My Newsletter

Upcoming Events, Two Sermons

Notes for daily Bible reading are available in Church for 50p. * If you e mail me, I’ll send you these notes free as an attachment. The 50p is only to pay for the paper! Or see other web page.

Shared lunches every first Wednesday and every Wednesday in Lent in Church Hall 12.00.

Dates For Your Diaries

28th July: 2.30 pm Strawberry Tea with Thelma Partridge at 140, Broomhill Road, Strood.

*7th August: Tea With the Wells (204, Bush Road) 2.30 – 4.00.

*14th August: Coffee With Phyllis (9, The Street) 10.00 – 12.00

21st August: Barbecue With the Beaneys (95, Pilgrims Road)

23rd August: 2.00 Teddy Bears’ Picnic, St John’s Church.

29th August: 7.30 Bible Study @ Rectory

*31st August: Cheese & Wine With the Rector (The Rectory) 7.30 onwards.

8th September: 2.30 pm Cream Tea with Thelma Partridge at 140, Broomhill Road, Strood.
Also Christian Aid Quiz at St Francis, Strood.

15th September: 2.30 pm Cream Tea with Thelma Partridge at 140, Broomhill Road, Strood.

29th September: Soirée after Patronal Festival Eucharist (6.30) at Cuxton.

7th October: Harvest Supper at Halling.

27th October: Quiz in Church Hall.

On October 13th Frank Smith will be giving a photograph presentation at St John’s illustrating Halling over the last 100 years. Watch this space.

*Events marked with an asterisk are to raise funds for Andrew Daunton-Fear our CMS link mission partner in the Philippines.

Please give Thelma a ring on 722093 to say that you are coming to the events at 140 Broomhill Road.

Science and Religion Forum
President: Professor John Hedley Brooke, Chairman: Professor Neil Spurway.
http://www.srforum.org Registered Charity Number 1034657

The 2007 Annual Conference
Theology Evolution And The Mind
6th – 8th September 2007
Canterbury Christ Church University, England

The Main Speakers
Speakers: Prof. Steven Mithen (Prehistory of Mind and Religion), Prof. Neil Spurway (What can Evolved Minds know of God?) Prof. Roger Trigg (Are we Ghosts or Machines?), Dr. Fraser Watts (Evolution, Religion and Theology) and Dr. Jeremy Law (A Theological Reflection on the Development of the Brain/Mind in Homo Sapiens).

Short papers (maximum 15 minutes) on the conference theme
may be submitted by participants.

For all bookings and further information contact: Rev’d Roger Knight, SRF Conference, The Rectory, 6, Rochester Road, Cuxton, Rochester, Kent, ME2 1AF, England, Tel: +44 (0)1634 717134; Email: RogerKnight@aol.com

Two Sermons
An Irrelevant God? A Sermon for Quinquagesima
Exodus 34 vv 29-35 p94, 2 Corinthians 3 v12 – 4 v2 p1160, Luke 9 vv 28-36 p1040

By the word of the LORD were the heavens made; and all the host of them by the breath of his mouth. Psalm 33 v6.
And the Word was made flesh and dwelt among us, (and we beheld his glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father,) full of grace and truth. John 1 v14.
For the word of God is quick, and powerful, and sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing even to the dividing asunder of soul and spirit, and of the joints and marrow, and is a discerner of the thoughts and intents of the heart. Hebrews 4 v12.

Classic Christianity proclaims that God is all in all. He not only created everything that exists, but He is also responsible for everything that happens. So we sing:
He only is the Maker of all things near and far;
He paints the wayside flower, He lights the evening star;
The winds and waves obey Him, by Him the birds are fed,
Much more to us, His children, He gives our daily bread.

If you recognise that God is like that, every sunset is a reason to be thankful, every meal deserves a grace and prayer is the natural response to every problem.

God is interested in us as individuals and He cares about the way we live our lives. Classic Christianity teaches that God not only looks after each human being, but also that He judges us for the way we live. Every one of us is accountable to God for what we do in our lives. God’s Law is revealed in the Bible and taught by the Church. We are rewarded or punished as we deserve (in this world and the next) and the standard by which we are judged is God’s Word, to which Holy Scripture bears witness.

That is classic Christianity. It is my fear that the world in which we live is drifting away from classic Christianity towards a practical atheism in which God, if He exists at all, is largely irrelevant. It is also my fear that we, who call ourselves Christians, are in danger of drifting with the world towards the rocks of atheism, instead of fulfilling our true vocation, which is to act as a light to warn of the dangers and to illuminate the way.

