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The Four Gospels

The Four Gospels
sermon at Christ Church URC Church 21.10.2001

I hope Friends, that you are not expecting to hear from me this morning my reflections on the international situation. While I am convinced that no-one and no situation in this world is past praying for, I fear that some are past preaching about – at least by me. I don’t know a ready answer to all the world’s problems. All that I can do is to try, however inadequately, to point towards the teaching, example and continuing indwelling presence of Jesus Christ – the way, the truth and the life. There we will find the principles that should guide our attitudes.
When, a few years ago, my wife and I used to spend part of our holiday in Sussex, we never failed to visit the village of Bosham, on an inlet from the sea near Chichester. Its church has a long and interesting history. Part of it is Romano-British, dating from long before Augustine landed in Kent to convert the heathen English.
The main part of the church was built in Saxon times. Among its early worshippers was Harold Godwinsson, destined to become King of England and to be slain at Hastings. He is depicted in the Bayeux Tapestry praying beneath the church’s clearly recognisable chancel arch. Even earlier worshippers there had been King Canute and his family. Tradition had it that Canute had a well-loved twelve year old daughter who was accidentally drowned in the mill stream that still runs through the village, and that she was buried in the nave of the church.
Although there was no documentary evidence of this, the story persisted over the centuries. In the mid-eighteen hundreds, some eight centuries after Canute’s death, the then-vicar decided to test the tradition. He asked a builder, who was carrying out maintenance work there, to excavate the nave at the point where the child was said to have been buried.
Precisely at that point the builder unearthed a stone coffin dating from the beginning of the second millennium, containing the skeleton of a twelve year old girl.
What relevance to us today has this story from the past? Simply that throughout the year, but especially at Easter and Christmas, we are all subjected to printed and spoken propaganda from unbelievers who are eager to pass on their disbelief in the Christian faith to the rest of us. A point that they often try to make is that the accounts of the life, ministry and miracles of Jesus that are to be found in the four Gospels are quite unreliable because they weren’t written down until several decades after his crucifixion
The story of Canute’s daughter forcefully illustrates the point that remembered events can be transmitted with accuracy not just over two or three decades but as many as eight centuries! The life and ministry of Jesus Christ was recorded in the Gospels either by first-hand or second hand witnesses of the events that they record, during the lifetimes of many who could still remember those events.
Considering the impact that Jesus Christ has had, and still has, on the lives of countless millions of people, we really know very little about him. Had the Gospel stories been invented they would surely have had something imaginative to say about his appearance – his height, his features, the tone of his voice and so on.
Not so; we have the story of his miraculous birth and infancy recorded in two Gospels; an incident that occurred when he was twelve years old in just one of them, and then nothing till he was about thirty years old and was baptised by John the Baptist. Then over a period of two or three years, he gathered together his disciples, taught, healed, prophesied and was cruelly put to death – but rose from the dead to complete his mission of revealing God to mankind.
Had the Gospel stories been invented, their authors would surely have made certain that they agreed in every detail – and about what was, and what was not, important. But they don’t, just as the recollections of honest witnesses of contemporary events are unlikely to agree in detail and emphasis. What the Gospels do have, is what J.B. Phillips, biblical scholar and translator of the New Testament into modern English has described as ‘the ring of truth’. They clearly come across as the honest – and perhaps sometimes puzzled – recollections of four very different men.
How very different they were too! Matthew’s Gospel, the longest and the one printed first in our Bibles – though it wasn’t the first to be written – was clearly the work of a well-read Jew determined to persuade a Jewish readership of the validity of Our Lord’s claim to be the awaited Messiah.
The Gospel begins with an account of Jesus’ lineal descent in an endeavour to establish him as an heir to King David and to Abraham. On over sixty occasions Matthew refers to Jesus as fulfilling Old Testament prophecies about the Messiah – occasionally, in fact, giving the impression that Jesus did this, or endured that, for no other reason than that ‘the Scriptures should be fulfilled’.
Because of this, Matthew’s Gospel may be undervalued by today’s overwhelmingly Gentile readership. This would be a pity because it gives the most complete story of Jesus’ life and ministry, including the story of the wise men and their gifts, and the flight of the Holy Family into Egypt. It also gives the fullest and, in may be thought, best account of the Sermon on the Mount, a summary of Jesus’ moral and ethical teaching.
It should be remembered too that, of all the disciples, Matthew had the most to lose in following Our Lord. If Jesus’ mission failed, the fishermen could return to their boats and their nets – and, in fact, that is just what they did until Jesus convinced them of the reality of his resurrection and continuing mission. Matthew, the tax collector – the civil servant – once having abandoned his post to follow the unorthodox Nazarene teacher and healer, could never hope to return to it.
St Mark’s Gospel is very different. It was the first to be written and was clearly intended for a Gentile readership. There are no references to Jewish law and Mark makes a point of explaining words and phrases, Boanerges (Sons of Thunder) and Talitha Cumi (‘Damsel, I say unto thee arise’) for example, that would not have been understood by a Gentile readership.
Despite being the shortest of the Gospels, Mark’s account is full of observed detail – omitted from the other Gospels – that convince the reader that it was written by an eye witness of the events recounted. Here are just three examples. When Mark describes the quelling of the storm on the Sea of Galilee he says that Jesus was sleeping on a pillow in the boat; describing the feeding of the five thousand, he says that the multitude sat down ‘on the green grass’; recounting the incident in which the disciples drove away the mothers, with their children, who were seeking Jesus’ blessing, he says that Jesus was much displeased and his is the only account that records that, after rebuking the disciples, Jesus took the children into his arms and blessed them.
Tradition has it that Mark was the young man on the Mount of Olives at the time of Our Lord’s arrest who, as he says in his Gospel, was girt about with a linen cloth and who left the cloth behind and fled naked when he feared his own arrest.
Mark’s Gospel has an immediacy, an urgency in fact, that is not to be found in the other Gospels. Just as in Matthew’s Gospel we continually encounter the phrase ‘that the scripture might be fulfilled’, in Mark’s we learn over and over again, that ‘straightway’ this, that or the other event happened.
St. Luke, the author both of the Gospel that bears his name and of the Acts of the Apostles, was a physician, a faithful companion and friend of St Paul and almost certainly a well educated Gentile. Like Matthew he gives Jesus’ genealogy but he traces Jesus’ roots not just back to Abraham, the forefather of the people of Israel, but back to Adam, the forefather of us all!
It is to Luke that we owe the fullest account of Jesus’ birth and the events that preceded it.
We have too the only story from the developing adolescence of Jesus – his lingering in the Temple at Jerusalem at the age of twelve, in earnest conversation with the doctors of the law, oblivious to the fears of his worrying parents. How graphically Luke describes that parental anxiety – an anxiety that modern parents will recognise only too well if they have ever had a twelve-year old son or daughter go missing, perhaps only for a few hours.
‘Son’, says Mary his mother, ‘Why hast thou thus dealt with us? Behold, thy father and I have sought thee sorrowing’.
Luke records Jesus’ reply. He was apparently surprised that they hadn’t realized that he had to be about the business of his Heavenly Father Luke adds that his mother kept all these sayings of her son in her heart (as indeed mothers do today) and that, ‘Jesus increased in wisdom and stature, and in favour with God and man’.
It is surely not fanciful to suggest that these passages about Jesus’ birth, childhood and adolescence indicate that St Luke, perhaps because he was a physician, had at some time been a friend and confidant of Jesus’ mother, the Blessed Virgin Mary, and that she had shared with him her memories of Jesus’ birth and early life.
I find it interesting that no less than three passages from the early chapters of Luke’s Gospel are regularly used in worship in some mainstream churches. The angelic salutation ‘Hail, thou that are highly favoured, the lord is with thee, blessed art thou among women’, is the basis of the Ave Maria, the Catholic prayer to Mary: ‘Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee’ Then there is the Magnificat, ‘My soul doth magnify the Lord, and my spirit hath rejoiced in God, my saviour’, Mary’s song of triumph when she had accepted as a fact that she was to bear the Messiah, and the Nunc Dimitis or Song of Simeon when the infant Jesus was presented at the Temple, ‘Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace, according to thy word’.
The fourth Gospel, that of St John, is quite different from the other three. The Gospel was written, probably at John’s dictation, towards the end of the first century. Christ’s crucifixion and resurrection had occurred over sixty years earlier. Some have claimed that the John who, with his brother James, was called by Jesus to be ‘fishers of men’ couldn’t possibly have been the author of the fourth Gospel since he would have been nearly a hundred years old at the time that it was written.
But would he have been? When James and John were called by Jesus they were fishing with their father Zebedee who was clearly young and active enough to take charge of a fishing boat and play an active role in the fishing operation. The nickname of the two brothers was .Boanerges’, sons of thunder, which to me suggests the impetuosity of youth. James, whose name is always given before that of John in the New Testament, was presumably the elder. John may well therefore been in his teens when he was called. If that were so he would have been more than ten years younger than Jesus and would have been in his early eighties during the final decade of the 1st century.
Still pretty ancient you may think. Perhaps so, but I’m just into my eighties and I like to think that I’ll be capable of writing effectively for a little while yet. What’s more – my memory of events that took place sixty years ago is often clearer and more detailed than it is of events that took place last week!
While the other three evangelists tell us of the actions of Our Lord, John seems to probe his innermost thoughts and motives. I find his Gospel both immensely challenging and immensely rewarding. Previously from this pulpit I have declared that my Christian faith, my Quaker faith, has that wonderful preface to St. John’s Gospel – the first fourteen verses of Chapter 1 – as its foundation.
I find myself overwhelmed by the thought that Jesus of Nazareth was the Word of God, who was with God and was God from the beginning; that all things were made by him and that without him was not anything made that was made; that he was and is the True Light that is available to everyone who comes into the world.
The last time that I was here I explained my conviction that Jesus was speaking in his role as The Word and the True Light when he claimed that ‘before Abraham was – I am’ and said that he was the way, the truth and the life and that no-one came unto the Father save through him.
It seems to me that while Matthew, Mark and Luke recount the ‘where’, ‘when’ and ‘how’ of the life, death and resurrection of Our Lord, John struggles throughout his Gospel to give us the ‘why’ – a ‘why’ that is really beyond human comprehension.
Jesus turned accepted values on their heads. Despite the prophecies to which Matthew constantly referred, he was not the kind of Messiah that was expected. As the Scottish poet George MacDonald put it:
They all were looking for a king
To slay their foes and lift them high;
Thou cam’st, a little baby thing,
That made a woman cry.

