We Sing of Loyal Lydia

Sermon, preached at Matins on the 11th Sunday after Trinity at St Mary Abbots Church, Kensington.

Lessons: 2 Kings 4.1-37, Acts 16.1-15

Let us pray: Father, all these words and thoughts that come from Thee, wilt Thou bless them and make them fruitful. And all those words that come not from Thee, but from our own vanity, wilt Thou forgive. Amen.

We have just heard in our New Testament lesson about the meeting between Paul and a woman called Lydia in the city of Philippi.

What does purple mean to you? What does it say? I have a friend from my days as a Chapel Intern in Oxford who is known throughout the diocese (and in the Prayer Book Society and on General Synod!) for only wearing purple, and to me, this part of Acts always makes me think of her, and how easy, these days, she finds it to find clothes in her colour of choice!

It didn’t used to be like that. Dyes were natural, not synthetic, and the dye for purple was made from a juice found in minute quantities in shellfish. It took thousands of crustaceans to make a yard or two of purple cloth. So it was very expensive, worth its weight in silver it was said. It was a statement of status and wealth, the Gucci handbag, the Rolex watch or Kensington townhouse of Roman times.

And that’s what Lydia is selling. She’s selling purple; purple cloth, purple robes, the power of purple. She’s not local. She’s from Thyatira, a town well known for making purple cloth. She seems to be the head of her household, there’s no husband around, even though she’s a travelling trader. And if she’s a seller of purple, she’s not poor, because she couldn’t have afforded her stock.

She’s not Jewish, but she believes in God. She’s what the Jews knew as a ’Godfearer’ – someone who worships in the synagogue, but hasn’t converted completely to Judaism.

So here is this rich, confident woman, meeting Paul for the first time. Who was never rich, and must have been anything but confident at that point in his ministry.

It had all started so well. Paul and Barnabas had travelled through Asia, founding churches and setting people on fire for the gospel. But they had come back to a less than rapturous welcome from the Jerusalem church, who wanted to know why they were baptising Gentiles. Then Paul had fallen out with Barnabas, and set off on his next journey with Silas instead.

In a way which he doesn’t explain, Paul felt the Spirit had forbidden them to go back to Asia. Wherever he tries to go he feels he is rebuffed, until finally he is called in a dream to Macedonia. He goes to Philippi, on the outer fringe of the Jewish diaspora, where he finds no synagogue where he could preach the gospel; so he goes to the river probably looking for Jewish leaders, and finds ’only’ women.

And there he meets Lydia. Lydia who has had her heart opened by the Holy Spirit, so that she can hear the message of God. Remember this verse: ” The Lord opened her heart to listen eagerly to what was said by Paul.”

It is excruciatingly difficult, sometimes, to talk to people about our faith. We get tongue-tied, we feel foolish, we feel that no-one could possibly be convinced by what we have to say. And that’s quite right, they can’t. But they can have their hearts opened by the Spirit, just waiting for a Christian to put into words, or better still into actions, the meaning of their faith in Jesus. We don’t have to convert people, the Spirit does that. All we have to do is speak honestly and openly about what faith means for us.

So Paul, who seemed this time to be on a mission that was going nowhere, meets the woman who will be the lynchpin of the church in Philippi. Other churches give him nothing but grief, the Philippians are a constant source of support for him, financial as well as spiritual. His letter to them is one of the warmest of the epistles. He’s founded a church in what seemed an unlikely place, and it’s been one of his success stories.

And it happened because he listened to the Spirit, heard and obeyed when the Spirit said “no”, went where the Spirit called him, and met Lydia the seller of purple, whose heart the Spirit had opened.

Sometimes – not all the time, but sometimes – there is a reason why things don’t seem to go right. The house sale that falls through. The job offer that doesn’t come. Sometimes it just is what it is, and we have to cope and try again. But sometimes it seems that it really is God’s providence; that he has a plan for us, and is just waiting for us to see it, listen to the voice of the Spirit, and follow.

Lydia, the seller of purple. Is this just a story of Lydia and Paul, or is it more? One of my favourite shows on television is Cruising with Jane McDonald – I love travel shows, and this is more or less what this part of Acts is! The book of Acts is a journey; a journey of the gospel from Jerusalem to Asia and then on to Rome. And here, near the middle of the story, as Paul leaves Asia for the first time, he meets Lydia the seller of purple.

Purple wasn’t just an indicator of wealth. It was a symbol of political power. The more important you were as a Roman senator, the more purple decoration you had on your tunic and your toga. The emperor, and only the emperor, would wear a toga made entirely of purple cloth. Purple was the colour of the Roman elite. In fact, it’s still not cheap -in 2008, a German scientist recreated purple dye using the ancient recipe, and found that the cost of 1 gram of purple dye was in excess of £1,000!

Some people claim that, in the running-up to his crucifixion, Our Lord himself was dressed in purple – perhaps that’s why our clergy wear purple during the penitential seasons of Lent and Advent?!

And here, as the message of the gospel crosses the Aegean and moves towards the heart of the Graeco-Roman world, here the imperial purple and the message of the kingdom meet. (Some people claim that Lydia was the first leader of a Christian congregation in mainland Europe – as a woman, nonetheless!)

But they don’t meet on a battlefield. They don’t meet in a trial of strength – ’my God is more powerful than your God’, or ‘Anything you can do I can do better’ (to quote Annie get your gun). How can a faith that’s based on a God who humbled himself to be a man, who was prepared to die for humanity because he loved us so much, who was prepared to submit to torture and degradation and humiliation – how can a faith like that truly be spread by power politics and strength of arms?

