Easter Sunday 2026

John 20.1-18

The Rev’d Devin McLachlan

(This sermon was delivered extemporaneously, and its oral nature may be reflected in the grammar of the written text below.)

When I was in seminary — and here's my excuse, it was a quarter century ago, and so I can't remember the actual citation —but when I was in seminary, I have a distinct memory of my one of my professors, a liturgics professor, talking about one of the early church fathers, one of the great Patristic writers in a sermon comparing the resurrection of Christ to a cork exploding back up to the surface of the water from where it had been held down. That nature of the God of Love is such that death could not hold him down. That it was impossible for anything to happen other than the resurrection. Such is the power of God's love.

You know this sense memory. Clara, being baptised today, is probably about the age to be figuring it out right now. Julian and Silla — also being baptised today — are old enough to have already made this discovery. That discovery when you're in a bath and you've got something that floats and you hold it down with your hand under the water and then, boom!, it rises up.

There is a delight and a joy. It's about that sensory experience, but it is also an important and incredible moment of neurological development. It's something children go through with the whole world, which is discovering rules. And you think you've figured it out. If you've ever been with a baby in a high chair, you know they love seeing how gravity works. They like to check it on a regular basis. Then suddenly gravity doesn't work in the tub! And the universe unfolds in a whole new dimension we didn't expect.

For the whole history of humanity since the fall, we have sunk like stones. And then on that Easter day, we discovered that indeed God has always intended us to be buoyant, to come rising up above the dark waters and that death cannot hold us down.

But John and indeed the other gospels make clear this was no still, warm bathtub. This was no leadth me beside the still waters. This was a torrent and a rapid.

 I love John showing off about whoever that beloved disciple is —maybe John — boasting that he won the foot race with Peter to get there. Again and again. It feels like John's trying to score a little point here: I got there first.

What I've realised this year, and it's because folks in this congregation have taught me some things about myself, is: Oh my goodness, are those disciples guys.Mary comes back weeping and confused. And what do those disciples do? ‘We've got to do something. we're going to go and see it for ourselves,’ and they take off and Mary is like, ‘But wait…”  She has to follow them all the way back to the tomb but they've raced each other to get there. I love that detail.

But it's also that this story is not a still pool but a rapid, a cascade. One of the great aspects of the authenticity of the stories of the resurrection is that they are not simple, logical, straightforward and clear. They run back and forth and sideways they look at the tomb, they don't go in, they go back in the tomb, and then they leave again. These are swirling waters of wonder and grief and fear and confusion.

And in those swirling waters, Mary was not feeling buoyant. I've preached a lot over the Triduum about waters, including on Maundy Thursday about the anointing of salt tears at Jesus's feet. And Mary weeping outside the tomb. Mary, her heart heavy, spilling over with grief.

Mary, whose grief is so heavy, she is almost uniquely in scripture completely unfazed by the angels. It's one of the few times that angels appear and I can imagine them. They're about to say, "Do not be afraid." They get it far as like, “Do not….”

She's not afraid. She's just sad.

And they say to her, "Woman, why are you weeping?”Her grief is so enormous that even the angels are silenced by it.

This is Mary, the first apostle, the apostle to the apostles. Apostolos, meaning the one who is sent off, the messenger. Mary who brings the resurrection, who is given that news, not because she's a happy Christian.

And yet in that moment, when Jesus says her name, she too becomes buoyant. She hasn't found that buoyancy that by being chipper and cheerful all the time, or inauthentic, or always unafraid. But she is buoyant by the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.

And then Jesus says to her, "Do not hold on to me.”

On Good Friday, during those 90 minutes of preaching, I talked about different kinds of waters. We've talked here in this sermon about these waters being whitewater rapids. One of the things I learned in the few times I got to go whitewater rafting (and I drank a lot of river water in the process), is that one of the most dangerous places in a river is just after the big rock, right behind the big rock. And they teach us that because instinctively when you're being rushed and knocked about and spun from side to side, that's kind of where you want to go. You're like, "Oh, that's going to be the lee. I'll be nice and sheltered there." But it's one of the most dangerous places. The river is rushing back in to fill the gap behind the rock and it is pulling everything down and the water is trying to cling to the rock.

So Jesus says, "Do not hold on to me.”

What a surprising Easter message. You would think from the way our faith is so often portrayed, from the outside and sometimes right from the pulpit, that it's all about clinging tightly to Jesus and nothing more. But Jesus says, "Do not hold on to me."

Because Jesus sends Mary out into the world to share that good news, to celebrate the buoyancy that she has been given through the resurrection of Jesus Christ.

So in a moment we're going to crown our Easter celebration with three baptisms. We've been hearing about water all through the Triduum, and here we will have the water of baptism springing to eternal life. We will rejoice with Physilia, with Julian and Clara. And through baptism by water and the Holy Spirit we will welcome them into the household of faith. Three more Απόστολοι, three more messengers, whom Christ welcomes with open arms and gentle words, and to whom he will also say, "Do not hold on to me."

Oh, hold fast to the faith. Hold fast to Jesus Christ as our Lord and Saviour, our friend and brother. The word of God, light from light and very God from very God. But do not stop there.

Be buoyant. Float and flow on this river of light. Hold your hands not fiercely tight. Hold them open, cupped and spread so that the water of eternal life may pour into your life and out from your heart. So that the water of eternal life may pour into all our lives and out from our hearts into a thirsty world that needs this good news of justice, of joy, of life, of welcome, of peace, of hope, so desperately. Cup your hands so that the waters of eternal life may pour into it and then out from the hearts of all believers, springing to life this day and every day.

Alleluia. Christ is risen.

He is risen indeed. Alleluia.

The Revd Devin McLachlan

Good Friday 2026

I. Water and Spirit      

In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth, the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep, while a wind from God swept over the face of the waters. 

Genesis 1.1-12

 Now there was a Pharisee named Nicodemus, a leader of the Jews. He came to Jesus by night and said to him, ‘Rabbi, we know that you are a teacher who has come from God; for no one can do these signs that you do apart from the presence of God.’ Jesus answered him, ‘Very truly, I tell you, no one can see the kingdom of God without being born from above.’ 

Nicodemus said to him, ‘How can anyone be born after having grown old? Can one enter a second time into the mother’s womb and be born?’ Jesus answered, ‘Very truly, I tell you, no one can enter the kingdom of God without being born of water and Spirit. What is born of the flesh is flesh, and what is born of the Spirit is spirit. Do not be astonished that I said to you, “You must be born from above.” The wind blows where it chooses, and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes. So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit.’ 

John 3.1-8

Darkness. Perfect darkness, covering the face of the deep. And over it a wind, moving over the water but strangely not yet stirring the water, insubstantial; a wind not of molecules dancing and waving: A wind of the Spirit.

Always a little dangerous in a sermon to share a personal memory, but I invite you to come on a short journey with me. We are in the pacific waters of the Pacific, the sheltered waters of the Salish Sea near Vancouver Island.  It is a warm summer night, late July, moonless. There is almost no breeze. The sky is clear. The sky is clear and blazing with stars. You slip into a kayak and head out into the water.

 When you put your blade in the water, you discover what happens in the Pacific on a warm summer night: The sea is alive with bioluminescence with invisible microscopic zooplankton bursting with light. A cool blue colour that takes up swirls from where your blade moves through the water. You spin galaxies behind you. You splash around for a time, enjoying the surprise, and then you go out into the stillness. You trail your fingers through and see streamers of light drifting behind you. And as your heart begins to calm and the waters go still again, you notice there is still light. light from the stars of creation. That same colour of light that you've made in the water is in the cosmos all around you.

Welcome back.

We know these waters are safe. They're there in our imagination, in the safety of this great sanctuary. And I knew those waters, knew them to be safe, and home just in reach.  And you travelled with me, the stars cool and in reach, the wind gentle and the waters calm.

Not so for Nicodemus. Nicodemus went out that night knowing he was on a fragile craft  above a fathomless deep, unknown fears submerged in the darkness, and the wind blowing hard as he flitted through the shadows of Jerusalem.

Nicodemus did not know if the waters were safe. And Nicodemus was right.

If you have found your faith as an adult, you might get these words right away; for those of us who were born in happy, comfortable churches, we had to learn them the hard way, if at all. Annie Dillard, in Holy the Firm, writes:

On the whole, I do not find Christians,….sufficiently sensible of conditions. Does anyone have the foggiest idea what sort of power we so blithely invoke? It is madness to wear ladies’ straw hats and velvet hats to church; we should all be wearing crash helmets. Ushers should issue life preservers and signal flares; they should lash us to our pews.[i]

Nicodemus is right. Faith swims over deep, dark, and dangerous waters.  Nicodemus is right. Some of the things that shine brightly in those waters are not safe. Nicodemus was right that the wind was dangerously strong, blowing him somewhere he did not think he wanted to go. Nicodemus knew his craft was fragile. Pride, and the powers and principalities of this world, are leaky and thin above that deep.

There is brightness and there are shadows. And we know as Christians above all the shadow of the cross.Dark things swim in this water. Not to our harm or our destruction, but indeed to the harm and destruction of all those dependable things of mortal life. All those ways we have insulated ourselves against the wonder and majesty of God.

Nicodemus's caution, his nocturnal questions, his skepticism at being born again, none of those were unreasonable fears. He is a hidden spring. He appears only three times in John's gospel and nowhere else. First in steep, uncertain headwaters, visiting Jesus secretly, asking theological questions; hungry and wondering but not so sure, being quite reasonable in his interrogation of Jesus.

But something was springing out from his heart. Nicodemus appears again defending Jesus when the council wanted to arrest him after Jesus proclaimed, "Let anyone who is thirsty come to me. Let the one who believes in me drink. Out of the believer's heart shall flow rivers of living water.” We'll get to that declaration soon. We see Nicodemus as a daylighted spring for a moment, in an ecosystem where he is engaged with his community asking questions about justice, about the rule of law, about fairness. Nicodemus's personal spring has started interacting with an ecosystem of community with neighbours with the people to whom he is accountable with the people whom he feels he must protect.

And then we will see Nicodemus on Good Friday bearing myrrh and spices to tend the body of Jesus. There is a waterfall here. Nicodemus is risking his community and finding a new community of love. But he does not know where it is going to flow. And John will not tell us what happens to Nicodemus next. That stream has gone underground again.

Reformers like John Calvin look down on Nicodemus, in that determined “I am right and everybody is wrong” period in Western Christianity. For Calvin, Nicodemus was nothing more than a coward. Nicodemites is what John Calvin called those who profess to the reformed faith only secretly.

In the African American tradition, Nicodemus is in a more heroic light to a people who had to seek liberation, faith, education, and freedom under cover of darkness and secrecy. Those whose faith is known to you alone, as the old prayer has it.

We started with an ocean. But Nicodemus may be an underwater river.We heard last night in our Maunday Thursday sermon about water flowing underground, about underground rivers and cavern streams — and beneath that, millions of cubic kilometres of unseen water hidden in the mantle.

In Underland, Robert MacFarland travels deep underground in the Dolomites, where he is invited to dive  into the waters of an unmapped system of underground, starless rivers. This story of imagination might feel a bit more claustrophobic:

I took a series of deep breaths, lifted my arms above my head, joined my legs, expelled the air from my lungs in a rush of bubbles, and slowly sank.  At a depth of ten feet or so, the weight of water building on skull and skin,  I fanned my hands to keep myself steady, and opened my eyes.…  Ahead of me in the water was the black mouth of a tunnel entrance, leading away into the rock, more than wide enough to engulf me, its stone edges smooth. The pull of the mouth through that eerily clear water was huge.  Just as standing on the edge of a tower one feels drawn to fall, so I experienced a powerful longing to swim into the mouth and on…[ii]

Nicodemus felt that pull. You can hear it in his bluster and his defensiveness, his hunger and his yearning. There is a vast opening, in Jesus’ invitation — to be born again, we know as Christians, means we must first die to sin. Die to the glamour and dazzle, the smothering comfort, of the powers and principalities of this world.

Good Friday begins as it ends, in prison cell and dungeon vile, as the old hymn has it, Good Friday begins in darkness, as it ends in darkness underground and entombed. It is the only we we can be ready to be born again fromabove by water and the spirit.

Where are the caverns and underground rivers of your faith? Where do you meet God in the darkness, in the deep and starless waters? We’ve learned, in a world of consumerism and capitalism,  to avoid these dark places: to fill the darkness with bright screens, to fill the silence with noise, to fill the empty spaces with waste, to dam the rivers and lay waste to the waters, so that we can no longer drink from them.

Good Friday is the day to lower ourselves down into the starless waters. To know that Christ is there in the the caverns and underground rivers of our faith. To meet God in the darkness, in the deep and starless waters.

While I draw this fleeting breath,

When mine eyes are closed in death,

When I soar through tracts unknown,

See thee on thy judgement throne;

Rock of ages, cleft for me,

Let me hide myself in thee.[iii]

II: A Bitter Cup

Save me, O God, for the waters have come up to my neck.
I sink in deep mire, where there is no foothold;
I have come into deep waters, and the flood sweeps over me.
I am weary with my crying; my throat is parched.
My eyes grow dim with waiting for my God.

But as for me, my prayer is to you, O Lord.
At an acceptable time, O God, in the abundance of your steadfast love, answer me.
With your faithful help rescue me from sinking in the mire;
let me be delivered from my enemies and from the deep waters.
Do not let the flood sweep over me, or the deep swallow me up,
    or the Pit close its mouth over me.

Answer me, O Lord, for your steadfast love is good;
    according to your abundant mercy, turn to me.

Insults have broken my heart, so that I am in despair.
I looked for pity, but there was none; and for comforters, but I found none.
They gave me poison for food, and for my thirst they gave me vinegar to drink.

Psalm 69.1-3, 13-6, 20-21

Then Jesus went with them to a place called Gethsemane; and he said to his disciples, ‘Sit here while I go over there and pray.’ He took with him Peter and the two sons of Zebedee, and began to be grieved and agitated. Then he said to them, ‘I am deeply grieved, even to death; remain here, and stay awake with me.’ And going a little farther, he threw himself on the ground and prayed, ‘My Father, if it is possible, let this cup pass from me; yet not what I want but what you want.’ 

 Matthew 26.36-39

So, there's a man living on the flood plains in Mississippi and it's been a wet, stormy winter. A neighbour comes by in his pickup truck and says, "Hal, there's flood warnings. Come on, put your stuff in the truck. Let's get to higher ground." And how says, "No, no. The Lord will provide."

River starts rising. Comes up to his front porch. Boy Scouts come by in a canoe. “Come on, sir. Get on in. We're getting away from the water.” “Oh, no. Lord will provide.”

Hal gets up to the windows of that first floor. Deputy Sheriff comes by in a motorboat, says, "Hal, you've got to get out of here. The river is still rising.” Hal says, "No, no, no. God will provide."

Water goes up to the roof. Hal's climbed out through a hatch in the attic. Helicopter comes by from the Coast Guard man repels down, says, "Come on, grab hold of me." Hal says, "No, no, no. God will provide." Water keeps rising and Hal drowns. He hets up to the pearly gates and there he's standing. I like to imagine him dripping wet. I'm not sure how it'll actually work. 

And mad as a hornet, he says to St. Peter, "I told everyone, God will provide. And what am I doing here?" Peter says, “We sent a guy a pickup truck. We sent the Boy Scouts. We sent the deputy sheriff. We sent the Coast Guard. What more did you want?”

And…Among the many verses not written in scripture, most canonical might be: God helps those who help themselves.” Sophocles and Ovid and Benjamin Franklin, yes, but not the Scriptures. In fact, Isaiah 41.10 makes it clear that it’s quite the opposite: God is the helper of the helpless

And next to ‘God helps them who help themselves’ in the canon of non-scriptural Bible quotes is this howler: “God never gives you more than you can handle.”

God. Gives. You. More. Than. You. Can. Handle.  All the time.  All the time.

Which is why Jesus, who loved to go up to the mountain top alone, who sometimes took late night walks alone atop the waters of the Sea of Galilee invited his most boisterous disciples, Simon Peter and the sons of thunder,  to come pray with him.  He didn't pick quiet Barnabas. He picked his really noisy friends in the hopes they would say something stupid and cheer him up. Because sometimes we've got a lot more going on than we can handle alone.

