Stepping into God’s vision for the world

 Sermon preached on Acts 6:1-7 & Matthew 9: 27-38, 

For the ordination of deacons, Liverpool, 2025

 The twelve apostles called together the whole community, and said: ‘Friends. Select from among yourselves some of good standing, full of the Spirit and of wisdom, whom we may appoint to this task.’

Friends, we have a job to do. Things are not right in our world.

It’s probably not, in your neighbourhood or mine, precisely that Greek-speaking widows are being neglected in a daily food distribution. But in your neighbourhood and mine, right now, there are people who are hungry, and who need feeding. In your neighbourhood and mine, right now, there are people who are hurting, and who need healing. There are people who can’t see a way forward, who need hope and insight. There are people whose voice is not being heard, who need liberating from all that binds them, who need empowering.

So year by year the church says – friends, please. Choose from among yourselves a handful of people who are of good standing, who seem to you to be motivated by the right spirit, who you trust to make wise decisions – who we may appoint to help tackle these challenges.

And the fact that the Church is still here, two thousand years after those first deacons were nominated and appointed –

the fact that the Church is still here, despite in some places showing her age, a bit battered and bruised by the passage of time, pretty humbled by the knowledge of her own inadequacies and failings –

the fact that the Church is still here, that we have all gathered here today, is testament to the fact that year by year, people like you have looked out at the world around them, seen that things aren’t right, things are just or fair, seen that there is a job to be done, and have chosen from among themselves a handful of trusted people to help lead them in the work.

So thank you, first of all, to those of you who represent the family and friends, the church communities and the work colleagues, of those being ordained today. And I do mean you – even if you’re not someone who identifies as a Christian, even if you’re just here today to support a friend or colleague in this strange thing that they’re doing that seems to make them happy. Every single one of you - family, friends, colleagues - has been in some way part of forming these ordination candidates into the people they are today.

Adam, Anne; David, David, David, David; James, Kate, Kirsty; Martin, Paul, Tom: Every single one of you is part of a community that has collectively considered that you are people of good standing; who have a good, healthy, holy and positive spirit within them; who are to be trusted to act and decide wisely when faced with new situations and dilemmas. So on behalf of the Church, thank you all for your part in selecting and forming these candidates for this life of service, and thank you, each one of you, for being willing to offer yourselves today.

Because, gosh, there really is a job to do, isn’t there? The world right now is really not how we would have it be. The details of the complaints and the injustices might change from year to year, but the difficult realities that they were dealing with in the early church are still all too present. We still struggle with conflicts over the fair allocation of limited resources.  We still struggle with injustices between different groups, groups that we have a horrible tendency to define and set against each other whether that’s by language, culture, religion, or whatever else we will find as humans to hang our tribal identities on. We still struggle within the Church with the fact that we have to change and adapt what ministry looks like and how its most efficiently organised, as the shape and size and the make up of our churches and as the challenges of injustice that trouble our society change over time.

The world that we inhabit falls far short of God’s intention for a place of peace, justice, and joy. And yet we are given a vision to hold onto, of what the world could be like, of a future that God calls us to help shape and grow. This is the big picture that the Christian faith invites us to inhabit. It’s the story that the Bible invites us to step into. It’s the challenge that these candidates are accepting today.

On page 1 of the Bible, we’re given a kind of dream-time vision, of God creating the world. Day by day, more complexity is added – sun, moon, stars; seas and oceans are carved out from land; the earth and the waters and the sky are populated first with vegetation, and then with an incredible variety of life – things that swarm and creep and swim and fly. And through it all, like a heartbeat, runs the refrain – ‘and God saw that it was good.’ Creation, the earth and all that is in it, are repeatedly affirmed as good. Holy. God-given.

Open the Bible at the other end, and on the last pages of the Bible we find another dream-like vision. The author of the book of Revelation, imagines a new creation. In his vision, he sees God wiping away every tear from our eyes. Things have gone wrong – but they have been healed. He sees a river running through the centre of a city, irrigating everywhere equally; he sees the city itself built of jewels; there is no shortage of resources here to cause conflict. He sees a tree whose leaves heals all ills, all pain and hurt and tension in and between nations; he sees a place where people from all corners of the earth have gathered, where instead of being divided by culture and language, all people rejoice together, united in their diversity by their shared joy in the presence of God.

In between, we get 2000 pages or so of people trying to work out, with God, how we get from here to there. There are poetry and hymns to inspire us; there are stories of incredible successes and abject failures for us to learn from; and as the turning point of it all, a pivot point between the long Old and the much shorter New Testament, the birth of Jesus.