No, the battle between Roman power and the message of the Gospel meet in the heart of a woman. A woman who sold luxury goods to the elite and the powerful, but who knew there was something more to life. A woman whose heart was prepared by the Holy Spirit to hear the call of Jesus, and to follow him. May we, like her, as we just sung, dare to daily live God’s Word.

Amen.

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“This man is exactly where he needs to be tonight”

Photo by Erik-Jan Leusink on Unsplash

Sermon, preached on the 23rd July 2023 – 7th Sunday after Trinity and the Feast of St Bridget of Sweden.

Readings: Genesis: 28:10-19; Psalm 139:1-11, Romans 8:12-25; S Matthew 13:24-30, 36-43

No, for in gathering the weeds, you would uproot the wheat along with them. In Nomine +

She was one of the few Swedes who can be said to have founded a still thriving monastic order, to be mentioned in a public address by Pope St John Paul II, and she accused the Swedish King and Queen at the time to be guilty of “erotic deviation, extravagance and murderous plot”. (Let me just clarify that yours truly, despite being one of her compatriots, would never resort to such a drastic turn of phrase….)

I am talking, of course, of the Swedish saint and co-patroness of Europe St Bridget of Sweden who would have been commemorated today, had today not been a Sunday. Now, some of you might wonder how a 14th Century Swedish noblewoman relates to St Matthew’s writings we just heard. Bear with me, I will get there eventually.

First, a little bit more about Bridget – or Birgitta in Swedish.

Born in 1303 she was the daughter of once of the richest landowners in Sweden at the time, and married a nobleman at a young age. Throughout her marriage she was very active in various charitable works, focusing mainly on unmarried mothers and their children.

During her childhood Bridget frequently had visions, both of the Nativity of Christ and of His Passion and Death, and she prayed for a long time to know how many blows Christ suffered in His passion, and eventually she was rewarded when the Saviour appeared to her and told her the number 5480. It is said that he then devised a form of prayer which, if you say them daily for a full year, you will have prayed for each of His Wounds.

She was eventually made lady-in-waiting to the Swedish queen at the time (the one I referred to at the beginning of my sermon), and after her husband died, she founded the Order of the Most Holy Saviour, these days more commonly known as the Bridgettines (who today have one English house, in Birmingham to be precise, and whose superior general was one of the few personal friends of Pope St John Paul I).

In 1350 Bridget went out on a pilgrimage to Rome, both to seek authorisation for the establishment of her order, and to pursue her mission to elevate the moral tone of the age. In Rome she soon became much beloved by the poor but ruffled a few feathers in her zeal for moral reform and fight to end the Avignon papacy and making the Pope return to Rome.

All of this work, to try and improve the moral standards of the Swedish court (I’m told by reliable sources that at least some of the current occupants of the Royal Palace in Stockholm are of a much more sedate nature than their 14th century predecessors), to found a religious order and to make the Roman clergy live according to the rules of the Church were all things Bridget did driven by her visions of our Lord and Saviour, her absolute trust and confidence in His mercy and her willingness to live a more Christ-like life.

Much like in St Bridget’s time, using parables to do with farming was a good way for Our Lord himself to be understood by his audience. Initially, the rather feisty Bridget would most likely have referred to the Swedish monarchs as weed, being, from what we have heard from some of her pronouncements, a woman inclined to see the world somewhat in black and white.

Poor sinner that I am, however, I struggle to see the world as a monochrome, black and white, society, where we know perfectly well what is right and what is wrong. It is very easy to, to allude to another famous parable from earlier in Matthew’s Gospel, to keep seeing the mote in our neighbour’s eye but not the beam in our own OR – for that matter – that a matter isn’t clearly black or white.

It could be something as dramatic as Christian missionaries coming to non-Christian territories wanting to bring them the Good News of the Gospel, but while doing so suppressing – and sometimes oppressing – a thriving culture that had been there for ages and ages, OR something as simple as sending clothes to an earthquake zone abroad, wanting to send aid to the needy, but not realising that they are flooding an already fragile clothes industry with free clothes, thereby destroying peoples’ livelihood.

It is perhaps instinctive to do (like I’m sure St Bridget, with all her blessings, was prone to do) like the servants wanted to – gather the weeds and burn them. I would like to propose that that is not our role as Christians, rather we should take on the role of the householder and leave things be, not to uproot what is good amongst what is evil, resting in the faith that Our Lord will do the sorting at the time He sees fit.

I am not saying this in relation to anything here in this parish – but rather as a general rule for all of us as Christians and, indeed, something I struggle with myself far too much. It is far too easy to be overly moralistic (like my beloved compatriot) and think “Oh, he’s gay” , “oh, her child is born outside of wedlock” (just like yours truly) , “oh, he’s divorced” or “oh, she didn’t come to church last Sunday” and not leave to the Son of Man to judge at the end of the age.

Let me leave you with a little story:

A grown son took his mother to Christmas Eve worship. She was a teetotaler who did not approve of anyone drinking alcohol. As they sat down, the son noticed a disheveled man sitting in front of them whose head jerked back every few seconds. Initially the son presumed the man had a nervous tic—until he discerned the flask in the man’s hand! The son was horrified, worrying that his mother might also notice the man drinking and demand the ushers escort him out; but when she did notice, the mother whispered into her son’s ear, “That man is exactly where he needs to be tonight.”

