New Beginnings

Texts: Isaiah 43:17; Acts 8:14-17; Luke 3:15-17, 21-22

This is a wonderful time of the year. It would, of course, be heretical for me as a priest to say that I often feel more excited and energised by New Year than by Christmas, so I’ll overcome that problem by rolling the two into one. The Christmas-New Year Holiday is a wonderful time of the year.

And one of the reasons why I have always enjoyed it is to be found in the word we sometimes use for a holiday – we sometimes call it a break. The Christmas-New Year break, we might say. Probably we mean a break from work, but it can be so much wider than that. It can be – if we’ll let it – a new opportunity to break away from all sorts of negative things that have accumulated during the past year, or perhaps during the past many years.

When I worked in the pressured atmosphere of Parliament things usually built up to a pretty hectic crescendo as we entered December. It became, as they say, a matter of survival. The rush was on for the Government to get all its legislation into Parliament before the summer recess; at the same time, we were under pressure to get the legislation that had been passed, checked and printed in final copy for the public. So we were all pretty stretched and tired and volatile as the year ended. If any minor little thing went wrong within the office, it had the potential to blow up out of all proportion.

Usually it didn’t – we were careful with one another. But if it did there was neither the time nor the energy to fix it. We would tell ourselves that we would deal with it in the New Year, sort it out then. And you know what happened – by the New Year, it had sorted itself out. If we remembered it at all, it all seemed so petty and trivial nobody wanted to re-visit it.

The Christmas-New Year break had broken through the nonsense and set us free. It had given us an opportunity to stand back, to rest and recover, to remember that life went on outside Parliament, and generally to get things back into perspective. Without that break, we may or may not have survived as individuals – I am certain we could not have survived as the close-knit team we were.

So the Christmas-New Year break gives us an opportunity to let go of the negative things that made themselves felt in the year just finished. A religious word for that might be “repentance”. We’ll come back to that shortly. But there is also a much more positive aspect about this wonderful time of the year. It’s an opportunity to think about the future – to make a fresh start – a new beginning. What do we want to do this year that we haven’t done before? It’s a time for new resolutions – new commitments.

Of course, we are likely to be a bit cynical about New Year resolutions. We may have made a few of our own over the years, and not managed to keep them. But that doesn’t take away from the fact that the opportunity is there again this year. No matter how many times in the past we have failed, we are given this new chance now. There’s a religious word for that, too – I think it’s grace.

With these things in mind I’m glad that today in our Church Calendar we celebrate the Baptism of Our Lord - because here we have a new beginning par excellence. St Luke, the great storyteller, has already set the scene for us with some graphic descriptions of the effect John the Baptist was having.

He had suddenly come upon the scene – herald of a dramatic new beginning. He had heard or sensed the calling of God. It is time for a fresh start. So he had emerged from the desert where he had been living in solitude for years and started to call to the people. And his message was, in a nutshell, exactly what I have been saying about this time of the year. Repent, he said – leave behind the negative stuff that has been bugging you and wearing you down. Let go of it – leave it in the past. It is time to begin a new future.

And his message struck a chord with the people of his time. People flocked to him from all over the region – they, too, sensed there was something new in the air. John didn’t spare their blushes or try to be nice to them. He socked it to them! And they responded – he got through to them – they recognised the truth of what he was saying. And he baptised them in vast numbers. We might not feel the shock of that – we’re used to baptism. But they weren’t – converts to Judaism went through a form of purification equivalent to baptism, but Jews didn’t. Yet here they were in huge numbers wading into the Jordan to be baptised by John.

Then St Luke the storyteller comes up with a classic short line: When all the people were being baptised, Jesus was baptised too. That’s it. No details – no discussion – just action. St Matthew tells us that John was a bit reluctant – he had a theological problem with the idea of Jesus being baptised. If baptising is about the forgiveness of sins, Jesus being sinless did not need to be baptised. Well, as our readings show today, there is more to baptism than that.

St Luke has stripped this story down to the bare essentials. We are not given any of the practical details. I once read a very learned article by a man who had carried out extensive research on the relative depth of the River Jordan at the traditional point of Jesus’ baptism, apparently to prove to his own satisfaction that the water wasn’t deep enough to allow baptism by total immersion! (Presumably, he was trying to make a case for baptism by sprinkling!)

Well, St Luke has no interest in the “how” of Jesus baptism. It is over and done with in one sentence. St Luke is interested in what happened next. Jesus prayed, and two things happened. First, the Holy Spirit descended on Jesus in bodily form like a dove. There was a visible demonstration of the anointing of Jesus in baptism by the Holy Spirit.

Secondly, there came from heaven a voice saying: You are my Son, whom I love; with you I am well pleased.” There was an audible demonstration of who Jesus is. Could there be any more beautiful words than these? And let’s be clear here: God does not adopt Jesus here: He does not say, from now on you are my son; from now on I will love you… This is a moment when God assures Jesus of their intimate relationship, assures Jesus of his love for him, assures Jesus of the pleasure he finds in him. And with all those assurances, Jesus is ready to set out on the new stage of his life.

One of the sources of these words, according to scholars, is this wonderful passage from Isaiah in this morning’s first lesson. Again, from the context, this is about a new beginning. The disasters of the past – unfaithfulness, defeat, exile – are to be left in the past. God is promising them a new beginning; but first they need to be assured of their identity as the people of God and of his love for them. And so these wonderful words flow out of Isaiah the prophet to God’s people. Fear not, for I have redeemed you; I have called you by name; you are mine…I will be with you…you are precious and honoured in my sight…I love you…I am with you…everyone who is called by my name, whom I created for my glory, whom I formed and made.

That’s what baptism is all about – it is an intimate act with God in which God whispers words of love to the person being baptised. And to seal that love – to manifest it – to make it effective in our lives – in baptism God gives us the gift of his own Spirit.

Now we can see the “problem” with the baptism the Samaritans had received. In our reading from the Book of Acts St Luke says, this: the Holy Spirit had not yet come upon any of them; they had simply been baptised into the name of the Lord Jesus. In the words John the Baptist used, they had been baptised for the forgiveness of sins. That’s half the process; now they needed the other half. They had let go off the negative; now they needed to be empowered with the positive.

So this wonderful time of the year, this Christmas-New Year break, can be for us a sort of renewal of our baptism; an opportunity to let go of the negatives from last year, and to be reminded of who we are, by whom we are called, who loves us and who has promised to be with us this New Year and always. Amen.

