Category: Podcasts

Stanley Crook Co. Durham war memorial - 'Sorrow'. © Dave Webster (WMR-71421)

Silence. Absence of speech. Heads bowed. Time transcended. Two minutes of eternity. Strangers’ names sounded aloud. Anchor still holding. Lighthouse in the storm. Death faced. Or not.

Our acts of remembrance are presented in many different ways. Most commonly, they are seen in terms of sacrifice (‘for your tomorrow we gave our today’), wistful romanticism (‘they shall not grow old…nor the years condemn’), and nationalism (‘I vow to thee, my country’ and ‘God save our gracious king’). They are often extended to express thankfulness for the current armed services, and more recently the emergency services as well. Others tend to focus on the horror of war and use it as a moment of reflection on the current state of the world and our place in it. Still others recall the deaths of the thousands of animals in war that had no choice.

Some of these are more helpful than others.

War is always predicated on difference. This ‘difference’ is promoted by those who would seek to benefit from it as a means of separating ‘us’ from ‘them’. The difference may be expressed in terms of nationality or race, ethnicity or creed, colour or ideology, tribe or geography, even gender. However it is expressed, the difference is used to distance the ‘other’ from ourselves, to separate ‘stranger’ from ‘friend’. Often it uses some form of fear to pose the other as a threat.

But difference can be cause for wonderment and celebration, excitement, education and insight. Before children learn their ‘histories’ and attitudes from the grown-ups around them, they have natural curiosity and delight in discovery. Their world is one of acceptance and joy, of play, fun and inclusion. ‘To enter the kingdom of heaven you must become like one of these little ones’, a messiah once said. Exclusion and bullying only enter later through attitudes learned, or experienced, from their elders around them.

So much political rhetoric these days seems to feast on vilifying the ‘not us’, and in particular, the threat ‘they’ may pose to ‘our’ situation. We have seen it in the riots on the streets of Britain this year, in terror-based extremism, in the elections held in the USA and in countries across Europe, in the horrific conflict in the Middle East between Jew and Arab, in the promotion of gender-based violence on social media. Every single one of these examples, and countless others around the world, derives from stories we tell about how ‘they’ are ‘not us’.

These are not stories with which we are born; they are stories told to propagate memories of separation through difference, stories of how we, or our forebears, have been hurt, or treated unjustly, or cheated out of something that should be ours, that foster hatred and bitterness, or that are based on greed, arrogance and condescension. They might take hold as simply as a ‘joke’ that tests the reaction of those around, to see who else laughs. And this is where the difference that ends in violence begins, with nothing more than the acquiescence of a smile. Or silence.

So the silence in our acts of remembrance needs to be that still point, that anchor that holds us to the reality of where it all can lead; two minutes of reflection on the horror of violence, the bitterness of separation, the cruelty of greed, the aggression of fear. But then on how we might be part of the solution, by meditating on the Beatitudes, and their extraordinary vision of what it looks like to be truly human, to be in Christ’s image. That is our hope and our prayer, that, one day, there can and will be a future founded on love, that Christ is the cornerstone, and that we are the building blocks. And that is the point of Remembrance.

The Bewcastle Benefice sermon for Remembrance Sunday 2024 can be found here.

Threave Castle

In the depths of our inner being exists, in each of us, a part that no one else ever sees. Its the place where sometimes even we are too afraid to go. Its where our deepest secrets lie, the things we are too terrified to let others know about us; where the disappointments that have crushed us are buried; where memories of being rejected, or humiliated, or bullied, when we have been so badly hurt it feels like a sword has run through us, are shut away in the dark because otherwise they would overwhelm and drown us. Where we know how we have sometimes treated others, said and done unthinkably unkind and cruel acts of which we are so ashamed we can’t bear to admit them. And it leaves us with this deep sense of isolation and utter alone-ness.

