When you come up to communion this evening, you need to keep your eyes open. There’s plenty to look at near the front of the church – lovely decorations, candles, baubles and twinkling lights. But keep your eyes peeled for a couple of strange, ethereal, beautiful creatures standing on either side of the altar.

Strange, ethereal and beautiful.

And I’m not referring to Cedric and myself.

On either side of the altar, you will see a couple of angels that were rescued from the crypt a while ago. They were covered in grime and cobwebs and I thought they needed to be dusted down and polished up. I thought they would probably be happier joining us for our celebrations tonight than languishing in the darkness of the crypt with the spiders and the damp.

It turns out that they originally were carved for another church in the diocese and when that mission of God’s people closed everything was dispersed. Homes were presumably found for all the other chattels but there was nowhere for the angels to go. So they came here. Swooping in from one part of this great city to reside here at St Mary’s.

It is that image of Angels swooping and hovering over the city that I want you to hold in your imagination tonight as I am preaching. For if angels can come to girls like Mary or carpenters like Joseph then they can come to everyone. Indeed, the passages of scripture that we read at this time of year are full of angelic appearances. No part of the nativity is without them. They seem to be everywhere.

A little while ago, I was asked to take part in a video recording. A production company was making a video of something called the Glasgow Gospel. It was being filmed in locations across the city and was an attempt to show the stories of the gospels located here in this place, where we live. The thing that made it particularly special was that the dialogue was all to be in Scots. Or perhaps more accurately in Glaswegian. I cannot tell you how thrilled I was to be given a speaking part. I cannot tell you how delighted I was to be given just one line to say.

I also cannot tell you how exhausted I was after having done take after take after take trying to say the words in the way the director wanted. Somehow my accent was not quite right. Somehow the words of the Glasgow gospel just didn’t sound right, even though, as I patiently explained to the director, my accent ought to pass muster because I went to school just 5 miles from here.

He was unimpressed. In the end, after yet one more attempt he said, “Just give us that line in English.”

I nailed it. One take and we were done.

You know, the day they film the Bearsden gospel, directors will be beating a path to my door.

But the thing that I remember about that video shoot was that they did not simply want to video me. They also wanted to take still shots of the two angels that stand in front of the altar tonight. Not content with them, they went roaming around the church looking for more. Indeed they were particularly pleased to find Gabriel high a-flutter up above the high altar giving his surprising news to Mary.

I discovered that they were making a video collage for the end of the DVD. Everywhere they went in the city they were looking for angels and photographing them. They told me that they had found images of angels all over the city. Great roof bosses in the University of Glasgow’s chapel carved into angelic form. Angels in stone on public buildings. Angels with downcast faces on memorials to the tragedy and pity of war. Angels in stone, in paint, in wood. Angels in parks, in churches, in public squares.

Angels everywhere.

Now, I don’t care what you think about angels. Belief in angels has never been more common, so maybe you’re in the business of seeing them daily. More likely in a congregation like this is that you accept that angels are mythological beings that are unlikely to stop you in your tracks. If that is what you think, don’t let that stop you hearing the news that the angels bring. For angels dance and sing from the moment when our own holy imagination meets God’s divine creativity. The message that the angels bring is planted deep within you. Where your own imagination and God’s creativity unite, hope is born.

Hope for a world that needs hope. Hope for a world that needs the Good News that only you can bring.

The important thing in scripture is never the arrival of an Angel in a story, but always the news that the angel comes to impart.

An angel came to a humble peasant girl Mary and gave her dreams of a better world. The angel said to her, “Do not be afraid” and gave her a song of justice to sing.

An angel came to Joseph the worker and told him that God was not in the business of scandal or disgrace and gave him the courage to stick with Mary with his head held high. The angel said, “do not be afraid” and gave him purpose, direction and a vocation to be a human father to the child.

And an angel came to ordinary shepherds and proclaimed the birth of the babe in Bethlehem saying to them, “do not be afraid” and sending them tumbling over one another in a rush down to the village to see what thing had come to pass there.

But what comes to pass here? What do Glasgow’s angels say to you?

Angels seem to be in the habit of saying, “Do not be afraid”.

If angels hover over this city this night, they say surely say two things – firstly, “do not be afraid” and secondly, “turn your hearts towards God for God is born amongst you”.

Do not be afraid to make a proper home for the Christ Child in your heart. Do not be afraid to demand dignity for the vulnerable. Do not be afraid to cry for justice for the oppressed. Do not be afraid in your busy brutal world of kindness, gentleness and peace – for such is the way that God comes.

As you come to communion this night, see the angels by the altar and ask what news they bring. As you leave this church later, imagine Glasgow’s angels hovering over the city and strain you heart to hear the song they sing. As you face the year that is to come, may the angels prompt you to discover the babe of Bethlehem alive and in this city. For the Christmas news is that if Christ could be born in Bethlehem, then Christ can be born in your heart and bring good news to this city too.

