Vigeon Post

A QUIET DAY
FOR THE CLERGY
OF THE DEANERY OF
KIDDERMINSTER
SEPTEMBER 200

INTRODUCTION TO MARGARET BARKER

    For twenty years or so  Margaret Barker has been sharing her enthusiasm for rediscovering  what was going on at the conception of the Christian Religion with her readers.
Top of her year at the Divinity School at Cambridge she made a conscious decision not to be a professional theologian, living in the hallowed halls of academe.
Born into the Methodist tradition she now teaches at a girl's boarding school in Derbyshire and as a lay preacher in the local circuit chapels . Yet she was a few years ago elected President of the Society for Old Testament Studies, a singular mark of the respect for her held by her fellow scholars.
Her thinking is shaped through her amazing knowledge of religious literature  in the years preceding and following the time of Jesus of Nazareth. Not only that but she has an encyclopaedic knowledge and familiarity with the Dead Sea Scrolls and Nag Hammadi texts ; and I venture to say that she is among the best guides to a source which is still largely unknown by you and me.  She will alert you, for example, with  a remark that what we know of the life of the early Christian communities in the Mediterranean corresponds almost exactly with what we know of the Qumran communities. She finds her underlying mission to rediscover the nature of pre-exilic Israeli religion; specifically the cult of the High Priest/King who disappeared when the legal boys returned from Babylon  with their deuteronomic revamping of the old traditions and the founding of what we now call Judaism.
She does not care for deuteronomists who changed the richness of the old faith into a moralistic religion of laws and salvation through the keeping of them.  She does not like what their successors do today. In a letter to me she complains that the introduction of the Nave Altar completely distorts the meaning of the liturgy by making the ceremony an upper room memorial rite instead of the pleading of the atoning sacrifice of Christ.
I am not a biblical scholar; I  find much of what she has to say difficult to digest. But I can learn enough to be stimulated and excited and made to think. I cannot today give more than a whiff of the treasures to be found in her writing, She wrote to me
"I want my readers to sense that the NT writers probably got it right; that  Jesus was seen from the first as the Messiah and High Priest and that Jesus believed this about himself and his calling. I am totally opposed to most of the NT scholarship of the last two generations which has not taken into account the evidence of how the first Chrsitians lived their faith through their liturgies.........Jesus and the first disciples were by no means country bumpkins. This is all part of the anti-intellectualism which has plagued and all but destroyed the churches." Elsewhere she states  "The Jesus of history and the Christ of faith are one."







ISRAEL'S SECOND GOD

Margaret's ultimate quest is to try to recover the pre-exilic shape of Israel's religion.She believes that the work of Jesus son of Joseph son of David was the restoration of the kingdom as it was before the faith returned from exile as a legalistic religion. Jesus knew what he was doing - the cleansing of the temple should be seen as as his assertion of the authority of the  Kingly High Priest of his Temple - he was Melchisadek Priest of the most high God, King of Salem.
Was there some brilliant unknown theologian who put together the language from which the church would erect the dogma of the Holy Trinity ? Or was the evidence, the tradition already there in the thought forms of Israel's religion ?
Is it it just custom that Jesus is referred to constantly as LORD both in conversation and in faith phrases. "Jesus Christ is Lord to the glory of God the Father."
We know that Yahweh was translated Kyrios in the Septuagint; and in one essay Margaret makes out a case that the OT Massoretic text which we now use was manipulated to make it difficult for the necessary connections to be made
by Christians seeking scriptural authority. There are verses here and there which would have wide implications had they been allowed into the canon. She draws attention to texts in which the LXXX and Qumran texts agree as against the Massoretic version we find in our bibles today.
We were all brought up secure in the knowledge that Israel was different from other nations. That it pioneered the cause of monotheism  as opposed to those nasty people who were Baal worshippers or other pagans.  Good old Elijah ! That is the orthodoxy of the deuteronomic editors who seem to have excised much of the references in the Old Testament which would give the game away. Features which would have been favourable to an interpretation of the faith in Christian terms were cut out. But hints and alternative readings in the Septuagint and the scrolls can be found to make us ask questions.  
When Paul refers to the scriptures, he is not of course referring to the OT as we know it - the word simply meant religious writings extant at the time in  or out of the canon.  At the turn of the present era - the time when the OT canon was being sorted, books like I Enoch were of great interest; for its themes related to the First Temple. But it was never adopted .
Even so there are still odd verses in our Old Testament which do not relate easily to deuteronomic orthodoxy and seem a little strange, Such a passage is that in Exodus where we are told that the elders ate and drank in the presence of the Lord and did not die. That in a Bible which tells us that no-one can behold the face of the Lord and live.
Or another typical minor point. You may remember that in the Passion Hymn "The Royal Banners forward go" written in Latin by Venantius 530-600 AD there is a reference in verse three "Fulfilled is now what David told in true prophetic song of old how God the heathen's king would be for God is reigning from the tree".  There is no such text in our present Bible - but it seems clear that a version of Psalm 96 containing that reference was known in early times.  It  seems to have been in the Old Testament that the latin hymn writer knew.
There was, Margaret wants us to know, the old tradition still to be found in  Jewry alongside the scribal orthodoxy - a tradition which was opposed to many of the features of the post-exile ways. In one of her earlier books, Margaret found a starting point for her investigations in a neglected and relatively unknown passage in Deuteronomy 32 verse 8. Her knowledge of the DSScrolls and of the Septuagint draws attention to the fact that it translates
"When the most high gave the nations their inheritance
when he divided up all mankind; he set up boundaries for the people according to the number of the Sons of God.  The Lord's portion is his people and Jacob his allotted inheritance."
Of course it is dangerous to make too much of an obscure text - but it is a strange verse for on any straightforward meaning of the passage it is saying that the LORD is the Son of  the most High God [Elyon] allocated to Israel to be their God.  And we remember the phrase "He shall be called the Son of the most High"
As one reviewer puts it, this is a shifting of biblical tectonic plates. Briefly, [and this is not the only evidence] Mgt believes that pre-exilic religion centred on the temple in Jerusalem ruled over by their Priest King. The High priest of Jerusalem was Melchisadek not Aaron. In II Samuel David is referred to as being like a Son of God. The implication then is that the King in the Jerusalem cult was Yahweh incarnate. If this tradition which perhaps lay underground for generations, still lingered on then we have in place an explanation for the proclamation of the early Christian church "Jesus Christ is Lord "  We are almost saying Jesus Christ is Yahweh Incarnate. We have probably always assumed that someone took the tale of the obscure Carpenter of Nazareth who was crucified as an enemy of the state and interpreted it in terms of messianic expectation.
 But we don't need to posit an unknown brilliant intellect who could invent the whole Christian theological position. Jesus knew himself to he the Son of the Most High God. Indeed that belief lies behind much of the Gospel records but we discount it as post Jesus editing. How about the temptations in the wilderness for starters.
There is also a suggestion that the Kings of Judah had a consort and that she was the Queen of Heaven whose removal from the cult is grieved over by the women of Jerusalem in Jeremiah. But that is another story.
Finally if Yahweh is a Son of Elyon then we remember that other nations had their own Son of God. Indeed the present Emperor of Japan is of course about the last to have that title. Priest Kings in ancient religion usually had a ritual by which they died and then rose again as part of the almost universal nature cults. Those of us who may have delved into Fraser's Golden Bough that  great encyclopaedia of ancient beliefs  - are at home here.
My mind goes back to CS Lewis' memoirs of his Oxford tutor in Surprised by Joy. He was a confirmed atheist and as hard as nails intellectually. but once he let slip to Lewis this aside.
" Funny thing that dying and rising God thing. It actually seems to have happened once" And for the young agnostic Lewis this opened up a great freedom to have a new vision of the possibilities of belief. If his tutor could say that, then who was safe from the shattering truth ?

