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Sermons

Life Abundant

A sermon preached at St Martin-in-the-Fields on April 26, 2026, by Revd Dr Sam Wells

Reading for address: John 10: 10

Anne Sullivan had a lot in life stacked against her. Born in 1866 in western Massachusetts, her parents had emigrated from Ireland during the Great Famine. Aged 5 she contracted trachoma, severely impairing her eyesight. She experienced violence from her alcoholic father. Her mother died from TB when Anne was 8. Aged 10, she was taken into the local almshouse with her brother, who died four months later. A year on, the almshouse was subject to an investigation into the grotesque way the children were treated. Even then it wasn’t closed: Anne, though only 11, was housed with young single mothers. Finally at age 14 she went to Boston to a school for those experiencing visual impairment. She learned how to communicate with a young woman who experienced severe loss of both sight and sound. On graduating, aged 20, she was hired by a southern newspaper editor to tutor his seven-year-old daughter. As soon as she arrived, she expressed her dismay that until 25 years before her employer had owned slaves. But what made her famous was the influence she came to have over the next 50 years on that young girl. The young girl’s name was Helen Keller.

I want to reflect with you what it means to live abundantly. In today’s gospel Jesus says the resonant words, ‘I came that they may have life, and have it abundantly.’ When we reflect on Jesus’ ministry, we tend to focus on the way he addressed the two chief challenges that constitute the human predicament. Those challenges are the prevalence of sin, by which we harm one another, and the persistence of limitation, by which we experience sickness, pain, and death. I want to consider the story of Anne Sullivan and Helen Keller to suggest it might point the way to a richer notion of Jesus’ ministry than the one we usually assume.

Notice first how Anne and Helen’s story challenges the way the story of Jesus is habitually told. By the age of 14, Anne had been on the receiving end of enough sin to last several lifetimes. She’d been subject to a dominating and damaging parent, whose substance misuse had made him dangerous to be around. She’d been incarcerated in a ghastly and horrific children’s home, where unspeakable things had been visited on the residents. Her country had experienced a civil war, with thousands slaughtered, and was emerging from centuries of slavery, with the division, denial and cruelty it entailed. Meanwhile both Anne and Helen had experienced the other half of the human predicament – limitation. Anne was significantly visually impaired. Helen, having contracted meningitis when 19 months old, lost her sight and her hearing entirely.

This appears to be a story of profound scarcity. If we perceive Jesus’ ministry as one of triumph over sin and the conquest of limitation, then we might expect this to be a story in which Anne’s father went to prison, the proprietors of the almshouse were exposed and shamed, Anne gained her sight and went round the country giving sight and hearing to all she encountered, Helen Keller first among them. But it isn’t that kind of a story at all. And yet it’s a world-famous story because it’s an astonishing account of the transformation from scarcity to abundance – a story relevant not just to those experiencing loss of hearing and sight, but to everyone who’s ever lived. That’s because it’s a story that changes our whole understanding of why Jesus came.

The central moment in the story of Anne and Helen comes about a month after Anne arrived in Alabama. Anne set about spelling words into young Helen’s hand, starting with the letters d-o-l-l for doll. But Helen had lost sight and hearing at 19 months of age; she had no notion that language assigned a word to each object. All Helen could do was imitate Anne’s hand gestures; until the day she realised the correspondence between the cool water running over her left hand with the gestures Anne was making on her right hand. In her autobiography, Helen described the moment like this. ‘Suddenly I felt a misty consciousness as of something forgotten—a thrill of returning thought; and somehow the mystery of language was revealed to me. I knew then that w-a-t-e-r meant the wonderful cool something that was flowing over my hand. The living word awakened my soul, gave it light, hope, set it free!’

Thereafter Helen began to name all the objects in her world. She went to Boston to the same school Anne had attended, and subsequently another school for those with hearing loss. Eventually she attended Harvard University, and became the first person with both hearing and sight loss to earn a degree. She learned to speak, she discovered how to ‘hear’ people speaking by using her fingers to feel the lips and throat of the speaker; she learned to use braille and to fingerspell. She could tell different people by the thud of their feet as they approached. Eventually she realised that by placing her fingertips on a tabletop she could experience music being played.

See how the story of Anne and Helen transforms our notion of scarcity and abundance. It turns out, beyond dismantling sin and overcoming limitation, there’s another way to imagine living abundantly. We might assume dismantling sin and overcoming limitation are all we could possibly want or need: after all, when we feel sorry for ourselves, the two things we blame are other people, for being so stupid or demanding or mean, and life, for being so difficult or unfair or constrained. Take those imprisonments away, we always assume, and all our troubles would be over. But what the conventional account of liberation or salvation doesn’t give us is an account of what to do with our blessedness once we’ve been given it. I’ve never forgotten a woman being interviewed in Romania after the dramatic fall of the oppressive dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu in 1989. She said, bewildered, joyful, but confused, ‘We have freedom – but we don’t know what to do with it.’ Just ponder those words. And reflect on how much of the world’s population they apply to. Countless people across the earth struggle to overcome terrible regimes; at least as many strive to withstand or cure miserable poverty or cruel disease. Often people somehow manage to overcome immense setbacks and hardships – yet don’t know how to use the liberation they’ve attained. I had a friend who was so surprised to find she was still alive when she emerged from a drastic and last-ditch operation that she spent the last ten years of her life like a lost puppy, wondering why she was still here. And countless people have left prison after years of campaigning for their release and not known how to live beyond the confines of a cell. Maybe it’s true of almost everyone who lives a reasonably comfortable life in the West: we have freedom – but we don’t know what to do with it.

