We look up at the rocky cliffs around us, carved with shrines to Caesar, Pan and other local gods. Our eyes linger on the place where a stream used to be before an earthquake blocked it.

Some believe the place where this stream came out was an entry to the underworld. This is a location dedicated to empire and power and competing gods, all striving for our attention, loyalty, and worship.

Then Jesus, looking up at the scene around him, asks a question:

“Who do people say that the Son of Man is?”

The disciples answer him:

Maybe John the Baptist, Elijah, Jeremiah, or some other prophet.

This is the popular answer. The crowds like Jesus. They think he’s a holy man, a ghost from the past with a new look, a prophet sent by God. But that’s all. A good man, with important things to say, but no more.

It’s a start, the beginning of something, but Jesus pushes.

“But who do you say that I am?” he asks.

He makes it personal, direct, a challenge. A more dangerous question with the potential to upset people in authority and rearrange our priorities.

Silence falls among the group. The wind blows round the niches filled with gods and around the statues built to the glory of Caesar. But then Simon Peter, ever one to speak up, has a moment of divine insight and calls out,

“You are the Messiah, the Son of the living God”.

And the tension breaks as Jesus laughs and smiles in delight because one disciple at least has got it. One disciple at least has heard his Father in heaven and knows who Jesus is. One disciple, in the middle of that place of competing powers, has stood up for Jesus.

So, Jesus makes a promise. Simon becomes Peter, the rock. He will be the rock on which God’s church will be built.

And God’s Church will endure, even against the gates of the underworld, even when the pagan gods’ niches are empty, Pan is just a story, and the Roman Empire is a matter of history.

Peter has faith, and Peter has a calling. Like Sarah and Abraham, the rock and quarry from which God made the nation of Israel to be his people, Peter is to help create a new people for God based on faith.

Sarah, unable to have children, and Abraham, already an old man, were called to leave everything behind to start a nation. No wonder Sarah laughed. But they had faith and a calling, and through them the nation of Israel was born.

Now it’s Peter’s turn. But not only his turn. His fellow disciples also have their faith and their calling.

We know little about the lives of most of the first followers of Jesus. But we do know that through their ministry, and the ministry of others around them and after them, the Church has been built, and faith has been passed on from generation to generation.

And now it’s here, with us, in this ancient building, filled with life, with love, with the presence of God – and with us. We too have faith, and we too have a calling.

Paul lists some of the callings we might have. Some might prophesy, some might teach, some might exhort, some might give generously, some might lead with diligence, some might show compassion with cheerfulness.

It’s not an exhaustive list, and neither are the categories mutually exclusive. But it tells us something important about faith and calling.

Like those first followers of Jesus sitting around a campfire, like Sarah and Abraham, and like all the many millions of followers of Jesus throughout history, we each have a calling.

And each person’s faith and calling is vital.

There’s a natural human tendency in institutions of all kinds, including religious ones, to especially value the leaders, the ones up the front, the ones who seem to be set apart for something the rest of us mere mortals can’t do.

Obviously, there need to be leaders, and we should value and encourage and support them, but they’re not the whole story.

All of us, together, are the whole story. Each of us has a role, and none of us can be overlooked or harmed or dismissed without damaging the whole.

Once, when I was about 11, I broke one of my little toes trying to dance in the kitchen. It was a small bone but very painful to break, and the effects on my ability to walk, run and even lie down and sleep were big.

Similarly, without the contribution of even the smallest person, the whole body of Christ suffers. It’s for that reason that we all, each one of us, has a calling.

I tried to list all the many ways in which people express their callings in this church but gave up because the list kept on expanding, and I probably still forgot something.

I guess, though, that the list of jobs to do isn’t really the point. The point is that there are as many callings as there are followers of Christ, and every act of service matters, including, and perhaps especially, the ones that people might fail to remember or notice.

They matter because they’re acts of service and love to God and others, carried out because God first loved us, and God notices and treasures all of them. They matter because we, like those first followers of Jesus, are also surrounded by empires, conflicting loyalties and idols.

We live, work and walk among many competing calls on our attention, our time, our loyalty and our worship, and we must choose who or what gets priority.

We too are asked by Jesus, in the middle of all of it, who do you say that I am.

And each one of us, as we declare, “You are the Messiah, the Son of the Living God”, are called to take our own unique place in the body of Christ, to be both loved and loving – to have faith and a calling.

The Rev’d Dr James Crockford

1 Kings 3.5-12

Romans 8.26-end

Psalm 119.129-136

Matthew 13.31-33, 44-52

Do you ever remember your dreams? I wonder, as I ask that question, what vivid dream springs back to your memory. But don’t worry, I’m not going to ask what you’d been dreaming about.

We all probably dream far more than we can remember. Perhaps you recall times when, having awoken, you have just the haziest memory that you had had a dream, or that something a bit like this or that happened, but the detail, the sequence, is all gone. Dreams tend to happen in the thin layers of sleep, as our brains are firing up, but our bodies, and our memories, are still on reduced functions. But still, sometimes what we get up to in the washy and wacky world of our dreams, lodges enough for us to recall it when we awake, for good or ill. We remember some intoxicating love affair we conducted in a dream somehow without all the self-consciousness and risk that are there in the real-life version; or we remember falling off a building or all our teeth falling out. When I was growing up, I had a recurrent dream in which I was a podgy cherub, with a giant silver hula-hoop that encircled me, levitating around my waist like Saturn’s ring; and if I made breaststroke movements with my arms and legs, I started to fly. Make of that what you will.

It strikes me as a bit of a gamble, then, in our first reading, for God to appear to Solomon in a dream, and ask him what he wants. It is here, on the cusp of consciousness, that we test out and toy with experiences that might seem impossible, unattainable, in the light of day; here where the worst of ourselves might be freely imagined without consequence, or where the things we conjure up might make absolutely no sense at all. Ask me in a dream what I want, you might get some very strange answers.

But in another sense, the world of our dreams sometimes – sometimes – is where we find our desires most unfiltered, where we might see and feel and touch what we most deeply need and want, in a way that gets easily crowded out and suppressed in all the noise and fear and jostling contentions of waking life. It’s not the case for every dream, but I’ve known, and perhaps you have too, the feeling of waking with some sense of revelation, of unveiling, that a dream carried me on, whether in unlocking grief, or anger, or love, or longing, that needed to find a way to the surface, and I find that I’m grateful it did.

God promises to give us our hearts’ desires, but it takes a lot of soul-searching to find what those desires really are. Solomon’s dreamed response does not mention the obvious Christmas-list stuff for an ancient near-Eastern King – for long life, riches, victory and security, for wives and concubines and horses and armoury – but he asks instead for understanding, for wisdom, to know justice, and all the true fulfilment that those things bring with them. (Though, spoiler alert, Solomon does get all the riches and victory, the wives and concubines and horses, and it ruins him.)