Everybody knew that it was a good thing to be wealthy and powerful, to love one’s friends and hate one’s enemies; to respect the authority of the rulers of the Temple and to resist (though discretely) the power of Rome.
Jesus said Blessed are the poor; Blessed are they that mourn; Blessed are the peacemakers. He told them to love their enemies, bless them that cursed them and pray for those that despitefully used them. He put the will of God above that of the rulers of the Temple. He healed the servant of the Roman centurion and when asked by Roman soldiers what they must do, he didn’t proclaim ‘Romans, go home!’ or ‘Judaea for the Jews!’ but simply told them to refrain from violence, not to bear false witness, and to be content with their wages.
His message offended both the Romans and the leaders of his own people. He was cruelly put to death – but rose from the dead to found a faith that still flourishes world-wide after two thousand years. And I believe that, inasmuch as the prophets of other world religions have testified to the truth, they have been inspired to do so by his indwelling spirit, by the inward light of Christ. He was, is and always will be ‘the way, the truth and the life’.
Both Matthew and Mark record that, as he was dying, the Roman centurion in charge exclaimed ‘Truly this man was the son of God’.
Jesus’ followers were convinced, and the gospel stories have convinced me – as they have convinced millions of others – that the Word of God, by whom all things were made, ‘Was made flesh and dwelt among us, and we beheld his glory, the glory as of the only-begotten of the Father – full of grace and truth.

The Nature of God


Sermon preached in Christ Church URC Church and an abridged version later published in ‘The Friend’

This morning, friends, I would like to share with you my ideas of the nature of God. This may seem an ambitious, even a presumptuous proposal from someone who has had no specialist theological training. Yet surely our God is the God of ordinary people like me – not just the God of the intellectual and the learned.

I heard recently a story, which I am assured is true, of a primary school teacher who noticed a little girl in her class working particularly assiduously over a drawing on her desk in front of her.

‘What are you drawing dear?’ she asked.
‘I’m drawing God’, came the reply.
‘But’, said the teacher, ‘No-one knows what God looks like’.
‘Well’, replied the little girl, ‘They will when I’ve finished my picture!’

I haven’t either the confidence or the optimism of that little girl. It may be though that my hesitant and faltering conjectures about the nature of God may help you to clarify your own.

No-one knows what God looks like. No-one can know. As St John declares in the first chapter of his Gospel. ‘No man hath seen God at any time’. The human mind cannot envisage infinite power, infinite wisdom and infinite love any more than it can envisage infinite time or infinite space – yet no-one, I think, doubts that both time and space are infinite.

Our ignorance of God’s appearance hasn’t deterred artists through the ages who have portrayed God as a wise and all-powerful old man reaching down out of Heaven into his earthly creation. But, of course, neither Heaven nor God are like that at all. Even less is God like the haloed old gentleman of the national newspaper cartoonists, usually depicted as wearing a nightgown and standing on a cloud. It is rather sad to realize that in our country today there are probably tens of thousands of young people, growing up ignorant of the Christian or any other faith, who imagine that Christianity teaches that God is some kind of elderly superman who lives in a Heaven ‘above the clouds’.

We can’t hope to know what God – or what Heaven - is like. Yet it is part of human nature that we should strive to do so. It is at the root of such questions – unanswerable by human reason alone – as what is the purpose of the creation, what is the nature of Life, why were we born and why will we eventually die to this world. The pages of the Old and New Testaments record the evolution of humankind’s ideas of the deity from a capricious and sometimes cruel tribal god to the loving Father of all humankind of whom Jesus told us.

