SERMON PREACHED AT THE
CHURCH OF THE GOOD SHEPHERD, FRED’S PASS (NT)
SUNDAY, September 2nd 2012
(ORDINARY SUNDAY 22 / FOURTEENTH SUNDAY AFTER PENTECOST)
Readings: Song of Songs 2.8-13
Psalm 45.1-2, 6-9
James 1.17-27
Mark 7.1-8, 14-23
Amongst my many mid-life crises – a description that is increasingly over optimistic as I slide into what I fear is Shakespeare’s fifth out of seven ages of human life! – was one brought about during my first post-grad degree, when I had cause to read a book by a man called Alexander Irwin. The book had much within it with which I was impressed, much at which I was somewhat horrified. But that wasn’t the point: the point was that the learnèd author was younger than I was. Actually I had a similar crisis a few years earlier when Kylie Minogue hit the airwaves, but that’s another story altogether. The real story is that Irwin was the first author to alert me to the sense of the erotic in the human relationship with God, with the divine.
Eros, the ancients’ god of sexuality, has tended to receive bad press within the Christian community. Not least, in recent decades, this was driven by C.S. Lewis, who in his The Four Loves treats Eros in some depth, but is often misrepresented by people who haven’t read him as disparaging (‘dissing’) this form of love. He doesn’t, but at the same time he recognizes its limitations and potentials for abuse. I have no argument with that, and my author Alexander Irwin is not engaging, in any case, with Lewis, but with a very different philosopher/theologian, Paul Tillich.
Paul Tillich, who had an enormous influence on twentieth century theology, needn’t altogether detain us here, except in so far as he introduced the language of eros into the descriptions of the relationship between humans and the divine. Tillich, it must be acknowledged, allegedly had a few problems of his own with regards to the erotic, but that for now is another story. What does matter was that he took something of which Christians have often, at least since St Augustine, been afraid, and tried to draw it into the mainstream of Christian discourse. Which is the point of Alexander Irwin’s book (Eros Toward the World: Paul Tillich and the Theology of the Erotic) even as it gave me my nineteenth nervous breakdown, midlife crisis, or whatever it was.
In fact if we reach into the writings of the mediaeval and earlier mystics we will find that the language of the erotic often tinges writings about the life of prayer and devotion into which holy men and women of God entered through prayer and extraordinary discipline. The Reformers cast out many babies with the bathwater of reformation: a quick tour of England’s ruins soon reveals the extent of Henry VIII’s and Thomas Cromwell’s obscene orgy of destruction. Like the Taliban destroying statues of the Buddha they rode roughshod over human spirituality, destroying both the corrupt and the godly in their demonic pogrom. That, sadly, is a flaw deep in the DNA of Protestantism, and one we must admit with shame, if that is, we see ourselves as Protestant.
But in the wonderful life of prayer of those whose writings - and even architecture - survived there is a longing for the knowledge and experience of God that has probably only ever been matched, in the Judaeo-Christian tradition, by the author of the Song of Songs. That book, from which we read today, was of course ‘spiritualised’ by Christian writers, removing its essential energies so that it became a weak parody of itself. It is a writing about longing and love, of bride and groom and all that courses through human veins and arteries when we are – or were, when we were younger – captivated by the darts of the erotic. It is not about the love of Christ for his Church.
Except that it can be. It isn’t, but it is. The love of Christ for his Church, and for you and for me, and the love that we can experience for the risen Christ in moments of immeasurable devotion, that love has all the uncontrolled idiocy of the erotic but so, so much more. That was, I believe, the point that Tillich was attempting to make.
We have however tended to exercise no more than a flaccid parody of that love. One poet wrote in rather unchurchy terms of what one vandal once did to a statue of Venus: perhaps all we can say in church is that the vandal removed that statue’s potential for fathering baby statues.* We have done it often, in our preaching and teaching, too often portraying our God as a miserable celestial wowser forcing eternal miseries on his – his – subjects. That is not the God of the Songs of Songs – though there is no doubt that the deification of sexuality is a dangerous misdirection of energy, too.
