Take Hold of Eternal Life

A Sermon for Bloomsbury Central Baptist Church

Sunday 19 July 2026

1 Timothy 6.6–19
Luke 16.19–30

I want to start with a confession,
            which is that on the way in this morning
I passed at least two people sleeping in doorways along Shaftesbury Avenue,
            and I'm fairly sure I didn't really see either of them.

I registered them, the way you register a lamppost or a bin.
            And I kept walking, because I had a service to get to and a sermon to preach,
            and the sermon, as it happens, was this one.

I mention that not to perform some tidy little guilt,
            but because it's the honest place to begin with these two readings.

Because both of them are about seeing, and about not seeing.
            And both of them suspect that the not-seeing is something we practise,
            something we get good at,
            something a whole way of life can be quietly organised around.

Last week, as we began this short series in the letters to Timothy,
            we started with grace.

We heard that extraordinary testimony –
            that even a life marked by violence
                        and opposition to God could be turned around,
            that no one is beyond the reach of mercy.

And that gave us confidence. Not in ourselves, but in God.

But grace, if it's real, has to go somewhere.
            It isn't a single event that we can file away and admire.
            It's a beginning.

And so the question shifts this week,
            from has grace reached us
            to what does it look like to live that grace out,
                        over the long haul, day after ordinary day.

Because we all know that beginning something is one thing,
            and continuing it is another,
            and finishing it well is something else again.

That's true of gym memberships and it's true of discipleship,
            and the author of this letter knows it.

And I should pause on that word, "author," for just a moment,
            because although this letter comes down to us in Paul's name,
            most scholars now think it was written a little after his lifetime
            by someone standing within his tradition
            – holding his voice, carrying his gospel forward into a new situation.

That doesn't make it any less Paul's in spirit.
            It just means that when I keep saying "the author" this morning
                        rather than simply "Paul," that's the reason why.

And the author knows, as we all know,
            that finishing well is the hardest part –
which is why the end of this letter reads less like theology
            and more like a coach's final word before sending the team back out.

And the world he's sending Timothy back into is Ephesus.

Now, we tend to hear "Ephesus" as a sort of neutral biblical backdrop,
            but it was nothing of the sort.

It was one of the great cities of the Roman Empire –
            a port, a banking centre,
            a place where the imperial economy did its work in plain sight.

Wealth flowed through Ephesus,
            and it flowed the way it always flows in an empire: upwards.
Patronage, status, the visible display of who mattered and who didn't.

And in a place like that, certain assumptions settle into the water supply.
            That those who have more are, somehow, more blessed.
            That prosperity is a sign of divine approval.
            That security is a thing you accumulate.

And the church in Ephesus is breathing that air along with everybody else.
            Of course it is.
Which is why the warning here isn't abstract moralising –
            it's a survival question.
How do you live faithfully in a system
            that has already decided what a human being is worth,
            and measures it in coin?

And into that comes the line everyone half-remembers and usually misquotes.
            Not "money is the root of all evil,"
            and not even "the root of all evil,"
            but "the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil."

The precision matters,
            because the writer isn't staging a naïve war on money itself.
Money can be used well;
            the letter will end by telling wealthy Christians exactly how.
What's being named is something further in –
            a love, a trust, a devotion that has attached itself to the wrong thing:
                        the moment money stops being a tool in your hand
                        and becomes a master over your imagination.

And the author traces what happens when that shift takes hold,
            and it's worth slowing down over,
because he's describing a process, not a single dramatic fall.

It begins with the illusion of security.

Wealth makes a promise –
            that if you have enough, you'll be safe,
            that you can insulate yourself against the future,
                        manage the risk, seal the cracks.

And there's a grain of truth in it,
            which is exactly what makes it so persuasive;
resources really do open doors and steady the ground.

The danger isn't that money does nothing.
            The danger is the moment it becomes the thing we finally trust,
            quietly taking the place that belongs to God.

Then comes the distortion of desire,
            because we're shaped by what we chase.

If the horizon of a life becomes more,
            then slowly, almost without our noticing,
            our wanting gets retrained.

We start to measure ourselves by what we hold.
            We compare. We feel the pull.
And after a while it stops feeling like a distortion at all and just feels like life –
            while underneath, the older desires,
            the desire for God and for justice and for our neighbour,
            get crowded quietly out.

And then, thirdly, what I can only call erosion.
            The author says that some, in their eagerness to be rich,
            "have wandered away from the faith."

Notice he doesn't say renounced it, or rejected it, or argued their way out of it.
            They wandered. It's a drifting word, a slow word.

And that, I think, is the most searching thing in the whole passage –
            the suggestion that the real threat to faith
            isn't usually persecution or crisis or some frontal assault.

It's the steady, ambient pull of a rival set of values
            that never once announces itself as the enemy.

Wealth rarely destroys faith with a bang. It just fills the room.
            It occupies the space where trust and dependence
            and openness to God might have lived,
until one day you look up and your life is pointing
            in a direction you never consciously chose.

