To think it arose only from a desire to make the funeral arrangements would be unduly cynical, there were many people who seemed genuinely to value the presence of a priest at moments of bereavement, but rising from the bed at 2 am to drive to some lonely farmhouse to condole with a family always took an effort of will. Perhaps it was the tiredness, perhaps it was the inability to find words to match the occasion, often, though, it was the coldness that most registered in the consciousness.

In the Eighties, central heating would hardly have reached many of the farms. The fire in the grate or the kitchen range would have been the source of warmth, but in the early hours of the morning, the grate would have no more than embers and serious business like a funeral could only be discussed in a good room. The best front room would be opened up and everyone would sit exhausted and stunned in the harsh light of a bulb hanging from the ceiling; it would have been thought frivolous to have turned on table or standard lamps and so to have changed the mood of the room. Tea would have been made and hardly a word would have broken the silence of the sadness.

The undertaker would arrive fifteen minutes later, immaculate in black suit and waistcoat, white shirt and black tie. The time of the service would be discussed and he would take his leave; there would be prayers and a time fixed to see them in the morning. Of course, it was already the morning, it would be three or four o’clock, and returning home in the darkness, the sleep that would follow would be fitful. The alarm would ring at 7 am, there was a day’s work ahead.

Coldness evokes those moments; the coldness that comes from tiredness. Sitting in front of an empty fire with only the ceiling light lit, memories come of snatches of conversations and details of hymns and passages of Scripture and tea in china cups.

Arriving back at 11 pm from preaching in Co Wexford, the house is cold and the bones are tired. Mercifully, no-one is dead. There comes a time when some things require someone younger.

There can only be one choice, though.

‘A quarter of lemon bonbons, please?’

There was a day I went fishing in the River Cary with the Brooks brothers from down our road. We had stopped at the village shop with the few pennies in our pockets and bought sweets. That day, forty odd years ago, I had bought lemon bonbons. I had caught nothing, but it had been a magical day and the taste of the lemon coating of the sweets remains as intense as ever.

Lemon bonbons are part of a litany of reassurance, things remembered when feeling fed up. The list includes:

Points West:  The BBC local news programme broadcast from Bristol each weekday at 6.00.  It had always the feel and the reassurance of a local newspaper.  Living in Northern Ireland from the age of 22, too often the local news was a repeat of grisly stories that had filled the national news.  Points West rarely had anything grisly to report, it was a daily reassurance that all was well with the world, and, where things weren’t perfect, then some earnest person would appear on camera to explain how things would be put right.

Car headlights on a country road: There is reassurance in real darkness.  Standing watching from an upstairs window, it was possible to follow cars making progress towards our tiny village from the small town three miles away.  There was not a single street light in the village; the illumination of hedgerows, garden gates, parked cars, and night animals, will forever create a childhood sense of being homeward bound at the end of a long day.

Grocery vans: Shopping options in the village were limited, but each Monday teatime a man called David Macey would arrive with a big old van that was more the size of a lorry.  It had a long nosed bonnet and you could step up inside it through the back doors to buy stuff from the shelves on either side.  He had his scales just behind the driver’s seat and it was here that you paid 3d for Barrett’s Sherbet Fountains.  Looking back, it was hard to imagine that there was much of an income to be derived from kids with thrupenny bits and the odd villager buying a few things.

The Western Morning News: Perhaps an imagined memory.  The Western Morning News is a Plymouth paper, why would it be on a kitchen table in Somerset?  Perhaps it was the Western Daily Press, that would be more likely, it’s Bristol, that’s our area.  The image remained firm, the Gothic type of the newspaper title.  The paper was on Mrs Vigar’s kitchen table at Manor Farm.  Manor Farm was where we went to be collected each morning by the car that transported a handful of us to the grammar school, plucked from our friends and community at the age of eleven.  The newspaper on the table perhaps suggested continuity, stability, an order in things.

Feeling battered and depressed about the church, on this side of the Irish Sea, the lemon bonbons are the only option available.

A big house Protestant, Constance Gore-Booth, the Countess Markievicz, commanded the Irish Citizen Army in the College of Surgeons during the Easter Rising of 1916.  It is said that after the rebels had surrendered, she was recognized as someone from a different social class and offered a lift in his motor car by the commander of the British soldiers.  The Countess declined; preferring to walk alongside the remnant of her makeshift army.  Con Markievicz now looks impassively across the ornamental gardens once garrisoned by her comrades; her fresh face and groomed hair marking her out as coming from a prosperous background in a country that was filled with the direst poverty.

