Month: April 2020

       

                                  Passover Eve A.D.33  A soldier talks.

It was a bloody awful day; that is, it was bloody and a day to be remembered but in remembrance more like night.

Which is not to say we didn’t do our job well-we kept our pride if nothing else, proud to be Caesar’s peacekeepers and to do what is required.

The things I’ve seen; you have to think that it’s just my job and not so bad now-not like my father’s father’s days of wading in Gaulish fields thick with Gaulish blood.

Word came that it was a political-done as a favour for some priest. It takes, they say, all sorts.

And politicals are not so bad, show trials serve a purpose what with the beating and spitting-roll up for the theatre of the damned.

Another sparrow legged hothead ridiculed and lost, for once, for words, Caesar’s cat has got his tongue.

Not like the thieves. Poor wretch to be a thief under a pitiless law. Each with a story disregarded by due process. Men like you and me. There but for the grace of God.

But I digress.

It’s a routine, choreography if you like, though never two the same.

The thorns for instance, they were new, taken from acacia thickets where you wouldn’t send a dog.

Kings with such crowns fail to see the irony.

Blinded they fall but not this man.

He was in Hell but not our Hell-more a Universe he had wrapped into himself to overwhelm. We, with our rods and mockery were just a passing thing.

Destiny,I am convinced, hung from wood that day.

We rolled dice but there was no joy in it.

                                                  

Easter Day 1960

Three score years ago, when Eastertide began,

I wore my new white shirt and, joyful sang.

Lent then a memory set aside, no more kneeling quiet

On cold stone floor, and sweets restored

To the diet.

Each year the same, a week preceding of holy high emotion;

Palm Sunday’s Passion read, Good Friday’s devotion,

And familiar faces, familiar phrases and the stately rhythm

Of ecclesia in stasis

Now all is interrupted; should I mourn those days,

Those Easters past, when I imperviously praised

My risen King in hallowed sacramental story,

And would sing, supernal anthems echoing,

Thine the glory.

No, we must believe our Lord is here despite our isolation,

And venture within ourselves to hear his words of consolation

To Mary, and mind that it is to every soul he’s talking.

We’re not confined, and we will find him

In our garden, walking.

                                          19^th April 2020 Easter 2

I wandered lonely as a cloud,

That drifts along in azure air,

When all at once I saw a crowd

Of dandelions, flowering where

They’re considered plants of little worth.

An interesting flower, though,feminist,

Males having been found superfluous.

Its blooming and seeding all consist,

Parthenogenetically virtuous,

Of an altogether virgin birth.

Each dandelion fruits as a crown

Of symmetry, pure and crystalline.

Each facet light as thistledown-

Built as a clock they then combine

To scatter from a small child’s mirth.

Is it too much to suggest a parallel

With Christ new risen from the dead,

And with seeds of the hope that conquered Hell;

Not born to die but dispersed instead.

To settle on a waiting Earth.

The character in my story looks for certainty, chiefly the certainty that all will be well. This is what we all want of course but have learnt to ignore the desire to know to a degree since we come to realise as adults that in this world no such certainty is available to us.

People of religious faith often are motivated by the need to see God in the face as it were. We are taught in our faith that even if it was possible for us nevertheless it would not be good for us. Even the God of Jesus Christ is the God who would not show himself to Moses face to face. Nevertheless there are Christians who would want a direct, immediate, unmediated experience of God, God as he really is rather than some representation of him by someone else; by the Church. To have such an experience would be to see absolutely the meaning of things; how all things come together for our good. The question ‘why?’ arrests us at the hardest times, but the vision of God would answer all such questions and supply the reassurance that we are desperate for in the most difficult days of our life.  It would be to see beyond death, and to know absolutely that our loved ones who perhaps are dying, or have even died, yet live; we will see that we will live after death and there will be no more doubt, the fear and uncertainty regarding life and death that underlies and seems to burden our whole existence will be banished. We will have peace.