When the flood waters rise, when the cup you are given is bitter vinegar and gall,  don’t go it alone. It’s the first rule of water safety (it’s the rule of water rescue as well)  not to go into those dark waters alone. After all, God is never alone – there is but one God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Creator, Word and Spirit. The three in one and one in three, and that Trinity is made of love, is always relationship. I and Thou making We, the Trinity always in relationship, always Love, before all things came into being.

Through Jesus Christ we dwell in God; and, amazingly, God,  mother and father to us all, God dwells within us.  We are never never truly alone.

When faced with loss and fear  Jesus told his friends before his death,  ‘I will not leave you orphaned; I am coming to you.  In a little while the world will no longer see me, but you will see me; because I live, you also will live. On that day you will know that I am in my Father, and you in me, and I in you.” (John 14.18-19)

Abide.  

 Abide.

God was there with the deputy sheriff in the outboard, and the Coast Guard pilot in the chopper.  Not because God helps those who help themselves, but because God helps us to help others. Because God reaches out to us when we are in need,  through the saints and strangers all around us.   Because you have been given the logos spermatikos, the Seed of the Word of God.[iv]  You have been given a message to someone who needs to hear it. And I have no idea where or when in your life you will share that, but I know you will.

St Bene’t’s is a church that knows this lesson very well. You know it well in the recent years following Anna's death.  And you've known it over the thousand years of plague, wars, riots, tyranny, heartbreak, and confusion. This church has stood a thousand years echo of the rock of ages, as witness to the truth that when we are given more than we can handle, by the grace of God, we bear one another up.

And when our neighbour is given more than they can handle, by the Grace of God we hold one another up. And when no one seems near,  God is still with us — a vast ocean of love stretching down to the very mantle of our being.

My father died of pancreatic cancer when I was a teenager, and I lost my faith when he died — and it felt like there were none to bear me up in the flood water.

I have come into deep waters, and the flood sweeps over me. (Ps. 69)

It took me years. It took me years not before I found my faith. And there's a sermon for another time. It was actually after I came back to a faith that had and has lots of questions, and it took years to see where God’s healing hand had been at work, not amidst the broken strands of mis-transcribed DNA in Donald’s cancerous cells, but in the reconciliation we began to experience as a family in the last year of his life. In the faith my father quietly held to. In the care we began to take for one another.

That’s a wound and scar I share todaybecause that experience would, eventually, change how I see the cross: That Jesus drank of the bitter water of the cross, not to satisfy an angry tyrant — neither emperor nor God — Jesus drank that bitter cup, not because he knew it would get him out of suffering, but because he know it was the course by which all of creation would be saved from the flood, the cross becoming an ark great enough for the whole cosmos.

Soul of my Saviour, sanctify my breast,

Body of Christ, be thou my saving guest,

Blood of my Saviour, bathe me in thy tide,

Wash me with water flowing from thy side.

———

 Strength and protection may thy passion be,

O blessèd Jesu, hear and answer me;

Deep in thy wounds, Lord, hide and shelter me,

So shall I never, never part from thee.[v]

III: Violent Floods

The Israelites, the whole congregation, came into the wilderness of Zin in the first month, and the people stayed in Kadesh. Miriam died there, and was buried there.

Now there was no water for the congregation; so they gathered together against Moses and against Aaron. The people quarrelled with Moses and said, ‘Would that we had died when our kindred died before the Lord! Why have you brought the assembly of the Lord into this wilderness for us and our livestock to die here? Why have you brought us up out of Egypt, to bring us to this wretched place? It is no place for grain, or figs, or vines, or pomegranates; and there is no water to drink.’ Then Moses and Aaron went away from the assembly to the entrance of the tent of meeting; they fell on their faces, and the glory of the Lord appeared to them. The Lord spoke to Moses, saying: Take the staff, and assemble the congregation, you and your brother Aaron, and command the rock before their eyes to yield its water. Thus you shall bring water out of the rock for them; thus you shall provide drink for the congregation and their livestock.

So Moses took the staff from before the Lord, as he had commanded him. Moses and Aaron gathered the assembly together before the rock, and he said to them, ‘Listen, you rebels, shall we bring water for you out of this rock?’ Then Moses lifted up his hand and struck the rock twice with his staff; water came out abundantly, and the congregation and their livestock drank. But the Lord said to Moses and Aaron, ‘Because you did not trust in me, to show my holiness before the eyes of the Israelites, therefore you shall not bring this assembly into the land that I have given them.’ These are the waters of Meribah [that is, ‘Bitterness’], where the people of Israel quarrelled with the Lord, and by which he showed his holiness.

 Numbers 20.1-13

Pilate said to them, ‘Then what should I do with Jesus who is called the Messiah?’ All of them said, ‘Let him be crucified!’ Then he asked, ‘Why, what evil has he done?’ But they shouted all the more, ‘Let him be crucified!’

So when Pilate saw that he could do nothing, but rather that a riot was beginning, he took some water and washed his hands before the crowd, saying, ‘I am innocent of this man’s blood; see to it yourselves.’

Matthew 27.22-24

Among the many complexities in the history of the attributions for books of our holy scriptures, is the longstanding tradition that Moses wrote the Pentateuch, the first five books of the Bible. What makes this astounding to contemplate is that of course Moses dies partway through. Now, there are rational and mystical answers to this, including perhaps Moses sitting there writing his own death some long dark night before his death occurs.

Moses had been through a lot — from the very beginning, set off onto the Nile in a fragile reed boat…Moses was not a young man, certainly not by the end of those 40 years through the desert. There are any number of reasons why Moses might have died.

This passage in numbers tells us why Moses died. There's a lot going on in this reading. It might have slipped past you, but it's there. God tells Moses “You shall not bring this assembly into the land that I have given them.”

There's a great deal of midash about this passage.( One of the wonderful traditions of Jewish biblical scholarship, prayer, and faith is that scripture is accompanied by an entire canon of stories and commentary, midrash, and commentaries wrestling with Midrash. An old friend, Rabbi Yehezkel, taught me:  You get three rabbis together, you get five opinions.)

You might be wondering, “Wait, wait. So, the vicar just said this is why Moses died. What did he do to die?”

God said, "Take the staff, assemble the congregation, you and your brother Aaron, and command the rock before their eyes to yield its water.” But Moses took the staff as he Lord had commanded him, "Gather the assembly together. Listen, you rebel. Shall we bring water for you out of the rock?” Then Moses lifted up his hand and struck the rock twice with his staff.[vi]

That was not in the rubric. Somebody called the archdeacon. There were no instructions to strike the rock.

Rabbi Rashi of the 11th century argued that Moses tried to lessen the greatness of the miracle by hitting the rock. Instead of speaking to it, Moses and Aaron failed to show the Israelites how even the mute and deaf stones obey the word of God's commands. Maimonides, the greatest of the medieval Jewish philosophers, in his discussion of the sin of unjustified anger, explains that Moses’ sin lies not in deflating the grandeur of the miracle, but in his violence.[vii]

But Rabbi Cheryl Peretz, a contemporary Reform Jewish rabbi, points to Miriam’s death. I don't know if you caught that at the beginning of the passage. This is where Miriam dies. We have this story of water from the rock twice. Once at the beginning of the story of the journey, in Exodus, and then once towards the end, here in Numbers. And this story begins with Miram’s death.  Rabbi Cheryl writes:

“Miriam’s death robs Moses of his ability to govern. Not yet having had a chance to mourn the love and loss of his sister,  Moses lashes out at God, at people, and even at rock. His sister’s death takes from him the very ability in him that she inspired to courageously and unashamedly intercede with God on behalf of the Jewish people. In those moments of sorrow and hurt, Moses is a human being crying out in pain. And perhaps, God’s words about entering the land are less of a consequence and more a way of helping Moses to acknowledge that he and Aaron, like Miriam, had limited days in this world, and would die soon as well.” [viii]

Mortality is terrifying. I don't like it. And Good Friday is a day of terrible violence and of terrible injustice. The violence of institutions terrified of change and in denial of their own mortality. It is a day about the violence of the state of institutions — Pilate, temple soldiers, the crowd, the appeal to higher authorities, the threatening with riot and with shame. A day of power, control, fear.

Today is a day where we tell the story of the violence of the state. The violence of communities when they are frightened, unjust, unable to change, unable to face the reality of mortality. To fear death above everything else is to worship death. It is to make death into our idol. So often our nations have done so.

Good Friday is a day of terrible violence of religion as well.  (And here, let me flag up because it's a Johannine year, that there's a long Christian tradition of taking John's gospel as proof of blood libel. “His death be upon us and our children and our children's children.” Our responsibility is to the log in our own eye, including using this passage to justify pogroms and Holocausts.

Today is the day where we tell the story of the violence of religion. All the kinds of violence the church has and still carries out — a history of slavery ,some of which funded Lambeth Palace, the Church of England, some of our churches here in Cambridge. The violence in our failures in safeguarding. The violence done to those whom we should protect. Precisely because the failure of safeguarding comes when an institution is so terrified of its own mortality that it will harm anybody else rather than speaking up — failures to take responsibility, acknowledging sin and failure, facing change, consequence, responsibility…

But Good Friday tears in two the veil which disguises the violence of every power and principality. Oh, I don't want to go here, but I'm going to go here. Pete Hegseth, US Secretary of War and member of a self-described Christian Nationalist church, prayed last week for  “overwhelming violence of action against those who deserve no mercy….Let every round find its mark  against the enemies of righteousness and our great nation”[ix]

In the words of Pope Leo, quoting the Prophet Isaiah: “Jesus does not listen to the prayers of those who wage war, but rejects them, saying: ‘Even though you make many prayers, I will not listen: your hands are full of blood.’ ”[x]

With every word of Hegseth’s sinful prayer, with every munition falling on Iran, falling on Israel, falling on Palestine, Lebanon, on Ukraine, on Sudan…with every round, I hear the soldiers pounding their nails into our Lord’s hands and feet, trying to bloody hands that never were curled into fists, that never struck the rock, were always open and raised in love, were always ready to heal, to comfort, to feed.

Pilate may pour out his libations of smooth words, he may dribble his water from his golden ewer into his silver bowl, but it will not wash away the violence of Good Friday. 

Thank God for this day, this Good Friday. That at least one day a year we might not flinch and look away. That we might not water down our faith and make peace with war. Thank God for this day, which teaches us to grieve at loss, at injustice, at cruelty and violence, at the devastation of creation and the fouling of our waters, at the exploitation and abuse of those who should be most protected, at the genocide and erasure of whole peoples.

Listen to the crowd. Feel the skin-crawling hypocrisy and cowardice of Pilate. And then Look on the Cross, and know it to be the Tree of Life. O Tree of beauty, Tree of Light![xi]Jesus even in his agony choosing mercy and forgiveness, that a river might spring up from the foot of a cross, not by violence, not by pride, not by avarice, but by mercy and fidelity and love, so that justice may roll on like a river, righteousness like a never-failing stream![xii]

IV: Everyone who Thirsts, Come to the Waters

On the last day of the festival, the great day, while Jesus was standing there, he cried out, ‘Let anyone who is thirsty come to me, and let the one who believes in me drink. As the scripture has said, “Out of the believer’s heart shall flow rivers of living water.”’

 John 7.37-38

Then the soldiers came and broke the legs of the first and of the other who had been crucified with him. But when they came to Jesus and saw that he was already dead, they did not break his legs. Instead, one of the soldiers pierced his side with a spear, and at once blood and water came out.

John 19.32-34

One of the questions I'm asked when teaching First Communion and Confirmation classes is, what's up with the pouring a little bit of water into the chalice of wine?

The first answer, and not the only answer, but the first answer is because that's how wine was drunk. Transporting wine by clay amphorae across distances was expensive and difficult. Storage was complicated. A strong fortified wine will keep better, travel better, and takes up less space, but doesn't taste very good unwatered. It is the orange squash problem.

Now, that's actually not a bad thing to teach because it's not a secret and it is part of the anamnesis, the remembrance that happens here at the eucharistic table. We remember that last supper. We remember Jesus's words and action at that table. It doesn't invalidate the other meanings hid within.

The mystery of the wine and water outpoured runs through the whole of Christian mysticism, sacramental theology, and illustration. Wonderful images of angels holding chalices at the wounded side of Christ.It's echoed in the pelican here at our door when you come in. That beautiful, beautiful set of handles that Sarah Airriess here in this congregation designed. The story, the legend, of the pelican is that when she doesn't have food for her children, she pierces her own side and feeds her children with her blood. A medieval bestiary telling the story of the sacrament.

The water mingled with blood from Jesus's side was not entirely unusual. It is a bit grim and gory, but one of the effects of crucifixion is drowning. The inability to take a full breath. The lungs filling up with plural effusion. It was for John a miracle and a medical point as well, which is to say the water and blood was confirmation of Jesus's death. And the reality of Jesus death is an essential condition for the resurrection.

For some early church fathers, mingling of Christ's nature, human and divine, is visible in that mingling of the water. For Cyprian, Bishop of Carthage in the third century, the mingling of water and wine symbolises the mystical union between Christ the wine and the faithful baptized. Ambrose some centuries later writes, "The water flows into the chalice and springs forth into everlasting life.” An incredible transformation. The act of adding water to the cup brings our mind to our baptism. Brings to mind the river of life that flows from the heavenly city. Brings to mind what Nicodemus heard.

On the last day of the festival, the great day, while Jesus was standing there, he cried out, ‘Let anyone who is thirsty come to me, and let the one who believes in me drink. As the scripture has said, “Out of the believer’s heart shall flow rivers of living water.”’[xiii]

Nicodemus heard those words, John’s gospel implies,  because a few lines later, the Chief Priests and Pharisees are shouting at the Temple police for not arresting Jesus.  They had one job to do. But they were wise enough that when they heard Jesus they thought, "Oh, something bigger than us is happening here.” But the chief priests and Pharisees are angry. It's much easier being the one sending out the violence than having to carry it out.

Nicodemus, himself among the leaders, pours oil on the stormy waters by saying “‘Our law does not judge people without first giving them a hearing to find out what they are doing, does it?”[xiv]

It’s a procedural trick, perhaps — we’re in an era now of police procedurals, but for old fogies like me…I remember Matlock. I remember when the hero of the procedurals was the defense attorney. At some point in the 21st century, the public defenders became the bad guys, prosecutors always the good guys.

But Nicodemus uses a word trick worthy of Matlock or of Rumpole of the Bailey. A trick that worked because it was justice. Because Nicodemus knew there is a reason for procedure, for safeguarding, not just for Jesus whom he visited at night, who perhaps Nicodemus wanted to hear more of, or who perhaps was a little worried that Jesus might look up and say , "Oh, there you are. I remember you.” But because Nicodemus knew what might happen to his whole community if the law could be used as a weapon, careless where it lands and who it damages.

And then on Good Friday, Nicodemus is somewhere there in the crowds standing in the shade, perhaps with the other religious leaders. He told himself he had to show up because otherwise his colleagues would begin to suspect. Suspect what? Well… suspect.  Suspect that he was an enthusiast. A follower. A gullible Galilean.  He told himself it was for his own safety, a life-preserver of respectability and compliance…He had worked hard to get to this post. He was not going to let the tug of his heart endanger all that hard work.

Living here in Cambridge, many of us have heard the voice of this temptation to never rise above a dry and private faith: rational, quietly hidden and shy of any public confession. And like all sandcastles, a dry faith can crumble when the tide comes crashing in.

For when the water and blood flowed from Jesus’ side,Nicodemus knew that he was drowning. Knew, as sure as he was standing there on the dry stones of  the Jerusalem hills, that he was drowning. Drowning beneath a flood that washed away every dry sandcastle of his life, the pitiless violence of all he had esteemed laid bare, and on the cross, the gentle teacher with whom he had quietly spoken so many nights ago.

The day had grown strange and dark. The crowd silent and sullen, but for the weeping of the Galilean women.The blood and water flowed from Jesus’ side, and it roared in Nicodemus’ ears, roared like tempest and gale, cataract and flood.

And then silence. Terrible silence.  Tears coursing down Nicodemus’ cheeks. And in that silence, a still small voice whispers: Out of the believer’s heart shall flow rivers of living water.[xv]

Pierced by the spear, from thence there flow

Water and blood from out his side:

Baptise me in that cleansing stream,

 Jesus, my Lord, the crucified.[xvi]

The water flows into the chalice, and springs forth unto everlasting life.  With tears of grief and hurt; with the warm lifeblood of love and joy; by your baptism, by your participation in the eucharist; out of your heart shall flow rivers of living water.