Jesus was an enigma in his time. By all accounts, he by turns attracted, puzzled and infuriated the people who met him. So if you find the figure of Jesus an enigma, you’re in good company.

On the one hand, he did the most incredible things. Take any passage from the gospels at random, and the chances are that, like our gospel reading this afternoon, it will contain miraculous encounters, lives transformed, people healed. What’s not to like.

And yet Jesus also infuriated people on a regular basis. I’m not just talking about the fact that he ended up being crucified – even earlier in his ministry, we’re told at one point he wound up a village so much that they tried to chuck him off a nearby cliff.

He held out such a tantalising vision of what the world could be like, what he called the Kingdom of God. It was strangely attractive – but in a deeply unsettling way. It got under the skin of everyone he met, so that whilst a few followed him, many more found themselves needled unbearably by the challenge he put before them, by the gap he exposed between how we live our lives and how we’d have to risk living if we want the world to be different.

This week marks the 1700^th anniversary of the first great ecumenical council, the Council of Nicaea. It was called in 325, starting on 19^th June, to think through and make some decisions about what the Church had been arguing about for 300 years – who exactly is this Jesus? And what does that mean for how we are challenged to live our lives?

I find it strangely reassuring to think that the Church spent 300 years arguing about that before they even got to that point. It puts into perspective a lot of the church arguments and debates that can seem so all consuming to us now. The fact is, the church has always been and probably will always be a place where we continue to debate everything from the nature of God to what that means for how we live out our lives. I can’t see how it can be any other, since inevitably the limitations of our languages and our human finitude can never fully grasp or express the infinity that is God. To borrow a phrase from computing – wrestling with these questions is not a bug, it’s a feature, of our faith.

In the same way, stepping into this big story of faith involves getting used to living with the discomfort between, and wrestling with the disconnect between, the vision of a world of peace, justice and joy that the Bible sets before us – and the down to earth reality of concrete examples that we see at every level of society, from our local communities and neighbourhoods to the world stage, of things not being right, fair or just. People of a certain group being discriminated against on a daily basis. People crying out to have their eyes opened. People who don’t even have the ability to be heard, as they cry out for what they need.

One of the most incredible things that the Bible teaches us, is that for some strange reason God chooses to intervene in these situations through us. Again and again, God trusts normal people like you and me, like these ordinands - chosen by the community, called by God, affirmed by the Church – to crack on with the enormous task of working together with all of us in the eternal task of forming the world, one step at a time, into the place of peace, and justice, and joy that God wants it to be.

Suscipe

 

 

I thought giving all I had to God

Meant a pageant of renunciation.

Unbuckling my jewelled sword and scabbard

Casting down my crowns

Stripping all that clothes me.

 

I thought accepting grace as enough

Meant shivering before the altar

Trying to muster up feelings of gratitude

For the shroud I received in return.

 

I wanted to bargain for what I could keep.

I resented feeling guilty

When I couldn’t feel grateful enough for long.

 

I want to always see this from God’s eyes.

Helping me out of sweaty, tear-stained rags

Receiving them gently

Respecting them for what they’ve seen me through.

 

Cloaking me in a wedding-garment

Handing me a priceless chalice

And, in a golden casket, the key to his treasure-store.

 

 *'Suscipe' is Latin for 'receive', and is the title of an Ignatian prayer which retreatants are encouraged to make their own at the end of the Spiritual Exercises.

Out of the Shadows: Women's Voices

 

I've decided that I need to start blogging again - I was really taken aback to discover that my last post on here was over a year old! So to begin with I'm going to post a few pieces I've written over the last year or so that never made it here.

First up, here's a piece that sadly never made it into print at all. I was asked to write the Foreword for this fabulous book, but it somehow ended up being missed out of the print edition. But here it is!

 

 

Women’s voices need and deserve to be heard. The ‘Women’s Voices’ conferences that Liz Shercliff has convened for the past ten years have been a shining example of how this can be done well, and the first ‘Out of the Shadows’ volume bottled some of that hard-earned wisdom. So it’s wonderful to welcome and commend this second volume, which focuses our attention on women in the Biblical narratives who have been hiding – or been hidden - even deeper in the shadows of the text, and of our Christian consciousness.

Many of the women in these pages have names that will be unfamiliar to all but the most avid Bible readers. Many are omitted from the lectionary altogether, or find themselves mentioned only in passing in stories which mainstream Christian preaching traditions have seen as men’s stories in which they are only walk-on characters. Others, though, are women whose stories are given significant air time in the Bible, whose words and actions form a substantial contribution to the overarching narrative and developing history of Israel, and yet who have been relegated to the margins in the choices that have been made over time about who is important, and which stories should be given precedence.