I don’t know why God has made it so that this ‘vision’ is an impossible ambition in this life, but he has. We are can only know God via media, via words, symbols, language, the testimonies of other people and all these being various media of the the witness of the first Christians. None of this is certain, it is a basis for faith. In ordinary times such faith is relatively easy. In times such as we find ourselves in at the moment it becomes much harder. And there are many people who are grieving at this time for whom faith, if they have had any at all, becomes a much more difficult thing to sustain.

There is something necessary about our uncertainty. And what has been taught since the beginnings of the faith, is that a part of that necessity has to do with fostering a sense of dependancy upon God. To have a self contained certainty regarding God and all the most essential things would be to obtain a sense that we no longer need God nor anything else. We are made to live from God as a constant source of life just as we live from food and water. And just as this living from food is no sort of impediment to life but a source of enjoyment, living from God, in full dependancy upon God, so that we go back to him every day, is joy and peace.

There will be times of uncertainty and there is nothing to be gained from underplaying how hard it is to live without the certainty of the love of God when we or those we love are in danger or taken from us. Then there is heart break and devastation and some of us will feel that we are taken to a dark, dark place  from which we will never return. That darkness is black as pitch. But men and women have been brought back even from here. It may take time; it does take time, but people who place their broken hearts into the hands of God do come home.

Practically speaking the route would be, as far as any of us are able, through prayer, through reading of scripture, through study of the word. Study of the word is not a popular aspect of all this but for me, through theology and philosophy, it is a matter of getting to know, more and more deeply, someone that I love. And by getting to know more, I love more.

But there are times when the heart no longer has the energy even to pray, at least not in the most formal sense. I remember that Lynn had trouble thinking about prayer in any other way than the most formal way and thought her connection with God must be severed if she can no longer find the will to do that. But it is not so. We remember Augustine’s words: ‘pray as you can, not as you can’t’. This must extend all the way to sighs of the heart, the reflexes of emotional pain. The most authentic prayer is a cry of desperation in the night. We are told that we are heard.To all of you I wish God’s blessing and that we all come through this strange and, for many, this painful and fearful time. Remember that we are made to live from God each day, one day at a time. But you are only called ti remember that as best you can, speak it in you heart, long for God’s pea

Some thoughts for Low Sunday, on which I would have been preaching

In the Aplin household now the children have all left home, breakfast is normally a solitary meal. Whichever of us gets up first lets the dog in and prepares their own breakfast whilst the other uses the shower. Then roles are reversed and so we both eat alone. (Although we eat together for all other meals.)

However, on Easter Sunday morning, I laid the table for us to eat together and I did it properly, hotel style, with matching cutlery, crockery etc. The meal was to be boiled eggs and toast, the last two eggs we had, which I had decorated with permanent marker pens. For drinks we had orange juice and then cups of tea. In addition, there were two chocolate oranges as I couldn’t get Easter Eggs as we are self-isolating.

At ten past eight as we ware cracking the eggs, we turned on the radio to hear Archbishop Justin celebrate the Easter Eucharist in his kitchen. We both found the service very moving, as we quietly continued our meal. The music chosen was beautiful and the message from our Archbishop was both uplifting and profound and exactly right for these very difficult times.

When we came to the communion, as Archbishop Justin said the words “take eat this is my body which is broken for you” Eileen broke off a corner of her toast and passed it to me and we both ate a small piece of toast. Like wise at the words “This blood is the new covenant in my blood” we both took a sip from our glasses of orange. This was entirely spontaneous; we had not planned this at all. We continued to the end of the service, joining in the prayers and hymns as best we could and by the end, we both felt very blessed.

Later I reflected on whether we had in fact, taken part in a communion service. The bread had at least been bread but the orange juice was not wine and neither element had been consecrated. Nonetheless I felt particularly close to God at that point which is one meaning of communion. There was also a wonderful sense that God had come into our home and was sharing the meal with us.