Here is a definition of God that has stood the test of time. ‘There is but one living and true God, everlasting, without body, parts or passions; of infinite power, wisdom and goodness; the Maker and Preserver of all things, both visible and invisible. And in unity of this Godhead there are three persons, of one substance, power and eternity; The Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit’.

This is, in fact the first of the 39 Articles of Religion to which all Anglican Clergy are required to give general assent. I think that it is a definition that would be accepted by most Christians though some might have difficulty with the affirmation of the Holy Trinity in the final sentence.

The idea of One God in three Persons certainly worried me when, some seventy years ago, I was an Anglican choirboy. It continued to do so for many years after. How could one God be, at the same time, three persons? It was beyond my understanding. My confusion was compounded by what seemed to me to be the contradictory affirmations of the Athanasian Creed, which I discovered in explorations of the Book of Common Prayer during long and boring sermons. ‘The Father is God, the Son is God: and the Holy Ghost is God. Yet there are not three Gods: but one God’ – and so on.

There was a glimmer of understanding when I learned that our word ‘person’ derives from the Greek ‘persona’ meaning the mask worn by actors in classical Greek dramas. The Father is God in his persona as creator and Lord of the Universe, the Son is God in his persona of Emmanuel ‘God with us’. This is the true light that lightens everyone born into the world and who, as St John says, ‘was made flesh and dwelt among us’.

The Holy Spirit, as the Nicene Creed affirms is God in his persona as ‘the Lord and giver of Life’ (all life, not just human life) who inspired the prophets of old and has inspired the leaders of the Universal Christian Church throughout the ages.

I personally find it more helpful to think of ‘the Creator’ rather than the ‘Father’ and of Jesus Christ as John does, as The Word, or the True Light rather than as ‘The Son’. Father and Son are words that, in today’s world, have biological and perhaps sexist implications that, I believe, are by no means an essential part of the Christian Gospel.

Christ, the second person of the Holy Trinity, is ‘God with us’; God’s human face. We have to remember that, unlike us, God is not bound by time and space. God is simultaneously able to rule the Universe, listen to and answer our individual prayers, weep at human folly and cruelty - and note the fall of the sparrow.

Other religions than Christianity have acknowledged a Creator God
and have suggested that there may be a divine spark in every human being. What is unique about the Christian faith is our conviction that Christ, who was with God and was God from the very beginning, and without whom was nothing made that was made, was incarnate in Jesus of Nazareth.

That conviction is the rock on which my Christian faith, my Quaker faith is built. Jesus was the human face of God, the incarnation of the Christ who was one with the Father and of the Inward Light that, even as he walked the earth in Palestine, was available in the heart of every individual man, woman and child in the world, always had been and always would be.

Jesus tells us all that we need to know about the nature of God. ‘I and my Father are one’, he said. ‘He who has seen me has seen my Father’.

We Quakers have an anthology called ‘Quaker Faith and Practice’. It is a selection, regularly updated, of accumulated Quaker wisdom and experience over the three and a half centuries of our Society’s existence. Part of a contribution from Ruth Fawell, a contemporary Friend, says ‘We may make our guesses at the nature of God and we are often like my small daughter who said, “My mind goes round and round when I want to think about God, but I can think about Jesus”. To me Jesus is a window through to God, a person who in terms of personality, in a way that can be grasped by our finite minds, shows what mercy, pity and peace are like in human life. I turn to the Jesus of the New Testament – to his healing word, his freedom from anxiety, his outreaching insight, to him as a whole person to let him live and grow in my life’.

I certainly empathise with Ruth Fawell’s small daughter. I find the idea of God the Creator, ‘ruler of the earth and sky’, ‘pavilioned in splendour and girded with praise’ whose ‘chariots of wrath the dark thunderclouds form’ a distant and awesome figure. He is the figure of whom the psalmist wrote ‘The fear (or awe) of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom’. My prayers are addressed to and through Emmanuel, God with us, Jesus Christ our Lord – Jesus, son of the carpenter of Nazareth, whom the Christian Church has always taught was both fully human and fully divine.

The Gospels suggest that Jesus was fully aware of his divine, as well as of his human nature. He would not have been fully human though if he had always appreciated that others couldn’t understand this. We are all familiar with the story, recorded in St Luke’s Gospel of the occasion on which Mary and Joseph, returning from the Temple in Jerusalem to their home in Nazareth, suddenly realized that their twelve year old son Jesus was missing.

Every modern parent will understand the desperate anxiety that must have gripped Mary and Joseph. The perils that an unaccompanied twelve year old faced in first century Palestine were certainly no less than those faced by a similar child in England today. And in those days there was no news media to publicise his disappearance, or government agencies and charitable organisations to help find him.

When, after three days of intense worry and sleepless nights, they found him deep in discussion with the doctors of the law in the Temple, he appears to have been puzzled by their anxiety and their relief at finding him. ‘Didn’t you realize that I had to be engaged in my Father’s business’, he asked. I suspect that rather more words were exchanged between parents and child on that occasion than are recorded in Holy Scripture!

The clearest indication in the Gospels of Jesus’ knowledge of his divine identity, as an adult, is surely the occasion on which he was mocked for his claim to be acquainted with Abraham despite the fact that ‘he was not yet fifty’ and that Abraham was long dead. He replied ‘Before Abraham was I am’.

My own Quaker conviction that Jesus was the incarnation of the ‘True Light that lighteth everyone who comes into the world’ helps me to accept some of his recorded sayings that I would otherwise find difficult and invests other of his well-loved words with new significance.

I have little doubt, for instance, that when he said ‘I am the way, the truth and the life. No-one comes unto the Father save through me’, he was speaking not as the carpenter’s son from Nazareth but as the true light. All who faithfully follow that inward light can hope to come in the end to the Father. Similarly, it is I think generally assumed that when he said, both of acts of kindness and acts of cruelty and neglect, ‘Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me’ he just meant that it was as good, or as bad, as if it had been done to him. I believe that his meaning was more literal than that; that whatever – good or bad – we do to another human being we are doing to the divine spark, the light of Christ, that was made flesh in Jesus and is the inheritance of each one of us.

It was this belief that inspired the nineteenth century Quaker Elizabeth Fry, whose picture we now see on the back of every £5 note, to visit the cells of Newgate prison, bringing comfort and practical help to the women prisoners there, who were regarded by ‘respectable’ society as the very lowest of the low. ‘I was in prison and you visited me. I was thirsty and you gave me drink. I was naked and you clothed me’, said Jesus.

It was the same conviction that persuaded the seventeenth century Quaker William Penn to meet the native American Indians of Pennsylvania as friends and to make a lasting peace treaty with them that was described by the French writer and philosopher Voltaire as ‘The only treaty that was never sworn to and never broken’.

