Sermon at Christ the King, Johannesburg, 8 September 2019

Sermon Preached at Christ the King Anglican Church, Mondeor, Johannesburg (Diocese of Christ the King) on Sunday 8 September 2019 (Twelfth Sunday After Trinity)

“If anyone comes to me and does not hate his father and mother, his wife and children, his brothers and sisters – yes, even his own life – he cannot be my disciple”. (Lk 6.26)

May I speak in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.

Sometimes even the most Bible-based of Christians encounter a passage of Scripture that offends much of what they take as given about the Christian faith. Often it is a saying of Jesus Christ Himself. When that happens, there are two natural reactions: one is to try to minimise the importance of that passage; the other is to try and rationalise away the obvious meaning of the words, to somehow force them to fit a more conventional understanding.

This morning’s Gospel reading contains just such a phrase, and I ask you to avoid either of those temptations, and to allow for the possibility that Jesus Christ will have known exactly how disturbing and uncomfortable these words will have been. They will have been disturbing to the devoted and strong families of both the Jewish and Roman Imperial cultures of his day. Beyond that local context, this passage is offensive and disturbing to people across the vast chasms that separate us from the world that Jesus Christ walked, for these words strike at the heart of the closest human relationships that are most treasured by people in every place and time. God can only have inspired these words as Holy Scripture knowing them to be offensive.

In early 21st Century Christianity, family values have come to be seen as being at the very heart of the faith. I do not for a moment wish to decry strong family values. Those of you who live in homes shaped by them are truly blessed – give thanks to God for your fortune and pray that he will guide you so that this will continue. But there is a strong warning here that we must not make an idol of our families and, indeed, that we must not make an idol of any of our preconceptions of what living as a Christian means. None of us can ever perfectly and completely understand the message of the Christian Gospel – that perfect knowledge belongs to God alone. We Christians are not perfect, and there is a great temptation to pick out the parts of Scripture that are comfortable for ourselves. It is a natural temptation to pretend that we already at least very close to what God wants us to be. Instead, cherish these difficult parts of Scripture, and allow God to provoke you out of your comfort zone, driving you forwards to become ever more like the people he has made you to become. Continue reading

Posted in Christianity, sermons, South Africa | Tagged , , , , , | Comments Off on Sermon at Christ the King, Johannesburg, 8 September 2019

The Mosque of Bohoniki

The Mosque of Bohoniki, South West ElevationThe mosque at Bohoniki is one of the last places of worship of the Lipka Tatar community which still survives as it has since the late 14th Century in what are now the borderlands Poland, Lithuania, and Belarus.

The mosque was built at the turn of the 19th and the 20th centuries, probably in 1873 to replace an earlier mosque destroyed in a fire. During World War II, the mosque was destroyed by the Nazis, who organised a field hospital on the site. After 1945, the mosque underwent several renovations several times. In 2003, the roof was renovated; the tin roof was changed to shingle roof. In 2005 a general renovation was carried out.

It is a simple wooden building built on a rectangular plan with dimensions of 11.49 m × 8.03 m. It has been restored with the help of the Polish and Turkish governments and the European Union.

Bohoniki Mosque - Minbar

This is the minbar, a pulpit in any mosque, where the imam stands to deliver sermons, as well as delivering a wider range of readings and prayers. Continue reading

Posted in Europe, Islam, Photography, Reflection, Travel | Tagged , , , , , | Comments Off on The Mosque of Bohoniki

Cathedral of the Theotokos, Vilnius

Cathedral of the Theotokos, Vilnius, South-West ElevationThe Orthodox Cathedral of the Theotokos in Vilnius. Originally built by architects from Kievan Rus’ in 1346-8, commissioned by Grand Duke Algirdas for his Orthodox wife, Uliana of Tver. From 1609, it was used by Eastern Rite Catholics until it was abandoned after a major fire in 1748. It was reconstructed in 1785 only be wrecked nine years later by the Russian army in the Kościuszko Uprising.

In 1808, a local prelate sold the neglected building to the Vilnius University. After that, the building hosted an anatomical theatre, library and other university facilities for half a century.

Cathedral of the Theotokos, Vilnius, South Elevation

The old cathedral was confiscated and transferred to the Russian Orthodox Church during the mid-19th Century Russification campaign in Poland and Lithuania. The Russian architect Nikolai Chagin was responsible for its reconstruction from 1865 until 1868 in a style imitating medieval Georgian architecture. The cathedral was damaged during the Second World War but was restored in 1948-57. Today the cathedral belongs to the Russian Orthodox Church and was once again renovated in 1998. Its services are attended mostly by members of the ethnic Russian and Belarusian communities of Vilnius.