When we realise that dismantling sin and overcoming limitation actually don’t give us everything we need, we can begin to apprehend what the story of Anne and Helen shows us. What Anne showed Helen was not the scarcity of what she didn’t have, but the abundance of what she did have. Helen’s seven-year-old life was shrouded in scarcity: she couldn’t see, and she couldn’t hear. She seemed totally isolated, apparently in a world of her own. But this is not a story where she gained her sight or her hearing. Those never returned. Instead, it’s a story where she found abundant life within the context of the constraints she faced. And this was not because she was some astonishing gifted individual (although she undoubtedly had literary gifts and extraordinary determination). It was because of two things.

The first is, she built a remarkable inner world of imagination and exploration and discovery and truth. That world is all the more remarkable because it’s available to every single one of us, but, because most of us can see and hear without undue difficulty, we never bother to enter it. Helen Keller’s life is astonishing not because she lived a surprisingly normal existence once she’d learned to communicate despite her profound disabilities. It’s astonishing because she explored a hinterland most people couldn’t bear to think about, let alone embark on discovering. The name for this hinterland is abundant life. Helen Keller’s witness is that abundant life isn’t solely or even principally found through dismantling sin or overcoming limitation: it’s found through making studied and detailed use of the limitless gifts every one of us has, even, indeed especially, those with extensive disabilities.

The second thing about this story, and the way it shows us the path to abundant life, is that Helen was guided to abundant life by Anne. It was Anne who came from a faraway place and dwelt with Helen when Helen was exasperated and isolated. It was Anne who kept coming back when Helen in her frustration broke things and lost her temper because she couldn’t understand what Anne was trying to share. It was Anne who gently and patiently spelled out every single word in the language until Helen had a vocabulary. What Anne reveals to us is a model of Jesus. We conventionally think of Jesus as forgiving sin and overcoming death. But as we’ve seen, that leaves us with the problem of how to use the freedom we’ve been given. Anne shows a deeper vision of who Jesus is. Jesus comes from afar, sits beside us, patiently shows us the depth and extent of the life we’ve been given, never leaves our side until we’ve learned to explore and discover and find the hinterland of what we might call eternal life (because it’s never-ending). And remember how Helen’s breakthrough moment came when she felt cool water pour on her hand as Anne was spelling out the word on her other hand? Just so in the water of baptism we cross the threshold from a freedom we don’t know what to do with to the limitless possibility of life with God. And recall how, through Anne, Helen learned the name of everything and the ability to describe extraordinary things? Just so at Pentecost the Spirit gives us a whole language to discover and explore and imagine and enter.

The apologist G.K. Chesterton said in 1910, ‘The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult, and left untried.’ (What’s Wrong with the World) The story of Anne and Helen is a parable of Chesterton’s words. Helen is each one of us, humankind: floundering around, trying to make sense of the world and find connection beyond ourselves. Anne is Jesus: he came that we may have life, and have it abundantly. He opens up for us a whole new world that was already there, but we’d never begun to explore; and he overcomes our isolation and makes a relationship with us that enables us to make true relationship with God, one another, and the creation. God took what was weak in the world to shame the wise, and what is of no account in society to shame the strong. Anne Sullivan shows us who Jesus is, and why he came; Helen Keller shows us how, not despite but through our apparent deficits, through the guidance of the Holy Spirit, we can find the way to eternal life.

 

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Sermons

Encountering the Risen Christ

A sermon preached at St Martin-in-the-Fields on April 19, 2026, by Revd Richard Carter

Reading for address: Luke 24: 13-35

One of the best pieces of simple advice I was given in my training in theatre and drama was ‘show don’t tell’. There is, as you will realise, a lot of cross over between church and theatre. Both the theatre and the church’s worship involve the performance of action to an audience or congregation through word and movement in order to communicate a narrative in a way that engages all our human senses. We may think that that theatre depends on pretence- pretending to be someone we are not. But what the best drama has always been about, is not pretence but revelation- revealing the deeper truth behind human facades. And the greatest actors are not those who are best at pretending but those best at revealing the nature of our humanity and the truth beneath the skin of the character they act- in other words not deception but a greater transparency.

And isn’t this ability to reveal the deeper truths of our humanity the very thing we see in Jesus Christ and the Gospel? Jesus is the very greatest dramatist. He reveals truth not with rules or dogma or theory but by living his narrative. He makes word become flesh. His own flesh and blood. He communicates throughout the Gospels not just by the things he tells us, but by the life he shows us and the narrative he invites us to enter into. He shows rather than tells. And he lives – lives to such an extent that his words become inseparable from his actions. Jesus in the Gospels embodies the love of God- in a real and transformative way..

This for me is what makes dramatizing the life of Jesus so exciting in a church like this. Because we are not working out how to pretend to be Jesus. When members of the International Group and congregation acted out the Passion story, our aim was not to represent past history but to make this story live- live now- embodying it in our own flesh and blood. It is easier of course to embody pain and crucifixion than it is to act out rising from a tomb and resurrection. And yet this is the work of the church itself- to make resurrection real. And one of the ways to do that is to show the way people respond to resurrection so that we respond too. This is what we tried to do on Easter Day- create a living narrative into which we are invited to enter- Mary in the garden, weeping and then longing to hold onto Jesus, Mary trying to relate what she has seen- then that vitally human response of running: the disciples running with all their might to the tomb- the beloved disciple outrunning Peter, but fearful of going in- Peter reaching the tomb and going in and then the response- we responded in this church with bells and baptismal water- like those first disciples commissioned and empowered by Christ to take his Good News to the ends of the earth.