Time is of the Essence '06

Texts: Zephaniah 3:14-20; Philippians 4:4-7; Luke 3:7-18

One of the ways in which some theologians have talked and written about the Incarnation – beginning, of course, with the Christmas event – is to say that eternity invaded time. God invaded time, perhaps. God chose, in Jesus Christ, to subject himself to the passage of time – to become a participant in human history.

Whatever else all that means, it says something about the importance of time in our human existence, and in our faith. As far as we know, the human being is the only creature with any real concept of time. That’s not to deny that other animals follow timetables in their lives. Migrating animals know when it’s time to leave; those who hibernate need to get their timing right. And anyone who has kept a dog or cat for any length of time can testify to the accuracy of their pets’ sense of timing around mealtimes. Come to think of it, dairy herds start heading for the milking shed without any prompting from the farmhands.

But a vital part of being human is our understanding of past, present and future. Take away our past and we lose our identity; take away our future and we lose our hope; take away our present and we might as well be dead. Our lives only have meaning if we can understand them as continuous, as an ongoing story. The scientists tell us that physically we are not the same person we were seven years ago, or whatever it is. Cells are dying and being replaced constantly. And, of course, we grow up, have new experiences, change our views and attitudes from time to time with the passing years. But through it all, surely, we remain the same person that we have always been.

The trick is to keep the past, present and future in healthy balance. We all know people who are stuck in the past, a temptation we all face as we get older. Nostalgia is powerful illusion; someone has defined it as refusing to let go of something that never actually happened! More usually, it is remembering very fondly something we didn’t enjoy at the time. Steam trains come to mind! Usually this sort of nostalgia is harmless enough – part of our charming eccentricity.

More painful are those who insist that everything was better in the past – that the world is going from bad to worse – that “in my day” everyone was happy and healthy and cared for one another, not like today! So who would like to take their chances at a dentist or with a surgeon using the methods of fifty years ago? Who would prefer the planes of that time to those of the present? The past is important to use – the real past, that is.

We also meet people who seem to spend all their lives dreaming of the future and waiting for it, and never quite get round to living in the present. Again, we understand the temptation. When the children are off our hands, when we have finished renovating the house, when our career is established, then we will have more time for this or that. And we go on telling ourselves this same future story for years, without apparently noticing that time is passing, and unless we actually stop dreaming and start doing, it ain’t going to happen.

We need a real understanding of the past, a realistic hope for the future, and a real commitment to the present. Which gets me to page 19 of the ODT ‘s edition for last Thursday. It was one of their opinion pages – and it had two very interesting pieces side by side. The first to catch my eye was from a regular syndicated columnist, Gwynne Dyer. He usually has a political angle, but this column was about space exploration. He took as his starting-point a recent lecture by the British cosmologist Stephen Hawking, the guy who’s battled over the years with the ghastly motor neurone disease.

He was awarded yet another medal of some kind, and in his acceptance speech he said this: “The long-term survival of the human race is at risk so long as it is confined to a single planet…Sooner or later, disasters such as an asteroid collision or nuclear war could wipe us all out. But once we spread out into space and establish independent colonies, our future should be safe. There isn’t anywhere like the Earth in the solar system, so we would have to go to another star.”

Big stuff – impossible stuff for the foreseeable future. Has Hawking abandoned real science fore science fiction – or is he a prophet who can see several centuries into the future?

The second article was by Rawiri Taonui, the head of the School of Maori and Indigenous Studies at the University of Canterbury . It was about the Government’s proposed deadline for the lodging of historical claims with the Waitangi Tribunal. The writer was opposed to any deadline being set; and what interested me in the article was the emphasis he placed, not on the eventual outcome of a particular case, but in the importance of the process of being heard.

He put it this way: “The OTS process [essentially, direct negotiation with the Crown] denies tribes the fundamental right of all victims to a full and fair hearing of the crimes against their families, ancestors, tikanga and culture. The Crown wishes to end the richness and healing that comes when stories are told in the forum of the tribunal. Their truth is the emancipation of generations, the liberation of suffering and the reconciliation of peoples.”

Put those two articles together ane we are talking about a stretch of time beginning about 200 years ago, and looking forward several hundred years into the future. We alone of the creatures on this planet have the ability to contemplate such a period of time. And we have that ability through the two gifts that in many ways are the greatest we human beings have received from our Creator: the gift of memory and the gift of imagination. Together they must shape the way in which we behave in the present. Together they must guide us in living out our lives as Christians, as the people of God in this place.

And Advent is the time to re-commit ourselves to that calling. Our first reading today is from one of Stephen Hawking’s predecessors – a man known to us as Zephaniah. He was gifted with the sort of foresight that Hawking shows in his speech – the ability to look centuries ahead and see something of the future that God has in mind for his people when the time is right. He was a contemporary of Jeremiah’s; he was talking to the people of Judah , and like all the prophets what he had to say was both bad news and good news. The bad news was that they had forgotten their history; they had forgotten their dealings with God. They had gone astray because they were unfaithful to their covenant with God. The good news was that God was not unfaithful; he had not forgotten the covenant; redemption was coming – one day – several centuries into the future. In the meantime, the people were to guide their lives by a realistic understanding of their past, and a confident hope in the future.

Next we hear the strange voice of that strange man we call John the Baptist raving away on the edges of the desert. What was in Zephaniah’s time a far distant dream is now about to happen; it is time for action. John, we might say, is the ancestor of those who are now at NASA, planning a space station on the moon and a manned landing on Mars as first steps to that incredible journey Hawking has already foreseen

And, perhaps, closer to home, the ancestor of those who are alerting us to the environmental state of the earth. We must act now, they tell us, if the earth is not to suffer catastrophic damage in 50 or 100 years time. Repent, say all our prophets, before it is too late; look to the future and live your lives accordingly.

That’s St Paul ’s message, too. The Lord is near. Do not be anxious about anything, but in everything, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, present your requests to God. The message then as now is to start today living into the future, learning from the past. If we want a peaceful, just and loving future, we need to work for that in the present. If we want a world that is fit to live in, we need to live now in a way that does no harm to our environment.

And if we want to prepare the way for the return of the Lord, we need to remember his coming among us in the past, his presence with us today, and his certain promise of our future with him when time ends – or, as those clever theologians might say, when we step out of time into God’s eternity.

