10/10/2020
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Sermons & Services
Audio Sermon for the 18th Sunday after Trinity: 11 October 2020
Revd. Canon Leonard Doolan – St Paul’s Athens
10/10/2020
In
Sermons & Services
Trinity 18 – 11th October 2020: : Philippians 4, 1-9; Matthew 22, 1-14.
Revd. Canon Leonard Doolan – St Paul’s Athens
At a religious rally the preacher who was famous for his fire and brimstone sermons addressed the pressing subject of God’s judgement. Among the familiar phrases at such a rally he used the phrase, ‘and there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth’, a phrase he may have picked up from today’s gospel reading in Matthew. Someone in the audience shouted out, ‘but I don’t have any teeth!’ to which the preacher responded, ‘and teeth will be provided’.
Today’s gospel is set within the image of a wedding banquet. This is a popular image in the gospels, and allegorically it is Christ who is usually considered to be the bridegroom of these wedding parables, with the corollary that the bride is his church.
Indeed in the new Marriage ceremony of the Church of England these words ‘Marriage is given that as man and woman grow together in love and trust, they shall be united with one another in heart, body and mind, as Christ is united with his bride, the Church’.
So in this formulary of the Anglican marriage ceremony the connection between bridegroom and bride is overtly stated. It is so plain that you don’t have to read anything into the language to develop the image.
Weddings were great social occasions in cultural life in the setting of the scriptures, indeed they still are in the East and here in Greece. They are huge events, and in smaller villages everyone will turn out to the wedding feast, the marriage banquet. No expense is spared, and the food and drink never seem to run out. When it did run out at a wedding in Cana of Galilee Christ was there as a guest, and he ensured that the wine supply was restored.
03/10/2020
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Sermons & Services
Sermon Preached on 27th September 2020 – Creationtide
Deacon Chris Saccali
MAY I SPEAK IN THE NAME OF THE LIVING GOD, FATHER, SON AND HOLY SPIRIT.
I had just brought the washing in and was settling down for a siesta when my husband came in holding a photo on his phone. Our granddaughter’s latest escapade, I thought but no it was a picture of a snake basking in the sun on the flagstones! It turned out it was an Ottoman adder after consultation with Google. Now it is a long time since we have found or seen snakes on our property.
Creation and nature seem to be making a come back even though we are told species are dwindling. This is the season of creation from beginning of September through to 4th October St Francis feast day instituted by Patriarch Dimitrios in 1989. This year is entitled Jubilee for the Earth which combines ecological and economic justice. It reveals the truth that our redemption from financial indebtedness and material poverty is inextricably intertwined with the redemption of the land from wanton extraction and pursuit of profit. We are encouraged as Christians to hold a climate Sunday service during this year.
This past week has been international climate week. Prince Charles, a friend to this church and a staunch activist on Climate said this week at the virtual opening: COVID 19 offered a window of opportunity to reset the economy for a more sustainable and inclusive future. He added the pandemic was a wake up call we cannot ignore.Remember Prince Charles suffered himself from COVID earlier in the year.
At the end of August I preached on a lockdown psalm and today it seems appropriate to use another psalm, so relevant in these times when the world seems to be facing a second wave and CO20 summit due to take place later this year has been held over until 2021. This piece is written by Rev Dr David Pickering based on psalm13:
‘How long?’ cries the psalmist, facing seeming abandonment in the face of affliction.
‘How long? ‘Cries the psalmist, expressing as enemies assail.
3,000 years on we too may cry, ‘How long will the shadow of illness surround me or a loved one?
How long shall lockdown separate me from my loved ones?’
‘How long, cries Greta , on behalf of the world’s youth, will we ignore the house on fire?’
‘How long?’ speaks Sir David on behalf of the scientific community, will policy fall short of evidence?’
‘How long, Extinction rebellion prophetically protest, must we wait for a zero –carbon, just and green new normal?’
By articulating their concern the psalmist starts the transforming journey from their hurting hungry, heart.
Their next cry, ‘give light that i may see your light.’
Opens way to a renewed faith and trust in God.
The psalmist’s journey from a problem stated
To action taken, is one of engagement and hope.
It is so in our lives, for the way of healing
Is lined with with care of body, mind and soul,
And the loneliness of lockdown
May be overcome with phone call, post and messaging.