Christ is born and all shall be well. If the other angels don’t spread the Good News fast enough in the city in which you live, then make sure you join them in their task.

In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.

Amen.

One of the nights of my life which I most remember  is the night that I was ordained as a priest. It was in our cathedral in Perth and was very magnificent. Someone preached a great sermon. The music was as good as it could have been. The crowd was large and their welcoming of me as a priest in the Church of God was warm and wonderful.

But I remember a little exchange that took place which I want to use as my starting point for this morning’s sermon as we consider what it means to keep the Feast of the Saints.

Just as I was preparing to leave the cathedral that night, someone came up to speak to me with a message. She was someone married to a cleric of some significance in our church but whose own approach to Christian faith was, well, not quite as orthodox as others.

She believed in one or two things which I don’t think ever made it into any Christian catechism.

She came up to me in great excitement and proclaimed – “I’ve seen it! Tonight I saw it?”

“What?” I asked. “What have you seen?”

“I’ve seen you aura.” she cried. “I’ve seen your aura … and it is golden!

She dashed away into the night and never spoke to me about it again. Leaving me wondering whether she was a particularly perceptive mystic. Or perhaps someone who was particularly perceptive in knowing what to say to a dedicated attention seeker on the night of his ordination.

There are more things in heaven and on earth than I understand. Perhaps she was both.

There are certainly people who claim to see auras – claiming to see colours around about someone which relate to who they are. I don’t think I see them myself, but I do know what it is like to see someone glowing with health and wellbeing. And those of us who have perceptive personalities often pick up what’s going on inside someone instinctively, and I don’t find it hard to imagine that someone might perceive that intuitiveness visually.

The question I want to ask you this morning is not quite about your aura but about something related to that. It is about your halo.

What colour is your halo? And what shape is it?

(Let it never be said that my preaching is not practical and down to earth!)

One of the traditions in art is that holy people get halos. The saints are consistently represented as having a halo around their head. It is a direct connection to that idea of being able to perceive someone’s nature by seeing something like an aura about them. A way of painting personality. A way of portraying holiness to the world. In religious art, you can easily tell who the saints are. They are the ones whose heads are surrounded by a gold halo. Their holiness shines.

Indeed, if you see an old mural and can’t quite make out the figures, you can sometimes tell which one is Jesus by the way the cross is marked into the halo around his head.

Wouldn’t it be great if we really could tell how people were by the colour of light surrounding them?

Wouldn’t it be great if we could make up our minds about whether someone was good or bad, trustworthy or deceitful, on the make or working for justice, on the razzle or growing in goodness, just by looking at them.

Sadly, it isn’t so. (Unless you happen to be the person who spoke to me the night I was ordained). Instead, we have to use that old faithful way of making judgements about the world we live in – old fashioned, godly common sense – that most unacknowledged of God’s gifts of the Holy Spirit.

But what’s your halo like?

How would you draw it? What colour would it be? If you were depicted amongst the saints, what would be distinctive about your aura.

For part of what we preach and teach is that we are numbered amongst the saints. The saints themselves were a funny, tricky and rather odd bunch on the whole. Though at first glance it might seem unlikely, I suspect that the congregation here at St Mary’s would blend right into that cloud.

For we have two things to do today. To acknowledge and enjoy the saints of the ages, the great cloud of witnesses. And also to acknowledge that there is no gulf between us. We are part of that cloud. Unlikely. Difficult. Troubled as we may be, we belong to God and our own hopes for glory mingle with those of the blessed throughout all the ages.

But, what shape is your halo?

I must admit, that’s a new one to me, but I learned from one of you recently that there is a convention in art that some people are depicted with square halos.

I hadn’t heard of that and had to go away and look it up.

A square halo, in case you are wondering is what you use in art to depict a saint who is still living.

So, what shape is your halo?

I did entertain myself this morning with the idea of making square halos out of coat-hangers and making you all wear them throughout the service in order to get the message over.

Discretion proved the better part of valour however and I abandoned that idea. I thought that you might look like a collection of religious teletubbies.

But don’t forget as you go through this week that as one of the saints – as one of God’s own, a halo belongs to you.

Just up the road from here there is a rather splendid halo. If you look at Oran Mor at night, you’ll know the one I mean. The building used to be Kelvinside Parish Church and then the Bible College and now a venue with restaurant, theatre and nightclub. And they’ve put a halo on the spire recently which is rather magnificently off kilter. Squint. It isn’t just a halo, it is a slipped halo.

It makes me laugh every time I see it.

If we had more money than sense, I’d suggest that we respond with a square halo around our spire.

For as living people, flawed people, odd people, holy people, hopeful people, we are in the company of many saints.

My halo may be square. My halo might be gold like my aura. My halo is certainly from time to time, rather squint.

But I’m on the way to heaven in the company of many saints. And so are you.

In the name of God, Creator, Redeemer and Sanctifyer. Amen

Do you say a wee prayer of thanksgiving for the couple?

Maybe you do.