V: Drought

The hand of the Lord came upon me, and he brought me out by the spirit of the Lord and set me down in the middle of a valley; it was full of bones. He led me all round them; there were very many lying in the valley, and they were very dry. He said to me, ‘Mortal, can these bones live?’ I answered, ‘O Lord God, you know.’

Ezekiel 37.1-3

After these things, Joseph of Arimathea, who was a disciple of Jesus, though a secret one because of his fear of the Jews, asked Pilate to let him take away the body of Jesus. Pilate gave him permission; so he came and removed his body. Nicodemus, who had at first come to Jesus by night, also came, bringing a mixture of myrrh and aloes, weighing about a hundred pounds. They took the body of Jesus and wrapped it with the spices in linen cloths, according to the burial custom of the Jews. Now there was a garden in the place where he was crucified, and in the garden there was a new tomb in which no one had ever been laid. And so, because it was the Jewish day of Preparation, and the tomb was nearby, they laid Jesus there.

John 19.38-42

We began our journey hovering over the deep, dipping our oar into the star-swept ocean. But now we find ourselves in the desert. A valley full of bones.  We walk with Ezekiel, led by the hand of the lord around the valley,  and everywhere he stepped, bones. Femurs and ribs, ulna, clavicle, tibia and fibula, metacarpals, tiny malleus, incus and stapes, all silently rattling in the wind. And they were very dry.  Very dry.

I’ve known deserts. Lord I have known deserts. I’m guessing you have as well.  Times that were so very dry when prayers turn into dust before they can move from the heart to the mouth—  and the heart withering in the heat of anger or loss, anxiety, exhaustion. I've known deserts with no faith at all and deserts where I knew I had a faith, but it kept turning to sand.

One of the great comforts of the gospels is that the consequence of Jesus’s baptism in those lush waters of the Jordan, named after its swift flowing waters, was not transportation into a green paradise, but being driven out into the desert. We can struggle sometimes if we expect that our faith in God, our journey with Jesus Christ will be easy all the time. But Jesus, baptized with water and the Holy Spirit, goes out into the desert, tested, struggling, thirsty, and alone.

Out of the believer’s heart shall flow rivers of living water. But God knows what God is about,  and the scriptures tell us clearly:  I  am about to do a new thing; now it springs forth, do you not perceive it? I will make a way in the wilderness and rivers in the desert.[xvii]

Out of the believer’s heart shall flow rivers of living water and so the Spirit drives us into the desert.  We stretch out our hands, and are taken where we do not wish to go.  To bring to the desert the waters entrusted to us, to pour out our hearts onto the dry and stony ground, so that new life might begin.

It is into that desert that Nicodemus, almost ludicrous in his grief,  fresh in his desert-spring eruption of faith, comes staggering with nearly a hundred pounds of myrrh and aloewood. Even adjusting for the relative lightness of the Roman pound, it’s an impossible amount, a sort of desert madness. Joseph of Arimathea must have been shaking his head when Nicodemus came lumbering up to the tomb, bearing enough myrrh to anoint a whole village. But whatever sarcastic comment might have been on his lips withered and dried at the look of grief on Nicodemus’ face.

He sets the jars down at the entrance to the tomb, wipes his eyes and whispers: ‘Mortal, can these bones live?’

“All the paths of the Lord are steadfast love and faithfulness,” the psalmist tells us.[xviii]  All the paths — even the ones into the desert. Nicodemus went out that first night  knowing he was on a fragile craft above a fathomless deep, unknown fears submerged in the darkness, and the wind blowing hard as he flitted through the shadows of Jerusalem.

Nicodemus did not know if the waters were safe. And Nicodemus was right.

Nicodemus suspected there was blood in the waters. And Nicodemus was right.

But until that moment, standing by the open maw of the new hewn tomb, Nicodemus did not know that the waters were bearing him, not directly out to open, star-filled seas,  but underground, drawn into the dust of desert and death as if the living waters had never been:

Lifeless lies the pierced Body,

Resting in its rocky bed ;

Thou hast left the Cross of anguish

For the mansions of the dead. [xix]

The living waters cannot be held down beneath the driest sand, nor the living waters damed and kept from flowing out of the believer’s heart.  But this day, this day we will not leap ahead to Easter.  We will wait in the desert, so very very dry. We will step with Nicodemus into the darkness of the tomb, our arms shaking with the weight of our grief, our aloes and myrrh.

We will step into the desert. with those made homeless and bereaved by war. With refugees near and far. With friends bearing unbearable grief.  With the woundedness of creation, with the agony in our own hearts, with our scars and wounds of betrayal and loss. We will step out into the desert.

We come to the desert of Good Friday, to the darkness of the tomb with no answer of our own but Ezekiel’s cry: O Lord, You know.

From deep within, behind the shadows and the rocks in that tomb, maybe there is that trickling golden sound of water flowing underground? On this Good Friday, we strain to hear.

But loud in the desert, the wind howls. Nicodemus takes our hand, gently, still trembling with faith and grief, and tells us:  The wind blows where it chooses, and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes.  So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit.[xx]

ENDNOTES

[i] Annie Dillard, Teaching a Stone to Talk: Expeditions and Encounters (New York: Harper & Row, 1982), pp. 40-41.

[ii] Robert Macfarlane, Underland https://lithub.com/why-are-we-driven-to-explore-the-very-depths-of-this-earthly-abyss/

[iii]Rock of Ages, Augustus Toplady, 1740-78 (NEH 445)

[iv] cf Justin Martyr, d.165 AD, though my use here is admittedly little nebulous and would probably annoy both the Stoics and Bishop Justin

[v] NEH 305, Soul of my Saviour, sanctify my breast (Anima Christi), Latin 14th century, translation anonymous

[vi] cf Numbers 20.7-20

[vii] https://www.thetorah.com/article/moses-strikes-the-rock-his-sin-depends-on-your-worldview

[viii] https://www.aju.edu/ziegler-school-rabbinic-studies/our-torah/back-issues/caught-between-rock-and-hard-place

[ix] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/mar/26/hegseth-prayer-violence-pentagon

[x] https://www.reuters.com/world/pope-leo-says-god-rejects-prayers-leaders-who-wage-wars-2026-03-29/ , Isaiah 1.15

[xi] The royal banners forward go (Vexilla Regis prodeunt) Venantius Fortunatus, 530-609 Translator: J. M. Neale, 1818-66. NEH 79.

[xii] Amos 5.24    

[xiii] John 7.37-38

[xiv] John 7.51

[xv] John 7.38

[xvi] O come and stand beneath the cross,  © The Canterbury Press Norwich (NEH 98)

[xvii] Isaiah 43.19

[xviii] Psalms 25.10

[xix] ‘It is finished! Blesséd Jesus’ (NEH 99), William Maclagan, 1826-1910

[xx] John 3.8

The Rev’d Devin McLachlan

So we found the end of our journey.

So we stood, alive in the river of light,
Among the creatures of light, creatures of light.

Words inscribed on Ted Hughes’ memorial stone in Poet’s Corner, the end of one of his beautiful River poems, ‘That Morning’. Hughes imagines standing waist-deep in a river teeming with wild salmon, light and lupins, fish and water all glowing in a ‘dazzle of blessing’

It is a poem of transfiguration and wonder, carried along by a river which is not only unnamed, but unseen, invisible in the poem, a presence inferred by the swimming of salmon, by the phrase ‘waist-deep’ — but never named, never spoken of directly.

So it is with water, miraculously translucent, carrying all life along. Humans are up to 60% water, our brains three-quarters water: cucumbers with anxiety, as the meme has it.  When we look up in the atmosphere, there are some 13,000 cubic kilometres of water up there. Draw out a square meter on the ground and extend it up through the air — that column of atmosphere alone holds 4 stone of water.

And that amount is dwarfed by what lies invisible under our feet, tens of oceans worth, quintillions upon quintillions of gallons not just in underground aquifers, but — miles and miles below us molecular water dissolved under high pressure in the rocks of the earth’s mantle.

Transluscent, all around us. And desperately precious.

Here in Cambridge, we are stewards of some of the rarest waters in the world — chalk streams, such as Hobson’s Brook, in dire need of protection and care.

The abundant, free clarity of water which Bene’t’s churchwarden Thomas Hobson helped bring to Cambridge is all but a thing of the past; water in this country is now not only private but in a state of privation and pollution.

But our attention this week turns to the Holy Land. Today in east Jerusalem and throughout the West Bank water is almost impossible to come by for Palestinians, new wells and even rainwater collection being largely illegal under occupation.[i]

Even in that Upper Room in Jerusalem some two thousand years ago,water was rare and precious. A system of springs, aqueducts, cisterns and pools watered the city of Jerusalem. In the days leading up to Passover, Jews would immerse themselves in the mikvah, pools of living water for ritual purification — required as well before entering the Temple complex. That, along with  the enormous influx of visitors to the city for Passover would have made water scarce for that last supper.

Water. Invisible, and all around us. And desperately precious.

Six days earlier, Mary washed Jesus’ feet in Bethany, washing his feet in perfume, as the woman in Galilee, had washed his feet with her tears a year or so earlier.  Desperately precious, salt water poured from the penitent heart:

Drop, drop, slow tears, And bathe those beauteous feet,

Which brought from heaven, The news and Prince of peace[ii]

Mary’s gift of anointing affected Jesus deeply, hearts-ease and sorrow combined, quenching his own fears.

He has returned Mary’s extravagant hospitality in that upper room, pouring waters drawn quite possibly from the Siloam pool where Jesus had healed the man born blind.  While he does not wash the disciples’ feet with expensive perfume as she did, Jesus kneels at their feet as tenderly as Mary, and — overbrimming with love and knowing what was to come — who can say but that his own salt tears were not mixed in with the waters.

It is to the sound of pouring water, trickling tenderly from a ewer, plashing into a stoneware basin, that Jesus, kneeling and stripped to the waist, gives them a new commandment:

Pour out Mary’s gift, pour out my gift,  pour out God’s gift of love, not parsimoniously trickling upstream: but let love roll down ever-flowing. Let love pour out, clear and precious, invisible until the light of God plays across its waves. Let love be a flood of justice, rolling down, an unfailing stream, poured out as libation at the roots of the tree of life, whose leaves are for the healing of the nations.  Let love be the river that bears the church through history.

Love one another. Just as I have loved you, love one another.

A very different poet named Hughes this time — at the age of 17 Langston Hughes wrote a whole history of the African-American experience, of continuity in migration and slavery, in 13 short lines. It famously begins:

I’ve known rivers:

I’ve known rivers ancient as the world and older than the flow of human blood in human veins.

My soul has grown deep like the rivers.[iii]

For two thousand years, Jesus has been pouring out rivers of love over our feet, inviting us again and again to course his new commandment, a current of love weathering away a new channel in the world.

Like Simon Peter, we resist — a dam of misplaced pride, an ox-bow of insecurity, unwilling to leave the dynamics of the dry desert that is this world’s powers and principalities.

Like Judas son of Simon Iscariot, we resist — uncomfortable with the extravagant flow of love, parsimonious in our love of neighbour, penurious in our love of God, a faith watered down rather than watering.

But Christ’s love is persistent, constant in every sense. We have not loved well; we certainly have not loved one another as Christ loves us. And even still, he kneels at our feet and pours out that love again.

Listen to the sound of water plashing against feet, remember the taste of salt tears, look to the water mingled in the sacramental wine.

Translucent. Living and moving. All around us, above and below us. Extravagant and precious all at once.

May the water of Christ’s love,  teach our souls to grow deep like the rivers, so that at the end of our journey we may stand, alive in the river of light,
Among the creatures of light, creatures of light.

[i] cf https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/campaigns/2017/11/the-occupation-of-water/

[ii] Phineas Fletcher (1582-1650)

[iii] Langston Hughes, The Negro Speaks of Rivers, from The Collected Works of Langston Hughes. Copyright © 2002 by Langston Hughes. www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44428/the-negro-speaks-of-river

Gavin Koh, ALM

Ezekiel 37:1–14 (The Valley of Bones)

John 11:1–45 (The Raising of Lazarus)

I have a American friend,  who is proud to be American; but her pride has been challenged these past few years.

A couple of weeks ago, I got a message at 3 am her time, which I thought was very strange.

"I'm in New Zealand," she declared. This was an exercise in "How not to live in the country that started WWIII" was her message.

I think there are a lot of us in a similarly black mood.

Today’s scripture passages are about despair, about death. The end of the story, the end of the road, the end of hope.

 I want to tell you the story of the prophet Ezekiel, and the story of Israel.

 Ezekiel was born in the southern kingdom. in the kingdom of Judah in 622 BC. He was born during the reign of King Josiah and being of priestly heritage, was taken into exile in Babylon.

He was called by God to be a prophet at the age of 30; his visions and prophecies take place over a span of 22 years. He died in Babylon in 570 BC and his tomb in Southern Iraq is a site of pilgrimage for both Muslims and Jews alike.

In the year 605, King Jehoiachim of Judah was defeated by King Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon.

The city of Jerusalem was destroyed and the people of Judah were taken into captivity. Israel.

God's Chosen people. God's promise to Abraham, that through Abraham and his descendants, God would bless all the people of the World. And Israel behaved like spoiled children.

We are God's favoured people. And look what happened.

The exile to Babylon was a period of despair. The end of history. The Babylonian army ravaged the land of Judah, the city of Jerusalem was destroyed, the holy temple of God lay in ruins.

All was lost. There was nothing left. There was no hope. Ezekiel sees a valley of bones. Judah, Jerusalem, his home is gone. All he sees is death. All that there is is despair.

In today's Gospel reading, we read of the death of Lazarus. Jesus arrives in Bethany to find he is not just ill, in fact, Lazarus is dead.

 The Gospel writer, John, deliberately points out  that the body had already been in the tomb for four days. In fact he mentions this twice, once in verse 17 and again in verse 39. here is no hope.

Lazarus was not just dead, he was very very dead. Four days' dead.

Ezekiel did not live to see The Return. Ezekiel did not live to see the rebuilding of The Temple,

Those events are recorded in the books of Ezra and Nehemiah. The visions recorded by Ezekiel are messages of Hope for those living in darkness and despair. This is the meaning of Ezekiel's vision:

Even in the blackest despair, when the bodies of Israel's dead have been dead for so long there is no flesh left on the bones and even the bones themselves are dry.

Even in that despair, God will clothe the bones in flesh and skin and breathe life into them.

St John's Gospel tells us a similar lesson. There is no place so black and so hopeless to which God cannot bring Hope.

 In the Gospel reading, contrast the reaction of the disciples and the reaction of Martha.

Martha says "...even now I know that God will give you whatever you ask of him." [and] Jesus said to her,  ‘Your brother will rise again.’

Jesus gives her permission to hope against hope, to believe the unbelievable.

 Remember the context, Jesus and the disciples have escaped Judea, left Bethany, they are in hiding. They fear being killed.

News comes to Jesus, saying Lazarus is ill and near death. When Jesus says he is going to Judea, the disciples try to dissuade him, because they fear he will be killed.

When they fail to dissuade him and they realise that he is going anyway, the disciple Thomas says, ‘Let us also go, that we may die with him.’

To the disciples, this is a fool's errand, they will achieve nothing and are simply going there to die.

 If you grew up with a Christian education, you will know another story of Martha and Mary.

However, in this story, Martha is the hero, because she alone holds onto Hope. She believes in Jesus, and Jesus responds to her Hope.

This is Hope:– When all is lost, when everyone tells you that you are crazy, you are deluded, to hope against hope.

Hope is to roll back the stone of the tomb, to let Jesus shout into the darkness, and to see Lazarus stumble out into the sunshine, his hands and feet still wrapped in strips of cloth.

Let us pray for sacred Hope: God of resurrection , we turn from the cross of death towards the tree of life and dare to imagine another possible world where violent conflict becomes peaceful reconciliation; where pain and tears are healed and tenderly wiped away. 

In a time of inequality and division we are united by hope,  anticipating the flourishing of creation and fullness of life for everyone.

To the glory and praise of your Almighty name. 

Amen

(based on Christian Aid https://www.christianaid.org.uk/pray/prayer/prayer-hope)

John 4.5–42

The Rev’d Devin McLachlan

St Bene’t’s, Cambridge

 Another morning and I wake with thirst for the goodness I do not have. I walk out to the pond and all the way God has given us such beautiful lessons. Oh Lord, I was never a quick scholar but sulked and hunched over my books past the hour and the bell; grant me, in your mercy, a little more time.