Escaping the death sentence passed on her male comrades, Markievicz was imprisoned and turned her back on the tradition in which she had grown up, and was admitted to the Roman Catholic Church.  She found the Church of Ireland tradition from which she came so alien to everything she believed, that she felt that she could only fully identify with the poor by being part of the religious tradition to which the majority of them belonged.

Were Con Markievicz to read the coverage of last week’s Church of Ireland General Synod, she would feel her tradition had not much progressed.

A report on the list of centenaries to be marked between 2012 and 2022 seemed selectively written; a schoolmaster stood and questioned why the Dublin Lockout of 1913, a major moment in Irish working class history, a moment that affected thousands of working class Protestants, had not been included in the list. There seemed to be no answer offered.

Hours were found to debate matters of private sexual morality, but where were the hours spent on discussing how Jesus would have seen the health cuts, on discussing Jesus’ response to the cuts in services to the elderly and the disabled? Where were the hours of debate on the Biblical injustice of the bank bailout?  Where were the hours of reflection on our stewardship of God’s good earth?

Were Con Markievicz living a century later, it is hard not to think that she would find a church even less connected to the poor than it was in her time. Perhaps she would not join the ranks of the Roman Catholic church, but she would not  remain in a tradition whose bishops have nothing to say to the poor.

20th June – Introduction

27th June – The Law (Genesis to Deuteronomy)

4th July – History (Joshua to Esther)

11th July – Wisdom (Job to Song of Solomon)

18th July – Major Prophets (Isaiah to Daniel)

25th July Minor Prophets 1 (Hosea to Micah)

1st August – Minor Prophets 2 (Nahum to Malachi)

8th August – The Gospels (Saint Matthew to Saint John)

15th August – The Acts of the Apostles

22nd August – Saint Paul’s Letters to the Churches (Romans – 2 Thessalonians)

29th August – Saint Paul’s Letters to Individuals (1 Timothy – Philemon)

5th September – General Letters (Saint James to Saint Jude)

12th September – The Revelation to Saint John

George Bernard Shaw once wrote, “Reasonable people adapt themselves to the world. Unreasonable people attempt to adapt the world to themselves. All progress, therefore, depends on unreasonable people.”

All progress depends on unreasonable people– it’s an interesting thought. When you think back through history, when you think of explorers, and inventors and the scientists who made great breakthroughs, they were unreasonable people. Some were people who just didn’t conform, some were eccentric, some were regarded as being quite mad. Had they been reasonable, they would have accepted the world as it was, they wouldn’t have questioned what was seen as being the way things were by everyone else.

You have to be unreasonable if you’re going to make progress, because progress demands disagreeing with what everyone else thinks, it means disturbing people, it means annoying people. Being unreasonable means asking questions about what everyone else takes for granted; it means being prepared to say what no-one else has so far said; it means being prepared to go where no-one else has been prepared to go.

Exploration, invention, science, each demanded unreasonable people to make progress. Being unreasonable is also at the heart of the history of Christianity. Being a Christian is fundamentally unreasonable because what we say we believe simply does not fit in with the way our world understands things.

When we look at the first days of the Church, Matthias was an unreasonable man. Jesus’ followers are looking for someone to take the place of Judas and Peter says, “It is necessary to choose one of the men who have been with us the whole time the Lord Jesus went in and out among us, beginning from John’s baptism to the time when Jesus was taken up from us. For one of these must become a witness with us of his resurrection.” There are two candidates for the job, Joseph called Barsabbas (also known as Justus) and Matthias.

Can you imagine the comments and the criticisms both of them would have got over the previous three years? Peter says that the person to replace Judas must have been with them right from the time Jesus’ was baptised until the time when he ascended into heaven.

What would Matthias’ friends have said to him? What are you mixing with those people for? Sure they don’t even count you as one of their number. Why are you always hanging around on the edge of things? Matthias, why don’t you take some good advice and go back to the day job? Nothing good can come from following that Jesus from Nazareth. Matthias, be reasonable, go home, go back to your house and your family and your work, do that religious stuff in your spare time.

Matthias is unreasonable, he is the most unreasonable of the Twelve because he had never been given any hope that he would be anything other than an unknown person on the fringe of things. There must have been moments when he got comments from the Twelve. ‘What are you doing here, Matthias? You’re not part of the group. You weren’t invited. Why do you keep following us?’ The Twelve included people like James and John, who argued about where they would sit in Heaven. If they had such petty squabbles among themselves, we can be sure that Matthias would also have been subject to comments and criticisms and snide remarks.

