tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4973247400566774832024-03-17T13:46:24.085+00:00Annabel Smyth's SermonsSermons preached from September 2008 onwards. Mrs Redboots (Annabel Smyth)http://www.blogger.com/profile/11270027663691257254noreply@blogger.comBlogger268125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-497324740056677483.post-37707738768350780652024-03-17T11:00:00.032+00:002024-03-17T13:45:30.307+00:00Patrick and Butterflies<p> <i>A talk in two parts at All Age Worship. Not that anybody there was under 50, but they seem to have enjoyed it and got something from it.</i></p><p></p><p align="left" class="western" style="line-height: 100%;">
</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEhjNBsHJuFCuppab9mNh_D7WATsh6TkmCuo9z6HeawO5-43srVQq5OGixRTQqmvbv2UCMWC0cBQ4vjDjdZFeuvoFaWvkhhqH8purIp993vmcgjgHWuB_E9Yiu_5aeNBm4wLY4zB5j6562_r07Vm9vZELbxJ2MuI5qpQCv87Lclh7ndQ5DvTxWNKaN07AKo" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="217" data-original-width="300" height="231" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEhjNBsHJuFCuppab9mNh_D7WATsh6TkmCuo9z6HeawO5-43srVQq5OGixRTQqmvbv2UCMWC0cBQ4vjDjdZFeuvoFaWvkhhqH8purIp993vmcgjgHWuB_E9Yiu_5aeNBm4wLY4zB5j6562_r07Vm9vZELbxJ2MuI5qpQCv87Lclh7ndQ5DvTxWNKaN07AKo" width="320" /></a></div><br /><br /><div><iframe frameborder="0" height="100" src="https://drive.google.com/file/d/13l6yDjvtD2vcz3UTs7WyGumycuxhGOQJ/preview" width="500">
</iframe><br /></div><div><i>I do apologise for the appalling coughing fit I was struck with at the end of the first part of the sermon! No idea what got to me, but something did. I should fast forward past that point, were I you!</i></div><div><br /></div><div>Once upon a time, long, long ago, a boy was born in a small town in
Scotland. His name was Maewyn Succat. For the first sixteen years
of his life he grew up in a happy and stable family, but when he was
sixteen, something dreadful happened! Pirates raided his village,
and carried Maewin, and probably other boys, too, off into slavery in
Ireland. <br />
<br />
And for six whole years, Maewin had to belong
to someone else, not free to be his own person. He was very lonely,
so he turned to God for help, and learnt to love God and to pray
pretty much constantly, listening to God and chatting to him.<br />
<br />
After
six years, though, Maewin was able to escape to France, where he
spent many years studying and learning what the great Christian
fathers had thought and taught about Jesus. Sometime during those
years he was baptised, and took the name we know him by best:
Patrick. He was ordained a priest, and then made a Bishop, and then
God called him to go back to Ireland – the place where he had been
a slave, remember? And he went, and spent the next 30 years or so
telling the people of Ireland about God, and about Jesus. He died on
17 March in the year 462, and is buried in the grounds of Down
Cathedral. And every year, we celebrate him on 17 March. In America
they even dye their rivers green, and their beer! And some of us –
me included – like to wear something green, just because.<br />
<br />
But
there’s more to celebrating St Patrick than that! Patrick trusted
God, and wrote a lovely prayer, now turned into a rather long hymn.
I quoted four lines right at the start of the service, and here is
another verse.<br />
<br />
I bind unto myself today<br />
The power of
God to hold and lead,<br />
His eye to watch, his might to stay,<br />
His
ear to hearken to my need.<br />
The wisdom of my God to teach,<br />
His
hand to guide, his shield to ward,<br />
The word of God to give me
speech,<br />
His heavenly host to be my guard.<br />
<br />
Patrick
trusted God, and looked after God’s people in Ireland. We are
going to sing a hymn reminding us to look after God’s people
wherever we find them. “Brother, sister, let me serve you”.
It’s number 611 if you want to use the hymn
book.<br />
<br /><div style="text-align: center;">---oo0oo---</div>
<br />
Apart from St Patrick, today
is all about butterflies!<br />
First of all, we are going to watch a
video,<br />
telling us a story you know very well –<br />
you
probably remember it being read to you, or perhaps you read it to
younger brothers and sisters, or to your own
children.<br />
<br /><iframe allowfullscreen="" class="BLOG_video_class" height="266" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/yx6j22iGm2o" width="320" youtube-src-id="yx6j22iGm2o"></iframe><br />
<br />
So
the caterpillar became a beautiful butterfly.<br />
But before he
became a butterfly, there was an intermediate stage.<br />
He built a
cocoon around himself.<br />
He became a pupa.<br />
<br />
That isn’t
just a matter of hibernating, like a dormouse or bear;<br />
to become
a butterfly, caterpillars have to be completely remade. <br />
While
they are in the pupa, all their bits dissolve away, <br />
and are
made from scratch, from the material that is there. <br />
It’s
not just a matter of rearranging what is there, <br />
it’s a matter
of total breakdown and starting again.<br />
The caterpillar
more-or-less has to die before it can become a butterfly.<br />
<br />
That's
really scary.<br />
But it's also very appropriate as we enter the
season called Passiontide.<br />
Jesus said, “Unless a grain of
wheat falls into the earth and dies, <br />
it remains just a single
grain;<br />
but if it dies, it bears much fruit.”<br />
<br />
Jesus
knows that he is going to die.<br />
He is dreading it. He was, after
all, human. <br />
We wouldn’t like it if we knew we were to be put
to death tomorrow. <br />
I once dreamed that I was going to be
executed, and I can’t tell you how frightened I was!<br />
I was so
relieved to wake up and find that it was all a dream. <br />
<br />
The
farmers were sowing their fields. <br />
Jesus knew, perhaps, that he
would not live to see the crops grow. <br />
But he knew that they
would grow. <br />
And, more importantly, he knew that they would not
grow if they were not sown, <br />
if they remained in their basket,
they might germinate, <br />
but they would rot away almost at once.
<br />
Or, if they were kept in very dry conditions, they might remain
viable for years, but nothing would happen.<br />
<br />
The seeds had
to die.<br />
<br />
The birds, at that time and in that place, were
building their nests and laying their eggs. <br />
But the eggs
couldn’t remain as eggs –<br />
they would addle and be no good to
anybody. <br />
The young birds had to grow inside the eggs, <br />
and
then they must force their way out or they would die.<br />
<br />
Jesus
could see the caterpillars that were hatching from the eggs laid last
year.<br />
He knew, I expect, that they had to become pupae before
they could be butterflies.<br />
<br />
Someone he knew had had a baby
lately;<br />
Jesus remembered this:<br />
“When a woman is in
labour, she has pain, because her hour has come. <br />
But when her
child is born, she no longer remembers the anguish because of the joy
of having brought a human being into the world.”<br />
<br />
Jesus
saw all this and knew that from seeming dissolution, God brought new
life. <br />
He knew that he would have to die, so that new life could
come.<br />
<br />
Perhaps at that stage he didn’t really know how
this would happen. <br />
He knew that it must happen, but not how it
would.<br />
<br />
We know that God raised Jesus from death, and
because of that, we have eternal life.<br />
But that didn't stop it
being really scary for Jesus.<br />
You remember how he spent all
night in the park, praying that God would make him not have to go
through with it. <br />
But he had to, and he knew he had to.
<br />
Because if he hadn’t died, he could not have been raised from
the dead, and could not have made us right with God.<br />
I expect St
Patrick was very scared when he was sold into slavery.<br />
We know
that he was very lonely, so he learnt to pray, and turned to God for
comfort.<br />
And then, when he was able to leave Ireland and go to
France,<br />
that must have been scary, too.<br />
However much he
hated Ireland, change is always scary,<br />
and he didn’t know what
France was going to be like. <br />
And I should think he was even
more apprehensive when God asked him to go back to Ireland and bring
the Good News of Jesus to the people there.<br />
<br />
But Patrick
did what God asked him to do. <br />
He said “Goodbye” to his old
life; <br />
he died to it, if you like, and went bravely ahead into
the new life God was calling him to.<br />
<br />
Jesus did what God
asked him to do.<br />
We are just beginning the season called
Passiontide, when we think about how Jesus went forward to his death,
and through death to the glorious resurrection we will be celebrating
on Easter Day. <br />
<br />
But what does it mean for us?<br />
Are we
facing any changes in our lives?<br />
Life is full of change, isn’t
it?<br />
Some changes are gradual, others sudden. <br />
Some –<br />
many,
perhaps, are expected; <br />
others come out of the blue.<br />
But
even the expected changes can be frightening – <br />
it’s scary
to move out of your parents’ home and live on your own for the
first time, for instance.<br />
And growing old is most definitely not
for wimps!<br />
But we know we have to grow and change;<br />
we can’t
stagnate, any more than an egg can stay and egg, <br />
or a
caterpillar not transform into a butterfly.<br />
But the joy of it
is, Jesus was there first!<br />
<br />
Here, again, is St
Patrick:<br />
Christ be with me, Christ within me,<br />
Christ behind
me, Christ before me,<br />
Christ beside me, Christ to win me,<br />
Christ
to comfort and restore me,<br />
Christ beneath me, Christ above
me,<br />
Christ in quiet, Christ in danger,<br />
Christ in hearts of
all that love me,<br />
Christ in mouth of friend and stranger.<br />
<br />
As
we face changes and new growth in our lives, let’s pray that we
learn to recognise Christ in all around us, as Patrick tried to do.
Amen.<p></p><i></i><p></p></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><br />Mrs Redboots (Annabel Smyth)http://www.blogger.com/profile/11270027663691257254noreply@blogger.com0Brixton Hill Methodist Church, London SW2, UK51.4492735 -0.120100444.769172588284036 -8.9091629 58.129374411715958 8.6689621tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-497324740056677483.post-58862890272770355972024-01-28T10:30:00.012+00:002024-01-29T16:26:10.717+00:00What do you want with us, Jesus of Nazareth?<p><br /></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEgI9WxBUmPaV25dRBndw4QfctyNfodwuDgFZ5B34d48Ey3h5Kc4y0pyJLDiASKE9o61oydoDJiu9OvYbooXYVPIbd8X4yW6Shxq75g7pRO30uW7sZ9VA4i7LvJi32lz14-ZUauQzM_nZzCrGpWFTeStHb689Xn6BMj-ZsfwYI2RAUHKimNAHl02vuUEE3s" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="1620" data-original-width="1080" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEgI9WxBUmPaV25dRBndw4QfctyNfodwuDgFZ5B34d48Ey3h5Kc4y0pyJLDiASKE9o61oydoDJiu9OvYbooXYVPIbd8X4yW6Shxq75g7pRO30uW7sZ9VA4i7LvJi32lz14-ZUauQzM_nZzCrGpWFTeStHb689Xn6BMj-ZsfwYI2RAUHKimNAHl02vuUEE3s" width="160" /></a></div><p style="text-align: center;"><iframe frameborder="0" height="100" src="https://drive.google.com/file/d/10I-eTpWaTm_jH5Z2OrUOKN43GmJD8kFx/preview?usp=sharing" width="500">
</iframe></p><div class="western" style="background-color: white; font-family: Verdana, Geneva, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><br /></div><div class="western" style="background-color: white; font-family: Verdana, Geneva, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; margin-bottom: 0cm;">We don't always remember this in our day and age, but Jesus was a Jew. This seems obvious when I say it, but we don't often think through the implications of it. And one of the implications is that every Sabbath day, he went to worship at the local synagogue, wherever he found himself. Normally at home in Nazareth, but when he was on the road, he went local. The picture above is of a synagogue in Capernaum which is thought to be slightly later than the one in Jesus' day, but still on the same site.</div><div class="western" style="background-color: white; font-family: Verdana, Geneva, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><br /></div><div class="western" style="background-color: white; font-family: Verdana, Geneva, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; margin-bottom: 0cm;">And here, in Mark's Gospel, Jesus is at the very beginning of his ministry. Mark tells us that he has been baptised, and then gone into the desert to think through the implications of this, to work out what it means to be “God's beloved Son, in whom he is well pleased.” He was tempted, and learnt what was and was not the right thing to do with his divine power.</div><div class="western" style="background-color: white; font-family: Verdana, Geneva, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><br /></div><div class="western" style="background-color: white; font-family: Verdana, Geneva, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; margin-bottom: 0cm;">And then John, his cousin, was put in prison and Jesus knew the time had come to start his own ministry in good earnest. He came out of the desert, and picked up Andrew and Peter and one or two others – we know from John's gospel that Andrew and Peter had been followers of John before this – and then, on the Sabbath, he finds himself in Capernaum, about 20 miles as the crow flies from his home town of Nazareth. So they all go to the synagogue there.</div><div class="western" style="background-color: white; font-family: Verdana, Geneva, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><br /></div><div class="western" style="background-color: white; font-family: Verdana, Geneva, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; margin-bottom: 0cm;">Now, one of the things about synagogue worship was that – is that, I should say, as I understand it is much the same today – is that you don't have to have a trained preacher up there, but almost any adult – adult males, in many synagogues, but some welcome women, too – can get up on his hind legs and expound the Scriptures. And visitors were very often asked to read the Scripture passage for the day as a way of honouring them, and it was quite “done” to comment on it. You might remember Jesus goes home to Nazareth at one stage and is asked to read the Scriptures there, with rather disastrous results. But not on this occasion.</div><div class="western" style="background-color: white; font-family: Verdana, Geneva, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><br /></div><div class="western" style="background-color: white; font-family: Verdana, Geneva, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; margin-bottom: 0cm;">What happens here, though is equally unexpected. Someone with an evil spirit is there, and the evil spirit recognises Jesus, and causes its host to cry out, interrupting whatever Jesus was saying or reading, to cry out: “What do you want with us, Jesus of Nazareth?”</div><div class="western" style="background-color: white; font-family: Verdana, Geneva, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><br /></div><div class="western" style="background-color: white; font-family: Verdana, Geneva, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; margin-bottom: 0cm;">“What do you want with us, Jesus of Nazareth?”</div><div class="western" style="background-color: white; font-family: Verdana, Geneva, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><br /></div><div class="western" style="background-color: white; font-family: Verdana, Geneva, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; margin-bottom: 0cm;">It's a good question, isn't it? What does Jesus want with us? Why does he come, interrupting our nice, peaceful church services? Why does he come, interrupting our nice, peaceful lives? What do you want with us, Jesus of Nazareth?</div><div class="western" style="background-color: white; font-family: Verdana, Geneva, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><br /></div><div class="western" style="background-color: white; font-family: Verdana, Geneva, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; margin-bottom: 0cm;">Of course, the answer is going to be different for each and every one of us. And yet there are some universal truths.</div><div class="western" style="background-color: white; font-family: Verdana, Geneva, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><br /></div><div class="western" style="background-color: white; font-family: Verdana, Geneva, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; margin-bottom: 0cm;">Firstly, I think, he answers “I want you to let me love you.”</div><div class="western" style="background-color: white; font-family: Verdana, Geneva, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><br /></div><div class="western" style="background-color: white; font-family: Verdana, Geneva, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; margin-bottom: 0cm;">To let him love us. That sounds as though it ought to be a no-brainer, but in fact, it can be very difficult to allow ourselves to be loved. And we tend not to look at it that way round, anyway. We think it's our business to love God – I am not quite sure what we think God's business is, but we don't always expect him to love us. And yet, how can we love unless he loved us first?</div><div class="western" style="background-color: white; font-family: Verdana, Geneva, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><br /></div><div class="western" style="background-color: white; font-family: Verdana, Geneva, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; margin-bottom: 0cm;">There's a story you may have heard before, told by the theologian and writer Gerard Hughes, in which he describes an image of God that many of us may have grown up with; a God who demanded our love and attention, and threatened us with eternal damnation if he didn't get it. And we ended up telling God how much we loved him, while secretly hating him and all he stood for, but terrified of not appearing to love him, because of the eternal damnation. We weren't told, or if we were told, we didn't hear, the first bit, which is that God loves us! God loves us so much that he knows quite well we can't possibly love him first. “We love, because He first loved us,” we are told. His love comes first. We need to let him love us. That's the first answer to the question, “What do you want of us, Jesus of Nazareth?”</div><div class="western" style="background-color: white; font-family: Verdana, Geneva, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; margin-bottom: 0cm;">“I want you to let me love you.”</div><div class="western" style="background-color: white; font-family: Verdana, Geneva, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><br /></div><div class="western" style="background-color: white; font-family: Verdana, Geneva, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; margin-bottom: 0cm;">And the second answer is “I want you to let me heal you.”</div><div class="western" style="background-color: white; font-family: Verdana, Geneva, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><br /></div><div class="western" style="background-color: white; font-family: Verdana, Geneva, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; margin-bottom: 0cm;">Healing. It's a bit of a vexed question, isn't it? We know that healings happened in the Scriptures, and we know that they can and do happen today, but we rarely seem to see any. We do see miraculous physical healings now and again, and we thank God for them as, indeed, we thank God when people are healed through modern medicine. But our bodies are going to wear out or rust out one day, whatever we do. We aren't designed to live forever on this earth, in these bodies, and they will eventually come to the end of their usefulness to us. But Scripture teaches that we will be raised from death in a new body, so it makes sense to me that the parts of us that make us “us”, if you like, are the parts that need healed. Our emotions, our personality, our memories. Things that have screwed us up in our pasts, that we find hard to get beyond. I believe Jesus always heals us when we ask, but we usually get the healing we really need, not necessarily the one we thought we wanted!</div><div class="western" style="background-color: white; font-family: Verdana, Geneva, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><br /></div><div class="western" style="background-color: white; font-family: Verdana, Geneva, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; margin-bottom: 0cm;">Also, while our language differentiates between healing and forgiveness, Jesus doesn't seem to so much. Remember the paralysed bloke whose friends let him down through the roof? Jesus' first words to him were “Your sins are forgiven!” which was what healed him. We need to be forgiven our sins, we need to be healed of being a sinner, if you like. We need to be changed into someone who can love God, and who can step away from sin – and we'll never do that without Jesus, let me tell you. We need to be healed so that we can become the person God created us to be. “I want you to let me heal you.”</div><div class="western" style="background-color: white; font-family: Verdana, Geneva, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><br /></div><div class="western" style="background-color: white; font-family: Verdana, Geneva, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; margin-bottom: 0cm;">“What do you want with us, Jesus of Nazareth?”</div><div class="western" style="background-color: white; font-family: Verdana, Geneva, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; margin-bottom: 0cm;">“I want you to let me love you.</div><div class="western" style="background-color: white; font-family: Verdana, Geneva, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; margin-bottom: 0cm;">I want you to let me heal you.</div><div class="western" style="background-color: white; font-family: Verdana, Geneva, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; margin-bottom: 0cm;">And I want you to let me fill you with the Holy Spirit!”</div><div class="western" style="background-color: white; font-family: Verdana, Geneva, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><br /></div><div class="western" style="background-color: white; font-family: Verdana, Geneva, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; margin-bottom: 0cm;">To be filled with God's Holy Spirit. According to the Bible, this isn't an optional extra, it's an absolutely central part of being a Christian. Remember the believers at Antioch, who were asked whether they'd received the Holy Spirit when they were baptised, and they were like, “You what? What's the Holy Spirit?” and Paul had to re-explain the Gospel to them. It turned out they'd only got as far as John's baptism of repentance, not the baptism into a new life with Christ. So far as Paul is concerned, receiving the Holy Spirit is an absolutely central part of being a Christian.</div><div class="western" style="background-color: white; font-family: Verdana, Geneva, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><br /></div><div class="western" style="background-color: white; font-family: Verdana, Geneva, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; margin-bottom: 0cm;">Makes sense, really, when you think about it. Because if we are filled with the Holy Spirit, we are filled with God Himself, and can be loved and healed and made whole, and God Himself can direct our lives, never forcing, never compelling, but always asking and reminding us, and enabling us. We need to be filled with God's Holy Spirit if we are to grow and change into the people God designed us to be.</div><div class="western" style="background-color: white; font-family: Verdana, Geneva, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><br /></div><div class="western" style="background-color: white; font-family: Verdana, Geneva, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; margin-bottom: 0cm;">“What do you want with us, Jesus of Nazareth?”</div><div class="western" style="background-color: white; font-family: Verdana, Geneva, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><br /></div><div class="western" style="background-color: white; font-family: Verdana, Geneva, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; margin-bottom: 0cm;">Of course, at that time the question was inappropriate, as was the follow-on of: “I know who you are, the holy one of God!” because Jesus was only just at the start of his ministry. He wasn't ready to become universally known, and anyway, he could sense that that which asked the questions had no interest in wishing him well. So he did the only possible thing, which was to command the evil spirit to come out of its host, which it did, and when the host recovered, all was well. But, of course, stories like this spread around, and Mark tells us that Jesus' fame in the area began to grow.</div><div class="western" style="background-color: white; font-family: Verdana, Geneva, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><br /></div><div class="western" style="background-color: white; font-family: Verdana, Geneva, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; margin-bottom: 0cm;">“What do you want of us, Jesus of Nazareth?” The question still resonates down the years, and I think the answers are still the same as ever: “I want you to let me love you. I want you to let me heal you. I want you to let me fill you with the Holy Spirit.” What is your answer? What is mine?</div><div class="western" style="background-color: white; font-family: Verdana, Geneva, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><br /></div><p></p><div class="western" style="background-color: white; font-family: Verdana, Geneva, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; margin-bottom: 0cm;">Will you let Jesus love you? Will you let Jesus heal you? Will you let Jesus fill you with his Holy Spirit? Amen.</div>Mrs Redboots (Annabel Smyth)http://www.blogger.com/profile/11270027663691257254noreply@blogger.com0Tulse Hill Methodist Church, Christchurch Road, London SW2, UK51.4492735 -0.1201004-0.46821365317034491 -70.4326004 90 70.1923996tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-497324740056677483.post-82152099810578039082024-01-14T10:30:00.011+00:002024-01-29T16:39:34.757+00:00Samuel<p> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEik_MWwDHmMLzfNQQcauCeBKQhZ1HwII-8ukwSSt2gyRBB0OcCJnlpRVZgaMFzAQ7U8Z0fh-xtMdj9fLbVvEpF9SUYJ6sD6ZW8bSH9cf_jhdsAx34obazJsyq1kILWnNNASDmOVMg3v_cQSD1zYQO4bI4P7vakQgzdLDX99ETUi19uapUFMiNrkQd3TUfU" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="185" data-original-width="272" height="218" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEik_MWwDHmMLzfNQQcauCeBKQhZ1HwII-8ukwSSt2gyRBB0OcCJnlpRVZgaMFzAQ7U8Z0fh-xtMdj9fLbVvEpF9SUYJ6sD6ZW8bSH9cf_jhdsAx34obazJsyq1kILWnNNASDmOVMg3v_cQSD1zYQO4bI4P7vakQgzdLDX99ETUi19uapUFMiNrkQd3TUfU" width="320" /></a></div><br /><audio controls>
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<span face="Maiandra GD, sans-serif">The story of Samuel in the
Temple is an old friend, isn’t it?<br />
I was amazed, when I came
to have another look at it, <br />
that it was actually a much darker
story than I remembered.<br />
We all know the bit about Samuel waking
up in the night and thinking Eli has called him, <br />
and Eli
eventually clicking that God was trying to speak to Samuel.... <br />
but
what is the context?<br />
And what, actually, did God want to
say?<br />
<br />
It all started, of course, with Samuel’s mother,
whose name was Hannah.<br />
She was married to a man called Elkanah,
and, in fact, she was his senior wife.<br />
But her great sadness was
that she had no children, <br />
and her co-wife, called Penninah,
did.<br />
Elkanah actually loved Hannah more than he loved Penninah,
<br />
and although I don’t suppose he minded for his own sake that
she had no children, he minded for her sake.<br />
<br />
And, we are
told, whenever Elkanah went to the Temple to make sacrifices, he gave
Hannah a double portion.<br />
And one day, Hannah, in the Temple, is
just overcome by the misery of it all, <br />
and pours out her heart
to God –<br />
I’m sure you’ve been there and done that;<br />
I
know I have.<br />
And Eli, the priest, thought she was drunk, seeing
her mumbling away like that.<br />
<br />
It was rather a bad time in
Israel’s history.<br />
I don’t know if it ever occurred to you
–<br />
it hadn’t to me until quite recently –<br />
but this is not
the Temple in Jerusalem that Jesus would have known;<br />
the first
Temple in Jerusalem wouldn’t be built until the reign of King
Solomon, about seventy or eighty years in the future.<br />
This
Temple was in Shiloh, and really, it was the place where the Ark of
the Covenant resided.<br />
And Eli is the priest in the Temple.<br />
Now,
back then, being a priest was something that only certain families
could do;<br />
and if your father was a priest, you usually were,
too.<br />
It’s actually only within quite recent history that what
you do with your life isn’t determined by what your father did
–<br />
and isn't it the case that people are finding
it increasingly hard to get a better education than their parents,
and perhaps do different things?<br />
Anyway, back then, you followed
in your father’s profession, <br />
and if your father was a priest,
as Eli was, then you would expect to be one, too.<br />
<br />
Unfortunately,
Eli’s sons were not really priestly material.<br />
They abused the
office dreadfully –<br />
taking parts of the sacrifices that were
meant to be burnt for God alone, <br />
sleeping with the women who
served at the entrance to the temple.<br />
I don’t think these
women were prostitutes –<br />
temple prostitution was definitely a
part of some religions in the area, <br />
but I don’t think it ever
was part of Judaism.<br />
These women would have been servants to Eli
and his family, I expect, <br />
and considered that service as part
of their devotion to God.<br />
And perhaps, too, they helped people
who had come to make sacrifices and so on.<br />
Whatever, Hophni and
Phineas, Eli’s sons, shouldn’t have been sleeping with them, <br />
and
they shouldn’t have been disrespecting the sacrifices,
either.<br />
<br />
There had been a prophecy that the Lord would not
honour Eli’s family any more, and that Hophni and Phineas would
both die on the same day, <br />
and a different family would take
over the priesthood.<br />
Eli had tried to tell his sons that their
behaviour was unacceptable, but they hadn’t listened, and one
rather gets the impression that he had given up on them.<br />
He was
not a young man, by any manner of means.<br />
<br />
And now he had
this child to bring up, Samuel, first-born of the Hannah whom he had
accused of being drunk.<br />
Hannah had lent her first-born child to
the Lord “as long as he lives”, <br />
since God had finally
granted her request and sent her children –<br />
unlike some of the
other childless women in the Bible, <br />
people like Sarah or
Elisabeth, <br />
God gave her more than one child in the end.<br />
So
Samuel, her first-born, was lent to God, and grew up in the
Temple.<br />
<br />
I had always somehow imagined the Temple as being
very like<br />
the Temple in Jerusalem, but, of course, it can’t
have been.<br />
It was probably just an ordinary house, but with the
main room reserved for the altar of the Lord and the Ark of the
Covenant.<br />
Samuel sleeps in there, you notice, and Eli has his
own room at the back somewhere.<br />
And I imagine Hophni and Phineas
have rooms of their own, too.<br />
<br />
I do think that the first
verse of our reading is one of the saddest there is;<br />
“The word
of the Lord was rare in those days;<br />
visions were not
widespread.”<br />
“The word of the Lord was rare in those
days;<br />
visions were not widespread.”<br />
It sounds like a very
bleak time, doesn’t it?<br />
<br />
Samuel, we are told, did not
know the Lord.<br />
He didn’t know the Lord.<br />
This in spite of
ministering in the Temple daily.<br />
He wasn’t able to offer
sacrifices, of course –<br />
he was not, and couldn’t ever be, a
priest, as he came from the wrong tribe.<br />
But he would have
helped Eli get things ready, <br />
he would perhaps have made the
responses.<br />
He would certainly have known what it was all
about.<br />
But he did not know the Lord, in those days.<br />
The
word of the Lord had not yet been revealed to him.<br />
<br />
So when
God calls him in the night, he has no idea what is happening, <br />
and
thinks that Eli is in need of help.<br />
And it isn’t until the
second or third time that Eli realises what is happening, either.<br />
But
once he does, Eli explains that it might be that God is wanting to
speak to Samuel, and he should say “Speak, Lord, for your servant
is listening!”<br />
<br />
And then what?<br />
No message of hope or
encouragement such as anybody would want to hear.<br />
In fact, quite
the reverse:<br />
<br />
“See, I am about to do something in Israel
that will make both ears of anyone who hears of it tingle.<br />
On
that day I will fulfil against Eli all that I have spoken concerning
his house, from beginning to end.<br />
For I have told him that I am
about to punish his house forever, <br />
for the iniquity that he
knew, because his sons were blaspheming God, <br />
and he did not
restrain them.<br />
Therefore I swear to the house of Eli that the
iniquity of Eli’s house shall not be expiated by sacrifice or
offering forever.” <br />
<br />
There will be no escape for Eli;<br />
he
could, and should, have stopped his sons from being blasphemous,
<br />
from disrespecting the offerings of God’s people, <br />
from
sleeping with the temple servants.<br />
I get the feeling Eli has
rather given up, don’t you?<br />
When Samuel tells him what the
Lord has said, his reaction is simply, <br />
“It is the Lord;<br />
let
him do what seems good to him.”<br />
And in the end, just to round
off the story, both sons were killed in a battle against the
Philistines, <br />
and Eli died of a heart attack or something very
similar that same day.<br />
And the Philistines captured the Ark of
the Covenant.<br />
<br />
All very nasty –<br />
not one of the nicer
stories in the Bible, I don’t think.<br />
But what does it say to