And so let us all, together, continue making St Thomas the place where someone can come to be exactly where they need to be, today and tomorrow, and where there continues to be, to quote the hymn, “Love, vast as the ocean”.

Amen.

St John Chrysostom, a shark and a little bit about LLMs

Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood abide in me, and I in them. In Nomine +
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Dear Friends, when writing this sermon I started off thinking about what has been a common denominator for all the parishes I have been in and felt at home, and I agree with what I thought at my first ever visit here (at Fr Sam’s installation), that we are a church (capital AND lower-case C) that our Church is a place of friendship and support, rooted in the Eucharist.
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Just before the Peace, I will be “read in” as your Reader, and while I have had the joy and honour (with the then Bishop of Kensington, Dr Graham Tomlin and Fr Sam’s permission) to preach here since 2019, I am very happy to now have the Diocesan Bishop, Bishop Sarah’s, official license to say that I am now one of the two licensed ministers – the other one being the Vicar – to whom I should direct my first thanks for being a generous Training Incumbent (whom I promised during my licensing to obey in all things lawful and honest!), but above all, my thanks go out to you all, for welcoming a stray Swede, for listening to my sermons, for teaching me more than I have taught you about the Bible, through conversations and through the Bible Studies I have covered here and there, and in general, for being the St Thomas Family.
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At my licensing last Wednesday, the Bishop started with these words:
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God has gathered us into the fellowship of the universal Church. As members together of his body, Christ calls us to minister in his name and, according to our gifts, to be instruments of his love in the world. Within this ministry, Readers are called to serve the Church of God and to work together with clergy and other ministers. They are to lead public worship, to preach and teach the word of God, to assist at the eucharist and to share in pastoral and evangelistic work. As authorized lay ministers, they are to encourage the ministries of God’s people, as the Spirit distributes gifts among us all. They are called to help the whole Church to participate in God’s mission to the world.
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I have been training for this role for 3 years, and I very much look forward to continue to walk together with you as the St Thomas family, today and in the years to come!
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So – over to the readings we have just heard…
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An atheist was swimming in the ocean one day. Suddenly he saw a shark in the water, so he started swimming furiously toward his boat. He looked back and saw the shark turn and head towards him. He was scared to death, and as he saw the jaws of the great white beast open, revealing its horrific teeth, he screamed “Oh God! Save me!”
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In an instant, time was frozen and a bright light shone down from above. The man was motionless in the water when he heard the voice of God say, “You are an atheist. Why do you call up on me when you do not believe in me?” The man was confused and knew he could not lie, so he replied, “Well, that’s true. I don’t believe in you, but what about the shark? Can you make the shark believe in you?”
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The Lord replied, “As you wish,” and the light retracted back into the heavens. The man felt the water move once again. As he looked back, he saw the jaws of the shark start to close down on him, when all of a sudden the shark stopped and pulled back. The man watched as the huge beast closed its eyes, bowed its head, and said, “Thank you Lord for this food which I’m about to receive…”
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Like many things that are good and holy in the Church today, the feast we are celebrating today was made possible by a nun. Sister Julianna of Liege, born in the twelfth century, did all the groundwork that was needed for us to celebrate what is officially known as The Day of the Most Holy Body and Blood of Jesus Christ the Lord, or, in the Anglican Kalendar, Day of Thanksgiving for the Institution of Holy Communion, today in St Thomas’ in 2023.
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At the time, however, it must have been rather offensive for the Jewish audience – not only is the consuming of blood strictly forbidden according to the kashrut dietary laws, but the word for eat used is more akin to devour or the more primal way of eating we see among animals. In the verse that follows directly after the Gospel reading we just heard, John writes “When many of his disciples heard it, they said, “This teaching is difficult; who can accept it?”. Let us turn to the experts:
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St John Chrysostom (or John the Golden-mouthed), the 4th Century Church Father (who was a Reader too!) said that in this Gospel passage, Christ “brought his body down to our level, namely, that we might be one with Him as the body is joined with the head”, and in the passage from Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians, we did hear Paul recall the institution of the Eucharist, and that is what John’s gospel too is all about.
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We are being told about the life-giving reconciliation and redemption that we were given that day when Our Lord himself died on the cross for us and today we celebrate that very same feast where bread and wine joins us with the LIVING Christ, and we belong to (and with) Christ in this community that is eternal, not for any major achievement of our own, but through the action of the One who laid down his life for the sins of the cosmos.
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And that, my friends, is exactly what we are celebrating today. We are being saved, not by our enemies saying grace before supper like the shark did, but by that overwhelming Love God had for us, when he sacrificed his only Son, our Saviour, on the cross for our sins.
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Let me finish with one of my favourite poems about the Eucharist, Love by George Herbert:
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LOVE bade me welcome; yet my soul drew back,             
Guilty of dust and sin.
But quick-eyed Love, observing me grow slack     
From my first entrance in,
Drew nearer to me, sweetly questioning             
If I lack’d anything.
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‘A guest,’ I answer’d, ‘worthy to be here:’            
Love said, ‘You shall be he.’
‘I, the unkind, ungrateful? Ah, my dear,             
I cannot look on Thee.’ Love took my hand and smiling did reply,             
‘Who made the eyes but I?’
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‘Truth, Lord; but I have marr’d them: let my shame             
Go where it doth deserve.’
‘And know you not,’ says Love, ‘Who bore the blame?’            
 ‘My dear, then I will serve.’ ‘You must sit down,’ says Love, ‘and taste my meat.’            
 So I did sit and eat.
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Amen.