So that's the diagnosis.
            And if that's the diagnosis, then everything hangs on the alternative –
            and here the whole tone of the passage turns,
            from warning to invitation.

Pursue righteousness, godliness, faith,
            love, endurance, gentleness.

And the word to hold on to there is pursue.
            These aren't things that happen to us while we're looking the other way.
They're things we go after, seek out, practise into being.

Faith, it turns out, is not something you receive once
            and then leave in a drawer.
It's cultivated. It takes shape over time,
            through habits and choices and the slow orientation of a life –
which is why it can be lost the same way,
            by drift, and found the same way, by pursuit.

And right at the centre of all this sits the phrase I want us to take home.
            Take hold of the eternal life to which you were called.

Now, we hear "eternal life" and we reach almost automatically for the future –
            for something on the far side of death,
            something we wait for,
            something that begins when this life ends.

But that isn't how it's being used here, and this matters enormously.

Eternal life here is not a reward stored up for later.
            It's the life of God, shared with us, now –
            a different quality of living that's already available, already breaking in.

Not simply more of the same life stretched out forever,
            but a transformed life, a life shaped here and now
            by the presence and the purposes of God.

Which changes everything about that little verb in v.12, take hold.
            You don't take hold of something you're waiting for.
            You take hold of something that's already within reach.

And so the language here is active and deliberate and slightly urgent,
            because this kind of life doesn't arrive by accident
            and it won't settle on us while we drift.
It has to be grasped.

And when you start to look at what it actually looks like when it's grasped,
            you find it looks like generosity instead of accumulation,
            like justice instead of exploitation,
            like love instead of the endless project of securing yourself.

It looks like a life that's stopped being organised around self-protection
            and has been set free, at last, to give itself away.

And it's precisely there that Jesus tells his story,
            and the story turns out to be a mirror
            held up to everything the letter has just said.

There's a rich man, and there's a poor man at his gate,
            and here's the first thing worth noticing,
            the thing that would have made Jesus' hearers sit up.

The rich man has no name.
            He's the somebody, the man of substance,
            the one the whole world would have known –
            and Jesus doesn't give him a name.

The beggar, though, the nobody at the gate covered in sores,
            he gets a name. Lazarus.
He is, in fact, the only character in any of Jesus' parables who is ever named.
            And that's not decoration.

In the economy of the empire,
            the rich man is a name worth knowing
            and Lazarus is invisible refuse.

In the economy of God, it's the other way round entirely –
            God knows the name of the one the world walked past.

And notice what the rich man's sin actually is,
            because it isn't what we might expect.
He isn't cruel.
            He doesn't kick Lazarus, or have him moved on,
            or do a single dramatic wicked thing.

His failure is quieter and far more familiar than that.
            He simply doesn't see him.
Day after day Lazarus lies at his gate,
            visible, present, close enough to touch –
and the rich man's whole life is so thoroughly organised
            around his own comfort and his own world
            that a suffering human being at his own front door
has become, to him, part of the scenery.
            Not hidden. Just unseen.

And that's the danger for us, isn't it?
            Not that we'll wake one morning and decide to renounce the faith.
But that we'll grow so accustomed to a certain way of living,
            so at home in a culture that treats deep inequality as simply the weather,
            that we quietly stop noticing.

Stop noticing who's missing.
            Stop noticing who's excluded.
            Stop noticing who is at the gate –
                        which, for us, is not a metaphor,
            but the actual doorways of the actual streets
                        around this actual building,
            where actual people will be sitting again this afternoon
                        when we've gone home.

And then the story does something almost unbearable.
            From beyond death, the rich man finally asks for something
            on behalf of someone else –
send someone to warn my brothers,
            send them a sign, someone from the dead, something undeniable.

And the answer comes back: they already have what they need.
            They already know.
They have Moses and the prophets.
            They don't lack information.
            They lack the will to act on what they already understand.

And that lands very close to home for a congregation like ours,
            because let's be honest – we are not people who are short of information.
We know the call to love our neighbour.
            We know the call to share what we have.
            We know the call to seek justice.

Nobody here needs a sign from heaven
            to tell them there are hungry and homeless people in this city.
The question was never whether we understand.
            The question is whether we'll live it.

And there's one more turn of the screw,
            and it's the one I can't preach past,
            because Luke lets the rich man say it out loud:
if someone rises from the dead, then they'll listen.

And we sit here on the far side of Easter and we know – someone did.
            In the central story of our faith, someone has risen from the dead.
And here we still are, still capable of walking past the gate.
            Which tells us something bracing and true:
            resurrection doesn't override us. It invites us.

The empty tomb doesn't force our hand;
            it holds the door open and waits to see
            whether we'll walk through it into a genuinely different way of living.

So how do we live differently?

The author has already given Timothy the word,
            and it's a word we badly misunderstand.
"Godliness with contentment," he says, "is great gain."

And we hear "contentment"
            and we think of a kind of soft passivity,
            of settling, of the absence of ambition.

But that's not it at all.