us?<br />
What do we have in common with these people at the end of
the Bronze Age, or early Iron Age, I’m not quite sure which they
are?<br />
<br />
The thing is, of course, we do have rather too much
in common with them.<br />
This is a time when the Word of God is not
heard too much in our land.<br />
It is a time when churches, and,
indeed, synagogues and mosques, too, are disrespected;<br />
synagogues
and mosques even have to have security at the entrance, just for when
people are coming to worship.<br />
Thank goodness that isn’t yet
the case with our churches, and pray God it will never be.<br />
But
even ministers and priests have been known to abuse their position –
I have not heard of any rabbis or imams doing so, but I shouldn't be
in the least surprised.<br />
<br />
I suppose that there is nothing
new;<br />
every age has probably said the same of itself.<br />
We
know that we are, naturally, sinners, and unless God help us we shall
continue to sin.<br />
<br />
Samuel served in the Temple but he
didn’t, then, know God.<br />
Eli had given up;<br />
Hophni and
Phineas set him a poor example.<br />
It must have been confusing for
Samuel –<br />
what was it all about?<br />
And then when God did
finally speak to him, <br />
it wasn’t a comforting message of cheer
and strength,<br />
but a reminder that God’s judgement on the whole
shrine and the priestly family who ran it was going to happen.<br />
<br />
But
good things came from it, too.<br />
Samuel became known and respected
as a prophet and as a judge in Israel.<br />
He couldn’t be a
priest, as he was from the wrong tribe, <br />
but he could be, and
was, a prophet who was widely respected and loved.<br />
It was he who
anointed Saul as king, and then David.<br />
<br />
So there is hope,
even in the cloudiest, stormiest days.<br />
The temple of Shiloh was
abandoned, and the Ark never returned there.<br />
But the Ark did
return, and eventually the Temple was built in Jerusalem.<br />
Samuel
became one of the most famous prophets of them all.<br />
<br />
Samuel
said “Yes” to God.<br />
He was willing to hear God’s message,
<br />
no matter how unpleasant it had to be, <br />
no matter how
traumatic.<br />
He was willing to hear, and he was willing to speak
it out.<br />
And so God used him to establish the Kings of Israel and
then of Judah –<br />
perhaps not the most successful monarchy ever,
<br />
but from King David’s line came, of course, Jesus.<br />
<br />
It
is never totally dark.<br />
God ended Eli’s family’s service to
him, yes;<br />
but the Temple endured, and was eventually rebuilt in
Jerusalem, <br />
bigger and better than before.<br />
The Ark of the
Covenant was taken into captivity –<br />
but it came back, and
remained in the Temple until it was no longer needed, as God made a
new covenant with us.<br />
<br />
When we go through difficult times,
<br />
and I think we all do, whether as individuals, <br />
as
churches,<br />
or as a society, <br />
it’s good to think back on
this story.<br />
God may be bringing one thing to an end;<br />
but a
new thing will, invariably, follow, just as spring follows
winter.<br />
<br />
The difficult thing, of course, is going on
trusting Him when all does seem dark, when we can’t see how things
are going to work out.<br />
It's been terribly dark just lately,
hasn't it, with the wars in Ukraine and Israel threatening our own
world.<br />
But remember Paul’s letter to the Romans, chapter
8;<br />
“And we know that in all things God works for the good of
those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose.”<br />
I
do think that we can ask to see how God is going to work a bad
situation for good;<br />
it’s amazing how that can and does
happen.<br />
Perhaps one day we will see the good that God has worked
out of the war between Russia and Ukraine. <br />
Perhaps one day we
will see the good that God has worked out of the conflict between
Israel and Hamas.<br />
<br />
And we need, like Samuel, to listen to
God, and to do what He asks of us, no matter how difficult.<br />
Are
you willing to do this for God?<br />
Am I willing?<br />
It isn’t
easy, is it?<br />
<br />
Thanks be to God that we need do none of this
in our own strength, but in the power of the Holy Spirit, who
strengthens us.<br />
Amen!</span></p>Mrs Redboots (Annabel Smyth)http://www.blogger.com/profile/11270027663691257254noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-497324740056677483.post-9568485890701659882024-01-07T10:30:00.007+00:002024-01-07T12:53:13.476+00:00Gold, Frankincense and Myrrh<p> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEhEvAuuZ6mxKeTShcXpCveai5IsgcGIeUVYZCCc29w0rdDrQ1svboqJq1iw0gVTx_C-HC2tyI2zFYgb95WMtPyGsu9vnFr-KoexoZOp2zxIo3HPCCyRlLCSqjbIfQeiOkgeWn3BXkEynuRq0Hn9E975mgElDbC-4MoXNuuKi_zLB1iI1ZQB1gJfluCUAfk" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="1024" data-original-width="1024" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEhEvAuuZ6mxKeTShcXpCveai5IsgcGIeUVYZCCc29w0rdDrQ1svboqJq1iw0gVTx_C-HC2tyI2zFYgb95WMtPyGsu9vnFr-KoexoZOp2zxIo3HPCCyRlLCSqjbIfQeiOkgeWn3BXkEynuRq0Hn9E975mgElDbC-4MoXNuuKi_zLB1iI1ZQB1gJfluCUAfk" width="240" /></a></div><br /><iframe
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What a very odd story this is, about the wise men coming to
Jesus.<br />
For a start, you only find it in Matthew's gospel, and
not in Luke's.<br />
To carry on with, it's quite difficult to
reconcile the course of events in Matthew with those in Luke –<br />
for
instance, Luke seems to think that the family go straight back to
Nazareth, stopping off at Jerusalem on the way to present Jesus in
the temple, <br />
whereas Matthew seems to think they lived in
Bethlehem all the time, <br />
fled to Egypt to escape Herod's
vengeance after the wise men's visit, <br />
and only then settled in
Nazareth.<br />
<br />
I don't suppose it matters much, really, though,
because we have also got an incredible amount of tradition mixed up
with the stories –<br />
the ox and the ass in the stable, for
instance;<br />
you don't find those in either gospel account.<br />
Nor,
in the one we have just heard read, were there three wise men!<br />
It
doesn't say how many there were. <br />
Tradition, of course, has made
of them kings;<br />
Caspar, Melchior and Balthazar.<br />
But that's
not what the Bible says.<br />
<br />
And it is only tradition that
identifies gold with kingship, <br />
frankincense with divinity, or
godhead, <br />
and myrrh with death. <br />
But seeing as we all have
our own mental image of the Nativity stories, <br />
it doesn't matter
very much.<br />
It wouldn't really be a Christmas crib without
donkeys and oxen, would it?<br />
And it's a lot easier to depict
Eastern potentates than Zoroastrian astrologers, or whatever they
really were.<br />
And if we see gold, frankincense and myrrh as
equivalent to kingship, godhead and death –<br />
well, why not?<br />
It
helps us remember a bit Who Jesus is, <br />
and anything that does
that is always helpful.<br />
<br />
I have heard people comment that
the wise men might have given more useful gifts, but, in fact, back
in the day what they gave would have been very useful.<br />
After
all, gold is always useful, and when the Holy Family had to flee into
Egypt, as Matthew tells us they did, <br />
they would have needed
gold to help cover their expenses.<br />
And although you can get both
frankincense and myrrh very cheaply in Brixton these days –<br />
Brixton
Wholefoods usually has them in their spice jars –<br />
back in the
day they were very rich and rare.<br />
And useful.<br />
Frankincense
isn't just about saying that Jesus is divine, <br />
it's also very
calming and soothing, <br />
and it helps to heal chest infections and
coughs.<br />
You can either burn it as incense –<br />
and it is an
essential component of the incense that some Christians like to burn
in worship –<br />
or you can buy the essential oil and dilute it to
massage yourself with.<br />
It's also used in face creams for its
anti-ageing properties.<br />
<br />
Myrrh, too –<br />
rarer than
rare, back then –<br />
is very healing.<br />
When I was growing up,
there was always a little bottle of tincture of myrrh in the medicine
cabinet in case anybody had toothache –<br />
tasted vile, but did
the trick.<br />
It's still a component part of some toothpastes, even
today.<br />
And I believe it can be used to heal skin irritations,
things like that –<br />
not the toothpaste, of course, but the
essential oil, or a cream containing it!<br />
And, as we know, it was
used in embalming the dead, and it's seen as symbolic of death.<br />
<br />
So
you see they would have been useful gifts, as well as symbolic.<br />
<br />
But
why does it matter?<br />
What is it all about?<br />
<br />
Partly, of
course, it is about giving to Jesus. <br />
The kings, or wise men, or
whatever they were, brought gold, frankincense and myrrh to the one
"Born to be King of the Jews", <br />
even though they were
not themselves Jewish.<br />
Three of the most valuable commodities in
the ancient world, <br />
and not only valuable, but very useful,
too.<br />
I don't know what we would think of as the three most
valuable commodities of today - probably something like platinum and
uranium and petrol, which, except for the last, wouldn't be quite so
useful! <br />
Nor quite so symbolic, either –<br />
the tradition of
kingship, divinity and death may be only a tradition, not biblical,
but it is very powerful.<br />
<br />
But then, that's not really
what's wanted today, is it?<br />
What God wants of us today is
–<br />
well, basically, nothing less than all of us.<br />
Not just
our money, not just our time, but our whole selves.<br />
And that's
scary!<br />
Next week, Rev’d Rita will be leading you in the
Covenant service, when we recommit ourselves to being God's person in
the year to come.<br />
Again, scary!<br />
<br />
Very scary.<br />
But
the thing is, that's actually only part of the Epiphany.<br />
The
posh name for it is “The manifestation of Christ to the
Gentiles”.<br />
The Gentiles.<br />
And, when you come to think
about it, the Magi couldn't really have been more outsiders if they'd
tried with both hands!<br />
They were, it is thought, some kind of
astrologers, diviners, <br />
just exactly the sort of person Jews
were forbidden to be.<br />
They came from the East, probably from
present-day Iraq or Iran, <br />
not countries with whom Israel has
ever had a peaceful and friendly relationship!<br />
<br />
The people
to whom God chose to make himself known in the person of the infant
Jesus were outsiders.<br />
Rank outsiders.<br />
Apparently not just
the Magi, <br />
but also the shepherds whom Luke tells us about were
total outsiders, <br />
far from the comfortable religious
establishment of the day.<br />
<br />
And again and again we see this
in the New Testament, don't we?<br />
It's the outsiders who get
special mention, <br />
the tax-gatherers, <br />
the prostitutes,
<br />
the quislings, <br />
the terrorists, <br />
the
members of the occupying power.<br />
<br />
Even after the Ascension,
it is still the outsiders who get special mention –<br />
Cornelius,
for instance, or the Ethiopian treasury official.<br />
<br />
And
us.<br />
<br />
What the story of the Epiphany tells us is that we are
loved.<br />
Loved to the uttermost.<br />
No matter who we are, what
background we come from, <br />
and whether we love God or whether we
don't.<br />
We are still loved.<br />
Don't ever believe the
fundamentalist groups who want to tell you that God hates Muslims, or
gay people, or whoever –<br />
it's simply not true.<br />
Even if
you were to say “Oh, bother this for a game of soldiers, <br />
I'm
never going near a church again!”<br />
God would still love
you.<br />
Even if you were to go out and murder someone in cold
blood, <br />
or order your army to attack innocent people.<br />
<br />
God
might hate it that you did that, but God would still love you.<br />
God
might, or might not, have approved of the way the Magi worshipped
him, but<br />
he still loved them, and caused their journey and their
gifts to be recorded in history.<br />
<br />
I don't know if that
makes it any easier to give ourselves to God or not.<br />
It's
difficult, isn't it?<br />
And I think sometimes we stress about it
unnecessarily. <br />
We are always going to get it wrong.<br />
That
stands to reason.<br />
We are, after all, only human, and the whole
point of the Incarnation, of Jesus becoming a human being, was so
that we could make mistakes and get it wrong and it wouldn't matter
too much. <br />
After all, salvation was God's idea, not ours.<br />
<br />
We
sometimes forget that, don't we?<br />
We tend to live as though we
have to get it right, or we won't be Jesus' people any longer.<br />
But
that's not so.<br />
After all, what are we saved by?<br />
What Jesus
did for us on the Cross, or by our own faith?<br />
I rather think it
is what Jesus did for us that saves us! <br />
<br />
But then, if we
are saved by what Jesus did for us, why bother?<br />
Why give
expensive and valuable gifts, <br />
like gold, and frankincense and
myrrh, <br />
or even our own selves? <br />
Isn't the answer because
Jesus is worth it?<br />
Those of us who are parents know something of
what it must have cost God to send his only son to earth as a
helpless human baby.<br />
We may even glimpse, sometimes, something
of what Jesus must have lost, limiting himself to a human body.<br />
Jesus
is definitely worth all we can give to him, and then some! <br />
And,
more than that, Jesus makes it worth our while giving to him!<br />
Because
we are loved, because Jesus loved us enough to give up his whole life
for us, then anything we can give is accepted with love, with joy,
and is transformed into something greater.<br />
Amen.<br />
<br />
</p>Mrs Redboots (Annabel Smyth)http://www.blogger.com/profile/11270027663691257254noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-497324740056677483.post-83481104779710496422023-12-31T11:00:00.010+00:002023-12-31T13:18:50.709+00:00It takes a village<p><iframe
frameborder="0"
width="500"
height="100"
src="https://drive.google.com/file/d/12-2zUo8CQS5HacoH2tMsutynbcKq0NkY/preview">
</iframe></p><br /><div style="break-after: avoid; line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0.21cm; text-align: left;"><span style="text-align: left;">Some years ago now,
R and I went to Avignon for a holiday during the first week of
January. As holidays go, it was a dismal failure, because I had flu,
the hotel was horrible, and it snowed! But one thing was very good,
and that was that in the Town Hall, they had a Christmas crib.</span></div>
<p class="western" style="line-height: 100%;"></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj58BPN5mW5f1Yg_rqsmKhR0UyIWlZeKt7s6Yuw935_D-7fVF1tJ6201cbLM_eGK2Av_wcwxUOWsaUDds88C6mKXEEzFWbscVoZqzahneT6rXpsNz1KzDDP_X9M_h-UgZ70mhjVWbPiHBLFZyoz5I9oVUtoabRk0G_bcLc3F_qk7BcKdj-nRpfrEbkItlQ/s640/Avignon%20and%20Provence%20012(1).jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="480" data-original-width="640" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj58BPN5mW5f1Yg_rqsmKhR0UyIWlZeKt7s6Yuw935_D-7fVF1tJ6201cbLM_eGK2Av_wcwxUOWsaUDds88C6mKXEEzFWbscVoZqzahneT6rXpsNz1KzDDP_X9M_h-UgZ70mhjVWbPiHBLFZyoz5I9oVUtoabRk0G_bcLc3F_qk7BcKdj-nRpfrEbkItlQ/s320/Avignon%20and%20Provence%20012(1).jpg" width="320" /></a></div><br clear="left" /><br clear="left" />On
Monday, you may remember, K showed us some pictures of various
Christmas cribs, and there was an exhibition of them at Clapham
church a few weeks ago. But in Provence they do things a bit
differently, as this picture shows: It’s a whole village. It’s
not a very high-resolution picture, but there are lots of little
figures, not just the Holy Family, although they are there, too, but
all the villagers going around their daily business. I took this
picture, which is a much better resolution, at an exhibition of cribs
in a church in Alsace a couple of weeks ago.<p></p><p class="western" style="line-height: 100%;"><br /></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjfwl4hyphenhyphenP8b3Zg71btWry_ShCzVXE1E8R5JMToFHS_gFFI_9TPGB9A324TnwRtFF_p5zDvYL8xmnndafCTxqj5xcDj465cQJd5tCawoBEzmYsXnWQrXdZwGSgEXZmByBHJyFSM7u-NRKXWGtDX3h0Kxk_eg75X6DhYOJnEdITYSuGARDzVVQPdd0sFt6rk/s4000/IMG_20231209_174448461_HDR.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="3000" data-original-width="4000" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjfwl4hyphenhyphenP8b3Zg71btWry_ShCzVXE1E8R5JMToFHS_gFFI_9TPGB9A324TnwRtFF_p5zDvYL8xmnndafCTxqj5xcDj465cQJd5tCawoBEzmYsXnWQrXdZwGSgEXZmByBHJyFSM7u-NRKXWGtDX3h0Kxk_eg75X6DhYOJnEdITYSuGARDzVVQPdd0sFt6rk/s320/IMG_20231209_174448461_HDR.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><br /> It doesn’t show the
village in quite the same detail, but just look at all the people!
You’ve got the Holy Family, of course, and then there is another
stable with what looks like pigs in it – improbable, really, as
Jewish people don’t eat pork or pig products. But you have all the
villagers going on with their lives. I couldn’t spend as long as I
wanted looking at it, as time was getting on and we needed to catch a
bus back to our campsite, but it’s one of those things that the
more you look, the more you see. There’s someone with his cart,
and someone setting out to go fishing or sailing in a dinghy, and
lots of people just standing around and chatting; a water-carrier is
going over the bridge, and so on.
<p></p><p class="western" style="line-height: 100%;">I love this Provençal
tradition. You see, unlike many crib traditions, it reminds us that
Bethlehem was, and is, a village, and Mary and Joseph were not
isolated. We tend to think of them as travelling alone – just
Mary, Joseph and the donkey – but of course they would have gone to
Bethlehem with a group of other travellers; it wasn’t safe, else.
And realistically, the manger would have been on the step separating
the animal part of the house from the human part, and there would
probably have been a great many women, mostly relations, helping Mary
with the birth and afterwards. We don’t think of animals as
sharing living-space with humans, as we only do that with our pets,
but of course the cattle and horses or donkeys would have helped keep
the house warm in the winter, and was the norm back in the day.</p>
<p class="western" style="line-height: 100%;">Yes, there were signs
that this wasn’t just another human baby being born at a most
inconvenient time. Yes, the shepherds came to visit – but they
might well have been family, don’t you think? And yes, Anna and
Simeon did respond to the promptings of God’s Spirit, and knew that
they had seen their salvation. But from the human point of view,
Mary and Joseph were just doing what all Jewish families did – they
had their son circumcised at eight days old, and then, at forty days
old, they took him to the Temple to redeem him from God – the first
and the best of everything belongs to God, so that parents would
redeem him by paying a small sum and having ritual prayers said over
him, these always invoking Elijah. Everybody did that, if they
could.</p>
<p class="western" style="line-height: 100%;">And then they went back
to Nazareth – again, travelling in a party for safety – and Jesus
would have grown up in an extended family, lots of aunts and uncles
and cousins around, and, in due course, brothers and sisters. He
would have learnt to roll over, and to sit up, and in due course to
stand and walk, and talk, and be potty-trained; he’d have had to
learn when not to talk, and when he needed to sit still and listen.
He’d have gone to school with the other kids his age, and learnt to
read and write, especially the Scriptures. He’d probably have hung
round Joseph, and learnt basic carpentry – and probably some
interesting words to say when he hit is thumb with a hammer!</p>
<p class="western" style="line-height: 100%;">And each year they would
go to Jerusalem, to the Temple. Again, they would travel in groups
and caravans. At first Jesus would be carried on his father’s
back, and then kept close to his parents, but as he grew older, he’d
be off with his friends, running ahead and being told not to go out
of sight, or lagging behind and being told to keep up. They’d
gather round the camp fire in the evening and sing the traditional
songs.</p>
<p class="western" style="line-height: 100%;">And then the kids were
coming twelve years old. Now, in Jewish circles, you were considered
a man at the age of 13, and from then on could be asked to read, and
comment on, the Scriptures at any time. These days they have a
ceremony called a “Bar Mitzvah”, or a “Bat Mitzvah” for
girls, where the child in question reads a passage from Scriptures,
translates it, and then preaches on it – my daughter went to a
friend’s daughter’s Bat Mitzvah last term, and was very impressed
by her performance. They also have a party, either immediately
afterwards or later the same day.</p>
<p class="western" style="line-height: 100%;">In Jesus’ day, they
didn’t have the ceremony, but every boy – not girls, back in the
day, alas – every boy approaching his 13<sup>th</sup> birthday knew
he could be called on at any time after his birthday. Their teachers
would have been focussing on this during the school year, and
probably some of the boys were getting nervous.</p>
<p class="western" style="line-height: 100%;">That year, they all went
up to Jerusalem as usual, and attended the Passover festivities, and
then gathered together to go home again. And it wasn’t until next
day they discovered that there Jesus wasn’t! His parents had
assumed he was off with his friends as usual, but suddenly,
horrifyingly, nobody had seen him. His parents rushed back to
Jerusalem – they didn’t like to go on their own, but this was an
emergency – and found him still in the Temple, deep in discussion
with the scribes.</p>
<p class="western" style="line-height: 100%;">You see, as Jesus had
studied the Scriptures, he became engrossed in them. God helped them
become real to him. And, of course, Jesus had endless questions.
I'm sure his parents did their best to answer him, but perhaps they
didn't know all that much themselves. And his teachers, perhaps,
didn’t have the time they would have liked to answer his questions
– or perhaps he wanted to go more deeply into these things than
they cared to do in an academic environment. And when he reached
Jerusalem that year, he found all that, for then, he was seeking with
the scribes in the Temple. They knew. They could answer his
questions, in the way that the folks back home in Nazareth could not.
They could deal with his objections, listen to him, wonder at his
perspicacity at such a young age.</p>
<p class="western" style="line-height: 100%;">I hope the scribes
didn’t laugh at him; it's not clear from the text, but they might
have. But probably not, if his questions were sensible and to the
point.</p>
<p class="western" style="line-height: 100%;">And Jesus, typically
adolescent, totally forgets about going home, forgets that his
parents will have kittens when they find he's not with them, forgets
to wonder how he's going to get home, or even where he's going to
sleep – or, perhaps, thinks a vague mention of his plans was
enough. Anyway, Aunt Elizabeth and Uncle Zach will put him up, he’s
quite sure.</p>
<p class="western" style="line-height: 100%;">And when his parents
finally find him, like any adolescent, he says “You don’t
understand!” And, rather rudely, “I have to be about my Father’s
business!” Poor Joseph – not very kind, was it?</p>
<p class="western" style="line-height: 100%;">We aren’t told what
happened next, whether they hurried to catch up with their original
caravan, or had to wait until the next one was going in that
direction. We aren’t told whether Jesus was grounded for a few
days when they did get home, or what.</p>
<p class="western" style="line-height: 100%;">Come to that, we aren’t
told whether he actually knew anything about who he was. He’d
probably grown up in the normal rough-and-tumble of village life, but
then, when they started studying the Scriptures in good earnest,
something came alight in him. He began to catch glimpses of God, of
That Which Is, of the Thought that Thought the World… and he longed
and longed to know more. Later on, of course, he would realise that
searching the Scriptures was not enough. Remember what he said to
the Pharisees: “You search the scriptures because you think that in
them you have eternal life; and it is they that testify on my behalf.
Yet you refuse to come to me to have life." He knew that you needed
more than just the words on the page – but at twelve years old,
this was what had intrigued him, fascinated him, to the point of
ignoring anything else.</p>
<p class="western" style="line-height: 100%;">But why does this
matter? For me, it’s about Jesus being human as well as divine.
He didn’t come fully formed from his father’s head, like some of
the Greek or Roman gods are alleged to have done. He didn’t grow
up in splendid isolation, just with his parents, and later, with his
mother alone. Even if, as it appears from Matthew’s gospel, the
family had lived in Bethlehem until they had had to flee into exile,
they would probably have resettled in Nazareth because they had
family there, rather than just choosing it at random. The thing is,
he grew up in the midst of other people. They say it takes a village
to raise a child, and Jesus grew up in that sort of village! He had
lots of examples to follow, both of how to behave and of how not to.
I hope he didn’t know how special he was, not until much later.
But he did grow up loving God.</p>
<p class="western" style="line-height: 100%;">It’s not always easy,
at this distance, to see the human Jesus, is it? We see him as
divine – and so he is, but he is also human. His experiences may
not have been exactly the same as ours, as he grew up in a very
different culture. All the same, if he was 13 years old today, he’d
be glued to his phone, getting WhatsApp messages from his friends
every few minutes, spending hours making a 12-days-of-Christmas
chocolate calendar for his parents, grumbling that he and his friends
aren’t allowed to go to Camden Town without a grownup – oh no,
wait, that’s my 13-year-old grandson, but you get the picture! And
I do think it’s important to see Jesus as human as well as divine,
because it makes him – at least, I find it does – much more
approachable, much more real, much more able to empathise with me,
and plead my cause with God. He’s not just the baby in the manger;
he’s not just the adolescent boy following his obsessions to the
exclusion of all else; at that, he’s not even the still figure on
the Cross. He is any and all of those things, and he is our Lord and
Saviour. Amen.<br /></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><br />Mrs Redboots (Annabel Smyth)http://www.blogger.com/profile/11270027663691257254noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-497324740056677483.post-89839685267290059582023-12-24T10:30:00.038+00:002023-12-24T12:14:37.724+00:00Advent 4<p> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjyDVeNL22ft7aQOLmcyFLSKWnizIeq7Istl7uHYC1GbxC5mMFtTpGPonGGl5pAfUpJdmkytDVLi2yrCkKm_tDe12ORaZzzR82kVLaSevBpw4iYxMc48csPn4EXK5eeqQzTUry4xDuu3lQEjDcZqNGMWiKfCpXBxuZgOCYvfDSuezyLFyBsS9pNxsGnoRs/s392/4th-sunday-of-advent.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="388" data-original-width="392" height="317" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjyDVeNL22ft7aQOLmcyFLSKWnizIeq7Istl7uHYC1GbxC5mMFtTpGPonGGl5pAfUpJdmkytDVLi2yrCkKm_tDe12ORaZzzR82kVLaSevBpw4iYxMc48csPn4EXK5eeqQzTUry4xDuu3lQEjDcZqNGMWiKfCpXBxuZgOCYvfDSuezyLFyBsS9pNxsGnoRs/s320/4th-sunday-of-advent.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><p class="western" style="line-height: 100%;"><iframe frameborder="0" height="100" src="https://drive.google.com/file/d/11SuKIIH-NoMZp8bk9946FOoLWkMIGYiP/preview" width="500">
</iframe></p><p>So, what day is it today? Christmas Eve. And tomorrow it’s
Christmas Day. I bet you’re all getting excited, aren’t you?</p>
<p class="western" style="line-height: 100%;">What are you going to do
tonight? Hang up your stockings. Santa’s on his way – my Santa
tracker says he’s (wherever he is).</p>
<p class="western" style="line-height: 100%;">Well, in church we
normally think about Jesus’ being born in Bethlehem, and today’s
reading told us how the angel came to Mary and asked her if she would
give birth to Jesus, and how Mary very bravely said yes she would,
trusting that God would look after her, and how Jesus would turn the
world upside-down. But you know that story – you’ve heard it
lots of times before, so I’m not going to retell it today. I’ve
got a quite different story to tell you, so settle down and listen.</p>
<p class="western" style="line-height: 100%;">Once upon a time, long,
long ago, in a land far away, a little boy was born. Not Jesus –
this was a couple of hundred years later, in a land called Patra, one
of the places St Paul visited on his missionary journeys. So it’s
not too surprising that this little boy’s parents were followers of
Jesus, and the little boy grew up to be a follower, too.</p>
<p class="western" style="line-height: 100%;">His parents were rich,
by the standards of their day, and when they died when the boy was
quite young, he inherited all their money. But because he loved
Jesus, he didn’t think it right to keep the money for himself, and
began to give it away to the poor and needy in the area.</p>
<p class="western" style="line-height: 100%;">He dedicated his whole
life to God, and was made Bishop of Myra while still a young man.
One famous story about him tells of a poor man with three daughters,
whom he could not hope to marry off as he had nothing to give for
their dowries, something that was considered vital back in the day.
And the future for unmarried women back then was bleak – slavery
was probably the best option. So this young Bishop, anonymously,
threw three purses of gold, one for each daughter, through the window
of their house, and the purses landed in the shoes the girls had put
to dry by the fire.</p>
<p class="western" style="line-height: 100%;">There are lots of other
stories about him – some of them probably legendary rather than
absolutely true. One story, which may or may not be true, tells how
during a famine in Myra, the bishop worked desperately hard to find
grain to feed the people. He learned that ships bound for Alexandria
with cargos of wheat had anchored in Andriaki, the harbour for Myra.
The bishop asked the captain of the fleet to sell some grain from
each ship to relieve the people's suffering. The captain said he
couldn’t because the cargo was "meted and measured." He
must deliver every bit as he would be responsible for any shortage.
The Bishop assured the captain there would be no problems when the
grain was delivered. Finally, reluctantly, the captain agreed to
take one hundred bushels of grain from each ship. The grain was
unloaded and the ships continued on their way.</p>
<p class="western" style="line-height: 100%;">When they arrived in
Alexandria and the grain was unloaded, it weighed exactly the same as
when it was put on board! No shortages at all! We are told that all
the emperor's ministers worshipped and praised God with thanksgiving
for God's faithful servant!</p>
<p class="western" style="line-height: 100%;">Back in Myra, the Bishop
distributed grain to everyone in Lycia and no one was hungry. The
grain lasted for two years, until the famine ended. There was even
enough grain to provide seed for a good harvest.</p>
<p class="western" style="line-height: 100%;">The Bishop, of course,
was made a saint when he died. And the stories of his miracles didn’t
stop coming. One rather splendid story concerns a small boy snatched
away by pirates while the townsfolk were celebrating the Bishop’s
feast-day. The boy, called Basilios, was made a cup-bearer to the
ruler, as he couldn’t understand the language so couldn’t gossip.
And he waited on the ruler with a lovely golden cup containing the
finest wines, and so on. This went on for a year, while his poor
parents grieved for him, thinking they would never see him again.
But then, on the Saint’s feast-day, they were praying at home when
quite suddenly Basilios reappeared, still clasping the king’s
golden cup. He had been really scared, of course, but the saint had
appeared to him and reassured him that he was quite safe and was
going home.</p>
<p class="western" style="line-height: 100%;">The Bishop became the
patron saint of children, and the patron saint of sailors, too. And
as the years and centuries passed, he was revered in Christian
countries all over the world, both Orthodox and Catholic. In the
11th century his remains were moved from Myra, now called Demre,
which was under Moslem rule, to a town in Italy called Bari, where he
is venerated to this day. Nuns started to give poor children little
gifts of food – oranges and nuts, mostly – on his feast day. And
his cult spread right across Christendom.</p>
<p class="western" style="line-height: 100%;">This saint was Saint
Nicholas, Bishop of Myra. And these days, we know him as Santa
Claus! In many countries, of course, he is still Saint Nicholas, and
on his feast day, which is 6 December, children put their shoes by
the fire and in the morning, they find the Saint has put some sweets
and perhaps an orange or a tiny present into their shoes. But here
in the UK, and perhaps especially in the USA, he is known as Santa
Claus!</p>
<p class="western" style="line-height: 100%;">You see, Protestants
like us don’t revere saints the way Catholics do, so you couldn’t
have St Nicholas giving out sweets and so on to the children. And
very strict Protestants didn’t even like celebrating Christmas,
seeing it as inconsistent with the Gospel. Here, in England, with
our gift for religious compromise, our folk traditions changed to
include Father Christmas and yule logs and things, but in many
Protestant countries, particularly the USA, it was considered “just
another day”. But it seems that German colonists brought the St
Nicholas tradition to the USA, and gradually he became the “jolly
elf” of the famous poem. And, of course, the illustrations for the
Coca-Cola advertisements began to settle his image as the fat old man
we know today. A far cry, really, from a young Bishop in ancient
Turkey!</p>
<p class="western" style="line-height: 100%;">But why does it matter?