Form our hands for service AND prayer

SERMON, preached at the Easter Vigil 2023 at St Thomas, Kensal Town

Gospel: S Matthew 28:1-10

Brothers and Sisters – Alleluia! Christ is risen!

Easter is like what it will be entering eternity when you suddenly, peacefully, clearly recognise all your mistakes as well as all that you did well: everything falls into place. In Nomine +

I was a bit of a church geek (and if the Vicar says anything, I’ll throw salt in his post-Mass bubbly!) growing up in my native Sweden, and the Church of Sweden had one single authorised hymnal from the time I turned 3 until the time I moved to the UK in 2013, so most frequent church goers would the hymns and their words, be it in central Stockholm or in the rural north, and my absolute favourite hymn (number 154 in the Swedish Ecumenical Hymnal, if anyone wants to know!) was one of the Easter hymns, which (somewhat roughly translated) begins like this:

Your hands are full of flowers,
to whom did you intend to give them?
Our flowers were intended for the grave of Christ,
but he’s not there, and his grave is empty!

and I think this hymn rather gloriously tell of the confusion that the two Marys must have felt coming to the tomb. They were going to lament the loss of the Messiah, to put flowers at the grave of their dead Master, and then – BOOM! Not only the surprise of seeing an angel, but an actual earthquake! It was enough to make the guards swoon, and from what history (and Monty Python’s Life of Brian) tell us, Roman Centurions didn’t swoon easily. The angel sits on the stone that was sealed shut by the chief priests and Phariesees , and the grave is empty! Mary Magdalene and the other Mary (the mother of the fishermen) had seen Joseph of Arimathea putting Jesus in the tomb themselves, and yet now, he was not there.
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Christ had – much like Fr Sam just sang in the Exsultet – broken the prison-bars of death and risen victorious from the underworld, AAAAAAAAND left. The angel then tasked Mary and Mary Magdalene with that message of unbelievable joy, to go and tell Christ’s disciples that He has been raised from the dead. They have been tasked to proclaim the Good News – the Evangelium – or, as we say in English – the Gospel. These two women became, one might say, the first post-resurrection evangelists.

‌On their way to proclaim the Good News to the disciples, Jesus himself meets them, and greets them, and then again tells them not to be afraid, and then to go and tell the people where they can see Him again. Let us re-visit that again – the final verse of today’s Gospel – “Then Jesus said to them ‘Do not be afraid’”.

This is NOT Christ telling his disciples that nothing will ever go wrong for them – I’m sure Paul would have one or two things to say about that – but rather the assurance that, whatever may happen to us, whatever a day may hold, God has the power to strengthen us and uphold us; that whatever we must face, we do not face it alone; that nothing we encounter is stronger than God’s love; that ultimately God gets the last word; that in the end—and sometimes even before the end—God’s love is triumphant. Only God can offer such assurance, and that is why, in the end, only God, be it as Father, Son or Holy Spirit, can say, “Do not be afraid,” and say it with authority.

‌In a way, this is also what we as a church (and I am not just talking about those of us gathered together here in St Thomas and those who join us online, but the worldwide Church, have at the very core of our being – that quotation from St John’s Gospel (or as we called it in Sweden – the Little Bible) – ‘For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life’.

You might well have heard a preacher, thinking he was being clever (in fact, it might even have been yours truly not too long ago), saying that every Sunday is Easter Sunday, and in a way this remains true. Every Sunday we celebrate Christ’s death and resurrection through the Most Holy Sacrament of the Altar, but tonight is the celebration par excellence of this most Holy Mystery.

‌Tonight is, in a way, the ultimate celebration of the Christian faith. We have the renewal of baptismal vows – how through the waters of baptism we let the old man die and then we rise again as members of the Church. We have Christ, through a miracle, being raised from the dead, and meeting the two women. We are, as it were, at the pinnacle of Christian faith – the penitence and death of Lent and the Triduum culminates in the absolute Easter Joy

‌I know that one of the Vicar’s candidates for immediate sainthood is the American Trappist monk Thomas Merton, who summarises the Easter Joy – OUR Easter Joy – rather well in these words: Easter is like what it will be entering eternity when you suddenly, peacefully, clearly recognise all your mistakes as well as all that you did well: everything falls into place.

‌And so let us then, together, with that very joy that Mary and Mary Magdalene showed and the recognition that, for once, our lives have fallen into place, albeit shortly, go out and proclaim these glad Easter tidings – the very same Evangelium that the two Marys were tasked with – with our words as much as with our lives, just as the final verse of the Swedish hymn I mentioned earlier says (equally roughly translated):

Jesus, risen you stand amongst us,
alive and suffering on Earth today.
Our eyes are made to see you,
form our hands for service AND prayer.

Which is, why we, together with our brother and sister Christians across the world join in the triumphant cry: Alleluia – Christ is risen! He is risen indeed, alleluia!

Alphabetically Me: Obambulate

Photo by Marianna on Pexels.com

Merriam Webster defines OBAMBULATE as “to walk about or wander”

Alphabetically me was a series I started during lockdown when I couldn’t really leave the house. While lockdown is now over (for the time being – there seem to be people who want to reintroduce the curfews again!) I set the various words to write about in this series during lockdown, when just wandering was one of the things I desired the most. During the three-quarters of a year I spent in London before we were forbidden to visit parks and churches, one of my favourite hobbies was going on long walks. (My favourite example was my walk from Westbourne Park to Canary Wharf in the summer of 2019!)