The narratives of resurrection are not packaged into learning modules  for dissemination- like prepacked takeaways. Rather each of the dramas of his risen life are  vivid encounters – revelations which go on working – go on revealing their meaning for generations to come. Each encounter with Jesus is an epiphany- an opening up. The resurrection stories are encounters that opened the disciples eyes to a new way of seeing, living, understanding and believing. Narratives that we take up and live too- Mary seeing Jesus in the garden-  the frightened disciples in a locked room meeting Christ and being breathed upon and given the gift of peace- Thomas unable to believe called to place his own hands in Jesus wounded hands and feet and side. The fishermen disciples returning to their trade on Galilee and being unable to catch anything all night and then seeing a person they do not recognise and following his instructions to cast their nets on the other side and being overwhelmed by the most abundant catch of fish – Peter plunging into the water and the disciples eating together an easter breakfast with Jesus.  These are all powerful sensual dramas of seeing, hearing, touching, tasting the living risen presence of Jesus in their midst- and inviting us too into the drama- not to experience Jesus as some historical theory or book of commandments but to live his presence- so that we too may be transformed by his presence.

One of the common factors in all these stories is that at first those who were familiar with Jesus fail to recognise the risen Christ. And this is the same in the story in today’s Gospel which Luke narrates for us quite brilliantly the story of two disciples meting a stranger on the road to Emmaus and not recognising who he is.  This is as good as any Shakespearean scene  of dramatic irony with disguised or mistaken identity because the unrecognised Risen Jesus of Nazareth has the opportunity to interpret for them the meaning of his own death and to repeat the actions of the last supper for them until their eyes are finally opened in the action of blessing and breaking bread to who he really is.  Luke is using this narrative to express a truth which is so difficult for all to grasp. A miracle of life and hope is taking place in their midst which changes absolutely everything. Like those disciples on the road at first we too have heard a story told to us of events that have taken place that seems impossible to believe. And yet through his presence with us that story is opening up and becoming vivid and real and life giving.  The story will be told over and over again and become part of their community, their meaning their identity.  And we too two thousand years later today and in each Eucharist will be still living out that drama, and living out of it, recognising Jesus present with us in the breaking of bread. This is what a sacrament is- not a tired ritual- but the revelation that we encounter the risen Christ here and now.

In dramatic theory, Patsy Rodenburg, one of theatre’s leading teachers, writes of moments of presence- presence that vital moment of connectedness, and full attentiveness akin to flicking on a switch, that surge of energy within when we realise our eyes and senses have been opened up to a greater truth. She writes of three circles of presence and relationship- the first circle the focus is inwards. It is the circle of introspection where we withdraw from the outside world and our interior world takes over. It is a needed circle for reflection, space, rest, withdrawal but  it can be isolating and a lonely space. The third circle of connection is the opposite it is when all  the energy is outside oneself. Putting on a public persona, creating an outward impression, acting out, projecting an image. One sees clergy, policemen, politicians, lawyers, officials, and world leaders acting from this third circle of connection. It is a rehearsed role they are playing and yet there is often a disconnect- they are speaking o and at but not with. The person presents, performs, speaks but  without  attentive response or interaction or intuition of those they are speaking to.

The true presence of a person is revealed according to Patsy Rodenburg not in the first or third circle of connection but the second circle of connection.  When we discover the centre of who we are. This is when you draw on your interior self from first circle of connection and the outgoing confidence of the third but discover a receptiveness an inner truthfulness- which draws on one’s inner self but is also responsive and attentive to those you are speaking to. You are in the moment, in the zone, giving but also receiving. Rodenburg describes this second circle as the place of energy, truthfulness and naturalness. It is an experience of truthful transparency: when we are in tune with our true humanity and that of those around us- and we are communicating without pretence of façade and the experience is liberating. There are moments when we all experience the life force of this open, natural truthfulness which feels like heart speaking to heart.

I think our true encounters with one another and with Jesus move us into this centre circle of openness and truthfulness. I was leading a wedding preparation for my nephew and his wife to be and I asked him what he most wanted for his wife and he said ‘I want her to be her true self’.  Her whole face lit up when he said this. He had recognised the most important need for this truthful centre. He didn’t love an image of what he wanted her to be- he loves her. It takes faith and wisdom and truthfulness for us to discern this true communication especially in a world where the public stage is so dominated by the bombastic, the celebrity, the threat, the fake, the deceptive. When you hear someone speaking from that second circle- that circle of transparency and truthfulness it has a luminosity and a soul in the midst of the world’s deception.

I am saying this because are there not moments for us too when our eyes are opened and our hearts burn within us? We may not have recognised Christ’s presence at first We hear the story, hear the explanation, and then in an encounter or an action the door is unlocked and we too can be set free. People describe these as light bulb moments- moments of revelation when the true self opens up and we recognise our reason for living and we are unafraid. Like those two disciples suddenly recognising the risen Jesus. This second circle- this truthful opened up humanity- this life in all its abundance is within us all waiting to be revealed. The true Christ given self so often oppressed of hidden or unheard.  This is what I and I am sure many others felt like this during this last week hearing the words of Pope Leo. I man who at the beginning of his office has not tried to publicise or in any way proclaim himself but has emerged simple, still , luminous, truthful, and humble in the midst of the world’s destruction: speaking Christ’s truth that we have longed to hear. To hear him speak was like a light being switched on.  I want to end this reflection on signs of resurrection with some of the words he has spoken:

‘Enough of idolatry of self and money! Enough of display of power! Enough of war! True strength is shown in serving life.

Woe to those who manipulate religion and the very name of God for their own military, economic or political gain, dragging that which is sacred into darkness and filth.