THE SEVEN CHURCHES REVISITED

Last May Sally and I took advantage of the large pre-war discounts to have a cruise in the Mediterranean. It gave me the opportunity I had always craved to visit Istanbul which I still call Constantinople. One of our stopovers was the Turkish port of Halidiki from whence we took a coach to inspect the ruins of the great Greek city of Pergamum, the city where John says Satan has his dwelling and where parchment was allegedly invented. As you look up to the hill top city even today the remains of the temple dedicated to the worship of the emperors stands like a sentry and dominated the surrounding scene. That would be Satan's dwelling for any early Christian who believed as the intro to the seven letters says that Jesus was the King of Kings. The sight reminded me of what Mgt had to say about the celebrated seven churches - always I suppose the most accessible part of Revelation.
What kind of letters are these ? They are oracles uttered by the prophet John and speak the words of God.  Elijah you remember wrote a letter to King Jehoram; Jeremiah wrote to the exiles  saying "Thus says the Lord". We should see the seven letters in a similar light and take note of the very full and sophisticated introduction to them with all their echoes of the psalms and prophets [read] The writer was not so much quoting directly from the bible text ; but rather he, like so many others steeped in the tradition, lived in the imagery of scripture  and it was for him a natural way of expressing himself.
It is noteworthy that with the exception of Ephesus the seven cities are not places where Paul apparently evangelised. And for that matter his experience of Ephesus was very uncomfortable; a place where he states that he had many enemies and where he fought with wild beasts. So unhappy was his experience that when on the way to Jerusalem for the last time he has to arrange to see his Ephesian friends at Miletus some forty miles down the coast.
Mgt asserts quite confidently that these churches were founded by other, non Pauline evangelists. Personally I like to think of the Christian outreach in Asia as being the most effective manifestation of the Jewish mission to the Gentiles. Some of Our Lord's parables make good sense in that context. The man who returned the one talent he had hidden away is like the parish which says "at least we have kept the show on the road". Jesus expects more than that from his followers.
It seems clear that when Paul refers in his letters - esp. Galatians - to his enemies the Jews, he is in fact referring to Hebrew Christians. He knew he was not really trusted at the Jerusalem Headquarters of the church. There were other missionaries, working perhaps under the direction of John the Apostle who was remembered at Ephesus as being a High Priest who wore the petalon. It would seem that Paul's enemies were Christians whose roots were in the temple. Remember Skeva the High Priest who had a family of seven exorcists in Ephesus.
Mgt assembles a picture of Hebrew Christians in Asia. They kept the law; they revered angels and visions and the knowledge which they called wisdom; they placed much emphasis on the calendar and adopted an ascetic lifestyle. It is this pattern against which as I mentioned earlier she sees correspondence with the rules of the Qumran community.
Mgt suggests - to my mind rightly - that the letters reflect the conflict between Pauline churches and those of the Hebrew Christians. I do not think it is too much to say that we may perceive dimly even here the church divisions we call by names like High church and Evangelical, Church v Chapel, or even perhaps Catholic and Protestant. John was a priest [we remember how he got access to the trial of Jesus by being known to the High Priest] and Paul was a scribe, a lawyer a man of words. We remember how he says somewhere that he wasn't bothered about baptising people - he just wanted them to believe the gospel.
A onetime girlfriend of mine told how her best friend at Oxford was a RC. As finals approached one of the sisters at the Catholic Chaplaincy said to her "We want to pray for you, Eunice,  but we were not sure which saint to ask for his prayers; then we realised we should pray for St Paul because he is the most Protestant of the saints isn't he ?"
It has been suggested that those "who claim to be apostles but are not" [in the seven letters] were descriptions of the followers of Paul. There are strange terms in these oracles. We are warned about the sins of Balaam. This has puzzled people for a long time.  But Balaam was sent to curse the people of God as they camped before Edom; and on the way to carrying out his task he [or his donkey] had an overpowering vision/experience as a result of which he could no longer curse his enemies but only bless them. It does rather remind us of a certain chap who changed sides on the way to Damascus after a blinding vision. And who was that dreadful woman Jezebel with her heretical teachings ? Jezebel you remember was Princess of Tyre when she married Ahab. What was Tyre - it was the centre of the world trade in fine purple. And of course we know a certain business woman who dealt in the purple trade  and she is a bosom pal of Paul called Lydia.  [If you want to know about the importance of the purple trade there is a very interesting exhibition as part of the Eden Project.]
We are so used to thinking of primitive Christianity as a beautiful and loving manifestation of the more charitable words of Jesus Christ that it brings us up with a jolt to realise that there was real enmity, real [we might almost say] hatred between rival versions of following Jesus. Somehow by the end of the first century the two models of a temple centred liturgy and an evangelical preaching mission had become welded together into a whole whose awkward joins still perplex and irritate us today.
Perhaps the present trials of our church are not so much between what the media call fundamentalists and liberals as between ethical synagogue religion and symbolic and mystical temple religion - or perhaps we could say between a religion centred on law and one centred on wisdom. It is a matter of different emphasis. But it allows the media to portray Christians as fools if they believe every word in the Bible is inerrantly true and as hypocrites if they do not . We do well to remember that one of the main obstacles to a conversion that Augustine recognised  was that as a young man he reckoned you would have to be a fool to believe all those unlikely bible stories. To remember that the Bible did pose problems for intelligent Christians of the primitive centuries and people like Origen tended to say that in addition to its literal meaning there was also a moral meaning and a spiritual meaning; and of these the literal meaning was probably the least important.
It is also always worth remembering that the next festival to emerge after Easter was Epiphany - the manifestation of Christ to the Gentiles. It is not of course really about  three kings at the birth of Jesus, nor even for that matter about the baptism of Jesus. Rather it proclaims the great great miracle of the first century - that by the year 100 AD the faith had passed to the Gentiles and the Hebrew church was no longer calling the shots. Indeed the miracle was that  Gentile Christianity was firmly established by the time Jerusalem was laid waste by Emperor Titus. in 70AD. The old city and the old temple were no longer needed - for Christians looked  to the new Jerusalem and the presence of the Holy One was mediated wherever they broke bread and shared the cup.
Early in the second century St Ignatius of Antioch passed through Asia on his way to Rome and to martyrdom. He wrote letters to the churches of Asia describing the clergy as if they are High Priests and Priests of the temple. The Bishop is God and the clergy are his heavenly council. In a word the Bishop is the LORD with his people - just the reward promised to the faithful leaders of the Seven Churches.  It would be nice for Rowan Williams ifd it were still so today !    

TALK THREE
THE GREAT HIGH PRIEST

One of the main thrusts of the teaching that  Margaret would like us to digest is this. We were probably taught to think of Christianity as a religion whose  liturgical life combined the scripture based synaxis of synagogue worship with the remembrance of the common meal in the upper room. It was on this understanding that I think so much of the reforming zeal of the Reformation was based. Once you announce, as Luther did, SOLA SCRIPTURA, you are limited for your understanding to what scraps of information the present Bible gives us.  Nowhere for example does the Bible tell us what really went on in the holy of holies, what the forms of worship were in the temple. Margaret likens the task of reconstructing temple worship to making a history of Christian worship in the last thousand years with a few postcards, some minute books and occasional publications like Fox's Book of Martyrs.
The Bible of either Testament is not particularly interested [it seems] in liturgical religion. For of course liturgical religion is the purview of the priestly caste, which has its traditions and secrets.  Yet it is the form of ceremony and ritual which actually tells us what the worshippers are actually believing and doing. One only has to cast one's mind over 1662,1928, Series II, Series III, ASB and Common Worship to realise that this is the material which tells us much of what is believed and practised in the English Church in the past century or so. The real relevance of modern worship styles perhaps rests on the fact that we are not governed by the Queens council, nor in this liberal society do magistrates punish wickedness and vice in quite the way Cranmer envisaged. I remember a member of my congregation in the eighties who was a great fan of 1662. When we celebrated a weekday Epiphany one year using the Prayer Book  she came up to me afterwards and said "Owen I realise now it wouldn't do to bring it back would it ?"
Margaret  would strongly suggest that Christian tradition emerged out of the Temple tradition - in particular the tradition of the First Temple which the revisionists of the exile did so much to damp down. The Epistle to the Hebrews as we all know has a special devotion of Jesus as our Great High Priest who has passed into the heavens. That is temple talk - for to pass into the heavens was to enter into the Holy of Holies from which the High Priest would then emerge to pronounce the reconciliation and atonement of the people's sins by their God through the sprinkling of the blood of the covenant. So you and I when we go unto the altar of God are passing into the heavens from which we come to bring the bread of life and cup of salvation to Gods holy people.
Up to recently the impression I received was that the author of  Hebrews got hold of this High Priest imagery and used it to help to explain the function of our Lord's ministry, his sacrificial death and his resurrection. We think of his interest in the priesthood of Melchisadek as being somewhat recherché.
But perhaps this is a  misleading approach. Perhaps it makes more sense to say that in Jesus the Priest/King after the order of Melchisadek returns to make the final sacrifice of atonement for the sins of the world. If this be so, then it can explain why the Christian church manifests itself as a community that meets in a church and where the merits of that sacrifice are  pleaded at the altar of the presence. Not only this; but Mgt informs us of the great excitement which was mounting in Judea in the first Century AD as the time of the great Jubilee approached - this was the tenth jubilee which dated from the jubilee when the exiles returned. It was anticipated with much fervour and excitement that the tenth jubilee would mark a definitive act of God for the redemption of the world. Jewish tradition remembered that the 490 years ended in 68CE and that the jubilee began in 19 CE. In a word tenth jubilee fervour and expectations were the context for the ministry of Jesus. Which of course then makes sense of a great deal of the proclamations of the coming kingdom in the gospels ; and deepens our appreciation of so much that Jesus did and taught
My own shorthand reading of those early formative years of Christianity so much of which is hidden from us is that the Christian Hebrew Church restored the Presence to the Diaspora which up to then had only the synagogue and the teaching of the law and the prophets. The Christian church was originally the most effective of the many attempts of the Jews to carry out their mission to the Gentiles.  Christians do not need to journey to Jerusalem to come before the presence of the Lord in the temple - every church is now a temple and the presence of the LORD is to be found around the table of the presence.
If you visit the annual trade fair of Christian Resources - if you haven't done so then your education is not complete  -you will likely see a stall run by the Orthodox Church which will sport a poster "Orthodoxy - the original Christianity"
Margaret, as I told you, grew up in the Methodist tradition - one where the word is paramount and ceremony of the sparest. I can resonate with this because I too was brought up in that tradition and attended a Methodist Sunday school. As I got older I rather rebelled against Sunday School lessons given by not very intelligent teachers and informal manners of worship. Suffice it to say that at eleven I migrated to the local parish church where my liturgical soul rejoiced in reverencing the altar and chanting the psalms and orientating for the creed. It seemed to a thoughtful and probably over serious young lad a more reverent and appropriate way of worshipping God.
When Mgt was first in Greece, she found the Orthodox Eucharist unlike anything she had ever encountered before. What her astonished eyes beheld was a translation into Christian terms of the rite of the day of Atonement.; The altar of the presence was hidden behind the icon stasis and the swirling of the incense, the bringing of the sacred elements from heaven to the people. This, she realised, was how the early Christian community jumped the gap from Jerusalem Temple to Parish Church. Every church is a temple - perhaps it was a subconscious understanding of this which led to the many years of church/chapel dislike in the past. This is where many of us in my generation got our basic church teaching - church has a nave which is the court of  the people, a chancel which is the court of the priests and levites and a sanctuary beyond the communion rails which was a real holy place.This Margaret realised is not what people often in ignorance imagine to be the early Christianity of those simple Galilean fishermen.
But the Jewish culture of the time was a rich and sophisticated one. The apostles were not ignorant peasant types.  I like to think of Peter James and John etc as keen business men and Round Tablers of the Galilee branch,  salting their catches and  exporting Galilean salt fish throughout the Roman Empire as a delicacy. [So I was given to understand]
Jesus himself as we hear each Christmas was the scion of the Royal House of David whose first son Solomon stood in the newly built Temple and offered sacrifices as King and Priest.
The false myth of a simple faith spoiled by those rotten high church priests is a travesty of the truth. There are plenty of references in early centuries to the secret teaching of Jesus to his apostles. If this was known to Clement of Alexandria in around 180 AD can it really be a late insertion ?   St Basil of Caesarea in the 4th century  asks "Where do we find in writing anything about signing with the cross at baptism or turning to the east to pray. which of the saints  has left us in writing the words of invocation [epiclesis] at the offereing of the bread of the Eucharist and the cup of blessing; for it is well known that we are not satisfied with saying the words  which the apostle  and the gospel have recorded but before and after these words we add other words on the grounds that they have great strengtth for the mystery.And these words we have received from the unwritten teaching."
All religions have their special mysteries known only to their priesthood - and it would seem it is so with Christianity.  In my tradition there was always a moment when as an ordinand one would be initiated into  priest craft - that being the approved method of administering the holy mysteries. From time to time as appropriate I remind people that High Mass is not an elaboration of an eight o'clock simple celebration of Holy Communion. Rather the opposite is true. The traditional eight o'clock is a paring down of the Eucharist to its bare essentials.
Let me end with one particular insight which I think leads us very well into our rite of Holy Communion.
Mgt quotes from Gregory Dix who in turn refers to Clement of Rome 1st C  for whom the Lord is the High Priest of our offerings, who is in the height of heavens.
"It can be said with truth that the doctrine of the offering of the earthly Eucharist by the heavenly Priest at the heavenly altar is to all intents and purpose the only conception of the Eucharist sacrifice which is known anywhere in the church. There is no pre- Nicene author whose eucharistic doctrine is at all stated who does not regard the offering and consecration of the Eucharist as the present action of the Lord himself the second person of the Trinity".
She goes on, and I compress too much, to  point out that e.g. the great A|thanasius writes "the Word comes down into the bread and wine and it becomes his body"; that the prayer we call the epiklesis was always an early part of the liturgy and that the expression maranatha was the earliest form of this. The call for the Lord to come which was originally the desire of the first Christians for the sudden return of Jesus becomes the prayer for the Lord to come to the bread and wine. And this, as we may detect in the gospel of John, was the mainstream understanding of the Lord who comes again. He comes again and again as we call on him in the Eucharist. The LORD is always the Lord who comes - he comes when we meet Him in the homeless stranger and the starving child and the rejected homosexual and all the victims of our humanity. He comes when we meet together in His name and he is in the midst of us in our fellowship and mutual loving. He will come to meet us when we die, and he will look at us in the striking words of Studdert Kennedy and say to us "Well?"
But above all he comes to us when we stretch out our hands to take the holy food. as the priests of the ancient temple would feed on the Holy Bread once a week, and we have no need to spend needless hours of study and prayer wondering when he will come again. For he is the Lord who is always coming  - again and again - and we rejoice and are glad . And leave the weirder speculations to the cults and the sects.