Do you rejoice that two people have discovered that they love one another and give thanks for the places in your own life where you have known love too?

Maybe you do.

Or, upon reading that invitation, is the first thought that comes into your mind, “Oh no! What on earth am I going to wear?”

It is as though we have a global, cosmic, universal, catholic fear of being the man in the parable that I’ve just read – the one who was caught out at a wedding wearing the wrong clothes and thrown out into outer darkness where there is “weeping, wailing and gnashing of teeth”.

I’ve already preached on that phrase once this year. I really must learn my lesson and look up the readings before doing the clergy rota. This parable is so horrible that it is the kind of thing that should only be scheduled for a curate. Or maybe a passing bishop.

It’s not too bad for a while – the idea that at the great wedding banquet folk haven’t turned up and God sends for the riff raff to fill the spaces is something that I think we can relate to. I always used to want to be in charge of a church which welcomed the riff-raff of the world….well, you should be careful what you wish for!

It is that last nasty bit that sticks in my craw – the story of the person not being dressed for the wedding being flung out into the dark.

On everything connected with this congregation we put the words “Open, inclusive welcoming”. There is no dress code here. This is a place where you can come in from the highways and byways of the world and just be present with God. You won’t be flung out for not knowing the routine or not wearing the right robe. We even provide great big pillars for you to hide behind, for as long as you chose. And that’s OK here.

A parable with a story that ends like this pulls us up short. Can that really be in the gospel, we think. Can that really be what God is on about in the world today?

I want to suggest to you that the answer to that question might just be “no”. And I also want to bring this all up to date by talking in a moment about the big current question about marriage – after all – there are people who feel very much excluded by God or God’s representatives from the institution of marriage. This little parable might be all too contemporary.

I’ll come back to that in a minute, but first, what on earth did it ever mean that allowed its hearers to hear it as Gospel.

Well, in a few week’s time we will turn the page and start to read Mark’s gospel on Sundays. We’ve been reading Matthew since last Advent. This parable is part of the stark black and white tone that Matthew strikes. The parable of the wedding feast that we have today is part of the old sheep and the goats, the saved and the damned stuff that permeates this gospel. I struggle with it every time we go through it. I’m not the only one who does. Though it has to be acknowledged as we read it that it makes perfect sense to many a religious community who need high barriers to entry and participation and who have a desperate need to see themselves as living in opposition to the ways of the world.

The most sense I can make of this parable is to go back to the theory that Matthew’s people were frightened people. The remnant of people who collected this parable were the ones trying to live as Christians without abandoning too much of their Jewishness. Issues of identity and probably dress were absolutely crucial to them.

I was reminded this week of seeing persecuted Christians in Egypt showing tattoos on their wrists to doorkeepers of churches in order to gain entry. They have crosses tattooed on themselves – something that Muslims would never ever do. These marks act as essential symbols of who they are and the faith they profess. You show a tattoo to gain entry – to prove who you are.

Matthew’s people may have had their own religious code – their own religious dress, their own tight religious world to preserve. In that context a parable about throwing someone out for wearing the wrong thing makes all kinds of sense, even if we may not like it now.

And coming back to now, what does it mean today?

Well, as I alluded today we would do well to remember that there are those amongst us (including me) who are cut off from the institution of marriage. Not quite thrown into the outer darkness where there is weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth, but outside the fold of respectability. Gay folk can’t get married and the government are consulting about whether the time is right to change that. I think it is and it is a change that some of us from this church have been working towards for quite a while – quietly writing letters and gathering signatures and speaking to politicians.

I believe that religious people have as much right to influence politicians as anyone else. Heaven knows I try to do so often.

However, I think that there is a danger that the influence of goodhearted, godly people is being undermined by some within the Christian community.

It vexes me greatly to say so in public, but at such a time as this, there seems no alternative but to speak up. The behaviour of our brothers, the Roman Catholic Bishops in recent days, has been so unpleasant and so ill judged that it risks harming the good influence of the whole Christian community.

To behave as though bishops carry some kind of block vote to Holyrood, to threaten politicians and to decry those who want access to the dignity of marriage as unnatural…. to say these things seems to me to go too far.

Such comments from the leaders of the Roman Catholic church have left me feeling embarrassed as a Christian. There is a risk that all of the churches will appear to be out of touch, arrogant, conceited and rude. We don’t all have to agree but we are all called to behave charitably and there has been an absence of love in this relentlessly bitter campaign and it diminishes us all.

One of the great things about living in Glasgow is that you can find out fairly quickly that one’s Roman Catholic friends and neighbours don’t all share all the views of the hierarchy of that church. Indeed a good many share that sense of embarrasment.

I hope that you were embarrassed and outraged by the parable told in this morning’s gospel. If you were not – go and read it again until you are. It may well have made sense to the people amongst whom it was first told but we must be frank, we must be bold and we must be clear – it has very little in it to edify us now.