What, you may ask, has this got to do with us? How does it affect us
this Christmas Eve? Many of us, perhaps most of us, are looking
forward to tomorrow, to our presents, perhaps to seeing family, to
eating Christmas dinner. We’ll probably go to church, but once
we’ve done that, the rest of the day is very much a day of
self-indulgence. And that’s okay, too, as long as we don’t
forget that some people won’t have a great day, if they can’t
afford to buy presents, or a lovely meal, or if they don’t have
anybody to celebrate with, and spend the day by themselves, watching
television. It’s a bit late for this year, but perhaps next year
you could do something to help – giving some really nice things to
the food bank, or the box for presents they put in Lidl, that sort of
thing. Or, if you know someone is going to be on their own over
Christmas, perhaps you could invite them to spend the day with you
and your family.</p>
<p class="western" style="line-height: 100%;">But the point is,
sometimes it feels as though Santa and Jesus are miles apart – but
now that we know that Santa, too, was Jesus’ person, and, one
assumes, still is, doesn’t that make a difference? I think it
does. It means Christmas isn’t divided into two halves; it means
it’s all one. Santa’s sleigh, the reindeer, Rudolph, all that
sort of thing is actually to honour Jesus, the One who gave us the
greatest gift of all! Amen.</p></div><p></p>Mrs Redboots (Annabel Smyth)http://www.blogger.com/profile/11270027663691257254noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-497324740056677483.post-84788119583688262532023-12-17T11:00:00.010+00:002024-01-29T16:34:43.105+00:00Be joyful always<p> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEicFwB6cPGGzGtemzgEj04EFjYvAGfz0EAtPOtX9YUHt5XkKyiezNMQX0YvCIhyyhOohXGbObmdP8Es6X8sUzn8N0AE0rLv8S-ioRyhYnRCCf5q-MQOqcgMQksaAsGDGe5n2ZtEGCpcZ7YKtB8Xw6-Q_s5iQjsYG_Vb9nPo1qZ4zyos6jRliwDP_0NLUG0/s109/3rd-sunday-of-advent.webp" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="109" data-original-width="99" height="215" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEicFwB6cPGGzGtemzgEj04EFjYvAGfz0EAtPOtX9YUHt5XkKyiezNMQX0YvCIhyyhOohXGbObmdP8Es6X8sUzn8N0AE0rLv8S-ioRyhYnRCCf5q-MQOqcgMQksaAsGDGe5n2ZtEGCpcZ7YKtB8Xw6-Q_s5iQjsYG_Vb9nPo1qZ4zyos6jRliwDP_0NLUG0/w195-h215/3rd-sunday-of-advent.webp" width="195" /></a></div><p class="western"><br />
</audio><iframe frameborder="0" height="100" src="https://drive.google.com/file/d/1wwYgLwp5WVR4NpQ4xwh1wFp_1so4YWoE/preview" width="500">
</iframe><br />
From St Paul's instructions to the Thessalonians, which formed part
of our first reading:<br />
“Be joyful always;<br />
pray
continually;<br />
give thanks in all circumstances, <br />
for this is
God's will for you in Christ Jesus.”<br />
<br />
“Be joyful
always;<br />
pray continually;<br />
give thanks in all circumstances,
<br />
for this is God's will for you in Christ Jesus.”<br />
<br />
Hmmm.<br />
It
rather jumps out and hits you in the face when you are reading the
passages set for this Sunday, don't you think?<br />
And I can't help
but wonder what on earth St Paul was talking about.<br />
How on earth
are we supposed to be joyful always?<br />
Does he mean we always have
to be happy, <br />
and it's wrong if we are miserable?<br />
Surely
not!<br />
How can we pray continually?<br />
We do have lives, after
all –<br />
we need to concentrate on other things <br />
like
cooking the dinner <br />
or the work we're being paid to do!<br />
And
how about giving thanks in all circumstances?<br />
Even in the middle
of a disaster?<br />
<br />
The Bible tells us, over and over again,
<br />
that we should rejoice and be glad –<br />
I believe there are
over 800 verses telling us to.<br />
So it must be something we are
meant to do.<br />
But how?<br />
<br />
We aren't always happy and
rejoicing –<br />
and indeed, it would be quite wrong if we were.<br />
If
someone is hurting very badly, <br />
it doesn't help to go and be
happy all over them!<br />
There are times when we are all very
unhappy –<br />
personal tragedies, <br />
dreadful things that
happen to loved ones, <br />
national tragedies.... <br />
how can we
“be joyful always” when people have lost their homes in a
hurricane or an earthquake?<br />
<br />
Indeed, in the letter to the
Romans St Paul tells us to “Weep with those who weep” as well as
to “Rejoice with those who rejoice”.<br />
And even our dear Lord
wept when he arrived at Bethany and found his friend Lazarus dead and
buried.<br />
<br />
So it's obviously not wrong to be unhappy, to be
sad.<br />
And yet we are told to be joyful.<br />
<br />
Well, for one
thing, St Paul also reminds us, in the letter to the Galatians, that
joy is a fruit of the Holy Spirit.<br />
<br />
Joy is a fruit of the
Holy Spirit.<br />
And this means that it isn't something we have to
find within ourselves.<br />
It is something that grows within us as
we go on with God <br />
and as we allow God the Holy Spirit to fill
us more and more.<br />
Joy grows, just as <br />
love, <br />
peace,
<br />
patience, <br />
gentleness, <br />
goodness,
<br />
kindness <br />
and self-control do.<br />
We become
more and more the people we were created to be, <br />
more and more
the people God knows we can be.<br />
<br />
That doesn't mean we'll
never be unhappy, far from it.<br />
But we know, as St Paul also
tells us, <br />
that God works all things together for good for those
that love him.<br />
Even the bad things, <br />
even the dreadful
things that break God's heart <br />
even more than they break
ours.<br />
Even those. <br />
We may be unhappy, we may be grieving,
we may be depressed.<br />
But we can still be joyful, we can still
rejoice, <br />
because God is still God, and God still loves
us.<br />
Okay, sometimes it doesn't feel like that, <br />
but that's
only what it feels like, not what has really happened.<br />
God will
never abandon us, <br />
God will always love us.<br />
God will weep
with us when we weep.<br />
And underneath there always is that joy,
<br />
the joy of our salvation.<br />
<br />
Okay, maybe that is
understandable.<br />
We can be joyful always if joy is a fruit of the
Holy Spirit.<br />
But what about praying continually?<br />
We have
lives, don't we?<br />
We have to do such basic things as eating and
sleeping and going to the loo, never mind earning our living.<br />
How
can we pray continually?<br />
<br />
I suppose it depends on what
prayer is.<br />
If it's all about a conversation with God, <br />
or
even worse, a monologue from us telling God about our world and our
lives, <br />
then it probably isn't possible.<br />
<br />
But what if,
what if it were more about an attitude of mind?<br />
A way of living
where we are continually conscious of God's presence with us, of
God's love for us?<br />
There is a plaque some people like to have in
their homes that says <br />
“Christ is the head of this house;<br />
the
unseen guest at every table, <br />
the silent listener to every
conversation.”<br />
That can sound as though he's some kind of
creepy stalker, <br />
but it's also a reality, if you are God's
person.<br />
And one can practice being aware of this, of God's
constant presence with us.<br />
<br />
It does take practice, of
course;<br />
you can't just go from only thinking of God when you're
in Church on Sunday or when you're praying or reading your Bible at
home, <br />
and forgetting about Him when you're watching East Enders
or getting the supper.<br />
Some people find it helpful to build
reminders into their lives, <br />
so that every time they put the
kettle on, say, <br />
or get up from their chair, or whatever, they
remember to –<br />
I was going to say grin at God, <br />
but you
know what I mean.<br />
After all, you can be sitting very happily in
the same room as someone else, both of you utterly absorbed in
whatever it is you're doing –<br />
even, it has to be said,
watching different things on the Internet –<br />
but you're still
aware that the other person is there.<br />
I think it must be a bit
like that with God.<br />
You can be getting on with your life <br />
but
aware, in the background, that God is there with you.<br />
I wonder
if it's that that St Paul meant by “Pray continually.”<br />
I
think it must be something like.<br />
<br />
By the way, don't think
I'm some sort of super-spiritual genius –<br />
I can't do this, a
lot of the time.<br />
Sometimes I can, but more often than not it
doesn't happen!<br />
<br />
I'd like to be able to –<br />
but then
again, like all of us, there are times when I'd really rather
forget.....<br />
<br />
And, you know, I bet that, like the underlying
joy that the Holy Spirit gives, being able to be aware of God's
presence, <br />
so that you can take up and put down conversations
with Him, <br />
must also be a gift of the Holy Spirit.<br />
<br />
So,
be joyful always, pray continually, and the third one was “Give
thanks in all circumstances.”<br />
<br />
Give thanks in all
circumstances.<br />
<br />
Now, I know there are some writers who have
interpreted this to mean that we have to give thanks for
everything.<br />
I don't see how we can do that –<br />
I mean, we
know that God's heart breaks when a child is killed on the roads, or
when an earthquake devastates a country,<br />
or when one nation
attacks another with incredible loss of life.<br />
How are we
supposed to give thanks for things that make God Himself weep?<br />
<br />
I
don't think it means that.<br />
I think it's more about having a
thankful heart.<br />
About acknowledging God's good gifts to
us.<br />
About –<br />
okay, if you like, about counting our
blessings.<br />
We can't, and I don't think we should, thank God for
the dreadful things –<br />
but we can be aware that God is there,
<br />
in the midst of the dreadful things, <br />
and we can certainly
thank him for that.<br />
We can be aware that in all things God does
work for good for those who love him.<br />
<br />
“Be joyful
always;<br />
pray continually;<br />
give thanks in all circumstances,
<br />
for this is God's will for you in Christ Jesus.”<br />
<br />
“For
this is God's will for you in Christ Jesus.”<br />
That's important,
too.<br />
I don't think we can just do all this in a vacuum.<br />
It
is because God wants this for us, it is His best for us.<br />
<br />
Yes,
it will take some work on our part –<br />
we know that God the Holy
Spirit will most certainly do his part <br />
by enabling us to
develop a sense of joy in Christ that can and will be there even
through the most heartbreaking of outward circumstance, <br />
but of
course we have to do our part by allowing Him to, <br />
by
practising, with His help, <br />
being aware of his presence at all
times <br />
and developing, again with His help, <br />
a thankful
heart that sees and acknowledges what God is doing in our world.<br />
And
no, it won't be easy, <br />
and no, we can't do it by ourselves but
only with Christ's help.<br />
<br />
We are in the season called
Advent, and Christmas is rapidly approaching.<br />
We've already
started singing carols –<br />
Tulse Hill is having their carol
service this morning, and Clapham has theirs this evening.<br />
And
over the Christmas season, we will be singing words like, <br />
“Yet
what I can, I give him, give my heart” and <br />
“Cast out our
sin and enter in, be born in us today!”<br />
The thing is, do we
really mean it?<br />
Are we just singing lyrics we've known for years
and never really taken much notice of?<br />
Even the ghastly “Away
in a Manger” –<br />
“No crying he makes?”<br />
I don't think
so!<br />
Not if he was a real baby, not a wax doll!<br />
Anyway,
sorry, even when we sing “Away in a Manger” <br />
we are asking
God to “fit us for heaven, to live with thee there!”<br />
At
Tulse Hill they used to pray this prayer every week, when the
children left for Sunday school. There's a brief introductory
prayer, and then everybody says together:<br />
“Be near me, Lord
Jesus, I ask Thee to stay<br />
Close by me forever, and love me I
pray.<br />
Bless all the dear children in Thy tender care,<br />
And
fit us for heaven, to live with Thee there.”<br />
<br />
And that's
what it's all about, isn't it?<br />
St Paul's instructions are things
we simply can't do on our own, <br />
no matter how hard we try.<br />
But
if we do ask God to help us fulfil them, <br />
if we do learn to <br />
“Be
joyful always, <br />
pray continually <br />
and give thanks in all
circumstances”, <br />
then when we do get to heaven, we'll fit
right in!<br />
<b>Amen.<br /></b></p><p></p>Mrs Redboots (Annabel Smyth)http://www.blogger.com/profile/11270027663691257254noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-497324740056677483.post-4341053661458918882023-12-03T10:30:00.007+00:002023-12-16T20:38:47.018+00:00The Coming King<p> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEh3_i6ZThf3IguwcwS7wv-mRkSBXmZDzWYCW0i833QCNL5b5xCJWZvlh_m9jw88zVWPaPTiMw8TuvsKxdnBvxupm4ejWUO-0-wVh-7iwkbMXsQNWWxK3Auw2YxeF8D_c16EdrtCXYyLCkpUDcDXdZML_sR9e_0jD8KsT0RW-x_WTJfITOl8m2dU51s1CkM" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="128" data-original-width="160" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEh3_i6ZThf3IguwcwS7wv-mRkSBXmZDzWYCW0i833QCNL5b5xCJWZvlh_m9jw88zVWPaPTiMw8TuvsKxdnBvxupm4ejWUO-0-wVh-7iwkbMXsQNWWxK3Auw2YxeF8D_c16EdrtCXYyLCkpUDcDXdZML_sR9e_0jD8KsT0RW-x_WTJfITOl8m2dU51s1CkM" width="300" /></a></div><br /><iframe
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<span face="Maiandra GD, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: medium;">So,
Advent.<br />
It’s almost an anomaly nowadays, isn’t it?<br />
Out
in the world, people are starting to celebrate Christmas already
–<br />
the shops have had their decorations up since the beginning
of last month, or even earlier,<br />
and the round of office parties,
works celebrations, school festivities will be starting any day
now.<br />
And the endless tapes of carols and Christmas songs that
are played in the shops, I should think they’d drive the shop
assistants mad!<br />
<br />
But here in Church, Christmas hasn’t
started yet, and won’t for another four weeks.<br />
We are
celebrating Advent,<br />
and it seems to be another penitential time,
like Lent.<br />
Those churches that have different colours for the
seasons have brought out the purple hangings, <br />
and many will
have no flowers except for an Advent wreath.<br />
<br />
But Advent is
really a season of hope.<br />
We look forward to “the last day when
Christ shall come again”<br />
to establish the Kingdom on earth.<br />
We
also look back to those who’ve been part of God’s story,
including John the Baptist and Jesus’ Mother, Mary.<br />
<br />
Today,
though, our readings are about the coming King.<br />
Our first
reading, from the prophet Isaiah, tells how the prophet,<br />
and
perhaps the people for whom he was speaking,<br />
longed and longed
to see God in action.<br />
“<span style="color: black;"><span lang="en-US">Oh,
that you would rend the heavens and come down,<br />
that the
mountains would tremble before you!<br />
As when fire sets twigs
ablaze and causes water to boil,<br />
come down to make your name
known to your enemies<br />
and cause the nations to quake before
you!”<br />
<br />
Scholars think that this part of Isaiah was
written very late,<br />
after the people of Judah had returned from
exile.<br />
They would have remembered the stories of the wonderful
things God had done in the olden days,<br />
in the days of Abraham
and Sarah,<br />
of Isaac and Jacob,<br />
of Moses,<br />
and of David
the King –<br />
and then, they would have looked round and
said<br />
“But hey, why isn’t any of this happening today?”<br />
<br />
</span></span>They
reckoned the answer must be because they were so sinful.<br />
“You
come to the help of those who gladly do right,<br />
who remember your
ways. <br />
<span style="color: black;"><span lang="en-US">But when we
continued to sin against them,<br />
you were angry.<br />
How then can
we be saved?<br />
All of us have become like one who is unclean, <br />
and
all our righteous acts are like filthy rags;<br />
we all shrivel up
like a leaf, <br />
and like the wind our sins sweep us away. <br />
No-one
calls on your name <br />
or strives to lay hold of you;<br />
for you
have hidden your face from us <br />
and made us waste away because of
our sins.</span></span><span style="color: black;"><span lang="en-US">”<br />
<br />
</span></span>It
does sound very much as though the prophet were longing for God,<br />
but
somehow couldn’t find him, in the mists of human sinfulness and
this world’s total abandonment of God.<br />
You know, there’s
nothing new –<br />
we complain that people don’t want to seek God
today,<br />
and our churches stand empty,<br />
but there was the
prophet saying that thousands of years ago!<br />
<br />
And, of
course, as it turned out,<br />
God hadn’t abandoned his people at
all!<br />
Jesus came to this earth, lived among us, and died for
us,<br />
and Isaiah’s people now knew the remedy for their
sin.<br />
<br />
But Jesus himself tells us, in our second
reading,<br />
that his coming to live in Palestine as a human being
isn’t the end of the story, either.<br />
Somehow, someday, he will
come back again.<br />
He obviously doesn’t know all that much about
it while he is on earth,<br />
and rather discourages us from
speculation as to when or how.<br />
But he draws pictures for
us:<br />
<span style="color: black;"><span lang="en-US">“The sun will be
darkened, <br />
and the moon will not give its light;<br />
the stars
will fall from the sky, <br />
and the heavenly bodies will be
shaken.<br />
</span></span>“At that time men will see the Son of
Man coming in clouds with great power and glory. And he will send his
angels and gather his elect from the four winds, from the ends of the
earth to the ends of the heavens.”<br />
<br />
It is a scary
thought, isn't it, with the world as unstable now as at any time in
the past century. <br />
What’s more today, as at no other time in
history,<br />
communications are such that if Jesus <i>were</i> to
come back,<br />
we’d know about it almost as soon as it happened
–<br />
look how quickly news spreads around the world these
days.<br />
Half the time you hear about it on Facebook or Twitter
before the BBC has even picked up on it. <br />
And Jesus' return
would be something totally unmistakable.<br />
But lots of generations
before ours have thought that Jesus might come back any minute
now,<br />
and Christians throughout history have lived their lives
expecting him to come home.<br />
We have remembered Jesus’ warnings
about being prepared for him to come, but He hasn’t come.<br />
And
we get to the stage where we, too, cry with Isaiah:<br />
“<span style="color: black;"><span lang="en-US">Oh,
that you would rend the heavens and come down, <br />
</span></span>that
the mountains would tremble before you!”<br />
<br />
Like Isaiah, we
long and long to see God come and intervene in this world, and wish
that He would hurry up. And that’s perfectly natural, of
course.<br />
Some folk have even got to the stage of believing it
won’t happen, and have given up on God completely.<br />
But Jesus
said it will happen,<br />
and one has to assume He knew what he was
talking about.<br />
<br />
But that doesn’t mean that we can blame
God –<br />
<span style="font-style: normal;">i</span>f You had come
back before now, this wouldn’t have happened.<br />
Every generation
has been able to say that to God,<br />
and it’s not made a blind
bit of difference.<br />
So maybe there’s something else.<br />
<br />
You
see, in one way, Jesus <i>has</i> come back.<br />
Do you remember
what happened on the Day of Pentecost,<br />
in that upper room?<br />
God’s
Holy Spirit descended on those gathered there,<br />
looking like
tongues of fire,<br />
and with a noise like a rushing mighty
wind,<br />
and the disciples were empowered to talk about Jesus.<br />
And
we know from history,<br />
and from our own experience,<br />
that God
the Holy Spirit still comes to us,<br />
still fills us,<br />
still
empowers us.<br />
<br />
One of the purposes of these so-called
penitential seasons is to give us space to examine ourselves<br />
and
see if we have drifted away from God,<br />
to come back<br />
and to
ask to be filled anew with the Holy Spirit.<br />
Then we are
empowered to live our lives<br />
as Jesus would wish.<br />
We don't
have to struggle and strain and strive to “get it right” by our
own efforts.<br />
God himself is within us, enabling us from the
inside.<br />
Jesus doesn’t just provide us with an example to
follow, but actually enables us to do it, by the indwelling of the
Holy Spirit. <br />
<br />
I do two tai chi classes a week, these
days, but it’s really difficult to get it all the way it should
be.<br />
Back in my ice dancing days, we only had to memorise a
routine that lasted two minutes, with musical cues to tell us what
move to do when.<br />
In tai chi, it’s a 25 minute routine with no
musical cues!<br />
I get very muddled at times. <br />
But supposing
somehow the spirit of a tai chi master could get inside me, <br />
and
actually make my body move in the right way, <br />
and show me how
it's done from the inside. <br />
That would be so much better than
anything my coach could say, or anything I can learn from watching
videos.<br />
I really would be able to do the routine, even at home!<br />
<br />
And that’s what God does –<br />
by indwelling us with his
Holy Spirit,<br />
He not only shows us what to do, but enables us to
do it.<br />
<br />
All of us will face the end of the world one
day.<br />
It might be the global end of the world, that Jesus talks
about, or it might just be the end of our personal world.<br />
We
expect, here in the West, to live out our life span to the end, and
many of us, I am sure, will do just that.<br />
But we can’t rely on
that.<br />
You never know when terrorists will attack –<br />
or
even muggers, or just a plain accident.<br />
We can’t see round
corners;<br />
we don’t know what will happen tomorrow.<br />
<br />
But
whether it is tomorrow,<br />
or twenty, thirty, forty or fifty years
from now,<br />
one day we will die, and then, at last, we will meet
Jesus face to face.<br />
And we need to be ready.<br />
We need to
know that we have lived as God wants us to live –<br />
and when
we’ve screwed up,<br />
as we always do and always will,<br />
we’ve
come back to God and asked forgiveness, and asked God to renew us and
refill us with his Holy Spirit.<br />
<br />
We can only live one day
at a time, but each day should, I hope, be bringing us nearer to the
coming of the King.<br />
Amen.</span></span></p>Mrs Redboots (Annabel Smyth)http://www.blogger.com/profile/11270027663691257254noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-497324740056677483.post-74751642485349875142023-11-19T11:00:00.014+00:002023-11-19T13:06:30.662+00:00It's what you do with it that counts.<p> <i>The recordings are from two services; firstly an abridged version for Night Prayer on 15 November, and then the longer version for 19 November.</i></p><p><i></i></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><i><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEj_77Fcj1JKl5oCn3sdOUXg69oIBg-8K7F58FtrmoTo5xkChZI9AaLiMLF7DWSQ9BSLQT4xFf6l2sOHzzk9mxiflacZFT5WmLXQ6Mo4BOimbfaqhgSHD-YZfFgZ9IR1XhU12zCp_iD4JcsLWvFnVoWcH_muV3k1KTaAVJGKBFF0uCa98MN004JfNgRhzBc" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="768" data-original-width="1024" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEj_77Fcj1JKl5oCn3sdOUXg69oIBg-8K7F58FtrmoTo5xkChZI9AaLiMLF7DWSQ9BSLQT4xFf6l2sOHzzk9mxiflacZFT5WmLXQ6Mo4BOimbfaqhgSHD-YZfFgZ9IR1XhU12zCp_iD4JcsLWvFnVoWcH_muV3k1KTaAVJGKBFF0uCa98MN004JfNgRhzBc" width="320" /></a></i></div><p><i><br /></i></p><iframe frameborder="0" height="100" src="https://drive.google.com/file/d/1H6PUCn-agDyS7HksAHhGstQe6AEC4LHV/preview" width="500">
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I often quail when I’m faced with a very familiar Gospel story to
preach on, <br />
as I never know whether I shall be able to say
anything that you haven’t heard a million times before.<br />
<br />
This
story is a very old friend –<br />
most of us, I expect, have known
it since our nursery days.<br />
Indeed, it is –<br />
or used to be
–<br />
often employed by teachers and so on to push children on to
practice and work hard.<br />
If God has given you talents, they say,
<br />
then you must work to make the absolute very best of
them.<br />
<br />
But, of course, it isn’t so much about talents in
that sense –<br />
although it can be taken that way.<br />
It’s
about money.<br />
Or at least, in Jesus’ story it’s about
money.<br />
I think it’s also about other things, too, <br />
but
we’ll come to that in a minute.<br />
<br />
A talent was serious
money back then.<br />
Maybe about twenty years’ wages for your
average labourer;<br />
maybe more.<br />
Serious money.<br />
So the
master was not messing about when he asked his slaves to look after
it for him.<br />
One slave was given five talents, another two and
the third just one.<br />
I suppose in these days they would be share
portfolios, <br />
and the slaves would be young investment bankers or
stockbrokers or something like that. <br />
<br />
In many ways, I
prefer Luke’s version of this story, <br />
where each of the slaves
are given the same amount of money, <br />
and come back with
different amounts.<br />
But today we have Matthew’s version set in
the lectionary, so let’s go with that.<br />
The master goes away,
for whatever reason, and shares out the money.<br />
And then he goes
away, and doesn’t come back and doesn’t come back.<br />
Maybe he
is away for months, maybe years, maybe even a decade or more:<br />
the
text just says “A long time”.<br />
And while he is away, things
happen.<br />
The first and second servants both go into business for
themselves using their unexpected capital.<br />
Perhaps they deal on
the stock exchange.<br />
Perhaps they open up a business of some kind
–<br />
a restaurant, say, or buying and selling houses.<br />
We’re
just told they traded with their money.<br />
<br />
I expect they made
themselves seriously rich, too.<br />
They would have felt able to pay
themselves a good salary,<br />
while all the time preserving and
adding to their Master’s capital.<br />
<br />
But what of Number
3?<br />
He’s quite comfortable already, thank you.<br />
He has a
good, secure job;<br />
he would really rather be employed by someone
than go into business for himself.<br />
It doesn’t occur to him
that, of all the slaves, <br />
he was the one chosen to see what he
would do, <br />
whether he would have the courage to invest that
capital.<br />
And in any event, he doesn’t have that sort of
courage.<br />
Supposing something went wrong and he lost it all?<br />
The
consequences don’t bear thinking about!<br />
Better play safe.<br />
Very
safe.<br />
Not the bank –<br />
not with the current banking crisis,
just look at Northern Rock!<br />
Okay, maybe his money would be safe,
<br />
but he wouldn’t be comfortable thinking about it, just in
case it wasn’t.<br />
Better just dig a hole in the ground and
pretend you’re planting carrots or potatoes.<br />
So that’s what
he does;<br />
the sort of moral equivalent of putting it into<br />
old
sock under his mattress, or in his underwear drawer.<br />
And he gets
on with his life.<br />
<br />
And then, one day, the Master comes
back.<br />
I wonder whether they had ever really expected that he
would, <br />
or if they had almost forgotten they weren’t in it for
themselves.<br />
<br />
And the first and the second servant come
swanning up with all the trappings of wealth –<br />
chauffeur-driven
Rollers, <br />
Philippe Patek watches, <br />
Louis Vuitton
briefcases, <br />
noses down in the latest top-of-the-range
smartphones,<br />
and, finally, able to present the Master with
<br />
share certificates <br />
and bank statements <br />
and other
records of profit and loss to show him that they had each doubled
their investments.<br />
<br />
The Master is delighted.<br />
“Well
done, you good and faithful servant.” he says to each of
them.<br />
<br />
“You’ve been faithful in little things” –<br />
not
that little;<br />
a “talent” was, as I said, serious money –<br />
“now
you’ll be put in charge of great things.<br />
Enter in to the joy
of your Master!”<br />
<br />
And then along comes the third
servant.<br />
On a pushbike.<br />
And he presents his master with a
filthy dirty and rather crumpled envelope containing the original
bankers’ order.<br />
“I couldn’t face it, Master!” he
explains.<br />
“supposing it had all gone wrong<br />
What would you
have said to me?<br />
You’re very harsh, and you do like your
people to make you lots of money, <br />
and I was too scared to
try.<br />
So I have kept it safe, and here you are!”<br />
<br />
And
the Master is seriously annoyed!<br />
“Oh, look here!” he
said.<br />
“So you didn’t want to play the stock market or start
a business, okay, <br />
but couldn’t you at least have put it on
deposit somewhere for me, <br />
so I could have had the
interest?<br />
Just not good enough, I’m afraid.<br />
Take him
away!”<br /><br />This story takes place in God's country, the Kingdom of Heaven. I often think that Jesus struggles slightly when talking about the Kingdom,<br />
trying to find an illustration that would
make sense to his hearers, <br />
talking of the tiny grain of mustard
seed that grew to become<br />
a huge shrub, <br />
or the tiny bit of
yeast that was needed to make the dough rise.<br />
And as I'm sure you know, these stories didn’t say to us quite what they said to
Jesus’ first hearers, <br />
as mustard was a terrific weed, like
stinging-nettles, <br />
and nobody in their right mind would plant it
deliberately.<br />
And yeast –<br />
or sourdough, more probably
–<br />
was not really associated with people of God, <br />
since
what you had at the holy feasts was unleavened bread,<br />
which was
then, by association, considered slightly more “proper” than
ordinary bread.<br />
And the thought of a woman baking it may well
have turned people up a bit –<br />
women tended to be rather
“non-persons” in those days.<br />
<br />
And, actually, it’s the
same here.<br />
Particularly for the third slave –<br />
you
what?<br />
He should have put his money in the <i>bank</i><span style="font-style: normal;">?<br />
To
earn </span><i>interest?<br />
</i><span style="font-style: normal;">I
don’t think so!<br />
Jewish people in that time and place took very
seriously the commandment that “thou shalt not lend out thy money
upon usury”.<br />
So here is the master telling the slave that he
should have done just that?<br />
Yikes!<br />
<br />
So what does it
all mean?<br />
This whole story comes in a section of teaching about
the End Times, <br />
something we don’t really like to think about
these days.<br />
Jesus has been saying that nobody, not even he,
knows the day and hour –<br />
there will be all sorts of signs and
symbols and symbolism, but they don’t necessarily mean
anything.<br />
And people will say “Oh, Jesus is coming on </span><i>this</i><span style="font-style: normal;">
date,” or “the end of the world is coming on </span><i>that</i><span style="font-style: normal;">
date”, but not to believe them.<br />
<br />
He says nobody knows
when it will happen –<br />
and these days, increasingly, it’s or
even if it will happen –<br />
but the idea is to be
prepared.<br />
“Who,” Jesus asks,<br />
“are faithful and wise
servants? <br />
Who are the ones the master will put in charge of
giving the other servants their food supplies at the proper
time?<br />
Servants are fortunate if their master comes and finds
them doing their job.<br />
You may be sure that a servant who is
always faithful will be put in charge of everything the master
owns.”<br />
<br />
And the Gospel for last week –<br />
although
you may not have thought about it as it was Remembrance Day –<br />
was
the story of the wise and foolish virgins, <br />
and whether you
would rather be with the wise virgins in the light, <br />
or the
foolish virgins in the dark.... <br />
well, not quite that, but you
know what I mean.<br />
Again, the sensible girls were prepared and
ready –<br />
the silly ones hadn’t even thought they might need
to light lamps if it got late.<br />
<br />
So again, Jesus is trying
to draw pictures of things that don’t go into words very well;<br />
he’s
trying to make his hearers understand what it’s going to be like,
<br />
when he himself doesn’t have a very clear picture of it.<br />
But
one thing he does know –<br />
we need to live as if he were never
coming back, <br />
but be prepared for him to return any second
now!<br />
It’s one of those Christian paradoxes that our faith is
so full of.<br />
<br />
It’s not just about what we do with our
money, or with our time –<br />
although obviously we need to make
sure we are good stewards of both.<br />
It’s maybe more, I think,
about what we do with our relationship with God.<br />
<br />
We are
all, I expect, Christians here;<br />
all people who enjoy a
reciprocal relationship with their Creator.<br />
And some people make
the most of it!<br />
Most of us do, I am quite sure.<br />
We make a
point of learning who we are, so we can be honest with God, <br />
we
make a point of learning from the Bible who God is, <br />
and making
a point of developing the relationship by spending time with God each
day.<br />
We don’t find it easy –<br />
nothing worthwhile ever is
easy –<br />
and, of course, the ones who are really expert at it
tend to make it look easy, which tends to make us feel
inadequate.<br />
But, of course, most of what we do to grow as a
Christian is actually done by God;<br />
our job is to be open to
being grown –<br />
and to use the “means of grace” that we have
been given to do that.<br />
<br />
But there are others around –<br />
not
here, I don’t suppose, not for one moment –<br />
but I’m sure
we know people who joyously responded to God’s call upon their life
–<br />
and then got stuck.<br />
Didn’t grow, didn’t, maybe,
even want to grow and change.<br />
Stayed as baby Christians, still
drinking milk when they should have been weaned on to meat, as St
Paul puts it.<br />
And maybe, one day, they will have to explain
themselves, too.<br />
“You had all these opportunities to become
the person you were meant to be, but you wasted them.<br />
Why?”<br />
<br />
The
good slaves, in this story, took what they were given and doubled
it.<br />
The bad one didn’t want to know, and buried his
money.<br />
It’s a picture –<br />
and only a picture –<br />
and
must be taken alongside the other pictures we have of the end
times.<br />
But nevertheless, it is a picture we probably need to
take seriously.<br />
We need to allow God to work in us, to make us
the people we have the potential to be, and maybe even to make us
more than that.<br />
We need to become what we can become, in
God.<br />
Much has been given to us already;<br />
now we need to be
open to God working in us.<br />
Amen.</span><br />
</p><i></i><p></p>Mrs Redboots (Annabel Smyth)http://www.blogger.com/profile/11270027663691257254noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-497324740056677483.post-62120654496931833192023-11-05T18:00:00.002+00:002023-11-05T18:50:09.222+00:00Lazarus and the Saints<p> <i>You will find the text of this sermon, which I have only slightly adapted, <a href="https://mrsredboots.blogspot.com/2021/10/lazarus-and-saints.html" target="_blank">here</a> Tonight's service was on Zoom, so no location details!</i></p><p><i></i></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><i><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEgi0mwieF35_WpdUtr-0pHVrLaZwy7AT_EhUlNYhspYj-RcpCRbA7GxYyR1Mg3ltc9GZmVsUzj0fKQRUyhuZPRszSygVZYU-thKx7xNUAl8co9_NgcLPZnT8xBFVGYbsT0GNBSFk4p4Wnj0JvU757n0PypBPme9mJNg6qKqex7W25b3jjzkeCnDSRIjYWY" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="1096" data-original-width="1920" height="183" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEgi0mwieF35_WpdUtr-0pHVrLaZwy7AT_EhUlNYhspYj-RcpCRbA7GxYyR1Mg3ltc9GZmVsUzj0fKQRUyhuZPRszSygVZYU-thKx7xNUAl8co9_NgcLPZnT8xBFVGYbsT0GNBSFk4p4Wnj0JvU757n0PypBPme9mJNg6qKqex7W25b3jjzkeCnDSRIjYWY" width="320" /></a></i></div><i><br /><br /></i><p><iframe frameborder="0" height="100" src="https://drive.google.com/file/d/1DMca7VUiUVRI2Jr6CdeC5pvc0R-f8_KQ/preview" width="500">
</iframe></p>Mrs Redboots (Annabel Smyth)http://www.blogger.com/profile/11270027663691257254noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-497324740056677483.post-22338839011222250232023-10-29T19:17:00.004+00:002023-10-29T19:17:34.562+00:00Bible Sunday and Black History Month<p><span style="font-family: helvetica;"> </span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: helvetica;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEijZt90x1ZWDfd9tZLMTeRc9L_rEZBZduhdzdZWNEYhq0w14skFj7tnoig5a_N8_HHoWhD32_6-00e5zewcoyIfqgkls9YwMfMeWhnKSaAZrGP6jmkIU0M73u9EfQ3bjiW7nHTxxGJV6WTNQLZaZ0VwOuSSnmH1rRNtCIoTeHtuSkDKhuIU9j9o9-UHxVY" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="675" data-original-width="1200" height="180" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEijZt90x1ZWDfd9tZLMTeRc9L_rEZBZduhdzdZWNEYhq0w14skFj7tnoig5a_N8_HHoWhD32_6-00e5zewcoyIfqgkls9YwMfMeWhnKSaAZrGP6jmkIU0M73u9EfQ3bjiW7nHTxxGJV6WTNQLZaZ0VwOuSSnmH1rRNtCIoTeHtuSkDKhuIU9j9o9-UHxVY" width="320" /></a></span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><p><iframe frameborder="0" height="100" src="https://drive.google.com/file/d/19atq1PMKOr1lnQnY06vJE8PoE74_cEcL/preview" width="500">
</iframe></p><p class="western" style="line-height: 100%;"><span style="font-family: helvetica;"><i>This was shorter than usual because we were celebrating the end of Black History Month, so needed to make sure we didn't overrun too badly. Which we didn't!</i></span></p><p class="western" style="line-height: 100%;"><span style="font-family: helvetica;">
Today, we are celebrating the end of Black History month, 2023.<br />
I
hope that most of our liturgy is reflecting that, and we will have
some more contributions to our celebration later on in the
service.<br />
<br />
It’s also Bible Sunday;<br />
when I was a girl,
this was celebrated during Advent, but they changed the calendar
around some years ago now, so now it’s celebrated on this Sunday.<br />
I
had to learn the collect, the special prayer for the day, off by
heart when I was a schoolgirl!<br />
I used to love “help us so to
hear them, to read, mark, learn and inwardly digest them….”<br />
<br />
And
it’s that which we have to do with the Scriptures, isn’t
it?<br />
Read, mark, learn and inwardly digest them,<br />
until they
become part of us, part of who we are, part of our lives.<br />
We are
told to let the Word of Christ dwell in us richly!<br />
<br />
But,
having said that, we do have to be aware
that our reading of the Bible is always going to be flawed,<br />
we’re
always going to read it through the lens of our own prejudice,<br />
our
own experience, our own political viewpoint.<br />
Or,
if we read with the help of a daily commentary, of that commentator’s
prejudice, experience, political viewpoint, and so on.<br />
<br />
But,
by and large, we want to internalise
Scripture;<br />
to let it dwell in us richly.<br />
And
I rather think the passage
that [the reader] read to us earlier is one that we really need
to internalise: “You shall love the Lord your God
with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.
