For whom the Bell tolls

  Sermon given at St John the Divine, Kennington Fr Charlie Bell The Feast of the Nativity of the BLM, in time of mourning for Her Late Majesty Queen Elizabeth II   There is a tension to today’s Mass – a tension, perhaps a contradiction. Like so much of the human condition, we hold what seems like an impossible, an incongruous paradox in the palm of our hand, and despite everything, this paradox makes more sense of the world than any neat and simplistic attempt at an overarching and unifying human narrative. The world we inhabit is live, is fizzing with contradiction, however we wish it weren’t. And in our hearts, we know that that is – and has always been – the life of the Christian.   For today, after a tumultuous week, there is not only one but two queens in our mind’s eye. We gather today to celebrate the birthday of the Queen of Heaven, Mary our mother, Mary the virgin, teenage mother of Bethlehem, of no human account and yet destined to be the Queen and mother of us...

  Martyrdom is not a very popular term in the contemporary world. It seems to sum up all that we have come to oppose in a secularised society – extremism, intolerance, sectarianism. In the popular mind, martyrdom is something that Christians don’t really bother with much nowadays. The tabloid press would have us believe that martyrdom is the preserve only of Islam and would have us all dismiss out of hand the very concept, so often with a simple wave of the hand and more than a dash of Islamophobia and generalised racial division. And yet we gather today on a great Apostle’s feast – the feast of our co-patron James – for whom martyrdom is amongst the only things we know about him. In fact, he is the only Apostle whose martyrdom is explicitly described in the New Testament – called amongst the first disciples, and among the first to die for the faith.   James, the son of Zebedee, for whom his mother – according to Saint Matthew – demands a special place in heaven, although St M...

 The lust for human domination, power and land has not been far from the headlines in recent weeks. It has been eighteen days since those first bombs fell out of the sky in Ukraine, bringing to an end a peace which – with some exceptions – had fallen across Europe since the cold war and given us all a false sense of security. Today, Russian forces continue to advance on Kyiv, and meanwhile the West looks on in horror, yet also in impotence. The fear of the aggressor keeps us away from the battlefield – not wanting to trigger what could be the conflagration of all conflagrations. Yet as we watch on, civilians are killed in their beds, and maternity hospitals are bombed. There is nothing, of course, that shows quite how shielded and Eurocentric we are as a society, than the way we have responded to this war on our doorstep. For so many, war is a historical entity – war is something that happened, to other people, in a different age. Yet for so many people in the world today, war is s...

  On 11 th   February 1858, in a small, fairly uninteresting country town in the south-west of France, a young girl gathering firewood was met by a vision of a tiny maiden, in white robe and blue sash. Over weeks and months, this apparition appeared again and again to her, and is now known as the apparition of Our Lady of Lourdes. Now a slightly terrifying ecclesiastical Disney world, Lourdes is nonetheless striking for being a place where those that society has forgotten – the sick, the disabled, those so often hidden away by the modern world – are placed at the fore. Anyone who has been there cannot fail to be moved by the processions before the international mass – led, right at the front, not by the dignitaries of this world, or the high and mighty – not led, even in the heart of France, by a gathering of mayors – led, instead, in a great winding line, by those that Lourdes has, ever since those apparitions, sought to place at the centre – the sick and the disabled. It is ...

For the Church of England ecclesiology and structure nerds, yesterday’s last minute Friday afternoon announcement of a consultation on the Canterbury CNC is quite significant. The proposal comes from a 2015 Diocesan Synod motion from Canterbury that asked for a reduction in the number of seats that they are allocated on the appointments committee for the Archbishop of Canterbury. The consultation does not provide any of the context of this decision.  Yet also within this proposal is the suggestion that there are four more voting members of the CNC, all of whom should come from the Anglican Communion – in the consultation, the communion is separated into grand world regions, and one would come from each of these (Annex A). In brief, the current composition is:   6 General Synod members  6 Canterbury members  Two English bishops  One person appointed by the PM  One member of the Primates meeting of the Anglican Communion (who is elected by the Joint Sta...