A sermon for Pentecost

Acts 2: 1-12; John 13: 12-31,  27^th May 2012,

St Matthew’s, Oxford
 

The celebration of Pentecost – provides us with an opportunity of thinking about the Holy Spirit.   And the best book on that subject is for me John V. Taylor’s ‘The Go-Between God’.   Even the title says such a lot.   By the ‘Go-Between God’ Taylor means and I quote from the Introduction ‘The Holy Spirit is he who makes one aware of the other, who gives one to the other’.   By this he means, for example, that the Holy Spirit is he who makes God the Son aware of God the Father and vice versa but also that the Holy Spirit is he who makes human beings aware of God and it is this essential feature of the Holy Spirit that I want to talk about today. 

Pentecost is the time in the church year when we celebrate the coming of the Holy Spirit – so a bit like Christmas – when we celebrate the coming of the coming of Jesus – God the Son – into the world.   Of course we now understand that just as God the Son pre-existed before his incarnation so we believe that God the Holy Spirit was always present even at the Creation.   Still it is at Pentecost that we remember the gift of the Holy Spirit to the first disciples, and in particular the way that Luke describes the first manifestation of this gift on a specific occasion 50  - pente - days after the resurrection. 

Some things to note about Luke’s account:  Firstly that it seems to differ from John’s account.   In John’s gospel Jesus certainly promises that the Holy Spirit will come to the disciples after he has left them.   He tells them many things about this Comforter - as the Spirit is described in the translation of that bit of John’s gospel we heard just now – a section of Jesus’ farewell speech to his disciples.   In John’s gospel Jesus breaths the Holy Spirit on them on Easter Sunday night.  In Luke’s account the risen Jesus promises to send the Holy Spirit to them but the Holy Spirit arrives only after Jesus has ascended into Heaven.

However it is notable that in both accounts the Spirit is given to the disciples when they are all together in one room and this seems to me important.   The Sprit is not given to individuals individually but to the group collectively.  It/he/she is given when people gather together for some special purpose in one place not when they are going about their every-day business on their own.

These two accounts of the disciples’ first experience of the Holy Spirit underline for me the fact that our experience of God is always collective.   If I had been born in a Moslem country I would now be a Moslem and my experience of God would be as a Moslem – there seems no getting away from this.   My experience of God is not an act of will on my part.   It is a gift.

Note , too, that in both Luke’s and John’s accounts of ‘Pentecost’ the Spirit is given to the disciples to empower them to do things they would not otherwise be able to do.   In John’s account – when Jesus breaths the Holy Spirit into the disciples he says to them that ‘If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven, if you retain the sins of any they are retained’   In Luke’s account, when the Holy Spirit the disciples are empowered to speak in other languages and to preach the gospel.

But surely the most striking thing about Luke’s account of the advent of the Holy Spirit, and indeed Luke’s description of the actions of the Holy Spirit later in Acts, is I think that the disciples experience its presence in a way most of us Christians – at least in this county - do not do so today.   The Spirit enables them to do things like preach the gospel in foreign tongues, to prophecy, to heal people, etc.   But the spirit is also ‘experienced’, felt as a living presence.   Luke underlines this point in the reading we heard just now by talking about a sound like a rushing wind and the appearance of ‘tongues as of fire’.  Note that Luke doesn’t say that the Sprit was actually wind or fire but that this is what it/he/she felt like to the disciples.

Now I confess I have never experienced the Holy Spirit in that way.   My experience of God and his Holy Spirit seems to me much less dramatic, more muted.   I have on occasion felt the presence of God while I have been praying: but this has been more of a warm feeling than a burning fire.   I have heard God at times but more in a voice which sounded suspiciously like my own rather than a rushing wind.

I have experienced that gift of the Holy Spirit – healing – on at least two occasions that I can think of in a way that made me, still makes me feel profoundly grateful.   But I have never spoken in tongues – that form of ecstatic speech which some people – even some people amongst the congregation of St Matthew’s– are able to express their praise of God.  

Now – when I said that Luke’s account of the advent and subsequent action of the Holy Spirit, is somewhat alien to my experience, it seems impossible to deny that in some churches – particularly those that describe themselves as Pentecostal, after the day we are celebrating today, the experience of the Holy Spirit is much more akin to that of the first disciples, according to Luke’s account, than to mine.

My temptation in the face of the ‘Pentecostals’ experience is either to deny its authenticity or to feel jealous.   But it is surely wrong to question its validity.  As Taylor says, ‘The whole weight of New Testament evidence endorses the central affirmation of the Pentecostalists that the gift of the Holy Spirit transforms and intensifies the quality of human life and that this is a fact of experience in the lives of [some] Christians.   The longing of thousands of Christians to recover what they feel instinctively their faith promises them is what underlies the whole movement.’

I am convinced of this longing that Taylor talks of.   I think many people long to experience God in their lives in the way that seems to have been the experience of the early Christians.   And indeed we can see that this experience – or something like it – seems given to some Christians today. 

But it’s not given to all of us.  Taylor points out that while Luke may place a lot of emphasis upon the direct communications which the apostles received from the Holy Spirit and on the gifts of healing, prophecy and speaking in tongues, in the Epistles as a whole this emphasis is not so pronounced, and although there are plenty of references to gifts of healing, prophecy and so on, life in the Holy Spirit is associated mainly with a new relation to God expressed in the words ‘sonship’ and ’liberty’ and in a new degree of love, of life-for others.

So perhaps those of us who do not experience the Holy Spirit as a rushing wind or as tongues of fire, or who do not have gifts of the Spirit such as the gift of speaking in ‘tongues’ or of prophecy or who have never experienced healing can feel reassured by, for example, Paul’s admonishment to the Corinthians that they should view the possession of gifts of tongues, of healing, etc as less important than a life in the Spirit where faith, hope and in particular love abound.   However that’s as maybe, it doesn’t lessen my longing, at least, for a more intense experience of God that does not seem given to me.   In other words I am jealous of the Pentecostalists.

What is going on here?   It is somehow our fault when we do not experience the Holy Spirit as others have or do.   No, I do not think it is a matter of fault as we might be tempted to think.   The Holy Spirit is not something we can command.   Jesus tells Nicodemus, ‘The Sprit blows where it wills, and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know whence it comes or whither it goes.’

And if Taylor is right and ‘The Holy Spirit is he who makes us aware of God’ then we are surely made aware of God to different degrees and in different ways depending on our character but also our circumstances.   As I said at the beginning of this sermon, the Holy Spirit comes to groups not to individuals.  ‘Where two or three are gathered together in my name there am I in the midst of them.’   Perhaps then it is the character and circumstances of the group to which we belong (our church) that determines how we experience God.  I was not brought up in a Pentecostal church I cannot now experience God as the Pentecostalists do.  For me, and perhaps for you, I must discover and then experience God in other ways.

We need to remind ourselves that God has primarily made his presence known in the person of Jesus and that it is  he who comes to us not we to him.   It is in the end up to God how he makes us aware of himself.   But he promises – as Jesus did – to his disciples as recorded in John’s gospel ‘I will not leave you desolate, I will come to you.’   And as the risen Jesus tells his disciples in the last words of Matthew’s gospel.  "I will be with you always, even till the end of time....."