Liewise, the Greta, Sir David and rebellious prophet within us all being concerned for the well being on earth, know of the imperative that policy follows science,
That personal rights shouldn’t trump community wellbeing. Today’s choices should be mindful of tomorrow’s generations.
We stand as Moses once did overlooking the river to the promised land beyond.
In a post lockdown world do we just gaze over a fictitious land of hope and dreams?
Or do we choose life, setting off to a just and green new normal to which we are called and ultimately born to run?
As heart cries, How long may eyes’ light see through darkness and hope lead the way.
We need to hold on to the Christian promise of hope in these times more than ever and be a beacon of Christ’s light to others and for the world. To this end on 18th September our Diocese in Europe held a service for Creation. You can follow this service on youtube if you missed it. On the very same day I followed it, Greece was watching the progress and path of Ianos the medicane Mediterranean storm. This is a rare weather phenomenon in this part of the world, parts of the plain of Thessaly, a rich normally productive and fertile land will see no harvest this year and maybe for many more. We have also been observing fires across the world and the pandemic , the root of this word meaning pan dimos all population in Greek, has affected us all.
How can scripture connect with this? We declare that Christ is the new creation when we use the words of Philippians as a creed. What we are saying is that only Christ, Son of God, can bring fullness out of emptiness life out of death. This is the meaning of kenotic.
Jesus is not always sweetness and light. Increasingly we have had readings in Matthew’s gospel of justice and fairness and how this applies to all with no exceptions, like the pandemic. In this parable which is told just after Jesus entered Jerusalem on Palm Sunday. He has overturned the money lenders tables outside the temple and his behaviour is challenging the Jewish norms.
We have not been promised an easy life or one without challenges to embrace. Creation is groaning and we are still crying how long O Lord? Mankind and creation is facing several challenges at this time. However, we are called as Christians in these times and that means we have to grapple with them. James Baldwin, the American author says: ‘We cannot change everything we face but we have to face it in order to bring change.’
As Christians in the year of our Lord 2020 what does justice across the board look like for mankind and the planet we live on and have been put in charge of by our Maker?
AMEN
16/09/2020
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Holy Cross Sunday – 13th September 2020: Philippians 2, 6-11; John 3, 13-17
Fr Leonard Doolan – St Paul’s Athens
There was nothing remarkable about the day when Jesus from the town of Nazareth was crucified on a hill outside the city wall of Jerusalem.
City life was going on as usual – hustle bustle, trading, noise, the shout of haggling. It was probably a bit manic that day in the street markets because not only was it the day that Sabbath would begin, but that particular year it was also the day before Passover. The residents of Jerusalem were actually occupied with their own dometic concerns. The fact that the Romans were crucifying some criminals and trouble makers was not important enough to detract them from their priorities. Of course, the families and friends of those being crucified would have gathered at Golgotha. Remember, this was not yet ‘Good Friday’ nor a public holiday.
There was nothing remarkable that Jesus of Nazareth was being crucified. His was not a unique punishment. Indeed the gospel narratives tell us of at least 2 others, who were robbers, being crucified alongside him. That doesn’t mean there were not others also. Crucifixion was commonplace. The main road that ran south from the city of Rome was the Via Appia. This Appian Way was the nearest the Roman civilization had to an autobahn, an autostrada, motorway, αυτοκινητόδρομος.
The Appian Way was busy with traffic, merchants, businessmen, traders, in carriages, horseback and on foot. It was normal to see crucified criminals either side of this main road.
Crucifixion was one of the normal methods of punishment inflicted by the Roman authorities. It was a horrible death, yes, but the most important feature is that it was very public. It was an overt display of what happened to those who both committed crimes, but also those who threatened the Roman state, either in Italy, or in a vassal state. This state was neurotic about insurrection – nothing must be allowed that threatened what they considered to be the Pax Romana.
The followers of Jesus had a different perspective, of course. Those who gathered there at Golgotha were witnessing the public punishment, and slow death, of the man they loved as a preacher and teacher; a man at whose hands miracles had happened; a man they had become convinced was God’s Messiah, the harbinger who would bring in the Kingdom of God on earth.
Their grief would have been palpable as they wept, swooned, and supported each other. St. John tells us (John 19, 25) that Mary, the mother of Jesus was one of them, along with Mary wife of Clopas, and Mary Magdalene. The disciple John was also there, but plenty of the closest friends of Jesus are not recorded as being there to see the death of their ‘master’. Yet, so many had seen this man’s works – his signs and wonders.