The words of Jesus to cling onto are the words which nourish and the words which heal. The stories that inspire, the sayings which embrace. Those ways of thinking which enfold the weary like that shepherd we sang about in the psalm – those are the elements of Gospel which the whole world craves.

As the apostle said, “So beloved, whatever is true, whatever is honourable, whatever is pure, whatever is pleasing, whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence and if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things.”

And in the name of God, forget all the rest.

There is something of a Back to School feel about the West End of Glasgow this week. I noticed it when I was trying to use one of the banks this week and found that there were nine students (all from China) trying to open new bank accounts in the queue in front of me.

If you’ve blown into St Mary’s on the breath of the new academic year that has just begun in our great colleges and universities, you are very welcome. The new student group for folk connected with St Mary’s begins after Evensong this evening.

I want to begin what I have to say this morning with a strong “Back to School” moment that I had a couple of weeks ago. I realised that my old Primary School – Bearsden Primary School was having an open day and inviting everyone in.

Now, I’ve not been there since I was 11 and so decided to head off up the road and have a look.

It was completely fascinating.

I had a good time at that school. It suited me fine. But it was, how shall I say, a little old fashioned, even then. It was a regimented regime. We walked in silence in straight lines. We wore smart blazers. We were there to learn and we sat in rows, from the cleverest at the back of the classroom to the thickest at the front.

How times have changed. Going into the school now, the classrooms were completely different. The sense of colour was overwhelming. Each classroom was vibrant – exciting spaces for learning. I stopped in passing to note that in the church our education methods probably haven’t changed much in the last 30 years – to our detriment. In good primary schools, they’ve changed beyond recognition.

As I stood in my school feeling 11 all over again, memories began to surface. In particular I remembered two teachers. My primary five teacher who was vivacious, kind and full of endless energy, and my primary seven teacher who made us recite the bible every day and whom I remember most clearly as the only teacher who ever belted me – corporal punishment being the norm in those days.

One teacher who didn’t really have much to say about faith, but who conveyed a sense of excitement and joy and wonder about the world. Another who came from the Plymouth Brethren, who had a lot to say about Jesus but who ruled with, not with a rod of iron but with a belt of leather.

As I think of those two characters in my childhood, I get glimpses into what Jesus was talking about in his tricky parable about the two sons. One said he would work in the vineyard and didn’t. The other didn’t agree to do so but did. Which son did the will of his father?

Which of my two teachers managed to convey anything godly to me in the classroom?

I stood for a moment outside the room that the second teacher taught in – the one who belted me, and thought about her. She took the belt to me twice. The first time for humming, the second for being cheeky.

If she thought she could belt the music out of me, then she had another thing coming.

If she thought she could belt the cheek out of me… well you can make your minds up.

If I learnt nothing else from her it was never to stand silent in the face of tyranny. Tyranny exists to be made fun of.

I moved swiftly along the corridor to more happy memories. I stood in front of a large display panel and remembered the displays we had constructed on it.

The one I remembered most strongly was a “Glasgow” display. We looked at the city in all kinds of different classes. If it was geography we were doing it was the geography of Glasgow. If history then it was the history of this city. And I remembered this great display of maps and diagrams, of pictures of the city chambers, industry and the mansions of the tobacco Lords.

But as I remembered it, I saw that there was a word missing from the display and it is the word which struck me most in the epistle this morning – slavery. Glasgow’s prosperity was predicated on slavery. It is how the tobacco industry worked. The wealth of this city depended on slaves. Western goods were loaded up in this city, where some of us come from. They were taken to West Africa, where some of us come from, and traded for slaves. They were taken to the Americas, where some of us come from and used on sugar and tobacco plantations and crops were loaded onto the ships which brought them back to Glasgow and the whole obscene cycle began again.

In the epistle this morning, Paul the apostle speaks of Jesus coming as a slave. He wrote those words whilst imprisoned. Probably aware that his life was on the line. He writes from the perspective of the death row prisoner.

He says Christ became a slave.

Now there is a lot of theology based on that notion. Most of it about the topsy-turveydom of the strange reign of God, who puts down the mighty from their seat and exalts the humble and meek.

This morning though, I want to ask you to just focus on the oddness of that curious phrase – that God took the form of a slave.

If God has taken the form of a slave, isn’t it time we set God free?

What enslaves God now? What binds the body of Christ today?

Out bickering battles over sexuality, for sure. Our inability to fully accept men and women as equals for certain. But sometimes I feel that Jesus Christ is bound by how dull the church has become. God longs to lead us in a great dance out of our churches, skipping through the institutions and gathering places of modern life setting free all who are oppressed and yet in an awful lot of places you’d get no idea that is the project at all. I get glimpses here sometimes. Precious glimpses.

People are enslaved by all kinds of things. Those forces which would silence me for being gay will dismiss you for being female. Or you for being black. Or you for being English. Or you for being poor. Or you for your ideas. Or you for being odd. Or you for just being you.