But back to his dream and ours: how to speak of those things that we truly desire and long for? Jesus, in our Gospel reading, layers image upon image, metaphor upon metaphor, to try to get our minds and hearts toward what he calls the kingdom of heaven – what things will be in that promised and envisioned day when the desires and hopes of all creation are aligned, harmonised, consummated, within the fire of divine love and enfolded in the steadfast peace of God’s heavenly reign. A new creation, a new earth, a new society, a new way of being – the new life that breaks upon the scene in Christ’s death and resurrection, the old order of sin and death giving way to the new life of glory, but this we still await in its fullness, to transform all that God has made. To bring about the kingdom of heaven. How do you articulate that reality?

Jesus can only stir our hearts and minds for this new day, for what it will be like, by summoning the power of our imaginations. Tiny seeds that look like nothing, becoming big bursting trees of splendour, a canopy for all creatures. A little yeast pounded and pounded with patience and resilience, punched through the flour, to transform the dough into the miracle of bread. Hidden treasure you would give everything for. A pearl worth sailing the world to find. A net cast into the sea that catches every kind of fish. (Every kind of fish in one net? Surely that’s mind-bending.) These feel like the hinted glimmers of dreams, imaginings that tug at some feeling, some hope deep within us, and that finds its fulfilment in the new life that Jesus is ushering in.

But we’re not there yet, are we? All very well trying to reconnect with those deep stirrings, trying to imagine ourselves into the world Jesus promises, but which of us cannot think of a hundred things to point out that can make all this seem like a pipe-dream?

But St Paul tells us not to despair. Neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, not depth…no no no, not anything else, nothing in all creation, can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord. We might know hardship, or distress, or persecution, famine, nakedness, peril, or sword…but God in Christ has given his everything, even his very self, for us all, and so not only is all not lost, but nothing can or will be lost. It is God who justifies, so who can condemn? It is God who calls us, and what can negate his promise? It is God who will glorify, and what in all creation could ever dampen his glory?

So, what then are we to do? Paul seems to send us right back to that dreamworld, if you will, the dreamworld of our prayers. In all our weakness, in the midst of the pregnant birth pangs, the violent pain of the new breaking into the old; in the desperation of our deepest yearning for justice, for redemption, for peace, we have the Spirit of God within us. The Spirit that helps us in our weakness. That in our despair, in the silence of not knowing how to face all this world throws at us, all the ways it may try to wreck our hope in God, in all this the Spirit moves us deeply, with prayers that are cries and groans, guttural sounds from the abyss, that summon our pain and longing into prayers that are the heartbeat of God within us. It’s a raw image. (It’s not very Anglican, really is it?) But Paul tells us to get in touch with that deep stirring, with that raw expression, the labour pang within us of a new creation breaking forth – to let the Spirit of God stir within us the passion for a world reborn, and bring to birth in us the mighty new things of God. Things that are like the pearl and the treasure, you’d give everything to have; like the tree that explodes to voracious life from the tiny ball of code dead in the ground; like throwing a net into the sea and finding you’ve caught everything.

Let us find in our own day, and in our own way, the images, the art, the music, the dance, the architecture, the friendships, the worship, the prayers, the acts of self-sacrifice, the labour and the love, that will enliven our imaginations to dream of the kingdom of heaven, and that will unleash our heart’s desire for a world set free into the freedom of God’s spirit, the glorious liberty of the children of God; and in those dreams and desires, find the energy and the fervour to pray and work and long for God’s coming kingdom to transform all that God has made, changing us into his likeness, from glory to glory.

Rector of St John’s Episcopal Church, Edinburgh

12 July, 2026

At present, I have the unenviable task of redesigning and updating my church’s website. And in the face of so great a challenge, I thought to myself: what use is there in reinventing the wheel? Why not go straight to the gold-standard of church websites – the pinnacle of the genre – and see how the professionals do it?

It was thus that I found myself recently scrolling through the well-formatted pages and calming mid-blue tones of a certain website known to many of you here: that of St Bene’t’s Church in Cambridge. And, what an experience I had, for, little did I know that, beyond the inspiration I might get for my own church’s website, I would also be in for a surprise – a treat, even.

For, there I was, flicking through the pages, when I saw, underneath a tab labelled ‘Community’ a page entitled ‘20’s & 30’s Group’, and, clicking on that page, to my great delight and surprise, I found myself greeted by none other than my own face, younger and markedly less lined, grinning inanely up at me. Indeed, looking a little closer, I saw, to my increasing joy, the chaplain of Corpus Christi College – the Rev’d Dr Rob Hawkins – slurping away at a chocolate ice cream. Looking closer still, I saw the Rev’d Rosie Hewitt, who currently ministers at Great St Mary’s and, to top it all off, my own wife, smiling alongside us all in the Cambridge sunshine. There we all were, in our twenties or thirties, enjoying an ice cream on King’s Parade having sung together, I think, in one of the contemplative evening services we used to run here.

I love that photo, not only because it features some of my great friends, but also because it captures a particular moment in the life of this great church. Many of you will, of course, have such moments of your own you can point to, whether in photographic form, or written form, or even simply in the form of memory; particular moments in the life of this church which capture something of its essence and identity. And, of course, with essence and identity in mind, one of the great paradoxes of a venerable old church like this is that it is at once both unchanging and constantly in flux.

What I mean by this is that, on the one hand, at what we might call a certain ontological level, St Bene’t’s is St Bene’t’s is St Bene’t’s, and has been for over 1000 years now. Just as a tourist may walk beneath its tower this afternoon, look up and say “oh look, it’s St Bene’t’s”, so a Norman soldier in 1068 could have walked beneath the self-same tower, looked up and said “Oh look, it’s St Bene’t’s”, before presumably bonking the local priest on the head and making off with the silverware.

And the point is that both Norman knight and 21st Century tourist would have been referring to the same thing. There is a particular category of being in time and space which is occupied by St Bene’t’s Church in Cambridge and nothing else, which both marauding Norman and Instagramming tourist refer to equally. And yet, on the other hand, St Benet’s’ is also a constantly shifting, constantly mutable, and ever-changing reality. The St Bene’t’s pictured in that photo of me and my friends already no longer exists, and some of you here I’m sure will have known many different St Bene’t’s’s over the years.

Existing as we do within time, this paradox of identity is present in almost any institution with a sizeable history, and can be discerned in many aspects of our lives as we experience them. It’s what lies behind the realisation, reached by all teachers, who find out sooner or later that every year they grow a year older, but that the students never age. It’s what lies behind the curious feeling of nostalgia one feels when visiting a house once lived in or a childhood haunt, and finds that everything is both the same and different at the same time.

