Sermons Author: The Very Rev. Dominic Barrington

Our citizenship is in heaven

March 13, 2022

Our citizenship is in heaven, and it is from there that we are expecting a Savior…

This morning it is, I think, impossible for us not to be conscious of the indiscriminate evil of a powerful tyrant. Self-indulgent, despotic, vulgar, compulsive, corrupt – a man whose deeds have caused fear and misery on a vast scale. A man whose deeds are so callous that some have openly wondered if the real motivation underlying them is simply a personal penchant for cruelty, rather than any more rational or quasi-rational excuse.

And like any tyrant, we find ourselves thinking of a person whose relationship to truth is, shall we say, severely strained. This is a tyrant happy to make outrageous claims based entirely on fantasy as a so-called justification for his own horrendous actions. Claims that another group of people were making it impossible for the tyrant and his regime to feel safe, and which thus demanded urgent and violent action. A claim which had a very particular impact on one significant minority who were sought out, persecuted, tortured, and murdered.

A minority, one of whose most notable leaders penned words which we heard read just now – the apostle Paul, writing to the church which he had founded in the Greek city of Philippi. Writing words that came, very probably, from a dark and dank cell in the Mamertine prison, into which he may well have been thrust in the persecutions that followed the great fire in Rome in the early sixties of the Common Era. Persecutions invoked by that megalomaniac tyrant, the Emperor Nero.

Philippians is overshadowed by Paul’s realization of the possibility that he might imminently be about to die. The very fact that he writes from jail is, itself, a big clue – for incarceration was not, in this time and place, a punishment in its own right. People were not sent to jail for a number of months or years as a court-imposed punishment of a kind we recognize from modern society. In the era of the New Testament, prison simply existed as a holding-space, either before someone was put on trial – or before they were executed.

And so, in the first chapter of this short letter, Paul says

“…by my speaking with all boldness, Christ will be exalted now as always in my body, whether by life or by death. For to me, living is Christ and dying is gain. If I am to live in the flesh, that means fruitful labor for me; and I do not know which I prefer. I am hard pressed between the two: my desire is to depart and be with Christ, for that is far better; but to remain in the flesh is more necessary for you.”

And, in the passage we heard just now, we hear, perhaps, Paul’s view of the depraved emperor Nero, as he speaks of those who “live as enemies of the cross of Christ. I have often told you of them, and now I tell you even with tears.”

Whether or not Nero was at the forefront of Paul’s mind as he penned those words, he is quite clear of the root of their sinfulness: “Their end is destruction; their god is the belly…their glory is in their shame; their minds are set on earthly things. 

And Nero is not, of course, the only person this morning that we might describe as being self-indulgent, despotic, vulgar, compulsive, or corrupt. For Jesus has just been told, “Get away from here, for Herod wants to kill you.” The name Herod, for Christians, conjures up more than one anti-hero. We first come across Herod the Great, who, according to Matthew, orders the massacre of the young children in Bethlehem in response to his encounter with the rather un-wise ‘wise men’, whose pit-stop in Jerusalem causes fear, rage and terror in the wake of Jesus’ birth.

But this morning, as we focus on the adult Jesus, we speak, of course, of Herod Antipas, one of the sons of Herod the Great, most famous, at least to Christians, for his immoral and incestuous marriage to Herodias, which led to the cowardly, craven execution of John the Baptist, and who, according to Luke, is also involved in Jesus’ own trial.

And at this point in Luke’s narrative, as Jesus is making a deliberate and rather protracted journey towards Jerusalem, we encounter some Pharisees warning Jesus that Herod is out to get him. As Jesus has visibly inherited the prophetic or homiletic mantle from John, and as he has been active chiefly in the Galilee, Antipas would most certainly have been aware of Jesus’ ministry and teachings, and – misunderstanding the nature of Jesus’ sense of vocation or messiahship – would very likely have seen him as a threat to the stability of his rule.