In that world, "contentment" was a proud word –
            it named the self-made ideal of needing no one and nothing,
            of being sufficient unto yourself.

And the letter takes that word and turns it inside out.
            Christian contentment isn't the fantasy
                        of the self-sufficient individual who needs nobody.
            It's the freedom of the person who has stopped believing
                        that more will save them,
            and has learned instead to depend – on God, and on one another.

It isn't settling for less.
            It's discovering, at long last, what is actually enough.
And from that place, and only from that place,
            real generosity becomes possible.

Which is why the closing instruction isn't a threat and isn't a shaming.
            It's an invitation held out to those who have plenty:
don't be arrogant,
            don't set your hope on something as unreliable as wealth,
be rich instead in good works,
            be generous, be – and here's the word that ties the whole thing
                        back to who we are as a church – be ready to share.

Because that word is the koinonia word, the fellowship word,
            the same root as the shared life
            we're always talking about at Bloomsbury.

Generosity, for our author,
            isn't a private virtue you practise alone with your bank statement.
It's the shape of a community that holds its life in common.
            This is how we take hold, he says, of the life that really is life.

And so we come back to where we started,
            on the pavement outside, walking past the gate.

We become what we pursue.

Chase wealth, and we'll be shaped, in the end, by its anxieties –
            always comparing, never safe, never seeing.

Chase Christ, and we'll be shaped by love, and by freedom,
            and slowly, mercifully, we might even start to see again.

Last week, grace reached us.
            This week, we're invited to answer it –
to take hold of the life that is really life,
            and to live it here, and now, and together.

Amen.  

The Patience of Christ

A Sermon for Bloomsbury Central Baptist Church

Sunday 12 July 2026

Ezekiel 34.1–6, 11–16 1 Timothy 1.12–17
Luke 15.4–7

Friends, it’s good to be back.

And "good to be back" is doing rather a lot of work in that sentence,
            not because I’m not glad to be here, I am.

But because there is a particular strangeness
            about walking into a building which is at once entirely familiar
            and somehow not quite where you left it.

Old friends greet you, and you remember them perfectly,
            but they have lived three months you’ve not been part of.

New rotas have started, new people have joined the church, (I hope!)
            …and one quietly discovers, walking back in,
that whatever sense of identity one had as Minister of this church
            doesn’t survive a long absence entirely intact.

It has to be picked up again, gently,
            like something fragile that someone has been keeping safe for you
            while you were away.

So before I say anything else this morning, I want to say thank you.
            To those who have preached and prayed and led,
            and served and made coffee and opened the door to strangers,
                        and wept with those who weep,
                        and rejoiced with those who rejoice,
            over the last twelve weeks.

A church does not stop being itself when its Minister steps away for a season.
            It does, however, become differently itself.
And one of the gifts of a sabbatical, perhaps the chief gift,
            is that you come back and discover
that what you thought you were holding together
            was being held together by something else all along.

Which is, I think, why this morning's reading
            from the first letter to Timothy lands where it does.
Because this is a letter written into precisely that situation.
            A church that is no longer in its first flush.
            A community that has lived through the absence of those who founded it.
            A second-generation Christian community in the city of Ephesus,
                        working out what it means to be the church
                        on the far side of the apostles.

Most scholars now think that the Pastoral Epistles,
            the two letters to Timothy and the letter to Titus,
were not written by Paul himself but in his name,
            by someone in the Pauline tradition perhaps a generation later.

That is not a scandal.
            It was an accepted way of writing in the ancient world.
And what it tells us is that there was a community who,
            faced with new questions and new pressures,
reached back to the voice of their founder
            and tried to speak with him into their own moment.

They asked, in effect, what would Paul say to us now?
            And then, with reverence and considerable nerve, they tried to say it.
That is, when you think about it, a deeply Baptist thing to do.
            To reach back into a tradition and to ask it to speak again.
            To trust that the voice of those who went before us
                        still has something to say,
            even when we are the ones who have to say it.

So here is "Paul," in the broadest sense,
            speaking into a church that is figuring out its identity.
And here is what he says.
            "I am grateful to Christ Jesus our Lord, who has strengthened me,
            because he judged me faithful and appointed me to his service,
            even though I was formerly a blasphemer, a persecutor,
            and a man of violence."

Notice those three words.
            A blasphemer slanders the holy.
            A persecutor hunts down those who follow a different path.
But the third descriptor is the one that makes me stop:
            The man of violence here is not just a thug.
The word carries the kind of arrogance
            which the ancient world thought even the gods would punish,
            the violence of the one who believes they have God on their side.

Paul is not merely confessing that he did harm.
            He is confessing the precise quality of the harm.
He had Scripture. He had tradition.
            He had the conviction that he was doing God's work.
And he was, in fact, terrorising the church.

That is not a small admission.
            And it doesn’t come from someone trying to soften his past.
It comes from someone who has looked at it with both eyes open
            and has refused to look away.

