Author: Village Vicar

Church of England priest, husband, dad, dog-walker, musician and coffee-drinker.

From impairment to flourishing

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The radical inclusion of the Gospel.

SERMON for the 5th Sunday of Lent, 2024. Readings are Jeremiah 31.31–34 and John 12.20–33

A cross of twigs hangs in the mesh of a fence. The death and resurrection of Jesus brings fullness of life out of death.

A seed looks dead, but we know that if it is planted in the earth we can expect to see it spring to life in due course. Jesus is telling us in that metaphor what will happen to him: he will be dead and buried, then rise again. But he also tells us that, as a result of that new life, other grains will grow and multiply.  It is no small thing: the death of Jesus is not merely the death of one man, it is the taking on of evil: the saving of the whole world, putting sin itself to death, burying it, so that resurrection life may come in its place.

Greeks appear saying, “We want to see Jesus.” They have come to worship at the Jewish festival as Roman citizens. They are drawn to Judaism, rejecting the pick-and-mix Roman gods, and the spirit of their age. These Greeks did their best to follow the Law and Jewish customs, but they could not participate in temple worship or all the ritual requirements of the Jewish faith.  They were Gentiles, outsiders, so there were very real, human barriers to their inclusion in worship and the communal life of God’s people. They were not part of the Covenant between God and Israel.

But long before this scene, Jeremiah wrote of the limitations of this covenant. One side of the deal was to be a holy nation, called to be the light of the world. But the human heart falls short: they did not live as a holy nation. So Jeremiah is given a new message: God will enter into a new covenant, a new promise, written on the heart, a covenant which goes beyond the letter of the Law.  Today’s Gospel reveals how inclusive this new covenant, our covenant, really is.

The Greeks asking to see Jesus is a sign: the Holy Spirit is moving in hearts and minds, causing people to reject the spirit of the age, to yearn for change; their hearts are seeking God. This is a dramatic moment: Jesus’ response to the world knocking at his door is to set his face towards the cross and to call us to follow in his footsteps, and this will be to the glory of God. The grain of wheat will be dead and buried, then rise again and bear fruit.

The radical inclusion of the Gospel is plain to see: Jesus died for the sins of the whole world. He performed miracles not just among the righteous and respectable but with outsiders: Gentiles, disabled people, soldiers of an occupying army, folk on the fringes of society. And each of these were drawn to Jesus, and went on their way praising God, and knowing who Jesus is.

Jesus tells his disciples that he will die on the cross to draw all people to himself. It is a calling to all humanity to repent, to have God’s law inscribed upon our hearts so we live in righteousness. It is a calling to turn the world upside down, to trample down the barriers of humanity and come together as disciples of Christ.  Going back to our Prayer Candle – that is why the inclusion of people with impairments in our church and our society matters: it is a Gospel imperative, not an optional add on. This is why we pray today for tomorrow’s hearing at the UN when the UK government will answer to the international community for its violation of the 2009 Convention on the Rights of Disabled Persons.

Impairment vs. Disability

A sign at a lift reads “Warning: Deep pit”. God’s Law is there to protect us.

Just to unpick language a moment: there is a difference between someone being impaired and someone being disabled.  When the impaired do not have their impairment taken seriously and reasonable adjustments made so they can participate, that is the point at which they become disabled. Their impairment is something we cannot readily change. The word “disability” on the other hand means the lack of ability (dis-ability) to participate, so that is something we very often can do something about, and we must do something about it communally, both in church and in our society.   Jesus rose to “new life – life in all its fulness”, so our goal should be human flourishing: participation together.  Our church school, St Mary’s, has an excellent vision statement which draws deeply on this Gospel theme: “Together, we inspire and nurture so that everyone can flourish”.  A great motto for a school, but it also sums up what it means to be the Church of God in this and every generation. We should aspire to be a place of welcome to everyone, so that all the modern equivalents of the Greeks who came to seek Jesus can seek him here, whatever their gender, race, impairment, disability, sexuality or socio-economic background.  Like Jeremiah, our calling is to be prophets in our own generation: to cry out for justice for everyone, which tomorrow especially means justice for Deaf and Disabled people in the UK – to pray, and make a fuss to our elected representatives about it. To proclaim to everyone that they are loved by God, loved by us, and are precious in God’s sight and ours.  This radical inclusion is not an optional extra to our faith.  The love of God is everlasting and infinite. We are called to inherit what Jeremiah promised: to know God, and to have everything which keeps us from godly living forgotten – barriers to our flourishing struck from history.   