Love for the earth and love for you are having such a long conversation in my heart. Who knows what will finally happen or where I will be sent, yet already I have given a great many things away, expecting to be told to pack nothing, except the prayers which, with this thirst, I am slowly learning.

            —Mary Oliver, Thirst

 I have been to the Samaritan woman’s well, some thirty years ago;  the well that Jacob bequeathed to Joseph. It lies within an Christian Orthodox monastery, in Nablus — and across the street from Balata Refugee Camp, built in 1950 for five thousand Palestinian refugees, and now serving ten times that number.

 The well where the Samaritan woman came alone in the heat of the noonday sun to draw water is a place where the children of Abraham,  the children of Jacob – Christians, Jews, Muslims, and indeed most of the last Samaritans — struggle to live alongside one another in a thirsty land.

 As it is now, so it was then under Roman Occupation, neighbours sometimes living in peace but too often in conflict and war, driven by suspicion and fear, manipulated by zealotry, sectarianism, and the quenchless thirst for revenge.

 Then, as now, most would have come to draw water from the well in the cool of the morning, those gentle hours between dawn and sunrise, when the water was cold and carrying a heavy water-jar less of a hardship.

 The woman at the well had no such luxury.    (She has a name, by the way — at least in the Orthodox church, where she is St. Photini, the Enlightened one, the and given the honorific ‘Equal to the Apostles.’)

At noon, the only people coming the well were those who didn’t want to be seen by others, people who struggled through the blinding heat because it was better than the whispers, the hurled insults, and sometimes stones, of neighbours.

Photini was a woman cut off — by choice or by social violence — from her community.

.I do not know what loses she had in her life — resist being cavalier about Photini’s marital history,        an error scholars can make with so many women in the Gospels.

 But we read in her history and in the bitterness of her words, a journey loss and grief, whether from death, betrayal, inconstancy, abandonment, abuse, fear of connection, fear of loss, Photini  was parched with thirst for a goodness she did not know, trapped at the well at noontime.

 As then, so now in our own lives, in our faith, we can be cut off — by grief, by loss, by abuse, by shame -told we cannot draw from the well.

 Sometimes it is done to us, sometimes we do it to ourselves: we decide that we are unworthy of the living water —   by our own failings, by the way others have failed us, by internalising the prejudices that surround us — the prejudices that were meant to prevent a Jewish man and a Samaritan women from talking, from sharing a cup of water; the prejudices that remain not only in that land, but also here in this nation as well.

Such prejudices can divide and damage us. When we internalise them, we do for our ourselves the work of the oppressor. We decide that we are unworthy of the living water — and so we will not drink of it.

 But we know that the Grace which comes from Jesus Christ is in defiance of all that seems impossible. ‘Sir, you have no bucket, and the well is deep,’ we cry out, shaking our heads.

 And then the Living Water comes to meet us in our thirst — not by flooding us and drowning us, but by coming to us as one who is thirsty.

 Jesus said to her, ‘Give me a drink’. Jesus said to her, ‘Give me a drink’. Jew to Samaritan, violating every social norm.

A truth which I know Anna Matthews, whom we especially remember on this, her year’s mind, preached so eloquently on, as Mark Oakley reminded us three years ago: preaching again and again from this pulpit that there are no outcasts with God, our God who came to us in Jesus as an outcast.

 Jew to Samaritan, Jesus made a simple request but one which changed everything in Photini’s life:

            ‘Give me a drink.’

 The living water, coming to the thirsty as one who thirsts. A conversation that gently held Photini’s cynicism, irony and doubts. And for once the disciples kept their mouths shut!

Witnesses to the living water drawn deep for the outcast, where, as John feels compelled to point out in his Gospel, no one said, ‘What do you want?’ or, ‘Why are you speaking with her?’

 A thirsty man who drew up a cascade living water from her thirsty heart, so much so that Photini leaves her own water jar at the well, hear heart now brimming over with the living water; she rushes into town crying out:   “Come and see!”

 Photini is one the first evangelists of John’s Gospel, becoming herself a spring of Living Water, bearing the cup of life eternal to the very ones who had driven her from the well:

“Come and see a man who saw me as I am and still asked to share a cup with me. Come and see the Saviour of the World, come and see a man who knows our thirst.”

 You have a thirst as well.  You were born with it; it lies deep in your heart, a universal human condition but a thirst deeply and uniquely your own, individual to you.

 It will not be quenched by war nor violence, it will not be slaked by shame nor oppression.

It is a thirst that has known grief and sorrow, trauma and loss, yet knows we are not made to drink bitter tears. That thirst is holy, for Christ meets us there at noon, tired and thirsty from his journey, asking for a drink, giving to us “a spring of water gushing up to eternal life.”

 I hope your thirst is something you can share with others, with family or friends who feel they have to hide themselves, or pretend to a dust-dry piety.

 To be able to say,  here we find the living water; here we bring our thirst to Christ who knows and loves us as we are, scoured by grief, yet spilling over with love.

 To say to one another, come,  pack nothing, except the prayers which, with this thirst, we are slowly learning.

 Come and share this cup with us.

Nicodemus is widely considered the patron saint of curious Christians, sceptics, and those with a restless faith. He’s also one of the few people other than the disciples who appears several times in John’s Gospel. Today we heard about his first appearance. Then he appears again in Chapter 7 standing up for due process when it comes to judging Jesus, and finally he helps Joseph of Arimathea to collect, anoint and bury the body of Jesus.

Only a few appearances but they seem to tell the story of someone moving from bafflement to public commitment. His faith takes time, most of John’s Gospel in fact, and that is a reassurance.

There are many stories in the Bible and beyond of people responding immediately to Jesus, dropping everything to follow him at once and finding their lives changed overnight. And that is a wonderful thing for which we give thanks.

But for others, maybe even most of us, faith is more a question of fits and starts, two steps forward and one step back. Sometimes things might seem clear and at other times confusing. And sometimes faith might feel like an endless series of questions. For those of us who fall into that category the story of Nicodemus might be especially meaningful.

Nicodemus is sure that Jesus has something to do with God but for now he’s unable to understand beyond that. He’s someone who’s devoted his life to learning, to asking questions, to solving tricky problems of interpretation and understanding using his intellect. He’s not so different to many people in Cambridge and in this congregation. And he’s curious about Jesus, so he goes to the original source to find out more.

Curiosity, we’re sometimes told, killed the cat. This is generally said to stop us asking questions, especially when we’re children and asking about everything. (In fact, a study found that children between 14 months and 5 years old ask an average of 107 questions per hour, which sounds exhausting!) But there’s a second line to the saying “curiosity killed the cat”, which is “but satisfaction brought it back”.

The first line reads like a warning against asking too many questions, but the second line is permission.

Curiosity can feel dangerous and plenty of people want to shut it down when it threatens their position, their dearly held opinions or their way of life. It’s no coincidence that dictators tend to keep a tight grip on education and are suspicious of the highly educated.

But if curiosity leads to truth, knowledge and clarity it’s life-giving, not deadly. And in Nicodemus’s case curiosity eventually led to all these things.

Not right now, in this meeting, but over the course of John’s Gospel we see Nicodemus getting bolder in his commitment. He comes to Jesus this time, though, because signs and wonders have convinced him that something is going on here that has to do with God. He hasn’t grasped the whole truth yet, but he comes to find out more, and Jesus leads him closer to the reality of what’s going on.

It’s a difficult process, with much frustration, and at times Nicodemus seems almost wilfully stupid, especially when he talks about not being able to go back into the womb. But how likely is it, really, that a man like Nicodemus, experienced in detecting subtle nuances, finding loopholes and articulating intricacies, couldn’t recognise a metaphor when he saw it?

Perhaps his objection was more to do with the impossibility of changing what’s already happened and the difficulty of changing who we are.

We can change, sure, if we work at it, but we can never go back to the purity and innocence of a newborn baby, however much we might want to.

The poet John Clare is believed to have said, “If life had a second edition, how I would correct the proof”, and that’s a sentiment we can all share.

So, Nicodemus and Jesus talk, Nicodemus asking his questions, not wanting to settle for easy answers or only half-understood truths and determined to work through his confusion and frustration.

Jesus tries to explain that he’s talking about a birth and a new life that comes from above, from God, that it doesn’t depend on any human actions but only on the love of God.

It’s a life that doesn’t wipe out the past but works to redeem it and give us a new beginning from which we can grow, learn, love and be loved.

And it’s in this context that we get the famous verse: “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but have eternal life.”

Jesus tells Nicodemus and us that new life is a gift freely given to everyone who wants it. He tells us that our lives can be made different because we’re loved beyond measure.

The story of Nicodemus reveals that we can be restless, sceptical and confused and bring those things to God confident that he will help us. It encourages us that curiosity is not a sin to be shut down with accusations of lack of faith but the beginning of a deeper faith. It shows us that questions are a chance to start a conversation about what really matters and about what troubles people, not a threat to the established order.

And it’s a reassurance that the journey of faith can and does include wrestling with God as Jacob did, demanding he listen as the Psalmist did, among many others, and learning, bit by bit, how very much we are loved, with our questions, confusion, misunderstandings and all.

“For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son…”

The Rev’d Devin McLachlan

Lent 1, 22 February 2026

St Bene’t’s, Cambridge

Matthew 4.1-11

It would be funny if it wasn’t so sad, but you will occasionally find in Bible Verse-a-Day calendars, as well as on the internet superimposed on soft sunrises or  images of praying hands,  this inspirational quote from Holy Scripture: 

All these I will give you, if you will fall down and worship me.

Ooops. Indeed, awks. 

That this quote from Satan sounds so like a promise from God…that’s worth spending some time to reflect on:

We’re reminded by Matthew that even the Devil can quote scripture. 

“For it is written,” Satan claps back at Jesus, going on to quote Psalm 91, 

He will command his angels concerning you…and on their hands they will bear you up

So much for any magical thinking about the Bible. It doesn’t make Scripture less-than, doesn’t make the Bible useless or flawed. 

But Jesus and the Devil quote Scripture at each other, each responding to the other with a passage from Holy Writ. 

Here, in Scripture itself, stands the warning that the Bible can be accurately quoted but cruelly abused to the harm and detriment of others. 

If you’ve ever been shamed or abused by someone quoting the Bible at you, you already know what this is like.  It hurts. It wounds, turning the consolation of your faith into a bludgeon for abuse.

How was it for the very Word of God, to have God’s word used as an instrument of abuse?

Context matter when quoting scripture. Intent matters. 

Does our reading of Scripture, does our theology — that is, our language of God, and the eyes with which we look out on God’s world and at God’s people  — do these things reflect the sacrificial love of Christ, or do they reflect the fear, division and hatred of the powers and principalities of this world?

We’ve had a lot of powers and principalities in the news of late, principalities and even former princes;

Our newsfeed seems to be full of women and men who have lost their moral compass in pursuing all the kingdoms of the world and their splendour.

Our faith can echo this  misorthodoxy as well, false prosperity gospels that claim:

All these I will give you, if you will fall down and worship me.

We are always at risk of focusing on the achievement — do we get the bread, the kingdoms, the angelic bungee jump experience?

We selfishly skip past examining our intention — even when warned that wicked intention can twist Scripture. It can help to look to neighbours at such times. 

Intention, in Islam, is one of the first things Muslim children are taught.  If you intend to fast during Ramadan, and then out of habit drink a glass of water after brushing your teeth, you haven’t broken your fast.  Your intention remained pure.

On the other hand, if you don’t eat all day but you never made the intention at dawn to fast, you really haven’t been fasting at all.

Intention is there in Christian ethics and theology, of course, although we have underplayed it in recent centuries.

It’s there at the heart of the Prayer Book’s invitation to communion: 

Ye who do truly and earnestly repent you of your sins, and are in love and charity with your neighbours, and intend to lead a new life…

Our Lent disciplins of prayer and reading scripture, of fasting or giving up a favourite food, of acts of charity and generosity, of coming faithfully to take part in the sacraments — these are all ways that we practice intentionality during Lent.

The sacrifice of hunger, or the sacrifice of time from work or rest to sit and pray, These are choices of intention, about how we are living our lives, moments when we say: 

This is how I intend to spend these 5 minutes, this is how I intend to share this meal, this is how I intend to give of my treasure and time and talent.

They might be little things, but it is in the little things that God has asked us to be faithful.

The Deceiver comes to us in the places in our lives where we assume we are the strongest.

Appealing to our desire for fullness, power, invulnerability, drawing on our hunger for affection, satiation, approval, exploiting our fear of poverty — material, social, or spiritual manipulating our anxiety around our mortality.

To the rich, promises of an endless banquet of riches.  To the powerful promises of kingdoms without consequence or cost. To our own illusions of self-sufficiency and strength, puffed-up promises of perfect ego:

Your eyes will be opened and you will be like gods. 

The Deceiver comes to us in the places in our lives where we assume we are the strongest.

But God, God comes to us where we are weakest.

In the words of today’s collect: 

“as you know the weaknesses of each of us, let each one find you mighty to save” 

A mighty fortress is our God. But not us. We are not called to be a mighty fortress. We are invited to take shelter in God who is mighty to save; to bring our weakness, our poverty of spirit, our soul-deep hunger, under the sheltering wing of the Maker of All Things. 

This Lent, our preaching series is about ‘bringing our questions to Christ’

Today’s gospel is the only one where there are no questions in the text — not outright. 

But the whole Gospel passage is an invitation to ask a question, a question most of us are very uncomfortable with asking:

How would our Lent change if —in a world worshiping strength and power, twisting institutions to serve the interests of the strong — our intention was ask Christ who hungered in the desert: 

Where, Lord, am I weakest?

Where have I hidden my sorrows, my fears, my deep heart-ache hunger?

Where have I hidden away my poverty of spirit, where am I holding my loneliness and pain?

Where is the desert wilderness in my soul, thorny with sin-sick longing?

This Lent, might we ask Christ to show us our weakness — not in anger nor in shame, nor even in fear of our weakness, but because we know that is where he will meet us in honest love, waiting upon us in the barren wilderness, living water springing forth in the desert of our hearts. 

Matthew 17.1-9

Sunday Next before Lent

15 February 2026

Where do you feel closest to God?

Is there a time, a space, in your life where your prayers feel clearer, your heart feels more open.

It is a challenge of our faith, that God is always present with us, reaching out to us, and yet in our human nature we do not always feel the closeness, not because God has stopped reaching out but because in the business and messiness of our lives, we are not always reaching back to God.

Or indeed, we are reaching but not finding what we were searching for.

Our scripture this morning, and many other places in the Bible, point towards the mountaintop as a place to reach out to God. The psalmist looks to the skies for righteous justice and protection.

Moses ascends the mountain to receive God’s law and instruction, for building the tabernacle to receive God. And it is indeed not the first time he has climbed a mountain to speak to God as if from a fire.

And so too with another character of our Gospel, Elijah, if we were to turn to the 19th chapter of the first book of kings, we would find him too climbing a mountain to hear the voice of God, through wind, earthquake, and fire, God speaking at the top of the mountain in the sound of sheer silence. Or if we allow the hymnist some poetic liberty, that ‘still small voice of calm’.

But! Fear not Cambridge, it is not only on the mountain top that we can encounter God. We need not condemn the flat fens as a Godless land.

For there are other ways in which we can step away from the pressures and crowds of the everyday to make time and space for God.

We do it when we pause at the end of a busy day to pray, we do it when we cease from the rush of day to truly encounter the stranger walking beside us, we do it this morning as we take time to come together in worship, to meet God in bread and wine.

Where do you feel closest to God?

Now indeed, Jesus, Peter, James, and John, do climb a mountain. But it is in the differences of this story that we find its deepest wisdom.

Much like the Moses and Elijah, they ascend the mountain and like with Moses God speaks out of the clouds.

But instead of the law provided to Moses, or the call to prophesy from Elijah, we hear a repeat of the words of Jesus’ baptism.

“This is my Son the beloved, with whom I am well pleased”

And this time, a short imperative is added. “Listen to him!”

The wisdom of God received on the mountaintop, the law and the prophets fulfilled and understood through the life of the beloved Son, Jesus Christ.

We perhaps shouldn’t be surprised that Peter, as a devout Jewish man, seeks to follow the pattern laid out before. As God meticulously instructs Moses to build a dwelling place in the tabernacle, Peter likewise sets out to create booths as a dwelling place for the divine.