For some reason, post-lockdown, I seem to have lost this hobby. I am not sure if this comes from becoming lazy after having been cooped up in my bedroom for more or less two years, or if it is because the Russian invasion of Ukraine has made everything so expensive one can’t even afford to go out and have a ‘spoons lunch when out and about.

At the moment, I live more or less right between Kensington Gardens and Holland Park, with both of them being less than 10 minutes away – so I should really get my act together, shouldn’t I?

I wonder what it will take me to resume my favourite hobby again?

2022 – A Year in Review

I normally write one of these posts every year, but apparently I forgot to do so in 2021, so that year will remain undocumented on my blog. However, here’s my 2022 in review.

January 2022 – I started the year celebrating New Year’s Eve with my family in Northern Sweden, followed by – hopefully my last – quarantine until I got a negative PCR test. This was quickly followed by a catch-up with an old friend near the Battersea Power Station (from which the photo above is), as well as lots of LLM course work alongside catching up with other friends, and, of course, doing my day job.

February 2022 – Yet another month of lots of work, as well as the start of the Queen’s anniversary celebration with Accession Day. I saw quite a few friends (including the trip to the London Transport Museum from which the above photo is), tried to help my Vicar host the Shrove Tuesday pancake party and was admitted as a full member of the Church of England Guild of Vergers.

March 2022 – The Lenten highlight of March was the sponsored walk (see above for a photo BEFORE we set out on the 10K walk!) I did with some friends and colleagues from work raising money for Glass Door, our local homelessness charity here in the Royal Borough. I was very humbled to manage to raise the money I aimed for, so if you donated – many thanks! They can always do with more money, so find their donation page here. As always, lots of work, including behind the scenes tours of both the London Metropolitan Archive and the Victoria & Albert Museum. Quite a lot of socialising was also on the agenda, wie immer.

April 2022 – Was, as almost always, Easter Month (the photo above is the Altar of Repose from church on Maundy Thursday evening). Not much happened socially before Holy Week, and then during Holy Week I was in church for every single service, and preached for Easter Day, followed by a lovely lunch at the club! (For those interested, all my sermons I’m happy to share can be found on this blog, looking at the “Preaching” category.) Lots of work as always, including picking up the virge again a few times, as well as dinners with friends.

May 2022 – The main highlight of May was the Affordable Art Fair in Hampstead, but all the photos I took of the art I saw were crap. Being at a really big event for the first time after the pandemic restrictions were (finally!) 100% lifted was a bit overwhelming for someone who hates crowds to begin with, but it was great seeing some really good art. The only sadness was the fact that I don’t have my own flat, so I couldn’t really buy anything. Towards the end of the month, I flew home (photos from the tarmac at LGW) to start my spring holiday with a few days with the folks in Northern Sweden, and then continued down to Stockholm for a lovely 23-hour cruise on the very new Viking Glory with my friend Monika. I used to love the Baltic Sea cruises, and it was my first since I moved to Oxford in 2017, so it was great fun to be on one again, and I fear I overindulged myself on the smorgasbord…

June 2022 – After the cruise, I had a few days with my sister and her bf, and then one of my best friends from my time in Oxford joined me in Stockholm for a the best part of a week (the photo above is from one of the alleys in Stockholm’s Old Town – or Gamla Stan). It was the first time I was back in the city that was my home for over 10 years since lockdown, and it was absolutely glorious. We did all the touristy things – a list of my Stockholm recommendations can be found here. We visited more or less all the museums listed, and it was great to pop the guide badge on again and take a friend around the city. Occasionally (especially now with COL having gone up so much in London), I sometimes still want to move back to Stockholm… Once I got back to London, things were full on, including the priestly ordination and First Mass of a good friend and some club dinners with friends – at their clubs, not mine, for once! Towards the end of the month I also finished the first of two two-year halves of my Reader training through the Diocese of London.

July 2022 – Another busy month at work, but the first event in the diary outside of work was the Pilgrimage to the Shrine of Our Lady of Willesden (altar party photo above), at which I was the Sub-Deacon at Mass (where Fr Matthew from St Anselm, Hayes, preached an almighty Word!) and then thurifer for Benediction. The Vicar at St Mary’s is an old friend of mine (part of the Twitter friends I met online before I moved to London and am ever so grateful for now that I live here!), so it was a great honour to be asked to come and help! Again, some socialising was squeezed in, and I remain very happy to be a member of my club!

August 2022 – Another busy month, including the Notting Hill Carnival (we kept the Church open throughout Carnival and welcomed over 400 people in, and the start of the trip (together with the aforementioned friend from Oxford) to my beloved Walsingham (the photo above is from the Blessed Sacrament Shrine in the Shrine Church). We stayed at the Priory of which I am an associate, as ever, and managed to squeeze in a museum railway trip to Wells as well as exploring Little Walsingham backwards and forwards.

September 2022 – We started the month at Church with a service to commemorate past, current and future, celebrated by the Archdeacon – so my first time being liturgical Deacon for an Archdeacon! (Dealing with him both through work and church, all of us in the Archdeaconry of Middlesex are very lucky to have Archdeacon Richard, who is the celebrant in the photo above!). September also had the wedding of two close friends, and the catch-ups with numerous more. We also started the final half of my LLM/Reader training with the Diocese, and the month of course also had the sad passing of Her Late Majesty the Queen, may she rest in peace.