Too often we major in the minors, fixating on easily identifiable errors in human lives, rather than flaming the spark of God’s image in struggling human beings. This of course effects not only questions of sexuality: anxious to override excesses of the mediaeval catholic church the Reformers did all they could to destroy many of its good points, too. Luther was so determined to emphasise, rightly, his gospel of grace that he, wrongly, sought to drive a bitter wedge between faith and so-called ‘works’ and between grace and works in the life of the believer – he even expressed the wish that the book we know as James be excised from the canon of faith.
How dare he? The books of scripture slowly came together in what we have come to know as the bible, slowly came together in a remarkable working of the Divine Spirit, slowly came together and were agreed on by the magisterium that Luther and other reformers hated, but by whose decisions they were, ironically bound in their obsession with scripture. It wasn’t written in scripture which books were scripture – but I digress! As a result of their obsession we often lost sight of the need to outwork our faith in works of what used to be called ‘charity’, to demonstrate as the first Christians did that the love of Jesus, in all its cruciform shape, is a practical love that empowers the disempowered, feeds the hungry, caresses the soul of the refugee even when wider society dismisses him or her as a queue-jumper and locks them behind razor wire.
Which ironically, or providentially, brings us at last to the acerbic words of Jesus, directed at religious hypocrites in every age, at those who lay burdens on the shoulders of the struggling in every age, of those who create prerequisites to the encounter with God’s love in every age. The acerbic words of Jesus that tell us that when we say people have to be more heterosexual or more middleclass or more Europeanised or more literary to encounter our God that it is we, not they who stand judged and condemned: ‘This people honors me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me; in vain do they worship me, teaching human precepts as doctrines.’ Too often, instead of using the potentials of the world around us as signposts to the magnificence of God we use them as weapons with which to hurt and condemn. Too often we make our Jesus not into the attractive, erotically magnetic figure that he is, but into a stern invisible friend, who judges only to condemn, not beckons to redeem.
We must not drive a wedge between sexuality and access to the divine giftings of eternity, any more than we should drive a wedge between faith and works, grace and works, love and works. Faith, hope, love: all these and more are the outworking of our experience of the God who calls us: “Arise, my love, my fair one, and come away”. We should be responsible celebrators of the giftedness of human life, not the destroyers of happiness we often seem to be. The mediaeval mystics were attracted through prayer and liturgy to encounter the divine with every pore of their erotic being. We have too often turned God into the subject of a scientific formula: telling them to say the sinner’s prayer, as Dylan parodies in his masterful “If You Ever Go To Houston”, so that all is suddenly, magically, eternally well when we do. We have emasculated not only eros, the God of love, but have de-energized the author of love. By seeing, or sounding as if we see, the world and all that is in it as defiled and defiling we have set ourselves against the potential of God. The challenge is to become so saturated in God-awareness through our own lives of prayer and liturgy that the powerful erotic beacon of the Creator shines through us, through our worship, through our acts of compassion and draws those around us back into the embrace of eternity.
TLBWY
*The statue of a Greek god lay on the floor
With his prick and balls knocked off by a chisel.
'Alison,' I said, 'they've buggered the god of death,
They've cut the balls off the god of love.
How can their art survive?'
James K Baxter, "Ode to Auckland" (18 October, 1972). In James K Baxter Collected Poems (Wellington, NZ: Oxford University Press, 1979), 598.
Friday 31 August 2012
Saturday 4 August 2012
good news for the not good enough
SERMON PREACHED AT THE
CHURCH OF THE GOOD SHEPHERD, FRED’S PASS (NT)
SUNDAY, August 5th 2012
(ORDINARY SUNDAY 18 / TENTH SUNDAY OF PENTECOST)
Readings: 2 Samuel 11.26 -12.13a
Psalm 51.1-12
Ephesians 4.1-16
John 6.24-35
It’s probably safe to tell the story, more than 5000 kilometres from its place of origin, of the clergyman in a far-off parish who decided in a dramatic manner to confess his conspicuous sins in the context of parish liturgy. It was evensong, back in the days before video killed the radio star, television killed the pulpit star, and Facebook killed the lot, placing our inner angst at the centre of the omniverse (though that is a different sermon altogether!). In a dramatic sermon the good archdeacon – and no, I am not creating any precedents or parallels here! – decided it was time metaphorically and spiritually to bare his all, and to go at least some way towards bearing his all sartorially at the same time. And so, having in his sermon dramatically confessed that he was having an affair with a parishioner, he removed his liturgical garments and exited the church with a flourish, never, literally, to return.