But blessed Peter, ever eager, and yet ever seemingly just off the mark, he has missed the ultimate extent of the glory revealed to him.

For the life, teaching, and example of Jesus is not only to be received on the mountain.

And when Peter is overwhelmed in reverence on the ground, Jesus approaches him, rests his hand on him, and offers those words of encouragement: “Get up and do not be afraid”.

Elijah, Moses, and the dazzling rays of light have passed, but his friend and teacher, Jesus, remains. The divine revelation is not a passing moment but incarnate in front of him. To live and learn alongside.

After all this has passed, God the Son climbs back down the mountainside, with his disciples.

It is not arbitrary that the lectionary compilers decided to offer us the transfiguration this final Sunday before Lent. It is firmly bookended in Matthew’s Gospel by two reminders of the passion of Holy Week. It is preceded by a call from Jesus to take up our cross and follow Christ, and it is followed by a reminder that the Son of God will suffer by human hands.

The transfiguration of Jesus is foretaste of the glory of the resurrection before the horror of the cross. A glimpse of the light of God shining into the world, through the pain and suffering to guide us through the wilderness.

I do not know if the disciples thought of the transfiguration in the darkness of Holy Saturday. If they dared to hope. Or like, as in the case of many of our lives, we only see the unceasing light of God from the other side…

But as we enter Lent, and look towards the empty wilderness, the suffering of the cross, we are given a glimpse of the resurrection to come, the incarnate light to focus our goal.

Where do you feel closest to the light of God?

God is on the mountaintop yes, but God also came down the mountain, is present as the body of Christ made up of all the people around us.

For I am afraid if giving up chocolate, biscuits, and coffee simply makes you miserable it is not an effective Lent discipline. Where do you encounter God, and what distracts you from getting there.

The transfiguration reminds us that before the cross was the incarnation, God in flesh, in person, in relationship.

It reminds us this Lent to put down our distractions and reach out to our risen God who is reaching out, living among us.

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

The Rev’d Devin McLachlan

3rd Sunday of Epiphany, 2026

Gospel: Matthew 4.12–23

Poor Annett…cast into the sea by Peter and Andrew.

Today’s Chevin Sermon, endowed in the will of Richard Chevin in 1589 along with other acts of charity (the dad joke at the start was free) was funded by bequeathing to the city the lease of a plot of land.

An immediate neighbour to that land was one Thomas Hobson.[2]

It is difficult to imagine that Chevin and Hobson did not, well, hobnob — Chevin a well-to-do burgess and baker, Hobson, a few years younger, a successful carrier and entrepreneur, prominent men of Cambridge with neighbouring holdings in Chesterton.

Hobson, however is the better known: the originator of Hobson’s Choice, and the Hobson of Hobson’s Conduit (more on that in a moment). Hobson’s portrait hangs in the Guilidhall, and he is buried here in chancel of St Bene’t’s, where he served for many years as a churchwarden. [3]

Hobson moved to this parish when his mother had purchased an inn from Corpus Christi, then known as Benet’s College.

The only college founded by Cambridge townsfolk,  they were selling properties to raise money for building their own chapel instead of using St Bene’t’s.

Years later, Hobson was churchwarden here under an interesting set of clergy, including Richard Sterne, then a fellow at Corpus Christi later a rather infamous and avaricious archbishop of  York, stern royalist, and sometime chaplain to Archbishop Laud.

It was in Sterne’s time, 400 years ago exactly, that Hobson gifted the church a first edition of the King James Bible, now kept for the parish by the Parker Library at Corpus Christi. (Perhaps a quatercentenary is called for this year?)

Locally, Hobson is best known as the eponymn for his Conduit, flowing from Vicar’s Brook at Nine Wells to the city centre. Now merely the bane of cyclists and unwary tourists, for two centuries Hobson’s Conduit provided clean, fresh, and free water to the residents of Cambridge, alleviating suffering and disease.

In my first Chevin sermon, in September,  I preached about the Draining of the Fens but also on the miracle of bread and roses;[4] Hobson’s Conduit was generous bread indeed, a generous work of Justice flowing from Hobson’s Christian faith:

            I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink

But here is something you might not have known about Hobson: Hobson didn’t build the conduit.

Authorities of Town and University collaborated with the Lord of the Manor in Trumpington to cause the conduit to be built. Hobson was merely a keen supporter and donor of this public, collective enterprise, built with no possibility of profit or shareholder value.

Hobson, however, did bequeath land  — indeed, perhaps the land adjacent to Chevin’s gift to Cambridge 25 years earlier — to fund a trust for the maintenance and upkeep of the conduit.[5] This Conduit Trust was, and still is, known as Hobson’s Conduit Trust, with rights over the stream to maintain it in good order for the town and the University.

Of course in time Hobson’s Conduit Trust became Hobson’s Conduit Trust and so the stream became Hobson’s Conduit. [6]

There’s a moral to this story that is salutary for our elected officials here today — whether members of the Corporation of the City of Cambridge, or the Parochial Church Council of the Parish of St Benedict (myself included, though I had fewer electors):

It’s all very good to have a clever idea. But it’s better to plan for maintenance and upkeep.

Which brings us back to poor Anette, cast into the sea. Or rather, to Simon Peter and Andrew, James and John: these fisherfolk called by Jesus to be fishers of people.

My father was a fisherman; he put himself through University by working commercial salmon boats in Alaska, big purse seiners with nets measured in kilometres. I can tell you from my father’s stories that while the Sunday School illustration of fishermen is all about the romance of hauling in the big catch, most of the work of commercial fishery is the careful stewarding, maintenance and repair of nets and boats.

It’s the work of James and John, the sons of Zebedee:  hours upon blistering hours of mending nets, scraping holds, plotting, scrubbing, tending, and above all, the waiting.

Discipleship isn’t just about bringing people to Christ. I rather think that’s ultimately the work of Grace and the Holy Spirit.

Discipleship is also about washing the coffee cups after worship, and setting out the chairs before.

It’s about walking with people — men and women, straight and gay, rich and poor — not just today, but through all the trials of life. It’s about waiting quietly in prayer, sitting with a dying friend, rejoicing in a stranger’s (or even an enemy’s) good news, listening to the story told by a homeless neighbour, and being comfortable in silence with Christ.

It’s all well and good to dig a ditch into town, but who will care for it for the generations to come?

It’s all well and good to throw your net into the sea, but only if you’ve ensured it won’t fall apart in the water.

It’s all very good to preach the Gospel, but only if you keep your eyes on the prize.

No good winning converts if you can’t work together to build community. No good building community, if you don’t know why.

Unless the Lord build the house, they labour in vain that build it. (Ps 127.1)

Which brings us from Hobson, to the fishermen, to the beginning of our Gospel:

Now when Jesus heard that John had been arrested, he withdrew to Galilee. (Mt 14.12)

Herod, keen on making Judea Great Again, had no time for troublemakers like John the Baptist who preached unpatriotic things such as repentance. Herod, who divorced his wife to marry his sister-in-law, who betrayed friends and family, and went to territorial war over petty personal grievances, who would, in time, meet Jesus’ gospel of peace with violence and execution…

The arrest and later execution of John the Baptist was the inevitable response of the violence of Herod’s state;

It’s hard not to see echos  in the the arrest of over one hundred clergy this Friday in Minnesota,  and the ICE extra-judicial executions of Alex Pretti and Renne Good.

In the words of the American prayer book: Save us from violence, discord, and confusion; from pride and arrogance, and from every evil way.

When John was arrested, Jesus withdrew to Galilee. Not outside of Herod’s tetrarchy, but away from the capital: up in the rural north, full of foreigners and gentiles — the Minnesota of Herod’s lands, if you will.

And it is here that Jesus calls his fishers, his disciples who will seek out the lost, the exiled, and the refugees.[7]

Jesus chooses men and women who are in it for the long-haul, who felt the call not to power and glamour, but to the careful labour of weaving nets and reading the wine-dark seas, reaching into the darkness below the waves because they are confident in their knots, and in God.

Disciples who know that the work of leadership is the work of service. Who know that the labour of fishing is the labour of long-term planning, care, and tending to the net.

Who know that to follow Christ is to walk through the valley of the shadow of death,  fearing no evil because we walk alongside the God of Love.

The 24/7 news cycle, the doom scrolling, the violence of wars and rumours of wars, partisan rhetoric, race-baiting and sabre-rattling….it is designed to wear you down, to undermine your resilience against the challenges to come.

So plan, and pray, like a fisherman. Like Chevin and Hobson,  like Simon Peter and Andrew, James and John, Martha and Mary:

 Look to the long term.   Get the dishes done, mend the nets, care for the conduit, sit patiently in prayer with your Lord.

Trust that Hope is a posture of Prayer, and and that prayer is a labour of love founded on the inalienable endowment of God’s future.

He comes to break oppression, to set the captive free;

To take away transgression, and rule in equity.….

The tide of time shall never his covenant remove;

His name shall stand for ever; that name to us is Love.[8]

[1] Richard Chevin ‘s will of 1589 bequeathed a house to the city on condition that £6 of the income be given to the poor and that two sermons should be preached in his memory before ‘the Mayor and Corporation’ at Candlemas and Michaelmas. Latterly, the sermon has been given by the Mayor’s Chaplain (currently the Vicar of St Bene’t’s). The first Chevin Sermon of this year’s series was given by the Rev’d Devin on 5/10/25 at Great St Mary’s, Cambridge: https://9fc91ba2-1728-4e4d-ae52-08ff18e08c64.filesusr.com/ugd/d47106_3c16f91fd51d49fb98da53ce1698dd05.pdf

[2] https://calm.cambridgeshire.gov.uk/Record.aspx?src=CalmView.Catalog&id=KCB%2f2%2fCL%2f17%2f3%2fPage+358   

[3] A brief biography of Hobson, and his connection to St Bene’t’s, can be found at https://www.stbenetschurch.org/st-benets-a-history/thomas-hobson

[4] https://9fc91ba2-1728-4e4d-ae52-08ff18e08c64.filesusr.com/ugd/d47106_3c16f91fd51d49fb98da53ce1698dd05.pdf           

[5] This is speculation on my part; please be in touch if you know more!

[6] The Trust still exists; you can learn more at https://hobsonsconduittrust.org/history/

[7] See Jeremiah 16:16. And also,  https://abmcg.substack.com/p/galilee-of-the-gentiles-jesus-in

[8] ‘Hail to the Lord’s Anointed’, James Montgomery, v1,4 (New English Hymnal)

St Bene’t’s Church

18 January, 2026

2nd Sunday of Epiphany

This Sunday’s sermon was given by two members of the multi-church group who travelled to Kenya with the Kyangala Trust.

Geoff:
May the words of our mouths and the meditations of all our hearts be acceptable in your sight, O Lord, our strength and our Redeemer. Amen.

This morning’s sermon, and the Sunday Supplement following the service, are devoted to giving you some insights from the visit last October to the village of Kyangala in central Kenya, made by group of eight of us representing the Kyangala Trust charity.  John Harrison started the Trust over 15 years ago, inspired by a young man (significantly for us called Benedict!) whose mother Josephine Msola had returned on retirement to live in her home village, as many Kenyans do. Since then the funds raised by the UK part of the Trust, including from St Bene’t’s, have gone straight to the projects and people nominated by the local trustees in Kenya.  

In the Sunday Supplement we will hear more about some of the specific projects the Trust is carrying out where further support from us would help.  In this sermon, building on the theme of gifts that we have been exploring during this Epiphany season – with the gifts of the Magi and, last Sunday, of the Holy Spirit in Baptism - Peter and I want to focus not on what the charity brings to the people of Kyangala, but on the gifts of insights into the love of Jesus Christ that this materially poor, but spiritually rich, community gave to us during our visit and which we can in turn pass on to you.

In our OT reading, we heard Isaiah explaining that he (like us all) was given by God ‘as a light to the nations, that his salvation may reach to the end of the earth’ – God’s love and redemption is for everyone, wherever they are in the world, both to receive and to pass on to others. Well, God’s light certainly shone bright in Kyangala as all the village, from young children to aged elders, turned out in force to surround our minibus to welcome us and to celebrate the commissioning of the sixth drinking-water borehole built by the Kyangala Trust.

Psalm 40 that we have just sung rejoices that ‘He put a new song in my mouth, a song of praise to our God; many shall see and stand in awe and put their trust in the Lord.  Happy are they who trust in the Lord.’  Never have I seen this so graphically demonstrated than by the children and adult groups who sang and danced at a welcome ceremony that lasted several hours to give thanks for the new borehole and the other practical and financial help they have received, facilitated by the Trust but truly seen as gifts from God.  They take none of the improvements the Trust has brought to their lifestyle, education and health for granted.  Everywhere we were surrounded by thankfulness.

Today’s Gospel reading describes the commissioning of the first disciples, and for me experiencing the centrality of Jesus Christ to the lives of these people, whose material wealth is a fraction of my own, and even of all but the most poor in the UK, brought a new insight into the meaning of discipleship, living out the Christian life as a way of making Christ’s love known to others.

I have already said how struck I was by how central God is to life in Kyangala; this is a community whose deep faith in God as Lord and provider of all, underpins how they think and all they do.  There is a thankfulness for all God provides in terms of food, resources, love, people with different talents, which comes over in small ways in conversations and in the way people are treated, in the classrooms of the Primary, Middle and High Schools, in the inspirational leadership of Headteacher Florence, in the way Mary and her team of cooks in their tall chef’s hats treasured the food they served to us.

Rather than focusing on what they don’t have, there is a gratitude, thankfulness and joyousness for what they do have in how they approach life.  They live life to the full and make the most of everything they have – the children have ambition for the future but also an underlying contentedness with the present. 

All this set into context my own problems and troubles, and the state of Britain I tend to moan about every day.  If they can be joyful and thankful, in often dire circumstances, trusting in the Lord and repeatedly thankful to him, why can’t I?  For me, and I think all of us new to life in rural Kenya, this visit was an eye-opening and life-changing experience which I hope I can continue to take to heart and live out – to take nothing for granted or as an assumed right, to treasure the preciousness of all God’s resources and to see – and give true thanks for - the impact of God’s love on my life more often than I do.

One thing I shall treasure forever is the time I spent with 80 of the senior girls and boys, talking to them about climate change and careers in engineering. The girls took notes diligently and the boys leant back, occasionally exchanging bored looks – but when it came to Q&A, they bombarded me for 45 minutes with some of the most insightful and challenging questions I have ever been asked by students anywhere!  With their help I even invented the ‘carbon dioxide’ dance to explain global warming, which I am happy to share with you afterwards.  I was infected by their enthusiasm and hope for the future and their gift to me was to cause me to think about my own specialism in ways I had never done before.

It was not all joy – we saw much suffering in visits to the homes of people receiving help from the Trust Hardship Fund.  Life here is hard and access to good medical treatment is difficult, especially as people age or have mobility difficulties.  So there is so much more for the Trust to do to help improve the quality of life in Kyangala, as we will hear later.

As well as a time of gifts, Epiphany is a time of revelation of God’s love and redemption for all peoples.  For me, the privilege of spending time with the people of Kyangala brought all these things – revelation, gifts and love - and my hope is that we can build on this close interaction with them so that some of you can encounter at first-hand what we were fortunate to experience. But of course we do not need to go to Kyangala to see Christ revealed in others. Who revealed Christ’s love to you this last week?  In which unexpected encounter will you come face to face with Christ in the week ahead?

So, over to you Peter to share your reflections about the visit.

Peter:

Now I don’t know about you, but I tend not to reflect too much on the formal greetings at the beginning of Paul’s letters. I’d rather get to the substance of what Paul wants to talk about. However, the beginning of today’s Epistle, “Paul, called to be an apostle of the Lord Jesus Christ….to the Church of God at Corinth”, reminds us that the early Church evolved while working to discern the work of the Spirit in communities that sometimes differed wildly in outlook and context, much like the Church of today.

So my modern equivalent of Paul’s salutation would go something like: “Peter, Geoff, John and Rosie, congregants of St Bene’t’s Cambridge, to the Church in Kyangala, and the Anglican Church in Kenya, led by the Most Revd Jackson Ole Sapit. We keep you in our prayers and would like to say Thank You.”

Thank you… for the learning that we received through experience in your community. Learning from which we can gain as individuals and as a congregation here in Cambridge.

