The Birth of Mary, the Mother of Jesus, Theotokos, God-bearer

Greek Orthodox Icon of the Birth of the Theotokos

Reflection at Morning Worship with the Community of Brendan the Navigator on Tuesday 10th September 2024

Today we remember the Birth of the Blessed Virgin Mary, which is included as a Festival in the Calendar of the Church of Ireland on September 8^th, last Sunday. It is one of only 3 birthdays included in the Calendar - the others are of St John the Baptist, and of Jesus himself of course, at Christmas.

Now, neither Mary’s parents nor the circumstances of her birth are mentioned in any of the Gospels in the canon of our New Testament. But they are mentioned in the apocryphal Gospel of James, which claims to have been written by James the half-brother of Jesus by an earlier marriage of Joseph. Scholars date it to the middle of the 2^nd century, long after James’ death.

This and later traditions tell us that Mary’s father Joachim was rich and pious, and that he and her mother Anne were childless. Anne solemnly promises God that if she is given a child she will dedicate it to the Lord. They both receive a vision of an angel, who announces that Anne will conceive. She gives birth to a daughter, whom Anne names Mary, and the couple rejoice. When Mary is 3 years old they bring her to the Temple in Jerusalem to be brought up there, in an echo of the OT story of Hannah and Samuel. When Mary approaches her first period, the Temple authorities betroth her to Joseph and send her away, because they believed menstrual blood to be a source of impurity. And we all know her story thereafter.

The Gospel of James was excluded from the New Testament canon, though not before it had been widely read, copied and translated, and it continued to influence later views about Mary. St Jerome, who translated the Bible into Latin, rejected it as spurious, and Pope Innocent I condemned it in 405, when he confirmed a list of the books of the NT as we know it.

So, I believe that the stories of Mary’s birth and childhood are best seen as pious, but unreliable, fictions. The one thing we can know for sure about Mary’s birth is that she was indeed born, like every other human being.

The canonical Gospels tell us Mary’s wonderful story of humility and faithfulness. At the Annunciation, when the angel Gabriel tells her she will give birth to a son, to be named Jesus, she willingly accepts the extraordinary privilege of nurturing him in her womb, saying ‘Here am I, the servant of the Lord; let it be with me according to your word.’ When she visits her cousin Elizabeth, she declaims the Magnificat, that great song of praise to God that we have just heard. She rears Jesus to be the divine man he was. She remains faithful to him throughout his ministry. And she suffers the unspeakable pain of watching her child’s brutal execution on the cross.

No matter whether we believe the stories about it or not, it is entirely right for us to remember and give thanks for the birth of Mary, the Theotokos, meaning God-bearer in Greek. So let us join with Christians of other traditions in the words of the Ave Maria:

‘Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee. Blessed art thou among women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb Jesus’.

 

Faith and Good Works

Jesus exorcising the Canaanite Woman's daughter. 

From Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry, 15th century.

Address given at St Mary's Nenagh and Killodiernan Church on Sunday 8th September 2024, the 15th after Trinity

Do you feel anxious for the future? Many of us do, I think, including me.

Different folk worry about different things. Some dread accelerating climate change, some are concerned by the unknown dangers of new bio-technologies or artificial intelligence, some are frightened that newcomers of different races and religions will change their familiar communities, while others fear that class, race, or religious hatreds will lead to disastrous wars and social collapse.

But there is nothing new in any of this. It is part of the human condition, as we grow older, to fear that the world is going to hell in a handcart. Jesus himself warned his disciples not to be alarmed by ‘wars and rumours of wars’, for ‘the end is not yet’ (Matthew 24:6).

Nor should we ignore the good things that are continually happening. In my lifetime, advances in hygiene and medicine have reduced the burden of disease and immensely increased life expectancy. And global development has lifted hundreds of millions of people across the world out of crushing poverty. We should see these as signs of hope, signs that God’s kingdom of peace and justice is growing.

I think today’s readings have much to teach us about our Christian duty to contribute to the growth of the God’s kingdom. If we respond as we should, perhaps it will allay some of our fears.

In the Gospel, Mark (7:24-37) tells us two stories about Jesus ministering to foreign strangers.

Jesus has left the Jewish homelands to travel on a circuitous route through Gentile country in the regions of Tyre, Sidon and the Decapolis. We are told he did not want anyone to know he was there, so perhaps he was taking a holiday from ministry, but news of his presence got out.

In the first story, a Greek-speaking Syrophoenician woman with a sick daughter hears about him and comes to beg him to cure her daughter.

Jesus says to her, ‘Let the children be fed first, for it is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs.’ She boldly and wittily answers, ‘Sir, even the dogs under the table eat the children’s crumbs.’ And Jesus tells her that because of what she has said, her daughter has been healed.

Do Jesus’s words sound like a rude and crushing response to you? The children might be understood as the Jews, the children of Israel, and the dogs as gentiles like her. But I cannot believe Jesus was being rude or crushing – it would not be like him.

