Sermon at Trinity College Cambridge

I was asked to preach on the circumcision of Jesus on 25th Jan at Trinity College.
The text should be on their website soon, athttp://trinitycollegechapel.com/sermons/

But here it is too: my 'eve of +Libby's consecration' sermon!

Sermon series: Following Jesus from Christmas to Easter:
The Naming and Circumcision of Jesus

The legend of Pope Joan has it that, at some point in the early medieval period, a woman became Pope. She disguised herself as a man, become a priest, and her outstanding abilities saw her become first a member of the papal curia, then a cardinal, and eventually Pope. The legend has it that she was only discovered when she gave birth to a child during a papal procession. (Interestingly, nobody seems to have commented on the fact that she had conceived a child, simply on the fact that its birth showed that she was female). An associated legend also grew up that after that, medieval popes had to prove that they were male. The story goes that they sat on a chair with a hole in the seat and a cardinal felt through to check that they had two testicles. One version of the legend even had the cardinal declaring the pope’s gender by announcing – In Latin - ‘he has two, and they dangle nicely’.

Its a myth that is a little too close to the truth about how important male genitalia are in the Church. I have personally known one young man, who was a candidate for the Roman Catholic priesthood, who was diagnosed with testicular cancer. When he was discussing how he felt about this with his vocations advisor, he was startled and not a little upset to be told that if he just had one testicle removed, that would be OK, he could go ahead with the discernment process for ordination: but he would be ineligible for ordination if any more of his genitalia were removed.
And I’m sure I needn’t remind you, that we are here on the eve of the consecration of Libby Lane. Tomorrow, in York Minster, she will become the first woman to be made a bishop in the Church of England, something that I and many others have worked and dreamed for, for many years. Im going to have to get up very early in the morning to get there from here! But there are still some, perhaps some of you here, who are unsure about this step; and there are some who think that actually, no, maleness - male genitalia - are required for a valid ordination.
I say all this because the topic I've been given tonight, on your journey through Jesus's life this term, is Jesus's circumcision when he was 8 days old. So perhaps my title for this sermon could be, ‘It’s all about the penis’.
Look at the picture. In Fra Angelico’s depiction of the circumcision of Jesus: It is Jesus’s penis that is the centre of attention. All hands point to it, as do the glittering tips of the knife. Look, says the artist: this was a real boy, with a real willy. I could have chosen many other depictions of this scene, and in all of them the centre of attention is Jesus’s naked penis, with the knife about to slice.
I have quite a few problems with this image, and with what it says about medieval theology. So perhaps we should deal with those first, before going on to think about how on earth this relatively obscure incident in Jesus’ childhood might tell us something about the good news of God's love for us.
The rise in celebration of Jesus’s circumcision happened in the middle ages. Interest in the circumcision as an artistic subject went alongside a rise in devotion to and promotion of purported relics of The Holy Foreskin. Now of course, you can understand the temptation here. In a culture where relics were the gold standard of devotion,it must have been really annoying that none of jesus's body parts were available. By definition, Christians believed that Jesus's body had been raised from the dead and then had ascended  into heaven. Whoever first though to claim that they had the foreskin removed from him as a child was a genius.
But these centuries in which devotion to the Holy Foreskin and the Circumcision arose, were also the period in which women were increasingly being marginalised by a centralising and clericalising church. Women’s devotion was increasingly being portrayed and promoted as  limited to the domestic sphere. Abbesses, for example, were systematically being demoted, their powers to hear confessions, absolve, and appoint bishops being removed. I can’t help wondering whether the rise of images such as this, with Jesus’s penis taking centre stage in such a dramatic way, was at least partly about staking a claim to the centrality of maleness to salvation.
The picture we have here is not entirely male, of course. The feast day of the Naming and Circumcision began life as a Marian devotion – and there Mary is, nearly at the centre of things. Mary here literally enacts her title of God-Bearer: she is bearing Jesus, holding him out, presenting him to the men. Her role is essentially passive – she is the handmaid of the Lord – presenting him to the men who will act upon him.
And there at the very centre of the picture is Jesus’s penis.
The medieval theologians who discussed the circumcision all agreed that this was important because it showed that Jesus was fully human. He was a real boy, with a real willy. The circumcision was held to be of central importance because it proved that the incarnation was real. Just being born from a woman 8 days earlier didn't seem to be enough to prove that - but having your penis on display, having it literally taken in someone's hand, 'fondled' (as One medieval preacher rather unfortunately puts it), made the real humanity of Christ beyond doubt. It is notable that these writers seem entirely blind to the question of what this means for women.
Does being ‘really human’ really mean being male? They didn’t even ask the question, it just seems to have been self-evident to them that having a penis was the definition of being properly human!
Today – on the eve of tomorrow – it would be hard for us not to think to ask this question. The unquestioned assumption that real humanity is male humanity has been the underlying theological justification for women’s subjugation in the church – and wider society - for much of Christian history. Women’s service has been seen as essentially passive and preparatory: men’s service, by contrast, has been conceptualised as being active agents, for good or ill. Just as in this picture, Mary presents Jesus for the men to do their thing with.
But tomorrow there will be a new icon for what it means to be fully human. When Libby Lane is consecrated, the visual image will be of a woman at the centre. A woman having a mitre placed upon her head, a woman and men together representing God for and to the nation as a bishop of the established church. Its taken us hundreds of years to get here, but at last we will start replacing this image of masculinity as central to humanity. At last we will start enacting and representing what we say we believe – that men and women are equally made in God’s image, and that the incarnation saves and includes all humankind.
So let me move on, and I'm afraid I'm going to raise a second problem that I have with this painting and this feast. And that is its implicit anti-semitism.
The man wielding the knife, and his helper with the jug, are very visibly presented as Jewish – their noses and hats are in marked contrast to the caucasian appearance of the other characters. These images of Jesus’ circumcision, which suddenly begin to appear in the high medieval period, all play into the popular anti-semitism of the time. This was the result of a wide variety of social and economic factors, and also of the crusades, during which the concept of European Christian identity was deliberately fostered by the papacy to encourage the various nations to stop fighting each other long enough to unite against what was presented as a common enemy.
So here we have an image not just of a cosy incident from the Jesus family album, but of ‘The Jews’ shedding Christ’s blood for the first of many times. Circumcision is here being presented as one of ‘those’ things that ‘those’ Jews do. The visual imagery of Jews laying violent hands on Jesus from the beginning is clearly linked with the blame they faced in the medieval popular imagination for their part in Jesus’s death. One of the reasons Aquinas gave for the importance of the circumcision was that it removed any excuse for the Jews to reject him.
Now of course, the very notion of circumcision is about inclusion and exclusion. Circumcision has always been a very powerful – and deliberately indelible – marker of group identity. In the Hebrew Scriptures it is the sign of being part of the saving Covenant, as we heard in our first reading this evening. Reject it, and you are cast out of the People of God.
 One of the earliest controversies among the first Christians was whether Gentile converts needed to be circumcised (a practice that was widely regarded with revulsion in Hellenistic culture). The Council of Jerusalem, as early as around 50AD, decided that they did not, at a time when Jewish councils were asking the same thing but coming to the opposite conclusion. This undoubtedly was a mission imperative of its time, and important in clearing the ground for the church to grow so rapidly, but do note that it represented a radical departure from the Scriptures. It might be interesting to reflect on whether there might be any precedent for todays church there.