And it’s the same of course, even with our own selves. At one level, you as a seven-year-old were as much you as you are today, and yet at the same time, almost everything about you is different now. We are creatures of time, and to live in any such system is to be subject to change, and provision, mutability, and even decay. This is our lot as time-bound creatures.

But what of God? What of that great unchanging inexhaustible source of all that is and which holds all things, even time itself, in being? Well, in strict theological terms, of course, God never changes. God is the great uncaused causer, the unmoved mover, that which exists beyond time and beyond therefore any possibility of ‘variation or shadow due to change’, as we heard in our epistle from James this morning. And yet as we have heard, we do change, and so although at the level of intellectual understanding we may know that God doesn’t change, our experience of God must do so. It’s in this sense that we can relate to God a bit like we relate to a church like St Bene’t’s: at once never changing, and yet always new whenever we encounter it.

The problem, however, faced with such a dynamic, is that there can be a great and understandable temptation for us to resist any change in our relationship with God. Faced as we are with a world of constant flux, in which all things are subject to variation and shadow, the temptation for people of faith can so often be to preserve our faith as it were in aspic; to resist the natural transformations that will happen within faith, and to cling to earlier perhaps simpler assumptions regarding God and his activity in the world. This is entirely understandable, of course, but it perhaps less than the natural, life-giving, growing relationship with God to which we are called. Our epistle from James this morning teases out this precise point.

We worship, the author of the letter writes, ‘the Father of lights, with whom there is no variation or shadow due to change’. And yet, he continues, ‘in fulfilment of his own purpose God gave us birth by the word of truth’. The word which the NRSV translates as ‘gave us birth’ literally means to bring forth or to grow, and so at the heart of this verse is the idea that in worshipping that which is unchangeable we ourselves are constantly changed and brought forth into being. To worship God, in other words, is not simply to change passively as we grow older, and to adjust our conception of God every few years to account for the growth, but actively to be changed, to be brought forth into being, by means of that relationship.

It’s not simply the case, in other words, that our changing bodies and hearts and minds will change how we experience God, but that in encountering the God who is beyond all shadow of change, we ourselves are changed. God is constantly calling us, constantly generating newness within us, constantly guiding and nurturing us into the people he created us to be.

There’s a wonderful poem by the metaphysical Anglican poet John Donne, entitled ‘Love’s Growth’, which explores this idea of growth and change within the dynamic of a loving relationship.

I scarce believe my love to be so pure

As I had thought it was,

Because it doth endure

Vicissitude, and season, as the grass;

Methinks I lied all winter, when I swore

My love was infinite, if spring make’ it more.

As Donne realises, and as the rest of the poem goes on to explore beautifully, it is in the dynamic of a loving relationship that we are changed and brought forth into being. Love itself actively changes us, even if the object of that love remains constant. Love itself actively changes us, even if the object of that love remains constant.

Today is the patronal festival of this wonderful church, and as we gather here in the ancient beauty of this holy place, it’s right that we give thanks for all that is constant and permanent and unchanging in the life of this great church. But as we ponder such constancy – as we marvel at the unchanging reality of St Bene’t’s over the past 1000 years – so we would do well also to remember that God’s call for this church has never been simply to sit and be, but constantly to be transformed anew.

To become, by means of encountering the unchanging source of all love, ever more loving; by worshipping the eternal source of all compassion, ever more compassionate, by drawing near to the eternal source of all that is beautiful and just and true, ever more beautiful more just and more true.

To be continually brought forth, in other words, into the church that God has always been calling it to become. My prayer for you today is that you would continue to hear that call of God upon you as a church, and that you would continue to grow ever more into that glorious future, which has always been at the heart of what St Bene’t’s was and is and is to become.

Amen.

The Fifth Sunday after Trinity, 5 July 2026

Matthew 11.16–19, 25–end

Recently, someone from Bene’t’s was asking me  about my journey to ordination. And I remember now that one of the odd things when I was an ordinand (perhaps because most of my friends and acquaintances were not churchgoers) was that invariably at any party or picnic where I let slip that I was at seminary, the person I was talking to would begin apologising,  with genuine embarrassment, for swearing earlier in the conversation.

As if that was the most important thing about our Christian faith.

By the way, if you’ve ever cut me off in traffic you’d discover that I still remember a number of excellent words taught to me by my father,  a man who spent many summers working on commercial fishing boats in Alaska before becoming a Chicago attorney.

So it’s a bit of a relief to see that Jesus too was filled with frustration  with people’s expectations about what it is to be religious:

For John came neither eating nor drinking, and they say, “He has a demon”; the Son of Man came eating and drinking, and they say, “Look, a glutton and a drunkard, a friend of tax-collectors and sinners!” (Mt 11.18-19)

As Christians we are assumed to be parsimonious and dour, as well as corrupt and extravagant, ignorant science-deniers and clever con-artists.  Fasting ascetic drunk gluttons, the lot of us.

In the words of the Life of Brian’s  ex-leper, there’s just no pleasing some people.[1]

Which was perhaps Jesus’ point.  We love our neighbour, but their opinion of our faith  is neither the beginning nor the end of our spiritual journey:

“A brother came to see Abba Macarius the Egyptian, and said to him, ‘Abba, give me a word, that I may be saved.’

So the old man said, ‘Go to the cemetery and abuse [insult] the dead.’ The brother went there, abused them and threw stones at them; then he returned and told the old man about it. The latter said to him, ‘Didn’t they say anything to you?’ He replied, ‘No.’

 The old man said, ‘Go back tomorrow and praise them.’ So the brother went away and praised them, calling them ‘Apostles, saints and righteous men.’ He returned to the old man and said to him, ‘I have complimented them.’ And the old man said to him, ‘Did they not answer you?’ The brother said no.

The old man said to him, ‘You know how you insulted them and they did not reply, and how you praised them and they did not speak; so you too if you wish to be saved must do the same and become a dead man. Like the dead, take no account of either the scorn of men or their praises, and you can be saved.’”[2]

In the words of Episcopal priest Fr Mike Marsh, “Part of our spiritual work then is to detach from another’s praises and insults, seeking our life, identity, and value in God alone. …it allows us the freedom to hear and consider what is said, to be with others in a more transparent and authentic way, and to live a humble life, neither making ourselves more nor less than we really are. And when we can do that we have a new freedom to be with God.”

For God’s yoke is easy. and God’s burden is light.