For it is sadly inherent that despots and dictators need to find contrived reasons to justify deeds that become increasingly unbalanced and evil. That is why, of course, if we jump to a consideration of the events of our own time, we find President Putin making the claim that Russia could not feel “safe, develop and exist” because of the threat it was under from Ukraine. That is why there was such an urgent need to ‘de-Nazify’ Ukraine, to prevent an apparent genocide from taking place there.

This past Wednesday, the BBC had a ten-minute interview with a young Russian politician called Maria Butina. Her name may be familiar, for she lived in the US a few years ago, until she was arrested and convicted for acting as a Russian agent ‘without prior notification to the Attorney General’, and spent fourteen months in a federal jail before being deported back to Russia, where she was elected to the lower house of the Russian parliament. A member of the United Russia party, which is enthusiastically pro-Putin, Butina is a strong and vocal supporter of the Russian president, and shares both his view of the situation regarding Ukraine, and his challenging approach to what you and I would call ‘the truth’.

Thus, in this extraordinary interview with a BBC journalist who had only, days before, escaped from Kyiv, she explained that President Zelensky was most definitely a Nazi. When it was pointed out to her that, being the Jewish grandson of someone who had fought against Hitler as a member of the Red Army, he was ‘a bit of an unlikely Nazi’, she was undeterred in her views, and explained that Nazis were people who killed and murdered civilians because of their race.

Her response to the inevitable follow-up question that such a definition must – surely – mean that Vladimir Putin was, in fact, a Nazi, evoked the clear, simple statement of apparent fact that “Russian troops are not bombing civilians.” When pressed about the veracity of this claim in the light of the vast amount of evidence in the western media that would suggest otherwise, she was crystal clear: “The Russian Army does not bomb civilian population. Absolutely not. We just don’t do it. Russian troops do not bomb civilian population.”

To which the best response, I think, are the words from that prison cell: many live as enemies of the cross of Christ; I have often told you of them, and now I tell you even with tears…

There are advantages in coming from a small island nation. Great Britain has, of course, the huge natural advantage of being an island, and with the great support of a powerful friend and ally, we were able to resist invasion during the dark years of the Second World War. That is not to say that the English have always behaved honorably with regard to our neighbors – there are reasons why the Welsh, the Scots and the Irish have historic reasons to dislike the English – but the borders of Great Britain have not been the subject of the kind of change and volatility that has dominated the history of central and eastern Europe.

It is undoubtedly true that Russia, along with Belarus and Ukraine, finds its historic and cultural roots in Kyivan Rus, reinforced by the Christianization that found its climax in the so-called ‘Baptism of Rus’ in 988. And at different times in the last thousand years or so, different rulers and political powers have exercised different kinds of governance over these troubled lands. None of which, of course, remotely justifies the evil behavior of President Putin, his supporters, and his armed forces.

Indeed, what it should remind us of are the horrors and terrors that come at the hands of those who live as enemies of the cross of Christ – those whose mind are set on earthly things. Which, sadly, all too often includes those who invest inappropriately in the ownership or sovereignty of land and who desire to oppress or harm people on account of their race, ethnicity or any of the other differences that cause to regard some of God’s children as being ‘other’.

For in our first reading, we find an elderly and bemused Abram being told by the Lord that he is being given a vast land to ‘possess’ – To your descendants I give this land, from the river of Egypt to the great river, the river Euphrates. Thus was born the concept of what is sometimes called Eretz Israel – ‘greater Israel’, as distinct to the political boundaries of the modern state founded in 1948 and internationally recognized around the ‘Green Line’. The only slight problem was that in Abram’s time, as the Lord makes very clear the land in question already belonged to some other people. In our bulletins that reading ended with a nice simple period after the word Euphrates.

However, if you open your Bible, you’ll find this a convenient piece of editing to spare modern day church readers having to carry on and say, “from the river of Egypt to the great river, the river Euphrates, the land of the Kenites, the Kenizzites, the Kadmonites, the Hittites, the Perizzites, the Rephaim, the Amorites, the Canaanites, the Girgashites, and the Jebusites.” Ten separate tribes or peoples or communities.

