation from God. Therefore, in his dying and rising again, Jesus tore down the division between God and us. Jesus broke down the wall between God and humanity, so we could live in perfect friendship with God. As Saint Paul put it in his Letter to the Romans, ‘[Jesus] was handed over to death for our trespasses and was raised for our justification.’

Jesus cleared the path for us to be reunited with God, and for us to become like God. One way that happens is through the sacraments, particularly the sacrament of baptism. Through baptism, we are washed clean of our sin, and God adopts us back into his family. For many of us, baptism happened when we were infants, because rebecoming a child of God is not about somehow earning salvation, but about God and his parental love and grace. When we were baptised, we did not stop being part of our biological, human families, or our adopted human families. But we also became part of God’s big family, the Church. And Jesus – the God-Man through whom the entire world was made – became our much older and wiser brother.

When we say “Our Father” during the Lord’s Prayer, we are acknowledging God as our adopted Father, and we are confessing that we are a part of his family. Being family does not mean that we are just saying “yes” to the easy parts of being a Christian. We are also saying “yes” to the tough parts. We are saying “yes” to recognising that we cannot do life alone, that we need the Holy Spirit and other members of God’s family in order to live. We are saying “yes” to those among us who are hated by the world, those of us who are homeless, refugees, or marginalised by society. We are saying “yes” to standing with each other and sharing in each other’s struggles. When we do that, we are not just sharing in other people’s suffering. Christ suffers with us, so when we choose to share in each other’s suffering, we are suffering with Christ himself, and we grow closer to God, and closer to the wonderful vision of Heaven where we will fully share in God’s life.

So, let us pray together. God, we pray that we will understand more fully what it means to be your children. We pray that we will continue to say “yes” to you as our Father. And we pray that, as we name you as our Father, that you will give us strength to stand with those among us who are undervalued and hated by our world.

Amen.

2 June 2024 First Sunday after Trinity

Katherine Price, Vicar

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

“Teach us to pray.”

The Lord’s prayer is one of the core texts of our faith and probably the one most familiar to those outside the church. For years, these words would have been amongst the first words a child would learn to read and write and they are often amongst the last words that stick in the mind of the very elderly, when other words have gone.

We’re told in the gospels that Jesus gives his disciples this prayer in response to their request: teach us to pray. And that’s something I also get asked a lot. So over the next few weeks, we are going to be going through the Lord’s Prayer line by line, in our Trinity Season sermon sequence.

This is what we sometimes call ‘ordinary time’, time to reflect on how we live out our faith in our ordinary lives, but also I think that the subject of prayer follows naturally on from our feasts of Pentecost and Trinity Sunday. So to start off this series of sermons today we’re going to think about the Lord’s prayer as a whole, what it is, and how it is the model for all our praying.

First of all, Jesus tells us how not to pray: we are not to pray like ‘those hypocrites’ who think they can earn or deserve something from God by their long-winded praying!

I remember in my own confirmation class many years ago I was keen to be taught how to pray but there was another chap there who was very reluctant to talk about prayer – and I think that’s often the case,  because when we talk about prayer we worry that we aren’t doing enough of it,  or we aren’t doing it right! And this other bloke who was confirmed with me suggested that prayer can’t be taught, that it just comes naturally.

Now after many years of praying, mostly very badly and not enough! I have come to the conclusion that this is both true and dangerously untrue. Prayer, like speaking, is a natural human activity but it is still one that we have to learn and practise. There is no one right way to pray and certainly not correct ‘quota’ of prayer per day – St Paul says we should be praying in everything we do – But there are definitely wrong ways of praying and Jesus identifies one of them right here, the people whose prayers are really directed at an audience not at God or who think they will get what they pray for because they use a lot of words!

You may have heard that smug Christian maxim that here are “no atheists in foxholes” –

meaning that everybody prays if they’re in a tight spot. Now I don’t believe that’s strictly true. But I do think there is a natural impulse to kind of plead with the universe – ‘please let this be okay,’ – let me pass this exam, let them get better, let me get away with this… 

Even for those who couldn’t say who exactly it is they are expecting to answer this plea.

So learning to pray is partly about unlearning our wrong ways of praying  which come so instinctively! Prayer is not ‘magic’ or ‘manifestation’ – saying the right words or using the right skills to get the right outcome but about drawing near to the true and living God.

So, secondly, our prayer needs to reflect what we know of God’s nature. Our prayers are not necessary to tell God something he doesn’t know and still less to cut a deal with him, or persuade him to do something he would otherwise think was a bad idea! Rather, every line of the Lord’s prayer tells us something we need to know: about our relationship with God, our relationship with others, our hope for the world. We don’t pray the Lord’s prayer for God’s sake but for our sake. By praying this prayer every day, many times in a day perhaps, and by making it the basis of all our praying, we are constantly being turned back towards God and towards the attitudes that we need to keep through our daily life of thankful dependence, of forgiveness and reconciliation, of hope for the future.

When we say the Lord’s Prayer, ‘thy kingdom come’, we are not trying to change God!

We may not even directly be expecting to change the world. But we are changing ourselves – we are opening ourselves to the possibility that we could be the answer to prayer.

Finally, this prayer is collective.  It is the Lord’s prayer, and the prayer that he gave to us his disciples. Even when we pray privately we always say ‘our father’, never ‘my’ father, ‘our’ daily bread, not ‘my’ daily bread. And in this parish we have a further tradition, of holding up our hands when we pray this prayer. That is how people prayed in the time of Christ. You will notice that I raise my hands in this way at many points during the service, whenever I am praying on behalf of the whole congregation but for this one prayer, the Lord’s prayer, we all do it, because this is not an individual prayer but a prayer we pray with and on behalf of the whole world even when we may be saying it privately.

The Old Testament reading I chose for us today is about the Shema, the special Jewish prayer which observant Jews say every day and which the Lord commands to be bound on hands, heads, hearts and homes – in the Rabbinic Jewish tradition that is taken literally, with the ‘phylacteries’ or little prayer boxes that are worn on the body. For us the Lord’s prayer has a similar function: It is the shared family prayer of the church, binding us to other Christians throughout the world and throughout the generations going right back to Christ himself – Binding us again and again to what we believe as the community of Christians, as the body of Christ.

But we do not just share in prayer with other Christians we share in prayer with Christ himself. We have called this season ‘ordinary’ time but it is also ‘Trinity’ season – particularly precious to this church! – Because our ‘ordinary’ life is life ‘in the trinity’.

You will notice that at the beginning of our intercessions we usually say the formula, “in the power of the Holy Spirit and in union with Christ let us pray to the Father”. That’s what it means to pray ‘in the trinity’, to pray in the way Jesus has taught us. So prayer is not just something that we do, that comes from us or we initiate. It is something that is already happening, and which we can if you like tune into or become part of.

So let us add our prayers into the great sea-swell of prayer that is the church praying, with Jesus Christ her beloved spouse, in his eternal offering of himself to the Father.

Amen.