And the move that follows is the one I want us to sit with this morning.
            Because Paul does not say
            that he was forgiven despite his religious violence.
He says that he received mercy
            because his life now stands as a worked example,
                        a kind of living illustration,
            of what God's patience can do.

"I received mercy for this reason," he says,
            "that in me, as the foremost,
            Jesus Christ might display the utmost patience."

And the grace, he says, overflowed.
            Not abounded. Overflowed.
Grace did the thing, and then did more of it, and then did more.

I don’t want to leave this in the first century,
            because the text doesn’t let us.

The figure of the religious persecutor
            whose violence is sanctioned by sacred conviction
is not a museum piece.

We have seen, these past two and a half years,
            what religiously authorised violence looks like in real time.

We have watched the destruction of Gaza,
            and increasing settler incursions in the West Bank.
And we have heard Palestinian Christian theologians,
                        Munther Isaac chief among them,
            call out and critique the use of Scripture
                        to justify the killing of children.

Their gift to the wider church has been to insist that we name what we are seeing,
            and naming – as Paul came to discover – is where grace begins.

We have seen our own government equivocate and arm
            and refuse to call things by their proper names.

I name this not to score a point this morning,
            and not because I have come back from sabbatical
            with a list of things I am angry about,
though I will not pretend that anger has been absent from these three months.

I name it because the text is about precisely this,
            and a sermon that reads 1 Timothy 1
without naming the religious violence of our own moment
            would be a sermon that has lost its nerve.

But of course this is not only Gaza and the West Bank,
            it’s also Hamas and Hezbollah,
            and it’s the evils of European Antisemitism,
            and it’s America and the religious nationalist right,
            and it’s Sudan, and it’s Ukraine, and I could go on.
And it’s not just Christianity or Judaism or Islam,
            because all religions, and all nations that claim religion,
            are capable of enacting violence that they claim to be divinely sanctioned.

But notice what the text does and doesn’t do.
            It doesn’t say that the violence does not matter.
            It doesn’t say that grace makes the harm disappear.

What it says is harder than that.
            It says that grace can reach even there.

That a man who held coats while Stephen was stoned,
            who breathed threats and murder against the disciples of the Lord,
            became the apostle to the nations.

Not because his past was erased,
            but because his life was turned around,
            and the very thing that had been a weapon became a witness.

If grace can do that,
            then there is no one for whom we are permitted to give up hope.

Not the soldier. Not the settler. Not the politician.
            Not the person who uses God's name to justify cruelty and harm.
And, lest this become too comfortable, not ourselves either,
            on the days when we have stood by, or stayed quiet,
            or signed a petition and decided that was enough.

And friends, this is hard.
            Holding hope in the face of what we've watched is hard.
Refusing to give up on anyone,
            including the ones doing the harm,
including ourselves
            on the days we have not been who we wanted to be,
this is not something we can do
            by gritting our teeth and trying harder.

It is, in the end, a contemplative discipline before it is an activist one.
            Or rather, the two are the same discipline seen from different angles.

We can only hold space for the transformation of others
            because we have known ourselves held.
We can only refuse to draw lines around grace
            because we have felt the lines we drew around ourselves dissolve under it.

The patience that this text speaks of, the patience of Christ,
            is something we learn by being on the receiving end of it
            before we are ever asked to extend it.

And one of the things I'm grateful for, after three months away,
            is having had time to sit with that again.
Time to listen.
            Time to be reminded that whatever we do for justice and for peace
            is sustained not by our resolve but by being held.

Which brings us to the shepherd.
            Jesus tells the story, in Luke 15,
in the hearing of Pharisees and scribes
            who are grumbling that he eats with sinners.

A shepherd has a hundred sheep. One is lost.
            He leaves the ninety-nine in the wilderness,
            and goes after the one until he finds it.

And when he finds it, he puts it on his shoulders,
            and he calls his friends and neighbours, and he throws a party.

We have domesticated this story. We have made it sweet.
            But it’s not sweet. It’s barbed.
Because the people Jesus is telling it to
            would have heard the echo.

Ezekiel 34. The great chapter on the shepherds of Israel,
            in which God indicts the religious leaders of his own people
            for being shepherds who feed themselves and not the flock.

"You have not strengthened the weak," God says through the prophet,
            "you have not healed the sick,
            you have not bound up the injured,
            you have not brought back the strayed,
            you have not sought the lost."

And then God says, in the most extraordinary turn in the prophets:
            Very well. I will do it myself.
I will be the shepherd.
            I will go and find them.

So when Jesus tells the story of a shepherd who goes after the one,
            he’s not telling a pastoral parable.
He is telling Ezekiel 34.
            He is saying, this is what God's shepherding looks like,
            and you, religious leaders who are grumbling
                        because I eat with the wrong people,
            you are the shepherds who would not go.

Jesus is claiming that the party he is throwing with these tax collectors and sinners
            is a foretaste of the party heaven is throwing.
And he is critiquing those who are standing outside it
            complaining about the guest list.

The story of the lost sheep, in other words,
            is not a parable about how God loves us all very much in a general way.