And it’s not really worked out very well from then until today. Abraham’s immediate descendants don’t exactly behave very nicely, and the peoples of Ishmael and Isaac are not great buddies to this day. There is good reason why our gospel this morning finds Jesus lamenting over Jerusalem, “the city that kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to it”, and, when he finally arrives in the city, six chapters later, we will, of course, find him weeping over it, saying, “If you … had only recognized on this day the things that make for peace…” 

Sovereignty and territory, of course, are two of the most prominent examples of the ‘earthly things’ that prompts Paul’s bitter remarks about those who ‘live as enemies of the cross of Christ’, and both the Middle East and Eastern Europe possess histories which would only make Jesus weep again, and again, and again, and again… Weep over the bloodshed and enmity that have been seen in so many successive generations, and, indeed, weep over the way the descendants of Abraham have treated each other and all too often claimed religious justification for their actions.

In a fascinating and profound article published a few days after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the author and medical historian Brandy Schillace offered a penetrating analysis of President Putin’s ultimate reason for his instigation of this evil and immoral war. “Putin’s war,” she writes, “is also a dance with death: his death.” Noting a pattern common to many such dictators, she goes on to explain:

Putin “lives in a world from which he is deeply disconnected. He is famously tech adverse, and his policies towards LGBTQ and most other progressive movements are backward and punitive. He is an alien in this world; he is also aging out of it. Vladimir Putin will die, and he doesn’t know when.”

“Fear of death has been with mankind all along,” Schillace writes, “but never have we been more in denial about it, more sheltered from it, more coddled by the suggestion of medical immortality … Vladimir Putin is the longest-serving politician presently in office — and has passed a resolution ensuring he can continue to keep “running” for president until at least 2036 (he would be 90)… It’s the longings of an old man for something he can no longer reach [by which she means his attempt to recreate the power and territory of the USSR into which Putin was born], and it’s the driving force of terror in the face of his own exsanguination.

It’s hard to speculate on how Putin will spend his last days,” she says, “but in his reckless declaration of war — and in recent days, his threat regarding nuclear strikes — we can see desperation. A magnum opus, a swan song, a bid at some lasting legacy, a desperate chase after retreating shades of youth: by whatever name, Putin’s war on Ukraine is evidence of his fear.”

And it is that fear, ultimately, which is, in theological terms, where we find the root of the many sins that the conflict in Ukraine presents. For Christians believe that in Jesus we have encountered 'the way, the truth, and the life’, but in the ideology for which Putin stands, and for which so many dictators have stood across too many centuries of warfare and cruelty, we see a ‘way’ that blatantly devalues life, and which manifestly tramples on truth – which is the stock in trade of those ‘who live as enemies of the cross of Christ’.

For allowing one’s actions to be so horribly perverted by the fear of death is simply not Christian, and shows an understanding of vocation that does not resonate with Christ – as Jesus himself makes clear in our gospel passage this morning, where the prospect of death in Jerusalem only spurs him on in pursuit of his vocation. And we might, perhaps, note that, in stark contrast to President Putin, Volodymyr Zelensky has made it clear that, as the leader of the people of Ukraine – as its democratically elected president – he does not have the right to fear the prospect of his death. His fear, he says, is the fear of not having a state – “you are asked where you are from, and you answer:” and the reply comes, “there is no such a country. I am afraid of this,” he says.

An example, perhaps, which leads us back to where we begun, to Paul, writing to the Philippians from his Roman prison cell, and the imminent prospect of his own death.

For – in sharp contrast to Vladimir Putin, at least when interpreted through Dr Schillace’s penetrating lens – Paul knew that he was called to speak great truths, not great lies, for by doing so ‘Christ will be exalted…whether by life or by death…For to me,” he wrote with confidence, “living is Christ and dying is gain.”