What I think is going on is this. A pious Jewish religious leader at that time would avoid contact of any kind with a Gentile woman to maintain his ritual cleanliness. But Jesus is different, he is intrigued, and he engages with her, no doubt with a twinkle in his eye and a friendly tone of voice. I think his words were to the effect that, ‘Look, I’m a foreign Jewish Rabbi and I’m on holiday – do you really want my help?’ In the woman’s witty reply, the word translated as ‘Sir’ is the Greek ‘Kyrie’, meaning Lord. She is acknowledging Jesus’s status and insists that she believes he can help. And that is what he does.

I ask myself, is this the moment when Jesus, fully human as well as fully divine, realises that his ministry is not just to Jews, but to people of all races and faiths?

In the second story, the friends of a deaf-and-dumb man bring him to Jesus to be healed.

Jesus ‘took him aside in private, away from the crowd, and put his fingers into his ears, and he spat and touched his tongue’. Then Jesus looked up to heaven and prayed over him, and the man was healed.

Notice how sensitive Jesus is to the circumstances and needs of the deaf-and-dumb man. The deaf man could not have known what was being said, and perhaps he was frightened by being the centre of attention in a crowd. So Jesus treats him in private, and Jesus uses mime to let him know what is going on.

As followers of Jesus we should model our behaviour on his.

Like him we must engage at a human level with people we meet who are different to us, and pay attention to their needs. We must not demonise people of other faiths and races, we must not demonise Muslims or Jews, but rather treat them as our neighbours, and offer them help if they need it.

And when we minister to people in distress, the poor, the sick, the vulnerable, we must, like Jesus, be sensitive to their circumstances and treat them as individuals with rights, not merely anonymous ‘cases’.

In his Epistle, James (2:1-17) urges Christians to break down the barriers of class and wealth in order to relieve the distress of the poor.

We can’t be certain who this James was, but an ancient tradition says it was James the brother of Jesus, a leader of the earliest church in Jerusalem. At the great council there, he and St Peter supported St Paul’s case that gentiles should be accepted into the Christian church alongside Jews without being circumcised.

Nor do we know what church or churches he is writing to, but they are clearly riven by class divides – the wealthy are being treated better than the poor.

James challenges his readers to ask whether their behaviour is consistent with their faith in Jesus Christ. He points out that God has ‘chosen the poor… to be rich in faith and to be heirs of the kingdom that he has promised to those who love him’. And he reminds them of the law proclaimed by Jesus, ‘You shall love your neighbour as yourself’.

‘What good is it, my brothers and sisters’, he asks rhetorically, ‘if you say you have faith but do not have works?’ By ‘works’ he clearly means good works, deeds of love and compassion toward those in need. He continues, ‘If a brother or sister is naked and lacks daily food… and yet you do not supply their bodily needs, what is the good of that?’ ‘So’, he concludes, ‘faith by itself, if it has no works, is dead’.

The message is clear. We have no right to call ourselves Christians, followers of Jesus Christ – our faith is dead – unless we seek to relieve human distress when we see it. For us in modern Ireland, this means, I think, that we should not evade the taxes which fund the social welfare system and the health service – we must pay up with a good grace, while giving thanks that we are rich enough to be obliged to do so. And we must also be generous in giving to the organisations which support those who slip through the cracks - organisations such as St Vincent de Paul, Protestant Aid, the Simon Community, and the Nenagh Food Bank, to name a few.

I shall finish in prayer with the Collect of the Word for today

O God, whose word is life,
and whose delight is to answer our cry:
give us faith like that of the woman
who refused to remain an outsider,
so that we too may have the wit to argue
and demand that our children be made whole,
through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen

 

Where are the butterflies?

 

From the September issue of Grapevine, the parish newsletter of the Nenagh Union of Parishes.

In August and September the Buddleia bushes in our gardens should be covered with colourful butterflies, sipping nectar from the sweet-smelling flowers. These are mostly from the Vanessid family: the native Small Tortoiseshells and Peacocks which survive the winter here as adults in sheltered places, including behind curtains in our houses; and the Red Admirals and Painted Ladies, immigrants from southern Europe and Africa, which arrive in Spring, breed here, and then return south in Autumn.

But where are they this year? Earlier in the year I saw many other butterflies, even a couple of tattered Small Tortoiseshells in early Summer. But as I write in late August there are almost no Vanessids to be seen at all. This I find very worrying.

Insect numbers generally have been falling over recent years, including butterflies. If you are my age, you will remember how car windscreens used to be matted with squashed moths and flies driving home after dark. But that is now a distant memory. There is less food now for insectivores like swallows and bats. One reason is changing farming practices, and the use of insecticides. Another is changes to the seasons due to climate change. The collapse of butterfly numbers this year is probably due to the disappointing summer we have had, connected to climate change. I hope that better weather next year will see numbers bounce back. But I fear we may be seeing signs of the collapse of the ecosystem that supports these butterflies. Future generations may never be captivated by their beauty, as I have been.

Butterflies are not mentioned in the Bible, not once. I wonder why not. They’re so beautiful and graceful. I can imagine Jesus, teaching outdoors, pointing to one, saying, “Behold, the butterfly…”, and using it to illustrate some profound truth. If he ever did, it’s not recorded.

