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Sunday 11th May 2008 _ Pentecost
St Peter’s, E17.


We all know what is so special about today don’t we? Yes, it is the last day of the football season!

There’s a story of a famous of a radical priest who climbed into the pulpit and shout “Fire! Fire!” The congregation started to panic until he then said, “Everywhere but in the Church!”

It’s true isn’t it? We can be on fire about all sorts of things, even as trivial as West Ham finishing a few points clear of Tottennham, but are we on fire as the Church? Is the church setting the world alight? Does the church fire you up, set you aflame? Are you bringing the fire of God to others?

It’s a good day to ask ourselves these questions about the church, because today is, of course, the day on which we celebrate the Holy Spirit coming down on those first 120 disciples and giving birth to the Church. The Church was born on the first Pentecost - so to all of you on this Pentecost 2008, Happy Birthday!

And how was the Church born? With fire! With what appeared to the first disciples as tongues of fire coming down from heaven, separating out and landing on each one them! The Church was brought to birth with fire!

If we look through the Bible we can understand why. In Exodus 3, God appears in the burning bush in the form of fire. In Exodus 19, God appears to Moses again, this time on Mount Sinai and we’re told he descends on the mountain in the form of fire. In Leviticus 6, the priests are instructed to set up a fire on the altar of the Lord and told ’the fire must always be burning on the alter, it must never go out’. In Isaiah 60 and similarly in Revelation 22, it is implied that the everlasting light that shines out to the nations is that of God in the form of fire. Have we got the point? Throughout the Bible, and there are many other passages which show us the same thing, the holiness of God, the presence of God is associated with, among other things, fire.

Here’s another story, in fact from another religious tradition, but we may well see in this story something that reminds us of the church:

After many years of labor an inventor discovered the art of making fire. He took his tools to the snow-clad northern regions and initiated a tribe into the art - and the advantages - of making fire. The people became so absorbed in this novelty that it did not occur to them to thank the inventor, who one day quietly slipped away. Being one of those rare human beings endowed with greatness, he had no desire to be remembered or revered; all he sought was the satisfaction of knowing that someone had benefited from his discovery.

The next tribe he went to was just as eager to learn as the first. But the local priests, jealous of the stranger's hold on the people, had him assassinated. To ally any suspicion of the crime, they had a portrait of the Great Inventor enthroned upon the main altar of the temple, and a liturgy designed so that his name would be revered and his memory kept alive. The greatest care was taken that not a single rubric of the liturgy was altered or omitted. The tools for making fire were enshrined within a casket and were said to bring healing to all who laid their hands on them with faith.

The High Priest himself undertook the task of compiling a Life of the Inventor. This became the Holy Book in which the Inventor's loving-kindness was offered as an example for all to emulate, his glorious deeds were eulogized, his superhuman nature made an article of faith. The priests saw to it that the Book was handed down to future generations, while they authoritatively interpreted the meaning of his words and the significance of his hold life and death. And they ruthlessly punished with death or excommunication anyone who deviated from their doctrine. Caught up as they were in these religious tasks, the people completely forgot the art of making fire.

De Mello p19... (Taking Flight).

Is the church a setting the world alight? Does the church fire you up, set you aflame? Are you bringing the fire of God to others?

Sometimes, most of the time, a fire is a tragic thing for a church! But occasionally - this is off the record - a fire in a church - whether partial or totally burning the church to the ground - is the occasion for a creative re-ordering or a new, more appropriate building. I think most people on reflection would agree that the fire here in the 1970s was a good thing for this Church, creating a more open and flexible space.

And I’ve often wondered - and this is totally off the record lest I get the sack - whether there is a Diocesan Arsonist occasionally sent in by the Archdeacons to do the business! But what I want to draw out in all of us is the question, how can I, how can we - without literally burning down church buildings - how can we actually be a church on fire, so that we can light up the world around us?

Let’s just think again about fire and then think again about that passage in Acts! The image of fire may seem fierce - and sometimes fire, even holy fire, the fire of the Holy Spirit - is fierce. It may be fierce in a positive way - like the fire of a coal furnace, creating energy that we receive in a controlled, helpful way. Or it may be fierce is a destructive way, like an out of control forest fire, destroying at random, possibly making way for something better to develop but maybe destroying that which we will mourn the loss of. But fire can also be gentle, providing not only warmth, but comfort and inspiration. Have you ever found yourself staring at a fire, maybe a bonfire transfixed, in awe at its wonder and beauty? Fire can be fierce but is can also be gentle: there are different kinds of fire.

And when we look again at Acts we discover also that there are different kinds of disciple - the very fact that the tongues of fire led the disciples to speak in so many diverse languages suggest there is no one way in which every Christian is expected to bring God’s fire to the world - as Paul puts it to the church in Corinth - there are many gifts, many ways of serving the Lord, but ... there is the one Spirit. In other words, it may be your gift as part of the church to bring the gentle warming, comforting fire of the spirit to those around you, or it may be your gift to bring disturbance, to set the world around you ablaze.

It so happens that today is also Christian Aid Sunday, because of the earliness of Easter and hence of Pentecost, always 50 days later, we have the rare coincidence of the red of Pentecost matching the red of our Christian Aid envelopes. But it is more than a good match of colour. Christian Aid is a great way of showing the practical love of Christ in action through our efforts bringing relief and hope to others. Christian Aid shows the Church on fire with God’s love.


It’s our birthday today, a day to celebrate, not least to celebrate our baptism and confirmation by the Holy Spirit. That is why we’ve invited back those who’ve been baptised or confirmed through St Peter’s in recent years. As a sign of us being on fire, I shall invite us all to renew our baptismal promises in words from the Creed, but since some are in Quest Club, we’ll do this at the end of the service rather than next. It is our birthday and its my prayer that we will be fired up as those first disciples were fired up to bring both the fierce and the gentle fire of God to those around us. Enjoy your birthday - but whatever you do, don’t blow out the candles!

Steven Saxby, MAY 2008.


Sunday 27th April 2008 (Christians and elections)

This morning, I shall be raising a few questions about Christians and elections. This is partly because the Bishop of Barking has issued a statement to all his clergy, requesting we read it out in our churches today in advance of the elections this Thursday. We are a few days away, of course, from the elections to elect the Mayor of London and the London Assembly. But other news stories in this last week have also highlighted issues to do with Christians and elections. In Paraguay a former bishop has been elected president. In South Africa, the Archbishop there is calling for the release of Zimbabwe’s election results. Here the Archbishop of York is leading a one day action in York Minster, also to call for the release of the Zimbabwe election results. All these events raise interesting questions for us as Christians as we prepare for the elections on May 1st.

Before I raise my questions, however, let us reflect a little on our Bible readings for this morning. The Acts reading gives us a glimpse of Paul in Athens. There he preaches to the people of Athens. He realizes they worship a whole host of gods but he also notices an inscription to “the unknown God”. Paul uses this as a tool to try to convince the people of Athens that the one God they should be worshipping is the one, true God who they do not know but has been revealed to them by the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Our reading from the John’s gospel tells us that obeying God means obeying the commandments of Jesus and that we are not left alone in seeking to fulfill Jesus’ commandments because we are given another, the Holy Spirit, to guide us as we seek to obey God.

These passages from scripture set the context for our thinking about Christians and elections. Our engagement in the political process stems from our duty as Christians to be concerned for God’s world. As we will hear in the Bishop of Barking’s statement, “it is a Christian duty to vote”. And, as Christians, we seek to draw on the guidance of the Holy Spirit to help us in all our weighty decisions not least the business of who will best serve the interests of our community, city or nation. It was Desmund Tutu who famously said “when people tell me Christianity and politics do not mix, I ask them which Bible they are reading”.

So then to my questions on Christians and elections, the first flowing from what I have just said. If it is a Christian duty to vote and if we seek God’s guidance as we vote, does that mean we will all vote the same way, for the same person or party? Now I don’t need to tell you that the answer to this is “no”. Those of us who’ve got to know others in this congregation will know that different people support different politic parties. But how is this so if we all draw our guidance from the same Holy Spirit? I think the answer must be that the Holy Spirit helps us determine what is right for us. This includes us reflecting on our own experience and perspectives, the necessary stuff through which God is at work in us. And it must be true that what is right for the world, through the Holy Spirit working in us, is not brought about by one political strategy directed from heaven but by the diverse ways in which human beings operate with and against each other for the betterment of society. God is clearly above politics and yet it is obviously partly through politics that God works to bring about peace and justice in our world.

This is one of the reasons why democracy is so highly regarded within the Christian tradition and why the apparent disregard for democracy in Zimbabwe is a cause for so much concern. Archbishop Sentamu, the Archbishop of York, cut up his dog collar on television in protest against President Robert Mugabe. Today he will be leading fasting and praying in York Minster expressing his concern and that of Christians throughout the world about the delay in releasing the election results there.

Let us turn to my second question: should Christians commit to a particular political party? I implied above that God is above politics and yet works, in part, through politics. I think this means that it must be right for some, not necessarily all, Christians to engage fully in party politics. Indeed if we consider the mainstream political parties in this country we can see that over the years we have had politicians in various parties who have been, for good or ill, variously open or discreet about their Christian faith. Moreover, we have examples of various politicians who have been consciously inspired by their faith to engage in party politics. And from time to time we can catch a glimpse with some politicians that what really guides them is less the cut and thrust of divisive party politics and more the desire to work together with all people of goodwill for the common good.