As I said, classic Christianity sees the Hand of God in everything. Every flower that blooms, every bird that sings is a miracle. God makes the sun rise and set. Children are a gift from the LORD. The lions roaring after their prey, seek their food from God. This is the world of Jesus, Who said that not a sparrow falls to the earth outside the love of God. For Jesus, God feeds the birds and clothes the grass of the field with the wild flowers. Will He not much more feed you, O ye of little faith?

But we are too sophisticated to share the naïve faith of Jesus. With all the blessings of modern Science, we think we know how the world works. The sun rises and sets because the earth is spinning. Crops need fertilising not blessing. If you are ill, you take medicine rather than pray. God is a hypothesis of which we believe we have no need. There is no room for God in this world. People are either atheists – believing that the Universe exists in itself and that there is no God – or they are deists – believing that God created the Universe a very long time ago and set it to run (like an immense and complex mechanism) according to certain rules and principles, but not being at all involved in every day affairs. Deism (believing that God is a remote mechanic) is practically the same thing as atheism. There is no immediate reason to be thankful for a particular flower or a meal or the birth of a child. All these things are simply the effects of the blind operation of scientific laws. Neither is there any point in prayer if God does not intervene in the day to day running of the Universe - unless perhaps it is to make the person saying the prayers feel better.

We are also too sophisticated to share Jesus’ naïve belief in divine Law and its concomitant judgment and the need for forgiveness. For a start, our society does not really believe in moral absolutes. “Everything is relative. It is all shades of grey, no black and white. We are all entitled to our opinion and who is to say that anyone else’s opinion is wrong? If there are such things as “right” and “wrong”, who can say with any certainty what is right and what is wrong?”

The Christian belief that the Bible reveals the Word of God and that the Church teaches that Word, depends on the belief that there is a God and that He does intervene in the affairs of this world. If we believe that God does not intervene, He did not inspire the writers of the Bible. In that case the Bible would have no more authority to guide our conduct than any other collection of ancient writings. Unless God truly has inspired His Church with the Holy Spirit, what the Church teaches is entitled to no more respect than the lobbying of any other pressure group or political movement.

In practice, many Christians do not base the way they live their lives on what the Bible teaches. They derive their values and their ethics from the world we live in and then selectively quote the Bible to justify themselves. The Church hesitates even to suggest to the world that our way, Christ’s way, may be better than theirs.

Then there is the question of reward and punishment. Our society has lost the sense that punishment is part of the moral order, balancing out the evil we do. We liberals recoil from the idea of punishment altogether, while neo-conservatives advocate punishment as a means to an end, as a deterrent or a way of reforming the bad guy. We find it hard to conceive of a God Who punishes either in this world or the next. I guess that people generally believe vaguely that, if there are such places as Heaven and Hell, most people (certainly they and the people they know) will finish up in Heaven. “If there is a God, He must surely be too nice not to let people in just because they did not believe in Him or take much notice of Him during their life on earth.”

So we have Deism, a practical atheism, a God Who, if He exists, is irrelevant. There is no point in saying “Thank you” to God if He did not intervene to create this flower or that bird. There is no point in praying if God does not intervene in the affairs of this world to make a difference. The standards by which Christians try to live are no different from the standards of everybody else. There is no reward or punishment in this life or the next. The Bible is no more special than any other book. Church services come to focus more on the worshippers (and their perceived needs and wishes) than on the One Whom we claim to worship. If we are becoming deists, it is not surprising that Sunday is no longer special, people do not prioritise prayer or bible reading and that church-going is dying out. God is largely irrelevant to our lives. Faith makes no real difference to the way we live now or to our prospects for eternity. Religious observance is therefore no more significant than leisure and less important that career and family.

Deism not only undermines religion; it also has a profound effect on our understanding of what it means to be human. On the one hand, deism (like atheism) appears to make us masters of the universe because we have no God to answer to for what we do. On the other hand, however, deism (like atheism) reduces us to the status of highly evolved animals. We can no longer regard ourselves as made in the image of God, dust of the earth become living souls by the inspiration of the Breath of God.