And In our own times, as we know, issues of Female Genital Mutilation – a collection of far more dangerous and damaging practices than male circumcision – are hotly contested in many cultures, with those who wish to continue these practices claiming that they are an important marker of their cultural identity, and often ostracising -or worse - those who refuse to conform. I hardly need to say, in the context of all the current debates about sexuality in the churches, that rules and cultural practices about what we do with our genitalia are still widely used as markers of inclusion and exclusion. If original sin means anything to us, I suspect it means something to do with this innate human desire to set boundaries around who is in and who is out of any human group.

So where is the good news for us in this picture, and in this commemoration?
Modern tastes are probably a lot more comfortable with the idea of celebrating the naming of Jesus.
Jesus was a common enough name at the time, but the power of it comes in its meaning, ‘Saviour’. A whole range of theological resonances of what it means for Jesus to save us are visually represented in this image of the circumcision.
look again at the picture, at the figure of the infant Jesus. His pose - suspended in the air, arms held out - is deliberately reminiscent both of the crucifixion, and of the priest’s traditional posture at communion.
For medieval theologians, the circumcision of Jesus was important because it was the first of five times that his blood was shed. The idea of Jesus's saving blood was increasingly important in medieval devotion. And so his circumcision became significant as the first time his blood was shed - the other four times being at the Agony in the Garden of Gethsemane, when he sweated blood; at his flogging; at the crucifixion itself; and finally when his side was pierced by the soldier’s lance to check he was dead. The first and last of these were often linked, as the beginning and completion of Christ’s saving bloodshed. You can see if you look closely at Jesus’s side in this picture, that Mary’s fingers on his side seem to foreshadow that lance wound.
So Jesus's  circumcision is being represented here as beginning the process of our redemption; a downpayment, if you like, of the price Jesus was going to pay for us.
And there is also a further visual link being made with the church and the sacraments as the means by which that salvation is mediated to us. Historically, circumcision would have taken place in the home, but here the background of the picture suggests a basilica or church. You can see too that the table underneath Jesus suggests an altar, and that combines with Jesus’s priestly arm position, to make the visual link in this image between the circumcision, the crucifixion, and our sharing in Christ’s blood when his saving sacrifice is made present at communion.
So perhaps its not  really all about the penis - its a lot about the blood, too. I'm not sure how much that helps in making the imagery any more palatable!
But in representing this little scene, the artist is inviting us to reflect on the reality of Jesus's incarnation, and all that it implied. The circumcision stands as a token of the daily humiliations that he would have suffered, living his life as a real child. It fleshes out the idea of christ's willing embrace of humility in giving up his equality with God to become fully human in the incarnation, and it foreshadows his willing embrace of the ultimate humiliation of death on the cross. We are invited to look into this image and contemplate the amazing mystery that such an accumulation of pain and humiliation could be the means by which Jesus became the name that he was given - our Saviour - and, through the Church, continues to mediate that salvation to us.
Amen.