It was an ugly moment in the life of the faith community, and one from which it struggled to recover for many years. It was, needless to say, a devastating moment in the life of the archdeacon’s marriage and family, details of which I am not privy to. It was in many ways a human tragedy that, at a whole heap of levels need never have happened. It was a story that gave Anglican Christianity a bad name in a small provincial town – and let’s face it, we, like all the Christian denominations, have had our fair share of moments by which we have given ourselves a bad name. This was at least one of the lesser ones, for all the devastation that was caused by his public pronouncement of fallibility and sin it was far less so than the shenanigans that continue to emerge not only from churches, but from all the caring professions as the sad tales of victims of abuse emerge into the daylight.
The histrionics that accompanied the failed archdeacon’s self-exposing confession were probably both redemptive and destructive, and no doubt intrinsic to his own particular personality type and psychological needs. He left the embrace of the church altogether, and I know nothing of the fate of others trapped in his errors. Society in any case demands retribution, and the complex issues of errant sexuality expose hypocrisies in Church and Society alike. Serial monogamy, which is what affairs often represent, is de rigueur in contemporary society (as reflected in the nonsense sold as magazines), and we might well want to flag a more decent standard. Predation, on the other hand, is forgivable by almost no-one but God, and we must feel the pain when our own offend so deeply against common decency.
Forgivable by almost no-one but God: yet the story of David which we have been following now for some weeks takes us, as Anne reminded us last week, deep into the heart of human failure. David was adulterous, murderous, and a predatory abuser of power. He was neither the first nor the last, yet he remains in Jewish and Christian history one of the great heroes of faith. Psalm 51 may or may not really have been written by David – I see no reason why not, though many scholars doubt it – but the point is that it takes us deep, deep into the heart of human failure. Have I ever failed in my life? Have you? I’m not going to engage in the histrionics of the archdeacon of many years and many decades ago, and nor should you, but the engagement of a journey into the heart of God begins with the recognition of our failure. Am I good enough to be a priest? No. Am I good enough to be a Christian? No. But, as the gospels remind us as they outline the abysmal failings of Peter and the apostles, nor is anyone. The gospel of Jesus Christ is the good news of and for the not good enough – it is no accident that the Cross, our central symbol, is a symbol of cataclysmic failure (albeit, I would argue, not the failure of Jesus the Christ, but your failure and mine to see and know Jesus as the Christ). It is no accident that Psalm 51 was rapidly associated with the pain and suffering of the Christ on the Cross, who, while we call him sinless, nevertheless entered into the deepest depths of darkness.
Our faith-lives must be lives of integrity. There’s a sense in which that begins when we can enter into the human depths of Psalm 51, and its reflections on the depths of the darkness of King David. It is there we meet the Christ: where we admit our fallibility, moral, social, intellectual, even athletic (as I reminded the people of Kormilda last week), and allow the invasion of Christ into our lives to be a greater, higher, more demanding truth, it is there that the journey into God begins.
As it happens that will never make us flavour of the month. While the broken human must pay society’s dues for crime and sin, nevertheless, we must never forget that the arms of Christ reach even into betrayal, murder and abuse. It is there that David becomes an icon of faith. It is there, in our failings, which are, pray God, less spectacular, that we can again and again reach the Christ who beckons us into the for-evers of God, there that we begin the work that Jesus calls ‘believing in him’. Even without histrionics: just, pray God, with integrity.
TLBWY
CHURCH OF THE GOOD SHEPHERD, FRED’S PASS (NT)
SUNDAY, August 5th 2012
(ORDINARY SUNDAY 18 / TENTH SUNDAY OF PENTECOST)
Readings: 2 Samuel 11.26 -12.13a
Psalm 51.1-12
Ephesians 4.1-16
John 6.24-35
It’s probably safe to tell the story, more than 5000 kilometres from its place of origin, of the clergyman in a far-off parish who decided in a dramatic manner to confess his conspicuous sins in the context of parish liturgy. It was evensong, back in the days before video killed the radio star, television killed the pulpit star, and Facebook killed the lot, placing our inner angst at the centre of the omniverse (though that is a different sermon altogether!). In a dramatic sermon the good archdeacon – and no, I am not creating any precedents or parallels here! – decided it was time metaphorically and spiritually to bare his all, and to go at least some way towards bearing his all sartorially at the same time. And so, having in his sermon dramatically confessed that he was having an affair with a parishioner, he removed his liturgical garments and exited the church with a flourish, never, literally, to return.