This is the greatest and first commandment. And a second is like it:
You shall love your neighbour as yourself.”<br />
<br />
Love.<br />
Of
course, there are all sorts of different kinds of love, and our
English language, unusually, doesn’t have different words for the
sort of love we give to our parents, our partners,
our children, our friends, even strawberries or our teddy bear!<br />
Greek
does, which is helpful, and the word it uses for loving God is
“agape”;<br />
it’s not used anywhere else.<br />
St Paul gives
that wonderful definition of agape love in his letter to the
Corinthians, you may remember:<br />
<br />
“Love is patient;<br />
love
is kind;<br />
love is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude.<br />
It
does not insist on its own way;<br />
it is not irritable or
resentful;<br />
it does not rejoice in wrongdoing, but rejoices in
the truth.<br />
It bears all things,<br />
believes all things,<br />
hopes
all things,<br />
endures all things.<br />
Love never ends.”<br />
<br />
Pretty
amazing, really.<br />
This is the sort of love that Jesus was talking
about, when he told us to love God with all of our being, and to love
our neighbours as ourselves.<br />
<br />
We
need to be centred on God, not on ourselves. <br />
<br />
But how do
we do that?<br />
<br />
After all, most people manage pretty well
without God, and even those of us who try to be God’s people spend
vast swathes of time doing other things,<br />
sleeping,
for one, or cooking, or working….<br />
<br />
We are, of course,
still God’s people while doing all those things, <br />
but it’s
not often at the forefront of our minds!<br />
<br />
In
John’s first letter, he equates
loving God with loving our neighbour, <br />
saying, basically, you
can’t have one without the other.<br />
<br />
“Those
who say, `I love God', and hate their brothers or sisters, are
liars<br />
for those who do not love a brother or sister whom they
have seen,<br />
cannot love God whom they have not seen.<br />
The
commandment we have from him is this:<br />
those who love God must
love their brothers and sisters also.”<br />
<br />
But then, just to
get us even more confused, he says<br />
“Everyone who believes that
Jesus is the Christ has been born of God,<br />
and everyone who loves
the parent loves the child.<br />
By this we know that we love the
children of God,<br />
when we love God and obey his
commandments.”<br />
<br />
So for John, loving God and loving our
neighbour,<br />
our brothers and sisters,<br />
are one and the same
thing.<br />
And, indeed, that God's love for us is first and foremost
–<br />
our love for God is just a response to that.<br />
<br />
And
I think he's probably right.<br />
<br />
We love, we are told, because
God first loved us!<br />
The love of God has been poured into our
hearts by the Holy Spirit.<br />
<br />
And without God, our human
loves can be desperately flawed.<br />
Parents can be overly
possessive of their children, not allowing them to grow and develop
in their own way;<br />
I
don’t need to tell you how often romantic love can go wrong;<br />
and
even friendship can be more about excluding another person or group
of people than anything else.<br />
<br />
But
if Love is the most important commandment in the Bible, then we
mustn’t exclude anybody, for whatever reason.<br />
Not even if they
hold views we find abhorrent.<br />
It’s
not always easy, of course –<br />
how do we pray for politicians
whose views we loathe?<br />
And
how easy is it to forgive, and to love, those who have rejected us
for whatever reason?<br />
I know my experience is peanuts compared to
what many of you have gone through, but I was rejected by my peers at
boarding-school a lot of the time, and those were not always happy
years.<br />
And
even though we are all friends now, over 50 years later, I still
have
to bite my tongue on occasion!<br />
Loving and forgiving those who
have hurt us, or those whose views we find abhorrent, or those who
have inflicted gross damage on the world –<br />
it really isn’t
easy.<br />
And I really think it’s only through God’s help that
we can.<br />
<br />
We are, we are told, to love our neighbours as
ourselves;<br />
and sometimes that is a case of “pity the poor
neighbour”.<br />
We are often either totally self-absorbed, or we
fail to value ourselves as we should.<br />
And, there again, it’s
only through God’s help we
can .<br />
<br />
<br />
Just
as we can’t love
God without God’s having first loved us, so we can’t love our
neighbours, or ourselves, without God’s help.<br />
It’s all one,
really.<br />
We need to allow the word of God to dwell in us richly,
to allow God the Holy Spirit to indwell us;<br />
we need to allow the
Spirit to grow us and change us and teach us to love.<br />
Amen.<br />
<br />
</span><span style="font-family: helvetica;"><br /></span>
<br />
</p>Mrs Redboots (Annabel Smyth)http://www.blogger.com/profile/11270027663691257254noreply@blogger.com0Brixton Hill Methodist Church, Elm ParkLondon SW2, UK51.4492735 -0.120100423.139039663821151 -35.2763504 79.759507336178842 35.0361496tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-497324740056677483.post-91359959858967214662023-10-15T10:30:00.029+01:002023-10-15T12:41:44.057+01:00Terrorism, or what?<p> </p><p class="western" style="line-height: 100%;">
</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEh3qnxp9Z7SIFZs4KKvhW8HFtqNdNFHUPKE55D61GlWNEpHtBdkJZKGOJDEmF1aGCiH6lriYrEJ4p3aS5w2UopjkFG2nmt3kk1CHytnuZNr_9e4elmAf8lWnvJs90pkQ40zbiftnm2s3yBSzzCapdWyrZJx9-WqZxyiYEQ6Z5A7ehOJfCmN8aqgY1bn1jo" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="768" data-original-width="1024" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEh3qnxp9Z7SIFZs4KKvhW8HFtqNdNFHUPKE55D61GlWNEpHtBdkJZKGOJDEmF1aGCiH6lriYrEJ4p3aS5w2UopjkFG2nmt3kk1CHytnuZNr_9e4elmAf8lWnvJs90pkQ40zbiftnm2s3yBSzzCapdWyrZJx9-WqZxyiYEQ6Z5A7ehOJfCmN8aqgY1bn1jo" width="320" /></a></div><br /><i>I ad-libbed the children's talk which makes up the first part of the recording.</i><br /><div><br /></div><div><iframe frameborder="0" height="100" src="https://drive.google.com/file/d/1E1d4HyXZPcssdj2ip-oPxOK9-rim0kIN/preview" width="500">
</iframe></div><div><br /></div><div>What an incredibly nasty Gospel passage was set for today! I don’t
like it one little tiny bit. But it’s there, it’s in Matthew’s
Gospel, and it’s our Gospel reading for today, so we had better
look at it, I think.<br />
<br />
A king is holding a wedding-feast
for his son. And, one presumes, his daughter-in-law, but she isn’t
mentioned! I believe even in Orthodox Jewish weddings to this day
the bride and groom celebrate separately, so perhaps that’s not as
surprising as it sounds.<br />
<br />
What is surprising, though, is
that people didn’t want to come. The King sent out his servants to
call them in, and they refused. And then when they were asked a
second time, they even beat up the servants and killed them. So the
King, in retaliation, sent his soldiers to burn down the city, and
gets the servants to invite a whole different set of people, “good
and bad alike”, who all jump at the chance to visit the royal
palace. Or who are too scared not to, by that stage. But then, there
is one bloke who isn’t properly dressed, and doesn’t justify
himself, and isn’t just asked to leave, as you might expect, but
bound hand and foot and cast into outer darkness. <br />
<br />
Well,
what’s it all about? The thing is, people tend to see the King who
throws the party as God inviting everybody in in place of the Jews
who refused Jesus’ invitation, and then the ones who are invited
later are the ones who, like us, have said “Yes” to Jesus. But
all that violence in the middle? Doesn’t sound like the Jesus I
know, does it you? And what of the guy who was thrown out for not
wearing the right clothes? Maybe he’s the one who tried to get in
on his own merits, without putting on “the garment of salvation”.
<br />
<br />
But this story, with blood and gore everywhere, with the
King seeming to be happy to kill everybody and burn their towns, even
while letting the feast get cold – what is that saying about God,
if we look on the King as representing God? What does it say about
the Kingdom of Heaven?<br />
<br />
St Luke, and some of the
non-canonical Gospels, the ones that didn’t make the cut, tell the
story in a very different way, where the party-giver is definitely
God, there are no reprisals for those who chose not to come, but then
the gaps are filled with anybody and everybody, no matter who they
are, no matter what their physical condition. All are welcome. Now,
that version of the story is giving a very different picture of God.
So what’s Matthew trying to say. Why is his version the kind of
image of God that can really damage our mental health, leaving us
worried and fearful of “doing it wrong” and being thrown out. Or
which can make us justify hating groups of people who are not like
us. Or can make us justify using violence in God’s name.<br />
<br />
Ah,
but think a minute. Matthew is Jewish, writing for Jewish believers.
And what was their experience of kings? Not the King of Heaven that
we associate with kings – but the puppet kings installed by the
brutal Roman regime. Maybe this story can be read another way. The
king is brutal, so violence and killing become the norm in that
society. Maybe the one who refused to wear a wedding garment, and
who refused to justify himself, and who was bound and violently cast
out – could that, could that, do you think, be Jesus? That is,
after all, what we are told happened to him. He was the one who
stood silently in front of his accusers, refusing to justify himself,
and who was bound and taken to the shameful death of the cross.<br />
<br />
If
you have ears to hear, said Jesus, then hear. Maybe many of his
followers were unwilling to see such a story as anything other than a
picture of God at his most vengeful; maybe they liked seeing God like
that. Maybe you do, too? One trouble with seeing God like that is
that it makes salvation be down to us, not down to God. If we get it
wrong, we’ll be chucked out.<br />
<br />
Although one way of seeing
the wedding garment, is the salvation that comes from God. We need
to acknowledge that we can do nothing of ourselves to save ourselves,
and we need to put on the “wedding garment” that Christ provides
for us. We can’t be, and won’t be, accepted on our own merits.
Acceptance is through Christ, and is unlimited. We will, of course,
receive due recognition, I am sure: “Well done, thou good and
faithful servant” – but it is through Christ we gain admittance
to God’s country.<br />
<br />
You can look at the story either way,
of course. But all that violence – isn’t there enough violence
in the world these days without having to see the rather cartoonish
violence in the story Jesus told. As so often, it’s over the top –
Jesus spoke Aramaic, which is a very over-the-top language. The king
wasn’t very likely to abandon his feast, go and kill those who had
killed his messengers and burn their towns to the ground, and then
come back and expect to find his feast just as he had left it, after
all! <br />
<br />
St Paul, in the part of the letter to the
Philippians that we also read earlier, reminds us that we should be
filling our minds with “those things that are good and that deserve
praise: things that are true, noble, right, pure, lovely, and
honourable.” This doesn’t mean, of course, that we must close
our eyes to the horrors that go on in this world – God
forbid!<br />
<br />
Even Paul is at his most practical at the start of
the chapter, urging two of the stalwart women who run the church to
get over themselves and sort out their differences, and he asks the
bearer of the letter, and some of the other elders of the church, to
help them do that. We’re not told what they were disagreeing about
– whether it was an important point of doctrine, or just whose turn
it was to arrange the flowers that week, or what was to be on the
menu for the communal meal at Pentecost. Even the little things can
assume undue importance at times!<br />
<br />
But then he reminds us
that we need to be joyful always in our union with Christ, and not to
worry about anything. Well, that’s easier said than done, for a
start! But the point is, Paul says, pray about it. Pray about the
issues, bring them to God, being thankful that God is there to listen
and to help. And you listen too, in case God wants you to be part of
the answer to your prayer, as does often happen. And the more we can
leave the issues with God, and focus on the good things, the more we
will experience God’s peace.<br />
<br />
Now, the word usually
translated “peace” comes from the Hebrew word Shalom. And Shalom
means far more than peace as in an absence of worry, although that
too. It’s more than just an absence of war and quarrels, although
them, too. It’s about wholeness. About things being the way they
ought to be, but so seldom are. <br />
<br />
The way things ought to
be. Wholeness. Reconciliation, not just within families, within the
church, between denominations, between nations, but reconciliation
between people, God and nature. Wholeness. And it’s the wholeness
of creation, the wholeness of ourselves within it. That is the sort
of peace that Paul says will “keep our hearts and minds in Christ
Jesus”.<br />
<br />
Now, you know as well as I do that we live in a
broken world. The horrendous conflict that has suddenly sprung up,
yet again, between Hamas and Israel over the past few days is just
one of the many conflicts going on around the world. The war between
Russia and Ukraine is still ongoing, even though the latest conflict
has knocked it off the front pages. Afghanistan is still refusing
women basic rights over their own bodies, as are parts of the USA,
but Afghanistan goes further and refuses them most of their rights as
human beings. <br />
There is still trouble in Syria… and so it
goes on.<br />
<br />
And then there is the brokenness of God’s
creation: climate change, pollution, extinctions and so
on.<br />
<br />
Nevertheless, St Paul says to pray, to thank God, and
then to fill our minds with “those things that are good and that
deserve praise: things that are true, noble, right, pure, lovely, and
honourable.”<br />
<br />
I’m not entirely sure that Jesus’ story
in our Gospel reading comes under that heading! But if the person
thrown out in chains for not wearing a wedding garment is Jesus, as
there is a strong argument that he is, then that is something we can
focus on. <br />
<br />
The thing is, I think, that we need to be
aware of the evil, bring it to God in prayer, and then put it aside
for now. We need to listen to or read the news, of course we do, and
pray as we read or listen, but we shouldn’t wallow in it! When our
friends on social media post something that means they need our
prayers, we should pray at once, so we don’t forget, and then move
on. We need to be disciplined about the rabbit-holes we fall down
on-line – some, of course, are wonderful, but others, not so much!
And so it goes. Common-sense, really, but how many of us have any
common sense? And we need to focus on peace, pray for peace, yet
still aware that there will probably be no peace in our lifetimes.
<br />
<br />
And as for the story Jesus told – let’s not wallow in
the bloodthirstiness and the nastiness, but let’s focus on the
solitary figure, silent, bound, and cast out – for it is through
him that we can know God as our heavenly Father, and experience his
peace and wholeness. Amen.</div><div><br /><div><i>With thanks to Nathan Nettleton of the South Yarra Community Baptist church in Melbourne, Australia, whose sermons, as published on <b>Laughingbird.net,</b> helped me enormously with this sermon.</i></div></div>Mrs Redboots (Annabel Smyth)http://www.blogger.com/profile/11270027663691257254noreply@blogger.com0Tulse Hill Methodist Church, Christchurch Rd, London SW2, UK51.4427424 -0.115816423.132508563821155 -35.2720664 79.752976236178853 35.0404336tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-497324740056677483.post-29627311796960822672023-09-10T10:30:00.000+01:002023-09-10T11:56:08.214+01:00Together in His name<p class="western" style="line-height: 100%;"></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEgMKhNrQkkE8ZaX19pDypBeW4e5oV64_GxCCN3PK-DqYLfy1i0ZBbLGzMXpnLFyN24I2tOhv0r9awZxzJ_MNm04r_X2OHjwxv7ibbQfJZ2PP0noMiOqbLu51OQlD294d_Z6gzKYNgvDcAEsSVi3EqbMJAvA3VFF8tgwgvDfmzUUNYFsCGGYnMcvogWgs18" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="261" data-original-width="400" height="209" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEgMKhNrQkkE8ZaX19pDypBeW4e5oV64_GxCCN3PK-DqYLfy1i0ZBbLGzMXpnLFyN24I2tOhv0r9awZxzJ_MNm04r_X2OHjwxv7ibbQfJZ2PP0noMiOqbLu51OQlD294d_Z6gzKYNgvDcAEsSVi3EqbMJAvA3VFF8tgwgvDfmzUUNYFsCGGYnMcvogWgs18" width="320" /></a></div><br /><br /><p></p><iframe
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</iframe><p class="western" style="line-height: 100%;">“Where two or three are gathered together in My name,” said
Jesus, “there am I with them.”<br />
<br />
I expect you know that
the Gospels were only written down about 50 or 60 years after Jesus’
death.<br />
A lot of things happened during those years, of course,
<br />
and although we know how accurate oral transmission can be,
<br />
there are a few places where it looks as though an extraneous
passage got inserted.<br />
I don’t quite mean extraneous, I don’t
think –<br />
but a passage attributed to Jesus that perhaps wasn’t
what he actually said, <br />
but what the early Church thought he
ought to have said.<br />
And part of the passage we heard just now
is, I think, one of those passages, mostly because it talks about the
Church, a gathering of Christians –<br />
and such a thing didn’t
exist in Jesus’ day.<br />
But whatever, it got into our Bibles, so
we need to read it and learn from it.<br />
And although my text is,
as I said at the beginning, “Where two or three are gathered
together in My name, there am I with them,” we do need to look at
the whole passage, as “a text without a context is a pretext!”<br />
<br />
The
first part does seem, at first reading, extraordinary, though.<br />
We
know from elsewhere that Jesus tells us never to put limits on our
forgiveness.<br />
We know we must forgive, or it’s impossible for
us to receive God’s forgiveness, we block ourselves off from
it.<br />
<br />
And we are told never to judge.<br />
We’re told to
sort out what’s wrong with ourselves first –<br />
you remember
how Jesus graphically told us to remove the very large log from our
own eyes before we could possibly deal with the tiny speck that
bothered us in someone else’s.<br />
<br />
But we are human.<br />
No
matter how much we want to love our neighbours as ourselves, it’s
difficult.<br />
It’s easy enough to love suffering humanity en
masse, to send a text to a certain number to give three pounds
towards relieving some kind of community suffering somewhere
else.<br />
It’s easy enough to throw an extra box of tea-bags into
the food bank box at the supermarket, or to donate to homeless
charities.<br />
It’s even relatively easy to do small things to
lower your carbon footprint –<br />
to take reusable produce bags to
the supermarket, to be scrupulous about recycling, and so on.<br />
<br />
Now,
don’t get me wrong, all these are good and right and proper things
to be doing, and we should probably all do them more than we actually
do.<br />
But they are all relatively easy –<br />
the difficult bit
comes when we have to start interacting with other people, and loving
them.<br />
“To love the world to me’s no chore.<br />
My problem
is that lot next door!”<br />
That’s when we’re apt to forget to
be loving, when we are apt to go our own way, when we’re apt to
hurt people, most probably totally unintentionally.<br />
The careless
word, the accidental insult –<br />
or even, sadly, the intentional
one.<br />
<br />
Now, obviously, if we realise we’ve hurt someone,
<br />
the thing to do is to apologise at once.<br />
Sometimes there
are times when we don’t really want to apologise –<br />
they
started it, it was their fault.<br />
Well, even if it is, we are the
ones who need to apologise, if only because it makes us bigger than
them…. <br />
Well, perhaps not for that reason, but you know what I
mean.<br />
<br />
But what if it is they who hurt you?<br />
The human
thing to do is to hit out and hurt them back, but we’re not
supposed to do that, and with God’s help we won’t.<br />
This
passage tells us what to do –<br />
first, go and explain what has
gone wrong, <br />
and if they agree and apologise, all is well and no
harm done.<br />
Then you take a couple of friends along to witness
that you had a problem and to try and help you be reconciled, <br />
and
then, finally, take it to the church.<br />
The church, note –<br />
not
the world!<br />
And then, the passage says, if they still won’t
listen, <br />
let them be to you as a tax gatherer or a
gentile.<br />
Which, on first reading, sounds as if you should shun
them completely, <br />
which was how Jewish people of the time
behaved towards them.<br />
<br />
But that’s not what Jesus
did!<br />
Remember the story of Levi, who was a tax collector, and
Jesus called him to become one of the disciples.<br />
Remember
Zaccheus, who resolved to pay back anybody he had cheated after Jesus
loved and forgave him and went to eat with him.<br />
Remember how
many times he talked with, and healed, Gentiles, non-Jews, people who
observant Jews would have nothing to do with.<br />
<br />
So what is
the church to do with those who won’t see that they’ve hurt
someone, or if they do see it, don’t care?<br />
From Jesus’
example, it looks as though we have to go on loving them, trusting
them, and caring for them.<br />
Heaven, as one paraphrase puts it,
will back us up.<br />
Obviously, there are very rare occasions when
steps have to be taken, <br />
if a child or a vulnerable adult is at
risk, for example, <br />
but mostly things can be put right without
that.<br />
And even when steps do have to be taken –<br />
and the
Methodist church has systems in place to organise such steps, <br />
so
our safeguarding people know what to do –<br />
we still have a duty
to love and care for the perpetrator.<br />
<br />
Now, the next part
of the passage is really not easy to understand.<br />
If, says Jesus,
or the Church speaking in Jesus’ name, two or three agree on
anything in prayer, it will be granted.<br />
But we know that, with
the best will in the world, this doesn’t always happen.<br />
We
have all seen times when our prayers, far from being answered,
<br />
appear to have gone no further than the ceiling.<br />
But then
again, were we only looking for one answer to our prayer?<br />
Were
we telling God what to do, as, I don’t know about you, but I find
I’m rather apt to.<br />
Were we just talking at God, and not trying
to listen, <br />
trying to be part of what God is doing in the
world?<br />
All too easily done, I’m afraid.<br />
<br />
But the
final sentence –<br />
ah, now that brings hope.<br />
“For where
two or three gather in my name, there am I with them.”<br />
<br />
You
see, in the Jewish faith, you need what’s called a minyan, a
minimum of ten people –<br />
in many traditions, ten men, not
people.<br />
If there are only nine of you, you can’t go ahead with
the service.<br />
But not for we Christians.<br />
We know that even
if there are only a couple of us, <br />
Jesus will be there with us
and enabling our worship.<br />
I think I told you that last time I
was with you, when the congregation was rather smaller than usual
because of the Cup Final!<br />
But Jesus was definitely with
us.<br />
<br />
<br />
“Where two or three are gathered together in
My name,” said Jesus, “there am I with them.”<br />
<br />
I
don’t know about you, but I found that to be very true during the
pandemic, during those long, weary months when we weren’t allowed
to meet together, and when we could, there were huge
restrictions.<br />
Last time I preached on these passages, it was, I
think, the first Sunday we had been allowed back to church in five
long months.<br />
We had to sign in, and in some churches we even had
to book a seat!<br />
We had to sit miles apart from anybody except
our own families, we had to wear masks, we weren’t allowed to sing,
or to take an offering (there was usually a box by the door for those
who had brought one), or even share the Peace or make our Communions
as we were accustomed to do.<br />
But it was a lot better than not
meeting at all, which had been the case for so many months, and was
to be again the following winter.<br />
<br />
Many of us lost loved
ones during that hard time, either to Covid-19 or to other
illnesses.<br />
Many of us had Covid ourselves, and although some
recovered quickly,<br />
others, myself included, were still feeling
the after-effects a good two years later.<br />
Many of us had mental
health issues during that time.<br />
Many, if not most, of us
wondered where on earth God was in all this.<br />
<br />
But God was
there.<br />
There in the many different ways we struggled to be
church together –<br />
the recorded services, the Zoom services,
eventually, the livestreams.<br />
Some of those continue to this day
–<br />
we now have two Zoom services weekly in the Circuit, the
Wednesday evening Compline and the Sunday evening service which,
although it is Clapham who run it, welcomes any of us who care to log
in.<br />
<br />
But most of this is, we hope, ancient history.<br />
There
may or may not be another pandemic in our lifetimes –<br />
I hope
and pray there won’t be.<br />
Eventually, there will be one, of
course;<br />
but I hope not for a long while yet!<br />
But what is
total, current, today’s news, is that Jesus is here with us, right
now this minute.<br />
We are gathered together in his name, and he
has promised that where two or three –<br />
or a dozen or so, in
this case –<br />
are gathered together, he is there with us.<br />
<br />
We
have been told what to do if we have a problem with someone else who
refuses to acknowledge it, or to clear the air.<br />
Although I’ll
just remind you here that Jesus said that if you know someone has a
problem with you, or you with them,<br />
you really ought to make it
right before you come to the Lord’s table together.<br />
But that,
as this passage points out, isn’t always practical.<br />
All we can
really do is pray for God’s grace.<br />
It’s not as if church
quarrels were anything new –<br />
even St Paul has to tell two of
the women in the church at Philippi to get over themselves and get
their acts together!<br />
They happen.<br />
They have always
happened.<br />
And they probably always will happen.<br />
<br />
But
Jesus is there with us, no matter how many people’s backs we’ve
put up.<br />
Jesus is there with us because we are gathered in his
name.<br />
And this, of course, means we can’t actually exclude
anyone!<br />
How can we be gathered in Jesus’ name and exclude
anybody from that gathering?<br />
We can’t, of course.<br />
Not
even people like tax-gatherers or pagans!<br />
Jesus would never have
turned his back on such people unless they had made it very, very,
very clear that they wanted nothing at all to do with him, and how
can we do differently?<br />
<br />
“Where two or three are gathered
together in My name,” said Jesus, “there am I with them.”<br />
And
it doesn’t matter what we are doing in His name,<br />
whether we’re
attending public worship,<br />
or visiting someone who is ill,<br />
or
helping at the food bank,<br />
or any other form of community
service.<br />
Or even being at work or school, or at home.<br />
If we
do it in Jesus’ name, and if there are other people involved, he is
there in the midst of it all!<br /></p><p>Amen. </p>Mrs Redboots (Annabel Smyth)http://www.blogger.com/profile/11270027663691257254noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-497324740056677483.post-72757989241198681492023-08-27T12:48:00.000+01:002023-08-27T12:48:20.450+01:00Moses in the bulrushes<p> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEgomYPD7Bd6trWkozLehVNP8WL8ZCu5N83SxKp9Yz0QA6PRe-rB1sTFzbeKBzxJSSuA9JBqZ-rUiL_taOehChOtTYC53XpZRJKXKoIxQzGwwi5oAaXjEo7-BJqDJX0o4zggZebfrE8IDSlo79HJvAOGfOM5SNJ8VqjBFfX9jDt4rznC4oLdwzR6r3am6wM" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="3000" data-original-width="3000" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEgomYPD7Bd6trWkozLehVNP8WL8ZCu5N83SxKp9Yz0QA6PRe-rB1sTFzbeKBzxJSSuA9JBqZ-rUiL_taOehChOtTYC53XpZRJKXKoIxQzGwwi5oAaXjEo7-BJqDJX0o4zggZebfrE8IDSlo79HJvAOGfOM5SNJ8VqjBFfX9jDt4rznC4oLdwzR6r3am6wM" width="240" /></a></div><br /><br /><p><iframe
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</iframe></p><p class="western" style="line-height: 100%;"><br /></p><p class="western" style="line-height: 100%;">
I think I remember first hearing the story of Moses in the bulrushes,
which was our first reading today, when I was in primary school! I
imagine you did, too, most probably. It’s one of the first Bible
stories we ever learn.<br />
<br />
It’s an important story, as Moses
was an important person – so important, in fact, that he was one of
those who visited the transfigured Jesus on the mountain-top, along
with Elijah. God made it clear then that it was Jesus who we are to
listen to, Jesus who has superseded both Moses and Elijah, Jesus who
is God’s beloved son.<br />
But Moses, like Jesus, wasn’t born to
greatness. In fact, rather the reverse. The Israelites, at that
time, were living in Egypt – you might recall how they moved down
there at Pharaoh’s invitation, and that of his right-hand man
Joseph. And at first they settled down, and built farms, and lived
their lives according to God’s word as it was then understood, and
all went swimmingly. They grew, and they prospered.<br />
<br />
Meanwhile,
however, the Pharaoh grew old, and died, and a few generations later
a new Pharaoh ascended the throne, and this Pharaoh had never heard
of Joseph, and didn’t really want to, either. He was concerned,
because here was this enormous group of people who weren’t Egyptian
at all, living in the middle of Egypt and it was possible –
although not probable – that they could overturn his throne.