Disappointment and grief is shared. Grief will be transformed to joy, but they are ignorant of this as yet on an unremarkable, normal day just outside Jerusalem.
With hindsight St. Paul can write about this same man, and the cross he died on, in a different way. Paul personally experiences and shares the joy and the light which is the flip of the shadow side of the cross – the Risen Lord. When he writes to the Christians in Philippi he speaks of God and the cross is an entirely new and radical way. Jesus is none other than the form of God, equal to God – God emptied in Jesus (kenosis); Jesus is as a slave is, humbled, obedient, crucified. Yet at the same time in this terrible self-sacrificial act, he is exalted, has pre-eminence; every knee will bow before him and all confess him as Lord to the glory of God the Father. The cross of shame is the throne of glory, and in this man Jesus we see the fullness of the God in whom we believe, and in whom we are being saved.
When the Empress St. Helena, mother of Emperor St. Constantine, decides to make a pilgrimage to the homeland of this man Jesus, whom she accepts as Lord and God, she asks for the blessing of the Pope in Rome. In Evelyn Waugh’s lovely novel called Helena the conversation goes like this.
‘Where is the cross anyway?’ She asked. ‘What cross, my dear?’ ‘The only one, the real one’. ‘I don’t know. I don’t think anyone knows. I don’t think anyone has ever asked before.’ Pope Sylvester goes on to say, ‘You’ll tell me, won’t you? – if you are successful.’ ‘I’ll tell the world.’
In Jerusalem at Golgotha Helena is guided to search in an area covered with basil bushes – of course, the plant of ‘the King’. Just as I said earlier the hill was covered in bits of wood – the tradition is that when the right bits were put together a dead man was placed on it and came alive again.
Helena was as good as her word, and the whole world now knows of her ‘invention’, her discovery. We too are commanded to tell the whole world about the mystery of the cross, and the man Jesus, crucified for us to guide us home to the Father, the man Jesus raised by God from the dead, the man whom the early disciples, Mary, Paul, Helena, and billions of people since, have worshipped, bent the knee, and confessed that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.’ Go, and baptise all the nations’ he tells us.’ (Matt 28, 19)
Philippians 2, 6-11 expresses for us superbly, in St. Paul’s words, a paradigm – THE paradigm – of God in Christ, reconciling the world to himself. St. John (John 3, 16), expresses it in this way, ‘For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life’.
In our own day the paradigm of God has much to teach us – the paradigm (παράδειγμα) is our example of Godly living, and at its heart is the mystery of the cross, humility, self -emptying, obedience. It is when we accept this that we can share in the mystery of our faith.
This paradigm turns upside down and inside out everything that we assume God will be. We assume that God is, in our human understanding of these words, all-powerful, almighty, omnipotent, yet Paul’s words in Philippians bring us to kneel at the feet of the one whose power and might rested in him not exercising this. I have used before the phrase, ‘the power of power not exercised.’
In Jesus, the man who died unnoticed by most people at a place where hundreds were put to death, by a method that was common-place, God chose to dwell fully, and show forth his glory in a manger in a stable, and on a cross on a little hill. As people of faith, we need to look at everything we do, everything we see, everything we assume, everything we collude with, everything we tacitly support, and apply to it the paradigm of the cross – a sign that in God’s kingdom nothing is what we expect.
In Greece this week, on the island of Lesbos, something tragic happened – we all know about it. Each of us will have a variety of views and reactions to what happened at the Moria Refugee camp. Those views might be coloured by where you live – suppose you live in Mytilene or one of the villages around it. Your view might be coloured by how the presence of this vast blight of a refugee camp has affected tourism, with the knock on effect on your hotel, your restaurant, your livelihood, the school where your children attend.
Your view might be coloured by what you think about refugees and migrants and their impact on Greece and Europe generally, and why does the EU not do more to help Greece; why should refugees be given cash cards to buy groceries when elderly Greek women, citizens, our mother or grand-mother’s age have to open the big street pedal bins to try and find something to eat or wear, or sell on for a few cents? You might be angry because your taxes are paying for the camp that was burned down by those it was built for; your taxes now pay for 900 police officers on one small Aegean island.