The Circumcision of Jesus

I'm preaching in a series on the life of Jesus at Trinity College, Cambridge this Sunday evening (6.15 if you are in the area and want to come!).
The topic I've been given is the 'Naming and Circumcision', and I was asked to choose a picture to speak to. I've chosen this Fra Angelico version.

I will blog the sermon after it is delivered (and it will go up on the Trinity Chapel website too), but in the meantime here are my headings:

Saviour
Crucifixion/Communion
Jewishness
Inclusion/Exclusion
Masculinity (and Libby Lane's consecration)

All in 12-15 minutes!

Teenage Prayer Experiment published soon!

I'm so excited to introduce this: doesn't the cover look FAB?

 PUBLISHED IN APRIL by SPCK.

Written by myself and Noah Threlfall-Holmes, my 13 year old son, this book began life as a blog exploring different methods of prayer. I came up with the ideas and he reviewed them. We then found lots of youth groups were using the blog, and we have now gathered feedback and comments on all the various ideas from a wide variety of teenagers from all over the country.

This book is an interactive prayer journal designed for teenagers to use: it encourages you to not just read about prayer, but give it a go, and then review the experience.

An ideal confirmation gift, or Easter gift for any teens in your life, or great for a church youth group to work through together.

You can Pre-Order it on Amazon here!

Christmas Day Gloria

Gloria for Christmas Day (tune: Ding Dong Merrily on High)

Glory! Merrily on high
In heaven the bells are ringing;
Glory! Verily the sky
Is riven with angels singing.
Gloria, Hosanna in Excelsis….

Peace to all throughout the earth
From heaven in the highest
Worship, thankfulness and praise
We sing to God our Father.
Gloria, Hosanna in Excelsis….

Jesus, Only Son of God
Our Lord and Lamb, Messiah,
Mercy, take away our sin,
And hear the prayer we offer.
Gloria, Hosanna in Excelsis….

Advent Eve: Review of the Year

I saw a tweet this evening that suggested that, at the end of a liturgical year, we should take stock spiritually of the year that is coming to an end. This has been quite a year, so here goes:

Personally:

This time last year, I was crying down the phone to a friend, feeling useless as a mother, a priest and a person. I was working too hard, and had very nearly burnt out.

The last straw was being told off by my son's secondary school for not making sure he did his homework. 'In what time is this meant to happen?' I thought. 'In the hour and a half between picking up the younger ones from after school club and going to an evening appointment? That hour and a half when I also have to get tea, do the washing, and normally shout at the kids because I'm also frantically trying to print out the papers for PCC, or prepare the materials for a baptism prep session?'

I couldn't see how I was meant to do my job and be a parent, especially if doing the homework of three kids - or standing over them to make sure they did the homework - was also part of my job description. Was I going to have to resign to be a decent mother?

I struggled through Christmas, and then completely hit the wall in February. After a few sessions with a counsellor, I have made some sort of peace with my inner child, and got rather better at pacing myself. I've realised that a large part of the problem was adjusting from the pace of university life (10 weeks of exhausting sprinting, followed by four or five weeks of recuperation) to parish life (you don't get the recuperation breaks, so you have to go at a steadier pace). I was working at the sprint level - anything else seemed lazy - and was simply exhausted.

Now, at the cusp of a new liturgical year, I hope I am better at pacing myself for the long haul. I think so. I'm also better at dealing with criticism - kindly receiving it, and then laying it at Jesus' feet rather than taking it into myself and letting it eat away at me.

