Vigeon Post

                      WE LOOK FOR A CITY

We sit on historic ground. Before the fens were drained this was more an Isle of Ely than it is now. And even now there is something islandish about the city - it is a cliché to describe the cathedral as appearing to sail over the horizon like a galleon.  When I looked for up to date information on my old hunting grounds I found that a few years ago excavations have been made to retrieve  what was here in Saxon times before the Normans planted the Cathedral like a fortress to defy the Saxon peasantry and counter the underground resistance movement of the legendary Hereward the Wake.  And that is what gave me the idea for this course of addresses.
So as we are planted in a city [however tiny] I thought we might meditate this week about the place of the City in the Christian faith. We may cheat a little because city in the Bible does not quite mean what we mean by the term. In my youth  a city was a town that had a Cathedral. So Ely is a cathedral but Leeds was not. But the bible city  is a generic term and usually  means an inhabited place. .
Again it is another cliché that the Bible story begins in a  garden and ends in a city. Adam and Eve are exiled from paradise but at the end we have John's great vision of the City of God.
I interpret a daily meditation as simply giving you something to think about. 
Where to begin ? I think with that impressive chapter 11 of the Letter to Hebrew Christians. "By an act of faith Abraham said yes to God's call to travel; to an unknown place that could become his home. When he left he had no idea where he was going. By an act of faith he lived in the promised land, lived as a stranger camping in faith. People of faith who live this way make it clear that they are looking for their true home. If they were homesick for the old country they could have gone back. But they were after a far better city than that - a heavenly city"
Perhaps that is a keynote text which defines you and I as members of a pilgrim people. People who live by faith not by sight. If we could see where we are going we would not need faith; but as our author tells us faith is being certain of what we cannot see. 
To be a Christian is to acknowledge that we are travellers who believe the journey through life is worth pursuing. We are not content to laze away our time here, not content to just please ourselves. Mind you in our country today for a large portion of us perhaps the need for faith is not felt. If you have a good job and a loving partner and nice children at a good school in a pleasant area then who needs all that God stuff. For  many folk today is as near to heaven on earth as you need. Until of course when something goes wrong - and then you feel hard done by - and God tends to get the blame.
 For our part, those of us who cling onto what is called these days in a derogatory sense 'organised religion' tend to make a poor fist of this pilgrim thing.  Organised religion is largely the ennshrinement of a tradition. And it is so easy for us to value that part of the tradition which takes our eyes and our hearts back to former times, safer times, more comfortable times. The longing for security is a very strong instinct.
The saints of God down the ages by and large encourage us to travel light. If you watch a Hollywood disaster movie or watch newsreel footage of  some contemporary human crisis you realise how initially people start their journey to safety by taking as much of their valuables as they can. But as the miles go by so they leave more and more by the wayside until  they simply cling to life itself.
Our faith reminds us that when we draw our last breath our earthly securities will be of no consequence.
So we are called to the pilgrimage of faith believing that the journey is worth the effort; that there is a purpose in it all though none of us here and now can get more than a very fleeting glimpse of what that end might be. But the end is what we call the City of God.
Jesus knew where he was going. In the Fourth Gospel he calls it 'going to his Father'. Thomas said to him, you remember. "Lord we do not know where you are going so how can we know the way"  And Jesus replies "I am the way". What better description of the Christian life than to think of it as a journey with Jesus as our companion and leader
We may be reminded of some oft quoted words by TS Eliot to whom I wilt return during the week
"We shall not cease from explorations
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
Quick now -  here - now - always
A condition of complete simplicity costing us no less than everything.
Perhaps this all seems rather academic from where you and I are
But wait a moment. Every time you take out your easel and palette you are following Abraham. You are venturing out on an artistic journey .  The creative experience of all artists is that you do not know when you start where you will end up.
When I start to write a poem I think I know what I want to write about; but invariably the act of creation takes me in a direction I had not imagined.  Techniques and visions interact in strange ways. Our artistic endeavours can become a parable for our living. The venture is everything  Staying true to the venture and the vision is even more everything.
Just before my ordination at the age of 26 I made my confession The wise priest who listened my stumbling and embarrassed statement of my sins gave me this counsel.
"The time will come when you will be tempted to stop being a priest and settle for being a parson. Sooner or later the temptation will come."
 I have lived with that one to one sermon for 53 years and it was wise stuff. The temptation is to settle for going through the motions; for acting the part of a stage vicar. But for anyone to give up the venture of faith is to die. Life and Death in the scriptures are more than biological words applied to human animals. You can be a breathing being but if you have stopped the venture you are already dead. While I am with you I will enter my 80th year - something I never imagined as a young man when 60 seemed to be very old.  I am so grateful that I am given the opportunity to keep alive and to serve my Lord.
Read Teillard de Chardin
Above all trust in the slow work of God. We are quite naturally impatient in everything to reach the end without delay.
We would like to skip the intermediate stages; we are impatient of being on the way to something unknown, something new. And yet it is the law of all progress that it is made by passing through some stage of instability and that it may take a very long time.
And so I think it is with you, your ideas mature gradually - let them grow. Let them shape themselves without undue haste. Do not try to force them on as though you could be today what time will make you tomorrow. Only God could say what this new spiritt gradually forming within you will be. Give our Lord the benefit of believing that His hand is leading you, and accept the anxiety of feeling yourself in suspense and incomplete

Many years ago now, I wrote the following poem about the importance of the city in Christian thought. Do not imagine that I dislike gardens but I wanted to redress the balance that religion is best experienced when we are looking at nature. Christianity has always been a city centred religion; and it came to the countryside later. What is noteworthy is that all the literature of the New Testament is addressed to city dwellers and classical civilisation.


THE  GARDEN  AND THE CITY   

When the English explain their religion,
they'll proclaim for all that they're worth
That "You're nearer Gods heart in a garden
than anywhere else on earth"
Well you may well be nearer to nature
as the sun shines on flower and tree;
but Adam ate apples in Eden
and Christ wept in Gethsemane.