Your view might be one of exasperation that we allow such refugee camps to exist at all; that they are inhumane, undignified, soul destroying, a sign of our failure and the failure of the nations.
These views and many others will colour the way we respond and react to complex situations of human challenge and misery. Whatever our view, we must return again and again to the Philippian’s paradigm of Paul to rediscover what our faith says to us, and how we understand ourselves and our world, in relation to the kenotic God, who emptied himself for the sake of his love for us.
It is extraordinary, is it not, that this man who died on a fairly normal busy day, with just a handful of friends around him, in a way that common criminals were punished, on a little hill outside Jerusalem, should have such a powerful hold on our lives and in the shaping of our world – the mystery of that cross.
‘You’ll tell me, won’t you?-if you are successful.’ ‘I’ll tell the world.’
05/09/2020
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Sermons & Services
Trinity 13 – 6 September 2020: : Romans 13, 9-end; Matthew 18, 15-20.
Revd. Canon Leonard Doolan – St Paul’s Athens
In all of the four gospels Jesus only uses the word ‘church’ twice. The Greek word is εκκλεσία. In ancient Greek the word is used for an assembly of citizens and the word comes from a verb that means ‘to shut out’. So an ekklesia literally means an assembly where those who are not its members are shut out.
Both times this word ekklesia is attributed to Jesus occur in the central section of St. Matthew’s gospel. The first occasion is where Jesus gives to Simon the additional name of Peter, the rock on which Jesus says he will build his church, his assembly of members, his ekklesia. There is something very prophetic in this message from Jesus as after his death and resurrection small communities of faith in the risen Lord began to emerge from Judaism in Jerusalem and the whole Mediterranean region, many visited and encouraged by St. Paul.
The second occasion ekklesia occurs in St. Matthew’s gospel is in the reading we heard this morning. It is basically a passage about resolving conflict, suggesting a protocol for those who feel sinned against by fellow members of the assembly (ekklesia) and how it is to be resolved.
30/08/2020
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Sermons & Services
12th SUNDAY AFTER TRINITY, 30/08/2020: ROMANS 12:9-21; MATTHEW16:21-28
The F Word – Deacon Christine Saccali
I speak in the name of the Triune God Father, Son and Holy Spirit
How are you? It has been a strange summer and year so far, hasn’t it? When I ask the question, ‘ How are you ?’ most people answer up and down and I understand exactly what they mean ανεβοκατεβασματα, a lovely word in Greek,meaning literal or life’s ups and downs.
Our continuing gospel passage from Matthew, a hinge chapter, set for this week encapsulates all the remaining chapters. Jesus is warning and pointing his disciples to what is to come in Jerusalem. He is also saying that his followers need to bear their own cross with all its ups and downs on the path of life.
15/08/2020
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Sermons & Services
Trinity 10 2020 – 16th August 2020: Romans 11, 1-2, 29-32; Matthew 15, 21-28
Fr Leonard Doolan – St Paul’s Athens
The same coach that drew into the lay-by to let all of our pilgrim group get a panoramic view of the Sea of Galilee had picked us up at Ben Gurian Airport in Tel Aviv. You may recall what I said last week about the Sea of Galilee – if not there are ways you can double check. From the moment we start our visit the official Tourist Ministry guide is offering us much valued information.
We are travelling from Tel Aviv towards Jerusalem. We begin in the flat plains of the Mediterranean coastline and the journey to Jerusalem is all up-hill, because the city is set in the mountains of the Judaean wilderness. Its height is more noticeable on the day we journey to the Dead Sea – such a descent to the lowest point on earth that your ears actually ‘pop’.
Anyway, this first journey has some interesting commentary from our guide. ‘Look to the right’ he says. No much good really because it is night time. ‘You can’t see what you are looking at because it is dark’ stating the obvious! ‘To your right is the ancient land of Canaan.’ He informs us. This land was occupied by many tribes generally referred to in the bible as the Canaanites. This area of land is also called Syro-Phoenicia where there were cities like Tyre and Sidon.
It was this land to which Moses sent two spies to survey the land to bring back a favourable report. One of the two spies was Caleb, the other was Joshua, the only two people of the original group of the 40 year Exodus, to be allowed to enter this ‘promised land’. It was this land of Canaan. Both these characters are shown in the stained glass windows in St. Paul’s Church (Athens).