And that is the vocation and that is the truth for us who are children of the new covenant forged in the life and the death and the resurrection of Christ. It is a calling which lifts us higher than the national flags and passports we possess, for it lifts us to that place in which we, and all God’s children, find our true citizenship, where the cross of Christ towers over warfare, violence and hatred.

For Paul was right that for those who follow Jesus, our citizenship is in heaven. And it is from there, and only from there, that we can ever expect a Savior. And that is why, my brothers and sisters, that is why, and it is the only reason why, like Paul, and like his beloved Philippian church, truly, we can stand firm in the Lord. Amen.

The Second Time

March 06, 2022

A still more excellent way

January 30, 2022

I will show you a still more excellent way…

You may well have heard me tell the joke about the new rector whose first sermon in his new parish amazes and delights his new parishioners. Word spreads around the parish that they have hired someone superb, and the crowd on the second Sunday is even larger as people gather to hear an even more wonderful homily… and he simply preaches the sermon from the previous week.

The punchline of the story comes when the rector is finally challenged by his wardens to explain why he only preaches the one sermon, and he responds that the next sermon will come when they start living lives that show they’ve taken the first sermon on board. It made you all laugh gently when I first told that story, so I suppose it’s an OK clergy-style joke in its way. But it always makes me want to ask what the next chapter is – what is the next sermon? And will it actually be as good as the first one? Will it be possible, to quote St Paul, for the new rector to show them a still more excellent way…?

Well, this morning is the day we get a ‘second installment’, and unlike the new rector joke, it comes hard on the heels of the first installment, all in about fifteen verses of Bible text.

Jesus’ first sermon – the one which had them on the edge of their seats – was simply his announcing that the great prophecy from the scroll of Isaiah has been fulfilled. Good news for the poor, release for captives, sight for the blind, and freedom from oppression. It sounds really good – it sounded good on the lips of the prophet over 500 years earlier, and it sounded really good right there in Nazareth.

But – like the joke about the new rector – clearly folk didn’t really want to own it. And thus we find Jesus’ fellow Nazarenes muttering, “Who does he think he is?” For whatever reason, they don’t really like the implications of his first sermon. And that’s when Jesus follows a different tactic from the new rector – Jesus gives them the second sermon straight away…. and if they didn’t like the first one, as we heard, they positively hate the second one! They do not like Jesus offering them a still more excellent way.

Today is the day when we both look back over our shoulder at the past critically to assess our mission and ministry in the twelve months gone by, and then stare as deeply as we can into our future, to make sure that our gaze continues to be focused on Jesus and the direction in which he calls and leads us. And I think it probably fair to say that in a time as extraordinary as that in which we find ourselves, both as a church community, and in the world at large, the disciplines which our annual meeting demand of us are probably more important than ever. For, while we might have tried as hard as possible to ‘keep the show on the road’, the nature of the pandemic has meant that it has not been ‘business as usual’ in many many ways – either for us, or for anyone else.

And in many ways, today is a day of celebration and rejoicing, as should be obvious from those ministry and financial reports. In a year that has had real ups and downs, almost all our ‘numbers’ have been impressively strong, and there is much about which we could boast. But – as we were just reminded by MJ – if we boast without love we have nothing. And that is why, on today of all days, we must strive to see a still more excellent way…

Paul, who wrote these words, had been having ups and downs. He had founded the church in Corinth, and for a while things had been glorious. The church community had grown well, they loved their founder and leader, and if they had had such a thing as an annual meeting back then, the first few would, I am certain, have been wonderful.

But Paul moved on – as is the way of church leaders both then and now – and problems began to arise. Indeed, if you read the two letters in the New Testament we know as First and Second Corinthians fully and completely, rather than broken down into the little extracts chosen for Sunday worship, you will be reminded how ‘situational’ almost all of Paul’s letters are, and you can see very clearly some of the problems that had arisen after Paul had moved on to pastures new. Divisions within the church community, inappropriate sexual relationships, tensions between rich and poor, rivalry over spiritual gifts and charisms – and a growing gap between the local church leaders and Paul himself.