October 2022 – Found me walking past this massive erection at one point (The Monument to the Great Fire of London). The same day brought me to our Diocesan Cathedral for Evensong. There’s something special about cathedral evensongs that I miss from my time as a verger in Oxford! We also had a really great away day with my Church (as opposed to work…) PCC, trying to articulate our mission in W10. I am a very lucky man, looking forward to be licensed to minister with the saints of Kensal Town!

November 2022 – Held, among other things, a friend’s birthday party, where I showed up, pretending to be Dr Pusey. The two things that weren’t my own were the tabs and the Canterbury cap! I also managed a lot of catching up with friends, a work Christmas Fair (for which I was responsible for all tills and card machines!) It also had the liturgical New Year – Advent.

December 2022 – The month of the first snow since I moved to Kensington, alongside my birthday party, seeing friends, leading a Carol Service, preaching twice, and being very grateful to close friends ensuring I am spending Christmas Day AND Boxing Day in the bosoms of London families of dear friends. Soon, I’ll be off home to finish the year with my Swedish family, so I wish you a Merry Christmas and a Happy New 2023!!

There were no computers in Bethlehem

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SERMON

Preached at Midnight Mass 2022, St Thomas, Kensal Town

Readings: Isaiah 9:2-7; Psalm 96; Titus 2:11-14; Luke 2:1-20

Glory to God in the highest heaven,and on earth peace among those whom he favors! In Nomine +

Let me start by stating the obvious. Something everyone knows. But sometimes, one has to state the obvious. There were no computers in the stable in Bethlehem. There were no computers in the stable in Bethlehem. There were no plugs, no cables, and no speakers or antennae. No screens, no broadband no Twitter, Facebook or Snapchat. . To make a long story short: in the stable in Bethlehem, there were none of the things we use to mark someone’s existence. None of those things we need to show that we exist or to let people know that something has happened. In the stable in Bethlehem, there were no computers, none of the things we used to prove that we exist.

And still, over 2000 years later, with another language and culture, and many miles, kings, wars, popes, events and events that changed the world, we watch our crib. Year after year, Christmas after Christmas, we see the crib here, Joseph, Mary, the Christchild, angels, donkey, sheep, the Magi, the stars and the shepherds. All those characters from Luke’s account of the First Christmas. And now that we see them all there just like last year, and the year before, and the year before, one starts to ponder what it would have been like to be there AT THE TIME, and how they found it.

What did they think? What did they feel? Would they have felt differently if they’d known that we, thousands of years later, would still look at them, and ponder this specific event? What was it like, one asks, and one feels the tide of history. And then I watch the kneeling shepherds. The shepherds. These men with a laborious and dangerous jobs. Those whose jobs meant that they were at the bottom rung of the social ladder. They belonged to those who lived their lives without appreciation or even attention.

They would probably never be noted in societal conversation and discourse. Shepherds were simply not noticed. And then, this night, as they lie by their fire to keep the darkness, the cold, and the danger away. Suddenly they meet a sight that they’ve never seen before, and, while their initial reaction is fear, they are eventually captured by what they see and hear. The sight, the song and the message they most likely never thought they’d find, all of a sudden steps right into their lives.

‌Just like the universe, just for a second, has opened the curtain and revealed its mystery. And they are very moved by what they see. The sight touches them and gives them a memory for the rest of their lives. And once the singing is over, the angels are gone, the glowing sky dark, and the night is silent again. Then they say, we must go to see this with our own eyes. They don’t stay there, staring into space to relive the experience they just had, they don’t try to savour the emotion, nor do they stay to talk, discuss and analyse what just happened. Nor do they try to find out if they hadn’t lost their marbles, or if they had hallucinated.

‌No, they simply go to see with their own eyes! And finally, they come to the place of this Miracle, and they meet… A stable. An ass, an ox, a lonely young family, a wrinkly baby, a young mother who has just given birth, with all that mess of blood, sweat and tears. There they come, the men who had gone to see the Messiah, and THIS is what they meet. Personally, I think that I would have been disappointed and started to wonder if I’d heard angles on high just a moment ago. Or if I’d misheard or hallucinated. It wouldn’t even remotely have met my expectations. Perhaps, I would simply have gone home!

‌But not the shepherds. They nod, hum, and say that everything was as they had been told. The shepherds don’t hesitate. Immediately, they recognise the divine in the mundane. They don’t struggle to see God, disguised in this lowly, dirty, forgotten appearance. For most of us, it can sometimes be difficult to see God. The divine doesn’t always have tangible contact with my daily life. And my days still go by. Summer, autumn and spring come and go. I go to work and return home. I eat, sleep, some days it rains and other days the sun shines. Some days life is good, other days a struggle. Life goes on, following the laws of nature, but one doesn’t always feel the divine intervention.

‌But sometimes, I start to wonder. Do I exist out of a pure coincidence? Where does everyone go when they leave this world? Is there a purpose to my life at all? We ask ourselves, time and time again if we’ve done the right or wrong things in the past. And sometimes it strikes me. How could something come from nothing? How could there come a homo sapiens from the big bang? Many people wonder about the purpose of life, if there is a God, some people have made up their minds that he doesn’t exist, some don’t care, and some spend their life looking.