Up Close and Personal '06

Texts: Micah 5:2-5a; Hebrews 10:5-10; Luke 1:39-45

The other day I was flitting from channel to channel trying to avoid the ads telling me what the real spirit of Christmas is and I came across two guys having a confrontation. Each of them was supported by a group of toughs, and they seemed to be challenging each other by means of break-dancing. Then they approached each other with all the machismo swagger they could muster until their noses were about two inches apart.

Just when an all-in fight looked inevitable, an attractive woman came out and told one of the guys he was wanted inside immediately. He obeyed, leaving the other guy to repeat this very aggressive act with the woman. She didn’t blink and the young tough slunk off. I have no idea what it was all about, but the gesture of being so close to someone reminded me of that classic moment in recent All Black history when some clod decided to eyeball Norm Hewitt when he was leading the haka. Although no blow was struck it was recognised as one of the most aggressive actions imaginable and Norm was furious.

Less obviously, it reminded me of Neil Rackham’s cockroaches. Neil was a Ph. D student at Sheffield University when I was there. He was studying psychology and, in particular, was studying the effect of stress on cockroaches. (I have no idea why – it’s the sort of thing psychology students do when they want to get a Ph. D, I suppose). Anyway, for some months he had been observing a population of cockroaches he kept in a glass tank, like a fish tank without the water.

But one day the study came to an abrupt end when Neil discovered that one cockroach had wiped out all his fellow cockroaches. Apparently, what triggers mass murder among cockroaches is population pressure in a confined space. All would have been well if some of the cockroaches could have left home and gone and sought their fortunes elsewhere; but because they were confined within a fixed space the pressure became too great and triggered mass murder.

That is one of the more graphic illustrations of what today we call “personal space”. The dancing tough guys and Norm Hewitt and his opponent were illustrating the same thing. When I was trying to be a moody teenager I used to tell my mother to “get off my back”. Today it’s “get out of my face” – far more graphic and zippy, isn’t it? We don’t like people getting too close to us – we have a need for personal space about us – more if we are introverts than extraverts – but we all feel uncomfortable when it is invaded. One of the things I don’t enjoy about going to the dentist, or the optometrist or even the barber is having them “in my face”, as it were.

So we’re talking about intimacy. The more special someone is to us the more likely it is that we will relax our barriers. We talk of our special people as our nearest and dearest – our closest friend, perhaps. We mean something more than physical closeness, of course, but the two are related. The more we love someone, the closer we can let them get to us without triggering our defence mechanisms. If someone else gets too close we will at least take a step backward, even if we don’t respond in the way Neil’s cockroaches did!

Christmas raises these issues of intimacy, of personal space, because the God who used to – most of the time! – keep a reasonable distance between us – suddenly chose to draw very near, too near for comfort. And that nearness is underlined for us today, on this Fourth Sunday in Advent, as we focus on Mary. The message of Advent that we have had so far, especially from John the Baptist, has been one of God drawing near to the world, to the whole of humanity. That could have been scary enough, but at least we could take same comfort from the fact that we’re all in this together. It has not yet become too personal – we are not singled out for special treatment. There is safety in numbers.

But the message that the angel brings to Mary is one of the greatest possible intimacy with her as an individual. In the Old Testament one or two great heroes of the faith were said to be intimates of God – friends of God – to have walked and talked with God face to face. Moses and Enoch were in that class. But even that degree of intimacy is now to be exceeded, because the Spirit of God is to enter into Mary and the Christ Child is to be born within her. And so instead of friendship being the great metaphor for the relationship God seeks with humanity, it is now to be pregnancy.

And today our readings invite us to stay with pregnancy, and not be in too much of a hurry to rush forward to birth. It’s a pity that this Fourth Sunday of Advent this year falls on Christmas Eve. We need more time than that to reflect on pregnancy as one part of the relationship that God seeks with Mary and, through her, with all of us.

Pregnancy and birth are two aspects of the intimate relationship that God seeks with Mary and with each of us. Jesus could not have been born from Mary without Mary first being pregnant with Jesus. Only after the Spirit of God had entered into Mary, only after the Christ Child had been conceived and had grown in her womb, could he be born into the world. Only after Mary had allowed God to draw close to her, to be intimate with her, could she become the Mother of Christ. And what was true of Mary is true of all human beings; only as we allow God ever closer to us, to invade our personal space, can we become God-bearers to anyone else.

So our readings today are all about this intimacy between God and ourselves. We started with Micah, one of the prophets who foresaw with remarkable vision, the coming of the Messiah, not as a mighty man of conquest, but as a baby – a baby with an astonishing past. In his vision, we see a hint of Christ’s eternity. Speaking of Bethlehem he says, out of you will come for me one who will be ruler over Israel , whose origins are from of old, from ancient times. And when will this happen? When she who is in labour gives birth. Israel ’s redemption is to come through pregnancy and birth.

In less dramatic and direct words, the Letter to the Hebrews also speaks of the change in relationship between God and humanity. The key to this letter is the destruction of the Temple in 70AD. As a faithful Jew we might have expected the author to be devastated by this event. But he sees it as all part of God’s plan to draw near to his people. For centuries the Law had required sacrifices and burnt offerings made in the Temple to a God who was essentially absent. But now all that has been swept away, as is made clear in today’s passage: Therefore when Christ came into the world, he said: “Sacrifice and offering you did not desire, but a body you prepared for me; with burnt offerings and sin offerings you were not pleased. Then I said, ‘Here I am – it is written about me in the scroll – I have come to do your will, O God.’” The regulation and control of ritual has gone, and in its place has come the intimacy of human life in the physical body of Christ.

And our gospel reading is a joyous celebration of pregnancy at its most exciting. Mary has rushed off to spend time in the countryside with her older cousin, Elizabeth who had long since given up hope of motherhood. Yet here she was, in her sixth month, as the angel had told Mary, and loving every minute of it. We can picture her rubbing her belly with glee as she jumps up and down with excitement, and she and Mary dance a jig of delight. No wonder the baby in Elizabeth ’s womb does a quick somersault! The whole scene in that little house throbs with life and excitement and joy, with the true spirit of Christmas.

Of course, we know what lies ahead for both women, and their precious babies. Beheading and crucifixion, to put it bluntly. In the real world sweetness and light don’t last for ever. We know that next year will bring tough times as well as joyful ones. But that shouldn’t spoil our mood today or tomorrow. Today and tomorrow are for celebration – for celebrating intimacy – relationships – for giving thanks for those special people whom we enjoy invading our personal space. Whatever other gift we may have in mind for them, can we also tell them how glad we are to have them near to us?