Rather, it is a parable about a God
            who goes where the religious leadership refuses to go,
            and brings home the ones the religious leadership has written off.

Including, by the way, the religious leadership themselves,
            on the day they finally let themselves be carried.

Which brings us back to our writer in Ephesus,
            and the way he ends this passage.
Because if you’ve been paying attention,
            you will have noticed that the section closes
            not with an instruction but with a song.

"To the King of the ages, immortal, invisible, the only God,
            be honour and glory ever and ever. Amen."

It is easy to read this as decorative. A pious flourish.
            But it’s not.

In Ephesus, in the late first century, this is a fighting sentence.
            Ephesus was a city of many gods
                        and of one emperor who was also a god.
            To say that there is one King who reigns over all the ages,
                        immortal where Caesar is mortal,
                        invisible where the imperial statues are everywhere visible,
                        the only God where the pantheon offers so many,
            is politically pointed, to say the least.

The doxology is not an escape from the violence the passage has just named.
            It’s the alternative to it.

It is the declaration that the powers which license cruelty in God's name
            are not, in fact, God.

There is one King of the ages,
            and he is not on a throne in Rome,
and he is not in Washington or Westminster or Jerusalem,
            but rather he is the one whose patience has met us in Jesus Christ.

So. First Sunday back.
            What are we being invited into, you and I,
            as Bloomsbury, in the season ahead?

Three things. And I will be specific.

First, we are being invited to tell the truth about ourselves.

Not in a spirit of morbid self-examination,
            but in the sober honesty that this passage models.

The church that can name its complicities
            is the church that can be free of them.

We are not a perfect community.
            We have, like every church, our own histories of harm
            and silence and failure of nerve.

The invitation is to name them, gently and clearly,
            and to put them down at the feet of the King of the ages,
            who already knows.

Second, we are being invited to refuse to give up on anyone.
            And that includes the people we find easiest to write off.

The politicians we cannot bear to listen to.
            The Christians whose theology we believe is doing damage.
The members of our own families who have hurt us.
            The version of ourselves we have decided is beyond help.

Grace overflows, refuses to be measured,
            and we are not authorised to draw a line
            on the far side of which it cannot reach.

Third, and this is the one I most want us to hear this morning,
            we are being invited to keep singing.

To let the doxology be the floor under our feet.
            Because the work of being a church that tells the truth
            and refuses to write people off will cost us something.

And the only way to sustain it is to remember,
            every Sunday and every weekday in between,
who the King of the ages is,
            and that he is not, in the end, any of the kings
            who are trying to bend the world to their will this week.

It is indeed good to be back.
            And so let us go on together, in the patience of Christ.

Amen.

What's the Buzz? Jesus on Stage and at the Movies

This post is written for the Bloomsbury Online Group, July 2026.

I was a teenager when I first met Jesus Christ Superstar, and not in a theatre but on a cassette tape: the "original cast recording", played and rewound until the ribbon started to wear thin. I was captivated, and I was moved. Here was the story I'd grown up with, the story I thought I knew inside out, suddenly sounding urgent and raw and dangerous. I learned every word of every song, and if you catch me at a certain point in the evening I can probably still give you most of them. It did something to my faith that a hundred sermons hadn't managed: it made me ask questions. And it turned out that asking questions was not, as I'd half feared, the opposite of believing.

That's why I wanted us to spend an evening on this. We have a church trip coming up to see Sam Ryder in Superstar, and it seemed the perfect moment to sit with a bigger question. When artists put Jesus on a stage or a screen, what happens to him? What do their interpretations reveal, distort, or illuminate about the gospel story we carry? Every generation remakes Jesus in its own image, and watching how it does so tells us as much about us as it does about him. So here are four attempts, two on stage and two on screen, one reverent and one less reverent in each pair. I'd love you to watch the clips before we meet.

Superstar: the gospel according to Judas

What startled me most about Jesus Christ Superstar, and still does, is whose story it is. Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice's 1970 rock opera hands the microphone to Judas. It's Judas who opens the show, agonising that things have gone too far; it's Judas who, after his death, comes back to sing the title number and fling his questions at Jesus like stones. Why here? Why now? Did you know how this would end? Are you who they say you are? It's a betrayer's-eye view of the passion, and it's electrifying.

Watch: "Superstar" (Carl Anderson as Judas, 1973 film):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NGcIvK7f77o

For a young Christian who was starting to have doubts he didn't dare voice in church, this was oxygen. Superstar takes Jesus' humanity with total seriousness. The Gethsemane number is one of the most honest depictions of fear and reluctance I know, with Jesus arguing with God, frightened, wanting the cup to pass. It refuses easy piety. And notice where it leaves us: at the cross. The show ends with the burial. There's no resurrection scene, no Easter morning, just a body taken down and an aching, unresolved silence.