You can flee from the world in a garden
and believe you are finding God's peace;
but the peace of the world was earned on a cross
surrounded by mockers and police.
Oh ! it's good to sit down in the evening
and let beauty refresh tired eyes
 but it's down in the city the world gets things done,
and outside its wall a Man dies.

God's heart does not rest in the garden;
God's heart can never relax,
till the souls of the creatures he loves most of all
have the Devil's weight freed from their backs.
For God made the flowers, but also the weeds
and God made the centipede too;
and he loves them, (and also the wasps and the worms)
but he  loves, above all, such as you.


So don't look for God in a haven of scent
where the roses and wallflowers bloom;
but look in the kitchen and look in the pub
and look in the grave and the womb
What right have I to a garden
to be peaceful alone with my God
when millions know nothing but concrete
and have to get on with the job?

And  when Christians want to draw nearer
to the heart of the God they adore,
they are called from their gardens to kneel side by side
rubbing shoulders with rich and with poor.
They don't look for peace on their own some
but they go to the foot of the Cross;
and they share in the loaf - 
and they drink from the Cup
and the lack of a garden's no loss.



BABYLON THE CITY OF TECHNOLOGY

And so this morning we turn inevitably to Iraq.  A few miles outside Baghdad are the archaeological remains of that great city of the ancient world which is Babylon -  which we first come across in the bible as Babel. The name Babel so the books tell us would mean the 'Gate to God'.  The bible gives us the Hebrew take on the word - it means a Babble = confusion of language.
In Burma you have pagodas. In Europe you have Cathedrals; in Babylon you had ziggurats - tall circular towers with a pathway up to the top where there was an altar to their God Marduk. You may be aware of the Breughel picture of the tower of Babel.
The taller the tower the nearer heaven you got. At least that was apparently the theory. In Genesis the story comes not long after Noah's flood.
"Come, say the folk, let us build ourselves a city and a tower with its top in the heavens and let us make a name for ourselves".
 In religious language this means the process of trying to get to Heaven by your own efforts.
Babel stands for the city built without reference to God. The impression is that while their intentions sounded good, to get up to God's level, they did not bother to bring God in at the planning stage. The tower was to be  the city's status symbol. There is something in the human heart that longs for recognition. To go down in history and make a mark. "Let us make a name for ourselves" say the builders.
At its most twisted that longing ends up in the massacre at Virginia Tech.  The classic  cases was the man who felt he was unappreciated in his home city of Ephesus so he torched the great temple of Aphrodite  one of the seven wonders of the world and the epitome of all that Greek religion stood for. He was a nobody but he  wanted to get into the history books and he succeeded. Less serious  but still rather obvious are the memorials in our ancient churches and cathedrals   In the middle ages you achieved a sort of immortality by endowing a chantry chapel and provided a priest to say daily mass for the repose of your soul for always. When Requiems went out of fashion at the reformation you built large ornate tombs  to guarantee long term fame. Only in  my lifetime has the church put a stop to the motto AMDG on windows,statues and other memorials. Around 1710 the then Bishop of Carlisle visited a village in west Cumberland where there was a parish school. He noted that on the lintel of the front door was a large stone inscribed with the words ex dono Robert Vaux de Brownrigg. The bishop commented  "From this you would gather that the same Robert Vaux of |Brownrigg had perhaps built the school or at least endowed it generously. On further enquiry it transpires that the said gentleman merely donated the stone."
Babel stands as the epitome of all folies de grandeur. It is an icon of a technology based on human cleverness. My 2 1/'2 year old granddaughter can already load a video cassette and very nearly work my dvd player. Yet as a boy in a professional family in the thirties we did not even aspire to a car. Babel today progresses apace.  Twenty years ago, popular computing was in its infancy; no laptops, no mobile phones, no DVDs, no satellite broadcasting. And there is this thing called texting which I still find puzzlinig but which everyone else knows about.
This is not to reject technology. For those of us who have even a very modest standard of living, to exist in today's western society is to be more comfortable than it ever has been. We may grumble at the NHS performance but many of us would not be here today without the benefits of modern medicine. I would not - as I had to have a heart bypass in 1993 - without it my heart would have given up long ago. For those in our society who are in what they used to call the submerged tenth, life is increasingly nasty brutish and short and for the most part God is not part of the equation.  Even with a church going prime minister Downing still famously comments "We don't do God here".
Perhaps one of the things which CARM retreats hope to do is to redress the balance - to bring human activity and the divine presence into some kind of harmony. But in terms of reconciliation between  Creation and the Creator it is obviously less than a drop in the ocean.
One of the visions of the New Testament is that of the healing of the fragmented human race. When at Pentecost we hear the account of that explosion of spiritual power the scripture is telling us that the City of Babel was being unravelled.
"We do all hear  in our own language the wonderful works of God".
Men of any race under the sun could understand one another. Paul's letters are full of references to the breaking down of barriers; barriers of race and culture and gender..  But it is a vision that has tended to be another of those fleeting glimpses which are asking too much of the human heart. Indeed today religion  stands in popular opinion as something divisive. Faiths and churches of all kinds all tend to some extent to build their own towers. The unspoken objective is to have a better religion than the other contenders.. I often remark that it is uncomfortable for me in my calling because from the beginning of the Bible to the end the one class of people who get the worst press are the professional clergy.
A study of the gospels reveals to us that Jesus did not have much time for those who knew better than God what God wants. He is reported to have said to the Pharisees  If you were blind you would have not sin; but now you say WE SEE  therefore your sin remains."
It was God people who were responsible for the Cross of Jesus. This is not to be anti-Semitic - it is to point out that religion can get in the way of God - and I believe that is one of the deep insights of Christianity to which not enough attention is paid. I was not for nothing that the first Christians were called atheists because they said that religion got the god thing wrong.
One of the great  virtues of art of all disciplines is that to embark on the creative journey is to be humbled. The artist is to be the servant of his/her art. When the artist starts saying "Come let me make a name for  myself" things start to go askew. We are not talking here about false modesty. Humility is the same word as humus - the stuff that we dig in our gardens - it means being down to earth about ourselves; there is legitimate satisfaction in a job of work well done.Perhaps this morning when you go to collect your equipment you might just pause for a moment before you set out. Be still and remind yourself that God already knows where you are going to set up your easel. And he is there waiting for you and eager to work with you as the colour splashes on.

