Sermon for Sunday the 5th of October
In the episode ‘you shall not covet…’ two brothers inherit a valuable but incomplete stamp collection from their estranged father and become obsessed by both the wealth they have inherited and the fact that the missing stamps in the collection are owned by other people’
In the episode based on the commandment “you shall do no murder” – the brutality of a disadvantaged killer is contrasted with the cold efficiency of the state in its preparations to take his life on the gallows.
In the film ‘honour your father and mother’ a child’s relationship with her father becomes complex and muddled when she discovers that he is, in fact, not her biological father.
I can lend it to you if you’re interested and are over the age of 18.
One of the critics notes rather innocently, that viewers should not take the connections to each commandment to be literal but rather that they are used as a reflection upon the complex nature of moral decision making. 'Please take this as art' – he seems to be saying – 'and not reality – because this is complex and not simple'.
But – we want to cry out – Life is not simple! Moral decisions are made in complex relationships – rarely are things simple and clear-cut.
Complex and not simple: If we keep to the simplest reading of the ten commandments then we will admit that it possible to keep all ten of them.
I, for one, expect to end my years not having killed anybody – I regard that as a reasonable hope. I would expect my family and members of my congregation to be genuinely surprised and dismayed if it were ever revealed that I had committed murder.
Surely there is no necessity to stray from the marriage bed. People remain faithful to each other within the covenant of marriage quite regularly.
I would even go as far as to suggest that with a certain degree of childhood formation in both humility and generosity that it might be possible to fulfil the plainest personal meaning of not coveting your neighbour’s goods.
And I have met folks who do, in fact, say ‘Darn, Shucks, or Fiddle when they bang their thumb with the hammer.
And so, for example, when the rich young ruler announces with cheery self-assurance to Jesus that he has kept all these commandments from his youth we have no reason to suggest that he is either a lying toad or some rare breed of human. It is within the realm of reasonable discipline to keep the Ten Commandments in the simplest and most ordinary way that they can be read.
Now if you were really cheeky you might interject that we are not all equally advantaged when it comes to law keeping. Some of us have stronger drives than others and straying from the matrimonial bed is easier. Some of us were raised with very little and so coveting the goods of others is harder for us to avoid than it is for you who were raised with much. Some of us are quick-tempered or live in violent communities. Raising our hand against another man is not so great a stretch.
So what about that one over there on his donkey with a cheery face talking to Jesus: is he a law-keeper merely because his drives are low and his needs met?
But that’s sort of a side-line, isn’t it? We were saying that it is possible to end one’s life having kept the Ten Commandments.
When Jesus launches himself into his ministry after the death of John the Baptist he finds himself constantly bumping into the Pharisees. These were men who had taken up the challenge of teaching ordinary Jews how to keep the law and affirm their identity as God’s people. Not only Jews living in Jerusalem but as was more often the case living in the midst of Gentiles – in the homeland but also abroad – in Asia Minor or Egypt - ordinary Jews living complex lives and not simple ones. And the law they were to keep was not merely the Ten Commandments but the whole of the Levitical law as it governed food and marriage, work and religious observance.
But the Pharisees believed it could be done and they also treated this as a reasonable hope and intended to be successful in what they taught.
We’re used to thinking of the Pharisees as Jesus’ opponents but they were practical and often very popular teachers. It might have even seemed to them to that the failure of partnership between themselves and this new rabbi was a great tragedy. For their part they initially looked on Jesus as one of their own – a teacher of righteousness who was gathering disciples around him. They showed genuine interest and unfeigned offers of fellowship - though somewhat tinged with curiosity because of the sorts of people who Jesus was beginning to gather to himself.
Jesus will part company with the Pharisees on this point – taking both a greater and lesser emphasis on law keeping. The Sabbath was made for man – he says – and men and women can be healed on it. God desires the return of his people and God’s servants must maintain contact with lawbreakers. There will be no shunning of sinners but, rather, contact and engagement. And yet the commands of the law are even greater than we imagine.
If you could only see – Jesus tells his disciples – that murder is not merely doing another to death but is a part of the whole cycle of anger which we cannot and regularly do not avoid. Adultery is part of lust and exploitation. It begins in the heart and not the bedroom. Bearing false witness merely the promotion of an unwinnable point in the face of much evidence.