Now, every instinct in me wants to insist that the story doesn't and mustn't stop at Good Friday. But there's something here that gives me pause, because Mark's gospel does something not so different. In its original ending, at 16.8, Mark breaks off at the tomb too. It's an empty tomb, granted, with a young man in white announcing that Jesus has been raised, but there's no risen Christ in sight, only the women fleeing in terror and saying nothing to anyone. The earliest manuscripts stop right there, and the familiar resurrection appearances were added later. A Jesus story that ends abruptly, in fear and unresolved silence, without Easter's reassurances, turns out to be not a modern innovation but arguably the oldest ending we have. Superstar holds us in the space of Holy Saturday, that terrible day when the disciples didn't yet know how it ended, when God seemed absent and the worst had happened. Most of us live a good deal of our lives in that Saturday space. A retelling that dares to sit there, and doesn't rush us to the happy ending, may be doing something more pastorally truthful than we first assume. It's a good question for us: does leaving out the resurrection distort the gospel, or does it hold up a mirror to how faith feels a lot of the time?

Godspell: the gospel as joy

If Superstar is anguish, Stephen Schwartz's Godspell (stage 1971, film 1973) is the opposite emotional key entirely. Same era, same countercultural energy, wildly different theology of tone. Where Superstar broods, Godspell plays. A ragtag troupe of clowns and hippies gather around a Jesus in a Superman t-shirt and face-paint, and act out the parables of Matthew's gospel as knockabout street theatre. It's silly, it's tender, and it's unashamedly full of joy.

Watch: "Day by Day" (Godspell, 1973 film):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ekoHxB4idmg

Some Christians find Godspell too flippant, and I understand why. But I think it grasps something the church often forgets: that the good news is meant to be good, that Jesus gathered people and made a community, that discipleship might involve delight. It's built almost entirely on Matthew, and it stages the teaching not as a lecture but as play, as friendship, as belonging. Its ending is instructive too. The crucifixion comes, and then the company lifts the body and carries it out through the streets, still singing. There's no staged resurrection here either, but the community goes on, the song doesn't stop, the life continues. Resurrection as something a people carry rather than a moment we witness. Set it next to Superstar and you have two very different answers to the same question: is the heart of this story grief, or is it joy? (The gospel, of course, insists on both.)

Jesus of Nazareth: the reverent screen

To the movies. Franco Zeffirelli's Jesus of Nazareth (1977) is the reverent Jesus film par excellence: lavish, painterly, epic, the Sunday-school picture Bible brought to luminous life. At its centre is Robert Powell, whose pale-eyed, barely-blinking Jesus became, for a whole generation, simply what Jesus looked like.

Watch: the Sermon on the Mount / Beatitudes (Jesus of Nazareth, 1977, Robert Powell):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BBqk04eO-kM

There's real power in reverence done well, and Powell's stillness is deeply moving. But reverence carries its own risks. This Jesus is beautiful, serene, ever so slightly unearthly, and you might ask whether a Jesus this composed and this Northern-European can still surprise us, still offend us, still overturn the tables. The gospels' Jesus wept, lost his temper, got tired, was rude to at least one foreign woman before she out-argued him. Does the reverent tradition, with all its devotion, risk smoothing him into an icon we admire from a safe distance rather than a person who might disrupt our lives? Keep Powell's face in mind, because it matters for what comes next.

Life of Brian: the irreverent one, and the most profound

Which brings me to Monty Python's Life of Brian (1979), and to a claim I will defend to the day I die: that this "blasphemous" comedy is the most theologically perceptive of the four. Brian, let's be clear, is not Jesus. He's an ordinary man born in the stable next door, mistaken for a messiah, and the film's satire is aimed squarely at us: at the crowds who follow blindly, the factions who'd rather fight each other than the empire (the People's Front of Judea versus the Judean People's Front), the human genius for turning a message about love into a squabble about a shoe.

Watch: the Sermon on the Mount scene (Life of Brian):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RpkWT5voTSE

Watch that clip closely, because it does something I don't think the Pythons fully intended. The crowd at the back can't hear properly. "Blessed are the peacemakers" comes drifting down the hill as "blessed are the cheesemakers", and off they go, earnestly debating what's so special about dairy producers and whether it's meant to be taken literally. It's the funniest scene in the film. It's also an almost perfect dramatisation of one of Matthew's deepest anxieties.

Matthew is obsessed with hearing and not-hearing, seeing and not-perceiving. "Let anyone with ears listen," Jesus keeps saying. In chapter 13 he tells the parable of the sower and then quotes Isaiah on a people who will listen and listen but never understand. The whole gospel worries away at the gap between the word going out and the word landing, at how the same teaching produces disciples and misunderstanders side by side. And here are Python, entirely by accident (or was it?), staging exactly that: the truth is proclaimed, but distance and distraction and our own preconceptions garble it into nonsense, and we go to war over the garbling. There's a lovely detail the scholar Mark Goodacre has pointed out, which is that the distant Jesus figure in Brian was deliberately made to resemble Robert Powell in Jesus of Nazareth. The film is standing at the back of the reverent tradition, straining to hear, and telling us the truth about how badly we listen.