Most of us bury this part of our soul, sensing that no-one would want anything to do with us if they really knew what we were like. So we try to compensate, perhaps by presenting an image of ourselves to the world by which we would like to be known. We choose our clothes, the way we look, our manner with others, to convey a particular impression, a mask behind which to hide, carefully cultivated in front of a mirror. Mirrors. Those silvered surfaces that reflect back the superficial us we want others to see. Where would we be without mirrors and photographs, and the rise of the ubiquitous ‘selfie’?

But this hidden part is the ‘real’ us – the rest is all facade. And it is this hidden part that God calls to. In the story of the Fall in Genesis 3, after Adam and Eve have eaten the apple, they realise they are ‘naked’, exposed to each other. They both feel this incredible shame and guilt, and so they hide from each other and from God. Its exactly the same with each of us. The story of Adam and Eve is the story of Everyman – we hide ourselves, alone and out of sight, as George Herbert so precisely puts it, ‘guilty of dust and sin’. But in the cool of the day, God walks in the garden and calls out to them ‘where are you?’

‘Where are you?’

That’s the question God asks of each of us.

Its arguably the most profound question in the Bible. ‘Where are you?’

Dare we answer?

‘But what if…?’

The rub is, of course, that he already knows exactly where we are, why we are hiding, and, most frighteningly, what we are hiding. And yet his love for each of us remains infinitely deeper than our worst fear. This is the Mystery of God: how is it possible for God to know what we are really like and still love us?

The question, then, is whether we are willing to be found…

The Bewcastle Benefice sermon for the 12th Sunday after Trinity 2024 can be found here.

She was incredibly beautiful. Lithe, graceful, shapely, bronze-skinned with full and dark flowing hair, nubile. Who could resist her? It all started with a glance out the window that turned into a lingering gaze. Did she know he might see her, bathing out there on the roof in the evening sun? She was so…tantalising. He was mesmerised.

It is the simplest of things. But at what point did he cross a threshold? Was it the glance? No, that was impulsive, accidental coincidence and he was shocked. Was it when he became transfixed, rooted to the spot, unable to tear his eyes away? Surely not – such beauty is created to be beheld, and how he appreciated such delectable beauty. Perhaps it was when he couldn’t shake the image of her from his mind as he lay on his bed that night? No, he hadn’t done anything wrong, it couldn’t have been then. But of course, everything starts in the imagination…

Years later, David’s heir was to say ‘If anyone looks at a woman lustfully he has already committed adultery with her in his heart…’

But just now, he had absolutely no idea how that lingering gaze was to lead to the destruction, not only of his family, but of the entire kingdom of Israel. No one did.

The nature of sin is that it reaches out in unexpected ways to enmesh, suck in, cling to, like tentacles that drag us down to the deep. It feeds on darkness and deception, jealousy and self-interest, fear and guilt. It destroys trust, faithfulness, honesty and kindness, generosity and love. How do we identify sin? Easy. It always has ‘I’ at the centre: s-I-n.

The trouble is, we don’t even see this as an issue any more. The new Olympian mantra repeated over and over is ‘I’m really proud of myself.’ At other times we say ‘I deserve it’, or ‘I’m worth it,’ as we desperately try to suppress the niggling doubt that we’re not. Others tells us ‘you need to forgive yourself’ as if we have the right or the power, or to ‘love yourself’, but love means laying down your life for another, so how does that work?

All of these point to a reversal of the true nature of love, a dependence and centring on the self instead of God and others; a distortion and corruption of the source of life into an imploding, self-destructive force that ultimately leads to the annihilation, not only of ourselves, or of our communities, or even society, but of entire species, ecosystems, and the climate. In a word, death.

And so the Bread of life enters our deep, dark, tentacled world to bring us back up to the surface, where we can gulp the Spirit, and breathe at last in the light…

The Bewcastle Benefice sermon for the 9^th Sunday after Trinity, 2024 ca be found here.