Good News! We can redeem the deist and make him once again a theist – a believer in the living God Who is all in all. Our redeemer is Jesus, properly understood. The Christian doctrine of Creation is not that God made the Universe billions of years ago and set it to run in accordance with scientific laws and with no more intervention from Him until, perhaps, the end. The Christian doctrine of Creation is that God made and sustains the Universe by His Word. Scientific laws are just as much the Word of God as the Ten Commandments. We discover scientific laws by observation and the Ten Commandments by revelation, but both kinds of Law are the Word of God. And the Word of God is Jesus. Scientific laws, the principles on which the Universe functions, are not impersonal, blind and amoral. Scientific laws are expressions of the Word of God; they are Jesus working out His Father’s Will in making, sustaining, and indeed, transforming, God’s World. Jesus fills the Universe and He holds it all together. We can, therefore, and must thank God for all the flowers and birds. They do all exist as expressions of His Love, the Love made flesh in Jesus. Birds and flowers are miracles – because miracles are signs of the presence of Jesus in God’s World. The regularity which we discover as scientific law is another miracle, another sign that God loves us. Fertilising the crop is one aspect of blessing the crop. Medicine and prayer are aspects of the healing process. It is foolish to pray and then to refuse scientifically based treatments. It is equally foolish to believe that fertiliser or medicine make prayer superfluous. It is the fool who said in his heart that there is no God.

As we say, we pray to the Father in the power of the Spirit and in union with Christ. As Christians, we are the Body of Christ. We are children of God, and Jesus, God’s Son, is our brother and one with us, we in Him, He in us. When we pray, we are joining Jesus in doing God’s work of sustaining and transforming the world. Prayer is profoundly important and we should pray every day and about everything, individually on our own and corporately where two or three (or two or three hundred) meet in His Name.

Given that it is in God that we live and move and have our being, our faith profoundly affects our values and gives us the standards we try to live up to. Again Jesus is the Word of God. We interpret the Church’s teaching and we understand the Bible in the light of Jesus. When He Himself radically re-interprets the Law, as He does, for example, in the Sermon on the Mount, He does so as the One Who is the fulfilment of the Law. The standard by which Christians have to live is Jesus, Whose love is obedient even to the death of the Cross.

If we truly believe that Heaven is the dwelling place of God, if we believe that eternal life is to be in His presence and to know Him as He knows us, we cannot take a place in Heaven for granted. Only the pure, only the holy, would have the right to go to Heaven. We cannot expect to get to Heaven because we deserve to be in God’s House in all eternity. Neither can we expect God to turn a blind eye to our failings, letting us in simply because He is too nice ever to say “No” to His children. Again Jesus is the answer. We have an inheritance in Heaven because God loves us so much that He died for us in the person of Jesus Christ. We should regard our place in Heaven as priceless, not valueless.

The deist, then, can be redeemed by Jesus. If we recognise that Jesus fills and sustains the Universe, if we recognise that He is in us and we in Him, then Christian life, the whole of our lives, is walking with Jesus. Life is co-operation with the Holy Spirit. This means that we are thankful for everything He gives us. We pray for all our needs. We seek to live Christ-like lives and we say we are sorry when we fail. Reading the Bible and praying are vital to us every day. To take part in public worship is our duty as well as our joy. Participation in Holy Communion is something we do simply in obedience to His commandment; “Do this in remembrance of me.” The blessings follow according to His promises. I spoke earlier of our perceived needs and wishes as worshippers. What we actually need is what all human beings actually need – to worship God in spirit and in truth because in Him we live and move and have our being.

Maybe the observances of Lent could be an opportunity for us to recover that sense that God is all in all and to use the means of grace, which He so generously offers us, to reconnect with Him, to feel that He is in us and that we are in Him, as we journey towards our eternal home in God for ever.

The State We Are In
A Sermon for Lent 1
Deuteronomy 26 vv 1-11, Romans 10 vv 8-13, Luke 4 vv 1-13

Twenty five years ago, when I was a young curate, some mothers-to-be among our parishioners complained that the Maternity Unit at the local hospital would not allow them to call their husbands, “their husbands.” Unmarried mothers were in no way to be made to feel different from wives. This episode provides an example of each of three trends in the way we are now governed: we have to be non-judgmental; traditional family life is not to be regarded as the norm; bossy state-funded professionals will tell you how you should behave, what you can and cannot say, and, indeed, how you ought to think.

I believe that the Prime Minister was wrong when he claimed that the spate of gun crime in our inner cities is not a symptom of a sick society. Since the Second World War, we, as a society, have lost respect for the three great institutions which should bind us together as a community: the family, the Queen, and all those in authority under her; and the Church. (I should say that I am using the phrase “the Queen” here in the sense that, as head of state, she represents authority in this nation. We could, of course, choose to have an elected head of state, but this would make no difference at all unless we had respect for what he or she represents.)