There is a third question which arises from this, should those who formerly represent the church - bishops, priests and others – engage in party politics? I suspect the natural extinct for most of us is to say that they should not, that there should not be a clear identification of the church with one particular set of political ideas. The Roman Catholic Church has fairly clear rules that its priests should not stand for election. This is why Fernando Lugo, a former bishop, known as “bishop for the poor” was suspended from his duties by the Roman Catholic church when he announced his intention to run for president of Paraguay. Now that he has been elected on a platform of promising land reform for the poor of Paraguay, he is unlikely to return to his role within the church. However, there are exceptional circumstances in which the Roman Catholic Church has allowed its clergy to stand for election, a notable example being when some were permitted to stand for one term to help form the post-Apartheid government of peace and reconciliation. Also in recent times there has been a lifting of the ban on Anglican clergy standing for parliament, something yet to be tested in the ballot box, although there are some clergy who also hold office as local councilors in the UK, including one in this diocese. Such identification of the clergy with political office certainly makes many feel uncomfortable and raises questions about the integrity of the person as politician and parson. My own view, for what it is worth, is that it is best avoided other than in exceptional circumstance, circumstances which I can more readily identify in Paraguay than here in the UK.

My fourth question is this: is there a case for Christians identifying with a specifically Christian party? This is worth pondering, not least because there are candidates running under the banner of “Christian Choice” in Thursdays elections. The question could be put more strongly, should a Christian feel obliged to vote for a “Christian” party rather than for another party? The rise of specifically Christian parties of which there are now two running as a coalition in these elections, is a relatively recent phenomenon in the UK. This is interesting because in many countries in the world there are Christian parties. In Italy and Germany these parties have held power for much of the post-war period. But it is only in the last ten years or so that we have seen a Christian parties develop here. I think the reason for this must be that historically our main political parties have been so heavily influenced by Christians and Christians have so easily found a home within them that distinctively Christian political organization has not seemed necessary. In view of this history and what I have already said above, my own view is simply that it is by no means the obvious choice for Christians to vote for a Christian party and that Christians should judge a Christian party, like any other, by its policy and make a prayerful judgment as to whether supporting it is, from your perspective, in the best interests of the common good.

And finally, I come to my last question on Christians and elections: are there political parties which Christians should specifically not vote for? Here I shall be a bit more definite and say “yes”, a Christian should certainly not vote for a party which at its core is incompatible with key Christian values, most obviously in relation to these elections we should be sure not to vote for any party which has racism at the core of all it stands for. I could more about this but instead, and to conclude this sermon, I shall read what the Bishop of Barking has asked me to read out this morning.




Fr Steven Saxby, April 2008.

"Vote for ONE Human Race", says Bishop

The Bishop of Barking is urging all church members and people of goodwill to vote on 1st May in the London and local authority elections.

The Right Reverend David Hawkins says: "It is a Christian duty to vote, not least in these elections where as little as 5% for the British National Party could give the BNP a seat on the London Assembly. Whoever else we vote for we must stop racist politics making gains in London and elsewhere."

The BNP has 47 local councillors across the country, including 12 in Barking and Dagenham and 6 in Epping Forest District. The Bishop has been working with churches and others across London (and Essex) to respond to the BNP. A joint paper between the Bishop and the Churches Racial Justice Network articulates a strong and informed response to racist politics, "based on the Christian belief that all people are created as ONE race, the human race."

Clergy across London have joined the Bishop in urging Londoners not to vote BNP in the coming elections. Revd Stephen Sichel is Vicar of St Matthew’s Brixton. He voted for a motion on racist political parties in the Diocese of Southwark’s Synod which mandated all churches "to ensure respect for all citizens is part of the contribution made by churches to local dialogue".

The BNP constitution states that it "stands for the preservation of the national and ethnic character of the British people and is wholly opposed to any form of racial integration".

Parish priests in Bethnal Green, Walthamstow, Ilford, Hackney, Islington and elsewhere have also supported the Bishop’s call for people to vote for ONE human race. Fr Alan Green Vicar of St John’s Bethnal Green said “I rejoice in the rich cultural diversity of our community. I hope people of faith will vote for those who are committed to London remaining a city where many cultures work together for the common good.”

Other church leaders across the UK have also been urging the faithful to vote for parties which are not racist. In Birmingham, church and other faith leaders are on record for having said "voting for or supporting a political party that offers racist policies is like spitting in the face of God".

“Each vote for the BNP," says the Bishop of Barking, "will put into reverse the patient, strategic work of healthy, race relations and social integration that is developing in our London Boroughs, Essex and else where in the country. We are members of one human race. We must vote for it through the ballot box on 1st May.”
Sunday 20th April 2008 (St Stephen)

This morning, I invite you to explore with me the subject of our first reading, namely Stephen. This is not a practical exercise so I will not be asking you to throw stones at me when I have finished speaking but it is an opportunity to take a closer look at Stephen and his relevance for our Christian lives. We know him in the life of the church as St Stephen, Deacon and Martyr. His feast day is 26th December, Boxing Day, so it may not be surprising if you’ve never heard a sermon reflecting upon St Stephen. So who was he and what is his relevance for us today? There are two major aspects to his significance for us, identified by those two words “deacon” and “martyr” so it will be useful to consider his two roles in turn.

Stephen comes to prominence within the life of the early church in events which scholars suggest took place within a year of Jesus’ death. We learn about him through St Luke’s sequel to his account of Jesus’ life, the New Testament book known as the Acts of the Apostles. This book makes brilliant reading as it recounts the inspirational stories of the first Christians, not least of Stephen. The first Christians lived as a community, sharing their possessions and look after the vulnerable among them. But a dispute arose when the Greek Christians accused the Jewish Christian of overlooking their widows when the daily food was distributed. The apostles, led by St Paul, recognize that supervision of the provisions is necessary but do not want to be distracted from their ministry of preaching and healing. So it is that they appoint 7 “deacons”, literally “servants” to supervise the care of the vulnerable and other practical matters. Chief of these is Stephen, described by some throughout history as an Archdeacon.

The office of deacon remains one of the historic orders within the Church of England: deacon, priest, bishop. Sadly, however, the role of the deacon is rarely understood. All priests normally spend a year as a deacon before ordination to the priesthood and too often the deacon year serves no more than as a year of waiting to be ordained priest. There are a few, too few, in the Church of England who regard themselves as permanent deacons, a role that is better defined in some other churches, including some Anglican churches overseas. The permanent deacon, where such exist, has a clear responsibility to care for the vulnerable. I remember spending time with a parish in San Francisco and Larry, the permanent deacon there, taking me to the homeless shelter where he would lead Bible study. I was fortunate myself to have longer time as deacon and was able to engage thoroughly in diaconal ministry through helping in the nightshelter, working with refugees and leading work on two advice centres in the heart of areas of high economic deprivation.
But every priest remains a deacon and should remain committed to the role of the deacon as it is set out at his or her ordination. Here is what is read out by the Bishop when a deacon is ordained:

Deacons are called to work with the Bishop and the priests with whom they serve as heralds of Christ’s kingdom. They are to proclaim the gospel in word and deed, as agents of God’s purposes of love. They are to serve the community in which they are set, bringing to the Church the needs and hopes of all the people. They are to work with their fellow members in searching out the poor and weak, the sick and lonely and those who are oppressed and powerless, reaching into the forgotten corners of the world, that the love of God may be made visible.

Now it ought to be obvious that deacons represent a ministry which is shared by the whole people of God. In some ways the role of deacon is similar to that of Lay Reader or Church army Evangelist but also of the way we all seek to make God’s love visible within our communities and seek to bring the needs of our communities into the life of the church. The liturgy of the Eucharist has a special role for the deacon. It is hard for us to appreciate this in a church without a deacon but our Readers and sometimes our priests when there is more than one of us will fulfill the liturgical functions of the deacon which are to introduce the confession, read the gospel, invite the congregation to share the peace, receive the offertory and give the dismissal at the end of the service. In other words, these are all functions which seek to connect the liturgy with the people and the people with the liturgy, to emphasis the bringing of the communities’ needs and the role of the church to serve the community – go in peace, says the deacon, to love and serve the Lord and behind all of these lies the inspiration of the very first deacon, St Stephen.

But Stephen, was more than the first Christian deacon, he is also remembered as the first Christian martyr. It is clear from the start that Stephen is special. He is described as a man full of the Holy Spirit and eminently suitable as the leader of the first seven deacons. However, he clearly transcends the role of deacon and becomes known for performing great wonders and signs among the people. By the grace of the Holy Spirit, he is a brilliant public speaker, something tested in public debate with leaders of various synagogues and something evident in the speech which leads to his death. This is speech is laid out in Acts where he hear Stephen recount the history of the Jewish people and indicate that there have always been Jews who have rejected God’s word and persecuted its prophets. He speaks out with such courage to the leaders of Sanhedrin, the Jewish Council, with such conviction that they have rejected Jesus as the Messiah, that they are stirred up into a rage and drag Stephen out of the city to have him stoned to death. In all of this we are told that Stephen’s face shone like an angel and that his last words, echoing those of Jesus on the cross, are words of forgiveness for those who have put him to death.

Stephen as deacon is a role model for us all as we seek to bring the community’s needs to the life of our church and seek to serve the community as the church. But what sort of role model is Stephen as martyr? Stephen is the first Christian martyr and he stands at the head of that great cloud of witnesses through the ages, the white robed army of martyrs in heaven, who have died for confessing their faith. Martyrdom is an extreme measure for extreme times. Few are called to be martyrs but at times of persecution throughout history and even now in certain parts of our world, martyrs arise as a response to extreme circumstances. Above the west door of Westminster Abbey, there are now 10 statues of 20th-century martyrs from various parts of the world, including Dietrich Bonhoeffer - murdered by the Nazis, Martin Luther King – the assassinated for his advocacy of civil rights for black people in America, Óscar Romero – the Bishop in El Salvador, shot for his speaking out for the poor and Wang Zhiming – a Christian killed in the cultural revolution..