Fear

Sermon on John 20: 19 – 23, St Matthew's, Oxford, 15th April 2012

In my sermon today I want to talk about fear and its antidote love. This is the Sunday after Easter when we are still thinking about Jesus’ resurrection and why that is good news. I want to suggest that one small part of that good news is that it means that there is nothing we really need fear. Of course fear is sometimes appropriate. When we cross a road we should be a little afraid of the oncoming traffic. But I also want to suggest that we spend too much of our time being afraid –and why the news of Jesus’ resurrection should change all that.

In our gospel reading we find the disciples meeting in the evening of Easter Sunday – the very day of Jesus’ resurrection: which we celebrated last Sunday. We don’ really know why they were meeting. But surely it was to discuss what Mary Magdalene had told them that morning and what Peter and John had confirmed, that Jesus’ tomb was empty. Perhaps they had also heard that Mary, when she had returned to the tomb later that day, had met the risen Jesus in the Garden. But we really don’t know how much the disciples knew or understood at that point: John doesn’t tell us.

We also don’t know what sort of a gathering it was: whether one of the disciples – say Peter – had called a formal meeting of the group or whether it was a more informal gathering of a few friends. We don’t know who precisely was there. John doesn’t supply us with such details. But he does tell us that the door to the room was locked.

John is writing when parchment was expensive and every little detail of his story counts. His mentioning that the room was locked is surely important and symbolic of the disciples’ state of mind at that time. He also tells us that the reason why the door was locked. The disciples were afraid. And he tells us what they were afraid of: the Jews. John doesn't tell us why they were afraid of the Jews. But what we can be sure of is that the disciples were full of fear on the evening of Easter Sunday.

That the disciples were afraid that evening is rather confirmed by Jesus’ first words to them, which were, according to John: ‘Peace be with you’. He actually says this twice in his seemingly rather short appearance. That they were afraid that evening is also confirmed by Luke who also suggests that fear was a major ingredient in the main group of disciples' first encounter with the risen Jesus. Luke however doesn’t mention that the disciples were afraid of the Jews but suggests that they were afraid of the risen Jesus himself – they thought they were seeing a ghost. In Luke’s account Jesus doesn’t just give them his peace but asks then why they are frightened.

Matthew’s and Mark’s accounts of what happened on Easter Sunday also suggest that fear was a big factor in the first meetings between the disciples and the risen Jesus. According to Matthew, Jesus, when he first met them, told them explicitly not to be afraid. And one of the most ancient versions of Mark’s gospel finishes with Mary Magdalene and the other women discovering the empty tomb. It doesn’t actually describe any of the resurrection appearances of Jesus and ends with the words. ‘So they [the women ] went out and fled from the tomb, for terror and amazement had seized them and said nothing to anyone for they were afraid.

Now you might not have imagined that fear would have been the disciples’ over-riding emotion on discovering or hearing about the fact that Jesus’ tomb was empty and that he might therefore be alive. You might have thought they would have been excited at and indeed pleased by this news about their beloved leader. If nothing this else this surely suggested that – despite what they must have thought when their leader was crucified – the ‘Jesus project’ wasn't all over quite yet, that something more was going to happen. You might have even thought, that on speculating on the empty tomb, and perhaps having heard of Mary’s encounter with the risen Jesus, they would be eagerly anticipating meeting him themselves. Luke tells us that that evening the disciples were discussing with Cleopas and another disciple their encounter with the risen Jesus on the road to Emmaus.

And yet both John and Luke tell us that that first meeting between Jesus and the disciples on Easter Sunday began with them all being afraid. Afraid of what? Was is it just the Jews that they were afraid of? Might it not also - as Luke’s account of this meeting suggests – been fear of other things besides?

It was perhaps convenient for the disciples to explain their fears as ‘fear of the Jews’ particularly in retrospect. When it is hard for us to explain what we afraid of, it is often convenient to tell people we are afraid of some external agent or some uncertain future event. Were the Jew’s really out to get them? Surely the Jews would have thought that the Jesus movement was over now that they had disposed of its leader. Was there really any threat from the Jews at that point? OK once the early church got going the Jewish establishment posed a real threat – as did, of course, the Roman authorities who were equally if not more responsible for the death of Jesus - but on Easter Sunday? Surely not.

I would like to suggest that when John says that the room was locked for fear of the Jews that this was largely a case of transference. That the disciples were really afraid of what the empty tomb and the possibility of the risen Jesus meant for themselves rather than the Jews. The crucifixion of Jesus – the leader they loved must have been a ghastly and horrible business for them – which we can only just begin to imagine - but Jesus’ death brought all that to an end and a seeming conclusion.

The death of someone we love is dreadful but in another sense it ends all the bad bits of our relationship with them as well as, of course, all the good bits. It’s a resolution that we assume we just need to come to terms with. We can’t do anything about our relationship with that person anymore and that can be a form of relief. And we know - at least with that rational part of our mind - that with time we will come to grieve the loss of that person less.

We can see surely that the possibility of Jesus being alive was frightening for the disciples: possibly more frightening for some of them than others. They were grieving his departure but also trying to come to terms with it. His reappearance on the scene changes everything. What would he say to them? They had been his friends and yet they had failed him, they had deserted him and if not actively colluded in his arrest and execution, had done very little to stop it. What would Jesus say to Peter who had actively denied knowing his friend and master?

Who amongst us would not be afraid of meeting, really meeting the risen Jesus? It would mean, what it meant for those first disciples: confronting our own inadequacies and surely that is what we are really afraid of? We are particularly afraid that somehow our inadequacies will be exposed or that we will have to reveal them And yet Jesus marvellously tell them, and us, that there is nothing to fear.

‘Do not be afraid’ is according to Richard Rohr the most common instruction in the Bible. I did a quick search on the Bible Gateway website for the phrase ‘Do not be afraid’ and those exact words are found 16 times in the New Testament compared with say only nine times for ‘Love your neighbour’ or three times for ‘Love the Lord you God’ or ‘Love your enemy’. OK not very scientific but a fairly clear result.

The Christian church has however sometimes suggested that fear is not necessarily a bad thing. ‘The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom’ is rather a favourite proverb of some – that exact rendering comes from the Psalms. Psalm 111: 10 to be precise. But you can find the same sentiment in Proverbs 1. I am sure I can remember the text, either engraved on a wooden plaque or embroidered onto some framed embroidery, hanging on a wall in one of my relatives’ houses that I visited as a child. But in fact the word fear in both Psalms and Proverbs is better translated as awe or reverence – as of someone we look up to and revere. ‘The reverence of God is the beginning of wisdom’ clearly has quite a different meaning to ‘the fear of God is the beginning of wisdom.’

To live in fear is what Jesus expressly thinks we shouldn’t do He tells us that we shouldn't even be anxious about tomorrow, or where our food is going to come from. So we certainly shouldn't be afraid of him or indeed of God.

And yet there is a lot of fear around. Our consumer society generates fear: fear of losing our incomes, our jobs, our houses and other possessions if we lose our income, our health and our self-image. The advertising we see on tv fosters some of those fears. If you don’t have this particularly deodorant you won’t attract as many women/men. If you don’t have this particular car you family will be less safe on the road. But the Church can also foster our fears. When it promotes conformity to religious norms, just as advertising promotes conformity to cultural norms, it also encourages the fear of not being part of the in-group, the fear of being rejected.