We will all I am sure, be very keen to get back to worshipping in our churches as soon as it is decided that this is safe to do so and we will be pleased once again to celebrate the Eucharist as it should be celebrated; but I shall cherish this memory, hoping that it will help me to remember that Christianity is not some thing that just goes on in churches but must spread into our homes and all aspects of our daily lives.

I shall think of it particularly when we read of Jesus meeting the disciples at the lakeside and sharing fish with them as I believe that just for a few moments Eileen and I shared in that experience.

Truly for us that Easter morning service was one of the most nourishing things that has come out of the Archbishop’s kitchen in a very long while.

Keith Aplin LLM.

Parish Church of St Peter and Paul Wisbech, 13^th April 2020 the 26^th day of self-isolation

We know, because we have heard it a thousand times times, that Easter is about new life, new life within life and new life after death. But what manner of experience was it that the disciples had when they said that they had seen the risen Jesus? We want to know this because for the resurrection to indicate a life beyond this one, for all of us, firstly we must have reasonable assurance that it was actually real. Secondly if we accept that the disciples were not lying, and just about everywhere now people think they were honest, not least given the way they influenced others, if we accept this, we must still at least try to obtain an understanding of what it was that they saw. So, for instance, was it merely a mystical, spiritual apparition of a disembodied entity?

We live just after a period in which scepticism about possibilities for reality beyond the ordinary was almost universally present amongst the clever people. Believing in the miraculous was thought a belief for the credulous in all but the theological faculties and even in many of those the faith was being radically rationalised. If there was any Christian belief amongst the educated and cultivated the notion of the resurrection was explained away. There was the usual explanations in terms of some psychological aberration amongst the disciples for whom the crucifixion was so traumatic that their minds collectively bent to the delusion that Jesus had appeared to them after his death. This has troubled many over the years.   And there was the already mentioned notion that they saw some mystical apparition that was only for them. It was not an objective manifestation that anyone could have seen. 

Some have written that the resurrection and its centrality to the Gospels was some invention of the gospel writers who imposed this layer of crucifixion and resurrection upon stories that were originally accepted as just accounts of Jesus’ sayings, a kind of wisdom literature. Many tried to get behind the traditions of the Church, including the writers of the Gospels, to some so called solid rock of history recounting the ‘true’ Jesus; what he actually said and did as opposed to words that the Gospel writers put in his mouth.

These accounts were mostly honest attempts to understand what happened. The researchers knew that their findings would hurt and upset many of the ordinary faithful but they thought it worse that such people should orientate their lives to lies and their intention was to liberate the faithful from untruth. But over the years none of these explanations of the Jesus of the Gospels, the miracles and especially the resurrection, have been particularly successful, either in converting the faithful or even convincing more orthodox scholars. Many of the latter have since written solidly researched, honest and hard headed rebuttals of these ideas. The debate goes on, but the days in which something like the resurrection of Jesus could not have happened because it does not conform to the laws of finite causality have long gone.

But what of the ordinary man and woman who struggles through life, a life sometimes beautiful and full of joy, sometimes devastatingly tragic and hauntingly, painfully sad? What Messiah do they want? What Messiah have they always longed for? What Messiah did the wretched of Roman occupied Palestine cry out for: shed so many tears before God in inarticulate sobs for? 

I must say that for myself, and what I am able to read of the hearts of so many people I’ve met over the years, what is longed for is a Messiah, a God that brings us and those we live to life after death. We want not to be ghosts, we want to live on in our bodies. The most painful matter part of the human experience is the death of those we love; even now I long to see my grandparents again, my departed friends, I would embrace them and cry with joy to see them. As Paul has said, if this is not what the Messiah brings then Christians, millions of them throughout the globe, are of all people most to be pitied (1 Cor. 15. 14-19).