It is hard to imagine any of us being placed in such extreme circumstances as Stephen or these 20th century martyrs but each of us does have a responsibility to stand up for our faith and to stand up for those who are oppressed and vulnerable. In this way Stephen the Deacon in his care for the poor, leads us naturally into a concern for social justice, sometimes demanding that we speak out for what is right even if what we have to say is unpopular and even if it leads us to be dismissed and derived by others. In small ways we may well find that we die a bit to self in standing up for others and is a small way we are able to emulate Stephen, not only the first among the deacons but also first among the martyrs of the Church and an inspirational example as we seek to live out our faith in today’s church and world.

Fr Steven Saxby, April 2008.
Sunday 09th March 2008, St Peter, Walthamstow.
Dry bones, Lazarus, miracles; Let us pray…

We’ve just heard two long readings and we are about to have a baptism, so you will be relieved to hear that we will have a short sermon! Briefly then: some thoughts on “miracles”. I remember several years ago going to see the re-make of that lovely Christmas film “Miracle on 34th Street”. In this film Santa gets disorientated, ends up in New York and is befriended by a boy who does not believe in Father Christmas. The long and short of it, if my memory serves me well, is that Santa only gets his powers back once the boy believes that Father Christmas really exists. Once that happens, of course, all the things that are going wrong in the boy’s life get put right again, specifically his divorced Mum hitches up with a guy the boy likes and we are left with a happy-family, Hollywood ending. I saw this at a rather sad time in my life and it cheered me no end. On the way out I was given a badge that said “I believe in miracles” which I wore for some time, occasionally bursting into the 70s pop song with the same title, “I believe in miracles – don’t you?”

Well, we may or may not believe in Santa, but a belief in miracles is core to the Christian faith. We are told that Jesus (and later his disciples) as well as others in the Bible, performed various miracles and today we have heard readings related to two of the most dramatic miracles in the Bible – the miracle, albeit only in Ezekiel’s vision, of dem bones in the valley coming to life and the miracle of Jesus raising Lazarus from the dead.

The first is a metaphoric miracle, it is a vision given to Ezekiel to communicate that the Israelites, who at this point have been taken out of their home land and forced into exile in Babylon, should have hope. Just as the dry bones are restored to life, so Israel will be restored to their home land. So miracles stand as a sign for us, a sign that God can always bring new life, even to what may seem like the most hopeless of situations. Importantly, it is God who brings this new life and one thing we cannot do is manufacture miracles – we should not be surprised if we do not get the miracle we ask for, but rather another miracle, the one God has in store for us. A belief in miracles is about trust in God and his purposes, a belief that all things are possible with God but that he will only make happen what he desires for us.

The raising of Lazarus is not just metaphor; it is a description of a miracle which John clearly believed had taken place. Jesus performed many miracles and this is by far the most dramatic, the raising to life of a man who has died. There are many features of the way the story is told, not the least the reference to the bad stench when he came out of the tomb after four days, which makes it clear, to quote the Wizard of Oz, that he was ‘not merely dead, but really most sincerely dead’. Should we be surprised at Jesus’ power to raise Lazarus to life? No, for it is God’s power working through Jesus that brings Lazarus to life. Why should not the creator of the universe, the one who had the power to bring all things into being, not also have the power to bring a man back to life?

A final point, these two miracles relate to where we are today. In remembering Jesus’ power to raise Lazarus, we remember God’s power to raise his son, the Easter event for which we are preparing during this season of Lent. Jesus death and resurrection is the ultimate sign for us that God brings new life, gives a fresh start to each of us, brings hope to even the most desperate situations. And it is this too which we celebrate every time we welcome someone for baptism. That is why in baptism we talk of dying to sin and rising to new life, not a once and for all experience, but something after baptism which we repeat again and again in coming to God in repentance, in bringing our failings, and, each time, turning to him for forgiveness and a new start, turning to him with all that defeats us and having hope that he can lead us in to new life.

As we baptize Xanda today, we remember that baptism is one of the miracles of our faith. I believe in miracles, don’t you?
SS – March 2008.

Sunday 23rd Dec 2007 – Angels and Archangels

“Was it an angel?” That was the question I heard 300 school children ask on Tuesday when Thorpe Hall had their carol service here. One of the songs had a chorus ending “Was it an angel? I couldn’t be sure because I’ve never seen an angel before.” In the song it is Mary who is supposed to ask the question after she is visited by an angel and told she will give birth to Jesus. I love the sentiment of that song, suggesting that the young Mary, who had had this strange experience, wasn’t sure what it was she had experienced. How could she know she had seen an angel if she’d never seen an angel before? And yet somehow she knew that it was an angel that had visited her.

Mary would have known all about angels, of course. She would have been taught about them because angels were a feature of the Jewish tradition and appear in the Hebrew scriptures (what we call the Old Testament). And angels are familiar to us, of course, we see them on Christmas cards, on this year’s Christmas postage stamps, we sing about them in hymns – such as Hark the Herald, the angel Gabriel from heaven came - we know they have wings, we have all seen the Angel of the North, every week we refer to them in the liturgy – “with angels and archangels for ever praising you and saying…” . But how would we know if we had seen an angel. Would we be sure? Or would we ask “Was it an angel?”

What do we know about angels? Where do they live? What do they do? What types of angel are there? (Cherubim, Seraphim, Archangels.) Which angels are mentioned by name in the Bible? (Gabriel and Michael.) In the Book of Tobit, sometimes included in the Bible, there is mention of Raphael. So 3 so far – but in Jewish tradition there are 4 other archangels (Uriel, Raguel, Sariel, and Jerahmeel). What is therir purpose? They worship God and they bring messages – the word angel means messenger. Indeed, that is what the angel Gabriel was doing when he visited Mary, bringing her the message that she was to give birth to Jesus.

“Was it an angel? I couldn’t be sure because I’ve never seen an angel before.” We know all sorts of things about angels. We are familiar with images of angels, but would we recognize an angel if we saw one? Of course we are all familiar with the notion of referring to a person as an angel. When someone does a good thing for us, something heaven sent, even if as simple as giving us a nice cup of tea, it is common to say “you’re an angel”. And in the Bible we are told that we should always welcome strangers unless we are entertaining angels unawares. For in the Bible it isn’t always obvious to those encountering them that they are talking to angels. They appear many times in human form. Perhaps Gabriel did when he visited Mary.

One of my favourite films is “It’s a Wonderful Life”. An angel called Clarence visits George Bailey and Clarence appears to George just as if he is human. “How can you be an angel when you haven’t got wings?” says George Bailey. And Clarence answers he hasn’t earned his wings yet. George is unconvinced. “Was it an angel?” It’s only in the last few seconds of the film, when George’s daughter tells him that every time a bell rings another angel gets a set of wings, that George believes and is assured that Clarence was an angel has just earned his wings.

Was it an angel? Again, it is all very well to think of references in the Bible, to use the language of good people being angels, to think of imagery in films – but does any of this get us closer to thinking about angels as a reality for us rather than just part of the make believe magic of Christmas, something akin to fairies or Santa’s elves? Let’s go a bit further with angels because I do want to encourage you to take angels seriously.

In the book Tokens of Trust, which some of us have been thinking about in recent weeks, Archbishop Rowan Williams spends a bit of time talking about angels. He does so in the context of taking about how we understand the world to be God’s creation. It is very hard for some human beings, who like to think they can know everything, to understand the world as something made by God. And yet most of are used to coping with the notion that we cannot understand everything, that there are things which we can’t explain about the world. Angels, says Rowan Williams, stand as reminders for us the things that are “round the corner of our vision”, things we can’t quite explain but which we nevertheless recognize as real. He actually warns us about being overly sentimental about angels and reminds us that in the Bible angels are often fierce and terrifying. Partly because of this - because they are sometimes terrifying, sometimes gentle, sometimes in the form of living creatures, sometimes as humans, but always there as a steady backdrop of praise to God – they remind us that there is more to the world than the things we can rationalize and that if we do try to rationalize everything we miss out on something of the exhuberence, the strangeness, the wonder of God. “Was it an angel?” is a good question as it is precisely about looking round the corner of the our vision of the world to the things we cannot always explain, to the mighty acts and the small, still voice of God.

One final thought: some years ago Peter Berger wrote a book called A Rumor of Angels. In it he considers “signals of transcendence” in the everyday of human life. These signals are indeed the kind of things that are round the corner of our vision. One example is that of when time stands still for us and he illustrates this by talking about little girls playing hopscotch. Here is what he says:
“They are completely intent on their game, closed to the world outside it, happy in their concentration. Time has stood still for them…The outside world has, for the duration of the game, ceased to exist. And, by implication (since the little girls may not be very conscious of this), pain and death, which are the law of that world, have also ceased to exist.”
Berger then talks about how an adult observing this, someone full of anxiety and pain about life, might be drawn in to “beatific immunity” and find that time stands still for them. In other words, the adult is drawn into another world, given a glimpse of heaven. “Was it an angel?”
As we go about our business over the next few days - as we occasionally catch a glimpse of an angel on a Christmas card, on the Christmas tree or an angel on TV – let us be reminded of the rumour of angels. Let us try to see within the experience of Christmas with our families, friends, with neighbours and strangers, something of the world beyond our everyday vision, something of the characteristics of heaven evident in our life here on earth. Let us try to see round the corner, to catch a glimpse of the angels and angelic moments in our midst. Let us ask, as Mary may well have done, “Was it an angel?” and let us try to believe that we have indeed entertained angels in our midst.