KING JESUS IN THE POST MODERN WORLD

    One - indeed the main - problem for telling Jesus as he is in the past three hundred years is that we have had to see him in what we call the modern world. This is a world where the basic truth about things is assumed to be scientific truth; a world where the mind is in ascendancy over the heart; a world where logic and reason are the criteria for explaining what goes on in our world. This attitude generally comes under the title MODERNISM
    So when modernistic scholars took on board the reading of the Bible they had problems. In the modern world, miracles do not happen. In the modern world God is not subject to analysis; in the modern world your attitude on everything must depend on what we call the burden of proof.  We all know how irritating it is to hear on the radio that for example the latest scientific research proves that most children like chips . There is no place even for common sense - it all has to be researched properly and subject to the rigorous discipline of reason.
    We can all recognise why the modern age has been for some time been the setting for an ongoing argument between science and religion. And most people still tend to assume that science has somehow proved religion to be wrong. But in the past century things began to change, almost unnoticed at times. The very scientists who began by presuming this was a material universe, began to find that the building blocks of the universe were not solid at all. The atoms which when I was a schoolboy were described as the smallest units of matter are now known to be bundles of electrons; and we seem now to be at the point where we may uncover what electrons are made of . But these are not solid things they are little more than patterns or waves of energy. As I understand it, even honest scientists are beginning to scratch their heads and ask questions about the ready answers their predecessors made about the material world.  We are entering - have entered - the world of what we call POST MODERNISM - which is a way of thinking and talking about the universe which no longer presumes on the materialistic theories of quite recent times.
There are three rather disturbing ideas in post modernism
1. There is no such thing as truth .  How can we discern between the reality of our natural eyes and what we see when we enter the world of virtual reality. I tell you this - you go into a side show in Disney land and you go on a ride in which you fall down the sides of a canyon, circle round the moon, get attacked by a dinosaur and generally end up a nervous wreck - and you have been sitting in a darkened room and never moved - but it is real enough.
2.  What do I mean by I ?  Am I the old fashioned 'master of my faith' ?  No - I am just a set of floating ideas - a temporary collection of atoms
3. The era of great stories  has ended. The sort of tale of empire that many of us here grew up on in the 30's and 40's and made us so proud to be British are no longer seen as good. These great stories or myths served the needs of the western world at the expense of what we would call today the third world. They were stories of inevitable progress towards a glorious future. But then there were Dachau and Buchenwald and Belsen and the idea of 20th century folk progressing to a glorious future seemed to be a sham. We had to rethink the liberal  idea of progress; It doesn't fit in with the facts or our nature.
    Where does this leave Jesus ?  For nearly 2000 years the west has been dominated by a way of life which called itself Christian and which was taken over by  whatever power complex was in charge at the time. For most of Christian history it has paid you and me to be a Christian - and at times it could be very painful not to be one. Long ago, an old man once told me of how when he was a boy in about 1880 in the shipyard town of Barrow in Furness that when you became an apprentice you found where your journey man went to church and followed him - and so it went on - if you went to church at the one attended by your foreman you could be well on the way to promotion. There was a social pressure in favour of good church going lads - and if you were lucky your vicar ran a lads club and was good at teaching you Indian clubs routine.  It was only a hundred years ago, that the Rector of the country parish could insist on his farmers paying him their tithe of their harvest  which in turn was sold to provide him with an income. It wasn't an offering it was a demand which was sustainable by law.
    That world has largely disappeared; and we are in a post modern world where the assumptions of an authoritarian society are fast disappearing. The petrol crisis is an excellent example - for we see people who not long ago would have been traditional members of a conforming society turning their backs on the old ways and deciding that they owe no allegiance except to obtain their just economic deserts.
    St Luke tells us that on the first day of the week, two disciples were walking home disconsolately to Emmaus; they were sad of face and were talking over and over about what had happened that long weekend in Jerusalem. Jesus in some disguised form meets up with them and asks why they are so miserable. And they tell him of how along with many other Jews they had hoped that Jesus would have been the Messiah, the one whom God was going to send to clear the Holy Land of its pagan enemies and set up the Kingdom and be crowned in Jerusalem. And now it had all turned to ashes; Jesus was executed shamefully; his followers fled; and even - they had heard before they left - the tomb where he had been buried was empty and all sorts of strange rumours were flying about.
    And their companion says
"O slow of heart to believe all that the prophets had told you - was it not right that the C Christ should suffer these things and to enter his kingdom ?"
And beginning with Moses he gave them an extended Sunday school lesson . What was he telling them. Surely something like this.
"You and all God's people have been suffering a long time from oppression. It was always thus - the Hebrews in Egypt; the power of the Philistines; the captivity in Babylon. And I know what you are telling yourselves. You are telling the story of how God will send his Messiah to fight for your independence as David did a thousand years ago.  But you've got the wrong story.  You believe that at the climax of history God will step in when  oppression is at its height and deliver you and make Israel the ruler of the world. And your problem is that it hasn't worked out like that. That is not the story.
    The story was never about Israel beating up her enemies and becoming master of the world and its King like a second Solomon sitting on a golden throne surrounded by ivory apes and peacocks. The real story is of how God would bring his saving purposes for the world to birth through the suffering and vindication of Israel.  I quote Nigel Wright _
    "Now suddenly with the right story in their heads and hearts a new possibility, huge and astonishing and breathtaking started to emerge before them. Supposing the reason the key story wouldn't fit the lock was because they were trying the wrong door ?  Crucifixion is what happens to people who thhink they are going to liberate people and then too late find it is not going to happen. In these days of course we are more sensible. We don't make examples of would be messiahs; they simply disappear or we put them in mental hospitals and drug them up to the eyeballs for the rest of their lives. But supposing Jesus' execution was not the disproof of this Messiahship but its confirmation and climax. Suppose the cross was not the usual example of the triumph of paganism over God's people but was actually God's means of defeating evil once and for all ? Supposing this was what God's light and truth looked like, coming unexpectedly to lead his people back into his presence"
    It seems to me that in our present time we are in a situation where those of us who can look back half a century are bewildered by the change in politics and morals and religion and all the multiplicity of markers by which we generally shaped our lives.  Perhaps the last vestige of the old tunes of glory is what we have been remembering this month - the 60th anniversary of the Battle of Britain. Nowadays the whole world can revolve around the fate of  a dozen lonely soldiers ambushed in the Sierra Leone jungle. What a change of scene !  We have been wondering what to do ever since almost the last vestiges of Empire vanished. Even the Olympic games are tarnished by drug abuse and the corruption of those who sit on the Olympic council chaired by a former fascist politician from Spain.
    Nigel Wright in his latest book, "The Challenge of Jesus"  suggests that Christians are like players in an orchestra. Jesus, as it were, composed the music but we have to play it in today's world.  We have to be sure we have the right score; that we are playing the right melody. The melody that Jesus sang was one that would serenade us into holiness. But we need a lot of convincing. For we are aware that most people have other priorites. We glimpse that to work for the kingdom means unpopularity and probably pain. If they have persecuted me they will persecute you, says the Master. For if we play God's tune we know what happened to the composer.  So we don't play the tune . Instead we are told we are the stewards of God's world; and we transform it into power - and the world becomes either an ash tray or a gold mine.  We take our divine gift of creativity and transform it into the  exploitation of forests and people.
    My kingdom is not of this world, said Jesus in the Gospel of John. The easy interpretatioin is to say that our Gospel is a spiritual one and is concerned  principally with saving our souls so that when we die we will be welcomed to the heavenly halls . I am not saying that is not part of the Gospel. But the word  for world which Jesus uses is kosmos. That means our world here and now as organised without reference to God.  Jesus is saying he has no political ambitions as the world understands them  - but he IS saying that his vocation is to challenge the cosmos ; for His story is  a differnt one from that assumed by most sensible people. What Jesus has to tell us is as relevant to life today as ever it was.
He is "Jesus Christ the same yesterday, today and for ever." and the task of those who believe in Him is to bring the shape of the Gospel into the world  in forgiveness and judgement