And as a human institution the church can use fear – as all human institutions do - to manage its members. Fear is a very convenient tool for getting people to do what you want them to do. So the Church too sometimes encourages people’s fear of being considered insignificant and unsuccessful. But perhaps the worst the Church has done in this regard is to present God as someone to be feared. It has done this by promoting our fear of what might happen after death, if its members don’t believe or do certain things.

Now the antidote to fear is, of course, love. If we love someone how can we fear them? John’s first epistle contains this useful proverb: ‘There is no fear in love but perfect love casts out fear’. This is the text which should be hung up in people’s homes I think, rather than, ‘The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom’. Of course when the disciples do meet the risen Jesus, their fears are cast out because it is clear that he loves them and loves them perfectly. The switch is clear in John’s account of the meeting: he says that ‘the disciples rejoiced when they saw the Lord’.

And if we too are not willing to be led through our fears and anxieties we will never see or grow. Just as the disciples could not have moved on to found the early church without first confronting the leader they had deserted and betrayed, so we too must confront our fears. Our first response to anyone calling us to a greater understanding of ourselves will be increased anxiety. We don’t say: ‘Isn’t this wonderful’. Instead we recoil in fear and say, ‘I don’t know if I want to go there.’

At the edges of medieval maps where the map-makers didn’t know whether it was land or sea and if land whether it was hospitable or not you would often find the warning, ‘Here be dragons’. We confront these dragons when we approach the edge of our comfort zone. But dragons need slaying rather than appeasing. And dragons are often more imaginary than real.

Jesus in dying on the cross has slain our dragons both imaginary and real. In rising from the dead he has shown us that we have nothing to fear, not even death itself. He meets us on the other side of the grave with a perfect love that acknowledges all our inadequacies and indeed recognises our fears. His perfect love casts out our fear.

Lenten fasting and Meat Free Fridays

Sermon on Matthew 6. 1-6, 16-21 and Isaiah 58. 1-12, Harris Manchester College, Oxford, Ash Wednesday, 2012

Today I thought I would talk about fasting. Our readings today are about fasting and Ash Wednesday – which we are celebrating today – is the start of Lent – when traditionally Christians have fasted until Easter. Of course very few of us fast during Lent anymore and the idea of a Lenten fast really only survives in the custom of giving up something for Lent. However when we do ‘give things up’ we often give up some specific type of luxury food – chocolate or alcohol, for example.

Today I want to commend to you the idea of fasting: even the giving up of certain foods for Lent. I want to suggest that fasting is a positively good thing and a custom we need to re-appropriate rather than abandon as something old fashioned and anachronistic.

By fasting I mean voluntarily depriving ourselves of food as opposed to say some other necessity or luxury. There are basically two types of fasting: firstly not eating at all or much less than usual - generally for a given period of time. The Islamic tradition of Ramadan includes fasting of this type. Secondly not eating a particular type of food – this can be for all of the time or again at particular times. Not eating red meat – as prescribed by St Benedict in his Rule would be fasting of this type, as would not eating meat but only fish on Fridays.

We may want to restrict the notion of fasting to food restriction with a religious or at least moral purpose. Some people, for example, do not eat wheat, because they are allergic to it. This doesn’t seem to warrant the description of fasting. Some people recently have joined Paul McCartney in his campaign for Meat Free Mondays. Is giving up meat on Monday – because of green-house gases associated with meat production - fasting? I would say so.

It is clear that the Church has largely abandoned the notion of fasting -as a religious practice. I can only really speak for the Anglican Church in the England but it also seems true of other denominations and in other countries too.

This is despite the fact that the Bible assumes that the practice is a normal thing to do and also that fasting has been part of the observance of Christianity for much of its two thousand year history. A legal prohibition on eating meat on Friday’s in this country was only repealed in the mid nineteenth century. And as late as the 1660s there were prosecutions for infringing fasting rules enshrined in English law. In the Middle Ages fasting was routine: not just in monasteries but on the part of ordinary people. There isn’t really time today to give you a history of Christian fasting which we in the Church seem to have largely forgotten as irrelevant – perhaps to our cost.

The best known Christian fasting practice is perhaps the Lenten fast with a long tradition going back to the early church. This has – over the years – involved both types of fasting I mentioned earlier – eating less than usual and only eating particular foods and not others. Red meat has been the food most generally restricted but so also have dairy products and eggs (leading to a surplus that then need to be eaten at Easter).

Lent has traditionally been viewed as commemorating Jesus’ 40 day fast in the wilderness at the start of his ministry but early Christian writers did not always make the connection. Athanasius, for example, makes no such association referring instead to various Old Testament figures who fasted. And indeed there are many: Daniel, Hezekiah, Ahab, Elijah, Samuel, Hannah, Moses to name but a few.

Our readings today whilst recording Isaiah’s and Jesus’ criticisms of fasting practices at the time assume that fasting per se is something a normal religious person would want to engage in: as normal as praying and giving to the poor. Both Isaiah and Jesus talk about how fasting should best be done. To summarise excessively: Isaiah suggests that fasting should not just be done for the benefit of the individual concerned but as a means of sharing food with the poor. Jesus tells us that when we fast we should not make a big deal of it.

But why did people fast? I guess this is a question like: why do people pray? Or even why do people give to the poor? The possible answers are many and varied.

You can explain fasting – as indeed you can explain prayer and giving to the poor on purely sociological or ecological grounds. Clearly one of the reasons why the Lenten fast got taken up in Northern European countries was because it made a virtue of a necessity. Food supplies in countries such as ours were – before we imported much of our food and developed ways of producing food that didn’t depend on the weather – were at their lowest in late winter, early spring. Meat was in particular short supply. At one level fasting in Lent created a way of providing for a fairer distribution of food when food was scarce. A point that has not escaped various Christian writers including Richard Hooker who echoing the Isaiah passage we heard today suggests that ‘much hurt hath grown to the Church of God through the a false imagination that Fasting standeth men in no stead for any spiritual respect, but only to take down the frankness of nature, and to tame the wildness of flesh’.

Of course fasting clearly has something to do with having control over our bodies – both individual and corporate – when those bodies seem – in different ways – out of control: ‘taming the wildness of the flesh’ as Hooker puts it. Those of us who give alcohol or chocolate for Lent are surely doing so, at least partly because we feel that alcohol or chocolate somehow exert some undesirable control over us.

And fasting clearly has some connection with one particular aspect of the wildness of the flesh: the sin of gluttony. Fasting seems to have developed – at least in part – as an expression of resistance towards the temptation to over-eat with all that entails. However nowadays when even Governments argue that we need to consume more to get us out of recession the sin of gluttony seems, in many quarters, to have been downgraded to a minor peccadillo or even a positive good.

But to my way of thinking there is an increase in gluttony, or as secular society prefers to frame it – of problems relating to over-consumption. I have in mind here the not just the problem of over consumption of food leading to obesity but also other problems relating to over-consumption of land, water and fossil-fuels – the latter leading in particular to the problem of global warming.