Pharaoh wasn’t having that! <br />
<br />
So he got together with
his advisors, and they pretty much enslaved the Israelites, demanding
– and getting – forced labour from them to build things and carry
burdens, work in the fields, and so on. They didn’t build the
pyramids – the pyramids existed long before Joseph went to Egypt –
but they did build a couple of towns, Pithon and Rameses. But the
harder the Egyptians forced them to work, the more children they had,
and the more they prospered.<br />
<br />
So the Hebrew midwives,
Shiphrah and Puah, were told they must kill any boy baby that was
born to an Israelite woman, although they could let the girls live.
But the midwives were not about to do that, and ignored their
instructions. And when summonsed to explain themselves, they said
blandly that all that work in the fields meant that the women had a
very easy time giving birth, and the babies in question had been born
long before they got there! And the children of Israel became
stronger and stronger and more and more numerous.<br />
<br />
So
Pharaoh got very cross indeed, and ordered that all baby boys must be
thrown into the river, there either to drown or to be eaten by
crocodiles, or both. But it still didn’t stop the Israelites.<br />
<br />
The
Bible doesn’t give the names of Moses’ parents; they are just
referred to as a Levite man and a Levite woman. This means they were
both descendants of Levi, one of Jacob’s sons. The Levites,
traditionally, end up being the tribe that is responsible for Temple
worship and so on – not the priests, but the worship leaders, if
you like. I don’t know if they had that role back in Egypt, but it
seems significant that Moses should be a Levite.<br />
<br />
This
couple had two other children that we know of; a girl called Miriam,
and a boy called Aaron who was a few years older than Moses, so
presumably born before the edict to kill the male babies was made.
And then Moses arrives.<br />
<br />
I wonder whether Moses’ mother
knew what she was going to do if she had a boy. I expect she was
praying and praying that it be a girl, and then it wasn’t.
Disaster! What on earth was she going to do? How could she give up
her beloved baby to be killed?<br />
<br />
We aren’t told that she
prayed, but I’m sure she did. And she was able to hide the baby
for three months, but babies are not an easy thing to hide, and
eventually she realised she simply couldn’t. But she had been
plotting and preparing. Her baby must go in the river, okay. But
she wasn’t going to let the authorities throw him in – instead,
she would put him in herself, in a basket she had spent time weaving
from rushes, and covering it with pitch so it would be waterproof.
<br />
<br />
And she took the basket, with Moses in it, down to the
river herself. Her heart must have broken as she placed it tenderly
in the reed-bed. She had done what she could, complying with the
letter of the law, if not the spirit. Only God could help her baby
now.<br />
<br />
She didn’t dare hang about to see what would
happen, but her daughter Miriam could lurk discreetly, pretending to
be playing, perhaps.<br />
<br />
And what does happen is that
Pharaoh’s daughter comes down to the river to bathe, with all her
attendants. And she hears the baby crying, and sends one of her
women to go and see what the noise is. And the woman brings back the
baby in his basket.<br />
<br />
Pharaoh’s daughter – we don’t
know her name, either; the Bible is so bad at giving women names –
is entranced by the baby, and even though he’s obviously a Hebrew
baby, she wants to keep him for her own, as though he were a stray
puppy or kitten. But the baby is getting hungry now, and howling,
and his sister, very bravely, comes up to the women and says “I
know where there’s a wet-nurse, if you want one for the baby!”<br />
<br />
The
wet-nurse is, of course, her own mother, who has just that very day
put the baby in the river. And Pharaoh’s daughter says “Ooh, yes
please!” and so the family end up moving into the palace, albeit
into servants’ quarters, and Moses is brought up as befits a royal
child.<br />
<br />
There are some obvious parallels with Jesus here,
aren’t there? The humble parents, the oppressed people, the edict
to kill the baby boys. Ironic, perhaps, that Mary and Joseph fled
into Egypt to keep Jesus safe!<br />
<br />
Meanwhile, Moses grew up as
a child of the palace, although he obviously did know he had Hebrew
roots, as we learn later in his story. But Jesus, we hope, had a
happy and serene childhood in Nazareth, treated no differently from
other boys his age, playing with his friends, going to school, and
only very gradually learning that he was different and special as he
grew up.<br />
<br />
I’m not sure, by the way, whether he knew what
Peter’s answer to the question “Who do you say that I am?” was
going to be, as we heard in our Gospel reading. Did he already know
he was the Messiah? He obviously knew he had a special calling from
God, that he was God’s beloved son – but, the Messiah? Peter’s
answer was very definitely God’s voice to him. Yes, you are the
Messiah. But he asked the disciples not to say anything, as he
didn’t want to be elevated to the status of a political leader,
which is what they had always imagined the Messiah was going to
be.<br />
<br />
Moses, as we all know, led his people out of slavery
and to the very boundaries of the Promised Land; Jesus wasn’t about
overthrowing the occupying power, or really anything to do with
politics; he brings us out of slavery in a totally different way –
the slavery of sin, as the Bible calls it.<br />
<br />
But Moses’
story has more to teach us than just the parallels with Jesus. It’s
about God’s wonderful provision for his people.<br />
<br />
It must
have been so awful for Moses’ mother, mustn’t it? She knew she
had to put her precious baby into the river; he could be – and
probably would be – swept away and drowned, or eaten by crocodiles,
or both. But she was also placing him into God’s hands, and God
wasn’t going to let him be swept away or eaten. God saw to it that
it was just at that precise moment that Pharaoh’s daughter and her
attendants came down to bathe. And just at that precise moment that
the baby woke up hungry.<br />
<br />
And so Moses was saved from the
crocodiles, and grew up a child of the palace.<br />
<br />
Jesus, too,
was saved from the edict that all baby boys be killed; his parents
listened to the angel who warned them, and took him to Egypt, where
they stayed until that Herod died, and then resettled in Nazareth,
where Jesus grew up as a normal village child.<br />
<br />
I wonder
how God provides for you and me? We are probably not going to be
leaders of our people, but we are still God’s beloved children.
And St Paul reminds us that “God will meet all your needs according
to the riches of his glory in Christ Jesus”.<br />
<br />
We didn’t
read the passage from Paul’s letters set for today, as it would
have made the service too long, but it was that bit from the letter
to the Romans where Paul reminds us that although we are one body in
Christ, we are all different, and God has given us all different
gifts, which we should not be shy about using. <br />
<br />
I am sure
that almost all of us, looking back, can see times when God provided
for us – I know I can, several times, over the course of my life.
Sometimes it was using decisions I made; other times it was the right
person in the right place at the right time, and so on. And I expect
– although I don’t actually know and don’t especially want to
know – there have been times when I’ve been the right person in
the right place at the right time. And I’m sure there have been
times when you have, too.<br />
<br />
Pharoah’s daughter was in the
right place at the right time. So, of course, was Simon Peter, to
tell Jesus that “You are the Messiah, the holy one of God!” I
pray that all of us may be the right person in the right place at the
right time – and I think I pray that we’ll never know it, as then
we might think it was we who did it, not God! Amen.</p>Mrs Redboots (Annabel Smyth)http://www.blogger.com/profile/11270027663691257254noreply@blogger.com0Streatham Methodist Church, Riggindale Road, London SW1651.420389 -0.128766823.110155163821155 -35.2850168 79.730622836178838 35.0274832tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-497324740056677483.post-37225748561112557282023-08-20T10:30:00.009+01:002023-08-24T10:26:40.618+01:00Being Wrong, Putting it Right<p> </p><p class="western"></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEgdJrcZucwe2QoS-tkW1wm-X-lvubnfGRppqJj3YkXpGEyvS4zt8zVdRqIS5Z7u7268ywjmYDiqXV7d1naq0QNb1XoRqXIidiCs7jj1KBvPdVBlDkIzJwyoJpC0QqLk--iRVDvQIgWgFpmysJ20elDjWZ-jiTAo6Ul_uLbJI1_a1meDsJ7TIs6eNlE5EX0" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="479" data-original-width="400" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEgdJrcZucwe2QoS-tkW1wm-X-lvubnfGRppqJj3YkXpGEyvS4zt8zVdRqIS5Z7u7268ywjmYDiqXV7d1naq0QNb1XoRqXIidiCs7jj1KBvPdVBlDkIzJwyoJpC0QqLk--iRVDvQIgWgFpmysJ20elDjWZ-jiTAo6Ul_uLbJI1_a1meDsJ7TIs6eNlE5EX0" width="200" /></a></div><br /><br /><p><iframe
frameborder="0"
width="500"
height="100"
src="https://drive.google.com/file/d/1UFGZ-lL4FdW_320HTTLh5OUy-EAO0P8k/preview">
</iframe></p><p class="western"><br /></p><p class="western">
Our Gospel reading this morning is a very odd sort of story, isn't
it?<br />
Here we have Jesus telling his disciples that what goes into
your mouth doesn't matter, it's what comes out of it – <br />
what
you say, even, perhaps, what you think – <br />
that matters.<br />
And
then he goes and says something that everybody, certainly today and,
I suspect, throughout a great deal of history, finds incredibly
offensive.<br />
<br />
Well, the first bit is easy enough to
understand.<br />
Jews and Muslims both have very strict dietary
rules, and believe that breaking them makes you unclean, and unfit to
be in God's presence.<br />
And they also have strict rules about
washing yourself before worship, <br />
being clean on the outside
before, one hopes, being made clean within.<br />
<br />
But Jesus was
able to see, as his followers couldn't, <br />
that what you eat
doesn't actually matter.<br />
Many of the rules – <br />
about not
eating pig, or shellfish, for instance – <br />
made sense in an era
where there was no way of refrigerating food.<br />
Eating them might
give you a tummy-upset, <br />
but it wouldn't be the end of the world
if you did.<br />
What goes into your mouth, says Jesus, eventually
passes through and comes out the other end, but what comes out –
<br />
well, that just shows what kind of a person you are!<br />
<br />
And
then a few days later – <br />
we don't know the exact date, that
wasn't the kind of thing that the first gospel-writers thought
important – <br />
a few days later he's off in a non-Jewish region,
and he is so incredibly rude to the woman who comes begging for
healing.<br />
What is going on?<br />
<br />
Of course, the traditional
explanation is that he was testing her.<br />
Well, that may or may
not be the case, I don’t know, but it’s what people often say
because it’s what they think Jesus is like. <br />
<br />
The
difficulty is, of course, that we can't hear the tone of voice he was
speaking in.<br />
Did he snap at her, which is a bit what it sounds
like?<br />
He had ignored her for some time until the disciples asked
him to deal with her or send her away.<br />
Was he trying to be
funny?<br />
I wonder how you “hear” him in your head when you
read this passage, or one of its parallels.<br />
<br />
I tend to hear
him as being thoughtful, trying to work it out.<br />
You see, in the
time and place when he was brought up, <br />
he would have learnt to
assume that the Jews were God's chosen people, and nobody else
mattered.<br />
Some things, it would appear, given the situation in
Gaza today, never change.<br />
But the point is, Jesus didn't know
any better, <br />
which I think today's Israelis ought to.<br />
<br />
It
might sound strange to say “Jesus didn't know”, because after
all, He is God, he is omnipotent and so on.<br />
But we believe –
<br />
or at least we say we do – <br />
that He is also fully
human.<br />
Unlike the various gods and goddesses of Greek myth, <br />
he
wasn't born already adult, <br />
springing fully formed from his
father's forehead, or something.<br />
He was born as a baby.<br />
<br />
Think
about it a minute.<br />
A baby.<br />
Babies are so helpless when they
are born; they rely on us, their parents, to do everything for
them.<br />
And they gradually grow and learn –<br />
first to sit
up,<br />
then to begin to play with objects,<br />
chewing them as
well as fiddling with them.<br />
And gradually to pull themselves to
standing, and to walk, and so on.<br />
And Jesus had to do the
same.<br />
He will probably have chewed on Mum's wooden spoon when
his teeth were coming through, and when he was of the age to put
everything in his mouth – <br />
and later, he will have discovered
that it makes a lovely noise when you bang it on the table, <br />
and
have to learn that not everybody enjoys that noise!<br />
<br />
And so
on.<br />
He had to learn.<br />
We are told he grew in learning and
wisdom.<br />
Remember the time when he was a teenager and got so
engrossed in studying the Scriptures that he stayed behind in the
Temple when everybody else had packed up and gone home – <br />
and
then, when his parents were understandably cross, <br />
he said “Oh,
you don't understand!”<br />
Typical teenager – <br />
and, of
course, Jesus was learning the whole time about the Scriptures,
<br />
about who God is, <br />
and, arguably, maybe a tiny bit about
who He was.<br />
<br />
And here, perhaps, he is learning again.<br />
We
can't rely on the Gospel-writers' timelines, <br />
they tend to put
episodes down when it suits their narrative.<br />
And here is Jesus,
perhaps having slipped away for a few days' break into Tyre and
Sidon, <br />
where he was less likely to be disturbed than in
Galilee.<br />
And then this woman comes and will not go away.<br />
<br />
We
don't know anything about her, other than that she was a foreigner –
<br />
Mark says she was Syro-Phoenician, Matthew, here, calls her a
Canaanite.<br />
Either way, she was basically Not Jewish.<br />
An
outsider.<br />
<br />
You know, the Bible is full of stories about
outsiders coming to know and trust Jesus!<br />
Just off the top of my
head you have the centurion whose servant was healed, the other
centurion who Peter went to after his dream to tell him it was okay
to do so, <br />
and the Ethiopian treasury official.<br />
Oh, and
Onesimus, Philemon's slave.<br />
Philemon himself, come to that, but
I think by the time the letter was written, it was becoming more
widely accepted that non-Jews could be Christians, as well as
Jews.<br />
<br />
But at the time, these people were outsiders.<br />
No
good Jew would have anything to do with them.<br />
And Jesus ignores
the woman, until his disciples ask him to get rid of her.<br />
And
even then, he doesn't heal her daughter.<br />
Instead, “It's not
right to take the children's meat and give it to the dogs!”<br />
<br />
But
I wonder.<br />
Do you remember the wedding at Cana, which we are told
is his first recorded miracle?<br />
And his mother came to him and
said “Disaster!<br />
They've run out of wine!”<br />
His first
reaction was basically, “So what?<br />
What's that got to do with
me?” <br />
but then he went and got the servants to fill those huge
amphorae <br />
and the water turned into wine.<br />
He changed his
mind.<br />
His first reaction was not to do anything, but if there is
one thing<br />
he appears to have learnt, it is to listen to the
promptings of the Spirit.<br />
<br />
And in this case, too.<br />
The
woman, consciously or not, said exactly the right thing:<br />
“But
even the puppies are allowed the crumbs that fall from the children's
table!”<br />
<br />
And to Jesus, that was God's answer.<br />
Yes,
he could and should heal this woman's daughter.<br />
So he did.<br />
With
the comment that right then, her faith was probably greater than
his!<br />
<br />
You know, the first time I heard this sort of
interpretation of this story, <br />
my immediate reaction was “No
way!”<br />
Jesus couldn't be like that – <br />
he couldn't have
got things wrong!<br />
You may be thinking the exact same thing, and
I really wouldn't blame you!<br />
<br />
But, you know, it wouldn't go
away.<br />
Like a sore place in one’s mouth, or something, <br />
I
kept on thinking about it and thinking about it.<br />
Why was this so
totally alien to my mental image of Jesus?<br />
<br />
Then I realised
that, of course, it was because I was confusing “being perfect”
with “never being wrong”.<br />
There’s a difference between
being mistaken and sinning!<br />
And, as I said, Jesus had to be born
as a human baby, to learn, to grow.<br />
And he may well have learnt,
consciously or unconsciously, that as a Jew, <br />
he was one of the
Chosen, and thus superior to everybody else.<br />
But he had already
learnt, as we found in the first part of our reading, <br />
that
keeping the Jewish Law wasn't what made you clean or unclean – <br />
so
perhaps it wasn't such a huge leap to discover that being Jewish or
not didn't actually matter.<br />
God still loved and cared for you,
whoever you were.<br />
<br />
And in the end, I found this thought
very liberating. <br />
It made Jesus far more human.<br />
I realised
that, while I had always paid lip-service to the belief that Jesus is
both fully human and fully divine, in fact, I’d never really
believed in his humanity!<br />
For me, he had always been a plaster
saint, absolutely perfect, <br />
never making a mistake, <br />
never
even being tempted. <br />
I realised I’d envisaged him overcoming
those temptations the gospel-writers talk about with a wave of his
hand, not really tempted at all.<br />
But, of course, it wasn’t
like that!<br />
St Paul tells us that he was tempted “in every way
that we are”,<br />
and if that doesn’t include really, <i>really,
</i><i><b>really</b></i> wanting to do it, <br />
then it wasn’t
temptation!<br />
<br />
But if Jesus could be mistaken, <br />
if he
sometimes had to change his mind,<br />
if being perfect didn’t
necessarily mean never being wrong, <br />
then that changed
everything!<br />
Suddenly, Jesus became more human, more real than
ever before.<br />
The Incarnation wasn’t just something to pay
lip-service to, it was real.<br />
Jesus really had been a human
being, with human frailties, <br />
just like you and me.<br />
He had
had to learn, and to grow, and to change.<br />
Suddenly, it was okay
not to get everything right first time;<br />
it was okay not to be
very good at some things;<br />
it was okay to make mistakes.<br />
<br />
And,
what’s more, it meant that the Jesus who had died on the cross for
me wasn’t some remote, distant figure whom I could aim at but never
emulate, but almost an ordinary person, <br />
someone I might have
liked had I known him in the flesh, <br />
someone I could identify
with.<br />
<br />
As I have frequently said, these Sundays in Ordinary
Time are when what we think we believe comes up against what we
really believe.<br />
Do we really believe that Jesus, as well as
being divine, was also human?<br />
Do we think of him as having had
to learn, to grow, to change.<br />
Do we think of him as having made
mistakes, <br />
having to change his mind, having to – <br />
to
repent, if you like, since that basically means changing one's mind
<br />
because one realises one is wrong?<br />
<br />
And if that is
so, if Jesus is not some remote plaster saint, but a human being just
like us – <br />
how does that change things?<br />
How does that
change our relationship with Him?<br />
And how does it change things
when we make a mistake?<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
</p>Mrs Redboots (Annabel Smyth)http://www.blogger.com/profile/11270027663691257254noreply@blogger.com0Stockwell Methodist Church, Jeffries Road, London, UK51.4760412 -0.12632712.3210586411532006 -70.4388271 90 70.1861729tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-497324740056677483.post-28097995755174461362023-08-06T10:30:00.013+01:002023-08-06T13:05:51.561+01:00Feeding the Five Thousand<p> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEg0R9CeO-FJKfQXN8yqlyKn5jjVUOEhoK_cO3WkZLBK52NAIXq7JQSBgUuh_xK8iANzvijHDLwKXgwPYg-BzqpRBe_hNlshxiC6GmH2-N6f4s0WvD8GvNbGC6aO7ptBh1cV1wQqXixoGJbx8158N2l8Zy0EugpFgrNFKK5OzpYMVoqgh4EaqiJxum3qByg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="307" data-original-width="400" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEg0R9CeO-FJKfQXN8yqlyKn5jjVUOEhoK_cO3WkZLBK52NAIXq7JQSBgUuh_xK8iANzvijHDLwKXgwPYg-BzqpRBe_hNlshxiC6GmH2-N6f4s0WvD8GvNbGC6aO7ptBh1cV1wQqXixoGJbx8158N2l8Zy0EugpFgrNFKK5OzpYMVoqgh4EaqiJxum3qByg" width="313" /></a></div><br /><iframe frameborder="0" height="100" src="https://drive.google.com/file/d/1KfurO8Dm981euInzQEjA-sLU_IllO6ja/preview" width="500">
</iframe><br /><br /></div><p></p><p class="western">
<span style="font-size: medium;"><b>Introduction </b></span><br /></p><div style="text-align: left;">Poor Jesus was having a very bad day.</div><div style="text-align: left;">In fact, a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day.</div><div style="text-align: left;">He had
just learnt that his cousin John had been killed by Herod, and he
badly wanted to get away by himself to talk to God about it, and to
begin to come to terms with it.</div><p></p><p class="western">
He did manage to get away
a bit later, and when he was feeling more peaceful, he walked across
the water to rejoin the disciples.<br />
<br />
But right now, he
hasn't had a chance to get away by himself,<br />
He went across the
lake in a boat, but the crowds walked round<br />
and because Jesus
was nice like that he gave up all thoughts of going off by himself
for a bit, and he healed the sick people, and I expect he taught them
a bit, too.<br /><br />
It was getting dark, and the disciples
know that Jesus really needed to eat,<br />
and they could use a break
themselves,<br />
so they try to get him to make everyone go away.<br />
But
they've all followed Jesus further away from town than they meant,
and it would be rather a long way to go back without a breather
first, and some food.<br />
But there is no food –<br />
and nowhere
to buy any,<br />
even if they could have afforded it.<br />
Just five
loaves and two fish.<br />
In some of the other gospels, we learn that
this belonged to a small boy, who had shyly come up to Andrew and
offered to share his lunch with Jesus, although Matthew doesn’t
mention this.<br />
But it appears that this was all the food there
was.<br />
<br />
Of course, I don't suppose it was all the food there
was, not really.<br />
After all, there were mothers in the
crowd,<br />
mothers with small children.<br />
They would have made
sure they were well-provisioned for the day.<br />
Probably many of
the men had lunchboxes<br />
or whatever they carried their food
in;<br />
certainly the children would have.<br />
Mothers do tend to
see to it that their families are provisioned,<br />
and few people
would go out for the day without some sort of arrangements for a
meal!<br />
<br />
But it was, so we are told, a small boy who was the
catalyst,<br />
who offers his lunch.<br />
And Jesus takes it,<br />
gives
thanks,<br />
breaks it,<br />
and shares it.<br />
And everyone has
enough food, <br />
and there are twelve basketsful left over.<br />
Enough
for each of the disciples to take a basket of food home to
Mum.<br />
<br />
Before we think about what this story means, and why
it’s still important, I want us to listen to a video I found which
tells this story through puppets.</p><p class="western" style="text-align: center;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" class="BLOG_video_class" height="266" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/KIrRcodXsSo" width="320" youtube-src-id="KIrRcodXsSo"></iframe></p><p class="western"><br />
Did
you enjoy that?<br />
I did!<br />
But we need to look at the story,
and what it tells us.<br />
I think it tells us something about
Jesus,<br />
something about God the Father,<br />
and something about
ourselves.<br />
<br />
<strong><span style="font-size: medium;">2.
Something About Jesus</span></strong><span style="font-size: medium;">
</span><br />
So what does the story tell us about Jesus?<br />
This
sort of food-stretching isn't unique to him, you know!<br />
It
happens in the Old Testament, too.<br />
Elijah goes to stay with the
Widow of Zarephath during a famine and promises that her oil and
flour won't run out if she will feed him, too.<br />
Which she
does,<br />
and it doesn't.<br />
<br />
Elisha, Elijah's
successor,<br />
performs a miracle very like Jesus',<br />
making 20
barley loaves stretch to feed 100 people, with some left over.<br />
Which
mightn't sound too bad to us, but those loaves were only about the
size of a hamburger bun –<br />
and if you were only given 1/5 of a
bun,<br />
you might well want to complain that it wasn't quite
enough!<br />
<br />
So this kind of miracle was something that
prophets did.<br />
You might have noticed that John doesn't tend to
record Jesus' miracles unless they teach us something about who Jesus
is.<br />
So on one level, in John’s gospel, the story shows that
Jesus was not only a prophet like Elisha, but something greater.<br />
<br />
And
did you notice something else?<br />
Jesus took the food,<br />
gave
thanks,<br />
broke it<br />
and shared it.<br />
Doesn't that sound
awfully familiar?<br />
Doesn't that sound like something we do some
Sundays,<br />
those Sundays we have a Communion service?<br />
<br />
So
the story is saying something about who Jesus is;<br />
it is showing
us that Jesus is not only a prophet,<br />
he is more than a
prophet.<br />
<br />
<strong><span style="font-size: medium;"><b>3.
Something About God</b></span></strong><span style="font-size: medium;"><b>
</b></span><span style="font-size: medium;"><b>the Father</b></span><br />
Then
secondly, the story tells us something about God the Father.<br />
You
see, Jesus says elsewhere that he only does what he sees his Father
doing.<br />
And one of the things that always strikes me about this
story,<br />
when I read it,<br />
is the amount left over.<br />
Twelve
basketsful.</p>
<p class="western">As I said earlier, enough for each of the
disciples to take a basket home to Mum!<br />
<br />
It isn't that
there was just enough food to keep everyone going until they got
home.<br />
It isn't that there was enough for everyone to have a
decent meal.<br />
There was enough for everyone to have a decent meal
and still have masses left over!<br />
<br />
That seems to be so
typical of Jesus, though.<br />
When he turned the water into wine at
the wedding at Cana,<br />
he made enough wine to stock a young
off-licence,<br />
never mind be enough for a few guests at the
tag-end of a party.<br />
And when people were healed,<br />
they were
healed!<br />
He made a proper job of it,<br />
even if it took him two
goes.<br />
<br />
It's typical of Jesus, and it's typical of God.<br />
I
mean, look at the sort of extravagance we see in the natural world
–<br />
all those desert flowers, for instance,<br />
and nobody knew
they were there.<br />
All those stars,<br />
all those
universes.....<br />
<br />
This story, with the twelve basketsful left
over,<br />
reminds us that God is generous to the point of
extravagance.<br />
And also, it was Jesus who broke the bread and
shared it out.<br />
He did the serving.<br />
It was Jesus,<br />
elsewhere
in John's gospel,<br />
who kneels with towel and basin,<br />
washing
the disciples' feet.<br />
It was Jesus who said of himself,<br />
"The
Son of Man came not to be served, but to serve." <br />
<br />
So
this story helps to remind us that God longs<br />
and longs<br />
and
longs<br />
to give us, his children,<br />
more good things than we
can possibly handle.<br />
God wants to serve us,<br />
to heal
us,<br />
to make us whole,<br />
to give us what we need –<br />
not
just grudgingly,<br />
barely enough,<br />
but pressed down, shaken
together and running over!<br />
<br />
<strong><span style="font-size: medium;">4.