And so, this time last week, we heard the previous chapter of First Corinthians, in which Paul reminds this fractured community that a church needs to be made up of members with all sorts of gifts. The body needs eyes, feet, hands and everything else, as he explains with great clarity. And that was as true 2000 years ago as it is today. That is why our reports makes such wonderful and exciting reading – for here at St James both within your staff team and across all our elected leadership and ministry leaders, we certainly live out that diversity of skills and experiences about which Paul was writing.

But Paul doesn’t leave it there. And I do not think it fanciful to suggest that the reason for this is he knows that the Corinthian community is falling apart. And – with I suspect a fair degree of exasperation in his voice – he knows that he needs to bang their heads together, to knock some sense – no, some grace – into them. And in what I suspect his long-suffering amanuensis will have heard as a cross between anger and despair, he cries out, I will show you a still more excellent way…

And then comes the most famous and beloved piece of Scripture in the Christian tradition. If – I – do – not – have – love – I – am nothing…

As simple as that. And more than that – nearly everything else will pass away. Everything except faith, hope and love…and the greatest of these is love.

In other words, says Paul to this not yet perfect Christian community, ‘get your priorities right and work together’. You can be better than you think you are. You can behave better than you currently are. And what message could be more apposite for us – or any church community to hear – on the day of its annual meeting. Especially when coupled with that ‘what happened next’ incident we heard in the gospel – that moment of rage when a faith community got confronted by Good News that challenged its own values and priorities.

Now when I look in the mirror, let alone when you all may look at me, it is plain to see that there are any number of times when the way I chose to take is far from excellent. But nevertheless, if it falls to anyone, now, today, Sunday 30^th January, 2022, it falls to me to prompt us all to remember the need for that still more excellent way – on this Sunday of all Sundays in the year.

For instance, when we start our meeting, we will, I know, be talking about our buildings. We will be talking about this beloved and beautiful cathedral, whose fabric shows concerning signs of wear and tear. And I dare say we may talk about the ongoing implications of the diocesan trustees decision to sell the office building and plaza.

But while we are, of course, called to be responsible stewards of our assets, let me tell you a little secret…. One day… this lovely church will either fall down or be demolished. And it won’t, ultimately, matter – it won’t matter if the St James community has taken seriously the words of the hymn that we just sung, which calls the followers of Jesus to raise a ‘living temple’ whose towers ‘may tell forth salvation’ and whose walls ‘may re-echo praise’. That’s the still more excellent way – without which, nothing we do in this building or to preserve this building is of any worth at all.

Or we might need to remember that more excellent way if COVID has made us prioritize attending church, receiving the sacrament, and participating in mission, formation, and fellowship just a little lower than was once the case. At a point when the majority of COVID cases for the vaccinated are mild, and when we gather in a very large and airy space, and when many other aspects of life are back to close to normal, our pews have been remarkably empty, our formation activities poorly attended, and our mission work sometimes struggling to find volunteers.

And the next time we look at our bank balance and our financial commitments, we might need to look for that more excellent way. As of some 48 hours ago, 51 families who I believe still consider themselves to be members of the cathedral community had yet to complete a pledge for 2022. That’s probably simply oversight – for we all lead busy lives – but it hinders our ability to function properly – it hinders our ability to tell those tidings of a new creation to this old and weary earth.

And, most importantly of all, (and let me say that now more than ever I am preaching first and foremost to myself), we need to keep looking in the spiritual mirror, and making sure that we have really understood and are really acting out the kind of love that Paul was talking about – the kind of love about which Charles Wesley spoke in that famous first hymn we just sung… the love that is divine, and without which nothing else is worth anything at all.

For you – and I – need always to remember that we are but a work in progress. We are still, as Wesley said, being ‘changed from glory into glory’, and, whatever we achieved last year and will achieve this coming year, that work will and must continue ‘till in heaven we take our place’. So join me, on this Annual Meeting Sunday, join me in following Christ on his unstoppable way of love, and allow him to show us all, a still more excellent way. Amen.