 SAMARIA  - THE UNJUST SOCIETY CITY

One of my favourite characters in the Old Testament is the prophet Amos. Not because I  particularly like him but because I know him. 35 years ago I was vicar of a small country parish which gave me a toehold of a living while I sailed round Lancashire visiting and sometimes inspecting our 200 plus Church Schools. Like many of the church's multiple jobs it was never really satisfactory and the work load drove me into what these days they call ministry burnout.
One of my sidesmen was Bob. He ran a small family mixed farm a few miles from the village in the low fell country of Lancashire. He had a  wife and three teenage children who all sang in the choir. Bob was a faithful worshipper - which is not as normal as some imagine of the country community. From his farm he could look down onto the Lancashire plain and in the distance see the tower blocks and chimneys of industrial Preston. Not a great city by national or world standards. But if you had been born and bred in a community of a few hundred folk then Preston was the great sinful city  not dissimilar to the great city of Samaria.
And it grieved Bob; the city was to him a dangerous and a wicked place and he was grateful that he was secure and safe in his rural retreat far away from the hustle of city life, tending his flock of sheep, milking his pedigree Friesians; sowing his field of oats. I do not mean to sound critical ; far from it really because Bob's sense of a sinful city was stronger than mine. After all I had grown up in a city myself and felt at home there. When Bob visited Preston - perhaps on farm business he did not like what he saw. When Amos visited Samaria it was the same. But more so. The contrast between the simple honest life of the countryman and the sophisticated and luxurious goings on in the city was too much for him.
Amos could be very rude. He called the wives of the prosperous merchant class  the 'cows of Bashan'. He was politically very incorrect.

You women who oppress the poor and crush the needy
Who say to your husbands pour me another drink
You turn justice into bitterness
You hate those who reprove you in court
And despise him who tells the truth.
I hate I despise your religious festivals
I cannot stand your assemblies [says the Lord.
Away with the noise of your songs; I will not listen  to your harp music
But let justice roll on like a river
And righteousness like a never failing stream
Those who still think OT God bad NT God good must forget that  700 years before Christ the first great prophets were announcing that God's city must be a just city. The Kingdom of God is a kingdom where God and People live together in that famous phrase 'covenant relationship' - the city of God is a city of mutual support and practical friendship. In the words of St Paul the Christian citizen is responsible for himself but at the same time he shares the burdens of those who find things too heavy to bear. . All the religion in the world is meaningless if the poor get pushed around by the wealthy and where the stranger in the city - the immigrant - is not made welcome; where business men chafe at  the bit because the law says they cannot open their shops on the Sabbath.
All this and chapter and chapter upon more- read some yourself in a modern translation. Amos ends up shouting his message in the equivalent of Westminster Abbey and is told by the Dean to go away and keep quiet because he is speaking in the royal chapel. He protests: I am no prophet i.e. I am not a professional clergyman. I look after my sheep and farm my fig trees. But I am only saying what the lord told me to tell you.
These folk who got the rough end of a farmer's tongue - were they really so awful ? I suspect most of them were like you and me; content to reap the fruits of prosperity and keep out of the way of the more ugly side of things. I find it difficult to get too upset about recycling my waste or global warming. After all what difference will it really make  to leave my TV on standby overnight when the city office blocks burn brightly with a thousand bulbs all night.
I do not excuse myself; I merely point out that we tend to like to get through our daily living as conveniently as we can and we don't relish those who stir things up
And is there then a moral dimension to creative art ?   That is a question too big to begin to answer here. But perhaps we need only remember how when artists in paint or photograph capture certain subjects then these speak louder than any words about the pain of our world or indeed the pain in the heart of God.  The most effective correspondents are perhaps the gifted photographers who can wound our hearts with a glimpse.  An 18th century bishop once wrote a prayer which said something like  "Lord when I am fussing about pretended wrongs and quibbling over silly details help me to remember how things are for so many humble folk in the real world outside my study."
I remember how when we were motoring on holiday in Alsace Sally and I found ourselves outside the Museum of Colmar not knowing what was inside it. Imagine our surprise to find ourselves viewing the famous Isenheim altarpiece which above all conveys the overwhelming agony of the cross.  Painted as perhaps you know as a commission for a hospital for those dying of a painful disease so that they might know that Christ suffered alongside them.
Prophecy is always ambivalent. Its validity  is proved or disproved by the eventual turn of events. Samaria for all its prosperity was indeed carried away to captivity and the ten tribes disappear from history..  But at the time  it is difficult to sort out the true from the false. None of us like being given good advice. There is a stubborn streak in human nature that claims the right to go to hell in its own way. My father in law was always giving us advice and the phrase 'if I were you' was one we resented over many years. The reason we resented it was the fact that his advice was usually RIGHT !  And prophets are those who say to society "If I were you". How for years died I jib at giving up smoking cigarettes  because smoking was my business. It made me realise how non believers jib at attempts to convert them to the faith.
The big voices in the prophecy business ion our time no doubt are the green lobby and allied to that the climate change lobby. They are the face of what you can call scientific morality.   Perhaps more akin to Amos is the Bob Geldof kind of third world lobby. Like Amos he is not a religious professional - but one who knows intuitively that this is an unjust world   a strange world in a sense where you and I can spend a quiet week painting and praying when innocents in many corners of the globe are at the mercy of violence, starvation and injustice.
One of the great 20th century prophetic voices from the Christian camp was Rheinhold Niebuhr; and one of his great themes was that it was not use praying for peace without first of all praying for justice.   We live in a city like Samaria and this city is not the City of god.
In the following poem I meditated one Christmas on a hodigita icon of the mother and child - one of those ikons where the Christ Child looks almost alarmingly adult and stares at you with a challenge. I pcitured the child who was to be the sacrifical victim as he came to Jerusalem and Belfast and London and Yugoslavia and the abortion clinic and the AIDS hospital and last of all the church.