It is by being unreasonable that Matthias shows that he is faithful to Jesus; it is by being unreasonable that Matthias shows he is worthy of his place amongst the Twelve; it is by being unreasonable that Matthias is part of a group that progresses from being a group of wandering Jewish men to a worldwide movement.

If Matthias had shown proper sense and caution, he would have stayed at home and got on with sensible things and worried about getting that job on the house done that he had promised his wife he would do last year; and whether that young man down the street was a suitable match for his daughter; and telling the rabbi that synagogue had got very long on the Sabbath. Those would be reasonable things; being sensible means doing reasonable things, doesn’t it?

It’s because he was unreasonable that we remember Matthias today, it’s because he and the rest of the Twelve went around telling an astonishing story that we have a Church today. Being reasonable, most of them would have spent their advancing years catching fish in the Sea of Galilee; thank God they were unreasonable, or we would never have heard about Jesus.

We are a very reasonable church, the Church of Ireland is known for its reason, its common sense, its moderation. Perhaps the time has come for us to be unreasonable. If George Bernard Shaw is right, and progress depends on unreasonable people, then telling the story of Jesus in the 21st Century will mean doing things differently.

In science, in technology, in medicine, we don’t expect people to do things as they did fifty years ago, or even twenty years ago. Our human bodies have remained more or less the same over the centuries, but we wouldn’t expect a doctor to treat us in the same way as he might have treated us in the 1960s. When it comes to the Church, we know that the Good News of Jesus doesn’t change, but we know that down through the centuries the Church has changed many times, yet we think we can carry on being the Church in the same way as we were in the 1960s.

It is time for us to be unreasonable and for each of us to ask serious questions about what is needed for our church to be able to carry on telling the Good News for generations to come. No-one is going to do that for us. Peter looked for an unreasonable man to replace Judas, “one of the men who have been with us the whole time the Lord Jesus went in and out among us, beginning from John’s baptism to the time when Jesus was taken up from us”.

Following in the tradition of Matthias, we are called to be unreasonable people.

It was the third Sunday in July of 1978 and the rain was lashing down.

The annual Tolpuddle Martyrs Memorial rally was drenched. Dampness permeated everything. Even with its poles resting on the ground, as the rally gathered around the platform for the speeches, the banner had become heavy; the fiery yellow colours at the centre of the banner had been dulled by the soaking. Standing in the rain, even the cheery notes of the brass band had ceased as the speakers began their addresses.

It came the turn of a government minister to speak.

‘Are you all wet?’

‘Yes’, shouted the crowd.

‘Are you all soaked to the skin?’

‘Yes’.

‘Don’t you think the men from this village who were transported to Australia would have loved to have stood here? As they laboured in the heat, don’t you think they would have loved to have felt the falling rain? Don’t you think they would have loved to have stood under grey Dorset skies instead of being on the other side of the world, sent there for no reason other than trying to organize themselves?’

The crowd roared its approval.

Ever since that Sunday afternoon, being wet has brought thoughts of the men from Tolpuddle.

It was a cold and gusty as we gathered this afternoon and this evening, to bless the seed sown at each end of the parish. There was a wind that went through you rather than round you. It was hard to turn the pages, to read,  without someone else holding the page down. The May chill continues unabated; the growth of the Easter- sown barley stunted by night frosts and biting days.

But the Tolpuddle Martyrs would have relished the chance of standing in grain fields in Offaly and Laois; the temperature would have been of no consequence to such weather-hardened men.

It was not the Dorset men of the 19th Century who were mentioned this evening, rather the people of 21st Century Sierra Leone; the situation of many of them probably worse than that faced by the people of Tolpuddle two centuries ago.

Perhaps the chill was appropriate, sharpening the senses, making one more keenly aware of reality.

Sean O’Casey, a working class man from the sort of community on which the Church of Ireland long ago turned its back, became embittered towards the church in which he had been baptized and raised.  The Church of Ireland had said nothing while the prospect of the sort of Ireland imagined by O’Casey, and those who had struggled for justice, disappeared without trace.  O’Casey eventually faced a situation where the influence of the Roman Catholic Church was such that it was not possible even for his plays to be performed.  At one point, in frustration, he had penned lines to the letters column of the Irish Times:

There we go; the streets of Dublin echo with the drumbeats of footsteps running away.  The Archbishop in his Palace and the Customs Officer on the quay viva watch to guard virtue and Eire; the other Archbishop (Barton) draws the curtains and sits close to his study fire, saying nothing; and so the Hidden Ireland becomes the Bidden Ireland, and all is swell.