Above al, can we find a moment to say thank you to God who for his desire to enter into a more and more personal intimate relationship with each one of us. May we with Mary say Yes to him this Christmas and always. Amen.

Towards Maturity '06

Texts: 1 Samuel 2: 18-20, 26; Colossians 3: 12-17; Luke 2:41-52

Those who were here on Christmas Day may remember that I had with me a small passage from Carl Gustav Jung’s interpretation of the Nativity scene, which I suggested was quite helpful. It was helpful in two senses; first, because it gave me something to say on Christmas Day that I hadn’t said before; and, I thought, it was helpful in itself.

Jung suggested that the stable was a symbol of human wholeness, of personal integrity in the strict sense of that word. He pointed to the union of the divine and the human, of the conscious and the instinctual, and so on; and as we might expect from that great man, there was a lot of thought and insight in what he had to say.

However, since then I have had an opportunity to spend more time reflecting on his whole approach, and I’m not sure I now agree with it. At least, I don’t think I now agree quite so much with what I said on Christmas Day. And my present doubts are underlined for me by today’s readings.

There is a danger that if we follow Jung we will convert Jesus from a human being into a mere symbol; and however powerful and helpful symbols can be for us, it would surely be a mistake to replace Jesus the Man by Jesus the Symbol. It is as a fellow human being that Jesus stands before us and challenges us to become what he is. A symbol could never do that. It could help us to understand something about Jesus – it could provide an interesting analogy – it could stir our intellects to greater thought. But it could never do for us what Jesus himself does for us, and that is to show us what is possible. To show us the complete human life. To show us our full potential as human beings.

What Jesus’ life on earth does for us is to show us what we are capable of as human beings if we allow God’s Spirit to become incarnate in us as he was in Jesus. Jesus is God in the flesh, not a symbol in the flesh. Jesus is Jesus, not a symbol of something or someone else.

I am reminded of one of the poets whose work I’ve become quite interested in recently. He was an American, called William Carlos Williams, and perhaps his most famous poem is one called The Red Wheelbarrow. The whole poem has just 16 words: so much depends upon/a red wheelbarrow/glazed with rain water/beside the white chickens. That’s it – that’s the whole poem!

I must confess, when I first read it I thought he must have been a bit of a con-artist to have got so many people admiring his great skill in writing such a trite poem! But what he was doing was trying to raise a flag against our human habit of turning everything into a symbol of something else. Readers of a poem like his almost inevitably start asking themselves, what dopes it mean? What does the wheelbarrow represent? And we can get so clever and engrossed in our intellectual games of that kind that we fail to see the obvious point that Williams is making. The thing exists as a thing – not as a symbol of something else. The wheelbarrow is just that – a wheelbarrow. It is red. It is wet with rainwater. It is beside the white chickens.

Of course, things that exist in their own right can be used as symbols of something else. Safe driving at intersections would not be enhanced if drivers observed a red light, remarked to themselves that it is a red light, wet with rain and just above two other lights, and kept going. The red light is a red light, but it also has a message for us that we need to interpret. Williams’ point is that we should not see the symbol only and lose sight of the thing itself.

And there, it seems to me, is the danger in Jung’s approach to the Nativity scene. It encourages us to see the symbol and not the scene itself. It encourages us to see human wholeness symbolised for us, rather than lived out for us in the person of Jesus of Nazareth.

Today’s readings offer us a helpful corrective here. Symbols don’t start off as babys, grow through various stages, and reach maturity over a period of years. Human beings do that, and we will lose sight of the human being before us if we are too quick to ask ourselves what he represents, what he is a symbol of, rather than who and what he is in himself.

However we are to understand the traditional teaching that Jesus’ birth (or, more correctly, his conception) was virginal, there can be no doubt that we are to understand that to Mary a human baby was born after a normal gestation period. And today, St Luke picks up this lovely little story in the First Book of Samuel and uses it to tell a similar story about the boy, Jesus. And while it appears on its surface to be a sort of boy-wonder story, what comes through to me anyway is St Luke’s subtle hint that Jesus wasn’t born as a complete package ready to go – a sort of compute program ready for installation.

Like every other baby he was born weak and vulnerable, and had a lot of growing up to do. By the age of twelve he had a startling knowledge of the Scriptures, but he still had a lot to learn. Unlike Samuel’s story, St Luke mentions that Jesus grew “in wisdom”, as well as physically, spiritually and socially. And perhaps even more radically, St Luke shows us that one of the things Jesus had to learn at the age of twelve was obedience to his parents. Like many a child before and since, Jesus had just scared his parents witless by going off on his own without telling them first. And compounding his error (at least, in my view) by giving his mother a rather cheeky reply.

St Luke, we remember, is the only one of the four gospel writers to give us this story. St Mark and St John shows no interest in Jesus’ birth and youth, and St Matthew tells us only of the flight into Egypt and the return of the family when the immediate danger had passed. He then leaps to John the Baptist and Jesus’ baptism as a thirty-year old. The implication in each case is that Jesus did not become interesting until he began his public ministry – that he is interesting as teacher, healer, holy man, etc.

We need St Luke to remind us that people exist as people before they exist in terms of their roles, occupations, or whatever. St Luke is interested in Jesus as a complete human being – one who is carried by his mother in her womb for a full term, one who is born as we are, one who is nurtured and looked after, one who learns to walk and talk, and how to become a mature human being. It takes him 30 years. That’s because he is a real human being, not a symbol of one.

The same thing is shown of Samuel, one of the greatest men of faith in the Old Testament. And St Paul is giving a similar message to the infant church at Colossae . Grow up in godliness, he is saying to them. Clothe yourselves, and go on clothing yourselves, with compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness and patience. Bear, and go on bearing, with each other; forgive, and go on forgiving. Put on, and go on putting on, love. It all takes time, a lot of time.

In other words, we too, like Samuel and like Jesus, are called to grow in wisdom as well as stature, and in favour with God and people. As we do that so we become, not symbols of wholeness, but real, whole human beings.

May we continue to grow towards that maturity in 2007. Amen.

All in All '06

Texts: Isaiah 25:6-9; Revelation 21:1-6a; John 11:32-44

Last week I spoke about acceptability to God. I should say that at the time I wrote that sermon – in fact, at the time I preached it – I had no idea of the controversy that was about to erupt here in our own diocese this week. To the extent that I was talking about qualifications for the priesthood, I was provoked by the decision of the Diocese of Synod to continue to exclude women from the priesthood. However, there is nothing I would want to resile from in last week’s sermon in the light of this week’s row.