THE ANNO DOMINI CAROL
inspired by a Greek Ikon of Mother and her stern Child c 1500 AD
"The Son of Man shall come at an hour when you do not expect him." Luke XII.39.

In the year of your Lord I came to you
I came as a babe to make all things new;
And I gazed hard at you from my mothers knee,
with the eyes and the heart of eternity.

In the year of your Lord I came to you
I came to the city where you were a Jew.
And I offered you Peace if only you would -
But you gave me Hell with nails and wood.


In the year of your Lord I came to you,
You were dressed in your Green or Orange hue;
As your Armalite gunned me down in my lorry
You made a mistake and you said "We're sorry."

In the year of your Lord I came to you
I came to the West End shopping queue;
And you threw me a coin and you went indoors
And cursed the Sunday trading laws.

In the year of your Lord I came to you
Where you hate as Serbs and Croats do;
When the shell went off in my hospital ward
You said it was macho to live by the sword.

In the year of your Lord I came to you
 H I V positive, my dread come true;
And you put on your mask and your surgical glove
And you cut me off from all that I love.

In the year of your Lord I came into you
And your womb was alive and your heart was blue;
"But this is MY body" - you said - "and so
I've no room for You and you'll have to go."

In the year of your Lord I came to you
To serve as God's priest, and His woman true;
But you turned me away and told me to wait
Till they'd made up their minds at St. Peter's Gate.

On Christmas Eve I came to you
As you knelt in your church in your comfortable pew;
And I said "Here I am" and you said "Who are you ?"
And I said "I'm the Christ that you never knew"


BETHLEHEM THE CITY OF DAVID

Thirty years ago or more Sally and I made the mandatory visit to the Holy Land
I had never  had a strong yen to make the pilgrimage because I believed Easter  separates us from the world of museums and monuments. He is not here he has risen and has gone before you into Galilee - says the angel at the tomb. And indeed he has gone before you and me to Ely - for Galilee is always the workaday contemporary world anyone lives in.  But in fact I enjoyed it more than I had imagined I would. The trip had one moment which pandered to my warped sense of humour. We had travelled through the mountainous wilderness where Jesus fasted for that forty days and forty nights. We arrived at Jericho in time for lunch. I could scarcely credit the  sign outside our hospitable restaurant -  The mount of Temptation self service restaurant. 
1I have  with me this morning the little Christmas crib which we purchased in Bethlehem. For perhaps one of the top ten verses we know is "To you is born this day in the City of David a Saviour who is Christ the lord". We should listen more carefully to what scripture tells us - not only Matthew and Luke in their infancy narratives but also Paul at the beginning of his great letter to the Roman Christians. They all point out that Jesus was not the humble illiterate peasant of romantic Christian legend - he grew up as a member of the household of Joseph and Mary and Joseph is of the House of David.  Carpenter or not  Jesus was brought up against an aristocratic background. 
Historians seem a b it cagey about Luke's Poll Tax registration; there is not apparently much evidence for it outside Luke's gospel; but what the narrative tells us is that Joseph went back to his roots, to Bethlehem the city of Jesse and his numerous sons  of which the youngest,David was chosen by Samuel to be the chosen leader of Israel in what always sounds a rather Cinderella kind of story.  So the roots are in the royal house of David and if you go further back in the genealogies provided by Matthew and Luke you find even stranger things about the family. Because David's grandfather was Obed and Obed's mother was Ruth the moabitess - a Palestinian no less as we might say ! Very strange. Stranger still when you remember Joseph was descended from David via Solomon the original son of David and Solomon was the son of Bathsheba and was conceived in an adulterous relationship that turned very nasty..
They say that one of the little problems that arises from the modern hobby of finding your ancestors is that sooner or later you are bound to find some minor or even major scandal. Some ancestor born as they say on the wrong side of the blanket. In Joseph's very distant ancestry was Perez  who was the son of Tamar by an incestuous coupling with her father in law. Again it is very odd and not what you would expect from a holy family. When we look for the City of David then we are looking for roots - for basics. And we do not see an idealised history.
I don't know about you but I retain a great affection for the city of my birth; where I went to school; where I had the fortunate inheritance of a stable home and loving and intelligent and musical parents. The city where I had my first girl friends; the City where I was ordained into the sacred ministry.
Those links have all but disappeared as my parents were themselves migrants  - one from London and the other from mid Wales and we have no family there. My only emotional link now is with the continuing dramatic fortunes of Carlisle united Football Club.
It is good to be aware not only of your genealogy but of your spiritual roots. A very good spiritual exercise is to pray for the guidance of the Holy Spirit and then write down your spiritual journey from childhood onwards - or perhaps even before birth. My own history is shaped in that both parents hovered on the seismic fault line between church and chapel, Methodist/Anglican. It doesn't matter these days but it did then.. Moreover both mum and dad suffered strong personal traumas in their lives. My  paternal grandmother died when my father was a baby and he grew up rather like a male Cinderella with three stepsisters and a stepmother who did not want him on board. My mother was the eldest girl of a family of seven and in 1917 she buried first her mother who had been a long term invalid and then in quite quick succession received the customary dreaded telegrams telling her that her two soldier brothers and her sailor brother had all been killed in action.
To recall and jot down your perception as to where you came from and how you find yourself today is a healthy exercise and can lead to the refreshing experience of gratitude  to God for leading you on the journey often[perhaps always] without you knowing what was going on at the time.  If you  can spare time from your painting perhaps you might like to try that as a spiritual exercise.
But of course there is another sense in which we seek the City of David. It is enshrined in the observing of our Christmas festival. It has been a long standing cliché that in the dark night of Christmas Eve we go like the shepherds even unto Bethlehem - and the stable is of course our local church and there we come to worship the Christ Child.  When there is a new baby in any family what everyone wants to do is to hold it . Even comparative strangers may ask "May I pick him up ? I would love to hold him".  And though it might be call an act of fantasising I like to tell people that when they hold out their hands to receive the holy bread it is as if the Christ Child is being given to them to hold.  Holding a baby is the symbol of hope; the marvel of a child in its infancy is that there we have a glimpse of what might be but which experience indicates  is that the innocence will not last. But there is a sense in which the Christ Child is the one who never lost his innocence. Not that he was preserved from reality. But it was the way he was not corrupted by the experience of living in the city of men that made him the perfect sacrifice for our sin. One of the classic definitions of Jesus is that he is the victim undefiled.
But in the fourth gospel we are told that Jesus 'knew what was in man' - he was never under any illusion that the city of God could be established easily or cheaply . We may rightly feel that the essence of our Christian discipleship is that we place our lives into his hands, and subject ourselves to his guiding spirit. But there is also the strange sense in which [as I indicated]  the Christ puts himself into our hands. This happens symbolically every time we receive the sacrament.. It is an overwhelming thought. There is an old story for a sermon which is perhaps now rather dated but is worth reminding ourselves. When at his ascension Jesus returned to heaven he was welcomed at the gates by a deputation of archangels; and Gabriel welcomed him home after his victory over sin the world and the devil. "Lord" he enquired" after all you have gone through what arrangements have you made for your work to continue ?"  "Oh " said Jesus " I have left it in the hands of twelve men". Somewhat aghast Gabriel replied "After all you have suffered you are leaving everything in the hands of some weak willed rather stupid and inefficient humans ?" "O yes " replied Jesus "you see I trust them."
Each act of Communion is a call to return to our primal innocence and a call to remember the  trust that has been put in our hands. A Christian who become hardened and cynical is scarcely a Christian - though it must be confessed that in some church circles gossip and scepticism are not unknown. A dear college friend of mine whose pilgrimage led him to Rome and to becoming a Benedictine monk once said to me "Owen if we really remembered what holy Communion is all about then we would never return from the altar to our place without a tear in our eyes. I think he was right. It is easy to become inured to the repetitious of so much religious observances. 
For me the miracle of the Eucharist is simply the wonder that our Dear Lord shares his life with me. He who announced the advent of God's kingdom trusts me to continue his kingdom work through my daily life and the life of my faith community.
As we used to say in Sunday school in imitation of St Teresa of Avila
Christ has no other hands but our hands to do his work today
 Christ has no other feet than our feet to lead men in his way
Christ has no other lips but our lips to tell men why he died
Christ has not other heart but our hearts to win men to his side.

