Richard's Sermon for Bible Sunday: 29th October 2017

So how well do you know your bible?

1.      How many books are there in the bible?

2. How many of these are in the Old Testament and how many in the New Testament

3. Do you know from which books of the bible these openings are?

a) ‘In the beginning….’;

b)‘The revelation of Jesus Christ which God gave him to show his servants what must soon take place…’;

c)‘Long ago God spoke to our ancestors in many and various ways by the prophets.’

d)‘In the days when the judges ruled, there was a famine in the land, and a certain man of Bethlehem in Judah went to live in the country of Moab, he and his wife and his two sons.’

e)‘In the first book, Theophilus, I wrote about all that Jesus did and taught from the beginning until the day when he was taken up to heaven.’

4. In what languages is the bible written?

5. Who are the four patriarchs?

6. Name four churches to which Paul wrote letters (there are seven in total).

7. Who was Philemon?

8. Name four prophets who have books of the OT named after them (there are sixteen in total)

9. What is the last book in the Old Testament?

10.Which of these is not a book of the New Testament?

a) Acts of the Apostles

b)  Epistle to Titus

c) Epistle of Stephen

d) Revelation of St John

1.      66

2.      39 +27

3.      Genesis + John, Revelation, Hebrews, Ruth, Acts

4.      Hebrew, Greek, Aramaic

5.      Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Joseph

6.      Rome, Corinth, Galatia, Ephesus, Philippi, Colossae, Thessalonia

7.      Man to whom Paul wrote a personal letter

8.      Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Daniel, Amos, Hosea, Zechariah, Haggai, Jonah, Nahum, Habakkuk, Obadiah, Micah, Zephaniah, Malachi, Joel

9.      Malachi

10.  c)

As we mark today Bible Sunday and give thanks for the revelation that the scriptures offer I want this morning to offer up three concerns.

The first is the worrying extent of biblical illiteracy

Bible Society YOUGOV report from 2014 interviewed 5800 adults and 800 children and reported on the worrying number of children who have little idea of bible stories that we might accept as classics.

For instance, A quarter of children (23%) indicate they have never read seen or heard Noah’s Ark or The Nativity (25%), rising to 38% for Adam and Eve and 43% for The Crucifixion

More than half indicate they have never read, seen or heard Joseph and his coat of many colours (54%), Moses parting the Red Sea (56%) and David & Goliath (57%)

Steve Legg story – ‘Why did Mary and Joseph name their baby after a swear word.’

But perhaps that biblical illiteracy begins with those of us who follow Christ and if we don’t know the bible very well, we can’t really complain about what is happening in society at large. I’m afraid that there is a worrying amount of biblical illiteracy within churches also. And with how things are in the wider society it is even more important that we do know our bibles.

The second concern is about the sort of knowledge we gather. For what we are about with our relationship with the bible shouldn’t really be about knowing the bible as we might know a set of facts.

Can anyone recite those four famous actions in today’s collect, that beautiful prayer written by Thomas Cranmer and used as the Bible Sunday Collect? We are to ‘read, mark, learn, inwardly digest’

So read – of course; on your own, in church, regularly, include listen, use a translation you can get on with;

mark, take note of -  definitely; BRF notes, bible study groups (home groups plug)

learn? Well you have heard me read a passage that I have learned and it’s not as difficult as you might think. Passage means so much more as you spend more time with it.

And inwardly digest, take it into you, make it part of you, so that you are nourished, strengthened, so that you grow.

‘Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly’, as St Paul writes to the Colossians

There’s the nub. You can know everything about the bible, but unless you inwardly digest what is there, little better than ‘clanging gong or noisy cymbal’ to borrow another phrase.

The bible is to be a conduit of our relationship with God, one of the things which makes that relationship possible. It is what we digest so that we can grow into the ‘knowledge of the fullness of the stature of Christ’. Through reading, marking, learning and especially inwardly digesting we find out what God is like, we are put in touch with his nature;

Through reading, marking, learning and especially inwardly digesting we find out what his purpose is for his children;

Through reading, marking, learning and especially inwardly digesting we find out how to behave towards and live with each other.

The third concern is, in many ways, the opposite of the first.

Of course the bible isn’t God himself, isn’t the relationship itself, rather the means he has given us to develop that relationship. There are many churches which fall into the dangerous area of bibliolatry, not wavering from scripture at all so that it becomes a constricting cage and they end up worshipping the bible itself. Rather the pages of scripture are like a window through which we can come into contact with God’s beauty. We look through it, not at it.