In the Gospel of John Jesus says    ‘I am the resurrection and the life, he that believes in me, though he be dead, yet shall he live’ (John 11.25), he raises Lazarus from the dead and God brings him from the death of the cross to renewed, physical life. I have no ambition for another teacher of wisdom, there are enough of them. What I long for, with my whole heart, is to know that he is the Messiah, The only Son of God, the Word made flesh, and that he is therefore able to make it that though I be dead, yet shall I live; though my mother, father, beloved spouse or most of all, child, be dead, yet shall they live. There can be no substitute. If there is no resurrection for us to witness to there can be no Church. We would do better to leave them closed.

You are at home now, not in Church. Many are hurt by being denied the right to congregate in Church together on Easter Day; that they will not receive communion. But this terrible disease is teaching us all something of great importance. It is leading us to new life in our understanding of the faith. I know you want for these externals and they are important to you, but they are not of the greatest importance.  Wherever you are the most important thing is to give praise to God and believe that he is Love, not your love or mine, but Love in itself, Love that values you in your little lives and all that you love. Believe God is Love, Love that literally brought Jesus back from the dead: embodied, objectively visible like you and I and ready to eat and drink with his friends. And through your tears and pain believe that he will raise you again, and all you love, and that you will take up your lives with them again.

Winter came upon us and in its cold touch it brought us low for everything seemed to be dead and dying. And I laid down upon the lifeless earth to fade without struggle into the long night. But suddenly I did open my eyes and it was spring. The sun warmed my skin and my limbs regained their vigour. I looked around and all that had seemed dead had been returned to life; for Love could not bear the loss of His children. So, he stretched forth His arms into the cold, winters night, He picked them up and brought them trembling and tearful home; warmed and enlivened again by His heart. Amen and amen.

¹ Praise the Lord.

Praise God in his sanctuary;
    praise him in his mighty heavens.
² Praise him for his acts of power;
    praise him for his surpassing greatness.
³ Praise him with the sounding of the trumpet,
    praise him with the harp and lyre,
⁴ praise him with timbrel and dancing,
    praise him with the strings and pipe,
⁵ praise him with the clash of cymbals,
    praise him with resounding cymbals.

⁶ Let everything that has breath praise the Lord.

Praise the Lord.

For the last six months I have been reading my way through Book of Psalms, Today I came to Psalm 150 the last of them. 

In trying to understand the Psalms more fully I have read Tom Wright’s book “Finding God in the Psalms” which I would recommend to anyone starting a similar study.

Each day I have read a psalm twice, together with the psalms which precede and follow it and then meditated for a while on anything that jumps out at me. Today after six months reading, I was greatly struck by the very last line of this the very last psalm

“Let everything that has breath praise the Lord.”

I have chanted this psalm many times, and used it as the opening words of services but I have never, until yesterday, given that last verse much importance, it just seemed to be the kind of things that the psalmist used to end their psalms. 

However today, having listened to graphic descriptions of what might be happening to the Prime Minister at St. Thomas Hospital the absolutely vital importance to breath and breathing to life was made abundantly clear. It seems that if the level of saturated oxygen in one’s blood drops by only 5% below its normal level breathing become difficult and painful and that below that level supplementary oxygen is needed and if it drops any further a ventilator is needed to maintain life.

Initially I was moved to pray for: 

All who are currently being kept alive by ventilators.

Those who manufacture and maintain ventilators.

Nurses, Doctors and Technicians who use ventilators to support patients.

All who suffer from respiratory illness.

Those who will today draw their final breath.

After a pause I moved on to consider the importance of breath in the scriptures:

The breath of God is often used as a way of visualising the way God’s Spirit can enter us, as in the hymn ‘Breathe on me breath of God’. 

We talk of the scriptures as being ‘inspired’ but the literal meaning of inspire is to breathe in i.e. the opposite of expire. We can therefore think of the writers of the scriptures as having breathed in God

When Jesus meets with the disciples in the locked room after the resurrection, St John records “Jesus said again, Peace be with you!as the Father sent me, so I send you.” Then he breathed on them saying “Receive the Holy Spirit.” (John 20:21-22 NIV.)