"MAGNIFICAT NOW"
for the year of the Church Urban Fund
    
O Child of mine, no room for you
In pleasant suburb, semi- detached
Only for you in damp bed-sit
or high rise flat will you be hatched.

O Child of mine, the world awaits
your first but not your last great cry;
For you are coming to a world
where every breath becomes a sigh.

A world where anger always lurks,
And bitter cynicism breeds;
A world of violence and crime
where innocence for ever bleeds.

Where children seek a taste of heaven
by fixing joints and sniffing crack;
and all too soon discover hell
has got them twisting on its rack.

The well-intentioned come and go;
the churches and the law report;
Urban priority has come -
attracting government support.

 When will they see that cash alone
is not the answer that will solve
the dereliction of our hearts
nor consequence of sin absolve.

O Child of mine the angel said
you would redeem us in your pity,
and bring the Kingdom in and found
your new born joyful holy city.



And you will fight to bring God's Peace
and bring God's righteous justice too;
And reconcile the rich and poor
to build our tattered world anew.
   
And you will strive and you will die -
betrayed alike by friend and foe;
for men prefer the darkness still
and hug and cling to status quo.

And you will pay the price of sin -
the debt it never fails to claim,
and know the cost of breaking down
the barriers of hate and shame.

But when your soul is crucified
and people  think at last you're dead;
O Child of mine you must arise
and free us from our fear and dread.

So sing my heart and praise my God !
for you're incarnate here on earth !
O Child of mine , O God of mine -
rejoice in your approaching birth