Something About Us</span></strong> <br />
But the third thing that
this story tells us is something about us.<br />
And I'm afraid that
it isn't very flattering.<br />
All those thousands of people –<br />
five
thousand men,<br />
and maybe up to four times that number when you
include the women and children –<br />
all those people, and one,
just one, was willing to share what he had!<br />
One little boy who
came up to Andrew and whispered, shyly,<br />
"Jesus can have my
lunch if he'd like".<br />
Nobody else was willing to share.<br />
<br />
Yet
most people probably had more than they needed that day.<br />
We tend
to take along more food than we'll need, just in case.<br />
And if we
make a packed lunch for our family,<br />
if they're going on an
outing,<br />
there's usually enough that we could share it,<br />
if
we wanted to,<br />
without going hungry ourselves.<br />
<br />
But the
people in the crowd weren't willing to risk going hungry.<br />
They
weren't willing to share their food,<br />
not even with Jesus and his
disciples.<br />
That was too great a risk.<br />
Perhaps they wouldn't
have minded missing lunch, for once,<br />
but what about their
children?<br />
<br />
Incidentally, I'm aware that I'm sounding as
though the sole source of food was from the crowd,<br />
rather than
from Jesus.<br />
I rather suspect it was a case of "both, and"
–<br />
I'm perfectly certain that if the small boy's five loaves
and two fishes were really all the food there was,<br />
Jesus both
could have and would have produced <br />
a delicious meal for
everyone from just that.<br />
However, I find it almost impossible to
believe that nobody else at all had brought any supplies with
them!<br />
Like so much of Christianity,<br />
the truth is probably
somewhere in between;<br />
a case of "both, and", rather
than "either, or".<br />
<br />
The crowd was selfish.<br />
Either
they had come out without any food, or,<br />
if they had brought
food,<br />
they weren't willing to share it.<br />
Either way,<br />
they
expected Jesus to do something about it.<br />
They weren't going to
do anything.<br />
They were going to hedge their bets,<br />
to wait
and see,<br />
to look out for Number One.<br />
<br />
And are we like
that?<br />
Well, yes, we are, some of the time, aren't we.<br />
We
can be extraordinarily selfish.<br />
Look how just a quarter of the
world consumes about seventy-five percent of the planet’s
resources.<br />
And even in our country, there are those of us who
have plenty, and those who are reliant on the food banks to feed
their children because their benefits simply won’t stretch far
enough.<br />
And if you are one of the ones who have enough, have you
given anything to the food bank lately?<br />
It’s easy enough to
buy an extra tin of tuna or packet of ramen noodles and drop it in
the bins the supermarkets all provide for such purposes.<br />
<br />
We
can be extraordinarily selfish,</p>
<p class="western">and we can be extraordinarily faithless.<br />
We
can't offer more than ourselves to Jesus,<br />
but how often do we
offer even that?<br />
The small boy offered what he had –<br />
five
loaves, and two fishes.<br />
It wasn't much, but he had the courage
to offer it.<br />
Nobody else seems to have had the nerve.<br />
But
why not?<br />
<br />
Partly, of course, it was selfishness and fear
–<br />
if I give my lunch to Jesus,<br />
maybe I won't get
any.<br />
Maybe my kids won't get any.<br />
I'm not going to offer;<br />
I
need what I have for myself.<br />
<br />
But partly it was a different
sort of fear.<br />
Fear of rejection.<br />
And that is one of the
most difficult of all fears to overcome.<br />
Been there,<br />
done
that,<br />
read the book<br />
bought the T-shirt<br />
You don't go to
Jesus with your five loaves and two fish because you're afraid he'll
shriek with laughter and say<br />
"Who on earth do you think you
are!" <br />
You don't go to Jesus and say<br />
"Use me as
you will", <br />
because you're afraid he'll either send you off
to work somewhere highly disagreeable,<br />
like somewhere with a
seriously nasty climate<br />
far away from all your friends and
family.<br />
Or else we're afraid that he won't!<br />
That he will
say "Oh, I couldn't possibly use <i>you</i>!”<br />
and sort of
throw you aside like a used tissue.<br />
<br />
But, you know, that's
not God!<br />
We've just seen how God longs and longs to be far more
generous to us than we can possibly imagine.<br />
And when we say
"Use me as you will",<br />
he says "Great!<br />
Now,
here's this present,<br />
and do take some of that,<br />
and are you
sure you won't have any more of the other,<br />
and you really need
some of this, and...."<br />
until you practically have to
say,<br />
"Hey, hang on, give me a chance to breathe!"<br />
<br />
Oh, but, you are saying, <br />
I've offered and offered and
nothing has happened.<br />
God doesn't want me!<br />
Well, I have to
ask two questions, then.<br />
The first is, did you really mean your
offering,<br />
or did you pull it back as soon as you'd made it.<br />
And
the second question is,<br />
are you sure God isn't helping you do
exactly what you're meant to be doing right now?<br />
Not all of us
are called to spectacular tasks, or to go and work somewhere with a
disagreeable climate, and so on.<br />
Some of us are asked to stay
right where we are, and be salt and light in our own families and
communities.<br />
<br />
Students are probably meant to be studying
hard and waiting to see where the road leads to next.<br />
Parents
are probably meant to be making a safe home for their children.<br />
The
elderly are often such enormous lights to the rest of us –<br />
we
need you so much in our churches,<br />
just for who you are and<br />
what
you have learnt about our dear Lord as you have followed him!<br />
<br />
In
fact, it's always safest to assume that God will want you to stay
where you are, doing what you're doing.<br />
If that should change,
you can be quite sure you will know about it totally
unmistakeably!<br />
But God can't use you unless you offer yourself
to him,<br />
and he will use you if you do!<br />
And if you hold
back, whether from fear, or from selfishness, or from any other
motive,<br />
then not only do you prevent the Kingdom of God from
going forward in the way God would like,<br />
but you also cut
yourself off from all the good things God wanted to give you!</p>
<p class="western"><br />
<strong>5.Conclusion</strong> <br />
I've
gone on quite long enough for one morning!<br />
But this story,<br />
this
central story,<br />
of how Jesus fed a huge crowd,<br />
does teach us
that Jesus is greater even than Elijah and Elisha,<br />
and does
foreshadow the taking, blessing, breaking and sharing of bread that
is so important to us.<br />
It reminds us of how extravagantly
generous God can be,<br />
and how much he longs and longs to share
that generosity with you and with me.<br />
And it reminds us that all
too often we can be selfish and afraid,<br />
and hold back from
offering what we have and who we are to Jesus.<br />
So lets make an
effort this morning to conquer our fear and selfishness, and to offer
ourselves anew to the God whose response is always so infinitely
greater than our terrified offerings. Amen.</p>Mrs Redboots (Annabel Smyth)http://www.blogger.com/profile/11270027663691257254noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-497324740056677483.post-63710162646468583142023-07-30T10:30:00.007+01:002023-07-30T12:10:36.570+01:00God's Country<p class="western"></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEi3CXfq8F7Z282sjDvNVA0WrE8b7EB2x6aaUk0TTRIOXPVpvnNgNoWEsg1neFO6RZhUWp8x8gPFbuA_hT7emuT077b67BjWPMu5dV_ijz22mldLmrx5KYQxe0ZEzxL1T3sm7zjNF_69YrjYsFti80dyLJJYBY8mGSvIzwQr41quw4KrF0eSninwwt0cB3Q" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="1504" data-original-width="1204" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEi3CXfq8F7Z282sjDvNVA0WrE8b7EB2x6aaUk0TTRIOXPVpvnNgNoWEsg1neFO6RZhUWp8x8gPFbuA_hT7emuT077b67BjWPMu5dV_ijz22mldLmrx5KYQxe0ZEzxL1T3sm7zjNF_69YrjYsFti80dyLJJYBY8mGSvIzwQr41quw4KrF0eSninwwt0cB3Q" width="192" /></a></div><br /><iframe
frameborder="0"
width="500"
height="100"
src="https://drive.google.com/file/d/1H44VSbpTotf70SzB2gQ_0U510_VRyOvg/preview">
</iframe><br /><p></p><p class="western"><br /></p><p class="western"><a name="en-GNT-31190"></a>Imagine, if you will, that there is a place you’ve always wanted to
visit.<br />
It sounds as though it’s really wonderful –<br />
permanently
great weather, fantastic scenery, <br />
lots of great places to
visit, <br />
lots of walking, or swimming, <br />
great bars and
restaurants, <br />
you name it, this place has it!<br />
And you long
and long to go there, <br />
but you don’t know how to get there,
<br />
and what’s more, you don’t know anybody else who has been
there.<br />
All the things you’ve heard about it are rumour or
hearsay.<br />
<br />
And then one day someone comes along who very
obviously has been there, and he starts to tell you all about it.<br />
But
–<br />
oh dear –<br />
it’s not at all what you thought!<br />
Weeds
everywhere, attracting masses of birds which could and did eat all
the crops!<br />
And the food, far from gourmet, is rotten bread made
by women!<br />
And then, he goes on to tell his special friends in
private –<br />
but you hear about it later –<br />
the place is so
infinitely desirable that people sell all they have to get tickets
there!<br />
<br />
Well, the place is, of course, the Kingdom of
Heaven, <br />
or God’s country, <br />
which Jesus is telling people
about.<br />
Unfortunately it seems to be the kind of place that
doesn’t go into words very well, <br />
and the parables that Jesus
uses to talk about it are, <br />
although we don’t hear it much as
we are so familiar with them, <br />
really not what his listeners
would have been expecting.<br />
<br />
To start with, the mustard
seeds –<br />
well, you know mustard seeds.<br />
I expect you use
them in your cooking, as I sometimes do.<br />
You can buy the seeds,
or you can buy the ground seeds as a powder to make your own mustard
–<br />
lovely in salad dressings and cheese sauces –<br />
or you
can buy ready-made mustard with or without various flavourings.<br />
I’m
sure they used mustard as a seasoning back in Bible times, too –<br />
but
it was, and is, a terrific weed.<br />
They do grow it, of course –
very pretty flowers, a pale yellow, much nicer than the brash yellow
of oilseed rape.<br />
But in Bible times they tended to use the wild
plant, because if you cultivated it –<br />
well, it was like kudzu
or rhododendrons, or even mint –<br />
you’d never get rid of
it!<br />
Nobody would actually go and plant it, <br />
any more than
you or I would plant stinging-nettles in the fields.<br />
And, of
course, it doesn’t grow into a terrific tree, <br />
never has and
never will.<br />
But it does attract birds –<br />
and you don’t
want birds eating all your other crops, either!<br />
Yet in God’s
country it seems as if you plant mustard and it does grow into a
tree, and you actively want to encourage birds, rather than
discourage them.<br />
<br />
And then the second story is almost
worse.<br />
You see, for Jews, what was really holy and proper to eat
was unleavened bread, which is what you had at Passover.<br />
You
threw out all your old leaven –<br />
we’d call it a sourdough
starter, today, which is basically what it is –<br />
and started
again.<br />
I remember being told in primary school that this was a
Good Idea because you need fresh starter occasionally.<br />
But the
thing is, leavened bread was considered slightly inferior –<br />
and
the leaven itself, the starter –<br />
yuck!<br />
It isn’t even
the bread that is likened to God’s country, it is the leaven
itself!<br />
And did you notice –<br />
it was a woman who took that
leaven.<br />
A woman!<br />
That won’t do at all!<br />
Again, for
male Jews, women were slightly improper –<br />
and who knew that
she wouldn’t be bleeding and therefore unclean?<br />
And she hid
the starter in enough flour to make bread for 100 people!<br />
She
hid it.<br />
It was concealed, hidden.<br />
Not what people would
expect from God’s country, is it?<br />
<br />
And yet, in the
stories Jesus told his disciples privately, a little later, it’s
like treasure hidden in a field, and it’s worth selling everything
you own just to get hold of that field, and its hidden treasure.<br />
Or
the one perfect pearl that the collector has been searching for, and
he finds it worth selling the rest of his collection to buy it.<br />
God’s
country is worth all we have, and all we are.<br />
<br />
It’s all
very contradictory.<br />
God’s country is totally not what we might
expect.<br />
It’s not a comfortable place –<br />
when Jesus told
the story of the lost son, he explained that the son was reduced to
looking after pigs, a job which the Jews, then and now –<br />
and
Muslims, too, incidentally –<br />
thought was really
disgusting.<br />
Perhaps we could think of him as working in a rat
farm, or a sewage works.... not a pleasant job, anyway.<br />
And yet
the father went running to welcome him home –<br />
and men in that
day and age never ran.<br />
The story is taking place in God’s
country!<br />
<br />
And if we want to be part of it, part of God’s
country –<br />
as, indeed, we probably do or we’d not be here
this morning –<br />
if we want to be part of the Kingdom of God,
<br />
then we need to expect the unexpected.<br />
Someone once said
that God comes to comfort the afflicted, <br />
and to afflict the
comfortable, and I think that’s very true.<br />
Often we are called
to do things we never expected.<br />
<br />
What would you think if a
group of refugees turned up here one Sunday morning, and asked if you
could find a time for them to worship –<br />
but they were Muslim,
and had no idea of converting to Christianity.<br />
They just wanted
to find a sacred space in which they could pray.<br />
Perhaps they
couldn’t find a mosque where they would be welcome, for whatever
reason –<br />
maybe there wasn’t one where their own particular
style of worship was practised,<br />
or maybe they simply weren’t
welcome there for one reason or another. <br />
What if they wanted to
join you on a Sunday morning because it was where the worship of God
was taking place,<br />
even if it wasn’t in a form they were used
to?<br />
Would you welcome them, or would you find their presence
intolerably disruptive.<br />
<br />
I understand that this very thing
happened in a church in the Midlands a few years ago;<br />
the
refugees just wanted a place where they could pray, no matter what
their faith was.<br />
The minister of the church was all in favour
–<br />
of course, come in, be welcome!<br />
But, sadly, the
congregation was horrified, and many of them moved elsewhere.<br />
They
thought the minister should be there for them, not for these incomers
who weren’t even Christians!<br />
But surely the church should be
the institution that cares more about those who are not yet its
members, or even who never will be its members?<br />
I’m sure that
in God’s country we will find that to be the case.<br />
<br />
Sadly,
though, it’s not surprising that the congregation reacted like
that. <br />
Look what happened when the Empire Windrush came over
<br />
and the people on it turned up in Church their first Sunday,
<br />
only to be turned away.<br />
Not everywhere, of course –<br />
many
churches made a point of welcoming immigrants;<br />
Railton Road
church, in this very circuit, had a big poster outside welcoming
people, and I believe many others did, too.<br />
But in some churches
people were turned away, simply because they weren’t “like
us”,<br />
God used this for good, of course, and we saw the rise of
the Black-led churches which did, and still do, so much good in our
inner cities.<br />
But all the same….<br />
I feel ashamed on behalf
of those who were turned away!<br />
<br />
In God’s country, values
are turned upside down.<br />
It’s not the wealthy, the educated,
the important who matter.<br />
It’s the poor, the downtrodden, the
refugee, the single mum on benefits.<br />
It’s the people who come
to the food bank for help,<br />
not those who give out the bags and
the coffee!<br />
Remember how Jesus said that at the last day,<br />
he
will say to those who did nothing to help “You didn’t help me!”
<br />
and will commend those who did help for helping him.<br />
<br />
Talking
of single parents, do remember, won’t you, <br />
that this can be a
very hard time of year for many families –<br />
they might just be
able to cope in term time when the children get a meal at school,
<br />
but in the holidays they struggle and have need of our food
banks, <br />
so do give extra when you can.<br />
As I’m sure you
know by now, Brixton Hill now runs a food bank and advice hub every
Wednesday,<br />
and it’s also a bit of a social centre where people
can sit down for a coffee and a chat.<br />
And donations, in cash or
in kind, are always very, very welcome.<br />
<br />
I don’t know
about you, <br />
but I am not very good at recognising Jesus in the
beggar outside Tesco, <br />
or even the checkout operator inside the
store.<br />
And yet we know that in God’s country, we are all loved
and valued, whoever we are and whatever our story is.<br />
And, as we
heard from St Paul earlier:<br />
“Nothing can separate us from his
love:<br />
neither death nor life, neither angels nor other heavenly
rulers or powers, neither the present nor the future, <br />
neither
the world above nor the world below –<br />
there is nothing in all
creation that will ever be able to separate us from the love of God
which is ours through Christ Jesus our Lord.”<br />
<br />
And
however disconcerting we may find God’s country, we know that
because of that love, it is worth all we have, and it is worth all we
are.<br /></p><p>Amen. </p>Mrs Redboots (Annabel Smyth)http://www.blogger.com/profile/11270027663691257254noreply@blogger.com0Stockwell Methodist Church, Jeffries Road,, London, UK51.4760412 -0.1263271-2.0200810269949443 -70.4388271 90 70.1861729tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-497324740056677483.post-56454156933656571612023-07-23T11:00:00.012+01:002023-07-23T13:49:35.016+01:00Flowers, weeds, ladders and seeds<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiEDWc3sgIwxP4NAjvDmiLPL4gxcMep3h5_7AdSQ_TKSU3L4KvVqyJvwfJ_tN-TGHmoulxpVeNCXI5RgPwOwTCFycW9eRhz44Jm3bx6SpfzQfRkvaMhAQuLRAlfmc5h34X9gRe4gfsbcKAKwazcabkkepYd7pIOusstjKbd9LMA07pt_WgGIV58ThkBRz8/s4000/IMG_20230619_100755565.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="3000" data-original-width="4000" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiEDWc3sgIwxP4NAjvDmiLPL4gxcMep3h5_7AdSQ_TKSU3L4KvVqyJvwfJ_tN-TGHmoulxpVeNCXI5RgPwOwTCFycW9eRhz44Jm3bx6SpfzQfRkvaMhAQuLRAlfmc5h34X9gRe4gfsbcKAKwazcabkkepYd7pIOusstjKbd9LMA07pt_WgGIV58ThkBRz8/s320/IMG_20230619_100755565.jpg" width="320" /></a><br /><br /></div><iframe
frameborder="0"
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src="https://drive.google.com/file/d/1DvTa9rcPOx2sKc2mbVsZ7ysUaocI3We1/preview">
</iframe><br /><br /><p>I have to admit that I do find today’s readings really rather
difficult.</p><p class="western" style="line-height: 100%;">
They are both familiar stories, and that almost makes
it worse –<br />
it’s not easy to see how they should influence
our lives today.<br />
<br />
Let’s look first at the story of
Jacob’s ladder.<br />
The joy of these very earliest stories in the
Old Testament is that they do present their people warts and
all.<br />
They don’t sanitise them into saints!<br />
And Jacob, it
has to be said, was not a nice person.<br />
In fact, he was one of
the nastiest people in the Bible.<br />
He is, of course, the younger
of the twin sons of Isaac,<br />
and a grandson of Abraham.<br />
He is
his mother’s favourite,<br />
and spends his time indoors,<br />
doing
the cooking and generally keeping the encampment going,<br />
while
Esau does the outside work and looks after the flocks and herds.<br />
You
remember, of course, the infamous story of how Esau sold his
birthright to Jacob for a bowl of lentil stew one cold day when he
was hungry.<br />
Lentil stew is good, but not <i>that</i> good!<br />
Esau
also married a couple of foreign wives,<br />
and, according to
Genesis 26:35,<br />
“they made life bitter for Isaac and
Rebecca”.<br />
<br />
And it was partly because of that, I think,
that Rebecca helped Jacob trick Esau out of his father’s
blessing.<br />
If you had the Old Testament reading here last week,
you will have heard that story,<br />
how Rebecca helps Jacob tie
goatskin over his hands,<br />
so that his father thinks it’s
Esau.<br />
Although I’m not sure quite how much Isaac was
fooled:<br />
“The voice is the voice of Jacob, but the hands are
the hands of Esau”.<br />
Anyway, Isaac goes along with it, and
gives Jacob his blessing.<br />
But, of course, Esau is furious, and
plans to kill Jacob,<br />
so Jacob has to flee.<br />
And it’s while
he’s on the run that our reading starts.<br />
<br />
Jacob falls
asleep,<br />
just on the ground with nothing more than a stone for
his pillow,<br />
and dreams of the ladder, or staircase, between
earth and heaven,<br />
with the angels going up and down it.<br />
And
God, speaking directly to Jacob,<br />
assuring him of his love and
blessing,<br />
reaffirming that God will be with him on his travels,
and will bring him safely home.<br />
And when Jacob wakes, he knows
he’s been with God:<br />
“Surely the Lord is in this place –<br />
and
I did not know it!<br />
How awesome is this place!<br />
This is none
other than the house of God,<br />
and this is the gate of heaven.”<br />
<br />
I
wish I could say that from that time on Jacob was a changed
person.<br />
But he wasn’t, of course.<br />
For him, God was
associated with places, not people.<br />
Bethel, where he had his
dream,<br />
was a place where God lived,<br />
and despite God’s
promise of being with him all the time,<br />
Jacob didn’t seem to
want to know.<br />
He goes on lying and cheating, as do the rest of
his family;<br />
his sons even plotted to murder their brother
Joseph,<br />
and were only just stopped from doing so.<br />
Even
though later on God encounters Jacob again,<br />
and this time Jacob
does seem to realise that God is more than just a local god, one
would scarcely describe them as God-fearing people.<br />
Yet God used
them as an integral part of his plans for the nation of Israel.<br />
<br />
And
so we turn to our Gospel reading, which carries on from last week’s
reading about the parable of the sower. <br />
<br />
In this story,
someone has been and gone and mixed weed seeds in with the wheat that
they have kept so carefully since last year.<br />
Now, a weed is
basically a plant in the wrong place.<br />
Many wild flowers are
simply lovely –<br />
I am never very good at knowing which is
which, except for obvious ones like bluebells or primroses. <br />
Robert
and I were in the Hungarian countryside a few weeks ago, the puszta,
they call it, and, as the land there isn’t very suitable for vast
monocultures, there were acres and acres of beautiful wild
flowers.<br />
Poppies, vetches, ladies’ bedstraw, lavender, all
sorts of other flowers.<br />
Also things like burdock and wild barley
–<br />
barleygrass, we used to call it in my childhood –<br />
that
I hadn’t thought of for years!<br />
It was wonderful.<br />
But,
although we deplore the monocultures that here in the UK can make
vast tracts of our countryside look very dull indeed,<br />
we do
prefer to keep the wildflowers to the headlands and verges!<br />
You
do need the wildflowers there, to attract insects and butterflies,
but you don’t want them messing up your crops.<br />
It would be
very difficult for even a modern weedkiller to target the right
thing, especially if the weeds were things like barley-grass or wild
oats – <br />
you couldn’t destroy them without destroying the
entire crop.<br />
Imagine what that would do to a subsistence farmer
in our day, for instance, perhaps in Africa!<br />
<br />
But,
apparently, back in Bible times, Jewish law didn’t allow you to
grow two kinds of crop in the same field.<br />
So the servants were
really anxious to go and pull up the weeds,<br />
it was all wrong to
let them grow.<br />
But the farmer knew that it would really damage
the wheat, and jeopardize the harvest, if they were to do that,<br />
so
he tells his men not even to try.<br />
Time enough, he says, to
destroy the weeds when the crop is harvested <br />
by then, they
won’t damage the crop itself.<br />
This must have been rather a
shock to Jesus’ hearers, of course.<br />
But then, I expect they
were used to Jesus saying things that might appear shocking!<br />
<br />
In
this country today, of course, the barren weeds would be harvested
along with the corn, and go through the combine harvester,<br />
but
back then, harvesting was done by hand with a scythe or sickle, and
it was easier to separate them out before they were turned into
sheaves.<br />
I expect the same would apply in those areas where
modern harvesting methods aren’t appropriate, in the developing
world, too.<br />
<br />
But what does it all mean?<br />
Do these
stories, familiar though they are,<br />
have any real relevance to
our lives today?<br />
<br />
I think, perhaps, they do.<br />
You see,
the whole point about Jacob is that God didn’t give up on
him!<br />
<br />
Jacob was a thoroughly bad lot, he didn’t even try
to live a godly and moral life, he was out for what he could get.<br />
But
God had serious plans for him, and for his descendants, and even
though he couldn’t really get through to Jacob on the first time of
asking, at Bethel, he tried again and again, until finally he was
sort of successful. <br />
<br />
So the first point is that <b>God
never gives up on us.<br />
</b>No matter how awful we are, no matter
how far we walk away from God, the Good Shepherd still grabs his coat
and wellies and goes to look for us.<br />
Time and again God went to
Jacob and his family, spoke to them in dreams and visions, tried to
show them something of who He is.<br />
Time and again he met with
failure,<br />
they said “Oh yes, there’s a god here, is
there?”<br />
and carried on with their lives.<br />
<br />
Then the
second point is that <b>God has confidence in us</b>.<br />
When Jesus
tells the parable of the weeds,<br />
you see how confident the farmer
is that the crop won’t be damaged by having the weeds grow among
it.<br />
There’s no way he’s going to risk damaging the crop by
doing anything prematurely.<br />
The weeds may take up space, but the
quality of the seed will win through to a good harvest.<br />
Doesn’t
the same God who sows the seed in us have the same confidence?<br />
That’s
something to celebrate, I reckon.<br />
Each of us, those of us who
have said “Yes” to Jesus<br />
and who are touched by His
Spirit,<br />
each of us has the most incredible God-given potential
to grow and develop into the person God created us to be.<br />
God
has confidence that we will be part of building the Kingdom of
Heaven.<br />
<br />
And the third point is that <b>we need to have
confidence in God</b>.<br />
Sometimes we feel afraid when we look
round and see that we’re surrounded by weeds.<br />
It feels as
though we <i>must </i>be overwhelmed,<br />
that we <i>must </i>go
under.<br />
But God knows that we won’t.<br />
God has confidence
that we won’t.<br />
It may be more than we can handle right now,
but God will be with us every step of the way, even if it doesn’t
always feel like that.<br />
We don’t have to handle those weeds on
our own! <br />
<br />
We also need to trust God when he tells us to
wait until the harvest.<br />
Sometimes we want to rush in, like the
servants in Jesus’ story, to Do Something About It.<br />
Like them,
it feels all wrong to us when wheat and weeds grow in the same
field.<br />
The mediaeval church reckoned the “weeds” were
heresies;<br />
we don’t fuss quite so much about heresies,<br />
but
sometimes we fuss more than we need to about other people’s
spiritual status before God.<br />
We fuss, too, when problems loom
large in our lives, whether personal or as a church.<br />
We fuss
when things have gone wrong and God seems to be absolutely ignoring
both us and the problem!<br />
We reckon that if we did this or that,
then things would become quite all right again.<br />
Sadly, of
course, it doesn’t work that way.<br />
If we rushed in and did what
we thought,<br />
it probably would hurt only ourselves, and not have
any effect on the problems we face.<br />
Unlike God, we can’t see
round corners.<br />
We need to trust God that, in the words of Mother
Julian,<br />
“All will be well, and all manner of thing will be
well.”<br />
<br />
</p>Mrs Redboots (Annabel Smyth)http://www.blogger.com/profile/11270027663691257254noreply@blogger.com0Railton Road Methodist Church, London, UK51.4492735 -0.1201004-4.4702369038505267 -70.4326004 90 70.1923996tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-497324740056677483.post-75229954863028778262023-07-16T10:30:00.012+01:002023-07-16T12:29:09.354+01:00Sowing the Seed<p> </p><iframe
frameborder="0"
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src="https://drive.google.com/file/d/1AS2N8cjpHnuBSMZnIDD22mclGln5dc6d/preview">
</iframe><p class="western">
</p><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEhVbu2yWWDl2eTxD25Pb82-uzls6kru2i_aDuwp53s_pToavHmF1PIXUiO2O-fY-6oUng5VYWqpeEjE-nsqEwSHKFHBZ8E55zQ0HyXk5uRRNIPOHU2ZLi7zBGJSLsUMoOQLoPScMDzncel1eV8Z9-L4k34uC0uQAiQs3RP9LxE2_YNB3-A8ejyLmSIVsgA" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="242" data-original-width="208" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEhVbu2yWWDl2eTxD25Pb82-uzls6kru2i_aDuwp53s_pToavHmF1PIXUiO2O-fY-6oUng5VYWqpeEjE-nsqEwSHKFHBZ8E55zQ0HyXk5uRRNIPOHU2ZLi7zBGJSLsUMoOQLoPScMDzncel1eV8Z9-L4k34uC0uQAiQs3RP9LxE2_YNB3-A8ejyLmSIVsgA" width="206" /></a></div><br />The story that Jesus told of the sowing of the seeds, and what became
of them, is one of the first we ever learn, isn’t it?<br />
We drew
pictures, in Sunday School, or in our primary school Scripture
lessons, <br />
of the sower, with his trayful of seeds, <br />
and
squiggly seagulls swooping down to grab them before they could take
root, <br />
hot sun shining on others, <br />
and lovely scribbly
weeds choking still others.... <br />
and a few, just a very few, ears
of wheat standing up in a field.<br />
<br />
And then, perhaps, as we
grew older and began to stay in Church rather than go to Sunday
School, we would hear sermons on this parable, <br />
and if you are
anything like me, what you heard –<br />
not, I should emphasize,
necessarily what had been said, but what you heard –<br />
was that
Proper People, or perhaps I should say Proper Christians, <br />
were
the ones who were the fertile soil, <br />
where the Word could take
root, grow and flourish.<br />
<br />
But, of course, if you were
anything like me, that just made you feel guilty and miserable –<br />
what
if you weren’t the good soil?<br />
What if you were the stony
places, or the weedy patches?<br />
And I’m sure that there are
times when we do allow other things to take priority, perhaps when we
ought not.<br />
And there are times when we do rather wither up, <br />
in
times of spiritual drought.<br />
All of us go through them, of
course.<br />
But it doesn’t help when the preacher starts banging
on about how dreadful we are if we are not 100% fully fertile soil,
and bearing fruit 100%.<br />
We just end up feeling guilty and
thinking that we must be terrible people.<br />
<br />
But I don’t
think Jesus meant us to think that!<br />
After all, we are told over
and over again how much we are loved, <br />
and St Paul reminds us,
in the reading we heard from his letter to the Romans, that if we
live according to the Spirit, <br />
we won’t be the barren ground
Jesus talks about!<br />
<br />
Of course, again, if you are like me,
you’re apt to think that you can’t possibly be living according
to the Spirit, because, pride.... <br />
but that’s stupid!<br />
Why
would we not be, if we are committed to being Jesus’ person?<br />
You