God’s vision of inclusion

We are called to share that promise with our world, and to have God’s generous vision of inclusion, so that we preach the full Gospel of repentance and forgiveness of sins, of receiving God’s wholeness and healing, and of being transformed into God’s Holy people to stand against the divisive, unloving, mean-minded, unjust spirit of our age.  

Our Diocesan vision, Living Christ’s Story has asked us to address how we reach people we currently don’t. It is an inclusive vision which we must grasp as a church community.  I want people to know that they can encounter the love of God here, that they can meet Jesus here, that here is a safe space to turn to Christ and be transformed into the likeness of Christ. But we need to make sure we know that they are welcome, regardless of their age, gender, race, socio-economic background, sexuality, or disability.

A sign reads “Beware of man made structures”.

May that Covenant, the Law of the Love of God revealed in Christ Jesus, which tramples human barriers and limitations into dust, be written on our hearts, and may we all be prophets of this inclusive covenant of grace in our world, to the glory of God. Amen.

We want to see Jesus

Village Vicar1 Comment

PRAYER FOR THE DEAF AND DISABLED
COMMUNITIES OF THE UK
on the occasion of the UN hearing on Monday March 18th 2024
into breaches of The Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities

The world comes to see Jesus, drawn by the Light
which cannot be overcome by the darkness.
But some face barriers made by human society,
both deliberately and unthinkingly;
barriers which disable people from
participation in the life of our churches,
in the life of our village community,
and in the life of our nation and world.

We light this candle as a sign of our prayer,
that the radical love of God
would inspire justice, peace,
and inclusion for people living with impairments.
May the love of Jesus spread
like a fragrance filling the whole world.

We pray for the leaders of our nation,
that they might seek and promote justice
and inclusion to Deaf and Disabled
members of society.

We pray in the name of Jesus,
whose wounds of impairment
were borne with him as he ascended,
and did not disable him
from entering into the eternal joy of heaven
where he reigns in glory. Amen.

You can watch proceedings at the UN livestreamed on 18th March 2024.

Micah, the BBC and me

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The 1920s crest of the BBC including words from the prophet Micah and a microphone feature in a window at All Saints’ Church, Thorp Arch.

Broadcasting House

Back in the day, I worked at BBC Broadcasting House on a few occasions (recording radio shows for RTE Ireland). I once smiled at John Peel in the lobby there, and witnessed John Humphrys dashing out of the building, but this was as near to celeb stalking that I could manage. There was a buzz about the place and a sense of weight to what went on there. This was before the building had its revamp, so it still held that mid-20th century feel of being at the heart of national conversation, its 1920s architecture a reminder of aspirations after The Great War: “Nation shall speak peace unto nation”, was inscribed above the entrance (and indeed celebrated in stained glass in All Saints’ church in Thorp Arch!). This was a vision rooted in, and quoting Scripture, 2750+ year old words from the prophet Micah.

Micah’s challenge

When he wrote this, the prophet Micah was addressing Israel and Judah (his own people) in a time of turmoil. This was the middle of the 8th century B.C.E. The Assyrian Empire is devastating the region, defeating Samaria and then Israel itself, leaving the southern kingdom of Judah alone to carry the flag of the people of God. Their calling was supposed to be acting as a godly light to all nations. But this must have looked like an impossible task. Devastation lay all around them. Refugees fleeing Assyrian persecution must surely have sought comfort and refuge among the people of God in those times. Perhaps there were people among them who spoke of these refugees as an invasion, framing them as a threat to the life of the nation using rhetoric redolent to our 21st Century ears of 1930s Germany? This would have been a time of isolation for these nations, lying apart from the major empires, political groupings and trading blocs. And Micah addresses a familiar human problem: in challenging times, at a time of national uncertainty and turmoil, how do we hold our nerve as people of faith and not nod along with those who call us to behave selfishly, unjustly and badly? How do we challenge those who seek security by scapegoating the vulnerable and minorities? How do we stand against those who stoke fear, who turn us against one another? And how do we offer sufficient space and grace to those whom we challenge so they can change direction (aka repent), change their tone, and bravely join the cause of righteousness?