And the more we live lightly in this world —  transparent and authentic, humble in the most life-giving sense of the word,  ‘gentle and humble in heart’ — the more we live lightly in this world, gently and humbly, the better able we are to receive the freedom of God’s love.

What the world thinks it means to be Christian is, in every important way, entirely unimportant.

And I’m not just talking about the neo-Dawkins atheists

(Oh there’s someone I’m professionally frustrated with — a zoologist pretending to be a scholar of religion. He reminds me of the physicist in the old joke who seeks to advise a struggling dairy farmer: ‘First, we assume a spherical cow….’)

It’s my fellow-Christians as well — for there’s always someone ready to judge that your faith is too dour, or too liturgical, or not formal enough, or too loud, or maybe just a little too swear-y, or too straight-laced. But “like the dead, take no account of either the scorn of men or their praises.”

How much easier it is then to love our neighbour, if the anchor to which we hold is not their opinion, but the love of the one whose burden is light!

And — equally, in fact even more importantly —  how much easier it is to love my neighbour, when i stop trying to judge their faith.

Our faith can bask in the love of God rather than trying to prove that a neighbour is wrong.  Our faith can rejoice in the beauty and intelligence of science, from cosmology to coniology[3]and dwell in holy mystery.  And even when our faith burns like fire in our bones e en while our tongues struggle to articulate that faith, we can still take comfort:

For God has revealed his salvation to infants. Not to our wisdom. Not to our intelligence.

God has not revealed these things because of our clever words or our straining achievements, the good opinion of our neighbours, nor to our professional qualifications.

God has revealed his love to infants. To the children of God we have always been. In this world of panic and competition, of striving and straining, be at rest, a child safe in its parents arms.

In this world of division and diatribe, set down the heavy, wearisome burdens of pride and fear. Set down the awkward burdens of judgement and anxiety. Instead, choose the yoke that is easy, lift up the burden that is light, learn the lesson that is gentle and humble in heart:

Loving God with all our heart and mind and soul and strength, loving our neighbour as ourself.

[1] Or was that what Brian said to the ex-leper? I’m going to have to watch that movie again.

[2]The Sayings of the Desert Fathers, trans. Benedicta Ward (Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian Publications, 1984), 132.

[3] the study of dust!

Vicar, St Bene’t’s

2nd Sunday after Trinity, 14 June 2026

Matthew 9.35 – 10.8 

Last week I finally got to climb the (terrifying, two-storey) ladder up our thousand year-old tower to join some of our ringers in an inspection of the bells.

On the way up, in what Neil Petersen tells me may have once been an oratory and is now the void chamber, I had the chance to look closely at our stained glass window of Saint Benedict. That window was one of the first things pointed out to me when I came here to St. Bene’t’s to interview; Geoff Maitland showed me how the step below the window is worn away from when it was a doorway to a gallery.

What you can’t see, unless your standing almost at the altar, is the raven at Saint Benedict’s feet. As many of you will know from reading the weekly email, there's a whole story about why that raven.

Every day a raven would fly in from the woods into Benedict's new community there at Monte Cassino. And Benedict would feed the raven from his plate — much to the scandal and shock of some of the new brothers, I imagine.

And it turns out there was a local priest who was very jealous of Benedict, of Benedict's welcome and Benedict's discipline and the way that Benedict's community was thriving. And so he decided to poison Benedict's bread.

The raven, however, knew what was happening. And so that day, instead of waiting patiently to be fed, the raven flew off with the poisoned bread, hiding it in the woods so that no one would be harmed.

I take to heart Jesus's instruction in the gospel of Luke to consider the ravens.  In Matthew’s version, we’re to consider more generally the birds of the air, but it was no accident of Luke that Jesus chose the raven. That’s a detail I missed until this week, researching about ravens. There is something about how we read scripture with eyes of culture and sometimes miss the words right in front of us.

Scripture is wonderfully ambivalent about Ravens.  They are traif, not kosher, not to be eaten. Then again, so are eagles—  and we heard about in our first reading of God carrying his people on eagle's wings.

Ravens were sent by Noah to look for dry land and appeared to have failed the job, although the rabbis still disagree about the exact meaning there.

Ravens are notorious in scripture for being careless parents, but in doing so are also used in scripture (see Psalm 149, Job 38.41) as proof that we can depend entirely on God.

And ravens return the favour of feeding, in first Kings, bringing the prophet Elijah meat and drink twice a day when he was hiding exhausted in the wilderness. (1 Kings 17:2-16)

Just as the ravens depend on God for their food, so God's prophet depended on the ravens for his food. Just as Benedict fed the raven, so the raven took bread from Benedict in order to save his life.

Consider the ravens.

In Peter France’s Encyclopaedia of Biblical Animals, he tells this story about ravens and doves: ‘… [the raven] wanted to step as gracefully as the dove, so he gave up his old way of walking and tried to imitate the dove. He almost broke his bones in the attempt and then, being mocked by the other birds, tried to revert to his original way of walking, but he had forgotten [how to do it], and now hops and steps clumsily.’ It would be a good story just there on this weekend of Cambridge Pride, about being authentic to the person that God has made us.

The Raven of scripture and of hagiography are icons and companion animals when we think about accessibility and disability, about dependence and generosity, above all about insiders and outsiders.

Saint Benedict built a community that made room for those who don't walk but fly. A community that fed and was fed by that most outsider of outsiders, a clever corvid of the woods and wilds.

Which brings us to the calling of the 12 apostles. Really.

Look at the build-up that Matthew gives us, in a few economical lines:

            “he said to his disciples”

then

            “Jesus summoned his twelve disciples”

then

            “These are the names of the twelve apostles”

All the disciples. Then twelve of them. Then their naming — their names, yes, but also their being named as apostles, the messengers sent forth to preach the coming of kingdom. They didn’t spring forth fully formed. They were among the disciples, their ministry gradual as well as sudden.

We like to skip past the genealogies and lists of names in Scripture, but they are not accidental. They ground the stories, remind us that Holy Writ is a history of people’s experiences with God —  not an instruction manual or cookbook, but the stories of complicated, messy, very human people, having messy, complicated understandings of our Creator.

And the 12 disciples chosen to be sent, ἀποστέλλω apostelló, are just that. 

Messy and complicated. Jackdaws, jays, rooks, crows, and ravens. Impulsive Simon Peter. Matthew the Tax-Collector. Simon the Zealot. The sons of Zebedee, enthusiasts but let’s face it pretty immature.  All of them outsiders. Difficult people, sometimes awkward and often obtuse. Wonderful loving people, proclaiming the good news,  curing, raising and cleansing.  Clever as corvids, raucous as ravens.

We are harassed and helpless in this world, like sheep without a shepherd. So Jesus sent us ravens. Outsiders, awkward hopers and acrobatic flyers, problem-solvers and problem-makers, comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable.