This week we are celebrating, appropriately enough, the Feast of All the Saints, and I would want to stress the word ALL. We are not making any distinctions between them. While individual saints are rightly remembered and honoured for the particular examples they have given us, today we are thanking God for the lot. And there are a lot! And our readings today tell us that there will be even more of us when the final whistle is blown.

Yes, I did say “of us”. You’ll have heard this before but it needs repeating every year. Saints are not especially brilliant, unworldly or pious exceptions to the general run of humanity. Saints, according to the Scriptures, are people who believe in Jesus Christ. In other words a saint is a Christian, any Christian is a saint.

Having got that off my chest for another year, let me get back to numbers. One of the aspects of the great question about acceptability to God has always concerned numbers. Not so much, who can be saved, but how many can be saved? Does heaven have an open-door policy – visa-free entry as it were – or is there a carefully controlled quota system? Do we have to have enough points to be allowed to enter heaven?

This is the sort of issue that underlies a lot of the small, narrow fundamentalist sects. The most obvious example is the Jehovah witnesses who believe that there is a pre-determined limit of 144,000 people who will be saved – a figure derived from Revelation 14:1. In fairness to those who hold such views, we have to admit that there are some hints in the gospels that seem to support that narrow approach. I’m thinking, for example, of Matthew 7:14, where Jesus is quoted as saying: “But small is the gate and narrow the road that leads to life, and only a few find it.” And there’s an even more troubling passage in Luke 13:22-30, which I don’t pretend to understand.

Associated with this narrow approach seems to be an element of joylessness. My limited experience of strict fundamentalists gives me a picture of how hard it is to please God, that nothing is ever quite enough, that we are at best hanging on to eternal life by our fingertips, and one slip up could mean eternal damnation. Maybe, the joy comes later but I’m not even sure of that. I suspect that their vision of heaven might be much the same as their vision of earth, except that the population has been radically reduced to them and their kind all worried stiff that God might suddenly relax the rules and let in the riff-raff, including those terrible Anglicans!

Against such a picture we have the glorious breadth of vision given to us, last week by Jeremiah, and this week by Isaiah and St John the Divine. .Remember how Jeremiah saw that vast multitude of people being gathered together and brought back from exile? He was making the point that all the people of God were acceptable to God, including those that the Law would seem to exclude. Isaiah has a similar vision of vast numbers, but he puts a different slant on the grace of God. Or perhaps I should say he illustrates the grace of God with a different image.

His image is the great feast to which “all peoples” come. No ticket is required, no qualification or entrance exam is prescribed. All come. And the host of the feast, who is, of course, God, supplies the best of everything. I suspect that Isaiah was a bit of a gourmet himself, or at least a wine buff. We can almost hear his mouth watering: the Lord Almighty will prepare a feast of rich food for all peoples, a banquet of aged wine – the best of meats and the finest of wines. A free smorgasbord of the very best of everything!

It’s a celebratory feast, of course. And Isaiah leaves us in no doubt what we are celebrating here. Nothing less than the defeat, the abolition, of death itself! And again, we need to note the universal breadth of his vision. He calls death the shroud that enfolds all people, the sheet that covers all nations. This is the universal reach of death that will be swallowed up for ever. There’s no hint of favouritism, narrowness or exclusion here.

And from a book written about 700 years before Christ, we can leap ahead to a book written in the first century of the Christian era, the Book of Revelation, and in today’s extract from it we find a vision with striking similarities to Isaiah’s. Again, the central point is the reunion of God and his people, and the abolition of death. But there is another even more important element this time. Isaiah’s vision was earthbound – he placed the great banquet on Mount Zion . But St John the Divine, as we call the author of the Book of Revelation, gives us an even broader perspective.

He sees the union of heaven and earth. With all due respect to those who talk of being taken up into heaven while the rest of us are left behind, this vision tells us it’s the other way around. Heaven comes down to earth. The earth is made new, or I should say, the whole of creation is made new. Verse 3 is key: Now the dwelling of God is with human beings, and he will live with them. They will be his people, and God himself will be with them and be their God.

That should sound familiar, of course, because it’s a straight steal from the early books of the Old Testament, where, again, the idea was God present with his people on earth. Against such a vision, we must surely see how narrow some of our classic Christian ideas seem. So often we have painted the picture of salvation being a sort of rescue operation, as if the whole earth was being destroyed and a lucky (or righteous!) few will be plucked to safety in heaven. Jesus as lifeguard, so to speak.

But these visions we have before us today show us something far more wonderful than that. God’s reach is universal, and so is his redemption. The whole of creation is being redeemed: There will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away. It is against this breadth of vision that I want to end this morning with a quick look at our gospel reading.

The story of the raising of Lazarus is much loved, and I love it myself. I have over the years preached on it a number of times, and used it for more than one funeral homily. But the more time I spend with it, the more I feel that the emphasis should be on Mary and Martha, rather than Lazarus. Lazarus is the passive one in all this. He doesn’t speak at any stage. Things happen or are done to him. He dies. He’s wrapped in burial clothes and sealed in a tomb. He’s called out of the tomb, and somebody is instructed to untie him.

Of course, we would wish for more – including an extended interview on 60 Minutes or something. But we are given no more, and the dialogue is between Jesus and the sisters. They represent us – with their natural human response to the disaster that has befallen their family. And they represent that part of us, however we might try to hide or deny it, which feels let down by God when something like this strikes our loved ones.

Both sisters say to Jesus: Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died. And we are to hear that against the background that they had summoned him, and he had deliberately delayed his arrival. It’s hard to avoid the suggestion that they felt let down by Jesus; he should have hurried and arrived in time to save their brother from death.

Their vision of Jesus, and therefore of God, is too narrow. As wonderful as physical healing is, it is always only temporary, as it were. It defers death, it doesn’t defeat death. So Jesus talks of resurrection, not healing. To illustrate that he calls Lazarus out of the tomb, but that is only a small foretaste of what is to come. And notice that at no time is any special plea made for Lazarus on ground of personal merit. We are told nothing about his qualities. In the story he is simply an example of human mortality. He points ahead to Jesus’ own burial and resurrection, and to our own.

In other words, he’s just one of the multitude of our fellow saints we remember today, as we prepare to participate in our heavenly feast of the finest bread and the finest wine. Amen.