On earth as it is in heaven?

Micah’s prophecy had two key themes. First, he challenges Israel and Judah to be more godly in their behaviour: they need to address their own evil behaviour rather than simply focusing on their enemies. Second, they need a vision of God’s eternal kingdom, beyond their current, challenging circumstances. Much of Micah’s indictment against Israel and Judah involves these nations’ injustice toward the powerless. Micah singles out corruption, robbery, mistreatment of the most vulnerable, and a government that lived in luxury off the hard work of its nation’s people. So what can we learn and apply from Micah today, here in the UK?

The BBC and me

Growing up in the UK in the 1970s & 80s, it was BBC radio that I tuned into in my bedroom. I had a portable radio with a mono earpiece and would often stay up late expanding my musical horizons on late night Radio 3, or listening to the world service and learning about life in these far-off places whose daily life and differing perspectives were so very different to my own. BBC Radio expanded my horizons and somehow informed my growing faith at the same time.

The music of Philip Glass blew me away in 1976 when I first heard “Spaceship” from his brand new opera Einstein on the Beach late one night. Glenn Gould’s Marmite approach to Bach, quirky and very personal, inspired me to start composing myself. Led Zeppelin’s “Stairway to Heaven” was an unexpected thing of beauty. The keyboard sonatas of Domenico Scarlatti made me laugh out loud at their reckless exuberance – the rock guitar shreds of their day. The late night programming on Radio 3 was where the Beeb brought out the fun stuff back then.

When I moved the dial to find the BBC World Service, this meant that I became aware of the wider world. I remember being fascinated by the challenges facing South American and African countries and Eastern European communist states, and how vulnerable minorities were so often the victims of injustice under regimes of very different political hues. I saw how fascism, communism, apartheid, occupation, dictatorships and political chaos all crushed the powerless: how extreme politics of both right and left each allowed evil to triumph. I also learned how important the arts are worldwide in enabling a wide variety of people to tell their stories and help us all gain understanding and empathy for how everyday life is affected by the huge, impersonal tides of history and politics. As my faith grew alongside all this, I also grew to understand how the prophets, the apostles and Jesus himself have always spoken into everyday life, into culture, into politics.

Part of the challenge of the Christian Faith is to learn how to apply what we know of God’s heavenly kingdom from Scripture here on earth, so having an open mind to learn about the world, as well as properly informed sources of information are part of our equipment as we work out how to pray, speak, engage and act in order to make the world (and ourselves) a better, more holy place.

George Orwell: “If liberty means anything at all it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.”

A less famous inscription can be found outside Broadcasting House. The author George Orwell worked at BH for a time, and beside his statue are words of this committed humanist which sit very well alongside Micah’s:

If liberty means anything at all it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.”

George Orwell – an essay on the freedom of the press, written as a preface to ‘Animal Farm’ but not included in the original publication

These words certainly apply to Micah whose criticism of his nation cannot have made him universally popular, especially among the rich and powerful. Orwell himself commented in the same preface to Animal Farm that he knew well the excuses intelligent people of influence make for not speaking out, but that these usually boiled down to timidity and dishonesty. The people of God are always called to speak out, to overcome their timidity and to be honest when their faith and morality compels them to call out injustice, oppression and evil. In every generation, in every country, we are called to be Micahs in the here and now. Being more Micah means being dismissed as woke, being called a snowflake, being told that Christians should stay out of politics. It means that our speaking up will be equated with “cancelling” the rhetoric and action we oppose. It means “whataboutery” will be used to deflect from the criticisms we raise. It means that we will be attacked as a distraction from the issue we raise – that we and our speaking out (rather than the evil we seek to highlight and argue against) becomes the story. It means all that and more. The same applies to any prophet in any age, and most certainly applied to Jesus. If it doesn’t apply to us Christians, we need to up our game.