Benedict’s disciples were scandalised by the raven.  They wanted a community of mature, adult, healthy able-bodied brothers. Not wild-feathered outsiders. Benedict’s rule, however, made it clear: The very young and the very old. The cantankerous and the gentle-hearted. The strong in body and the weak, the slow thinker and the clever…

A community where the awkward raven from the woods was not merely allowed, or reluctantly welcomed, but celebrated for her God-given, life-saving ministry, enabled, fed, free and fierce.

May the same be said of us today at St Bene’t’s.

That age is no barrier to ministry. That disability does not disable faith and inclusion — as we’ll talk about after the service and in the months to come. That the diversity of our minds, our nationalities, our sexuality and identities are gifts to be proudly celebrated, life-saving ministries by which we feed and are fed, here at God’s holy table. 

7th June 2026 |Trinity 1

Hosea 5:15-6:6 | Psalm 50:7-15 | Romans 4:13-25 | Matthew 9:9-13; 9:18-26

As humans, I find we’re very good at trying to categorise almost anything. A random selection of any books soon becomes categorised by topic, author, or indeed in these parts, by size. And very helpfully too, if we couldn’t organise our documents, books, music, laws… life would be much more difficult to manage.

And it’s something we learn from our earliest years. My nieces and nephews have always loved the ‘That’s not my’ series as children. I am sure some of you have come across them to, things like…

“That’s not my dog, its tail is too fluffy”, or “That’s not my rabbit, its ears are too floppy”.

These are good fun as children, and great for getting them to engage with the world, but a danger arises when we as adults don’t move beyond this and only engage with people based on which category we think they fit into.  

Our Gospel today is about just that, a collage of people who have been categorised as being outside of God’s love.

A tax collector, a woman ill with haemorrhages, a girl who has died.

One by one, they encounter Jesus, his kingdom is revealed, and all are welcomed with love.

First, we meet the Apostle Matthew, a character of immediate suspicion. Tax collectors were not collecting for schools and hospitals but the armies of the occupying Roman force, and their profit came from whatever they could extort on top of the existing payment.

Matthew then, had the wrong sort of job for the wrong kind of people. But he is welcomed, and Jesus breaks bread with him at dinner.

This clearly confused the poor Pharisee’s; they’ve studied scripture and worked very hard to categorise what can make them godly people; and tax collectors are not godly like them.

But they are met with a cutting irony from Jesus. To the experts of law and scripture Jesus retorts with scripture himself “I desire mercy, not sacrifice”.

And they will have surely known the second half of that phrase as we heard from Hosea 6:6 this morning: “I desire mercy, not sacrifice, and acknowledgment of God rather than burnt offerings”

Hosea speaks of healed wounds, restored lives, a spring rain which nourishes the Earth. A God who meets us in encounter, in acknowledgement in all our imperfectness, with rituals which guide us to that encounter, not exclude us from it.

For the Pharisees wished to serve God, and protect worship of God from the unrighteous, but had fallen into cordoning off people too different from them, too challenging to their strict standards.

Jesus reveals a kingdom where all are welcomed on their intention, not their achievement.

It is here we must not risk falling into the trap ourselves of placing people into boxes of godly or ungodly. A long, and tragically violent, history of antisemitism finds its roots in viewing the Pharisees not as fellow Jewish brothers of Jesus, debating how best to serve God, but an unfaithful other.

It is a view dismissed by our reading from Paul’s letter to the Roman’s, we are also to share in the promise of Abraham, not instead of adherents of the law.

And it is a view dismissed by our continuing Gospel reading.

Jesus rebukes and teaches the Pharisee’s at the dinner table, and then follows a leader of the synagogue, compelled by his faith. He is not bound by what category of religious teacher this man falls into, but an abundance of mercy and compassion.

Of course, before he reaches this man’s daughter, he is stopped by a woman who has been bleeding for twelve years. Another example of someone categorised and excluded from social and religious life.

From the context of this account in Mark’s gospel, the woman’s social and financial isolation, we can presume this was a gynaecological illness. This would have prevented her by custom from marriage, physical intimacy, and much worship under purity law.

The healing miracle offers more than the removal of pain then, but a foretaste of Christ’s kingdom where there is no exclusion from the full participation of all people in God’s worship.

And once again, Jesus offers a clever caveat that he is welcoming each individual as they are, not by the group they do or don’t belong to.

It would have been common in the Graeco-Roman world the gospels were shared in, to understand the ideal body as a normative masculine one, where fluids were balanced and contained, and consequently, those who menstruated could only fall short of this.

But we should not then see Jesus as reinforcing this, in some false idea that ceasing the flow of blood of the woman brought her closer to a normative masculine ideal.

For in healing the woman, Jesus is physically touched by her, his body becomes porous. In the Markan account, his power literally ‘flows out’ from him.

He enables the woman to re-engage in the societal norms of the day, but in doing so transgresses those very categories of gender.

It is this we celebrate at the Eucharist, Jesus Christ, Son of God, Son of Man, whose blood flows out to give us eternal life.

Which brings us to the final character of our story, the little girl who lay dead before the crowd. Jesus is dismissed, for surely, she is beyond any help now, but the ultimate glory of the kingdom is revealed, death is no barrier to God, whose life reaches all.

An eternal life which transcends background and religious practice, disrupts our ideas of gender and social order, pours out grace into the world beyond what we can imagine.

A life in which we are called to follow Jesus as nothing more than the people God created us to be. A life in which the less each person is oppressed by the norms of others, the more they fulfil God’s image, the more of God’s kingdom on earth is revealed. 

Trinity Sunday (31 May, 2026) & APCM

St Bene’t’s Church, Cambridge

_________

One of the interesting tasks of being the bishop's interfaith officer is that occasionally I have to explain to Muslim and Jewish neighbours how it is that we are monotheists.

It causes sometimes a little more confusion when I say that the Trinity is the smallest number by which monotheism is possible.

At least in a universe where God is love.

At least in a universe that is not cold and singular,

but which is inevitable in its being and creation and wonder.

Now, if I'd given this sermon 20 years ago, you would get at this point a very long discourse on Homoousios and the Aryan heresy.

We're here in Cambridge. We've had a lot of curates and ordinands over the time and many of you have probably heard that sermon already. Many of you could give that sermon, with great theological nous.

So what I'll just touch on,  is that those constructions of the trinity which have failed the test of orthodoxy —     built from prayer and meeting in community to try to understand what is going on with the nature of God.

The understandings of the Trinity which the church has rejected are the ones which fail the test of love.