JERUSALEM THE TREACHEROUS CITY.
We still by custom call Jerusalem the Holy City. It is still the centre of any pilgrimage to the Holy Land. A Rabbi may indeed tell you how tradition remembers that Jerusalem at its peak was so much a Holy City that it even smelt holy - it was a sort of gingerbread city redolent of the most exotic spices. That at any rate is what a Rabbi told me as he took a party of my congregation around our local synagogue. But perhaps  our Christian attitude to the Holy City is a somewhat sentimental one. It is not something you  encounter in the New Testament.There it is often the Unholy City - the City that betrayed its Messiah, its rightful King. The City which Jesus himself on more than one occasion pointed out was the city that had always rejected the prophets who spoke to them in the name of God.
"O Jerusalem - you who kill the prophets and stone those sent to you - how often I have longed to gather your children together like a hen gathering her chicks under her wings - but you were not willing. You did not want to". Look your house is left to your desolate [Matt 22.27]
"Jerusalem if only you had known the things that belong to your peace - but now it is hid from your eyes. Luke 19 21"
We remember how the gospel tells us how the country boys from Galilee were so impressed with the magnificent temple of Herod and how Jesus tells them that it would not be long till it was an utter ruin and not one stone would be left upon another.
Commentators who know a bit  tell us that in earliest Christian days  of the first Century Jerusalem was the unholy city. And when the might of the Roman legions torched it and flattened it in 70 AD it was seen as God's judgement by the Christian community. The Jewish population was killed or enslaved and the Jewish people dispersed thoughout the civilised world was left without a temple - the place where you might seek to presence of God  - and so it is to this day.  Jerusalem need not have been destroyed - but the population were internally in the hands of the zealots who refused to surrender and believed God would rescue them. For zealots read terrorists.  It must have been not unlike life in Baghdad or Basra in our own day. The supreme virtue for Rome was ORDER. They had no time for the equivalent of  Sunni insurgents, shia militias or al quaeda . If you did not conform to Roman order you were eliminated quite ruthlessly - you were either crucified or sent to the salt mines to be worked excruciatingly to death. There were no reporters sending back film to tender consciences at home in those days.
The story of the last moments of the unholy City have been told by Roman and Jewish reporters. Not quarter was asked, no quarter was given. In the end Roman legionaries were climbing over piles of dead bodies to reach the next victims of their swords. When the army reached the temple, its guardians hurled down anything heavy however valuable from the roof onto the incoming soldiers. The crowning tale is how a soldier carved his way to the centre of the temple determined to find this God who could command such sacrificial loyalty., He reached the inner sanctum - what was called the Holy of Holies which only the High priest could enter once a year. He slashed at the curtain screen expecting to find the hidden splendid statue of the Jewish God - only to find nothing apart from a chair and a table and a lot of dust..
I don't think we can  underestimate the importance for the Christian faith that a generation after the earthly life of Jesus, Jerusalem was no more. The first Christians were of course all Jews, the original church was a heretical minority Jewish sect. By 100 AD Hebrew Christians were a small minority; and Christianity had become a multi- ethnic religion. The historical miracle that placed the Christian community and its scriptures in the lap of the Gentile world before the home base was destroyed is commemorated in the festival of Epiphany - a festival that predates Christmas by many generations. The manifestation of Christ to the Gentiles is the real marvel and it is attested by public historical  experience - your credulity is not stretched..
You can in one way regard the success of the early Christian church in planting itself in first century Mediterranean culture as the most successful of the Jewish attempts to convert pagans to the true God. No longer did the true believer have to make pilgrimage to a Jerusalem that no longer existed - rather as our Muslim friends make their Haj to Mecca. The temple as portrayed in the New Testament is found where the community of faith meets together - where each member is a living stone held together by Christ the chief corner stone - and wherever they broke bread together there was Christ their God in their midst.  "Destroy this temple and in three days I will raise it up" says Christ in the Fourth Gospel; and John adds that by this he was speaking of the temple of his body - which from other sources we have learned to call his Church.
In all this we are not to be led into traditional anti semitism - though one can see only too readily how it may have taken root in Christian thought. When we see religions or cultures or nations in conflict and each praying to its particular God then we realise that God is not on one side or another but on the side of the human race,  And that when we hear Jesus in the gospels castigating the Pharisees for their twisted theology he is actually castigating the faults of religious activists of all persuasions. This is how all bad religion works.  You and I are the Pharisees of today, as a great lay Anglican theologian taught in the 1930's.
The faults which Our Lord condemns in the unholy city are not dead nor are the churches of today free from them. If you look at Christ's comments in the gospels you will find there, I think, three things that attract his greatest condemnation.
1. When teaching about the value of children he said that anyone leading a child astray would be better off with a stone round his neck and drowned in the sea,  This of course would include what we call child abuse - but I am sure it goes wider than that. It surely includes the poisoning of young minds with destructive ideas and all the other ways by which we distort the babe in arms into a false humanity.
2. He condemned those who judged people by their labels - who turned  values upside down; who in Milton's phrase  in Paradise lost say "Good be thou my evil' Evil be thou my good." Jesus taught that a good tree cannot produce evil fruit and a bad diseased tree cannot produce good fruit. By their fruits you shall know them not by their labels. In saying that he was simply echoing the words of Isaiah five hundred years before.
3. He condemned the sort of religious activist who seem to know what God is thinking better than God himself. Blind guides !  He exclaims; you say "we see" and that shows  you are blind. As one of my mentors used to say "Blessed are those who know that they don't know". That is another Isaiah thought.
So when Jesus is hauled before the High priest in a quasi legal court of doubtful provenance it is as if two conflicting traditions  faced each other. One Jew had a message for God's world; the other Jew careful to preserve the traditions of his nation; and his church At the end of his interrogation, Caiaphas asks his constituents what they thought and they all replied "He is worthy of death".
I was horrified as recently as 1972 to hear the headmaster of my Church of England aided school say to me "I can never forgive the Jews for what they did to Jesus".  Surely the whole point was not that they were Jews it was that they were men and women, and religious men and women at that. When the Holy One enters our world we do not recognise him. We want a God who will support our existing agendas. It all happened within the stage set of the people of Israel - but the play is there for us all to see ourselves at work.
Someone well said that our human nature is cross grained - look at a plank of wood with its grains and then draw a straight line through it - and the result is obviously a series of crosses. You might say that Jesus drew himself a straight line in his life - it was bound to encounter his cross
You do not need to be involved in the high ground of religious politics; you do not need to be grappling with the sight of Christian politicians fighting evil with evil. You just need to look at your typical local church community to realise how distant we are from the living Christ. I look back forty years and remember that as a young Vicar I would be physically ill for 24 hours before a meeting of my church council - the prospect was so stressful.
There is an old saying that the worst thing is when the best is corrupted. Christianity when it goes off song is a sad and even dangerous thing.
If we are seeking a city whose builder and maker is God then perhaps we are warned that there are dangers in religiosity; there are dangers in a church icon that is anything other than the humble servant of the kingdom . I remember the moment when as a keen and pro-active vicar I suddenly realised that the coming of the Kingdom of God is not the same as a vision of all 7000 million human beings faithfully attending the Parish Eucharist on a Sunday morning. Put it that way and the objective is somewhat laughable. Even Him upstairs must find it funny.
But 7000 million hearts loving one another ? Indeed another improbable dream - but surely a dream that reflects where the Spirit endeavours to lead us ?  The ultimate alternative is presumably the elimination of opposition by rigid force. The Roman historian Tacitus said of the exploits of the imperial army "We created a desert and called it peace".  It is an epithet that has been applied to Iraq in our own day.
My distinguished Professor of Modern History at Cambridge was also a devout Methodist Once I heard him say " If you are looking for what is important in 2000 years of Christian history forget about Kings and Popes and persecutions and heresies and all the headline things - the significant thing is that for 2000 years Christian pastors have exhorted their flocks to love one another"
As we look at Jerusalem the unholy city of God we should remember that the great sin in the whole Bible old and new testament is not sexual foibles or all the other failings that the world thinks we mean by sin - no the great sin is disloyalty and betrayal. And when the Christian community coined a word to describe what was happening at the Eucharist , it found the latin word sacramentum. And the Sacrament was the oath of loyalty which a soldier took when he joined the army of the Roman Empire.  Holy Communion is more than a reassuring moment of Christ's presence within us - it is far more - it is a moment of total committment.. 
Lord we beseech you to behold this your family for which  our lord Jesus Christ was betrayed and given up into the hands of wicked men  and to sufffer death upon the cross who is now alive and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit one God now and for ever.Amen