Many of these stories involve women whose moral or ethical status is ambiguous. There’s a theme that emerges throughout this book that these women are hard to categorise – heroine or villain? Victim or perpetrator? The old tropes of women being categorised as either Madonna or whore strongly persist in the discomfort that Shercliff and Bruce diagnose as we confront these ambiguities. One of the many often unnamed and unperceived aspects of male privilege is the much greater degree of freedom that society grants to men to be morally ambiguous. There is, therefore, a sense of daring courage in Bruce and Shercliff’s insistence on allowing these women to reclaim their audacious freedom to remain ambiguous. They don’t need to have their reputations whitewashed to deserve to have their voices heard.

That’s not the only uncomfortable truth that this book confronts. Many of these stories show women being used, abused, objectified, violated, bought and sold. There are stories of rape, of trauma, of women doing what they have to do to survive in a world where the odds are stacked against them. Perhaps part of the reason these stories are less well known is that we shy away from confronting the reality that these experiences all too often remain part of women’s lives today. In the specimen sermons offered here, Shercliff and Bruce model what it can look like to take these stories seriously as holding up a mirror to our own society. These aren’t just experiences that women had long ago ‘in Biblical times’ – here they are brought into stark dialogue with the realities of modern women’s experiences, through UN statistics, international reports, or the #Me Too movement. Whilst the need for careful handling and content warnings in discussing some of these topics is made clear, it is also made clear that to ignore these realities is to implicitly tell our congregations that they don’t matter. This book forces us to confront the realities of what it is to live in a world and a church shaped by generations of patriarchal rule, and offers us hope in the long-term task of resisting and seeking to reshape it.

In addition to all this, Out of the Shadows is also a practical handbook on the art and craft of preaching. Each sample sermon is followed by short, incisive notes on the rhetorical devices and techniques used by the preacher, which combine to give a masterclass in homiletical techniques. Reading this book will challenge and improve the reader’s preaching on any text, not just these women’s stories that this book brings out of the shadows. In these pages Bruce and Shercliff model for us how to interrogate a difficult text, bring it into dialogue with contemporary experience, and take a congregation from ‘you what?’ to ‘oh, wow!’.

Candlemas sermon

Sermon preached at Liverpool Parish Church on 28 Jan 2024

'Refiner's Fire, Launderer's Soap'

Readings: Malachi 3:1-5 and Luke 2:22-40

Let me start by taking us back to those two very arresting images in our first reading from Malachi -  that the coming Messiah will be like refiner’s fire and like fuller’s, or launderer’s, soap. The book of Malachi is the last book in the Old Testament as we have received it, written perhaps 400 or 500 years before the birth of Jesus. It’s a short book, just 2-3 pages of our Bibles, and it has a unique structure. Malachi takes the form of six short arguments between God and the people. In each of its six sections, a statement is made, which is immediately questioned, and then a brief argument develops the theme.

We need to go back to the final verses of chapter 2 for the set up to today’s first reading. ‘You have tired God out with your talk,’ says the prophet. ‘But you ask, ‘how have we tired him?’ By saying ‘The Lord Almighty thinks all evildoers are good; in fact, he likes them?’ Or by asking, ‘Where is the God who is supposed to be just?’

They’re eternal questions of the human condition, aren’t they. Just last week at Open Table I was asked by a fairly new Christian how it was possible to sustain faith in God when every time you turn on the TV we see horror and destruction and cruelty on a scale its hard for us to comprehend. ‘Where is the God who is supposed to be just?’ indeed. These are the age-old questions of why bad things happen to good people; and conversely, why bad people too often seem to have a great life.

Doesn’t God care about justice? That’s the nub of it. And Malachi’s argument, with the typical dramatic overstatement of the prophetic genre, is - be careful what you wish for. God will indeed come in judgement, God cares passionately and deeply about justice – but this isn’t about some of us watching on smugly while the politicians and punters that we are furious with get their comeuppance. The imagery of refining fire, of strong laundry soap, invite us to deeply examine what within us, within our own hearts and within our own  most cherished structures and families and institutions, is part of the problem. God cares wildly, passionately about justice – like fire. God cares deeply, humbly and doggedly about justice – like someone scrubbing stains out of the washing.

We have a lot of hymns developing the imagery of God as the refiner’s fire. It’s clearly an attractive, if violent, image – God’s justice burning through all that is wrong in the world, once and for all. I don’t think I’ve ever heard a hymn or poem reflecting on the other image Malachi gives us for God’s judgement – a launderer doggedly scrubbing away. Maybe that sounds a bit too much like hard work. It doesn’t have the glamour or the drama of fire. But it certainly rings a lot more true to my experience of trying to work for justice in the church.