MUSIC AND PRAYER
1. TUNING UP
When the Shah of Persia, a century ago, paid a state visit to London, he was taken as a guest of honour to one of Henry Wood's Promenade Concerts then held in the long defunct Queens Hall. Over drinks after the concert, someone asked him which piece he enjoyed most. Could it have been the Mozart Piano Concerto, the Beethoven Symphony, the Tchaikovsky Ballet music ?  No - the Shah replied - "I particularly liked the piece right at the beginning". "Oh you mean the National Anthem ?" "Certainly not - the piece before that!"
He had enjoyed the sound of the orchestra tuning up. You probably know what that is like - the leader signals for hush then points to the oboe player who plays an A. Oboe because that instrument keeps its pitch more accurately than any other. Then the players start playing notes to check that they are in tune with one another. These days, advanced orchestras seem to like to tune up a section at a time - brass, woodwind, strings and percussion.
So perhaps the variegated and unordered sound and the adjustment of strings reminded the Shah most of the oriental style of music hewas at home with.
One of the ways you can normally tell a professional orchestra from an amateur one is that the amateurs are not quite so secure in their tuning. If the trumpet is playing a fraction sharp, and the cellist has not got her D string quite on key; and if the tympani are slightly flat and if all three things happen together it can make someone with a musical ear squirm with pain.
I want in these sessions this week to a explore with you some of the ways we can learn from music making how we might structure our life of prayer. mujsic and paryer are - I believe - very much allied. Music making and praying is a better way of putting it. Humming to oneself as one goes about one's chores is  very similar to living in the presence of God. Or, for example, an audience is sitting in a concert hall, completely rapt as it hears a great orcestra interpret Mozart or Mahler. Is that audience simply enjoying an experience or is its soul being fed ? For many people hearing a superb piece of musicmaking is the nearest they can get to heaven. Perhaps it is indeed a foretaste of heaven - and music is indeed a great mystery - nobody really knows what it is or why we make it. Perhaps it was a good attempt when the poet Dryden called music the "soul of the world".  There are of course some souls who seem to be born without a trace of music in their ears - tone deaf folk for whom music is but noise. And I remember a very devout lady churchwarden reminding me that not everyone enjoys a musical service or even singing hymns. We must presume that they will have some other experience that takes them out of themselves.
But back to the Shah. He heard the London Symphony Orcestra tuning up. Beforee you can play you must warm up your instrument and get it in tune.
Ask any master of prayer and they will say that you cannot pray when you are flustered, tired, over busy. Of course you can always shoot off an arrow prayer. Like HELP !
On holiday in Greece you may still hear someone in stress say Kyrie eleison ! But that kind of activity is not what most of us are looking for. We are looking for quality time with God. That I will come to later. But first let us think of tuning up our souls.
20th century people are very impatient souls.We want and expect instant results. I can email my daughter in California for an urgent matter and receive back a written reply in a few minutes later. Pop music is for the most part music for instant gratification. Perhaps we owe this showbiz industry a lot because itg keeps the young happy when they otherwise might ask more particular questions about the world we live in. But if we are going to get beyond the superfcicial there are things we cand o which are the equivalent of the mujsician going over his fiddle or his flute before playing.
So then a few very simple and obvious rules - using the word rule to mean a way of doing things.
PLACE
It does help to have a place you can go to for prayer. God is of course everywhere -except when we we deliberately shut him out of our lives. So in one sense,, it doesn't matter - you can and most of us do at times pray anywhere. But we are only human. We are not disembodied spirits. Nor are we for that matter spirits enclosed in a body.  Our bodies are part of our whole persons. That is pretty obvious but it is so easy to fall into the trap of thinking that spiritual things are at a higher level than our bodies. It is important to provide for our bodies as well as our minds and our hearts - for our bodies pray as well as our thoughts. So it does help, if we can, to have a place for our prayers. And it does help to have something as a focus for our eyes,  to be an object of our attention - a cross perhaps, or a lighted candle -or a picture or an ikon. This is obvioiusly not always possible in today's crowded homes - but it can help.
POSTURE
To pray you need to be relaxed. Some people choose to learn the Buddhist lotus position where the body is both controlled and relaxed. But for most of us it is not possible physically.Our aim though must be relaxed but not slovenly. Most of us here probably remember that it was not all that long ago that kneeling was the only recognised posture. Kneeling is of course part of court ritual - the lesser kneels before the greater. But we seem to be getting out of that habit in church where many congregatioins stand for the general confession and for the blessing. Kneeling is fine particularly if you have a prayer desk or something similar to use. I find it stops me being lazy and concentrates my thoughts at times. Some find that actually prostrating themselveson the floor means that they can be both physically at rest but also totally being noting in the divine presence. But perhaps the best way to start, or start again, is simply to sit - not lounging in an armchair; but on a stool or upright chair, keeping the back straight, feet on the floor hands on the thights . Many including myself find it difficult but important to keep the neck upright not bowed down.
TUNING
You can then befgin to prepare for your time with God. Do not be in a hurry. If you have ten minutes then you might still be tuning up when you have to leave off without actually saying anything. That is not a cause for worry - for you have given God time iin his presence - and it is always far more important to give God time than to fill that time with words which are drawing attentioin to oneself. It is not what you say or do - perhaps it is not even what God may say and do - it is giving God time, giving him credence,giving him attention, becoming aware that you are preparing to come into the presence of the Almighty. In a book of meditatioins I have, the writer imagines Jesus meeting me and saying to me "Thank you Owen" and I am very surprised and I say to him - "What do you have to thank me for ? I have done nothing really worth while for you."  Ah,says Jesus, but you gave me time in a busy life; you thought I was worth some of your valuable time. And when so many people never think of me I really am grateful ."  We remember in the sermon on the mount Jesus saying "Go into your chamber and pray to your father in secret and your father who sees in secret will reward you
EXERCISE 2. DAILY PRACTICE

One of the great pianists of the 20th century is famously reputed to have said something like this.
When I don't practice for a day God notices
When I don't practice for three days I notice
When I don't practice for a week my audience notices.
Practicing at any skill is a strange thing. We acknowledge its necessity but often reject it when it applies to ourselves. It is particularly difficult for gifted people. I think I might have been a reasonably good musician - but as a boy I skimped practice like mad. I did not seem to need to practice because if I ran through my exercises for a week in the last forty minutes before my next lesson my teacher - who perhaps should have known better - would say "You HAVE worked hard this week haven't you Owen ?"
If you have a gift - or what I would like to call a facility, it is of course vital that you work hard to maximise the gift. Even the toddler Mozasrt at the age of three was given exercise after exercise to master by his father. He is the master musician not just because his genes produced a genius but he was also a practised and trained genius.  5% inspiration and 95% perspiration is always the norm .
The same goes for many skills. You may have a g ift for languages - it is a pity if that gift is not developed with practice. Many of us look back with gratitude on those boring old recitals of tables and the morning's daily mental arithmetic session at school in our childhood, before education became child centred and we stopped training our memory. When everyone these days uses a calculator it can be gratifying to take half a dozen items to a checkout and say "I think that will be £4.59" - to be greeted by an astonished cashier saying "How did you know that ?"
Mind you it doesn't always work out to plan. As a boy I spent hours being trained to write well by using a copy book - but in the end it did not do much for my handwriting.
Perhaps then, for most of us if not all there will be an acknowledgement that practice is needful but a reluctance to act  on best advice
Perhaps nowhere is this more true than in PRAYER>
Indeed there is often an assumption that prayer is too personal a thing to be subject to the discipline of exercise. We are congenitally spiritually lazy. If I don't practice my flute then I will end up only playing the simple stuff which no longer stimulates my mind and soul and I am not competent to play the music I would like to. Some years ago I attended a concert of chamber music featuring James Galway.  As I walked home I was on the verge of throwing away my flute into the rubbish bin. For I realised that I was not really a flute player. What Galway could do with a flute was of a completely different order than what my playing would produce. But the mind boggles at the hours of practice - often intensely boring - which gave him the mastery of his instrument.
I suggest the same goes in the field of spirituality. When you encounter a really holy person whose life is their prayer and their prayer is their life you feel like a mere beginner.; Yet behind that aura of holiness there is a pilgrimage of prayer that has been persisted in despite every kind of obstacle and pain and frustration. It is one thing to have a gift for prayer; but it is common experience that God does not give such souls an easy time - far from it.
But here is the encouraging factor. Most of those who help us to pray will acknowledge that every day is a new start. You never lose the feeling that  you are a beginner - which is not sup rising considering the greatness of God and the littleness of me.
St Paul knew all about this. His advice was "exercise yourself unto godliness". He knew as we all do that being a Christian does not really come naturally. Take a leaf out of the musician who knows his or her gift is not sufficient to be presumed upon. Indeed you can attain a high degree of proficiency without being particularly gifted.
If it is any encouragement , you find that those who pray well are invariably very humble about it. They never claim to be more than beginners themselves. One mystic soul said "what we can know about God is about the same as what you know about the Atlantic Ocean if you go to the beach at midnight with a pocket torch and shine it over the waves,"
Daily prayer I reckon is more about giving God a chance to make contact with you rather than you achieving a standard of performance. That is how prayer exercise and musical exercise differ in intention.
I find it helpful to be given guidelines for that exercise . There will always be times when our religion becomes dull and seemingly pointless. Times when the God we thought we knew and loved seems distant and perhaps we even question his existence. We may think to ourselves it has all been a great mistake, and we should pack our religion in.  But that is not the time to give up. That is the time for perseverance - for it may be that God is letting go of your hand for a while to help you to be more independent. We need to grow up spiritually - and not just  'keep a hold on Nurse for fear of finding something worse". We only grow up in any dimension of life though launching out and finding out reality for ourselves rather than just relying on the conventions on which we have been brought up.
It is amazing how many people do not realise, for they have not been told, that going through a period of spiritual dryness and apparent pointlessness is standard experience. The bigger the Christian soul, the darker the experience. The answer is not to give up but to make use of that very kind pair of twins we call Patience and Percy Verance.
You  may be content with your daily prayer - if so I have no desire or need to suggest you change. If you want to re-orient ate your spiritual life and try something fresh then you can explore the suggestions on the sheet  I will give you.  The exercise is called the EXAMEN which is not very helpful. I would prefer to call it "your ten minutes with God".  There is much to be said for the opinion that if we all spent our ten minutes with God day by day then the mental health of the nation could be transformed.