‘The masters of war pretend not to know that it takes only a moment to destroy, yet a lifetime is often not enough to rebuild. They turn a blind eye to the fact that billions of dollars are spent on killing and devastation, yet the resources needed for healing, education and restoration are nowhere to be found. Those who rob your land of its resources generally invest much of the profit in weapons, thus perpetuating an endless cycle of destabilization and death. It is a world turned upside down, an exploitation of God’s creation that must be denounced and rejected by every honest conscience. We must make a decisive change of course — a true conversion — that will lead us in the opposite direction, onto a sustainable path rich in human fraternity.’

Peace is not something to be invented. Rather, it is something we discover when we embrace our neighbour as our brother or sister. Family is not something we choose, but people we must accept as we live together in the same common home.

Amen.

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Thought for the Week

Enough

There is a tale that at a party given by a billionaire hedge fund manager, Kurt Vonnegut told his friend, Joseph Heller, that their host had made more money in a single day than Heller had earned in total from his wildly popular novel Catch-22. Heller is believed to have responded, ‘Yes, but I have something he will never have – enough’.

Paul writes ‘For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil, and in their eagerness to be rich some have wandered away from the faith and pierced themselves with many pains’ (1 Tim 6:10). That seems to me to be more relevant now than at any point in my lifetime with the extremes of greed driving ever more awful behaviour.

I imagine that we have all heard of players in professional sports being bribed to fix matches for corrupt betting syndicates. There were reports in the news last weekend of online platforms taking bets totalling hundreds of millions of pounds on the timing of the Iran war or whether particular Ukrainian towns will fall to the Russians. That takes the depths to which the greedy will sink to another obscenely hideous level.

Pope Leo is rightly ignoring those who are telling him to stay out of ‘politics’. If our faith has nothing to say about how we live and treat each other, then it has nothing to say. The prophets rightly railed against those who grind the faces of the poor into the dust – those who in human terms don’t have enough due to the greed of others.

We tend not to focus heavily on the Ten Commandments but ‘Thou shalt not covet’ seems especially appropriate for our age. How can we turn that round to a positive and to help remind ourselves that we have more than enough? I’ll turn to Paul again – ‘give thanks in all circumstances; for this is God’s will for you in Christ Jesus’ (1 Thess 5:16).

Jeff Claxton

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Thought for the Week

Spring – St Martin’s Charity

Spring is here, and at St Martin’s Charity we have been reflecting on the impact of your support over the past year.

Thanks to the generosity of many in the congregation and beyond, our 2025 Christmas Appeal surpassed its target, raising a total of £2.6m. At a time when more people are facing homelessness than ever, this support is already helping people across the UK to find safety and stability.

Through our emergency grants, we are continuing to help individuals and families who are facing homelessness to move into safe accommodation. Gary, who featured in our 2025 Christmas Appeal, described the impact of this support: ‘The grant helped me move forward and transformed my life. Things like this don’t happen to people like me every day. I’ve begun creating a place I can finally call home.’

Alongside this, we are funding projects in South Wales, Edinburgh and London trialling innovative new approaches to helping people with both mental ill-health and homelessness. And we are pleased to be able to provide our new Access to Accommodation Fund which is launching later this month, aiming to unlock or create new housing options for people experiencing homelessness, with a focus on grassroot organisations embedded in the local community. We also continue to support the vital work of The Connection at St Martin’s, working with people in Westminster who are sleeping rough, where it is sadly at the highest level on record in England.

Behind each of these interventions are frontline workers providing skilled, compassionate support. Through our Frontline Network, we bring workers from across the UK together to access training, share knowledge, and strengthen the support available to people experiencing homelessness.

This year also marks an important milestone. This year’s Christmas Appeal will be our 100th, which coincides with the church’s 300th anniversary. It is an opportunity not only to look back, but to recognise the role this community has played in supporting people over generations.

If you would like to share some of your memories of the appeal or how you have been involved over the years, we would love to hear from you by emailing henry.popham@stmartinscharity.org.uk. Thank you so much for your continued support.

Duncan Shrubsole, Chief Executive, St Martin-in-the-Fields Charity

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Thought for the Week

The Invitation of the Cross

The cross of Christ has long been an evocative symbol, whether now co-opted for nationalist movements, worn as a fashion statement or mounted on religious buildings. But the cross that springs to mind for me is the cross I wear most days as a member of the Nazareth Community. A cross fashioned from a boat that carried 500 people in search of a better life that tragically caught fire and sunk off the coast of the small Italian island of Lampedusa. It is the most poignant reminder that Jesus is to be found in humanity’s deepest suffering.
The cross can easily become a complex problem to be avoided if we have been fed with more legalistic theologies and when we add in ‘sin’, we can feel the need to look away from the cross rather than embrace it. But the cross is not merely about extinguishing the reality of sin but God – Jesus, entering it – absorbing its effects and promising a better and richer way of life. Where earthly systems and patterns seem to narrow, degrade and stifle, God offers a widening, dignity for all people and immeasurable abundance. What the cross does reveal is what, perhaps, our response to God, to difference, and to goodness can be – anger, a mob mentality and an unwillingness to express curiosity over judgement.
The good news is, the power of sin is exhausted by the unrivalled power of self-giving love. This is why for me and for so many around the world, embracing Easter, the cross and the person of Jesus Christ will always remain necessary. I need the reminder that, while extremist movements with the desire to reform ‘lost nations’ will likely always spring up and weaponise the sacred, we have the eternal invitation to choose the better, richer, ever expansive story of this self-giving love. This is the ultimate invitation of the cross.

Maddie Naisbitt

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Thought for the Week

Christian Traditions and Values

Recently the Conservative shadow justice secretary and two prominent Reform leaders, among others, expressed concern about the open Iftar held on Trafalgar Square on March 16.