It inspires too the Peace Testimony to which Quakers have witnessed for three and a half centuries. How could we, for any cause whatsoever, kill or injure a fellow man or woman endowed with the divine spirit of Christ?

From time to time I am asked to address groups in this area on the subject of Quaker faith and practice. I try to explain that Quakers believe that the ultimate guide to human conduct is neither the Church, nor the Holy Scriptures but the true light of Christ working within each one of us. Early Quakers therefore proclaimed themselves to be followers of Christ but neither Catholic nor Protestant. This reliance on being guided by the inward light of Christ applies both in our private lives and in the corporate decisions that we reach at our business meetings.

I have often been asked ‘How do we know that the inspiration that we may receive when we seek guidance is, in fact, from the indwelling spirit of Christ and does not spring – as it says in the Anglican Book of Common Prayer – from “the devices and desires of our own hearts”.

The only answer that I can give is that if we find ourselves urged to an attitude or a course of action that we can imagine would be blessed by Jesus of Nazareth, as we know him from the four Gospels, then we have been inspired by the Holy Spirit. If it is an attitude or course of action that we realize couldn’t possibly receive Jesus’ blessing, then we can be quite certain that we haven’t been.

I believe that, difficult as it may be to follow, this applies to public and international affairs as much as it does to our personal concerns. We can all surely imagine Jesus giving his blessing to aid to the hungry, the thirsty and the homeless. Can you though imagine him blessing cluster bombs, anti-personnel land mines, cruise or similar missiles or even the conventional guns with which, as a young man serving as a gunner in the Royal Artillery I was involved in World War II – long before I became a Quaker?

The demands of the Christian Faith may seem minimal compared with those of some other world-religions. There are no rigid dietary rules for instance, and no rigid standards of dress. Men and women can sit and stand together in worship. Nowadays, no dire penalties are faced by those who are foolish enough to desert the Christian Faith for another – or for no faith at all.

To live in the imitation of Christ though, which is what we Christians are called to do, is no easy task. We shall, since we are flawed human beings, inevitably stumble and fall. We must then pick ourselves up, ask for the forgiveness that will be freely given – and try again.

Fw: Sermon - Faith and Works

From the context, this sermon was preached in Christ Church URC Church on the last Sunday in Advent. I'm sorry - I don't know which year.

Faith and Works

Our Lord Jesus Christ said, 'Whosoever heareth these sayings of mine, and doeth them, I will liken him unto a wise man, which built his house upon a rock: And the rain descended, and the floods came, and the winds blew, and beat upon that house; and it fell not: for it was founded upon a rock.

'And every one that heareth these sayings of mine and doeth them not, shall be likened unto a foolish man, which built his house upon the sand; And the rain descended, and the floods came, and the winds blew, and beat upon that house; and it fell: and great was the fall thereof'.

This parable, to be found at the end of Chapter 7 of St. Matthew's Gospel, of the house built upon shifting sands and the one built upon rock has provided a popular text for many a stirring sermon.

I recall listening to many such in my childhood and youth as a choirboy and later as a server at an Anglican church in Ipswich. Always, as I recall, the preacher insisted that the rock upon which the secure house was built was the rock of faith. It was only upon a secure foundation of faith in the church's teachings that we could hope to build our lives.

Faith was equated with 'belief'. Even at a very young age, this struck a false chord with me. I couldn't force myself to believe something that I was by no means certain was true – and I didn't suppose that anyone else could. We could try to believe. We could, if we were prepared to deceive others, pretend to believe – but that was surely not the kind of faith on which we were being urged to build our lives.

I have since come to realize that the faith that is required of us equates more closely to 'trust' than to 'belief' and I am brought once again to that wise dictum of George Bernard Shaw that I have quoted before from this pulpit, that our faith does not consist of the things that we think we believe but of the assumptions on which we habitually act.

Furthermore

a closer look at the parable of the two houses reveals that the 'rock' on which the wise builder erected his home was not that of faith alone but of faith-in-action. Our Lord likened the foolish builder to those who hear his words only, and the wise one to those who hear his words and act upon them!

Archbishop William Temple once insisted that the Christian Faith was the most materialistic of all the world's religions. It didn't simply require that our creator and heavenly father should receive prayer and homage and sacrifice. He required us to do his will.

Jesus Christ, the Word of God, who was 'made flesh and dwelt among us' some two thousand years ago, said that 'not all who call unto me "Lord!, Lord!" shall enter into my kingdom, but those who do the will of my Father which is in Heaven'.

It is by heeding the words of Jesus and – we Quakers believe – by following the inward light of Christ's spirit, which illuminates our consciences and will, if we allow it, guide our actions, that we know what is the will of our Father in Heaven.

The ten commandments, originally intended for a primitive nomadic tribe in the Middle East many millennia ago, are for the most part still relevant today. They used to be read, with an appropriate prayer response to each commandment, at every Anglican service of Holy Communion. Nowadays they are, more often than not, replaced by what Jesus described as the two great commandments – to love God with all our heart and soul and mind and strength, and to love our neighbour as ourselves.

Some may think of these as easy options (there are, after all, only two of them!) but are they? To love God with all our heart and soul and mind and strength we must be continually conscious of his presence. How many of us, in the world of the 21

st

Century, can really claim that that is so?

Jesus told us that 'neighbour' includes everyone with whom we come into contact – including our enemies. I suspect that those who claim that loving their enemies is easy have never really had any!

It also means refugees staying in hotels in our town, the possibly alcoholic or drug addicted beggars whom we may encounter in the streets, and – of course – the people who live in the same neighbourhood as ourselves, including those who actually live next door.

My wife and I have always been very fortunate with our immediate neighbours. My years as a public health inspector and as Clacton's housing manager have taught me that not everyone is so fortunate. Some have distinctly unlovable neighbours with incessantly barking dogs, recurring smoky garden bonfires, noisy televisions and radios, and late-night parties.

Sometimes it is easier to entertain feelings of love for the poverty-stricken slum-dwellers of Latin America, the constantly flood-threatened peasants of Bangladesh, or the street children of Moscow, than for those who live near at hand.

There is a couplet in a satirical poem by G.K. Chesterton that goes:

'How I love humanity, with love so pure and pringlish –

And how I hate the horrid French, who never will be English!'

How do we even attempt to love someone whom we instinctively

dislike? The late C.S.Lewis, children's author, Christian publicist, and the subject of the play 'Shadowlands', to be presented by Clacton's Arts and Literary Society early next year, suggested that, when faced with the unlovable we should try behaving towards them as though we loved them.

God loves them – as he loves us all. And St Teresa pointed out in the 16

th

century that God has no hands but ours with which to do his bidding; no feet but ours to run his errands. It may be that by doing God's work, however reluctantly, there will be a transformation - perhaps of our neighbour; perhaps of our own nature.

In our second reading this morning we heard St. James, whom many believe to have been a brother of our Lord, ask 'If a brother or sister be naked and destitute of daily food, and one of you say unto them, 'Depart in peace. Be ye warmed and fed'; notwithstanding ye give them not those things which are needful to the body; what doth it profit?' What indeed?