But wait a minute. Consider the lifecycle of a Peacock butterfly. A tiny green egg is laid on the underside of a nettle leaf. A few days later a tiny, black spiny caterpillar hatches out. It devours the nettle leaves and grows until it is about 2in long. Then it hangs upside down from a stem and attaches itself with a thread. Its skin bursts and falls off, revealing a pupa. A few weeks later the pupa breaks open and the butterfly emerges with crumpled wings. It rests while the wings are pumped up with liquid and harden. Then it flies away in a new body perfectly designed for its new life, to seek a mate and start the cycle all over again.

These changes are called ‘metamorphosis’, from a Greek word meaning transformation. And this word is used by St Paul in his epistles, twice:

·         Romans 12:2: Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your minds, so that you may discern what is the will of God—what is good and acceptable and perfect.

·         2 Corinthians 3:18: And all of us, with unveiled faces, seeing the glory of the Lord as though reflected in a mirror, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another; for this comes from the Lord, the Spirit.

Perhaps Paul was inspired by the transformations he saw in the lifecycle of butterflies. He tells us that as followers of Jesus we should expect to be transformed, bit by bit, into entirely new people, able to discern what God wants of us, becoming more like the image of God in Christ Jesus. Just as the Peacock butterfly’s egg turns into a caterpillar, the caterpillar into a pupa, and the pupa into the adult butterfly.

Joc Sanders

Remembering Jeremy Taylor, Bishop of Down, Connor & Dromore

The frontispiece of Taylor's 'Offices',
for which he was briefly imprisoned in the Tower of London,
because his printer included the picture of Christ praying

Address given At Morning Worship for the Community of Brendan the Navigator on Tuesday 13th August 2024

On 13^th August the Book of Common Prayer commemorates Jeremy Taylor, Bishop of Down, Connor and Dromore. Who was he, you may well ask? He was ordained a priest in the Church of England, and lived from 1613 to 1667, through the tumultuous times of the English Civil War, the execution of Charles I, the Protectorate under Oliver Cromwell, and the restoration of Charles II.

In the secular world at the time, England was bitterly divided between Royalist and Parliamentary supporters. The Church was similarly divided between a High Church party known as the Caroline Divines, who were royalist supporters of a church with bishops, and Puritan and Presbyterian parties, who were not. Jeremy Taylor supported the former.

Under the patronage of Archbishop of Canterbury William Laud, he was appointed a chaplain to King Charles I. As a result, he was politically suspect under the Protectorate. He was briefly imprisoned several times, but was eventually allowed to retire to live quietly in Wales. There he wrote two devotional books, Holy Living, concerned with personal morality, and Holy Dying, concerned with preparation for a blessed death. They are renowned for their practical wisdom, as well as being models of English prose, admired by John Wesley and Samuel Taylor Coleridge among many others.

At the Restoration Jeremy Taylor was appointed to the See of Down and Connor, to which Dromore was soon attached. He was also made a Privy Councillor of Ireland, and Vice-Chancellor of the University of Dublin. He proved to be a vigorous reforming bishop. He advocated wise toleration, but felt obliged to eject 36 of his clergy with Presbyterian views, because they refused to accept his authority as a bishop. And he was widely loved in his own time for his undoubted sincerity and devotion, as well as for his books.

I think today’s reading (Acts 5:27-42) is appropriate as we remember Jeremy Taylor. Two things stand out in it for me:

·         First is the bravery of Peter and the apostles when brought before the High Priest and the Jewish Council. They must have known that their lives were on the line, but they would not be silenced. They boldly declared their faith in Jesus Christ, saying ‘We are witnesses to these things, and so is the Holy Spirit whom God has given to those who obey him.’

·         Second is the wisdom of Gamaliel. He successfully urges the Council to proceed with caution. ‘If this plan or this undertaking is of human origin, it will fail; but if it is of God, you will not be able to overthrow them—in that case you may even be found fighting against God!’ The message the apostles proclaimed prospered, showing that it was indeed of God.

Like the apostles, Jeremy Taylor stood up to the authorities for what he believed in. He never recanted his moderate high church episcopalian beliefs. He continued to write and minister in exile in Wales. We do not know why the Puritans in Parliament spared him the fate of his patron Archbishop Laud, whom they beheaded. But perhaps among them was someone as wise as Gamaliel to dissuade them. And when the Puritan turmoil was over, Jeremy Taylor returned from his exile as a bishop in the Church of Ireland, where he helped to ensure our church would continue to be guided by bishops.

Let is pray in words taken from Morning Prayer in Jeremy Taylor's Collection of Offices, London 1658:

O Great King of heaven and earth, the Lord and patron of all ages, receive thy servants approaching to the throne of grace in the name of Jesus Christ; give unto every one of us what is best for us, cast out all evil within us, work in us a fullness of holiness, of wisdom and spiritual understanding, that we increasing in the knowledge of God may be fruitful in every good work, through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen

 

Living Bread

 

Detail from a stained glass window in the chapel of St Joseph's Institution in Singapore

Address given at St Mary's Nenagh and Killodiernan Church on Sunday 11 August 2024, the 11th after Trinity

One of life’s greatest pleasures is to share a meal with loved ones and friends, isn’t it?