The Epiphany, by its nature, is enigmatic. On the 6th January every year, the 12th Day of Christmas (depending on when you start counting), we celebrate the visit of the wise men from the east to see the baby king in the stable with his mother and father, bringing their gifts. We call it The Epiphany because it represents the recognition of God’s coming by the Gentile (that’s us) world. ‘Epiphany’, that moment of sudden awakening or realisation.

But what was realised? Who noticed? Notoriously, Herod became furious when he realised he was tricked by the magi, and sent his soldiers to slaughter all the boys aged two and under in and around Bethlehem, perhaps between six and twenty children, in the hope of killing the baby Jesus and eliminating any competition for his throne.

But apart from the magi and the shepherds, we are not told of anyone else having a clue about the significance of Jesus’ birth. Some ‘epiphany’!

TS Eliot, in his famous poem ‘Journey of the Magi’, takes up this theme of the enigmatic nature of the Epiphany, telling it as a story seen from the perspective of the magi. But it is a journey riddled with pain, difficulty, and disappointment. There are moments that flicker with hope, ‘Then at dawn…’, but they soon fade back into the grey dampness of the cold world. They wander, searching, through the valley of the shadow of Christ’s death, unknowingly, until they reach their moment of ‘epiphany’: ‘It was (you may say) satisfactory’ in the most underwhelming of climaxes.

The journey, however, is for us. We are Eliot’s magi, on what seems a hard, bitter, and foolish journey with almost nothing to show at the end, except a morsel of bread made from flour from ‘the mill beating the darkness’, and the wine from ‘the vines-leaves over the lintel’ and the ’empty wine-skins’ being kicked under the table. But the encounter changes us, and we are left having died and been born again, no longer at peace with the idolatry of the world around us, waiting, longing for the old white horse in the meadow to, at last, carry its white rider…

The Bewcastle benefice sermon for the first Sunday of Epiphany (2024) can be found here.

For over 2000 years Japanese women, known as ama, have descended to depths of over 30m underwater, in a single breath lasting over two minutes, in search of pearls. They descend into the darkness where all colour has vanished. Only silence, shadows and outlines remain. It is a place of extreme cold and danger where few ever venture. They do it 100-150 times a day, and continue into their eighties, needing to retrieve a ton of oysters in their nets to find four or five decent pearls. Not many of us will ever experience the physical and physiological hardship of such a way of life.

But many of us do experience the depth of darkness of physical or emotional pain, loneliness, loss, or other forms of suffering. It can seem like a place without end, without hope, devoid of joy or happiness, no ‘light at the end of the tunnel’, just continual darkness. For some, the weight of bearing pain, or caring for others, can be relentless, lasting for years, For others, traumatised by experiences of years ago, or who have suffered abuse of one form or another, it can seem like being trapped in a suffocating cage from which there is no way out.

Paul, in his letter to the church in Rome, grapples with the depths on his own failure as a human being. Although he begins with a summary of the mess the world is in (chapter 1), describing our struggles with fallenness, he descends further and further into the darkness of our own, and ultimately his, sinful nature (chapter 7) – “For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I keep on doing. Wretched man that I am. Who will deliver me from this body of death?”

It is true that he passes the beautiful corals of Christ’s work on his way down (chapters 5 and 6), and they hint at the treasure below. But he must make that descent himself first, before he can find the pearl of great price for which he seeks in the darkness of his innermost despair.

The Bewcastle Benefice sermon for the 8th Sunday after Trinity (2023) can be found here.

Duplicity. Abraham complies with his wife’s scheming and then denies his firstborn. Isaac is tricked by his second-born with the help of his mother’s plotting. Jacob indulges his wives’ bitter rivalry, and so spawns the twelve tribes of Israel. The Patriarchs of Israel are a sorry bunch, for whom ‘integrity’ was not a word that carried much currency. And yet. And yet God chose them. Promised to bless the world through them – schemers and dreamers though they were.