THE MUSIC TEACHER

Genetically speaking, music comes out of my ears. My father was a gifted pianist whose grandmother was a pianist of concert standard and instilled in my father a devotion to Beethoven Sonatas which he thought made them excellent material for entertaining his young children. I still remember my sister and I shouting "Play us something louder daddy" and he would turn to one of the more tempestuous pages of his Beethoven for our improvement. My mother sang contralto; she met my father when n she needed an accompanist. She found him one Friday in Welshpool and on Monday my father said "You're not going to leave me now I've found you are you ?"  And he wasn't referring to renditions of Edwardian ballads around the piano on Sunday evenings either ! My maternal grandfather was an enthusiastic nationalist Welshman from a Denbigh family - the sort of place where if you trod on the toe of a Dryhurst Roberts then half the town jumped. He had that instinctive Welsh musicality which saw him write many tunes for the Welsh revivals of the late Victorian era and which could train a village choir to walk away with a first prize in its class at the national eisteddford. So I inherited a lot of musicality and Christianity from both my parents. My grandfather's family were Calvinistic Methodist stock but he appears on the scene as headmaster of a Church school at Pontrobert, Montgomeryshire and organist and choirmaster at the parish church in days when the church was still established. I suspect it was a professional choice in those days when such things mattered.
Both music and religion are exercises for the inner man - or for the soul if you prefer the word. One's faith of course is not inherited through our genes. But I think that if your genes give you a love of words as a gift then it will help you grow up with an instinctive grasp of the faith. A Welshman typically has the gift of being able to read aloud intelligibly with the minimum of practice because of this feel for words. If music is in your blood then you are more likely to embrace it and want to perform and enjoy it.
But all these inherited gifts are of limited value without a teacher, a guide and comforter give you a sense of direction, to guide you in your choice of music, to oversee the development of your technique. You can by chance be self taught and yet come good. There are some prime examples of non-professional musicians who entered the hall of fame. Moussourghsky who wrote Night on the Bare Mountain and the ballet music for Prince Igor was I seem to remember a Professor of Medicine at Moscow medical school and was therefore technically an amateur musician; but I suspect that his musical education had been very thorough for all that.
We are accustomed to talk about the twelve disciples. Typically they spent three years in the company of Jesus learning from him, making the mistakes that all pupils make, being reprimanded and encouraged; or given programmes to embark on. Study of the TWELVE is liberating. As Stuart Blanche a former Archbishop of York in the seventies used to say. "What a relief it is to realise that the twelve disciples were  such a shower !"
The point is, Jesus did not just call them, he gave them personal training - discipline is of course the same word as disciple. We get glimpses of that in the encounters of Peter and Jesus. "Who do YOU say that I am?"
"You are the Christ, son of the Living God."
"One of you will betray me."
 "I will never betray you - I'd rather die first!"
"Is that what you think Peter ?...."
The cult of British religion being a personal thing militates against this. But we really DO need more than a few week's confirmation class at a vulnerable age in order to grow up in the faith.
Even Christians who take up golf probably take it more seriously than their religion - they certainly will use their club professional for advice and guidance. 
We need someone to talk to; someone to accompany us on our journey who is sufficiently experienced to understand you but not a bossy boots who will tell you what to do.
Probably I am not talking about your minister; but someone whose integrity and confidentiality you believe you can rely on. We are talking about what is often called a SOUL  FRIEND. It makes no sense to be enrolled in the army of Christ and yet have not personal supervision of your life in the  Spirit. No wonder we flounder. No wonder we come up against brick walls or drown in the Slough of despond. Even worse is the way we can read Jesus all wrong . I still am shocked when I remember the headmaster of my village church school saying to me "Vicar I can never forgive the Jews for what they did to Jesus". He was a nice enough man, holding a responsible position in the Church -  but so terribly wrong. I have been told "I could never be a Roman Catholic because it was  Roman soldiers who crucified Jesus" and more amusingly.about the common market  "I don't agree with all this Treaty of Rome business - I think we should stay Protestants" 
These are exaggerated instances but it just demonstrates that saying your prayers and coming to church does not mean you are on the right lines.
Religiously,we tend to be like folk who have had enough tuition to read music and do our five finger exercises and then leave off and forage for ourselves into the future . Whereas what we need is something that eventually will lead us up to attending master classes if we have the ability and the temperament.  I would not be here today had not a Franciscan brother at Cambridge been in the position to say to me "Owen, forget all this I am not worthy business, what do you think God wants you to do with your life ?"
Is the practice of our religion a hobby for those who like to dabble in spirituality and that sort of thing. Or is it something as important as the words that it uses seem to indicate ?
That is a question which we ask of ourselves , of our church and of our civilisation.
If we choose the second option, the taking of these matters seriously, then we do need someone to be our companion on our pilgrimage so that that journey is taken as well as it can.
Funnily enough the word to describe this relationship of Pilgrim and Companion has a

 musical connotation. We call it SPIRITUAL ACCOMPANIMENT.