THE NEW JERUSALEM  -  THE HOLY CITY.
I expect that some of us of my generation will remember the days when local music making was more common and we would listen to assorted songs called drawing room ballads. It was my father's excellent piano playing that brought him and my mother together when she wanted an accompanist for her repertoire. One of the best known of those ballads was called the Holy City.  It had three verses. First we remembered the joy of Jerusalem on Palm Sunday when Jesus is welcomed into the Holy City. Second we remembered the city disgraced by the cross of Jesus. Thirdly we had a new vision of the new Jerusalem beside the silver sea. And we would join in the chorus
"Jerusalem lift up your voice and sing 
hosanna hosanna hosanna to your King".
It was a neat ballad that taught the ungodly the principal theme of the Christian faith very succinctly.
The City of God as the destination towards which all Christian folk were making pilgrimage really came on the map in the fifth century.  In 410 AD the Visigoths, a wandering warlike tribe had breached the walls of Rome and sacked and pillaged the ancient city. There were many refugees - principally from the more wealthy classes, many of them nominal Christians - and they fled to other corners of the empire like Norrth Africa There was a considerabl groundswell of muttering that this military and political disaster was due to the fact that in the previous century Rome had abandoned its old gods in favour of the Christian god. This was , the chattering classes muttered, divine punishment for forsaking the best of Roman tradition.
Augustine, Bishop of Hippo in North Africa [not the Augustine of Canterbury] was the church's premier intellectual of the day.  He used the situation to challenge this defeatist attitude and to produce a large book entitled the City of God.  Its the sort of volume that every student of church history knows about but very few have actually read.   But it is of some interest because he was writing in a situation very like our own civilisation in the wake of the twin towers of 9/11.  How do we proceed when all the stable icons of the past have been desecrated. How does civilisation cope with terrorism in its midst ?  Going back to our earlier look at Samaria, it seemed to me at the time that the reaction to 9/11 in America and the west generally was not the reaction we should have heard from Amos or Isaiah or any of the other great Hebrew voices from the past. They would not have regarded 9/11 as an attack on our freedom but as God's judgement on a society that had lost touch with its god.  God, they would have said, is using militant Islam to punish  the unfaithful city.
What Augustine succeeded in doing was to point to the other worldliness of the Christian religion.  The earthly city is the city as it has always been known in every culture and every history. It is the city which you and I live in today - and a city where almost anything goes. Augustine reckoned the city of this world is doomed to corruption and decay and its inhabitants will be consigned to the everlasting fires.. But the City of God is not one we shall find in this world; rather it is the city - the dwelling place of the saints - which will stand for ever whatever happens to the kingdoms of this world.  
Augustine was a great mind and influenced all Christian thought after him; but he was a mind of his time and apart from some strict sects the mainstream Church of our own day no longer speaks in these terms. We have more tender consciences perhaps; and for most of us we are fatally conditioned by the world we live in. After all in this century and in this country life is reasonably pleasant and fulfilling for a large proportion of the population.  If you have a good job and a loving partner and a nice house and clever children then you as a human being have never had it so good.  And in those circumstances who needs to bother about God
It seems we have a choice.; and in truth there has been a kind of Christian dialogue ever since Augustine.  Do we look for a city in this World or in the next ?  Both journeys have valid arguments in their favour.  There are those - and I think they are in the majority these days - who see the Christian journey as a working towards securing a more just world to live in.
They remind us that we are bidden to pray for the coming of God's kingdom on earth as it is in heaven. It was to his estranged world that the Lord Jesus became incarnate; and when John's gospel tells us that God loved the world then the word translated as world means human society organised without reference to God.  So when the Christian churches of the 19th century took their Christianity to what we know call the third world and which used to be called the colonies, they brought with them education & modern medicine as part of their gospel. The city may not be here in its fullness now but we cannot just wait for something to happen in the future - as the hymn says "make way - make way and bring the kingdom in". Those old enough can remember the heady days of 1945 when the country selected a labour government with a huge majority and a long agenda for bringing in the City of God. For a moment there was a vision of a new world; a society when we all look after one another - subsequently called the welfare state.  Then as now the dream quickly faded.  We cannot cope with too much expectation. Most of are content to get on with our private lives and we do not welcome the activists who want to stir society up.
In his play "Murder in the Cathedral" Eliot's women of the city of Canterbury see disaster ahead; they see Thomas Becket putting himself in the firing line. And like most of us they wish he would not.  
Here we have no abiding city; here is no abiding stay.
Ill the wind, ill the time , uncertain the profit, certain the danger
O late late late is the time, late too late, and rotten the year;
Evil the wind and bitter the sea and grey the sky, grey grey grey.
O Thomas return, Archbishop return return to France.
Return . Quickly. Quietly. Leave us to -perish in quiet
We do not wish anything to happen