During the week, I work as a therapist for the NHS, treating people for depression, anxiety and phobias. Common to all the conditions I treat is the problem of not living in the present. In depression, people often ruminate on the past and find the present too overwhelming to engage with. In anxiety, including phobias, it’s the future that is dwelt on - often a hypothetical future of “what if this or that happens?”

When I went to do a workshop in the Kyangala Girls’ High School, using a story about a red blood cell and its Swahili translation, I walked into a room with a blackboard simply painted on the wall, a long table in the centre, and the pupils working, sat on metal chairs, holding their books. I showed illustrations on my laptop…no projector. Yet they were some of the most engaged pupils I’ve ever worked with. Materially disadvantaged at school, and generally at home, it would seem reasonable for them to begrudge the past, including the wages paid and living conditions during British colonialism, or to be anxious about the future. But there, as in every part of life we encountered, they engaged healthily and fully in the present moment, actually producing delightful dramatisations of their own red blood cell narratives.

Jesus’ ministry, recorded in John’s Gospel from the point of our reading this morning, focused a lot on present actions – it is not usually the case of “it’s fine if you do it next week”. Jesus also didn’t choose to work through those with the most apparent power - governmental or religious leaders - or indeed spend time tracking down any supportive magi from the East. Instead he chose fishermen and a tax collector, certainly not esteemed in society.

I think it’s important to remember this at a time when we ourselves can feel very powerless, faced with an increasingly divided world with increasingly evident hostility. Our now-friends in Kyangala are no strangers to feeling powerless. Feeling powerless and being powerless are very different things, however. I think we all felt that a powerful grace was shown in the small, everyday interactions and actions of our hosts.

I don’t need to look any further afield than myself to find someone who can be guilty of thinking about God more on a Sunday. While I’ll say grace for certain meals, I don’t generally thank God for my morning porridge, eaten in the kitchen as I’m tidying away last night’s washing up. Why not? I don’t believe God is less present. Before every meal in Kyangala, boiled by Mary and her team in pots over the fire, we prayed, reminding me of God’s presence in the everyday ritual of sharing a simple meal – the root of our communion liturgy.

Geoff has already said how everyone’s contribution was valued. I’m not sure I’ve experienced many more joyful moments in a service than watching the children delight in the dancing… or even the effort of one very young child who took about a verse to figure out what his mother and older siblings were doing beside him - and then surprised everyone with a rather sudden attempt at the splits. Sadly I can’t demonstrate this.

On our last evening, I attended Evensong at the Anglican Cathedral in Nairobi. I asked for a harmony book so I could sing the hymns…and was swept up into the choir. As a total stranger, I was welcomed with open arms by Ben, the Director of Music, with the same high level of hospitality we’d experienced during our time in Kyangala. Janet sorted out my music. Susan annotated the Order of Service so that I could navigate the various books. Edward sorted out my robes. Tom, the fellow bass on my side, helped me through the service. The anthem was “I waited for the Lord”, by Mendelssohn. It’s the first and fourth verse of Psalm 40 – we’ve already sung that this morning and you have it in this week’s Tidings. Tom’s wife was one of the two soloists - he’s been married to her for 50 years. I’ll never forget how special it was to sing next to him while the 24-person-strong choir backed the soloists in Mendelssohn’s beautiful duet. On a personal level, all this was a wonderful gift to me, that probably none of them really noticed.

I don’t think any of us thinks that one day we’ll be at the pearly gates and be judged on just the momentous moments of our lives - that great lecture on Carbon Capture and Storage, that victory in the May bumps, that PhD thesis. So we do know that it’s the small things that matter, and where we can make a difference. How will you choose to wait on the Lord? How will you notice the Lord incline to you?

And what small things can we do as individuals and as a congregation to engage further with the people of Kyangala?  At the end of the service, while those serving the tea and coffee are making a very important difference, John, with fellow Trustees Paul and Katharine from Holy Trinity Leamington Spa, will be talking a little about the specific work and projects of the Kyangala Trust. Please stay behind for however long you would like to listen and ask questions - and let’s all be inspired by the small acts of grace which can come together to make a big difference.

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

Isaiah 42:1-9

Acts 10:34-43

Matthew 3:13-17

‘Let it be so now, for it is proper for us in this way to fulfil all righteousness.’

‘There was a man sent from God, whose name was John. He came as a witness to testify to the Light, so that all might believe through him. He himself was not the Light, but he came to testify to the Light.’

At Christmas, we began telling a story: the story of Jesus Christ, God incarnate. We began with his birth in a stable in Bethlehem; we continued through the visit of the Wise Men and the flight into Egypt; and today we encounter a change, as we begin the part of the story that deals with Jesus’ adult life.

John the Baptist has a purpose. He is there to testify to the Light; to act as a herald, announcing the coming of the Messiah according to Isaiah’s prophecy. And John is also there to make sure things happen properly, in the way that they should. It is John who sets up Jesus’ disciples: Andrew, Peter’s brother, was first a disciple of John. It is John who begins baptising in Jesus’ name, before Jesus’ ministry even begins, and it is John who baptises Jesus, just as Neo will be baptised today.

As we heard in our gospel reading, John is at first a bit wobbly about baptising Jesus (and Matthew’s gospel is the only one in which this question appears.) Now why should that be? He is John the Baptist, after all. Baptising people is what he does. There is of course the issue of Jesus being the Son of God, the One in Whose name John is baptising. It may just be that he doesn’t feel worthy, righteous enough; he doesn’t think this is how things should be done. After all, John seems to understand who Jesus is and what a momentous thing is taking place here.

But I wonder also whether part of John’s reluctance to baptise his cousin is to do with how he perceives the change in their relationship. Baptism is a time of change. And despite the difference in their adult lives – a prophet in the wilderness and a carpenter – we know that Jesus’ and John’s mothers were cousins, and were close. We know too that the two men were not six months apart in age. It’s not a stretch to imagine that, as young boys and teenagers, Jesus and John had spent a lot of time together: playing, working, perhaps even the first-century equivalent of going out on the town. They were likely close themselves. But the baptism changes everything. It signals the start of Jesus’ ministry, and the end of what John has been preparing for all his adult life. Their relationship is changing.

It's understandable that John should feel nervous at this point. With the benefit of hindsight, we know that this change in relationship is a good thing, something to rejoice in; and that it will bring John, and all of us, closer to God than he could ever have imagined possible. And Jesus knows this too: his response to John is reassuring. ‘Let it be so now, for it is proper for us in this way to fulfil all righteousness.’

It is proper. God, who has become incarnate in the person of Jesus Christ, now walks through everything we do, as a human being, and this must include baptism. Jesus may be without sin, but he is fully human even as he is fully God. He identifies fully with us by experiencing everything we do, including this first sacrament of baptism by water and the Spirit. When we are baptised into the Body of Christ, it means Christ is right here with us, as one with us, now and forever, whether we can see Him or not. It is not just a ritual, a sign of a new way of life. It is a sacrament: an outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace. It is a promise made by a person, or on their behalf if they are very young, to walk in the light of God all the days of their life, and to enter into all the joys and responsibilities that that brings. By water and the Spirit, all sin is washed away, and the fullness of God’s grace is received.

And what about ‘to fulfil all righteousness’? For this we might turn back to our Old Testament reading from Isaiah. ‘I have put my spirit upon him’, says the Lord of his servant; ‘he will bring forth justice to the nations.’ John baptised with water, but Jesus is baptised and will baptise with water and the Spirit. Our passage from Isaiah goes on to say that ‘he will not faint or be crushed until he has established justice in the earth and the coastlands wait for his teaching.’ We might hear echoes here of Jesus’ earthly ministry, teaching around the Sea of Galilee, and as the bringer of justice: ‘he went about doing good and healing all who were oppressed.’ The Son of God comes not to judge and condemn, but to heal and forgive, and show the way to a renewed and joyful way of life. This is what He offers us in baptism.

And the descent of the Holy Spirit but also opens the way for a new kind of baptism, as heralded by John: with water and the Spirit. As each of us receives the same baptism as Jesus did, as we enter into the Body of Christ, the whole people of the Church, our relationship with Him is changed, just as John’s was. We accept his offer of unconditional forgiveness and grace. We know ourselves to be beloved children of God, with whom He is well pleased. We are set on the path of righteousness: one-ness with God. We may rejoice in that, and wherever we are on our Christian journey, baptised or not, we may rejoice as well that that offer of forgiveness and grace is ever-present. Part of the promise of baptism is that we walk in the light ‘all the days of our life.’ It’s not a one-time-only deal, but a sacrament, and a promise, that endures forever.

The introduction to the baptismal service asks: ‘As you pray for the candidates, picture them with yourself and the whole Church throughout the ages, journeying into the fullness of God’s love.’ As we pray for Neo and his family and friends today, as he takes his first step on that journey, let’s remember also to pray for ourselves and for one another, as we continue to journey together.

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

Epiphany Sunday 2026

St Bene’t’s, Cambridge

One of the essential texts when I was reading for my degree in Folklore was Bronislaw Malinowski’s Argonauts of the Western Pacific. (1) With groundbreaking, if imperfect, field-work, Malinowski opened up to his early 20 th century readers the cultures and traditions of the Trobriand people in Papua.

He focused on the Kula exchange — a complex system of gift-giving, red shell necklaces being given in a sunwise circuit around the archipelago, white shell armbands given in a widdershins circuit.

Attached to this gift-giving were complex rules of kinship and authority, as well as long, dangerous journeys by sea.

For Malinowski, the moral was clear: Gift giving is never simple.

(1) As an aside: Malinowski’s personal journals are full of self-flagellation over his obsessive novel reading when he should have been doing field work – Dostoyevski, the Brontë sisters, Conrad, but, Malinowski wrote, “my narcotic is a trashy novel.” See Sams, Henry W. ‘Malinowski and the Novel’ The Journal of General Education Vol. 26, No. 2 (SUMMER 1974), pp. 125-138 (14 pages) https://www.jstor.org/stable/27796420

The kula exchange had very little to do with the red and white shell ornaments. Kula tied distant islands together, made possible other types of trade and barter, reinforced aristocratic lineages and tied gift-bearing men into matrilineal systems of ownership.

On its own, gift giving is remarkably inefficient. Christmas presents drive economists up the wall.

They note that the expensive cashmere pullover you gave a loved one is, being in a colour they wouldn’t have chosen for themselves, valued by your recipient about 20% less than what you paid.

Economists call this “the deadweight loss of Christmas,” which tells you all you need to know about the dismal science (2) .

Herod knew all about the power and danger of gift-giving. When wise men from the East came bearing gifts to pay homage to this unknown child born King of the Jews, like tyrants before and after him, Herod was frightened.

And like tyrants before and after him, the violence of the state offered easy solutions. Go and search diligently for the child; and when you have found him, bring me word so that I may also go and pay him homage… Homage indeed.

We heard about Herod’s homage, his deeds of fear and violence, last week in Ed’s sermon on The Festival of The Holy Innocents.

I feel like Herod has been in the news a lot of late. Herod’s violent grasp on power. Herod’s jealousy and paranoia. Herod’s fear. Herod’s murders. Herod’s … inability to receive and rejoice?

I bet Herod was impossible to shop for. What do you get the tyrant who has everything, including his brother’s ex-wife?

Choosing gifts isn’t too bad, most of the time. Perhaps its a little intimidating, but it can be a blessing to think about what the people you love might like to be given.

For many of us, receiving presents is the most difficult part. Even the risk of asymmetry aside, receiving a gift is a vulnerable thing.

(2) A less than flattering name for Economics, coined by Scottish essayist Thomas Carlyle in 1849

A gift is an expression of affection, of intimacy and self-revelation — receiving a gift lets us see how others see us; it creates a debt which cannot ever be perfectly repaid.

Receiving gifts is difficult. We resist. We resist especially when we know we cannot repay in kind.

Which makes God so … annoying! Receiving God’s gifts is deeply bruising to our pride. (I suspect God knows that.) And yet I am certain that the gifts we receive from God are exactly the gifts we need.

We live in an age of broken relationships and broken understanding, of wars and kidnappings of heads of state, tyrant preying upon tyrant, and woe to those caught between.

And still we gather here every day, when so much else feels lost and broken, to celebrate the good news, that God has given us an amazing gift.

A child to teach us love; a brother to teach us to be one family; a friend, to teach us compassion; a leader, to teach us to serve; a teacher, to show us the way; a saviour, to bring us to the salvation which God has always dreamed for us.

God has given us this gift, that we might share God’s love with one another. God has given us this gift, that we might learn to receive God’s love.

The wise ones came from the east bearing gold for a king, frankincense for God incarnate, the bitter perfume of myrrh for the one who would give, to all of us, his life.

Christmas Day 2025

St Bene’t’s, Cambridge

Luke 2.1-14

On 8 June, 1647, the English Parliament passed “An Ordinance for Abolishing of Festivals”

Re-iterating legislation passed during the Civil War, the act stated  “That the said Feast of the Nativity of Christ, Easter and Whitsuntide and all other Festival days, commonly called Holy-dayes, be no longer observed … within this Kingdom of England …”

That winter in London the military patrolled the streets, presumably seizing figgy puddings and sprigs of holly.

 Town criers walked the streets calling: “No Christmas, No Christmas”.

The Puritan ban remained in place for 13 years. It was a crackdown on revelry and boozy festivities, and a call to fasting and solemn prayer, but it was also a theological statement: Holy Scripture records no Christmas carols,

And indeed Jews of 1st Century Palestine did not celebrate birthdays, although Roman pagans did.

(By which we should not then conclude that therefore Jesus didn’t exist. The particular, often British atheist, argument of the non-existence of Jesus carries a deeply classist assumption — erasing from history the millions of peasants and other poor people whose names were not recorded by the Roman state.)

Equally concerning to Biblical literalists — of the 17th century and today — is that Holy Writ does not say on which day Jesus was born.

It’s not simply that this would have made it hard for Jesus to get a Drivers License.

[Jesus drove a Honda but didn't talk about it: John 12:49 “For I did not speak of my own Accord.” ]

In fact, if Luke’s Gospel is anything to go by, shepherds did not livi in the fields keeping watch over their flocks at night in midwinter.

In December, sheep were kept well away from tender rain-soaked fields. Sheep in the winter were either grazed in the wilderness, or kept in sheltered places. Midsummer was the more likely time to find shepherds living the fields.

 Which is why Happy Birthday is not a Christmas Carol. Today we celebrate far more than a birthday.

Today is the Feast of the Nativity — the Christ Mass: the great Christian festival of the mystery of Christ’s Birth, the Word become flesh to dwell among us.

Today is the day we remember God from God, Light from Light, Very God from Very God, whom heaven could not hold but a stable place sufficed:

Born in poverty, a manger for his bed, worshiped by poor shepherds.

Born as one of us, he and his family soon to be driven from their home by the powers and principalities of their land, to live for years as refugees.

Today is the day we rejoice in The Word made flesh who showed us God’s Kingdom, who came to live as one of us, to teach and to heal and break bread, to suffer death upon the cross, and to rise in glory.

Today is the day we hear the angels in bright brass voices, singing good news of great joy for all people. All people.

Neither Jew nor Greek, Slave nor Free, Male nor Female – neither wealth, nor citizenship,  nor physical ability, no one race, sexuality, nor denomination, – can lay exclusive claim to this good news of great joy.

Today is the day we remember that Christ came for all of us, to bring us all Good News.

 Which means, incredibly, this Feast of the Nativity means today is not only about Jesus. Today is your Festival. For to you is born this day in the city of David a Saviour, who is the Messiah, the Lord.

To you is born this happy morning, God of God and Light of Light.

You do not need to earn this gift, this present Present of Christ’s nativity. You can be as wise as the magi, you can be poor as the shepherds, as dour as the Puritans or as merry as can be.

All you need bring is your Heart. All you need do is to come to Bethlehem this day, faithful, joyful, triumphant; wondering, grieving, broken.

For this day is your joyful Christmas, the Word of God born in your heart, where it shines as a bright star in the darkness.

 Let no one cry again “No Christmas”, for this is your Feast of the Nativity: so come and behold him  born the King of angels.

O come let us adore Him, Christ the Lord!

John 1.1–14

‘Midnight Mass’ (The First Eucharist of the Feast of the Nativity)

24/25 December 2025

St Bene’t’s, Cambridge

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. 

Not words. Not, as Hamlet has it, words words words.