We might call it spin! We’d pay someone to do it on behalf of our company or our government.
Ultimately the law will tell me what sin is. The deeper I look the more I will find myself implicated and culpable. And I will come to recognize the violence that is within me when my anger boils over.
The law will tell me what sin is and I will begin to recognize that the half-truths I speak are covered by the heart of the commandment relating to false witness.
So what will I do? This is the question which is ultimately asked in plaintive tones by the disciples when Jesus gives them some home truths about the full weight of the commandment. 'Who then, can be saved', they ask.
In the long run I shall not ask for a certificate of my compliance from my Creator. I will not say that I have done all these things from my youth because I have not. I will not begin to pretend that I have fulfilled the demands of honesty which the law truly requires or that I have kept myself completely apart from the network of exploitation that is part of our world.
I shall not presume to have fulfilled the law’s demands.
I will do what the law of God and the judgement of God give me no alternative but to do which is to ask, ultimately, for grace and for mercy.
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The whole service is HERE. Sermon starts at 12:57 on the counter.
".....husband, father, missioner, youth worker, musician, blogger, priest, disciple...."
A congregation gathered in St Mary's Cathedral in Edinburgh this afternoon for the funeral of The Rev'd Tom Allen who had recently taken up a post with the Mission to Seafarers in Scotland and was living with his family in the town of Linlithgow, outside of Edinburgh.
Tom had only been in post for a few months and so he was a newcomer among us. He had already made himself known to many of us as Big Bulky Anglican and as Bishop David states in the sermon (which appears below) Tom's interests were many and the accumulation of experience and insight over his years as a musician, a youth worker and a priest were really quite remarkable.
The majority of Tom's contacts will have been outwith the Scottish Episcopal Church. A number of colleagues and friends with broad northern accents were in attendance including one young priest (there with his wife and little baby) whose vocation had been nurtured during Tom's time as a youth worker.
There were two hymns sung at the funeral: "Come down O love divine" and "My song is love unknown". Steve Butler was present as well and sung "Hill of the Angels"
Sermon at the Funeral of Rev Tom Allen
St Mary’s Cathedral, Edinburgh,
17th September, 2008
Rt Revd David Chillingworth,
Bishop of St Andrews
Chair of the Scottish Council of Mission to Seafarers
"Death is not an unforseen accident, not something left out of the scheme of our Creator. Rather it is something natural in the sight of God. … As we give thanks today, we are also given a blessed opportunity. We are each given a loving invitation to trust in God, and let him turn our fears into faith, our sorrows into joy, our loneliness, into divine companionship." Tom’s words not my words.
Anne has asked of us two things today: that we should remember Tom with thanksgiving and that we should worship God as Tom would have wished. So we put death in its place – something natural in the sight of God. We give thanks for Tom. Through our tears, we glimpse death not just put into its place but destroyed in the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead.
But we are only human. We begin by offering our deep sympathy and our love to Anne, to Katherine and to Matthew – to Tom’s father John – and to Tom’s wider family and friends. We who shared with him in ministry are bereft. Our loss is but the outer edges of yours. You are held at this moment within the prayers of a wide community – all sorts of people whom you have never met but who knew of Tom and what his coming here promised.
My first meeting with Tom was a virtual one – when I met Big Bulky Anglican in the community of bloggers. What impressed me about Big Bulky Anglican was the breadth of the agenda – his music, his reading, his reflections on his ministry.
When I began to get to know Tom, I realized that he was big in every sense. There were many parts to his life and he lived very intensely in each of them.
In the family, he was Do Do – beloved husband and adored father. This was the family life of the priest in which all were committed and sacrifices were shared.
As a youth worker, Tom adored children and young people and he held their affection and admiration in return. And always, he wanted to offer them more.
And that’s how he was in life and love and ministry. Restless energy and incisive mind. Music, theology, communication people. Parish and community. Taking people where they didn’t expect to go – and isn’t that just what Jesus did? Giving people the courage to step out of the conventional, the ‘what everybody does’ – so that they might grasp the fullness of life which is God’s will for each of us.