Martin Luther, is said to have denigrated this epistle as 'an epistle of straw'. In repudiation of the corrupt practices of the church of his day he believed fervently in 'justification through faith alone'. He had some pretty powerful friends among the German princes and may also have been unhappy about the denunciations of the rich and powerful in the same epistle.

Great as Luther undoubtedly was, I hope that I may be excused for regarding St. James as an even greater authority on Christ's Gospel.

The world of the New Testament was very different from the one that we know today. It was harsher and more cruel in many ways – but both acts of cruelty and of kindness were the responsibility of individuals.

Conquering armies would sack towns and carry off the inhabitants into slavery – but, unlike us, they hadn't perfected the art of dealing out death and mutilation impersonally and from a distance; from an aircraft miles above its victims perhaps, or from warships sailing a distant ocean. On the other hand, there was no health service, no economic 'safety net' to alleviate destitution, no human rights legislation.

Life and death, happiness or misery, depended upon the whim of a ruler, on the personal wealth of individuals and their families, and on the alms-giving of strangers. It seems to us that the difference between 'right' and 'wrong' must have been very much clearer in those days than it is today and that much biblical wisdom is hardly relevant to the 21

st

Century.

This certainly cannot be said with regard to either of the scriptural readings that we have had this morning. Those who seek a brief exposition of the Christian ethic can do no better than to read again Jesus' words 'I was hungred, and ye gave me meat; I was thirsty, and ye gave me drink, naked and ye clothed me: I was sick and ye visited me: I was in prison and ye came unto me'. And when those to whom he was speaking asked, in puzzlement, when they had done those things, he replied, 'Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me.

Jesus thus clearly identified himself with the sick, the disabled, the hungry and the homeless everywhere. To me, as a Quaker, it means rather more than that. I believe that every man, woman and child in the world is endowed with 'that of God' – a spark of that same Divine Light of which Jesus of Nazareth was the incarnation. Thus, whatever good – or bad – we do to our fellow men or women we are doing to the Holy Spirit of Christ.

This conviction is the firm foundation of all our Quaker testimonies – most of which, of course, we share with followers of other Christian traditions. It is the rock upon which we have built our faith and practice. There is our peace testimony, for which we are perhaps best known, our testimonies to political and economic justice, our concern for education, and our interest in penal reform from the time of Elizabeth Fry to the present day.

Jesus' 'Inasmuch as…….' is as relevant today as it was two thousand years ago. There are still sick, homeless, ill-clad, and starving people in the world. There are untold numbers of prisoners, victims of oppression, and victims of war and violence. What we do for them, good or evil, we are doing to Jesus Christ. Our indifference to their plight is indifference to the suffering of Our Lord.

Among the victims of oppression, war and violence are countless little children. Let us never forget that Jesus, though the gentlest of men, said of those who harm little children that it would be better for them if a millstone were tied round their necks and they were cast into the sea.

What should it mean to us, here in Clacton today? For many of us – the frail and the elderly – there may be little that we can do but pray and support the work that others are doing on our behalf. Other, younger and fitter folk will perhaps feel called upon to play a more positive role.

National and international charitable organisations that are undoubtedly doing God's work include Christian Aid, Oxfam, The International Red Cross (for whom I have always had a warm regard since they undoubtedly saved my life during my time as a prisoner of war) and Save the Children, as well as denominational organisations like the Salvation Army, Cafod and Quaker Aid.

They, and many others, deserve all the support that we can give them. In our multifaith society it may be considered politically incorrect to suggest that one religious faith could be better than any other – but can you think of any other world religion with an organisation like Christian Aid which, world-wide, supports those in need, whatever their race, colour or creed?

While it is right that we should support the sick, oppressed and disadvantaged world-wide, we should not ignore the plight of those in need in our own locality and our own community. In Our Lord's parable of the wealthy man, traditionally called Midas, and Lazarus, the beggar at his gate, we know very little about either of them.

The wealthy man may well have been a model citizen, honest and upright, a supporter of worthy causes. He was condemned for no other reason than that he chose to ignore the plight of the beggar on his own doorstep.

We should remember too, the words of the eighteenth century poet and visionary William Blake, perhaps best known as the author of the hymn 'Jerusalem'. He wrote that, 'He who would do good to another must do it in minute particulars'. No matter how old or frail we may be we can all manage the minute particulars of a friendly smile of welcome, a word of praise, of encouragement or of thanks.

Above all, I think, we should attempt to dedicate everything we do 'to the greater glory of God'. As the hymn declares 'Who sweeps a room as for thy laws, makes that, and the action fine'. I can't help comparing the permanence of the great cathedrals, erected to God's glory in the early centuries of the last millennium with the strictly temporary Greenwich Dome, hastily erected in the closing months of that millennium to the greater glory of contemporary humanity and our false god Mammon. It is, I believe, this change of purpose that has produced what seems, to my admittedly elderly senses, a modern cult of ugliness in art, in music and dance, in architecture, and in literature.

This Sunday is the last before Advent; the season during which Christians traditionally prepared themselves both for the anniversary of Christ's birth and for his second coming which, for many centuries, was believed to be imminent.

When I was a boy it was often known as 'stir-up' Sunday because of the opening words of the collect, or short prayer appointed for the day, in the Anglican Book of Common Prayer. My mother, who had been a cook in an Edwardian household, had no doubt that one of its purposes was to remind housewives that it was time to stir up the Christmas pudding mixture and make the pudding.

I think it likely that Thomas Cranmer, the sixteenth century author of the prayer book, did have the approaching Christmas celebrations in mind when he wrote that collect, but its real purpose is to serve as a rallying call, urging all faithful Christians to serve their Lord in deed as well as in word, in both faith and practice. Perhaps I may use it to close this address:

Stir up, we beseech thee, O Lord, the wills of thy faithful people; that they, plenteously bringing forth the fruit of good works, may of thee be plenteously rewarded; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

………………………….

Sermon - God and Mammon

Sadly, I wasn't systematic enough to put the date on the typescripts of the sermons that I preached at Christ Church. However the first paragraph makes it clear that this was the second sermon that I preached there and that it must therefore have been in 1998. The final paragraph makes it clear that the occasion was just two Sundays before Easter.

It was, I think, possibly my most controversial sermon. However, nobody stamped out of the church in a huff, certainly nobody fell asleep while I was delivering it; and I was invited back again!

God and Mammon

When I last stood here, on Remembrance Sunday, I said that the Scriptures offered us, among many other things, a vision of a world in which men and women of every race and nation lived together in harmony with each other and with nature; the fulfilment of our prayer 'Thy kingdom come; Thy will be done on earth as it is in Heaven'. This vision, I said, came from God, but since God has given us the gift of free will, it was we who to realize it.