Don’t forget that whilst the slave trade held sway from this city, back at home another group of people were not free to worship and subjected to cruel and sometimes violent oppression. We Episcopalians need to remember that we were once persecuted in this city. And the only good consequence that can truly come from oppression is that the oppressed find their own freedom and start to work for the freedom of all.

Paul said from his prison cell that God emptied himself and became a slave.

Isn’t it time we started to work out how to undo the shackles that bind, remove the fetters that imprison, isn’t it time to liberate God’s people, who are themselves, the body of Christ?

God emptied himself and took the form of a slave.

Now, isn’t it time to let that slave go free?

This sermon seemed to generate quite a lot of chatter on Sunday and has been much discussed with me since. It might be a bit apophatic for some, but clearly that speaks to people……

But the Lord was not in the earthquake, the wind or the fire. In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

It is clear why the Old Testament reading and the Gospel have been chosen to go together today. There are common elements – the wind and storm and then sudden peace. For Elijah, it came after earthquake, wind and fire. For the Peter in the boat on the stormy sea, peace comes when he puts his trust in Jesus, cries out to him and takes his hand.

They are both stories that people are quite fond of. And they are both stories that people preach on quite readily. There is a fairly standard narrative about each of them that is common in sermons. You get nice pious sermons about how we need to draw closer to God. Not in the hustle and bustle of life will we find the Lord but when we hear the sound of sheer silence. When we put aside time to be with God. When we cry out to Jesus to help us. When we reach out to God, we will find God is reaching out to us.

So far. So pious.

There is nothing wrong at all with such preaching. The modern retreat movement is largely built on that kind of interpretation of passages such as these.

Perfectly legitimate teaching. But!

But I’m not going to preach it today. And it’s not really because I don’t believe it. I’ve preached it myself. I’ve preached that kind of thing plenty of times, even though I know that I am as likely to encounter God in the buzz of the city, in the shout of the choir or in the conversation and relationships in which I participate as I do sitting contemplating life on my own in some quiet pastoral scene.

(There’s a market out there for noisy retreats for people like me).

But today, I want to focus on the first of the readings and particularly this statement that the Lord was not in the earthquake. It seems to me that it there is something else that we can think about this morning. And there is a spiritual truth hidden in that statement that the Lord is not in the earthquake that can unlock ways of thinking about our place in the world, which has seemed rather threatening and difficult recently.

Our world seems to have been concerned with huge, big news, bad news events for quite a while now. Firstly there have been things that can only be thought about as being the cause of human action – the shootings in Norway, the global economic crash, the war in Afghanistan, the collapse of government in Somalia and so on. Even though these have been the cause of human action of one kind or another – we still tend to turn to the metaphors of natural disaster the tsunami of debt, the maelstrom of the financial markets to describe them.

And then there has been the actual natural disasters themselves – famine in East Africa and earthquakes in Haiti, Pakistan, Indonesia, and Japan.

But the Lord was not in the Earthquake.

That’s the thing I want to invite you to come back to today and to take it with you as a mantra when you are listening to these bad news stories.

The Lord is not in the fire. The Lord is not in the great wind. The Lord is not in the earthquake.

Deep, hard questions are asked of religious people when these things happen and that needs to be part of our repertoire of things to say. These things happen but the Lord is not in the earthquake. Terrible things occur but God is not behind them. In our globally connected world, we see disaster unfold on an almost daily basis. We need to develop new ways of dealing with televised misery. And repeating to ourselves and to the world – the Lord is not in the Earthquake may be a way of coping.

It is not just big disaster too. I’ve been asked a couple of times this week how to cope with living when it feels that God has it in for you. How do we cope when it feels that things are not going our way and God seems to be causing us harm.

Well, the first thing to do is to wave goodbye to that kind of God. If we believe that God is behind all things, tilting the universe this way and that like a great cosmic puzzle game for divine amusement, we will end up wondering why God has chosen bliss for some and earthquake for others. Joy for others and misery for me.

If that’s what life feels like, remember, that God isn’t in the earthquake. God isn’t the cause of your fire or storm or inner upheaval and trembling.

We must look the phrase “Act of God” full square in the face and proclaim, “No, God is not in the earthquake”. Not in my earthquakes nor the tremors which shake the world itself. No, God is found elsewhere.

One classic event which led people to really think about the question of why bad things happen was indeed an earthquake. The Lisbon earthquake which devastated the Portuguese capital in 1755 took place on All Saints Day just when people of the city were gathered in church to celebrate the feast. The righteous – those gathered in church were crushed by falling masonry as the city churches crumbled. The unrighteous who has not made it to church survived.

It was a terrible disaster and a terrible disaster for the kind of religious thinking that had gone before – believing that God was good and that God caused things to happen which were good but which we might not see as such from our perspective. Intelligent people saw through that after the Lisbon quake immediately seeing that a good God could not be in the business of causing suffering to the good.

Yet there were two responses to that quake which seems to me to be one of the dividing points between Medieval thinking and modern thinking.