And lest anyone mistake what I am saying – when I say the sin of gluttony is on the increase I do not mean just gluttony as a problem for individuals but as a problem for society as a whole. Obesity is not just - or even mainly - the fault of the individual who is obese but of the food manufacturers and retailers who – with the permission of governments of all parties - sell us foods which make us fat. It is not just our fault that it is easier to use up the oil to get to work rather than work near to where we live.

Fasting as a means of doing something about the modern problems of overconsumption/gluttony does seem to be making a bit of a comeback in our ever more secular society just as the Church abandons it.

Yesterday – in my capacity as a researcher into healthy diets - I went to the launch of the Government’s latest initiative to curb obesity. The Government is challenging us all – both consumers and producers of foods- to make our contribution to cutting calorie intake in the UK by 5 billion a day. This means that we will all on average need to cut calories by about 5% which would be enough to halt the rise in obesity and even to reverse it. And similarly food producers will need to sell us 5% less calories than they currently do. The challenge seems a bit like the national fast called by Queen Victoria in response to the calamity of the Indian Mutiny. OK the crisis is different but the call for restraint in what we eat is similar.

So even the Government commends fasting of a type. Of course I don’t think that they have got it quite right. It is more important, in my view, to cut down on meat and dairy products and even eat more fruit and vegetables rather than cut down on food in general (here I think St Benedict would agree with me). But I do think that they are right to see fasting as not just the responsibility of the individual but of us all collectively. The Church has come to see fasting as basically a matter of individual choice: and this is surely where it has gone wrong.

None of this is to deny the psychological and spiritual benefits of fasting which I seem to have neglected in this sermon. I will try and deal with them on another day. At this precise moment I do not see how eating less calories or less meat and dairy makes us feel closer to God but I am sure it must.

So to conclude. It is time, think, that we within the Church recaptured Biblical notions of fasting. How are we to do that? Well for starters we need to see fasting as cutting down on foods, real physical foods, and not merely as a metaphor for something else – abstinence from something we consider a luxury, for example. Food is not a luxury. And after that I commend to you the old idea of not eating meat on Fridays and giving it up entirely for Lent.

With apologies to Meat Free Mondays and thanks to 'Theology on the Menu' by David Grumett and Rachel Muers (Routledge, 2010)

The Compassionate Life

Luke 15: 1-32, Micah 7: 18-20



Today I want to talk about compassion. This is a sermon in our series ‘The Relevant Jesus’. So I wanted to say something about what Jesus had to say about compassion that was new and different then and is still new and different – yet relevant - today.

I am also keen to talk about compassion because we are reading Karen Armstrong’s relatively new book: ‘Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life’ in a discussion group I attend. And when I say we are reading it I don’t mean just discussing it. Our group – perhaps because it has been going for nearly 30 years now - has got a bit fed up with just discussing things one week and moving onto something else more or less interesting to discuss the next.

Karen Armstrong’s book is not just a book to be read and put down as one would perhaps a novel or a biography of a famous person. It is rather an instruction book: more like a recipe book or a manual for a new piece of electronic equipment. Karen Armstrong is of course being extremely ambitious when she sets out to give us some instructions for a better way of living: a more compassionate life, but I recommend her book to you and this sermon draws from it.

Of course the Bible is also not just supposed to be merely an interesting read. It is – amongst other things - also an instruction book – like Karen Armstrong’s Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life. The gospel is not merely consoling but life-changing.

Now the Bible contains lots of stories about compassion such as the three parables in our Gospel reading. But it also contains some clear instructions. I’d like to touch on just four before I move onto the parables. The four instructions I have in mind: are first the principle of an eye for an eye, secondly the so called ‘Golden Rule’: ’Do unto others as you would have them do to you’, thirdly the second of the two great commandments: ‘Thou shat love thy neighbour as thyself and fourthly ‘Love your enemies’.

We need rules to live by if only because otherwise there would be no such thing as society. Margaret Thatcher was wrong when she said there is no such thing as society. Of course there is – and it needs rules to function. One of these rules which can be found in the book of Exodus is ‘an eye for an eye’ or more precisely: ‘an eye for an eye and no more’.

You’ll remember that it was – in Jesus’ time – legitimate for someone who, say, had had his sheep stolen by a neighbour to go and get a sheep from that neighbour’s flock whether or not he got his own sheep back as well.

Just one sheep mind. Otherwise you could see that the situation would get completely out of hand. In a way an eye for an eye is not a bad rule. Basically it prevents anarchy and we still use the principle today when punishing offenders: there is a graded series of penalties depending on the seriousness of the crime. Even if we now don’t say require a person who has killed a neighbour’s child whilst drunk in charge of a vehicle to hand over their own child to be killed: killing a child is treated more seriously than say killing a neighbour’s sheep – or these days –cat.

Now an eye for an eye and no more while sort of sounding fair doesn’t in the end lead to a stable situation for as Gandhi says ‘An-eye-for-an-eye-for-an-eye-for-an-eye ... ends in making everybody blind.’

Everyone – including atheists - would surely agree with Gandhi. We recognize that an eye for an eye is really no way to deal with crime such as manslaughter through drunken driving, or hacking into the mobile phones of missing teenagers, etc. – crimes punishable by the State. But it doesn’t work even when it comes to us ourselves dealing with less serious offences committed against us If we are burgled and we find out who burgled us we should not go round and burgle our burglar’s house. If a work colleague steals our idea and then gets credit for it with the boss it’s not going to work if we go and steal some of their ideas in retribution.

You’ll remember too that Jesus also criticised the eye for an eye and no more rule by saying – according to Matthew - "You have heard that it was said, 'An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.' But I say to you, Do not resist the one who is evil. But if anyone slaps you on the right cheek, turn to him the other also. And if anyone would sue you and take your tunic, let him have your cloak as well” Would atheists agree with this? Surely on the face of it is unrealistic and also a recipe for disaster. Giving my cloak to someone who has just sued me for my tunic is surely going to encourage others to sue me for car on the basis that I will give them my house

This rather odd instruction on the part of Jesus seems to suggest that Jesus had completely different ideas about justice, fairness and compassion. I’ll come onto those a bit late when I want to explain why I have chosen today’s Gospel reading and it’s relation to our theme of the compassionate life.

The second rule I want to talk about is the so-called Golden Rule, i.e. ’Do unto others as you would have them do to you’. Now this is a rule promulgated by all the major religions. Confucius says in around 500 BC ‘Never do to others what you would not like them to do to you ‘. And Jesus commands his disciples to follow this rule when, for example, in the Sermon on the Mount, according to Matthew, he says ‘So whatever you wish that men would do to you, do so to them, for this is the law and the prophets’.

Now ‘do unto others as you would have them do to you’ is at variance with ‘An eye for an eye’ because obviously exacting retribution in this way isn’t what the other would have you do. Even if I steal someone’s treasured possession I do not want them to come and steal my treasured possession.

Most atheists seem to agree with the Golden Rule. They might even agree that it comes to us via Jesus from the Jewish law and the Old Testament prophets rather than say Confucius. This is because of course it seems to require no belief in God. And on the face of it sounds sort of logical – if everyone behaved towards one another in a empathetic, compassionate way the world would surely be a better place?

