Second Sunday after Trinity

Readings: Genesis 3, 8-15; 2 Cor. 4. 13-5.1; Mark 3 20-end

Last week I baptised Alexander in Milton church, in two months I’ll marry Chloe and Craig in Shipton, today we shall share directly or indirectly in another token or sacrament of trust and intense meeting-points between God and all people of God: Christ’s Body and Blood in the bread and wine of the Eucharist. Whatever our church background, we probably all see a sacrament as an intentionally set aside time of being open to grace flowing from and linking us more intensely to God than usual.

Sacraments aren’t some sort of ‘now you see it now you don’t’ magic nor trivial items on an event management programme. Each sacrament is more food for the journey of faith, the journey of life.   As a long-retired Roman Catholic priest said some years ago, ‘a marriage isn’t a sacrament on the day of the wedding: we can only hope the couple will one day realise, in five, ten or fifteen years, that they are living a sacrament.’ Like breakfast, which nourishes long after the cups are washed and the crumbs wiped from the mouth, a sacrament is not completed when the chalice is cleaned, the confetti wept up or the font emptied: a sacrament offers a light for our forward journey, shining not just on the transient things that are seen but, as Paul put it, to the eternal things that are unseen.

The Eucharist, the Great Thanksgiving, feeds us repeatedly on the journey. The tokens of trust from God encapsulated in the wafer and wine, the Body and Blood of God, are eaten together to illustrate our sharing of the one bread in the community of Christ: if no one turns up for communion, the priest cannot consecrate.  Sacraments represent the flowing of God into our lives, and through that inflowing, the passing on of that embracing love of God to others. It would be meaningless for us dispassionately to observe a sacrament such as baptism or marriage as if it were a theatre performance rather than a challenge to and support of our faith life. Equally, if we received the gifts of God around this table yet greedily held on to them, preventing the onward flow of God’s loving care, we would make a nonsense of our faith. Sacraments are food to be shared by all people for all people.

And all people have the potential to think, remember, oppose, choose, in that journey to human responsibility illustrated in our Genesis reading. The snake manipulated Eve with the bait of wisdom. And yet that was a benefit, as without it humans lack the capacity for reasoned choice: at best we’d be smart monkeys. Shirking responsibility, Adam’s response to God’s clear question ‘did you eat the apple?’ was not ‘yes’ but ‘she made me do it,’ and likewise Eve’s response to that same question was not ‘yes’ but the equally irresponsible, ‘the snake made me.’

Before that point, we are offered the image of a cosy predictable life in Eden: afterwards, they became both vulnerable and aware, focussing on their own family. It is easy to idolise Eden- we might idolise the glorious past, or some distant shore, both of which were and are as ordinary and muddled as today here – or puff it up into a cataclysmic disaster rather as description of the birth of the mind. One outcome of such thinking demonises Eve, and women, as the source of all human disaster in another ‘passing the buck in Eden’ scenario, and it is a misogynist scene churches in their associated communities have kept alive throughout the centuries. If we look at the text carefully, we can deal with that. But there’s another problem, perhaps a bigger problem, and yet another example of buck-passing. It’s irresponsible egoistic fatalism: ‘that’s just how we are since “the apple” so we can’t change the world’. This allows us to ignore present realities of oppression and abuse which we have a human and a Christian responsibility to oppose.

Jesus’ abrupt words in the Gospel ‘my family are not my mother, my brothers, nor other religious leaders but anyone who does the will of God’ upset many who hear them. He was not rejecting his family of origin, the family to which his birth ascribed him, but rather making clear that there is a new and wider family of adoption. Moreover, he is making clear (as does Genesis) that firstly responsibility goes along with wisdom and choice, and secondly, that that responsibility is to all, not just our family of origin or creation. I say ‘not just’ advisedly, because Jesus carefully ensured his own mother would be cared for after his death. We each have immediate and permanent obligations to care for our family members but we also have obligations to that larger family, the family of God as expressed in the world-wide church.