In the beginning was The Word. The divine Word, the logos, from which all words flow.

Semitic languages, of which Hebrew, the language of Jesus, the language of most of the Bible, is one —

Semitic languages were the first to discover how to write all words not with hundreds of pictograms, but with a simple pocketful of 22 letters.

And the first letter of Hebrew is alef

Alef, the Rabbis tell us, was so humble that it let bet — the second letter of the alpha-bet — be the first letter of the Bible.[1]

And as a reward for its humility, Alef was honoured as the first letter of the ten commandments.

Alef is also the first letter of the Divine name which God gives to Moses:

I Am What I Am[2]

Alef it is the first letter of the word for Truth, emet[3].

Alef represents the number one, and so for the Rabbis represents the One-ness of God.

In the Beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God.

Here’s how you write Alef:

It’s a dot, serifed or not, — in Hebrew, called a yud —  up here.

And it’s a dot, serifed or not, — in Hebrew, called a yud — down here.

            (Yud up here and Yud down here)

And between them, a diagonal Vav, a line, descending left down to right.

 The Yud above represents God, immortal, invisible, maker of heaven and earth, of all that is, seen and unseen.

 The Yud below is us, God’s people, Creation, all the things that have come into being through God’s Word.

And descending to us, from God above to us below, the Vav — in Judaism, representing Torah.

Tonight, for us as Christians, I’d like to think of the Vav as this miracle of this Holy Night, when the Word became flesh and lived among us.

We have seen his glory, the glory as of a father’s only son, full of grace and truth — truth, emet, which begins with alef.

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. 

But there is something wonderfully miraculous about Alef, this first letter of the alef-bet, this first letter of Truth, this first letter of Commandment and the Name God told to Moses:

 Alef is Silent.

 Alef has no sound of its own. At the most in some dialects it is a glottal stop.

 The oneness of God. The holiness of Truth. The clarity of the Commandments.

The eternal Being of the Divine, and the mystery of the Incarnation begins with Silence.

As it did two thousand and twenty five years ago, on that Silent, Holy Night, shining in the darkness.

In a busy, noisy, words-filled world, St Bene’t’s has always treasured the holiness of Silence.

St Benedict dedicated an entire chapter of his Rule to the Spirit of Silence, and Silence is one of the spiritual gifts of this community which I treasure the most, though I suspect I am the very least gifted in its practice.

When Herod was shouting from his palace, and Roman and royal officialdom taking names for the census, neighbours gossiping, zealots haranguing, in came the Word of God with the silence of Alef, Silent as Light, to dwell among us, fully human, fully divine, the light that was the life of all people, the life that was the light of all people.

 How silently, how silently, the wondrous gift is given!

So God imparts to human hearts the blessings of His heaven.

No ear may hear His coming, but in this world of sin,

where meek souls will receive Him still, the dear Christ enters in.[4]

[1] A Chabbad simple commentary on Alef can be found at https://www.chabad.org/library/article_cdo/aid/137073/jewish/Aleph.htm

Another online source is https://hebrewtoday.com/alphabet/the-letter-alef-%d7%90/

[2] Exodus 3.14,  אֶהְיֶה אֲשֶׁר אֶהְיֶה

[3] אֱמֶת

[4] ‘O Little Town of Bethlehem’, The Rt Revd Phillips Brooks, Bishop of Massachusetts

The 4th Sunday of Advent

21 December 2025

St Bene’t’s, Cambridge

Matthew 1.18-end

Rejoice, rejoice, Emmanuel shall come to thee, O Israel.

We’ve sung these words throughout Advent, a weekly reminder that underneath all the busyness and pressures and expectations of this time of year we are waiting for something deeper, more solid, more lasting and more wonderful than we can imagine.

And now the waiting of Advent is almost over.

Of all the gospel writers, Matthew is the most set on linking Jesus to his Jewish roots and his place in the story of God and Israel, in what’s perhaps a timely message now, given recent anti-Semitic events.

The lectionary has spared us the list of names that comes at the start of Matthew’s Gospel, but they are there for a reason.

The names are a reminder that, through his adoptive father, Joseph, Jesus stands in the line of Abraham and David. He stands with all those generations of faithful people trying and failing, hoping and despairing, working and playing, loving and being loved by God.

God has been with Israel through slavery, exile and war, triumphs and disasters, and everything in between. He has laughed and cried over his people, rebuked and encouraged them, and never given up on them. And woven throughout the story of Israel is the hope for a Messiah, someone to save the people and establish God’s reign over all the earth. The People of Israel have waited for a long time.

And now, says Matthew, the time has come! Rejoice! Here he is, as foretold by the prophets! So, to further establish Jesus’s place in the history of God’s dealings with his people, he quotes Isaiah 7.14, rendered in our translation,

Look, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and they shall name him Emmanuel”, which means, “God is with us.

We have many titles for Jesus, and a lot of them appear in the hymn O Come Emmanuel: Wisdom, Lord, Branch of Jesse’s stem, Key of David, Bright Morning Star, King of Nations and King of Peace.

Yet it’s Emmanuel, God with us, that keeps appearing, because the Advent message that God is coming to be with us is the one that transcends all the others.

The message that God is with us runs the danger of appearing sentimental, something to make us feel cosy and warm like a mug of hot chocolate, protecting us from the cold outside.

But it’s not such a simple or easy thing as all that.

There was danger in God appearing on earth, for both Jesus and his earthly family.

The Messiah came to an occupied country, to a scandalous family situation, to danger of death at the hands of a tyrant, to all the problems and dangers that human beings face, and to the possibility of rejection even by his earthly father, Joseph.

We hear about Joseph’s doubts, and about an angel appearing and reassuring him, and it sounds quite straightforward.

But imagine for a moment the turmoil Joseph faced. His fiancée was pregnant, and not by him. As far as he knew he’d been betrayed and taken for a fool. He faced social and religious disapproval as well. People whispering about him, giving him funny looks at the Temple, pitying him or laughing at him.

What was he to do? The Law was clear: Mary should be sent away, even stoned for adultery. But he was a good man who understood that justice should be tempered with mercy, so he made up his mind to end things quietly, for her sake.

This was a dangerous moment. Alone and unmarried, Mary would be considered a fallen woman and subjected to moral condemnation no matter how kindly Joseph sent her away. She and her baby would lose Joseph’s strength, kindness, financial provision, and protection. And Joseph would miss out on his chance to be directly a part of God’s new work. So strong measures were needed in the form of angelic intervention.

Even before Jesus’s birth, then, being God with us in this new way, of taking flesh and living among us, was risky and uncomfortable. For Mary and Joseph, also, it took faith and determination in the face of social, religious, political and personal obstacles.

God with us doesn’t necessarily mean life is cosy. God being with us can be challenging. It can shake our assumptions about how things should work, as it did for Joseph in his relationship with Mary. It can mean our lives being upended, as it did for Joseph when he and his small family fled for their lives to another country. It can sometimes be unsettling when God comes alongside us and says,

I am about to do a new thing; now it springs forth, do you not perceive it?

Yet, God with us is also the source of our greatest hope just because it changes everything.

In loneliness and rejection. In tiredness and sadness. In sickness and pain. In fear and frustration.

When the world is in turmoil and we worry about what’s coming next.

In life and in death. In all these things, God is with us.

We know all too well what the problems of the world are, and the difficulties we face in our own lives.

But we also know that hope isn’t the absence of struggle but the presence of Christ within it.

And we know that even as we prepare to celebrate the first coming of Our Lord we are still waiting for his second coming.

We are still in a time of waiting, a time when we walk and love and work with God as we await his coming to put all things right.

Yet, in this in-between place, we have this to hold on to: whatever happens, either around us or to us, we don’t go through it alone because God has come to us in a new way and will never leave us comfortless.

We go through everything with Emmanuel, God with us, who has been there ahead of us and has promised never to leave us.

So, as we turn towards Christmas, may we have the strength and willingness to listen of Joseph, the faithful obedience of Mary, and the joy of the angels in heaven – for Emmanuel will come to us.

Third Sunday of Advent (Gaudate Sunday)

14 December 2025, St Bene’t’s Cambridge

Matthew 11.2–11

The first confession I ever took as a priest was at a women’s prison in Oaxaca, Mexico.

It was a very  different sort of prison from the ones of my American imagination ; in Oaxaca, the women’s prison built around an extended, three-sided courtyard filled with tables and lean-to’s where prisoners made trinkets, mended clothes, or cooked food; enterprises to be sold to folks on the outside, in order to feed themselves and support their families.

Very young children ran about or napped in the shade, living with their mothers. Trade, music, and family meant that the prison extended beyond the chain link fence and barbed wire into the surrounding neighbourhood —  what in Brazil would be called a favela, but in Mexico is a colonia popular or even a ciudad perdida, a lost city.

It was not a romantic prison — hunger, desperate poverty, abuse, neglect, and exploitation were all rife. But it was, economically and socially, though of course not literally, a permeable prison.

 Perhaps the same was true in some ways for John the Baptist’s prison. John was imprisoned for criticising the marriage of Herod to Herodias, the ex-wife of his half-brother Herod II, her uncle.

(Evidently a royal family who saved their imagination for intrigue rather than spend it on original names)

I keep imagining John the Baptist as a lone prophet in a dungeon cell, like Elijah in his cave, cut off from the world. Yet the Gospels tell us he was able to communicate with his disciples.

 But he was no longer on the banks of the fast-flowing River Jordan, beneath the poplars and willows and tamarisk trees. Now John found himself languishing in Machaerus, Herod’s great fortress and prison, on a steep hilltop overlooking the eastern bank of the Dead Sea. The Sword, Machaerus means in Ancient Greek, and indeed the sword would be the death of John the Baptist.

 When John heard in prison what the Messiah was doing, he sent word by his disciples and said to Jesus,

          ‘Are you the one who is to come, or are we to wait for another?’ (Matt. 11.2-3)

It’s a heartbreaking moment in the Gospels. John of the wilderness, John of wild locusts and honey and the cool-flowing river, the noonday light through the willow leaves, and the ice-bright stars of cold desert nights…all but extinguished as he languished in prison for preaching truth to power.

And there in the darkness, awaiting the death he knows is to come sooner or later, he sends his disciples to find Jesus and ask: Are you the one who is to come, or are we to wait for another?

As the psalmist cries, How long, O Lord?        (Ps 13.1)

Our sermons this Advent are on Hope — and no, the vicar hasn’t forgotten that it is Gaudate Sunday, the Advent Sunday of Rejoicing. For one, the rose-coloured vestments are hard to miss!

But what is it to talk about Hope when we’re rejoicing, unless we first look to John struggling to hope from the depths of prison.

The first sermon I ever heard at St Bene’t’s was when Anna Matthews preached a characteristically brilliant sermon on John the Baptist.  It was John’s Nativity, 24 June — a date, as Anna pointed out to us, when the days begins to diminish, as on Christ’s Nativity falls in December when days begins to increase: “He must increase, but I must decrease.” (Jn 3.30)

Of course, in John’s Gospel at that point of that remark by John, the baptiser is at Aenon near Salim and not yet in prison.

Now, though, the darkness is clearly closing in and John’s exhaustion, worry, and darkness seem to weigh down his words: Are you the one who is to come, or are we to wait for another?

Have you ever waited beyond hoping? And I don’t mean for British Rail, but those dark times on a hospital ward, or staring at the phone willing it to ring, or praying that it won’t, or looking out from a shadowed valley of grief or a prison of addiction, or wrestling with God in prayer at two in the morning, wrestling with silence at three in the morning.

Are you the one who is to come, or are we to wait for another?

We live with our fragile bodies, our delicately-balanced minds, our deep-bruised hearts, and a world of flood, fire, and failures. We live with shadows and deep darkness and wounds we can hardly bear to look at.

But we know now the answer to John’s question: the Messiah had come, but as one who would be broken on the cross, and in dying would overcome even death itself, still bearing his wounds, God whose healing love was made manifest in his dis-abled pierced hands and feet:

Go and tell John what you hear and see

Tell him that lives are transformed, good news is brought, the dead raised to life! Tell him yes the blind given sight, and, as we would come know, saints like Margaret of Castello who remained blind and lame all her life, St Paul with his thorn in the flesh, Margery Kempe with her gift of tears, St Francis with his sigmata, unable to walk without agony, unable to bear the sun’s bright light even as he wrote his Canticle of the Sun, all of them calling out across the generations to sing:

Go and tell John what you hear and see.

And John heard, and he saw, there his prison cell and knew at the last the “the abyss of light”           — that wonderful phrase of St Francis’ biographer — that in the very hour of darkness, God draws us — neither down nor up nor any cardinal direction of this world — God draws us in (and up and down and out, all at once) to “the abyss of infinite divine goodness”

(the phrase is from Chapter 9,  The Little Flowers of St. Francis)

 We are not called to run away from pain — our own or that of others. We are not called to imagine that Christian holiness can only be seen in physical wholeness. We are not called to rejoice because we have wealth or power or privilege; but to rejoice because, like Mary, sorrows pierce our heart, to rejoice because, like John, we are imprisoned for the sake of the Gospel to rejoice in the abyss of light even when the darkness looms, that like the desert and dry land in Isaiah’s prophesy we might “rejoice with joy and singing.”  (Isa. 35.1-2)

In the words of the old hymn:

What tho' my joys and comforts die?    The Lord my Saviour liveth;

  What tho' the darkness gather round?    Songs in the night he giveth.

  No storm can shake my inmost calm   While to that refuge clinging;

  Since Christ is Lord of heaven and earth,   How can we keep from singing?

(‘How can I keep from singing?’, lyrics either anon or Anna Barlett Warner)

1st Sunday of Advent (30 November 2025)

St Bene’t’s, Cambridge

Isaiah 2:1–5; Romans 13:11-14; Matthew 24:36-44

Today is Advent Sunday: the first day of the Church Year and the first day of Advent. What do we do in Advent? In Advent, we wait. We wait for Christmas, and it is not Christmas yet.

But in the world outside of church, Christmas is already here! Sainsbury's on Sidney Street has had mince pies and plum pudding since September! The Christmas lights on Kings Parade were switched on two weeks ago!

We are like children…we are very bad at waiting.

Wait! You can’t open your presents, it’s not Christmas yet! Have you never sneaked a peek at a Christmas present？ Tried to pick the wrapping paper off the corner of the parcel or given the box a shake?

We are very bad at waiting.

Back here inside the church, Advent is meant to be a time of austerity;

Just like Lent: Advent is a time of penitence and reflection, we cover ourselves in purple and we prepare ourselves prayerfully for the coming of our Lord.

“Let us live honorably, as in the day, not in revelling and drunkenness” says St. Paul to the Romans.

We prepare for the coming of our Lord, not as a baby in a manger (because that has already happened); but for his second coming when the trumpets will sound and the heavens open in glory, and…

…the Son of Man [will come] at an unexpected hour.

And so, Christ’s church has been waiting for 2000 years for him to come; and in every generation There are Christians who want Christ to come in their lifetime.

Many men and women have claimed to be the Messiah, the Second Coming of Christ. Many cults have been set up over the centuries, proclaiming that the end is near. Many of these cults are small, with only a dozen or so followers; but some of the more charismatic leaders draw together hundreds or even thousands of followers. They will quote Bible verses, make detailed calculations of when the end will come.

I probably spend too much time on social media.

In September, my social media exploded with predictions that ‘The Rapture’ was coming on 23 September. What is The Rapture?

Two [men] will be in the field;  one will be taken and one will be left.

Two women will be grinding meal together;  one will be taken and one will be left. 

In the Rapture, the "true" Christians will be taken up bodily into Heaven.

Brother Joshua, a pastor in South Africa said that Jesus had come to him in a vision, and that he was ‘a billion percent sure’ that The Rapture would happen on 23 September. YouTube, Instagram—it went viral on Tiktok with the hashtag #RaptureTok.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fOR9gkXN4ko

People quit their jobs; they sold all their possessions.

And waited.

Nothing happened.

Brother Joshua then changed his prediction to 7 Oct 2025, saying that Jesus would have used the Julian calendar, not the current Gregorian calendar.

Nothing happened.

St Matthew writes,

Keep awake therefore, for you do not know on what day your Lord is coming.

Christmas is about looking backwards, to a manger in Bethlehem, two thousand years ago. Christmas is about all the hopes and prayers of a sinful world laid upon a small innocent baby.