Two mottos: one challenge

Let us speak peace unto our own nation, and to all nations. The peace Christians are called to share is the Gospel – God’s Good News for all people. Sharing God’s Good News inevitably involves calling people to look at themselves critically, and then to turn from whatever they find within themselves which is wrong, unworthy, and evil (a process called repenting). In other words, we’re called to tell people what they often do not want to hear, but also to offer space for repentance: to have the grace to let people repent and accept them when they do. We’re also called to reflect and repent ourselves – this isn’t about setting ourselves up as a moral authority, but pointing ourselves and others towards God, the only true source of authority. But as Broadcasting House’s mottos remind us, if we are not truly pursuing peace in the human heart and in the world, if we are not standing up to populist ‘othering’ of groups of people, whether refugees, people of sexual and gender minorities, disabled people or citizens of other nations, and if we are not speaking words of challenge, rebuke and a call to repentance, then it is not liberty we are pursuing. It is something far different, far darker, and far from godly.

The Journey towards Hope

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When it comes to the mood music of the nation, I reckon lament is not our “go to” idiom these days. It feels unpatriotic. The keynote mood of the nation after Her Late Majesty Queen Elizabeth’s death was thanksgiving rather than lament. The national narrative at the time was of solemn thanksgiving for a life well-lived, a pause to ponder the decades of her reign, and the mood music of the nation, at least to my mind, was not lament. Respect, thankfulness, and a sense of the end of a chapter in our national life were what I sensed as the song the nation seemed to be singing. The state funeral naturally did include an appropriate amount of material which pondered mortality and lament but more generally, this was not the national mood music of the time.

By Kelly Foster – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=104179535

Once the Covid19 lockdowns of 2020-2021 were over, while there were church services to remember those who died during the initial phases of this ongoing pandemic, and certainly spaces were created for mourning both in churches and in gestures such as the National Covid Memorial Wall, the national instinct (at least, in terms of how it was presented in the media) seems to have been to nod to this at best, and certainly not to dwell on anything which spoke of lament, perhaps afraid that to lament too loudly would be seen as overt political criticism or somehow unpatriotic in the face of the national effort, notably by key workers.

Perhaps our avoidance of lament as an important step in our national recovery is partly an instinct to cut straight to hope – to hit a positive tone, an upbeat way forward, shaking off the trauma of the Covid years and resolving to get on with life. This is nothing new. The Great War soon gave way to the roaring 20s in terms of how our national tale is told, yet those who returned from the battlefield had a very different tune in their hearts from the celebration of peace which the nation demanded. Generally they never spoke of what they had lived through for fear of disrupting the nation’s focus on “the glorious dead’. It took a long time for other tunes to be heard more widely, and certainly to be accepted as a widening of our national understanding of what had been lived through. If you want to ponder this more deeply, I heartily recommend asking your local library to get hold of a copy of Rachel Mann’s book Fierce Imaginings – The Great War, Ritual, Memory and God.

There are lots of possible reasons why we sidestep lament, or feel it has no place in our national song. But what do we do when our hearts are not ready to hope? How do we honour those who need to lament? How do we create safe spaces where they can weep, and how do we find appropriate ways to weep with them? When our own song is not one of hope, but of grief, lament, hopelessness or depression it is hard not to feel like we are failing, and are not in step with the rest of the world.

Lament

Lament is often a very necessary stage in the journey towards hope. In the Psalms we frequently read words of lament, born of exile, famine, persecution, disgrace, death and a sense of abandonment by God – an overwhelming hopelessness. And yet these psalms often end with words of hope, born of faith in God who always loves us, even if our circumstances lead us to doubt that.