It is for me, and it is for you too I’m sure – good food, good drink and good company. And it must have been so for Jesus as well, since so often in the Gospels we find Jesus sharing meals with others. He shared meals not just with his disciples and friends, but also with tax collectors and sinners, and with Pharisees and scribes – with all kinds of people.

 When Jesus himself broke bread as the host at a meal, he had a special way of doing so – first he took the food, then he gave thanks or blessed it, and finally he broke it and shared it out. It was so distinctive that, after Jesus’s resurrection, it was only when the disciples on the road to Emmaus saw it that they recognised him. Today’s reading from John’s Gospel (John 6:35, 41-51) comes just after Jesus shares a meal with others on a grand scale – the feeding of the 5000 – a truly gigantic outdoor picnic. There too in his special way, he took, blessed, broke and shared the five barley loaves and two fish to feed the crowd.

We recognise this same sequence of actions – taking, blessing, breaking and sharing - in the Last Supper as recorded by Matthew, Mark and Luke. And that of course is the model for the Eucharist which we with all other Christians continue to celebrate in his memory. The Last Supper can be seen as an acted parable – and so, I think, can all the other meals Jesus shared in his Eucharistic way of taking, blessing, breaking and sharing.

But what does the acted parable of Eucharist mean? In today’s reading John opens out for us the spiritual significance of Eucharist for Jesus himself, in Jesus’s own words. The last verse (John 6:51) sums up what Jesus meant:

^‘I am the living bread that came down from heaven. Whoever eats of this bread will live for ever; and the bread that I will give for the life of the world is my flesh.’

Today I want to share with you what these words say to me.

First, what does Jesus mean when he says, ‘I am the living bread that came down from heaven’?

Jesus says ‘I am’ many things on different occasions, among them ‘I am the good shepherd’, ‘I am the door’, ‘I am the way’, and ‘I am the true vine’. He is of course talking in metaphors, about his relationship with those he is talking to, but also his relationship with God, who he calls his loving Father.

Jesus has just been responding to hecklers in the crowd who want him to display earthly power, as they believe Moses did by sending bread from heaven – manna - to feed the people in the wilderness. So naturally the metaphor he uses on this occasion is about bread.

As Jesus tells the hecklers, it is God who sent the manna, just as it is God who sends the food we all need to nourish our bodies. But Jesus wants his listeners to look beyond the physical to the spiritual. God also provides what we need to nourish our spirits – by analogy with the bread which feeds our bodies, this is bread from heaven.

And Jesus knows that his loving-father God is calling him, by his every action and every word, to offer this spiritual nourishment to all people. So he uses metaphor to describe himself as the living bread which comes down from heaven.

The hecklers in the crowd know quite well who Jesus is - the son of Joseph the carpenter from nearby Nazareth. They choose not to understand his metaphor – and they ridicule the idea that Jesus came down from heaven.

Second, what does Jesus mean when he says, ‘Whoever eats of this bread will live for ever’?

I suppose people since the dawn of humanity have dreaded death and had fantasies of living for ever. But we all know, as Jesus did, that our physical bodies are doomed to die and to decay.

Yet for Jesus this is not what truly matters. What does matter is our relationship with God. It is those of us who believe that God enfolds and protects us like a loving father that are released from dread of their own mortality. So he says, ‘Very truly, I tell you, whoever believes has eternal life’ (John 6:47).

Eternal life is surely a metaphor for a loving relationship with God. ‘This is eternal life’, says Jesus, after the last supper in John’s Gospel (John 17:3), ‘that they know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent.’

And more than that, Jesus knows his own importance. Working in and through him, God reveals his own nature as loving Father to those who listen to Jesus. Those who feed on Jesus’s words and actions, as on bread from heaven, have eternal life.

Third, what does Jesus mean when he says, ‘The bread that I will give for the life of the world is my flesh’?

Jesus goes on to equate bread from heaven with his own body, his own very flesh. He does so again at the Last Supper, when he says ‘Take, eat, this is my body which is given for you’, words we still hear every time the priest consecrates the Eucharistic bread.

Many have found this suggestion of cannibalism very shocking. It certainly upset the hecklers in the crowd. And it upset many of Jesus’s disciples too, who, as we are told, ‘turned back and no longer went about with him’.

And it is still a problem for some of Jesus’s disciples today. I think that perhaps they interpret these words of Jesus too literally, as the hecklers in the crowd did. For here surely Jesus is extending the metaphor of bread from heaven, and to understand it we need to look behind the literal words.

Christians have wrestled to understand Jesus’s metaphor of his flesh as bread ever since. They have come up with many different ideas about how Christ is really present in the eucharist: transubstantiation, metousiosis, spiritual presence, or as a memorial.  And perhaps this is part of the strength of the metaphor, that it can be understood in so many ways.

For myself, I think the point is simply this - Jesus is expressing the depth of his commitment to God’s saving work for us. He is ready to give up his life, his human existence, his very flesh, for our salvation.  That is precisely what he did for us on the cross.

These words of Jesus are difficult. I have told you what they mean for me, and I hope you find it helpful.