ENSEMBLE AND PERFORMANCE

When we attend a concert we rightly surmise that the musicians are there to entertain us and give us pleasure. We are the audience - there to hear the music.
The problem with being at worship is that we can so easily fall into the trap of thinking we are still at a concert.  For you and I sit there as what looks like an audience. And there upstage is a priest - or perhaps in a cathedral several priests and assorted functionaries - conducting the service, and no doubt there will be an organist and a choir singing psalms and hymns and spiritual songs.
So then what do we do as we come out of church - we comment on the performance of the choir, the quality or otherwise of the sermon, the conduct of the ceremonies. As if we are the audience and it is being done for our benefit. but of course I only have to put it like that for you to realise that I am quite wrong. For when we gather together in church we go - not to hear a concert but to worship Almighty God our Heavenly Father through his Son Jesus Christ in the power of the Holy Spirit. We are not the audience. God is !
Admittedly it is not all one way. God is audience and God is also participator. We listen to his word, we listen to his mouthpiece , the preacher. And occasionally you get caught up together and feel God has richly blessed us and that blessing is the equivalent perhaps of the applause.
An act of worship is when the community of faith come together in the equivalent of a performance. We offer him our praise and thanksgiving, we pray for others as for ourselves, we render thanks for all the blessings we have received at God's hands.
I think that from time to time we need to reassess the balance of our spiritual life. For up to now we have been thinking of ourselves, tuning up our souls, practising and exercising ourselves into Godliness. But is the Christian faith one for individuals who are saved and who come together voluntarily under a convenient roof for worship. Or is it first of all a community, the people of God of which we are all members. We remember how S Paul explained that the church of Christ is like a single body and we each of us are like a body's constituent parts; and we have no life outside the body.
One of the miracles of English Christian history was the evangelical revival in the 18th century - a century which began very much thinking of itself as an age of reason. Evangelists like the Wesley Brothers, pastors like John Newton the reformed slave trader who after his conversion was ordained and is remembered today for his hymn Amazing Grace. Leaders like that as it were personalised the country's religion. Responsible historians will say that the foundation of Methodism prevented a Revolution like the French revolution in this country for Jesus had been given back to the ordinary people.
There was however a back draught. For since then the English people - I cannot speak for the Welsh - have come to think of religion being a personal and private affair. That is not what was intended by its originators. We are still extricating ourselves from that position. For typical reaction in our society is that Church going is an option for Christians. nobody in their right minds would contest that you can lead a good life without going to church. That is not quite the point. If your private religion does not encourage you to share your faith and your joy with your fellow believers then there is something wrong with it.  Church going does not make a Christian but if you are a Christian you will not want, in the words of the new testament, to forsake the assembling of yourselves together.
Some of us these days, fear hat too much is expected of the hour + or - five minutes that churchgoers nowadays think is - in the immortal Lancashire phrase - "doing their whack". If you live in a part of the world where worshipping God requires  a considerable effort to get yourselves there, perhaps in Africa walking several miles - you would find a quite different ethos. On the whole African Christians like to get value for money. The longer the service the better they are pleased. My father in law did a six month locum for the Bp of Johannesburg in 1969 and told that after a long confirmation service, he would retire to the vestry and find that the congregation would be embarking on a prolonged hymn singing exercise.  What's more the church would be likely to be full with all ages from babes at the breast to the elderly. And their attention would be rapt - none of this 'let the children feel at home to run about' syndrome. No - you do not play games in the presence of the all holy all seeing God - you learn to behave in awe and wonder.
Perhaps we should ask ourselves what do we ourselves bring to the worship of God which is our ensemble playing performance. Do we prepare - do we for example check out the readings so that they are to some extent familiar. Do we expect God to speak to us through the public reading of the scriptures - and if we don't then why do we bother ? Do we bring with us the people and the causes we want to pray for; the sins we need to confess, the blessings we want to thank God for - all this as members of the body . In other words, do we bring a contribution which will add the to richness of the worship we are offering in common.
Sally knows better than I for I am protected by my function from knowing what is actually going on in the pews in front of me. But she assures me that wherever we go - and retired priests know a variety of churches - there is a tendency for subdued chatter - and some people she tells me never stop talking from beginning to end. That is hard to understand but I am sure she is right.
Such behaviour would never be tolerated in an self respecting orchestra or any decent choir. Certainly if I came to sing in a concert by my chamber choir unprepared and gossipy I would soon be out on my ear !
I may be wrong but I tend to put the weakness of Sunday worship to a lack of tuning up and daily practice. If you have not been close to our Lord in your prayer time, he will tend to be unreal at ten o'clock on a Sunday morning.
Of course there is another side to things as well. For I suppose that if  the congregation is the orchestra then the minister is the conductor. The way we are led can make an enormous amount of difference. But we all come together to serenade the Lord of the Universe. A moments thought will tell us that we should not imagine that He is the sort of God who judges our performance as if he were the music critic of the Times. It is not the musical or literary standards which He is concerned with - though obviously we should be offering the best in our powers - but rather that what we offer together on a Sunday should be an expression of the devotion we will be bringing to our daily lives in the following week. There is much to be said for the old motto - only our best is good enough for God.  Of course he loves you , and of course he forgives you for his not only all Holy but all Gracious. But that does not mean we can take him for granted. The classical story about all this is an old chestnut told about a small community of monks who lived near the top of one of the alpine passes and gave help and succour to weary travellers. They were getting fewer in number and older in age. One night in a snowstorm, a group of travellers knocked them up looking for shelter. They were welcomed in and given the usual hospitality. The Prior was excited to hear that one of them was a world famous tenor of Pavarotti proportions. He had a bright idea. do you think, signore, he said that you would give us all a treat and sing vespers for us tonight in chapel - it will make such a lovely change from the croaks of us old men. The tenor replied that it had always been his ambition to sing vespers solo and he would be glad to do so. So all gathered together at six o'clock in the chapel and what a treat it was. Never had the brothers heard vespers sung like that; and the guests felt particularly blessed. In the middle on the night Father Prior woke up and to his surprise saw Jesus standing at the foot of his bed. "Father Prior, said the Lord, what happened to Vespers tonight ?"  Oh Lord, said the old man, you would never guess - and he went on to enthuse about the wonderful service that had been sung in chapel. Jesus listened patiently and when the Prior stopped talking he merely said "No Vespers were heard in heaven last night"


                    CLASSICS AND JAZZ

There is a long standing apparent divide between those whose preference is for what they call free worship and those whose preference is for something more structure and perhaps formal.
A congregational minister friend in Burnley loved the Book of Common Prayer and told me how he once concluded his evening service with the third collect from Evensong "Lighten our darkness etc." He was then arraigned before the deacons for reading the prayer. They maintained that if it was to be sincere it had to be spontaneous or at least memorised but never read from a book.
That is a dated story for it was forty years ago and things have loosened up a lot all round in all churches. But it is a good starting off point.. People still occasionally ask me why I needed a printed page to give me words for worshipping God - if you are really religious [they imply]  you should be inspired to make it up as you go along. To which I will always reply at two levels ; Is it hypocritical for an orchestral violin player to play the notes the Beethoven wrote all those years ago ?  We should never imagine he would do otherwise. And secondly without words on paper it is difficult for the congregation to join in.
From the beginning Christians meeting together found they needed some measure of agreed words. There was always some degree of freedom of expression. One of the earliest descriptions of a Christian Eucharist from the second century AD says that at the Eucharist prayer the Bishop proceeds to give thanks [literally to eucharistise] in his own words sometimes at considerable length. Obviously boredom is not just a 21st century phenomenon!
Perhaps more relevantly, some fifty years ago a group of young radical keen newly ordained ministers in New York wanted to break out of the humdrum religion which had no appeal in mainly Afro-American Harlem. So they set up their own experimental church in a shop.They were a real mixture of Baptist, Methodist, Presbyterians and Anglican ministers.They wanted to cast off the shackles of the past - the age long discipline of boring old services and to resonate with the pop culture of downtown Harlem. Later they published a fascinating book about their experiences. For our purposes we may note that they soon found that when they met together for prayer the so called freedom which they thought they were espousing proved unsatisfactory in the long run.  No order, no plan, no obvious format. They ended up by printing a booklet of daily services of morning and evening prayer for their common use; and they found that this practice over the weeks and months began to form them into a team as nothing else did as they shared common words and ceremonies.
As always in life the answer seems to be not this or that but either/or.
In our ratherer superficial culture of today we may forget that brilliant pop and jazz artists owe so much to their classical roots and training. Only recently did I read to my astonishment that so many of the old original black jazz piano players like |Earl Hines or Duke Ellington were classically trained and their favourite recreation when noot performing was to practice Beethoven Piano Concertos. Beenny Good of course made fame by recording the Mozart Clarinet Quintet and Concerto while a leader of the world's premier swing band.
Do these thoughts relate to our Christian religion ?
Many years ago one of the foremost psychiatrists of the day, Norman Sargeant wrote a book called the "Battle for the Mind". It was written in the wake of the Korean war when the techniques of brain washing first came into public domain. It incouded a not very charita gble acount of the way religin uses techniques to achieve the same results - i.e. sudden conversion to a new belief system.  A less known book was published as a rejoinder to this from a Christian point of view and was titled "The Battle for the Soul". One very intersting point it madfe was this. Revival, renewal, aggoriamento - whatever you like to call it - over 2000 years of Christian history always emerged from the matrix of the church. The great Christian evangelists, reformers, leaders -  were invartiably drawn frfrom people who as children were baptised, went to Sunday school or its equivalent, got confirmed, listened to the Vicar's sermons. It was out of that classical training that Christian heroes and reformers sprang. They wanted to make the church a better thing because they loved it not because they hated it. A moments thought gives us the startling truth that Jjesus Son of god was a habitual church/synagagoue goer and listened as it were to the local Vicar's sermons sabbath by sabbath.Perhaps he of all people knew the truth of George Herbert's remark that there is no sermon so bad that some good cannot come out of it - even if it only be the meaning of the word PATIENCE.
    I think it is vitally important that as loyal members of the body of Christ we also learn to discover our own revelation, our own calling; to find what it is to be fulfilled as a child of God growing up. Jesus does not want or need pew-fodder. He calls you to follow Him in the way that leads to life.Abundant living it is called in S John's gospel. Authentic livinc, fullness of life, eternal life - perhaps these are all phrases that point to something beyhond our immediate comprehension and imagining; but never thelwss sound like something so very worth while. This is where meditation onf the Scriptures become part of the package.
We have thought of the musician tujning up. We thought of her practicing her exercises, maintaining and improving her skills. Butg she also of course does more; she practices the music he is to perform. Not just learning the notes, important though that be. I was singing at a choral concert where one of the contracted soloists had obviously not done her homework- a professional singer who did not know the nootes well and the result was disastrous. The whole piece of music lost its credibility and the Choral Society withrdrew part of the fee !
For Christians who are serioius about their pilgrimages there is nothing ot replace reading marking learniing an d inwardly digestinig above all Jesus as revealed to us in the Gospels. It is called meditation. Don't be afraid of the word - it is only a latinised word that means THINKING.  In the gospels we do not hear Jesus say MEDITATE he would say GO AND THINK WHAT THESE WORDS MEAN or WHAT DO YOU THINK.. Back in the thirties at Junior school our english text books were a series called READING AND THINKING - and that is a model title for reading our bibles. That is how those reformers and revivalists and evangelists and missioinaries became what they were - because they found that God was speaking to them as they read the gospels and thought about what they found t here. We need to meet the challenge of his life and thought ourselves, personally. I think one of the weaknesses of the church in our generation is due to the fact that for too long in the past we have learned our religion by hearsay and not made it our own.
Each one of us is his precious child and he says to us "Come and learn of me for I am meek and lowly of heart; and you shall find REST for your souls"