Steven Saxby, Dec 2007.

Sunday 30th Sept 2007 – Back to Church Sunday

’d like to begin by asking you all a question. It so happens that today, as part of a national Church of England campaign, has been designated “Back to Church Sunday”. And my question is “Did you know that today was Back to Church Sunday?”, not by hearing about it in church but by seeing an advert in the press or by hearing about it on radio or TV. Please raise a hand if your answer is “yes”. (And please raise you hand again if you specifically came to church today because you knew about Back to Church Sunday?) Well that shows that the campaign was … in terms of its national publicity (and to those of you who have come to church in response to the campaign, the rest of us want to offer you a warm welcome, so please do stay and chat with us after the service).

The main thrust of the Back to Church Sunday campaign was about encouraging existing church members to ask their friends and neighbours to come back to church. It is based on the fact that there are many people today who used to go to church, not necessarily this church, but for whatever reason or reasons no longer go to church. We decided not to join in with the campaign at St Peter’s this year, although I hope we might do so in the future, and when we do so it will be important to explore some of the reasons why people stop going to church. What I intend to do now, however, is to explore some of the reasons why we go to church. As Back to Church Sunday obviously begs the question “what is the point of going to Church?” and it’s a question that those of us who do go to church regularly ought to be ready and able to answer.

I’ve a few things to say about it, but again, let me ask the question of you. Who’s brave enough to tell the rest of us why you come to church? …

I’ve got three points to make on this topic of why bother to go to church and as it happens they all proceed nicely from the reading we heard from St Paul’s first letter to Timothy. That letter is Paul’s advice to Timothy on how to correct and encourage the church congregations under Timothy’s care. So, this short letter has various instructions: on worship, on leadership, on looking after those in need and, as we heard earlier, on the dangers of putting wealth before God.

My first point about why we bother to go to church is that this is actually what God wants us to do. God enjoys community, he enjoys it within the Godhead of the Holy Trinity and he enjoys it in his love flowing out into his creation. God does not need our worship, but God enjoys our worship and he ordained it so that his creatures should worship him. It is as much a part of who we are to worship as it is to eat and drink and we become just as malnourished spiritually if we fail to worship as we do physically if we fail to eat and drink. Jesus grew up as a Jew, well accustomed to worshipping with others and we hear about his attendance at worship all through the gospel stories. And Jesus specifically commanded his disciples to meet together and share bread and wine in remembrance of him. This is what Christians have done from the very first days of the church and Paul’s first letter to Timothy reminds us of that with its instructions to some of the first Christians about what they should do when they come together for worship. It is from 1 Timothy that we get the phrase upon which our first hymn was based today “immortal, invisible, God only wise” and is the very heart of worship, to gather together in praise of the one who created us. When we think that we would not be here without God, it seems strange that we sometimes find it so hard to make time to thank him for the time he has given us. We are God’s creatures; we are made to worship him. We can worship alone, we should worship him on our own as well – but it is his desire that we come together to worship him, he enjoys communion with us and enjoys us having communion with one another. It is, as we often say in church, our duty and our joy to give him thanks and praise.

My second point is that worship keeps us on the right track, it helps us re-focus our lives and thus to guard us from sin. This is not to say that church is full of righteous people, no the church is full, or should be full, of people who know the reality of sin in our lives and know that we need church to constantly help us to re-orientate our lives back to God. That is why there is such an emphasis in church on sin and repentance of sin, that is why we say “I are not worthy to receive you but only say the word and I shall be healed”. Now Paul writes specifically of the danger of wealth of how it can distract and corrupt. Paul is explicit, “Some people, eager for money, have wandered from the faith and pierced themselves with many griefs.” And what is true of money can be true of anything which takes priority in our lives over God. Paul also says that we are under the yoke of slavery, the slavery of sin, we are constantly being tempted by all sorts of things which lead us away from putting God first in our lives. I’m going to say something now which may seem a little harsh but is really intended for all our good. It is because we have need of God that it is really is important that going to church is a top priority in our lives. We are in need of God and we constantly need to be re-orientated towards him because sin is constantly seeking to pull us away from him. And this is why it really does matter that we attend church every week. Church is where we re-engage with the glory of God, it is where we bring to God our inadequacies, it where we are nourished by word and sacrament to go out into the world to love and serve the Lord. Of course there are times when we cannot make it to church, through illness, through attending to someone who needs our help, but so often these days church is squeezed in among a whole range of other priorities. If we are planning to attend a sporting event or go to a market or know that the events of the night before will prevent us from making it to church on Sunday morning, then we are quite clearly saying that other things can be placed as highly or even higher than our need to re-orientate ourselves with God on a weekly basis. If we are away, then let us be sure to find a church; if we are not, let us be sure to attend our home church saving only the most exceptional of circumstances. Now you may be thinking, well he would say that he wants to boost numbers on Sunday morning but that is not why I am saying it at all. I am saying it because it is my duty to care for the souls of my parish and I do believe our souls are in danger when we fail to put God first in our lives. Weekly attendance at church, whether we are in the mood for it or not, is good for our souls, not to attend every week is surely, to paraphrase Paul, “to pierce ourselves with many griefs.”

Coming to church, does something for God, it gives him the worth, the worship, he deserves; it does something for us, it helps us get back on track with God; and my third point is that it does something for others, it an arena in which we live out together what it means to be the body of Christ in the world. We do this in several ways of course. First we do it just by turning up. Never under-estimate the contribution you are making just by walking through that door on Sunday. Everyone who gathers here brings something special, you bring your own unique self as a gift to others, you help to create the diversity that the church needs in order to be a body made up of different kinds of people, the kind of people you might not ordinarily mix with in other spheres of your life. Church brings us into contact with others and thereby with a whole range of needs and experiences that become for us the material from which we can construct real concern and awareness of the needs of others. Paul writes (in 1 Timothy, Ch 2, v 1), “I urge, you then, first of all, that petitions, prayers and intercessions and thanksgivings be made for everyone.” And what happens in church, over time, is that we become aware of the experiences of others, of what they have gone through or are going through and these things. These things, along with what we bring and what we know of others in the rest of our lives, help us to be in-tune with the world and its needs. We are able to give and receive help and support from others, to live out the Christian calling to care for others, not least in the fellowship of the church. And then we are often reminded of the needs of our wider community, our nation, our world. We can engage in real steps to help others through our charitable giving, through all we provide for the community at Peterhouse, through our support for McMillan Cancer Relief of Christian Aid or Jeyapaul’s work in India. This is what it means to say, “though we are many, we are one body because we all share in the same bread”.

So often in our culture these days our approach is “what does it do for me?” That has to be an importance concern in going to church. I have suggested that we are in need of church whether or not it stimulates us every Sunday. Of course, if a particular church is not helpful to us then we should not be shy to try another and if someone prefers another church to this at any time in their lives, we should give them our blessing. But the point is to go to church, yes for our own good, but also for the good of others and most of all, to give glory to the one from whom all blessings flow. If Back to Church Sunday has nothing else this year then I hope it has helped us to re-focus on why we should bother to come to church. However, I also hope it might indeed encourage us to go out and tell our friends and neighbours that there are several reasons why it is good to go Back to Church.

Steven Saxby, Sept 2007.
Sunday 8th July 2007 – Theology and Anthropology, St Peter's, Walthamstow.

I’d like to see take this opportunity to share with you this morning some of the study and some of the thinking that is currently informing, and perhaps has always informed, my ministry as an Anglican priest. I want to do this as I suggest that it is relevant to our life together here at St Peter’s.

In particular I want to share an approach to life which is not specifically religious but is, I believe, at its best when in the service of the virtues held within the Christian community. And this is the approach of what is called ‘social anthropology’ or ‘social ethnography’, terms which are basically to do with the practice of paying attention to what is the case within a social situation.

I was formally introduced to this approach by Tim Jenkins one of my lecturers at university who is himself an Anglican priest but is also a trained social anthropologist. I was fortunate to have quite a bit of exposure to his ideas not only during his lectures but also during his sermons, for he was the Dean (or Chaplain) of Jesus College, Cambridge and I was required to attend chapel services in my role as the Dean’s Clerk. I say formally introduced as I realize now that his approach is, as he suggests, fairly typical of a certain kind of approach to ministry, an approach which is characteristic of the Anglican vocation and which the priests who I had grown up with had themselves embodied. It was they who inspired me to become a priest and I realize that the approach they embodied is the approach that still inspires me and informs my own ministry – it is essentially what makes me tick as a priest.

More recently I have come to pay more attention to the value of social anthropology through the secular studies I am undertaking in cultural heritage. Indeed we were required to undertake an ethnography of a particular social environment, to spend time in a place, pay attention to what was the case, describe how people interacted with each other and, indeed, consider the virtues embodied in the place – but more of this a little later.

The other thing which has led me to become fairly buoyed up about this approach at the moment is that I am reading a newly published book by Tim Jenkins, a collection of his writings over the years, a book called “An Experiment in Providence – How Faith Engages with the World”.