However when you start to think about it a bit more, the Golden Rule is not as simple as it sounds, because in order to put it into operation you need to know ‘what you would really and truly wish that men would do to or for you’. And in my experience this sounds simple but is not.

I am sorry if some of you have heard this rather simple illustration before: But when my wife asks me whether I would like some breakfast I know whether I am hungry or not. So far so good. But if I am hungry and she asks me what I would like then things start to get difficult. Should I have just a slice of toast as I am trying to lose weight? Or should I say a bacon sandwich which I know I will enjoy but has lots of calories or should I compromise with some porridge. I just don’t know. And as I get older I become less and less certain of what I want, let alone need. Perhaps we cannot really know what we need and our desires are surely a poor guide to our needs. It is I think only God who really knows what we truly need and therefore the Golden Rule – for all its apparent logic – only makes senses if there is a God who knows what it is we need and therefore what people should do for one another.

This brings me to the third rule: the second of the great commandments: ‘thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself’. This is called a great commandment because Jesus gives, or rather reiterates this commandment, in answer to a lawyer who asks him – according to Matthew – ‘Which is the greatest of the commandments?’ I have of course deliberately detached it from the first of the great commandments: ‘Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind’. And I will argue in a minute that the second doesn’t make any real sense without the first but to concentrate sole on the second for the moment.

It is I think, worth pointing out again and again what we tend to forget about this commandment, that here Jesus commands us not only to love others but to love ourselves as well. We can quite easily miss the end of the sentence. Actually I think loving ourselves is just – if not more difficult - as loving others. It is also worth remembering that Jesus connects the two things: loving others with loving ourselves, suggesting that one without the other is impossible.

Just a word about loving ourselves. This is not just about loving what we like about or find good in ourselves but what we also find shameful. Just as God loves us for all that we are – not just what he finds good but also what he finds bad - so we must love ourselves in a similar fashion. But I have talked about this before, so I won’t go on about it here.

I am not sure what atheists think about this second commandment but note how it is different from the Golden Rule.

Firstly this commandment talks about love rather than doing or not doing to others or what we ourselves desire or don’t desire. Of course love is as much about doing as feeling but it is surely more than just recognising the desires of others through empathy. For a start, as I pointed out earlier, compassion is surely as much about needs as desires. But love is surely also much than acting upon others needs and desires: I’ll come onto that in a minute when I talk about our Gospel reading.

Secondly, the second great commandment is different from the Golden Rule because Jesus connects it with the first great commandment: ‘Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind’. In Luke’s account Jesus roles them together as just one commandment: ‘Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind and with all thy strength and thy neighbour as thyself’: so indicating that all three: love of God, thy neighbour and thyself are all connected and perhaps that each is impossible without the other two. This is of course where atheists would part company with followers of Jesus.

And finally that fourth instruction: ‘Love thy enemies’. Jesus, according to Luke, gives this commandment in his Sermon on the Plain. When discussing an eye for an eye, the Golden Rule, and the great commandments Jesus makes it clear that he is just reiterating what had been said before ‘in the law and by the prophets’ but this commandment ‘love thy enemies’ is new and surely just as incomprehensible today as it was then. I am not going to attempt to say anything more about it.

Instead I want to turn, finally, to today’s Gospel reading. I chose this whole chapter from Luke’s gospel because all three parables – the lost sheep, the lost coin and the lost son are clearly meant to be read together and they all relate to today’s theme: the compassionate life. The third of the parables might seem to be more important because it has more of a plot. It superficially seems more interesting but, as I said earlier, the Bible is not just supposed to be interesting but life-changing. Furthermore whereas Jesus did say what he thought were the most important commandments he never said, ‘Listen to this parable this is more important than those I have just been telling you’.

Reading them all together takes a bit of time but brings out the similarities between them. All three have something that is lost – a sheep, a coin, a son. The central character in all three is also someone who is ‘lost’: the shepherd – because his is a despised occupation, the woman because hers is a despised gender, the father because he is humiliated by the behaviour of his son who in effect insults him grossly by claiming his inheritance before he has died.

But there are two other similarities which bear upon today’s theme. In all three parables the main character either expends a lot of energy and/or takes a considerable risk in looking for what is lost. And in all three there is a party at the end of the story when what has been lost has been found. All three stories are basically – when you look at them closely – frankly implausible. It is as if Jesus is saying: ‘This is the nature of love: it doesn’t make logical sense.’

So in the first parable the shepherd – out of love for the lost sheep - goes to look for it abandoning the other sheep. What shepherd would actually do that? And what shepherd would actually throw a party when he found a single sheep that had been lost.

In the second parable what woman would actually spend a day looking for a single lost coin – unless of course it meant a lot to her – and even then would she really invite all her friends around to celebrate what was merely a rectification of a mistake on her part?

Finally the father – in the third parable - does not need to divide his inheritance between his beloved sons at his younger son’s request and in fact risks a lot by doing so. He, in effect, by losing control over his property and income, becomes dependent on his sons – the younger of which promptly up-sticks and leaves home with the money - leaving him dependent on his elder son (who we know from later events) isn’t exactly generous. Then when the younger son having squandered all his money returns home, the father rushes out to greet him in a completely undignified manner, and they celebrate with the standard party. When I say standard I mean the party we have come to expect in such a parable, rather than a standard party per se: in fact this party is completely over the top with the best calf being slaughtered.

Who is who in these unbelievable stories and who are we the listeners supposed to identify with: the loser or the lost? Are we supposed to identify with the loser: the humble shepherd, the despised woman, the foolish and insulted father? Or are we supposed to think of ourselves as the lost helpless sheep, the inanimate coin which can hardly be held responsible for being lost, or the mean and feckless son, who even when he is has lost everything, and is himself disgraced, plots to wheedle his way back into the household by exploiting his Father’s demonstrable weakness.

Incidentally the lost son’s behaviour on finding himself penniless hardly seems to be a model for repentance: he seems more scheming than genuinely remorseful. And note too that the lost sheep and the lost coin do absolutely nothing to get found, to return to the loser.

But if we are supposed to think of ourselves as lost are we then supposed to imagine that the humble shepherd, the despised woman and the foolish and insulted father represent God? Well perhaps. In these parables Jesus shows that true compassion is so much more than what we might have thought it was or have come to expect: whether this is God’s love for us or our love, for him, for others or even ourselves, perhaps it doesn’t matter who is who in these stories.

Compassion is of course about empathy – as the Golden Rule and the second of the great commandments suggest – but these thee parables show us that compassion is so much more than that. Love is risking all for what is loved including dignity. Love is forgiving all on the part of the loved. Love is holding a party when the lost has been found.

Remarkable but still relevant today.