A survey of today's world shows all too clearly how little progress has been made towards that realization. It was nearly three thousand years ago that the prophets Micah and Isaiah looked forward to swords being beaten into plough shares and spears into pruning hooks. Sadly, it hasn't yet happened. Perhaps, if they lived today, those prophets would be looking forward to Trident nuclear submarines being transformed into children's hospitals and Eurofighters into life support systems.

One reason why we have made so little progress towards the Kingdom of Heaven on earth promised by the Hebrew prophets and by the writers of the New Testament, has been the conflicting demands of another world faith, a faith that is profoundly opposed to Christianity and is, so I believe, no less opposed to the principles of the other world religions.

This antichristian creed is faith in material possessions. Some may prefer to call it avarice, or wealth acquisition, or materialism or simply greed. I think that there is a lot to be said for personifying it as the worship or service of Mammon, the ancient false god of material wealth.

Jesus did this, when in the Sermon on the Mount, he told his followers that they couldn't serve both God and Mammon. No man can serve two masters. John Milton, in his epic poem Paradise Lost made Mammon one of the fallen angels. With somewhat uncharacteristic humour, he wrote that Mammon was 'the least erect of all the spirits who fell from Heaven', because even in Heaven, he had spent his time bent over, admiring the golden pavements.

I believe that it was in the person of Mammon that the Devil tempted Jesus by offering him, 'All the kingdoms of the world, and the glory of them'. That was the final temptation and the one that Jesus rejected in the strongest terms: 'Get thee hence Satan'.

The Devil, in the person of Mammon, tempts us in the same way – though he doesn't offer us 'all the kingdoms of the world'. He thinks that we can be bought much more cheaply. Let us pray that we may always have the strength to prove him wrong.

Mammon has had his servants on earth since time began. I am inclined to think though that he has never before had quite so many devoted followers as he has today. Nor have they ever before been able to do quite so much harm to God's Earth and God's people.

Long ago, I read a science fiction novel set in a future in which space ships travelled continuously throughout our galaxy. The crews of these space ships had their own organisation with its own hymn or anthem. I have long forgotten the name of the book and that of its author. However, the final verse of that anthem has stuck in my memory:

So grant me one last landing

On the globe that gave me birth.

Let me rest my eyes on the fleecy skies

And the cool green hills of earth

.

Today I ask myself – for how much longer will the earth continue to have fleecy skies and cool green hills?

Already the service of Mammon is destroying the protective ozone layer in the earth's stratosphere so that our children can no longer play safely in God's sunshine as we could when I was a child. That same service is binging about climatic change that will flood vast areas of the earth's surface and render others arid deserts.

It is the servants of Mammon who destroy the rain forests, who deplete and poison the oceans and pollute the atmosphere. It is in the service of Mammon that we manufacture armaments, the means of death and destruction to our fellow men and women and distribute them throughout the world.

Nor must we overlook the harm that the service of Mammon does to the human spirit. Have you noticed how nowadays every human institution has been given the status of a market stall, and every human activity has become a marketable commodity, with a price to be haggled over?

Working men and women have become units of 'human resources'. In Clacton's Safeways Supermarket you'll find that job seekers are no longer directed, as they once would have been, to the Staff Manager but to the Human Resources Manager. In the careers pages of the broadsheets they no longer advertise for Personnel Managers but for Directors of Human Resources.

Human Resources! That effectively puts men and women, whom we Christians believe to have been created in the image of God, on the same level as barrels of oil, baulks of timber and tins of beans!

Sometimes, just like barrels of oil and baulks of timber, human resources become surplus to requirements; surplus to Mammon's requirements though never to those of God. They are cast into the set-aside army of unemployed – or job seekers as we are now supposed to call them.

It is good to know that the numbers of unemployed are steadily falling though, even by the most optimistic estimates, there are still well over a million of them – a number that, even as recently as twenty years ago, would have been considered to be quite unacceptable.

Should here be any at all? Our country desperately needs more doctors, nurses and carers. We need more police, both men and women, more security guards, more people to clear up the litter on our streets. We need, as once we had, conductors on our buses and porters on our railway stations.

But to employ anyone beyond the strict dictates of cost efficiency would be an affront to Mammon. Mammon's servants cannot endure the thought of paying a proper wage to someone who is doing a useful, perhaps even vital, job that is not, strictly speaking, profitable. Profitability, Productivity and Cost Effectiveness are the three persons of Mammon's Unholy Trinity.

Perhaps we shouldn't be surprised that there is vandalism and violent crime on our streets, that there is corruption and sleaze in high places, that our national press becomes daily grubbier, and that many of our fellow men and women, our brothers and sisters in Christ, beg for a living and sleep in shop doorways and cardboard boxes, while others flaunt the superfluity of their wealth

During the first decade of the 19

th

century, William Wordsworth wrote, 'Milton, thou shouldst be living at this hour, England hath need of thee'. Today, as the twentieth century draws to its close, not just England but the whole world has need of a new Milton, a new Blake, perhaps a new Prophet Jeremiah, to engage the forces of Mammon and point us towards the promised land.

But of course, there is no new Milton, no latter-day Jeremiah. God has to make do with us to fulfil his purposes on earth. We must proclaim in our churches, in our political parties and trade unions, in conversations with friends and acquaintances, and in letters to the news media, that co-operation, love, trust and friendship must and will triumph over cut-throat competition, suspicion, enmity and greed.

Proclaiming this is the easy part of our task. On Remembrance Sunday I quoted George Bernard Shaw's contention that our faith does not consist of the things we think we believe but of the assumptions on which we habitually act.

I do not find it easy to translate those principles that I have just proclaimed into assumptions on which I habitually act. George Fox, who founded the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers) of which I am a member, told his followers, 'Be patterns, be examples', wherever you may find yourselves and then, he said, but only then, you will walk cheerfully over the world answering that of God in everyone.

It is a daunting task that faces us, but it is by no means a hopeless one. Experience has shown that when changes in human attitudes and in social and economic circumstances take place they do so with what, in retrospect, seems to be extraordinary rapidity.

I was born in 1921. Who, in that year, or indeed at any time throughout my childhood and youth, would have dreamed that by the time I was middle aged, the British Empire, the Empire on which the sun never set, would have disappeared – and that most people would consider that to be a good thing?

When I was middle-aged, in the 1970s, who would have expected me to see the end of the Cold War, the collapse of the Soviet Empire and the installation of Nelson Mandela as President of a multiracial and democratic South Africa?

Perhaps the days of Mammon's Empire too, are numbered. Who knows what wind of change, what tide of spiritual evolution or revolution, may even now be gathering strength out there in the world?

For while the tired waves vainly breaking

Seem here no painful inch to gain;

Far back, through creeks and inlets making,

Comes silent, flooding in, the main

As we survey the cynicism, the materialism and the cruelty of today's world, it would be astonishing if we did not sometimes despair. On such occasions it is worth remembering that it was out of the despair of the young George Fox with the churches and human institutions of his day that he discovered the truth on which the Religious Society of Friends is founded. When he was at his lowest ebb he heard a voice that proclaimed, 'There is one, even Christ Jesus, who can speak to thy condition!' and then, as he recorded in his journal, his heart leapt with joy.