‘Community’ for Jesus is people walking, talking, doing the will of God, supported by their common life in Christ nourished by the sacraments. That is the journey which, young or old, weary or spritely, is fed by the food of faith: let us prepare to eat and be glad.

Revd Dr Elizabeth Koepping

Milton under Wychwood

Midday Prayers
Midday Prayers are open to all and take place on Mondays in the Benefice Centre behind St Simon and St Jude Church, Milton under Wychwood.

“Midday prayers is a time for quiet reflection on varied matters, for which our prayers are needed.  The readings often turn out to be most appropriate.  Not only parochial “for the sick”, but also wider issues are raised and there are frequent occasions ‘when two or three are gathered together, you grant their requests ‘.

As a relative newcomer to midday prayers I can say what a difference it makes to be able to gather with some of the “church family” to discuss and pray over, issues and problems that cannot necessarily be addressed on a Sunday. It keeps a sense of continuity of being “church” in this community from week to week and allows us to get to know other members of our “fellowship” and promotes just that – fellowship.. It also provides a forum for us to be able to support each other in our needs and to help us maintain a closer Christian walk which at times is particularly challenging!

I come to midday prayers to share with others our own concerns, and those for people in our church and community and in the world, and remembering to thank God for his goodness – blessings we have received and answers to prayers. It is a more intimate space than church because there are only a few of us. As a result we have got to know each other well and feel free to share things that we might feel uncomfortable about mentioning on a Sunday morning. It is also good to read the set daily bible passages together, which often tie in miraculously with what we have been talking or thinking about.  It would be great if more people could come and enjoy them –Monday prayers are a welcome time of thoughtful reflection during a busy day and an opportunity to share concerns and give thanks with dear friends.  It has become a valued part of my life.”