The Overriding Theme '06

Texts: Daniel 7:9-10, 13-14; Revelation 1:4-8; John 18:33-37

Today we come to the end of another liturgical year; and like any end-of-year occasion it gives us an opportunity to do two things – to reflect on what has been and to consider what is to come. We have spent the last year, as we spend every liturgical year, rehearsing our great Christian story. So today we can both sum up the story so far, and look ahead to the continuing of the story into the future, and to the eventual end of the story.

Our readings have a bias towards the latter, and I’ll say something about that in a moment. But we get opportunities to look ahead in the next few weeks during the Season of Advent, so my preference is largely to think of this day as Summing-up Sunday. What have we discovered over the last 12 months about the Gospel of Jesus Christ, the Good News, as we should call it, particularly as we head towards Christmas?

To help me answer that question for myself, I thought it would be a good idea to go back through the sermons I have preached during the last year. After all, I can’t think of any other reason for keeping them. I wondered if there was any particular topic that would emerge from all those words, and I found there was. I found that one way of understanding the sweep of God’s story as we have it to date is as a battle between God’s desire to bring all things back into unity, and our human desire to frustrate that plan at every turn. And there, I think, is the starting-point for thinking about the significance of the fact that the Church now suggests that the last Sunday of our year be celebrated as the Feast of Christ the King.

There are many Christians today who struggle with this sort of terminology. Some object on grounds of gender. “King” is a masculine word, they argue, and therefore exclusive. Others object on more political grounds. Our tendency is to cringe a bit at royal terminology – it’s a bit undemocratic for our taste. There are many who refuse to use the term “ kingdom of God ” for these sorts of reasons, preferring instead something like “realm of God”.

And, then, of course, there are those who argue that to refer to Jesus as King of Kings, or something of that kind, smacks of Christian imperialism – Crusader language: it won’t do in a world of plurality. Jesus might be King of the Christians, but he can’t be King of the Jews, Muslims, and all the others.

What are we to make of all this? My view is that we need to be careful that in seeking to avoid giving offence, we cease to give Christ his due. We are, after all, custodians and proclaimers of the Christian story, and that story is essentially about how God has chosen to be, and how God has chosen to reveal himself to humanity. It is either true, or it is untrue, that God came among us incarnate in Jesus of Nazareth. It is either true, or it is untrue, that God is Trinity, one God in Three Persons. It is either true or untrue that there is only one God, that God is the creator of all things, and that God will one day draw all things back to himself in perfect unity. That is the story we have to tell. It is either true or untrue. And it matters greatly – the future of humanity – in fact, the future of all things – depends on it.

To begin at the beginning, there is a sense in which we shouldn’t start with Genesis. We should start with Jewish history as it actually happened, not as it was later written down and tidied up as history always is. It is quite clear that before there was a Jewish people, there were independent clans, not much more than large family groups, roaming around, clashing with one another, and trying to defend their own interests against one another.

The clans grew into tribes; and we don’t need reminding that sometimes tribes can disagree with each other quite fiercely. But over the centuries these tribes came together to form one people. And one of the unifying elements of this was undoubtedly the growing recognition that their clan and tribal gods were actually one and the same God. Scholars claim that the form in which we now have the great sagas of the patriarchs in the Old Testament, grew out of a desire to unite their different stories so that all the tribes could buy into the one narrative. Hence the various duplications we find in the texts today.

In other words, a key requirement for the tribes of Israel to become one people was to recognise that there is only one God among them. The most famous text in Judaism, the Shema, thus insists that the Lord your God is One Lord. The unity of the people is founded on the unity of faith in one God.

The next historical step was to go beyond the people of Israel , but that, too, took a long time. For centuries, Israel assumed that Yahweh was their God, and all the other peoples of the earth had their own gods. But gradually the realisation came, especially through the great prophet, Isaiah, that this was not right. That, in fact, there is no other God besides Yahweh.

And that, of course, raised an interesting question. If there was no other God besides Yahweh, did that mean that the other peoples of the earth had no god, or did it mean that Yahweh was the God of all the earth? The latter view came to prevail; but the Jewish people did not then draw the obvious conclusion from their own history. If they are one people instead of twelve independent tribes because they all worship the same God, then surely it must follow that if all the peoples of the earth worship the same God, we are all one people!

In one sense, of course, the Jewish understanding came remarkably close to that view. Their belief was that there were essentially two types of people, themselves as Jews and all others as Gentiles; and their theology was based on the fact that Yahweh was the God of the Gentiles as well as the Jews, but that he would deal with them differently. By the time of Jesus, there was quite widespread understanding that God would restore and redeem Israel first, and then there would be a great ingathering of Gentiles into the New Israel.

The Christian revelation took this understanding to its logical conclusion. In Christ, said St Paul , there is no such thing as Jew and Gentile; the two have been made one. The challenge for all of us ever since has been to get our heads around this astonishing truth, to accept it, and to live it out in our daily lives. We rebel against it in so many ways. We value our particularities. For some reason it is not good enough for us to be human beings. We divide ourselves by gender, by nationality, by faith, by language, by geographic boundaries, by anything else we can think of.

We laugh at Aucklanders, famously unable to agree with one another about anything. But listen to the arguments about electricity generation, and you will hear some good South Islanders complaining bitterly that our power is only going to be stolen by those on the North Island, as though that is some terrible alien place near the artic circle inhabited by hobbits or other non-human creatures.

Look at today’s gospel reading and there it all is in this short tense encounter between Pilate and Jesus. Pilate can’t get past the idea that Jesus is a Jew and he is not, even though both of them agree that it is the Jewish leaders who are bringing the charges. And if we follow the dialogue carefully we will notice that Pilate himself changes his ground a bit. First he asks Jesus, Are you the king of the Jews? And when Jesus teases him by asking whose idea that is, Pilate snorts: Am I a Jew?…It was your people and your chief priests who handed you over to me.

But after Jesus has spoken of his kingdom being from another place, Pilate says, You are a king, then!

And there’s the nub of the thing. If Jesus is a king, is he king of the Jews or is he king? Is he king of the Christians or is he king? The issue is not one of language or diplomacy. The issue is one of theology. To claim that Jesus is king without qualification of any kind is to claim that he is God. That is our story.

And to claim that there is only one King is to claim that there is only one human race – one humanity. That, too, is our story – whether we are talking about sports stadia, power generation or the peace of the world.