Some religious extremists wandered the streets looking for sinners whom they could literally string up to appease an angry God.

Others saw straight away that such madness would not do. For God was not in earthquake.

The aristocratic prime minister of Portugal responded when asked what to do, with the phrase, “bury the dead, feed the hungry”. And in that I can find something holy. He also kickstarted modern scientific reflection on the nature of earthquakes themselves. Seismic science can be said to have begun after that disaster.

The Lord does not cause our troubles. The Lord is not in the earthquake. God is to be found in our response to such trauma.

God was not to be found by Elijah whilst storm, fire or earthquake were raging. No, God was to be found in the stillness afterwards when he could ask his big questions and gather up his thoughts on how to face tomorrow.

When disaster comes, the Lord meets us in our responses. The Lord was not in the earthquake. But God is with us in our pain as the dead are buried. God is with us as we face the future and wonder how to feed the hungry. And God is with us as we explore this world with our science and questions and questing for knowledge.

However we meet God – in the noise of the city, or the compassion of humanitarian workers, in the wonders of science or in hearing the still small voice that comes to us when we calm down and sit still the important thing to hold onto is simply this:

God is good and delights in nothing more than our wellbeing.

In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen

If Christ were not risen, we would not be gathered here. In the name of the Father, and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

A number of years ago, before I came to St Mary’s, I was engaged in the business of celebrating Easter. There I was trying to get people excited about the Easter Vigil – that’s the service that we celebrated early this morning here at St Mary’s. Its full of drama – of that there is no doubt. You get a fire lit in the middle of it, from which we light the Pascal Candle which burns so bright and clearly amongst us now. The other thing you do is take some coal from the fire, slip it into the thurible, the brass thing on chains that Beth came in with at the front of the procession this morning. You put on a teaspoon or two of incense, waft it about and the whole church smells of heaven.

Anyway there was I trying to enthuse some young people about coming to this exotic service. One particular teenager I remember. He had an interest in serving at the altar in church and I did the obvious thing and did a deal. You come to the Vigil, I said, and I’ll put you in charge of the incense.

So he did. He carried the thurible dutifully. Followed me out. Watched me bless the fire. Watched me light the candle and watched me forget about him altogether and wander off into church without doing the incense.

The next thing I could see was sad eyes. “Off you go”, I said, “Nip out with your dad, get put a bit of coal into the thurible and add some incense and come back in.”

I carried on with the service. We sang a hymn. I had my back to the door at the key moment, but I knew instinctively that something was wrong. The choir faltered in their efforts. I turned and instead of a young lad bringing a thurible, I saw a cloud of smoke walking towards me rather like the pillar of smoke which we are told followed the wanderers with Moses in the desert.

In the midst of it was a red glow. Instead of a brass thurible, I appeared now to have one made out of molten lava.

It seems that what they had done was to almost fill the thurible with blazing coals. Then on top of they had poured not simply a teaspoon full of incense, not simply a tablespoon of incense, but the whole bag. A year’s supply.

Whenever any choir member has tentatively coughed at the sight of a thurible since, I’ve tended to think that they should be glad to have got off as lightly as they do.

Incense filled the place. Indeed, incense seemed to fill the whole town. Indeed, I suspect that if I was to go back 10 years later and take a sniff, the smell of heaven would still linger.

There is something of Easter Day about that extravagance. And there is something of the smell of heaven about Easter Day.

There have been various smells to ponder during Holy Week. The sweet smell of the oils the Bishop blessed last weekend to use for healing in churches through the diocese for example. And then the smells in the stories. The smell of the crowd crying hosanna. The smell of the donkey carrying him into Jerusalem. (I could tell other stories about real live donkeys in church but we’ll leave that for another time). The smell of freshly washed feet but also the whiff of betrayal at that last supper. And the stench of death on the Friday. The smell of vinegar and bitter herbs with which we washed down the altars here remembering them laying Him out for burial then.

The shear physicality of the stories that we enact in Holy Week ensures that they are a feast for the senses.

As you came into church this morning, my guess is that your senses were assaulted all over again.

The church yesterday was full of people cleaning, polishing, decorating. On Holy Saturday we beat the blazes out of the kneelers, made the brass work shine, washed and scrubbed, covered the church in flowers and hid more eggs than ever.

The church smells clean and pure. The holy smell of hard work and people getting on with one another, determined that should there be a resurrection then all would be ready.

Well there is no question. There has been a resurrection, for if Christ were not risen we would not be gathered here. If Christ were not risen we would not have any message of hope worth sharing with the world. If Christ were not risen there would be no-one to recognise the smell of heaven as it seeps throughout the world.

The stench of death has been unable to hold him.

Nothing has been able to hold him.

No tomb can hold him. No closet. No grave.

Nor the various betrayals and evils that we have contemplated this week.

Not the duplicity of Pilate, nor the complicity of Caiphas.

Not the betrayal of Judas nor the mob rule of the crowd.