Here is Sunday’s sermon by Revd. Dr. Elizabeth Koepping

Trinity Sunday 2018 Elizabeth Koepping

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Easter Three
Readings: Ps 4; 1 John 3, 1-17; Luke 24, 36b-48
What are the implications of the Epistle’s ‘we are all children of God?’ Is it just a phrase? It is easy to assume those who are ‘children of God’ differ qualitatively from those who are not: one in the light, the other in the dark, as we had last week. Think of those in the world who identify in some way as Christian: 1/3 of the population of the globe. A lot of people. All Christian, but it’s so easy to speak of an ‘us and them:’ if I am blessed, you are not, if we are blessed, they are not, and then decide – unconsciously perhaps- who is in the light and who in the dark, who is the same as or less worthy than me and my sort. A potentially divisive line in the Epistle might support such dividing: ‘no one who abides in him sins: no one who sins has seen him or known him.’ Christian history is littered with deluded self-satisfied groups who dispense with confession as, being in faith, they do not sin.
All sin: but few give weight to our sins of omission, to sins based on failure to respond and to act, to sins stemming from refusal to recognise the fact that all are made in God’s image, all are children of God. Little children rarely commit this sin, but by 5 or 6, they too have been taught and learnt to think tribally: our sort and others, children of (my) God whom I’ll treat with respect, and children of, well, some other God, who are beyond the Pale.
In a few minutes, when I add the water to the wine in preparing the chalice, I say silently: God baptise us afresh and give us the guts to follow Christ. Then I raise the elements, presenting all of us to God that all receive that of God from God, and I know that at that moment, God is utterly with us. That is neither triumphal nor excluding: it just describes that moment. But all too often, ‘God is with us’ becomes ‘with us’ excluding those who are not us, all those people outside our cluster, our kith and kin, leaving us as a happy band of look-alikes or act-alikes.
The intention, the assumption, the demand, behind ‘we are all children of God’ is that that governs our relations with all, for all are made in the image of God, you, me, him, her, them. However, the practice can look rather different. It is not so much inadequate faith which rejects this inclusivity as those socio-cultural-historical patterns which are so entangled with nationalism, rank, gender and ethnicity.
Imagine my flat left hand held horizontal is ‘my way of being a person,’ and being an ordinary human that’s how I expect others to be- as does every other person across the world! Watch me part my straight fingers, and let the fingers of my right hand slip up vertically through the cracks. But now see what is happening: my horizontal country/culture/ nationalism tentacles are bending round and strangling my faith. True, my faith still stands up, but it is changed, lassoed, constricted. How easily then does my group, who are really Children of God unlike your or their group, speak from a faith strangled by nationalism, racism, sexism, elitism or whatever. Others then cease to be seen and treated by me as fully ‘God’s children,’ with all the demands and the benefits of sharing and being that entails. They become indeed ‘them:’ inferior, unimportant, not-quite-persons, the essential move which enables abuse and violence.
Groups and individuals imbued with national and religious fervour, as well as plain evil, have frequently behaved and behave badly towards others they count as diminished or unimportant peoples: Rwanda, Burma, Ireland, past totalitarian governments in Russia, Germany and China, white Americans, Turks, ISIS, Boko Haram. And here too. Husbands who set aside their faith and hit their wife are hitting that Christ in the woman they pledged to honour and love, the woman who is an equal child of God. All here with a British passport who stay silent collude in the shameful treatment of older black Caribbean tax-paying residents who came as children with the Windrush and later ships. Today, as for the last few years, they are being denied health treatment, loosing employment, denied re-entry to their country, Britain, or taken from their homes to Yarley Wood detention centre for expulsion. People of my age, of your age are being treated (even if not so labelled) as illegal scum. If they can produce the fee (£1000 for citizenship), papers for every year of residence, and trust the Home Office enough to apply to residence: fine. If not: go
Christ died voluntarily once to show us through his resurrection that he lives: but he is strangled again and again! This is not party-politics: any person here who affirms them self as a Child of God can join a handful of CofE bishops and 90000 citizens and petition parliament that the rights of other children of God are fully recognised. This is not being patronising and kindly to the needy, but due justice with a touch of mercy: if justice and mercy were omitted, the bible would be a very short text. Only by insisting that the rights of people are acknowledged and restored, can those with a British passport hold up their head.
Look again at my two hands, the horizontal of context and the vertical of faith, and reflect on faith as it pops up through our everyday lives, our assumptions about the world and our own place in it. Are those flames of faith illuminating the words of God spoken by God? How does the strangling of faith in God mesh with Christ’s inclusion of Judas whom he knew would betray him, his gentle kindness to the disciples on the road to Emmaus and in the upper room, ‘peace to you,’ his request that ‘repentance and forgiveness of sins be preached to all:’ because all are God’s children? Do you feel a little uncomfortable? I do.
Lethargic acceptance of the status quo is no answer! Let us rather witness to Christ in our lives, look for that of God in every person we meet, and polish the image of God in us. Then as today’s psalm 4 says, we can truly ‘lie down and sleep, for thou O Lord makest me dwell in safety.’

Revd Dr Elizabeth Koepping
Milton under Wychwood
April 15th 2018

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Passover Supper: Wednesday 28 March 7pm

On the Wednesday of Holy Week, we would like to invite you to Shipton Village Hall (the meeting room) for our Passover Supper. We welcome people of all ages to this event which is great for families, very interactive, and there are Easter Eggs to find and readings to be read by children and young people. As the evening unfolds we learn about the Jewish tradition of the “Passover meal” and reenact it from Jesus’ perspective at his Last Supper, with his disciples. Please R.S.V.P. to [email protected]

Good Friday: 30 March
On Good Friday we will have our family service in Milton church at 9.30, followed by hot cross buns.  After the service there is the opportunity to join in a leisurely walk across the countryside to Fifield for a picnic at 12noon.  Of course, you could just drive up and bring your picnic!

Good Friday Walk:
A reminder that you can join the walk at any of the points along the way.
The itinerary is as follows:
10.30am Walk from Milton Church to Fifield
12noon “bring-your-own” Picnic at Fifield Church
12.45pm leave for Idbury Church
1.30pm arrive in Idbury
2pm Idbury Hour at the Cross