The parable of the wheat and weeds (2): humbleness of mind

Sermon on Matthew 13: 24-30, Colossians 3.12-17, St Matthew's, Oxford, 6th February 2011

The other day I got caught out by a friend. I was saying how much I liked a swingeinglly critical review of a new book – it doesn’t really matter what the book was. The reviewer had laid into the book and skilfully ‘demolished’ it and I was expounding on how much I agreed with the reviewer. ‘But have you read the book?’ my friend asked me. Err no I hadn’t. I had just assumed what the reviewer said about the book was true. I was basing this assumption on what I knew about the reviewer – who I respect – and the writer of the book – who I don’t actually know much about. Basically I was being uncharitable to the writer – making assumptions about his intentions – which I really had no business doing without, at least, reading the book, and even then…

The first verse of our Epistle reading was: ‘Put on therefore, as the elect of God, holy and beloved, bowels of mercies, kindness, humbleness of mind, meekness, long suffering; forbearing one another and forgiving one another’. And today I would like to say something about ‘humbleness of mind’– something I was patently not demonstrating in the conversation with my friend. I have been thinking about humbleness of mind because I have reached Karen Armstrong’s seventh step of her ‘Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life’ which I mentioned I was reading in my last sermon here. Karen’ Armstrong’s seventh step is ‘Recognise how little we know’ which seems to me a pre-requisite or perhaps a consequence of humbleness of mind.

I find that I presided at the 8 o’clock Communion on the 5th Sunday of Epiphany last year -although I am not entirely sure whether this is the 5th Sunday of Epiphany or the 3rd Sunday before Lent – and that I therefore preached on these two readings we heard just now a year ago. Last time my main message – based on my reading of the parable of the wheat and weeds – was that we shouldn’t try to distinguish and root out the weeds amongst us: ‘lest’ – as the farmer says to his servants ’in gathering the weeds you root up the wheat along with them’. This is because cannot tell very easily what is wheat and what is weeds: they appear to be very similar.

Note too that there is no indication within the parable itself that the two different types of plant are supposed to represent two different types of people. If you read the parable in the context of the parable immediately before it – the parable of the Sower – and the parable immediately after it – the parable of the Mustard Seed – both parables about seeds - you come away not nearly as certain that the wheat represents good people – the saved - and the weeds bad people – the damned - but more like different types of knowledge or wisdom. Wisdom that is nourishing and productive in the case of the seeds sown by the Sower, the mustard seed or the wheat, knowledge that is the converse – distracting and unproductive in the case of the weeds (in both the parable of the Sower and today’s parable).

But back to humbleness of mind: in the Greek ταπεινοφροσύνην.

In the first verse of our Epistle reading Paul links humbleness of mind with bowels of mercies. He uses the expression bowels of mercies - σπλάγχνα οἰκτιρμοῦ - because the Greeks thought that the bowels were the site of the emotions rather the brain (and we of course still associate the heart with our emotions – at least with love – a little higher up our body but still rather anatomically incorrect). ταπεινοφροσύνην is a composite word with ταπεινο meaning something like lowly and φροσύνην meaning mind or the faculty of perceiving and judging. By putting together σπλάγχνα οἰκτιρμοῦ with απεινοφροσύνην Paul is reminding the Colossians that compassion is not just a matter of the emotions it is a matter of the mind. Not only of having loving feelings towards one another but about being humble about one’s own opinions and respectful of others. He urges them to be forbearing one to another – and this forebearance surely encompasses one another’s opinions as much as feelings.

This is why Karen Armstrong includes her seventh step in her ‘Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life’. Only by ‘recognising how little we know’ can we be truly forbearing to one another.

Karen Armstrong argues that the point of recognising that we know so little is 1) ‘to recognise and appreciate the unknown and uknowable’ 2) ‘to become sensitive to over-confident assertions of certainty in ourselves and other people ‘and 3) ‘to make ourselves aware of the numinous mystery of each human being we encounter during the day’.

She shows that many of the greatest philosophers and religious thinkers have come to the idea that we know very little but often think we know a lot. Isn’t it true that as we grow older and wiser we become increasingly uncertain of the strongly held opinions that we formerly held and also increasingly clear that there is little that can be said with any certainty? By saying this I do not what to say that we know nothing but rather that we should err on the side of being uncertain in how much and also what we know.

Karen Armstrong notes how disturbing it is to hear someone talk dogmatically about something you think you know about. This happens to me all the time. I consider myself an expert on food but because eating is something we all do, most people have opinions about food – quite strong opinions sometimes – and will often tell me things about food – which in my view are patently wrong, or which I know already, or which I feel I know more about than them. This can make me unreasonably irritated at times. I complain that if I were an expert on say nuclear particles, or the history of the Second World War, or even car maintenance, this wouldn’t happen to me but I am not so sure. It also makes me think I must do the very same to other people at times: when I expostulate on books I haven’t read, for example.

Socrates insisted that the only reason he could be considered wise was that he knew that he knew nothing at all. Wittgenstein famously finishes his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicushis with the words ‘Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.’ Christians on the other hand have often been held to be quite certain about a lot of things – but yet the unknowability of things is perhaps a bigger theme in the Bible than one might assume.

In particular there is clear idea that God is mysterious. OK the Christian and Jewish tradition is that God has revealed himself and Christians believe that God has, in the particular person of Jesus, provided a clear revelation of himself, but still that revelations is partial and incomplete. The resurrected Christ is not instantly recognisable – even to his closest friends. He cannot be held (or completely grasped) because he has not yet ascended to his father. Paul writes to the Corinthians: ‘For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part, then I shall understand fully.’

Karen Armstrong suggests that – as a sort of spiritual exercise - we should spend time in trying to define exactly what distinguishes us from everybody else, noting that who we are constantly eludes us. We should also note how often we contradict ourselves and act or speak in ways that we are surprised by. In conversing with my atheist friend Ron recently I have begun to realise that I am very uncertain about who exactly I am. And I note that describing to others who I am has become increasingly difficult – even in a sort of way painful. I wonder whether you experience this difficulty on those occasions when, in a gathering, everyone is asked to share their news in turn or worse still (to my mind) to say something about who they are.

If it is so difficult to describe who we think we are I wonder how we think we can possibly talk so knowingly as we often do about other people. And how then can we presume to know whether other people are good or bad, right or wrong, saved or unsaved? And to pursue this line of thought further: if it is so difficult to sum up other people how much harder it is to sum up God, what he/she is or is not.

This recognition that we and others (including God) are essentially mysterious and that we should be humble of mind about this is an essential part of the compassionate life. In our Epistle reading Paul goes on to say ‘And above all put on love, which binds everything together in perfect harmony’. Love without self knowledge is, as I explained, in my last sermon, extremely difficult if not impossible. But love without recognising that one knows so little – not only about oneself but per se – is I think also impossible. I, with Paul, commend to you ταπεινοφροσύνην: humbleness of mind.

Prevention is better than cure: the media coverage of our recent paper in the BMJ

The front page headline for the Daily Mail last Thursday was ‘Heart attack deaths halve in 8 years’. This was a report of our paper published that day in the British Medical Journal (BMJ) and to be found here.

The paper also made the front pages in the Telegraph and Express and into the Guardian, the Independent, the Mirror, the Huffington post and onto the BBC News (radio and television), the Today Programme and even into a newspaper in Winnipeg (according to Kate Smolina – the first author of the paper and until recently my DPhil student (jointly supervised with the co-authors of the paper: Michael Goldacre and Lucy Wright)). Unfortunately the paper doesn’t seem to have made it into the Daily Mash yet as one of our other papers recently did.