Saving the Earth '06

Texts: Daniel 12:1-3; Hebrews 10:11-14, 19-25; Mark 13:1-8

At our archdeaconry meeting on Thursday The Reverend Tim Hurd gently reminded us that this Sunday we might like to celebrate the Feast of Christ in All Creation – in other words, to major on environmental issues. In our Lectionary a different set of readings are suggested for that purpose. It was interesting to find that I was not the only one present who hadn’t thought of that in time. One of the drawbacks of doing our readers’ rosters and our service planning two or three months in advance is that, by the time someone more switched on than me like Tim Hurd raises an issue like this, it’s too late to do anything about it without considerable upheaval.

However, all is not lost because in a way today’s readings do raise issues about saving the planet, saving the world – and whether or not it is worth saving or even can be saved. They’re about transience and permanence – about the future, and whether or not there is anything we can or should do about it. And such issues could hardly be more timely – once again the Scriptures are remarkably modern in their concerns.

Now that our political leaders have at last dragged themselves out of the gutters of personal abuse and character assassination and have turned their attention to policy matters, we find ourselves focussed on two particular issues – global warming and sports stadia. And in a funny sort of way, these two issues are inter-related – they come together, for example, in our gospel reading, to which I will return in a moment.

But first I want to say something about this issue of environmental care, and how it relates to the Scriptures in general. In the eyes of many environmentalists our record is not too good. It is said that our traditional attitude towards the creation stories in Genesis has led to a lack of environmental concern on the part of many Christians. It is not hard to see some grounds for that charge when we read some of the stuff coming from the so-called Christian Right in the US .

Many people in this country hold Dr James Dobson in high regard for his teaching on family issues. Less well known is the fact that he is a founder member of an organisation called the Interfaith Council for Environmental Stewardship, which sounds wonderful, doesn’t? Well, its starting-point is Genesis 1:28: God blessed them and said to them, “Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air and over every living creature that moves on the earth.” According to this group, this text proves that human beings are not part of nature, but are superior to it. More worrying still, the group says this text shows that God intends no limits on population growth or on the exploitation of natural resources.

Won’t we eventually run out of stuff if we follow this course? God heavens, no! According to a book called America’s Providential History – which, believe it or not, is an authorised history text-book for use in secondary schools in the US - that is just socialist propaganda.: The secular or socialist has a limited resource mentality and views the world as a pie…that needs to be cut up so that everyone can get a piece….the Christian knows that the potential in God is unlimited and there is no shortage of resources in God’s Earth. The resources are waiting to be tapped…. While many secularists view the world as overpopulated, Christians know that God has made the earth sufficiently large with plenty of resources to accommodate all of the people.”

All of which may be, and almost certainly is, dangerous nonsense, but at least it is comforting dangerous nonsense. But the same sorts of groups somehow also embrace the idea that the earth is heading for total disaster, and extreme environmental episodes are evidence of it. Here, of course, the emphasis switches from one end of the Bible to the other, from Genesis to Revelation. But the Gospels are cited, too, including, of course, today’s reading from St Mark: When you hear of wars and rumours of war, do not be alarmed. Such things must happen, but the end is still to come. Nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom. There will be earthquakes in various places, and famines. These are the beginning of birth-pains.

And, of course, because these things are supposed to be signs of Christ’s imminent return, the Christian is supposed to welcome them. Far from total environmental degradation being an awful prospect and something to fight against if we possibly can, we are meant to cheer it on. The most famous example of this line of reasoning (!) came from James Watt, President Reagan’s first Secretary of the Interior (whose responsibilities included national parks, etc.). In 1981, he said: “God gave us these things to use. After the last tree is felled, Christ will come back.”

And now a word or two about what some wit has called our edifice complex – our love affair with great big buildings. My favourite of the great stories in the first 11 chapters of the Book of Genesis is the one about the Tower of Babel . Remember how the people of that time decide to start building: Then they said, “Come, let us build ourselves a city, with a tower that reaches to the heavens…” What for? Well, here’s the bit I really love about this story. They are absolutely honest about what they want it for: “to make a name for ourselves”. There’s no attempt at PR spin – no pretence that it is to be worthy of the gods they worship, or it is necessary to help in navigation or weather forecasting. They want to build something grand and imposing to make a name for themselves. A monument to their own glory.

Fast forward to our own time and country and what have we got? Mayor Dick Hubbard (for whom I have great respect, I might add) told us that he favoured the proposed waterfront stadium because “we need something that is worthy of a world-class city”. It’s not about building a stadium that can host the number of spectators expected for the rugby world cup final – it is about showing off to the rest of the world – making a name for ourselves.

The disciples would vote for the waterfront stadium. In our gospel reading today, they have come into the big smoke, perhaps for some of them it is the first time in Jerusalem , and they are awestruck at the size of the Temple . Look, Teacher! What massive stones! What magnificent buildings! But Jesus is quite sharp and dismissive in response. He assures them that the Temple will not last. And in this short dialogue we have some real conservation issues to reflect on.

First of all, I think Jesus may be rebuking them for their attitude. Theirs is the attitude of a tourist rather than a worshipper. They have come to the Temple of the Lord, but their focus is not on the Lord God – it is on the ingenuity and skill of their fellow human beings. “Look, Teacher, they might just as well have said, “how clever we human beings must be to be able to build such a big building as this.” This is a point that all of us need to ponder as we face issues about the preservations of our historic churches. Do we seek to preserve them because we like old buildings, or do we see them as places of worship, as part of our offerings to God?

These are not easy issues, but nor are they peripheral ones. They are essentially spiritual issues, and they tell us a lot about our own theology, are own understanding of God and of our Christian gospel. If we believe that the earth is heading for destruction, that this is God’s will, that only then will Christ return, then at the very least we will become passive, at worst we will join in the reckless use of the earth’s resources.

But if we understand that the promise of God at the heart of the Christian gospel is to redeem the whole earth, and that the call of God at the heart of the Christian gospel is to be co-workers with God in this work, then we will all become careful stewards, green warriors, defenders of the planet. We will not sit back and wait for Archangel Michael to rescue our nation, as Daniel suggests in our first reading. Nor will we make the mistake of thinking that it all depends on us to save the world: the writer of the Letter to the Hebrews reminds us that there is only one Saviour and he has already made the one perfect sacrifice for the world.

What we will do is grasp the whole message of the Scriptures from Genesis to Revelation, passing through the gospels on the way. That God created all things and saw that they were good. He created humankind to help him keep things that way. The fact that we have failed so miserably in the past is no ground for giving up in despair. It is ground for repentance and a prayer for the grace to do better in the future. It is a ground for humility, for hope, and for action.