But I suspect too, that in the process of looking for the City of God in our midst we may tend to lose the wider and more glorious vision without which we simply become do gooders and not all that effective ones at that. I always like to remember CS Lewis' description of a lady in the congregation as 'the sort of person who spends her whole life doing good to others. You can tell the others by their hunted look"
We have been too concerned perhaps to abjure the kind of superficial teaching about pie in the sky by and by when you die and as a result failed to lift our eyes to the wider vision.
The vision of a perfect society is one that bubbles up again and again in civilised society. Augustine's book coincided with the burst of spiritual energy which we associate with the beginning of Christian monasticism.  Men like St Antony had decided that the only way to find the city they sought was to leave civilised life in the town and find God afresh in the deserts of Egypt. At first they were hermits; then gradually the hermits banded together to form a community.  So one  recipe for the Holy City is the monastic community. In the light of the disasters threatening civilisation people like Benedict and his disciple Etheldreda of Ely set up communities centred round the worship of God which we call monasteries . Historically they provided communities of stability which somehow survived the excesses of the dark ages and ensured that the Christiani culture would re-emerge and eventually flower again in the mission of St Francis and the art of Giotto and the artists of the first renaissance  The monastery is one model of the city of god.  But that has always been considered the vocation of a relative few. And a religious commuity is extremely unlike the liberal democratic society we have made for ourselves in the west. So perhaps there are other optionsn - hopefully for you and me there are other options !
It is unwise to speak confidently about what we do not know or have not seen.
The vision at the end of Revelation about the new heaven and the new earth still speaks powerfully of a world where all the things that spoil and frustrate our life here on earth are done away.  But it is all in code - for the picture is not something that can be correlated with anything that is observable or knowable in terms of human intellect. It cannot be identified from observation.  The world of apocalyptic visions and prophecies in which it is to be found was a world where you might say political ideas were shared under the coded language of religion.  There, the city of God would not come by human effort but rather - after great and cataclysmic events - it would be brought in by God. It is the language of what we would call revolution. It was certainly the language of that greatest of Jewish heresies the Communist Party. In a Roman Empire that would not sanction a fire brigade because between emergencies the fire fighters might start gossiping about local politics, then the only way to talk of the City of God was through strange and sometimes scary literature. It is in the light of that we should always read Revelation.  I    believe it is true that in the Bible Belt of the midwest America a very large proportion of the Christian population believe that perhaps quite soon, God will bring history to an end and the redeemed will  receive the gift of the great rapture and be wafted up beyond the skies.  And our Jehovahs Witnessing friends [as you probably well know] make Gods New World a very appealing part of their particular crusade.
I tend to think as a historian more than as a theologian; and one sees this apocalyptic vision of a dramatic end to history as something which recurs again and again in the story of our civilisation.  Actually I believe myself that the vision for the future is much greater and demands much more faith than any of these things. If we really believe in the God of the Christian Church and the Scriptures then we have to believe that even if our planet were destroyed by a nuclear holocaust or if we destroy ourselves by poisoning our environment beyond recall then even then it will not frustrate the ultimate purpose of God in his creation. There is always more than we dare to suspect.
But here's a slightly different thought to end with . In the later middle ages some thinkers took from Aristotle a concept they called the empyrean -  by which was meant the glorious source of light. And they used that as a tool to speak about heavenly things.  Dante knew of this and it is crucial to his great poem about Paradise.  When ordinary folk talk about going to heaven when they die, they are unconsciously using this terminology - the Holy City is here the exterior dwelling place beyond creation where nothing changes because it is a perfect state.  But stay with the concept of light and think of your art.
When you think of it, you remember [better than I as a non artist] that the great painters always were able to do something special with light. I remember a year or two ago going to the Caravaggio exhibition at the National Gallery  and being taught how the artist pioneered new ways of bringing light into his paintings. The showing of light is [I understand] the greatest challenge to an artist.
But it is ,we might say, the task of the artist [whatever the discipline] to show us the light. Art  is a powerful tool for taking what is outside us and bringing it deep down inside us.. At one of our annual CARM consultations where tutors and chaplains mix together for 48 hours, a new art tutor of considerable talent described himself as an illustrator endeavouring to become an artist. We noticed the humility and the truth of a very talented young man.
Those of us who have recognised to some degree the creative urge within us are those who have at least a hesitant glimpse of the City of God which is light.  It is our task to live as citizens of that city.
Meanwhile let me end by quoting from a sermon of a mind of great illumination John Henry Newman. I found this passage by a Roman Catholic Cardinal in a book on the Kingdom of God by a Methodist Bible scholar and theologian so the mixture is probably about right..It is piece of good old fashioned theology and perhaps something we ought to be recovering.
The earth that we see does not satisfy us; it is but a beginning; it is but a promise of something beyond it - even at its most gay with all its blossoms on,  and shows most touchingly what lies hid in it. Yet it is not enough. We know much more lies hid in it than we see. A world of saints and angels, a glorious world, the palace of God the mountain of the Lord of  Hosts the heavenly Jerusalem, the throne of God and Christ; all those wonders everlasting all precious mysterious and incomprehensible lie hidden in what we see.
What we see is the outwards shell of an eternal kingdom and on that kingdom we fix the eyes of our faith.
Shine forth O Lord as when on thy nativity angels visited the shepherds, let thy glory blossom forth as bloom and foliage on the trees; change with thy mighty power this visible world into that diviner world which has yet we see not; destroy what we see that it may pass and be transformed into what we believe.
Bright as is the sun and the sky and the clouds; green as are the leaves and the fields; sweet as is the singing of the birds; we know that they are not all; and we will not take up with a part for the whole. They proceed from a centre of love and goodness which is God himself; but they are not his fullness; they speak of heaven but they are not heaven; they are but as stray beams and dim reflections of his Image; they are but crumbs from the table.
We know that what  we see is as a screen hiding from us God and Christ and his Saints and his Angels
The City of God is about citizenship rather than place or building. Here and now you and I are citizens of heaven. In a way you and I have been living a kind of parable of the city for the past week. Work and play and prayer in some kind of balance - we have loved one another and that includes what the apostle calls "putting up with one another in love".
The City of God is surely the City of the redeemed, the  city of resurrection - for resurrection basically is a word denoting the rebuilding of a structure; and the Greek word anastasis is about rebuilding a wall.   Passover is the festival of liberation. So too is Easter. One of my precious moients was one year when the rabbi of our local synagogue presented me with a pack of unleavened bread to use at Easter because that year the festivals coincided.  Redemption means that slaves become citizens. Slaves of  Babylon, the technical heartless city; slaves of Samaria the city of the unjust society; Bethlehem the genealogical city; Jerusalem the traitor city become in Christ  citizens of the New Jerusalam - we are free.