So what is this approach all about and how is it relevant to the life of a priest? Essentially it is about paying attention to what is the case, to what folk are getting up to, to how they are leading their lives and, theologically, it assumes that God is already at work in the world even the bits of it that we as the church are not engaged with. Now you may be thinking “so what?” isn’t that obvious, what’s the big deal? Well, if you are than that probably means that you are a pretty typical Anglican – you expect to find God at work in the world around us, expect to pay attention to what is out there, seek to find out how God is at work in others. But this is not the approach of all church communities. For many, God is not at work outside of the church and it is specifically the job of the Christians to take God out into the world. Christianity, for them, is a project to be imposed on the world not, as for many Anglicans, a blessing of what God is already doing within it.

Now I am generalizing as not all Anglicans embody the approach I have described and not all non-Anglicans take the other approach. Nor am I deriding the other approach. In fact I think it is fairly necessary and complimentary to the broadly Anglican one. Moreover, we find these different perspectives at work in non-religious bodies and we might reflect on governments which seek to impose projects upon us and those which more or less leave us to use our own initiative.
I hope I have conveyed the kind of approach which informs my ministry, an approach concerned with paying attention to what is the case, to how God is already at work in the world around us. What then does a ministry look like that is informed by this approach? Well, let me take my own ministry here in this parish as an example and, hopefully, what I am seeking to convey will become even clearer.

During my time here I have tried to be involved in this local community, to pay attention to what is the case, to what God is already doing here. In this way I have been like many traditional Anglican priests but, I acknowledge, not like all Anglican priests today. I have been something like a chaplain – not just to the congregation – but have aspired to be such for the whole community. It is not easy of course in a parish which is so spread out and which is as diverse as it is. But as much as possible I have tried to make myself known in places where people gather together, to learn about what makes them tick and, from this basis, I have found many opportunities to engage in ministry with them.

So I have spent time as you know in the pubs of the parish. I have got to know people, less through holding prayers there, but more from talking at the bar and playing with the football team. I have travelled on the 230 and 20 buses and most journeys I find myself talking to folk, particularly elderly people from the neighbourhood. I have sought to engage with the schools and businesses in the area. I have taken funerals for people who have had no previous connection with the church. I have encouraged us to meet the dog walkers in their space in the forest rather than expect them to come to us. Recently, following a request to do so, I blessed some of the allotments in the parish.

This then, among other tasks, is how I conduct my life as a parish priest – engaging with people where they are, seeking to find where God is at work in their lives, providing resources, where appropriate, to help them in the business of human flourishing.

This is what I get up to. How then does this impact upon our life together at St Peter’s? Well let me make three short suggestions. First, ask yourself what your approach is to those around you. How do you seek to live out your Christian engagement with the world? Are you someone who seeks to find out what is going on, discover what is the case, how God is at work in the lives of those around you? Or, are you someone who engages in the complimentary approach of seeking to take a message into the lives of those around you? Or, are you even someone with the capacity to do both? In other words, I am asking what is the character of your Christian vocation as it is lived out in relation to others?

Secondly, one of the insights of social anthropology is that every social environment creates for itself its own culture, its own rules, its norms and ways of being. Now, for my studies I had the difficult task of conducting an ethnography of a public house and I had to spend time there observing how people behaved and thinking of the social rules at work in that particular environment. The anthropologist Kate Fox has written a wonderful book called Watching the English with a chapter on Pub Talk and she describes many of the behaviours and unwritten rules which I discovered at work in the pub which I studied - things like the invisible queue at the bar, how strangers at the bar will talk to each other, how people buy each other drinks and call each other nicknames. She describes the pub environment as a “social micro-climate”, an environment, if you like, with its own weather just as a dogtrack or a hairdressers would have its own different set of rules, its own climate. Now the relevance of this for us, it seems to me, is that a Sunday morning church experience is likewise a particular kind of social environment and people within it behave in certain ways. We need to be conscious of this, for unless we are careful we shall – as can happen in an unfriendly pub – form habits which shut people out rather than habits which make it easier to draw people in.

And finally, I would suggest that the relevance of my approach as a priest in the parish and the various interactions that you have with people in the community are all experiences which we bring with us when we meet here on a Sunday morning. They form the raw material we need to be an Anglican parish church, to be a church which is able to bring the needs and thanksgivings of our community and its people before God. This is what it means to “pray for the parish” and this is, I would suggest, one of the key things which makes an Anglican parish church, rather than any other kind. It is precisely because we are engaged with the world out there and that we seek to represent that world to God when we gather here that we can call ourselves the parish church community of St Peter-in-the-Forest.

Steven Saxby, July 2007.

Sunday 1st July 2007 - Petertide, St Peter's, Walthamstow.

Let’s imagine visitors from outer space were to come to earth and hover silently and invisibly in the sky observing various features of life on this planet. Imagine they were to hover over a church, perhaps this church, and take in all of its physical features - the stone, the wood, the metal, the physical make-up of every aspect of the building. Let’s imagine this and ask ourselves a question: “Would they have discovered what a church is all about?”

I guess most of us would answer “no” to that question, for we know that the church is not just the building. Indeed we sometimes say that the church is the people, it is the living body of worshippers, that we come together “as the church” not just come together “in the church”. Does that mean therefore that the building is unimportant, that we could just as easily meet say in Peterhouse, or in the pub or in the forest as we did this morning? Well, in one sense this has to be true but at the same time its hard to get away from the notion that we are taking the church “out into the community” and that the church we are taking out is the church which is shaped by the life it shares for the most part in this building.

We were visited by some good friends earlier from St Martin’s-in-the-Fields, Trafalgar Square. Currently their church building is closed for refurbishment and the Sunday morning congregation is meeting at St Mary-le-Bow. Since the church’s dedication is to St Martin of Tour, they are using the pun “St Martin’s on tour” but they are in no doubt that that is what they are, temporarily elsewhere, but still the people shaped by their life together in the building which is the church of St Martin-in-the-Fields.

It would seem then that the building matters and it matters not just on the level of stone, wood and metal. The building matters for the building in some way represents the life of the people who meet within it. We might even say that the building itself is like a person, it has a personality, a personality which shapes and it shaped by the human personalities which inhabit it. I am currently undertaken a placement related to my studies with the Churches Conservation Trust, the body which looks after some 340 “redundant”churches. It interests me that those who work for the Trust call other churches “living churches” and again it seems hard to get away from the notion that something is desperately lacking when a church building becomes divorced from a regular body of worshippers; with no “living” people to populate it, a redundant church begins to die, with the Trust serving as a kind of life-support machine. One of the exciting prospects - a project I am involved with - relates to bringing these churches into more frequent occasional worship, helping to bring these churches back to life.

Even within a redundant church however it is possible to detect the echoes of the life that was there before. Even within these buildings you can hear people calling out from the memorials, the furniture, the décor – “we were here” – and within a living church we are conscious that we are not alone, we live alongside those who have been here before. The memorial plaques, the inscriptions on furniture, the list of vicars, the stories passed down - these all remind us that we have inherited this building and we share it with those who came before.

This week I discovered two things about our past which I had not known before. The first relates to Revd Tullie Cornthwaite the first vicar of St Peter’s. When this church was established in 1840, first as a daughter church of St Mary’s Walthamstow, Thomas Dry, the headmaster of Forest School, was appointed as its curate in charge. But in 1844, St Peter’s, Walthamstow was established as a parish in its own right and from 1844 to 1851 Tullie Cornthwaite was its first vicar. What inspired me to do find out more about him was an enquiry about my predecessor from a student at Berkeley University in California. He is studying a collection of plants, deposited by Tullie Cornthwaite in a collection at Charterhouse School. Could I tell him anything about the collector, specifically was there any connection to Forest School? So I dug out what records I could find. The link to the school was easy. Forest School chapel was not built until 1857 and before that St Peter’s was used by the school for worship. I then read that Tullie was buried in the churchyard and so looked for the grave. I found the grave, just outside the tower entrance, and found, sadly, that it is in very poor condition. Somehow the process brought Tullie alive for me and has inspired me to try to do something about his grassed-over grave.

The second thing was learning only yesterday at the 150th Anniversary service for the dedication of Forest School chapel that soon after the dedication in 1857, Archbishop Tait took the chapel’s first confirmation service, which was another way of discovering that at least one Archbishop of Canterbury has visited the parish.

It’s easy, and perhaps natural, to focus on the clergy; the List of Vicars is a must of any church. Even if it takes the somewhat humble form it takes here, it is one way of telling us that the church was alive, it was populated by real people, people with names and histories. Better still are the stories of the characters, sometimes eccentric characters of the past, stories past on by lay people about lay people, stories which re-assure us that all sorts of people fitted in to the human story of a church which was alive in the past. Indeed, this is why I am delighted that most surviving former vicars of St Peter’s have been back since I have been here – and I delighted that through our new Deputy Leuitenant I have made contact with Chris Elliot a former curate who has agreed to return and preach soon. And, of course, those of us in the present, in sharing our space with people from the past, are, at the same time, acting with confidence that others will come after us. This is why we have a faculty system which forces us whenever we make a significant change to the building to be mindful of its impact not only on the present and the past but also in the future. And this is why, if I may say so, a List of Vicars should always have plenty of space so that names can be added of future vicars.

In all I have said so far I have tried to suggest that our visitors from outer space would not understand a church, no less St Peter’s-in-the-Forest Church, by a physical analysis of the material from which it is built. A church is more than the building but at the same time a church community is a community formed by the life that it leads within a particular church building. That building embodies the collective personality of the people past, present and future who make the church community what it is. Now just as a person has a name, so a church has a name, and just as a name impacts upon the character of an individual, so the name of a church impacts upon the character of that church community. So what does our name mean and what does it mean for us?

