Becoming the argument of my own scorn

I am pleased to announce that on Wednesday 17th September, Miss Brooke K. Wilson, spinster of Moscow, Idaho (whom I have been courting) accepted my proposal of marriage.

Lord willing, our wedding will be next July.

Psalm 102

Click below for the sermon I preached at Morning Prayer at St. James’s, Poole, on Sunday 14th September:

Psalm 102 (25:22, 5.84MB)

Children and Matthew 18

When considering chapters like Matthew 18, or Mark 10, I have noticed a tendency to extrapolate truths about ourselves as adult Christians, whilst completely missing what these passages have to say about children. I’m not quite sure why we do this, and I think these passages do have something to say about children.

In Matthew 18, when the disciples are wondering about greatness in the kingdom of heaven, Jesus calls a child, stands him in the midst of the disciples and teaches. We need to remember that throughout this discourse, there is a child standing in the midst of them. He says that you have got to become like children to enter the kingdom, and the one who humbles himself like this child is the greatest in the kingdom (vv. 2-4). Whoever humbles himself like this child. This child is in the kingdom and is great in the kingdom. The point is that to be in the kingdom and to be great, the disciples have got to become like the child.

Moreover, to receive such a child in Jesus’ name is to receive Jesus, and for the one who causes a little one who believes in him to sin, it were better for him to have a millstone tied around his neck and be drowned (vv. 5-6). Now Jesus isn’t using tender language to talk in general about receiving believers and not causing other believers to stumble. Remember: there is a child standing in the midst of them. ‘One such child’, ‘one of these little ones’ means children. That is the plain meaning of the text. Children are great in Jesus’ kingdom (which is why we must become like them), to receive them is a great privilege, and to cause them to sin is a great disaster. But these aren’t just ordinary children. These are children who believe in Jesus (cf Psalm 22.9-10, 71.5-6), covenant children. These little ones have a privileged position – their angels see the face of God the Father – and so they are not to be despised (v. 10). God does not want one of these little ones to perish (v. 14) and instead is like a shepherd who goes after one of his sheep which gets lost. Again, when Jesus talks about ‘these little ones’, he is talking about actual children. ‘One of these little ones’ is right there in front of them. They have a privileged place in God’s kingdom; when they go astray he goes after them because he doesn’t want them to perish. And so we are not to despise them.

We therefore have to ask ourselves:

• How do we receive covenant children in Jesus’ name?
• In what ways do we have the potential to cause covenant children to sin, so that we can avoid this disaster?
• In ways can we despise covenant children, so that we can take care not to?

I imagine answers to these questions will be along the lines of regarding them as a blessing and a joy rather than a burden, rearing any children the Lord may give us with gladness, teaching them faithfully and modelling good Christian discipleship before them, welcoming them into the family of the church, baptising them and giving them a place at the Lord’s Table. It is interesting in regard to the latter that the apostle Paul describes the behaviour in Corinth (which he rebukes), where some eat and get drunk, while others are left to go hungry, as despising the church of God (1 Corinthians 11.22).

Traditional liturgy: forming lifelong worshippers

“When we have given glory to God, then we cannot give glory to the Führer.”

This was the response Christopher Cocksworth received when he told a German Lutheran theologian that he thought the Gloria was a dispensable part of the liturgy.

With the advent of Fresh Expressions there has been a move to develop new ways of being Christian community and of reaching out to the contemporary world with the good news of Jesus Christ. I’d like to explore the idea that traditional forms of liturgy continue to have an important role in today’s church, and not only amongst those who belong to an older generation.

As a matter of personal testimony, I was baptised in an Anglican church and went along to clubs and meetings in my parish church during my childhood, then during my teenage years I started going to an independent church where my best friend and his family were; when I accidentally tuned into Choral Evensong on Radio 3 on a Wednesday afternoon after sport in my last couple of years at school, and then started saying the Daily Office in chapel at university, I was attracted by these traditional patterns of worship.

As Christopher Cocksworth also observes in Being a Priest Today, ‘liturgy has immense formative power’ and he describes the ancient principle of lex orandi, lex credendi: we believe what we pray. That is why, when he suggested that the Gloria was not necessary, he received the response I quoted at the beginning; as he later concludes, “We are to proclaim the divinity of God and disown the idolatries of the age.”

Traditional patterns of liturgy help to form mature, lifelong Christian disciples and worshippers. God’s purpose for the children of his people is that they be baptised, included in his church, and nurtured in their faith. Regular set prayers and forms of worship each Sunday serves this purpose as children learn to pray these prayers for themselves. This also holds true for the mentally handicapped. Liturgical worship also has lasting blessings: as believers age and start to lose their mental capacity, they are still able to participate as prayers, responses and creeds are burned into them through constant use over the decades. My own experience illustrates this: when I was working as a nursing auxiliary in a hospital, one of our patients was an elderly lady in a side room who was unwell and confused. She was often heard talking aloud and as I walked past her room, I stopped and listened and she was repeating hymns and Bible passages; what she had learnt through repeated, regular use stuck with her when everything else went.

Moreover, all this is seen in action by those who grow up outside the church or those who are new Christians and it is not so much unintelligible or off-putting, as unfamiliar and challenging, and can be profoundly attractive. Jeffrey Meyers, a Presbyterian pastor in America recalls the case of someone he visited who had come to two services and who confided that it was hard work to know where they were in the service and why they were doing what they were doing. He was about to apologise when she said this:

“I realise that I am a very new Christian. I knew that I don’t know my Bible. I don’t know many of the hymns that you sing. The music is not familiar to me, since I didn’t grow up in a church. But that doesn’t bother me, because I also know that I have a lot to learn. I shouldn’t expect to know how to worship God after two weeks of church, should I? I look at all the children in your church and I weep. They know the hymns. They know where to turn in their Bibles. I want to learn all of that, too. I wasn’t raised that way. I need to learn how to worship God.”

I’ll conclude with one observation: it is noteworthy when considering all this that the Church of England bears witness to its doctrine not just in a confession of faith – the Thirty-Nine Articles – but also in the Book of Common Prayer. This is our inheritance, and we must hold on to, and make use of its patterns and principles as we seek to obey our calling as the church to proclaim the faith afresh in each generation and fulfil our mission to teach, baptise and nurture new believers.