A century on from the Ireland of the young Sean O’Casey and it might have been imagined that a church now with no reason to fear anything from anyone might manage some contribution of substance to the public discourse of the state.

Yet the preoccupation is with sex – not with the economic crisis in Ireland, not with the chaos in Europe, not with the plight of hundreds of millions of people in Africa, not with global concerns about the environment, but with sex.

In an Ireland gone from boom to bust, where hundreds of thousands have lost their jobs and where the poor and vulnerable must now pay the cost of the reckless greed of a small and influential minority, the bishops have still not managed a single statement in response to the culture of lies and deceit and the contravention of the Biblical imperatives to act justly and to defend the poor. Bishops quick to express opinions on matters of sexuality find no words to condemn the scandal of taking from the sick and the weak to give to the wealthy and to the powerful.

Archbishop Barton closing his curtains and pulling his chair closer to the fire was positively outspoken compared to some of his successors today. O’Casey would despair of them.

Standing at the Jervis Luas stop at 11 pm, waiting for a tram that takes an eternity to arrive, it seems that a strange amalgam of humanity has gathered for no apparent reason. What reasons have brought them here at such an hour?

A young professional woman stands deep in earnest telephone conversation? Were the evening hours spent in the office? Or maybe there were drinks or a meal with friends? She turns her back and moves to the platform’s end, shying away from a group of late teen girls.

The girls have been drinking; one still has a bottle in her hand. They are loud and protest at the electronic display that shows the tram will not arrive for another ten minutes. ‘We could have had another drink. We could have spent nine minutes having another drink and still caught the tram’.

They are watched by an odd family group. Two girls, aged perhaps three and seven, run up and down the platform as if it were 11 am and not 11 pm. A young man in his mid 20s watches them and then calls them back. The woman beside him is indifferent to what is going on. The odd dimension is the dog they have with them, upon which they lavish great attention. A chihuahua, without collar or lead, which never moves more than a few feet from the man’s side. Why would anyone be in the city centre at eleven at night with two little girls and a small dog? Where would you gain admission in such company?

An African man arrives, chatting to someone in his phone. His backpack suggested an arrival from somewhere, but, if that was the case, why catch the tram at Jervis, a back street stop nowhere near the bus or rail stations?

As the tram approaches, a soldier in combat dress ambles up. The camouflage of his rucksack matches that of his fatigues. His boots are large and polished. What was a soldier doing at a city centre tram stop at eleven at night?

The tram doors open and those assembled step inside, their distinctive character being quickly diluted among those whose numbers ensure the tram is well-filled. There is a library-like silence; the only voice audible being an Englishman trying to give a telephone number to a friend. The faces on the tram are expressions of tiredness; people staring fixedly into nothingness. A man in a suit sits opposite; his pallor matching the grey of his suit.

Sometimes, there are moments when different worlds seem to co-exist in one very small country.

Would Jesus have been a reactionary? Many church people have thought so.

Many of his followers in the 18th and 19th Centuries thought he might have supported slavery.  George Whitefield, the 18th Century cleric who is a major figure in evangelical history actually campaigned for the legalization of slavery in the state of Georgia because he believed it necessary for the economic success of the state.  While the 19th Century abolitionist movement had strong evangelical roots, it also met strong opposition from Christians.  Richard Furman, a Baptist leader in South Carolina in 1822 published an ‘Exposition of the Views of the Baptists Relative to the Coloured Population of the United States’; it was a defence of slavery that would be used up until the end of the American Civil War

Would Jesus have been a democrat? Not according to the 19th Century Methodist leader Jabez Bunting. When the question of adopting democratic procedures in church governance, Bunting was unequivocal in stating, ‘Methodism is as much opposed to democracy as to sin’. Bunting would have opposed even the idea that the the synod should be allowed to vote on the motion.

Would Jesus have thought racism as something his followers should accept? Many evangelical Christians in the United States actively embraced racist attitudes, seeing no incompatibility between discrimination and their faith.  Bob Jones University refused to allow admission to African Americans until 1971. The Religious Right emerged through government interventions to remove charitable status from institutions that practiced segregation.

What about equality for women? Didn’t Jesus treat women as equals? Didn’t he step outside the norms of society in his interactions with women? There are conservative evangelicals who insist that whatever Jesus might have done, the whole Bible must be taken into consideration; verses from Genesis are adduced to argue woman is subordinate to man.  Even Bible translations are vetted to ensure they comply with the theme of male dominance; the Southern Baptist Convention in the United States passed a resolution in June 2011 condemning a gender neutral New International Version of the Bible.