But when you get home, why don’t you take down your bible, turn to John’s Gospel chapter 6, and spend a little time pondering Jesus’s words for yourself? They may speak to you in quite a different way to how they speak to me. And that is OK. Metaphors often bear many different meanings at the same time. God will surely grant you the ones that are right for you.

Let us listen again to what Jesus says:

‘I am the living bread that came down from heaven. Whoever eats of this bread will live for ever; and the bread that I will give for the life of the world is my flesh.’

I shall finish in prayer with a Collect of the Word

Grant, O Lord,
that we may see in you the fulfilment of all our need,
and may turn from every false satisfaction
to feed on the true and living bread
that you have given us in Jesus Christ;
who lives and reigns with you
and the Holy Spirit,
one God, now and for ever. Amen

Who is Jesus?

An early representation of Jesus Christ with a beard,
Catacombe di Commodilla, Rome

Address given in St Mary's Nenagh and Killodiernan Church on Sunday 14th July 2024, the 7th after Trinity

The theme linking today’s readings is this question, ‘Who is Jesus?’

It is a question Christians have wrestled with from the very beginning.

 There are things to help us answer it. We have the Gospels. They are stories of Jesus’s life and ministry written more than a generation after his death, which do not always agree with each other. We have the Epistles and the Acts of the Apostles, which tell us about how the earliest churches developed, and something of what the first Christians believed about Jesus.

We also have the creeds. Over the following centuries church theologians continued like terriers on a rabbit to toss the question about.  Amid highly charged politics and power-struggles, they often disagreed with each other, and they frequently denounced their opponents as heretics. Out of those disputes the creeds were crafted in the C4th. They became more or less generally accepted, though details are still disputed, between Western Churches like ours, the Eastern Orthodox, and the Oriental Orthodox. And even Christians who agree on the words may disagree on what the words mean.

For many, such ancient disputes seem pointless. Yet if we are to follow Jesus, if we are to call ourselves Christians, it is surely essential that each one of us can answer the question, ‘Who is Jesus?’. We need to wrestle with scripture and the creeds to find who Jesus is for ourselves. But in humility we must also recognise that we may be wrong and others may be right.

 

In the 2^nd reading, from Mark’s Gospel (6: 14-29), Jesus has been making a noise, and attracting attention.

He has been travelling around the villages teaching and healing, proclaiming his message, ‘Repent and believe the Good News’. He has also sent his chosen 12 apostles out in pairs to multiply his message – I see it as a kind of training exercise for apostles.

Now everyone is talking about him, and the people are asking themselves, ‘Who is this man Jesus?’. Even King Herod.

Mark tells us, “Some were saying, ‘John the baptizer has been raised from the dead; and for this reason these powers are at work in him.’ But others said, ‘It is Elijah.’ And others said, ‘It is a prophet, like one of the prophets of old.’ But when Herod heard of it, he said, ‘John, whom I beheaded, has been raised.’”

King Herod has a guilty conscience, and so he should. The story of how King Herod came to order the beheading of John the Baptist explains why. Herod tries to appear strong, but shows he is weak. Because he fears being shamed in front of his guests, he denies his better instincts. Herodias is a manipulative monster. And her daughter allows her mother to use her. It’s a real horror story, isn’t it?

At this time, early in Jesus’s ministry, everyone could see that Jesus was in some way special. But no one could understand his true significance, not even his disciples. Jesus’s true nature and significance could only become clear much later, after his crucifixion and resurrection. It took his followers generations to begin to understand it.

St Paul summarises his own answer to the question, ‘Who is Jesus?’ in our 1^st reading from his letter to the Ephesians (1:3-14).

Paul is writing a full generation after Jesus’s death and resurrection, in what is probably a circular letter to the rapidly growing gentile churches he has helped to establish. His words may echo the liturgy of some of the earliest Christian worship. Clearly the earliest Christians have been thinking deeply about who Jesus is, and what this means for them.

It is an amazing, poetic passage. It’s a single sentence in the original Greek. The subordinate clauses break one after another like waves on a seashore, pounding in Paul’s message that God ‘has blessed us in Christ with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places’. The word Christ, from the Greek, literally means ‘the anointed one’, and unambiguously refers to Jesus.

The name of Christ Jesus echoes and re-echoes through Paul’s words:

• ‘In Christ’, God ‘chose us … before the foundation of the world to be holy and blameless before him in love’.

We are not Christians because we choose to be, but because God has chosen us to be - and we can trust God not to change his mind, because he chose us from the very beginning.

• ‘Through Jesus Christ’ God has ‘destined us for adoption as his children …, according to the good pleasure of his will’.

God adopts us as his beloved children, full members of the household of God, because his Son Jesus introduces us to him.

• ‘Through (Christ’s) blood we have redemption and the forgiveness of our trespasses, according to the riches of his grace that he lavished on us’.

It is Jesus’s example of self-sacrifice upon the cross which shows us the way to redemption and forgiveness. It is a gift from God we do not deserve.

• In Christ, God has revealed ‘the mystery of his will … as a plan for the fullness of time, to gather up all things in him’, that is in Jesus, ‘things in heaven and things on earth’.