In all generations there are times when hope looks a frail thing indeed for many people. I grew up in Yorkshire in the 1970s and 80s when there was a lot of unemployment and seemingly never-ending strikes. My earliest memories include candles in power cuts (which were quite exciting to me at the time), radio reports of a bomb in Belfast (which was troubling but seemingly distant), mills closing (which affected my dad’s work in the textile industry), and the threat of nuclear war (which was just “a thing in the background” for everyone). At a fairly early age I won our village fancy dress competition in a costume which involved my riding a hobby horse, festooned in balloons and pound signs, titled “Galloping Inflation” (and no, I don’t have a photo of this handy, but I was turned into a literal, physical satirical meme by my mother at this tender age, and with good reason!). This was the national mood music. But not everyone’s experience was the same, and certainly my childhood was a happy one, and looking back, I had cause to hope. My generation was the first in my family to be able to consider going to university. Music education was still taken seriously by governments. I joined a thriving local church choir, and then Huddersfield Choral Society, and then the National Youth Choir, and all these opportunities opened all kinds of doors to me in life and gave me experiences and skills which have served me well. I suppose what I’m acknowledging is that hope and hopelessness varies within each generation, and within everyone’s life, as does opportunity. But I do think that every generation can tell its own story of the challenges and sources of hopelessness which had an impact on some more than others.

Hope

The world around us swirls like an unpredictable sea, with everyone facing the same storms but some of us in sturdier boats than others, yet there are times for every generation when hope seems to be elusive. And yet the Christian Gospel is a story of hope in the face of the very worst the world can throw at us. The cross is where love met hopelessness, took the burden of sin and death, submitted to its weight, died with it… and prevailed. Jesus met hopelessness head on, took the whole weight of our sin and death when he died on the cross. Hope died with him, too, at least that is the reality his mother and his friends must have experienced. Surely their songs of lament were still going on three days later when Jesus rose from death, still bearing the wounds of the cross. Hope won through, but not before the songs of lament had finished.

Living hope

So after we weep with those who weep, hear their song of lament, and walk with them on their Way of Sorrows, how do we turn our inner hope into a living reality, for ourselves and for the world around us? There are some words which are often attributed to St Augustine, but there’s no actual evidence that they are his, and certainly I can’t tell you which of his writings they are supposed to be from. But despite their spurious provenance, they ring true, if not as words of Augustine himself, then as rooted in the Christian Faith:

Hope has two beautiful daughters; their names are Anger and Courage. Anger at the way things are, and Courage to see that they do not remain as they are.

pseudo-Augustine
Life can mangle us, corrode us, leave us feeling useless. All kinds of things can lead us to lament.

If we see ourselves as people offering a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from death, when we see others who are lamenting, our instinct should be to weep with them, but also to allow our hearts to empathize with their anger at the circumstances which gave them cause to lament. Out of control anger isn’t what we should be offering in response to their lament, but I believe that God listens to the human heart, tunes in to human emotions and responds, and so should we. Jesus wept at the death of Lazarus, so grief and lament must be in tune with God’s nature. When we’re faced with folk who lament, anger-empathy helps us pray in a way which opens our hearts to the work of the Holy Spirit and to acting in distinctly Jesussy ways in response. As we pray, we should be seeking the mind of Christ whose empathy with those who were being exploited and excluded caused him to seize a whip and angrily flip tables over in the temple. We should pray in a way which inspires us to courageous, godly action in response to lament.

TL;DR summary

God listens to those who lament, and weeps with them, and so should we. Lament and grief are not signs of failure, just of being human. If we pray in hope, and if our empathy is with those who have reason for anger, God’s Spirit is with us, and as we pray, we can seek the mind of Christ. This can inspire courageous, loving actions, and so the song of lament – on our own account, or in solidarity with others – turns to a song of hope, which we sing as we set out to respond to causes of lament with acts of courageous love.

May it be so. Amen.

Revival came

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Revival came…

Revival Came

Revival came:
Not in a cascade of noise and praise
But quietly, unseen, uncelebrated.
It came, heralded not by Alleluias
But by tears and sighs.

Revival came:
Not in tongues of flame
Or dramatic outpourings,
But in shared silence, tear-stained vigils;
In listening, rather than explaining.

Revival came:
Not through feeling holier
Nor suddenly being on Cloud Nine,
But in being known, accepted
Warts and all, even in despair.

And revival came:
Not in a sudden mass-revelation
Of deep things suddenly understood;
Revival came heart by heart, one by one…

yet communally, kindly, in shared love.

Revival came
As Love stared into the darkness,
Stood and wept into another’s wounds
And washed as it wept
And healed and cleaned and comforted.

And revived.