That's why I find Brian more profound than the pious films, not less. It knows that the problem was never Jesus. The problem is always the crowd. The problem is us.

Some questions to bring with you

Watch the four clips, and come ready to talk. A few things I'll want us to talk about:

• Which of these four Jesuses (or non-Jesus, in Brian's case) feels truest to you, and what does your answer reveal about the Jesus you already carry?
• Three of these retellings stop at the cross and leave the resurrection implied or absent. Is that a distortion of the gospel, or an honest reflection of how faith is really lived?
• Is there such a thing as too irreverent? Where's the line, and who gets to draw it?
• Superstar helped me question my way further into faith rather than out of it. Has a film, a song, a novel or a play ever done that for you?
• If our church were to put Jesus on stage tomorrow, what would he look like, and what would that tell us about ourselves?

See you at the Palladium. And blessed are the cheesemakers.

Come - A Sermon for Pride Month 2026

A Sermon For Renew Inclusive Church, Cambridge

Pride Sunday, 14th June 2026

Revelation 7.9; 21.1-5; 22.17

It was a joy yesterday to be present for the Pride parade in Cambridge.

When Jess told me she'd like a focus on God's inclusive love for Pride Sunday,

            my mind went straight to the book of Revelation.

 

And I'm aware that for some of you,

            that might feel like the last place to look.

Revelation, after all, has a reputation.

            It's the book that gets quoted at you by street preachers.

            It's the source of the imagery on the placards that tell you you're going to burn.

It's the book that's been used, again and again,

            as a weapon against the very people we're celebrating this weekend.

 

So I want to begin by saying: that's not what Revelation is.

            The people who use it that way haven't really read it,

             or at least they haven't read it properly.

 

Here’s the key thing to know: Revelation is resistance literature.

            It's a letter written by a man called John, exiled on the island of Patmos,

            watching the Roman Empire crush the communities he loves.

 

It's his act of defiance,

            his insistence that Rome doesn't get to write the final chapter,

            that the empire's version of reality isn't the only version on offer.

 

The Greek word we translate as "revelation" is apokalypsis,

            it’s the word we know as apocalypse, but it doesn't mean catastrophe.

                        It means unveiling.

            It means: let me show you what's really going on.

 

And what John shows us, when we let him, is extraordinary.

 

The first text I want us to sit with is Revelation 7:9.

            John writes:

 

"After this I looked, and there was a great multitude that no one could count,

            from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages,

            standing before the throne and before the Lamb."

 

That image, a crowd too vast to count,

            drawn from every nation and tribe and tongue,

            is John's counter-vision to the Roman Empire.

 

Because Rome had a version of unity too,

            it just didn't look anything like this.

 

Rome's unity was enforced sameness.

            One language, one currency, one Caesar,

                        one way of being in the world,

            and if you didn't fit, there was a cross waiting for you.

 

Rome called it the Pax Romana, the peace of Rome,

            and it was real enough if you were wealthy, male, and Roman.

For everyone else, it was a peace built on their silence,

            their servitude, their erasure.

 

Does that sound familiar to you?

 

But against that, John offers this:

            a multitude of dazzling, irreducible human difference,

            gathered not by conquest but by love,

                        not in uniformity but in unity,

            every language still spoken,

                        every people still recognisably themselves,

            all oriented around the Lamb

                        who gave himself rather than taking from others.

 

Now, I want to be clear about how I understand this vision,

            because it matters enormously.

 

This isn't a picture of heaven as a future destination

            we'll arrive at one day if we're lucky.

This is a vision of what God wants,

            held up as a mirror to the present,

            a challenge to the church to ask:

                        is this what we look like?

                        Is this what we're aiming for?

 

The question Revelation puts to any community

            that calls itself the body of Christ

isn't "will you be ready when the end comes?"

            but "are you becoming this now?"

 

And here's where I need to be honest,

            because I think part of what we're doing this weekend,

                        not just celebrating, but actually lamenting and repenting,

            is acknowledging that the church has so profoundly failed this vision.

 

The church has, for most of its history,

            been the empire in this story, not the multitude.

It has been the force of enforced conformity,

            the institution that told people their love was wrong,

            their identity was broken,

            their presence conditional on their silence.

 

The church has been the source of wounds

            that are still being carried by people who may be in this room.

 

And it's not just the church.

 

Just over a year ago, the UK Supreme Court ruled

            that the words "woman" and "sex" in the Equality Act

            mean biological sex at birth;

and the Equality and Human Rights Commission has followed that up recently

            with guidance that trans people must use the facilities

            of the sex they were assigned at birth,

            in workplaces, public services, and schools.

 

The British Medical Association’s Resident Doctors called it scientifically illiterate.

 

What it means in practice is that the state has decided

            that it gets to tell people who they are,

                        regardless of how they live,

            regardless of who they know themselves to be,

                        regardless of the dignity and safety of having to use a bathroom

                        that publicly marks you as other.

 

In 2015, the UK was ranked first in Europe for LGBTQ rights.