Posted in Photography, Travel | Tagged , , , , | Comments Off on Cathedral of the Theotokos, Vilnius

Vilnius Cathedral

Vilnius Cathedral, West ElevationThe Cathedral Basilica of St Stanislaus and St Ladislaus of Vilnius (Lithuanian: Vilniaus Šv. Stanislovo ir Šv. Vladislovo arkikatedra bazilika) is the Roman Catholic mother church of Lithuania.  

The coronations of the Grand Dukes of Lithuania took place within its confines. Many famous people from Lithuanian and Polish history are buried there During the Soviet period the cathedral was converted into a warehouse. Masses were celebrated again starting in 1988, although the cathedral was still officially called ‘The Gallery of Images’ at that time. In 1989, its status as a cathedral was restored. 

It is believed that in pre-Christian times, the Baltic pagan god Perkūnas was worshiped at the site of the cathedral. It has also been postulated that the Lithuanian King Mindaugas ordered the construction of the original cathedral in 1251 after his conversion to Christianity and appointment of a bishop to Lithuania. Remains of the archaic quadratic church with three naves and massive buttresses have been discovered underneath the current structure in the late 20th century. After Mindaugas’s death in 1263, the first cathedral again became a place of pagan worship. In 1387, the year in which Lithuania was officially converted to Christianity, construction began on a second Gothic Cathedral with five chapels. After several burnings down and restorations, the building substantially reached its current form in works were completed in 1783 (exterior) and 1801 (interior), according to the neoclassical design of Laurynas Gucevičius

Vilnius Cathedral, Interior

The Cathedral and the belfry were thoroughly renovated from 2006 to 2008. The facades were covered with fresh multicolor paintwork, greatly enhancing the external appearance of the buildings. It was the first renovation since the restoration of Lithuania’s independence in 1990.

 This article incorporates text from the English Wikipedia.

Posted in Photography, Travel | Tagged , , , , | Comments Off on Vilnius Cathedral

Cathedral of St Nicholas the Wonder Worker, Białystok

Cathedral of St Nicholas the Wonder Worker, Białystok by night

Saint Nicholas the Wonder Worker is the Orthodox cathedral in Białystok, and the seat of the Bishop of the Białystok-Gdańsk in Polish Autocephalous Orthodox Church. Białystok is the tenth largest city in Poland, and the largest in the north-east, which has a relatively large Orthodox population compared to most of this predominantly Roman Catholic country.

The 40 metre high edifice was erected in 1843-46 as a parish church, following eastern Poland’s ‘partition’ into the Russian Empire, and both an anti-Uniate persecution campaign and migration from other areas due to the industrialisation of Białystok, which led to a rise in the Orthodox population in the city. It was built in a neo-classical style typical of Russian Orthodox architecture in the late 18th and early 19th Centuries.

It became the cathedral of the Białystok-Gdańsk Orthodox Diocese in 1951. In June 1991, Pope John Paul II visited the cathedral as part of his official visit to his native Poland.

Cathedral of St Nicholas the Wonder Worker, Białystok in twilig

Posted in Christianity, Photography, Travel | Tagged , , , , , | Comments Off on Cathedral of St Nicholas the Wonder Worker, Białystok

Holy Cross Church, Vilnius

Holy Cross Church, Vilnius

The history of the little church of Holy Cross, Vilnius, dates back to 1543, when a chapel was built on the site to commemorate the martyrdom of a group of Franscians in the 14th Century. In the 16th century, a Gothic chapel of the Holy Cross was built here by the Bishop of Vilnius Povilas Alšėniškis and soon the adjoining house was converted into a Baroque church. All this had to be rebuilt in 1737 after a disastrous fire, when the current late baroque interior was installed.

In 1976 the Church was converted into a concert hall by the Soviet authorities, and was in secular use until being returned to the Roman Catholic Church after Lithuanian independence in 1991.

The Mary Immaculate Sisters of the Poor have a house on the site, which is Simonas Daukantas Square (map) within a few hundred metres of the office of the President of Lithuania.

Posted in Photography, Travel | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Holy Cross Church, Vilnius

The Bright Field

The Bright FieldLate on a summer evening, as I took photos from the summit of Divis (478m above sea level) the highest of the Belfast Hills towards Lough Neagh, suddenly a shaft of sunlight broke through and illuminated the fields on top of Budore Hill, about 4 km away. Clearly visible on Lough Neagh is Ram’s Island, and in the distance, the countryside around Brockagh and Ardboe in County Tyrone, gradually rising into the Sperrins and South Tyrone uplands.