Not the terror of his friends, nor the violence of the soldiers.

Not the pain of human suffering, nor the agony of death.

No tomb can hold him.

Nothing could hold him. Pain, death, loss, grief, betrayal, violence – all are beaten.

For the Lord of life is risen from the grave.

The smell of heaven is seeping into the world. Lillies. Polish. Incense. Justice. Healing. New life. New hope. New opportunities to love and be loved in return.

For Christ is risen this April day. And with him rise our hopes, our dreams, our prayers and petitions.

Christ is risen this Easter day. The smell of heaven is abroad in the world.

He is risen indeed. Alleluia.

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In the name of God the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

A couple of weeks ago I took a brief holiday in London. It was a sly, sleekit weekend break to enable me to recharge my batteries before Holy Week. And it worked. I came back refreshed and ready to go.

But I spotted something in London that is my starting point for this final sermon this afternoon.

I had gone up to Camden in north London. It was a hot day and it was lovely to sit by the canal and watch the boats go by. But when I tired of that, I set off a wandering through Camden Market before going back into town.

There were people pressing in on every side. A great mass of humanity. People out to enjoy themselves. Shopping. Selling. Sightseeing.

Its a lively tourist market full of tens of thousands of people, lots of them young. It feels like a microcosm of the world. People of every culture packed cheek by jowl, each looking for their own bargain.

Its hot. Its colourful. There is a faint smell of incense from countless joss stick stalls. People are pressed in on every side.

And suddenly something caught my eye on one of the stalls.

It was a bowl – an old battered fruit bowl, I think. And in the bowl were religious figures. There were Hindu deities – I recognised Ganesh the elephant God and Shiva who is depicted as a fine young man meditating. Then there were various forms of the Buddha. There was Buddha sitting in the lotus position, a happy Buddha laughing and a gloriously fat Buddha looking content and replete. And yes, when I looked, there was Jesus. A crucifix amongst these holy figurines. The figure of Jesus on a cross, the object of our meditations this afternoon. There. Alone. Dropped into a bowl on a stall in Camden Market.

And the thing that struck me most was the sign next to the bowl.

We’ve heard this afternoon of a sign placed above Jesus’s head on the cross, “Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews”.

Next to the bowl of deities in Camden was a sign which read – “Gods – 3 for £5”.

In the middle of the market melee, it felt as though something had hit me hard. Everyone was walking past the bowl, the stall and me without taking any notice.

Into my mind came the line, “Is it nothing to you all you who pass by?”

Gods – three for five pounds.

I realised that something in that place was dead. Though I’ve no doubt that God was alive in each person who walked by, though I have an absolute conviction that God is present in every culture represented in that market, though I know that God is alive and active and loving in every place and time forever, just for that moment, it felt as though something was dead.

Gods – three for five pounds on a market stall.

It put me in mind of a famous quote from George Macleod, the founder of the Iona Community. He once said in one of his books:

I simply argue that the Cross be raised again at the centre of the market place as well as on the steeple of the church. I am recovering the claim that Jesus was not crucified in a Cathedral between two candles, but on a cross between two thieves…at the kind of place where cynics talk smut, and thieves curse, and soldiers gamble. Because that is where He died. And that is what He died about. And that is where we should be and what we should be about.

There is something about that which is fundamentally true. Jesus died in the marketplace with people of all nations and all kinds of beliefs around him. Jesus died on a cross amongst people who were real, not precious pious people.

But if Gods cost so little – three for five pounds. How will you choose which to take home with you?

There are things to be learned from all traditions. Things to be learned from our Hindu friends about experiencing the divine in the everyday. Things from our Muslim neighbours about the reality of community prayer and putting a sense of justice at the heart of faith. Things to be learned from our friends in the Sikh Gurdwara about hospitality. How striking it was at Christmas when previously unmet Sikhs came to midnight mass and it occurred to them that they would be anything other than welcome at the communion table – for to be religious for them is to feed others.

And I never get through Good Friday without reflecting on the Buddha saying that life is suffering. Its a fundamental truth that we in Christianity have much to reflect on when we get going with our petty questions about why bad things happen to good people. Its just life. Life is suffering. Suffering and hardship and pain.

And glory too, but we’ll get to that on Sunday, if he rises.

But let us leave that for then. And leave the other Gods be for now too. Let us fix our attention on a figure on a cross.

Our God.

Our Jesus.

Our Dying Lord.

In coming at Christmas he identified with us utterly. In living with disciples then and now he identifies with us utterly. In dying a painful and awful and horrible death he identified with us utterly.

That utter identification is what today is always about for me.

God came into our world and walked its dusty streets for a while and became like us. Suffered like us. Died like us.

Such is our God.

Out of that bowl of figures, I take Jesus on the cross and I look at him again. Out of the marketplace of values and cultures and peoples, I fix my eyes on him again. Out of the wonderful, glorious melting pot of this diverse and vibrant world I see him again. A figure on a cross.

And I think of that sign – “Gods – 3 for £5.