‘Oikonomia’ is the Greek word translated here as ‘plan’. It literally means the stewardship or overseeing of a household or institution. I think Paul is saying here that God’s purpose in overseeing his creation is that the whole of it should be drawn together in Jesus Christ. The whole of creation, chosen, adopted, redeemed and forgiven, all in Jesus Christ - what a breath-taking cosmic vision!

• ‘In Christ we have also obtained an inheritance’. Those who hear his ‘word of truth, the gospel of salvation and … believe in him’, are ‘marked with the seal of the promised Holy Spirit’ And ‘this is the pledge of our inheritance towards redemption as God’s own people’.

It is precisely because we can feel the Holy Spirit at work in and through us, the Spirit Jesus promised us, that we can be sure that God has chosen and adopted us as his children, and has redeemed and forgiven us.      

Paul bludgeons us to recognise that we must start with Jesus, with Christ, who is God’s anointed one! This is Paul’s key message. This is the message which I hope you will take away from my words today. We must start with Jesus – everything else, including the church as a human institution, can only be secondary to Jesus.

I shall finish in prayer with the Collect of the Word for today.

Generous God,
we thank you that, by your grace,
you have made your Son known to us,
and have adopted us as your children,
marking us with the seal of your Spirit.
Help us to praise you with all our might
and to bless others in all our deeds
through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen

Our super-power

Reflection for morning worship with the Community of Brendan the Navigator on Tuesday 9th July 2024

Today, I think most of us feel afraid

We are fearful for what can seem like a threatening, dangerous future. I shan’t spell out the names of my own fears. We each know what we personally fear, though we don’t necessarily agree on it. It would be so very easy, wouldn’t it, to let ourselves be overwhelmed by pessimism, to feel the future is hopeless? But that would immobilise us. That would prevent us from responding to the real dangers we face. And that would make the bad outcomes we dread more likely.

That is not how we as Christians are called to behave. The future is not hopeless. God has given us a great gift of hope, hope in the love of God in Christ Jesus, our Lord. And surely we must share this gift of hope with others, who may not share our faith, but badly need our hope.

The ground of our hope is our Christian belief that nothing, nothing whatsoever, can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus.

Paul expresses this belief compellingly in the reading we’ve just heard (Romans 8:31-39):

·         ‘If God is for us, who is against us?’, asks Paul rhetorically, answering that God has proved he is for us by giving up his own Son for our sake.

·         ‘Who will separate us from the love of Christ?’, asks Paul again rhetorically, answering that the risen Christ Jesus intercedes for us at God’s right hand.

·         So Paul declares, ‘I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.’

These are beautiful, encouraging and reassuring words, aren’t they?

If we share Paul’s conviction that nothing can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus, then like him we too must live in hope. Our hope becomes our super-power, with life-changing implications:

·       Because we believe that God loves us, we live in hope.

·       Because we live in hope, we do not fear the future, no matter how dangerous it may seem.

·       Because we do not fear the future, we have the confidence to work to make our world a better place, in other words, to work for God’s kingdom.

This poses a great question to each one of us – and to us all as a body, as Christ’s body the Church. The question is this: What am I going to do, what are we going to do together, to make God’s kingdom a living reality?

We do not fear. We hope. We are convinced that nothing can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord. This is our super-power.

 

How can Satan cast out Satan?

Saint Augustine and the Devil, by Michael Pacher

Reflection for Morning Worship with the Community of Brendan the Navigator on Tuesday 11th June 2024

Jesus is being mobbed like a rock star in today’s reading from Mark’s Gospel (Mark 3:20-35). He has been travelling around Galilee proclaiming the Good News and healing those who came to him, followed by crowds thronging to see this celebrity. Now he has returned to the fishing village of Capernaum on the Sea of Galilee. Even there the crowds still press in on him, so that he and his disciples don’t have time even to eat, we are told.

But not all in the crowds support Jesus. We hear of two groups of people who want him to cease his ministry – first his family, and second a party of scribes.

Back in Nazareth his family has heard how he is being mobbed. They fear that the authorities will seek to put him out of the way for being so outspoken. He must have ‘gone out of his mind’, they think – we must go to fetch him home and end this madness. But Jesus rejects their attempts. Pointing to his disciples he tells his family, ‘Here are my mother and my brothers! Whoever does the will of God is my brother and sister and mother’. From this I learn that each one of us has the freedom in Christ to follow what we discern to be God’s call to us, our vocation. Even if others including family and friends oppose it. If I am certain of my call, I must be prepared to reject the well-meaning intervention even of those whom I love and who love me.

What about the scribes, who had come down from Jerusalem to oppose him? They cannot deny he has been healing the sick, since so many people have seen it. In those days it was believed that illness was caused by evil spirits – by demons. So they start to spread rumours about the source of Jesus’s healing power: ‘He has Beelzebul’ – the chief demon – ‘and by the ruler of the demons he casts out demons’.