Our paper presents several ‘findings’ but the main finding is, in my view, that just over half of the decline in heart attack deaths between 2002 and 201 in England was caused by fewer people having heart attacks and just under half by more people who had heart attacks surviving. We knew already that the number of deaths from heart attack was declining and suspected that this was partly due to fewer people having attacks and partly due to more people surviving attacks but we didn’t know for certain which was more important and now we do.

I therefore find the headline of Jeremy Laurance’s piece in the Independent ‘The curious case of the vanishing killer’ and its opening lines particularly irritating. Laurance says ‘It's a good news story that has [not’ had’ note] medical researchers baffled: in the past decade, deaths from heart disease in the UK have fallen spectacularly, and no one knows why…’. Has he not read our paper? Does he not get the point? But what was the point of our paper as opposed to its main finding? I’ll try and explain that later but meanwhile what did the media reports think was the point.

The reporting of our paper has been extensive but also extremely variable with the report by NHS Choices being one of the best and the report by Sky News  being one of the worst.

Many of the reporters don’t seem to have bothered to try and contact the authors of the paper for their views on the pointy of the paper or even what the paper says but have relied instead on comments from others – notably the British Heart Foundation. The best report I have seen – from NHS Choices – does not rely on comments from others but draws its own conclusions. I don’t entirely agree with all of its conclusions as I do not entirely agree with everything that is said in the paper. (A paper written by multiple authors is always a compromise.)

In particular – as NHS Choices says - ‘It should be noted that although the study shows a fall in heart attacks and also in death rates among heart attack patients, it does not tell us the precise causes of either.’ It’s probably because the paper is so clear in its main finding – and sorts out an important question – that speculation on both fronts has been so rife. For my own speculations see the news story from the University of Oxford University

Some of this speculation is quite frankly ‘wild’. There is some wild speculation in our paper itself such as: ‘The increase in acute myocardial infarction event rate in London between 2007 and 2009 may be a result of the financial crisis that peaked in 2008 and greatly affected the London financial district.’ How on earth did this get into the paper I am now thinking? This rather small, foolish bit of speculation seems to have been reproduced in several articles: as if the financial crisis just affects the ‘London financial district’. See for example the Telegraph.

So what are the real causes of the a) decline in the number of heart attacks b) the death rates among heart attack patients? These are many and varied and could well be displayed in the sort of map that the Government’s Foresight Programme developed to ‘explain’ the causes of obesity and which I have discussed previously on this blog here.

I was tempted in my one (rather ill fated) media appearance in relation to the paper to suggest that improvements in food labelling had played a major role in the decline in the number of heart attacks. Implausible? Equally plausible, in my view, as the suggestion that the financial crisis had important effects on the trends.

There is actually some research into (rather than speculation on) the causes of the decline in deaths from heart attacks in England - admittedly from an earlier time period i.e. from 1981 - approximately the point at which the decline in deaths from heart attacks began - and 2000. This research - from Simon Capewell and his colleagues at Liverpool University - suggests that 58% of the decline can be attributed to ‘population risk factor reductions’ (principally smoking, 48%; blood pressure, 9.5%; and cholesterol, 9.5%). Given that the annual decline in heart disease deaths between 1981 and 2000 was roughly the same as between 2002and 2010 it is not unreasonable to suggest that this research should be used to interpret our results. Did any of the journalists do this? No of course not.  We did mention this paper in our paper but perhaps we should have given it a bigger billing.

Of course interpretation in science is largely value driven rather than evidence driven. There are two interpretations of our results which I like. The first comes from Andy Burham - Labour's Shadow Health Secretary.

Any Burham seems to be suggesting that the introduction of the National Service Framework for Coronary Heart Disease – introduced by the last Labour Government – was a cause of the fall in heart disease deaths. He says ‘In Government, Labour launched a national drive to cut deaths from heart attacks through the national service framework on coronary heart disease. It succeeded because of the strength of the NHS structure - which Mr Cameron is now to break apart.’

Andy Burnham’s contention that the National Service Framework was a major cause of the decline in heart disease deaths is a tad speculative - particularly as the decline started in around 1980 long before the National Service Framework was introduced (in 2000) but nevertheless it is true that our study ‘calls into questions whether the NHS needs to change radically in the way it does things.’ And Andy Burnham’s point the ‘if the NHS isn’t broke why fix it?’ is appropriate – at least with regard to the treatment of heart disease which, it should be noted, is one of the causes of ill-health in England, if not the biggest. Note that both David Cameron and Andrew Lansley have used the argument that England’s high rate of heart disease (compared with say France) justifies their proposed reforms.

The other interpretation I like I haven’t found anywhere yet. This is that our study shows that ‘prevention is better than cure’. Note that more than 50% of the decline in heart attacks deaths is due to the decline in the actual number of attacks and less than 50% of the decline is due to improvements in survival after an attack. I.e. the prevention of attacks is more important than what goes on after the attack. Note too that it is possible that survival after attacks has only a little to do with improvements in the treatment of heart attacks (after they have occurred) and more to do with hearts getting stronger (from preventive activities prior to the attack).

Of course the decline in the number of attacks may be partly due to improvements in the drugs given to people at high risk of an attack (statins for raised blood cholesterol, anti-hypertensives for raised blood pressure, etc) and even improved forms of surgical treatment (such a ‘stents’) for people who have serious heart disease but given these drugs and new forms of surgical treatment came into use only over the last decade or so – long after the decline in deaths began (around 1980) it seems unlikely that they have made a major contribution (see too Simon Capewell’s findings mentioned above) This leaves us with lifestyle change as the mostly likely main cause of the fall in heart attack deaths (again see Simon Capewell’s findings). The decline in smoking is probably the most important lifestyle change but improvements in diet such as the switch from animal fat to vegetable fat which began about the time heart attack deaths began to fall, may also have contributed.

Whether the Health Service (much as I love it) has had anything much to do with these lifestyle changes seems unlikely. The switch from animal fat to vegetable fat was largely due to the increasing availability of cheap vegetable oil (sun-flower, rape seed, etc.) due to agriculture subsidies under the Common Agriculture Policy etc. When did your doctor last talk to you about saturated fat and did you head his/her advice?

Interpretation of the results of papers is, in the end, value driven. My interpretation of the results of our paper (which I am not sure is even entirely shared by my co-authors) is that it means that prevention is better than cure. This interpretation is – like Andy Burnham’s –based, not just on the findings of the paper – but on speculation. Though I do have some empirical support from other research such as that of Simon Capewell and his colleagues. I also have some logic to support my case. It is value driven: because I am a preventionist rather than a treatist.

The problem with the media coverage of our paper – from my (preventionst) point of view was that it got hijacked by too many treatists. OK perhaps I should feel grateful for the amount of coverage our paper got and that at least prevention sometimes got a mention. (The paper does to some extent speak for itself without the need for too much interpretation.)

Several people have congratulated me on the extent of the media coverage for the paper. But I really do not care about coverage. All publicity is not good publicity in my book. I am sorry that the coverage didn’t do more to help Andy Burnham’s cause - hat the NHS isn’t broke so why fix it - or mine that ‘prevention is better than cure’. In saying this I should say that I am not blaming anyone but myself.

'Thou shalt love thyself as thy neighbour?'

Sermon on Romans 12: 1-21, St Matthew's, 14th January 2012 (but changed quite a lot).