A meditation for Good Friday by Stephen Harris

This year, in the course of Holy Week we have not been able to follow the Way of the Cross in our churches, or to stand in meditation before the Stations of the Cross. We still have, though, the Passion narratives for our own personal meditations and in them can find the Seven Last Words. These have, throughout the life of the Church, formed the backbone of Good Friday devotions. The texts are precious and I hope that, together, we can draw something important from them today.

Jesus, reduced to a husk of a man, was in the most vile of circumstances. He was in unspeakable agony, unimaginable degradation and the most abyssal dark night of the soul. We cannot begin to comprehend. We read of his suffering with tears in our eyes. Yet through it he speaks, if not to the unhearing crowd, to us who want, who need, to believe.

What can those Words say?

We have come to the Gethsemane moment for our generation. In this time of trial do we, like the disciples, fade out of the picture-duvets over our heads. We do. Yet talk to me Lord, talk to me from the Cross.

Jesus said ‘I thirst’ (John 19 vs 28).His thirst was physical; how could it not be, hanging uncared for under a Passover Sun. And it was spiritual too; a thirst for righteousness and the redemption of fallen humanity. So too must we thirst, thirst for great things and thirst for small. We must be desperate for a change to come throughout the human race. We must thirst for our cup of suffering to be a signpost on the road to a world seen as the Kingdom of Heaven.

Jesus said ‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? (Mark 15 vs 34). These words should shock us, can you imagine the effect on a new Christian? They are a barometer of pain, the measure of a mind derailed; the words of a Messiah truly human as well as truly God. And we might say something similar – ‘why has this plague been inflicted on us?’

Jesus, when his mind clears, knows that he has not been forsaken. And nor have we. Might it not be better to say ‘My God, my God why have we forsaken you?’ We can now see that the past decades have been crazy; times of strange infatuations and ‘greed is good’. Like the words in our Easter Messiahs, we like sheep have gone astray. If we understand that it is us who have turned our face from God, not he from us, we see that by turning back we can be whole again.

And we have the example of the penitent thief, to whom Jesus says ‘Today you will be with me in Paradise’ (Luke 23 vs 43). The thief saw that moaning and recrimination were not the true Way of the Cross. Knowing that we are not forsaken guides us on the true path as well.

Jesus said ‘Father forgive them they know not what they do’ (Luke 23 vs 43). Even in torment he could forgive them then. Can we plead for forgiveness now? For the leaders of the nations when they stand against co operation, for rumour mongers and profiteers, for those obsessed with salvaging their reputations; for us as we say ‘surely these instructions don’t apply to me?’ Father forgive me too.

‘When Jesus saw his mother, and the disciple whom he loved standing near, he said to his mother ‘Woman behold your son’. Then he said to the disciple ‘Behold your mother ‘ (John 19 vss 26,27). In our time of trial how hard has it been to comply with the guidelines and not be with the ones we love. Yet how wonderful the response of neighbours and strangers, and, again, how wonderful the response of those proud to be independent who now realise how much they are loved.

Can you too feel the love of God walking in our streets, breaking down barriers and showing, as Jesus commanded his mother and his friend, that we are family. As, regardless, we always should be.

Jesus said ‘Into thy hands I commend my spirit, (Luke 23 vs 46). These words strike such a chord. We also may have to commend our loved ones into the hands of dedicated professionals, knowing that we may not see them again in this life.

Jesus having said this Word, Luke says that he breathed his last. Jesus was secure in knowing that he was going to the Father. We must be secure in the knowledge that souls precious to us will, in faith, take that journey too. After a time here, we, like our Saviour, will go home. Let us hope that this may be some small comfort, when separated in the time of dying, and in the finality of death.  