The great New Testament scholar, Bishop Tom Wright, has suggested that the Christian life can be compared to taking part in an unfinished Shakespeare play. He asks us to imagine that there exists such a play whose fifth act has been lost. The first four acts provide great deal of characterisation and such excitement within the plot that it is generally agreed that the play should be staged. However, rather than leaving everyone guessing after the fourth act or asking someone to write a fifth act, it is decided to give the key parts to expert actors who would be told to immerse themselves in the first four acts, and in the language and culture of Shakespeare and his time, and then work out the last act by themselves, to improvise it. This is the manner, Bishop Wright tells us, in which we might approach the Christian life. We have the scriptures and we have the Christian tradition and we have reason. Anglicanism is sometimes said to rest on the three pillars of scripture, tradition and reason. Perhaps we should think of it instead as our faith resting on the living word of God as interpreted through the Christian tradition and by our reason – it’s a sort of dynamic relationship.

And so, the scriptures and tradition will not necessarily tell us exactly what we ought to do in any given instance, but they will be the bedrock upon which we are called to improvise. The more we are steeped in the bible, the more we can read, mark, learn and inwardly digest, the truer will our improvisation be and the worthier will it be of the God we follow.

Richard's Sermon for the annual service of Remembrance and Thanksgiving for the Faithful Departed (All Souls): 29th October 2017

All Souls 2017

I am often asked whether taking funerals is the worst part of the role I have. Of course it isn’t ever easy but taking a funeral  is always actually a great privilege and because of that many ministers will say that they are among the most worthwhile things we do.  Besides, I always reply that it is far worse for those who are bereaved than it is for me; and so I am very aware on an occasion such as this, looking out at your faces and the stories that they reveal (or hide) that this will have been a difficult year for  you. You are the ones in the crucible, whether the one you love was 9 or 89. You are the ones touched most vigorously by grief. You are the ones struggling to come to terms with the void in your lives.

So I don’t want to let this occasion pass without saying thank you for being here to make your remembrances in public, to say your ‘thankyous’ for the years shared alongside others doing the same. Just being here is an act of courage in itself; and I am always humbled by the way that the loss of someone so dear is so often met with dignity, courage and patience.

Facing suffering or grief with virtue, being able to hold together in tension all that life sends our way, good and bad is what I want  to speak to you about today. After all, the death of a loved one is one of the most profound experiences we will ever go through. How we get through it and the mark that it leaves on us goes a long way to defining who we are.

We soon discover that, trite though it often sounds, life goes on. At first that in itself may seem all wrong.

It is more than 20 years since Four Weddings and a Funeral, but the W.H. Auden poem that was made famous by the film still has the power to haunt because it speaks of the sense of outrage that there can be that the normal stuff of life doesn’t stop just because our world seems as if it has ended.

“Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,
Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone,
Silence the pianos and with muffled drum
Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come. “

He makes the same point, in a slightly different vein in another poem – about how, of course, the continuity of ordinary life goes on around us, when all we might feel is great discontinuity.

About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters; how well, they understood
Its human position; how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer’s horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.

Twenty years ago I was at a wedding in Windsor. It was the 5^th September 1997 and I can tell you the exact date because it was the day before the funeral of Diana Princess of Wales. Inside the hotel there was quite proper joy and celebration. Just across the road a long snaking queue of mourners waited to sign the book of condolence in Windsor castle. I wonder what they though of the smiling faces they could glimpse through the hotel window.  There was joy and there was grief. The Royal Standard hung at half mast above the great tower and mid way through the afternoon the most beautiful rainbow appeared directly above it. There was a sign of mourning, there was a sign of hope.

Life and death, suffering and jubilation, bereavement and joy; how often we live with these held in tension – being able to do so is part of what being fully human is all about.

One of the reasons that I am a minister of Christian religion (apart from the belief that this is what I believe God has called me to) is that in Jesus Christ - in his life, and especially in his death and resurrection, we see the one who makes whole those two facets of our existence, those two facets of what makes us fully human and fully alive; and I just want to put people in touch with him.

I said especially his death and resurrection because it is the cross and the empty tomb that enable us to grapple with how it is ok to be both joyful and grieving at the same time. For the cross of Jesus reveals a God who takes us, and who takes himself, into the depths of what it is to suffer, what it is to lose the one we love, what it is to watch them die; who takes us into the heart of human darkness.

Yet he is also a God who doesn’t end the story there, who knows that apart from those first apostles, everyone else who encounters the cross does so through the lens of the resurrection; knows that the pain, evil, death not cancelled out by the resurrection but rather transcended.

It is possible to hold them together. Life does go on. Joy can break out. The void left by the end of the life of the one we love will always be there, not filled, not cancelled; but we discover that their end doesn’t bring the end, that we can hold grief and joy together.