First, of course, our name is special. There is no other church in the UK and probably none other in the world called “St Peter’s-in-the-Forest”. It is quite unusual for a church to have a name indicative of a location. There are some notably exceptions such as St Peter’s on the Wall at Bradwell and St Martin-in-the-Fields, referred to earlier. But of all the thousands of benefice names in the Church of England, there are only about 30 indicative of a location. There are several in the city like St Dunstan in the West (finished off by John Shaw junior the architect of this church), All Hallows by the Tower and St Andrew by the Wardrobe. There is a St Michael in the Hamlet, a St Mary in the Elms, a St Saviour on the Cliff, a St Mary in the Park, a St Peter in the Causeway and a St Peter in the Field – but there is only one “in the forest” and that is St Peter in the Forest, Walthamstow. So our name is special and our location is special. We know it is almost as much as an anomaly to be a church “in the forest”, here in urban Walthamstow as it is for St Martins to be in now non-existence fields. But even with 38, 500 vehicles passing us each day, we remain in a strip of forest and that remains something of our charm, a unique selling point or USP as it would be called in the world of advertising. In short, we are unique, special and let us be proud of it and promote it to others.

However, there are two aspects to our name and the first is formed by the person of St Peter. This is, of course, is a name we share with many, many thousands of churches throughout the world. Some small in villages and in estates, some in towns and cities, some famous not least the Abbey Church of St Peter at Westminster and the most famous of all, St Peter’s Church in Rome. So we are linked through St Peter to thousands of other churches throughout the world. And this link is a link to the story of St Peter, a story we share with the universal church. And to a certain extent, we are shaped by that name , we are inspired to follow the example of all the saints bu inspired especially to follow the example of St Peter. Our banner here is a tremendous resource for us, it echoes the stories in todays readings and others about Peter – the one who followed Jesus, the one who denied and was forgiven, the one who was to be the rock, the one who was given the keys to the kingdom and the responsibility to tend the sheep, the one who suffered and died, following th pattern of Christ.

It is this story of Peter, of course, which makes us particularly what we are, followers like him of Christ, followers of a living Christ, a Christ who was here for those before and will be here for those who come after us. Indeed without this faith in Christ, we would fail to bring this church to life, it would be a church as redundant as one in the care of the Churches Conservation Trust. If we are to be a church alive today, alert to the past and confident about the future, it is that faith which will give us life. It is that, above all, that we celebrate on this Petertide, that which we have inherited from others and that which we seek to pass on for future generations.

The END.

Sunday 10th June 2007 (Corpus Christi ), St Peter's, Walthamstow.

Today we celebrate Corpus Christi – a day of thanksgiving for the institution of the Holy Communion, the Holy Eucharist, the taking of bread and wine to be the body and blood of Christ.

I sometimes think that Holy Communion must seem very strange to those not used to the church. Imagine someone totally unfamiliar with Christianity, someone from a tribe in the Amazon previously unknown to our civilization or, these days, imagine someone under 40 who’s grown up in Waltham Forest and could, potentially, have had just as little contact with the church. What would they make of a communion service? Many times people come to a communion and think the service is at an end when we get to the peace. Many a time I have known baptism families leave at this point, genuinely thinking the service was over. But of course the service carries on. And imagine our citizens of the Amazon and Waltham Forest watching what happens next. Why does the priest start saying words from behind a table? What are those pieces of silver that have been taken up to him? What is this about body and blood? Is he saying Jesus’ body is like bread? Why is the priest holding a white wafer instead of bread? And what is that about blood? Did he say the wine is Jesus’ blood? Did he just invite us to eat to drink that wine? Is it proper to drink alcohol in this place of worship? Why are people standing around the table? Is the priest giving out those wafers to people, are they just taking a small sip of wine? Why doesn’t everybody take it? Are they pretending to drink blood? Are they cannibals? Do they not worship this Jesus? Why are they pretending to eat his body? Is this supposed to be a meal? If they want a meal, why don’t they bring some proper food? Why don’t they all stay afterwards? Why didn’t anyone talk to me after the service? Was that supposed to be about love?

Surely it does all seem strange to an outsider but how does it feel for us? We’ve become used to it perhaps. We know it is what Jesus asked us to do, to eat bread and wine, well symbols of them - did Jesus say use symbols? – to do this in remembrance of him. How would we explain it to others? Is it about love, is it about communion, about being in community with one another, or is just a ritual we go through? It means something to us personally but does it make any difference to our lives? Have we sanitized communion, made the body and blood into harmless symbols, symbols that give us a personal holy glow, make us feel good as individuals? At least we come to church without having to worry that it will change us, make us behave differently in the world around us. We wouldn’t want that would we?
It’s not just us you know. Even from the earliest days of the church, communion was not operating in the church as it should have been. Indeed this is the very context of that passage we heard from St Paul’s first letter to the church in Corinth. Let’s take a closer look at that letter. It was to a group of people that Paul wrote, to those who gathered as church. The first Christians did not have church buildings as we know them; they met in each others’ homes. And that we pray is how we come together this morning, not in the church of St Peter, but as the church of St Peter. And Paul writes to a church community in Corinth in which there are divisions. As we read the letter, it becomes clear that some of these divisions relate to what is going on when they meet together to share in the Lord’s supper, in holy communion. Now let us be clear, when they gathered together for the Lord’s supper, they gathered for supper, for a meal – and in the context of this meal they ate bread and drank wine and remembered that Jesus had spoken of the bread and wine being for them his body and his blood. Why does Paul remind them of this in the passage we heard? He reminds them because they have lost sight of what communion is about; their coming together has become a gathering of division rather than a gathering of love.

So what were this divisions related to the Lord’s Supper? For many years there was a general consensus in New Testament scholarship that these divisions were a) among a Church which was mainly made up of members 'of low rank in the social order', and b) 'almost wholly determined by theological and religious factors' (Dunn, 1995: 46, 48). But a serious challenge to this consensus came in 1960 with a small publication by the Australian scholar E. A Judge entitled “The Social Pattern of Christian Groups in the First Century”. This pointed to evidence both from the New Testament itself and from knowledge about social relations in its environment to suggest that the earliest Church communities included people of both higher and lower economic status. Furthermore, it claimed that social factors, more specifically economic factors, had a huge influence on the ethos and practice of the first Christians.

Since then a new consensus has emerged among New Testament scholars that the divisions at Holy Communion related to social divisions which existed for the Christians within wider society. Scholars have drawn upon internal evidence from the epistle and from what is known about first-century Corinthian society to argue that socio-economic factors were at the heart of the controversy over the Lord's Supper, the issue addressed by Paul in 1 Corinthians 11. They point to four particular factors which they believe fuelled this controversy: 1) that the food for the Lord's Supper was provided by the wealthier members of the Church; 2) that the wealthy hosts were providing food for other wealthy members before the start of the congregational meal, i.e. before the Lord's Supper proper; 3) that this food was of greater quantity than that provided for the congregational meal; and 4) that this food was also of better quality than that provided for the congregational meal. (Theissen, pp. 147-159.) Indeed the controversy about meat eating in I Corinthians may relate to the social circumstances whereby the wealthy had access to good quality meat but the poor, it at all, only had access to off-cuts and food like tripe.

One scholar, Theissen, also suggests reasons to explain the exclusive behaviour of the wealthier members at the Lord’s Supper: first, the very practice of hosting a congregational meal meant that the host could not help but demonstrate his or her social standing; secondly, such meals would have provided ideal opportunities to invite wealthy guests for a private meal, even those who were not Christians; thirdly, a host could justify excluding poorer members from the private meal since only bread and wine needed to be shared for the congregational meal; and finally, it was not uncommon in the surrounding culture for the wealthy to invite poorer folk to a meal and intentionally treat them as second-class guests (p.161). So the problems Paul addresses are all social, the problems of a socially stratified community in which 'the Lord's supper, instead of providing a basis for the unity of the body of Christ, is in danger of becoming the occasion for demonstrating social differences' (p.160).

These conclusions have also received support from archaeological evidence related to first-century Corinth. For example, Jerome Murphy-O'Conner provides some insights into the shape and size of houses in his St. Paul's Corinth. He concludes that even the houses of wealthy members of the community would not have been able to accommodate the whole Christian assembly - including at least 28 persons - in one room for a communal meal. He suggests that some would have been able to recline in the triclinium (the main dining room) but others would have had to sit in the atrium (the courtyard). He speculates that the 'first-class believers' would have been invited into the triclinium and writes that 'space available made such discrimination unavoidable, but this would not diminish the resentment of those provided with second-class facilities.' (Murphy-O'Conner: 1983: 153-61.)

One scholar wrote of these relations within the Church community, that 'it is an essential characteristic of the church that its members at least want to try to remove the social barriers which ordinary society loves to erect. And it remains a battle against worldliness in which there is never a ceasefire.' (Tidball, 1983: 103.) However, it is likely that Paul believed such a battle would be won and the whole of the letter appeals to the Christians in Corinth to transcend their social divisions for the sake of their love in Christ. Remember it is in this letter, 1 Corinthians, that we read Paul’s beautiful words about love, ending “three things last forever, faith, hope and love and the greatest of these is love”.

I want to move to a close by drawing your attention to two books which have had a profound effect upon me in relation to thinking about what we do when we gather for Holy Communion.