They're constructions of the Trinity where there is God and then there is a demi-urge, where there is a hierarchy of time and being within the persons of the three persons who are one God.

God is always love. God from before the creation of time itself, much less the creation of that first speck of matter, is already in relationship.

The I and the thou of the father and son, the We that the spirit constructs between father and son…

God is always in relationship. To be singular and loving is to be Trinity. If you are my age or older, you might remember that incredible gestalt shift that travelled up north when Archbishop Desmond Tutu incorporated into his anti-apartheid preaching and theology the Zulu proverb:

Umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu

A person is a person through OTHER persons.

As it is in the Trinity, so it is in humanity, made in God’s image: only possible to be our selves because we exisit in relationship and connection.

As Archbishop Tutu wrote:

Ubuntu speaks particularly about the fact that you can't exist as a human being in isolation.

It speaks about our interconnectedness. You can't be human all by yourself…

We think of ourselves far too frequently as just individuals, separated from one another,

whereas you are connected and what you do affects the whole world.

When you do well, it spreads out; it is for the whole of humanity.[1]

That ubuntu is a call to justice and mutual dependence, yes. Ubutnu is a call to dwell in the Trinity, and to re-imagine the Church:

Ubutnu is the reason why Trinity Sunday is an excellent occasion for the APCM (and a rare one as well — most years, Trinity Sunday falls beyond the deadline for an APCM set by canon law).

Because this is the Sunday when we reflect on our interconnectedness — the generous gifts of time, treasure, and talent that make St Bene’t’s possible. And because on this APCM Sunday, we need to continue to be aware of the obligations of Ubuntu beyond this congregation.

St Bene’t’s is an incredible church. It has had an amazing thousand years of history. It has had gifted, charismatic leaders such as Br Sam and Anna Matthews and Michael Ramsey.

It is filled with wonderful, loving, marvelously eclectic and incredibly gifted people. We’re an inclusive church, welcoming and loving and safe. There are very few churches in England like it. (There are some. But I wish there were more…)

But St Bene’t’s is not the object of our worship. St Bene’t’s could exist or not exist, and God would still be, and we would still be called into relationship with God who is always love, who has always been love, even in the dark silence before creation.

Thanks be to God.

The sacrificial generosity of our time, treasure and talent has all been to send us out into the world, rejoicing in the power of the spirit, carrying out the ministry that God has called each of us to at our baptisms.

The offering of your time, of your financial giving, of sharing your gifts, has all been to that same end, that same purpose, which made the Trinity inescapable, which made Creation inevitable, which made Christ’s death and resurrection ineluctable, which made the gift of the Holy Spirit ineludible:

Love. We meet here each day, because God loves us, and in loving us, God invites us to respond with love:

umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu

We are made people through other people. We are made Church through the whole body of Christ. We are made in God’s image by the very image of God — and that Image is perfect love.

So first we will break bread together, and share in the body of Christ: being made one body by sharing in the one bread, broken for us.

And having prayed together and received the sacrament, and been sent out into the world, we’ll then meet as a whole community, made one by sacrament and love.

We’ll elect leaders to serve as wardens and PCC members and synod representatives, we will receive the many and excellent reports from our different ministries, including the work of the PCC, and the state of our fabric, but also our important ministries with children and young people, our mission giving, the wider councils of the church in synod, safeguarding and community building by the social committee.

And we’ll delve into the finances of the church – which are relatively healthy, although we are still confronted with a gap between our expenses and what the congregational has been able to give. 

It can feel like a lot of work and administration. That’s true of a lot of theological writing about the Trinity as well!

But the core message is still the same — it is love.

Put things in order, the apostle tells us, and live in peace. and the God of love and peace will be with you

Today at our APCM we put things in order, examining the ways by which we are enabled to come together to love God with all our heart and soul and mind and strength, and love our neighbour as ourselves.

There it is. I cannot think of a more important thing for me to say to you, as your vicar, than this:

God, the Holy Trinity, is Love:

And God has made you, as you are, in God’s image — to love and to be loved, to dwell forever in God’s love.

[1] https://www.beliefnet.com/inspiration/2004/04/desmond-tutus-recipe-for-peace.aspx

Gavin Koh

What do you do when you are challenged? If you look at what is going on in the world and there seems to be yet another war. What is your reaction?

It can be tempting to avoid argument; to stay comfortably in our respective bubbles; to surround ourselves with people who share our point of view.

What do today's Bible readings have to say about that? On first reading, perhaps very little.

If you are a scientist, then Luke's account of the Ascension presents some difficulties. St Luke writes:

"...as they were watching, he was lifted up and a cloud took him out of their sight."

Humour me. Please humour me. If you launch Jesus like a rocket straight up into the sky from the Mount of Olives on Ascension Day 33 AD. What speed was he going at? We have to assume that Jesus achieved escape velocity, because otherwise he would have fallen back down to Earth and burnt up in the atmosphere.

You are welcome to check my maths for me, but at 11.2 km/s, Rocket Jesus would have passed Pluto in the year 45 AD, the same year St Paul started his first of his missionary journeys. At 11.2 km/s, Rocket Jesus would have exited the Solar System in 83 AD, when Domitian was Roman Emperor.

At the same rate of travel, Jesus would now be travelling in interstellar space and would be scheduled to arrive at Proxima Centauri, our next nearest star, in another 110,000 years or so.

I'm glad that you laughed, because I think that this is why the Book of Acts begins with the angels challenging the apostles:

"Why are you staring up at the sky?"

Because, we, are too often to be found staring wistfully up at the sky. The first chapter of Acts sets up all that happens next. Having received the good news, having received the Holy Spirit, Jesus' disciples are charged with taking that good news out into the world.

"Why are you staring up at the sky?"

Go! Spread the word! A recurring theme in the Gospels is the Kingdom of Heaven. It is possible to become fixated on an ideal of heaven, for which we are destined as Christians.

It doesn't matter what happens here in this world, because after death, we are plucked from Earth and plonked into a Heaven where all our worries are relieved….and so we wait dreamily for the Kingdom of Heaven to arrive and until then, when the world outside look difficult, we retreat into our little bubbles to gaze longingly at a heaven we so desire and to surround ourselves with friends whom we love and avoid all the difficult people whom we dislike;

To listen only to music that entertains but does not stretch us;

To read only things that comfort but do not challenge us;

To discuss topics that confirm our pre-existing beliefs but avoid talking about anything difficult or controversial.

The Book of Acts, is a long letter written by St Luke to his fellow-believer, Theophilus.

It begins with the account of Jesus' Ascension into Heaven; but importantly, it begins also with a one-sentence summary of the Book of Acts: Jesus says "you will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you; and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, in all Judea and Samaria and to the ends of the earth."