Today’s epistle reading – from Paul’s letter to the Romans – is partly about gifts and talents but also partly about how we should behave as Christians. I thought today I would focus on the idea that comes up again and again in Paul’s writings, and is in Jesus’ parables too, that whilst undoubtedly we human beings have weaknesses we also have strengths – gifts in other words - and how we are going to discern what these are.

My focusing on this theme in the epistle reading is partly motivated by reading Karen Armstrong’s Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life. In this book Karen Armstrong challenges us to be more compassionate and sets out a twelve step programme for how to achieve this. After learning about compassion (Step 1) and looking at the world (Step 2) Step 3 is entitled ‘Compassion for yourself.’ Significantly this comes before ‘Compassion for others’ (Step 4).

Of course compassion for ourselves is important and something we regularly forget to practice. In our service just now I reminded you of Jesus’ summary of the law: Firstly ‘The Lord our God is one Lord and thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all they mind and with all thy strength’ and Secondly ‘Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself’. Now we all tend, to forget the second half of this Second Commandment. We are not only to love others but we are to love ourselves.

Now I think compassion for ourselves requires looking for and finding the good in ourselves rather than just the bad. In fact it would seem somehow perverse to love what we see as bad in ourselves – although I am not sure that it is always easy to tell what is good and what is bad and often the two are inextricably mixed. If we are courageous we may be reckless, if we are honest we are may be rude, etc. etc. But let’s leave that for a moment

Karen Armstrong tells a story about a friend – the Rabbi Albert Friedlander – who had grown up in Nazi Germany and as a child was bewildered and distressed by the vicious anti-Jewish propaganda that he heard from every quarter. One night when he was about eight years old he couldn’t sleep and so made a list of all his good qualities. He told himself firmly that he was not what the Nazis said, that he had talents and special gifts of heart and mind which he enumerated to himself one by one. Finally he vowed that if he survived he would use those qualities to build a better world. Karen Armstrong notes that this was an extraordinary insight for a child of eight in such circumstances, but she says that Albert Friedlander – in later life – was one of the kindest people she had ever met.

The commandment that thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself is related to what is sometimes known as the Golden Rule i.e. ’Do unto others as you would have them do unto you’. Jesus commands his disciples to follow this rule when, for example, in the Sermon on the Mount, he says ‘So whatever you wish that men would do to you, do so to them, for this is the law and the prophets (Matthew 7:12).

Now the Golden Rule also presumes self-knowledge – you need to know what you wish men would do to you to be able to do the same for them. It requires us to know ourselves. And in particular we need to know what we need. Some of us find this really rather difficult. When my wife asks me whether I would like some breakfast I know whether I am hungry or not. So far so good. But if I am hungry and she asks me what I would like then things start to get difficult.

Should I have just a slice of toast as I am trying to lose weight? Or should I say a bacon sandwich which I know I will enjoy but has lots of calories or should I compromise with some porridge. I just don’t know. But what I do know is that I like my wife offering to make breakfast for me – even if I don’t actually need any breakfast. It is a fairly safe bet that she would like it if I were offer to make breakfast for her. In part I know this because I know myself.

We do know our basic needs - for food for love – and because we know this we can respond to one another’s needs. We can love our neighbours as ourselves. Love seems to me – at heart – about responding to one another’s needs. Paul says as much when he talks in this passage about how members of the Roman church should behave towards one another e.g. verse 10 suggests that they ‘should outdo one another in showing honor’. This is because Paul knows that in Roman society ‘honor’ is a big deal. Romans got stressed if they felt that people were dishonouring them or their family. Their need for honor was great. To respond to this need was to ‘love one another with brotherly affection.’

But beyond our general needs we may not know our specific needs. It is – I admit – conceivable that someone else – someone who really knows and loves me – my wife perhaps – might know – better than I know myself – what I should have for breakfast. We do not know our specific needs because we are not honest with ourselves about our strengths and weaknesses.

Paul tells the Roman Christians ‘I bid everyone one of you not think of himself more highly than he ought to think, but to think with sober judgement, each according to the measure of faith which God has assigned him.’ But my problem is not I think – thinking more highly of myself than I ought – though perhaps I am a bit guilty of that – but of thinking of myself with sober judgement and coming to a conclusion about who I am. I do not think I could –very easily - do what Albert Friedlander did as a child: enumerate my talents and gifts – my strengths in other words.

The flip side of recognising one’s strengths is to recognise one’s weaknesses. I certainly cannot easily enumerate my weaknesses. This is even harder than enumerating my strengths. But I do think the attempt is worthwhile. We do this in general terms in most of our acts of worship and we will shortly say a prayer of confession today. But although it is relatively easy I think to acknowledge that, we – in general - commit ‘manifold sins and wickednesses…by thought, word and deed’ it is much harder to admit what these are in detail even to ourselves and certainly to others.

But confessing our sins and weaknesses is not the subject of this sermon: it is identifying our strengths. This is surely the part of ourselves which we present to God at the end of our service, in the prayer of oblation, when we offer ‘ourselves, our sours and bodies, to be a reasonable, holy and lively sacrifice’. After all we can hardly offer our manifold sins and wickednesses to be such a sacrifice can we?

Note that Paul starts this section of his letter on gifts and Christian living with the words ‘I beseech you therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, that ye present you bodies a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable unto God, which is your reasonable service’. The words are obviously the origin of the prayer.

So how are we to identify our strengths? I think that what Paul suggests rather helpfully here in Romans is that we can begin to identify our gifts in the context of our relationships with others. Here he talks about this context as the ‘body of Christ’.

He’s just been talking about presenting our individual bodies as a living sacrifice. Here is another sort of body – a corporate rather than an individual body - and it is only within this body – the body of Christ -that presenting our individual body makes sense. He urges his readers ‘Having gifts that differ according to the grace given to us let us use them’ –try them out – in the context of - and for the benefit of - that corporate body to which we belong.

So if we are a prophet we must prophecy, if we are good at serving people we must serve, if we are a teacher we must teach, if we are a car mechanic we must mend cars, only then will the body that we are all part of function properly. Note too that Paul talks about gifts –here at least- as mainly things we do rather than things we are but I think we can see gifts as both character traits and skills.

What is this body of Christ of which we are members and hence ‘individually members one of another’? Those who heard Paul’s letter for the first time would have been wrong to assume that it meant just their little church. It meant at least all the Christians in Roman and beyond.

It seems to me significant that Paul – in this passage – moves seamlessly on from his exhortations to use our gifts to further exhortations about how we are to use these gifts i.e. in a loving fashion. It is no good being good at giving aid to others if we don’t do this with zeal and it’s no good if we have a talent for mercy but aren’t cheerful about it.

This discernment – and more importantly - use of our gifts are primarily acts of love: a response to others needs. Do we first need to love ourselves before we can love one another, as the order of Karen Armstrong’s Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Live would seem to suggest and indeed the commandment to ‘Love our neighbours as ourselves’ implies? Perhaps not: if discernment of our gifts is in the using of them in the service of others.

So loving ourselves is hard. Even knowing ourselves, what we truly need and who we are, including our good qualities, is difficult. Perhaps self-knowledge is not absolutely essential for if we are to love ourselves. We are commanded to love ourselves but only in the context of loving others and not for its own sake.