        FIRST TALK [INTRODUCTION]
Last year the parishes in Bromsgrove asked me to conduct their annual Quiet Day for lay people. what we are doing today is essentially the same programme. But what we are doing is also the product of a slap on the wrist from above. For I said I would do it firm in the knowledge that it was not only filed away safely ; but also that it was there in the word processor files of my computer, No problem - I thought - no sweat - all I will need to do is to revise it and edit it . Little have I learned in all these years the way of the almighty. For about three weeks ago my computer crashed and I lost all my files apart from a limited number that I had backed up a couple of years ago. Well that was very annoying but didn't yet pose a problem. All I had to do was to get out the printed script I had used and saved for a rainy day. But of course that was the problem. For Sally and I went through every nook and cranny of my study and everything was there EXCEPT the one item I needed. Somehow it must have got in the wrong pile when I was tidying up the other week. Think of all that accumulated wisdom decorating the local infill site ! Anyway it was lost and all I had was the outline programme which you have before you. Everything else has to start almost from scratch apart from a very few scribbled notes I had made in preparation.
So you have the theme for the day:
        GOD THE MILLENNIUM AND ME
and together we have already learned from my personal story the first thing about a subject like that.
YOU NEVER KNOW WHAT GOD HAS COOKED UP FOR YOU AROUND THE CORNER
    I chose this subject because it seems to me that there is a danger that the whole subject of the Millennium is in danger of being monopolised on one side by political journalism set on rubbishing the millenium dome and on the other sideby some rather neurotic Christian voices. Indeed not only neurotic but also psychotic. You may have heard that the Israeli police in Jerusalem are extremely nervous of the fact that strange minded Christians - mainly from strange cults - are arriving in Jerusalem and have dangerous ideas about ushering in the Kingdom of God in power in the year 2000. They are under the illusion that they are God's instruments delegated by Him to bring in the final conflict and usher in the reign of God . Allegedly there is no limit to which they will not go to create havoc in the city of destruction. I think there is need for more sanity in our thinking. And here our first hunch becomes important. It is very dangerous to think you know what the future holds - even if it concerns something as minor as a Quiet Day at St. Thomas' St. Annes on the Sea. Perhaps my mistake was to leave God out of the equation. I ought to have said
"IF THE LORD WILL I WILL CONDUCT A QUIET DAY ON 3RD JULY"
    So I am inviting you to explore with me today what the mind of Christ MAY have to say to us as we begin the countdown to the year 2000. We shall do so within the structure of the Eucharist. But we shall extend the eucharist over several hours in order to give us time to think and meditate on what we were doing in a more leisured way.
There will be three more addresses after this; and these will go alongside the OT NT and Gospel readings. And at the end we shall celebrate Holy Communion together. There will be quiet periods and there will be music to listen to. The important thing is not the content of what I shall be saying but rather the opportunity for us all to enjoy some quiet, some stillness of heart and soul, some pondering on the word of God, some opportunity to pray . Listen not only to what I may say; but listen to the psalms and the readings which have much more authority than me. And relax and enjoy.

        GOD
        NEVERTHELESS MY SOUL WAIT THOU STILL UPON GOD
What a wonderful word is NEVERTHELESS
All of us here in some way or other - probably privately and in obscurity - have made this great affirmation. NEVERTHELESS
When Jesus commanded Peter to let down the net for the umpteenth time after a night of futile fishing; you remember he replies -
"We have toiled all the night long and caught nothing; NEVERTHELESS at your word I will let down the net again.
We remember Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane, agonising over what is going to be done to him over the next twelve hours. "Father take away this cup from me. NEVERTHELESS your will not mine be done"
Paul writes to the Galatians that wonderful description of the life of a believing Christian who is no longer subject to the laws and conventions of society.
"I am crucified with Christ. NEVERTHELESS I live. Yet not I but Christ lives in me and the life which I no live in the flesh I live by the faith of the Son of God who loved me and gave himself for me."
We turn to the Fourth Gospel and we find Jesus at table in the Upper Room explaining to his friends the meaning of his approaching death. He goes on
"  Because I have said these things unto you sorrow hath filled your heart. NEVERTHELESS  I tell you the truth. It is expedient that I go away; for if I go not away the Comforter will not come to you. But if I depart I will send him unto you."
I quote from the Authorised Version because NEVERTHELESS is a very strong word which has largely vanished from modern translations. Peter tends to say " But if you say so I will let down the net"
Those of you who are with me today have said in your hearts
NEVERTHELESS  let us turn to God this morning. In doing so you are going against what modern good sense and good taste would consider a use of a Saturday in July.
NEVERTHELESS let us go against the odds; for we have made our wager - we have bet our lives on God and his promises. And we are aware how the clever people of the world would like us to believe we are backing a loser. I suppose that is what the disciples thought as they saw their erstwhile leader and friend led out to Calvary. Let us not belittle the opposition. The difference for Christians between fifty years ago and today is that in 1949 there was a likelihood that you felt safe with majority opinion and your Christianity contained a good deal of convention. Fifty years on the convention has disappeared. Religion - especially the Christian religion and perhaps even more especially the religion of the Church of England - is regarded by many people as a rather quaint minority hobby and interest. To be a professed Christian today is to say that despite all the signs to the contrary despite all the mocking of the media and the arguments of the pundits on intellectual programmes on late night TV, NEVERTHELESS my soul wait thou still upon God.
Then consider who is talking . My soul. Again a rather unfashionable word - philosophers have long affirmed that the existence of such a thing cannot be proved. Even near on 2000 years ago a philosophic tyrant had his slave strapped down and systematically cut up slice by slice so as to prove that nowhere in the human body was such a thing as the soul visible. If you want a snappy catch Christian answer to such shenanigans then you say that your body has not got a soul - it is the opposite - your soul has a body - you are the embodiment of your soul.
And where do we find the soul in our faith.
We think of Mary singing  "My SOUL doth magnify the Lord."
We see Jesus again in the garden praying "My soul is exceeding sorrowful even unto death"
You could say that my soul equals my self. But not in the egotistical way we use the word self. My soul is the deepest reality about me - my real self - my non-tangible self - the pattern of my being. When I say "My soul" I am talking to myself [""He thinks he is God"]
NEVERTHELESS WAIT THOU STILL UPON GOD
Why ? Our world is a world of immediate results - it is a press of the button culture - pressing the right button give us our pleasures at our disposal - pressing the right button produces the answer in a flash. We are not used these days to wait patiently and persistently.
But god is not to be hurried. God as shown us in the Bible is an inscrutable God. When we look for him he often seems to be the God who declares "I am a God who hides myself". But when we are not looking , or when we are waiting and not really expecting then he can suddenly burst upon us in ways we had never foreseen.
The psalms are full of such insights.
37; O wait for the Lord , wait patiently for him.
104: The eyes of all wait upon the O Lord.
Isaiah 40: they that wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength.
Acts I Jesus says at his ascension "Wait for the promise from on high.
Paul in Galatians: By faith we eagerly wait for the righteousness we hope for. In Thessalonians "We wait for Jesus God's Son from heaven.
Our religion should never be seen as simply results on demand. We often would like to think so. It is easy to give the wrong impression - for example that all we need to produce God is to do a few simple  things with bread and wine. It is easy for Christians to give the impression they have God all buttoned up, parcelled up in a box.  But scripturally the one slogan we are allowed to recite is that poster of Jesus on a Cross. Again Paul in Galatians says "We placed on a placard Jesus Christ only and Him crucified."
We have seen that we are approaching the year 2000 AD as something to celebrate . And we note that there are other things around the edges that worry or disturb us so that perhaps we would want to be reassured that the future is in good hands. We are ambivalent about time. We celebrate its passing - birthdays , anniversaries, church festivals, new years, millennia. But equally we should note that time is always reminding us that we are only here for a short while. And our consciousness of approaching death distorts time - for we want it to mean something other than we see it to mean.
We Christians ought to be able to cope with this for we believe we are already sharing in the eternal life which is Christ's gift. But do we really believe that.
    In the society we now live in, the Church of England is already in practice disestablished even though the law says otherwise. By which I mean that it is now only one and often a lonely voice in many. Fifty years of public mockery, two generations of derogatory remarks from the media and press has damaged its image and blunted its impact. Our street cred is on the wane. Archbishops of Canterbury are written off while Cardinals of Westminster are written up.
    At individual level do we really still believe; or are we taking refuge in a cosy spiritual club which protects us from reality. I don't think it is too much to say that most people today view us Christians as people who have a quaint hobby called religion. They are quite happy for us to indulge in it, but cannot see it has much relevance to their lives or concerns. I wonder sometimes if anyone will take Christianity seriously until and unless Christians are again ready to die for Jesus.
Is there perhaps a sense of the end of an age ? Do we perhaps sense - as I do sometimes in moments of depression - that Christianity as an institution in its present manifestation has run its natural course. Most people no longer THINK in terms of a God centred existence or social order.
If we turn away from the madness of the sects  and the enthusiasm of the literalists, what do we have to offer our world, our country, our town, our parish? Already the media often seems to have made up its mind that the fundamentalists are the real Christians who  believe in God and that you and I are temporisers and dissemblers.
Are they right ? Do we have real convictions any longer or do we cling onto our faith because we would be lost without it ? Have we become contaminated by the all pervading ethos of the payment by results economy.  
In a sense we live in a more materialistic society that did the old Soviet Union with its atheistic dogmas. At least Communists believed that their convictions shaped the environment and not the other way round. Is God then relegated to being the private chaplain of the remnant of what was once the all pervading spin doctor of public and private morality i.e. the Church ? Do you get the feeling - as I do when I am in one of my moods - that we are living near the end of things as we have known them ? That is the millennial feeling. The actual date does not really matter. All THAT does is to provide some sort of a framework. Is it sufficient to consider your Christian faith as a consoling belief that when your world comes to an end and you die there will be more to come ?
As you listened to our Gospel reading just now did you notice how our Lord guides us away from wanting to be too expert and detailed about dates. The important thing is to be ready. When you break it down , all this language about the Day of the Lord; the day of judgement; the millennium - what it means for you and I is precisely that sometime somewhere sooner or later in our life some ultimate questions are going to be asked of us. How we will respond to such questions will reveal what we truly are. And that is our judgement. It will reveal whether the words we have professed have taken root in our hearts or have remained just nice words. I notice with interest that when Jesus tells the parable of the sheep and the goats, it is not only the goats who are surprised at their fate - it is also the sheep who are surprised and delighted and wonder how they have come to merit their Lord's approval.
I find myself returning over and over again to the poem OF Geoffrey Studdert Kennedy in which he suggests the most realistic image of the last judgement is to be standing alone on the sea shore and know that "He" stands next to you and in the silence there is just one word - "WELL?"
Can I and my church die and rise again to new life in God's new world.
Do WE - never mind the vast army of practical atheists, really value what a privilege it is to live in Western Europe in 1999. If we have lived through the Kosovo crisis and not learned that then we never will.
And does not the voice of the prophets ring a bell when they universally forecast that a golden age of prosperity will have within it the seed of its own corruption - why  ? because the God who provided the prosperity will be forgotten.
Do we have the faith that in waiting upon God we will believe that however cataclysmic the future, His Divine Purpose cannot in the end be overcome ?
And back to the beginning.
Can we say what we shall be celebrating in the year 2000.
Just perhaps the symbolic birthday 0f Jesus of Nazareth ?
The way the Spirit of Jesus was let loose on the world at Easter so that the unique figure of the Carpenter has challenged the universal assumptions of I myself and me.
The miracle that after 2000 years human souls can still be opened up and re-born when they come face to face with Jesus Christ and him crucified
Or is it just a cultural jamboree ? a celebration of the fact that faith born among the Hebrews and intellectual science born in the ancient Greeks and the concept of the rule of law - that great gift of the administration of the Roman Empire all combined to produce a civilisation which has taken knowledge and technology and human achievement further than any other in the history of the human race.
In the face of all this do we have the guts to say
"Yes - but what we really should be celebrating is that our era began when a child was born who is the embodiment of God - or as St. John puts it "The word became human".
That - we believe as orthodox Christians -is the centre point of world history and everything that followed is only comment on the battle of Christ to win humanity back to its first loyalty and first love.
Lastly the great question with which the approaching millenium challenges us all is enshrined in our Lord's parable of how the pangs of childbirth lead to a greater joy. He spoke of his own death and  resurrection - but in truth he was speaking of all our deaths and our own Easters to which we may look forward. Death does not just mean the moment when we draw our last breath - it means every influence that threatens our existence from the tiny irritations  to the enormous cosmic dimensions of life.  I end with a quotation from a non religious book which I found thought provoking.
"We live in a society that has elevated the cop out into an art form. We live in our air conditioned buildings; we drive heated cars; and above all we hide and deny death. Hiding death is the epitome of our contemporary Western civilisation - and I believe it will be our civilisation's epitaph."
If there is truth in that - and I believe there is, then perhaps it points us to what the Christian community has to offer the world as it celebrates our millennium for us. We have good news about death. But we hesitate to proclaim it in these cynical days . yet perhaps it is what people have really been waiting to hear from us. Perhaps that accounts for the reverence in which Cardinal Hume was held - becuase in his quiet but faithful way he talked mostly about God and Death and Life. I occasionally conduct a half hour prayer for healing session at Worcester Cathedral. It involves giving a short address or meditation. After one of these a lady came up to me and said "Thank you Owen - I have been coming to this cathedral for fourteen years and that is the first time I can remember anyone speaking about death."  I think that no more needs to be said.