Later in his life, George Fox experienced a vision of an ocean of darkness, despair and death that was overcome by an even greater ocean of light and love.

Few of us these days are given to visions of that kind. However in the eye of my imagination, I too can see a great ocean of darkness surrounding us – but it is an ocean that is punctuated by countless millions of tiny sparks of light. They are the light of Christ shining in the hearts of every single man, woman and child in the world.

As St John tells us in that wonderful introduction to his Gospel: 'He is the true light that lighteth everyone who comes into the world'.

'Seek and ye shall find', said Jesus. If we look we can see evidence of that true light at work in the world today.

My wife and I frequently watch the children's and young people's programmes on BBC tv. We have seen evidence of the universal light of Christ in the efforts of children throughout the UK and beyond, in raising over a million and a half pounds during the past four months to help young sufferers from cystic fibrosis. We have seen it too, in the eagerness with which young people, inspired by Children's Newsround , have prepared video films to raise awareness of the plight of homeless street children in Latin America and Asia.

Nor should we forget the world-wide revulsion against antipersonnel landmines triggered by Princess Diana's support for the Red Cross Society's anti-landmine campaign, and the great wave of compassion and generosity both in this country and overseas that arose in the wake of the princess's tragic death.

We must be of good cheer. Good

will

triumph over evil – and is already doing so in the world today. In just a fortnight's time we shall be celebrating God's ultimate demonstration of that triumph; the resurrection from the dead of Jesus Christ our Lord – the 'true light' of God.

My first sermon - Remembrance Sunday 1997

In 1997 Clacton's Christ Church, United Reformed Church, was without a Minister. The congregation asked followers of other Christian traditions to help them by leading their Sunday morning worship. I had, by that time, acquired a 'Further Education Teachers' Certificate from the City and Guilds of London. I was an active member of Clacton Quaker Meeting and was fairly well-known locally as a capable public speaker. I was asked to lead the URC worship and accepted the challenge.

The task involved choosing the hymns and bible readings, leading the prayers, having a brief chat with the children (anything up to about a dozen) before they departed to their children's class and preaching a sermon that was the focal point of the service and was expected to be about 25 minutes long.

I was asked to lead the worship on Remembrance Sunday 1997. Below is the typescript of this, my very first sermon. The congregation must have liked my style because I was asked back again and again. Even after the appointment of a resident vicar (Rev. Chris Wood whom I am proud to regard as a friend) I was asked to lead the worship once or twice a year when he was unavoidably absent.

The experience that I obtained on those occasions emboldened me to contribute an occasional 'Thought for the Week' (a kind of five minute sermon used in the Tendring Talking Times, a weekly 'newspaper' for the blind and visually impaired within the Tendring District) and also, on one occasion, to lead a funeral service at Clacton Crematorium for an occasional attender at our Quaker Meeting for Worship who hadn't wanted a 'Quaker Funeral' but did want me to preside at his funeral because I, like him, had been a prisoner of war in Germany during world War II.

I always refused the offered payment for these services because of the Quaker testimony against paid ministry: 'Freely have ye received, Freely give'.

………………………………….

Sermon – Christ's Church, URC, Clacton-on-Sea 11

th

November 1997

Remembrance Sunday

'They shall beat their swords into ploughshares and their spears into pruning hooks. Nation shall not lift up sword against nation. Neither shall they learn war any more'.

This familiar prophecy, that we heard in our first reading this morning, was made some 700 years before the birth of our Lord Jesus Christ. It is to be found both in the book of the Prophet Micah and that of the Prophet Isaiah. It does not stand alone. The Scriptures offer us, among many other things, a vision of a world in which men and women of every race and nation live in harmony with one another and with nature under the fathership of God; a Kingdom of Heaven on Earth. The vision is of God, but since God has given us humans the gift of free will. It is only we who can make it reality.

St Paul, in his address to the Athenians, declared that God had made of one blood all nations of men to dwell on the face of the earth. Elsewhere he declared that 'In Christ is neither Jew nor Greek, Bond nor Free'..

In teaching us to pray to '

Our

Father in Heaven', Jesus acknowledged all men and women to be his brothers and sisters. He told us to ask that God's rule should be established on earth, as it is in Heaven. He also said that whatsoever, good or bad, we do to the very least of his brothers or sisters, we do personally to him.

That thought becomes even more awesome in the light of those wonderful' first fourteen verses of St. John's Gospel in which Jesus is identified as the Word of God, that was with God from the beginning, that was God, and without whom not anything was made that was made.

He was, and is, the Divine Light, that true light that St John tells us 'Lightens every man and woman who comes into the world'. It enlightened the people of the ancient world, long before the 'Word was made flesh' in Bethlehem. You'll recall that Jesus once said, 'Before Abraham was, I am'. It is available to enlighten every single one of the world's teeming millions of people today, including those who have never heard of Jesus Christ, and those who would deny him.

Early Quakers often referred to that inward light of Christ as the seed of God. It was an appropriate metaphor since seed and seedlings can be either nurtured or neglected. I believe though that not even in the most depraved person can the seed be totally destroyed, the light wholly extinguished. 'The light shineth in the darkness and the darkness cannot overwhelm it.

Such is my Christian faith today. It is the faith of a Quaker, and I have been a Quaker for nearly fifty years. It is not the Christian tradition into which I was born. I was brought up in the High Church tradition of the Church of England (to put it in a local context, closer to St. James than St Paul's!) My parents were loyal and committed members if our local church in Ipwsich, and so was I. I was a choir boy and then, when my voice broke and after confirmation, a server at the altar.

Thus it was that early in 1939, while I was still seventeen, convinced that war with Germany was inevitable and firmly believing that Nazism and Fascism were evils that could be overcome only by force, I joined the Territorial Army. I was called up into the Royal Artillery the day before war was declared and I served in the UK and in North Africa. I took part in the battles that raged in the Egypt/Libya frontier area from November 1941, and was captured when Tobruk fell to General Rommel's Afrikakorps on 21

st

June 1942.

I have fallen comrades to remember on this Remembrance Sunday; some killed in battle, others died of diphtheria in an epidemic that swept through the Prisoner of War transit camp in Benghazi. Over fifty were drowned when the prison ship that was transporting them from Tripoli to Italy was torpedoed by a

British

submarine. Others died – I watched them sicken and die – of starvation related illness in an Italian prison camp. One died by my side in an accident at a railway siding during the last eighteen months of the War while we were at a small working camp (Arbeitskommando) in Germany. As I remember them, it is difficult for me to realize that had they survived as I did they would now – like me – be old men!

I survived. Why me? I sometimes ask myself if my survival had a purpose and, if it did, have I fulfilled it? I fear that the only honest answer to the second part of that question is 'almost certainly not'.

I met the girl who was to become my wife on 3

rd

September 1939, the day that war was declared. We were married on 27

th

April 1946, just four days after my discharge from the army. She was a Methodist. My faith had worn very thin during the war years but we were, and are, both church-going people. Neither of us settled happily into the Methodist and Anglican Churches that we attended, first in London and then in Ipswich.