Jesus understands very well what the scribes are about. He confronts them directly to their faces, dismissing their argument as a logical impossibility. ‘How can Satan cast out Satan?’, he asks. ‘If a kingdom is divided against itself, that kingdom cannot stand … If Satan has risen up against himself and is divided, he cannot stand, but his end has come’. Look at it this way, he says, ‘No one can enter a strong man’s house and plunder his property without first tying up the strong man’. Jesus turns the tables on the scribes by pointing out, ‘I am stronger than Satan because I have cast out Satan’.

Jesus has refuted the scribes’ claim that he is possessed by ‘an unclean spirit’, not the Holy Spirit from God. Now he turns their words back on them. For the scribes to say that a spirit that comes from God is not good but evil is a blasphemy, an insult to God. It is the scribes whose spirits are unclean, not Jesus.  ‘Truly I tell you’, he says, ‘people will be forgiven for their sins and whatever blasphemies they utter; but whoever blasphemes against the Holy Spirit can never have forgiveness, but is guilty of an eternal sin’.

Over the centuries many Christians have been confused by this unforgiveable blasphemy, ‘the sin against the Holy Spirit’. I understand it in this way. Our God-given conscience enables us to distinguish good from evil. People who cannot tell good from evil are conscience-blind. They are unable to recognise what is evil in themselves, so they cannot repent it. And without repentance they cannot be forgiven. Some Christians over the years have feared that they may be guilty of this unforgiveable sin, causing them great suffering. But they should take comfort, I suggest, that precisely because of their fear, they are not conscience blind, and can seek repentance and obtain forgiveness.

In this reading, Jesus has given us a tool we can use to discern whether someone we meet is motivated by a spirit of evil, as the scribes from Jerusalem were. Anyone whose conscience is so lacking that they cannot distinguish between good and evil must be motivated by a spirit of evil. When we recognise this, we must confront and overcome the evil as Jesus did, without violence. Such people will not be able to repent the evil they do, and so they cannot be forgiven - their sin can only be eternal.

Unless God intervenes, that is, because all things are possible with God - as St Paul, the persecutor of the Church, discovered on the road to Damascus.

 

Remembering St Columba

 Address given in St Mary's Nenagh and Killodiernan Church on Sunday 9th June 2024, the Feast of St Columba

I ring this bell to call us to remember St Columba, whose feast day it is today.

St Columba’s name in Irish is Colm Cille, which means Dove of the Church – Columba in Latin simply means a dove. He was born in 521 in Co. Donegal to an aristocratic, warrior family. He studied in Clonard monastery, Co. Meath, became a monk, and eventually was ordained a priest. In his early years he is said to have founded several monasteries including those at Kells, Derry and Swords.

But Columba was not always as peaceful as his name suggests. He got embroiled in a quarrel over a psalm book with St Finnian of Movilla. Columba borrowed the book and copied it secretly for his own use, but Finnian disputed his right to keep it. The High King adjudicated the case, coming to the famous judgement, ‘To every cow its calf, to every book its copy’. This set a precedent that is still remembered in copyright law. Columba would not accept the judgement, and the dispute eventually resulted in a pitched battle between the supporters of the two men in which 3,000 people are said to have died.

A Synod threatened to excommunicate St Columba for these deaths, but St Brendan of Birr spoke up for him, and he was allowed to go into exile. Columba went to Scotland as a missionary, pledged to convert as many heathen Picts as had been killed in the battle.

Columba sailed into exile in 563AD in a curragh with 12 companions.

No doubt he brought with him a precious copy of the Gospels and the psalms, perhaps also a bell like this one, as many early Irish saints did, to call his fellows to prayer and worship.

Landing on Iona, an island in the Inner Hebrides, Columba began his life’s work to convert the Picts to Christianity. He established a great monastery in Iona, one of the most important in the Celtic world, which he developed into a centre of learning and a school for missionaries.

He became deeply involved in Scottish politics, helping to broker peace between the warring Picts and Gaels. The aristocratic Irish warrior who caused so much slaughter became St Columba, the dove of peace.

Today’s 1^st reading (Micah 4:1-5) is very apt for his feast day:

‘(The Lord) shall judge between many peoples, and shall arbitrate between strong nations far away;

they shall beat their swords into ploughshares, and their spears into pruning hooks;

nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more;

but they shall all sit under their own vines and under their own fig trees, and no one shall make them afraid.’

Columba’s monastery on Iona continued to flourish after his death in 597 AD.

It was renowned for its learning, and for its scriptorium which made beautiful, illustrated manuscripts, among them the Book of Kells. From Iona missionaries went not only around Scotland, but to England where St Aidan came from Iona to Lindisfarne where he converted the heathen Anglo-Saxon Northumbrians.

The Iona monastery was eventually abandoned in 849AD after being sacked several times by the Vikings. Its treasures and relics were dispersed around Scotland and Ireland, which may explain how Kells got its famous book.

But Columba’s monastery continued to live on in memory. Scottish kings continued to be buried in its ruins, including Macbeth, whom we remember from Shakespeare’s play. 

And in 1203 a Benedictine Abbey was built in its place, which continued to flourish until it was suppressed at the Reformation.

Yet that is not the end of the story!

In 1938 a Presbyterian Minister called George McLeod brought a party of unemployed men from Govan near Glasgow to rebuild Iona’s ruined Benedictine Abbey. In doing so he founded what is now known as the Iona Community.