Every step forward in human rights, every struggle for equality and dignity, has been opposed by many Christians.  Scripture has been quoted in defence of oppression and degradation.  Given that the church has supported slavery, autocracy, racism and sexism, is it surprising that it  should be opposed to equality for gay and lesbian people?

In decades to come the attitude of the bishops will be seen as part of a tradition of discrimination, as alien to the 21st Century as the views of their predecessors in the tradition.

My medical undergraduate daughter this evening commented, ‘what I don’t understand is why any of you think that anyone cares about what the church thinks’.

We are not just pursuing the path of discrimination; we are pursuing the path of irrelevance.

I remember travelling from Larne in Co Antrim down to Dublin one bright May morning to attend a meeting in Dublin. I was only there for the afternoon business, which was deadly dull and boring for the most part, but that didn’t matter. The train journey was a time to think and a time to reflect, a time to be quiet and to hear what God might be saying.

I have always loved trains; they give you the feeling of order and organization in the world, the feeling that you are part of something bigger. I can just lean against the window and look out. It was a good morning for looking out. It was mild and dry and clear, there was no more than a gentle breeze.

As the train moved out of the station, heading along the lough shore, there were black-headed gulls circling around looking for food. Then as we went along the old quays where, in times past, there would have been great activity as the coal boats unloaded, I caught sight of a cormorant.

The cormorant was standing contentedly in the gentle breeze, with its wings outstretched. No-one really knows why cormorants do this, but you will often see cormorants standing on the rocks with their wings spread; no agitation, no movement, just standing peacefully in the sea breeze.

I remember thinking that maybe there was a lesson to be learned through watching the cormorant; a lesson in being quiet, setting aside all the agitation and all the things going around in our heads, and being still. Perhaps as the cormorant stood there on a May morning, receiving the gentle breeze, so there was a lesson in being open to the gentle breath of the Holy Spirit.

It was a picture that was so simple: if we want to hear what God is saying, then we have to stop and be still and listen. The very thing that God tells his people to do in Psalm 46 is to be still and know that he is God—simple enough.

Isn’t most of what being a Christian is about fairly simple? “This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you,” says Jesus.

What could be more straightforward? All Jesus is asking of us in order for us to obey his commands, is that we love one another; no more complicated than a cormorant standing on the shore on a fine spring morning.

Where did we go wrong? Why did the Church get so complicated? If all that is required is that we obey God’s commands, then how do the churches get into such arguments?

I keep reading people who try to explain the decline of the Church by saying that we are living in a secular age, that people aren’t interested in spiritual things anymore. I think this is nonsense. We are no more secular now than we were in the past; there is a spiritual element in all of us. There is huge interest in “spiritual” things, the bookshops have whole sections on “mind, body and spirit”. There is a fascination with angels. Within more traditional religion, pilgrimages to places like Saint Patrick’s Purgatory and Croagh Patrick have never been more popular. People like spiritual things.

I have read no survey anywhere that shows Irish people have turned against God. There is no evidence that against Jesus does not command the same interest he always did. What surveys have shown is that what people find hard is the Church. We no longer accept its authority and we no longer really understand what it is talking about; sometimes I wonder how much we ever did understand.

The sad thing about church debates that they are mostly completely irrelevant to the world beyond the stained glass windows. I wonder sometimes if we are like sailors standing and arguing about who does what, when all the time the ship is sinking. The sort of thing that is the stuff of disputes in church circles is utterly meaningless to the people whom Jesus would seek as his friends. Try stopping someone in the supermarket and asking them about their theological views—and if that sounds absurd, it shows how far we have departed from Jesus.

“This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you”, not to depart so much into the realms of philosophical language that we completely lose touch with the world Jesus came to save.

If our Church is to have a future, it will be one rooted in simplicity: simplicity in our worship; simplicity in our teaching; simplicity in the words we use.

Read and re-read the Gospels and we will not find anywhere Jesus departing into the abstract world of the bishops and the theologians; he can take the most profound, most serious, most important questions in our human lives, and he can give answers in words understood by people who have had no formal education.

If there are things in the church that don’t have any meaning for us, then we have to ask ourselves what sense they make to someone who comes only occasionally, or even steps into church for the first time.

Like the cormorant standing on the shore of Larne Lough, perhaps we need to stand still for a while and listen. What is God saying to the church?

“This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you.” It’s not complicated—how are we going to fulfil Jesus’ commandment?