The Book of Acts can be summarised like this: the Holy Spirit comes at Pentecost, then the disciples take the good news to the rest of the world. That's it: Jesus summarises the story in one prophetic sentence.

There is a Chinese expression used to describe someone who is ignorant, someone who is not worldly wise:

井底之蛙

We say that that person is like a frog, sitting at the bottom of a well. The frog sits comfortably in the black water at the bottom of the well, surrounded by darkness and all it can see is the bright circle of sky at the top of the well; and the frog imagines that this is the whole world. There is nothing else, but the dark water and the little patch of light up above above.

The last ten years have been very educational for me. Election after election, I find the outcome to be different from what I expected. I have seen outcomes I thought were impossible, because no-one I knew had voted for these things.

I have come to realise that maybe I am a frog, sitting at the bottom of a well, because the world is filled with people whom I don't know and to whom I have not spoken.

Yes, the world is a difficult place right now. Yes, it is hard to engage with people who seem to hold view diametrically opposed to ours.

But imagine a world where nobody spoke up. Imagine a world, where everyone just changed the topic of conversation whenever things got a little heated. Imagine a world where evil was allowed to persist unchallenged.

Jesus tells us that we are to be witnesses to the ends of the earth. It is not Jesus' command that we spend our Christian lives staring up into space sitting still in our own little bubbles.

It is our job to bring the Good News to the World. Love. Faith. Hope. We need to speak up and to say that it is wrong to blame people for being poor. That God's love is universal. That God's love is not restricted by colour or gender or sexuality.

That bigotry is not the same as common sense. that compassion and empathy are not weaknesses, that Jesus died for the sins of the whole world,

Not just those people currently in postcode CB2 3PT.

These principles are Biblical and Christ centred and the fact is that there are people who disagree and these people will disagree loudly and sometimes even with violence. Which is why St Peter says, do not be surprised at the fiery ordeal that is taking place among you to test you.

If you are reviled for the name of Christ, you are blessed…

The Gospel reading is from St John's Gospel, which records Jesus' High Priestly Prayer.

These are Jesus' last words, before he is taken from his disciples to be crucified.

Jesus words are addressed to God the Father: I am asking on their behalf; I am not asking on behalf of the world, but on behalf of those whom you gave me, because they are yours. …and now I am no longer in the world, but they are in the world and I am coming to you.

Jesus knows that he is leaving his disciples behind physically. His prayers are for us, because he knows that what he has asked us to do is not easy.

We look to our church community for refreshment and joy. We begin each week on a Sunday, gazing into heaven, trying to discern in the clouds of incense, the figure of Jesus vanishing into the distance.

But come Monday we are asked to look down and to gaze around us. We are asked to think about how we, as Christ's disciples, will engage with the big wide world around us.

5th Sunday of Easter 2026

St Bene’t’s, Cambridge

In the early 90’s on the Boston underground, (we call it the T), someone had paid to put up an evangelising ad on the Red Line,  quoting John 14.6.

Unfortunately, they had decided that punctuation was too much to bother with, and compounded the problem by not paying attention to line breaks.

So as you rode from Alewife to South Station, letting your eyes drift up to the advertisements above the heads of taciturn strangers, you might read:

I am the way without the way

there is no going

there is no other way

A wonderfully Zen moment and an opportunity to reflect on the difficulty of faith in a pluralistic world. There’s nothing new about religious pluralism.

It was the great anxiety of Judaism in the classical period, it was the defining conundrum of early Christian churches.

The British experience of religious homogeneity, absolute from the 13th to 17th centuries and nearly absolute until the modern era is an aberration in human history,            enforced by violence by both church and state.

Religious plurality is far more the norm.  Religious plurality is built into the DNA of Paul’s letters and into the experience of much of Global Anglicanism; it is not a new 21st century phenomena.

Interfaith conversation is, of course, inevitably transgressive. There is a narrow gate through which we necessarily pass. But sometimes in passing that narrow gate we can becoming anxious and fierce in describing the high wall between the faithful and everyone else.

From Genesis onwards, the Bible encounters the anxiety of interfaith contamination:

Intermarriage, syncretic religious practices in the high places, even at times the mere presence of other ethnic groups with their own gods, might drive people to terrible violence.

And yet, even as the high places are burnt, the sacred poles cut down and the prophets of Baal slaughtered by the people at Elijah’s insistence…

the Scriptures also present us with faithful women and men whose religious relationship to the God of Abraham is unclear at best — Jethro and Malchezidek, the Egyptian midwives, Rahab, Cyrus, the Good Samaritan, and the Centurion seeking healing for his servant.

Scripture invites us again and again into offering our hospitality to strangers, knowing that we ourselves are strangers here on earth.

A theology which cannot offer hospitality to the religious other is in conflict with the imperative in Scripture to welcom and sometimes to be, the stranger.

In the wake of the antisemitic Golders Green stabbings as well as in attacks on Sikhs, Muslims and Hindus in Britain, it is not enough to resolve these contradictions with simplistic feel-good theology.

The bloody history of religious and ethnic conflict in the Bible (two separate but intermingled categories) should not be lightly set aside — historically, Christianity has misused these texts to justify our own violence, from pogroms to crusades to slavery.

Nor can we engage in the heresy Marcionism which (inaccurately) claims,  ‘Oh, that was the Old Testament.’

I don’t think these stories can be readily reconciled. They are the dark icons of our human journey with God, to be ignored at our peril. They show us the very real risks of the human inclination to tribalism.

Nor can we turn to Jethro, Machezadek, Naaman, and the Good Samaritan,  using them as a free pass to fuzzy universalism.

Each of these positive encounters has their own unique message and none of those encounters result in the elimination of either the universal or the particular claims of our Christian faith.

Instead, can we have the Centurion in our south window sit in conversation with those dark icons of religious chauvinism and violence, to discomfort us and draw our attention to the complicated limens of our Christian faith?

What do we mean when we state that it is only by the name of Jesus that we are saved, that no one comes to the Father except through Jesus Christ?

Whether one is particularist or not, soteriology — the theology of salvation — has to be addressed when looking at other faiths from a Christian perspective.

But I’m inclined to ask: do we run the risk of treating our faith as a favourite football team?

We can fall into football-fandom Christianity from either two extremes:  

The first is a weak universalist understanding of salvation which treats all faiths as members of the same sport, interchangeable players simply wearing different uniforms.

The second football-fandom approach to Christianity sees the world as a zero-sum territory, reducing our faith of many dwelling-places into mere identity, simply another man-made idol like nation and race, the powers and principalities of the world, the ideologies and idols of this present age. 