Tim Hurd was right. We should have thought about these things today.

Christ, the Great Interceder '06

Texts: Jeremiah 31:7-9; Hebrews 7:23-28; Mark 10:46-52

In a sense, there has only been one great religious issue within the Judaeo-Christian tradition. That issues is NOT whether or not God exists. That is a question for philosophers, perhaps, but not for religious thinkers and theologians. For a theologian to discuss whether or not there is a God would be as silly as a botanist wondering whether or not plants exist. The starting-point for us is shown very clearly in the Bible: In the beginning, God….For us, religion, theology, spirituality – call it what you will, they all mean the same thing – is about the human response to the reality of God.

Within our tradition the one great religious issue is this: who is acceptable to God? That underlies the question we come across in the New Testament in various places and in various forms. The rich young man asked Jesus, what must I do to inherit eternal life? When Jesus spoke about the difficulties facing the rich, his disciples asked him, Who then can be saved?

In the Old Testament the emphasis is on the approachability to God. Who can come near to God, who can set foot on the holy mountain, who can enter the Temple , and so on. There was a great fear of getting too close. We think of the people huddled at the bottom of the mountain, and sending Moses up to find out what God wanted. The man who touched the ark of God in David’s time when it was being transported back to Jerusalem was struck down dead for his impertinence.

And this idea of the holiness of God and the danger of approaching too close is seen in Moses’ approach to the burning bush. He is instructed to take off his shoes as he is now on holy ground. The purity laws are also based on this same principle: people must be purified before they come into the worshipping community.

And in some ways all this is summed up in the attitude towards who can and who cannot be a priest. In the early tradition the position was somewhat complicated by the fact that the priesthood was to some extent a matter of inheritance. Only descendants of Aaron and Levi could be priests. But there was more to it than that. I think I have referred to this in the notes in today’s pewsheet. A priest had to be without physical defect – the lame and the blind, for example, could not be priests according to the Levitical code.

In short, there were tight restrictions on who could and who couldn’t be a priest, and even restrictions on who could and who could not participate in temple worship as members of the congregation. Those who were ritually ‘unclean’ could not attend Temple worship until they had undergone purification and become ‘clean’.

It’s against that sort of background that we can understand the full import of what Jeremiah is saying in our first rather brief lesson this morning. Poor old Jeremiah has gone down in history as the prophet of doom and gloom. He is remembered for the bad news he brought to his people, the news of imminent disaster at the hands of the Babylonians. We usually overlook the fact that, like most of the other prophets, he also proclaimed the good news. Disaster on a national scale was never going to be the final word. God was and is faithful to his covenant. He will one day restore his people, bring them back from exile. The bad news is in the foreground but it always has as a background the firm promise of redemption in the end.

Does this sound like a prophet of doom? Sing with joy for Jacob; shout for the foremost of the nations. Make your praises heard,… Jeremiah looks beyond the agony of national defeat and exile, and sees a time coming when the people of God will be gathered together and brought home. And among them will be the blind and the lame, expectant mothers and women in labour. In other words, people who represent, as it were, those with ‘defects’ and those who are ‘unclean’. All those barriers will be broken down – everyone will be in the great throng returning home.

Which is great news for Bartimaeus, to take just one example. He’s the blind beggar squatting on the side of the main thoroughfare out of Jericho . It’s a great position – that’s a busy road with a great deal of foot traffic. But, of course, he’s a nobody, he is defective, he’s a blind beggar, who should sit there out of peoples’ way and keep his mouth shut.

But somehow or other he’s heard about Jesus – heard about his power to heal. And so when someone tells him that this very same Jesus is now walking past him, he starts yelling out; and what he yells is highly significant. He calls Jesus ‘Son of David’. By doing so he identifies himself as a fellow Jew, one of God’s people, and identifies Jesus as the Messiah.

That’s two bonus points for Bartimaeus, but he hasn’t finished there. He asks Jesus to have mercy on him. That is the sinner’s prayer to God for forgiveness. No wonder people told him to shut up – it must have sounded like blasphemous babble to the crowd. But Jesus heard him and responded. He called the man. That’s the same word as used when he called his disciples. He calls the man to him. The man is acceptable to him. And Bartimaeus approaches, quickly, joyfully and with great confidence. He throws off his cloak, his covering, and jumps to his feet.

Jesus asks Bartimaeus what he wants Jesus to do for him, and Bartimaeus immediately asks for the impossible: I want to see. How could his sight be restored? Humanly, this is impossible, but not with God; all things are possible with God.

Who is acceptable to God? It’s fashionable in some quarters today to dismiss all this as being part of our strange history. If we ask the question at all, we run the risk of being considered arrogant, or judgmental, or simply stupid. And yet this is an issue that still bothers the Church today. We Anglicans are still struggling to hold our world-wide communion together over the ordination of homosexual people; the Presbyterians in this country have finally made a decision on the issue and must now work through the consequences.

And this week came news from Sydney that their diocesan synod has once again affirmed that women cannot be ordained to the priesthood. – they say, on biblical grounds. Whether they ordain the blind, the lame, and other people with physical defects has not been reported, but consistency might suggest they should not.

Unless, of course, they have read and understood our second lesson, from the Letter to the Hebrews. This is not one of my favourite books, to be honest, but it does contain some absolute gems, and we have one of them today. Here again is verse 25: Therefore Jesus is able to save completely those who come to God through him, because he always lives to intercede for them. I don’t think I really understood that verse until I came across this story with which I’ll end this morning.

A father took his small son to a fair-ground, where there were various rides and other attractions, for each of which a ticket was required. Dad bought some tickets, and told his son to look around and when he found something he wanted to go on, he should come back to Dad and get a ticket. This went on for a while; and then another little boy turned up and asked the Dad for a ticket. Dad refused, saying he didn’t know the boy so why should he give him a ticket.

The little boy’s face fell; “Your son promised you would if I asked you nicely.” The Dad thought about that for a moment, then gave the boy a ticket. After all, he wanted to honour his son’s promise.

That’s what this verse means. If anyone comes to the Father through the Son the Father will give that person the ticket of eternal life. It has nothing to do with the quality of the person – whether that person has or has not any physical defect or is or is not ‘unclean’ is any way. It is all to do with the Son.

That is the biblical message; and, with due respect to those who hold a different view, I strongly believe that it applies as much to the priesthood as to the congregation. Amen.