Spiritually, the experience has made me much more conscious of my total reliance on God. Psalm 23 - 'thy rod and thy staff, they comfort me' - has a new, deeper resonance for me now: I imagine myself walking across the hills relying on God's walking poles! 'With the help of God, I will'.

In the wider church:

The other thing that has shaped the year for me has been the final stages of the Women Bishops saga. This time last year, we were beginning to be hopeful that this new version of the legislation might actually get through Synod in a reasonable timescale. Just a year later, I can hardly believe that long, exhausting journey is finally over. (Well, nearly - we haven't actually had a woman appointed yet...).

July was great - tears of joy, and of relief, in equal measure. It felt like a weight being lifted from my shoulders when that vote went through - at last, no need to fight for this any more! The promulgation in November was much lower-key, a legal formality, but still a good moment.

But all this has brought a new and unexpected source of stress - I had no idea how draining all the speculation about who might be the first women bishops would be! I also had no idea that any of that would involve me personally. It seems ridiculous that people are naming me as a potential candidate - I know I am not on any official lists - but what was initially rather amusing is now becoming a serious embarrassment.

When the legislation first went through in July, a male colleague tweeted that he was pleased women priests would now have all the hassle men have with well-meaning parishioners asking if they were about to become a bishop, and I thought he was joking! But every woman priest I know has been saying the same thing in recent weeks, and it is all getting rather wearing.

Still, that is a small price to pay for the feeling of having played some small part in the major achievement of the Church of England opening all three orders of ministry to women on equal terms to men - hallelujah!

Spiritually, this is making me reflect on the nature of vocation afresh, and reminding me of my initial sense of calling to be a priest. Looking back on that initial experience from the perspective of twenty years later, is proving really interesting.

In the parish:

In the parish, I will remember this as the year of thinking and working on the concept of Shared Ministry. The best meetings of the year have been the evenings I've spent with the small task force convened to plan how best to go about implementing a Shared Ministry plan.

We prayed together, planned together, dreamed dreams together, and went about things slowly and steadily (NOT my natural modus operandi!), and we are finally being commissioned by Bishop Paul as a Shared Ministry Parish next week.

Spiritually, this has been a wonderfully affirming experience: I think we all felt the Spirit moving and guiding us in our meetings together, and I feel excited about what is to come as I begin to work with the new Shared Ministry Development Team that has been called.

What a year! I will remember it with exhaustion, with head-shaking wonder, and with - I hope - quiet satisfaction that it was a year that laid really solid foundations in God for the growth that came in later years.

The Diversity Debate: Evolutionary Theology?

Last week I took part in one of the Oxford Faith Debates: 'What kind of unity is appropriate, nationally and internationally? How can diversity become a strength?'

You can listen to a podcast of the debate here:

Oxford Faith Debate on Diversity

My main points were:

1. 'Diversity' is a value-laden term. We use the word diversity to refer to differences that are morally neutral or good, differences we are prepared to tolerate or want to celebrate (and it often has a mildly patronising undertone). We don't use the term 'diversity' for differences that we consider unacceptable. We can conjugate this:

I am different, I stand out from the crowd. 
You are diverse; you bring interesting colour and variation to the scene. 
He is deviant. 

2. The Biblical images of diversity-in-unity - a vineyard, a body, a building - are all about unity of PURPOSE, or FUNCTION, rather than any more abstract idea of unity. The best example of this in the churches in recent times is perhaps the Jubilee 200) campaign. We may best find unity in action rather than belief?

3. The second part of the question provides us with the direction for answering the first. Diversity becomes a strength when it produces resilience, adaptation, flexibility. So the kind of unity that is appropriate is one that facilitates resilience etc. 

4. In agricultural terms (following on from all those biblical vineyard and field metaphors), diversity is opposed to monoculture. Using the insights of evolutionary biology (if God has chosen to create the world using the medium of evolution, God is presumably in favour of it as a method), Bio-diversity is generally seen as a strength because it is more resilient to changing conditions. I wonder if we can understand theology (and indeed culture), as well as biology, as evolving? If so, this would involve random mutations and a certain amount of adaptation to niches. The current clashes between theologies that have adapted to different niches around the world and within cultures might be analagous to the threat to biodiversity that human expansion is causing. 

I only had 5 minutes so I didn't say this: The future is uncertain - do we artificially preserve strands of theology that would otherwise die out in a 'survival of the fittest' battle, rather like the captive breeding of pandas or the preservation of steam trains? On the other hand, are we happy to simply allow theology red in tooth and claw to fight it out and let the collateral damage take care of itself? 

Can we learn from biological models? And can we step back enough from our own interests and beliefs to think about what might make for a resilient church?