In such conversations it’s common for people to refer to Christian traditions and values, especially if they wish to portray those as under threat. But it’s less common to articulate what those traditions and values are. So I thought I might note ten.

  • Love your neighbour as you love yourself. (Mt 22:39)
  • Do to others as you would have them do to you. (Mt 7:12)
  • I was hungry and you gave me food. (Mt 25:35)
  • Do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers, for by doing so, some have entertained angels without knowing it. (Heb 13:2)
  • Jesus asked, ‘Which of these three, do you think, was a neighbour to the man who fell into the hands of the robbers?’ The lawyer said, ‘The one who showed him mercy.’ Jesus said to him, ‘Go and do likewise.’ (Lk 10: 36-37)
  • What does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God? (Micah 6:8)
  • You shall also love the stranger, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt. (Deut 10:19)
  • The fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. (Gal 5: 22-23)
  • Jesus said to Simon the Pharisee, ‘I entered your house; you gave me no water for my feet, but she has bathed my feet with her tears and dried them with her hair.’ (Lk 7:44)
  • Seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you … and pray to the Lord on its behalf, for in its welfare you will find your welfare. (Jer 29:7)

Looking at this list, it would seem that right now, the Muslims who welcomed people of all faiths to Trafalgar Square on March 16 – fed them, offered them hospitality and showed them kindness – are embodying these traditions and values better than those claiming to defend those traditions and values are. Christians, rather than spread fear and express hostility, might be advised to thank our Muslim friends for setting us such a gracious example.

Revd Dr Sam Wells

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Sermons

The Story of Lazarus

A sermon preached at St Martin-in-the-Fields on March 22, 2026, by Revd Richard Carter

Reading for address: John 11: 1-45

Our Gospel today tells us the story of a death.  To begin with, it is a story with which anyone who has gone through a tragic bereavement can readily identify: the beloved brother of Mary and Martha, Lazarus, has died.  It is the sickening reality of irreversible loss.  Jesus has arrived on the scene too late.  The desperate hope and prayer that something could possibly change, the hope of some miraculous reprieve or intervention, has ended in despair.  Jesus’ late arrival serves to highlight the failure of God.  Jesus himself seems powerless, not the saviour for which they have waited, but one of the grieving.  He weeps. And, as often happens at a time of death, alongside this sense of powerlessness we see the beginning of anger and blame – when we are so unable to prevent a tragedy then we often blame ourselves, feel we have failed, or find someone else to blame.  Here, the accusation is negligence: couldn’t this Jesus who had opened the eyes of the blind have arrived in time? couldn’t he have prevented this man, who he claims to love, from dying? How often after a death we have heard this. Could we have done more? Whose fault was it? Why did the doctor the ambulance the NHS the family fail? Why did God fail to save the beloved?

This death is real and palpable.  It is like all real death, irreversible.  The life has gone out of Lazarus.  A cold dead body in a cave, blocked up by a stone.  Dead,  flesh, dulled blank eyes, no breath. If you have ever seen a dead body you will know what is like when the Spirit leaves the body- it’s no longer the person you knew it’s a body without the person inside.  We are told that he has been dead for four days; they warn Jesus not to open the tomb for fear of the stench. Not only is Lazarus dead but his body is decomposing. The horrifying physical reality of death.

The problem for us with the next part of the Lazarus story is that in real life this next bit never happens. Up to this point we can identify with the grief of Mary and Marta and the grief that longs to turn back the clock- that says to Jesus- you should have been here- Why couldn’t you have prevented this from happening? But the thing about death in real life is that it is so irreversible. The literal raising of Lazarus never happens in our own lives however much we may want it. You simply can’t call the dead back to life again can you?  Isn’t that why grief is so incredibly painful because however much you long for them you can’t have them back the way they were before. You can’t reverse time.

If we read today’s Gospel simply as a miracle which reverses human mortality I don’t find it real or helpful. Somehow this story is bigger- it’s not a reversal of death. We cannot overcome death by going back into the past- we can only go  through death by going on loving- loving into something bigger, not avoiding death but somehow unbinding death so that it has no dominion.

I was thinking about this a lot as I tried to prepare this reflection and as I was thinking about this Lazarus story I met one of those who had just been taking part in the Being With the End of Life Course which has been taking place every Thursday night at St Martin’s. For those of you who don’t know about this course- it is one of the Being With courses that our vicar  Sam has written for those who have experienced loss or grief- and for those of us, how shall I say, who for whatever reason have decided it is important for themselves that they think and reflect upon what the end if life means for them. It is after all possibly the biggest question that every single one of us will one day have to face. Anyway I had heard from many of those taking part in this Being With the End of Life ten weeks, what a life changing experience it had been and how the group meeting together talking and listening to one another had grown in depth and understanding and deep empathy as they had reflected and spoken openly about loss, and grief, and what their faith means. The person who met me after the 10th and final meeting of course had really been suffering because of the grief  which followed the death of a sister she loved very deeply and her own increasing feelings of loss and vulnerability in older age. She told me that this Being With the End of Life Group had been an amazing experience- to be able to talk about death- all that she had been holding within- and the way grief had somehow isolated her- “its such an important subject she said and yet we never get the chance to share our own inner feelings and to realise others experience this same painful journey too.” She told me she had had the last of their sessions and in this last session they were given nine words…. Nine words that took them she said “from despair to hope, from death to life from darkness to light.” As this person spoke to me I could see how peaceful but also excited- she seemed and how much the journey of those nine words had meant to her and the group. So when she had gone I looked up in the course book what those nine words were.