might remember last week’s reading, <br />
where St Paul was being
upset about the fact that he found it nearly impossible not to do
wrong things, but now he is triumphant –<br />
God’s Spirit
enables him to live as he should.<br />
And us, too. <br />
<br />
Going
back to the story of the sower for a moment, I think that it’s not
so much that any given one of us is barren ground, <br />
or weedy, or
stony, or fertile –<br />
but that each of us has all of those
characteristics within us.<br />
Think, for a moment.<br />
Sometimes
it’s really easy to be God’s person, <br />
we can’t think of
anything else we’d rather be.<br />
Other times, not so much!<br />
Times
when we are tempted to sin, <br />
or times when we want to do
something that isn’t necessarily sinful, but isn’t going to help
our spiritual lives.<br />
Times when we know God is asking us to do
something that we would really rather not.... <br />
you know the kind
of thing.<br />
<br />
But the thing is, if –<br />
or rather because
–<br />
we are living according to the Spirit, <br />
we are able to
allow God to help us grow and change.<br />
We don’t have to
struggle to be good, <br />
we don’t have to struggle to turn
ourselves into fertile ground!<br />
That part of it is God’s
job.<br />
All we have to do is to be willing to let that
happen.<br />
<br />
And, meanwhile, sometimes we are the sowers
ourselves –<br />
often, maybe, we don’t even know it.<br />
Again,
it’s probably as well when we don’t –<br />
nothing worse than a
rather forced presentation of the Gospel as someone tries to explain,
embarrassed, why they follow Christ.<br />
But sometimes, who knows,
just a “Good morning”, or a smile in the right place can tip the
balance for someone who may have been despairing;<br />
a box of pasta
or tampons in the food bank box might make all the difference to
someone’s summer holidays.<br />
<br />
Which reminds me – as you
know, I’m sure, many families who can just about cope in term time
when their children get a meal at school find it a lot more difficult
during the holidays.<br />
You will remember Marcus Rashford’s
campaign during the pandemic to get children the food they so
desperately needed while the schools were closed.<br />
So do consider
giving a little more to the various food banks than you usually do –
most supermarkets have a box where you can put donations, or you can
give money.<br />
Or, of course, bring stuff to Brixton Hill, which
hosts a food bank on a Wednesday.<br />
And not only a food bank –
there is an advice centre where people can get helped to get the
benefits they need, or with housing, or whatever.<br />
Wednesdays, 11
until 1.<br />
It’s also a social session; people are free to stop
and chat and have a coffee – it’s basically a descendant of the
“warm space” we had last winter.<br />
<br />
That’s a bit of a
digression.<br />
But the point is – well, the other week we heard
Jesus reminding us that whatever we did for anybody else, we did it
to him.<br />
So we don’t judge, we don’t look down on people who
need food, we don’t try to preach to them.<br />
But who
knows?<br />
Maybe one day they will come to know and love God, just
because we were kind to them and smiled at them and helped them in
their need.<br />
<br />
Some years ago now, I read about a church in
Colorado whose congregation was mostly elderly, with no young
families, but who wanted, and prayed for, a youth group.<br />
One
day, their minister was sitting in a coffee shop when he was
approached by a group of young people who asked whether his church
was a place where people could say goodbye to friends who had
died.<br />
He explained that it was, and they explained that one of
their friends had just died of an overdose, but his parents had taken
his body home before there could be any funeral.<br />
The young
people were allowed to use the church to hold their own funeral –<br />
no
hymns or prayers, but they spent time telling stories about their
friend, and then ate a meal that church members had prepared for
them.<br />
One of them said “Oh, I wish we could eat like this
every week –<br />
it reminds me of my grandma’s cooking!”<br />
And
the church members said “Well, of course you can –<br />
we’re
here every Sunday;<br />
you come and bring your friends!”<br />
Those
young people may never attend worship at that Church, but the
congregation still loves them and cares for them and feeds them every
Sunday.<br />
<br />
Nearer home, a friend of a friend had four tiny
children, including twins, when her husband was diagnosed with
terminal cancer.<br />
She was left widowed, but her local church
stepped up to the mark and started to care for her, bringing her
meals, babysitting, finding clothes for the children that, perhaps,
their own children had outgrown but which were still good, and
generally caring for her.<br />
I believe that she is now a pillar of
that church, although before her husband died she had no idea of
faith.<br />
<br />
What I’m trying to say is that often it’s not
what we say that is the seed we are sowing, it’s what we do.<br />
And
not putting pressure on people –<br />
the church in Colorado knew
that they would lose the young people if they started insisting they
came to church, <br />
or even conformed to any kind of dress code
when they entered the building.<br />
My friend’s church knew that
someone with four small children would find coming to church very
difficult, even if they had wanted to come.<br />
<br />
We may never
be in exactly that sort of situation, but there will always be times
when we are called to love people into the Kingdom of God.<br />
Our
duty is to do the loving we’re called to do –<br />
and it’s
God’s job to worry about the results!<br />
Whether the seed falls
on the path, or on stony ground, weedy ground, or a fertile field
isn’t our business –<br />
our job is to sow the seeds.<br />
And
our job is also to allow God the Holy Spirit to live in us and
transform more and more of us into fertile ground in which God’s
Word can bear fruit.<br />
<br />
God is good, and, going back to our
theme, if we say “Yes” to God, God will help us become more and
more fertile ground for growing seed and producing fruit;<br />
God
will help us live by the Spirit, the life that leads to life.<br />
And
God will help us sow seeds that may or may not fall in fertile
ground.<br />
Amen.<br />
<br />
<br />
<p></p>Mrs Redboots (Annabel Smyth)http://www.blogger.com/profile/11270027663691257254noreply@blogger.com0Streatham Methodist Church, London, UK51.4307467 -0.129497729.2838807803397 -35.285747700000009 73.5776126196603 35.026752300000005tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-497324740056677483.post-56905538047056627082023-07-09T11:00:00.010+01:002023-07-09T14:53:52.048+01:00God gets involved<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEh_JrNSqdPDtWGyABDCJr9jV8wbr_QtzQg17ziJGkMvJAJlu2MOp1c2gYFuu18BwbutCLQf3DyxkPOH2zoVYtI10XGC8kgxmBDP1WJ-Egn47M-buCNksN4BBNCpVBs1XNiF8ytlYVljTN15SKGeOSFk6qQSDjlL2OkCx-27pqnuKQw8G6_okilCOrBea_k" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="900" data-original-width="1600" height="180" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEh_JrNSqdPDtWGyABDCJr9jV8wbr_QtzQg17ziJGkMvJAJlu2MOp1c2gYFuu18BwbutCLQf3DyxkPOH2zoVYtI10XGC8kgxmBDP1WJ-Egn47M-buCNksN4BBNCpVBs1XNiF8ytlYVljTN15SKGeOSFk6qQSDjlL2OkCx-27pqnuKQw8G6_okilCOrBea_k" width="320" /></a></div><br /> <p></p><p><i>A new introduction to an old friend!</i></p><iframe frameborder="0" height="100" src="https://drive.google.com/file/d/163aDfJTL9HERaLJorqpeNKC53DBbxzFm/preview" width="500">
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At this time of year, our Old Testament readings are all about
Abraham. Over the last month, if the Old Testament lesson was read,
we learnt how God called Abraham to leave his home in Ur<br />
how he
and Sarah were childless, but God promised them a child;<br />
how
Abraham pre-empted this by conceiving a child, Ishmael, on his
servant;<br />
how that all went rather pear-shaped when Ishmael
started playing too roughly with Isaac, when he was finally born, and
making him cry;<br />
last week, we had that extraordinary episode
when God appeared to be asking Abraham to sacrifice Isaac;<br />
and
now, this week, we come to a nearly-grown-up Isaac, and his search
for a wife. <br />
<br />
Scholars seem to think that these stories of
Abraham, <br />
which had been an integral part of the Jewish
tradition, <br />
were collected together and written down during the
5<sup>th</sup> and 6<sup>th</sup> centuries BC –<br />
this, you
remember, was when the Israelites were in exile, <br />
the Temple had
been destroyed, <br />
and they had no king of their own.<br />
Only a
very few Israelites were left in Jerusalem, <br />
and they had rather
lapsed from their traditions and practice.<br />
So the various
stories were collected and written down, <br />
possibly somewhat
haphazardly, in case it should all be lost.<br />
<br />
Abraham
himself is thought to have lived in the early part of the 2<sup>nd</sup>
millennium BC.<br />
Apparently the earliest he could have been born
was 1976 BC and the latest he could have died was 1637 BC.<br />
This
was in the Bronze age –<br />
he would have had bronze tools, not
iron, and possibly still a flint knife.<br />
<br />
Many years ago
now, Robert and I visited the town of Bolzano, <br />
where they have
the museum where the body of Oetzi, the ice-man, is stored.<br />
You
may remember that he was found in the Alps about 20 years ago,<br />
having
been shot by person or persons unknown.<br />
His body had been
preserved in a glacier for over 5,000 years.<br />
The point is, this
was even longer ago than Abraham –<br />
he only had a copper axe,
as they hadn't discovered about bronze yet.<br />
But the things that
were found with him –<br />
his axe, <br />
his coat, <br />
his
trousers, <br />
his bow and arrows, <br />
his knife and so
on, <br />
you could see just how they were used, and he was really a
person just like you or me!<br />
That makes Abraham feel less remote,
as he, too, would have worn clothes we recognise, and carried tools
we'd know and so on.<br />
<br />
Abraham had felt called by God to
leave his home-town of Ur in the Chaldees, which in his day was
allegedly highly civilised. <br />
They had, apparently, nineteen
different kinds of beer and a great many fried-fish shops, if you
call that being civilized!<br />
However, they did enjoy other kinds
of food, such as <br />
onions, <br />
leeks, <br />
cucumbers,
<br />
beans, <br />
garlic, <br />
lentils,
<br />
milk, <br />
butter, <br />
cheese,
<br />
dates, <br />
and the occasional meal of beef or
lamb.<br />
Just the sort of food I like!<br />
<br />
There was wine
available, to make a change from beer, <br />
but it was expensive,
and drunk only by the rich.<br />
They played board-games, <br />
enjoyed
poetry and music, which they played on the lyre, harp and drum, <br />
and
were generally rather well-found, from all one gathers. <br />
<br />
The
only thing was that without many trees in their part of the world,
<br />
they had to do without much furniture, <br />
and tended to
sleep on mats on the floor, for instance, instead of beds.<br />
But
definitely a sensible and civilised place in which to live.<br />
When
you hear it described, it doesn't sound all that remote, does
it?<br />
They were people like us, and had similar tastes to us.<br />
<br />
But
Abraham had felt called to leave there, <br />
and to take his family
and household and to live in the desert.<br />
And they had all sorts
of adventures, and sometimes things went very wrong, but mostly they
went all right.<br />
<br />
And now Isaac has grown up and Sarah has
died, <br />
and it is time for Isaac to marry.<br />
Abraham is urgent
that he marry a woman from his own tribe, <br />
not a local Canaanite
woman, who wouldn't have known about God, <br />
so he sends his
servant back to Ur, to find a suitable relation for Isaac to
marry.<br />
<br />
The servant explains, rather earnestly, how he
asked God to show him which the right woman was –<br />
would she
offer to draw water for his camels, or not?<br />
That wasn't an easy
task –<br />
camels, which can go four or five days without water,
like to drink A LOT at one time, so she'd have needed a fair few
bucketsful!<br />
<br />
Rebecca's family would have liked a few days
to get used to the idea, <br />
but the servant says he needs to get
back as soon as possible, <br />
and Rebecca agrees to leave next
day.<br />
So she and her various maidservants –<br />
one of them
may have been her old nurse –<br />
got packed up and ready, and set
off.<br />
And eventually they get home safely, <br />
and there is
Isaac coming to meet them.<br />
And they get married, and live
more-or-less happily ever after!<br />
<br />
We sometimes get alarmed
about arranged marriages these days;<br />
<br />
we know that in those
communities where they're still more-or-less the norm, things can go
horribly wrong –<br />
think of those so-called “honour killings”
we hear so much about!<br />
Even in this day and age, it isn't always
easy for someone to escape an abusive situation if they don't know
where to go.<br />
But as I understand it, an arranged marriage can be
every bit as happy and as successful as one where the bride and groom
have chosen one another;<br />
<br />
we all know that you have to work
at being married, <br />
whether you knew your husband for years
beforehand or whether you met him a few days or weeks before the
wedding –<br />
or even at the wedding!<br />
<br />
I think Rebecca
was very brave going off with Abraham's servant like that;<br />
<br />
she
had no way of knowing who or what was awaiting her at the far end of
the journey.<br />
The servant had bigged up Abraham's –<br />
and
thus Isaac's –<br />
wealth, and had given her lots of gold
jewellery, but was he telling the truth?<br />
<br />
But one thing
stands out about this story and that is that God was involved from
beginning to end!<br />
And God led them all to a happy ending.<br />
<br />
I
wonder how much we actually believe that God is really involved in
our lives?<br />
I know we say we do, but these Sundays in Ordinary
Time are very much places where what we think we believe tends to
come up against what we really do believe!<br />
After all, not all of
our stories have happy endings, do they?<br />
Some do, many do, and
for these we give thanks, <br />
but what happens when they
don't?<br />
Does God get involved in our lives?<br />
And if so, how
does this work, and how can we work with God to ensure a happy
ending?<br />
<br />
Well, the Bible definitely tells us that God is
involved in our lives, <br />
and I am sure most of us could tell of
moments when we were perfectly and utterly sure of this.<br />
But
equally, most of us could tell of moments when we really struggled
with it!<br />
Where was God when this or that bad thing
happened?<br />
Does God really care? <br />
In the story from two
weeks ago, Ishmael and Hagar in the desert,<br />
we found that God
was there with them, even though it hadn't felt like it.<br />
<br />
Many
of us have lived through enough bleak times to know that one comes
out the other side.<br />
We know that, when we look back, we will see
God's hand upon it all.<br />
God may not have led us to a happy
ending, exactly, <br />
but we can see how God has worked all things
together for good for us.<br />
<br />
It's not a matter of God waving
a magic wand and producing the happy ending we want;<br />
<br />
we
all know God doesn't work like that.<br />
And it's not a matter,
either, of God having set the future in stone so that nothing we can
do can change things.<br />
Nor is it a matter of God simply sitting
back and letting us struggle as best we can, although everybody feels
at times that this is what is happening.<br />
<br />
It's more as if
God is working with us, moment by moment.<br />
Sometimes we –<br />
or
other people –<br />
do things that mean the situation can't come
out as God would have wished.<br />
God has a detailed plan for
creation, but his plan for our individual lives isn't –<br />
can't
be –<br />
mapped out in moment-by-moment detail <br />
since we are
free to make our own choices.<br />
But God truly wants the best
possible life for each one of us.<br />
The idea, I think, is to stay
as close to God as possible, <br />
trying to be aware of each moment
of decision and what God would like for us to do.<br />
<br />
But, of
course, as St Paul points out in the letter to the Romans, that isn't
actually possible!<br />
We're a bit crap at actually doing the right
thing, no matter how much we know we want to!<br />
It was impossible
for Paul to keep the Jewish law in its entirety, <br />
no matter how
much he wanted to.<br />
And although we know we are, and I quote,
under grace not under the law, <br />
we do tend to find it easier to
try to follow a set of rules and regulations than to follow
Jesus!<br />
And, of course, we don't follow those rules and
regulations perfectly –<br />
how could we?<br />
<br />
But Jesus
points out that his burden is light!<br />
Sometimes we don't feel as
though it is.<br />
“Come unto me all you who are burdened, and I
will give you rest!”<br />
<br />
I am sure Abraham's servant must
have felt incredibly burdened when he went back to Ur to find
Rebecca.<br />
But the servant, at least, spent his time
moment-by-moment in God's presence.<br />
He trusted that God would
lead him, step by step, to the right woman and that God would bring
the whole journey to a happy conclusion.<br />
“Come unto Me all you
who are burdened, and I will give you rest!”<br />
Abraham's servant
trusted God.<br />
I wonder how much we trust God?<br />
It isn't
always easy, is it.<br />
Last week's story, how God asked Abraham to
kill Isaac, <br />
was very much about trust.<br />
Abraham didn't even
argue with God –<br />
he just went ahead and did as he was told,
leaving it very much up to God to do the right thing!<br />
Even Isaac
didn't struggle –<br />
he was a young man at that stage, not a
small boy, <br />
and he could easily have overpowered his elderly
father.<br />
But no –<br />
he allowed himself to be bound and laid
upon the altar.<br />
And God did do the right thing, as it were, and
produced the ram.<br />
<br />
And now God did show the servant his
choice of wife for Isaac.<br />
And so was born the Kingdom of
Israel.<br />
We never know the consequences of our choices –<br />
they
may be far more far-reaching than we expect.<br />
But we do need to
practice involving God in our everyday lives, <br />
otherwise, when
the crunch comes, we'll find it much harder than it need be to rely
on him.<br />
“I will give you rest,” says Jesus, but if we don't
know how to come to him for that rest, how can he give it to
us?<br />
Amen.</p>Mrs Redboots (Annabel Smyth)http://www.blogger.com/profile/11270027663691257254noreply@blogger.com0Clapham Town, London, UK51.4658813 -0.141326323.155647463821154 -35.2975763 79.776115136178845 35.0149237tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-497324740056677483.post-41812796228506209052023-06-04T18:00:00.013+01:002023-06-04T18:41:07.234+01:00Trinity Sunday 2023 Evening service<p><i> This is similar, but not identical, to what I preached this morning. This was a Zoom service; please excuse the washing-machine noises at the beginning!</i></p><iframe frameborder="0" height="100" src="https://drive.google.com/file/d/1TJriFB-FP9DfqSqh9ymYXTtdam8xf3Rb/preview" width="500"><br />
</iframe><p><i></i></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><i><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEhgcI3xGFNZlshiq3rdo29o0iJqUuxIx35q9tmHeFmLbuFpiH_MnxkVVx6wyeLzOIy_YuV0rG5_wHigrTy5ry7RwGREtW5oYKwIXNh7l6kc1_ceT4KANUpofhRVNZAdGJRwEFEoQyZ-ZUiQ1L2YdjPehD4EZRizHBj2YzjTS_PxSih-NC9By3AoFa-8" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="1438" data-original-width="1500" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEhgcI3xGFNZlshiq3rdo29o0iJqUuxIx35q9tmHeFmLbuFpiH_MnxkVVx6wyeLzOIy_YuV0rG5_wHigrTy5ry7RwGREtW5oYKwIXNh7l6kc1_ceT4KANUpofhRVNZAdGJRwEFEoQyZ-ZUiQ1L2YdjPehD4EZRizHBj2YzjTS_PxSih-NC9By3AoFa-8" width="250" /></a></div><br /></i><p></p><p></p><p class="western" style="line-height: 100%;">
Today is Trinity Sunday, <br />
the day on which we celebrate all the
different aspects of God.<br />
It’s actually a very difficult day
to preach on, <br />
since it’s very easy to get bogged down in the
sort of theology which none of us understands, <br />
and which we can
very easily get wrong.<br />
<br />
The trouble is, of course, that the
concept of the Trinity is trying to explain something that simply
won’t go into words.<br />
We are accustomed to thinking of God as
Father, Son and Holy Spirit, <br />
and most of the time we don’t
really stop and think about it.<br />
Trinity Sunday is the day we are
expected to stop and think!<br />
<br />
The thing is, the first half
of the Christian year, <br />
which begins way back before Christmas,
<br />
is the time when we think about Jesus.<br />
We prepare for the
coming of the King, in Advent, <br />
and then we remember his birth,
<br />
his being shown to the Gentiles, <br />
his presentation in the
Temple as a baby.<br />
Then we skip a few years and remember his
ministry, <br />
his arrest, death and resurrection, and his ascension
into heaven.<br />
Then we remember the coming of the promised Holy
Spirit, <br />
and today we celebrate God in all his Godness, as
someone once put it.<br />
<br />
The second half of the year, all
those Sundays after Trinity, <br />
tend to focus on different aspects
of our Christian life.<br />
And today is the one day in the year when
we are expected to stop and think about God as Three and God as
One.<br />
And it is difficult.<br />
It’s a concept that doesn’t
really go into words, <br />
and so whatever we say about it is going
to be in some way flawed.<br />
It took the early Church a good 400
years to work out what it wanted to say about it, and even that is
very obscure:<br />
“That we worship one God in Trinity, and Trinity
in Unity:<br />
Neither confounding the persons nor dividing the
substance.<br />
For there is one person of the Father, <br />
another
of the Son, <br />
and another of the Holy Spirit.<br />
But the
Godhead of the Father, of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit is all one,
<br />
the glory equal, the majesty coeternal.<br />
Such as the Father
is, such is the Son, and such is the Holy Spirit.<br />
The Father
uncreated, the Son uncreated, and the Holy Spirit uncreated.<br />
The
Father incomprehensible, the Son incomprehensible, and the Holy
Spirit incomprehensible.”<br />
The whole thing incomprehensible, if
you ask me!<br />
<br />
There are all sort of illustrations you can
use to try to get a mental image of what it’s all about.<br />
Look,
for instance, at what happens when you join two hydrogen atoms to one
oxygen one – <br />
you get H<sub>2</sub>O. <br />
Di-hydrogen
monoxide! <br />
Which, I am sure you realise, can be ice – <br />
a
solid, good for cooling drinks or injuries, for preserving food, or
for skating on. <br />
Or it can be water – <br />
a liquid, making
up most of our bodies, good for drinking, sustaining all life.<br />
Or
it can be steam – <br />
a gas, good for removing creases from our
clothes or for cooking vegetables. Ice, water, steam, all very
different from each other, but all, still, H<sub>2</sub>O.<br />
<br />
It’s
an illustration.<br />
It happens to be my favourite one, but there
are plenty of others.<br />
Another local preacher, on the same
subject, brought in three tins of soup –<br />
lentil, mushroom and
tomato – <br />
well, it might not have been exactly those, but
something like that – <br />
all tasting very different but all
soup.<br />
Some people like thinking of an egg, <br />
which has the
shell, the white, and the yolk....<br />
They are all sort-of
pictures, but only sort-of.<br />
Nobody really understands it.<br />
And,
of course, that is as it should be.<br />
If we could understand it,
<br />
if we knew all the ins and outs and ramifications of it, <br />
then
we would be equal to God.<br />
And it’s very good for us to know
that there are things about God we don’t really understand!<br />
It’s
called, in the jargon, a “mystery”.<br />
That means something
that we are never going to understand, <br />
even after a lifetime of
study.<br />
Lots of things to do with God are mysteries, in that
sense.<br />
Holy Communion, for one –<br />
we know what we mean
when we take Communion, <br />
but we also know that it may very well
mean something quite different, but equally valid, to the person
standing next to us.<br />
Or even the Atonement –<br />
none of us
really understands exactly what happened when Jesus died on the
Cross, only that some sort of change took place in the moral nature
of the Universe.<br />
<br />
Nevertheless, for all practical purposes,
<br />
we live very happily with not understanding.<br />
We synthesise
some form of understanding that suits us, <br />
and, provided we know
it is not the whole story, that’s fine.<br />
And the same applies
to the Trinity.<br />
It doesn’t matter if we don’t really
understand how God can be Three and One at the same time:<br />
what
matters is that we love and trust him, whatever!<br />
<br />
And in
our Gospel reading, Jesus talks of Himself, the Father and the Spirit
as equal:<br />
“<span lang="en-US">All that belongs to the Father
is mine. <br />
That is why I said the Spirit will take from what is
mine and make it known to you.”<br />
Like St Paul, He doesn’t
have the word “Trinity”, but it is the kind of thing He
means.<br />
<br />
And in the reading from Proverbs, which </span><span lang="en-US">is
sometimes used today,</span><span lang="en-US"> we are reminded of
Wisdom.<br />
<br />
</span>“<span lang="en-US">The LORD brought me
forth as the first of his works, <br />
</span> before his deeds of
old:<br />
I was appointed from eternity, <br />
from the beginning,
before the world began. <br />
When there were no oceans, I was given
birth, <br />
<span lang="en-US">when there were no springs abounding
with water;” <br />
<br />
and so on and so forth.<br />
Wisdom, here,
is personified as female.<br />
The Greek word for Wisdom is
Sophia.<br />
And some commentators equate Sophia, here, and in other
passages, with the Holy Spirit.<br />
<br />
Incidentally, some people
find the image of God as Sophia, Wisdom, helpful and different.<br />
It’s
one of the many images of God we have, up there alongside the
Shepherd, the Rock, the Strong Tower and so on.<br />
If you don’t
find it helpful, then don’t use it, but if it is something that
appeals, then do.<br />
<br />
But that is beside the point.<br />
Seeing
God as Wisdom is a very old tradition, <br />
but the real point is
that even in the Old Testament we get glimpses of God as having more
than One Person.<br />
The Trinity might not be a Bible expression,
but it is a Bible concept.<br />
<br />
But really, the thing about
today is that, no matter how much we don’t understand God as Three
but still One, <br />
today is a day for praising God in all his
Godness.<br />
It is not really a day for deep theological reflection,
nor for self-examination, but a day for praise and wonder and love
and adoration. </span><span lang="en-US"><b>Amen<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
</b></span><br />
</p><i></i><p></p>Mrs Redboots (Annabel Smyth)http://www.blogger.com/profile/11270027663691257254noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-497324740056677483.post-75523559374513062642023-06-04T11:00:00.006+01:002023-06-04T12:58:15.402+01:00Trinity Sunday 2023 Morning Service<p> </p><p align="center" style="break-after: avoid; line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0.21cm; page-break-after: avoid;"></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEgC40EVgObErYtFBb0BsUwTq1jeTIQ2eYgM5W4JlijVocGO-aPP7I12ZZoR275rKvRuMp3bZ8nVPc6AcIpaENN9dEAoOnTXihfh7YWyVOz1wlXWXcakgKaJEyxLbCf30iw77e5BbWrQZaO9U2UxnNptVm9qMIf3UcQBsFnCS6DKQx_y6_C3p11uJ00d" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="612" data-original-width="612" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEgC40EVgObErYtFBb0BsUwTq1jeTIQ2eYgM5W4JlijVocGO-aPP7I12ZZoR275rKvRuMp3bZ8nVPc6AcIpaENN9dEAoOnTXihfh7YWyVOz1wlXWXcakgKaJEyxLbCf30iw77e5BbWrQZaO9U2UxnNptVm9qMIf3UcQBsFnCS6DKQx_y6_C3p11uJ00d" width="240" /></a></div><br /><br /><p></p>
<p align="center" style="break-after: avoid; line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0.21cm; page-break-after: avoid;">
</p>
<p class="western" style="line-height: 100%;"><iframe
frameborder="0"
width="500"
height="100"
src="https://drive.google.com/file/d/1T0vUuobX2MLU5QtkCjKhZ1c4GqaNZBBP/preview">
</iframe><br />
</p>
<p class="western" style="line-height: 100%;">Today is Trinity Sunday,
the day on which we celebrate all the different aspects of God.<br />
It’s
actually a very difficult day to preach on, since it’s very easy to
get bogged down in the sort of theology which none of us understands,
and which we can very easily get wrong.<br />
<br />
The trouble is, of
course, that the concept of the Trinity is trying to explain
something that simply won’t go into words.<br />
We are accustomed
to thinking of God as Father, Son and Holy Spirit, and most of the
time we don’t really stop and think about it.<br />
Trinity Sunday
is the day we are expected to stop and think!<br />
<br />
The thing
is, the first half of the Christian year, which begins way back
before Christmas, is the time when we think about Jesus.<br />
We
prepare for the coming of the King, in Advent, <br />
and then we
remember his birth, <br />
his being shown to the Gentiles, <br />
his
presentation in the Temple as a baby.<br />
Then we skip a few years
and remember his ministry, <br />
his arrest,<br />
death and
resurrection, <br />
and his ascension into heaven.<br />
Then we
remember the coming of the promised Holy Spirit,<br />
and today we
celebrate the whole Godness of God, as someone once put it.<br />
<br />
The
second half of the year, all those Sundays in Ordinary Time, tend to
focus on different aspects of our Christian life, and how what we
think we believe informs, or should inform, the way we live.<br />
And
today is the fulcrum, the changeover day<br />
the one day in the year
when we are expected to stop and think about God as Three and God as
One.<br />
<br />
The concept of the Trinity isn't really found in the
Bible. <br />
The bit about doing things in the name of the Father,
the Son and the Holy Spirit is as near as it gets.<br />
It's really
the early church's efforts to put things into words that don't really
go.<br />
They knew, as we know, <br />
that the Father is not the Son
or the Spirit, <br />
the Son is not the Father or the Spirit, <br />
and
the Spirit is not the Father or the Son.<br />
But the Father is God,
<br />
the Son is God <br />
and the Holy Spirit is God.<br />
And
yet we don't have three Gods, we only have one God.<br />
<br />
That's
basically what it's about, but it's very confusing.<br />
And the
trouble is, most illustrations simply don't give you more than a tiny
glimpse of it, if that.<br />
You can, for instance, think of three
tins of soup –<br />
maybe you have lentil soup, mushroom soup and
chicken soup, which are all different but all soup.<br />
But that
doesn't really help, as soup is soup, whatever flavour you
drink.<br />
Some people like to think of an egg –<br />
the yolk,
the white and the shell.<br />
Or an apple –<br />
the core, the
flesh and the skin.<br />
<br />
My own preferred illustration is of
water, ice and steam –<br />
all H<sub>2</sub>O, but very different
from each other and used for different purposes.<br />
Water is not
ice, and water is not steam;<br />
ice is not water, and ice is not
steam;<br />
steam is not water and steam is not ice.<br />
But water
is H<sub>2</sub>O, ice is H<sub>2</sub>O and steam is H<sub>2</sub>O.<br />
Water
is about drinking and washing;<br />
ice is about skating and cooling
injuries.<br />
Oh, and cooling drinks, too, of course.<br />
And steam
is about clearing your head when you have a cold, <br />
and showing
you that the kettle is boiling....<br />