As Rowan Williams wrote:

“There is a difference between seeing the world as…a territory…where rivalry is inescapable and seeing the world as a territory where being in a particular place makes it possible for you to see, to say and to do certain things that aren't possible elsewhere.…

Standing in the place of Christ, it is possible to live in such intimacy with Godthat no fear or failure can ever break God's commitment to us and to live in such a degree of mutual gift and understanding that no human conflict or division need bring us to uncontrollable violence and mutual damage.

From here, you can see what you need to see to be at peace with God and with God's creation; and also what you need to be at peace with yourself, acknowledging your need of mercy and re-creation.”[1]

Location, location, location, realtors tell us.

What would it mean to know that our fathers house of many dwelling places is not built on an island but a holy mountain, the rising son the rising sun of the OS map, allowing us to see the whole world as Christ sees us — with love.

The very particular nature of our Christian faith is that the view from the cross reconciles us to all creation. Because Christ loves us so dearly, we cannot help but to love and welcome the outcast and the stranger, not from smugness, but because we too are strangers, pilgrims on the Way, welcomed into the Father’s house where the bridegroom has built dwelling places for us all. ‍

[1]  ‘Christian Identity and Religious Plurality’, Archbishop Rowan Williams The Ecumenical Review, Jan-Apr 2006, Vol.58(1/2), pp.69-75

Fourth Sunday of Easter

19 April, 2026

Luke 24.13–35, The Road to Emmaus

They stood still, looking sad.

One of the best things my brother ever did for me was to take me out hiking in the Olympic mountains a few days after our father’s funeral. It was about a month after my 18th birthday, and went out to the Olympics. They are a temperate rainforest in the Pacific Northwest.

It was an incredibly healing three or four days, of enormous old growth cedar trees and mossy logs and rolling glacial rivers over rounded stones. There was bird song in the air. There was a near-constant mist with the occasional surprise of sunlight. There were steep paths to work out my grief on, walking up and down.I have no idea where we went. I'm pretty sure my brother had a map. I didn't have a clue.

But there is something deeply healing about heading out onto the road.

It was true on the road to Emmaus, and it’s true today. But here’s something I didn’t really click on for the first half century I’ve been hearing this story —which is that Jesus was also travelling along the road.

συνεπορεύετο (syne-poreueto) is the verb Luke uses; Jesus began travellingwith them.  They didn’t bump into Jesus, nor did he pass them by. . He went from being a stranger to traveling with them. Just like like that in that wonderful suddenness that the gospels have. It's an almost Markan moment, rather than Lukan, in its immediacy:  Suddenly Jesus was there and walking alongside them. He became in the end, quite literally, their companion.[1]

I don’t know which way Cleopas and the disciple were headed — towards Emmaus, or simply just getting away from Jerusalem like Brave Sir Robin. It’s clear that the disciples had no clear plan; they were grieving, confused, heartbroken and sad, and so  they set out on the road.

I love that scholars cannot agree where Emmaus is  — it is a very generic place name and the most ancient manuscripts we have give the distance  as anywhere from 7 to 160 stades,[2]

I think that vagueness is deliberate on Luke’s part, a stylistic confusion symbolic of the disciples own confused journey.  It was not important where the two disciples where headed,  just that it was away from Jerusalem, with no clear plan in mind beyond escape and grief.

And in that very broken journey, Jesus began travelling with them. Jesus, Luke writes, drew near — using the same word the synoptic Gospels use  when Jesus says the Kingdom is at hand.

You and I, we are only sometimes good at drawing near to God.  But Jesus, desires always to draw near to us. All the time, God draws near, to walk alongside us in our grief and confusion. To share the story that the prophets have been telling for ages. To ask us to tell our story. I love that moment in the Gospel today, Jesus innocently asking: “What things?”

People need to talk when important things happen to us, Barbara Crofton writes. We make a story out of the events in our lives. We discern the manner in which they fit together,  or else the randomness of life overwhelms us.  And, when terrible things happen – even life-threatening things, physical things, events demanding a practical and immediate response –  we continue to need to make a story of it in order to get through it.

Some of us do that naturally. Some of us don't know when to shut up. (That’s me.) Some of us struggle and need to be cued by Jesus.

What things? Jesus asks. They stood still and looked sad. And so Jesus invited them to begin telling their story, and he shared stories of his own.

Here’s a little piece that might be part of your story: How may of you are Godparents? Hold up your hand if you’re a godparent.  Thank you for your ministry. And most of you here have godparents, or if you were baptised as an adult you may have sponsors, mentors, and the witnesses of a whole congregation.

You might be surprised to learn that our word ‘gossip’ comes from the Old English ‘God sib’ — God siblings, the relationship between two godparents.  The word didn’t originally refer to backbiting and whispering that gets condemned in the epistles. It was that god sibs were – and are – expected to talk about, and with, their godchildren.

Whether or not we are godparents, as Christians we find, that people need traveling companions to share their joy, to share their grief. To set aside time to listen. Even if you have to bound it, to say I have a quarter hour or I have two miles or 60 stadea and I want to hear your story. To walk, to travel alongside ,sometimes literally. An invitation to a meal, to a prayer ,to a blessing, to be a companion — literally to share bread.

As they came near the village to which they were going, Jesus walked ahead as if he were going on. But they urged him strongly, saying, “Stay with us, because it is almost evening and the day is now nearly over.”

And it was in that invitation that their sorrow was changed to joy. Abide with us, the disciples say.  The King James Version has it quite clearly and it will be familiar to those of you who attend Compline: Abide with us, for the night is at hand and the day is now past.

Abide with us, through walking and stories. Through hospitality and breaking bread. Even just by slowing down and letting Jesus catch you up on the road.

That is is a ministry we all can do: to journey for a moment alongside a friend or a stranger. To tell stories, and share a meal, and break bread. We journey and tell stories and break bread because that is what the risen Lord has done for us. And in doing so, he has turned our sorrow into joy and made our joys ever more complete.

So, you might make plans today over coffee after church with someone you haven't seen for a while or an old friend or a newcomer. You might drop a note to your godchild or telephone one of your godparents.

The world is complicated, worrisome, confusing. We find ourselves turned around, walking away from Jerusalem instead of towards it. Now is the time to slow our pace and listen; to tell stories, to share meals and break bread. Making companions of one another. Making a companion of the one who abides with us always, even Jesus Christ, our constant companion on the road.

[1] Middle English: from Old French compaignon, literally ‘one who breaks bread with another’, based on Latin com- ‘together with’ + panis ‘bread’.

[2] “Seven Stades to Emmaus” Stephen Reece, New Testament Studies , Volume 48 , Issue 2 https://www.academia.edu/30821102/Seven_Stades_to_Emmaus

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.