Here is a spoiler alert. I encourage you all who are interested to take part in this whole journey and not just jump to this 9 word conclusion which I cannot do justice to in this address. Rather see what I tell you here as a trailer to do the whole course: the 9 words which she had been given were these;

  1. Gone
  2. Over
  3. Never
  4. Here
  5. Now
  6. New
  7. Again
  8. Always
  9. Forever

As I looked at the journey of those words it was a kind of revelatory moment for me too because I realised these are the words that unbind the Lazarus narrative.  As I said the story of Lazarus has never made sense  as a one-off miracle. There are too many things that don’t add up. If Jesus knows he can raise Lazarus from the dead with a word- why then does Jesus himself cry and show such grief. And if faith in Jesus involves raising people from the dead in a literalistic way – how does that help anyone because it actually never happens, well not in my experience anyway. Don’t we all have to face death one day including Lazarus and his sisters?

But what if this story is not about a one-off miracle but actually the story of us all when we put our trust in the Jesus and the God of love. Can we  not also be led by Jesus, with those who love Lazarus, on that same journey- through the grief of a death we agonise over indeed through our own death too.  We begin with the first three words gone, over, never: Why are they are gone? Is their life really over? Is the beauty and their presence ended forever? Is all that we loved and experienced permanently deleted- never again? How brutal that never again. And like Mary and Martha is it not  completely understandable in the pain of this grief to ask where was Jesus. Why did he not stop this? Why didn’t he heed our prayers? Why was he not here at the hour of our greatest need?  But now the next words- Here Now, New- Jesus is here now. He has arrived. He is present at the centre of the story. And the story has shifted from blame and accusation and the agony of loss that can’t be changed, into a sense of now. Jesus present in this moment now. In this moment of unbearable pain and regret Jesus is calling us into that present. He is sharing our suffering, our grief, raw love and loss but by his presence  this love moves from something past tense to something with us and within us now. Jesus has arrived and is weeping too, sharing the outpouring of anger and regret and grief that Martha and Mary pour out. And somehow in this place of grief something is being made new. It is not all over- a new story is being created in the place of the story of decomposition and death. There is an again– the again not just for Lazarus but for us all. From the very graphic reality of human death Christ calls the name of Lazarus.  – just as later, three days after his own death, he will call the name of Mary: a name reaching beyond and across death; a name called by the one who knows each of our names and knows us both in life and death and beyond death.  He calls the name of the one who is dead.  He calls in love, calling through the divide, into the dark cave which had been blocked and which you thought could never be opened… calling into life.  “Lazarus, come out!”  Words to each one of us “Come out!”… Come out of the darkness, come out of all that you thought had bound you and crushed and destroyed love forever, come out of grief, come out of guilt and your sense that you can never be forgiven, or ever love again.  Come out of death.  Breathe the breath of Christ’s life.  Imagine those grave-clothes holding and binding you in regret and victimhood and loss and making you believe that you will never be free again.  These words are spoken to you: “Unbind him, let him go free!” unbind her, unbind us let us go free.  That is the very essence and nature of God’s love for us.  This is the Gospel.   Jesus by his presence with us is calling us into the always- into the forever.

There where the stone blocks us, when the grave-clothes, of death, or loss or longing or regret bind us, when it may seem that there is no beyond or no future, there at this grave Christ’s calls us –to realise that here at the grave the stone has been rolled away and he is calling us out of the tomb of death and all that binds us. John, the evangelist, who tells us this story, as he contemplated his own experience of the death and resurrection of Christ was to know deeply, beyond all human reason, that same revelation of God’s love: life and death not as two divided and separate worlds – the one blocking and locked to the other, but as one reality: a new heaven and a new earth, inseparable; heaven opened on earth and earth opened and one with heaven.

This is surely the meaning of the way of the cross. Not that there is no cross but that through the way of the cross the greater love of God opens for us – a love that conquers even death. A love that unbinds us and sets us free. A love that will not let us go. Jesus is calling us into life again, and  always and forever.

The next two weeks in our Christian year we will be following Jesus on that way of the cross. It will be a journey to Calvary which seems to be the end of all we believed in.  The story of Christ does not avoid or bypass the agony of life, grief and  death and yet it moves through and beyond that pain and opens up an even bigger story – a story that we can only comprehend through love. It is the story of how love is stronger than death. It is the Gospel.  It is the journey of resurrection. A journey we too must live. Unbind us Jesus Christ. And let us go free.

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Thought for the Week

Removing the chains that bind – a different kind of fasting

Our Lent course, focusing on seven paintings in the National Gallery, is challenging us to reflect on how the light shone by Christ on our world can be both liberating and threatening at the same time. The status quo of both religious and political structures are threatened by his light. This reminds us of Isaiah 58: ‘Is not this the fast that I choose: to loose the bonds of injustice, to undo the thongs of the yoke, to let the oppressed go free and to break every yoke?’ Lent calls us to question the realities of our world and to do all in our power to undo what is unjust.
A few weeks ago, a small number of the Sunday congregation watched a film about the current situation in Palestine which included disturbing scenes and featured Shireen Awwad Hilal who spoke at our Parish Away Day last year. Her comments, even bleaker on this occasion about living under an apartheid system, were reinforced by Caroline and Andy Brookes who shared their recent experiences of visiting Palestine.
Since the beginning of the war with Iran, Israel has imposed a total closure of the West Bank, trapping Palestinians in their cities and villages. Meanwhile, Israeli settlers are rampaging through communities and killing with impunity. They have shot dead five Palestinians since the war started.
What kind of fasting is called for when the ‘threatening light’ of Christ shines on these realities? Our Lenten Appeal gives us the opportunity to give alms for the Al-Ahli Hospital in Gaza and to Musalaha in the West Bank. We can also refuse to buy goods from Israel in our supermarkets since these often include products from illegal settlements on stolen Palestinian land. All these actions play a small part in removing the chains that bind.
Jim Sikorski
Categories
Thought for the Week

‘Woman, behold your son… Behold your mother.’