We were, partly as a result of the war, disenchanted with the mainstream churches as we saw them at that time. Early in 1948 we visited, on impulse, the Quaker Meeting in Ipswich's Fonnereau Road. We were made welcome, began to attend regularly and became members after a few months.

We came to Clacton in 1956 and could, I think, be regarded as active members of Clacton Quaker Meeting. We have both served as both overseers and elders. I have twice been Clerk of the Meeting and my wife's voice on the telephone is well-known to many Clactonians who have never met her personally, as she has, for nearly twenty-five years, organised the letting of the accommodation at the Quaker Meeting House to local organisations.

It has been in the based-on-silence Quaker Meetings fo Worship that I have, over the years, regained my Christian faith.

Quakers are well known, and proud to be known, as a 'Peace Church'. We have a very strong historic peace testimony and most, though not all, of our members of military age registered as conscientious objectors during two world wars. It should not be forgotten though that Quakerism was born in the wake of the 17

th

century English Civil War – Cavaliers versus Roundheads as they used to teach us at school. A great many early Friends were, like me, disillusioned ex-servicemen who had been discharged from Cromwell's army and had been unable to find spiritual fulfilment in any of the churches of their day.

I hope too, that we never forget that Jesus Christ didn't say 'Blessed are the Peaceful' but 'Blessed are the Peacemakers'. We Quakers can claim to have played a small part in active peace-making. Wherever there is a trouble spot there is usually a reconciling Quaker presence. Quaker are active in Northern Ireland and there is a permanent Quaker Office at the United Nations.

Remembrance Day tends to split me in two. I am an old soldier and I find myself deeply stirred by the sounding of the Last Post, concluding in a message of hope with Reveille. Yet I remember that most of my dead army friends thoroughly detested ceremonial parades of any kind.

For many years therefore I have remembered and honoured them in quiet Quaker worship. Yet, on that particular day, I am never completely comfortable in the company of those whose experience has been very different from my own. I am grateful therefore to have been invited to attend, and indeed to play a part, in your service of remembrance today. I can only hope that you don't regret your invitation.

Christianity is a 'doing' as well as a 'believing' faith. Jesus Christ said, 'Not all who call unto me Lord, Lord, shall enter into my kingdom, but those who do the will o0f my Father who is in Heaven'. What we know of the will of his father is set out in the passage from St. Matthew's Gospel that we have had read to us this morning. It is to feed the hungry, give drink to the thirsty, clothe the naked, visit the sick and comfort those in prison. Those who have failed to do that, however outwardly respectable and law abiding they may have been, have failed.

A favourite parable of mine is the one about the rich man, we usually call him Dives, and Lazarus, the beggar. The rich man may well have been a pillar of society and a willing subscriber to worthy charities, generous to his friends and family and kind to animals. We know nothing to his detriment except that he was wealthy – and that he failed to help the beggar at his gate, whom he saw every day of his life.

It is a favourite parable – but it is also a searching one. I know that there have been times when I have failed to help the beggar and have failed to do all that I could to help others in trouble. I have, as it says in the Anglican General Confession, 'followed too much the devices and desires of my own heart and have left undone those things that I ought to have done. I am grateful for the Christian doctrine of forgiveness of sins of those who are truly sorry for them.

The late Archbishop Temple once said that Christianity is the most materialistic of religions. It expects the faithful to do, not just to believe and pray. William Penn, the founder of Pennsylvania and a very well-known early Quaker once wrote that, 'True religion doesn't turn us out of the world but helps us to live better in it and excites our endeavours to mend it'.

I don't think that George Bernard Shaw would have wished to be described as a Christian, but he was certainly a shrewd observer of life. He once remarked that our faith does not consist of the things that we think we believe but of the assumptions on which we habitually act.

Among the best-loved titles of Jesus Christ is that of Prince of Peace. He said 'Blessed are the peacemakers' - but how is peace to be made.

My father had been a regular soldier. He wore his first world war medals with pride on those between-the-wars Armistice Days. When I volunteered for the Territorial Army early in 1939 I had not the slightest doubt that I was doing the right thing. I saw the developing war situation as a crusade against evil that could be destroyed only by force of arms.

Old soldiers who, like me, fought in the North African campaigns of 1941 and 1942 will, I think, agree that in the desert at that time we and the Germans fought a pretty civilised and gentlemanly war. On our battlefields there were no civilians to be killed or turned into refugees, no occupied towns to be sacked. Neither side shot prisoners, fired on the Red Cross or poisoned wells. The white flag of truce or surrender was always respected.

I saw the realities of war as a prisoner in Germany with the brutal treatment of Soviet prisoners of war and civilian slave workers from Russia, Poland and the Ukraine. Later I saw convoys of hopeless German refugees, half-starved, half-frozen and terrified as they fled from East Prussia and Silesia from the inexorable advance of the Soviet Army.

They were making for Dresden. Thousands of them – and, of course, many allied POWs and civilian slave workers – perished in the terrible British and American firebomb raids in February 1945. We were just sixty miles from Dresden and we spent the night in an air-raid shelter. It was only in the immediate aftermath of those raids that I encountered any personal enmity from German civilians.

Later, as I made my way to freedom, I saw towns reduced to piles of rubble, smelling of death, and with a few pitiful survivors grubbing through the rubble for anything useable. It was, of course, only after I got home that I learned of the death camps in which millions of Jews, gypsies, and – though this is sometimes forgotten – dissident Germans, were mercilessly slaughtered

I hesitate to describe myself as a pacifist. I d not think that someone who volunteered for the forces when he was seventeen, has the right to claim that title when he is far too old to fight.

I am though, horrified by the realities of modern warfare; the nuclear weapons that may yet destroy us all like worthless flies, the transcontinental missiles, the nerve gases, the antipersonnel land mines, the heat seeking and life seeking missiles that target inexorably on their prey, and against which there is no defence.

The army in which I served had more in common with Queen Victoria's redcoats than with today's armed technologists.

Let us all strive to be peacemakers within the limits of our abilities. We may only be able to fulfil that role among our family and friends. Others, through church organisations, trade unions, or political parties, may be able to influence a wider field. None of us should shrug our shoulders and bury our heads in the sand while our streets are filled with violence, while Trident submarines patrol the ocean depths, while the arms trade flourishes, and children are losing their limbs – or their lives – daily on unmarked minefields.

I look forward to a future, distant though it may be, in which the arms trade is as unthinkable as the slave trade, in which the world has been at peace so long that not even the oldest person living has memories of war; a future in which there are no longer war-wounded ex-servicemen and women or war-wounded civilians.

Then Remembrance Day will have become a timely reminder of horrors long since past. Then it will be possible to feel that those whose names are engraved on our war memorials did not die in vain – and that a small step has been taken towards the realisation of our prayer, 'Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done on earth as it is in Heaven'.

.