And those who, as Anne says, ‘Got it’ – were inspired and led and opened up to the Spirit of God in new ways. Tom was new wine – and he sometimes made the old wineskins look a bit frayed and tatty. To mix the metaphors, the word ‘dinosaur’ did cross his lips occasionally. But it was kindly meant. And Tom was unusual because he had a majestic God-centered vision – but he read and understood the small print as well. So he was deeply theological and intensely practical at the same time. He was usually – and sometimes infuriatingly – right.
It was the love of the sea which drew him to Mission to Seafarers. It was about seafarers but, above all, it was about mission. He was going to lead us too in directions where we didn’t expect to go. ‘Do you mind the traveling?’ I asked him. ‘No it gives me time to think’ was the reply. He was already reshaping our whole approach to chaplaincy and that would have had an impact not just on maritime ministry but on chaplaincy in many other areas of life.
But the righteous, though they die early, will be at rest. For old age is not honoured for length of time, or measured by number of years; but understanding is grey hair for anyone, and a blameless life is ripe old age.
Death came to Tom in the midst of life. He lived intensely, richly, completely the journey of his own love of God and of his family.
"When we have done everything, and said everything, we realise it isn't enough. At death we come to the end of human knowledge. We are left to the mercy of God. Comforting it is, therefore, to have a God to trust in, and one who has perfect love, absolute knowledge, boundless forgiveness and infinite patience. God is love, and that is a glorious fact to lean upon now. "
Not my words – Tom’s words.
Tom – husband, father, missioner, youth worker, musician, blogger, priest, disciple. May he rest in peace and rise in glory.
There are worries that the new Large Hadron Collider thingy buried under the French-Swiss border will generate tiny black holes which might somehow manage to exist on their own, grow in size and suck the planet earth inside out before going on to swallow the solar system,
etc etc.
Other less worried sorts have pointed out that the sorts of particle collisions being generated by this large gizmo occur naturally when gamma rays enter our atmosphere and so that the only difference here is that these collisions will be measurable and therefore useful for understanding the conditions of the universe several seconds after the big bang.
I dunno. It's all too much for me. Too many details.
The machine was turned on yesterday and particles are now whipping around the long circumference of the machine. At some point in the next few weeks a lot of clever people will begin aiming particles at each other and getting them to collide.
It's promising to be a busy few weeks here in Penicuik. I'm not looking forward to everything which needs to be done. It would be just my luck to have the world end after my upcoming Vestry meetings and not before.
Our sister in Christ over at Get out of Jail Free has a link to the following website where you can have the fundamental question answered without getting too bogged down in the details.
Fruit and what it means.....
Jesus is the Way
......and not merely the Answer
I think I had a T-shirt once which proclaimed 'Jesus is the answer' - t'was back in the 70s.
Such statements could not help but provoke the response:
"Doesn't it depend what the question is?"
Tim Chesterton from Edmonton has a good piece of prose bits of which I shall inadvertently nick for a sermon.
I am the proud (step) father of an eleven year old boy who struggled, on occasion, within the all-female environment of his local primary school and who does, from time to time, present an excess of attitude and a lack of desire to clean his room.
I was thoroughly chuffed to read an article in this morning's Times by Alice Thomson. Well done!
And the little old man Shirley was still officially married to but who no one had seen for twenty years – he arrived in town too and moved into Shirley’s flat. He sold her things, took the art off the walls and drove it down to a dealer, found the key to the safety deposit box and claimed the contents of that as well.
The children had told me this would happen. There was precious little they could do to prevent it. A number of items, of purely sentimental value, were simply disposed of. Which hurt. Which seemed almost like spite. When the old man showed up at the funeral or at least at the graveside, people were pretty subdued. They shifted their weight from foot to foot. They didn’t know what to say around him.
After I’d finished the words of committal and Shirley’s coffin was lowered into the ground, the old renegade husband broke the silence.
“She was a good wife” he said.
It was the wrong thing to say. Bill the funeral director and I caught this sudden movement out of the corner of our eyes as the youngest daughter – a pretty little blonde thing - launched herself across two or three relations in the direction of the old man. We stepped between them Bill and I did. I was young and Bill had good reflexes. Like many funeral directors, Bill is a solemn fellow – very prompt and very correct. But he admitted later that he’d delayed intervening just long enough for the daughter to land one good right hook.
“It was the least I could do”, said Bill, with a twinkle in his eye.