I have just returned from visiting my family in Hong Kong. Somehow it felt harder to say goodbye this time. Perhaps it’s because I don’t know when we will be together again. Or perhaps it’s a heightened awareness of the inevitable implications of my parents’ advancing age, after conversations with friends who recounted their parents’ health problems.

Filial piety (孝) is a big thing in traditional Chinese culture; indeed, it ‘ranks first among all virtues’ as one saying goes. Its practical manifestations can be complex – for some it is a privilege and a loving ‘being with’, for others it can entail oppressive obedience and onerous obligations.

The Gospels only give us glimpses into the relationship between Jesus and his mother: the remarkable encounters surrounding Jesus’ birth; teenage Jesus going AWOL then expressing surprise and perhaps frustration that Mary was searching for him; Mary asking Jesus to perform a wine miracle at the wedding at Cana; Jesus responding to his mother and brothers waiting outside to speak to him when he was teaching by saying that ‘whoever does the will of my Father in heaven is my brother and sister and mother’; and finally Jesus, hanging on the cross, entrusting his mother and his beloved disciple to one another, likely prompting Mary to recall Simeon’s warning that ‘a sword shall pierce your own soul too’. I find the interactions between Jesus and Mary very human – I can hear the ups and downs of ‘being with’ in their exchanges.

Yet I am also struck by Jesus’ expansion of familial ties, calling us to widen our imagination of who we are called to ‘be with’. Close to death, he binds his loved ones together so that none of them must face the future alone. This seems to chime with the concept of ‘chosen family’ that LGBTQIA+ people often speak of: friendships and communities that hold, care and bless when biological families cannot or would not.

For many, Mothering Sunday will be an occasion for gratitude and celebration. For others, it may be weighed down by grief, regret, anger, or other complex emotions. I wonder what it means to be a child of God. I wonder what it means for the church to live as the ‘household of God’. I wonder who we are called to behold, and be with.

Ivan Yuen

Categories
Sermons

Seeing and Knowing

A sermon preached at St Martin-in-the-Fields on March 15, 2026, by Revd Dr Sam Wells

Reading for address: John 9: 1-41

There are two versions of why I got my name, Sam. The pious version is this: my parents had experienced significant grief in conceiving children and bringing them to term, and when I survived, they called me by a name that means ‘God has heard.’ The less pious and I suspect more accurate reason is that Sam was my grandfather’s nickname. That was because when he was at school, his classmates all read Charles Dickens’ novel Pickwick Papers, in which one of the main characters is called Sam Weller. The book gives several examples of a Wellerism. A Wellerism ridicules clichés and proverbs. My father inherited his father’s favourite Wellerism: ‘“I see,” said the blind man, as he shook his wooden leg.’ My father belonged to the school of thought that believes a joke becomes funnier the more your repeat it. Hence he trotted out this phrase whenever I was trying to explain something complicated. What I’m not sure he ever realised was that he’d perfectly expressed the meaning of today’s gospel reading.

John chapter 9 is about seeing and knowing. The word ‘see’ and the word ‘know’ each occur around a dozen times. The story’s about the difference Christ makes, and it depicts how various social groups respond to that difference. It’s a whole gospel in miniature, because it portrays what’s wrong with the world, who Christ is, why he’s here, how he works, how we are to respond, and how we’re not to respond. It comes alive when we realise how significant the story is at the time John is writing it, perhaps 50 years after the events it describes; and recognising that makes it easier to understand why it matters for how we respond to Jesus today. I’m going to explore the story and the main characters and then see what it shows us about what Christianity is really about.

The story comes in seven parts. They work as a chiasmus, which means part one corresponds to part seven, two to six, three to five, with part four as the centre of the story. Part One describes the world Jesus enters. There’s plenty wrong with the world; but that’s not why Jesus is here. He’s just walking along, in the company of his disciples. He’s among us to be with us, not to fix us. But he sees our plight. Straightaway he sees the man born blind. Now it’s important to recognise in this story blindness isn’t an illness or disability – it’s a metaphor. Blindness is a distinctive not a deficit. Indeed many blind people today don’t aspire to become sighted, but instead celebrate their uniqueness. The point is, in this story it’s the blind person who truly sees.

Suddenly the disciples try to make this a story about sin; just as many people still make Jesus coming among us a story about sin and its removal. But see how Jesus is having none of it. He says this isn’t a story about sin and deficit – this is a story about beholding the glory of God. As for this episode, so for Christ’s incarnation as a whole – it’s a story about God meeting us as we are and enjoying us, and our beholding God’s glory through him. This episode is about the irony that those who think the story’s all about sin end up not being able to see or understand Jesus at all.

Quickly Jesus returns to the earth, from which, according to Genesis, humankind came; and makes mud. He opens the man’s eyes, which in this story means he enables the man to see who he, Jesus, really is. Immediately, in a gesture to baptism, the man washes – and the name of the pool makes clear the man straightaway becomes a missionary. This is a story not about terrible things we or others have done in the past but about wonderful things the Holy Spirit may do through us in the future.