    Jesus said ‘It is finished’ (John 19 vs 30). It was more than his suffering that was finished, more than a life’s work. The thing finishing was the physical intervention of the One God in the world that he had created. And it was finished well. And in our way, you in your small corner and I in mine, we have to finish this chapter well. We realise that it will not be enough to just get through; we understand that we need to work tirelessly to rebuild a wrecked economy, in God’s way, and a society on the rebound. Yet, with God’s help, we too may be able to say with conviction ‘It is finished’

Amen     

In  the Anglican tradition I grew up in, the Passion Reading was sung on Palm Sunday during the morning Eucharist. There was never felt to be need for a sermon after that and the message was reinforced by the symbolism of the Palm Crosses and the Easter garden. If, then, you have imagined Palm Crosses and have read the Gospels and don’t feel you need any more I quite understand. Silence is golden and thank you for reading this far.

But if you would like more….

A Jewish man was sitting quietly at home one day when his phone rang.It was his medical student son.’I hope you don’t mind dad but I’ve decide to become a Christian’. ‘Of course I don’t mind’ said his father, but, on putting the phone down, he did feel a little confused and unsure of what to do. So he went to his Rabbi for advice.

‘Funny you should say that’ the Rabbi said ‘the same thing happened to me a couple of years ago; my son became a Christian as well. I didn’t know what to do either, so I prayed and asked God for guidance’. ‘And did you get a reply’ said the man eagerly.

‘Oh yes’ said the Rabbi, ‘God said ‘funny you should say that…….’

Perhaps not the most precise theology but it introduces today’s focus which is squarely on the Son of God. Jesus knows, as he rides into Jerusalem on a donkey, that this is what the Son of God must do. He knows how easily swayed the crowds are, he knows that the authorities can never tolerate his message of love, he knows that he is alone in the hubbub, and he knows that alone, but for a few, he will die.

And we know that, had we been there that Passover week, we would have been no better than the people in Jerusalem who ask ‘Who is this’?

We are, whether we like it or not, herd animals. We live in vast herds and react as creatures in a herd do. Currently at home we are, I say we but I’m not really very good, doing a 1000 piece jigsaw of a meadow full of cats-I would think at least a hundred, superimposed. And this is deeply strange. You would get a hundred people in a meadow, you might get a hundred dogs, but never in real life a hundred cats.

Herds are not all bad. Anyone who has seen Ice Age (the 20^th Century Fox film) will recall that when Manny the mammoth (it’s not a grownups film) saves Diego the sabre toothed tiger at great personal risk, the tiger is  very surprised and asks ‘why’. The mammoth says ‘it’s what you do in a herd’. I think this is profound despite, or because of, its target audience. And we can see that the present acts of kindness and generosity are also what people do in a herd.

Yet herds have hierarchies, influencers, enforcers and a desire to do what the next man is doing. Jesus knows this and loves the vicious Good Friday mob as much as the Palm Sunday cheerleaders. That is you and me.

We are Peter too, the disciples,  the accusers and the smiters; maybe even Judas the betrayer, yet Jesus, the man alone, loves us. We see that that love of God, in a human being, was tested beyond all knowing on Good Friday but still he could say ‘Father forgive them, they know not what they do’.

We are living through a highly charged time in a world as excitable as the first century pressure cooker of Jerusalem, in Passover week and in a police state.  

Yet still and quiet, gentle and alone, in the middle of our turmoil Jesus stands, now as then. Today we see him on a donkey, this week we will see him die, next Sunday we will see him rise in glory; everyday we must see him as our Saviour, and as a friend holding out his hand.

And if the resolution of so many things-our present troubles, our return to normal life, the coming of the Kingdom, seem so far off we have our Bible and hymns of hope to sing. We, like the Rabbi, can talk to God in prayer. And much on my mind recently has been something you might find trivial. There’s a song from 1970 called ‘Seems Like A Long Time’; you might know it or be able to find it.

The first verse goes:

Night time is only the other side of daytime,

But if you’ve ever waited for the sun,

You know what it’s like to wish daytime would come,

Don’t it seem like a long time, seem like a long time, seem like a long, long time.

(Ted Anderson,Beaver Music)

Daylight will come.

Amen