Family is based on unconditional love. When a couple marry, they promise for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health, to love and to cherish, till death us do part. This is the same kind of love that mothers have for their children – and hopefully fathers too. It is the kind of love we ought to have for our parents and for our brothers and sisters. This kind of love is the gravitational force which holds society together.

You might say that love like this only exists in cloud cuckoo land and that real families are places of conflict, infidelity, jealousy and sometimes violence. Ordinary people are, however, capable of true love. We get things wrong. Sometimes we go very wrong, but part of love is repentance and part of love is forgiveness. We can say sorry and we can forgive.

We have become so concerned to be non-judgmental that we are unable to say that a couple who marry for life, look after their own children and other members of the family, and sacrifice self on the altar of caring for others, have done a better thing than those who have brought children into the world without committing to one another or have deserted their wives or husbands, or who have put their own perceived needs before the needs of the people they claim to love, and to whom they made supposedly life-long vows.

Sex in marriage is sacramental. It is an outward and visible sign of the inward and spiritual grace of a couple’s love. Commitment-free sex may be fun, but it devalues one of God’s most precious gifts to the human race and robs sex of its potential for satisfying our deepest need – the need to be loved for ever. Commitment-free sex all too often leads to the birth of children who cannot rely on the love of both their parents.

We have also come to rate material wealth above nearly everything else. People are judged by what money they earn. So any paid job, how ever humdrum, is seen as more worthwhile than looking after one’s own children. Moreover our children have grown up in a society where their own worth is measured in terms of having the right trainers and the trendiest computer games and going on the coolest holidays. So children, whose parents have worked shorter hours in order to spend more time with them, appear to be deprived when compared with children, whose parents have worked every hour God sends to give them bedrooms full of electronic toys and wardrobes full of designer clothing.

Mothers come under a great deal of social pressure to put their young children in nurseries, which are increasingly run, not by family and friends, as they used to be, but by professionals, following a government sponsored curriculum. Thus parents can go out and get a “proper” job as opposed to merely caring for the next generation and little Henry and Henrietta can climb a couple more rungs of the developmental ladder a few months before other children who stay at home with Mum all day. If parents opt out of sending their children to nursery, their children are thought to be at risk of missing out on an opportunity to learn and to make friends and there is also the threat that they may not be offered a place in the infant school of their choice when they at last reach the ripe old age of five years.

Under government plans, schools are to open fifty hours a week, with activities laid on before and after the existing school day. Thus parents will be set free to do real work for money in offices and factories and the state gets to determine what children will learn and experience for pretty well all their waking hours.

For decades now, at eleven years of age, many children have had to leave their old friends behind them and travel to giant impersonal schools where the teachers need photographs at parents’ evenings because they are unlikely otherwise even to be able to recognise the children they are asked to talk about. Such schools struggle to become communities and it is hard for children to build lifelong friendships with other children whom their families know.

If you doubt that it is public policy to undermine traditional family, consider the Civil Partnership Act. If I were gay, I could set up house with my homosexual lover and register a civil partnership which would enable him to keep the house when I die, just as if he were my wife. But, if I set up house with my sister I cannot do anything to protect her from having to sell up or lose the tenancy on my death, even if she were to be made homeless as a result.

A very high proportion of robberies and violent crimes, including murder, are connected with illegal drug-taking and/or alcohol abuse. Why do so many young people feel the need to get out of their heads on drugs? Could it be that their lives are so bleak because they do not know real love – the love of family, the love of friends, the love of God?

So much for family. What of the Queen and all those set in authority under her? We live in a society in which, if an adult uses physical force to prevent a child or a teenager from committing a crime, the adult is more likely to be punished than the young criminal. And that goes for teachers and policemen as well as for ordinary people. So, many young people grow up believing that they are literally untouchable whatever they get up to. In fact, in many parts of the UK, teenagers are more likely to respect and fear the criminals on the estates than the police, social workers or teachers.

The Church teaches that all power is derived from God. The laws and rules governing nations are derived from the Law of God, not the arbitrary will of human rulers. Human rulers are answerable to God for administering just laws justly. This being the case, we are bound to obey the law, not principally because of the punishment we fear if we do not, but for conscience’ sake.