‌He is an intangible entity, something that our minds can’t grasp, and a longing that we can’t put into words. And man stands there, almost as if he was made to be a question mark. With the question of the origin of man and his Creator just barely visible in the corner of your eye. Then, tonight happens. Jesus is born, God made flesh, he who is beyond our vocabulary comes and stands on the human stage. The intangible leaves His silence. As a stage and audience, he has chosen a carpenter named Joseph, a teenage girl to be a mother, a collection of shepherds, some animals, a star and a manger. His own body is an infant. God comes without computers and websites, without Twitter and Facebook. Without microphones or megaphones. Without shouting loudly, without trying to win fame and reputation. God comes slightly under the radar to mankind, the saviour of humankind sneaking in through the back door. And we can see a pattern starting to develop, a body in the shadows.

‌God doesn’t force Himself on a human by absolute concrete facts and doesn’t force anyone to worship him. Doesn’t try to win anyone over with indisputable facts. God gives man a chance to approach Him freely. God shows us His existence by a sign. The angels said to them “This will be a sign for you: you will find a child wrapped in bands of cloth”. God shows Himself by signs. We are given signs, traces and ideas. And perhaps, tonight the shepherds are role models for those of us looking for God. Maybe we, too, will dare to follow the signs without having all the facts. Maybe we dare to hold a faith that only occasionally flames up to be an absolute certainty, but just as frequently just shows itself as a quivering sense that yes, something might be there. Perhaps we, like the shepherds, can see the divine in the utterly mundane. Perhaps, this Christmas Night we, like the shepherds, will dare to open our hearts to that still small voice of calm that says that the God who lives beyond time and space has come to mankind for no other reason than that he wants to live with every one of us?

‌Merry Christmas!

‌Glory to God in the highest heaven,and on earth peace among those whom he favors! In Nomine +

Joseph as a role model

Sermon, preached on the 4th Sunday of Advent 2022 at St Thomas, Kensal Town

Readings: Isaiah 7.10-16; Psalm 80.1-18, 18-20; Romans 1.1-7; Matthew 1.18-end

“Joseph, son of David, do not be afraid to take Mary as your wife, for the child conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit”

In Nomine +

Joseph and Mary were, for lack of a more accurate word, engaged. Most scholars believe that Mary herself was around 15 years at the time. They didn’t even live together, and yet, all of a sudden, Mary finds herself pregnant. The story about that – the Angelus – we will sing together at the end of Mass. Much has been said about Mary and her faithfulness and bravery in saying those words – “Be it unto me according to Thy word”, but we hear precious little about Joseph, and so today we are given an opportunity to consider this carpenter.

‌We know that he was a carpenter – indeed, one of the attributes he frequently is pictured with – just like at our own shrine at the back of church – is a carpenters’ square. Some people claim that he was among those learned in Jewish scripture, but the one thing this Gospel passage tells us is that he was “a righteous man”.

He is celebrated as the patron saint of, amongst other things fathers, workers, especially carpenters, expecting mothers, unborn children, attorneys and barristers, emigrants, travellers and house hunters.

I wonder if we could actually put ourselves in St Joseph’s footsteps – He’s about to marry this woman, and all of a sudden she finds out that she’s pregnant. Pregnant by the Holy Spirit – who’d ever heard about such a thing?!? Soon she’ll claim that the dog ate her homework as well!

‌This would have been a massive scandal, and utterly, utterly humiliating for Joseph – to have your young bride-to-be pregnant by someone else. However, he didn’t take Mary to court for full divorce proceedings and confiscate her dowry – we are told that he was righteous, and rather planned to file a quiet note of divorce in front of just a couple of witnesses, thereby not scandalising Mary in the way that he himself thought he was scandalised.

‌Scandal at Christmas – don’t we all remember a lot of comedies on this specific theme – many of them involving a lot of running around on the stage and slamming doors! In this case, though, rather than having a door slammed shut, we see a door opened!

‌Just as the angel Gabriel appeared to his fiancee, a nameless angel here appears to Joseph, and explains to him that Mary has not been unfaithful to him, that the child is from the holy spirit, and that this son is to be the new Emmanuel – God is with us.

‌And then – as the Gospel tells us – “When Joseph awoke from sleep, he did as the angel of the Lord commanded him; he took her as his wife”.

‌It is incredulous to us today! This ‘righteous man’ Joseph, however, risked all to do what he felt led to do – regardless of the consequences. And the result, we believe, is that Jesus of Nazareth grew up nurtured in a family, with brothers and sisters, in the synagogue, protected and loved by an adoring mother and stepfather – to fulfill his destiny on earth: to be in the truest sense the Son of God and the Perfect Man.

‌The Bible generally does not give us a very good picture of fathers. Look at Herod, who slaughtered all the newborn male children out of fear; or Herod Antipas, who promised his daughter Salome anything, including the head of John the Baptist on a silver platter. Joseph could have become one of those fathers. He had every right to be upset, after all, Mary was carrying another man’s child. But he didn’t; even though Joseph was a ‘righteous man’, he chose another path.

‌Joseph believed in what the angel told him, so that what the prophets had said would happen would be foretold.

‌He ignored Jewish religious and cultural rules to do what was right, no matter what the consequences.

‌He maintained his integrity under what could have been severe public ridicule. He became a model to young Jesus, of a living, protective father and was the best stepfather he could be, showing unconditional, patient love.