So it is quite a good
illustration.<br />
<br />
But even that is merely a tiny glimpse of
what the Trinity is all about.<br />
Maybe we shouldn't even try to
explain the Trinity –<br />
it's what's called a mystery, meaning
that while we can get a good working image of what it's all about,
<br />
we know that it isn't more than an image<br />
and our
conception may well change over time.<br />
We'll never know exactly
what it's all about, because we are not God!<br />
<br />
But, as St
Paul points out, we can think of the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ,
the love of God and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit!<br />
That
makes it easier, I think.<br />
We might not understand how we can
have three Persons, as the technical term has it, in one God, <br />
but
we can understand a little about the Grace.<br />
We will close this
service, as we close so many services, by wishing one another God's
grace in these very words.<br />
<br />
I wonder, then, what we are
actually wishing each other.<br />
Again, when you start to unpack it,
it isn't as easy as it looks.<br />
After all, what, exactly, does
“Grace” mean?<br />
We think we know –<br />
we have a working
model of it –<br />
but again, it's one of those concepts that
really doesn't go into words, <br />
as so many of the things of God
don't.<br />
Oh, we say glibly that it's “God's riches at Christ's
expense”, <br />
and of course that is very much part of it, but
it's only part of it.<br />
Grace is about all that Christ gives to us
in the package we call “salvation”.<br />
We can't earn grace, we
can only accept it as a freebie.<br />
It is everything that Christ
poured out for us on the Cross.<br />
And it is that that we pray for
one another!<br />
<br />
And then Love.<br />
Again, how can we put
this into words?<br />
We know what love means –<br />
we think.<br />
But
then, we love strawberries and we love our children and we love our
spouses or partners, and it's not the same sort of love, is it?<br />
<br />
If
you want a general definition of love, one can say it is the
condition whereby the happiness and safety of the beloved is of
greater concern than your own.<br />
The happiness and safety of the
beloved is of greater concern than your own.<br />
That, of course,
can't apply to strawberries!<br />
And I would have difficulty in
applying it to our love for God, I think, wouldn't you?<br />
<br />
But
I have no difficulty whatsoever in applying it to God's love for
us.<br />
God's love for us is quite beyond our imagination.<br />
It
is constant, unremitting.<br />
God loves each and every one of us as
though we were unique.<br />
It doesn't matter who we are, or what we
have done, or whether we serve Him or not –<br />
God loves us.<br />
In
a way, our prayer ought to start with the love of God, <br />
for it
is from that love that the rest stems.<br />
If God didn't love us, he
would not have sent Jesus, nor the Holy Spirit. <br />
<br />
Some of
us here this morning have children, maybe grandchildren.<br />
Anybody
have great-grandchildren?<br />
Well, I don't know about you, but I do
remember that when my daughter was born, <br />
I began to have a
glimpse, just a tiny glimpse of what God's love for us is like.<br />
That
was over 40 years ago, and I am a grandmother now, <br />
but I still
remember it.<br />
That realisation that this, <i>this</i> is
something a tiny bit like how God cares for me!<br />
Amazing!<br />
<br />
So,
the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, <br />
and the love of God, <br />
and
then, of course, the Fellowship of the Holy Spirit.<br />
The
Fellowship of the Holy Spirit.<br />
Some translations say the
Communion of the Holy Spirit.<br />
You notice it's “of” the Holy
Spirit, just as it is the grace <i>of</i> our Lord Jesus Christ and
the love <i>of </i><span style="font-style: normal;">God.<br />
The
Holy Spirit sends, among other amazing things, fellowship,
communion.<br />
Both with God and with one another.<br />
<br />
Yes,
of course, we are friends.<br />
And there are always going to be
people in the church we are more friendly with and less friendly
with, if that makes sense.<br />
But by our very human nature, we're
going to like some people more than we like others.<br />
That's
okay.<br />
But we are given the gift of having fellowship with
everybody in the Church, whether we like them or whether we don't.<br />
We
can sit beside them in worship, <br />
we can study the Scriptures
with them,<br />
we can pray for them and their concerns, <br />
we can
lift them to the Throne of Grace.<br />
And that is the gift of the
Holy Spirit here.<br />
<br />
And we can also have fellowship with
God.<br />
That sounds even more amazing, doesn't it?<br />
Fellowship
with God himself, the Creator.<br />
The Father –<br />
Jesus said to
call God “Father”, <br />
</span><span style="font-style: normal;">b</span><span style="font-style: normal;">ut
I know that isn't helpful to everybody, if they have had a poor
relationship with their own father, for instance. <br />
You may
prefer a totally different name for God, and that's okay, too –<br />
and
often, your preferred name for God changes as you travel along your
Christian journey.<br />
<br />
We know the Old Testament was full of
different names, <br />
from the plain basic “El” that meant “The
Lord” –<br />
you still get this in names like “Michael” or
“Rachel” or “Gabriel”, or any of those Bible names that end
in “El”.<br />
They all mean something about God –<br />
Michael,
for instance, means “Who is like God?”, <br />
which is a
rhetorical question, of course, because nobody is!<br />
Gabriel means
“Strong man of God”, and so on.....<br />
Anyway, names for God
–<br />
the plain basic “El” that I mentioned, and then a lot of
other ones –<br />
shepherd, judge, redeemer, king, rock.<br />
Or
there is “El Shaddai”, which has several different possible
meanings, including God the Destroyer, or even God with breasts –<br />
but
is mostly used to mean God Almighty.<br />
<br />
And talking of God
with breasts, there are a few feminine names for God, which you may
or may not find helpful, <br />
including Lady Love, and Lady
Wisdom.<br />
Some people refer to the Holy Spirit as “She”, <br />
on
the grounds that the Hebrew word, Ruach, is feminine.<br />
</span><span style="font-style: normal;">There’s
that lovely hymn you may have sung last week – we did at Stockwell
– with the image of a female dove brooding on the water.<br />
</span><span style="font-style: normal;">Do
so if you find it helpful, but if it irritates you or feels gimmicky,
then don't. <br />
<br />
I seem to have wandered rather far from “The
fellowship of the Holy Spirit”.<br />
But today isn't really a day
for understanding, you see.<br />
It's much more of a day for
rejoicing.<br />
</span><span style="font-style: normal;">I</span><span style="font-style: normal;">
said </span><span style="font-style: normal;">at the beginning that</span><span style="font-style: normal;">
it was a day to celebrate the whole Godness of God, and I rather like
that definition.<br />
We will never even begin to understand who God
is, and that's okay.<br />
We know that we have a loving Father in God
–<br />
or whatever other title we wish to use.<br />
We we know that
we have a Redeemer and a Brother in our Lord Jesus.<br />
And we know
that we are filled with the Holy Spirit, who enables us to grow into
the person God created us to be, and who gives us all we need, and
more beside, to become that person.<br />
<br />
And then, there is the
fact that it is a mystery.<br />
That we can't understand or explain
it.<br />
And that's great, too!<br />
So let us rejoice, and give
thanks to God.<br />
Amen.</span></p>Mrs Redboots (Annabel Smyth)http://www.blogger.com/profile/11270027663691257254noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-497324740056677483.post-14690115063759949802023-05-28T12:21:00.000+01:002023-05-28T12:21:07.745+01:00Pentecost 2023<p> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEimIsRy7du9GuI5NbgWv97gWKpR2iDbuNUwg_0vSMVPFgIRhd1yuHzhcM6w8JLv_QNRlRLNHvQMv0JRE2rqgGNkyGSABiEazw9MFDW2zC69rss7-I8kzVV_IT7_MfpXg86ZNkewfoUZBA39eNQJ8Zyq9X2K8arJM6HgsAQ0ZF9vh2vKzoWYuTSny-LC/s1445/Pentecost.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1445" data-original-width="820" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEimIsRy7du9GuI5NbgWv97gWKpR2iDbuNUwg_0vSMVPFgIRhd1yuHzhcM6w8JLv_QNRlRLNHvQMv0JRE2rqgGNkyGSABiEazw9MFDW2zC69rss7-I8kzVV_IT7_MfpXg86ZNkewfoUZBA39eNQJ8Zyq9X2K8arJM6HgsAQ0ZF9vh2vKzoWYuTSny-LC/s320/Pentecost.jpg" width="182" /></a></div><br /><p></p><p class="western" style="line-height: 100%;"><br /><iframe
frameborder="0"
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src="https://drive.google.com/file/d/1PlgSejuS_XgTrR8YZEWYz9K6iWAZOxGR/preview">
</iframe><br />
I wonder what it must have been like.<br />
It almost beggars
imagination, doesn't it.<br />
There they were, in that upper
room.<br />
One hundred and twenty of them, they say,<br />
including
Mary the mother of Jesus<br />
and several other
women.<br />
Waiting.<br />
Waiting for what must have felt like simply
forever.<br />
<br />
They'd been told, in Luke's version of the story,
to wait in Jerusalem and they would receive power when the Spirit
came upon them.<br />
So they waited, and waited.<br />
At least ten
days, <br />
we don't, I think, know exactly how long,<br />
until the
Day of Pentecost dawned.<br />
I wonder how many of them had felt like
giving up and going home,<br />
and celebrating Pentecost,<br />
which
back then was a sort of Harvest Festival,<br />
celebrating the first
fruits of the harvest,<br />
celebrating Pentecost with their
neighbours?<br />
<br />
But they didn't go home.<br />
They stayed.<br />
And
when the day of Pentecost was fully come,<br />
the Spirit came on
them.<br />
<br />
It must have been a pretty dramatic visitation.<br />
The
tongues of flame,<br />
the rushing mighty wind.<br />
And the
immediate explosion of praise,<br />
and when they ran out of words
those other words,<br />
words of praise that, in this
instance,<br />
turned out to be words "in our own native
language?<br />
<br />
Parthians,<br />
Medes,<br />
Elamites,<br />
and
residents of Mesopotamia, Judea and Cappadocia,<br />
Pontus and
Asia, Phrygia and Pamphylia,<br />
Egypt and the parts of Libya
belonging to Cyrene,<br />
and visitors from Rome,<br />
both Jews and
proselytes,<br />
Cretans and Arabs –<br />
in our own languages we
hear them speaking about God's deeds of power." <br />
<br />
Thus
the bystanders.<br />
They might not have seen the tongues of
flame,<br />
or heard the rushing mighty wind,<br />
but they certainly
saw the results.<br />
<br />
But some people were more cynical<br />
And
they said,<br />
oh, these people have been on the booze;<br />
they're
bladdered;<br />
they're lathered.....<br />
And I can think of several
rather ruder things they might have said,<br />
and so, I expect, can
you.<br />
<br />
So Peter, glorious, wonderful Peter,<br />
who never
used to be able to open his mouth without putting his foot in it
–they used to say he only opened his mouth to change feet –<br />
Peter
jumps up and lets out this terrific bellow which shuts everybody up,
sharpish.<br />
"No, no, no, no, no, no, no," he
goes,<br />
"we're not on the sauce –<br />
come off it, it's
only nine am, what do you take us for?<br />
We're not football
fans!"<br />
And he goes on to explain that this is what Joel was
talking about,<br />
this is what they'd all been expecting.<br />
And,
as you know, he preached so powerfully,<br />
and God's presence was
so overwhelming,<br />
that three thousand people got converted that
day alone!<br />
<br />
Thus the story.<br />
We know it so well, don’t
we?<br />
Every year, this passage from the book of Acts is read.<br />
We
could probably quote a great deal of it off by heart, and the bits we
can’t quote –<br />
all those nationalities, I can never remember
them without looking –<br />
we know what they say, even if we don’t
know the words!<br />
<br />
Obviously, then, it is an important story
–<br />
as important as those other stories we hear every year,
<br />
the stories of Jesus’ birth,<br />
the coming of the
magi,<br />
the presentation in the Temple, <br />
the visit to
the Temple the year Jesus was 12,<br />
and then the gap to the adult
Jesus, <br />
his arrest,<br />
death,<br />
resurrection,<br />
and
ascension into Heaven.<br />
And then the coming of the Spirit.<br />
<br />
One
way of seeing it is that it’s the Church’s birthday.<br />
The day
we celebrate the anniversary of the explosive growth from a tiny
handful of believers –<br />
barely more than a hundred –<br />
to
several thousand, <br />
and on down the millennia to the worldwide
organisations and denominations that is the Church today.<br />
But
there again, that’s just history, rather like we celebrate our own
birthdays.<br />
Pentecost is more than that.<br />
I think that much
of it is one of those things that doesn’t go into words very well
–<br />
what is officially called a “mystery” - <br />
the
Church’s word for something that words can never fully
explain.<br />
<br />
After all –<br />
a mighty wind, and what looked
like tongues of fire?<br />
We know the damage that both wind and fire
can do –<br />
hurricanes seem to be increasing in both frequency
and strength, and have caused terrific damage over the years. <br />
And
we all know what terrible damage fire can do.<br />
<br />
But the wind
and flame from God were not sent to destroy, <br />
but to cleanse, to
heal, and to empower.<br />
Some of the empowerment was pretty
spectacular –<br />
the speaking in other languages, <br />
the
healings, <br />
the preaching that brought thousands to Christ in one
go.... <br />
some of it, of course, would have been less so.<br />
<br />
And
then there were the other side-effects –<br />
the changes in
people’s character to become more the people God meant them to
be.<br />
The fruit of the Spirit –<br />
Paul, in his various
letters, reminds us both of the various gifts he saw in use (the
tongues, the prophecies, the healings and so on) and the fruits he
saw develop in people’s characters:<br />
"love, <br />
joy,
<br />
peace, <br />
patience, <br />
kindness,
<br />
generosity, <br />
faithfulness, <br />
gentleness,
<br />
and self-control" .<br />
<br />
The thing is, of
course, that it wasn’t and isn’t just those few people in the
Upper Room in Jerusalem who received the Holy Spirit.<br />
Nor was it
just the three thousand people who were added to the church that
day!<br />
Right down throughout history, and right down to today,
<br />
God has sent his Holy Spirit on to believers.<br />
And that
includes you and it includes me.<br />
<br />
But some of us will say,
oh, help, no, not me,<br />
I'm not worthy.<br />
I'm not clean.<br />
Well,
you're no more and no less worthy than anybody else.<br />
But there
are things that can stop you being filled with the Holy Spirit.<br />
The
first is if you are not walking God's way.<br />
You do need to be
God's person<br />
and that is not something that happens
automatically.<br />
You have to consciously commit yourself to
God.<br />
We Methodists do this formally each year in the Covenant
Service,<br />
but you don't have to wait until then!<br />
<br />
And
you may say, well, yes, years ago –<br />
but these days?<br />
I’m
all dried up and God doesn’t use me any more.<br />
<br />
Well, look
at my cup.<br />
I get very thirsty when I preach, and like to have my
water-bottle with me – we do try not to use single-use plastic
bottles unless we know we have another use for them afterwards.<br /></p><div style="line-height: 100%; text-align: left;">
But
supposing I wanted to put some coffee in a cup like this?<br /><i style="color: #2b00fe;">(waves reusable coffee cup with lid)<br /></i>
I
can’t, can I, as it has the lid on!</div><p></p><p class="western" style="line-height: 100%;">
<br />
Okay, let’s take
the lid off.<br />
Hmmm.... still can’t put any coffee in here, just
look at it.<br />
All sorts of bits and pieces in here......<br /></p><div style="text-align: left;">
think
this mug must be rather elastic!</div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="color: #2b00fe;"><i>(removes bits and pieces from mug)</i></span></div>
The point is, it doesn’t
really matter what’s in there, <br />
but they shouldn’t be
there.<br />
Perfectly good, valid and worthwhile things in
themselves, <br />
but they don’t live in a coffee cup.<br />
<br />
And
thank you, but I don’t fancy drinking my coffee out of a mug that
has been filled with all these things.<br /><div style="text-align: left;">
So we need to wash the
mug, and rinse it, and dry it.... </div><div style="text-align: left;">
and now, at last, we can put
coffee in it!</div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="color: #2b00fe;"><i>(Mimes these actions).</i></span></div>
<br />
That’s a very old illustration;<br />
I
first heard it about fifty years ago.<br />
But it’s still valid
today.<br />
You see, we can thwart God completely by refusing, if you
like, <br />
to “take the lid off” yourself and allow God in there
to work.<br />
And yes, it’s scary doing that.<br />
Horribly so.<br />
We
really do have to trust God and trust that He loves us.<br />
And once
we have “taken the lid off”, <br />
we have to allow God to search
for those things that are filling us up wrongly –<br />
perfectly
valuable, valid things in their own right, <br />
but things that
aren’t right for us. <br />
John Wesley, for example, said that
while there was absolutely nothing intrinsically wrong with a career
in mathematics, it wouldn’t have been right for him.<br />
<br />
<br />
That,
too, is hard.<br />
We are so afraid that God will take all the things
we love from us, and leave us with boring Church things.... <br />
I
doubt it. <br />
Most of us love what we do, or we wouldn’t do
it!<br />
God doesn’t call us to be bored and miserable, but to be
fulfilled and happy.<br />
<br />
And then finally we need to be washed
–<br />
cleansed, forgiven, made whole.<br />
Again, sometimes it’s
difficult to allow that to happen, which is largely because we often
find it very hard to forgive ourselves when things go wrong.<br />
And
that makes it hard for us to believe that God has forgiven us. <br />
<br />
But
when all that has happened, then we become fit for purpose.<br />
We
can be filled with God’s Spirit.... <br />
not only filled up, as we
would fill a coffee cup, but filled to overflowing,<br />
pouring out
everywhere, a sort of coffee-fountain, if you like....<br />
<br />
And
once we are filled, what then?<br />
That, of course, is up to God,
who knows us far better than we know ourselves.<br />
He knows our
characters, our desires, our needs, our failings.... <br />
It’s not
our job to worry about the “what then”.<br />
If there’s
something specific God wants us to do,<br />
you can be sure we will
know it, one way or the other.<br />
Otherwise, we go on with our
lives, just being!<br />
God does the rest –<br />
we very often
don’t know<br />
<br />
So –<br />
how?<br />
That one’s easy
–<br />
just be willing!<br />
That’s all we have to do –<br />
be
willing.<br />
God does all the rest. <br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: times;"><span style="font-variant: normal;"><span style="color: #444444;"><span style="letter-spacing: normal;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">To
help us find the words to be willing, let’s </span></span></span></span></span><span style="font-variant: normal;"><span style="color: #444444;"><span style="letter-spacing: normal;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">stand
and </span></span></span></span></span><span style="font-variant: normal;"><span style="color: #444444;"><span style="letter-spacing: normal;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">sing
</span></span></span></span></span><span style="font-variant: normal;"><span style="color: #444444;"><span style="letter-spacing: normal;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">hymn
385: “Holy Spirit, we welcome you”</span></span></span></span></span></span><p></p>Mrs Redboots (Annabel Smyth)http://www.blogger.com/profile/11270027663691257254noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-497324740056677483.post-8835993536303179942023-05-07T10:30:00.011+01:002023-05-07T13:17:56.781+01:00Coronations and Vocations<p> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEgkDq_ANPYlqUcCbxSmicdne1z_dWNUHJMpcQdA8NxnmZjAfoCsosuR4uGBWmmj3XVXk-D5oY7MVDwr29ZPIdvTA7EafmjOmtWWESt9a4GEZPNaqXd2F8qbPiNhwimNVLjnL2_5cCkv6yw2hWEPmnuVPIdpDCakhbrAzuqkm22LsLwY739SPznQE8Wc" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="549" data-original-width="976" height="180" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEgkDq_ANPYlqUcCbxSmicdne1z_dWNUHJMpcQdA8NxnmZjAfoCsosuR4uGBWmmj3XVXk-D5oY7MVDwr29ZPIdvTA7EafmjOmtWWESt9a4GEZPNaqXd2F8qbPiNhwimNVLjnL2_5cCkv6yw2hWEPmnuVPIdpDCakhbrAzuqkm22LsLwY739SPznQE8Wc" width="320" /></a></div><br /><p></p><p class="western" style="line-height: 100%;"><a name="en-NIVUK-26671"></a><br/><iframe
frameborder="0"
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src="https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Hw1JlHC8MYX2Hn37fIpJo_sUeCImQ7Vh/preview">
</iframe><br />
<span style="font-variant: normal;"><span style="color: black;"><span face="Maiandra GD, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="letter-spacing: normal;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">Jesus
said to his disciples: “</span></span></span></span></span></span></span>Do
not let your hearts be troubled. You believe in God; believe also in
me. My Father’s house has many rooms; if that were not so,
would I have told you that I am going there to prepare a place for
you?”<br />
<br />
“My Father’s house has many rooms; if that
were not so, would I have told that I am going there to prepare a
place for you?”<br />
<br />
This Eastertide, I have been thinking a
lot about how Jesus deals with people as individuals. You can see it
during his ministry, of course – far too many instances to go into
here. But what I have been thinking of specially was how he came to
people after his resurrection. I mean, you have Mary Magdalene
crying in the garden, and how lovely he is with her; then there was
the walk and chat with Cleopas and his wife on their way to Emmmaus,
when he went through the Scriptures with them to show them how the
Resurrection was foretold – and agreed to stay the night, but then
vanished after he’d broken bread at the supper-table. Then he
comes specially to Thomas when he had missed the original appearance
to all the disciples, and had trouble believing it had really
happened. And, perhaps finally, he speaks to Peter on the shore of
Lake Galilee, forgiving him for denying he knew him, and reinstating
him.<br />
<br />
All these people needed a different touch from Jesus,
and they all got it. And that holds true for us, too. Jesus comes
to us through the Holy Spirit, but our experiences of this will all
be different. “In my Father’s house are many rooms.” Many
rooms. They will all be of different shapes and sizes, according to
our individual needs.<br />
<br />
I wish, in a way, that the Epistle
set for today was that lovely passage from 1 Corinthians about how we
are all part of one body, but all different parts. <br />
<br />
Today,
you see, is Vocations Sunday, when I think I’m supposed to urge you
all to offer for ordination, or something like that. Don’t worry,
I’m not going to! Although I will just say that if you do think
you are experiencing a call to offer for ordination, or indeed to
become a local preacher, worship leader, or another role in the
church, do go and talk to Rev R about it! She will be able
to tell you what your first steps should be. And, by the way, if you
think you might be feeling such a call, you haven’t gone mad! It’s
always worth exploring, even if the call turns out to be for
something quite else. I mean, look at me – I’ve been a local
preacher for over 30 years now, if you count time spent on note and
on trial. They still haven’t discovered they made a terrible
mistake…. <br />
<br />
Seriously, though, our vocation need not
necessarily be for a role within the church. Some people are called
to be teachers, or medical professionals – and, goodness knows,
given the way the Government sees fit to pay public sector workers,
it would have need to be a vocation, as you certainly wouldn’t be
in it for the money! And in other roles, that aren’t necessarily
anything to do with the church, or a profession, for that matter.
God needs Christians in any and every role, from doctor to decorator,
judge to janitor, lawyer to labourer, professor to plumber,
rat-catcher to retired, and so on. We need people to stand as local
councillors, or maybe even get more involved in politics, if that is
something that interests you. And our schoolchildren and students
need to be focussing on their studies and their play, and on finding
out who they are as beloved children of God.<br />
<br />
From youngest
to oldest, we all have our role to play in God’s plan for this
world. We all fit in the community in our various roles. We all have
different needs, different gifts, different preferences, different
dreams.<br />
<br />
It can be instructive, sometimes, to read how God
dealt with his prophets and leaders who really didn’t want to
answer God’s call. Moses said he was crap at public speaking, so
God gave him Aaron to be his mouthpiece. Jeremiah also said he was
hopeless at it, and anyway, he was far too young for anybody to take
him seriously. He needed God’s reassurance that “I am with you,
and I will protect you,” plus a special touch from God, a special
gift of the Holy Spirit, if you like, for him to be able to
speak.<br />
<br />
Isaiah, too, was horrified when he saw God’s
glory in the Temple and realised that God was calling him to be a
prophet. “Oh, no! I will be destroyed. I am not pure enough to
speak to God, and I live among people who are not pure enough to
speak to him. But I have seen the King, the Lord All-Powerful.”
And he needed a cleansing touch from an angel before he could say
“Here I am, send me!” to God.<br />
<br />
Three different men,
with very similar concerns – they simply weren’t good enough for
God to use them. And God basically said “Rubbish!” and gave them
the reassurance they needed that they could, indeed, do the work to
which they were being called.<br />
<br />
And it’s the same for us.
No matter what we are being called to do – and don’t forget that
most of us, probably, indeed, all of us, are doing exactly what we
are meant to be doing – no matter what it is, God will enable
us.<br />
<br />
Whether we are called to actively preach the Good
News, or whether we are being asked to pray quietly at home, we will
be given the gifts we need to do so. All our gifts are given to us
as individuals, and, of course, God isn’t stingy! In fact, given
half a chance, God would give us far more than we are able to cope
with. <br />
<br />
We are, after all, God’s children, not his
servants! Jesus reminds us, also in our Gospel passage, that nobody
can come to the Father except through him. There may be – there
are – other paths to God, but only Christians can know God as
Father. And Jesus reminds us that earthly fathers don’t – or
most don’t, we see exceptions in our newspapers all the time –
give bad things to their children; they don’t give a stone instead
of bread, or scorpions instead of fish. <span style="font-variant: normal;"><span style="color: black;"><span style="letter-spacing: normal;"> “</span></span></span>If
you, then,” Jesus concludes, “though you are evil, know how to
give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father in
heaven give good gifts to those who ask him!”<br />
<br />
How much
more! More than we can ask, or even imagine.<br />
<br />
God deals
with us, then, as individuals – but, of course, we are part of a
community, of a family, and our gifts and calling will reflect that.
We are all one body, with many parts. We are, as our first reading
reminded us, <span style="font-variant: normal;"><span style="color: black;"><span style="letter-spacing: normal;">“</span></span></span>a
chosen people, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God’s special
possession, that you may declare the praises of him who called you
out of darkness into his wonderful light.”<br />
<br />
Yesterday, of
course, was a very special day in the life of our nation, as our King
was anointed and crowned to his office. I know our late Queen felt
that God had anointed her as Queen, and this meant being Queen was
who she was, not what she did. I rather suspect our new King feels
the same way. Certainly he, like his mother before him, believes
that he has been appointed to serve the various countries of which he
is King, and has sworn an oath to that effect. The crowning and
anointing, so we were told in the service yesterday, set him apart
and consecrated him for the service of his people.<br />
<br />
There
is, of course, only one King. But we are all consecrated by God for
his service, as our reading from Peter’s letter reminded us: “But
you are a chosen people, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God’s
special possession, that you may declare the praises of him who
called you out of darkness into his wonderful light.” God does not
call without enabling. Of course, that doesn’t mean our service –
whatever it may be – will always be easy and trouble-free; you know
as well as I do that it won’t be! There are always rocks along the
way – as Jesus said, “In this world you will have trouble. But
take heart! I have overcome the world.”<br />
<br />
And, finally,
many years ago now I knew someone who had served as a medical
missionary in Burundi. She told me once that, when she had been
getting ready to leave, she got worried, as she was so looking
forward to going she started to wonder whether it was really God
calling her to go there, or whether it was just what she herself
wanted. And when she took this worry to her advisor, she was told,
“Why on earth would God call you to do something you would hate?
You wouldn’t do a great job if you were unhappy all the time, quite
apart from anything else. And the God who loves you gives good gifts
to all His children!” <br />
<br />
It won’t always be easy.
Often we will wonder whether we’re on the right track or not.
Often we will wonder why so-and-so is called to be a worship leader
and we aren’t, or vice versa. But “In my Father’s house are
many rooms,” and each and every one of those rooms has been
specially designed. There is one for you, and there is one for me!
Amen.<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
</p>Mrs Redboots (Annabel Smyth)http://www.blogger.com/profile/11270027663691257254noreply@blogger.com0Springfield Methodist Church51.458372999999987 -0.189135623.148139163821142 -35.3453856 79.768606836178833 34.9671144tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-497324740056677483.post-25312335909919069602023-04-23T13:06:00.001+01:002023-08-02T12:42:55.322+01:00Going to Emmaus<p> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgUrut12HFP_zQPw-3ipWHBLeK0rqIjqcPwaZHnVy89fyzHRRWyh-5aUPrTN0TQcVMKYYdSxTSMHVHYvlV6l_LQqf56gYioLn18AMozbS9K6azlOTpdgUHttHeJebzvIZ2e7QAvBb2lHPu79FljxZbsFS52XVSsg_A8SwASNt71utgfIGVSti2Tmz1n/s600/Emmaus.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="495" data-original-width="600" height="264" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgUrut12HFP_zQPw-3ipWHBLeK0rqIjqcPwaZHnVy89fyzHRRWyh-5aUPrTN0TQcVMKYYdSxTSMHVHYvlV6l_LQqf56gYioLn18AMozbS9K6azlOTpdgUHttHeJebzvIZ2e7QAvBb2lHPu79FljxZbsFS52XVSsg_A8SwASNt71utgfIGVSti2Tmz1n/s320/Emmaus.png" width="320" /></a></div><br /><p></p><p><iframe
frameborder="0"
width="500"
height="100"
src="https://drive.google.com/file/d/19eX3e80stEwG9H5g_YwGsbplvxcZ73jQ/preview">
</iframe><br /></p><p>The text of this sermon is substantially the same as the one preached <a href="https://mrsredboots.blogspot.com/2017/04/going-to-emmaus.html" target="_blank">here.</a></p>Mrs Redboots (Annabel Smyth)http://www.blogger.com/profile/11270027663691257254noreply@blogger.com0