BUT

Christmas is also about looking forward to the second coming of Christ. And we do so every year, and have done so for 2000 years.

Does that make us lunatics? Are we all gullible fools taken in by a 2000-year old fairytale?

We live in a broken world: There is anger, hate, division everywhere we look.

Ukraine. Gaza. Sudan. Anti-migrant marches in Trafalgar Square. And it is very very hard to see God working in the world right now. 

And we are told that Advent is about Hope. Hope means the world is not perfect, but God will make it so.

But we are very bad at waiting for that to happen; And that is why Hope is a Christian virtue. For in this world, our Hope is continually challenged.

The three cardinal virtues are Faith, Hope and Charity. Why is Hope even listed as a virtue?

‘I hope it doesn’t rain next Sunday.’

‘I hope I get an iPhone for Christmas.’

How is that virtuous?

Hope is not a figure of speech. Biblical, Christian Hope  is a fierce, deliberate, purposeful act of defiance.

Yes, There is pain in this world, but the promise of the Gospels is that God will take away our pain. Yes, This world is full of tears, but God promises to wipe every tear from our eyes. Yes, There is Death in this world, but Jesus promises us Eternal Life. Things are not right with this world; but the Advent promise is Hope.

In a short while, Juliette Maxine is going to be baptised., and that baptism is a symbol of Hope. Hope is what enables us to bring a child into this broken world.

For how could you present a child for baptism unless you have Hope? This Advent: in this season of Hope: we are commanded to put on the armour of light, to muster up the force of will needed to hold on to Hope.

For the night is far gone and the day is near…and still we wait.

Church Engagement Manager, Embrace the Middle East

https://embraceme.org/

Christ the King Sunday (23 November 2025)

St Bene’t’s, Cambridge

Christ the King Sunday stands at the threshold of Advent. It’s a day that invites us to look beyond the familiar images of kingship; crowns, thrones, and power and to see what kingship means in the light Christ.  

We begin with Jeremiah who speaks with passion “Woe to the shepherds who destroy and scatter the sheep of my pasture!” These are not gentle words. They are a rebuke to leaders who have failed in their calling. Those entrusted with responsibility and care have chosen power over justice and control over compassion. In Jeremiah’s day, kings were meant to shepherd their people, to guard the vulnerable, to reflect the justice of God. Instead, they exploited and no doubt in their desire to divide and rule, scattered the people., actions that echo in our own time. And so God promises a different kind of king: “I will raise up for David a righteous Branch… and he shall reign wisely and execute justice and righteousness in the land.” 

This is the heartbeat of Christ the King Sunday: a vision of kingship completely unlike the world’s. Not domination, but service. Not coercion, but reconciliation. A reign marked by justice and peace. 

Psalm 46 gives us the soundscape of that reign: “God is our refuge and strength… therefore we will not fear, though the earth be moved.” Nations rage, kingdoms totter, but God is in the midst of the city. The psalm does not deny chaos, rather it locates hope within it. “Be still and know that I am God.” Stillness here is not passive resignation. It’s radical trust in the God who breaks the bow and snaps the spear. The God who dismantles violence and calls the nations to peace. 

And then the letter to the Colossians lifts our gaze to the cosmic scale: Christ is “the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation… in him all things hold together.” This is kingship beyond borders and beyond time. The one who reconciles all things whether on earth or in heaven through the blood of the cross. These readings take us on a journey from a promise, a ruler who will reign wisely and execute judgement, to a paradox, a King enthroned on a cross, whose blood sacrifice makes peace possible.

So what does this mean for us living in a world where violence, avarice and the scattering of people through an unprecedented refugee crisis, populate our newsfeeds on a daily basis?

Where fear and injustice fracture communities? Where power is too often exercised at the expense of the weak? 

It means that Christ’s kingship is not an abstract doctrine; it is a summons. If his reign is justice and peace, then his followers cannot be indifferent to injustice. If his throne is the cross, then his people must stand where suffering is real.

This is where the mission of Embrace the Middle East speaks so powerfully. In the lands that form the cradle of our faith, the people who call this fractured yet beautiful part of our world home, live in constant fear of the ‘other’. Atrocities are committed, hostages taken, children detained, sometimes without charge and without trial. Millions of people live under occupation and millions more with the consequences of enforcing it. Embrace works with local partners to bring hope: legal aid for the vulnerable, food and warmth for the homeless and the refugee, education for those denied opportunity, healthcare for those on the margins. These are not acts of charity alone; they are signs of the kingdom. They say, in practical ways, that Christ’s reign is breaking in.

Christ’s kingship does not look like the world expects. It is easy to miss. In Colossians, Paul prays that we may be “strengthened with all power… for endurance and patience.” We are called to resist the seduction of unredeemed powers – the powers of control and empire that lead to cynicism, apathy, and despair. It means staying alert to the places where God’s justice is absent and daring to act. 

Walter Wink, in his work “Naming the Powers”, helps us see that this is not just a spiritual truth, but a radical claim about the structures of our world. Wink argues that every system – political, economic, social – has both an outer, visible form and an inner, spiritual reality. These “powers” were created good, but they become fallen when they serve domination instead of life.

When Paul says Christ disarmed the powers and made a public spectacle of them, he is declaring that the cross exposes and defeats systems of injustice. The powers are not destroyed; they are unmasked and called back to their divine vocation to serve human flourishing under God’s reign.

Why does this matter for us today? Because when we look at oppression, discrimination, antisemitism, Islamophobia, children held without charge or trial, we are seeing the visible form of a fallen power: a system that claims to offer security but ends up crushing the vulnerable. Wink would say that our task is not only to resist these systems but to redeem them and to call them back to justice. That means advocacy, prayer, and action that confronts the spiritual reality behind the visible injustice. 

So when we stay alert, as Jesus commands, we are not just waiting for a future kingdom; we are discerning the powers at work now and joining Christ in the work of exposing and transforming them. This is what it means to walk in the light: to live as if the powers have already been reclaimed by Christ, and to act in ways that anticipate that reality.

So what does it look like to honour Christ as King? It looks like prayer that refuses to be sentimental, prayer that wrestles with God for justice. It looks like advocacy: calling out injustice in places where it thrives. It looks like generosity: supporting those who work for peace on the ground. And it looks like hope, not naïve optimism, but stubborn, defiant hope rooted in God’s promise. 

Honouring Christ as King also calls us to slow down. “Be still, and know that I am God.”

Stillness here is not withdrawal; it’s an opportunity for us to gain clarity. To get our priorities in order and the refusal to let fear dictate our choices. It is the courage to act even in the midst of chaos. 

The kings of this world still scatter and exploit. But the righteous Branch has come. The cosmic Christ holds all things together. And his kingdom is breaking in through acts of justice and peace, through healing the wounds of history and lives that bear witness to his love. 

We are each offered the invitation to honour the King with our lives. Working and praying for the day when all of creation is reconciled to God’s self and can live in safety.  

Amen.

2nd Sunday before Advent, Year C (16 November 2025)

St Bene’t’s Church, Cambridge

Text: Psalm 98, Malachi 4.1-2a, Luke 21.5-19

Sing to the LORD a new song;  for he has done marvellous things.

Unexpected, unfamiliar music, a song that rises, unbidden, from the heart.

A new song, rising up from all of creation. A new song. A new song.

We open to God  the packed lacquer  music boxes of our hearts’ desires, and God answers those prayers with new and unexpected song.

It is not the song we expected. It is not — sometimes — even the song we want, nor the song we think we have asked for. It is a new song.

 Make music to the Lord with the lyre, ♦︎

   with the lyre and the voice of melody.

With trumpets and the sound of the horn ♦︎

   sound praises before the Lord, the King.

There are woodwinds in this song, dulcet tones of blessing, raising up in music a cloud of incense, of blessing. There are trumpets in this song, bright cymbals and clarion trumpets,  calling out, calling out good news, piercing notes breaking chains and dullness, proclaiming liberation, with sharp notes reminding: liberation may call for walking four decades in the desert.

There are strings, constant strings, in this song, at times pizzicato, at times legato, lending length and constancy and rhythm because it is a song that runs from day to day, the strong song of the ordinary made new at each sunrise, at each moonrise,  in each star and leaf.

And there is silence in this song, long measures of trembling rest, Sabbath between each note, the silent aleph at the start of each page, the silence that spreads her wings at night in this sanctuary.

The silence which is worshiping God in the beauty of holiness,

Sing to the LORD a new song; and all the ends of the earth have seen the salvation of our God.

There are voices in this song, so many voices, in so very many languages. voices  of every language, of every nation, of every people, bringing forth the wonder and glory of God.

A polyphonic choir -- dissonant voices resolve into harmony, in God’s ear.

God sings answers to our prayer in unexpected ways,

Good news carried by the most unexpected people, the refugee and the outcast, the stranger in the land

His own right hand and his holy arm have won for him the victory.

It is not an easy song. “the days will come when not one stone will be left upon another; all will be thrown down”

This is no elevator music, no worn-down easy-listening pap.

This new song is full of dynamics and accidentals, the creative strains required to set aright and in harmony a creation that has gone sadly, violently astray.

“Nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom; there will be great earthquakes, and in various places famines and plagues; and there will be dreadful portents and great signs from heaven.”

But “the the sun of righteousness shall rise, with healing in its wings,”

“In righteousness shall he judge the world and the peoples with equity.”

Sound praises to the Lord, all the earth; break into singing and make music.

Let the sea thunder and all that fills it, the world and all that dwell upon it.

Let the rivers clap their hands and let the hills ring out together before the Lord,

Of course there are angels in this song, heavenly host, powers and principalities, thrones and dominions, with their bronze voices, seraphim singing in silver and cherubim in gold. 

 But never forget that there are earthen voices, creatures here below, claw and caw, roaring and purring and whistling.

God’s plan is not our plan, and we are not the only creatures in this choir!

 Watery voices, leviathan whales singing perpetually across the deep, under  deep bass breaking waves.

 God’s song carries the echos of the ekos, the household of creation, rightly ordered, unpolluted,             growing and giving forth.

So tend the earth and shelter creation; Seek God in field and tree and sea and star.

Listen to God’s voice singing out with the sound of the silence of the night sky, and the invisible rush of waters beneath the stones.

Sing to the Lord a new song, for he has done marvellous things.

Unexpected, unfamiliar music, a song that rises, unbidden, from the heart.

A new song, rising up from all of creation. A new song. A new song.

How else can we hold in one measure the destruction of the Temple, and the resurrection of the Son of God? How else can we encompass the certainty of wars and insurrections, and the unshakable promise that not a hair of our heads shall perish?

The old music, the siren songs of power and fear, wealth and tribalism, adorned with beautiful stones — they shall all be thrown down, notes trampled under foot.

We must open to God the packed lacquer music boxes of our hearts’ desires, tuning our voices not to our own wills, but to God’s grace, letting God teach us to sing a new song, a song of the Cross.

It is not the song we expected. It is not the song the world thinks it wants. It is a new song, and it sings of marvellous things.

The Rev’d Devin McLachlan

All Saints’ Sunday, 2 November, 2025

St Bene’t’s, Cambridge

 Almighty God, you have knit together your elect in one communion and fellowship in the mystical body of your Son Christ our Lord…[1]

I was re-reading an essay I wrote in seminary a long time ago, about All Saints’ and memorial services in the Episcopal Church. It is a classic ordinand’s paper – one part overconfidence, one part earnest excitement, one part wisdom cribbed from much wiser people.

The paper began with a quote from Peter Berger’s The Sacred Canopy — not a work of Christian theology, but on the sociology of religion (sometimes it helps to see how we look from the outside).

It’s a quote that captures the challenge of All Saints Sunday, of intentionally opening a church to remembrance, grief, and resurrection:

“The power of religion depends, in the last resort, upon the credibility of the banners it puts in the hands of people as they stand before death….” [2]

Let’s take a look around at some of the banners we carry against death, like the regimental banners that stand in Ely Cathedral.

Some of them are mysteriously vague. Some of them are torn. And some of them are quilted.

They stand in struggle, in tension with time — just as Jesus’ beatitudes speak both to the here-and-now, and the what it is to come:

The deep history of God, the indescribable future ahead of us, not yet revealed, the now-ness of being the children of God.

As it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be.

This time-travel of ancient, future, and now is central to the spiritual health and well-being of any Christian community.

 If we stand as if we believed in a God trapped by time’s arrow, then the banners we hold on the front lines before death begin to droop windlessly.

Churches can worship so heavily in the past that they become little more than a medieval recreation society, a museum for nostalgia, reluctant to engage with the outside world.

At the least, the liturgy can feel stale. At the worst, the broken ethics of a time long past --             homophobia, clericalism, racism – might remain unaddressed.

Or churches can focus so strongly on an eschatological future, a theology of exclusive and personal salvation at the end of time…

At their hyperbolic extreme, churches so distanced from history and unconcerned with the present, that their theology can’t even be described as concerned with the hereafter, because the hereafter presumes some relationship with the here.

In either event, we can find ourselves immobilised by the fear of not having all the answers in the face of death, in the face of hope and resurrection.

Fear to trust that salvation is shared—  not by timeless individuals — but by a Koinonia, fellowship, of saints spanning all time and geography in the hope to which Christ calls us.

On this day, in this now, All Saints’ Sunday, we are invited to stand under the banner of the Lamb in the face of death.

And we are invited to take hold of the banner of our own lives, to consider our lives as a piece of fabric. Our material might be sturdy or delicate, stained, washed, and timeworn. It may show stitches of old repairs, and it may boast embroidery and designs.

When we face death and loss, it creates a tear in that fabric – a whole network of relationships has been changed and torn.

 The work of grieving is to find the right material with which to repair the tear in our own fabric — sashings of stories and memories, piercings and bindings of hope and expectation.

In the midst of this work, our shared faith becomes, in Sarah Brabant’s words,

“a hoop…that stabilizes our fabric for both mending and embroidery stitches.”[3]

On a personal level, All Saints’ and All Souls’ is the time to examine the stitching in our own hearts:

 We may be surprised how much mending we have done, we may need permission to say that our lives still feel torn by death and loss.

But on All Saints’ Sunday we also take hold of wonderful Fat Quarters — have you seen those in a fabric shop? They are irresistibly beautiful, whimsical rectangles of brilliant fabric used especially for quilting.  Bold blues, warm yellows, fierce animals and verdant leaves and blood-red stripes.

We pick them up, turn them in our hands, these fat quarters, these stories of the lives of the saints. Benedict. Francis. Elizabeth. Brigid. Anthony. Etheldreda. Hilda.

The saints inspire us and challenge us, their stories and struggles bright, creative lives pointing  to a greater pattern: we hold up these fat quarters and remember that our tears and our embroideries        are not on some lone squares.

All Saints becomes a reminder that the fabric of our own lives doesn’t lie on its own in a jumble basket – the fabric of our life is quilted, together: with all of us, with everyone we pray for, with everyone who cares for us, with the living and with the dead.

Particularly in a society which values the individual over community, our Christian witness to membership in a self-transcending wholeness with God stitching the lines of our tears of grief and so binding a new connection to those whom we love but see no longer.        

We are all part of the koinonia, the communion, the fellowship, the quilt  of saints -- The quilt of saints gathered in prayer and song right here, every Sunday morning, across the ages, across languages and cultures.

Here is where we practice prayer, practicing and practicing, unashamed, imperfect in poverty of spirit.

Here is where we carry our tears, and comfort one another, mending the tears in our common quilt.

Here is where we seek God, lifting up our hearts. Here is where we serve one another and the world, and sown together in the meekness of service, inherit the earth for Love.

Here in this lofty space is where we are filled, no batting better, and here is where we go out hungry for Justice.

Here is where we are pierced by love, learning to give and receive mercy, practicing forgiveness, practicing being forgiven.

Here is where we rest from all weariness and injustice, and are given by grace the strength to seek out the communion of saints. Here is where we are  knit together, quilted together in one communion and fellowship in the mystical body of Jesus Christ our Lord. to follow the template of God’s blessed saints in that Great pattern of His inexpressible joys set down for us across the ages.

Amen.

 [1] Collect, All Saints’ Sunday, Common Worship (nearly identical to the 1662 BCP collect)

[2] Berger, Peter L The Sacred Canopy New York: Doubleday, 1990.

[3] Brabant, Sarah Mending the Torn Fabric: For Those who Grieve and Those Who Want to Help Them Amityville, New York: Baywood, 1996.