It was an ugly moment in the life of the faith community, and one from which it struggled to recover for many years. It was, needless to say, a devastating moment in the life of the archdeacon’s marriage and family, details of which I am not privy to. It was in many ways a human tragedy that, at a whole heap of levels need never have happened. It was a story that gave Anglican Christianity a bad name in a small provincial town – and let’s face it, we, like all the Christian denominations, have had our fair share of moments by which we have given ourselves a bad name. This was at least one of the lesser ones, for all the devastation that was caused by his public pronouncement of fallibility and sin it was far less so than the shenanigans that continue to emerge not only from churches, but from all the caring professions as the sad tales of victims of abuse emerge into the daylight.
The histrionics that accompanied the failed archdeacon’s self-exposing confession were probably both redemptive and destructive, and no doubt intrinsic to his own particular personality type and psychological needs. He left the embrace of the church altogether, and I know nothing of the fate of others trapped in his errors. Society in any case demands retribution, and the complex issues of errant sexuality expose hypocrisies in Church and Society alike. Serial monogamy, which is what affairs often represent, is de rigueur in contemporary society (as reflected in the nonsense sold as magazines), and we might well want to flag a more decent standard. Predation, on the other hand, is forgivable by almost no-one but God, and we must feel the pain when our own offend so deeply against common decency.
Forgivable by almost no-one but God: yet the story of David which we have been following now for some weeks takes us, as Anne reminded us last week, deep into the heart of human failure. David was adulterous, murderous, and a predatory abuser of power. He was neither the first nor the last, yet he remains in Jewish and Christian history one of the great heroes of faith. Psalm 51 may or may not really have been written by David – I see no reason why not, though many scholars doubt it – but the point is that it takes us deep, deep into the heart of human failure. Have I ever failed in my life? Have you? I’m not going to engage in the histrionics of the archdeacon of many years and many decades ago, and nor should you, but the engagement of a journey into the heart of God begins with the recognition of our failure. Am I good enough to be a priest? No. Am I good enough to be a Christian? No. But, as the gospels remind us as they outline the abysmal failings of Peter and the apostles, nor is anyone. The gospel of Jesus Christ is the good news of and for the not good enough – it is no accident that the Cross, our central symbol, is a symbol of cataclysmic failure (albeit, I would argue, not the failure of Jesus the Christ, but your failure and mine to see and know Jesus as the Christ). It is no accident that Psalm 51 was rapidly associated with the pain and suffering of the Christ on the Cross, who, while we call him sinless, nevertheless entered into the deepest depths of darkness.
Our faith-lives must be lives of integrity. There’s a sense in which that begins when we can enter into the human depths of Psalm 51, and its reflections on the depths of the darkness of King David. It is there we meet the Christ: where we admit our fallibility, moral, social, intellectual, even athletic (as I reminded the people of Kormilda last week), and allow the invasion of Christ into our lives to be a greater, higher, more demanding truth, it is there that the journey into God begins.
As it happens that will never make us flavour of the month. While the broken human must pay society’s dues for crime and sin, nevertheless, we must never forget that the arms of Christ reach even into betrayal, murder and abuse. It is there that David becomes an icon of faith. It is there, in our failings, which are, pray God, less spectacular, that we can again and again reach the Christ who beckons us into the for-evers of God, there that we begin the work that Jesus calls ‘believing in him’. Even without histrionics: just, pray God, with integrity.
TLBWY
Walking Talking Temples
SERMON PREACHED AT THE
CHURCH OF St FRANCIS, BATCHELOR (NT)
SUNDAY, July 22nd 2012
(ORDINARY SUNDAY 16 / EIGHTH SUNDAY OF PENTECOST)
Readings: 2 Samuel 7.1-14a
Psalm 89.21-38
Ephesians 2.11-22
Mark 6.30-34, 53-56
To read the story of the Hebrew people and of their Temple, edited as the story was over hundreds of years, is to read the story of a people both open to the new and tenacious in their adherence to that which is valuable in their past. The tricky bit, of course, is to know what is worth holding to, and what is worthy only to be jettisoned. The great and sometimes bitter arguments of church history and theology are, I suggest (and suggest retrospectively, for hindsight is a wonderful thing!) the brutal outworkings of God’s Spirit, that unsettling, disturbing third Person of the Trinity. Which is always very easy to say after the event, but less easy when we are caught in the midst. When no less a figure than David has the bright idea of building a Temple for his God to dwell in, but is chastised by a God who will not – yet – be even symbolically restrained by walls, when no less a figure than David gets it radically wrong (as he so often did!) it should only serve to encourage us in our blunderings.