But perhaps it was the dreaming for which they were chosen? All of them ‘heard’ God speak words of promise. What does it mean to ‘hear’ God? How do you know it’s God speaking and not your own imagination, or madness? Then again, they were all exceptionally wealthy, so perhaps they weren’t mad after all.

But Jacob has fled from his brother, having deceived his father into giving him the blessing of the firstborn, which his brother, in a moment of rash stupidity (and probably joking), had agreed to give him in exchange for a bowl of stew, and been sent off by his mother to her brother’s household in search of a wife.

Alone and in the darkness of the wilderness, Jacob dreams a dream: God promises to bless his offspring and the whole world. So he calls the place ‘beth-el’, house of God.

But what, really, is this ‘house of God’ that Jacob attempts to locate in the wilderness? Paul, in his majestic letter to the Romans, unpacks the promise, and our place in it.

The Bewcastle Benefice sermon the the 7th Sunday after Trinity can be found here.

‘Are you sitting comfortably? Then I’ll begin. A long time ago…’

We love stories. From our earliest days to old age we love listening to, and telling, stories. They are how we make sense of the world around us, how we first encounter ‘others’ in our imaginations, and they are how we form our collective memories that bind us as societies. Jesus was a master story-teller; his stories, called parables, played off the collective stories familiar to his listeners, and turned out to be enigmatic, challenging, full of surprises and unexpected outcomes. His stories are crafted to disrupt in order to allow light to enter the dark places of our hearts.

The problem, though, is that the darkness in our hearts only enters through stories as well. Bad stories. Stories that speak against, stories of victimisation and discrimination, of separation and boundaries, stories that reinforce prejudice. These are the stories that feed self-pity and blame others. We see it all around in families, local communities, society, politics, nations. At every scale stories feed and shape our beliefs.

The story Jesus tells is of the end of all these dark stories and the beginning of the new story, which is the oldest one of all. It is the story of death; Christ’s death, our death. And then birth, with the offering of a new beginning, where, like children, we learn there are no borders other than in the mind. ‘There is no Jew or Gentile, no slave or free, no male or female, for we are all one in Christ.’ This is the nature and gift of baptism. The new story is of the unquenchable love of God poured into the world, poured into our hearts.

The Bewcastle Benefice sermon for the 3rd Sunday of Trinity can be found here.

‘Deep calls to deep in the roar of your waterfalls’ shouts the psalmist through the drenching thunder.

So many of us are nervous souls, battered down by cares and worries, apprehensive for loved ones or ourselves. The experience of hurt and disappointment has left us timid and small. The adventure of childhood has long since been buried to allow us to cope with our journey towards the end. The thrill of life is now often found only in a book or on a screen. We manage our environments as best we can – warm homes, stocked cupboards, comfortable cars. Even so, financial worries still fret away – will we be able to afford next month? Church, too, is sedate and safe, routine and reassuring. Danger is best avoided with a thorough risk assessment. Our small worlds are contracted to a single stone in a bare field.

The wilderness is a long way from here. Thankfully?

I read a poem recently, about Christ being crucified on “the skull of the world”. It’s reference, of course, to the hill on which he was crucified, called ‘Golgotha’, meaning ‘place of the skull.’ But it captures something far deeper about the deadness of the world, the deadness of humanity, on which and for which he died. The poem goes on to speak of the one who hungered yet fed others, who thirsted while inviting others to come to him to drink, who raised the dead to life while dying himself. As the mockers so astutely put it ‘he saved others, he cannot save himself.’ How? And why?

Christ lived under the thundering cataract of God, the swirling presence of the Holy Spirit. We have been given so many images of this Spirit; water, wind, fire, and none of them are comfortable, not even the dove, who ‘drove’ Jesus out into the wilderness. And yet the Spirit is called the Comforter.

Perhaps its time we rediscovered this Spirit of God.

The Bewcastle Benefice sermon for Pentecost can be found here.