And I ask myself. How much was the cost for him?

How much does it cost me to following him wherever he leads?

Amen.

In the name of God, Creator, Redeemer and Lifegiver. Amen.

A long time ago now, I took myself off to study theology. I was not a priest or clergy person. I did not even belong to any church. I just had religious questions and for me that was how I tried to answer them.

I enjoyed my studies very much and eventually I started to understand the questions that I had and began to work out which of them might be answered and which were never going to be answered by which were instead pathways into wonder and mystery and delight.

But there were never complete answers. Nothing was ever completely sewn up. Indeed, the number of things I could be absolutely certain of became fewer rather than greater the longer I studied.

One of the things which I remember which my teachers kept putting in front of me was something which can be exemplified by the title of book – which was the central text in what they were trying to teach me. The book was called “We drink from our own wells”. It was part of what they call Liberation Theology. It was written by a theologian in South America. And I just didn’t get it.

The idea was that the Bible needed to be read from the point of view of those who are poor and those who are oppressed. Indeed, the idea was the sin those things which make people poor. Sin is those things which make people downtrodden. Sin is those things which oppress the spirit and those things from which people long to be set free.

And you know? I just didn’t get it.

It seemed to me that you just needed to read the text of the Bible in a neutral voice and its message was universal. It did not seem to me to matter who it was who was reading it. Surely if we just understood the text the way the authors meant us to understand it then wasn’t that enough?

Do we need to drink from our own wells? I wasn’t so sure. It seemed to me that the Christian faith was the well into which we needed to scoop up living water and the world would find all the nourishment it needed.

Liberation theology seemed another world away. Maybe it was what was needed in South America – but what use was it for me? And it tended to be a kind of theology that meddled with political power in a way that I wasn’t so sure of. There was more than a whiff of Marxism about it and anyway, wasn’t it the case that Marxism was being proved wrong? The Berlin wall was tumbling and the Soviet Union was breaking up. There was nothing in Liberation Theology for me.

And yet they kept on setting it as a set text and kept on asking exam questions like – “What would a Liberation Theology look like in modern day Britain? Can there be a Liberation Theology of the West?”

Now. Skip forward a number of years.

Skip forward to the third Sunday in Lent six years ago.

Our liturgical cycle is a three year one. So we only read the story of Jesus and the women at the well every three years.

Six years ago it was about a year before I came here. I was in my former congregation.

I had been a good priest – I had prepared well in advance. I sat in my big rectory with my feet up. The sermon on the woman at the well was all prepared. It was done. Finished. in the bag.

And then the phone went. It was someone in the congregation who called to let me know she was leaving the church. Why I asked, somewhat shocked. Because of the way the church treats my gay friends, she replied. She said she would come in the morning to say goodbye to everyone and then that was it. She was off for good.

On putting the phone down, I found myself somewhat disturbed. I eventually went to bed. Couldn’t sleep much. And ended up getting up in the morning to rewrite the sermon completely. That was the sermon when for the first time I spoke in public about what its like to be a gay priest in an uncomfortable Anglican world.

And I found that by engaging in public with the woman at the well in that sermon that something was set free in me. For I spoke in my own voice about something that mattered for the first time. An immense energy and creativity and freedom came to me as a result of that sermon. I had no idea at the time, but that was the start of a new journey down a new pathway. A pathway which was to lead in the end to my current job, to this place. To this time.

And gradually I realised what I had done in preaching that sermon.

I had drunk from my own well. Not drunk from the knowledge of others. Not drunk from the books of my teachers. Not drunk from the spirituality of the world around me, but drunk deep from my own well.

Archimedes famously said, “Give me a place to stand on, and I will move the Earth” He was right – and having a place to stand is won by the fight for the basic rights and dignities of every human on the planet. And once you have a place to stand, you can start to look for living water – drinking deep from your own well.

What does a liberation theology of the west look like? I think I’m starting to find an answer to that exam question I could never answer as a student.

Its not about my story so much as being about your story and your story and your story. And its about the stories of people who are different from me and different from you. Black theologies of struggle, feminist theologies of gender equality, Asian theologies of justice, South American theologies of liberation and indeed Western, Scottish, Glaswegian theologies of change too.

It is about finding a place to stand, a place which allows you to stand in solidarity with all who are oppressed, all whose voices are unheard, all whose names (like that of the women at the well) are lost to history, all who need in some way to be set free. And it is about finding ways of drinking from our own wells. Finding the life giving, thirst quenching water of refreshment that God has placed all around about is and indeed is deep within us.

That refreshment is found in spirituality which brings us nourishment for our inner soul. That refreshment is found in working for the world that God believes in, that I believe in and that you believe in too – a world where all are fed, all thirst is quenched, where everyone has a place to stand and where all wrongs are righted. And one of the names of that life giving water is justice. And it tastes so very sweet and good.

I have drunk from my own well.

The well is deep.

And the taste of the water is lovely.

Amen