Modern secular society believes, however, that ethical rules are not universal and absolute, but culturally relative. Different cultures have different norms. Laws and rules are human inventions and are enforced by peer pressure or by force. You are not allowed to say that modern British values are better than, for example, Saudi Arabian values, because moral values are all relative to culture.

This means that the authorities in this country cannot rely on universal moral principles, backed by religion, to confront such practices as forced marriage or female circumcision. “It is their culture; who are we to say they are wrong?” Lacking universal moral absolutes, we are all uneasily conscious that power is arbitrary and that the rule of law depends on force rather than the ability to justify itself in moral debate. A young black man, cautioned for possessing cannabis, might think that it is just an attempt to enforce white ethical norms on black culture. A student caught illegally down-loading music might say that the police are being used to protect bloated capitalist record producers from poor people exercising their legitimate right to enjoy the bands of their choice. Government cannot rely on the principle that it is enforcing universal moral standards because it does not believe that there are universal moral standards. Ordinary people, therefore, may conclude that they only need to obey the Law if they are afraid of being caught and punished, not for conscience’ sake.

It is not surprising, then, that the Government’s reflex reaction when confronted with any public order problem is simply this: more surveillance, more laws, harsher punishments. Being morally bankrupt, it has no other resources.

But what of Church, the third and greatest force binding our community together? Surely the Church bears witness to the universal moral Law, the Law of God summed up in the two great commandments to love God and neighbour. Surely the Church supports the authority of the state while providing the whole nation with a moral compass. Surely the Church sustains family life. Doesn’t the Church bear witness that human beings will never find fulfilment in money, material possessions or casual sex, and certainly not in drunken or drug-induced oblivion? Doesn’t the Church offer every human being the gift of eternal life, joy in all its fulness? Doesn’t the Church have the tools for reconciling humanity to God? Isn’t the Christian Gospel the key to all humankind’s problems?

Surely, but remember the Parable of the Sower. Jesus talks about the seed which fell among thorns. The thorns grew up, and choked it, and it yielded no fruit. This, He says, is like people. They hear the word, and the cares of this world, and the deceitfulness of riches, and the lusts of other things entering in, choke the word, and it becometh unfruitful. Doesn’t this describe so many Christians in England today? Aren’t we unfruitful because, although we hear the word, the cares of this world, and the deceitfulness of riches, and the lusts of other things entering in, choke the word, and it becometh unfruitful? We are unable to transform modern society because we have been absorbed by it. We are supposed to be the salt of the earth, the light of the world, the leaven that leavens the lump, but too many of us have given up being salt, light and leaven and have effectively become earth, world and lump!

So what is to be done? Repentance would be a good start. It is no use blaming other people or bemoaning a past golden age. Maybe things were better in the past; maybe they weren’t. We have to live in the present and build the future. So we need to repent of our lack of commitment to God and His world. We also need to pray for the Church and the world. When we pray, we ally ourselves with Jesus, the divine Word, Who sustains and transforms God’s whole creation. We need to do what we can to influence public policy, to bring up our own families, to play our own part in the community. We may, for example, be school governors or help with guides or scouts or youth clubs. We need to make clear that, as Christians, we live by Christian principles. Public worship and private prayer are our top priorities. We, ourselves, try to live by the Law of God as we learn it from the Bible and the Church’s teaching. Spiritual things really matter more to us than material things. Money is no more than a means to an end. People come before things.

It isn’t going to be easy or instantaneous. We are commemorating this year the 200th anniversary of the end of the slave trade. The slave trade didn’t end easily or quickly. Wilberforce and his companions laboured for decades, spending huge amounts of time and money and enduring a great deal of hostility. They not only had to argue with the evil people who operated the trade, but also with “realists” who thought that the British economy couldn’t survive without slavery and misguided people who managed to convince themselves that negroes were not fully human or that there was biblical warrant for the institution of slavery. Much blood was spilt ending the slave trade, as well as money and words. Sometimes those liberating the slaves inadvertently made things worse. A freed man starving because he couldn’t find a job might be worse off than a slave with a full belly. So ending slavery was not simple, quick or easy. Indeed there is still slavery in the world and still work for the anti-slavers to do.

Sorting out the problems of British society won’t be simple, quick or easy, but you and I can make a real difference if we commit ourselves to God and His world. The greater our commitment, the greater the difference we can make.

My Newsletter

Services Etc

Upcoming Events, Two Sermons

Rector

My Favourite Links