I was put in mind of verses from the priest and poet RS Thomas:

I have seen the sun break through
to illuminate a small field
for a while, and gone my way
and forgotten it. But that was the pearl
of great price, the one field that had
treasure in it. I realize now
that I must give all that I have
to possess it. Life is not hurrying

on to a receding future, nor hankering after
an imagined past. It is the turning
aside like Moses to the miracle
of the lit bush, to a brightness
that seemed as transitory as your youth
once, but is the eternity that awaits you.

Posted in Anglicanism, Christianity, Northern Ireland, Photography, Poetry, Reflection | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on The Bright Field

Blogging Staggers Day Three: Sunset Skies

Truly spectacular sunset skies at St Stephen’s House this evening. This is, like, where I actually live and stuff. The church is St John the Evangelist, Iffley Road.Staggers Sunset-2

Posted in Anglicanism, Christianity, Photography | Tagged , , , | Comments Off on Blogging Staggers Day Three: Sunset Skies

Blogging Staggers Day One: Praying With the Lepers

The Bartlemas Chapel – a name that sounds like something out of Dickens, and the chapel felt like something from a disappeared world as well. A few hundred metres down a laneway from the noise and bustle of the Cowley Road lies a former leper chapel, feeling as if it were behind a portal to another time, when Cowley was still country fields across the River Isis from Oxford.

The Bartlemas Chapel was rebuilt in 1326 to replace a 12th Century original. After leprosy was essentially eradicated in the 16th Century, it was used as an almshouse. Later, under Cromwell it was used as a stable, and then in Victorian times as a cowshed. Yet, somehow, the instinct to pray in this place reasserted itself afresh in century after century.

Part of the parish of Cowley St John, Evensong is prayed in this little chapel on the fifth Sunday of the month, under clear glass and whitewashed walls. This will surely be the last such service for some months held without the building’s only heating turned on, a cast iron brazier fired with coal. Dickens would be in his element.

Eight of us chanted Evensong from the Book of Common Prayer. The familiar words of the psalms and canticles connected me with the world of daily prayer at Salisbury Cathedral I had just the day before left behind.

“The Lord setteth up the meek : and bringeth the ungodly down to the ground.” How appropriate in a leper chapel.

“He hath no pleasure in the strength of an horse : neither delighteth he in any man’s legs.” I grinned, as always. Religion that lacks a sense of humour about itself is a terribly dangerous thing.

I was connected to many of my own yesterdays; with the people praying the same words in St George’s in Belfast at the same time, and in another St George’s in Cape Town, and dozens of other churches scattered across several continents.

“Deposuit potentes de sede, et exaltavit humiles. Esurientes implevit bonis, et divites dimisit inanes.”


But I was connected well beyond that; with the lepers in the reigns of the Henrys and Edwards, sitting in the same spot, for whom the promise of Mary’s song, chanted in Latin, with its exaltation of the humble and meek and filling of the hungry with good things, will have been the only promise of a better tomorrow they heard.

הַלְלוּ-יָהּ

Connected still deeper in time and further in place, to the Temple in Jersualem a hundred generations ago, to people praising the Lord for the coming of a restoration unimaginable during the long years of their exile.

“He giveth snow like wool : and scattereth the hoar-frost like ashes. He casteth forth his ice like morsels : who is able to abide his frost?”

I pondered that the Liberal Catholic tradition in which my faith has mostly blossomed fears the idea of a mighty God; fears the idea of a God who might need to be feared. We assumed that once given prosperity, security and democracy, people were basically nice. Therefore God must be frightfully nice as well. This was the philosophy that led to whole ‘difficult’ sections of the psalms being eviscerated from the regular round of Anglican worship in 1929.

I found it difficult to reconcile this view of progress through reason to universal niceness with the living contradiction that is the Cowley Road: in the heart of one of the wealthiest little cities in the planet, home to what is perhaps humanity’s finest place of learning, junkies scream abuse at strangers from their roadside bedding at the corner of streets where three bedroom terraces sell for over half a million.

Posted in Christianity, Reflection | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Blogging Staggers Day One: Praying With the Lepers

St Aldegundis, Emmerich

St Aldegundis, Emmerich, North Elevation

Difficult to photograph close in due to its dense inner-city site, some say that St Aldegundis is on the site of the original mission church in what later became Emmerich am Rhein, founded by St Wilibrord around 700. That is debatable, but what is certain was there was a collegiate foundation in the town by 914 and that a church on this site burnt down in the early 15th Century. The current building was built to replace it between 1449 and 1514.

It has many lovely late medieval statues, photographed and described below…

Continue reading

Posted in churchcrawling, Germany, Photography, Travel | 1 Comment