        THE MILLENNIUM

The human race seems to be haunted by the dimension of time. It seems to us to be a very real thing - we carry watches and check them for accuracy; we display public clocks so that we can measure it. Clergy in England have a sort of mania about their services starting on the dot of the appointed time. Whereas in Africa they are much more sensible and reckon the advertised time is a suggestion and that the Sunday morning service will begin when everyone is ready - much to the annoyance of untrained Europeans who turn up for ten o'clock and find the Eucharist gets under way at about midday.
`    We also have a habit of trying to interpret the events of our own day as if they were history. The truth is that [for example] we have not the slightest idea how NATO's Kosovo Crusade will appear to historians in a hundred years time. There is a nice cartoon showing Adam and Eve being expelled from the Garden of Eden by the avenging angel and Adam is saying to her "Well my dear, you must realise that we are living in an age of transition." Which is merely making the point that 'living in an age of transition' is simply the excuse we make to one another to excuse our uncomfortable feelings about the way our history is going. We wish we could get hold of God's angle on all this. The best parable I have come across about the relationship of time to eternity and the riddle of whether we can influence events or give way to fate is this. Imagine you are in a plane taking off at night. As you speed down the runway you see the lights which mark out your path going by faster and faster one after another. The the plane lifts off and circles around and you look down and you see the lights below you. They are no longer moving; they are now seen as an unmoving pattern. That may give us a tiny inkling of the relationship between time and eternity. And indeed may help to spell out the thought in our Epistle that one thousand years is as but one day.
    Our problem is that we can look back ; but we can only guess the future. In the prescientific ages it was largely the priests and the religious who manipulated our idea of time. We might remember the verdict of St. Paul in Ephesians: "In the fullness of time God sent his Son, born of a woman, born under the Jewish law; so that he might set us free from the law." Time was not measured scientifically but in terms of quality. So they tended to measure in standard  amounts - 40 days and 40 nights is typical; a week of seven days was appropriate because seven is the mystical number - the addition of the first prime number and the first product number 2 by 2. All calendars had their roots in the attempt by religiously minded people to harness time and give it significance. I was surprised myself to find that the whole concept of BC and AD did not happen until the 8th century and was the invention of an Englishman no less. Up to that moment, time was measured by referring to events and reigns. At Christmas St Luke tells us that Jesus was born when Quirinius was Governor of Syria. That was the method of those days. It was eight centuries later that the Emperor of western europe wanted something more accurate and he called in the greatest scholar of his generation - no less a one than our own Venerable Bede of Durham - to solve the problem.
And it was he who introduced the measuring stick with which we entitle every issue of our morning papers. In a perverse sort of way it was through the fairly new idea of numbering the years  that the advent of the first Millenium of 1000 AD made a lot of people nervous. If we hadn't started numbering off. that date would have no doubt passed us by without much comment.
    Today's preoccupation with the coming year 2000 is a latter day example of this desire to manipulate our history. Our problem as humans is that we are always being torn two ways. In practical terms, we take the future fairly philosophically and optimistically. We have come through several crises [perhaps] and we are still here. But there is also the nightmare scenario which seems to haunt us. Whether it be the nuclear threat of yesteryear, or the threat posed by BSE or GM crops; and more particularly in the light of today's theme, the millenial bug -  we seem to delight in living under the possibility of a future cataclysm. The future is either a coming golden age or a cosmic disaster. And in our own age we notice that this is not primarily a religious message but one related to our concept of the achievements of science and technology and human cleverness. A well known American writer wrote a play in the 1950's called "The skin of our teeth" in which he shows a family coping with various threats to existence from the great Ice age to the nuclear bomb. His theme is that in the face of life threatening events the human race has somehow boxed itself out of its corner and survived - if only just. And that is cause for optimism.
    When we go back to our Bibles we find  this either/or message is part of the ground thinking. The prophets of old seemed to have found a  sort of divine perverseness. When Israel was suffering disasters and humiliations politically, then prophets like Isaiah saw these things as the birth-pangs of God's  gift of a new and coming golden age. When everthing was on an up and Israel prospered politically and economically then they propheceid doom. For prosperity breeds a culture of plenty and a national lottery and the corruption of society.
    Jesus typically spoke of the age giviing birth and the pain of labour briinging in the end Joy that a child is born. You couldn't minnister in old time Lancashirewithout being told by a devout lady "No cross no crown Vicar !" The world cannoot be born again, says the New Testament, without its labour pains. Jesus told us to pray for the coming of Gods kingdom; and there is little in history to re-assure us that the reign of justice and purity and love can come about simply by the mutual consent of the megalomaniacs of political power or big business or organised crime.
    Where does the year 2000 fit in to all this ? I don't think you need me to remind you that it is going to be a purely artifical date. Most people reckon that Jesus was probably born about 6BC - so in one sense the second millenium has long gone. Truth to tell it has as little relevance to reality as does  the Queen's Official Birthday. And perhaps that is the sensible way to think of it. So we can conscientiously use it as a time for celebration.
    At the same time, behind all this hoo-ha about the millennium there lies an insticnt which goes back maybe to the very beginning of human civilisation. That instinct seems to be a gut feeling that the affairs of the human race are subject to the long term and often idiosyncratic influence of the power behind the scenes we call God. Many years ago I read in a Salford newspaper how a Vicar surveyed his parish church which had just been burned down overnight. Standing benath the wreckage he pronounced
"It must be an act of God under suspicious circumstances."
Professor Bowker late of Lancaster University and now I think at Kent once pronounced "Religion is what the human race does with its madness".By madness he really meant that non-rational, emotional or intuitive side of our nature which refuses to concede sense to the inteligent and rational part of us. And so perhaps although we here are reasonably sensible people not given ot much fantasy, it may be that we will all utter a little sigh of relief when 1st January arrives without great disaster . Mind you, it would in a way be a very biblical thing if something disastrous did happen because we had failed to read the signs of the times and take due warning. It is at least somewhat reassuring that apparently all British Airways executives have been ordered to spend New Years Eve in mid air on board their international flights as a gesture of confidence in their computers; and that Sainsbury's have been using a redundant store in Exeter to simulate 24 hours working on eitheer side of the date. We are never quite happy to believe all the scientific evidence - life is a bit deeper and more subtle than that.
Closing prayer
         Lead us O Lord from fear to hope
        from doubt to faith; from deceit to truth.
        from dryness to tears; from coldness to love
        from thought to action;  from the past to the future
        So may your kingdom come and your will be done
        on earth as in heaven. AMEN