The concept of 'mutual flourishing' draws on this bio-diversity model. It is in danger of being hijacked and turned into 'my right to demand what I say I need for my own flourishing': but it is still, I think, a concept that has some promise here. Ideally, it would result in something like 'three sisters' agriculture, in which all three crops flourish better and crop better as a result of being grown together. This doesn't work, of course, if the other crops are poisonous, or if their growth stunts our own: not any three crops can be grown together!

One person, in conversation after the debate, pointed out that what we all skated around was fear: fear of being threatened, fear of being the one to be stunted, fear of competition, and fear, I think, of the soteriological implications of all this.

Because the big question if we use an evolutionary model for theological diversity is: does it matter if we are right? Evolution inevitably produces dead ends as well as adaptation, since it is driven by random mutation. If we take the idea that God works through evolution seriously, what does that mean for salvation? Either we need to go for a Calvinist double-predestination, or we need to accept that being on the right end of evolution (biological or theological) isn't necessary for salvation. Food for thought?

5 Things I miss about being Laity

Don't get me wrong, being a priest is wonderful. It's a privilege, its an awesome vocation, and it is quite a responsibility to live up to. (I've always been very grateful that the vows at the ordination service are couched not as 'Yup, I will totally nail that' but as 'With the help of God, I will'.)

But there are always some things you miss about your old life when you change it, aren't there?
Here, in no particular order, are five things I miss about being a member of the laity:

1. Kneeling to receive communion.
              I guess this may vary from church to church, but wherever I've been I have usually been the only priest 'up front', and it is therefore me who is presiding. Sometimes I receive communion from a server, and sometimes I may even get to kneel, but I miss the experience of going up the altar rails and kneeling down and receiving communion as a guest rather than the host. In my last job I used to nip across to the cathedral for a lunchtime eucharist once or twice a week, but even just being a couple of miles further out that stops being a practical option. Very occasionally I have been able to do this in my own church, and it is wonderful. But even with only two churches, it is surprisingly rare.

2. Distributing the chalice.
            Staying with communion for now. As a lay person, I loved being on the chalice rota. There is something about it - the silver of the cup, the lights reflected in the deep red of the wine, the careful attentiveness to the communicants that is needed to see how each one intends to handle taking the cup and whether you are pouring too much down their throat or not letting them get to the wine if you are tipping it yourself - that speaks deep within me. But in big church services, the convention is that the priest distributes the bread, while the lay chalice assistants do the wine. I secretly love the tiny little services that mean I get to do the wine too!

3. Being able to miss things.
            OK, this and the next one on the list are more about being the vicar than being a priest per se. But as a lay person, even when I was very involved in the church - on PCC, on deanery synod, or when my husband was a churchwarden, for example - if we were on holiday, or ill, we simply didn't attend the meetings that happened that week, and other people did the stuff that was needed. Or if we really didn't fancy a particular church social event, or were knackered after work that day, we didn't go. As a priest-on-the-staff, though, that just doesn't seem to be acceptable. If I am on holiday, the meeting gets rearranged for a week when I am free. If I have a headache, I go to the pie 'n' pea supper anyway. This is exhausting.

4. Having a staycation.
          Living in a vicarage is many things, some good, some bad. One of the really, really bad ones is not being able to have a holiday in your own home. Maybe some people manage it, but I find it really hard to switch off, even if I shut the study door (which isn't really practical if I want to do anything else that uses the computer, like write my novel, or google the opening times of an attraction). The whole house is a symbol of my work. A holiday in it is not really a holiday. This is tough on the rest of the family, who would love to just lounge around at home - it is also tough on the budget, as holiday cottages are expensive if you use them for 5 or 6 weeks of the year!

5. Using my gifts and talents in the church.
          But aren't I doing? Well, sort of, yes. But being a lay person meant I could really be me in the church - I wasn't responsible for a whole raft of stuff getting done, with any personal flourishes being an add-on at best. As a lay person, I did what I did well - ran a massive community passion play for the millenium, or a parish panto, for example. As a priest, anything I do that I am doing because I am me seems to instantly draw accusations of being distracted from my 'real job'. Even if I do it in my day off, or in my (theoretically) one-free-session-in-three-per-day, it is seen as time that I clearly could have spent visiting more people, or doing more church stuff, since I was 'free'. I particularly resent the (often well-meant) line 'Oh, we know you can't do more, you've got a family': the implication being that if I didn't, I should be working 24/6 for the parish. I try to tell myself that the point of being ordained was to set me, in all my particularity, aside for God. But I miss the freedom to be myself for God that I probably never fully appreciated when I was a layperson.

What about you?