In words taken from their website (iona.org.uk), the Iona Community today ‘is a dispersed Christian ecumenical community working for peace and social justice, rebuilding of community and the renewal of worship. We are an ecumenical community of men and women from different walks of life and different traditions in the Church, engaged together and with people of goodwill across the world, reflecting and praying for justice, peace and the integrity of creation’.

The Community run pilgrim and retreat centres on Iona and nearby Mull. They also run outreach programmes in Glasgow, and programmes for children. Their Wild Goose publishing house makes new, exciting liturgy and hymns available to Christians everywhere. The Iona Community continues to bless Christians in these islands by building on their inheritance from St Columba.

The history of Iona is one of continuing cycles of decay and rebirth. This brings Jesus’s words in today’s Gospel reading (John 12:20-26) into sharp focus: ‘Unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain; but if it dies, it bears much fruit’.

I have a personal dream - foolish, maybe; perhaps impractical; but it is bold.

What is there to stop us in the Church of Ireland, perhaps in this diocese, from emulating our brothers and sisters in the Iona Community? What is there to prevent us from bringing together and fostering a new dispersed, ecumenical community of Irish Christians to be a resource for the churches of all traditions in this island?

This new Community might draw on the experience of Iona to develop new and exciting resources for modern, joyful worship, designed to attract and inspire pilgrims, and the young at heart in all generations, from every tradition across Ireland.

This new Community might develop new ways to engage with the increasing numbers of people in our towns and cities, and our rural countryside, who have no contact with our Christian faith or any church.

This new Community might adopt one of our many beautiful, ancient buildings, whose stones, like Iona’s, speak of a long and living Christian tradition, as a focus of pilgrimage, prayer and retreat. St Brendan’s Cathedral at Clonfert comes to mind, as one of several possibilities. Clonfert cathedral is barely used by the Church of Ireland, which also owns the nearby ruined Bishop’s Palace. And next door is the Roman Catholic Emmanuel House of prayer and evangelisation.

Who knows what blessings might flow from a new Community like this?

I ring this bell to call us to remember St Columba.

Let us give thanks for St Columba’s arrival on Iona nearly 1,460 years ago, and for his work as missionary and peacemaker.

Let us give thanks in our own day for the 85 years of Christian witness and service of the Iona Community.

Let us give thanks for the inspiration we continue to receive from both St Columba and the Iona Community.

And let us pray in words attributed to St Colmba himself:

Kindle in our hearts, O God,
the flame of love that never ceases,
that it may burn in us,
giving light to others.
May we shine for ever in your temple,
set on fire with your eternal light,
even your Son Jesus Christ,
our saviour and redeemer. Amen.

Reflecting on St Matthias

 

Today we are celebrating St Matthias, whose feast-day is May 14^th.

As we heard in today’s reading from Acts 1:15-26, he was chosen by casting lots to replace Judas, who had betrayed Jesus as the twelfth apostle, and died a wretched death. The story prompts me to ask three questions.

1.       Why did Peter and the other disciples believe they needed a twelfth apostle to replace Judas?

There were twelve historic tribes of Israel. Each was supposed to descend from one of Jacob’s twelve sons, though by Jesus’s time all but two had been dispersed and lost in exile. Jesus himself chose twelve of his disciples to be apostles, perhaps to symbolise that all twelve tribes of Israel would be reunited in the Kingdom of God. The word apostle comes from Greek, and literally means ‘one who is sent off’ – in modern English we might translate it as emissary or ambassador. Jesus sent the twelve apostles off in pairs to proclaim his own message about the kingdom of God, and to heal the sick. It must have seemed obvious to the disciples that Judas needed to be replaced.

2.       Why and how did they cast lots to choose Judas’s replacement?

Peter took the initiative to propose that Judas should be replaced as an apostle, and persuaded the 120 believers that they should choose someone who had been with Jesus from the first. Two people were nominated, Joseph also known as Justus, and Matthias. But they did not want to presume to tell God who should be chosen. So they prayed that God would show them who he preferred by casting lots. We do not know precisely how the casting of lots was done, but it must have involved an element of chance, much as we might toss a coin to decide the winner of a drawn election.

 

3.       What sort of person was Matthias?

This passage from Acts is the only mention of Matthias in the NT, so we know next to nothing about him, other than that he must have been a faithful disciple from the very start, from Jesus’s baptism by John right through to his resurrection. Though there is a doubtful ancient Greek tradition, that he planted the faith in Cappadocia in modern Turkey near the port of Issus, and on the shores of the Caspian Sea.

Despite his election as an apostle, Matthias does not appear to have played a prominent part in the life of the earliest church. Nevertheless, it is right to remember and admire him, both for his faithfulness, and for his readiness to accept a call to a ministry he did not seek. And, I think, we should also celebrate him as a kind of patron saint of all the countless other faithful Christians through the ages, of whom history has recorded little or nothing, mostly not even their names. Their faithfulness, their names, and their modest lives and examples are all known to God.

Greatness in the Kingdom of Heaven has nothing to do with great deeds or historical memory.