The first is this quite wonderful book, now out of print but available via the internet, called Dare to Break Bread. In this book, the author, Geoffrey Howard writes about the relevance of communion, the Eucharist, to the rest of our lives. He writes in the forward, ‘What is the challenge of the Eucharist after you’ve received a handshake at the church door and gone to Sunday lunch?’ In his book he says, ‘We will see the Eucharist not just as a sacrament of a dead Christ on a cross, but of a living Christ in the world.’ And throughout this book he tells wonderful stories of communion live out perfectly and imperfectly within the context of his life as a Christian. I love the way he relates arguments between members of the church at the church fair to what happens the next day in the sharing of the peace and, most of all, I love the section about Harry, a homeless man who brings the writer some cakes he has scavenged from dustbins at the local market. (p75). A little earlier he writes, ‘The Holy Eucharist is not in a vacuum…. Sharing the cup on a Sunday morning is a blasphemy if I cannot share the cup of experience with people God loves.’

And the second book is one called ‘Teaching a Stone to Speak’ by Annie Millard. It is really a book of exquisitely composed travel writings, but in one chapter she writes about the church. She writes about being present during Holy Communion and is very sharp on how the liturgy has become sanitized, disconnected from what it is really supposed to be about. For example, she writes of sharing the peace, if her saying “peace be with you” and the teenager next to her responding “yeah” (p.35). And here is my favourite part (p.52), ‘Does anyone have the foggiest idea what sort of power we invoke? ... It is madness to wear ladies’ straw hats and velvet hats to church, we should be wearing crash helmets’.

What are we doing when we gather to eat the bread and drink the cup? What does it mean to it in remembrance of the one who dies for us, who poured out his love for us so that we might love another? How does Holy Communion, the Eucharist, look to those on the outside? We are never perfect, always making mistakes, not unlike the first Christians. However, let us have the confidence of St Paul that the holy communion really can we a place where we transcend all our divisions and where we learn to love each other and take that love to those we meet within our daily lives.


Steven Saxby, June 2007.

Dillard, A., Teaching a Stone to Speak (London: Harper Perennial, 1998).

Dunn, J.D.G., 1 Corinthians (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1995).

Howard, G., Dare to Break Bread (London: DLT, 1992).

Murphy-O'Conner, J., St. Paul's Corinth: Texts and Archaeology (Wilmington: Michael Glazier, 1983).

Theissen, G., The Social Setting of Pauline Christianity (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1982).

Tidball, D., An Introduction to the Sociology of the New Testament (Exeter: Paternoster, 1983).



Sunday 22nd April 2007

St Peter's, Walthamstow.

Theme: Reconciliation

“Reconciliation”: this is the issue I invite you to explore with me this morning. It is a long word, but with a simple meaning: where a relationship has broken down, the healing of that relationship is “reconciliation”. And as we know, reconciliation can take place not just between individuals but also between groups of people, even between nations.

Reconciliation is a key message of this Easter period and indeed of the Christian faith. Let’s consider some words from Paul’s second letter to the Christians in Corinth. Starting on page 1096 of our pew Bibles, 2 Corinthians 5: 14-21.

…

Through Jesus’ death we can be set free from our sins and lead a new life reconciled to God through Christ.

Reconciliation really is central to the Christian faith. A few years ago Archbishop Tutu described it in a little book called “No Future without Forgiveness”. Without the belief that human beings can heal their disputes, we would never overcome disputes within families, with friends, with neighbours, between groups and nations. The site of Gerry Adams and Ian Paisley sitting together is a tremendous image of reconciliation and one that, at last, brings a promise of true peace in Northern Ireland. No future without forgiveness.

What comes across from our readings today is how central reconciliation was to the early church, including to its two leading personalities Peter and Paul.

Let’s look at Peter first. It was Simon Peter let us we remember who denied knowing Jesus three times after Jesus had been arrested. This leader among the disciples let Jesus down in his time of need, declaring three times “I do not know the man”. In the story we heard earlier, on page 1030, reading from John 21: 15, we encounter the way in which Jesus brings about reconciliation with Peter. He asks him a first time “do you love me?” and Peter replies “yes, Lord, you know that I love you”. Jesus asks a second time and then a third time “do you love me?” and eventually Peter is hurt that Jesus repeats the question. Peter is taken back to each one of his denials. He has to face again the reality of his betrayal of Christ. Can you imagine how Peter must have felt? But Jesus fully restores Peter, forgives him for each of his denial by asking him three times to look after his sheep, to be the leader of the disciples. That is the radical reconciling love of Christ.

And let’s consider Paul. We learn from our Acts reading on page 1040, Acts 9: 1, that Saul was a great persecutor of the first Christians. A little earlier we learn that he was present at the stoning of Stephen and now that he is still breathing murderous threats against the Christians. And yet it is this Saul, whom Jesus appears to on the Damascus Road. The encounter radically alters Saul’s life. Jesus tells him to go to Damascus where he will be told what to do. He has lost his sight and is there in Damascus when after three days he receives a visit from Ananias, a prominent Christian in the city. Ananias knew of Saul’s reputation. He can’t believe that God tells him to go to Saul who he knew was coming to Damascus to persecute him and other Christians. Yet God instructs Ananias to go, telling him that God has chosen Saul to be his servant in preaching the gospel to non-Jews. Can you imagine how Ananias felt? He had to go and visit this man, who had been threatening to kill the Christians, who was involved with the murder of Stephen. And yet, Ananias goes to Saul, calls him “brother Saul” and restores his sight. Once again, that is the radical reconciling love of Christ. Imagine how Saul, to become Paul, must have felt as he encountered that reconciliation. No wonder he writes so enthusiastically about it in the passage we looked at from 2 Corinthians.

Both Simon who became Peter and Saul who became Paul, these two leading personalities of the early church, both of these experienced personally the radical reconciling love of Christ. One had denied ever knowing his master; the other was deeply involved in persecuting his followers: both were reconciled to Christ to play the two major roles among the first disciples.

A few months back Adriaan Vlok, a former law and order minister in the Apartheid regime, made an extraordinary act of reconciliation. He who had once been responsible for brutal beatings and other acts of violence and sometimes murder of anti-Apartheid campaigners, went to see one of those former campaigners Frank Chikane, now Director General of the South African presidency and offered an apology for his actions of twenty years ago. Furthermore Adriaan Vlok insisted on washing the feet of Frank Chikane. He was a changed man through becoming a Christian and he wanted to express his need for forgiveness and reconciliation is personal terms, saying every one like him needs to make reconciliation a reality but going to his neighbour “man to man” and saying sorry. This is not an easy thing to do, but it was clear from the video I watched of this that the action had had a profound impact not only upon Adriaan Vlok but also upon Frank Chikane: a modern day example of a Saul seeking reconciliation with someone like Ananias.

Reconciliation then was at the very heart of the personal lives of Peter and Paul, those who were responsible for the growth of Christianity. It remains at the heart of the Christian message. And it is at the heart of what we are encouraged to share with others. To recall those words of Paul again “he has committed to us the message of reconciliation. We are therefore Christ’s ambassadors as though he were making his appeal through us.” It could hardly be clearer; we are given a responsibility to share this message of reconciliation with others, to be ambassadors for Christ.

Reconciliation, it is a message for us, something for us to experience time and time again as we forever fall away from God but are once again forgiven and restored to him. It is a message for us to practise in our lives as we seek to forgive others as God forgives us. It is a message of hope for the world, that human beings can put an end to hatred and embrace each other in love, that there is a future if we would only believe in the radical reconciling love of Christ.

Steven Saxby, April 2007.

Maundy Thursday Agape Supper

7.00 pm on Thursday 5 April 2007

Exodus 12 v 1-4 and 11 to 14 and John 13 v 1-17 and 31B-35

On this bitter sweet Holy Day may I speak in the name of God our Creator, Jesus Christ the Foot Washer, and the Holy Spirit, Amen.

“Now the Son of Man has been glorified, and God has been glorified in him. If God has been glorified in him, God will also glorify him in himself and will glorify him at once” (Jn 13 v 31-2)

Introduction

• Tonight at the end of another dirty year, Jesus offers to wash our feet

• In the year that has passed since we last marked Maundy Thursday, have we learned to stay closer to God?

• Are we more able to let God love us?

Biblical reflection

This is the most bitter sweet day of the year for all Christian people.

• Sweet as we share in the Meal with our Lord and the Disciples on the night before the crucifixion

• Sweet as we see the echoes of the Jewish festival of Passover and the memory of the great and formative escape from slavery in Egypt in the Exodus Story.the institution of Holy Communion

• Bitter as Jesus points us towards the betrayer, Judas, among them

• Bitter as crisis upon crisis looms on every side in our Lord’s final few hours

Tonight we gather with our sisters and brothers all over the world, and as Christians have gathered in every generation since the Resurrection, so we are surrounded as always by a great crowd of the witnesses of history to remember the night before the Crucifixion when, as told in John’s Gospel, Jesus washed the feet of the Disciples.

• It was customary for a host to offer a guest the opportunity to have their feet washed

• In part it was practical – the roads were dusty in summer and muddy in winter – which ever season travelling was dirty

• It also carried an element of symbolism – ritual washing of the guests

• It was a task performed by the domestic servants of the household

• Remember it was common for households to keep domestic servants at that time

• So when Jesus gets up to wash the feet of his Disciples what is he saying?

• Had the host forgotten? Some how I doubt it. And there is no evidence in the story that the host had not done their job properly

• No Jesus, the leader, volunteers to play the role of the servant

• And he touches the disciples: he touches their feet.

• Not a part of the body that we see Jesus touching in other Gospel stories – we can think of examples where he touches people – their heads, eyes, hands.

• And we can think of times when he does not touch them at all, but simply by the power of the words he speaks he heals and liberates.