Of course if we were to step outside of today’s text we would know that the Temple continued and continues to have a troubled story. Visible only as ruins today, it has twice been built and twice destroyed. Some millennialist groups insist on seeing any completion of a Third temple as a prelude to the end of time. While that may be right – though I personally doubt it – I abhor, and so should we all – the fact that such a belief leads them to blind support of anything and everything the modern State of Israel does to oppress its admittedly recalcitrant neighbours, the Palestinian and other Arab States. Confronted by millennialist preaching that permits such atrocity (yet privately affirms that believing Jews are condemned to hell for their rejection of the messiah-hood of Jesus) we must ask over and again what would, what did Jesus do? Did he preach hate, or love, oppression or liberation, division or reconciliation?
Indeed we might even remember the New Testament teaching, alluded to in our Ephesians reading and powerfully stated in 1 Cor. 6, that it is the believer’s body, the believer’s ‘selfhood’ we might say, that becomes the dwelling place of the Shekinah, the holiness of God. This teaching may not have been entirely unique to the Christian community, but it was a powerful hallmark of the Christians’ self-understanding, and drove their attitudes to sexuality (reflected in Paul’s teaching on prostitution) in particular. Jesus himself had become the walking, talking locus of God – which is why Peter was not permitted to build tabernacles on the Mount of Transfiguration – and the New Testament People of God were, by the indwelling of the Spirit, likewise the dwelling place of God’s holiness, God’s shekinah. The implications of this for debates about sexuality in today’s context are complex, and more complex than they at first sight appear; there is no doubt this sense of personal in-dwelling of God’s holiness has shaped Christians’ attitudes to all aspects of what we might call ‘bodiliness’, also apparent in Paul’s slightly self-conscious diversion on the many members of one body in 1 Cor. 12.
If we though, are as it were mini-temples, what other implications are there for the way in which we live our lives? There is a sense in which we are called to live our lives as reminders to ourselves and those around us of the values of the eternities of God. At the very least this means we are called to raise ourselves above the ephemeral eternal present of the society around us. This isn’t easy: almost all the values of the market-place in which we live are based on ephemera. In the baptism service we are asked to turn to Christ and to ‘reject selfish living, and all that is false and unjust’. I doubt any of us can claim to have fulfilled that promise – one of the reasons I reject a ‘rigorist’ approach to baptising children. The shoes I wear were made in an Asian sweat shop, the fossil fuels I burn in my car are destroying God’s earth, the food thrown out at the end of each day in the cafés I frequent could feed a third world family. Have I rejected selfish living?
And yet the author of Ephesians calls us to be the peace of Christ. The liturgical sharing of the peace is no trivial moment: we are saying to one another may you be, and may I be an embodiment of God’s peace that is, as Paul put it, beyond human comprehension. Martin Luther King was not the first to remind God’s people that God’s peace is not a warm and fuzzy feeling, but the absence of all injustice: I for one am far from an embodiment or walking advertisement of the perfect justice and righteousness that Jesus embodied.
These are of course no more than meandering thoughts, random thoughts triggered by stories about temples, about dividing walls of injustice, about gaps between haves and have-nots materially and spiritually. I can ultimately look only at my own life and know that it – that I – fall far short of what Paul calls the glory of God, far short of the dwelling place of God’s shekinah, God’s holiness that I am called to be. Yet that is what God calls us to be – calls us to be, and despite our inadequacies, simply calls us as being. We are not yet what we are called to be, but we are called to become what we already are in Christ.