            By the time of that ruling, we'd dropped to twenty-second.

That's not progress.

            That is empire logic: the insistence on enforced categories,

                        on making some people invisible or impossible,

            it is the empire doing what it always does.

 

Which brings me to the second text. From Revelation 21:

 

"And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying,

'See, the home of God is among mortals.

            God will dwell with them; they will be God’s peoples,

            and God will be with them; God will wipe every tear from their eyes.

Death will be no more; mourning and crying and pain will be no more,

            for the first things have passed away.'

And the one who was seated on the throne said,

            'See, I am making all things new.'"

 

God will wipe every tear from their eyes.

            And God is making— not God will make, not God has made,
            but God is making, present tense, ongoing, now — all things new.

 

This isn't a promise you wait for.

            This is a description of what God is doing in the world at this moment,

            the continual divine project of making new things,

                        healing broken things, restoring what has been damaged.

 

And for this to be good news on a Pride Sunday,

            we have to name honestly what some of those tears have been.

 

Some of them were shed in churches.

            Some of them were caused by people wielding scripture as a weapon.

Some of them belong to teenagers who were told they were an abomination,

            to adults whose relationships weren't recognised,

to people who loved God and were told by God's representatives

            that God didn't love them back.

 

When the text says God will wipe every tear,

            all those tears are included too.

Maybe especially those tears.

 

There's something important in the phrase "the first things have passed away."

 

The old arrangements, the old hierarchies, the old mechanisms of exclusion,

            John sees them as part of what God is in the business of dismantling.

 

The new creation isn't just a bigger and better version of the old one.

            It's built on fundamentally different terms.

 

And communities like this one, small, imperfect,

            doing their best to be genuinely what the church is supposed to be,

are signs of that new creation,

            not because you've got everything right,

            but because you've committed to a direction of travel.

 

The third text is the one I want to end with,

            because I think it's the most beautiful and the most radical of all.

 

It comes right at the end of Revelation, chapter 22, verse 17:

 

"The Spirit and the Bride say, 'Come.'

            And let everyone who hears say, 'Come.'

And let everyone who is thirsty come.

            Let anyone who wishes take the water of life as a gift."

 

Come. The Spirit says it. The church says it.

            And then, and this is the bit that gets me,

            everyone who hears is invited to say it too.

 

The invitation becomes contagious,

            spreading from person to person, community to community,

            until the whole earth is echoing with it.

 

And then: let anyone who wishes take the water of life as a gift.

            Anyone who wishes, anyone who wants to.

That's it. That's the criterion.

            Want to come? Come.

 

The welcome isn't conditional on your sexuality, or your gender,

            or your relationship status, or your past,

            or how other churches have treated you.

 

The Spirit holds the door open and says: anyone.

            If you're thirsty, there's water here.

 

I'm not part of the LGBTQ community myself,

            and I want to be honest about that,

            I'm here as an ally, and as a witness to what I've seen.

 

I've been minister of Bloomsbury Central Baptist Church in London

            for fourteen years now,

and one of the things I'm most grateful for is that we've tried,

            often imperfectly, to work out what it means

            to be a genuinely inclusive community,

not in a way that has people prove their credentials at the door,

            but in a way that simply assumes whoever walks in belongs there.

 

We haven't always got it right, and we're still learning.

But what I can tell you

            is that when you try to be the kind of community that Revelation 7 describes,

            extraordinary things happen.

 

People come home who'd assumed they'd been permanently expelled from the faith.

            People find healing they'd given up expecting.

People discover that the God they were told didn't want them

            turns out to want them very much indeed.

 

The vision of Revelation isn't a destination we're waiting to reach.

            It's a calling we're trying to answer, today, in this room,

            with this particular gathering of people.

 

And the word the Spirit keeps saying, right to the very end of the whole Bible,

            is simply: Come.

 

Come as you are.

            Come, and find the water of life.

Come, and take your place in the multitude

            that no empire can number and no power can silence.

 

That's the vision. That's the calling.

            And I think you already know it's yours.

 

 

Discussion Starters:

1. "Has there been a moment, in a church, or somewhere else, where you felt genuinely welcomed as you are, rather than welcomed on conditions? What made the difference?"

2. "John's vision in Revelation 7 is of a community where every nation, tribe, people and language is present. If you picture the communities you belong to, including this one, who's missing? And why might that be?"

3. "The sermon suggested that these visions in Revelation aren't about a future destination but a present calling. Does that feel like good news, or does it feel like too much pressure? Or both?"

4. "God wiping every tear, if you take that seriously, what does it ask of the communities who claim to follow that God? What would it mean for this community, specifically?"

5. "The ruling that trans people must use facilities based on their birth sex was described as empire logic in the sermon, the state insisting it gets to define who people are. Do you think that's a fair framing? What do you think the church's response should be?"

6. "Revelation ends with the Spirit and the church together saying 'Come', an open, unconditional invitation. If you were going to say 'Come' to someone who'd been hurt by the church, what would you need them to know first?"