‌Joseph helped raise Jesus to fulfill his destiny on earth. He showed him the kind of love that Jesus and God show us. He risked common opinion to do what was right, no matter what the consequences. And he had NO idea of what was going to happen to his little boy. Joseph was not the earthly father of Jesus, but showed to us what I believe to be a sense of complete trust in the Lord that I believe we are all called to.

‌And so, brothers and sisters, as we begin to look towards the great feast of the Nativity, still in the very last minutes of the Advent fast, maybe it is now incumbent on us, as we light the last purple candle in our Advent wreath to examine our hearts, to see if we are ready to abandon ourselves fully to God, to trust in him, to trust in that great gift that we are about to receive – Emmanuel. God Is WIth Us.

‌“Joseph, son of David, do not be afraid to take Mary as your wife, for the child conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit”

‌In Nomine +

Tempus Fugit

Context: I live in an Anglican boarding house near to work, with most (if not all) of my housemates being in their 20s.

The other day cooked for the house – chicken Stroganoff using MotherDearest’s recipe. During our dinner, some of my housemates (who are all young, but very accomplished) said when I complained about aches and tribulations “you’re not that old!”, and yes, they may well be right. I’m no more than 15 years older than most of them, but when we started discussing the things I can remember but they can’t, the room went silent. I can remember…

• Actual 3.5″ (not floppy) floppy disks
• CD-ROMs
• Mixtapes
• Film cameras
• iPods
• A London where one could barely use cards
• Being able to listen to an LP at the local library while reading paper books
• Public transport tickets and carnets (back home in Sweden) that were validated by a conductor with a stamp
• Rotary dial phones
• Windows 3.1
• Portable CD players
• Filing your tax returns on paper forms (that took ages to fill out, even for a trained accountant)
• Dial-up internet connections (those of us who remember the sound, will sigh nostalgically)
• Working in MS-DOS
• No security control when flying
• Swedish passports where the photos were physically glued to the page
• Mobile phones with pull-out antennaes and T9 dictionaries when texting
• Pagers
• Only having access to 2 channels on Swedish state television
• My first ever computer had a respectable 1 GB hard drive, these days my phone has 128 GB…
• Sending your dad a fax for Father’s Day
• Paying bills by cheque or giro envelope

Remembrance Sunday 2022

Sermon, Preached on the 2nd Sunday before Advent – Remembrance Sunday, at St Thomas, Kensal Town

Readings: Malachi 4.1-2a; Psalm 98; 2 Thess 3.6-13; Luke 21.5-19

They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old:
Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.
At the going down of the sun and in the morning
We will remember them

In Nomine +

I don’t know if the compilers of the Revised Common Lectionary had that in mind, but it is certainly a happy coincidence that we have a gospel that is so much focused on self-sacrifice on a day like Remembrance Sunday, where we remember all those who have fallen, fighting for freedom.

On Remembrance Sunday, the two parts of my heritage, one being from neutral Sweden (a country that hasn’t seen war since 1812) and the other from Norway that was occupied by the Nazis during the second world war, always compete between slight reprehension and heartfelt understanding.

We come together today, not to romanticise war, but to worship almighty God and to give thanks for all of those who have fallen, fighting for the freedom of this country and of many other countries.

Just as we remember Christ’s death every Sunday (and indeed in every Mass) “in broken bread and wine outpoured” – we hear, twice in the Eucharistic prayer, “Do this in remembrance of me”. As such, remembrance is at the heart of our life as Christians, and today, as we have on the second Sunday of November every year since 1946, we gather to remember more specifically those who fell in the two world wars.

Christ himself knew from the recitation of the Passover narrative each year that telling the story can keep a memory alive and present.

In his institution of the Eucharist, he taught us to remember, time after time, his sharing in OUR earthly suffering, his own personal sacrifice, but also the joyful message of Resurrection which follows the pain.

Elsewhere he taught us, as he went on to demonstrate, that “Greater love has no man, than that he lay down his life for another.”

So, too, today, we re-tell the story of those who, as we have just heard, “laid down their lives in the service of our country and in the cause of peace.”

We remember them, and by remembering them, we keep their memories and stories alive.

But in remembering, we also reflect year after year on the lessons which must be learnt from the cost of past conflict, that we are called by Christ to be peacemakers first and foremost, and to reach out to one another with love, compassion and understanding.

We must recognise within ourselves the lack of love and tolerance which can lead to discord, and seek to replace this with the desire to build bridges and to share the peace of Christ.

Those who have experienced the devastation and anguish of conflict can teach younger generations to strive for a better tomorrow.

We pray today for those who continue to bear arms on behalf of our nation, that they may have both courage and compassion.

We give thanks for all who strive for peace and who fight for justice, in all nations of the world.

This remembrance, this thanksgiving, comes shortly after two other major commemorations in the liturgical year, those of All Saints – where we honour all those holy men and women who have gone before us, living the life of the Gospel, and All Souls, where we remember and give thanks for those loved ones who are no longer with us.

It is perhaps apt that all these days of remembrance and thanksgiving, come so close to the start of the new church year, where we are told so much about the hope of the coming of Christ, and even more so that the liturgical year then takes to the joy of His nativity, and, eventually, to that glorious hope of His Resurrection.

This means that our remembrance does not necessarily have to be one of just sorrow and grief, but one in which we know that there is hope, hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ, and also the hope that we will, at one point, meet again.

They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old:
Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.
At the going down of the sun and in the morning
We will remember them

In Nomine +