The rest of the story is about various parties’ response to Jesus. Since the disciples and neighbours are somewhat peripheral figures, I’m just going to talk about three. I’ll start with the man born blind. He does what Jesus tells him. Then he says, ‘I am.’ He says it multiple times. They’re exactly the words Jesus uses in John’s gospel to describe himself. Remember ‘I am the good shepherd,’ ‘I am the way, the truth and the life’ and several others. It’s the closest Greek approximation to the Hebrew name for God in the Old Testament. He’s becoming like Christ. Then he says what he knows – and, crucially, says what he doesn’t know. He doesn’t exaggerate, posture, or pretend. He’s totally transparent. Eventually he says of Jesus, ‘He is a prophet.’ Next he patiently explains again what he knows and what he doesn’t know. Then he winds up Jesus’ opponents by asking provocatively, almost sarcastically, ‘Do you also want to become his disciples?’ Finally he realises who Jesus is and worships him. He’s the model of a perfect follower of Jesus. He’s not a hero: he’s a plain man who speaks the truth and won’t be intimidated. He’s what John wants you and me to be.

Then there’s the second group, the Pharisees. The Pharisees are the pantomime villains in this story and elsewhere in the gospels. The reason for this is they’d reinvented Judaism as a religion not of the temple and sacrifices but of the home and the heart. Which meant after the temple was destroyed in 70 AD, they were the only show in town, because the religion of temple and sacrifice was finished. The reason this matters is they were the principal alternative to early Christianity. What appears to be going on in this story is a confrontation between legalistic Pharisees and the man born blind, representing the simple plain Christian believer. But what’s really going on is John showing the early Christians that they couldn’t go on being both Jews and Christians: they had to choose. The story is telling them whose side they should be on.

So the Pharisees are made to look ridiculous. They rule out any consideration about the blessings of Jesus, because he’s broken the law about working on the sabbath. They dismiss Jesus as a sinner. They rather ironically say, ‘We don’t know where he comes from.’ They get further and further away from understanding Jesus – as the man born blind gets nearer and nearer to realising who he is. John sums them up in part four when he says, ‘They did not believe.’ The story is one in which seeing and knowing are contrasted. At the start of the story the man can’t see, but still he knows. He doesn’t know much, but when his eyes are opened, which is a metaphor for conversion, he starts to see, and his knowledge, from humble beginnings, begins to grow. The point is, so long as you see Jesus, you don’t need to know very much. All this man knows is, he can see, Jesus changed his life, he believes, and he worships. He doesn’t know; but he does see.

By contrast, the Pharisees are obsessed with knowing; but they can’t see. They know about the law, about Moses, about the sabbath, about sin. They know that no one in the Old Testament was ever given their sight, but that this was precisely one of the signs the Messiah was expected to perform. They know sin and adversity are supposed to be related. They know God only listens to them and not to sinners. They know an awful lot; and their power lies in what they know. But their obsession with knowing renders them unable to see. Jesus sums them up in part seven when he says, ‘If you were blind, you would not have sin.’ This is a total reversal of where the story started off, when it said, ‘You’re blind because you or your parents sinned.’ Blindness has become the key to seeing, which is a metaphor for believing. Blindness in this story means humility: the humility to recognise what we don’t know, and the simplicity of saying that all we know is Jesus. Then Jesus says, ‘Now that you say, “We see,” your sin remains.’ The Pharisees’ real problem is that they’ve persuaded themselves that their form of knowledge and law is what believing is, and they impose that belief as a power that controls others. Their knowledge is exposed and dismantled not by domineering authority but by the disarming humility of a blind man who knows nothing but sees everything.

But I said at the start the story is arranged in seven parts: rendering the fourth part the middle and crucial one. Curiously, almost bizarrely, Jesus doesn’t appear in the middle part; neither does the man born blind. But the clue to the whole story is found in the line, ‘Anyone who confessed Jesus to be the Messiah would be put out of the synagogue.’ What’s clear is that at the time of the gospel being written, anyone who came out as a Christian was in danger of being ostracised by the Jewish community. The parents of the man born blind become the central figures in the story, because they have to choose whether to follow their son and truly see Jesus, or whether to abide by what the Pharisees know. It says, ‘They were afraid.’ Imagine living in a country where the Romans were violently hostile and by declaring your Christianity you were putting yourself at enmity with your own people. The stakes were seriously high.

The portrayal of the parents is ambivalent. On the one hand they’re like their son, because they transparently communicate the simplicity of what they see, and don’t buy into the culture of claiming to know. But on the other hand, they fail to stand with their son by not upholding his version of events and telling the Pharisees to speak to him. While we’d all love to be the man born blind in the story – simple, humble, transparent, disarmingly faithful – in reality we’re the parents, easily offended by the suggestion we might have sinned, aware of the wonder of Jesus but frightened by the consequences of declaring who he truly is, and unreliable when it comes to standing up for the courageous disciple, even when it’s our own son.

This is a story about what Christianity is; how not to respond; who Jesus is; and how to be a Christian. What is Christianity? It’s renouncing the desire to know when knowledge becomes a form of control, and instead having the simplicity to see who Jesus is and the difference he makes. What does responding not mean? It doesn’t mean clinging to precise formulations and throwing people out of the community, let alone judging and imposing and threatening. Who is Jesus? Jesus enters his world, leaves aside philosophical questions about how the world is, and simply sees us, dwells with us in our predicaments, meets us in our need, and offers us life with him. How are we to be a Christian? Being a Christian means seeing Jesus as Jesus sees us. We don’t need to be full of knowledge, which often gets in the way. We don’t need to compare ourselves to other people, because looking askance at them takes our eyes off Jesus. But we do need to respond with simplicity, humility, and courage.

‘“I see,” said the blind man, as he shook his wooden leg.’ Faith is trusting what you’re seeing even when you don’t know. Being a Christian in the light of John chapter 9 comes down to two questions. Are you willing to let Jesus see you – really see you? And are you willing to let Jesus open your eyes, dismantle your knowledge, bypass your efforts at power and control – and really see him?