• No, tonight, Jesus touches the disciples. And touches them in a place of vulnerability and intimacy. For feet are not symbols of strength. Rather they are symbols of our humanity.

• Remember Isaiah’s vision of the Lord “sitting on a thrown, high and lofty: Seraphs were in attendance above him;” [now please do not go and ask me what a Seraph is - because really I am not sure that I know – but they had lots of wings…]

• “each had six wings; with two they covered their faces; with two they covered their feet; and with two they flew” (Is 6 v 1-2)

• “With two they covered their feet”. This vision of Isaiah illustrates the modesty with which feet were seen. Maybe symbols of vulnerability. Maybe a sign of our humanity.

• And so Jesus challenges the Disciples to let him touch them; to care for them and look after them.

• It comes as no surprise to us that it is the impetuous Peter who challenges Jesus. Ever the out spoken one. Ever choosing the wrong word for the wrong moment.

We read tonight from the book of Exodus the story of the great escape. Fleeing the slavery of Egypt. The night when they roasted lamb with bitter herbs and ate it with unleaven bread. The night when the people of Israel splashed the blood from the lamb on the door frames and lintels of the front doors of their houses to protect them from the visit by the Angel of Death.

We could be forgiven for thinking we had the wrong Gospel reading. For if we think about it, having heard the story of the roast lamb at the heart of the Exodus, we would expect to hear tonight the story of the Last Supper; of Jesus celebrating the Passover with his Disciples.

• Of the institution of Holy Communion.

• Of those great words: “this is my body broken for you. This is my blood shed for you”.

• And if tonight we had read from the books of Matthew, Mark or Luke that is indeed what we would have heard.

• For that is the part of the story that they tell us.

• But the writer of the Gospel of John has a different story to tell.

Remember the writer of John has already given us the Eucharistic story in chapter six of his Gospel where, in the setting of the feeding of the five thousand he tells us at great length that Jesus “is the bread of life”.

No tonight the writer of the Gospel of John has a different purpose. He wants to tell us about the Glory of God that is all wrapped up in the humanity and divinity of Jesus. For John’s account of Jesus washing the Disciples feet is the beginning of what, for many Christians, are some of the most important chapters in all of the Bible. What has been called the “Great Book of Glory”. When for several chapters, during the long hours of Thursday night, before the narrative of the crucifixion story begins again on Friday morning, the writer of John in this Holy Place tells us all about the Glory of God, and how that Glory is shattered and shared among us in the broken life of Jesus Christ.

Summary and thanks giving

In this Agape Meal tonight

• We remember the meal Jesus shared with the Disciples

• We see signs of betrayal

• We sense the crisis

• But there is more: Jesus remembers us

• Jesus invites us to let him, tonight, wash our feet

• Jesus in re-membering us, re-makes us.

• In the moment of his own crisis he still reaches out to us

• For the Christian faith, and all the inheritance of the Church, was born in crisis. It is for us a normal state of affairs.

• There is no need for us to be afraid of any crisis, how ever large or small it more seem to loom in our hearts and minds at this time in our lives.

Conclusion

Tonight we prepare to watch with our Lord as the crisis of Good Friday steels ever closer upon us. But for this moment. There is a short space of calm. This time and place of bitter sweet celebration: Jesus, at the end of another dirty year, offers to wash our feet.

Amen

Geoff Hammond, Reader

Sunday 4th February 2007 (Candlemas – tr)

Theme: Children and Communion

Today we celebrate Candlemas – the day when the child Jesus was taken to the Temple.

Two people were really pleased to see Jesus when he got to the Temple. One was an old man called Simeon and the other was an old lady called Anna. They were so happy when they saw Jesus – and they probably started singing out loud to everyone! We’ve waited years and years to see the messiah come to the Temple – and now he is here!

I love that story because two really old people welcome the child Jesus into the Temple. They realize that he is special and they are really happy to see him. Today we sometimes people think that old people don’t like to see children in church, but this is not true. Some old people do find it hard to relate to children – and some younger adults do too. But lots of old people really love to see children in church – they realize that the children are special. And one great thing about the church is that old and young can meet together: the old can learn that the very young are special and the young can learn that the very old are special.

The gospel story we heard earlier is the story of when some disciples tried to stop children getting to Jesus, but what did Jesus say? "Suffer the little children” or “Let the children come to me and do not stop them for the Kingdom of God belongs to such as these". I like that idea of suffering the little children – making an effort to put up with them even if it is sometimes hard. Jesus said “let the children come to me”. He even said “unless you receive the kingdom of God like a child, you will never enter it.”

Now I want to say a few words about children and communion. As you know some children receive communion in this church and some more children will prepare for their first communion at Easter. This practice of children receiving communion is quite new for the Church of England and was introduced here, as in many other Church of England churches, just a few years ago.

The church council asked the Bishop’s permission to allow children to receive communion a few years ago and the church council has just re-applied and again been given permission by the Bishop for us to carry on with the practice.

In the Church of England we were used to the pattern of children being baptised as infants, confirmed in their teenage years, and not receiving communion until after confirmation: baptism, then confirmation, then communion has been our familiar pattern.

Our new pattern here places communion before confirmation. Baptism, rather than confirmation, is the major requirement for receiving communion. So a child (or indeed, an adult) is able to receive communion at any point after baptism. In this parish we now have age-related courses about communion each year. One course is aimed at children around the age of 7 or 8 and takes place during Lent in the Quest Club sessions. All children around the age of 8 or above are invited to prepare for communion - providing they are baptised, providing they regularly attend church, providing they desire communion and providing their parents agree. We will also run a course for older children in the SPITFLY sessions this year. If adults want to receive communion, they will be prepared for confirmation at the same time and learn about communion in the run-up to a confirmation service.

Although this practice of children receiving communion has been in place for a while now, we’ve realized that some people still have some questions about it- it still seems like a big change from what we were used to – so, by way of encouragement and reassurance to everyone, I am going to make three points.

First, although new for us this pattern isn't really new at all. The pattern of baptism, then communion, then confirmation is in fact the more traditional pattern. It has always been the way of the Eastern Orthodox and Roman Catholic churches. Orthodox children may receive communion at any point after baptism, for some it comes straight after baptism at a few months old; Roman Catholic children normally receive their first communion at 7 or 8, receiving their preparation as part of their primary school education; and indeed until the 19th century it was quite common for Anglicans to receive communion as children. Over the last twenty years or so, many parts of the Anglican communion overseas have adopted the pattern of baptism, then communion, then confirmation and since permission was granted here several years ago, hundreds of Anglican parishes in England, including most others in Waltham Forest, set out on the same road as us.

Secondly, the pattern of baptism, then communion, then confirmation, in my view, makes much better sense of what communion is. The old pattern of baptism, then confirmation, then communion seems in my mind to view communion as a kind of prize awarded only to those who've passed the test of confirmation. It tends to encourage the view that communion is about "understanding", that there is something about receiving communion that children are too young to understand. Where the pattern of baptism, then communion, then confirmation is in place, it's clear that there's a lot that children of 8 and even younger do understand about communion. They understand that the bread and wine represent the body and blood of Jesus, they understand that they are important members of the church, they understand that communion is special and holy. As we observe here we have children of 8 receive communion and it is moving to see those children (sometimes), sitting quietly, paying close attention to their service books, reading and singing the parts for the whole congregation and then receiving communion as reverently and prayerfully as any adult. So it seems clear that children of that age do actually understand what they're doing, but communion is not all about understanding.

Communion is a lot like marriage, a gift from God, a holy mystery - and the way to understand it is not to study it but to experience it for yourself. I imagine if you tried to explain to somebody else what communion means to you, it would be very difficult, perhaps impossible, for you to that without drawing on your experience of what it has been like to receive communion. Have a think about it? What does communion do for you? Perhaps it helps you feel closer to Jesus? Perhaps it gives you strength to deal with your problems? Perhaps it makes you feel more a part of this community? Sometime this week reflect a bit on that: What does communion do for you? And then ask yourself if there is any reason why it shouldn't do the same for a child.

Finally, I think the new pattern of baptism, then communion, then confirmation will does a great deal to help our children feel less excluded. One thing that is very clear from the comments of many children where they do not receive communion is that they do sometimes feel excluded by not being able to receive communion. I read an article in the Church Times by an Anglican priest who said that in the middle of one service his four year old son said "Dad, I'm not part of the body, 'cos I don't have any bread". Another article quoted a nine year old girl called Naomi, now receiving communion, who said "When I started church, when I was about four or five, I used to think it was boring, I felt left out - now I feel special and grown-up".

We take it for granted that children are excluded for certain areas and experiences of life, but I've come to believe that we often take that exclusion too far. Its striking sometimes when you hear or read the stories of people who struggle with life as adults, to discover struck me is how many are, even now, deeply affected by childhood experience of exclusion, exclusion by parents, exclusion at school, and yes, even exclusion by the church. We shouldn’t need to state that every child matters, it should be part of how we live as a church.

I've briefly set out the new pattern of baptism, then communion, then confirmation which we practice here St Peter’s. I've suggested that this new pattern is, in fact, a much more traditional pattern and commented that it's now wide-spread throughout the Church of England. I've also suggested that this new pattern does more justice to what communion is and that it does a great deal to prevent the long-term hurt that comes with childhood experiences of exclusion.

But for me the most compelling reason to for children to receive communion goes back to the words of Jesus, the words of the one who was welcomed as a tiny child in the temple, and as an adult said "let the children come to me and do not stop them, for the kingdom of God belongs to such as these".

Steven Saxby, Vicar