TLBWY
CHURCH OF St FRANCIS, BATCHELOR (NT)
SUNDAY, July 22nd 2012
(ORDINARY SUNDAY 16 / EIGHTH SUNDAY OF PENTECOST)
Readings: 2 Samuel 7.1-14a
Psalm 89.21-38
Ephesians 2.11-22
Mark 6.30-34, 53-56
To read the story of the Hebrew people and of their Temple, edited as the story was over hundreds of years, is to read the story of a people both open to the new and tenacious in their adherence to that which is valuable in their past. The tricky bit, of course, is to know what is worth holding to, and what is worthy only to be jettisoned. The great and sometimes bitter arguments of church history and theology are, I suggest (and suggest retrospectively, for hindsight is a wonderful thing!) the brutal outworkings of God’s Spirit, that unsettling, disturbing third Person of the Trinity. Which is always very easy to say after the event, but less easy when we are caught in the midst. When no less a figure than David has the bright idea of building a Temple for his God to dwell in, but is chastised by a God who will not – yet – be even symbolically restrained by walls, when no less a figure than David gets it radically wrong (as he so often did!) it should only serve to encourage us in our blunderings.
Of course if we were to step outside of today’s text we would know that the Temple continued and continues to have a troubled story. Visible only as ruins today, it has twice been built and twice destroyed. Some millennialist groups insist on seeing any completion of a Third temple as a prelude to the end of time. While that may be right – though I personally doubt it – I abhor, and so should we all – the fact that such a belief leads them to blind support of anything and everything the modern State of Israel does to oppress its admittedly recalcitrant neighbours, the Palestinian and other Arab States. Confronted by millennialist preaching that permits such atrocity (yet privately affirms that believing Jews are condemned to hell for their rejection of the messiah-hood of Jesus) we must ask over and again what would, what did Jesus do? Did he preach hate, or love, oppression or liberation, division or reconciliation?
Indeed we might even remember the New Testament teaching, alluded to in our Ephesians reading and powerfully stated in 1 Cor. 6, that it is the believer’s body, the believer’s ‘selfhood’ we might say, that becomes the dwelling place of the Shekinah, the holiness of God. This teaching may not have been entirely unique to the Christian community, but it was a powerful hallmark of the Christians’ self-understanding, and drove their attitudes to sexuality (reflected in Paul’s teaching on prostitution) in particular. Jesus himself had become the walking, talking locus of God – which is why Peter was not permitted to build tabernacles on the Mount of Transfiguration – and the New Testament People of God were, by the indwelling of the Spirit, likewise the dwelling place of God’s holiness, God’s shekinah. The implications of this for debates about sexuality in today’s context are complex, and more complex than they at first sight appear; there is no doubt this sense of personal in-dwelling of God’s holiness has shaped Christians’ attitudes to all aspects of what we might call ‘bodiliness’, also apparent in Paul’s slightly self-conscious diversion on the many members of one body in 1 Cor. 12.
If we though, are as it were mini-temples, what other implications are there for the way in which we live our lives? There is a sense in which we are called to live our lives as reminders to ourselves and those around us of the values of the eternities of God. At the very least this means we are called to raise ourselves above the ephemeral eternal present of the society around us. This isn’t easy: almost all the values of the market-place in which we live are based on ephemera. In the baptism service we are asked to turn to Christ and to ‘reject selfish living, and all that is false and unjust’. I doubt any of us can claim to have fulfilled that promise – one of the reasons I reject a ‘rigorist’ approach to baptising children. The shoes I wear were made in an Asian sweat shop, the fossil fuels I burn in my car are destroying God’s earth, the food thrown out at the end of each day in the cafés I frequent could feed a third world family. Have I rejected selfish living?
And yet the author of Ephesians calls us to be the peace of Christ. The liturgical sharing of the peace is no trivial moment: we are saying to one another may you be, and may I be an embodiment of God’s peace that is, as Paul put it, beyond human comprehension. Martin Luther King was not the first to remind God’s people that God’s peace is not a warm and fuzzy feeling, but the absence of all injustice: I for one am far from an embodiment or walking advertisement of the perfect justice and righteousness that Jesus embodied.
These are of course no more than meandering thoughts, random thoughts triggered by stories about temples, about dividing walls of injustice, about gaps between haves and have-nots materially and spiritually. I can ultimately look only at my own life and know that it – that I – fall far short of what Paul calls the glory of God, far short of the dwelling place of God’s shekinah, God’s holiness that I am called to be. Yet that is what God calls us to be – calls us to be, and despite our inadequacies, simply calls us as being. We are not yet what we are called to be, but we are called to become what we already are in Christ.
TLBWY
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