The philosopher Hannah Arendt drew a distinction between two different types of work in the human experience – what she called ‘work’ and ‘labour’. What we tend to think of as ‘work’ is productive. You spend time at work and you have something to show for it at the end of the day. Maybe you’ve made a beautiful piece of pottery, written 500 words of your novel, or made 300 widgets on your production line. This sort of productive workt is what so many of our modern ideas of economic worth are based on.

What Arendt calls ‘labour’, on the other hand, is much harder to measure. You work just as hard, but there’s rarely anything to show for it, or not for long. Doing the washing is a good example. You get clean sheets and smalls at the end of the day, but they instantly go back into the cycle of being worn and dirtied again. Labour needs doing again and again – cooking a meal, washing up, weeding the garden, maintaining relationships. We might add much of what it takes to be church into this category. In a moment we’re going to be licensing Jenny as your Assistant Priest – and Jenny is someone who knows well both from her day job managing social work and from her ministry here, that the work of accomplishing justice, of building the kingdom, is slow, often behind the scenes, and very hard to measure success in.

I love the fact that Malachi uses a pair of images which cover both sides of this for God’s redeeming work of judgement. A refiner’s fire, a burning furnace; we can imagine a master craftsman looking with satisfaction at the end of the day at the piece of beautiful precious metal that the day’s work has produced. And a launderer’s soap; we can imagine a washerwoman standing up at the end of a long day putting a red, soap-roughened hand to her creaking back, and hanging out the washing – pleased that it is clean ready for another day’s use, but knowing it will all need doing again next washday.

Its something of this dogged determination that we see in both Simeon and Anna in today’s gospel. There’s such a dramatic symbolism in the meeting of the very old and the very young. Picture the tiny, plump hand of the 40 day old baby, an exact miniature down to its almost impossibly minute fingernails, held in the gnarled, wrinkled hand, with paper-thin skin, of an 84 year old. It’s an arresting visual image of the meeting of the old and the new, the passing on of the baton from one generation to the next. These faithful old people have given a lifetime of service to God. Simeon has heard God’s spirit send him to the Temple that day, while Anna dwells in the Temple night and day. And here, in the Temple, they meet with what we will come to know, later on, as the new temple that is the body of Christ.

It's such a beautiful image of the holding together of continuity and change  - on a natural, human, generational level, an encounter between a young couple and their baby with two old people who pass on their blessing to the new generation.

It’s important to resist the generations of Christian rhetoric that speak too glibly of the passing on of the baton from Jewish temple religion to the new covenant in Christ. This story of Jesus’ presentation gives us a much more nuanced picture. Mary, Joseph, Simeon and Anna present us with a sample of what it was like to be a first century observant Jew; loving the temple, finding joy and fulfilment in living out the practices and traditions of the law, a law and set of beliefs and practices which form them together as a community and remind them of their part in God’s covenant of grace. Jesus’s life and teaching grows naturally from this soil and these roots, as he grows. When the gospels later tell us of Jesus’s often sharp critiques of injustice, of practices neglected or misdirected, he is speaking, like Malachi, from within and to a tradition that he is part of. Simeon and Anna recognise and bless Jesus from within their long lives of faithful, dogged commitment to God. They anticipate that with him, the story and the work will go on.

Malachi’s sharp questions don’t simply go away because of what we now know Jesus has done for us. The work of the gospel, the good news of the scriptures, isn’t a quick fix – its not something we can count, and measure, and sit back satisfied that justice has now been done, salvation achieved – tick. Just rarely, just occasionally, will we have the satisfaction of a job completed, a task finished, in this life of faith. I think that’s why Simeon’s song has echoed down the ages as one of the church’s favourite texts to sing – that sense of completion, of satisfaction, of a life’s work well done is something that strikes a chord deep within us.

 We long for that sort of job satisfaction. But even when one lifetime closes, others begin. Even when one person’s work is done, others take up the baton. The work of building the kingdom of God is not factory work, or even artisan work – its much more like domestic labour. Do justice today – knowing it will need doing all over again tomorrow. Like the wrinkled hand of a great-grandparent cradling their great-grandchild, like a washerwoman doing the laundry – the work of the world lies ahead of us.

So may all of us, whatever our age, stage or life circumstances - be blessed with the patience, the perseverance, and the dogged determination of Simeon and Anna, as you do your part in the work of God’s kingdom– today, and tomorrow, and the day after that.

Amen.